Cardio Rehab Car Thoughts And Imagined Treadmill Disasters: Cold Start

So, for those of you interested in a position stalking me, you should be aware that on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, at the unreasonable hour of 7 am, I have to go to Cardio Rehab, all because my aorta exploded a few months back. Cardio Rehab is basically just normal cardio-based exercise but they have doctors around and they have you hooked up to sensors while you’re doing it, and it’s in a special section of the hospital-run gym that I think has a big sign above it for the normal gym-goers that reads something like WARNING: AREA FULL OF GEEZERS WHAT MIGHT DIE or something like that. Anyway, since I’m so bad about doing these Cold Starts the night before, I often try to think of what I may want to write about while I’m there. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it ends up like today, where I have some dumb car and other thoughts and decide to share them with you. Lucky you!

The big car-related thing that caught my eye was this early 2000s Jeep Grand Cherokee in the parking lot, positioned just right behind a fire hydrant that it reminded me of something. The position of the hydrant right in front of the headlight – which we know are the eyes of the car, of course – reminded me of something very specific. A periscope! It looks just like that Grand Cherokee is a submarine commander, peering through a periscope, assessing the conditions on the surface, lurking, waiting to arise!

You see it too, don’t you? Look up top there again. Or should I repeat the picture so you don’t have to scroll? Why not, those bytes are already hanging around in your cache memory as it is, after all:

Man, that totally looks like it’s looking through a periscope. Though I also noticed something else as I walked towards it – you can also read the round cover of the hydrant as an alternate headlight design, so if you’re curious how this generation of Grand Cherokee would have looked with big, round lights, that big round hydrant cover kind of gives you an idea, which I’ll duplicate for you on the other side:

Hmm, not bad! I left some red hydrant-metal trim around the edges just for fun, but that’s not necessary. I also like the idea of Jeep selling a car so tough it had manually-removable cast-iron screw-on headlight covers, just like that. Anyway, customizers, take note!

Oh, one other car thing:

This was a car parked next to me, a relatively modern car. Look at all the door handle-area scratches! This is extremely common, which makes me wonder why carmakers haven’t given much of a shit about this issue? Some cars do have little plastic inserts there to absorb the damage of scratchy fingers, but they rarely look that great.

Surely designers can accept that this is a Thing That Happens to cars, and design some integrated, more elegant solution that more gracefully deals with this kind of damage?  This feels like a solvable problem, and a worthy challenge.

Okay, one last, car-unrelated thing, though it does involve wheels and motors. It involves treadmills. So, for this cardio rehab thing, part of it is on a treadmill. When I get on the treadmill, I like to imagine the worst possible disaster that can happen on the treadmill, but in, you know, a funny way.

I think the ideal way to get flung off the treadmill is this: it would start with one of the therapists who work there approaching me as I start on the treadmill and asking if I need any help connecting the safety doohickey or whatever, and maybe suggesting I start at an easy pace. I’d respond like an absolute dickhead, because that’s what’s needed to make the soon-too-come disaster really satisfying, snidely saying something like um, I think I know what I’m doing, thanks, but in a really dickish way.

Then – and I think this is key – I’d crank everything up way too high before hitting the start button. I’m not even sure this is possible on the treadmill, but I think for this to work well, that’s what I’d want. Make a big show of setting a high speed, and then hitting START.

Immediately upon hitting start, I’d get flung backward off the treadmill at a fantastic speed. Vwooooosh!

Ideally, my little white earbuds would linger and rotate in the air where my head was before dropping to the ground. Within mere seconds there would be a colossal SMACK sound, and everyone would turn around to the large glass wall that separates Cardio Rehab from the Normal People gym areas. I’m not even certain that wall exists, but I’d like it there for this.

I’d be splayed out on the glass like one of those rubber octopus toys that dentists give to kids, sticky rubbery things you fling at walls and they slowly tumble down. In my case, I’d slowly slide down the glass, accompanied by some loud squeaking sounds, my face smushed up against the glass, eventually falling the last three feet or so to collapse, heavily, into a heap at the base of the wall.

The people in the gym would have been watching this, silently, and once I hit ground, after a pause, they’d all turn back around, turn their music back on, and ignore the panting heap on the gym floor.

Maybe I’d pee myself then? Is that too much?