May/2007: Wow, am I tired. I'm trying not to go to sleep because going to sleep at six AM isn't really the best thing to do for your productivity. In fact, in case you didn't know, when you go to bed at six AM, you wake up at like two PM. By the time you stop blinking and thinking "Wait... it's two PM" it's four PM. At that point, it's fuckin' four PM, mate.

That's not a good way to spend your days. The problem is that my sleep schedule is not something I can control all that well. I suck at staying up more than 18 hours at a time. That's what happens when you get old.

So, I'm tired. I'm trying not to sleep. I figured hell, why not write a boring blog about WHY you're so tired. That, perhaps, may wake me up. Of course, the chances of something as exciting as writing a blog being invigorating enough to rouse you from a track towards slumber is... uh... yeah, probably isn't going to happen.

Anyways, I'm tired because I've discovered perhaps the greatest discovery since I discovered a few months ago that non-stick woks are really cool for cooking almost anything. I discovered this new discovery last Saturday night. I was awake, bored, and decided to go to the gym at two AM.

You know those scenes in movies where the guy leaves his house and he goes into the street and there's nobody there? And there's nobody for miles? There's just fuckin' nobody and he's pretty much the last person standing? Yeah, that really cool scene where I know you were looking at the screen and thinking "Why isn't this guy going to the grocery store or Best Buy or something?"


Yeah, like this scene from Vanilla Sky, even.
That scene is my local gym at two AM in the morning. It is awesome. Last Saturday, I walked in and the clerk who is supposed to scan me in was sleeping. Now, I had never quite seen that before. I really hadn't ever run that scenario through my mind of what to do if the gym clerk is oh, sleeping. So I stood there for about thirty seconds until I figured it would be a really heel move to wake her up just to scan me in. I entered the place and it... was... that... scene.

There was nobody there.

Nobody on the treadmills. Nobody on the exercise bikes. Nobody doing weights. I check the locker room... nobody there. I check the pool area. Nobody there. Not one person.

It would surprise none who know me that I found this event to be one of the neatest feelings possible. A dream come true. The general public vanished. It WAS that scene from the movie. So I treadmilled for an hour and a half while watching the rest of "A Beautiful Mind" (WHICH, btw, I had not seen before and I knew nothing of the whole mental angle that comes in. Nice surprise, that.) on my fifty dollar Zune (I love my Zune, btw again). I looked around after being done with that... there's still nobody there. Not a person. The clerk looked like she was still sleeping.

Awesome.

So I swam, hot-tubbed and just in general appreciated that the gym was mine. I owned the gym. I could do whatever I wanted. The gym was mine.

Of course, after I was done with all that and leaving around four-thirty AM, there were two other people there and the clerk had awoken. But no matter. I lived that scene, if only for a small window in time, and it was awesome.

So, I went back last night. At two AM.

Same. Situation. Well, except that the gym clerk was a different person BUT... HE was asleep when I got there. Oh, and I watched the first two-thirds of "Walk the Line", yet another movie I haven't seen all of. Oh, and I played some basketball afterwards because I stayed longer than last week. But otherwise, exactly the same. That same cool as hell feeling of living that scene.

Hello awesome, your name is the feeling of the empty gym.