Addled. Exhausted. Yet, somehow ready to surge into the next activity. For, you do what the universe instructs you to do. Flip a card, follow its lead despite how crushed you felt by the relentless mandates that the deck had decreed earlier. You knew that what would follow would consist of more of the same. It’s a pattern, even if its exact shape remains a mystery. The construct, as a whole, as a structure has boundaries. Rules. Terms. Within this framework, you navigate. An endpoint sat ahead. You could glimpse it. The beauty of toil is that it terminates. You endure.
At this snapshot moment in time, that spell that followed the near-consecutive jokers, was unlike the span of time that had come before them. Stunned. Hexed. Clueless. That’s what happens when a magician summons lightning to throttle you. Prior to the jokers, things had been going smoothly enough. Then the jokers arrived. They broke me. We had been flipping through a deck of cards. Royals indicated specific minute-long exercises. Non-face cards required us to complete reps equal to their value, each suit a different exercise. Aces are effectively royals. Jokers, they’re where you lose touch with thought; life becomes reminiscent of a non-lucid dream, in that things happen and then afterward you look back with a hazy memory.
The word “fluid” served as an apt descriptor of how my muscles felt. Water might feel more solid than I considered myself to be following the second joker. A desire to flow along the floor to the nearest corner leg of my bed arose. Along that pillar, I could reach the mattress by leveraging some manner of capillary action reliant on physical laws rather than anything a kinesiologist might label as human motion. Not sure that I had worked myself this thoroughly in some time. The front stretches of my shoulders ached. My hips creaked. I hungered for a salt lick. I fantasized about coconut water or some permutation of liquid that could replenish me beyond the capabilities of water. My lungs through diaphragmatic gasps informed me that breathes alone could not supply the oxygen that my blood flow desperately required so as to transport nutrients to refill my depleting reserves. My brain failed to retain much of what followed.
Gloria Gaynor says “survive” in “I Will Survive” fewer times than I had anticipated. For the joker, we did bicycles (the ab workout) throughout the song. Whenever she said the word’ survive,” we’d launch into v-ups. V-ups are awful. They hurt. Say v-ups and the word cloud of responses to the exercise would include “Intense.” Yet, bicycles start to burn more quickly than you anticipate. That a v-up becomes a rest activity demonstrates how difficult it is to maintain bicycles for about four minutes. That Gloria sings “survive” about ten times during the song shocked me. I anticipated more talk of survival. I thought of Roxanne. So much “Roxanne” in Roxanne. Not nearly as much surviving in a song dedicated to keeping on keeping on. I longed for “survive.” I mentally begged for v-ups.
Two jokers. The second joker involved the same song. This time we maintained front plank as Gloria sang. On “survive,” we would do a push-up. I longed for the push-ups. They were an escape. A break. Before the song concluded, I could barely plank. This is the liquified moment. That line following when I had given it my all. When my face surely looked possessed. Demonic. Call a priest. That my head was not rotating fully must shock people more than my head would have had it so turned. Some terrible manner of grimace must have overtaken my expression.
And, that, is how you do a workout.