16th Day Of Sobriety - Hollywood

I have a love/hate relationship with Hollywood...California. It was the first town I lived in when I first arrived.

My work makes me travel on the 101 south and end up in some of the seediest neighborhoods in the country. Not that I'm afraid per se...since it is daylight. But it's like the morning after a carnival picked up stakes and left the grounds. The place smells like piss. And some transvestite is crying in a corner.

I work in the heart of Hollywood. Off Santa Monica Boulevard. Off Gower. Off Fountain. Just off. As I navigate my car thru the different streets, I realized at some point this all was just vacant land, unsettled and unloved. Unless you were an orange. Because that was all there was. Oranges.

I often think about the Golden Age of Hollywood. Somewhere between the 1920's to the 60's. That's when the town boomed with hopes, dreams and stardom. Today, everything is behind closed doors. Hollywood and Highland came up and sanitized the dank. No one seems to come here for dreams anymore. At least not what I see. No one seems so driven anymore. The work dried up for a lot of the industry (which headed North to Canada). So instead of having a handful of jobs for a gazillion people, you have no jobs for those same gazillion people. I wish all those special effects those wizards conjure up in movies would make some of these people relocate.

Okay, that was mean. I'm pretty sure in some other person's dream board they have a photo of me, suitcase in hand at the border of California and Nevada with a handwritten sign that says "Ohio or bust".

So today, after work, I decide to go back to the gym I first signed up at. The place has changed, as I mentioned in a previous blog. They have a juice bar now. Treadmills with t.v.s Weight machines that look like torture devices. I stick to the free weights and squat bar. I modify most of my workout to NOT use the devices as intended. For instance, the leg press, I flip it around and use it as shoulder press. I use an incline press to push off the pad to do chest work. You meet really interesting people when you go outside the box.

Leo, a South American bodybuilder caught me in between chest exercises. Everyone always seems to make you guess their age. I'm pretty good at it. But if people insist, I ALWAYS guess older. Why? Because it will only make that person workout harder. I know they look good for their age. But why support their vanity?

Leo is different. He put up over 300lbs on a bench press. I had to ask this guy what his secret was. He didn't speak English. But he pointed to my bicep and nodded in approval. So, me being me, I kept speaking to him in English "What do you take?...creatine?" Nod. "How about some whey?...you do the whey thing too?" Nod and a smile. "Man, you put up some serious weight." Nod, smile points to bench press. I'd been holding him up from doing his workout. There he was pressing all that weight. I contemplated asking this dude to press the front part of my car to change out a tire.

Foreign bodybuilders, good for all occasions. He told me he was 54 years old.