By the look in your eyes I knew you were born to lose
To the gym. The “Silver Sneakers” aerobics class has just finished, forcing me to wade through the throngs of elderly, who have just completed their lightweight exercises and are headed out to the diner now, to hang around. “How you doing, big guy?” some of the older guys address me. “Have you found someplace to work yet?” they want to know. This is the daily locker room banter. I am out of place here, at a time when most people my age are in office places and all manner of different work environments. They gather around me as I bring them up to speed on my life in two seconds. “You ever play any basketball?” Ron wants to know. Being tall, apparently, qualifies you to do certain things, and this is a question I’m asked relatively often. Still, I find myself unable to sufficiently reason my way out of exactly why I do not play basketball. “No, not really,” I let him know. “No reason, really.” The answer disappoints. He has a grandson, apparently, taller than I am, and he plays basketball. What can you do? Slipping into my Public Enemy T-shirt, I excuse myself to go do some aerobic exercises.

What I typically do is annex the private room, which has its own stereo system, and although a sign strictly admonishes, “do not change station,” I waste no time in making a b-line right for that same stereo and turn it to the station I like. The 12:00 college radio show is about to come on and I turn it up all the way. What at first seems like a fairly innocuous playlist is then hyper-amplified in the company of the middle-aged women who also end up making their way into the room. I cringe a little when they play the killer new rock track and an older woman comes in. Falling away, for the first time, is my own staid perception, and I hear the song for the first time from an alien point of view, as I often do when listening to music with others. The guitar part is big and the singer screams, shocking as it does this woman, who probably thought the Partridge Family were pretty insane. She wastes no time in turning it not only down, but all the way off.

Heading back out into the main area of the gym, there are an inordinate number of jacked-up men in here today. I feel out of place, like I just stepped off some type of liner destined for some alien continent and am now experiencing the life form indigenous to the mainland. The weird thing is, I have pretty much always been a native. It’s kind of funny watching these guys taking sideward glances at me in my PE T-shirt, and wondering what they think of all that. If they feel bad about my lack of cultural appropriateness in the same way that I feel bad about theirs. I eavesdrop on their conversations between sets, amazed by the subject matter. They’re playing that Green Day song, where it goes, “walking down the lonely road/ the only one that I have ever known”, and the guys are expressing a real reverence for this song. The Green Day track is where it’s at, man. I like listening in on this commentary, because I’m pretty much sure that it wouldn’t matter what is being played ten times a day that would garner a reaction like this one, and liking the Green Day track is pretty much proof positive of this. What cult-deprogramming center I’ve been attending that they have apparently missed out on, I’m not sure. But it was something, somewhere along the line, which made me detach and let go completely. And now here I am, and there they are, walking down the only road that I have ever known.

Getting on the treadmill, I can see myself in the mirror on the opposite side of the gym. Walking at myself, into myself. The Public Enemy shirt, with the crosshair design on the front in perfect view. I stand before myself, incredulous at my own sense of alienation from my fellow human beings. Turning up the speed on the treadmill, running faster now, into myself, although never really getting any closer.