Frank slid a 45-pound plate onto the bar, then another, then another, and then he walked around to the other side of the rack and did the same. He cranked up the volume on his iPhone and slapped the headphones over his ears. Slipknot blasted directly against his eardrums and he ground his teeth together.
Broken legs. Gunpowder.
Raging hard-on.
Polar bear eating a baby seal.
He slapped his thighs twice and breathed out.
He ducked under the bar and lifted. He breathed in as the weight pressed against his shoulders. His heavy in-and-out breathing made a whoo whoo whoo sound that Frank couldn’t hear over his music. The pre-workout he had taken 30 minutes ago coursed through his veins and accelerated him into a tyrannosaurus in heat.
LET’S GET THIS MAX, FAGGOT!
“HIUNNGG.” He dropped down to a 45-degree angle, knees just behind his toes. Parallel. His face turned stark purple. He felt Super Saiyan energy shoot down his spine, through his buttocks and thighs, and into the floor below him.
“UUUUUH!” He lifted off, an inch a second. His vision was quickly becoming obscured by the stress behind his eyeballs, but he couldn’t give in yet. The disembodied voices of fitness legends from Australia to the States whispered encouragement over the music. Unleash yourself. And with that, the 315 pounds of iron soared through the air, back to starting position.
“UH!” Frank emitted as he completed the rep. The words NEW 1 REP MAX flew across his dizzy vision like a holographic billboard from Blade Runner. He took a second to catch his breath, leaning against the side of the squat rack.
Frank inhaled and exhaled victoriously, the very air he breathed tasted like gold, and his reflection looked back at him with a sly grin. “Glutes for the slutes, eh.” He chuckled to himself, flexing in the mirror. A janitor looked over then returned to his cleaning.
***
Frank slumped down in his sweat stained desk chair and typed in his computer password: 4theVolk. He took a gulp from the protein shake he had just blended for himself and ripped a fart which tore through the air like a rusty knife. He cringed at the smell; it was foul, but manly, so he didn’t mind. He began to browse the fitness forum on Ynet.
There he sat, marinating in his pheromonal cloud, clicking intermittently between threads of general fitness questions, to current body threads, wherein users would post a shirtless picture of themselves to see how they compared to the rest of those online. He also indulged himself by viewing threads with pictures of so-called ‘High Test’ women; curvaceous beauties that had more than a little meat on their bones, but all in the right places. He even perused feet threads, which were completely unrelated to fitness, but still managed to sprout forth on the fitness board every day. He saved several pictures from this thread to a folder hidden deep within his hard drive.
Frank paused and pondered how his attractions had changed over the years. It made sense in a universal balance sort of way that as he became more muscular (masculine) he would find attractive women with higher body fat percentage (feminine).
Yin and Yang. Chakra. Chi.
This concerned him; as he progressed in his journey to physical perfection, would he seek out women who were simply overweight? Even obese? Morbidly obese? He pushed the thought away and looked at more pictures of feet, an attraction he found even more inexplicable.
He changed tabs, and out of some synaptic connection between sexual shame and his far-right political beliefs he opened a page of the Ynet Politics board. Here he was free to speak without hurting the tender feelings of fags, Jews, hallowed minorities, and everything Marxist and degenerate that was celebrated elsewhere in the world. He was home.
Frank considered himself an honorable member of the Alt-Right, a political amalgam of mostly white men which had come to the surface during the election of Hillary Clinton but had been stewing online for some years before that, yet unnamed. Frank had a healthy distrust for people of color, a hatred for the LGBTQ+ Community, he thought women ought to pursue motherhood rather than positions in Human Resource departments, and had decided to vote for Trump the moment the man’s oval-shaped mouth uttered the word WALL. Sadly, the state of the world was becoming much more hellish each day.
Each time Frank checked up on the politics board, there were reports of a new plague coming to haunt the citizens of America, whether it be some Hollywood film with an obnoxious liberal bent, or a new regulation on churches who refused to marry gays, or the fact that beaners were pouring into the country on the daily by the thousand and no one in Washington seemed to care. He hated that what was essentially soft-core pornography was shown on MTV and ABC family to little kids. What happened to traditional values? West Coast Jews trying to spread their perversions to the masses, and the sheep lapped it up.
He perused a thread which seemed more intellectually stimulating. The header read: NET NEUTRALITY AT RISK. He clicked on the thread’s original picture which showed a suit-wearing Indian man photoshopped into the cockpit of a B-29 bomber, preparing to drop a payload on Hiroshima, which was labeled ‘Internet’. He chuckled, then began to read.
***
This is an excerpt from Goddel M. Robert’s new novel, Harv and the Big Collapse. You can purchase the book from Terror House Press here.
Goddel M. Robert is a writer who has spent his formative years dwelling in the worst places on the Internet. Having learned from this, he wants to share the culture and stories with people in a tasteful, yet true-to-character manner. Please consider reading his work, Harv and the Big Collapse, published by Terror House Press.
