Siddity in the City

Friday, I dropped some of my dwindling cash on a short-term membership at my local gym. I hadn’t been in over a month, since about a week after I was laid off, because even though the company-sponsored membership was paid up through January, I was still spending about $5 per day on my mass transit round-trip journey to the downtown gym.

I just trudged up to my new gym today and put in an hour on the elliptical. Nothing major, yet, I feel so freaking good right now that I’m wandering around my apartment belting out “Jet City Woman.” (Snaps for Geoff Tate, bitches!)

I’ve always known rationally that working out makes me feel good. But, as I was bouncing away to, like, this ditty here

Burn - Nine Inch Nails and “Song for the Dead,” I was very much in my head, hammering out plans for the coming week, pondering the emotional speed bumps I’ve hit lately, and generally just finding my center, if I may go all new-age, patchouli-stank hippie for a mo’.

I used to do that most days of the week (workout/center, not “go patchouli-stank hippie.” Ed.). Lately, I haven’t been doing it at all. I can’t work out at home, because if I’m anywhere near my laptop, I feel compelled to job-hunt or play Mob Wars on freaking Facebook. And even if I’m not online, I’m either dealing with my demanding battlecat Gris-Gris, trying not to murder a D chord while plunking away at mother-effing “Margaritaville,” or cooking, cleaning, laundering, and farting around. I can’t get to the same psychic place, say, power-walking around Chicago, because my thoughts tend to be focused on not being mowed down by Chicago’s delightful drivers (no, reversing down a one-way street does not make it magically legal, genius!) and a general running “OMGit’sfuckingcooooold” background mental static. And in the absence of regular returns to my center via florescent-lit pedaling to nowhere, I’ve lost direction, and found myself bursting into freaking tears at my favorite upscale gastro-pub. Weeping into elk-ragout poutine. I don’t cry, bitches! Spontaneous emotional eruption is not me! And I can never enter that bar again, damnit! THE SHAME!

I need a warm, indoor, not-my-home place to hamster-wheel, it seems, because that expensive hamster-wheeling is my meditation. This is one of the reasons I have no interest having a “gym buddy” or in group fitness classes (the other reasons for the former being compulsion to chatter, and the latter being a general lack of direction-following ability and/or spontaneous coordination). I’m a loner, Dottie. A rebel. And for the next 28 days, at least, I am going to be one chipper-goddamn-gym-going rebel.

Yeah, I said it. Chipper.