Ftrain, by Paul Ford

This bed set is stuffed with bedbugs, or an old lady died.

I awoke in a panic. The bill for the things I've put off doing is here; I need to deal. Here are the things:

1. Piece I need to edit. I've let this sit for five or six months. It's been tormenting me every day since July, a sense of failure and incompleteness.

2. Technical project where I need to re-establish communication and do some programming. It's been tormenting me every day since July, a sense of failure...

3. Code I need to launch. Horrible, painful PHP code that makes me cry. It's been tormenting me every day since July...

Every week I go to work and think: in among my other responsibilities I'll get these things done. By Friday I say: this weekend I'll deal. And on the weekends I sit in front of my computer and stare for an hour or two, then do something else, or watch a video. I get the basics of my job done via muscle memory, but anything extra, well, the mind just isn't there. Just where I wanted to be at 35. I'd like to say I'm overwhelmed, that there's just too much in life for me to handle. It's more likely I'm holding on to these things, gripping, proof of something. Artifacts of failure. Rings for my sausage-fingers.

Of course I'll deal. I'll find a new grind.

"Here's what you need to know about X--. X-- takes on six jobs," said a friend about another friend. "And he does three of them really well." He might as well have been talking about me. But if I don't try to do everything at once then who will?

Yesterday it rained so I sat on the train and read Starting Strength by Mark Rippetoe. It is a detailed explication of weightlifting, written with clarity and humor; it turns the squat into a science. The acknowledgments remember the author's mentor and friend; he describes this friend dying from cancer, doing deadlifts while wearing an oxygen mask. I want to be that way. After I die (well in the future) I want people to say: "you never saw anything like it. There he was, weeks before the end, with the data-shunt crammed into his artificial heart, scanning laser-beams shooting out of his eyes, hovering six inches above the ground purely by flapping his augmented rotor-arms. A portrait of dignity and grace."

I am glad to see the photos of women in the book. It comforts me to be where women are. They don't see me as contagious. With men I feel like a virus.

"Do you want to lift weights with me?" I asked my wife as we ate the dinner she'd cooked us. "That would be kind of fun if that was something we did together."

"I can't stand balls," she said.

Fair.

Starting Strength makes clear to me that I will need, at some point, to enter a gym with weightlifters, and then ask someone for help. This wearies me to think of. I will have to come to it head-down, having read a book and lifted at home, and hope someone will take interest in my particular plight. And I will need to be obedient, forever a supplicant.

I'm tired of approaching situations on my knees.

Which is why this is one huge lesson in humility.

My friend, the one who recommended Starting Strength, also recommended a training course to me, but it's at a Crossfit gym. (Coincidentally the dude who co-owns the gym and teaches the class appears to enjoy The Morning News, where I sometimes write. Checking those links and writing that down took about two minutes, and burned one calorie.)

This is what Crossfit looks like:

Crossfit does not look like a 300-lb. man with a calf's-tongue belly trying to heft the equivalent of a bag of groceries. It's easy to imagine the woman in that video driving her palm through your heart and ripping it out. Ten heartrips is just one exercise on her circuit, right before she does deadlifts.

I'll work out with my miniature barbells until they feel like they're holding me back. Right now I'm chasing them. May be a couple of months or years.

There's something about iron that feels so conservative. Crossfit has many advocates and practitioners in the military. I like soldiers one-on-one. My family has many.

But. All that stuff. All the hoo-ah and confusion over the homosex.

And fuck it. I am a real godless liberal. Media elite even. I'm what people hate. And this is how gyms feel to me:

Among other exercises I had 75 crunches to do this morning. I thought, people are always yelling shit out. Always doing it for the Gipper and so forth. God-and-country.

I need to yell something out. "Unions," I grunted. It felt good. "Fucking unions. Public option. Five more. Healthy meat-free school lunches, motherfuckers. Five more. Welfare. Welfare without work. Gay and lesbian marriage. Arts grants. Five more." Breathing hard and hurting. "Come on you asshole. Come on. MAPPlethorpe." Finally I had but five crunches to go, barely able to lift my flabby chest a few inches from the floor. So little, but so much to me.

(You fat bastard get this shit done do not roll around like a speared walrus stay straight yell it.)

"No--," I said. "No--, Noooooam CHOOMMMSSSKKKKYYYYY." I held it there for a count of ten before I collapsed to the floorboards, and when I rose to my feet I was ready to beat up Pinkertons.

Yeah buddy. Lightweight.

Ain't nothing but a peanut.

Weight: 295.5 lbs