Ok, with the weather and the time change… neither the Orange Sherbet nor the Lemon-Lime have been able to ride here lately. So… I found out my company will reimburse half of the monthly fees for health club/YMCA membership. The Y has “pay-the-day” joining fee this month so I joined for a dollar today. Now I hope I have a job long enough for this to matter.
*to bring everyone up to speed. The Orange and Lemon-Lime Sherbet are my persona on a Bike. I wear either a day-glo Orange or a day-glo Lemon-Lime shirt when I ride.
Day 1:
Alrighty then… Upon arriving I realize I am out of my league right out of the gate. I keep telling myself, “Don’t compare yourself to anyone, don’t compare yourself to anyone,” but it is humbling when the Geriatrics are putting me to shame.
Ok so this is how it went down. I thought I had prepared, bag, change of clothes, towels, clean underwear (the non-holie ones), shampoo, shower shoes, work out shorts, bottle of water … am I forgetting anything? Lock, need a lock… I know, I’ll use one from work. (mistake #1) It did not fit… so after 20 minutes of tossing my work van I found a short, small diameter shanked lock. Most of my exercise so far was just walking back and forth from the parking lot to locker-room.
Thirty minutes after I arrive, I wander out into the hall. Picture this.. an old, gray-haired, white Fat Albert (just not as cool) with a pony-tail wandering the halls with an, “uh-huh, yep, that’s right it’s my first time here, yep, uh-huh” look on my face. My inner self was screaming, “Don’t draw attention to yourself!” Try to blend in… act nonchalant. One pass through the exercise area doing a little recon along the way. Now the brain is starting to have second thoughts. As I look around it is going, “What the heck is T-h-a-t? What does that do? How does that work? And finally, “What is this contraptio… oh, I see… it’s a scale.”
Ok I need to know what my baseline is so I’ll start here.
I step up… “Nothing”
Ok, don’t panic. There, there’s the on button. Step off and let it “zero.”
Step up… and…this time it tells me a secret, a very weighty, burdensome secret.
I look up and let out a loud, deep, sigh and that’s when I notice it. It may motivate some but it’s the last thing I want or need right now: mirrors. They’re freaking E-v-e-r-y-w-h-e-r-e! I’m still not sure how I feel about that image looking back at me. I try to avoid the guy looking back at me in the mirror, maybe if I ignore him he’ll go away?!
So, baby steps… that’s how I’ll start, baby steps.
In order to avoid the guy in the mirror I skip stretching and loosening up. (mistake #2) Find something that looks familiar and climb aboard. Recumbent bikes have come a long way from what I used to know. I try to look like I know what I’m doing while figuring out how this one works on the fly. I finally settle in to a routine and the best I can figure I did around 6.5 miles in 30 min.
I’m sweating and sore from not exercising since the time change. So I call it an evening and head to the sauna.
You know… they are a lot hotter than I remember them also.
So we come to the end of Day 1.
“Baby steps”… that is a massive accomplishment for me.
I leave with a sense of satisfaction.
Manipulating the Masses…for their own good.
Sunday, May 19, 2013 by persifler
Opening passage:
THE conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.
We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society.
Our invisible governors are, in many cases, unaware of the identity of their fellow members in the inner cabinet.
They govern us by their qualities of natural leadership, their ability to supply needed ideas and by their key position in the social structure. Whatever attitude one chooses to take toward this condition, it remains a fact that in almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons—a trifling fraction of our hundred and twenty million—who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind, who harness old social forces and contrive new ways to bind and guide the world.
It is not usually realized how necessary these invisible governors are to the orderly functioning of our group life. In theory, every citizen may vote for whom he pleases. Our Constitution does not envisage political parties as part of the mechanism of government, and its framers seem not to have pictured to themselves the existence in our national politics of anything like the modern political machine. But the American voters soon found that without organization and direction their individual votes, cast, perhaps, for dozens or hundreds of candidates, would produce nothing but confusion. Invisible government, in the shape of rudimentary political parties, arose almost overnight. Ever since then we have agreed, for the sake of simplicity and practicality, that party machines should narrow down the field of choice to two candidates, or at most three or four.
Read more here: http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/bernprop.html
Americanized Religiosity is an important part of the Control Mechanism.
As distasteful as this ideology is to the “American Spirit” of rugged individualism it is an accurate observation on the mechanics of how society operates. The important thing is to see it, understand how it works and be aware of how it is being used. Knowledge is power.
Personally I would rather be consciously aware (at least as much as is possible) of how I am being manipulated than blindly following the power masters programming.
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