Stairmaster Quotes

Where I'm is one of those stair climbing machines the agent has installed. You climb and climb forever and never get off the ground. You're trapped in your hotel room. It's the mystical sweat love lodge experience of our time, the only sort of Indian vision quest we can schedule into our daily planner. Our StairMaster to Heaven.

What distinguishes an asana from a stretch or calisthenic exercise is that in asana practice we focus our mind’s attention completely in the body so that we can move as a unified whole and so we can perceive what the body has to tell us. We don’t do something to the body, we become the body. In the West we rarely do this. We watch TV while we stretch; we read a book while we climb the StairMaster; we think about our problems while we take a walk, all the time living a short distance from the body. So asana practice is a reunion between the usually separated body-mind.

I think credibility died of shame around 1986, just as all those sixties war protesters and fearless battlers for racial equality were discovering junk bonds, Martha Stewart Living, and the StairMaster.

The Patty Winters Show I taped this morning hasn't been watched yet. It's sixty minutes about women who've had mastectomies, which at seven-thirty, over breakfast, before the office, I couldn't bear to sit through, but after today - hanging out at the office, where the air-conditioning broke down, a tedious lunch with Cunningham at Odeon, my fucking Chinese cleaners unable to get bloodstains out of another Soprani jacket, four videotapes overdue that ended up costing me a fortune, a twenty-minute wait at the Stairmasters - I've adapted; these events have toughened me and I'm prepared to deal with this particular topic.

I kept a jar of macadamia nuts by the bed, ate a few whenever I rose to the surface, sucked a bottle of Poland Spring, gravitated to the toilet maybe once a day. I didn’t answer the phone—nobody but Reva ever called me anyway. She left me messages so long and breathless that they got cut off midsentence. Usually she called while she was on the StairMaster at her gym.

A film presents images; a book creates them inside the reader, with the reader's active participation. Books are good for your brain. Neurologists have found that, when watching television or film, the viewer's eyes remain idle, straight ahead, but when reading, the actual physical movement of scanning the page from left to right (or right to left, or up and down, depending) stimulates and conditions the brain, a Stairmaster of the mind.

I know people who watch CNN all day, particularly when working out on the StairMaster, buffing their butts while those headlines of disaster slap them in the face with an up-to-the-minute report on another high school shooting. You can see a lip-lubed anchor woman running over to an injured cheerleader, shoving the microphone in her face demanding, ‘How do you feel about the incident?’ giving her a little kick as she sinks into unconsciousness. ‘How do you feel?’ She has the look of a cat before it kills a mouse as she turns to the camera and says, ‘Well, Jerry, that’s all on the up-to-the-minute report on the tragedy happening down here, back to you.

Call it cathartic. Call it therapy. Call it what you will. I tell you these things because I am trying to exorcise a few demons, and the fucking stair-master is broken. So

COFFEE FOR TWO Get one of those “concentrated” jugs of cold brew coffee. Pour a “shot” of concentrated cold brew. It’s just coffee. Drink it like a tequila shot. Go to the gym. Get on a StairMaster. Unable to stand, legs wobbling, fall off the machine. From the gym floor, text your spouse for help. Make your way outside, crawling, holding on to the wall. Your spouse arrives, looking amused. Your loved one shakes their head, helping you into the car, calling you a monkey.

Lewis pretends this is a play, and he is an actor who will go home to real life at the end of the night. Wren imagines herself on the StairMaster at the gym, taking one even step after the other while never getting any higher. Brief tableau.

You just want to hold a grudge.” “Yes. Burns more calories.” “That's not true.” “Yes, it is. How do you think your grandma got those legs of hers? She's not exactly a StairMaster gal.”-Rory and Lorelai, Forgiveness and Stuff (Season 1, Episode 10)