Flavour Town – Part 1
Tuesday is always leg day, and it’s something Sev looked forward to. There was something special about it, and it definitely wasn’t something he would have thought he’d enjoy when he started his gym journey. But now here he was, carefully planning out his program to make sure it was built around a heavy compound movement, a squat or deadlift, then a couple of isolation exercises, and finally a small abdominal routine before heading home and finishing the day with 30 minutes of cardio. This whole experiment with the gym still felt surreal to Sev, and often, he still couldn’t believe he was being a “gym guy”. Primarily because there were so many parts of the gym he didn’t like, first and foremost, he wasn’t a fan of crowds – they made him uncomfortable, and he still wasn’t a fan of the more revealing gym clothing.
So, he preferred going to the gym later in the evening, where he could be alone and not have to deal with other people in the weight room. Luckily, the evenings at Living Good Gym were quiet, a place of solitude and sweat where Sev could feel comfortable. Indeed, these last 6 months of initiation into the church of iron had been surprisingly enjoyable, and it was getting to the point where Sev couldn’t imagine his life without it. There was something soothing about the rhythmic pattern of contraction and extension that accompanied weight training. He liked the exertion of pushing weight against the tyranny of gravity and the feeling of triumph as he stood tall in front of the mirror, the barbell quivering in submission to his strength and power.
Stepping into the elevator that led up to the gym, Sev pressed the second-floor button and casually rested his head against the back wall. Turning to the side, his reflection on the mirrored side panels showed a figure he almost didn’t recognize. Sev looked himself up and down, still occasionally in disbelief at the physical changes that had occurred. His normal black joggers seemed to fit snugly around his legs and hips, and his shirts now felt tight around his arms and chest. After years of being skinny, it felt like he was finally beginning to fill out his frame and find some mass. Over 6 feet tall, Sev was a handsome young man with distinct dark features, sharp cheeks bones from his mother and curly hair from his father. The contrast of facial features that his parents had given him gave him a certain ethnic ambiguity that allowed him to blend in wherever he went while simultaneously being rejected by the cultures he had grown up in.
Even speaking Japanese, Sev had always felt excluded, though the exclusion was rarely from overt xenophobia but often expressed in subtle and unintentional ways. Because people could never really tell what he was ethnically, they always felt safe to express their thoughts around him, and through his last 30 years on the planet, Sev had realized that when people feel comfortable around you, they generally start telling you why they dislike other people. It’s even worse when they don’t realize you have a cultural connection to the people they are speaking about. But that had been the story of Sev’s life for as long as he could remember, he was constantly in a cultural limbo, trapped between two parts of who he was and never quite being able to ground himself in either.
He would be lying if he said he didn’t find it extremely frustrating to be outside of every group, not really having a place where he just fit in. It made him feel isolated and alone, even when he had never suffered for friends, it was more the need to find people like him. That was before he discovered the gym, and since then, the lonely dark thoughts that often seemed to plague his mind have not come as frequently. It was what his therapist had actually recommended.
‘What did you like to do in high school?’ his therapist had asked during their second session. Sev had taken a moment to answer this, it had seemed like forever since he had attended Trudeau High, and even longer since he had given it any thought at all.
‘I was on the senior badminton team’, Sev had recounted. ‘I also practiced Kendo, and I used to like to doodle a lot. But I think that was just because I would get bored in class and it was the only thing I could do.’
‘Do you still do any of those things?’
‘No, I don’t really have a lot of time. Most of my time now is spent in the lab’
‘What do you do in the lab?’
Sev leaned back in his chair and thought for a moment. He had been asked this question on several occasions, and each time ended in awkward silence and no second date. Not that Sev was delusional enough to think that his therapist would be romantically interested in him, but the social conditioning from past experience still gave him pause.
‘I do experiments on Rats’, Sev finally answered. ‘I am trying to understand the impacts of dreams on perceived reality.’
‘Rats have dreams?’ his therapist responded, a subtle note of curiosity playing in their inflexion.
