Report from Gymnasium Pandemica

Taking a break for safety's sake

Welcome and précis

Sundman figures it out! is an autobiographical meditation, in the spirit of Michel de Montaigne, of a 71 year old guy who lives with his wife in a falling-down house on a dirt road on Martha’s Vineyard that dead-ends into a nature preserve.

Incidents, preoccupations, themes and hobbyhorses appear, fade and reappear at irregular intervals. If you like this essay, I suggest checking out a few from the archives. These things are all interconnected.

Regular readers of this gazette have surely noted that my most recent posts have been darker than usual. There’s a lot of scary things going on these days in the world that you and I share, and also a lot of scary things going on in my own private world. Today I’m stepping back a bit from that. In this essay I’m not going to name the scariest things that are most on my mind these days, the worries that wake me in the middle of the night. Instead I offer a story of another scary time, a little more than four years ago, and a project I undertook to help me get through it. Maybe you’ll find some hope in it. I do.

After the updates in the section below, this post is just a photo essay about the backyard gym that I built when Covid hit and the weight room in the loft above the apparatus bay at the Tisbury firehouse, where I had regularly exercised for years, was closed.

Three updates

For those of you who’ve been following my son’s health situation, which I introduced in my Toxoplasmosis, my Pazuzu posts: Jake’s eye surgery has been postponed until November 18. He is still at a rehabilitation facility on Cape Cod where he’s getting physical and occupational therapy. He is slowly regaining the ability to walk, but it’s looking to be a long road back to where he was just a few months ago.

For those of you wondering if I’ll ever produce my long-promised new editions of my existing books, plus the new novel Mountain of Devils (the prequel to both Acts of the Apostles and Biodigital): I’m doing my best to get the new editions of the old books ready for sale (and shipped to founding supporters of Sundman figures it out! and long-suffering backers of Creation Science) before Christmas, with Mountain of Devils to follow in early 2025.

For those of you curious about The Desired Effect, my podcast about ‘science, science fiction, literature and technology,’ which I announced a couple of months ago: It’s in the works. There is a learning curve. I’ve made a few false steps, but progress behind the scenes is real. In addition to interviews with writers and scientists that I recorded years ago (Cory Doctorow, George Church, Nicole Galland, several others) which I am re-editing, I have recently recorded interviews with Ken MacLeod, Brooke Binkowski, Lucian Truscott and Dave Karpf, and I have more interviews scheduled. You can expect the first episodes of The Desired Effect to post Real Soon Now.

A shed of one’s own

In 2017 I hired Lou, the guy for whom I’d been a common laborer at building sites all over Martha’s Vineyard off and on for twenty-some years whenever I couldn’t find better-paying work, such as managing an information architecture group for a fucked-up Kendall Square startup or writing bafflegab about crypto, to build a big shed in my back yard. Lou had been my boss when I personally popped the dot-com bubble and destroyed the new economy back in 1999 by working on the cursed house that a dot-com billionaire built on land which he probably should have left alone, and when I crawled on my belly like a reptile under Carly Simon’s house.

To save money I told Lou not to bother shingling the walls or roof of the battleship-sized building by the edge of the woods behind my house, saying I would do that myself. But one thing led to another and the unsightly shed sat unfinished for the next two years, wrapped in tyvek.

When I wrote the check to Lou for building this shed I put the words ‘brick shit-house’ in the memo field. He built the thing to withstand a nuclear exchange. The weathered post sticking out of the ground is one of two that had been in the yard for decades; they once framed a garden gate and were impossible to remove.

Breaking ground in the uncertainty of the plague

I had retired from firefighting in November 2017 but I still had privileges at the firehouse weight room, and I worked out there a lot until Covid came along and everything shut down.

In those early months of 2020, as Covid-19 spread like wildfire across the land, there were still no known cases on Martha’s Vineyard. For many weeks we were an outlier of health, and sometimes I even convinced myself that the water around our island would be some kind of magic moat, that we would remain untouched by the contagion.

