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Here Comes the T-Rex from the Rear

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By Tamara Shoemaker

Don’t you just love the whole atmosphere of a gym? Cardio, fitness, ambition blazing in the sweat-soaked faces of hard-core people bound and determined to burn at least 500 calories in the space of 20 minutes?

I like watching the joggers. Lithe, smooth, graceful. Kind of like gazelles. They push off from one foot, the opposing leg stretching forward in a smooth arc, landing in a light roll from the heel to the toe. Repeat as needed.

I wish I looked like that when I run. A graceful doe bounding at the head of the pack.
I’m more like the T-Rex, lumbering along at the rear. Thud THUD, Thud THUD. Thud THUD. Clear the track! Ponderous heavyweight coming through!

I certainly don’t resemble the majority of gym-enthusiasts who frequent the fitness facilities, muscle tone oozing from every pore of their bodies. “Tone” in my book runs more along the lines of a spot-on musical note. But that’s beside the point.
The point is, I am bound and determined to succeed at health.

But I don’t eat salad every day. Protein smoothies do not constitute a major portion of my life. I even sneak a brownie into the closet now and then out of view of my kids’ prying eyes and attack it like a starving animal.

However, in my slow, determined, lumbering way, I drag myself to the gym (or the track or the street, or to the front of the TV for an aerobics routine) and doggedly burn away those calories.

When the mental fatigue hits (usually about a mile into my run), I think, I can’t do this anymore. My feet plod slower and slower in front of me as I heft my weight from one foot to the other, to the first one, to the second one. Just. One. More. Lap. I. Can. Do. It. No. I. Can’t.

Enter the good guy. The Encourager.

I like to call him that. He’s a regular at the gym at which I often run. He’s always there, pink cheeks glowing from exercise. He wanders around the weight machines, nodding to one person or another, always giving a word of encouragement. “Great job!” “Five more reps, you can do it!”

He usually comes out of the weight room about the same time I’m rounding the curve of the track to cross the mile-marker. My mind has shut down. All I can think of is taking the next step. And the next. And the next. My lungs are burning, oxygen is short, and I won’t be able to sustain even that much effort very long.

Then the grin crosses his face like lightning, shooting a bolt of new energy into my tired muscles. “You’re doing great!” he says. “Keep it up!”

And suddenly, I find I can do one more lap. Sure, why not? What’s a little fatigue when it’s all said and done anyway?

I’ve often watched the other people at the gym, most of them petite, fit and and obviously in better shape than I am. I wonder what they think of me, trotting around the track at a snail’s pace, gasping for air like I’ve just swallowed a gallon of sea-water. I think to myself that I’m doing pretty well, with three young kids at home, a side-career as a writer vegetating in front of a computer, carving out a few extra minutes to get some cardio in. But that pep talk doesn’t even cut it in the throes of fatigue.

What does cut it is that one encouraging word. That extra smile that boosts me for another lap. The smile that says, “We’re all in this together; it doesn’t matter what your body build is or the amount of sweat you drop in a 20-minute period of time.”

So when you hear the tell-tale thunder of Jurassic Park behind you on the track, think about how that person may be watching you with a little admiration, even a little envy, and throw a smile their way.

We can’t all be gazelles.

Tamara Shoemaker is the author of several books, including “Broken Crowns,” “Pretty Little Maids” and the recently released “Ashes, Ashes.” She lives in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia with her husband, Tim, and their three children.

On Red Meat and Mortality

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By Matt Swartz

The other evening, I visited a newly-opened grocery store. The marketing and signage made it clear to me from the street that its intention was to compete with Whole Foods. I pulled in hoping that its strategy would be price competition, rather than an escalation in the arms race of foodie esoterica that has recently gotten so obnoxious (“I wanted some gluten-free pine-nut-based energy snacks with acai berries in them, but the only ones I can find have soy isolates in the ingredient list! Thanks, but I can’t buy these. I care too much about my family!”)

On the whole, my expectations were met. The innards of the store were filled with healthy snacks at inflated prices, much like a Whole Foods, but all the important deals are on the outside edges of a grocery store anyway: produce, dairy, bulk dry stuff and meat. These were wholesome and reasonably priced, so much so that I intend to return regularly. But I had an interaction at the butcher’s counter that stayed with me.

At the butcher’s counter, I could see that they were doing everything right. My powers of description aren’t anywhere near equal to the shiny redness and thickness of the steaks, marbled, stacked high, and priced cheaper than I’d expected. On the wall behind the counter, various marketing blurbs were written (did I mention how good ALL of the typefacing on this store’s advertising looked? Painstaking effort had clearly been taken.)

