#588 Gaining Members

So I’m at my club the other day. It sounds so cool when I say it that way.
Unfortunately, it is a club that is obviously run by far off corporate interests, who have more interest in the shrinking corporate bottom line than in any shrinking bottoms brought about by healthy exercise.
The “club” is getting pretty run down.
It’s more of an improvised bludgeon at this point.
In fact, since no new improvements other than signage seem to be coming down the corporate pipe, the staff, desperate for ideas to stanch the open wound of bleeding membership, have taken to rearranging the furniture.
That’s right, they’re doing what every strapped-budget American household unable to buy new things does; they’re shifting old stuff around for a new look.
There once was a racquetball court at this club. It was a challenge court with a glass wall and all. In one of the club’s spurts of rearrangement a while ago, they took out the glass wall, carpeted the expensive hardwood court floor and used what was now a very large alcove to create an semi-enclosed circuit of exercise equipment.
Recently, they removed all of that equipment and moved in and rearranged a bunch of treadmills in serried ranks. There are now six rows, each of them with five or six treadmills. It’s an impressive sight.
And when they are full of people it looks for all the world like a stationary marathon.
Runners of all shapes and sizes, some of them jogging, some running full out, and some just plodding along like it’s either the end of the race or the beginning of a long haul to shed a hundred pounds.
And none of them getting anywhere.
And none of them gaining on anyone.
It’s like the self esteem-preserving game of musical chairs they played in my kid’s preschool. Everyone got a seat.
This is a marathon where there are no winners or losers, only people toiling. This treadmill supplied by Sisyphus incorporated.
But judging by the smell in the enclosed, not designed by the original architect to be too well-ventilated alcove, if success is part inspiration and part perspiration, they got one part of it covered.
America ya gotta love it