Mind Your Own God Damn Business

-CBF-*

*( You may have noticed the “CBF” above. Allow me to explain: My new setup only displays an excerpt of my blog posts in RSS feeds, requiring you to click through to the actual website to see the full post. This change has been met with universal outrage. For the most part, people are irritated because they don’t want to navigate away from their RSS reader. One person went as far as to call me a “fucker”. There’s nothing that I can do for these people (except change it back to the way that it was, which I’m not going to do.)

There has been another concern that has been expressed to me, however.

As you may know, my blog can, from time to time, contain content that one might consider of questionable taste. The occasional profanity, the lurid details of my erotic Wilford Brimley (“The WB”, as I call him) dreams, or, hypothetically, the occasional picture of a man proudly displaying a giant tattoo that is decorating his butthole. Such images are easy to avoid from the RSS reader, but are much more difficult to dodge when visiting the actual webpage.

Like I said, I can’t (read: “am unwilling to”) help the people who want me to switch back to the old format, but I CAN help those of you who are afraid that if you click through to my website you will find mural-sized jpeg of a rectum leering back at you.

From now on, I will comb through my blog entries before posting them and search for inappropriate pictures. If the post passes inspection, I will stamp it with -CBF-, which, naturally, stands for “Certified Butthole Free”. You can then view the rest of the post reassured that you will not have to see anyone’s pooper.

Thank you for understanding, and enjoy!)

(I apologize for the image above. I am still working out some of the kinks in the new system, and this must have somehow been overlooked by quality control. I have no idea how it got there. Rest assured that I am working around the clock to rectify the problem.)

(And really, you know you’re maintaining a quality blog when you have to put an alert at the top of all your posts to let readers know whether or not it contains pictures of buttholes.

Enjoy!)

-BEGIN BLOG POST-

The gym is a wonderful place.

It’s a good opportunity to space out and listen to music or catch up on podcasts without anyone bothering me.

It’s a good place to leer at girls.

But most importantly, it’s a great place to watch guys make asses of themselves while they’re lifting weights.

You thought that I was going to suggest that it was great for working out, right? Whatever. That’s incidental.

I have to strongly recommend the weight room to those of you that don’t regularly visit it. I don’t care if you hate lifting weights, can’t  exercise because of a heart condition, or are paralyzed from the neck down – If you like to laugh, the weight room is the place to be.

This weekend, I was at the gym. I was doing my thing when I was suddenly startled by a series of loud noises behind me. It started with a man screaming, followed shortly by a VERY loud clanging of metal, followed by another loud scream. If I had heard the noise out of context, I would’ve guessed that the Kool-Aid man was trying to bust through a steel wall.

OH YEAH!

But the sound WAS in context, and so before I even turned around, I knew exactly what was going on: some jackass and his friend were doing squats with way too much weight and very poor, dangerous form.

For those of you that don’t know, a squat is when you hold some weight on your shoulders, squat down like you’re sitting down in a chair, stop when your thighs are parallel with the ground (or go lower if you’re really hardcore) and then stand back up.

Believe it or not, putting a bunch of weight on your back and then squatting down before standing back up a few times has the potential to injure you in all kinds of exciting ways. There are a few ways to screw up your back really badly, and there are all kinds of exciting ways to fuck up your knees. Squats scare the shit out of me, so I always try to be sure that I’m doing them like I’m supposed to so I don’t end up crumpled in a heap on the floor.

Anyway, I turned around to see if maybe all of the screaming and metallic banging meant that something entertaining was going on behind me.

I was not disappointed.

Sure enough, a gentleman was standing there with an absurd amount of weight on his back. He would bend his knees an almost imperceivable amount, lowering the weight two, maybe even three inches before yelling at the top of his lungs, standing back up and banging the bar back into the braces that were holding it before doing it again.

Appearance makes a difference too, though: If I see some guy doing something that seems ridiculous, but he’s also 250 pounds and 3% bodyfat, I figure that maybe he knows what he’s doing.

Here’s an example: As near as I can tell, Ronnie Coleman is completely insane. He almost always wears tights and a sleeveless t-shirts, which kind of makes it look like he’s wearing a tunic all the time. He has a Mike Tyson-esque high-pitched timbre to his voice, and as near as I can tell, he spends almost his entire time in the weight room screaming things like “Light weight baby!”, “Yeah Buddy!” “Ain’t nothing but a peanut!” and “Everybody wanna be a body builder, don’t nobody wanna do ( insert whatever exercise he is currently doing here)!”.

Ridiculous? No doubt. But here is a picture of Ronnie Coleman:

"Everybody wanna be a body builder, don't nobody wanna do bicep curls... or change this diaper that I'm filling to the brim even as we speak!"

A little bit crazy looking? Certainly. Not the kind of look that most people aspire to. Even repulsive to a lot of people.

And yet, when you see this man, no matter how insane his wardrobe is, comically musclebound he may be, or how much the things he yells make him sound like he’s suffering from the final stages of dementia, when you see a picture of him, it’s hard to not think to yourself “This is a man that knows a thing or two about lifting weights”.

Let me just re-emphasize how insane Ronnie Coleman is.

When I see people like this in the gym doing crazy things, I’m usually willing to cut them some slack. If some big guy is fondling his nipples with his free hand while he’s doing butterfly curls, hell, maybe I should too, because it seems to be working for him.

This was not the case, however. The gentleman in question did not have the appearance of a man who knew what he was doing. He was built roughly like me (a clear sign of incompetence if there ever was one), and was sporting a tight white undershirt, the collar of which he had cut in order to turn it into a very, very deep V-neck.

But it didn’t stop there. He had a friend with him. The friend in question was screaming motivation at the guy lifting to help him really push it to the limit.

“YEAH!” “YOU GOT THIS!” “COME ON! COME ON!” he would scream, while his buddy just barely bent his knees and then screamed some more at the top of his lungs.

After finishing, they spent some time high fiving and congratulating each other as though one of them had just killed a grizzly bear with his hands.

When I see things like that, it really reminds me how important it is to make sure that I make it to the gym regularly.

It also reminds me how hard it is to hold up weights when I’m giggling.

Goodnight.

Oh Jesus! I’m sorry! I don’t know how this keeps happening!