One of the blurbs was styled like this: “ask me about _______ .” “Me” was clearly the butcher, so I asked him the scripted question. He paused for a moment, considering, I suppose, that we were of  similar age, build, social class, and level of grizzeledness, and went off script: “Oh, they have a big speech I’m supposed to give you, but basically it just means we massage the cows before we kill ’em.” We MASSAGE the cows, before we KILL THEM.

I bought two steaks and left, but on the drive home, I realized that in his parting words, I’d found an ace that I could keep (apologies to Kenny Rogers, of course). It is a natural fact that every one of us is going to die, and we don’t know when. Luxury deadens our awareness of this looming fact, in the same way small acts of conscientiousness (Buy grass-fed! Buy organic!) lead us to imagine that we can delay it. But neither change facts. On a day we don’t and can’t plan, we’re going to be led down the chute, and when we get to the bottom of it, whatever massages we’ve had recently will be utterly beside the point.

My drive home took me past what I think is the oldest cemetery in Columbus, Ohio. I looked over the stone fence into the  tree-filled, shadowy resting place of those now, some of them, nearly 200 years dead. Some are marked with crosses, some with obelisks, and a few, signage informs me, aren’t marked at all. Those people ate grass-fed and organic, and I suppose if they’d had health care plans they liked, they would have been able to keep them. But they’re gone and forgotten.

I’m a Christian man; I have hope for the next life, and for that I’m thankful. But what I don’t have, what nobody has, is control over this day or that one. Our mortality is a fact that bears reflection. And when a meat cutter at a yuppie grocery store can spur that reflection, it’s been a good day.

Sleepless

By Posted in Fiction Tagged , ,

By Jason Ropp

TimeMarcus blinked back to reality. “Such a lovely dream,” he said as he leaned to the left and mashed the snooze, inciting five light puffs of air that struck his face. Thirty seconds later he opened his eyes yet again and yawned, sprawling his arms as wide as the sleep-eaze would allow. “Now that’s more like it.”

The glass door, framed in a bright polished stainless steel opened with a hiss as the airlock released. Marcus glanced at the clock on the opposite wall, which glowed 9:01 in neon. “One of these hours I’m going to stop sleeping in so much.” He slipped out of his red friction-free velvet, sleep-eaze compatible jumpsuit and into his tailored three piece suit, a steal he had picked up the other day for only $2,395.99 from the body scan seamstress booth down the street. This would catch Murphy’s eye. He grabbed his tablet off the bureau, folded it to the size of a wallet and tucked it in his breast pocket.

Since he was in a bit of a hurry, Marcus grabbed a light second dinner. A 10-ounce New York strip with a side of steamed shrimp lightly buttered with a touch of basil, and garlic mashed potatoes. “Perfect,” he said to himself, “and perfectly lonely.” He poked at the steak with his fork. “Bah! Pull yourself together.” He set the plate, still half covered with second dinner, and the silverware into the dishwasher, which whirred to life with a soft hum, ejecting the now spotless plate onto a side tray with a ding. The silverware dispensed like change just below. He set them on the shelf next to his cup and headed for the door.

During his commute, Marcus turned on the auto-drive, unfolded his tablet and eased into the dark unit by responding to a few emails as he made his way down the 429. “Send message to Diana Marton, Same-Unit Shipping Solutions. Begin:

Diana, thank you for the update on the overseas costs. I know I’ve been pushing you pretty hard on this one, but I promise I’ll make it worth your while. Maybe an all expenses two unit, double stop vacay to Antarctica, and that new inland Congo river resort that just opened up. I heard they give the staff access to the sleep-eaze, so it’s not one of those nasty shut down for dark hours places you hear about outside post sleep countries. I don’t have any promises, but Murphy has been upping incentives lately.

But that all depends on what we can do with shipping. I mean 51.5 hours to get 45.8 tons from St. Louis to Beijing? Really? We’ve got a waking economy here, which you know means double income, double consumption, double demand, which means we need the surplus inventory, before this all goes down. Remember what happened when Australia switched over? The strike by sleep lovers, the infamous 35.25 hour shutdown in Sydney’s port? Pandemonium, riots, disruption in global economy growth. Do you really want to be responsible for economic chaos in the world’s most important emerging market? Beijing is only the beginning. They’re predicting the first billion will be on half-sleep masks by the end of this decade.

In summary: if you value the wonderful relationship our companies have had for the last 25 meta-units, you know what to do.

End message.

Marcus looked up just in time to see a billboard for a new casino lighting up the rolling underside of the ever- present charcoal clouds. A debonair billionaire surrounded by other celebrity types, a slender blonde on his left arm as he rolled the dice. Marcus sighed. “If only there were more hours in a unit.”

