She has a gym in her building and hates it

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Dear Ken Layne: I notice that you are a big advocate of getting outside and seeing nature. I think you also wrote a book about walking the length of California, but maybe I made that up. If I didn’t make it up, when is your book coming out?

I wonder if you could help me find the motivation to exercise each day. I work at night and have plenty of time to sleep late and then go to the gym (which is free and in my building) but I still don’t do it. Instead I read the Internet and write jokes. I fear that as I age and my metabolism slows I will become morbidly obese. What to do? — Sincerely, Sara Benincasa.

You can’t escape reading the Internet and writing jokes. It’s your job, Sara. When you’re supposed to perform comedy onstage or host that nighttime radio show full of filthy sex talk, what are you going to do, talk about the transcendent quality of nature? (This is exactly why Ralph Waldo Emerson got fired from his job on satellite radio.)

Still, you want to exercise, like everybody claims to want to do these days. Morbid Obesity is apparently no longer the American Dream, what with the new Health Care Reform and the preventative medicine and the Death Panels. The problem, for many, is that exercise is Not Fun.

A gym in your building, is that fun? It’s an amenity, and adds to the price you pay for the apartment. Yet nobody ever thinks in anticipation, “I cannot wait to go to the gym in my building’s basement.” The only similar room to The Gym in most apartment or condo buildings is The Laundry Room, a Place of Shame people avoid unless they can’t get away with wearing the same stained sweater and stiffened socks for another day.

There’s often a teevee mounted to the wall in even the smallest gyms, so that the pain of exercising can be partially blotted out with the History Channel or cable news. This is also terrible.

Even the big city membership gyms — the 24-Hour Fitness centers and the Equinox and the Y — are built for the Chore of Exercising. (And finding sex partners, which is a kind of different subject, probably, but still a chore.) While some people love the whole gym atmosphere and the spinning classes and the parasitic foot fungi, you don’t sound like that person.

I despise organized exercise, myself. Don’t want a new social scene, don’t want to network, don’t want to buy hemp Workout Wear, don’t want some creep in spandex hopping in front of me like an insane frog, and sure as hell don’t want a Nordic Track. If we stacked all the unused Nordic Tracks in America, we’d have a ladder to the Moon. And then America’s Unemployed could carry supplies to our new Moon Base, like Sherpas.

You need to be forced to leave your building.

How fun would it be to join a crew club of incompetent amateurs who row along the river two or three mornings a week? Maybe not fun at all, but still! What about a springtime Central Park “health-walking” deal with a set schedule to make you feel ashamed if you don’t show up for what is literally a walk in the park?

If you’re not motivated by a dog who needs a walk or a natural love of some oddball activity such as riding a bicycle until you’re run over by a cab driver, some kind of Group Activity on a Solid Schedule might be your ticket to physical fitness and a regular supply of comedic material. And is there anything more beautiful than Central Park on a spring morning, or the Hudson as the sun comes up and the shorebirds go nuts all around you? Even a corpse floating in the river can be pretty when the light hits it just so. As Thoreau often said, when he was drunk, “New York City is Nature times a million, plus all the money.”

PS — Last year I did hike about six-hundred miles along the seashore from Tijuana to San Francisco, writing about the California Coast during this awful recession. And yes, that mileage math doesn’t actually add up at all. As for when the book might see the Light of Day, my current publisher is currently represented by a Customer Service webform. Publishing is a challenging business these days.

Send your important questions to ask.layne@gmail.com. But if you have a REAL problem, call the police or something, as Ken Layne will not really help you at all. This is just a web page on the Internet, and he is just a writer who works for Wonkette.