I haven’t blogged for a week, or two…but I have a good reason. I’m lazy. I performed my usual routine: worked until 6:30ish, moseyed over to the gym, ripped it until 8:30ish, grabbed some fine, fine dinner, brought it back to the apartment, gobbled it, took a shower, changed, watched some TV…”Well, I guess it’s about time to write ye olde blog. But the Mets are on, and they’re losing…I can’t let them lose by not watching. Plus this couch is so ridiculously comfortable and my laptop is all the way in my room four steps away. And I’d have to unzip my laptop bag! And the Mets! Would somebody please think of the Mets!!”
And so it went. And so went the days of my life. For about two weeks. But here I am blogging and de-lazifying myself. These blogs take a lot of brain power, you know. It’s not easy to write a blog about three completely random topics in essentially stream of consciousness format while lying on my stomach sprawled across my bed.
Anywho, I almost died at the gym today. I was completing part two of my routine (go to the gym after workage), and I didn’t want to run on the treadmill because my right knee has been bothering me lately. As I mentioned in a blog way back when, I have back issues: scoliosis, kyphosis, meiosis. My medical expertise is telling me this: my curvy spine is causing one of my legs to appear longer than the other causing excess pressure on my right knee during running.
Therefore, I went with the Stair Master. I had never used a Stair Master before, and it may be worse for my knees than running for all I know. But it seemed right at the time. So I went on the Stair Master, looked down upon the peons at the gym from my pedestal 30 feet in the air, pressed a few buttons and I was off.
It wasn’t that bad, until I upped the speed a bit. And then the stairs started raining down, and I started sinking. But I eventually got my act together and caught up with the speeding stairs. “Ok, this isn’t that bad,” I thought. But then I looked up at the TV, and got my foot caught in a crevice practically causing me to tumble down the stairs and break my neck. Again, I regained my composure. “Easy, easy, you can do this Josh, you own this Stair Master.” But the second I looked up, BAM, crevice.
I realized something. I was incapable of climbing the stairs and looking up. I tried looking up and maintaining the exact same leg motion over and over. Eventually, I would crack under the pressure, slightly alter my motion, forget where I was and then see my life flash before my eyes. So I went with plan B…look down at the moving stairs the entire time.
So I plodded on, keeping close watch where my feet were landing. Up down, up down, up down…the stairs, they were so mesmerizing…so beautiful! It was like watching a seizure-inducing Japanese cartoon. It all melded together in a Jackson Pollack painting. The stairs were me and I was the stairs. The stairs were life. I was life.
And suddenly…where were my feet?? Where were my feet? I missed a stair, then another one, then held on tight to the railing. “Where’s the stop button, where’s the stop button, would it even stop fast enough if I pressed the stop button…wait, I can’t even press the stop button because I can’t lift my eyes upward enough to see where it’s located…death by Stair Master is gonna be so embarrassing…”
I finally managed to make it through 20 minutes worth of these antics by looking down at the stairs for a little bit, then slightly shifting my eyes up, but not too up, and then glaring back at the stairs to make sure I was on the right track. I call it the Great Compromise of 2008.
Anyway, I don’t think I’m gonna do the Stair Master again for a while. By the way, the guy working out on the Stair Master next to me seemed quite bewildered by this whole affair. He also didn’t seem to have much of a problem watching TV and climbing stairs simultaneously.
So I guess it’s just me…although I never had a problem tapping my head and rubbing my stomach at the same time. I blame my meiosis.
This also seems like an appropriate place to put one of my favorite comedian Mitch Hedberg quotes:
(in funny voice) “I like escalators because an escalator can never break: it can only become stairs. You’ll never see an Escalator Temporarily Out Of Order sign, just Escalator Temporarily Stairs. Sorry for the convenience. We apologize that you can still get up there.”
