alone at home
late at night
I shut the blinds
turn off the light
... and play Dance Dance Revolution.
Some years ago, I went caving with friends. Before the tour started, the guide took a moment to warn us that some of the rock formations were very fragile. "There's a $1,000 fine for everything that you touch. We're very serious about this. Please respect the cave."
Twenty minutes (and $17,000 in potential fines) later, I was frustrated, embarrassed, and ready to get out of that place as directly as possible. I simply could not duck or hunker down low enough, or compact myself small enough, to avoid scraping against rocks with my shoulders and back. Finally, toward the end of the tour, we had to squeeze up a narrow rock passage on a metal ladder. The guide reminded us that the "$1,000 fine per touch" rule was still in place. One of my friends turned to me, poked me in the stomach, and said, "That means you."
When Randy came to visit, we played video games... a little bit. We spent some time at arcades, and during one visit, we watched the kids play Dance Dance Revolution for a while.
They were good. They weren't missing a step. It was kind of amazing. The kids, in fact, made it look like a lot of fun.
"You know," I said to Randy. "If I had one of those machines at home, where no one could see me, I'd actually play it."
"You know," said Randy. "I'd pay to see that."
When I was very, very young, my mom used to sing a special cowboy song, all for me. I didn't know what the words meant until later, when I realized that it wasn't very flattering. The song was Bill Wills' Roly Poly— and mom would sing, "Roly Poly, Daddy's little fatty... "
Way to go, mom.
Sometime after Randy went home, it dawned on me: There is probably a version of Dance Dance Revolution for Dreamcast, which my housemates had. I started researching the game online, and found not only a version for Dreamcast, but one for the Sony Playstation, which I personally own, but mostly ignore. I found a great deal on a software and dance-pad bundle, and bought it. I also was able to save money on shipping, because I could just pick it up at the manufacturer in Sunnyvale.
Of course, that meant picking it up at the manufacturer in Sunnyvale.
My earliest nickname was "Fat-view," a perfectly stupid nickname that my brother gave to me. It stuck for a couple of years, until everyone realized how limp it was.
Red Octane, the manufacturers of the Dance Dance Revolution REDOCTANE Ignition Pad ver. 2.0, is run by twelve year olds. I swear to God, it's a Junior Achievement course with no sponsor.
When I arrived to pick up my Dance Dance Revolution bundle, half the kids were in the meeting room (Creepy Factor 9.5— they all looked like Fred Savage in their white shirts and ties,) and the rest of the kids were in the warehouse playing hockey.
I followed the signs and arrows into the warehouse, where I was supposed to pick up my bundle. The hockey game stopped immediately when I walked in, I guess because children have a built-in mechanism that stops all fun when the grown-up arrives. They stood and stared at me.
"Um," I began. "I'm supposed to pick up my order? I have a print-out."
If any of them called for Malachai, I was heading for the door.
They didn't. "Oh, yeah. Sure. Let me get that," one of them said, and took the print-out. He collected my order, printed up a receipt, and sent me on my way. When I left, the hockey game had started up again.
Meatloaf and mashed potatoes night, and I am stoked. I love meatloaf.
My stepfather is at one end of the table, and I'm at the other. My brothers are to my right, my mother and sisters are on my left. Standard formation. My older sister will probably get in trouble, because she's got a book at the table again. I've finished up what's on my plate; everyone else is still working on theirs. There is plenty more food.
"Please pass the mashed potatoes," I say, in the goofy, sing-song incantation my family uses when saying that phrase. Suddenly, the table is in uproar.
Stepfather: "You don't need it."
Brother #1: "Really."
Sister: "Do you ever stop?"
Brother #2: "Oh no! Your plate's empty!"
Brother #1 (handing me the bowl of mashed potatoes): "Better get something on it!"
I don't take the bowl from my brother. I don't even look at it. I look at my plate. It is empty. It is empty, and I am fucking humiliated. I hate that I finished first again. I hate that I am fat. I hate these people around me. I hate my empty plate, the food, and I especially hate the fact that I have to eat at the table with my family. I can't get up and leave, because I can't bear to raise my voice and ask to be excused from the table. I want to vanish.
My brother is still holding the bowl out to me when my mother says, "If people talked like that to me, I'd eat in hiding." She says it quietly. I don't know if she is crying, or angry, or what, because I can't look at her. Everyone falls silent. My brother puts the bowl down. Eventually, my mother repeats herself. "I would hide and eat."
