My second day

It's the end of my second day at PICA. A little tired, but that's good. Now the question is what to blog about? I promised (largely to myself) that I would blog everyday for a week. I missed yesterday, but I posted twice on Sunday, so I'm counting it. So for today...I worked out last night and this morning before work. The gym culture is so interesting to me. I go to 24 Hour Fitness and it's actually a little on the awful side. Like McDonald's or Target or any of a number of other chains, it's built for volume. There are lines and lines of exercise equipment, lines of people stairstepping or ellipticalling or treadmilling. Everyone doing the same thing, with minor variations. And besides aerobic machines, there are five acres of free weights and anaerobic machines. And mirrors all around, floor to ceiling mirrors that actually make you look really good while you're working out. Then when you go home, one look at your old crappy bedroom mirror and you are thinking about the next time you can go to the gym. Everything is built to inspire you to come back and that desire is based on dissatisfaction. The dissatisfaction with your self, with your present. There is always the possibility of the future implicit in gyms. You enter the gym slightly pudgy or slackly muscled, and you run a half hour and tone your arms and legs with weights--and then, after a period of time involved in a regimented workout schedule, you suddenly realize you've lost a few pounds or made that thigh quad stand out. Yet even then it's not enough; you come back and you come back, you subscribe to a series of magazines and watch television shows that reinforce the desire to be something better than what you are right now. So you're left to continue with the gym, with the supplements, with the bi-weekly yoga and the vegetables.

As I'm writing this, I realize that there's something missing here. I've described an ideal situation--and the thing is, gyms are built around an expectation of the ideal. What makes gyms sort of palatable is that only a small percentage of people actually get sucked into the "bigger, faster, stronger" thing where they end up a health nut and doing pilates twenty hours a week. Most people are fallable to a great degree; they don't come regularly, they don't eat healthily for very long periods of time, they essentially fall off the wagon of an addiction most people aren't really addicted to, at least physically. The addiction is psychological, to the ideal of a perfect body, a non-polluted physiology, a clear mind.

One might go on and on about culturally-mediated behaviors, etc. One might agree with a thesis that stated that going to the gym is something arbitrated by the bombardment of information that surrounds us. But beyond the sweat towels and dirty socks, if we make the leap to all the other retail chains that are around, there might be something to be said about how they operate in terms of creating desire. It's a bit like holding the carrot in front of the donkey. There's always a rider on the donkey, the person or thing who is controlling the movement, the direction of the donkey's attention. At the risk of calling everyone donkeys, including myself, there it is. I think there needs to be an ongoing conversation about how we consume. Of course there is a kind of metaphysics of consumerism going on in our culture right now. Adbusters is the first that comes to mind. Michael Moore is another, in his Awful Truth days. And living in Portland, I see evidence of awareness of capitalistic manipulation everywhere. Yet despite this awareness, I think we've decided to live with it rather than change the intentions of the donkey. For better or for worse, eventually there will be a moment when we must face how we get and consume our goods. Until then, I ride the elliptical machine and watch The Colbert Report; I buy my clothes at Banana Republic but recycle all of the extant paper in my house; I love summer blockbusters and I learn about global warming from a movie. There are trade-offs everywhere.