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“Dust collects in the corners of my room. My girl, she gets so sick of
it, she’ll sweep it up. I don’t care one way or the other--right now,
dust is the least of my concerns. Like dust, loose change piles up in a
jar I keep on the floor by my front door. When there’s enough, I’ll use
it to buy what I need, like more food. Yeah, it’s like that... From
randomness comes order. From order comes a clearer picture. As a kid, I
remember the game, connect the dots. You start with nothing, just a
bunch of dots on a page, and as you start connecting ‘em, something
emerges. When you’ve finished, you’re rewarded with an answer, a
complete picture. For the past four months, I’ve been toiling in the
shadows, in anonymity... And I’ve been patiently connecting each dot,
waiting to see what will emerge.”
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The
world is against us brothers. In big ways and in little ways...The
looks, the comments,
the disgust... The difficulty in finding clothes that fit.... The choices we
have to make when we eat. The world conspires against us brothers. In
ways that are obvious and ways that are subtle... It wants to lull
us into a fucking stupor, make us like them, like cattle... Take
meat.
Yeah, beef. Lean red is at the center of our diets. For me, my poison
is eye round--a cheap, plentiful and lean cut. Whole or ground, 16-20
oz. per
meal. That's typical for me. Now "cheap" is the key word here. When I'm
at the
butcher's, I'm always eyeing the sweet cuts, the "prime" cuts--the NY
strip, the porterhouse, the T-bone. Fuck, what I wouldn't give for one
of those right now with a side of baked potatoes, sour cream and
butter. Here's the fucking irony though... What jacks up the price of
steak is not how lean or healthy it is, but how much fat, how much
marble that steak has. What's valued in my butcher's shop, what costs a
shitload more, is the excess, the fat. Society is like that butcher. We
live in this jumbo-size world
of excess. We live in a society where all of our desires can be had
with a piece of plastic--a credit card that lets us live today and put
off our responsibilities for another day, so that we can live off the
fat of the land. This, brothers, is excess.
In this game, in this life, I have one bit of advice... Trim the fat
brothers. Cut out the excess from
your steak and from your life. Run clean, run lean. Tell the world you
don't need the fat and
send that shit back.
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The
excess… The uneeded… The fucking ignored… Like the skin on a chicken,
it's what you discard, what's left at the end of the day in my
butcher’s shop. Like that skin, your skin, my skin… Shit, it just gets
in the fucking way. It’s a flimsy yet stubborn wall that separates us from one another.
Every day people look at me, at my skin, and judge. Who am I? A
bodybuilder. What’s beneath my skin? Slabs of beef that took me years
to build, sculpt and refine. Is that who I am? All that I am? Dig
deeper. Maybe you’ll find a heart pumping like a fucking piston.
Instead of innards, maybe you’ll see gears and springs and coils. Is
that me? You tell me because if you don’t know, I’ll be damned if I
tell you. Peel away the skin and you get to the real meat, the man
himself--what that that man is made of. Every drop of blood ... Every
fiber of his being. Every last fucking sacrifice he ever made. So the
next time you see me, look
further. There’s more than meets the eye… I am more than this face,
this body. I am more than the years I’ve put behind me, more than the
sum total of seventeen agonizing, fucking weeks. I am more than today
and still reaching for tomorrow. So fuck yeah, my skin may not reveal
who I am, but as it gets peeled and onion-thin, maybe it'll give you a better glimpse of what I'm made of and what it took for
me to get here...
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Meat. Shit, meat is about the here and now. The eyeround that I
consume. The muscle that hangs heavy from these bones. If meat is the
present, then bones are the future--the impenetrable and fucking
inevitable
future.
So the question I’m left with is this, brothers… What’ll happen once
these eighteen weeks are over, when next week comes and goes? When I'm
old and need to lean on a stick? Will I leave a mark? When my time on
this earth has passed, how will I be
remembered? Maybe it’ll be a passing mention in the papers. No... Maybe
a
line next to my name of the competitions I won or lost. Fuck no... Damn
it brothers, let me tell you my life will be more than a clot of words.
My
accomplishments will be more than a trophy. I will not lie down and make peace with myself. My legacy will
be more than the meat, more than the skin, more than the fucking bones
themselves. One day, all that shit will be gone. Now next week, I'll head
out for the show. But over the
past seventeen, I have spit out teeth and blood, cracked bone,
and
spilled guts. I have been feverish. I have been scarred. Yeah, this
life will try to smash me, but I will smash back... I will hit back so
fucking hard that when
the day is done, I will have burned a
hole in the memory of my foes and my friends. I will rattle my bones
and make a noise so loud that a generation who follows in my footsteps
will feel my wrath and remember my name... They will hear my echoes long after the
dust has
collected on my bones… These bones that will become the dust
itself. |
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