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October 1st, 2005

My birth-control anti-inflammatories, I think they might be helping a little, but if progress has been made it hasn’t been major. I was just cutting my nails and had to grip the clippers like a bicycle handlebar, ironically enough, instead of between my thumb and forefinger when I went to cut the nails on my right hand. And when I swim I’m still a little gimpy. My thumb and first to finger stay pretty tight together when I pull them through the water, but the numb ring and pinky fingers flail about as if tethered on a short leash.

Exies II:
• 20 p’s
• 20 l’s

I’ve been posting here about wanting to get in shape. So, how much am I trying to lose? What’s my target weight? I don’t know. How much should I lose? I’m not about playing the numbers. I think it’s healthier–physically and mentally–to take a more rational wholistic approach. How do I look, how do I feel? That should be the measure, I’ve always believed. But doing those twenty leg-lifts there, I came up with a new criterion, and how it happened went like this:

The floor is a parquet. For some time before my arrival, the apartment had only been occupied itinerantly by visiting/vacationing family and friends. By the looks of it, nobody was invested enough to sweep or mop the floor. And neither have I. I wanted music–my recent Agent Orange downloads, incidentally–to accompany my lifting of the legs. This ruled out my doing them on the bed at the opposite end of the trailerhousethingonstilts, and left only the pube-confettied, dust bunnied (Playboy bunnies judging by the amount and color-variety of the pubes) floor as a surface upon which to march my abs along the road to six-packdom. Well, I was wearing a white shirt at the time–this was about 20 minutes ago–the white shirt Care Pharmacy generously and marketingously gave me. I look good in white T-shirts. It was new. No pubes on T-shirt backs for me, no siree! So I took it off, lied down on the buckling parquet (butter! margarine!) and commenced the lifting. Thing about that, though, is that rotating your hips along that axis recurves your spinal column, flipping up your tailbone and pushing the small of your back and–this is the unfortunate key–the love handles which flank it down into the the surface on which they floppily rest. Continuing up and on, bring your knees toward your chest, seals the deal–hermetically–and the lowering reverses the process, sucking your vacuum-packed flesh back up off the floor creating a grotesque farting noise more perfect than the fart noises you made as a child, cupping beneath your underarm, creating The Wind Beneath Your Wings. In this–the Still Life on Parquet–version, you get a whoopee cushion worthy effect both ways: going up and going down, which makes it also cost-effective, and embarrassing as you consider the 80-year-olds through the floor below you until you remember that he’s got a colostomy and hikes his shorts–cut-off polyester slacks from his earning days–up so high that his nutsack hangs out and onto the wheelchair he sits on, probably making its own pneumatic noises on a hot South Carolinian day. That thought makes me feel better and nauseated simultaneously. But the point I’m getting to is this: wholisic-shmistic, my new goal is to get to the point that leg-lifts in a crowded room, without a dog to blame it on, do not require an ‘excuse-me.’

Entry Filed under: Lifin