This is the time of year that gyms love. After the excess of the holidays many of your friends and neighbors step on the scale, let out a horrified shriek and run or more likely waddle to the nearest work out palace. The gyms and health clubs love this because they get the added income from the new members and they know that in a few weeks time these new members will disappear like all New Years resolutions do.
But for a few weeks the joints will be crowded.
I work out regularly and have become amazingly set in my routines. The addition of these new members annoys me. They get in my way, use MY machines and generally make me wish they would go to a planet on the galaxies outer rim.
But what really has set my teeth on edge these past few weeks has been the arrival of “The Whistlerâ€. You probably hear someone like him in your travels. You can be walking the aisles of the grocery store minding your own business and out of nowhere someone is trilling and riffing some old forgotten song. It’s usually an older resident of our community and almost always accompanied by the jingling of coins in his pocket.
Of course in those circumstances you can move away from the aural assault. I am not so lucky in the instance of the “Gym Whistlerâ€. This guy seems to be able to time his day to catch me in the locker room, hot, sweaty and sometimes hung-over, eager for a trip to the sauna to sweat out the sins and excesses of the night before. There I sit while he flattens my eardrums in my skull with his tuneful but LOUD solo.
The locker room is cold hard tile and the whistle bounces around until it drills into my skull like a woodpecker with a dentist’s drill for a beak.
It’s more than I can take in the small, reverberant space. It was bad when he ran through his repertoire of Christmas songs. Now it’s excruciating as he works through the hit parade of by gone days.
Now I am certain this is a nice man, kind to his Mother, gentle with his family. So common courtesy precludes me from my more murderous thoughts.
But the other day I could take it no more. When he paused briefly in his attack on my ears I asked “Do you know Lady of Spain?â€
A moment of blessed silence.
Then he laughed and launched into it.
So my mission is now clear. Keep coming up with ever more bizarre songs until I stump him into silence.
