Most Useful Information September 2023

Muscles, Starvation, Astral Projection, Winning, America, and Diarrhea

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What’s the Point?

Life moves through phases. Every phase has involved extreme exercise. In middle school and high school I was a competitive gymnast. I would go to the gym 3-5 times a week. Twice a day in the summers. My buddy and I would tie weights around both our ankles, hang from the high bar and do pull-ups. He’d do one. I’d do two. He’d do three. I’d do four. Up to thirty. We liked to push each other.

Often we’d push too far. I injured my shoulder. Got shots of cortisone, so I could lift my arm above my head, so I could keep competing. Once our coach did a round-off back handspring double back flip. He landed square on his head. Said he was fine. Played basketball a couple days later and heard a grinding noise. He had dislocated three vertebrae. Had to have surgery and wear a halo drilled into his forehead for months. It’s easy to go too far.

In college, rock climbing. Same buddy. We'd climb for two hours and lift weights after. He claimed lifting weights after climbing prevents arthritis. I don’t know. On our way out the building we’d buy Muscle Milk from the vending machine. Around the same time I learned how to swim. Mornings I’d swim laps. Evenings I’d climb and lift weights. Until I sprained both my ankles messing around trying to do some gymnastics shit. It’s easy to get hurt.

My buddy didn’t follow me to library school. So I picked up running. Pushing by myself. After leaving library school I started training for a marathon. Four runs a week. One short. One medium. Another short. One long. Off days I’d lift weights at the YMCA or yoga. The weekend before the start of a new semester I got up early on a Saturday and ran 26.2 miles by myself on backroads of central New York. A few months later I was in physical therapy trying to fix my knee. It’s easy to run too far.

Now I get up at 5AM and go to boxing class. I’m slow enough and bad enough that most of class is spent taking punches by dudes better, faster, stronger and with more tattoos than me. I leave feeling like I was run over by a truck. It’s the best.  So far no injuries.

With every form of exercise I’ve gotten into there’s a point where my brain switches off and my body just goes. It’s a paradox that through physical exertion I lose awareness of my physical body. It’s cool. But it takes a lot of time. It also often leads to my body breaking down.

Early in August I returned to work after three months away. Waiting in my spam folder was a long unhinged email. It felt like a targeted ad, as if the spammer datamined me before composing a spam specifically for me.

No line breaks. Inconsistent punctuation. The mafia and the government create and distribute drugs. Police arrest people for doing drugs. Some actions break your aura and destroy your chakra, allowing evil and demons into your body and soul. One such action is eating meat, “Doing bad things like eating meat, when you die, the devil will catch you and will beat your ass with candy.”

There are ways to rebuild your chakra and rid your life of evil and demons and also sickness, “There is a technique to cure any disease. Good jobs, having a woman, dream, music, laughter, adrenaline, crying, love all works. always be happy. must feel, fantasize that you Boss beats with the Gods, remember nostalgia.”

The email turns into a mystical, antivax self-help health plan. Ending on the most surefire way to restore aura and chakra, “Do not do a bad thing, make exercise, do starve. When the body becomes empty and light, you will be able to slip into the astral world, and when you slip, you will win. Because those are the rules.”

Rules are written. Follow them and win. Exercise. Disordered eating. Astral projection. Win.

I’ve made exercise, but I never did starving. Never astral projected. Never won. 

I bring all this up because everything I read this month is about winning and escaping corporeal existence through the combination of extreme exercise and disordered eating called bodybuilding.

Enjoy! 

Muscle: Confessions of an Unlikely Bodybuilder by Samuel Wilson Fussell. First published by Poseidon Press in 1991.

Sam’s parents are academics. He attends Oxford. He is about to begin a PhD program in American Studies at Yale. But he feels vulnerable. Unsafe. He joins a gym for muscle. Muscle is armor, protection. With muscle Sam knows he’ll feel invulnerable. The gym takes over his life. Four hours a day. Six days a week. In addition to exercise he eats 5000 calories a day. (six eggs, six pieces of whole wheat toast, a whole grain cereal mix, a can of tuna, a pound of ground hamburger, a baked potato, a fistful of broccoli, a small salad, two chicken breasts, spinach pasta, two more slices of whole wheat bread, another pound of hamburger or steak, a can of tuna, another potato, more bread, a gallon of nonfat milk, three protein shakes each with three raw eggs, three tablespoons of protein powder, and a pint of nonfat milk). Gains 80 pounds. 

