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Heavy metal pressing down, your neck in its path to the ground.
Contracting muscles, screaming joints squeeze out the chemicals your brain knows as "fear".
It's the folly of humanity, the preference for harm over boredom.
It's the schizoid relationship with the self; the awe at the infinite potential shown on the magazines, and the despair over the work required, work that can only end ever end underground unless you love (or hate) your body enough to try and make it perfect.
It's cool. It's a craft. It should be catered to your tastes.
It's endless lies, peddled and inherited, the biggest two being that the numbers matter and that the numbers don't matter.
It's the love for the moment; the sweaty mechanics of forever existing in a present ready to abandon you. That's where the power of the exercise comes in. When you lift, you defy space but also time. Taking the bar means taking the present and refusing to let go, stretching the instants as far as your condition can because on some deep, reptilian level you know you don't have an infinite supply of them.
Apr 24, 2024
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I won't blather on about all the physical, hormonal, empirical benefits that I'm sure we've all been informed of ad nauseum. I think lifting allows for a firsthand encounter with the suffering that's inherent to living, the suffering that the more sensitive among us can't help but metabolize as depression or despair. Lifting weights is not pleasurable in the traditional sense; you are literally tearing your muscles apart. It's taxing, it's exhausting, and when you go to failure you're gracelessly reminded of your limitations, of your mortality. In fact, the only way to grow stronger is to go to failure— it’s absolutely necessary that you must confront your own weakness regularly. But this encounter is incredibly important, it makes something previously nebulous and overwhelming and undefinable real, measurable, and extremely importantly, in your control. And this suffering with time transforms into growth, strength, beauty. When everything's said and done, I think that's the best you can hope to make of the sorrow that's essential to life. It's not for everyone, but it's brought me a surprising amount of peace.
Nov 25, 2024
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I got into weight lifting for the same reason I get into most things, which is pure unbridled vanity. I read or heard somewhere in my many biohacker information channels that weight lifting is the most anti-aging form of exercise, especially for women, and so I was like on my way! I wasn’t about to pay some community college bro $100 an hour at my LA Fitness to train me though so I just googled “weight lifting classes near me” and because I live a charmed and bless life I found the fucking coolest independent gym like a mile from my house and have been going there for almost a year. Vanity aside, it just makes you feel so good all the time. I love watching myself get stronger and I love the feeling after you lift something really heavy you thought you could never have lifted and I love all the neighborhood friends I’ve made there, including former PI subject and possibly coolest girl alive Petra Cortright. (Honestly a large part of my social life takes place there?) Anyway everyone over 30 should lift weights, preserve your waning muscle mass and build up your self-esteem babe.
Oct 20, 2023
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Embrace the gratification of picking increasingly heavy things up and throwing them down, form be damned. Get a bench press in your basement, do it in your jeans, get a sweat minimal midday win.
Nov 13, 2023
Top Recs from @capnhahab
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Underwear, soap, sunblock, sheets; if you're putting up a barrier between the physical you and the oh-so-hazardous world then, if possible, have it be the most effective barrier it can be.
May 15, 2024
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Receiving is giving too. Also, there's quite a high chance you deserve to be complimented.
Apr 26, 2024
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Why do they hide so much history within them? Why does that past come out in most unprompted ways? Why is the pizza line at Costco essential for me to learn my grandfather's name was Salvador, that dad was buddies with famous luchadores, or that he is casual friends with many a notable playwright?
I hope it's not the feeling that I'd be uninterested; I certainly am.
His storytelling is so casual, so carefree. Maybe he likes the old days to be the old days and his place to be in the now, and his way of keeping the past at bay is to scarcely visit it, to give nostalgia no special regard.
Perhaps he likes the chance to be mysterious, and he very much is in these moments. It's strange for there to be mystery between us, but that's unavoidable, I guess. I try not to take it as a barrier. We are mysteries even to ourselves; it's an unjustly tall order to make ourselves crystal clear for others, even our children, perhaps.
Whatever it is, I treasure each pearl of the weird history, the places he has been and the trouble he got into. He was and still is that young man just as I hope to still be who I am today, even if in bite-sized, shocking portions.
Apr 29, 2024