I started writing and ended up with nothing much. Ideas are like that. Lucky for me there’s always tomorrow.

My eyeballs barely stay open and my body feels like an oversized sore thumb. I walk up the stairs to the study and flop on my cushioned couch. A fiery sensation winds its way up over my calves. I shouldn’t blame the stairs. I purchased my three-floor condominium for the view and the extra space, and I figured the extra stairs wouldn’t kill me and might even keep me in the semblance of a normal shape. It didn’t. As I pulled my baggy burgundy shorts over my oversized legs in the locker room today, I cursed the stairs and their false guarantees.

I visited the gym today. I think of the visit the same way I thought of my visits to an elderly aunt who I never really knew, and who, at the end, had nobody but me left in the world. It was an obligation and perhaps the right thing to do, but the visits were never pleasant. It was a duty that I steeled myself by gritting my artificially altered teeth and breathing shallow mouth breaths.

I’m not much of a gym person. As much as I wish it wasn’t the case, there are gym people. I watched these rats scurry around the gym as if they owned the place. They wore elastic clothing that stretched and bounced and generally scared the lemon juice out of me. They spoke to each other with a familiarly that bordered on insanity, offering one another something called a spot, and providing suggestions about how to build muscles through the optimal number of reps verses resistance. I read many science fiction books, and there is the constant theme that the hero is a stranger in a new world. He shares his discovery of the new world. When I visited the gym, I felt that amazement and I hoped to share it with the world. It turns out I can’t. There’s a theory that it’s impossible for peoples of one epoch to understand peoples of different epochs. No matter how much history or philosophy or study, once an epoch line is crossed, there is no way to truly understand how the peoples in a different epoch lived or thought. It turns out the gym is the same way for me. I don’t think I will ever be able to explain it no matter how many times I visit. For my sake, I doubt that will add up to many.

It turns out the gym will stay in business even if I never go again, never use any more days in my three years worth of memberships. Like many things, it’s cheaper when you buy in bulk, and also like many things, you believe you’re going to use every last day of the membership. After the tour I had only the best of intentions.

I once bought a hundred six-pack paper towels. It was on sale in one of those warehouse stores, and the sale was so good that the wife and I decided to grab a whole mat of them. Did you know that they sell such things in mats? They even used a forklift to deliver the mat to our truck. They left us to load it, though. Loading would have been extra. We piled the extra-absorbent paper towels into large pyramids in our attic and promptly forgot about them. We would shop at the supermarket and without thinking buy a single or triple paper towel, always forgetting that waiting in our creaky attic was a mat full of absorbent goodness. I know it’s hard to imagine forgetting about a mat of paper towels. It turns out we did remember. It was after a terrible rainstorm, and our condominium had leaked all over. We used up the dry towels and our two rolls of paper towels in the kitchen when it hit us: we had an entire mat of paper towels in the attic. We lowered the attic stairs to find that the roof had leaked worse than the rest of the house. Lucky for us, the water got through the plastic wrapping and we were left with a soggy mat of paper towels and a surprisingly dry attic.