It is 5 AM.  I am in the gym.

I am alone.  Thank goodness.  This is not a pretty site, a gentleman of a certain age who travels extensively—a nice word for the current grammatically incorrect but popular phrase ‘way much’—and who now resorts to sweating before dawn so that the rigors and pace of my life do not fell me prematurely.

I am stretching, lifting, crunching, pedaling—anything I can do to reduce my waist line, enhance my energy level, and ward off the evils of poor lifestyle choices from my bulletproof youth when I smoked and drank adult beverages without concern for my future and the dangers of being overweight, the ills of diabetes, the threat of high blood pressure, oh heck, the list is long and depressing. 

So, here I am, pedaling away while the vast majority of the people who live and work in this building are either still curled up in bed or they are enjoying that first hot, steaming cup of coffee while enjoying the morning newspapers…

Not!  I ran into the deliveryman this morning on my way to the gym.  He handles the deliveries for four newspapers.  He informed me, sadly, that most of the people who live or work in this 32-story building do not take the paper.  He delivers less than two dozen newspapers, including the Dallas Morning News, the New York Times, The Financial Times and the Wall Street Journal.

So what does this tell me about my neighbors?  They are either victims of rampaging ambivalence about news in the morning, or they have embraced the digital age and are reading the overnight developments on their iPad, iPhone or some other impersonator’s electronic device.  And they are not in favor of improving their physical health, at least not at 5 AM in the morning.

And so it goes…

© 2012 John Gregory Self