Sam’s parents are sad and disgusted. They don’t understand. To help his dad understand he talks about “democracy and deadlifting, ‘urban dissonance,’ and diarrhea.” It didn’t work. Dad didn’t understand. To help his mother understand he shows her the movie Pumping Iron. It didn’t work. She cries. Says bodybuilders are so illiterate they can’t even speak. He tells her that Lou Ferrigno speaks like that because he is deaf, not illiterate. Sam moves from New York to LA where the real body builders live. Roommates with guys named Nimrod and Bam Bam. They inject steroids into each other’s butts and cry. 

Sam enters a competition. Wins. Enters another. Loses. Quits bodybuilding forever. Never makes it to Yale. 

Muscle is funny. On his first visit to the gym all the guys look at Sam and start shouting, “NEW MEAT! NEW MEAT!” One man brags to Sam, “I vomit the most. That’s why my legs are the best.” They all insist on fake names like The Portuguese Rambo. Shortly after his move to LA Sam meets a guy named Vinnie. Vinnie is the biggest and most intense bodybuilder at the gym. He becomes Sam’s best friend and roommate. Sam sees Vinnie wearing a diaper so explosive diarrhea from protein and steroids doesn’t interrupt his workout. Bodybuilders have so much diarrhea and are babies.

It’s easy to laugh at the gym freaks, but sadness underscores everything. The first people Sam meets in LA are a father and son. The father trains the son, controls his diet, injects his steroids. They live together in a car in the gym parking lot. Undeniably sweet people. Undeniably sad. 

Sam first joins the gym to build armor so to protect himself from outside threats. At the same time he wants to build a prison to keep his true self locked in. He doesn’t want anyone to see the “real” him. Exercise frees him from thought. Body builders speak in clichés and platitudes: no pain no gain, pain is weakness leaving the body, etc. With an arsenal of clichés there’s no need to think about or express anything. Bodybuilders become shells.

People use bodybuilding to build and sculpt a body. One can create something (muscle) where there was nothing. It is creative and empowering. It’s also a way to build and sculpt an identity. Sam likes muscles, but it’s the identity, the attitude, the lifestyle, the emptiness he’s truly after. An identity that masks thoughts and feelings while projecting a numb strength. Sam never mentions any big trauma or terrible event that made him want to smother himself in muscles. His parents get divorced. A friend dies. It’s sad, normal life stuff. Normal life is hard and pushing himself to physical and mental extremes provides an escape from normal life. But the escape never lasts.

Near the end of Muscle Sam is at his final bodybuilding competition. He sees a guy warming up in the back. A crowd has gathered around the man. Everyone is impressed. Sam, “joined the crowd and watched as he did set after endless set of seated calf raises. What was that look on his face? Once I would have mistaken that thousand yard stare for ruminative mysticism, now, it seemed more like doleful resignation.”

Escaping the thoughts and feelings of a normal sad life through sculpting body and soul in a gym is truly mystical. Also impossible. Muscle is the story of disenchantment. Muscle turns to fat. Mysticism turns to resignation.

When I was in graduate school in Indiana I was with my friend Kevin. For some reason we started talking about Waffle House. I’d never heard of it. Zero Waffle Houses in Idaho. Kevin said Waffle House was great. The nearest one was in Columbus, Indiana. Kevin said Columbus had beautiful architecture. So we drove an hour east to eat at Waffle House. We sat in a booth and overate. The only server working was a young woman. At the counter sat two elderly men. The three of them were chatting like old friends. Kevin and I overheard the server say she had started using protein powder. It gave her explosive diarrhea and six pack abs. We chuckled to each other because diarrhea is funny. Reading Muscle I learned the waiter wasn’t weird. She was a bodybuilder. 

My Father’s Diet by Adrian Nathan West. First published by And Other Stories in 2022.

My Waffle House server was a midwestern bodybuilder. The father in My Father’s Diet is a midwestern bodybuilder, who much like the man warming up at the end of Muscle is disenchanted. My Father’s Diet is a quest for enchantment. 

An American family. Father, Mother, Son. Divorce. The mother remarries a guy called “the weirdo.” The father moves away. Gets a PhD. Thinks it will bring him a career and happiness. It doesn’t. Son and father are estranged. Mother, the weirdo and son move out into the woods so they can be hippies. The son hates it. Goes to college. Father moves back. Remarried. Father, son, and stepmom start having dinner on Sunday nights.

The stepmom, Karen, spent some time in Africa as a child. She learned German:

After a streak of introductory phrases —Hallo, wie geht’s, wie viel Uhr ist es—she fell into an apparent fit of glossolalia, emitting a mishmash of nasal vowels interspersed with trills and murmurs, the odd proper word bobbing to the surface like a soup bone in a pot of roiling broth, then finished with a row of what began as real numbers and transformed into a semblance of monotones in Mandarin or Cantonese: ‘Eins, zwei, drei, hai, lai, kai, sai.’

