Of course, the natural place to go with the idea of being heated with joy is to sex, and all the greatest adventures, real or fantasized, one has to do with reaching such climactic pleasure, and sweating as a result of all that joy, that no other heat compares.
I beg to gently differ, however, as much as i love sex.
For me, in days gone by, completing an entire hour with my slave driver of a trainer Alyona resulted in me being filled with heat, relief that i made it through the hour (was ever an hour so long???) and joy awash with the heat of all my exertions.
Even if i could barely walk out of the gym, so worked out and stretched and taxed to my limits, i was filled with the joy that at least I was still alive to tell the tale. And my little blonde perfect Russian slave driver’s words of congratulations felt like the warmest of a mother’s hugs….she always encouraged me in my utter destruction and pain. I loved her for that.
We used to call (or at least I did) the room where we did the most rigorous of floor exercises “dom boli”, which in Russian means something like “room of
torture”. I would prefer doing machine after exercise machine after yet another machine rather than go to the dom boli, but to the room of torture we would inevitably go, and somehow, week after week, session after session, i made it through the rubber stretching walks across the endless room, the crunches on a matted space on a floor i could barely get up from, the lifting of free weights that even a child could have lifted more easily than i could…but i did make it, session after session after session.
I was ALWAYS SO WASTED, i had to take the elevator DOWN the STAIRS, my legs were so wobbly , my stomach so exercised it could hardly take in breath….and how i actually got showered, dried off, dressed in my street clothes again remains a mystery. and there was always a sodden bunch of gym workout clothing to schlepp home, heavier than Thor’s Hammer. I’d make it home, obviously, because here I am telling you all about it, still alive, but how i did it…well…i’d even take a bus home, since sometimes i realized driving my car home from the gym was more effort than i could manage…so id take the bus and even somehow walked up a hill (!!!) to reach my front door on Page Street .
In my eyes, especially now as I write about it, i was a super hero.
Well, it was a well-earned heat. One I thought would portend wellness for my later years.
Funny though…the body waits around for no man…or woman….and the Covid pandemic put an end to my gym going days. And now i can barely get myself to walk down the block to my favorite nail salon…..i have become a lazy slob…and you know what?
I’m fine with that.
After over 7 decades of living a hard and busy life, i now forgive myself for every useless and enjoyable hour spent in my comfy bed or irreplaceable arm chair, reading a book, where my most taxing exertion is the turning of yet another page….of course, with Kindle, i now don’t even have to do that! And my husband bought me a gadget that will hold my iMac notebook for me, and all i have to do is push a button to get to the next pages….i mean, come one….peel me another grape, Ponchatong (my imagined slave).
So, one of these days, i’ll get to that nail salon…and my beauty parlor is right downstairs in the court yard of my building , so I’m bound there every couple of weeks for a good wash and trim and blow out….
I used to blow out all my muscles with gym-like fervor…and now, i’ll let my hairdresser do the heavy lifting.
Heat? Yeah…sex is good.
But the warmth of my morning coffee and a good toasted bagel will do for now.