Libertarian Punk. Keep your fucking hands off!

I'm such a sexy beast.

When I work out, I almost reach a state of Zen.  I am thinking about the exercises I am doing, but also about a hundred other things that fly through my mind simultaneously.  Most often, though, I think of the discipline that weightlifting requires, and how the weight will accept no excuses and give you no ‘A’ for effort.  You will either lift the weight or not.  The bar is not going to help lift itself because you, the lifter, did not put in the training and work necessary to build the strength to lift it. 

I admit, in my younger days, I was no fan of athletics or organized team sports.  They have a way of separating you out really quick as a kid.  If you show no natural prowess as an athlete, no attempt is really made to try and spark that interest.  I can remember my parents trying to push me into sports for a while because they felt that it would be good for character development.  First it was soccer, and this is a sport I loathe to this day.  While I can respect the athleticism it takes to play soccer, I was simply uninterested in it.  Yet my parents kept me on that team for a whole agonizing season.  We won only one out of twelve games and I consider it a complete waste of my time.

The next sport my parents tried to get me into was baseball.  I tried out for a little league team and would have probably made it, as I was good with a bat, but something else came along that I fell in love with- karate.  I was maybe 10 years old and I was a natural.  I became a quick study and advanced several belts in that first year.  Consider that I was this small, weakish kid who was mercilessly picked on by bullies, especially jocks who thought I brought down their “team” in gym class, and you can understand why I took to martial arts so quickly.  Unfortunately for me, I sabotaged that by misusing my skills.   An older boy in my neighborhood was standing on my porch telling my parents that I had shot him with a pea shooter, and my response was to deliver a flying side kick right to his ribs that knocked him clean off the porch and into the courtyard.  After that, no more karate lessons, but now that I remember that incident, I can recall the expression on Roger Gray’s face as he looked up at me from the sidewalk.  I haven’t seen such a surprised look since.

After that, sports and athletics took a back seat for a long time.  I wanted to wrestle in high school, but I was disappointed when I showed up at the first practice and saw that there was no ring.  I’m not even joking about that.  I was a huge WWF fan in the late 80’s and I thought I’d be putting the figure four on some fool from across the river in no time.  When I was 27 I actually went to a wrestling school where they teach you to bump and fall properly, call spots, and execute horrific looking moves without crippling each other too much, but after two days, my body hurt in spots I didn’t even know existed.

I didn’t start lifting weights until I was 30 years old.  I actually met an ex-WWF wrestler named Jim the Messenger (that was his stage name, but everyone just called him Big Jim).  I delivered a pizza to this mountain of a man, who stood 6′ 5″ tall and was a solid 330 pounds.  As usual, my big fucking mouth got me into a situation I couldn’t back out of.  I asked him if he still lifted, and he said ‘yes’.  I then made an empty boast about how I “used” to lift and I want to get back into it, but, you know-

“Cool!  Meet me here Monday at 8 AM, I’ll take you to the gym.”

Oh no.  Oh, no no no.  I had just gone and done it.  I mean, I had written that check with my mouth that my body was about to cash in a very painful way.  I could have backed out, or done a no-show, but something in me just said, just do it and see if you like it.  May not be all that bad.  So, on a chilly March morning, I started something that I haven’t really stopped doing since.  There was a point in that first workout where I could have quit.  Halfway in, I made a dash for the bathroom and prompty threw my breakfast up into the toilet.  I sat on that cold floor with the smell and sting of stomach acid in my nostrils and tendrils of vomit streaking down my chin, and I thought to myself, I could walk away now.   I could say I tried, and I didn’t like it.  And then, something in me just completely snapped.

Yeah, the other side said, you could quit, like you’ve been doing your whole life.  Running away from any challenge you couldn’t easily overcome.  You can get by on your smarts and your size but you will never have any real sense of accomplishment because you never stick out the difficult battles.  So you’re going to just pack it in like a coward, or are you going to go back out there and finish your fucking workout?

He- I mean, I- was right.  I do tend to take the path of least resistance.  I do tend to lack discipline.  So, I picked myself up, washed myself off, and went back out.  Big Jim asked me if I wanted to stop, and I said, no, let’s finish.  And so we did, and for almost a year we trained together three times a week.  I lost 55 pounds of fat and fell in love with strength training.  I went on to compete in amateur strongman contests and train alongside pro strongmen and hardcore powerlifters.  I became a certified personal trainer.  I then crossed over into Olympic-style weightlifting which is the discipline which I focus mostly on today.  And so, the circle is complete, and you’re asking me:

What the FUCK does this have to do with being Libertarian, punk, or both?

It comes down to pulling your own weight in this world, whether it’s on a platform in the gym, or in real life.  It’s about achievement and pride, about being able to respect the person in the mirror.  It’s about self-reliance and discipline, doing what you have to do even if you don’t like it because the reward at the end is worth it.  You can’t get these feelings if you’re mooching off of someone else, living on the alms of others or on the money confiscated by the government from people who do contribute, who do pull their own weight and then some.  If you’re not striving for something, then you’re not really living.  As far as punk goes, I think it’s time that punx and jocks knocked off the enmity, there’s a lot we can learn from each other, and being a little bit of both, I should know.

~Matt Frost