You might be looking at the title and thinking, "What the fuck? The Grasshopper has been singing praises of these workouts for the better part of a year. Why is he telling us not to do them?"
Look, despite my many posts talking about how great they are, I was completely wrong. Sure, it made me lift heavier weights than I ever had in my life, but they just aren't going to do the same for you.
I could give you all sorts of reasons for it, but all I can say is that you have to trust me on this one.
It has nothing to do with the fact that every time I've hit the gym as of late, no matter what time of day or night it is, I find that there are lines for the squat racks at my gym.
Nope, nothing to do with that at all.
It has nothing to do with that fact that I go to the gym after work at midnight, MIDNIGHT FOR CRISSAKES, and find that the gym's TWO (not ONE, but TWO) squat racks are already being used!
It has nothing to do with the fact that I see the guy in front of me doing sets of five, and I know he's doing the exact same fucking workout that I'm about to do, and I have to patiently wait as he gets done with all his sets before I can jump in and claim that squat rack as my own.
It has nothing to do with the fact that when I go into the gym I turn into Samuel Jackson, and all I can think is, "I'VE HAD IT WITH THESE MOTHERFUCKING GUYS ON MY MOTHERFUCKING SQUAT RACK!"
What kind of lunatic goes to the gym at midnight, anyway? Except me, of course.
There was a time when I could go into the gym late at night, and there'd be one other guy there running on a treadmill like a hamster on a wheel. Not anymore!
Look, if you want strong legs, there's a leg extension machine with your name on it. Go ahead, give that a whirl.
Squats and deadlifts are just bad for you. Don't worry about all of the scientific data that directly contradicts me on that, just go with me on this one guys!
Ten years ago, I was one of the top political bloggers in the state.
That and a dollar will get me on a bus. It would have done the same ten years ago.
In the years between 2006 and 2009, the liberal "netroots" had reached its peak, and there was no stronger a state to find it than in Michigan. While every state had its own network of bloggers, in the netroots community, Michigan was known as "the Juggernaut". At our peak we had over 80 blogs discussing politics in our state. We were the largest collection of bloggers in the country, and we were damn proud of it.
I had my own blogger handle that was picked out for me when I was young.
In the 90s, back in the days of usenet groups and dial-up modems, I was given my name when I was 15 years old.
I got it because I had just started doing karate in those days, and every time I advanced to the next belt, I wrote about it on those usenet groups to my online friends to boast of my accomplishments. Those friends named me:
The Young Grasshopper
Like any 90s kid that does martial arts, I was a fan of the show Kung Fu, and loved it. I owned that name. I made email addresses out of it. It was my name on every internet related thing I had to sign up for (back in the days before you could simply sign into something by giving your Facebook profile).
So when I started political blogging in the mid-aughts, that was my name. DJ The Young Grasshopper, usually as the acronym that had all the first letters in that name. I blogged because during the beginning of those times, I was in Iraq, and netroots activism was all I was able to do to do my part to fight against the Bush Jr. administration. In 2004 I was mad that the war in Iraq (before I deployed) had already gone to shit, and wanted to do my part to get the war to end. By the time I deployed, I was writing.
I became one of the top bloggers in Michigan for that very reason. Blogging when you're serving in Iraq (and even after I came home) gives you a ton of street cred, and also makes you a powerful weapon against chickenhawk assholes that would dare call anyone against the war traitors. I would remind any trolls that we came across that I did my time in the sandbox, so where the fuck where they? I didn't serve with them. They were at home preaching about the need for this needless war, while I was over there, wondering if I would see tomorrow.
The years passed, and I made a name for myself in the Michigan juggernaut by having both an extremely sharp wit and equal parts cynicism and self-righteousness that made my posts as entertaining as they were biting. I would attack both Republicans and Democrats alike (but mostly Republicans) when they were involved in any kind of state or national fuckery.
