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Charlie Hatton
Brookline, MA
(Yesterday was a ZuG day, with Zolton Does Amazon: On the St. Paddy Wagon! going live to the delight of green-wearers, mustard connoisseurs and honorary Irish everywhere.
Or just me, probably. But still — it’s up there. Have a look, if you like. Meanwhile, back at the blog…)
I mentioned recently that I’m in the midst of an athletic dilemma. The “fat old man sports” just aren’t cutting it for me any more, and I’m in the market for something new. There was more to that story — but a bout of mild food poisoning cut me off in the middle. And nearly at the middle, the way it felt. But I made a note to finish the job at some point.
That point is here. The job is now. The story will tell. The circle complete. Before, you were saved by the bell.
(Or more accurately, by the bell pepper, likely cross-contaminated by contact with improperly-stored whatever-animal-is-used-to-make-off-brand-chicken-nuggets. Horses? Tapirs? Voles?
As Krusty would say, “Think smaller. More legs.“)
But now, I’m ready to admit something that I never saw coming:
I’ve been taking yoga classes.
I don’t know what I expected yoga classes to be. But what it isn’t is dart boards and pool halls and pints of beer, for certain. As such, it’s quite the culture shock.
“Basically, they seem to be riding the nonslip mat-tails of traditional yoga and offering something that looks and feels fairly similar, in that you’re asked to stand on one foot for days at a time or throw your leg behind your back and massage your vertebrae with your toes.”
To be fair, what I’ve been taking isn’t “yoga”, exactly. The place says ‘yoga’ in the name, sure, but it comes from an entirely different country and tradition. The exercises are different, the poses are different, the chiropractor that I’ll need after a few more weeks is presumably different. Basically, they seem to be riding the nonslip mat-tails of traditional yoga and offering something that looks and feels fairly similar, in that you’re asked to stand on one foot for days at a time or throw your leg behind your back and massage your vertebrae with your toes. But it’s not “yoga”, per se. I think of it as fauxga.
Whatever you call it, it’s a formidable workout. My wife got me an introductory pass early in the year, and I’ve huffed and groaned my way through fifteen sessions or so. She knows me awfully well by now, and realized that the one place I might stick with is one that’s directly between my office and our place. Out of sight is out of mind — but if I have to actually avert my gaze to avoid seeing the gym on the way home, then there’s a chance I’ll drop in occasionally.
(It would be better if there were a microbrewery between home and the work. But I’ll take what I can get, I suppose.
And it could be worse. If there was a yarn shop on the path home, I’d be sitting here right now stabbing my thumbs with a set of knitting needles, trying to make a tea kettle cozy or some equally ridiculous nonsense. Or practicing my cherry-breasted warbler call, if a birdwatching club moved in down the street. Convenience is a dangerous mistress.)
And so, I’m doing fauxga — once or twice a week. And I feel pretty good; no aches or pains to speak of. The instructors are very good at telling us to ‘just do what you can; don’t over-exert yourself‘. So while the rest of the class is turned upside-down or sucking one of their own knees, I’m free to relax and stretch out. Maybe have a nap. Or eat a sandwich — all that lounging around on the floor is hungry work.
It’s pretty cool to be exercising at least in some similar way to my wife, though. She’s never been much for the team sports I’ve played, but she’s pretty heavy into ‘hot yoga’, which sounds super intense from what she tells me. Evidently, they turn up the thermostat and just smoke the lazy out of you. I wonder whether people just spontaneously combust from all the heat being generated inside and out. You probably get a discount on your next class or something, if that happens.
Now she and I can talk about how things are going at our respective yoga (or fauxga) classes — though frankly, I’m not much help. My classes don’t have too many poses, and I haven’t bothered to learn the names for them. I just sort of look around and contort myself in some way that looks equivalently painful to whatever everyone else is suffering through. Or I have an ice cream bar. You know, if I’m feeling too ‘over-exerted’. Safety first; rules are rules.
So she’ll come home in a ‘sharing’ mood and say something like: “We were holding Camel Pose for so long! I just wanted to take a break in Child’s Pose to regroup for a minute, you know?”
