The hottest guy in the gym just dug a Richter-scale booger out of his nose in front of me

Which totally knocks him off the top spot, and if I can score well in the cha-cha I can probably improve my ranking on the leader board.

Also: I just did ten unassisted triceps dips. That technically triples my advantage over Booger Boy.

Oops! I took this selfie at the gym today and totally forgot to post it.

WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH ME?

Anyway, it was arm day. And Lots Of Inspiration Day. Yowza. So you’re all caught up.

Now I must go to bed because I need to be rested up for the excitement of tomorrow’s Tony nominations. I totally hope they pick you.

My family told me on no uncertain terms to NOT post these pictures, so challenge accepted!

The good news is I got our back deck and the grill and all the patio furniture (now christened Porch Song Trilogy) all scrubbed and cleaned and dried and set up for summer.

The bad news is the umbrella for the table didn’t get set up. It’s on a high shelf in the garage, see, so I set up our tall step stool in a place near one end of the umbrella. That place also happened to be directly under the surprisingly sharp and surprisingly hard end of the track for the garage door. Not noticing this troublesome placement, I bounded up the step stool at full force ... and hit my head so hard on the sharp, hard end of the track that I saw stars and all but collapsed to the floor where blood ran down my arm and the pain intensified so quickly that I actually started gasping and sobbing.

My poor dad—who is legally blind—ran to get our poor neighbor—who had to look at my bloody, swollen head without barfing—and together they decided to take me to the ER:

The other good news is I don’t need stitches, but I have an impressive lump and a possible concussion and a badass punk-rocker streak of blood in my hair:

The other bad news, though, is the stupid, mean, dumbass doctor won’t let me go to the gym for arm day. So I apologize in advance if you see me today with my lumpy red head and my saggy, deflated arms.

The other freaking awesome news is our freaking awesome neighbor climbed (carefully) up the (newly placed) step stool to get our umbrella down, and it was waiting next to the driveway for us when we got home.

Huh.

It turns out that when you suddenly no longer have EXACTLY 42 MINUTES AND NOT A SECOND MORE to squeeze in a plausible workout between work and rehearsals or shows, you’ll lollygag and futz around and get to the gym an hour later than you’d planned and you’ll stretch your (expanded, to be fair) workout to almost two hours. BUT! You’ll have a whole new pile of fresh meat—oops: fresh inspiration. sorry. typo.—preventing you from taking a passable stealthfie.

Also! Not not to brag, but I just jumped up to 80 lb dumbbells on the incline press and the 80 lb barbell on skull crushers (which, if you do them right, do not, in fact, crush your skull). I may be a Peter Procrastinator tonight, but I also feel like a big ol’ Mike Monster.

I’ve been really conscientious (thank goodness autospell took that word and ran with it for me after three letters) about stretching and gently easing into movement with the areas of my body that have historically flared up with chronic gym injuries

... and I’ve perhaps been too enthusiastic about diving into my workouts involving every part of my body that hasn’t previously given me trouble because now I have heretofore-not-existing pain and tightness deep in my ventral left deltoid. It’s not bad, but it’s bad enough that it’s sidelined my chest and shoulders workouts out of caution. Fortunately, I still have a back and legs and a core and two arms, the latter of which are getting some brutal attention today. OK, intermittently brutal; there are currently five other people here and they’re all on the other side of the gym and clearly not holding auditions for Husband Who Actually Works Out Instead Of Sitting On The Equipment Brazenly Taking Selfies And Playing On His Phone and I’m probably spending too much time sitting on the equipment brazenly taking selfies and playing on my phone instead of brutally blasting my arms.

Oops—the Bus Of More Gym People must have pulled up while I blathered on and on in that last sentence because now there are more gym people here. I’m still all alone on the preacher bench at the front of the gym though, so maybe they all know something I don’t. Or they’re afraid of seeing my ventral left deltoid explode in a shower of pain, gristle and glitter.

My anatomy isn’t such that I can take a selfie that shows any progress on my arm blast, so I’m reduced to posting a selfie that shows zero progress in removing my face wrinkles or taming my hair. The management regrets this error.

It’s All of you are Really in My way Day

(often shortened to ARM Day) at the gym, and it’s so bottlenecked at the first- and second-tier equipment that if I want to get in any type of workout I’m relegated to third-tier equipment like that stupid triceps-extension contraption where you put your upper arms on that little shelf and push the uncomfortable handles forward and get more of a wrist sprain than a triceps pump.

Fun fact: That little shelf makes a great place to rest your arms for a stealthfie.

Doing back, shoulders and biceps makes me all shaky and affects my typinf

What's a meta for?

When your super-cute T-shirt HAS A SUPER-CUTE T-SHIRT PRINTED ON IT but it’s TOO BIG TO CAPTURE IN A GYM STEALTHFIE but it gives you a valid opportunity to say META and OTHER CAPITALIZED WORDS and then YOUR REHEARSAL GETS CANCELED so you stick around in the gym an extra half hour to BLAST THE LIVING HELL OUT OF YOUR BICEPS which is MAKING YOUR ARMS ALL SHAKY and TOTALLT MESSIMG UP YOUR TYPINB.

