Wading in the Velvet Sea

Luckily, I had a few aces up my sleeve going into this appointment. Firstly, I’m not a needle junkie. Score one for me. I wore condoms during sex, sometimes as many as six or seven depending on the partner. And I’d joined a gym two years earlier and knew there was no way I’d way more than then, which is all a way of saying I was boring prude fearful of chlamydia who ran from his latent fears on a treadmill. I took up the GI Joe mantle of “knowing is half the battle”, which stood in direct opposition to my normal mantra of “if you ignore it enough, perchance it will flee due to boredom”. Lesson to be gleaned here: my personal health only comes to mind when it affects my chance to get to third base on a fairly regular basis.
They poked, pushed, prodded, x-rayed, sliced, diced, drilled, and sandblasted for what felt like forever. After that, they drew blood for approximately 415 diseases, half of which I’d never heard of, a quarter of which I’m fairly convinced they made up for their own amusement. And the end result of all this is an “OK, we’ll let you know soonish if you’re due to die this year” and a kick out the door. And people wonder why I have issues going to my primary care physician. I could pay nuns to urinate on my face and have that money be better spent than it is on my copay.

The next week I spent working my overactive imagination into a frenzy the likes of which hasn’t been seen since I heard rumors of a Mandy Moore sex tape on Kazaa. I imagined my liver depleting, my colon receding, my lungs imploding, my esophagus exploding. I inventing organs I didn’t even have atrophying to the point of non-existence. I imagined dialogue from random sexual encounters I’d never even had: “Who needs rubbers? I’ve had 115 partners in the last week without them, why start now?” So forth and so on. I nearly had to go to the emergency room, only stopped because my desire to avoid forking over money for the copay overruled my fear of imminent demise.

Seems to me that if you visit a doctor’s office, they should automatically give you enough sedatives to make it through the waiting period to hear if you might soon be bleeding from your eyes. Just seems a common courtesy, really. Unless, and this is what I truly believe, that it’s all a conspiracy to mindfuck you into another illness, which requires more visits/hospitalization/prescriptions, and then they all go to Maui and laugh about you. Call me paranoid. I don’t care. The little trolls in my closet do it all the time. Doesn’t bother me none. I’ll smack you with a broom the same way I do to them. Bring it on.

So there I am, a week later, having moved all the steak knives to my mother’s place lest I stab myself in the neck to ease the inevitable bad demise, and I get a call from the doctor’s office. And lo, they actually have good news. All tests negative, and my cholesterol? That had been so high years ago, so much so that the nurse who called didn’t believe my age? Below “normal”, meaning it was better than good. So what do I do?

I call my mother and non-ironically, and ecstatically, tell her the news.

And I knew, at that moment, I was old.

Young people don’t celebrate cholesterol results. Young people don’t know what cholesterol is. Young people might mistake cholesterol for the substance causing so much ado in major league baseball. Old people, though, old people care about this stuff. Next thing you know, I’ll be calling Mommie Dearest telling her everything is OK in Colonville. I. Am. Old.

I think about this moment every time I’m at the gym, every time I run another mile, every time I complete another session on the Stairmaster, every time I finish a set of weightlifting, every time I do a set of situps. I’m doing it for vanity, sure, but I also am keenly aware, in a small way, of how I’m staving off death as well. Not an entirely morbid thought, but it’s there, and it sure wasn’t there back in my days rowing three hours a day for freshman crew in college.

It’s on the minds of other people at my gym, but I think it’s on there in different ways. I look in the mirror and see a guy who’s young yet old. I’m OK with being both. Most people there, however, seem to be ignoring the latter status with everything they can. A six-pack stomach seems the cure for this condition. A good set of arms can fend off mortality. So forth and so on. Rather than extending life, working out forms a way of staving off death.

Maybe I’m overthinking this. Maybe I’m putting more thought into this than they are. Maybe I’m offbase. Maybe. Doubtful, though, at least in its entirety. I’ve seen people at the gym. I’ve seen the utter lack of joy in their workouts. Not like running for forty-five minutes should engender a perpetual smile, but man, it’s as cheerful as a funeral in there sometimes. On top of that, it’s ultra-competitive. I get more body issues in my hour-a-day there than the other 23 combined, only because everyone is constantly evaluating their own bodies in relation to everyone else’s the entire time. I watch women give each other the once over as they wait to go into spin class. It’s the same look they give other women eying their man at a bar: “Don’t even think about sitting on what’s mine, or I’ll give you a non-AMA sanctioned mastectomy.”

Once I leave I’m OK, and generally, I’m much better at handling my own esteem issues now than when I started 18 months ago, but it’s interesting to see people with supermodel bodies as worried about their looks as I am. Kinda comforting, in a way, to have that in common with them. Kinda sad, though, that they are as unhappy as me after a weigh-in. I’m learning, slowly, after 18 months, to stop looking furtively during my own workouts to compare my body to others and rather compare myself to, well, myself, the way I did back with that cholesterol result. Not a sexy comparison, but who ever said getting old was sexy?

It can be, though. Least, that’s my new line of thinking. Helps to have it now as grey hair appear in a random pattern in my hair and on my chest. Guess I’m going to be one of the few hundred billion before me to embrace this aging thing will aplomb. It’s OK to work out for my health as well as my ability to fit snugly into a tight tee shirt. It’s cool to enjoy some wine at home versus a beer at a bar. So on and so forth. It’s all those little things I don’t ever see myself doing but in six months/a year/five years, can look back upon as instances of the slow and sure transition from who I was towards who I am. Hopefully, I can look back liking the person I will be versus the person I was. Think I’m on the path.

We’ll see.