But meanwhile, of course, we were all on pins and needles. Sources of masks and gloves were closely guarded secrets, like the best places to find bonita or bluefish biting in early October when the the annual fishing derby was on. My trips to the grocery store every ten days or so — bundled and masked, wearing latex gloves — were scarier than any building on fire I had ever walked into in my firefighting days. When I got home with the groceries I carried them onto our front porch and cleaned everything with clorox wipes, then scrubbed myself in the outdoor shower before bringing anything into the house. It didn’t help that my wife Betty has a PhD in the genetics of viruses, and that rumors about this virus was freaking her out.

In February and March of 2020, when so much was still unknown about this terrifying new disease, and when the internet was full of reports of morgues overflowing in Milan, Paris, Saigon, Pretoria, Sao Paolo, and New York — and even in Boston, only 75 miles away — I found myself lying in bed at night next to my wife the quondam virologist, trying to imagine how I could build, on the cheap, someplace where I could continue exercising. I would just need a platform on which to do pushups or lift dumbbells, and someplace to attach some latex resistance bands, and a beam or a bar from which to hang a heavy punching bag and other gear.

There was a pile of lumber in my back yard that had been sitting under tarps for two years — overbuys from the shed project. For several nights in a row I fell asleep figuring out how to best use it. A plan took shape in my dreams. One fine morning I sketched it out on a piece of paper. Assuming that the new plague didn’t get me, by the time the migrating birds retuned to Martha’s Vineyard from their winter homes in Venezuela and the first daffodils were poking out of the earth I’d be back in some kind of exercise routine. Maybe that would help me keep from thinking about The Masque of the Red Death around the clock.

On March 23, 2020, I broke ground on what was to become Gymnasium Pandemica. The air was cold.

Devs, jigsaw puzzles, tips for the guy who delivers the beer.

Over the next few weeks the new annex to the shed took shape as Betty and I, like pretty much every other person on earth, I expect, tried to find a new rhythm, tried to figure it out, tried to learn how to exist in the context of all in which we lived and what came before us.

Every morning, over coffee, Betty and I worked an hour or more on one of a succession of jigsaw puzzles: Planets of our solar system. Boats on a canal in Amsterdam, at dusk. Still life with fruit and garish flowers.

We watched Netflix in the evenings. Our Market delivered beer once a week; I tipped the driver extravagantly.

The first Netflix series we watched was the creepy-cool quantum-computer-hacking superimposed-realities show Devs. Betty liked it, but thought it was almost too disturbing to watch. Who writes this kind of creepy shit? she wondered. After that we watched Unorthodox and Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul and Transatlantic and a bunch of others. (Every once in a while I’d get an email from a friend: “Hey John, have you watched Devs? It reminds me of your books! Totally creepy!”)

It was still not known if a vaccine to protect against this virus was even possible. Lee Fierro, the actress who portrayed the grieving Mrs. Kinter in Jaws, and who was a friend of my wife, succumbed to Covid in early April. Although Lee was not living on the Vineyard anymore, we felt her loss as one of ours. At some point — I think it may have been as late as June — word came of the first cases at Martha’s Vineyard Hospital. A much beloved island grocery-store owner and philanthropist, stricken by covid, was taken by helicopter to Boston where he spent weeks teetering on the edge; it was front page news when he returned here, much weaker that he had been before, but very much alive.

Meanwhile, in Washington, the ignoramus Trump suggested that injecting bleach might be a good way of combatting the disease (while he himself got the most advanced care available on Planet Earth when he became infected), and New Age cranks, conspiracy mongers and Evangelical preachers brought about the needless suffering of millions of people, and the deaths of hundreds of thousands, with their antivax nonsense, secure in their arrogance that they knew better than the people who had devoted their lives to the difficult discipline of studying virology, epidemiology, immunology, medicine, and the like — thousands of whom had died, giving the last full measure of devotion, trying to save their fellow humans from this terrible thing.