And I don’t know the lingo. My whole deal I’m doing is in another language, and we probably don’t even do Camel Pose, anyway. I don’t even know what kind of camel she’s talking about. I could probably make a hump and spit at people, but if I have to make two humps and retain water for three weeks without peeing it out, then I’m probably going to need a more serious mat or a catheter or something. And meanwhile, she’s just smiling at me, waiting for me to share my class experience. So I do:
“Um… yeah. We were, uh… doing that thing where you sit down and twist sideways — Excruciating Corkscrew Pose, I think it might be called, maybe — and that sucked, for the first five seconds or so. But then I looked down and saw the Slim Jims I brought in my back pocket, so I just ate those in a corner for the rest of class.”
“*sigh* Exactly what kind of yoga are you doing, again?”
“It’s fauxga. Great stuff. Hey, you want a Slim Jim?”
She never wants a Slim Jim. And lately, she doesn’t seem to want to talk about yoga, either. Not sure why, really — maybe all that heat is finally getting to her. Too bad; I thought yoga was supposed to be fun.
Permalink | No CommentsI’m soon to make a raving fool of myself.
I say that not because the law of averages exists and I haven’t embarrassed myself in the last twelve seconds, nor because it’s a day ending in a ‘Y’.
Those conditions still hold, of course. ‘Raving fool’ is basically par for the course at this point. And I’m usually the one getting thwacked with a 3-wood.
But this is different. This time, I can see my lunacy coming. It’s like I’m standing at the edge of a tall cliff, staring down at my own inner idiot.
(He’s making faces and sticking its tongue out at me. And now he’s mooning me.
He just tripped over his underpants headfirst into a ravine. Nice. Idiot.)
Here’s the problem: I have a song running through my head. It’s been there for days, and I don’t know what it is. Don’t know who sings it, don’t know when it came out, and I forget where I heard it. Could be in my MP3 collection, right now, taunting me from this very computer. Don’t know. And what’s worse, I don’t even know enough to find out what it is. I only know enough to cause myself mental pain and anguish. And eventually, raving foolery.
“I couldn’t carry a melody if you crammed it facefirst in a Bjorn and tied it around my neck in a double windsor bow.”
Because this song is like some kind of Chinese musical torture. I have this tiny piece of song — the barest snippet of half-remembered snippet — in my brain. I don’t even have lyrics, exactly. I just know there’s some kind of pause or crescendo, and then a few words I don’t recall, and then this sort of staccato-filtered ‘ge-e-e-et down on your knees‘.
Or maybe it’s ‘get up off your knees‘. Or ‘get busy with your knees‘. For all I freaking know, it’s ‘rub new medicated Vaseline on your knees‘, and I’ve been humming a damned petroleum jelly commercial in my head for the past three weeks.
(Which is perhaps not as shameful as the summer I spent involuntarily screaming ‘TROJAN MAAAAAAN!!‘ after one too many times spent sleeping on the couch with late-night TV ads blaring.
But it would be a close second.)
I’m pretty sure this isn’t a Vaseline jingle, or any other kind of ad. And if it is, I don’t know what I’d do, exactly. Buy all the product I could find, because it’s so damned catchy? Or beat their ad weenies with a rusty crowbar, for injecting three seconds of their stupid jingle into my fragile cerebellum?
(Probably the beating, naturally. All marketing types deserve a good thrashing now and then, for something they’ve done. Or they’re about to do, or are doing right this very moment.
Also, a simple assault charge would be a lot easier to explain to my wife than why I suddenly bought forty-three cases of new medicated Vaseline jelly. Marital vows only take you so far in a relationship.)
Anyway, this song. No idea what it is, but it’s persistent as hell. It’s wrapped its grubby little claws around some poor cluster of my neurons, and it’s not letting go. So I have to find out what it is — not because I love the song, or its my new fave OMG killer ringtone — but just so I can play the damned song through six or eight times and shake it out of my head. That’s how it works. That’s what I have to do to restore some semblance of sanity.
But I’ve got nothing to go on. I tried looking up lyrics online, and I’ll tell you this: if you ever decide to Google ‘get up OR get down OR get busy on’ and anything to do with ‘knees’, then you’d better either have your search ‘family filter’ set to “Pope” or be prepared for a bunch of image hits that are not anything to do with the song that’s in my head.
