Previous - 90. Moneytime
Falling
Walking to the gym this morning I saw what looked like a small tree lying on the sidewalk outside the Sutter-Stockton garage. I assumed it was a branch knocked off a tree by a truck, this happens frequently. But as I came abreast of the fallen foliage, I saw that it wasn't a tree or a branch but a mass of vine that had come off the side of the garage, I know not how. It seems to have fallen from at or near the top, maybe seven parking levels up.It was raining yesterday, but it wasn't stormy. I can't even imagine how a crazy person could have detached it from the wall. A mystery.
Speaking of the gym, I ran into one of the few people there I know by sight (a long time ago he got very bitchy when I started using a machine he was still "using," along with the machine he was actually on at the time. This is one of those situations where you say something like, "Sorry, I didn't realized you were still working here" when you actually mean, ""Fuck off, you can't claim multiple machines at the same time" or "Is it okay if I use any of the machines here or are you "using" all of them?"). Anyway... seeing him reminded me that I haven't seen three regulars I often saw him interacting with. They were all serious bodybuilders (the three, not the guy I saw) who seemed to be in every day, or at least they were always working out when I was there. Did they OD on Muscle Milk? Was there a tragic "spotting" accident that prematurely ended their lives?
For years I avoided popular gyms (like mine) because I assumed they were places attractive people went to meet other attractive people. I only work out during the quiet times -- maybe at the busy periods there is more of that -- but I haven't noticed it at all. And the bodybuilder crowd seems to be mostly focused on their "work." It's hard to imagine them being distracted by, or even noticing, potential mating behavior. I could be wrong.
Back when I was driven from the Chinatown YMCA by their renovation program, my cardio time was spent on a crude stationary bicycle (40 minutes each session, if I recall correctly). My current gym has nicer stationary bikes (these will give you your heart rate) and there are TVs to distract you. I still use the bikes for ten minutes at the beginning to get warmed up, but I soon moved to elliptical machines for my real cardio work -- so much nicer, and easier on your butt. I've reduced my time to 25 minutes (with the longevity of my joints in mind) and recently shifted to Cross-Ramp machines, a kind of elliptical machine where you can configure the machine to work on particular muscles in your legs. (I originally spelled that "Crass-Ramp machine". No idea what that would be like but I would love to see one.)
Shifting gyms is another of those life changes -- like buying my condo -- that wasn't my choice but that has really worked to my advantage. The strangest way this is true is probably that I wouldn't have discovered my global, online Buffy community if I had stayed at the YMCA since I discovered Buffy only after having run into Charmed on the TVs here. Charmed is not as good as Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but it is really a great distraction while using a cardio machine.
Musicophilia
I'm currently re-reading Musicophilia by Oliver Sacks for my book club. I thought I had written something about the book, but can't find a word. Surprising. I thought I had written about absolute pitch because I hadn't known that was a thing. Will have to look around some more.But speaking of music, my recent musical trip to the '50s and '60s made me very aware, the other day, that my gym was playing a strange mix of popular music from both today and the 1950s. And none of the songs from that decade that I had enjoyed, either.
YouTube has preserved that musical trip of mine in the form of playlists it keeps offering me. One, that I did play last night, is mostly Brazilian influenced though it does branch out into other Lani Hall music, which is fine with me. I was thinking about this because I just read Sacks about earworms, or, as he prefers, brainworms. (Something else from the book that I would swear I have written about.) I think of earworms (Sacks has a point about "brainworms" but, ewww) as being derived from popular songs and jingles, so it's nice to know that Sacks has gotten something similar from classical music.
Just yesterday I was reading about people trying to decipher (quite literally) the amazing (and amazingly loud) sounds made by sperm whales. The sounds are so complex as to be daunting when it comes to trying to interpret what they could mean. With music, we have some idea how to translate at least some notes into an emotional language. Wagner, tone poems, and movie scores in general, demonstrate that music has an inherent ability to convey meaning. It would be interesting to know if the musical "hooks" most likely to get caught in your ear, have anything in common simply as sound. I'm not even sure if it's primarily the tune or the lyrics. The song I've had trouble with most recently is an Adele tune and is unusual for her in that I can understand almost none of the lyrics. Unless it's subliminal, it would seem to be just the repetition of sounds that gets stuck in my head.
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