Gonna Sigh Now

A few weeks ago, I decided it was time to get fit and lose approximately six hundred pounds. Despite encouraging reports that the world’s fattest man had become engaged to be married¹, I reckoned that a fitter, thinner me would enjoy improved confidence and quality of life.

Displaying a level of both fiscal responsibility and pragmatism that most gym-belonging humans never reach, I quit the gym a year ago because I never went. Not eager to pay the exorbitant fee required to sign up yet again, I recalled that my apartment building has a fitness room. In advance of my first workout, I went down to see what kind of equipment was there.

To my dismay, I found a graveyard of broken equipment that would look very much at home in Miss Havisham’s decaying mansion. There was a Nautilus weight machine with a broken cable and a missing pull-down bar. There was a stationary bike that worked in the sense that the pedals turned, but the electronics were ripped out. There was a step machine with steps that sank straight to the floor and exhaled with a “thoooop” as soon as you stepped on them. There was a trampoline that was intact, but rather inadvisable for use in a room with an eight-foot ceiling. And there was a treadmill that sort of worked. The treadmill runs, but that’s a very generous description. The destroyed plastic overlay makes the control panel nearly impossible to read, the machine has a habit of shutting off by itself when you raise the speed past 3.5 mph, and it also arbitrarily raises the incline by as much as 15 degrees in a matter of seconds entirely on a whim.

I briefly considered living out my remaining years as a fat man, reasoning that at this rate at least there wouldn’t be many of them. I also toyed with the idea of performing an exorcism on the treadmill. But as always, we find our redemption in the movies.

I had recently watched one of the gems of American cinema, Rocky IV. As you surely recall, this is the one where Apollo Creed is beaten to death in the ring by a steroid-gobbling Russian meathead, prompting Rocky to travel to the Soviet Union to train and then avenge his fallen friend by fighting the commie cyborg in Moscow.² In an attempt to prevent Rocky from properly preparing for the fight, his Russian hosts put him up in a log cabin in the middle of Siberia with no modern amenities or training facilities. However, in a stirring montage to the strains of a Survivor song that is not “Eye Of The Tiger”³, Rocky trains with what is available to him. He chops wood, rolls logs, runs in the snow and pulls a donkey cart. The clear implication is that Rocky has been toughened by his experience and is better prepared for the bout than his Soviet counterpart, who is shown in very antiseptic environments getting shot up with needles and working out amid enough technological machinery to launch a Space Shuttle.

Of course, this leads to Rocky not only winning the fight but getting an arena full of commies, soldiers and KGB stooges to chant his name, much to the consternation of an actor portraying Mikhail Gorbachev. I decided that much like Rocky, I would use the sad state of the fitness room as motivation. No fancy chichi gym with plasma TVs and safe, operational equipment for me! I’m getting down in the muck and slugging it out with both my flabby body and that broken down crap!

It’s been three weeks. The stationary bike is somewhat usable but frustrating. I’ve managed to work around the treadmill’s quirks to a degree. I’ve even added “Gonna Fly Now” to my workout mix.

But on the whole, I’d rather pull a donkey cart.



1. Where does he even meet girls? Honestly. Unless his wang is the fattest one in the world too, I don’t get it.

2. If Rocky had only realized that this was no fearsome warrior, but merely Dolph Lundgren, I imagine a lot of this nonsense could have been avoided.

3. I didn’t know there were any others, either.

Even More People Who Steal My Good Ideas

I've previously detailed how my brilliant idea for an ice cream flavor was stolen by Ben & Jerry's. Several years ago, a South Park script I wrote was replicated in stunning detail on an actual episode of the show. I'm dismayed to report that my fertile mind has yet again been raped and pillaged.

In April, I wrote a post about how various historical figures might have used Twitter. Today I was innocently surfing the web and came across a blog called Historical Tweets. Cocoa Puffs fell from my mouth as I stared agape at my pilfered creation. I certainly recognize that a great idea might occur to more than one person. But three times? The script, the ice cream, and now historical tweets?? And this isn't even counting the way Hulu infiltrated my brain to appropriate an inside joke!

I've had it, Internet. I've had it with you and your underhanded thievery. You'll get no more good ideas from me. Henceforth, I will traffic exclusively in terrible ideas. This way, if you continue your dastardly behavior, you will at least be punished with bad content.

Here then, Internet, let me give you a sneak preview of some things I've been working on:

* A richly illustrated coffee table book exploring life at a 55-and-over nudist colony.

* A weekly newsletter written by and devoted exclusively to the adorable activities of Princess Foo-Foo, an unnervingly anthropomorphized Persian cat.

* A PBS miniseries that investigates scientific accuracy in the television show Battlestar Galactica, hosted by a rotating series of bachelor computer programmers.

* A blog in which Don Koharski of Skokie, Illinois uses each night's frozen Hungry Man dinner as a jumping off point to detail the unending agony and haunting loneliness that have reduced his life to an interminable wait for the sweet relief of death.

Have at it, boys!

A Note From Homeland Security

Gentle Readers:

Sadly, I have had to install word verification on my blog. Sometime overnight, my blog was spammed by someone going under the clever moniker of "Anonymous". About 30 of my entries were pasted with multiple comments that looked like this:

Now, in order to catch such a nefarious character, we need to find out exactly what this message is. I have three working theories:

1. It is an ancient coded message from any of Nicolas Cage's last six movies.

2. It is a transcript from a particularly heated game of Mah Jongg.

3. It is a group of leftover pieces from that game on The Price Is Right with numbers under pictures of the front and back of the car.

If you have any other leads, please contact me via this blog. Thank you and God bless you all.