The great thing about Dance Dance Revolution? It's getting me to exercise, daily. The bad thing about Dance Dance Revolution? Everything else about it.
Butterbean night. It's not the main course, but it doesn't matter. Anything with butterbeans is butterbean night. I hate butterbeans. Nothing triggers my gag reflex faster. They are fat, pale, greasy-mealy insect larvae, as far as I'm concerned.
Mom doesn't get it. She thinks my hatred is arbitrary— that I'm practicing being finicky about food. It's obviously something I picked up from my friends. "You're not leaving this table until you finish your butterbeans," she commands.
An hour later, and I'm still at the table. I'm alone; everyone else has finished and gone off to watch TV. My butterbeans are cold. I have managed to swallow three beans— whole, like goldfish, because I can't stand to chew them— and wash them down immediately with the huge glass of milk that I'm nursing.
A friend of the family arrives. She is a loud, tasteless, chain-smoking woman who I have tolerated, but never liked. She lets herself into our house, and sees me in the dining area. "Matthew, are you still at the dinner table?" she asks loudly. Then, helpfully, because she thinks I'm fat and retarded, she says, "Everyone else is in the living room."
My family immediately sees the joke, and joins in.
"Oh, he's always at the table."
"He never leaves it!"
"He'll be there all night."
Fucking butterbeans.
Dance Dance Revolution is confirming a few suspicions that I had:
My right knee is shot. After years of compensating for my left knee, which was injured in a car accident, my right knee is really starting to grind down and weaken. These days, it bends pretty much when it wants to, which isn't what you expect from a major body part, and I've had to stop predicting its behavior.
My feet are big. This game has very definite ideas about where your feet should be at any given moment, and if your feet are two places at the same time... say, with the major part of your foot mostly on one of the squares, but with the toes sticking out onto another... well, let's just say that the game really doesn't like that, and your score reflects the fact.
I suck at dancing. Really. A whole lot of sucking is going on at my place. That game has me leaping around like an idiot. The kids who play at the arcades are graceful, and have to hold onto the armrests to keep themselves from flying away and bumping around the ceiling air vents like Charlie and Grandpa Joe, because gravity doesn't affect them. I, on the other hand, am doing my best not to pound a big splintery hole in Chris and Dan's nice hardwood living room floor. Mostly I just feel sorry for the dance pad.
All dance music is excrement.
Junior high school physical education. I almost don't have to be specific, do I?
I am a freak. I am thirteen years old, 6'1", and 183 lbs. It amazes me now, how enormously fat I thought I was.
In gym, we are learning wrestling. I am hopeful, but not optimistic, that I will do well. I suck at everything but volleyball, and I'm getting annoyed. I'd like to be good at something other than volleyball, which is, let's face it, not exactly the manliest sport.
I sit on the sidelines, watching the other boys wrestle, until the period is almost over. After this is lunch, and then 4th period band practice, where I play both clarinet and bassoon, and I'm actually very good at both, because I'm a big sissy. It looks like I won't be wrestling today.
Suddenly the coach barks out my name. "Keller! You're wrestling with Johnson. Get on the mat."
The gym explodes into cheering. The last wrestling match of the day, and coach Lacorre has thrown together the two fattest guys in the class. Everyone is yelling and stomping their feet as I kneel down into starting position, with Johnson over me.
(Johnson's nickname is "Bubbles"— worse than anything I've ever been called. I don't like him, and he doesn't like me. His bathing habits are questionable, and he has shown up at school with head lice more than once. I strongly resent being associated with him.)
Before the coach blows his whistle for us to start, I realize that the boys' yelling has resolved itself into a chant. They're screaming, "Sumo! Sumo! Sumo!" and clapping along. Coach blows his whistle. I put up a brief fight, and then I throw the game, so I can get the hell out of there. As we're leaving, coach Lacorre glares at me, as if I'm the dick. Fuck you, Lacorre.
Oh, by the way. One of the songs on Dance Dance Revolution is called "20, NOVEMBER (DDR. Ver)".
I read that and thought, "Huh. A Deutsche Demokratische Republik version. Funny, it doesn't sound overly Teutonic."
