Exercise on the Cheap

This friday is payday, and more important than the $400 I’ll get for the two weeks I spent stacking cans of gluten-free cat food is the fact that I’ll receive my third consecutive pay stub. I need it to prove to the San Francisco YMCA that I don’t make enough money to pay full price for a membership, which I want because at the San Francisco Y you can check your e-mail while riding a stationary bicycle or watch a Forensic Files marathon while on the treadmill. Exercise was never easier!

Since becoming an alleged adult I’ve always felt like I should exercise -- or should at least want to exercise -- and make a feeble attempt at health, thus staving off terrible things like the coronary heart disease and high cholesterol described to me in 1980s margarine commercials. But the truth is that I find nothing so soul-crushing as spending my Slurpee and hot dog money on preventive health measures.

I’ve probably had nine different rarely used Y memberships in my adult life. My pattern is: Sign up, pay the enrollment fee, buy a new sports bra, go one or two times, guiltily watch the monthly fee deducted automatically from my bank account, get depressed, and cancel my membership under the pretense that I can use the money toward sliding-scale psychotherapy.

When I lived in Providence, R.I., my friend Lamby and I managed to finagle a $3-a-month membership at the saddest YMCA ever. Three dollars for both of us. The family plan enabled us to ride 1970s stationary bicycles in a room the size of a broom closet. When I see a room full of people pedaling away on stationary bikes, I fall into an existential spiral. It’s confirmation that all we do as humans is pedal, pedal, pedal, and go nowhere. We’re just specks of dust in the universe, riding 1970s stationary bicycles. Every wall in that broom closet was covered with signs asking members to wipe off the bikes when they were done using them. The few times I actually rode one, I got up afterward and looked hopefully for sweat to clean off the seat, but there was none. Still, I diligently wiped the seats and handlebars like a beleaguered housewife in a play, scrubbing, scrubbing -- my work never done.