Charlie Sheen, Street People and You

"Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose" (French Proverb)

Yeah, Yeah, Yeah I get it. You don't speak French. Well neither do I. Nor do I condone the speaking of French by some of my fellow countrymen. Please don’t get me wrong, if you want to speak French in deference to the great nation then be my guest.

It’s just that there tends to be this nasty habit common to some people from the Metropolitan Northeast. I am sure you know at least one of them. They speak French because they think it makes them better than everybody else in this fine land of milk, honey and cut off jean shorts (please note that these are the same people who learn Spanish so they can “speak the language of the people” and insist that they will send back a plate of pasta unless it is al dente). In the spirit of full disclosure I must admit that I do know some French but it is limited to Croissant, French Toast, French Fries, Baguette and a Doctor of Chemistry named Nico who is
Marrying my buddy Gina.

Now before you go and run and grab your copy of the French to English Dictionary I will save you the trouble and play the role of interpreter. What the proverb says is “The More Things Change, the More they Stay the same”.

In an effort to keep what is left of my sanity I have to remind myself of this saying on almost a daily basis. I do this primarily because of my dealings in the fitness world. But it also seems to consistently apply to my experiences in life.

Charlie Sheen

So other day I was sitting around watching this train wreck that is the tragedy of life called Charlie Sheen. In between “Winning”, “Tigers Blood” and whatever the next piece of drivel that was to spew out of this guy’s mouth I couldn’t help but feel bad about my enjoyment of the whole experience. Here is a guy who is obviously about three or four fries short of happy meal, having a breakdown on national television in front of millions of people and the only thing I seem to be able to do is watch and laugh.

Odds are Charlie Sheen will wind up dead soon, much earlier than nature intended. This is sad not only because when he is straight he is an amazing talent (go stick your thumb up your butt Ferris Bueller) but more so because the reality is this issue goes much deeper than his skills as an actor.

For a long time now we as human beings have had a fascination with the “crazy”, “abnormal” and “mentally insane”. A recent New York Times article told about the Bedlam Hospital in London where during the 1800’s people would pay a penny to walk the halls and peek in on the residents, all of whom were suffering from some type of mental infirmity. Apparently this was some sad form of entertainment as well as a way for the hospital to make money. After watching the public’s reaction to old Chuck I can safely say that neither I nor the rest of you out there have come very far from that point.

Not to be a total buzz kill but the fact is that Charlie Sheen is somebodies son, somebodies father, and I am sure that somewhere out there are other people who genuinely care for him but can do nothing to help other than sit back and watch him slowly disintegrate. It has to kill them and there is nothing they can do about it. Addiction really is a waste of life.

STREET PEOPLE

If there ever were guardians of the proof that addiction is indeed a waste of life you don’t have to look much further than some of the street people who reside in the alleys, missions and shelters of biggest city near to you.

I just got done reading a great book called Beggars and Thieves, written by Mark S. Fleisher. It is a non-fictional story about a scientist who spends time amongst the street people of Seattle in order to get a better understanding of the world they live in.

One part that really got my attention is when Fleisher writes about street people constantly talking about going clean (i.e. giving up drugs and moving to full time employment, paying taxes, obeying laws etc.). He relates this specifically to the millions of dollars that governments spend on programs in a wasted effort to help these people turn their lives around:

“Going straight talk is folklore…Hustlers talk about personal change is analogous to children’s talk about what they want to be when they grow up. Young children aspire to become doctors, lawyers, firemen and policemen and these aspirations are expressed without a clue about the reality of achievement in modern American society, grade point averages, the writing of research papers, the reading of thousands of pages in hushed libraries, college and graduate school entrance exams, tuition payments and college debts….(the drug users) don’t care about the realities; the pleasure comes in saying the words; the verbal ritual itself brings pleasure”.

It might seem terrible to you, as it did to me, that these people spend most of their lives in a world of fantasy, denying the reality of their situation. But here’s a newsflash for all of us, we do the same thing too. Maybe we don’t sleep out on the streets or drink alcohol to excess or do massive amounts of drugs but in some ways we are just as bad as they are. This holds especially true when it comes to dieting and weight loss.

YOU

I know a couple of people who actually don’t find the Charlie Sheen situation very funny and are quite sick of the whole thing already. You might wonder if these enlightened souls are simply better than the rest of us, existing on a higher plane of being than we simple fools could ever hope to attain.

Nope.

If there is such thing as a simple truth, the one thing I have found that all these people have in common, these Charlie Sheen outliers, is that they are recovering addicts, family members of recovering addicts, or people who work in the mental health care/addiction therapy area.

When I started this blog entry off with the proverb I was referring to the fact that no matter how much we chose to believe we have changed (i.e. we no longer believe that all of life’s illnesses can be cured with a good bleeding) there are certain aspects that are part of being human that we will never be able to outrun. Like the historian Will Durant said, history is not so much about learning not to repeat our mistakes as it is a study of the human condition. Being human is something that doesn’t change.

One of the aspects that I find is most human is our incredible inability to really understand a situation unless we are knee deep in it. Hence why most people who are some way related to addiction don’t find Charlie Sheen very funny while at the same time some of us can’t stop laughing about it. I would imagine that I too would have a hard time laughing at somebody else’s drug problem if say one day during my adolescence I came home to find my mother hanging off a rope by her neck with a puddle of pee beneath her because she didn’t balance her uppers and downers correctly. Or if my face became the deceleration point for a nasty drunk of a father’s right fist.

While not so vivid or extreme I find the same issues with my life in the fitness industry. I have been in gyms since I was fourteen years old. You will have to forgive me if twenty one years later I still cannot figure out how somebody thinks they can take a pill, or rub on a cream, or “carb block” their way to fat loss. It actually blows my mind, probably because I have been knee deep in fitness for more of my life that I have not. I mean really people; do you really believe that a pill is going to make you thin? Seriously? I just cannot feature that. Another thing I cannot feature is the body of your dreams in three times a week for twenty minutes. Hell I got abs but I spend more time than that marinating my steak and chicken for the week. I spend one hundred minutes a week just stretching. Five to six hours just lifting weights. What’s up with the sixty minutes a week thing! God, sometimes this stuff really pisses me off.

But then I need to calm down, think a little French, and remind myself that people are just that, simply people. Maybe the reason they don’t understand is because they haven’t spent a better part of their life as knee deep in fat loss as I have. They might be just like that little kid who wants to be an astronaut who doesn’t realize that you pretty much have to be both fearless and a freakin genius in order to be one. That being an astronaut is more than just having the desire to wear a helmet.

At this point I have no idea any more where this blog post is going. Maybe all I want you to do is take a hard look at yourself and an even harder look at your goals when it comes to weight loss and really ask yourself some hard questions. Am I being that little kid who wants to be the astronaut? Am I being that homeless addict who really believes he is just one big drug deal away from hitting the big time? Am I being realistic about exactly what it takes to look like that fitness model on television? Are the abs I want not only worth it but are they actually possible to obtain given all the other things I choose to have going on in my life? Or am I just drunk with the idea of it all and the feelings of fantasy that make the stark, painful realities seem much smaller than really are.

One thing is for sure. There will always be somebody in the fitness industry willing to make a buck by selling you the belief that you can do it. Whether you can is something that is up to you to decide. I got a feeling that for most of you the only real truth about six pack abs is you aren’t getting them anytime soon. And there is nothing wrong with that because there is more to life and being a good person than having a great ass.

But then again what the hell do I know.

Yours in chocolate chip cookies.

Mike Cruickshank