S-M-R-T
In 1983, the B-52's released WHAMMY!, which had the song Butterbean on it. One of the lines in Butterbean went:
some people are fat, some people are lean
but I want you to show me the person
who doesn't like butterbeans
My friends misheard the first line as "some people are fat, some people are lame". Knowing about my special relationship with butterbeans, they thought this was hilarious, and delighted in singing that stanza to me.
Fucking butterbeans.
Another incidental factoid: I play nude. There. I said it, and I don't care who knows. Randy didn't think I would admit that.
I do it because... well, it's just easier. That, and I'm working out at the gym again. If I wore my sweats to do both, I'd be washing laundry every day. Screw that. I'm dancing skyclad.
A warm summer night, between grades in high school. We are lying on the front lawn, hands behind our heads, stargazing. It is one in the morning. Everything is motionless. The wind chime is silent, hidden behind leafy wisteria vines that run along the top of the front porch. Honeysuckle air.
Steve sits up. "You guys wanna go running?" Mike and I like the idea. We obviously have nothing better to do. I change shoes, and we go trotting off.
I keep pace with them at first, but they're only warming up. After a while, they gain speed, and it's pretty clear that I'm not going to be able to match it for very long, although I'm trying my darnedest. It angers me that this is so easy for them.
They eventually get about ten yards ahead of me, and then they slow down to let me catch up. "We're not going to keep waiting for you, Keller," they say conversationally.
"I'm trying," I wheeze.
This happens once more. The third time they get ahead of me, they don't slow down. I push myself to gasping, flappy-armed exhaustion trying to catch up to them, but they merely bound away, effortlessly putting distance between us. Five minutes later, they turn a corner and don't even look to see if I'm still following. I stop running. I put my hands on my knees, take in a big breath, and vomit. Then I walk home.
I want to meet whoever provided the voice for Dance Dance Revolution, so I can pull his tongue out of his head.
Why do all announcers have to have that out-RAGE-ous voice? Why do things have to be comin' at me? All these years of it, and I'm still not desensitized. If there was a way that I could disable that voice, I would do it. I found a setting in the options/sound menu that allows me to shut off booing, or to shut off all voices. I always choose "all voices," which shuts the announcer up while I'm dancing, but it does nothing to stop the between-song patter. I fucking hate it.
"Show me your hottest moves!"
"Awesome technique!"
"Give it your best shot!"
"You have good taste in music!"
"Let's see your energy!"
"Heat up the dance floor!"
Etc.
But the worst phrase... the most insufferable phrase— the phrase that makes me grit my teeth just typing it out— is the title of the game itself.
"Dance! Dance! Revuh-LOOSH-uuhhhnnn!"
It is not enough that he die. His cause must be silenced.
In high school I went through a succession of nicknames, none of which were intended to flatter me. Among them were "Fat Matt", "FM", "Grimace", "The Pudge", for God's sake, and "Bear". That final one only lasted as long as it took them to figure out that I actually liked it.
"FM", by the way, made it into my senior yearbook as my nickname, due to some friendly string-pulling with the yearbook staff, without my knowledge. Is it any wonder I don't associate with my friends from high school anymore?
The cat is fascinated by Dance Dance Revolution. She sits at the foot of the television, and watches me throw myself around.
I wish she wouldn't.
Another high school summer. A big group of us guys are hanging out, sunning ourselves poolside after an afternoon of swimming. The Run-DMC tape has stopped, and no one has bothered to flip it over. We're sort of quiet and snoozy in the sun.
"Hey Matt," one of them says.
"What?"
"You look like a big blob of mayonnaise, just laying there."
Everyone laughs, and I laugh with them, because I can't think of an elegant way to handle it. The mayo joke follows me through the rest of high school. I never take my shirt off outdoors again.
Let's take a quality moment, and talk about the music in Dance Dance Revolution, shall we?
Actually, let's not. It's shitty.
Instead, let's talk about song lyrics that are now forbidden to dance music, forever and ever, world without end, amen. If you hear these lyrics in any future song, let it be known that the artist didn't even try.
I realize that this leaves very little for dance music artists to work with, but I'm sure there are loads of other words in the English language. Try a few of them. They're fun!
One afternoon, when I was fifteen, I came home from school and immediately started frying up a hamburger. I had just enough time to cook it and eat it before I had to bicycle off to work for the evening. While the hamburger was still cooking, my fourteen year old sister moseyed into the kitchen and watched me for a while.
"Can I have that?" she asked.
"No," I said, dumping Worcestershire sauce on it.
"Come on. Please? I'm really hungry."
