Benchpressing Dialogue

Finally, last night and this morning I got back into the gym. Graduate school is not conducive of good health. You can't exercise, you eat shitty food all the time because shitty food is quick and cheap (grad school is all about being poor and having no time) and you spend an inordinate amount of time on the couch reading and writing and, if you're me, snacking on bowls of goldfish crackers. I've put on weight, have a spare tire, and my arms are scrawny-looking. Walking as much as I could on campus and taking the stairs wasn't going to stem the tide of old age and an inbalance of calorie intake and no calorie burn.

But it wasn't my body that also suffered from this lack of physical activity. My writing did, too.

I've always used physical activity as a way to purge my brain. Before I had to stop running, I would run for miles, usually at the end of the day, to mull over the day's events and just get all the nasties out of my system. All the real and perceived slights I felt were handed to me by life. All the great and little failures that were holding me back. I'd leave them out there on the road in my wake to die. I'd think and bathe my thoughts in endorphins and supercharge them to find paths to make them reality. Great dialogue--heightened dialogue--is written on adrenalin and endorphins. I rode a bike. Played basketball. Hiked. I still can't just sit still. If you read my blog yesterday, you can see that I have be doing things to let my brain do it's job.

And while I understand and believe that this body is just a temporal container for the real me, I know I do so much better mentally when I take care of this physical container. I can't create when I'm upset or in a bad emotional spot--I'm not one of those artists who has to suffer to create; it's the opposite for me. And, just like I can't explain what happens when I write, I can't explain what happens when I exercise. I do know today I was on a machine today, cranking tunes on my iPod, when suddenly a bit of dialogue came into my head that I've been struggling with for weeks now. And there it was. It just appeared.