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Yes, That’s Me, Listening To Taylor Swift On The Elliptical
A middle-aged confession
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Fist bump.
Sup.
Fist bump.
Hey, how many sets do you have left?
My girlfriend bought me a few sessions with a trainer at our local YMCA as a Christmas gift. She wants me to live a long, healthy life, so I must sweat. After all, I am a middle-aged man, which means I am slowly transforming into a human cupcake.
I complained at first and dragged my feet, but then I went. I didn’t want to admit I was nervous. A gym is a strange place for a sensitive poet like me, it’s the opposite of a couch, both physically and philosophically.
I have dim memories of high school locker rooms, the unholy smells, and the snap of wet towels. There are two types of people: those who are perfectly comfortable strutting around gym showers naked and those who react to public nakedness like vampires exposed to sunlight.
The trainer’s name was Ahmed, and he was exactly twenty-five years younger than me. Ahmed is lean and powerful, not too beefy. He’s studying to be a lawyer but he’s not sure. He’s sharp. We tell our best and brightest they can grow to be whatever they want to be but, generally speaking, that’s a nice, mostly dishonest, thing to say. Not everyone can grow up to be whatever they want to be. Luck plays a huge part. But so does talent, and Ahmed could be a lawyer if he wanted a doctor, or, I don’t know, an Instagram influencer.
He carries himself with confidence. Ahmed loves rap, especially Danny Brown, whose name I recognized because an intern once talked my ear off about him during a coffee where the intern was supposed to pick my brain—a terrible phrase as if my brain were a bucket of banana pudding hiding one magic vanilla water.
No one told me that growing older meant growing heavier, not because of metabolism or late-night nachos. I feel pulled earthward more every day, weighed down like I’m draped in Marley’s chains, or zombie's hands are grabbing my ankles and dragging me down, the gravity of the grave. I knew I’d grow hair in my ears, but I didn’t know that years are bricks that crush you slowly.
I wanted to feel stronger. I wanted to be able to lift the days that I had left. I needed to learn how to navigate a gym. I didn’t know how to use exercise equipment, especially the large pieces that look like medieval torture devices. I was honest with him: hotel gyms are intimidating.
Ahmed taught me how to squat. Squatting is everything; He taught me how to properly sit on a workbench and pull down weights. To imagine I was squeezing pieces of fruit between my shoulder blades. I know how to use the vertical pull, the seated row, and the biceps curl. I do cardio now, too. But most of all, he taught me how to act in a gym.
How to behave. The gym is similar to a fancy restaurant or going to the ballet. It is a space shared by all kinds of people, and subtle and not-so-subtle social cues rule it. A nod. A fistbump. A polite question. Don’t stare. It’s okay to grunt, but don’t overdo it. Ahmed was confident and cheerful, and so I mimicked him.
Sup.
Ahmed was supportive, even tender, of me. Even when twenty-pound weights tested the limits of my Jell-o muscles, he’d warmly smile and tell me I was doing great, and you know what? I’d believe him. And he’d lightly tapped the knuckles of his fellow gym rats as we worked our way around the racks of dumbbells and rowing machines. This was his community, and I was welcomed into the sweaty club. after a couple of sessions, I, too, offered up my fists for bumps. The crew — many skinny teens and local meatheads — were stonefaced but encouraging. They were fond of saying, “You got this, dude,” to each other.
So now I stroll into the gym with a benevolent poker face. There are comedy and tragedy masks, and I wear the workout mask, eyes narrowed, and my mouth relaxed. I know what I’m doing. When I'm done, I wipe down the bench and return the kettlebells to where I found them.
Ahmed once asked what I listened to when I worked out. I inhaled and then replied, “Rap.” Small talk is allowed at the gym.
Fist bump.
“What kind of rap?”
“Oh, you know, old school stuff. Danny Brown, too.”
He nodded approvingly and walked away. Before doing 20 minutes of cardio, I put in my earbuds and hit play on my favorite Taylor Swift album, Folklore.
Hey.
Fist bump
What are you listenin’ to?
Podcasts.
Cool.
At any time, in every musky gym in America, at least one man in his forties or fifties powerlifting or jogging on the treadmill is listening to Taylor Swift, the incandescently popular singer-songwriter.
And yesterday, it was me. I was on the elliptical, the low-impact exercise machine that does not mimic any real-life activity — you’re walking! running! skiing! hands pulling and pushing, feet sliding back and forth, and to look at me, huffing and puffin, little white plugs in my ears, you’d think I was rocking out to something stereotypically masculine, like Led Zeppelin or Metallica or the sound of chainsaws.