While my name carried zero recognition in 99.9% of the state, politicians in Lansing knew me quite well, and many were scared of me. I was told by another liberal blogger that the state GOP had files on all of us. We were scary enough to them that they did opposition research on us. I gave zero fucks on that, because they had nothing on me. What are they going to say, that I'm an angry Iraq war veteran? Shit, at that time in the war, if you were going to go after an angry veteran that had become disillusioned by the war, you'd have to take a number. Three quarters of us were against the war at the time.
But, things changed.
Because of a situation that I can't discuss much about because it ended in a lawsuit settlement (I can tell you that I ended up being on the better end of it), I stopped blogging. I really can't discuss that lawsuit, but what I can tell you is that the actions that happened before that lawsuit scared the hell out of me. I feared for my life for a very long time because of actions taken by a certain person.
Back then, before the neo-nazis and the mens right activists fucked it all up, even trolls had rules. You kept the shit online and impersonal. That person broke them. That's all I'll say on that.
By the time the dust settled on that situation, blogging had become archaic. I was fine with that, because I was too scared to do any political blogging again. It was easier just to post news stories on Facebook.
After I had kids, I had very little desire for any type of political activism, even the type that you do online. Hell, it's one of the bigger reasons why I wish that Clinton had won the election.
I still debate politics online under names that aren't remotely related to my blogger archetype. After the election, I told right-wingers that they didn't realize what they had done. We old(ish) activists were tired. I was hoping that Clinton would win for many reasons, but a big one was that I was just too damn tired to be an activist anymore. Yeah great, Clinton wins. She already knew that she wasn't going to get any cooperation from the GOP in Congress, so she'd carve her own path. Great, it means that I don't have to get in the dirt anymore. I can just do my day job, raise my kids, continue to kick ass at the gym, and be done with the whole damn thing. Her victory would have been the best thing to happen to the right, because we on the left were just too goddamn tired of fighting, and her victory would be enough to take a long rest while the right would continue to do battle.
But here we are.
Yep, here we fucking are.
The right didn't realize that Trump's win would do more than energize us. It made us lose our fucking minds! I'm now hearing conversations from the left about arming ourselves and getting concealed weapon permits (I already have guns and permits, but thanks for joining me guys). That's a sharp turn from just a few months ago. We didn't just get motivated, we got fucking militant. We saw a guy become president by not just losing the majority of the voters, but one that was actively helped by white supremacist groups. One that was helped by Russian interference into our democratic process. A man that has no goddamn business having access to the nuclear codes.
The left isn't tired anymore, and we're a fuck-ton more motivated than we were in 2005. We're ready to do one thing, and one thing only. Destroying Nazis.
We want our scalps.
Before this election, I would listen to "Fight to Live" by The Bouncing Souls, and scream about how, "the fight to live is the only fight, I got left in me". After the election, I got a lot more fight left in me. Enough to last four years.
I started this blog with the intention of logging my weight loss and fitness journey after I had bariatric surgery. I found that this wasn't enough, as parenting and mental illness were just as much as part of my fitness journey as hitting the gym and watching what I ate.
I never intended to start writing about politics on here, and did my best to avoid doing so, but I can no longer pretend that politics isn't a big part of my life and interconnected to my health and well being. Politics is a major part of what happens in all our lives, whether we want it to or not. I can no longer talk about fitness, health, and mental illness and leave discussions of the fate of the Affordable Care Act out of it. I can't blog about my mental illness without discussing the fear of our country being ran by an insecure, narcissistic idiot that is both Russia's puppet and has the ability to get us all blown to hell in a nuclear holocaust at worst and will lead us into another recession where I'm scared about money problems at best. I can't blog about raising two wonderful girls to be strong, independent, and healthy without talking about feminism. I also can't refuse to talk about racism, implicit bias, and prejudice and call myself a decent person.
I can't separate the political and the apolitical on here anymore. They're both connected, and I'm done with pretending that they aren't.
The Grasshopper is back from retirement. I'm too old to be The Young Grasshopper anymore. Just call me The Grasshopper, or Grasshopper for short.
And should any trolls try to come after me, keep in mind what happened to the last guy. The local trolls can tell you all about him, and it's why they fear my name. I could always use another settlement check.
