60 lb dumbell (mark michaels' featured household item of the day)
This is my dumbell--one of two that I own. I've had my dumbells a long time now, maybe ten or twelve years. As you can see this one is pretty heavy, its sixty pounds.
I've had some late night parties where people come back to my place when the bars close, and before the night is over there's always some dude who wants to curl my dumbells.
"Usually," he's like, "holy shit, can you curl this?"
I just nod my head modestly.
The dude trying to curl the dumbell will start making a fuss to other people.
"Fuck! I can't even lift this thing one time. Hey, come try this! Mark says he can curl these!"
Other dudes will try to curl my dumbells, but none of them ever can. Girls will try to lift my dumbells, but usually they can't even stand up straight with both hands wrapped around one.
Each of us is allowed some talent of gift. Mine is that I can curl some sixty pound dumbells. I usually do about ten reps a day. But its been a little spotty lately since I've been sick and somewhat lazy.
But to explain the dumbell talent I have to go back a long way into my childhood when I was absorbing warped values and ideas about what's important in life. I grew up watching a lot of superhero shows like Batman and the Superfriends. After hundreds of hours of this kind of show I got it in my head that having big muscles is a very important part of being an adult. I assocaited big, sharply chiseled muscles with power and greatness and excellence.
The next thing I knew I was out in the garage lifting my dad's weights, looking in the mirror, hoping to increase my muscles and my greatness. To my great delight, bigger muscles actually began to appear.
(to be con'td, maybe) (Rachel distracted about twelve times while I was writing this, and then each time I had to go back and read the whole thing again to try to pick up the feel of it again. But then just as I started to write again, Rachel would come back and say that she was bored or whatever. Then it turned into a thing where she was gonna go home. The next thing you know I can't really focus on my dumbell post, I'm just grumbling at Rachel in my head, and when I reread my dumbell post its not really that funny or interesting and its not really going anywhere. So now I'll just sum up the whole dumbell thing with a few key points:
*I got to the point where I wanted to be a Mr. Universe just like Arnold Schwarzenegger and I would work out for hours everyday.
*Then someone told me that bodybuilding was for fags and I kind of lost my enthusiams for the sport.
*Still unable to atrophy to a level of mush, I did a certain workout routine that kept it under the "fag" level.
*Eventually I got rid of all my barbells and and bench presses and stuff in favor of simple pushups and sit ups etc. But the only weights I kept were my dumbells.
*My sense of self-worth has long been tied to my workout routine. I remember as a teenager I would go places where there was no gym and I would feel really uncomfortable and disgusting. One time this happened at a church retreat, like a bible school camp thing, and there was no gym or weights, so I had to just start doing push-ups.
Other people in the Sunday school thought this was pretty odd. They immediately nick-named me push-ups.
4:29:11 PM 
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