Pressured

So I’m out with a friend for dinner and another friend greets us. I get up to give him a hello and I see some weird cloudy sh*t moving in from the side of my vision. I hang into him as the clouds take over. I find myself staring into his blank stare. Now I’m sitting on the bench. My friend is sitting next to me. Also the blank stare. Twilight zone. “Are you OK?” Me: “Uh, What happened?”

One of these guys is a nurse. Thinks I had a stroke. Asks me to read some signs. (apparently when you have a stroke you can’t read for a while.) I read the signage. In the clear, only not quite. What the hell was that? A drop in blood pressure, he says, from standing up.  Great. I’ll spend the rest of my life sitting in a wheelchair afraid to greet anybody.

Now, a few years back, when I was having a helluva time trying to get a job out of grad school, I was having these amazing headaches. Stressed. Not sleeping. Whackjob 101. So the doctor says, blood pressure is borderline.  So on top of being stressed about everything else, I have to be reminded that I’m now MIDDLE AGED! So I take some low dose of BP medicine. My whole family is on this drug, so I feel like there has been some personal guinea pig action close to home. I won’t die from side effects. Aside from being so expensive I apply for a mortgage to get my first doses. (More stress/no insurance.) But al in all, a successful induction into the perma-pharma-addicted population. Headaches gone. Sleeping better. Ta-dah!

Fast forward two years: I get divorced, pull a disc in my back, go through physical therapy and get the sage advice to lose weight and get in shape. Today I have lost 15 pounds and am in the best shape I’ve been in 10 years. (See? There are a few silver linings to the dark cloud of breaking up.) But wait. The dark side. I am still using this blood pressure reducing crack. My nurse buddy takes my pressure: 103/58. I have the BP of a 16 year old living in  Sub-Saharan Africa. So my doctor says dump the drug and let’s see what happens. So this week is a big experiment. I am drug free to see if I’ve kicked the high blood pressure habit. If this is true, this is amazing. I thought once you go on that stuff you’re forever popping pills from pharmaceutical companies that take all your disposable income for the rest of your life, switching them with higher and higher priced versions as much as your body and insurance can tolerate. This is a pleasant surprise, baby. Preventative medicine can not only keep things from happening, it can reverse the verdict on some decisions.  Maybe I should give up smoking crack, too.

Why the Big Suit?

I’m not big on suits now, but I used to think it meant you had a real job when you wore a suit. When I first arrived in the Big City years ago I had three suits. I wore them every day to my job as a glorified secretary. I looked ridiculous. I wanted to be an account exec. The suits were hand me downs from my brother, who was a lawyer, so I thought I was way stylish.

Not too long after that I decided that account work was for dorks and that I really wanted to be a Creative,^TM one of those cool guys who wore jeans to meetings and never seemed to get enough coffee. I became a copywriter. Years of meetings later I was still wearing jeans. Then I started making some money. I started to eat better lunches (not pizza), hanging out in film editing houses where sweets and sandwiches kept coming in. I also bought better jeans. The jeans started to have bigger waist sizes. I became creative director (for a hot minute) and found myself in the unfamiliar situation of having to wear a suit to present my work to the Client®.  I already had a suit in my closet poised for the odd wedding or funeral that might pop up, but that rag was feeling a little, um, dated. So I went out and bought a New Suit.^SM

The new suit was an understated dark blue, no stripe, Italian number. Nice fabric, two button, ventless. Sweet. No sooner had I returned from the store when I discovered that my awesome job running the creative department was over. For whatever reason I was back to actually doing the work. Bummer. I was a jeans-wearing grunt once again.

Today I have a meeting with another Client.^TM  This time I’m a Strategist,^SM which means I generally talk more and produce almost nothing but PowerPoint decks. For this meeting, where I will actually meet a person, I need to wear a suit. So I took to my closet in search of that Italian number. I took it out and tried on the jacket. When I looked in the mirror I saw David Byrne from Talking Heads. The shoulder pads jutted out like a linebacker. I looked like a kid dressing up for Halloween. And the pants revealed something else: I was a fat Creative Director. I could probably have put these pants on without unbuttoning the front now. I looked like either a very stylish homeless guy or Tom Hanks in the last scene of Big. The suckiest part of this picture is the price tag dangling off the cuff of the suit. I hadn’t even worn it once and it had to be retired.

