The Pish-Posh: 8 Week Challenge

Week One:

The Pish-Posh has started another challenge and this time I was awake enough to get in on the ground floor. I want to be posting more, and to lose two pounds per week. That would be excellent.

So far I have had three long walks and lost two pounds. Trying to keep the diet under control. The weekends are always the hardest time. I used to run 5k every day, and if health permits I would love to be doing that again.

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The first time I went to a gym a friend took me. We were 19 or 20, and he was deeply dedicated to becoming a cop. This gym was seedy looking on the outside, but decently outfitted inside. He told me the cops used it in the evenings.

The day we arrived it was early, and no one else was there but us and one woman. She was Asian, seven feet tall, with a huge head of wavy black hair, and in full makeup. She had a couple of volleyballs badly hidden about her person. All of this confused me, and I remember trying to get a look at her feet, because, seven-feet tall?

My buddy, let's call him Ed, was also openly staring. We were two 19-year-olds from the suburbs, and in his case, from a very small town almost as far as the interior. Without turning he muttered "... and during the day the local strippers use this place."

I never learned if she was working out in stilettos, because I did my best to put my back to her and get on with my workout. Ed was a tall boy, thin as a rail. He started lifting a barbell with light weights on it pretty quickly, I thought. When I picked up one with more plates, he shook his head and motioned for me to do likewise, so I took less weight.

His lifts got faster, and he started puffing as he went. It didn't feel right to me, too light, and too fast, but I went along. So far so good, until the woman, oh hell, the stripper, set up with a barbell on her shoulders a few feet behind Ed. She started doing slow squats.

I frowned and squinted like I really had something else on my mind, and redoubled my efforts. I started to breathe pretty hard. Ed's head began to turn backwards like an owl's, almost against his will, and he almost clocked himself with his barbell.

We were both turning a bit red, but couldn't seem to coordinate to stop. Maybe Ed had started out with a plan and a schedule--I did not know. I was afraid if I asked that my voice would crack. On and on we went, raising and lowering those barbells frantically. It was getting hot and I wished we had set up a fan near us.

When she lay down on the leg-curl bench, facing away from us, and started flexing, the strain became too much. I ran into the men's locker room, past the showers, pushing aside the largest, fittest, wettest, most entirely nude black man I have ever seen, in order to dive at the nearest toilet and throw up heartily.

Somehow I thought I might have deserved that a bit, but I cleaned up and went home, chose a published routine and made Ed follow it with me for a while. Shortly after we had been there, the seedy gym had been closed down by the cops for laundering drug money, so I didn't have to argue against going back. 

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A year later I was working at a trendy burger restaurant and she came in with four other girls with their arms around some incredibly ugly guy in bell-bottomed jeans and a silk shirt opened to his waist. The girls were wearing very little, and carrying balloons. He was so thin and pale it was scary; he looked like his face had been half-eaten by cats, and most of his nose had been knocked right off as a child. 

I asked "Who is that?" 

They said "Don't you know? That's Steven Tyler!" 

"No, not the guy, the tall woman."

"Who cares? That's Steven Tyler!" 

So I guess from that, that she stripped at the No. 5 Orange, or possibly did excellent accounting or sound engineering. You never know.