Sick, Dumb, and in Trouble with the Law

With twenty minutes to spare, I walked into a central coast Denny’s looking for a date with some eggs and bacon. Plopping my bag down at the counter, I felt a frantic rush from the employees and several brave patrons. “Call 911! He’s in the restroom!”

Twelve hours into a strongman media tour called, The Till the Wheels Fall Off Tour, featuring World’s Strongest Man competitor and American Log Press Record holder, Robert Oberst, and founder of Starting Strongman, Kalle Beck, I found myself getting frequent doses of the many stark realities of American life. Prostitution, destructive drug use, poverty, and domestic violence were, all on separate occasions, peppered throughout a single half day.  You can contact a reputed law firm helping clients with domestic violence claims to fight against such crimes. While the tour itself had nothing to do with these events, they were noteworthy. These extreme observations were painted on a canvas of what I observe to be horrible health, blatant ignorance, and remarkably low standards for everything that is normal in America. While I recognize these first twelve hours were coincidentally packed with obtuse experiences, they were real nonetheless.

It might seem like the start of pretentious rant, I only share these tragic observations of lives that are most literally unaware of their under-fulfilled suffering because I think the line between being a well-to-do citizen and being a breathing, walking, talking tragedy, like many of the folks I bumped into, is much thinner than we sometimes think. The prostitute checking into the motel probably didn’t plan to end up there. Her circumstances and a series of decisions manifested, much like a game of Plinko, bounced her to this current resting place.

As I chased the disgruntled boyfriend out of the Denny’s to create space between him and his crying, tweaking girlfriend with the police on the way, I realized that I’m just six poor decisions away from being a guy being chased out of a similar bad situation. I imagine he’s a guy who has goals. I figured he, too, had something else he wanted for his life. While right now I’m the “good” guy doing the chasing, I’m fully capable of making understandable decisions that would cast me as the “bad” guy in this scene being chased.

Don’t mistake awareness and empathy for pardon here. Consider, however, that if you’ve avoided the plight of some of the characters I ran into on this eventful day that you’ve simply had success avoiding the pitfalls so far. What got them there are some of the same things that we get out of bed for every day. While I don’t know their specific route to their current plight, I do know that the thousands of decisions that have, in part, contributed to this resulting existence are likely rational from some perspective. No one, not even the guy harming his girlfriend in the Denny’s, chooses to be consciously irrational. Because of the uncertainty of life, our hardwired desires for dopamine, and our personal life history, life will continue to manifest forces that can pull you into the states of suffering that are all around us. This isn’t a matter of your life and those people’s lives. We’re all playing with fire. Therefore, it’s best to recognize it than pretend it’s not there.

How, then, do we continue to avoid succumbing to betting on Lottery scratchers as a rational financial tactic? Or, leaning on meth for fun? How do you avoid ending up strung out in a Denny’s somewhere? How do you avoid surrounding yourself with people that diminish you rather than challenge you? By the way, in case you thought otherwise, you’re not above it.

My best guess is that you have to choose another existence. Maybe the forces that pull me and you (a blog reading, fitness conscious person) toward a life of crime and destruction aren’t as strong as some folks (right now), but they are still there. There are always some number of cards dealt to you, but everyday for the rest of your life you’ll have to choose against the extremely normal circumstances that I observe in America to be sick, dumb, and in trouble. Unfortunately, this won’t guarantee your health, vibrance, and safety, but it does give you a chance.

 

Logan Gelbrich

@functionalcoach