Venice Beach, California 2014
When he's not painting, reading, writing, lecturing or lying on his back ruminating on the blessedness of his genius, my dear, solipsistic friend David Schoffman is working out at the gym.
Living as he does in Los Angeles where mailmen are typically buffer than Mark Wahlberg and primary school teachers miss on average 18 days of classroom work per year due to their intermittent commercial auditions, the pressure to be fit weighs heavily on every unfortunate fatso.
In places like Malibu and the Pacific Palisades, body fat index is a more vital statistic than one's credit rating. I've heard of people being denied apartments by landlords afraid of the stress excess girth might impose upon their buildings.
Even boutique épiceries like Wholesome Grits and Martin's have imposed spending limits on customers deemed too flabby to fit comfortably into their corporate brand.
My dear friend David has adapted to this stringent cult of corpuscular curation by maintaining a strict regimen of callous calisthenics more punishing than the hazing rituals of Israeli marines and more spartan than the unspeakable pains imposed upon the Carthusian monks of Chartreuse.
The result is a body so toned and tanned yet so wrinkled with age that when shirtless David resembles something more like an old leather purse than an actual living person.
When questioned about his questionable parsing of time - how he devotes so many hours to his fetish of body-sculpting and self-preservation - David shrugs off any suggestion that this all comes at the expense of an active life of the mind. "I live in L.A." he says as if that's explanation enough, "where do you think those wordless Ikea instructional booklets come from?"
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