About five days a week I work out with dumbbells in the backyard. My sister turned me on to an Equinox trainer in NYC named Erika Hearns who began uploading workouts to Instagram during Covid and has kept it up as a side gig ever since. I’ve taken Erika to Greece and Colorado and Columbus and Ogallala and Iowa City and Brooklyn and Mexico City and San Miguel de Allende and Kansas City and Champaign and Chicago and who knows where the heck else over the past five years.

She’s a friend to my body which all too often I hate. Flat feet and chunky legs, my weight gain distributed evenly so that all the sudden nothing fits. I’m stronger than I’ve ever been but also kind of thicker, and I don’t know how I feel about it. I’m past the point of starving myself, but also too vain not to compare myself to the genetically blessed, as they say. People say I’m aging well, and I suppose that’s true, but I want to be a beautiful two-dimensional image. And it’s absurd and I don’t judge others the way I do myself and I’m too old for this, but here we are. And that’s me in perfect health. Can you imagine it when I’m sick?

It’s a wonder I write anything at all with this mind. I’m a third through a revision of the Nebraska novel and it’s slow going but I am making improvements. Will it be enough? That’s up to others, and I fear it doesn’t even have to do with the quality of the writing but the quality of the concept. What a dumb world. When I was a kid, movies cast ugly people, and that was cool, it was fine, it was great.

Enjoy the mix.