Two things from this passage. One. Humor in the behaviors observed makes the sadness of characters easier to bear. Two. I like the way it’s written.

The father and Karen plan to open a holistic health center. Karen is a nurse. She believes in medicine. She also believes in alternatives to medicine. People don’t trust doctors. People are scared of anything artificial. They want massages and spas and yoga and meditation. The father insists the scientific evidence for mindfulness is piling up. “I’m talking improvements in relationships, better immune function, reduced depression and anxiety.” 

Karen gives the narrator (I’m not sure the narrator or father are ever named) a book about mindfulness. He reads it. The book says, “The life we claim, the person we say we are, is a blend of fictions pulled from thin air and reactions to the prejudices and expectations of others.” The life we claim is artificial. Therefore bad. A true life, a true person, a good life, a good person comes from inside the individual. It is our job as individuals, each and every one of us, to block out external prejudice and expectation. Cut out influences from family, schools, jobs, culture, society. Do the work. Find out who we really are. That’s what the holistic health center is going to do.

Karen wants to heal people's bodies and minds, but she is disgusted by bodies. During a mindfulness class she can hear someone’s stomach grumbling and admonishes the attendees. Next time they need to eat breakfast before mediation class. Her marriage with the father ends around two incidents of body. The first when the father farts in the bathtub. Karen can’t believe he’d do something so gross. She won’t be in the same room with him. The marriage totally falls apart after the father gets skunked: 

The stench on him did not diminish, but revealed new layers as we grew accustomed to the more patently repulsive notes, in a kind of inversion of the acquired pleasure connoisseurs claim to find in Scotch or cigars. Sulfur gave way to putrefaction, putrefaction to intestinal gas, but tinged with something musky and sweet, like opium gum. My father rolled down the front windows, but the cold air rushing in only blew the rot back in our faces. I closed my eyes and tried to concentrate on breathing through my mouth, but the odor clung to my palate and the inside of my cheeks. My father’s wife retched and clamored: ‘What are we going to do?’

Father and son in crisis. Son gets dumped. Does poorly in school. He has no interests or ambitions. He sits in his apartment and listens to Iggy Pop, like scum. Father invests everything in the holistic health center. It fails. So does his marriage. No enchantment in love or entrepreneurship. Life has lost meaning. Two atomized individuals float through life, uninspired and melancholic. Newly divorced and no money. He moves in with his son. Father continues looking for enchantment, for meaning by entering a bodybuilding competition. The Body You Choose. Contestants take pictures, exercise for an amount of time, and take pictures again. The transformation is judged, not the final product. For the duration of the contest he has a purpose, meaning. 

Like any good father, he imposes his new found purpose onto his unwilling son. The father doesn’t know how to get fit enough. The son looks up gyms and trainers. They go to a gym together. The experience is torturous. Humiliating.

The father meets Nancy. They take things slow. They fall in love. The father apologizes to the son for not being around during his childhood. He rubs bronzer all over his body. Puts on a speedo. Hires a professional photographer. Sends the photographs into the competition. We never learn the results. He didn’t find what he was looking for, but he no longer feels the need to search.     

At times in my life I’ve struggled to see the point of anything. When I was a gymnast it was clear I wouldn’t compete in college, so I thought, “What’s the point?” At competitions instead of trying to win or do my best I would knowingly add skills to my routine that would hurt my score but make my coach and teammates and parents laugh. Now I have a job that I enjoy and appreciate, but I don’t get meaning from it. My job doesn’t provide purpose. I just took three months off and I’m not convinced it mattered. What’s the point? My Father’s Diet captures life without point and the pathetic search for one. 

The father really wants there to be a point. He wants meaning, but a hyper-individualized world doesn't allow for meaning. A person is responsible for their own health, their own soul, their own identity, their own life. With so much responsibility falling on one person there’s no time for meaning. Meaning comes from relationships not from inside the self and not from self improvement. The bodybuilding competition is meaningless. Nancy and his son provide meaning. Not mindfulness. Not bodybuilding. Not gymnastics. Not careers. 

The Hero’s Body by William Giraldi. First published by Liveright in 2016.

William Giraldi doesn’t struggle to find meaning in his life or in bodybuilding. Meaning is handed to him from generations of men. Instead he’s conflicted about the meaning he inherits. For him everything points to masculinity. For him masculinity is both a blessing and a curse. It gives him life, purpose, and belonging. It also takes away life, purpose, and belonging.