"Make one yourself. I'm late for work."
"I don't know how!"
"I'll show you how! I'll stand right here and walk you through it, while I eat this one."
"But you're better at it. Please?"
"I can't. I'm late for work, and I'm hungry too."
Then, in a brilliant tactical maneuver sure to convince me that she, logic, and a keen insight into what motivates people were all teammates in this argument, she said, "But you're always hungry."
And that was the end of my involvement in the conversation. I flipped my hamburger in silence.
"Why are you so mean to me? GOD!" she screamed (in Californian: "Gaw-id") and stormed out of the kitchen, down the hall, and slammed her bedroom door after her.
A while later, after I had finished the hamburger, I was rearranging my backpack, making sure that I had everything to do my homework when my job got slow. Suddenly one of my sister's friends blew in through the front door. She turned toward the side hall, and stopped short when she saw me.
"Where is she?" she demanded, addled and panting.
"She's in her room," I said calmly.
She stared at me for a moment at first confused, and then critical. "Do you even know what's going on?" she asked.
I had no idea what she was talking about.
"Some brother you are. Asshole!" she said, and brushed past me, down the hall.
I thought: Okay.
A moment later, I was about to leave. My sister came out of her room. When she saw me, she crossed her arms and stared right at me, defiantly. I could hear her friend yammering excitedly on the phone in my sister's room.
"What's wrong with her," I said.
"She's calling 911."
"Why?"
"Because I swallowed a whole bottle of pills," my sister said, nonchalantly. And then, amazingly, she smiled at me— a cute little tight-lipped smile that I had grown to know very well. It was the smile she wore whenever she deliberately fucked up something that I cared about, or when she was tattling on me. It was her victory smile.
I was absolutely fucking dumbfounded.
Her friend came back up the hallway, all tear-streaked. She got between me and my sister, and hugged her, stroking her hair, murmuring, "It's going to be okay, baby. Don't worry baby. Don't worry. They're on their way. They're going to come help you. It's going to be okay."
My sister hugged her back, but continued to stare at me over her friend's shoulder, eyes tearless, still smiling her victory smile. I turned and went to work.
I didn't get a phone call while I was working. Later, when I got home past midnight, the house was dark. I softly padded down the nappy-carpet hallway toward my bedroom. I checked— my sister's room was empty. My stepfather was a muffled burr in their room. I quietly closed my bedroom door behind me, and started breathing again.
Within ten minutes, I was in bed, on my side, staring at the wood grain of my dresser. I was pretty sure that I wasn't going to fall asleep anytime soon.
Then, I heard a creak in the hall outside my door. Suddenly my mom was in the room. She didn't turn on the light. She just stood there. I didn't say anything.
Finally, voice shaking, she said, "I hope that hamburger was real good." Then she left, leaving my door open.
I can recognize two covers in the original version of Dance Dance Revolution. One is Olivia Newton-John's Have You Never Been Mellow, and it's completely unnecessary. It just didn't need to happen.
The other is a reworking of the Deep Purple classic Smoke on the Water. Not only is it unnecessary— do we really need to hear this song any more?— but it's downright offensive.
The artist is Mr. Ed Jumps the Gun. He sounds like a skeevy white-boy Beastie rip-off. I can see why he's writing soundtracks to videogames. He left out the song's lyrics (did you know that Smoke on the Water had lyrics?) and just seems to do a lot of babbling and toasting.
Oh. That's number 16. No more going "Yo! Yo! Yo!" on the upbeats in dance music.
And then, every once in a while, Mr Ed Jumps the Gun finishes a line by yelling "nine-ty de-grees!" in the skeeviest white-boy voice he can muster.
It's really quite awful.
My junior year in high school. We are piled into Andrew's dad's red convertible Mustang. The guys all have their Ray-Ban Wayfarers on. We are a fucking Kokomo video, but we're singing Dead or Alive's You Spin Me 'Round at the top of our lungs, which we will continue to do until the day we see the video and realize that Pete Burns is a tremendous homo. Then the Youthquake tape will mysteriously disappear.
I'm sitting in the back, as we rumble through the streets of downtown Los Gatos, which we probably shouldn't be doing. Los Gatos has cruising laws, and guys like us are ticketed regularly. Los Gatos is kind of a shitty place to be a teenager. Actually, Los Gatos is kind of a shitty place.