Income vs. jobs: The minimum wage Red Herring

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By Andrew Sharp

The guy ringing up your order of fries can’t survive on his minimum wage paycheck. But can anything be done about that? Recent debates about the minimum wage — what it should be and whether there should even be one — have been brought to the forefront by fast food workers demanding their pay be doubled. Well-meaning people take different sides of this argument. The problem is that it’s the wrong argument.

The standard argument generally runs as follows:
Kind-hearted labor advocate: These people can’t live on the money they’re making. They deserve fair pay and the minimum wage needs to be raised to give it to them. People should make enough at their jobs to pay the bills.

Thoughtful capitalist: Raising minimum wage won’t help. Rich business owners will keep their money, and they’ll just raise the prices on all of us to cover the higher wage. Then there will be fewer jobs.
Arrogant capitalist, chiming in: Yeah, and the poor people need to get college degrees or actually get a real job that pays the bills, not a high-schooler’s job. They signed up for that wage, they should just be happy with it or go work somewhere else.

I hardly need to rebut arrogant capitalist; his argument is snide and flimsy (especially because I made it a straw man). But the other ideas are worth careful thought.
Many of those who argue against raising the minimum wage insinuate — or say outright — that there shouldn’t be a minimum wage at all, because then the free market could have full reign as God intended and there would be plenty of jobs for all.

Presumably, we could then all go back to a happier day when everyone had a job at whatever rate the rich people felt like paying, and lived in squalid shacks without health care or enough food or heat in the winter.

In those golden days, when the free market reigned with an iron hand, its serfs often lived and died in squalid conditions. Ask your grandfather, if he’s still around, how he liked breathing coal dust for a living in Appalachian mines. He died at 39, you say? Well, at least it’s a mercy that the family has been able to make a new life on the inheritance he passed down, since he received a fair reward for his hard work. What’s that? Penniless? Oh.

Therein is the flaw, of course. Rather than argue about whether the minimum wage will fix anything, why are we not questioning rich business owners who refuse to cut into their profits for fair employee benefit, but instead choose to pass the costs along to the customers? Of course it’s legal — and good capitalism — but does being legal make it good? The relationship between law and justice is often only a casual one.

While we argue over whether the minimum wage will work, we often ignore the deeper issue of whether free market capitalism, as touted by many of its proponents, is really a good thing. At this point in the discussion, some people will start to get very upset. Their faces flush. They breathe faster. They howl, “BUT THAT WON’T WORK PEOPLE ARE GREEDY AND SELFISH CAPITALISM IS THE BEST WAY CONSIDERING HUMAN NATURE ADAM SMITH HARD-EARNED GAINS NO WELFARE STATE YOU CAN’T FORCE PEOPLE TO BE GENEROUS” and so on.

Sure, maybe unchecked capitalism works, for some people. But again, is it good? If we let people compete savagely with greed and selfishness, with only the fit surviving, we may indeed end up creating vast wealth. But will we end up with a prosperous, happy society? Minimum wage is not a fix, in such a system. Rather, it is a sad symptom of greed.

While I can’t answer these profound questions that people have been wrestling with for centuries — this is an opinion column, not a philosophical breakthrough — I would like to make two simple suggestions. (And no, for those who have been getting worked up, it’s not to get rid of capitalism.) One suggestion is that we no longer assume that business owners who hog all the wealth they can get are somehow virtuous, achievers of the American dream, if they got there by screwing their workers. That kind of behavior should be a shame, spoken of in hushed tones, rather than lauded as success.

And two, I submit that a minimum wage is a good check on greed. If we raise it back up to 1970 levels, adjusting for inflation, and as a result we all have to pony up a few more pence for a hamburger, I don’t think it will kill us. Although the hamburger might.

Lucky

By Posted in Poetry Tagged

By Candice Mast

I drink my caramel latte and feel the heat from his arm bleeding into mine.
I watch the bouncy girl in the movie get her hair pulled violently.
My stomach is a fizzing acid burn
Remembering her pain as I walk with him from the theater out into
The shadows of the city.
On the dim street in a press of bodies, cook smoke clouds,
A teenager with an ad pinned to his shirt sells big-eye contacts
To other teenagers who want to look more Korean.
A girl sits at the bottom of the escalator, hunched into her knees,
A begging bowl cupped over her head
Still as a country night in the chaos around her.
The man in black looks normal
Then he bends over the garbage, poking, hooking bags
Takes a long pull from a cup of trashed ice.
On the train home, a man is wearing a beret and talking on a cell phone
As she slips into a seat behind him, head down,
At first I’m not even sure they are together and he doesn’t look at her at all.
With him. Not with him.
Scum and victim, vain and lost, I stick my labels on them all.
I tuck my lucky hand into his arm.
As we go toward the exit
I see one perfect petal on the platform, alone, glowing from inside.