(Although the people in the photos may well each have forty-three cases of Vaseline in their pantry. For various uncomfortable meanings of the word ‘pantry’.)
That leaves one last resort — a final Hail Mary heave only available to me thanks to wonders of 21st century technology: my Android phone, and the SoundHound app, which can purportedly identify a song based only on someone humming the tune.
I’ve got the app. I know the tune, or some small part of it. And last I checked, I had a hummer. I’m missing none of the ingredients needed to grease this thing up and put it to bed for good.
Except that I have zero musical capability. I couldn’t carry a melody if you crammed it facefirst in a Bjorn and tied it around my neck in a double windsor bow. The situation is hopeless; I can’t possibly create the right series and pitch of consecutive noises to tell my phone what song is boring through my hemispheres night and day. But that’s the only way to get rid of it. So I have to try.
And I’ve been here before. Oh, yes. This is not virgin territory, by any stretch. Last time this happened, the song — I found out months later — was Laid, by James. Didn’t know that. Had never heard the song name, and the artist didn’t ring a particular bell.
Which is why, months earlier, I’d sat with the door locked and blinds down in my bedroom unevenly warbling, ‘Weee-EEEE-ooooo-ooo-hooo! WHEY-EEEEE! HOOO! OOOOH!!‘ at my phone for three hours one weekend. And what did I get for my troubles?
A sore throat for three days, and a stupid SoundHound app asking me if I was trying to find something off ‘Mr. Ed Sings the Blues‘. Effing smartass.
And how will I be spending this weekend, locked in my bedroom with the blinds pulled tight?
I’ll give you one guess, and two hints — it might give me bronchitis, and it won’t involve forty-three cases of medicated Vaseline. ‘On my knees,’ indeed.
Permalink | No CommentsI’ve mostly recovered from my weekend illness, though I’m still feeling a bit ’emptied out’. For reasons that you probably shouldn’t think about in too much detail.
I’m happy to report, though, that solid food was back on the table today. Also, in the stomach, which makes me even happier. But it was another bit of liquid diet that gave me pause this evening.
(Not the stomach sort of pause, thankfully. I promise, I’m done with the gastrointestinal humor. At least until Thanksgiving.)
After a light dinner, I was feeling up to a pre-bedtime drink. And what better way to shuffle off toward Sleepytown than with a nice big glass of milk?
(Not warm milk, though. I know that’s the insomnia cure cliche, but I just don’t go there. I stopped drinking my milk warm when it stopped being dispensed through a boob. So unless you count the possibly mildly retarded high school kid who stocks the dairy aisle at my local supermarket, those days are sadly done.)
But I didn’t reach for regular milk. No. Though I’m a big fan of the moo juice — cow squirts, dairy drip, udder pus, call it what you will — I’ve recently discovered that I also have a taste for another kind: soy milk.
“How on earth they milk those little bean teats — or what kind of sicko first tried — is not something I pretend to understand. Or have fingers small enough to attempt myself.”
To be fair, soy milk is a different animal altogether than cow’s milk. For one thing, it doesn’t come from an animal at all. It’s made from soybeans, of course. How on earth they milk those little bean teats — or what kind of sicko first tried — is not something I pretend to understand. Or have fingers small enough to attempt myself. I just know that I drank it once, and I liked it, and now I drink it on occasion when the mood strikes.
(Or when I accidentally call regular milk names like ‘dairy drip’ or ‘udder pus’ in my head. Seriously, you do not know what it’s like in here. Life gets complicated in a hurry.)
So I reached for the carton of soy milk and poured a nice tall thick chalky glassful.
(Hey, I said I liked it. I never said I wasn’t realistic about it. If you gave me cow’s milk the same consistency, I’d think it had been grazing in a field of dirty blackboards. Somehow, coming from little beans makes it okay. Coming out of a bean makes everything okay.)
As I returned the carton to the fridge, I noticed a new slogan printed on the side. In big, friendly letters it read:
‘Made From NORTH AMERICAN SOYBEANS‘
A simple enough message, I suppose. But I couldn’t help wondering — why was it there? What insightful bit of genius marketing inspiration had compelled the company to update their packaging to slather this piece of information on every container? Somehow, they felt that advertising the continent of origin of their beans would make them money. But how?