Giraldi was raised by men in a town called Manville. At an early age his mother abandoned his family leaving his father, uncle, and grandfather to indoctrinate him and his brother into their strict code of masculinity. In early childhood Giraldi feels alienated from family machismo. He likes to read books about Greek gods. Something his father would never understand. Tough guys don’t read. 

His father is a carpenter and works hard to provide for Giraldi and his brother. By all accounts he is a great parent. Still, Giraldi feels rejected and imprisoned by the masculinity he’s inherited. As a way to impress his father and an ex-girlfriend Giraldi starts bodybuilding. It is both a physical and intellectual exercise, “I needed to make my own creation myth, to renovate my pathetic vessel into a hero’s body.” Becoming one of the gods he reads about would bring him into the family fold.

Giraldi insists that he was the least likely to bodybuild. He insists that he wasn’t naturally manly like the men in his family. Bodybuilding was the first time he expressed anything macho. Yet at a young age he watches First Blood and loves it. He dresses like Rambo for years afterwards. When his dad gives him a BB gun he imitates Dirty Harry. All macho. All before bodybuilding.

What Giraldi characterizes as a lack of masculinity is actually alienation from his family. Something a lot of teens experience. His thinking follows, “I don’t fit in with my family, my family is manly, therefore I must not be manly.” Clearly he is manly.

The Hero’s Body reproduces masculinity that it is trying to criticizing and unintentionally adds misogyny:

We, the ultra-masculine, had transformed into stereotypical females in order to do it. We repined for the approval of dominant males, shaved and tanned ourselves, wore tiny clothes, were food-obsessed, weight-obsessed, always standing on scales, secretly worried about our brittle images and self-worth, our always tremulous control. With one another at the Edge we made a show of whoops and high-fives, not unlike those syndicates of teenage girls who embrace one another at the mall with shrieking brio.

Giraldi thinks he is deflating the male bodybuilding ego by pointing out their vanity, but he reveals what he thinks of women. It’s fairly despicable. He goes on to compare male bodybuilders to women struggling with anorexia. They are inverse. One wants to be huge and the other small. He insists the two are exactly the same. I’m unconvinced. Muscle and Body lead me to believe that male bodybuilders suffer from a variety of eating disorders. At best Giraldi is being glib, but it comes across as willfully ignorant macho bullshit. 

Class is more significant than Giraldi realizes. His upbringing is blue collar. His family doesn’t respect education. At least not the type of education one gets at school. Especially not at college. Giraldi goes to college. Studies literature. Becomes a writer. Jumps class. The discomfort he felt with his family didn’t come from not being masculine enough. He’s plenty masculine. It came from an internalized desire for intellectual rather than manual labor.

The Hero’s Body is divided into two parts. Each part reads like its own separate book. The first about a teenager’s experience in competitive bodybuilding. The second is about a middle aged man reckoning with the untimely death of his father. On a Sunday motorcycle ride Giraldi’s dad crashes and dies. One section is about growing, sculpting, building a manly body. The other section is about destroying a manly body. 

Machismo crashes the motorcycle. He’s out riding with other macho men and they drive too fast. Egg each other on. Act careless. Miss a turn. Crash. Giraldi can’t help but look up to and respect his father. So the book struggles. His father exuded manliness. He idolized his father. He idolized manliness. When an overabundance of manliness kills his father, he can’t help but respect it.

Body by Harry Crews. First published in 1990 by Touchstone Books.

In a goofy, oblique way each of these books about bodybuilding reveal a vision of America. 

New York in the 1980s is decayed and decadent and it scares Samuel Fussell. Existing was too dangerous. No one will protect him. Whatever is good in life is unavailable because he’s too scared to go outside. He finds a way to protect himself. Through hard work he builds something hardy. Something to protect and something that protects. Once he builds his fortress he can take part in the decadence. Pull yourself up by your bootstraps and make something. Once you do you can enjoy the USA.

America in My Father’s Diet is ennui from failed opportunity, neoliberal atomization, and a crisis of meaning. Failure after failure grinds the father down until he doesn’t care about anything. He drifts melancholy and apathetic. Can’t change job or past or soul, yet he is solely responsible for all three. He can change his body though. Or try at least. Pulling yourself up by your bootstraps isn’t enough for some people in the midwest. When it doesn’t work, when you're miserable and sad and alone, try mindfulness. 

