zero push ups so far today

Ten years later, I still want to do this.

Instead Of Funny

Around two today I walked out into the rain for another cup of coffee. The drops had just begun to spatter across the city, pushed by a herky-jerk wind, and even though it was cold, the air had that scent of new rain on dusty concrete, a sensation I count among the most pleasant confirmations that I am still alive. The beautiful girl up in the Mud truck on Cooper Square didn't hear my order the first time I shouted it over the Led Zepplin song sandblasting its way into the eardrums of passersby. It was windy out too, as I said, and the rain was finding its way into the hole cut in the side of the truck. I worried about the electric space heater I saw in the back, and about what would happen to the graceful coffee girl if it got wet. She had arched her body out of the way of the raindrops so that just her face was in danger of becoming wet. Maybe this awkward angle and the wet wind that inspired it explain why she didn't hear me, or maybe it was because my voice faltered when I ordered the two small coffees with milk, one for me and one for my friend back in the office. I become shy when this pale-faced girl or the dark haired one look down at me from their perches in the truck, all business, wanting to know what I want and wanting to know it fast, and my voice sometimes betrays me, losing consonants in my throat, shifting pitch unnecessarily mid-word. And I get the feeling that anything that slows the pace is, if not exactly the enemy, an obstacle on the quest toward proper coffee distribution. But today, when she asked me to repeat my order, she smiled for a moment and offered a benevolent pause before turning back to her frantic pouring and passing. I paid, stuffed a dollar in the tip mug, making a point to meet her eye--she said Hey, thanks!--and then turned to head back down Lafayette. Above and beyond me the stone and iron edifices, many of them once the homes of the richest New York families, cascaded off toward the darkening sky, tumbling into one another in that ballet of geometry that you can only ever see when you manage to forget that it is always all around you here.

Against Dreams

No push-ups today. My left wrist is still janky from my skateboard accident.

I considered another title, “Done Fucking Around,” for this first-in-far-too-long post. The phrase is, in my most perfect vision of what this world could be, the label that would best apply to myself. “Oh, did you hear about Natonymous? No? It’s huge. Apparently, he’s done fucking around. Yeah, I know. Look out world, right?” These are the sorts of things I imagine people saying about me once the label applied. Such fantasies, I think, betray their inherent solipsism. And the problem with self-regard is its tendency to distract us from what’s off in the periphery. You know, like the rest of the world and junk. Or, to consider the specifics of this particular brand of narcissistic projection—wishing for a different kind of self—it obscures one’s sense of the here and now in favor of reverie over what might become. My overpowering desire to be done fucking around (for the record, I see no end in sight), has nothing, really, to do with what a cessation to the around-fucking would actually entail; keeping a schedule; refusing opportunities to indulge; casting aside those paralyzingly comfortable feelings of not-quite-readiness; engaging in activities according to ratios described by previously agreed upon priorities; passively accepting whatever experience flutters in the window, let’s say, a bit less frequently. Instead, such a desire—a yearning to be done fucking around, rather than simply fucking around on substantially fewer occasions—has everything do with avoiding exactly the entailments (← Is that a word? It should be.) that might make the desire a reality. In other words, in my innermost self, I know I have every intention of continuing to fuck a dizzy array of circles and figure eights around the important matters some other part of me think I should see to. I wish that I were different, but not enough to make it so. (Please refer to this entire paragraph for confirmation of this final statement.)

I wanted to spend the lion’s share of this post complaining about the widespread use of the word dream to mean aspiration, ideal, or longed-for scenario, using last night’s broadcast of the Oscars as a good example of how stupid-making this word has become. And I should probably admit that I really didn’t like the movie, Once, when I saw it in the theater—it went down about as well as a can of condensed milk would have done. But I did like it when those two played their song. And I thought then, and remembered thinking back when I wandered out of the theater and into the wind last fall or whenever it was, that that Chezch girl was by far the best thing about the whole deal. So I was bummed when she didn’t get to declare her thanks before the go-away music swelled, and I was pumped when Jon Stewart dumped whatever bit he’d planned in favor of bringing her back out to say her piece. And then my stomach sort of turned when she said, something along the lines of what the commencement speaker always says just before the kids treat their hats like Frisbees: follow you dreams. She used the word hope a few times too, and she basically used the old, “I’m the exception that proves the rule” logic that says, sure, it’s super hard to get here, and really very few of us do, but the fact that I’m here, which, by the way, is only remarkable because of how unlikely the event is, shows you that it and therefore anything are possible, so go ahead and have your own dreams because, and here’s where logic makes a chasm-spanning leap, they’ll definitely come true.

Fuck off, Marketa, you know? How about a simple, “I can’t believe it. This is what I hoped would happen, and I’m so, so happy it did, and I can’t help but think of all the people who are just as deserving as I am. I truly do wish they could feel what I do right now. By the way, we’re all going to die, and sometimes things just don’t work out, both facts that make this moment of triumph that much sweeter. Good night, everybody!”

Besides, every dream I’ve ever had has been a mess of images and feelings, a vertiginous journey through disconnected surprises. Occasionally, I’ve awakened laughing out loud, so clear was it that my unconscious mind was simply fucking with me.

There’s more to it, of course, but I’ve already wasted time on this stuff and now I’ve got to get back to work.

