Hoarders



A handful of weightlifters pull a trailer of weightlifting equipment to the empty warehouse that has made its home to spiders, dust, loneliness, and an unknown identity.  No truck can pull this trailer that we will soon feed to the gym, for only a weightlifter's pull can handle this colorful array of circles that we all cherish so much.  Weight, that's all it is.  Round weights that are heavy. Weight that has most people run away, but we pull a trailer down the middle of the street to lift.  This my friends is why we are outcasts; we are freaks that get a high off lifting shit.  Up, then down, then we spin all around......freaks, and boy how I fucken love it.  But see freak is an identity that we have, and I bet the empty gym would love as well.  An identity creates relationships, and relationships create understanding, something this gym will soon learn, as we continue to pull to feed the beast with this goal. 

Green veins from the monsters we chug, and wings to help us pull faster from the red bulls we crush.  Adopting weights for a new home that awaits.  A gym is the mother and these sons of bitches are her new found kids, and we......well we soon come to find out are the prisoners of an always growing power.  One that I have seen grow from the day we moved in.  We brushed the dust and awoke the gym from rest.  Wake up you gym! We have brought you life! We have brought you power! We are now you and you are now us.  I see you like techno music, shit.....I do too!  You like coffee spilled on your floors, well I like coffee spilled down my mouth and into my soul. We are best friends even though I will at times cus and shun you, flip you off and un-love you. You are my safety net that has many holes, holes that can lead to missed lifts and constant reminders of how much I miss my father. Sitting on my resting seat today, I noticed how much this little gym in a warehouse has grown.  I don't mean by teammates or supporters that watch through the red eye, but by dead coffee cups that have pushed their way further and further from the gym boundaries, and into unknown territories where the non weightlifters walk....you know....those weird sons of bitches.  Bars have made new homes as they rolled away, creating a property line without asking for the city's approval yet.  Platforms have multiplied from pieces of wood being taken out of their own bodies like clones, and dragged to a new part of the gym.  Jerk racks have magically appeared in a part of the gym that I didn't even know existed by who the fuck knows.  It's almost as if when the lights shut off, the AA meetings begin, and the monsters talk about how bad they feel for treating people like monsters, and the coffee cups cry rivers of pain and sadness because the humans that were once in love with them, now left them all alone.  Bars roll like weed in a college dorm, and platforms multiply like a dog's paws when sleeping on the couch.  A mind of its own, and we the one trick ponies of weightlifting, have no idea the life that surrounds us.  The power of all these emotions in a gym, from the living gym, to our own, make for a hot and cold type of person.  Maybe this is why I have lived my whole life one extreme to the next, because I channel energy from living things I didn't even know were alive.  The car I drive.....what kind of mood was it in for me to drive so fast, or slow?  Maybe I have mixed too much liquid codeine, NyQuil and tea together a little too much lately, but it just got me scratching my head as I found myself noticing a gym that was literally growing right in front of our eyes......and none of us even noticed. 

We pull our own weight, and we create our own atmosphere without even knowing it.  We have nestled into a gym and not only made it our gym...but our home.  We the weightlifters, we are the ultimate hoarders.  We hoard weights and bars, blood towels and scars.  We hoard emotions that we put into lifts that create a storm of chalk we keep stacked in the back.  We hoard medals of all kinds, and weightlifting shoes like girls and their heels, and if a bar is broken what do we do? Nothing, we lay it to rest in the corner with the other bars that build dust and once used chalk that now meet at night and talk about the good old times.  We don't throw shit away, because it's not shit, it's a part of us.  A broken pair of shoes don't ever go in the garbage, they go in the retirement closet to be smiled at from time to time from the memories you once shared.  The gym is alive, don't be fooled.  Keep slamming bars and feeding it its fuel.  We feed off each other like one brother to another, sister to sister, and coffee cup to monster.  Pull, weightlifters pull!

Graveyard Bars 2016