My girlfriend dumped me in 2000. I didn't handle it well. The weekend I was supposed to move out I trashed the apartment. I wrote on every picture of her, like put an 'X' on her face with a ballpoint and put a bouquet of dead flowers on the kitchen table and left. I told you I didn't handle it well. I found a place to live and there was a 24 Hour Fitness right near by work. One night I decided to put on 5 pounds of muscle. I was pretty god damned skinny.
I went to the 24 Hour Fitness. They showed me around and as soon as they showed me the pool I decided I'd join. I told the guy I needed a personal trainer and signed up for a fucking year at the gym. The guy said, "Come back on Monday morning and write down what you ate all weekend and we will assign you a personal trainer."
On Monday I went there in the morning with my sheet showing my diet and saw that it only had Oreo cookies on it. I had only eaten Oreos allll weekend. Weird. When I got to the gym they introduced me to the personal trainer. I handed him the sheet, he took me into the gym which was not crowded but not empty. There were totally people around. All I had to wear were the fucking short shorts from high school. I was wearing fucking dolphin shorts and he made me do sit ups. I remember thinking, "Everyone is seeing this dude in dolphin shorts doing the most erratic sit ups ever," and I'm not kidding, I totally told the guy I had to leave and left.
That Friday my phone rang. I didn't answer it and it went to my answering machine. He said, "Mike, this is Phil and I'm your personal trainer at the gym, just calling to see if you wanna come in." And then he hung up. I did not call him back.
The gym was near both my work and a Safeway. I used to go to the Safeway a lot to get lunch. I was in line with my lunch one day, like a year later. The fucking personal trainer was in line behind me. I could not believe this. He even remembered what I looked like. I had a bag of fried chicken wings, a stick of butter, a small bag of white rice and a giant bag of little white Hostess donuts. I remember thinking, "Holy shit it's that guy." He saw me and said, "If you ever wanna come in, come on down!" In my mind I said, "I'm never coming there again, you need to accept that, it's been a fucking year."
