ATOMIC DOG
Back to the Future Redux
by TC

Let me tell you something, if I woke up tomorrow morning to find myself transformed into Jay Cutler, Lee Priest, or any other modern-day professional bodybuilder, I'd let out a scream. Not just any scream mind you, but a Godfather-bloody-horsehead-in-the-bed scream.

Given my druthers, I'd prefer to wake up to find myself transformed into a "monstrous vermin" with six legs like that dude in the Franz Kafka short story.

Fuck that.

And if it did happen, if I did wake up looking like the rendering of a comic book artist on acid, I'd start de-training right away. I'd get up, slowly, as to not cause my grossly over enlarged heart to explode all over the linoleum, sit myself down in front of the TV, click on Nick at Night, and stay put until some of that excess muscle catabolized itself.

I guess you can tell that I find today's professional bodybuilder to be an example of wretched excess, but yet I'm editor of a website about bodybuilding. Yeah, yeah, the irony's so thick you can hack at it with a machete. I don't care.

You know what else is ironic? The fact the vast majority of women find the average professional bodybuilder to be repulsive. They'd sooner give it up to fish-breath Gollum:

We wants it! We wants it, we needs it. Must have the precious!

There isn't a professional bodybuilder alive who's had a woman throw her panties at him while he was on stage, unless perhaps she was trying to inflict harm and it contained a tampon or something else unpleasant to give it some heft.

And yet a lot of these guys on stage started lifting weights so they'd be more attractive to women!

I don't know about you, but I'm here to get laid, not once, twice, or even three times, but as often as humanly possible without interfering too much with other necessities of life, like the occasional meal. So, if the majority of women don't like physiques that are examples of wretched excess, neither do I.

That's not to say I don't like the aesthetics of muscle. I do, I surely do. But I yearn for a gentler, saner time. I yearn for Arnold in his prime in the seventies, or Frank Zane, who's often decried by today's fans as "anorexic."

I yearn for the time when bodybuilders had personalities, distinct looks and charisma up the wazoo. I yearn for the time when bodybuilders took a little deca and a little d-bol instead of Costco-sized tubs of assorted androgens.

Then and now.

It was nice to know that these guys could actually run down the street and catch a 20-yard pass without having to gob on Vaseline to prevent their chafe-prone thighs from igniting and starting a small forest fire; without having to warm up and stretch for several minutes so their hamstrings wouldn't rip from the sudden stress; to know their heart rates could approach 200 beats per minute and they wouldn't die of exhaustion like West Virginia steel-driving man John Henry when he went up against a steam-powered drill.

And it's not just the current state of bodybuilding that's gotten me so nostalgic about the past; it's the current state of a lot of things.

Screw it, it doesn't even have to be the seventies; take me back to the eighties. Bodybuilders of that time were still within the realm of the unrepugnant, so the eighties will do just fine.

Tell you what, let's fire up the nuclear-powered DeLorean, dial in 1984, and let's go back in time. When I hear 99 Luftballoons coming over the airwaves, I'll know I'm home.

This was a time before the Internet, before people could simply address an email to me and type, "Dear TC, Blow me," and hit send. Why, back then, you'd have to get the typewriter out of the closet, put in some lilac scented paper, type "Dear TC, Blow me," and then address an envelope, attach a stamp to it, and walk to the mailbox. When someone took the time to do all that just to tell you to blow them, by Jove it meant something!

This was a time where you could go into a gym and actually fail to trip over a goddam Bosu ball, before sons of bitches like Paul Chek and Lorne Greenberg had every housewife in America training to be circus seals.

Back then you had maybe three workouts that everybody did. You had HIT, 3 sets of 8, and pyramid training. You didn't have to cover your floor and walls with thousands of workouts and complex diagrams so that your room looked like Russell Crowe's garage in A Beautiful Mind.

You could buy a copy of a bodybuilding mag back then without feeling like someone who had to register with the police department as a sexual deviant. You could actually buy a mag that showed a guy on the cover lifting weights!

Think that's rare? Take a look at the current sorry-ass collection of mags on the newsstand. Take a look at the guy on the cover of the current issue of MuscleMag and tell me he's not taking a leak into the ocean.

Heaven help us.

If you were a fat bastard, it was your fault; it wasn't because of stress and it wasn't because McDonald's failed to put warnings on every gut bomb it churned out. Furthermore, nobody gave a damn if you were fat! The world wasn't filled with self-appointed diet messiahs whose mission on earth was to turn you into a David Beckham clone.

In the eighties, even politics were simpler. You knew what the hell Democrats and Republicans stood for and if your side didn't win an election, nobody much gave a shit because you could pretty much wake up every morning confident that the world hadn't changed overnight.

This was a time you could go swimming in a relatively unpolluted ocean without being forced to play German U-Boat commander, your body being the sub and the floating turds being mines.

Sex was uncomplicated. Girls didn't have to scrub my penis with a wire brush and some bleach before sex, and not once did one want me to put on a raincoat, and I'm not talking about prophylactics, either, but miniature yellow slickers with little galoshes for my balls and a yellow cap for the head of my penis. Yep, girls weren't so kinky back then.

And speaking of sex, girls didn't shave their pubes into landing strips in the eighties. They had big, glorious bushes. Sure, sure, I know 9-11 changed all that and girls have to shave those suckers off to give the terrorists one less place to hide, but still I miss those big, rollickin' hydrangea-like bushes that smelled like springtime.

I mean if you're going to shave your pubes into a landing strip, you might as well put in other facilities like a Cinnabon and a gift shop and a control tower to warn you when another penis is on the runway.

Abort! Abort!

Ah, who am I kidding? The truth is, I much prefer the world of today, genital warts and all. I know damn well I'd miss a whole lot of things if I really could go back in time, things like satellite TV, computers, Blu-Ray DVD's, thongs and boy shorts, sucralose, low-carb foods, Dexter, nose hair trimmers, Adriana Lima, good-tasting protein powders, and some pretty cool supplements.

I also know, despite my protests, I'd miss Testosterone and a lot of the training knowledge we have today. And I really do like those deforested landing strips. So, maybe I will get back into the DeLorean, fire up the flux capacitor, and get back to the future.

I do wish, though, that we could bring back yesterday's idea of bodybuilding, that being an activity that was designed to enhance maleness rather than turn a man into a gross caricature of it.

The orginal version of this article was first posted on September 17^th, 2004.

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