the life you save
I know I don’t have very many fans judging by the sparcity of hits I get on the Skeeter Daddle blogsite, but occasionally someone acknowledges they read something in the Crab Cracker and then usually they offer me ideas for my next so-called humor sketch. I assume they figure, possibly a bit too accurately, that I’ve run out of my own ideas.
Recently a friend said I should write one about Zumba. I don’t actually know jack about Zumba. Course, I don’t know doodley about much of anything and that hasn’t stopped me, but my friend was kind enough not to mention that. We got Zumba down at the South Grange. Looks like a rock concert parking lot out there where they’re zumba-ing. Without the drugs and drinking. I got a buddy who goes so I asked, hey, Zorba, what’s the deal with this Zumba stuff? And he looked at me the way Lance Armstrong would look at the jerk who asked him why he didn’t just buy himself a Harley. To meet women, he said, what else?
Now, I’m not politically opposed to organized exercise. You want to get in shape, I’m okay with it. Really. But there is something about group sweating I’ve never warmed up to, no doubt a personal failing, a flaw in my communal DNA, and probably the reason my career as quarterback in the NFL took a small detour. I drive by a gym and see those panting bodies cycling maniacally with headphones strapped on next to dozens of other aerobiscists and I get the deja-vu of a high school locker room crammed with week old jock straps and the pheromones of pre-steroid sadists and I think to myself I’d rather have two teeth extracted without novacaine than join back in with the athletic crowd.
I chop wood and haul brush and clear land and build outbuildings and, well, all that old school exercise that wasn’t considered exercise, just an active lifestyle. A study recently (and I KNOW we don’t believe science anymore) said exercise for folks who are basically sedentary really didn’t offset the deleterious effects of entire days spent in a cubicle or at a desk. Not that you should give up and wait for that aortic stent….
Then again, maybe you should do like we do down at Nature’s own gym of the South End: quit your job, go back to the land, find your natural aerobic center. The life you save might just be your own.
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