Yesterday evening after work, as per our plan, Joe, my coworker, dragged me to the on-campus recreation center, for some good ol’ fashioned machismo.
I had, in my life, been in one gym before. This was when I was 12. I did nothing while there.
I have become increasingly aware of the need for my physical health. It’s beginning to effect my attitude towards a great deal of my life, and I would like to be in shape for at least part of my 20’s. After all, I sit in an office all day, every day, and stare at a tube.
The newly rennovated and highly improved recreation center was a bit daunting to me at first. While I was standing outside, waiting for Joe to arrive, I began to feel sweat beading up on my brow, and noticed that my breathing had quickened. Obviously, it was primarily psychological, and my body was preparing to do what it hadn’t done in a while… which was anything more than sitting on its own ass.
It was either that or the fact that I was standing outside in direct sunlight in 100 degree heat with oppressive humidity, and my body was revolting against the heavy Oklahoma August and begging, crying, wailing for the sweet, sweet release of air conditioning, and a nice comfy chair to plant itself into for a few good hours and stare at a tube.
We go inside, and suddenly, I’m at ease. I’m no longer nervous or concerned.
Or was that the sudden rush of processed, cooled, and filtered air?
First up was the treadmill. The goal was to get the heart-rate up and get the body working for what was to come after.
20 minutes, 150 burned calories, 1.3 miles, 10 minutes at a target heart-rate of 170, and a couple of false starts with the jet airplane cockpit style controls of that damnable torture device later, I’m sweaty, breathing heavily, and my heart rate is high. But I’m not exhausted. Granted, my muscles are a little on the tired side, but I’m doing alright. My heart and breathing rates are high, but I’m not short of breath or winded, just… active.
I actually feel, you know, not shitty.
Next is the weight machines. For about 20 or 30 minutes, I wander around and try about 10 to 20 crunches, pulls, pushes, bends, stretches and other repetitive and highly painful sounding movements on each of about 5 different Nautilus machines. I’m, as they say, feeling the burn, baby.
And then, it was time to go home. Less than an hour of exercising, and we’re done. Hmmmm. I’m a bit winded, I’m giddy from the natural endorphine high, I’m sweaty and sticky and humid, and it’s time to go home and hop in the shower.
Allow me to digress, as I’m so wont to do.
When I first moved into my apartment three years ago, I had the most god-awful, wuss-ass, low-flow spitting and sputtering of a shower-head it wasn’t even funny. At the time, it wasn’t a big deal.
One morning, about a month into my tenure at my apartment, the shower head developed a leak that meant most of the water shot straight up and out in a kind of breathtaking arc, damaging a small portion of my bathroom ceiling and causing the most peculiar Rorschach ink-blot stain on the dry wall above my morning induced delerium filled head. As a side note, I’m really into irrelevent detail in the mornings, for some inadequately explored reason.
So, I bought a new shower head. I decided to splurge a little, and instead of blowing my money on yet another trickling excuse for a bathing device, bought a shower head that actually had a few features, promised a good flow, and still claimed to have a water saver function. It’s one of those that has multiple styles, selectable by spinning the “Wheel-Of-Water!” on the front and picking your style.
There are four styles:
1. Rock-hard, pounding single stream of pressurized water. Not enough for a shower massage or anything, just enough to hurt like a mother if you accidentally get shot in the face by this overpowered super-soaker.
2. Kind of a pulsing ring o’ water thingy, again, not useful enough to ever help massage a sore shoulder, just enough to annoy the hell out of you with it’s overpowered “Thdthdthdthdthdthdthd” sound as you try and gradually wake yourself up.
3. Your average, run of the mill circle of little holes that ends up being nothing more than just a generic stream of water. Your canonical shower showerhead, so to speak.
4. The “mist” function. This sprays water at you, not in any kind of stream, or a couple dozen tiny streams, but by practically atomizing the water, mixing it with incoming air from the aerator, and blasting it right at you at high speeds. We’re talking trying to take a shower in a misty version of a fire-hydrant here. If they had a super-soaker that could fire like this thing with high range, whomever had one would be an instant winner in any water fight.
