By seven on a Friday night, the commuters have left the gym, exercising while waiting for traffic to clear, finishing their three days a week at five fifteen workouts. Weekday nights it’s still crowded at this hour, but not Fridays. The weekday crowd, I’m guessing, doesn’t regard exercise as a suitable prelude to weekend entertainment. Me, I’m waiting for my friends to get out of the X-Men movie before we head over to TC’s for PBR and bad selections on the jukebox.
The music on the Sports Club Network Radio tonight is dance and disco instead of the usual top-forty and alt-rock, and the treadmills and stairmasters are populated by breastless anorexic women and heavyset fortysomething guys. They seem to be punishing themselves for not having anything better to do. The weights, though, seem to be draped with overmuscled, underclothed men who gawk and stare and flirt. For a lot of them, it seems that the gym is the entertainment.
Secretly Ironic 