Boldly Going Where No Flab Has Gone Before

I sprained my ankle this morning. Normally, such a sprain could ruin my day and put a downer on my outlook on life. Not today! Alarmingly, I have remained imperturbable throughout the course of my injury. This is alarming for two reasons: First, I'm not quite sure what imperturbable means. Secondly, whenever I suffer a traumatic injury - or even a relatively bad nose bleed - I usually milk it for all it's worth. To put it bluntly, I use my injured state as an excuse to get people to do things for me. I don't entirely take advantage of people's kindness, just a couple little requests for favors here and there, along with the occasional letter of appeal to the Make-A-Wish Foundation, but I have yet to hear a positive response from them. I can't seem to convince them that whatever illness I am suffering at the time could result in death. Their typical reply to my requests usually say something to the effect of:

Dear Mr. Brock,
Our staff of medical experts assure us that 'Terminal Noseimus Bleedimus' is not a real condition. Please don't write us again.

It goes without saying that I'm beginning to lose all hope in humanity. Where's the trust? Where's the love?!

At the moment, my ankle is every shade of black and blue. There are even subtle hints of burgundy and fuchsia which actually go quite nicely together. Apparently my ankle has more fashion sense than I do.

If you are the inquisitive type, you may wonder how I sprained my ankle in the first place. Of course if you were to ask me, I would be way too modest to tell you how I saved a child from the third story of a burning building, and how I twisted my ankle after leaping through the billowing smoke, out the window, and onto the fireman's trampoline. My own modesty (along with the fact that everything I just said is entirely false) prevents me from bragging.

In actuality, I hurt myself while working out at a fitness center of which I am a currently a member. As a general rule of thumb, one must always be wary of any organization that requires membership. The Democratic Party, The Ku Klux Klan, fitness centers; they all have one thing in common and that's membership. Anyways, for those of you who don't know, a fitness center is a place where any person of any age, shape, and size can come to feel fat. You can blame society for this, because it would have us believe there is an "ideal" body weight that we all must conform to, when in reality only actresses and Somalian refugees ever achieve this "ideal." And maybe a few fitness center employees.

Take a peek into any Gold's Gym or 24 Hour Fitness and you will see what you, Joe McFlabby, are up against: Guys that are freakishly buff and triangular, thanks to substances of dubious legality, and overly-tanned blonde girls whose biggest meal of the day is their toothpaste. You don't stand a chance! Consequently, the parking lots of fitness centers across America are filled with people who pace indecisively between their car and the front doors of the gym, trying in vain to muster enough courage to enter the Land of Chiseled Abs.

So what are we going to do about this? Well, we can either get in shape before we go to the gym, which seems somewhat contradictory, or we can brave the fitness center waving the banner of flabbiness proudly. In a metaphorical sense, of course. There is a third option, though some might see it as just a little drastic. It requires the extermination of the entire earth's population of ridiculously good-looking people. Like I said, maybe that's slightly drastic, but I'm sure you'll agree that somebody needs to do something. As much as I would like to step up and lead this revolution, I can't. I have a bum ankle.