“There is something wrong with a society that drives a car to work out in a gym.” - Bill Nye (The Science Guy)

If I vent enough of my opinions, I’m sure to alienate just about everyone I know. As an experiment, I’ll give it a go.
Today I take issue with gyms.You might think, being such a blowhard on the subject of bicycles, that I’d be the type of person who would rather spend time in a gym than in a bar. Not the case. The very idea of going to a gym to “get healthy” or “get in shape” strikes me as a ridiculous waste of resources. It presupposes that the rest of life is unhealthy, that the gym is some magical location that can undo all the damage the outside-gym habits are doing. By playing into this mindset, I believe gyms actually reinforce the bad habits they ostensibly counteract.

Gyms advertise as if they have cornered the market on human health, strength and endurance. Why? What do they really offer? Access to a few dozen shiny machines that will turn you into a perfect human specimen? Is the obesity epidemic really the result of a lack of access to nautilus machines and pilates reformers? Personally, I think cultivating health is an exercise of a much broader scope, and shouldn’t be relegated to some corporate kingdom that makes you pay for the privilege. In the words of the Buddha, they are “selling water by the riverside.” You may choose to visit the gym as an island of health in a world of disease, but I would much rather visit an island of disease in a world of health: the neighborhood bar.
The corner bar “where everybody knows your name” is a dying, if not dead, institution. I know this is not a surprise coming from me, but I once again blame the personal automobile for this trend. In a driving culture, there are no real neighborhoods, only strips of generica with gas stations and chain restaurants. A chain “grill and bar” restaurant is to the neighborhood bar what the Jonas Brothers are to rock and roll: a lifeless, sterilized corporate substitute, force-fed to the public until they’re too numb to remember the real thing. Our culture has taken the cigarette smoke out of the bars, but allowed infernal combustion to pollute every mile of public thoroughfare.
Personally, I wouldn’t mind the smoking section so much if I could walk home in fresh air.
It’s been ten years since I’ve had a real neighborhood bar to go to, an Irish pub where the old country barkeep would start pouring my beer when he saw me walk through the door. No high-volume sports bar insanity, with ten six-foot screens blaring the latest insignificant developments in worldwide timekilling. A real bar, a place for a few cold ones and good conversation. A place for people, not consumers.
Okay, just in case I haven’t lost enough friends with today’s rant, try this one on for size: rehash my anti-gym rhetoric substituting the word “church” for gym, and “religious experience” for health. I’ll leave the mental
exercise to you.
“Now just a minute, you godless, liberal. . .” Blah, blah, blah. I’m just lucky the comments are broken on my blog.
If you want to take it up with me further, I’ll be at the bar. You’ll know the one. It’ll have a bike parked in front of it.

“Religion is a defense against religious experience.” - Carl Gustav Jung