Porcelain God

It's Sunday so I was in the gym this morning, working on legs. On the weekend you tend to see the same faces, and the gym isn't very busy. It was a good workout, spoiled a bit by the completely and utterly shite music they were playing. This is a suburban, predominantly white gym - you can play old rock, modern rock or anonymous techno music and they'll all be good to work out to; what you can't play is lightweight ghetto/soul crap (I don't even know how to describe it). It pisses off the clientele, but it's a waste of time talking to the staff - they typically have the IQ, combined, of a hamster. And not an intelligent hamster, either - one of the dense ones that can't quite work out how to make its wheel go round.

Anyway, my buddy and I were about done when we noticed Pam had arrived. She's a forty-ish suburban mum with a good sense of humor who works out hard, but this was a little late for her to be showing up. Turns out she'd been up all night praying to the Porcelain God as result of an ill-advised wine consumption regime the previous evening. As many of us do, she'd sworn "never again" between technicolor yawns, and in the cold light of day now had to figure out what "never again" meant. No alcohol ever? No wine ever? No excessive consumption ever? Of course we've all made that promise at some point. (If you've never had too much to drink you don't have enough life experience to be reading this.) Most of us have promised it more than once, which goes to show what a meaningless vow it is, although at that point when you've got the helicopters, sweating all over, saliva flooding your mouth, and horrific nausea, the point where you now know it's coming, you'll be ready to promise a limb just for it to be over.

The good news is that we don't get much smarter with age. Pam is, I think, about as upright a citizen as you'll find, and if she can spend an evening talking to God on the white telephone then there's really no hope for any of us. She showed up to the gym though, which is always my cardinal rule for people at work - I don't care how fucked-up you get at night, you'd better answer the bell in the morning. And that means showing up ready to go, not shambling in, green visaged and squinting, no use to man nor beast.

Of course puking followed by gym is fine; gym followed by puking can be dodgy. I once worked on my abs, went home and promptly succumbed to one of those 24 hour stomach flu things. When I finally heaved, my stomach muscles cramped up as a result of the exercise and I was in agony and unable to breath in again. I wondered for a few seconds if this was going to be how I died - of course it wasn't, but it added a new dimension to an activity that was, I had thought, already about as un-fun as it could get.

Anyway, I'm going over to a neighbour's place tonight to sit out on the deck with a beer, and I'm taking Boddingtons. It's not beyond the bounds of possibility, as good as that beer tastes on a hot day, that I'll be making a promise of my own later tonight. I think I'm smarter than that, but the evidence of history is probably against me. Just ask Pam...


Copyright 2007 Edward Bison