A pound of flesh versus...

... a pound of fish?

We're at this new gym we joined last week. Small, but clean with lots of machines crammed into a long space, though it doesn't feel tiny or cramped.

We're sweating riding the recumbent bikes.

In front of us, on the wall, are two TV sets...one to the left, one to the right. I'm not really listening...I have on my headphones and am grooving to Brandi Carlile and Angelique Kidjo.

Ann is staring to the left where the TV channel is tuned into a boob job. Yes, a boob job. A petite woman is under the knife and there it is, for everyone to see, her "fat" (though it really isn't because she is, as I've said, petite with barely an ounce of fat on her). There is blood, lots of it, and white tissue, which I assume is the fat. The doctors are folding and bending the blood and the tissue and cutting it off like fabric.

She doesn't stop at her tummy or her boobs -- the boobs get extra "tissue" while the tummy gets "trimmed" -- they do her face and her chin and her nose, too. She's one big bandage when her husband comes in the recovery room and asks to have a look (well, I assume he did because I'm listening now to Ani DiFranco, not the TV) and she lifts up her hospital gown and there are her new and improved boobs sitting their like sculpted rock formations -- smooth, round, and fully exposed like two mountains.

And her hospital gown stays up for a long time while her husband stares and smiles and shakes the doctor's (another male) hand. The husband looks as proud as a new papa of twins. The wife's gown is still up over her head as these two men gawk at the bouncing babies lying on the hospital bed.

I turn away.

I look at the TV on my right.

There is a large man in front of a huge audience gathered in some kind of stadium to watch some guy come up to a huge scale to weigh his freshly caught fish -- bass or something -- and in the audience is this guy's wife, proud as can be, anticipating the "weigh in", which according to the words flashing up on the screen must beat 32 pounds in order to win the grand prize. I haven't a clue what the prize is, but in the backround is this gi-normous power boat glistening under the stage lights.

They show a close up of the bass flat out on the scale. They show a close up of the wife, hands covering her anxious mouth. They show a close up of the fisherman who looks as if he just got off his boat after 3 days of round the clock bass fishing. They show the numbers of the scale going up and down and up and down until they finally settle on 37.3 and the fisherman goes crazy. His wife goes crazy. The audience goes crazy. The lights on the boat start flashing different colors. The wife runs up on the stage and throws herself into his arms and he bounces her up and down and up and down.

Another close up on the fish. Another close up on the wife, now crying uncontrollably. Another close up on the guy who caught the winning fish who keeps tipping his baseball cap up off his head and then back down again, as if to say, "Well, shoot, it weren't nothin'"...

I keep pedaling. I decide to close my eyes since the bike is stationary. I listen to my music. Indigo Girls followed by Lucinda Williams followed by Bonnie Raitt.

There's an older woman to my right who has been talking to herself the whole time we've been working out. I take off my headphones to wipe the sweat from my forehead, when I realize she's not talking to herself, she's talking to me.

She's about 70 years old and she's pedaling the bike about as slow as it can go, but she's pedaling. I smile at her and she says, "I told all them trainers they got around here, I look good enough already. Just tell me what I need to do to lower my cholesterol."

I laugh. Then I look up at the TV to the left. There's the boob job woman months later taking her daughter to ballet class. She looks like a Barbie Doll. I look to the right and there is the winning bass fisherman months later, standing in his new fangled boat, baseball cap askew, his rod (and I mean his fishing pole here) tucked into his groin as he heaves and reels, heaves and reels, a proud smile pressed against his face, his wife no where in the picture.

And the 70 year old woman turns to me and says, "We didn't have to do none or this here stuff when I was 13."

Amen, I think, Amen.