The gym tonight is (please select all):

1. Teeming with masculine pulchritude
2. Collectively doing chest, shoulders and triceps because EVERYONE’S USING THE EQUIPMENT I WANT
3. Celebrating the entire discography of Wilson Phillips
4. Rudely ignoring the awesomeness of my Mew Mew Kitty shirt
5. Bringing back the man-bun

Back, Biceps and

BOY I WISH THAT GUY WITH THE BALL CAP AND THE BEEFY QUADS WOULD LOOK UP SO WE COULD MAKE EYE CONTACT AND EXCHANGE SMILES AND SCHEDULE THE CAKE TASTING FOR THE WEDDING.

Also: BOY I NEED TO CLEAN MY GLASSES.

When you’re all psyched up for a killer leg workout

but when you warm up at the squat rack you feel the tiniest hint of a twinge of an old tendon injury deep in your awkward buttish region so in the interest of preserving your ability to walk you have to abruptly pick another body part to work out as you bob and choke in a bewildering sea of whatdoIdonowness so you decide to do chest and triceps but you’ve been thinking about destroying your quads all day so your head just isn’t in it but speaking of my head here’s an artistically composed pec-deck portrait of me and my phrenology shirt.

Things that get you beaten up at the gym:

• Rainbows
• Stars
• Pastels
• Failure
• Cutsie-poo shirts
• Saying cutsie-poo
• Stealth selfies
• Calling them stealthfies

In my decapitating-headache haze this morning, I still managed to pack for the gym. Just in case. My mind wasn’t really in the game (as the sportsie-poo dudes say) after work, but a big shaker full of Blue Raspberry C4 Sport Pre-Workout magic re-lit my pilot light quite nicely, and I must say I now have the chest and triceps of a 25-year-old competitive bodybuilder. They’re buried in a shallow grave under the porch, but still.

Speaking of (my workouts, not murder), do you want to know the difference between a pre-50 workout and a post-50 workout? Of course you do: It’s abs. Before I was 50, if I accidentally sneezed I counted it as a week’s worth of abs workouts. Now that I’m 50 (as rumor has it), I have an unhealthy obsession with my waistline and I won’t leave the gym without going all Geneva Convention on my abdominals. Which, coincidentally, makes sneezing extra-super-fun.

But pain is weakness leaving the body. I saw that on a T-shirt once. And it wasn’t pastel.

So. Not. True.

(Back, shoulders and biceps tonight at the gym, if anyone wants to join me. Or see the pictures I post on Facebook.)

Back, biceps, shoulders and maybe abs day! I’ll have countless ways to humiliate myself.

#ArmDayFail

Well. I just did three sets of 40 lb dumbbell curls with a 40 in one hand ... and a 35 in the other. Without noticing. Which portends for me a day of unmitigated success at walking in a straight line and paying attention to detaif,

Anyway, here’s the arm I didn’t screw up:

Hi, Jake

My name’s Jake, I’m 49, and I wear Abercrombie & Fitch without express written permission from the Gurl You’re Too Old For That Council.

Plus there were too many judgey people in the gym this morning for me to take a proper Thankfully Productive Arm Day selfie so I had to use a mirror I found in a tanning room.

Dance to the beat of the rhythm of the night

When your dad is in the hospital (bronchial infection/COPD complications, not flu, not pneumonia, almost certainly coming home tomorrow) and while you’re visiting him this afternoon the nurse blows out a vein doing a saline push and after you go home for a while and come back to visit him tonight the hospital finally sends an A-Team nurse to tap a vein and when the nurse comes in the room he kind of takes your breath away because he looks like the deceptively wholesome college football player who answers the doorbell to find the boyishly innocent pizza delivery guy standing boyishly innocently there on that really hot day in that one movie and where was I oh yeah so this super-hunky nurse comes in with an actual ultrasound machine that he uses to virtually spelunk your dad’s arm for a heretofore uncharted vein and he taps it on the first try like a boss and then he works into the conversation that he and his wife have popped out four kids in rapid succession so you’re pretty sure he won’t be ordering any pizza from you if you know what I mean and after he leaves you hang out with your dad and mom for a bit and since you have no friends or pretty much no life or interests to occupy your time you go to the gym all by yourself on a Saturday night all by yourself on a Saturday night dear god what kind of loser goes to the gym all by himself on a Saturday night but the two benefits of going to the gym all by yourself on a Saturday night are there’s nobody there to take your weights or Judgey McJudgerson judge you if you take a couple gym selfies and let’s not kid ourselves here of course you’re going to take a couple gym selfies and also you don’t have to be embarrassed when you track in a bit of slush that melts on the gym floor but the downside is there’s nobody in charge there who can change the crappy music that’s that mix of rap and R&B where effete pre-teens with bilateral lisps mumble mostly incoherently about girls being fine over sloppily mixed samples of public-domain El DeBarge elevator music tracks which is as motivating as the already-used-by-you-but-then-casually-refolded-by-the-waiter cloth napkin you find at your table when you come back from your second trip to the buffet but you still manage to rise above those buzzkill challenges and have such a brutal arm workout that you’re almost obligated to take those gym selfies to commemorate the evening but let’s still not kid ourselves you were going to take those gym selfies anyway so you do and then you head right to your Blogger app to post the two that make your arms look the biggest and your waist look the smallest because you can’t decide and you desperately don’t want to let go of the delusion that you look like you’re 38 even though you’re going to be 50 in two months the end and I don’t mean the-end-you’re-going-to-fade-into-irrelevance-and-die-because-you’re-turning-50 I just mean the end of this brief story. The end.