The Cerebral Catalyst

This one is hot off of the presses. It's 4:30 in the morning on Thursday and I just woke up. Why so early Captain?, you may ask. I couldn't sleep, silly, why else? I just wanted to get a normal decent night's sleep, but that was too much to ask for. The writing bug bit me again. So here it is, what I did yesterday, a day filled with all too much emotional larceny, if you can swallow that one.

Wednesday morning I went with my parents (as a family, as my mom would say) to see my 4½-year-old niece at her gym class. I know, it sounded pretty creepy to me as well. I spent the morning looking for a "real" job online, you know, the one where you have to sell your soul to the company and all that jazz. I mean a career. Yes, that's right. I was looking for a career other than boozehound or manic-depressive, chain smoker… you get the picture. There wasn't much that I was interested in, or really qualified for. Thank you, higher learning. I made myself a mix on my mini-disc, which I should add is about the biggest waste of time; I'm sure an I-pod is better but the big wigs will appreciate the endorsement from an unemployed near brain dead recluse. While I was making this mix and surfing every job site I could find, my mother woke up as usual and sifted through her morass of bags and boxes in a futile attempt to straighten up our house. I saw piles and piles of coupons, stuffed animals, clothes of all sorts, trinkets she bought at the dollar store, coloring books...etc. Some of these things I supposed were gifts for my niece, but alas, they took their place back in the pile.

At around 7:00, I went down to the basement to work out. Now I will say that Chuck Norris' Total Gym is definitely the way to go. I got a good circuit-training workout going, alternating between the total gym and my step machine. I should add that what I refer to as my "step machine" is really an old tweeter my dad nailed some wooden boards on top of, which sounds pretty stupid but it's worked for me for over ten years. I worked out to The Dark Side of the Moon, which was pretty apropos, seeing as how I'd spent the morning trying to sort out my future. I got chills when I heard "Time." I've been wasting a lot of it recently. I thought about funerals during "The Great Gig in the Sky." At any funeral, I always think about how I'm going to change my life and actually do something with it instead of being so lazy and melancholic all the time. At the most I'd change for about a week. There is no change, abandon that concept. At least after 25.

So fast forward through the ride in the car because there's nothing good there, just me listening to my kick ass mix which started cornily enough with Michael Jackson's "Want to be Startin' Something," and trying to drown out my mom picking out every obvious thing, such as if there was a cow, we'd hear, "Look, there's a cow. It was black and white and it mooed. Awww." Her stating of the obvious drives me insane. Get to the point already. I have eyes in my head, I know what a cow is.

X-cel Gymnastics (their spelling not mine) in Cranberry featured a rock with some biblical quote on it that I can't remember, along the lines of, "You shall dance and play before the lord," (Ezekiel 4:10-12). I wondered aloud why this was so, but no one bothered to listen to me. I felt real out of place in the entranceway, where we waited for my sister to drop off, with all the little kids jumping around and the whole atmosphere of the place. I felt like a pedophiliac stalker, waiting to pounce on his prey. It was probably a mistake to wear almost all black, and I am bearded and scary to kids (although I like to think I'm lovable). I began to feel that all the mothers standing around with their kids had somehow projected their fears on to me, and that I had become that. There was just no place for me there at all, the whole thing was basically my parents wanting to visit with my two nieces and my sister; there's always a battle over the different regimes in our family; more like a contest to see who spends the most time with the kids. I will add there were some hot looking young moms there, because I still have a pulse and am a man.

The X-Cel Gym was somewhere between an army base training camp and Chuck E. Cheese. Everything was in loud yellow, orange or red, kind of like the kids were trapped in a giant plastic hot dog. They had the horses, most of them pretty low to the ground, platforms and mats stacked everywhere for the kids to jump safely onto. There were two ropes that hung over a pit filled with foam squares kind of like you might have seen on "Guts," and a giant trampoline. Now all of the Gym leaders were clearly alert and concerned about the welfare of the children, but there was something awry. I noticed a can of paint left out, but it wasn't near where the kids played. Beneath the trampoline I could see cement blocks; the way it was set up was there was a kind of space in the floor which showed the basement. The trampoline was almost level with the floor, and there was some sort of aperture beneath it, the whole setup kind of like in cartoons where Elmer Fudd tries to catch Bugs Bunny or guerilla warfare in the jungle where you set a booby trap of leaves over a hole and wait for your enemy to unsuspectingly pass over and fall in. None of these kids looked in. I would have. I would have looked down at the bear pit and thought about what horrors lay underneath it. When my dad used to take me to swim my laps at the YMCA, I used to scare myself while I was swimming thinking about a giant creature who lived in the pool and only came out in the deep end, which was about twenty feet as I remember, so God knows what could have fit in there. I knew what it looked like then. It had a mealy mouth and steely black eyes, with barnacles and little creatures that looked like Salacious Crum living on the top of it, waiting to pounce on the leavin's from its latest kill.

The inside of the gym area smelled like old socks and Cheetos. Most of the kids were dressed in leotards or sweatpants, as if they were auditioning to be in a child production of "Fame". Most of them seemed to take it quite seriously. I made bets in my head on which one would be the first to puke. That's got to be the biggest pitfall when working with children. Either that or a wet blanket (and I don't mean the kid pissed himself), like I would have been. You know, the instructor with her bad perm spends five minutes just trying to get the kid to jump. Here, I had a big revelation when I started to remember things. It was like in swimming class, which my parents coerced (read: forced) me to take until I was in fifth grade. I remembered the first time I jumped in the water. I was so goddamn scared that I was going to die, or that the strange people were going to dunk my head underwater until I breathed no more, or that the kids were staring at the rolls of blubber at my waist. Whatever the case was, I refused to do it, and the instructor pulled me in. I say instructor, but she was really a heartless bitch to do such a thing.

