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.