Just sayin'
I'm also armed, carrying, and I train while you sleep.
I was doing really well on November 8th. I had just been hired for a new job that provided better pay and more opportunities for advancement. I hadn't had a panic attack in months. I was physically stronger than I had ever been. My mental, physical, and financial state were all looking great, and I was optimistic about the future.
It was election night. All the polls pointed towards a win for the first female president in history. A flawed woman, so it was, but a woman that was far more qualified than her male opponent. I looked forward to telling both my daughters when they were older that they were born just in time to see history being made; to tell them both that they too, can be president someday.
My wife and I watched the results of the election on CNN. She doesn't follow politics as much as I do, so I showed her the states where Hillary Clinton was expected to win. That includes my state. Michigan. A state that had been reliably blue for over two decades.
We watched the election results unfold. I laughed when I heard that Florida was turning red. Clinton's firewall was strong enough to withstand our craziest state going red. Yeah, great. "Florida Man" is going to a guy that brags about molesting women. What a shock.
And then, I saw Michigan going red. And with it, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
Prior to that moment, I didn't have the slightest bit of fear over this election. Donald Trump had revealed himself to be the most unqualified candidate to ever run for the highest office in the land. Over the last year and a half, he showed that he not only doesn't know how our government or Constitution works, but he didn't even care to know. He says he wants to register Muslims? Fucking great. It goes against the First Amendment and is racist as fuck, but he's not going to be president, so who gives a rats ass? Seriously...
But watching those states fall, all I could think was:
"America, what have you done?"
I know now that the majority of America didn't choose this, but it doesn't matter. It happened. After watching the whole block of reliably northern blue states fall, my fight or flight response was activated, and all it said was, "RUN!"
The next two months were awful for me mentally. Jesus Christ, I was doing so well before election day, but my fear of what's to come caused me to go into panic attacks routinely. My anxiety was through the roof. I pleaded with my wife to take the kids and run away to Australia.
I fell into a deep depression. This kind of depression is a new mental illness for me. I've had depression in the past that masked itself in anger, but this is far new. This is what classical depression feels like.
Where I had depression in the past and it manifested itself in anger, this classical depression came with the symptoms of non-stop sadness and a severe lack of energy. I stopped going to the gym, not because I no longer had a desire to achieve maximum fitness potential, but simply because I had no energy. I could barely force myself to get out of bed, let alone hit a gym. I felt hopeless. I ate very little, but I drank A LOT. It was those eating and drinking (booze) habits that caused me to lose much of my muscle mass and still keep my weight the same as it became replaced with booze-calorie infusing fat. All the time, I wanted to run away to a place far away from the damage that's about to consume this country.
Why run, you might ask? Well, if I wasn't a white man, I could say that it was due to Trump's desire to put Muslims in camps. I could say that it was his desire to use racism to convict innocent black people of a crime they didn't commit. But I am a white man, so as horrific, racist, and unconstitutional those stances are, they don't affect me.
But no, here I am, a white man in his 30s, scared of a Trump presidency for this reason:
On top of that, Trump spoke favorably about dissolving NATO, the greatest military alliance the world has ever had, and the one alliance that kept us from nuclear war.
In a reasonable, sane world, that would have been enough to disqualify this openly stupid piece of shit from holding the office of dog catcher, let alone the presidency. But apparently, we are not living in a sane world anymore.
These things are what have kept the Western World from falling into chaos. They're what protects us from a nuclear war, and Trump has declared that he just doesn't give a shit about any of them.
That's why my "fight or flight" response told me to run. I spent the next couple of weeks trying to convince my wife that we need to leave America for Australia.
She refused, so here we are, still living in the United States.
So if I still have to live here, let me ask those that voted for Trump (or who voted for Gary Johnson but now support Trump now that the election is over) a few questions:
1. Why didn't Trump's stance on nuclear weapons (based on all the links that I showed above) scare the ever loving fuck out of you?