The Hero’s Body exists in a Bruce Springsteen working class New Jersey America. Freedom and family. Bodybuilding gives Giraldi the confidence to do and say whatever the heck he wants. Freedom. It’s also a rite of passage into a family governed by masculinity. America is a patriarchal society governed by unthinking machismo. Unthinking machismo, in Giraldi’s world, is what’s admirable about America and what will kill it. 

Body by Harry Crews is the only book to cut the shit and say something straight forward.

Shereel Dupont is competing in the Ms. Cosmos competition. Her trainer, Russell Muscle is pissed because her redneck family, the Turnipseeds, along with her ex-fiance turned up unannounced. Russell is afraid they will spoil Shereel’s chances of becoming the best female bodybuilder in the cosmos. He’s not wrong.

The novel takes place in the hotel hosting the competition. When the Turnipseeds are checking into the hotel the receptionist asks for a driver’s license. Either no one in the family has one or no one wants to provide one. Shereel’s sister Earline “shouldered past her brother and deposited her enormous breasts on the desk to confront Julian. ‘This,’ she said, popping the pork rind into her mouth, ‘is the United States of America. You thinking of sommers else. You don’t need papers to travel in the United States of America.’”

Everyone in Body acts like a cartoon.

Julian, the hotel receptionist, “practically lives on natural yogurt and jogging. Jogging and natural yogurt made him feel spiritual. For that reason if no other he felt an immediate oneness with bodybuilders.” He learned the concept of “immediate oneness” from the philosophy class he took while studying hospitality management at junior college. 

The manager of the hotel, Dexter Friedkin, is a closeted gay man obsessed with the male bodybuilder physique. Obsessed with perfection. Repulsed by imperfection. When Julian’s diet of natural yogurt causes him to fart in Friedkin’s office, Friedkin freaks because, “Employees of the Blue Flamingo Hotel were not allowed to fart, at least not during working hours. They were all warned—right down to the dishwashers—to avoid offensive foods, foods that caused flatulence.”

Earline sees a man practicing poses by the pool. She thinks he’s having a seizure. At junior college she majored in “Problems for Living” and learned CPR. She gives the bodybuilder mouth to mouth. It causes a scene. Russell and the hotel staff both freak out. The man Earline “saved” is Bill “the Bat” Bateman. He has the best back in America and an eating disorder. It has prevented him from becoming a champion and helped him develop a fetish for watching overweight people eat junk food. Earline is overweight and loves eating junk food. They quickly fall in love. 

Shereel’s brother is named Motor. His body is completely covered in hair. It’s like he doesn’t have skin. Until Billy the Bat shows him how to pose. Motor becomes obsessed. Shaves his body smooth to show off his muscles. His mother gets too excited.

Shereel’s only competition in Ms. Cosmos is Marvella. Marvella has four sisters: Starvella, Shavella, Jabella, and Vanella. The fourtet walk around the hotel together doing little choreographed songs and dances. They’re also bodybuilders. Russell Muscle thinks they’ll all be world champions at some point. For some reason they aren’t competing in Ms. Cosmos. 

Nail Head, Shereel’s ex-fiance, is an unhinged Vietnam vet always about to stab whoever is in front of him. They have sex in a hotel conference room. He gets drunk in a parking lot. He’s the only one that gets Shereel, which is sad.

Crews presents two possible futures for women’s bodybuilding and for America. One strives for pure, huge, accumulation of mass. Bigger is always better. Never too big. Never too much. Grow, grow, grow. The other appreciates small perfection. Marvella’s trainer, Wallace, believes bigger is best. 

[Wallace] had decided it was the American way. Where was the American who owned anything that he did not wish was bigger? Wall’s waking hours were haunted by Donald Trump, and his dreams were shot through with whole populations of Donald Trumps, amassing, gathering, piling, higher and higher, adding numbers without end, because everybody knew, numbers had no end.

Russell and Shereel appreciate the small. Russell believes, “bigness was dead or as dead as it could ever be.” Shereel can change the trajectory of bodybuilding, of America. All she needs to do is win.

Shereel Dupont, at one time or another, had beaten every woman of monster size and thickness in the sport. Now all she had to do was beat them here, in this place and time, to crown herself as the ultimate female athletic body, the body that was the standard by which all others would be measured.

Shereel and the idea of appreciating something small, subtle, and perfect loses with her. Bigger and bigger and bigger wins. Almost immediately Shereel goes to her hotel room and ends her life in a warm bath. There’s no future for Shereel’s bodybuilding, for her America, for her. Nail Head knows and blocks her door. Stops anyone from disrupting her. He gets it. Vietnam proved to him America is fucked. Wallace was right all along and Donald Trump became president.

I don’t know what type of bodybuilder my Waffle House server was.