‘Yah, they do.’ Sev paused before continuing. This was usually the part of the conversation that had historically taken an already average date to the point of no return. ‘We use electric shocks to stimulate parts of their brains and trigger certain types of dreams’
‘You can make them have specific dreams?’
She seemed genuinely curious and interested, though Sev quickly concluded that it was probably because it would encourage him to continue opening up. That was her job after all, to head shrink, and what better way to do that than to get him to open up about his research. She was, after all, the only person besides his supervisor who seemed interested. Even his RAs seemed to be only marginally interested in the work they were assisting with, and Sev could rarely get them to seriously engage with the project.
‘Well, specific types of emotions,’ Sev clarified. ‘Fear, anxiety, happiness, curiosity, things like that. Once we trigger the emotion, the rat’s brain fills in the rest and creates a dream around those emotions. It’s their attempt at trying to explain and make sense of what they are experiencing. Humans do the same thing, though our imaginative process is a lot more complex, fundamentally it’s the same.’
The therapy conversation concluded with her recommending that Sev pursue hobbies outside his research, and he decided he might give the gym a go. It seemed like a simple enough hobby, and the decision to join Living Good Gym was easy because they were having a sale at the time and were open 24 hours a day. He had been pleasantly surprised when he had found out he actually enjoyed working out, and the body transformation was just a bonus.
‘Good to see you again Sev,’ the front desk attendant said, jolting Sev out of his mind and back into reality. ‘Good day so far?’
Sev moved towards the automatic gates that guarded the weight room floor and scanned his membership card.
‘Just another day in paradise, even better now that I am here.’
‘That's my man!’ the attendant said, smiling broadly and pressing the button to swing the gate open. ‘Hope you enjoy your workout and make sure you try the new equipment we special ordered in from Ohio for the booty buzz zone’
‘Ohio? What’s so special about Ohio?’ Sev asked as he glanced towards the back corner of the gym. Straining to see the equipment that made up the small area the gym had set aside for glute development.
‘It’s from this new company called Fieri Strength, they make all types of equipment, but they’re best known for their twin hip thruster machine. It's supposed to help your glute development by evenly distributing the strength curve through the whole movement’, the front desk attendant proudly recited as he returned to absent mindedly folding towels.
‘Rumour is that it’s an old prototype from the West Side professor. Something he found in an old Soviet strength manual.’
Sev tried to hide his excitement at the prospect of properly stimulated glutes, but couldn’t help a small smile from creeping out at the thought of this mysterious new contraption.
‘I might just have to give it a go’, he said, pushing through the gym turnstile and giving the desk attendant a courteous farewell before steeling his mind ahead of the ravaging he was about to inflict on his body.
‘I could substitute out the goblet squats I was going to do, so I can try out the new machine’, Sev thought as he made his way towards the astroturf area to begin warming up his lower body.
Setting his gym bag down, Sev was already lost in thought, systematically thinking about how he would force his body to sweat and grind out the next hour or so. Going down into a soft lunge, Sev closed his eyes and took a deep breath, feeling the astroturf on his knee, and slowly pushed his hips forward into a deep stretch. Sev focused on feeling his body respond to the new exertion on his tendons and muscles, bringing his hips down and forward, making sure to maintain proper alignment between his front ankle and knee. Pushing off from his half-kneeling position, he began moving through a walking lunge complex to warm up his legs, butt, hips, and joints.
He planned to put his lower body through a punishing gym session and needed his joints warm and loose so that the strain wouldn’t put him out of commission and delay his gains or even worse make standing in a lab all day excruciatingly painful. Midway through the warmup, Sev stripped off his shirt and took a second to catch his breath, enjoying the inklings of sweat that were beginning to percolate across his body. 6 Months ago, Sev would have been horrified at the prospect of standing in a public place half naked, but the gym had instilled a newfound confidence in his corporeal form and as long as he had his legs covered the empty gym felt oddly at home despite his nakedness. Taking a deep breath in and slowly beginning to stretch his neck, Sev drank in the smells that permeated this sacred place. He had come to love the sweet, vulgar smell that hundreds of sweating bodies left in the air and ground around him. This pleasure still didn't quite make sense to him, it was a gnarly smell, but there was something about it which felt intoxicating and alluring.