But I wasn’t. I was listening to the song ‘Fortnight,’ written and performed by Taylor Swift, with help from tattooed crooner Post Malone. This is the first track from her new album The Tortured Poet’s Department. This is her eleventh studio album, and while it doesn’t break new ground, it is as witty, melancholy, and cathartic as her last, Midnights.
My top 5 favorites: 5. ‘Down Bad,’ 4. ‘My Boy Only Breaks His Favorite Toys,’ 3. ‘The Black Dog,’ 2. ‘Florida!!!,’ 1. ‘Who’s Afraid Of Little Old Me.’ Her song about London is a fist-pumper, though.
I am okay with more of the same. One cannot improve on nachos. I trust she will grow as an artist, but in the meantime, I’m happy with what she creates.
This is her fourth collaboration with Jack Antonoff, the indie music veteran who shares Swift’s theatrical tastes. His band, Beaches, is pretty good, too. Chill, glam rock.
Swift’s story is pretty well known: young country star turned music industry behemoth, an autobiographical artist whose life is a widely lucrative global brand. Who listens to Swift? That is also no secret: young women, but not exclusively. You see these people screaming with joy in Swift’s blockbuster concert movie Era and on social media. They are her followers and enforcers, her sisters. I think it’s assumed that most so-called Swifties identify as women and women who, like Taylor, have survived having their hearts broken by mopey men.
But there is a shadow audience for her music, an unlikely horde of listeners who secretly blare her infectious and uplifting power rock while desperately trying to stay fit on the elliptical, an invisible army of sad dudes who hide their sadness because dudes are assigned two emotions at birth: anger and tree.
The spectrum of Swift’s demo is vast, but at one end are socially awkward teen girls who do not know what society expects of them, and at the other end are socially awkward middle-aged men who do not know what society expects of them.
Swift chronicles modern love’s primary paradox: We’re all the center of our little universes, and yet none of us are happy. Of course, there is a cure for this profound loneliness, and that is Swift’s music, which connects people. Her songs are hymns we can sing together in the Church Of No One Understands Me.
I know the cranky, hipster opinion of Swift’s music — and I’m not specifically referencing tediously misogynistic criticisms — is that Swift’s work is bubble gum, and you know what? If it is bubble gum, then why is it that when I chew it, I feel momentarily weightless, a dandelion puffball waiting for a breezy Swiftian melody to carry me away?
That’s good bubblegum is what I’m saying.
I haven’t always been a fan of Swift’s work. But during the most suffocating months of the 2020 lockdowns, I listened to her gloomy 2019 masterpiece, Folklore, and she reminded me that confusion, anger, and sudden, unfathomable sorrow can be beautiful, like the woods in the winter, cold and dead, and stark, a skeleton standing in the snow, waiting to be kissed by spring.
I have allowed myself to forget those months and years, but I remember how Swift’s heartfelt, exquisitely produced record cooled my fears, which filled my subconscious with smoke and fire. I can’t be objective when it comes to Folklore, which I’ve written about before. Is it special? Immortal? Or is it a mass-produced entertainment designed to balance the scales of my heart? I don’t know. My top 5 songs are: 5. ‘Mirrorball,’ 4. ‘My Tears Richochet,’ 3. ‘Exile,’ 2. ‘The Last Great American Dynasty,’ 1. ‘August.’
As a writer, Swift is inspired by regret and the righteous path. She yearns for freedom, and goddammit, so do I. Her lyrics are human and vulnerable, but she’s also a myth, a goddess. Her entire body of work tells one long, complex story about a woman who grew up too fast and endured scorn and betrayal. There’s so much lore. But Swift’s music can also be enjoyed without knowing anything about her; pop songs are mirrors that reflect something deeply personal and universal to the listener. I wear her music like wax wings.
The gym is my new asylum. I am trying to slow the clock and lower my blood pressure. I want more time, but I don’t know exactly what I will do with that time.
Today is “leg” day. I stretch and attack a foam roller, then jump jacks. After that, leg presses, hamstrings, lunges, and back on the elliptical. In my earphones, Swift is singing about small men. She’s pushing back. She is triumphant. Sweat leaks down the sides of my face. My legs swing back and forth, and my arms pump to the rhythm.
I’m listening to "Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me” — a song about gossip and justice—and it’s typical Swift, soft and barbed, explosive. When she sings about leaping from the gallows and levitating, I am panting and soaking my shirt. The elliptical machine is a flying machine, a mechanical pterodactyl, and high up from the clouds, looking down, I see myself and think, “That guy’s trying his best.”
Grief. Friendship. Jazz hands.
My debut memoir, Theatre Kids, will be released on June 18th, and you can pre-order it here.
