Every* Muscle in My Body 2020
By: Dustin Mark
Tags: Health, Body, Humor, Muscles, Fitness

It’s December, which means it’s time to take stock of my body. For the internet to continue tracking my personal growth it’s important that I provide data that can be empirically judged: on its own, against someone else, against next year’s data, or against last year’s (if you got my 2019 muscle report).

Yes, I’ve decided to keep the intro the same. The parallelism is a stylistic choice, not laziness — and certainly not that I’ve run out of new words or phrases.

My opinion of muscles as a thing is more or less the same. I need them to survive, which most days I want to do, but intricately developed muscles are antithetical to the image I’m trying to create for myself: guy who’s fit enough to survive and can probably run pretty fast asthma permitting, but who places no value in pursuits as vain as having sick muscles, and who is kind of lanky because he’s an intellectual, and intellectuals are either fat or lanky.

Going deeper into that image of what I want — what can be seen and what it says about the parts of me that cannot be seen — the more questions unrelated to the forthcoming semi-nudes I’ll have to answer (i.e. what does leg strength have to do with you being a mercurial, inaccessible quasi-comedian? Why not just go for a run? You might feel better), and I neither want to answer those nor detract from the task at hand, which is analyzing my body as viewable from the eyes of those without access to or my permission to use ingestible or penetrative cameras on me.

I’ve lived in the same world that you have this year, and I haven’t been exempt to the fear of death, the feeling of being trapped, the futility, the listlessness, the malaise, the pervasive anhedonia that only gambling and drunken shithousery can temporarily assuage, and the lack of public resources a la the gym or the lap band surgeon. All things considered, I exercised a total of zero times this year. Notwithstanding a few bouts of healthy dieting, I abused my body with fat and sugar and booze. I worked a mostly-sedentary job: not completely sedentary — with enough movement to keep my joints working — but sedentary enough that my heartbeat was rarely elevated, save for a few stressful phone calls with overseas clients threatening to pull out of lucrative deals. Mind you, I spent half of 2019 walking dogs, and for that half a year you couldn’t find someone more fit of leg and with normal, working heart.

Those of you following my GPS status know that I’ve spent every day this year in sunny Los Angeles, a town whose streets are paved with the discarded bottles of diet pills and driven on by people on their way to GNC to buy more diet pills. Not everyone here is superficial — my roommate, for instance, is quite large (and a pure soul, I should say to soften the blow of that burn) — but the pressure to look fit and tan and strong is escapable only to the select few who have the partnership of high metabolism and confusing, destructive self-image that I do.

I also, I regret to report, have made no love in 2020 (the consequences of this far outreach my musculature and the implications will weigh heavily in my psyche and my sensitive, sensitive genitals for what could potentially be forever). Obviously 9–10 of these months of abstinence were a public health measure and a commitment to not being part of any sweaty, carnal transfer of fluid, which I understand is how this virus thrives. The other 3 months we can attribute not to my failure to memorize Neil Strauss’s “Rules of the Game,” but to the psychosexual games I am, for whatever reason, given to. ( I am also a great coward!)

This is not just me bragging about not having touched a person in 2020 — it’s important to note that the act of banging has been a primary source of exercise for me in the past. I’m a ferocious lover, and an even more ferocious banger, and no gym in the world can offer me the full-body workout that a bout of concentrated passion can (if there is such a gym, please advise). It has long been the answer to the mystery of ‘why does Dustin look so fit when he fails to stick to a conventional work-out routine’ that my ferocious banging will keep the pounds off, keep the joints loose, keep the muscles engaged, and allow me to eat what I want. This year, no such protection.

And with a year of celibacy, self-pity, indulgence, and refusal to put effort into my health, I now have a new body to show — perhaps a body recognizable to you, and perhaps even recognizable to me if I squint hard enough or remember what I’ve always looked like, but a body weathered and neglected (though still kind of sick). Without further ado, see: title of piece:

Not naked yet

Here I am, clothed.

Important to show myself with clothes on, first. I’m here in my brother’s bathroom — come to think of it, I’ve gotten naked in lots of other people’s homes, and I’m not sure how they’d all feel about that. Obviously showers, but for other weirder things, too. Anyway, I haven’t weighed myself in…two years? I’m probably around…175 lbs? I really, really don’t know. I’d have to imagine my hair accounts for a pound or two.

Chest, abdomen, general front view