I arrived in a ski shop in Sun Valley, ID, where I was investigating the situation with the rentals.  I knew I wasn’t going to get skis from this particular shop, though, because I knew I wanted to ride on Volkls, and they were only available at a different shop around the base of the mountain on the other side.  So I went outside into the parking lot turnaround area, then realized I had some kind of a shoe situation– like I suddenly thought maybe I had no shoes at all.  I wondered whether I had forgotten them back inside the shop, or perhaps had neglected to pack them in my suitcase, but then I noticed that I was carrying a pair under my arm, pinned against my torso on the left side.  I put them down on the ground with the intention to put them on.  They were a blue casual sneaker, pretty ordinary on the outside, but the unusual thing was that they had a wooden quality on the inside, like the interior lining which you’d expect to be soft and cushy was instead like splintered plywood.  There was no smooth, sanded and polished, finished quality about it– it was fractured like it had perhaps been crushed.  I didn’t dwell on it too long, however, then suddenly arrived at a gym.

It wasn’t a typical huge facility like 24-Hour Fitness or Gold’s Gym, it was more of a boutique type of place– smaller than normal and seemingly with some non-standard equipment.  I went straight over to try out a particular leg machine that appeared familiar at first, meant for seated hamstring or quadricep extensions.  Instead of the typical lap bar with black foam pads over the top of the legs, meant to secure the hips in order to isolate the desired muscle group, in this case that part was a large, thick, clear panel made out of glass or acrylic.  I figured it was functionally meant to do what one would expect, to keep the body pinned to the seat to keep ideal form and prevent engaging the abs or lower-back, but the peculiar thing was that I suddenly realized I was naked underneath it.  At first I was like Whaaa? and I looked across the room in the mirror and saw my junk squished under the panel, then observed other people on other machines around the room, basically with the same situation as myself– squished thighs and squished genitals under these clear panels.  So I just tried to roll with it, accepting that this was the probable ‘gimmick’ or angle of differentiation for this particular place.

Then, however, I started to wonder whether this stuff was clean and safe to use in this fashion.  Did I remember to at least wipe it down first?  I carried on, completing a few reps.  I didn’t move, but suddenly where I was located in the facility had changed.  Whereas before I was inside the main area, now I was on a smaller outdoor deck space that was up a flight of stairs.  There was a flatscreen on the wall across from me and it was playing an informative program about the health risks associated with frequenting gyms and using public exercise equipment.  It went into some detail about two particular types of fungus or bacteria and the types of respective skin or internal problems associated with the diseases they caused.  Obviously this made me a lot less enthusiastic about this naked-under-the-panel gimmick at this gym.  Then the message on the screen became personal to me, flashing a “This is Your Final Warning” message and implying a countdown type of scenario to when I would most likely become infected.  So I stood up, thinking OK time to go.

As I walked down the stairs back into the main area, I heard one of the sales managers shout over to me “DreamTrader, I think you oughtta…”  I didn’t hear him clearly but I was sure that it was some sales spiel to get me to sign up for a membership.  I asked him for him to repeat what he had said, just for clarification as I walked toward the door, but then a second manager said something about ringing me up.  The original guy said to make it $60.  I explained that I had stopped by only because I had received an email that was an invitation to come by for a free session, to check out the club, etc.  I’d never have come unless I believed it would be free for at least one session.  The second manager seemed unsympathetic, saying some bullshit about they got a new computer system and it didn’t recognize or validate prior offers.  I stood there for a moment in disbelief, then the original guy suggested they discount it, make it like $45 then.  I was pretty annoyed, obviously, as this was some kind of ploy.  I said “How about zero!?” which was more a statement than a question.

The original guy then handed me a laptop which had a series of very similar photographs for me to scroll through.  There were essentially three different subjects, each depicting a different scene: one was like a house in a rural town with a yard and a few trees, another was a more natural scene of a park with a pond and thicker surrounding trees, then finally a baseball diamond inside a stadium that looked about the size of a double-A team.  The photos were a bit tough to see clearly; there were a couple versions of each photo with varying color filters which made some black & white, others kind of orangish and black.  He asked me to pick out which one depicted ‘autumn’, which was challenging because of the monochrome treatment. Most of them looked either like summer or winter; I remember one in particular appeared to have a blanket of snow, so I chose the baseball diamond, with the idea being of it depicting fall-baseball, the playoffs, etc.  He said no, then asked me another question. I looked again, and the photos had changed to different things, but it was essentially the same type of thing– similar functionally to one of those “I’m not a robot” test submissions on certain websites, but in this case was designed to be an endless time-suck to try to keep me longer on the premises.

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