We are pulling up to a stoplight, about half a block ahead, and we're going to stop side-by-side with some girls in another convertible. The guys suddenly realize that we know them.
"Holy shit! It's Heather! And Katie!"
"Fuck!" And then, as they realize that I'm going to screw everything up for them, "Matt! Duck down on the floor!"
Here's the thing: I do it. I practically throw myself onto the floor of the car, and stay quiet during their conversation, believing that I'm doing them a big favor.
Telling, don't you think?
At Microsoft, we had some guy walking around calling himself "The Jazzman". I have no idea what his real name was, but every once in a while he was allowed to play saxophone with his little jazz combo during lunchtime, out on the cafeteria patio.
What I'm wondering is this: are all videogame music artists insufferable, or was it just The Jazzman? Because... honestly? If the artists who came up with the music for Dance Dance Revolution ever copped an attitude, I can see them getting slapped around a lot.
High school is over. I have successfully dumped my entire friendship base, and replaced them with another group. The new group is more intelligent, more creative, and far, far more supportive of each other. We make movies. We make music. We briefly have a cable access TV show, parts of which I can still enjoy today. They are great people.
It's a scorching-hot, early August day, and I'm on the sandy shore of a small, man-made lake in San José. The beach is preposterously crowded. My friends are splashing around in the water. I am lying on a towel, reading.
I hear: "Oh my God."
"No fucking way. That is so gross."
Two male voices, somewhere up the beach. I can't see them without craning my neck in a funny direction. I shift on the towel, and adjust my t-shirt, which is sticking to me. It's hot.
"It's sweating. Why is it sweating? It's just laying there."
"Dude, it gets tired just breathing."
I stop reading. I know they are talking about me. I stare at the page, not seeing the words, and listen more closely.
"It's stuck. Maybe we should throw some water on it."
"No. It's waiting for a child to come too close. It's hungry."
Jesus Christ. It never fucking ends.
My friends return from their swim, boisterous and cheerful, still dripping, their towelled-off hair standing up comically. They settle around me, shivering in the sun.
"Hey Matthew," says Chris. "Why don't you take off your shirt? Aren't you hot?"
I close my eyes.
Up the beach: "Oh, please, God. No."
I say, "That's okay."
Chris continues to be supportive. "Matthew, seriously, no one cares. Take off your shirt."
"I'm okay. Thanks."
Chris shrugs. It's no big deal.
Conversation continues. We talk about sketch ideas, story ideas, silly things. We have no trouble entertaining ourselves. I start laughing again, cheered immensely by their company. I absolutely adore these people. Eventually they bust out the junk food that we've brought along with us. Potato chips, a small cooler of soda, stuff like that. Chris pops a can of Pringles, and offers it to me.
"Thanks," I say, reaching for it.
Up the beach (In a cartoonish voice): "MMMM-mmmmmm! Pringles!"
I sigh, and hand the tube back to Chris.
Nope. No, sir. It never fucking ends.
You know what? Some of the Dance Dance Revolution instrumentals aren't that bad. The problem with them is that they're either too slow for me, or too fast. The ones I dance to have words, and I'm not the type of person who can ignore them. I wish I was, because this would be far less painful.
My friend Roger happened to mention in passing that some of his favorite music from the Dance Dance Revolution soundtrack are songs with Korean lyrics.
This is brilliant.
I need to get my hands on some versions of Dance Dance Revolution that have foreign lyrics. As long as I don't understand them, I think I'll be okay. Sadly, there are only three versions of the game for the US Playstation. I'm going to have to find out if the Japanese versions (of which there are nineteen billion) will work on my machine.
When I was 22, I found a lump on the inside of my right thigh, in a difficult spot for me to see. The lump was on the surface of my skin. It was shiny, irregular, somewhere between dark purple and chocolate, and I freaked the hell out. I called out sick from work, and went to see the family doctor immediately.
Doctor Sabatino looked at it for about four seconds, prepped it, and then sliced it off, right there, boom, no pussyfooting. He put it in a jar for later biopsy, and then started cleaning up the wound. As he taped a bandage to the area, he said, "you know, if you lost some weight, you'd have a girlfriend, and you would have found this a long time ago."
He called this his "bedside manner."
Dance Dance Revolution makes you jump. You have to. Your feet must leave the dance pad, and then land on two different squares at the same time. You gotta jump.
Actually, this move is worth more points (and burns more calories in Workout Mode!) than anything else, so jumping around a lot is good.