She was gentle at first. Here, give me your hand. Oh, it's okay. Then Bam! And it hurt! I cried in the water, and my tears mixed with the chlorine and I rubbed my eyes and made it even worse. So I think you can read into this whole thing like I did, I need to take some sort of a plunge; take a fucking risk or something. Stop living and get off the couch.

My niece's view of the gym class was different. I don't doubt that my sister enrolled her in the class to get her out of her hair for a while, but my niece was enthusiastic in the class. They did a whole bunch of things that ultimately seemed boring to me. First, the class assembled in a circle and stretched, then they listened to "Chicken Fat", a record which teaches kids at an early age the shame of being overweight and that the situation can only be remedied with strict diet and exercise and a healthy helping of shame. I'm sure that last verse had something about Phen-Phen…

The kids did jumping jacks with a twist. They had wooden rods in their hands that looked like nunchucks, and they cracked them together at the peak of the jump. I was just waiting to see who was going to suffer the first head trauma, but they were well behaved. This was because the class was primarily composed of little girls. It was a gym class after all, a bit too similar to ballet for most rugged 4-year-old boys, I guess. Pretty soon they'll be shaving and eating a wildebeest they killed with their own bloodied hands. All the while my parents watched the spectacle with glee. The same way they used to watch me at my swim class. This is not a type of voyeurism I endorse, although I am a big fan of people watching in general. It makes the kid overly nervous, or at least it did to me. This didn't bother my niece. So I stood there some more. It was boring and I hadn't had any sleep the night before. All they were doing was jumping up and down. They didn't even hit the rope or the trampoline; that must have been for the bigger kids. It looked like the most boring fun a kid could have.

When most people look at kids playing they say things like, "Wouldn't it be nice to be that age again, so carefree." I was never carefree, I missed out on that until I got to college, and I've hit another dormant period again. Why bother reminiscing? You can't go back into the past. Everyone does it. Sometimes memories float around in my head the way I wish they were than how they really were. I have two sets of memories for everything from childhood. The whole experience was unnecessary to me, until halfway through I decided to write about it. And I did what I always do, I thought of all these great lines and things to say while I was there but I forgot them all.

After the gym-boree, more grief. We went to a Chinese buffet for the convenience. We were there for two hours. I don't enjoy gorging myself (at least in front of other people), and I'm currently on the South Beach Diet, which is as big a racket as they come, so I didn't eat much. A salad and some seafood here and there. I had to get the table because my dad is afraid of foreigners and my mother and sister and my two nieces were doing God knows what in her van. It turned out that all the females went in my sister's van and me and my dad (the males) took our car. So it's no surprise that we sat at the table for fifteen minutes waiting for them. I love chauvinism.

What bothered me about this place was the way they seemed to hound over your food, sweeping like vultures the second it looked like you were finished. Three times I had to defend my mother's plate while she was in the bathroom. My dad stuffed himself as usual, with every manner and combination of food stuffs. Lemon pepper fish and mashed potatoes on pizza? Sure, why not. He even ate the frog's legs. Do frog's legs count as sea food?

At the restaurant, they had a little fountain at the entrance, and at the front of the restaurant, a larger one with a pool that housed about fifteen turtles of various sizes. I paid no attention to it until we spent practically an hour there waiting for my sister to change my other niece's diaper. I watched the turtles, who were insurmountably happy before my dad and niece went over. My niece screamed and shouted at them, and I watched their wrinkly necks crane over to her. They looked so delicate even with their shells on, and when my dad picked a large one out of the fountain, I couldn't help but fear for his life. Fresh out of the water, it quickly retreated into its shell while my niece screamed and yelled at it. It was like a day at the zoo, or a day at the madhouse, I couldn't say which. Her screams were more those of curiosity and youth, but I cringed when she shouted for my dad to "plop him in the water". It sounded so violent, and for a second I was afraid he would do it. He didn't and we left.

That afternoon, my niece was going to a birthday party (already at 4 her life is more full and faster paced than mine), and I had to sit and watch her and her sister while my sister went into some crafts store to buy trinkets for it. I strained to talk to my niece. What do you say to a four year old? I can't talk down to kids; I've never done it. So I asked her about her party and her friends, etc… I don't think I could ever have kids. It feels like there's more you could screw up than get right, but the passage through adulthood involves sorting out what your parents have left you with and why, emotionally, spiritually, and so on. That was the purpose of the day, as I look back on it in retrospect. Being a part of someone's childhood memory is in a way special. How my nieces will come to see me is still unknown, but I hope that I can come off as someone who cares about them enough to not use them as guinea pigs or project my own fears and dreams on to them. Oh, and I also hope to get off of my ass and truly enter the world of adulthood. Until next, Keep on truckin'!

Visit Captain Fun's Swarthy Archives.

______________________________________
Joseph L. Conty, Jr. wears a buffalo hide tunic and sips peach nectar from a chalice. Known to drink multiple flagons of mead for breakfast and chew bear fat for gum, he would like to remind the public that anyone else who dares to use the moniker of "Captain Fun" isn't fit to carry his merkin.

Posted 03.21.05

Emergent Properties:

Main

F.A.Q.

About

Archives (alphabetical)
Archives (chronological)

Links - Updated 05.05.08

Books - Updated 05.05.08

Pandemic Poetry

Taglines

Site founded May 7th, 2003, by Project Catalyst.
All written material is the copyrighted property of its respective authors.
All other elements can be blamed on the Cerebral Catalyst Editorial Board.