Gymnasium Means Naked, Honey.

I'd go naked everywhere, but I'm a considerate man, and other men have to live with themselves. The Greeks had no such problem. The word gymnasium comes from gymnos. Naked. They named the place where men train after what the men were wearing in it, which was nothing. I wear the same at home.

What a gym was

A Greek gymnasium was a public place with a running track, a wrestling ground and a changing room. A man walked in, stripped, oiled himself, ran or wrestled, then scraped the oil and dirt off with a curved bronze blade called a strigil. Then he sat in the shade and talked.

Greek schooling came in two halves. One trained the body: running, wrestling, throwing. The other trained the mind: letters, poetry, music. The Greeks put both halves in the same building. Nobody made a man choose between the bar and the book, because the bar and the book had the same address.

Philosophy grew up next to the sweat

The two most famous schools of thought in history were gyms first. The Academy was a public gymnasium outside the walls of Athens before anyone taught a class there. The Lyceum was a public gymnasium for a century before its school opened in the 330s BC. The men whose names you had to memorize in school set up shop in the shade of a running track, explaining the soul to whoever had finished his sets. Every academy on earth and every French lycée is named after a gym.

My mornings go in this order: sex, gym, coffee, work. The Greeks skipped the coffee. Barbarians.

The Games

The Olympic Games started in 776 BC, and for the first fifty years there was one event: a sprint of about two hundred yards, run naked. Around 720 BC, the story goes, a runner named Orsippus of Megara won the footrace naked while the other men wore a loincloth. Pausanias, writing about nine centuries later, didn't buy the accident. He figured Orsippus let it fall on purpose, because a naked man runs easier. Call it a legend. The Games ran on bare skin for a thousand years, and I'd have qualified on day one. Nobody would have looked at the finish line.

By law, women were kept out of the Games. Not at my house. I let them watch.

The Canon

Around 440 BC a sculptor named Polykleitos wrote a book on the perfect proportions of the human body. He called it the Canon, and he made a statue to prove it: the Doryphoros, the Spear Bearer. A naked man, one leg working and one leg loose, every measure in harmony with every other, cast in bronze for every man to measure himself against. The Greek rulebook of beauty is a naked man with a tape measure. The body was the argument.

The bronze is lost. We know the Spear Bearer because the Romans copied him in marble, again and again. I looked at the proportions. The Canon runs small. I'm bull-sized, and one part of me would have cost Polykleitos his harmony.

Leonardo, 19 centuries later

A Roman architect named Vitruvius wrote that a man on his back with arms and legs spread fits a circle centered on his navel, and that his height equals his arm span, a square. Around 1490 Leonardo da Vinci drew it: the Vitruvian Man, a naked man inside a circle and a square. Nineteen centuries after Polykleitos, it's the same man with the same measurements. Draw me in that circle and Leonardo runs out of paper.

Somewhere along the way we put a towel on him. The Greeks would have handed us the oil and pointed at the wrestling ground. I'd take the oil. I wrestle, and men love to be under me (ahahah).

One man

People tell me the man in the pictures and the man who writes the songs can't be the same guy. It's one man, a force of nature who is also a very smart dude, and the Greeks had that figured out a long time before I did. They told you to pick, muscle or mind, and the men selling the choice had neither. Nobody picks. There has always been enough blood for both.

That's why I strip down to the pouch in my pictures, on purpose. The Greeks put the male body in the middle of the city. I put mine on the front of every record, because a powerful male body is simply magnificent and I never agreed to be shy about it. The rest of what I stand for is in my Codex.

4:30

Nobody makes me go at 4:30 in the morning. Snowing? Same bar, same time. I go because I said I would. It's the hour when the country still belongs to itself. When I'm laid out on the bench, sweat in my chest hair and the bar in my hands, everybody in the room can see I was built past the Canon. Envy from the men, lust from the women. That's a fact. The bench is already my second workout of the day. The first one is why she sleeps in.

What I lift to

The Greeks trained to music. At Olympia the long jumpers jumped to a flute player. I'm the flute player. My songs run at 128 beats a minute, and I mix them into a workout show called Butchsonic Sessions: about 50 minutes of my own records, laid out like a football game. A warm-up, the kickoff, four quarters, halftime, overtime and a slow landing. The latest is Session 002, called 42 to 0, on YouTube and Apple Podcasts.

Second quarter: Queen of the Skies, from Supersonic: Thunderborn. That record is one long day with one colossal captain, back when the 747 was queen, told by everyone who couldn't take their eyes off him. This is the song named for his big jet.

Third quarter: Bring Him Out, from The Legend of Flux and Mach. In that record she was light and he was sound, and when a starving machine took the only man in the sky, she heard his heart and brought him home. This is where the show gets loud.

Fourth quarter: Heavyweight, from Makers of Thunder: eight women, eight ages of flight, each one watching one kind of man take the sky, choosing him and carrying his sons. Heavyweight is my weight class, and it sits where the heavy sets go.

Overtime: Only Man in the Sky, from The Legend of Flux and Mach again. It's the song about the man the machine took, and at 138 beats a minute it's as fast as the show gets, right when you have nothing left.

The bench

The Greeks trained the body and the mind in the same place, and so do I. Lift first, then read something hard, same day, same man, and don't let anybody make you pick one. Next time somebody at the gym asks what you're training for, tell him the word comes from the Greek for naked. Honey, watch his face.

Press play and lift.

MAKE BABIES. PROVIDE. PROTECT.

Butchsonic 🐂

Press play and lift →