What better artifact of the Suburban experience than a treadmill my dear friends? When I was a real chunkster so my family had a spare one – rarely used, dust accrued – and maybe I’d walk on it bi-weekly at a doctor’s approval. For a short stint. Before I forgot doctors existed and food is meant to be discarded.
Because how absurd it’d be to walk around the block! Why go out there when you can walk and watch some TV? Timidness always as a rule – maybe because that’s how they make MK-Ultra subjects after all. What better portrayal than the surburbie who switches out clothes and hops in the car, drives in traffic three miles to enter a well air conditioned facility, greets the clerk and treks toward the back; all as a ceremonial devotion to The Treadmill.
Such a ceremony – a ceremony I’d often do when timidness was the rule. Timidness before ageing takes control, I suppose – then it becomes avoidance.
In a cycle of office schematics I find it pithy how a holy grail ends as a treadmill desk. Such it was with some of the managers. Hearing each step and a whirr of the machine, slightly out of breath as they disclose this Sprint’s tickets impending.
If you were the one to hold a standard – that you won’t succumb to endless sitting and complications therein – then you’d be well-read to know there’s no static posture that’s good. May as well lather some sunscreen while you’re at it, in a frail rebellion of Nature’s demands. Preserve thyself, preserve, maintained: maintained for a traffic jam, most certainly. Maintained for a quiet ending.
This isn’t really about treadmills as a physical trinket. It’s Treadmills in a weaseled-in description of our human-conditioned existence; e.g. the Hedonic Treadmill. Or rendering a modern take of our Sisyphean condemnation.
Treadmills capture the quandary so common and conveniently forgotten with the people exchanged, jobs moved – new vicinities. That you’re walking, but it’s still the same mental places. Same frameworks or modes of existence and the scenery wraps around. You may think you’re moving but it’s our familiar electric ground.
The real heart hidden here isn’t a condemnation. It’s a simple appraisal: but I won’t lie, a partial motivation is wondering when the treadmill here ends. When will one find some rest? There’s always another, and the shoulders got stiffer. And everything starts looking the same, same as it ever was.
There’s an opposite take, too, where the treadmill is the salvation. The same as speedrunners. What will they do when they reach the world record? They go again. They’re in their own piece of heaven, however rote it’ll be.
It seems there’s a common insecurity or some tepid anxiety. And the only solution is to stop thinking and keep smiling even though everyone is so off their rocker around, downing more coffee as a testament and submission there’s nothing else but to crank it up until you’re vibrating while talking. All aboard our Treadmills!
Time to tend to yours.