Jeremiah's School of Levitation

When I was done pounding my body at the gym, blasting my blood through my veins at speeds that would get my blood cells arrested on the road, and dripping sweat almost in rhythm with the rain outside, I was able to think again, and, as those thoughts started to race, like they always do, revving up alongside each other like hot-rodding teens, daring their idle chatter to try to beat the torque of the idle chatter idling next to them, I realized two things: I realized why I exercise, and I realize why I keep coming to this blog.

I exercise not because I need to get back into college shape because, frankly, that would mean I'd need to lose 50 more pounds, gain about 20 Saturday night poetry night's worth of hipness, gain ten thousand minutes of naive bravado, and increase my social life by about three girlfriends, (1000 if you count the ones that I WISHED I could date). Not going to happen.

No, I exercise because, for an hour, I don't have to think. When I exercise, my mind shuts down, or, maybe, just gets outrun. I can then just be a body. I can ram my legs and arms into weights, whip my legs round and round on a stationary cycle (with "no destination, no scenery, and no roads" as Speech says--though, sometimes, there IS scenery, if you know what I mean...), and stretch my thighs across distances that, in normal life, I wouldn't bother to cross unless there was no one around to pick up what I dropped. I can stop my mind from racing with itself.

When I exercise, all I do is hear the music coming from my iPod, count my reps, and feel my heart pounding in my neck. I don't mull over anything, curse my awkward day, or replay all the things I COULD have said. I just sweat, pound, lift, groan, hear Apples In Stereo (great band), count my reps, feel glorious pain, grunt, shiver, and, finally, feel the wonderful release of muscle deciding that it has had enough and will now miraculously become a bowl of spaghetti, thank you.

No thoughts. No self-criticisms, regrets, arcane desires, or flat-out annoying bursts of inner ranting rising and bursting like a rolling boil. Nothing but a series of levers and pulleys I become. I'm the physical rendering of all those workers' efforts in that movie Metropolis. This is glorious. This is a release from myself. An old friend of mine once called me a shark. I wondered if he was calling me that because he'd seen how I attack a plate of boiled crawfish, but, actually, he explained his comparison by saying that I was like a shark because it seemed like I never stopped moving.

But, I do stop moving, I just never let anyone see it. You ever drop the strings of a marionette? What happens to the marionette is what it looks like when I stop moving. Not pretty.

So, I keep moving, but I can't deal with all the movement being done by monkey mind. Sometimes, I need to go fight some resistance, like weights, or having to wrestle stuff from my head and onto a keyboard.

Which brings me to why I keep coming back to this blog. It too is another release, another way I can drain the thought swell in my head. I wish I had brilliant thoughts. Instead, they are more like chatter, more like what you hear if you attend a pro football game--60,000 or so voices, all at a different tone, only every now and then a majority of them rising to concentrate on and speak about the same thing--a great play, or a bad call, or the cheerleaders.

My blog is hard to come to because I know when I do, I will spill my thought bile and drop my marionette on it and it'll look funny when I'm done, sometimes so much so that I'll pull the plug on it and let my words drain out into the ether. Most of the time, the mess I make stays, and you "get" to read it.

So, anyway, what I think I'm trying to say is the same thing I want to say to the health club. Thanks for being here, thanks for welcoming me when I show up, and thanks for letting me pound on you for a while. It's therapy to me. I'd need a few more blogs, and a hundred more years, to really get my mind flossed, and I'll need to gain about 500 pounds more bravery to even approach a blog daily to work out. But, geez, my mind needs to lose some weight, so I'll keep showing up.

I love every bit of this blog post.

You've captured how a lot of us feel, I think...that blogging is a release of sorts, a kind of mental self-love, or stimulation, or dumping ground, that keeps us in shape.

Days I don't or can't blog, well, I feel guilty. Maybe not guilty...more like something's missing, like I forgot to pee, or eat breakfast AND lunch.

(hehheh...I just said 'pee'...and THAT, dear Jeremiah, is why I blog....)

Ditto what Mona said. My blog keeps me sane. But exercise for me is a time that I CAN get inside my head without hearing things like screaming and toys being thrown across rooms and all that great stuff. I gotta say though that the stuff that spills out of your head here is just so. so. well inspriational.

Pretty nice words for a therapy session.

That'll be $120.00 please. Where should i send the bill?

I come here because i like what you have to say, and i like the way you say it. We vote with our time.

20 Saturday night poetry night's worth of hipness"

Okay, you do read your OWN BLOG don't you???

ditto to what mona said cause it sounds smart and because she is a rebel and uses words like 'pee'.

Oh my God, if you weren't married, I'd make you run away to Vegas with me!

Yes, yes, YES!!! You get it!

The gym. The sometimes scenery at the gym. The long-lost 20 year old body. The blog.

Sigh... You get it.