Pick Up That Gauntlet. But Only If It’s Absurdly Heavy

I’ve gone and gotten an urge to bulk up and bulk out lately.

Perhaps I’ve been standing too near the mountains. The show-off “look-at-my-snow-tufted-peaks” mountains. Those “ooh-I-bet-you-wish-you-were-as-riddled-with-goats-as-I-am”mountains. Mountains with an entourage of Sherpas playing fifes in their immovable wake.

Maybe I’ve been too long in the too near mountains, but that’s New Zealand for you…and for me. Still better than the old Zealand.

Perhaps it’s not ‘Zea-land’, but rather instead ‘Zeal-and…’; thereby leaving you with fact that Kiwis are espousers of zeal and…whatever else you’d like to add. It’s pleasant when national identity is a matter of, first, enthusiasm and, second, whatever else you’d like to add.

Like laziness. One could be be enthusiastic and then lazy, 100% dedicated push towards not really being bothered about it. Enthused lethargy.

Not that I’m saying Kiwis are vehement recliners, because that seems a tad racist and if I’m going to be racist I’m going to save it up for a good one (brace yourselves…Scandinavians).

Scandinavia…that’s another common hangout for mountains; the sort of mountains that once did terrible things to handmaidens or gave birth to longboats, or other ancient Scandinavian strangeness.

But to be like a mountain; I’ll give it a go.

I’m beginning with lifting some heavy shit, but not actual weights.

I’m going to improvise variously, such as by lifting a shipwreck’s timber or a conveniently proximate boulder.

However, best place to find a new heavy thing for up-and-downing is a farm. Sure, armfuls of bundled hay and discipline-inducing muck for shovelling, but mainly livestock, for the best things to lift for applicable strength are things that wiggle, and wriggle is rampant in the farmyard.

For there lay the beasts that have the ancient instinct of not-knowing what being lifted up is, but know in their gut they must not allow it to happen to them by any and all means deemed appropriate at the time of departure from the ground. It should be one of those situations in which the animal is so pissed off that the majority of noises it makes are coming out of its nose. An articulate snort of sorts.

If they don’t wiggle or kick, then it’s one of those animals that naturally climb people, like scenery.

Complimentary though it maybe to be considered vast enough to be a place to spend an afternoon (“I think I’ll have tea at Sam…perhaps the elbow region.”), it doesn’t count as lifting. Even if a horse climbs you; that’s down to the horse, not you.

And when the animals become willing to be lifted…rotate your sheep, sir.

Keep an unwilling yet steady procession of animals a’coming, thoroughly unprepared for being hoisted and lunged at the sky as though eager contrary proof against the cloud’s accusing suggestion that you don’t have any sheep to hand.

And the method works! My biceps nowadays…they’re why animals think of me as scenery, like a valley.

You know when the show-off body builders kiss their biceps? Well, I can’t help but do that, because mine are near my lips perpetually, being a bit of a sizeable bother to be honest.

My biceps are so large; they’re near. Near the dog, near the hat stand, near the computer, my wife complains when my biceps get in her light whilst she reads…and her soup.

More importantly…Forearms. You’ll want nice manly firearms, naturally the kind that make your daughter’s suitors know that you can…just…keep…hammering, in a rugged checkered shirt, whilst your beard looks on sternly and bushily.

How illegal is a hammer anyway?

Hammers give me confidence, less son-in-law strife and and forearms that bulge like I’ve got a problem.

Bulging is either a sign of the absurdly healthy (healthy to the point of arousal) or desperately done-for. And I’m the former.

You don’t even need nails, though some earplugs to hand and ear might be advisable. And then, thoroughly deaf, you can show the ground why you live on top of it. Make it pay for abandoning those sheep and other livestock to your lofty ambitions of cloud collisions.

Hammer, mallet, axe; all these are tremendous for the forearms and greatly decreases the proximity of those you want, increases the distance of those you don’t want, and adjusts the altitude at which you prefer your sheep to be.

I say sheep, but there’s nothing more biblical than ‘oxen’ to lift.

When you go ‘oxen’; you’re too-too-much in general terms.

Like as a wedding gift. Once an oxen would have been an ideal wedding gift, sitting patiently as a future grandchild’s inheritance, between the toasters and bed sheets. Now though, that oxen is too-too-much.

‘Biblical’ is a hell of a method of overkill though.

5000 people for dinner and serving just fish and loaves of bread? With some suspiciously watery wine? And then retaliating to a rude comment at the water-wine bar by flooding the Earth? Rounding things off by killing yourself to one of the worst torturous deaths imaginable and then saying to people as they walk back to their seats from the bar: “I’m doing this for you, y’know. How about some applause!? If it’s not to much to ask?! Can’t do its myself obviously, can I?!”

Biblical is one way, but medieval is quite another.

Like chucking down a gauntlet and expected other folk to be suitably insulted by it, thereby picking up the gauntlet prior to you both killing each other’s employees.

If you’re going to take part in that daftness, at least make it a heavy gauntlet.

That’ll do for today’s…whatever this is. I wouldn’t call it advice, as I’m more that chap your teachers and parents warned you about regarding being told to jump off a bridge.

Remember.

Variety and weight. Every day. Check the farmyard.

Conditions are perfect.

Silly enough?

Sam