I could think of only two reasons. But neither made much sense.
First, it’s possible that they want people to know that the beans being milked — or squeezed, or wrung, or sweated, or however the hell they get that juice out — don’t have to travel far for the job. Which would be useful to know if, say, we were talking about strawberries. Or bread. Or people breast milk. These are delicate and perishable items, easily spoiled or contaminated if left too long on a slow cargo boat to their destination.
But soybeans? I’m not so sure. Maybe I’m wrong in this, but I thought the advantage of soybeans was that they’re pretty sturdy little buggers. They ship well and spoil slow — you could send them on a luxury cruise around the Cape of Good Hope and still confidently gobble down the edamame when they hit the dock at home.
(That may sound a bit barbaric, when put in those terms. Still, I just hope to god that if someone ever decides to eat me, they drop me on a Carnival boat for a couple of weeks of R & R first.
Seriously. I’ll have the time of my life, and be nice and fattened up for whoever’s chowing me down. It’s a ‘win-win’, is all I’m saying.)
More likely, I figured, was that the milk men wanted to hop on the patriotic bandwagon that triggers millions of clean-livin’ hard-workin’ lunchpail-totin’ Americans to buy when they see a product that’s: ‘Made in the U.S.A.‘
Only, these beans aren’t, I bet. Or else the carton would say so. Instead, it says: ‘Made From NORTH AMERICAN SOYBEANS‘
So you know what that means, right? Some of those little buggers are Canadian beans. Those beans have been planted by French-speakers, fertilized with moose turds and had their little bean boobs milked by north-of-the-border universal health care workers. Probably even been called legumes.
Or maybe those are Mexican soybeans — raised on tequila and chimichangas, protected by sombreros from the siesta-time sun, and whisked away at the peak of ripeness by mustachioed banditos from Tijuana. For all we know, they were fried — and refried again — before the leche was squeezed out of them.
But that would never do, if the brand is shooting for the ‘homegrown’ angle. So ‘NORTH AMERICAN SOYBEANS‘ it is.
Me, I don’t really give a damn. I just like the ‘milk’. And I figured the beans were from Japan, probably. Because what the hell do I know about soybean production around the globe? What am I, a ninth grade social studies report?
The only important things to me here are:
1) the milk, now finished, was delicious;
B) it was neither warm, nor squirted directly from lactating bean hooters; and
iii) the carton gave me something to think about, after a wasted weekend of being sick.
Imagining little Royal Canadian Mounted soybeans or Cinco de Mayo-celebrating soybeans contributing to my tasty beverage is just a bonus. And one which may lead to some very interesting dreams. I think I’ll go see what those are like now. Good night.
Permalink | No CommentsI’ve found over the years that I make a pretty good patient. When I’m sick, I don’t demand pillow fluffings or constant attention. I’m content to lie in bed and moan softly, ruing the day I was ever born.
Okay, so I’m not a great patient. Great patients probably do a lot less whimpering. But I’m not what you’d call ‘high-maintenance’, either.
What does happen when I’m sick, though, is that my respect for — or even recognition of — conversational boundaries takes a distant back seat to being miserable. Today has been a prime example.
Late last night, I began feeling not so well. Stomach pains, aches, chills — a veritable cornucopia of malady symptoms. Overnight, I made a few round-trips from the bed to the bathroom and back, and woke up exhausted. So I stayed in bed for most of the day — other than the occasional round-trip, as noted above.
Late in the morning, my wife came to check on me. I told her I was under the weather, and was staying under the covers — perhaps for good this time — and she patted me on the forehead and let me sleep.
(And didn’t ask too many questions about my condition. Probably because she knows she’ll get a straight — and unfiltered — answer.)
“We were pushing dinnertime, and I was still sucking pillow in my pajamas. I think that worried her a little bit.”
She spent the afternoon running errands, and came back just a little while ago to find me still in bed. Still moaning. And still ruing. She’s perhaps accustomed to seeing me in the bed late on a weekend morning, but this was unusual. We were pushing dinnertime, and I was still sucking pillow in my pajamas. I think that worried her a little bit.