Now I remind you that this meeting is Today. There is no time to get this thing tailored, but another suit or make amends to the Fashion Gods. I have to return to my reliable-yet-dated suit. This is not good news. I wanted to look good. These clients are Bankers.^® My perception of bankers is that they consider dry cleaning an annoyance the rest of us must tolerate. They take a new suit every day fresh from the wrapper, put it on and go. The creases and stretches are inconsequential to them. In with the new. What it also means is that what I say has to outshine my lack of a New Suit.^SM I have to sound better than I look.

Kettle Bells are ringing

I was just stretching. Minding my own business in one of the classrooms at New York Sports Club. Normally I work out in the morning, so the classrooms are blissfully quiet, dark and empty. Tonight: bright as a June morning. So I get down to it, the ridiculous poses and grunts that accompany my attempts to be limber in the face of middle age. Some activity was happening in by the door. Normally just another midlife refugee who wants to stretch and escape the pounding decades-old beat of the gym’s music selection. My iPhone thankfully blocks out the un-deejayed selections. 

So as I lay on my stomach trying to arch my back like a seal, I see black shoes in front of me. For a second I think, Your ear buds are preventing you from hearing anything. Comments, music, fire alarms. Maybe you should take them out to see what’s up. I look up t see a handsome, tall black man in one of those muscle shrink-wrapper shirts. He smiles, politely asking, “So? You taking my class?” 

Lately, since my “divorce,” my philosophy has been, Whatever opportunity comes along, just say Yes. This philosophy has gained me some cool new experiences and got me into some weird situations. Maybe this is the former. Worth a try.

“What’s your class?” I said.

“Kettle Bells,” which came out of his mouth with a smile and a wink that said, Get ready for something.

“Umm… OK. Yes.” (There’s that philosophy again. I should do something about that, huh?)

So there’s one anther guy I the room. A middle aged white guy like me in reasonably good shape. No fat on him. I thought I could beat him in a race but maybe not arm-wrestling. I introduced myself/he did the same (Jeff). Now we’re all family. What can only be described as an ass kicking. There were a few pieces of gym torture equipment I had to help bring out. Two different weights of kettle bells, which look like little bowling ball purses covered with rubber so you won’t scuff you good shoes. Some dumbbells, a platform made of stacked plastic squares, and two pieces of rope about 30 feet long each. This was going to be interesting. Also: the gym outside the window to this classroom was packed to the gills with spandex-clad gym rats. That, coupled with the June morning lighting, made me feel like a lab experiment, or worse, a make up gym class from the 7^th grade.

So Black Adonis says, “We’re going to do something called Spartacus.” So me, I thought this involved some bad drag and a Tony Curtis impression. Nope. It’s 10 exercises done for one minute each in succession. Ten minutes? That doesn’t sound bad. So B.A. gets us warmed up, stretched out a little with jumping jacks, push ups, squats. So far, easy.

From here the test begins. Jeff and I do a 10 second version of everything. Push ups, lunges, squats while holding our rubber purse kettle bells, rows with dumbbells, more lunges with dumbbells. It goes on through all ten. All the time the rats outside the window are watching. No problem.

So B.A., who is yelling instructions at the top of his lungs to just us two, says we are ready. The next set is one minute each. The first minute was a snap, the second I felt a little burn. So what?  By the third minute I thought the clock was slowing down a little, but he had his iPad showing us the time. Coming up on the fifth minute I was breathing heavy, pulling my arms with the dumbbell over my head with that sound. You know that sound? The very quiet groan you heard from your dad as he got up in the morning? Now my dad was an athlete of sorts, so I thought that sounds came from the same place my morning sounds came from when I was young. I just loved sleep so much I didn’t wan to get up. And me making that sound was an effort to ward off the day and my mom telling me that school was a-coming and I’d better be ready NOW. As I’ve aged, I now realize that sound my dad was making was coming from moving limbs that would rather stay still. I was making that sound because my body was saying, Be still! Fool! You should be watching television and drinking a cold one! Lay down! For the first time in a long time this voice was making some sense.

I’m in pretty good shape for somebody my age (47). I had to get it together. I go to the gym because (1) I’m single now, (2) I live in New York City, and (3) I’m gay. It’s the law. The fear of being single, the affinity for drink and the inability to et any sleep over the last 8 months while we separated allowed me to trim down my pork-bun-like figure to a more svelte Nan-style consistency.  I thought I had it going on. Until this class.

So I’m sweating now. And like any male, I’m trying to hide that, which is tough without a towel. It’s only been eight… long…minutes. I look over at Jeff, who is… standing still!