Time

I finally got around to putting asphalt shingles on the roof of the shed, and then to covering the walls with cedar shakes. In the evenings I resumed my workouts. At the firehouse I had used free weights and machines, and I liked that a lot, but I discovered that now I liked exercising with resistance band even more. I bought a red punching bag and filled it with water and at the conclusion of each day’s session I took out my fears, frustration and anger on it. This one’s for you, Mitch Fucking McConnell. Smack, jab, cross. How do you like that one, Betsy Fucking DeVos? Left-right-left. How about you, Jared? How’d you like an uppercut?

Time passed. One daughter and her children came to live with us for a while; our other daughter got married in a Rotterdam courtroom during the lockdown: bride; groom, judge, and one friend who served as witness and photographer. Our first three grandchildren got older and a fourth grandchild arrived.

Betty had four spinal fusion surgeries, each one followed by a stay in a rehabilitation facility. The first operation was successful; the others, alas, not so much.

One evening during an imaginary encounter with some antivax dipshit I managed to hit the red punching bag so hard that it burst. Although that bag was a month out of warranty the good folks at Title Boxing gave me full credit towards a new, larger black one. I built a little ‘mini-me’ shed to the side of the Gymnasium to keep workout gear: boxing gloves, handles for doing pushups, sand bags, a weighted vest, lots of resistance bands. . .

As a surprise for Betty, while she was experiencing one of her several grueling recoveries from back surgery at a rehabilitation hospital on Cape Cod, I dug out the sign from The Elephant’s Child, the children’s book and toy store which she had had to close when we moved from Gardner to Silicon Valley in 1993. Betty had long since forgotten that we still even had that sign.

Biden got elected, Trump’s first attempt at a fascist coup failed, a smidgeon of normalcy returned to America. Gymnasium Pandemica entered maintenance mode. I put down a new layer of plywood on top of the first floor (which I had pieced together using scrap), but I didn’t seal it well enough and after two years the plies began to separate, so I put down another layer, and this time I painted and sealed it well. I purchased a set of ‘battle ropes,’ and over a few months wore a muddy groove in the yard where the grass had been. So I made a little patio of sorts with fieldstone and some cement bricks made at Goodale’s quarry, just a mile down the road from my house.

So here we are

Betty and I got our most recent vaccinations last month: Covid, flu, RSV. It’s routine now.

Not counting the starting lumber (which was already paid for) I estimate my financial investment in Gymnasium Pandemica, including lumber, paint, screws, nails, caulk, patio bricks and workout gear has been about $750. I use my little gym 12 months of the year, although, much more in the spring, summer and fall than in the winter. I’ve done hundreds of workouts there. I count that $750 as money well spent.

Sometimes, even, on rare occasions — perhaps five times each year — when I feel a big thought coming on, I purchase a cigar and a bottle of La Fin du Monde from Jim’s Package Store in Oak Bluffs, bring a flimsy porch chair with a seat of woven plastic plaits to the back edge of the platform facing the woods of Brightwood Park. I pop the cork off that bottle, light that cigar, sit back in my chair and attempt to commune with the universe.

You recall from your 8th grade French class, of course, that “La Fin du Monde” means “The end of the world.” Which is a good name for a beer that you’re drinking while thinking about such things.

And sometimes I find myself thinking of those early, scary covid months with a kind of weird nostalgia, when it was just me and Betty hanging out, doing jigsaw puzzles, binge-watching TV together every night.

As is yours, my life is full of many worries, and at times the challenges feel insurmountable. My many responsibilities keep me from spending the time I would like to spend on my John Sundman, Famous Author project. But I said at the outset of this post that I wasn’t going to name my worries in this essay, so I’ll leave it at that. But if you ever felt like upgrading to ‘paid,’ I’m just say’n.

It would probably be better for my health if I cut out the beer and cigars altogether, but I know for sure that if hadn’t built my little shed annex I’d be in a lot worse shape than I am.

I sign off wishing you good health, with a photo that I took today, Saturday, October 26, 2024.

I never managed to get those two gate-posts out of the ground. I just cut them off at about 8 inches and built the steps around them.

Cheerio!