Exercise: The Horror, the Horror...

For all of you bona fide exercise lovers out there, I ask you --

How did you get that way? What twist of aesthetic perversion helped you become comfortable with the bleeping, pounding and TV-radiated environment of the average gym? What keeps you going back? Is it those seductive endorphins?

Because I cannot bear the machine-mill that most gyms have become. Even Curves is just a bunch of machines, waiting to torture the next victim. Sometimes me. Usually some grim-faced, zombie-like treadmill-walker with an I-pod. The TV or TVs flickering above us, the thump of the masturbatory work-out music (pump pump pump aaaaaah pump pump pump aaaaah). The horror!

I don't really mind the exercise itself. I like that part of it, actually. It's the environment, designed for efficiency perhaps, but certainly not humanity. We've long known that we get strapped into desks at school so that we'll be less uncomfortable when we get strapped into our cubicles when we join the 9-5, regulated by silent bells and fast-food lunch half-hours. What are we being trained for in the gym environment?

I suspect we're learning that the body is a machine -- not a sensual, flexible collective of organs and muscle and bone and skin, but a machine we can "work out" with the dispassionate science of sleek progressive machinery that measures our heart beats and regulates our calorie expenditure. And if my body is a machine, then I am only a mind encased in that machine, so I best keep it well-oiled and regular, and distract my mind with a little expensive downloaded music so I can keep on creaking through the world with my eyes on whatever prize I'm supposed to focus on.

And even if the metaphor has some merit, biologically, it certainly loses a great deal of soul in the gym-bot environment.

No wonder most Americans would rather be fat than fit, if this is our cultural solution to fitness. March, march to the beat of the faux-disco-reggae-TV-pulse of the World Gym machine. March, march, to a healthier death, with plump muscles and withered spirit. Although it's no better to be tethered to the couch watching TV (watching like the marching zombies, sinking into blankness), there has to be a better way to activate and energize healthy bodies!

Otherwise, the machine story wins. I, for one, am not a machine.

Maybe Duke Ellington had it right: "It don't mean a thing if it ain't got that swing!" Dancing, anyone?