I keep mine on “3″. It’s simple, it’s effective, and it gets me clean.
Yesterday evening, however, my purpose for stepping foot in the shower was not necessarily just to get clean.
Oh, don’t get me wrong, I was already taking a bath in my own sweat, and I probably smelled like some wild creature had died, and instead of just doing everyone a favor and rotting in peace in some quiet little out-of-the-way and well-ventilated grave, had, with the last spasms of life before its body stiffed, crawled all over my body and effectively slimed me.
But my main purpose at this point was to cool down and not do anything that involved running or moving big heavy bricks of steel in a repetitive motion like some demented construction worker who couldn’t decide if he actually wanted to anything constructive.
So, I turned the shower on, pulled the cold water on, and left my hand hesitatingly over the knob for “hot”.
Ehhh, screw it.
I didn’t turn on the hot water. Clouds of cool steam began billowing from the shower as I did what most of you probably don’t want to hear about, think about, or even admit ever happens at any point in this cosmic existence.
I stripped bare-ass nekkid.
I noticed a significant temperature change in the bathroom. This was going to be interesting.
I hopped in. Well, not so much hopped in, but more like gingerly placed my feet on the cold, damp shower surface and tried not to slip and crack my noggin on anything hard and tile-ish.
I stepped into the flow. Or cloud, as it were.
To quote Keanu Reaves in any movie he’s ever been in…. “Woah.”
Freezing steam poured over my body and enveloped me in a cloud of sensation, every nerve ending firing, screaming at the sudden loss of heat, while miniature pinpricks of crisp, freezing water exploded against my skin. My body temperature lowered, my breathing quickened and then slowed, and I allowed myself to be engulfed in this miniature hurricaine.
At first, the noise emenating from me was a gasp. Then a chuckle. Then a chortle. Then a full-out, raucous bout of side-tearing laughter.
I was laughing. I had no clue why. Maybe it was the overdose of hormones and other chemicals that I had given myself while pushing my body to extremes it had not seen in years, if ever. Maybe it was the fact that the day, the week, even the month at work have been pretty much surreal in its bottomless stupidity.
Or maybe it was the fact that I felt like I had just awakened, and not from any common-grade night-sleep.
This was a different kind of awakening. It’s the same reason why martial arts experts are forced to endure sitting under a waterfall. This gushing river of clear, cold water pouring on you, over you, around you, through you just makes you forget… everything. Everything but the most important thing in the world. Laughter.
It felt… wonderful.
For 30 minutes (thank god water is paid by the apartment complex), I stood in the shower, laughing and giggling like the most demented of psychotics, making an utter damned fool out of myself, and giving not even a single damn.
As I’ve stated before, I’m all about sensation. At times I can seem cold and calculating, and at other times I’m jovial but detached, I still, for the most part, never feel like I’m part of this world. It’s as though my body is on auto-pilot while my brain concentrates on more important matters. Even when I look around, or smell scents, or taste or feel or hear, I give it little more than a passing thought, as though I only skim the surface. Most of the time, the sights and sounds and sensations that go on constantly around me are old hat, things that I’ve become bored with and used to. It’s as though I’m dreaming when I’m awake, like some poor insomniac who’s never truly awake, I stumble around in a dim haze while I go on internally about what I consider to be more important things.
So when something, anything, has enough power to catch my attention, and suddenly smacks my brain out of its constant analyzing and forces it to observe and perceive and sense, it’s quite mesmerizing. It makes me feel truly alive. This is why I’ve written so much about forcing yourself out of mental detachment recently.
Blinding light, searing pain, breathtaking cold, stark contrast, any of these will cause me stop, mid-mental sentence, and simply perceive. It’s the only way I can slow down it seems, and it feels good to take a momentary soma-style holiday from “higher”-conciousness and allow my senses do the talking for a change. Don’t worry, I’m not a cutter, although I think I could regress down that spiral quickly if I allowed myself to.
So, for 30 minutes, while standing in something as simple as a shower, I envisioned being in a cold autum thunderstorm. I imagined myself at the base of a waterfall. I pretended like I was diving into the proverbial river of sensation from the cliffs of higher awareness.
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