Maybe more than a little bit, because she sat gently on the bed, stroked my hair and asked sweetly, ‘How’s it going, honey?‘
I wanted to be sweet, too. Or at least be a trooper for her — not to mention garner a few more sympathy points, since I really was feeling pretty lousy. Looking back, the best response would probably have been a faint but brave, ‘I’ll be okay… I think.‘
Something along those lines. The plucky patient, rallying as best he can in the face of unmitigated horror. Or mild food poisoning. Whichever. It’s the ‘plucky’ part we need to focus on here. That’s what gets you the sympathy points when you’re a sick little trooper.
Something that doesn’t get you sympathy points? This:
‘Babe, nothing solid has gone into me — or come out of me — all day.‘
Damn my lack of filters.
So instead of rubbing my hand or singing me a lullaby or maybe bringing me a sippy cup of 7-Up, she said, ‘Ew, gross.‘ And left me to my sleeping. And whimpering. And the ruing — always with the ruing.
Hopefully, tomorrow will be better — both health-wise and foot-in-mouth-wise. Right now, I’ve been out of bed for about an hour, and it’s calling me back again. That pillow’s not going to drool on itself.
And if it knows what’s good for it, it won’t ask me any questions, either.
Permalink | 2 Comments(Yesterday was a Bugs & Cranks day, featuring the not-so-wordy [but oddly time-consuming] bit of fanta-tweet baseball known as Designated Twitter: Don’t Call It a Comeback. Have a gander, if you’re so inclined.)
I’m having a bit of a fitness dilemma.
Not my usual fitness dilemma, which is something along the lines of, “What is this ‘fitness’, anyway, and how can I ignore it completely while mainlining aged prosciutto scraps directly into my arterial system?‘
This is different from that. And somewhat less delicious. Here’s the thing:
I play a fair number of ‘sports’. I put ‘sports’ in quotes because these are not, for the most part, actual physical activities meant to stimulate cardiovascular health or lung endurance or working up a warm sweaty glow. Rather, these are fat old man ‘sports’. Perspiring is not a priority. Neither is stretching. In some cases, we’re encouraged to move as little as possible for the duration of the event.
Take billiards, for instance. I’m in an 8-ball league. Most of the league night involves long periods of sitting and waiting, punctuated by short bursts of hunching over a table and peering with one squinty eye down a long shaft. It’s essentially the same workout as patronizing a gay boardwalk peepshow.
And while you might run into people who qualify as ‘sporty’, in various senses of the word, that hardly makes it a sport.
Or take bowling — three steps, a little curtsy and a flourish. That’s not athletics; that’s meeting the Duchess of Kent in a reception line. Only with uglier shoes. And less grease on the balls.
And don’t get me started on softball. There, they’re just happy if you make it from the dugout to the plate without falling over. If you manage that, you get a pat on the back. Also, a beer. A single gets a beer, a groundout gets a beer, a strikeout gets a beer, coaching first base gets a beer, sitting in the dugout gets a beer — you get the picture. There’s basically nothing you can do on or near the field that doesn’t qualify you for a beer. Which, come to think of it, probably explains all that falling over people tend to do between the dugout and the plate.
So softball — also not a sport. Softball exists solely to make you feel okay about drinking beer outside in the middle of a park on a Sunday morning, because you see nineteen other people around you doing the same thing. It’s like a support group in favor of drinking. They should call it “Alcoholics Athleticous”.
The crux of my dilemma is this: These are the sorts of ‘sports’ I play when I decide to wave a feeble, flabby hand in the general direction of ‘fitness’. Which is not that often. Unless I’m thirsty. And I’m pretty sure that “Jonesing for a Guinness” isn’t on the approved list of valid fitness motivations.
So I’m looking for something else. Something a bit more… strenuous. I’m not afraid to take on a challenge. And if it gets me healthier, and means that I’m able to carry around this aching, dumpy body for a few extra years, then… well. I should probably work on the ‘motivation’ part later. I’m clearly not any good at this, because that sounds kind of awful. Does ‘fitness’ come with some sort of wheelbarrow, maybe? Or, say, a beer?
Because I’m really jonesing for a Guinness right now. And that always puts me in the mood for a ‘workout’.
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