2. If you're not racist, why did Trump's history of racism not offend you? Why did his Hitleresque talk about registering Muslims not disgust you? Why didn't his hiring of Steve Bannon, an honest-to-gosh, card-carrying member of the white supremacist movement, not piss you off enough to vote against him? Why in the goddamn, ever-loving fuck, did the KKK's endorsement of Trump not be enough for you to be like, "Fuck this shit I'm out" as far as his election was concerned?
3. If you're not sexist, why did his comments against women not offend you? When multiple women came forth and said that Trump had molested them, after he had admitted that he molested women, why was that not enough for you to vote against him? Why, to any man that has daughters, was that not enough for you to want to send that piece of shit to the dustbowls of history? I know that if any man grabbed my daughters like that, I'd douse gasoline on them, set them on fire, and gladly do the jail time. Where the fuck were you, dads?
4. When Trump openly mocked a disabled reporter, why in the fucking hell did you not decide that Trump is a worthless piece of shit that should die of canceraids?
My good friend Charles Gaba posted a tweet that sums up all that perfectly:
Yeah, you might not be personally racist, but you decided by damn sure that you weren't offended by it. Congrats on coming to terms with knowing that you aren't offended by racism. Do you feel great (again)?
And for those fragile snowflakes that might feel some white fragility from that line, let me throw something else in to make you see the sickening reality of what you voted for:
Yeah, you sold the rope and looked the other way. Fuck you.
You gave a madman access to our nuclear stockpile and looked the other way. Fuck all of us.
And it's with that line above, I'm going to address something that's pissed me off royally the past few months.
I'm fucking sick of being gaslighted. I'm sick of people acting like I'm the weird one for worrying that Trump is going to get us killed. I didn't come to this because of some stupid, irrational thought process (you know, like the one that wingnuts came to when they claimed that Obamacare was going to lead to all our rights being taken away).
Jesus Christ, you shitbags were protesting against people having HEALTH INSURANCE!
No, this fear is rational. This fear is based completely on the things that Trump has said he will do if elected president. He talked about using nuclear warheads as conventional weapons. He's said that he will disregard the Constitution and discriminate against people based on religion. He has said he would go after the media in a blatant violation of the First Amendment. He has shown a complete and utter disregard for what the Constitution says, and for how our checks and balances system of government works. So yes, I am afraid, and that fear is completely rational, so any attempts to claim that I'm paranoid are simply a refusal to either admit that you voted for a psychopath, or from a desire to normalize what isn't normal.
None of this is normal. I refuse to be gaslit, and I refuse to normalize any of this.
And for those few that might be whining that I got all political on a blog that's supposed to be about weight loss and fitness, just eat a fat dick. I constantly post my love of the Starting Strength program. The founder of that program, Mike Rippetoe, constantly posts videos of right-wing extremist James Yeager on YouTube (go ahead and search it, I won't link to any of that shit). Rippetoe constantly lets little right-wing zingers into his videos as well as videos with right-wing extremists, and I let that shit go because I want to get better at fitness.
If he can make videos with right-wing extremists, I sure as fuck can post on MY OWN FUCKING BLOG our political situation that is currently scaring the ever loving shit outta me!
I'll still post about fitness and mental health for sure, but I won't begin to be silent on politics on this blog anymore. Not when our country and democracy are at stake.
I will end this blog on a hopeful note, though.
I hope that I'll be wrong and Trump doesn't do a bunch of shit that causes us to all get nuked into oblivion. If that happens, I can say that all of the forces against Trump - all of the anti-racists, the pro-women's rights people, the LGBTQ rights advocates, didn't and aren't going anywhere. We were around long before the election, and our presence was made known at every protest, and in every piece of pop-culture that has been around in the past few years (yeah, racist shitbags, we even have a black superhero in the mainstream now, and he's awesome as fuck). Black Lives Matter isn't going anywhere, and neither are those that fight for the rights of any other minority group.
We're still here, and we will resist.
I've also gone back to hitting the gym, so to all the white supremacists still fighting for Trump, come at me, fuckers. I'll be ready.