Anyway, I’m trying to do this again, post stuff here. We’ll see, I guess

Revival

1.
A thousand pushups. Again: the idea, the appeal, is this: it’s a dumb, funny, difficult thing to do. Also it seems tough. Or, more to the point, it makes you seem tough. Probably you will be a bit tougher. You will more easily lift things. Your out-stretched arm will more easily sway – coax, really – heavy doors open. Your shirts will fit differently. Even if they don’t, you will be convinced they do. The world will no long weigh quite so heavily upon your shoulders. Think of Mick Jagger on a thousand pushups a day. Who gives a shit if the man on the radio smokes the same cigarettes as him then? But we’re already drifting from the main current. Dumb. Funny. Difficult. Mick doesn’t help us much here. His dissatisfaction is too elegant, and he’s always been far too serious about his fun. Iggy Pop, perhaps, is closer to the mark. I understand he performs a ludicrous number of pushups each morning, though not, I think, as many as a thousand. Please note I mean to say nothing of his music when I say this: he seems dedicated to the aesthetic we’re describing here.

2.
Figure an average of two seconds for each pushup, by no means a brutal rate. That’s just over half an hour per day. Break it up. Once you’re up to par, that’s three minutes ten times. Like bowing to east.

3.
It’s a metaphor, of course. For other dumb, funny, difficult things. Here, for me, today, the most important correspondence is with the act of writing. What a strange thing, to sit here, hunched, tapping plastic against plastic, watching the dots form words. There are certainly better ways to spend time. Speaking to other creatures, for instance. Writing is embarrassingly difficult—none of this seems good enough. But really, how funny is any of this? I worry most about that. I’d like the writing to be funny, to capture the dumb, funny, difficult nature of life. I call it an aesthetic, but it’s simpler than that for me. It’s the truth. Or, a bit more complicated, a bit more accurate, thinking life is dumb, funny, and difficult (hereafter DFD) is the best way to see and hear what’s best in the world.

4.
Getting your face close to the floor, inhaling all those low odors: that’s more of it than you realize at first. That muscular ache that later creeps into places you’ve forgotten about, the momentary disappearance of the world sometimes when you stand up too fast afterward, the out-of-body imagining of your own taught frame – these are important too, but lifting all those sensory organs glommed onto the front of your head, lifting them up and then letting them fall toward the hard ground, that ridiculous demonstration of faith in the self in the midst of exotic quotidia of the stomped-upon parts of the world…this is close to the stumbling essence of life.

5.
As always, the metaphor is more accurate than its unpacking. DFD is too close to Jackass. A thousand pushups is not flying down the hill in a shopping cart full of porcupines. Porcupines and shopping carts are obviously funny. Self-inflicted pain and slapstick bravery are unignorably spectacular. One thousand pushups is only funny if you think it is. It is a valiant act because it is mostly mundane. Jackass cannot comprehend the tragedy of life, even if its stars are all tragic figures. Or perhaps it is simply this: Jackass is a car crash; one thousand pushups is cancer. The DFD we want is chronic and incurable. Slowly, I hope, it will devour us.

Played Out, Codification, The Case for Quanity over Quality

So: I was planning to catch up to MIK yesterday and could have done so, I think, had it not been for opening night of a certain Off Off (repeat as necessary) Broadway production and my post-theatrical enthusiasm for Vitamin B, the King of Beers. Still, 325 seems nothing to sneeze at, and I deserve style points, I think, for the last 50, which were performed in public and got me much closer to East Fourth Street Bar's floor than I'd ever previously wanted.

And: we've clarified the rules somewhat. Henceforth, the status of "1,000 push ups a day" can only be achieved after a full week of 1,000 push ups a day. That said, for health and safety reasons, we have decided that "a day" should really be interpreted as every other day, meaning "1,000 push ups a day" really connotes a seven-day period in which 4 of the days entail at least 1,000 push ups each.

Finally: I do not speak for MIK here, but I want to be clear. These are not good push ups. Oh, I do my best to keep by back straight, my butt down. But the object here is quanity. Not quality. I'm quite sure a significantly smaller number of push ups, performed slowly and carefully would yield much better muscle definition, superior strength, fewer injuries, etc. All beside the point. The object here is to do a strange, difficult thing that's a little bit stupid. Proper technique is only an issue when it allows the particpant to achieve a greater number of push ups. Everyone clear on this?

MiddleInitialK's Sensei is not named Splinter

There's no backing out now.

As I understand it, in this day and age, signaling one's commitment to something via the pixels of a blog is tantamount to a covenant with God. And so it is in anticipation of Atlas' shoulder cramps that I hereby proclaim: by the end of the summer we'll be doing 1,000 push ups a day.

This began with MiddleInitialK's casual retelling of his Judo sensei's casual remark: "If you do 1,000 push ups in a day, you're in good shape." Bear in mind MIK paid as many as forty dollars for the privilege of this man's attention and wisdom over the course of a semester. As I saw it then and still see it now, it is not for us to question a man deemed fit (deemed, mind you, by an athletic department slathered in majestic purple) to direct people how best to fall down on gym mats.

And so our journey of self-exploration begins. MIK's already up to 250, while I have inched up to 120. But think not that our paltry efforts doom us to failure, for we have been joined by another, my cousin, for whom I haven't yet thought of a clever name. He'll probably be Zoyashi G.

Come back for regularly updated pictures of our guns.