Now that I think about it, I could be jumping rope in the backyard. But really, would that be half as stylish?
Dan, my ex, is thinner, fitter, furrier, sexier, and far less body-conscious than I will ever hope to be again. As a result, he was able to throw anything into the grocery cart without a second thought, whenever we went shopping together.
He didn't recognize the rules. He didn't understand the balance that I had developed carefully over the years— the ratio of good foods to junk. Lots of green leafy vegetables, a carton of low-fat milk, and a box of "grown-up" cereal made it okay to buy a two-liter of soda. A loaf of whole wheat bread and a pack of skinless chicken breasts made a single pint of ice cream admissible. That sort of thing.
"Matthew," he would say. "It doesn't matter what I put in the cart. They're for me. You have your good stuff, and I have my fun stuff."
Isn't that cute? He mistakenly thought I was concerned about health, when the real source of my neurosis was the unassailable fact that everyone in the store was judging the contents of my cart. It didn't matter how many loads of spinach and bagged salad mix I put in— if Dan put something that actually tasted good into our cart, everyone would assume that it was for me, because I was the fatter of the two.
Grocery shopping— already an unpleasant chore— often turned into quiet, glowering battle, with Dan trying to find a balance between making me happy and getting what he wanted, and with me trying to find a balance between sullen embarrassment and outright snarkiness. Date me.
By the way, as a direct result of my neurotic influence, Dan is far more conscious of what he puts in his grocery cart these days. In North Carolina, some of the markets have self-checkout counters, and if Dan feels that he has too much Little Debbie in his cart, he'll go there instead of the regular checkout aisles, even if the self-checkout lines are twice as long. He used to be grocery-innocent. That's gone now. I'm sure he thanks me.
I have to admit that I have a secret fantasy. It involves waiting in line to play Dance Dance Revolution at the Golfland arcade in Milpitas. I would be openly mocked by one of those skinny skate kids who always monopolize the machines.
"You think you can play DDR? Give it up, old man. Go home."
And I would say, "Care to bet on doubles, little boy?"
He would take up the wager, confident that he can smoke me. Of course, I'd take it easy on him at first, choosing the slower songs, and throwing an occasional step to lull him into complacency. Then I would move in for the kill, selecting Afro-Nova, or one of the Paranoia mixes, and then nail all the steps, including spins and trick combos, naturally. A crowd would appear from nowhere, and cheer me on. Finally, the kid would collapse in defeat and tears.
"Pay up, kid," I would say.
"Fuck you, old man!" he would yelp.
I would take him by the ankles, and whirl him around and around until all of his change flew out of his pockets. The crowd would cheer again, scrambling after the money, like candy from a piata. I would set the kid down, and he would run to his father at the pizza bar.
"Waaaaaaaaah!" he would cry. "Daddy, that man took all my quarters!"
And his father would say, "That's because I have a pussy for a son!" and drag him by his ear out to the parking lot, where he would perform a few brake-stands on the boy's head.
Because I am a big silly, I decide that getting a membership at Gold's Gym in Mountain View is a good idea. Every other day, after work, I sit in my car in the gym parking lot, and smoke for half an hour, trying to calm my nerves enough to go inside. I really don't feel like I belong there.
When I finally go in, I'm pretty much ignored by the staff, which is perfect. I want them to leave me alone. The only problem with this, of course, is that I don't know what I'm doing. It takes me five minutes to find weights that I'm comfortable with. My form is crappy. Even though I've done lots of research about exercising with weights, I do things wrong.
At one point, I find myself doing a back exercise at the triceps station. My exercise book tells me to do the pull-down exercise while resting on my knees. I do not realize that Gold's Gym has a different station for back exercises, so I go to the triceps machine, drop to my knees, and start pulling. Functionally, the exercise is identical.
A Gold's Gym employee sees me doing this exercise at the wrong station. "You," he booms, pointing at me. "We don't do that here at Gold's." I stop, and wait for him to come over and explain what he's talking about. He does not. He shakes his head in disgust, turns, and walks away.
Only when I'm leaving do I see the other station for back exercises. It doesn't matter. I'm not coming back to this gym.
You know what I like best about exercise? It's how good it makes you feel.
Last updated 24 March 2003
Contents of this Website ©1997-2004 Matthew J. Keller except when otherwise noted. Please do not copy without the author's permission.