I went to the gym at 2 PM today, a Tuesday, like someone who had control over their life. The ten-minute walk was hotter than usual; the air-conditioning inside felt more assertive. There were fewer people at the place, on account of either the weather or people having jobs. Lower body at mobility today, sir, said the trainer. Did he mean leg day, but why call it that? To avoid the (deservedly) horrid reputation of working one’s legs? The exercises were all unfamiliar; the worst was one during warmup—lateral / crab walk with the legs restrained by a demonic resistance band that I suspect will figure in that final montage before people die. The body keeps the score and all that. The season finale of Severance was morosely satisfying, as C had reported. There is something unspeakably moving, almost religious about an idea it floated: what makes a person a person, you you, what the severance procedure is unable to maim is a kind of wholeness premised on the inextricable simultaneity of love and pain. Tenderness and grief. Both profuse, unstoppable. Mutually reinforcing. Maybe dialectical. An ouroboros (69?) of affect suffused with memory, experience. In response to my usual breathless complaints in the middle of reps, the trainer said something that I suppose makes sense in the world of gym bros and physiology but which I found absolute insane: the weaker the body part, the more work it is to be given. ’Yung mas mahina, mas dapat pahirapan. No, Ron, no. Have always abhorred the notion and practice of struggle (except class). Nice and slow is good for the nervous system. If this struggle is life, why prolong it etc. And in gym as in life. But getting older and bigger, and in the aftermath of that recent brush with mortality, I’ve also grown to appreciate the banal idea that my body could move. Reminded of that devastating monologue on that devastating episode of Fleishman is in Trouble, also rewatched recently. ‘How poorly I wear this life. How the adjustment to it is taking so long. I’ve started to feel like it isn’t coming soon. It isn’t coming ever. It was never coming.’ The character’s husband is named Glenn. To egg me on, the trainer said all the Glenns he knew were strong. Then I can be the weak one, I thought, or said. In one of our first sessions months ago, I asked him why my legs were so weak even if I walked all the time. There is a difference, he said, between endurance and strength. It’s been months, and I am still waiting for the promised endorphins from working out; I suppose there’s a threshold or plateau of struggle that I needed to transcend, that it will come if I keep at it. I suspect that I measure my days based on how feebly or strongly this illusion sustains me. In gym as in life.