Maybe it was because of what it represented, every drop of sweat that fell on this floor was the result of some sort of exertion. A memento of the force needed to overpower the weight of an object, brutally subjecting it to your will despite its efforts to crush you. He had come to love the grind, as cringy as that sounds, but it wasn't because of his newly toned back and legs or even the attention it seemed to occasionally bring him. There was a sense of pride that accompanied hard work, and the gym was a temple to it. A mecca of strength gained through exertion and pain, it was a sacred place where everyone was equal, no matter who they were, they were all striving for improvement and embracing pain to accomplish it.
Sev realized that there was a tinge of sadomasochism that was sprinkled through his new outlook on life, but it was so much more than that. Not that he was a philosopher, as a career scientist he had little use for long winded pontifications, but long hours spent on the stairmaster or treadmill often allowed his mind to wander freely through the ether of his thoughts, unrestrained by the confines of the lab. And indeed there was something confining about the lab, with its rigid procedures and formulas. Of course, Sev recognised the necessity of these strict rules, both for safety and experimental consistency, but there was no freedom there. Often, he would look at the rats and wonder if he was any different from them, merely trapped in a small box being played with by some other apathetic being simply trying to find something new to publish so he could make tenure.
‘What a lame idea’, Sev thought to himself, using his now discarded shirt to swipe the sweat from his forehead.
‘I am beginning to sound like a 15-year-old kid who just discovered Reddit.’
But there was an air of truth to the uncertainty and lack of purpose that highlighted the reflective ramble his mind had taken during his warm up. He did feel hollow and apathetic, like his life was devoid of colour and emotion. A life that was constructed of white sterile tiles and eggshell coloured walls, where everything was just a little too shiny but still dull in the absence of any real lustre. Even his thoughts at times felt oddly linear in their logic and need for concise clarity. There was no room for ambiguity or uncertainty within the tyrannical regime of the scientific method, they were a chaotic force which needed to be subdued and carefully reorganized till they could hold a single form of truth.
Gently turning his neck to look to the right, Sev glanced at the new equipment from Ohio that the front desk attendant had mentioned. If his life was just a solid mass of offwhite, strictly regimented and ordered, the gym was the small splash of colour and chaos that he had so desperately needed. And right now, what he needed most was to feel his butt strain against some heavy weight. The booty buzz zone was placed in the far corner of the gym and was always a busy section, with the precious glute-specific equipment occupied by every shmo who thought they could obfuscate their intolerable personalities with dumps the size of trucks. Sev wasn’t one of those types, he knew that strong glutes were at the foundation of a healthy body, but would never be caught intentionally showing them off. Taking his shirt off was one thing, his right bestowed by hours of exertion and commitment to developing and moulding his body, but he hated the idea of showing off his glutes in a similar way. Glutes were to be respected, not simply flaunted.
‘Strong glutes, strong mind’, Sev thought as he bent forward at the hips, continuing his warm up.
Pushing his butt back and engaging his hamstrings, Sev lets his hands hang down, moving his head from side to side to continue stretching out his neck. Closing his eyes again and focusing on stretching, his tranquillity was briefly interrupted by what felt like the sudden ignition of the gym's AC. Shivering at the sudden rush of cool air that seemed to creep over his toned and naked torso, caressing his body and leaving in its wake thousands of goosebumps, Sev opened up his eyes and slowly eased out of his bent over position. Coming upright, he caught a glimpse of an individual at the far end of the astroturf on his left.
Facing away from Sev, this enigma was dressed in a baggy dark hoodie with the hood pulled up, white Nike blazers, and very revealing booty shorts with the words “Heat” across them.