How I Look to Me

To celebrate my first week of running after a three-month layoff, I gave myself the gift of shin splints.  But I’m too out of shape to stop cardio work altogether, and it’s too cold to swim in the ocean.  So I’m walking.

Like an old man with a stick, I’m walking.  You’ve seen the old men with sticks, sometimes golf clubs?  They walk briskly, as if to suggest that they might at any moment begin to run, or maybe play a quick nine holes.  But they never do.  They just walk.  Frequently these old men are accompanied by their old women.  They walk together, step for step, or the man walks several paces in front of the woman, which freaks me out, but then none of my romances has lasted longer than a few years.  Maybe that’s what happens.  Maybe I just never let a relationship age past common courtesy… oh, yes, I did too.  One girl used to hit me with lamps, and I have probably said discourteous things to everyone I have ever met, which would include most of my girlfriends.

The thing is, it’s fine to walk.  Walking is great for you, easier on your knees and hips than running, not to mention your feet.  I mean it.  Don’t mention them.  I don’t want to talk about your feet.  But old people do; old people always want to talk about whatever body part especially hurts this week; and that’s what’s wrong with walking: I may as well wear a T-shirt that says, “Too Old to Run.”  Or “Too Fat and Lazy for Forty Years to Be in Shape Today.  Please Punch Me in the Face.”

My vanity probably knows bounds, but I’ve never crossed them.  It is a particular humiliation to me, a man not really old-looking except to people in high school or college or the first ten years after college, more or less, to walk down a jogging path.  Even though I do not carry a golf club, I know that people look at me as I walk and they think, “Huh.  An old cripple.  Shouldn’t have eaten so much.  Walking’s not gonna help, dude.  Try running.  Oh, right, you’re crippled.”  And now I understand why it is that old men carry sticks.  It is in the hope of meeting a dog or perhaps a drunken teenager that they can beat to death, in order to feel less impotent.

Why then do I walk?  Constraints of time management limit my regimen to my own neighborhood, where I am likely to meet people I will see again, who will remember the next time that the last time I was wearing sweatpants and carrying a water bottle but only walking (“Poor old person!”).  Prideful creature that I am, shouldn’t I just stay idle for a couple of weeks while my tibia reconciles itself to my calf?  Why expose myself to censure?  Ah, but that’s the point: it is my narcissism that drives me out before the cold, laughing eyes of society on my stupid old-person’s chore:

If I don’t do it, I’ll wear the holiday pie around my waist that much longer.  And every day longer just delays that moment when a girl half my age will look at me with longing and remember her daddy complex.  I will almost certainly not take advantage of her psychological weakness.  Probably I will not.  Well, if I do, I’ll feel bad about it later, or she will, which will cause me to feel bad.  But in the short term, I will feel better simply for  having flirted successfully with another person.  You may reserve your judgment up your ass, for once I am in shape again I will not be able to notice it, dazzled as my eyes will be by my own reflection in every polished surface.

And so, for now, I walk briskly, breaking a light sweat in my unflattering, ill-fitting athletic clothing, risking my self-respect today in blissful contemplation of tomorrow’s glory.

You’d think I went to drama school or something.

(visit stageandcinema.com for my upcoming reviews of Sacred Fools’ Richard III and Cirque du Soleil’s Ovo; but there’s no waiting to read these recent reviews:

Troilus and Cressida at the Porters of Hellsgate

God’s Ear at the Echo

The Beauty Queen of Leenane at The Production Company)