Every* Muscle in My Body 2020

*A lot of the important ones

It’s December, which means it’s time to take stock of my body. For the internet to continue tracking my personal growth it’s important that I provide data that can be empirically judged: on its own, against someone else, against next year’s data, or against last year’s (if you got my 2019 muscle report).

Yes, I’ve decided to keep the intro the same. The parallelism is a stylistic choice, not laziness — and certainly not that I’ve run out of new words or phrases.

My opinion of muscles as a thing is more or less the same. I need them to survive, which most days I want to do, but intricately developed muscles are antithetical to the image I’m trying to create for myself: guy who’s fit enough to survive and can probably run pretty fast asthma permitting, but who places no value in pursuits as vain as having sick muscles, and who is kind of lanky because he’s an intellectual, and intellectuals are either fat or lanky.

Going deeper into that image of what I want — what can be seen and what it says about the parts of me that cannot be seen — the more questions unrelated to the forthcoming semi-nudes I’ll have to answer (i.e. what does leg strength have to do with you being a mercurial, inaccessible quasi-comedian? Why not just go for a run? You might feel better), and I neither want to answer those nor detract from the task at hand, which is analyzing my body as viewable from the eyes of those without access to or my permission to use ingestible or penetrative…