Beng Kidney is just like you. He enjoys a beer (or two!) at the local sports bar and when his team wins the big game he cheers and claps and feels nothing.
There’s a little Kidney in us all.
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You have to fight yourself some days. There’s a suppressed element of self that’s so powerful, so motivated to come out; it can get insistent. The KFC giblet slurping, alarm snoozing, deadline skipping, titty ogling, spineless, grease chinned lovechild that blubbers to you from the rocks and decaying vegetation, reminding you of your default inertia; that you exist in the plentiful age and that Crossfit and Paleo diets are concepts invented by the cover of a magazine.
The gloss of the covers instruct us that there is an epidemic of obesity between pictures of ripped abdominals and powerful pecs, but that’s what we always wanted. We don’t handle it as gracefully as we’d like, and we don’t like the look of ourselves for some reason or another, but it’s no human catastrophe that we got fat and slow. Our strength has never been in our physicality; that much is obvious. The stately wombat can beat Usain Bolt down the hundred metres, and it doesn’t operate as a state-sponsored athlete with six hours of dedicated exercises per day and a specialised diet; it sleeps in a hole and eats dry leaves. It also looks like an oversized hamster.
I personally have a natural aversion to jumping doubles, they scare me in the certain way that gives me dread. But I try do them anyway: folly. I suppress my crappy little self on the entry, and fight my fingers that try to grab at the brakes. And the lip goes by and I’m in the air and I’m committed to whatever fate my confliction has dealt. Generally I land okay and I say a quiet “fuck you” to myself and the crappy part of me shrinks briefly. Then we go get some KFC and make up.
But really I should just relax. It’s natural for us to be this way, and whatever’s coming on the horizon will be natural too. Natural, the magazines love that stuff.
