What sort of degeneracy has me googling “Daniel Craig cardio” at midnight on a Tuesday? “Jake Gyllenhaal ab workout.” “Christian Hogue calories diet.” What derangement has me thinking that I can, should, or ought to know about any of those things, let alone well enough to emulate them, which I do try to do. Vanity, sure. But, what lunacy would compel me to follow it so far? Why do I think I can/should/even deserve to look like Southpaw when I am not in training (or being paid) for a movie, a modeling gig, a close up of any sort?
It isn’t something I’ve ever really wondered aloud, but why is it that I feel as if I need to, in my very humdrum life as a failing writer and photographer, look like bloody James Bond? (Or: to be everything, to borrow from Glenn O’Brien.) This morning I started to wonder if it might have to do with my lack of any other signifiers of, you know, viability. I don’t know how I feel about Professor Galloway and all of our takes these days on the state of men, but a friend posted a line he’d written about the imperatives, as he sees them, for men on dating sites. “To be successful on dating sites,” he wrote in a post of a week ago, “men need to signal a lot more than physical attractiveness — they need to signal earning potential, intelligence, humor, and graciousness. Those are hard to squeeze onto a profile pic.”
Well what if you have no earning potential, if you spend your entire life (maybe subconsciously) sabotaging stability, responsibility, etc? Maybe, in that case, my “health,” such as it is, is in response to a despair over my “wealth,” which does not exist. It is then the only (Overly plucked) plumage I’ve got that fits in the only portal I can use to court attention, be it romantic or otherwise.
Not that my shirtless selfies ever really solicit the attention I’m going for. It is never one of my crushes who jumps in the dms as a response. Never a retired Victoria Secret model who wants to talk about my gym routine. Perhaps they are all rightly more interested in those chaps managing to signal earning power, humor, graciousness. And maybe the people I am attracted to are simply not attracted to me.
So could I be charitable (to myself) and think that my buffing and dieting in keeping with the tenets of celebrity fitness gurus be actually for myself? While it is certainly true that the wheels have long since come off this jalopy and even a couple glasses of wine ruins a night of sleep, that a single bowl of pasta seems to take a month to work off, and none of my joints seem to move the way they were designed to, but I am very wary of thinking of my version of vanity-fueled exercise as some sort of self care. I’m not trying to get fit so much as “in shape.” And often injuring myself to do things that are more convenient than therapeutic — all weights, no yoga.
Which possibly makes it more akin to the body fascism of the body-hacking immortality-seeking folks than anything. The software kajillionaires, usually, who would do away with any and everything that makes them/us human so as to perform better, longer. My favorite exemplar of this type is a man spending $2million a year to reverse his own aging process, in part by removing himself, his taste, his decision making process from his own life (I’m oversimplifying, but still) — “firing” himself, as he likes to put it, because the evening version of himself, beset by cravings and temptations would continually ruin the plans his morning self had made. (This is a good precis to what he’s up to.) I recently wrote about our fantasy of decision deferral — and this seems to be part of that, wanting to just throw up our hands and be told what to eat, what workout to do, how to be, how to feel better, how to live by someone else, some expert we can delegate those responsibilities to.
And maybe my vanity a kind of cousin to the anti-aging kick, similarly a rebellion against mortality, as well as an acceptance of the life choices (not to mention the body image and value systems) of someone else: in my case, the diet and gym routines of male movie stars. Which, committing it to black and white on the page, is rather alarming, and grim. As is the effort to make up for shortcomings in the financial and accomplishments parts of my life, the better to woo an attractive mate. But, I dunno, we’re all just sorta killing time and figuring it out as we go, so, whtareyagonnado, you know? And I’m less and less interested in what I have to say about anything — maybe I’m firing my morning and evening selves, ha.
Anyway, I’m off to the gym.
SO many whys here, and ones that keep plaguing us as days tick off the calendar. From the far away vantage point of 81, I think there is still have a rich, rewarding life ahead. Owning what we have at any stage and accepting it is our work, imho. Not that we don't complain about it -- we do. But at some point we all have to both GO to the 'Y' (excuse me for the pun, here) -- and then find a way to GIVE something to the 'Y'. Volunteering uncovers another wide world of opportunity and self-worth. Expecting no return for something you give, like teaching a class (on anything -- you have so much to draw from) can 'pay off' in so many, many ways. And nobody cares how you look. All they will want is a little attention and supportive direction, be it writing their story, or sculpting their abs. Only speaking from my own experience, and one size certainly does not fit all. But we give what we can, and sometimes it changes worlds -- yours and theirs. Cheers! And CORRAGIO! And love.