pheromones

melissa and shoo have been talking about their scary workouts for the last month. i haven't been scared of a gym for two years or so, but if you remember me 40 lbs ago, you can bet i know a little about being intimidated. i definitely remember benching about 105 lbs without a spot one day and getting the bar stuck on my chest. i had to roll the thing down my chest, across my stomach, over my junk, and onto my knees before i could get up. free weights don't come with instructions, and they never will, because meatheads like watching ordinary people struggle. a weak or confused guy is the object of the regulars' unspoken scorn, but a woman is always safe. if a guy sees a woman struggling, he offers her pointers. it makes his balls feel big when he guides her arms up to show her the proper form for a military press. hotter girls sometimes make a game out of struggling on the free weights to get men to fawn over them. but those are the brave girls. usually there's a clear separation of the sexes: men on our weights, women and their boyfriends on the machines. if a man has to wait for a girl to finish with a bench, it's a territorial invasion. that's just what i think though. is it the same for you?

three weeks ago all our weights and cardio equipment were moved to a new area and combined. we don't even have a room. it's just one end of a gymnasium. from our squat racks and pec decks, we look right and see basketball games, and left to see stairclimbers, tvs, and asses. someone had the foresight to group treadmills, weights, and machines into their own contiguous areas, but there are no boundaries. they invade our turf with their distracting short shorts and inappropriate irreverence for the seriousness of our rituals. we invade theirs with lewd stares and lewder talk. machines have even been arranged to give the most sexual exercises a modicum of privacy. the inner thigh machines that look like stirrups in an obgyn office are probably the worst. they have to face the wall, so close to it that there's no room to walk in front on your way to the cable crossovers. we're slowly learning to tolerate each other, but the shift has everyone on edge - and turned on.

it always reminds me of that song, worked up so sexual. i guess you guys don't know indie loser dance-rock songs. download that one, by the faint. it's about strippers.