JesuJoyofMansDesiring!

I've done it.

I've finally gone and joined a gym.

Horrified as I am to discover that skipping a meal or two no longer suffices to reach my goal weight, that's not really the reason why I've done it.

I just haven't been feeling terribly healthy lately, and since I've been making such an effort to eat well, I figured it was about time I get serious about it.

I have to admit to being completely overwhelmed and intimidated by the idea of going to the gym. My experience of places in which people — men in particular — congregate to engage in athletic pursuits hasn't been all that great. It either results in me being bullied or laughed at. Of course, these experiences last happened when I was thirteen, so I may have the wrong impression.

But then again, have you people met the modern gay man?

I'm not sayin', I'm just sayin'.

But why, you ask, am I so repulsed by the idea of a working out at a gym?

It reminds me, I fear, too much of high school P.E. class.

I know. It's in the past, and I have to get over it, but that's just not the way I'm made, my friends.

Picture, if you will, lil' Joe, struggling to make his chum-like way through the mako-infested waters of the swill tank known as American Secondary Education.

Then imagine, if it doesn't strain too far your credulity, that Our Hero wasn't the most athletic of his tribe of adolescent animals. Imagine he had, say, the hand/eye coordination of, oh, I don't know, a retarded rhesus monkey, and the strength of a two year old girl.

Imagine further, if we may trouble you to do so, that selfsame young fellow plopped into the middle of a P.E. class in which the barbarian who ran the joint decided the young fellows in said class should murder each other with rubber orbs.

Oh, but it doesn't end there, my friends.

Continue imagining, do please, that Yours Truly manages to survive to nearly the end of the Trial by Ball and is, in fact, by some cruel twist of fate (read: mocking plan of the gods) the only player left on his side. Imagine that I successfully dodge a couple of shots, retrieve one of the balls, and have in my sites a clear shot at one of the Princes of the Jocks™.

I pull back with all the strength my girly arms can muster and prepare to heave-ho at said Jock.

At which point the Barbarian P.E. teacher decides to spare me and blows the whistle to end the game.

Remember my mentioning that bit about having the hand/eye coordination of a retarded rhesus monkey? Now's where that comes back to haunt me.

Because I've started the arc of my throw, ladies and gentlemen, and — like a horse biting down on an apple — once begun, this motion cannot be arrested.

And of course the Jock, hearing the whistle, relaxes and stands up out of his ready-to-leap-aside crouch — placing his face squarely in the path of my on-rushing Rubber Sphere of Death.

That's right.

That's the moment, my friends. That was the moment I was forever labeled as the poor sport who threw the ball after the whistle had been blown. And marked for all time (or, at least, 'til I finished high school) as the implacable enemy of the Tribe of Jocks.

And you wonder why I'm hesitant to step into a gym?

But I'm doing it. God help me.

Anyway, I'm lucky, 'cuz I have several people rooting for me, and at least a couple of gym buddy volunteers, so that's good.

So, yeah, I'm not really expecting to end up looking like the fellow in the picture to the left up there, but I at least hope to stave off looking like this a little longer: