I am Hubris the Great.
Virago has been pleading with me to, please, become a member at her gym so that I can become as buff in body as I already am in mind as well as in spirit, as demonstrated by my joie de vivre when cataloguing the sins of Rachael Ray for degrading an already degraded American cuisine.
“Hube, honey,” she said while puffing on a cigarette, as if powering a Union Pacific train over the Great Divide, “you’re my stud, but let’s face it, but you could use a little muscle tone.”
She signed me up at Eternal Fitness and Beyond for three training sessions with a woman named Petra. I say “woman” in the broadest sense of the term in that, yes, she appeared to have a reduced mass of mammary tissue atop a formidable pair of pectoral majors, and she had feminine-sounding vocal chords that enunciated such phrases as “Good job!” and “fitness goals.” It should be added that the Dale Carnegie-inspired expressions were accompanied by a smile that possessed a dental apparatus so white and straight as to be the handiwork of a secret engineering project in Area 51 of the Crest Toothpaste Compound.
“So Hubris, what are your fitness goals?” said Petra, who may have also clapped her hands as would a more sophisticated person throw a scarf over her neck for good effect when making a point that Anna Karenina was a superior character to Madame Bovary.
“It depends what you mean by fitness. If fitness is defined as an organism’s likely survival under changing environmental conditions, then you, Petra, should know that I, Hubris the Great, am about one-thousand years ahead of the rest of humanity on the evolutionary continuum, just as silicone-enhanced housewife of Orange County is more adaptable than a woman professor specializing in Betty Friedan when it comes to luring men called Lorenzo into the bedroom. But if you are equating fitness with the ability to do a push-up, then, yes, I want to do a push-up.”
“O-kaaay,” said Petra. “Well let’s see if you can do a push-up. Does that excite you, Hubris?”
“The history of the Communards of 1871 excites me, my dear, whereas the prospect of executing a bestial exercise in futility instills in me dread and boredom. But let’s, as you commoners say, ‘give it a shot.’”
“Great!” she chirped.
I had watched enough movies featuring a motley crew of misfits arriving at some military boot camp only to be molded into a cohesive fighting unit by a tough – though, in the end, caring drill instructor – to know the rudiments of the push-up. Ergo, I dropped down and gave her…first, twenty, then thirty, all the while realizing that numbskull repetition is as easy as driving a car into a telephone post.
I sprang to my feet flushed with vindication.
“Now that was entertaining,” I boomed in my exquisite baritone voice. I snuck a glance at Virago, who had just finished doing an exercise that resembled trying to get in and out of the fetal position – something she later called a crunch. The look of shock – and, well, adoration – on her face was worth the price of submitting myself to the hermaphroditic Petra.
Hubris The Great 