Trivial Pursuit: Muscle, Strength and Health

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Better late than being locked up for gun smuggling without a pair of hand grippers, or pinned under a 16-wheeler without an Olympic bar or held captive by Muguwambi cannibals without your favorite muscle tank top or stranded on a barren arctic iceberg with no squat racks.

Life can be cruel, but we have choices.

How are you this fine day, faithful IronOnliner recipients? No answer necessary. I ask because I’m concerned and I want you to know I’m concerned. Like the line in a song by the Beatles 45-years-ago, “I heard the news today, oh, boy.” There is more catastrophe and carelessness, violence and corruption on the globe than muscle on Ronnie Coleman, or, more appropriately, crooks in politics and high places.

Thank heaven we work out. Iron protects us from calamity. Lifting builds core strength. Regular exercise assures readiness.

Weightlifting is a wholesome and productive diversion. Absolutely honest and bound by truth, it not only enhances our devilish good looks, it diminishes tension and increases resistance, it un-clutters the mind and clarifies thinking, it improves poise and bolsters attitude, it expands understanding and provides fulfillment, it prepares the body for battle and discourages jerks from screwing with us. It’s cheap, it’s fun and can be done alone.

Why doesn’t everyone lift weights? Maybe because it’s hard work and takes guts.

I saw the news. A handheld TV camera followed oversized bodies around the mall and city streets, exciting footage to accompany the XYZ Evening Special: The World is Dangerously Fat.

Increasingly, headlines focus on obesity and the load it bears on the hunky individual and on society. It’s a costly predicament, from the extra mouthfuls to the mounting medical bills, lost workdays to lack of mobility. Solutions to the worldwide dilemma include raising awareness through amiable community exercise and weight-loss competitions, and 5k runs, presenting local, state and national recognition as the coveted award.

This should be a national movement -- fun, smart, positive and humbling. Promote it like sex, drugs and rock and roll and it’ll take off like the RK2 nuclear-powered, laser-guided, no-fail missile. Better yet, it’ll take off like sex, drugs, rock ‘n roll.

Less popular are state-proposed sugar-tax on soda pop and fat-tax on fast-food cuisine. Good enough idea, though government intervention is frowned upon by citizens of all shapes and sizes, and the billion-dollar junk food industry is slightly miffed.

Corporations -- lean-mean working machines -- requiring their employees to exercise at the company gym and meet weight standards display vision and wisdom and nerve. Kaboom, crash, burn... another set of cool tools are met with a cold and oversized reception.

Tough to persuade the mounting 70% large to abstain from overindulgence and poor nutrition when, but for a thin steel-edged slice, they don’t really care.

The obvious no-brainer is providing a healthy menu at all school cafeterias and removing the junk food vending machines from the reach of students’ pudgy, coin-filled fingers. Let’s reinstall physical education in school curriculums while we’re at it. Here’s an idea, concerned citizen: E-mail your chunky, corrupt government official and speak up for health and wellbeing, respect and responsibility and our kids and our nation.

Or not... States could always invest in research to harness the energy resources of roaches and rats and rattlesnakes.

I’m all for personal responsibility and patriotic participation, but with suicide bombers lurking in airports and drug lords chewing on the borders, I’m probably exhibiting excessive sensitivity and darn commonsense and pettiness.

Another trivial question: How far have you come this first month of the new year, and where do you see yourself, say, four months from now -- mid-spring. I’m not big on looking much further ahead than tomorrow, but it’s not a bad idea to glance at the not-too-distant future to stir the imagination and arouse intentions.

Mid-spring is a pleasant time of year, hopeful and stimulating; it’s close enough to anticipate with eagerness, and it’s far enough away to execute a purposeful training scheme. And this training scheme must include renewed disciplines in both lifting the iron up and shoving the calories down.

How enriching, rewarding and simple the deeds, bombers, when life has become so complicated and oft disappointing. Personal control of the most prized things -- your body, mind and soul -- while the once-stable fundamentals -- finances, jobs, security -- are out of control.

It’s the best we can do, which isn’t bad. Imagine the approaching spring -- bright and warm, alive and in full bloom. At the center of the portrait is you... shoulda tucked in your shirt and combed your hair. Is that a bug in your teeth?

Muscle, strength and health: We want it and seek it, we strive and achieve it. We feel awesome. What’s this: hard work and pain, time and patience, sacrifice and inconvenience, diet and menu? Oh, boy! We quit, we lose it, we miss it and we mope. We feel awesome... guilt, and start all over again.

Commonly known as the ABCs, the Agonizing Bodybuilding Cycles, the madness is easily acquired and hard to overcome. I know. Been there, done that in the mid-‘50s. No, not my mid-50s -- the mid-1950s, a junior in high school.

The suffering was too great -- drooling, incoherent outbursts, pounding my head against the school locker doors -- and by age 15 I vowed I would not submit to the ABCs again. No matter what, come graduation or occupation or matrimony, acrimony or parsimony, I would never quit. I would blast it with diligence, if not intelligence, and never quit.

Reluctantly I admit I’ve been an exaggeration of the norm. Stick-to-it-tiveness is commendable until it falls into the category of sick, obsessed and neurotic, completely mad or totally insane, screwy and nutso.

Pssst, hey you, propeller-head... you’ve got to help me, I’m locked inside myself and can’t get out.

I finally went to the gym this afternoon, entered the rear door and, when no one was looking, unleashed myself in the cage of metal. There’s something indescribably intoxicating about being mad.

I’m not alone, Wing Nuts...

dd

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