Jeffrey Goes to the VA, Part 2

Nigh on about five or so months ago, Adam and I started sniffing around Crossfit.  I don’t really remember actually how we found it, I think it was Adam who did.  A few months before that I had already been metaphysically reaching out for a similar community.  Something inside me told me that the whole no-mirror-gym, high intensity, group workout thing was where I belonged.  I had seen the “boot camp” crowd at the park but knew that that wasn’t really it for me.  My friend Hank, when he first found out we were moving to Salt Lake said, “Oh shit bro, you can work out at Gym Jones!”  “What’s Gym Jones?”  “They’re the people that trained all the actors and extras getting them ready for the movie 300!”  I found Gym Jones on the web and started obsessively reading and watching the videos.  I’d seen 300 and thought it was a beautiful movie, that is after I figure out you are supposed to watch it with the sound turned off.  Every frame of Larry Fong’s cinematography is a masterpiece worthy of hanging in a museum if you ask me.  Before I silenced the “dialogue,” I realized I was missing half the movie because I was perpetually rolling my eyes.  I spent as much time staring at the top of my orbital cavity as I did at the screen.  This is mainly because the movie is rife with transparent appeals to the lowest common denominator mindset of the allure of war and the appeal to stupid American boys that still think combat still has anything to do with meeting your enemy face to face and toe to toe with similar equipment.  It’s also propaganda for America’s impending war with Iran and for all those Americans who think that’s going to go down like any Hollywood happy-ending movie you are going to be oh so sorry.  There’s of course the racism and homophobia in 300 as well.  The darker skinned and feminized Persians are offensive and the use of the term “boy lovers” by Leonidus would have made me laugh out loud if I didn’t realize how dangerous homophobic shit in movies is.  The double-irony of course is because of what we know about the real Spartans and homosexuality and the fact that the film’s star, Gerard Butler talks so openly and unapologetically about his sexual attraction to both men and women.  (I wish he’d had the foresight and courage to refuse the homophobic lines. They hurt everyone. With his position on the film and if thoughtfully formulated, I’m sure that Butler could have made a case for dropping those hurtful lines and the film’s director, Zach Snyder would have succumbed to reason.  He seems like a smart man.)  Of course I realize that even though I can sweat testosterone with the best of ‘em and I’m sure not complaining about spending a couple of hours lusting after Gerard Butler in a beard, sandals and leather diaper, alas I am not the real target audience for that film anyway.  I’ve already seen behind the curtain. The downside of watching 300 with the sound turned off is that you’d miss Tyler Bates’ stunning (if controversial) soundtrack. How did I get started talking about 300?  Oh.  Hank.  Gym Jones.  300. That’s right.  So after I started snooping around the Gym Jones website and looking at some of the workouts online, I became obsessed (as I am wont to do) with finding out a way to work out there.

They’re not easy to find.  The website, as I remember didn’t have an address on there so I wrote to the contact address and got a response.  To tell the truth I don’t really remember what exactly it said but I believe there was some mention of coming to some initial class to see if the gym liked me and I liked the gym.  The cost was also mentioned; the cost of the initial class and the cost of going to Gym Jones on an ongoing basis.  Again, I don’t remember what the numbers were but I do know that it seemed wildly expensive and was far out of my reach.  Now I know y’all may think I’m crazy for this but I have (and probably still do) believe in “miracles.”  That is to say that when I have wanted something that seemed out of my reach, I have prayed to God to make a way for it to come to be if it’s what’s right for me.  When I’ve done this and then went about focusing on what needed to be removed in me to make me ready for the blessing, seemingly miraculous things have happened.  People and resources seem to materialize out of nowhere.  Now I do believe in a system of universal spiritual law.  I believe in the “Is” and I believe that nothing exists outside the Mind of God.  Wait a minute, now I’m going down another rabbit hole completely.  (See why I need help?)  The point is that I don’t believe in the celestial personality that says “yes” to one set of parents who are praying for their kid to be healed of leukemia and “no” to another set of parents praying for their kid.  In fact, even though I know they are just expressing gratitude in their own way, I hate to hear people say, “God healed my child of leukemia” because all I can think of is how fucked up that god would be for saying “no” to the other parents who no doubt loved their own kid just as much as the first parents.  My husband’s brother died when they were teenagers.  He was killed while riding a skateboard and holding onto the side of a car.  There is no doubt in my mind that his parents, my “in-laws,” prayed for the protection of their sons and that they love them as much as any parents do.  So if a child lives to adulthood and the parent thanks God for keeping them alive, it sort of infers to me that God said no to the Nelsons.  Fuck that.  Fuck that.  God is “no respecter of persons” and “causeth his sun to rise and sendeth his rain on the just and the unjust.” All that being said, I do believe that there are certain things that we can do to “co-create” our experience that the omnipresent creative force that is God.  Yep, I’m one of those.  So I went to find out where Gym Jones was.  Maybe if I saw the place in person; sat in my truck outside the joint; thought, prayed and meditated on how a man who basically lives hand-to-mouth all the time could somehow come to workout at a gym that expected me to pay over a thousand dollars just for some orientation course and then apparently at least several hundred more over the next year.  I reckon the guy gave me an address when he wrote back because I set out to find Gym Jones and do my little prayer and meditation session outside the home of what I had become convinced was going to be the next big step forward for me.