The Wind Beneath My Bingo Wings

I had another warm and fuzzy internet moment this week when a reader of this blog – let’s call him Frank – got in contact, observing that my fitness regime seems to be falling by the wayside and offering to help me out. ‘I’d be happy to take you out running,’ he wrote. Obviously, I was a little hesitant. When a strange man writes to you out of the blue offering to get breathless and sweaty with you, you do well to be a little circumspect. So first of all, on Tuesday evening, we met for a drink.

Tall like a tower block and bald like a blade, turns out Frank is actually a rather splendid chap. A splendid chap who happens to have the body of a Greek god. Now I’m not what you'd call a gay man, but I do know a top-notch piece of masculine ass when I see it, and Frank just happens to have a bod to die for. Happily, he didn’t get that bod by chance – that would just be annoying. No, Frank works hard to keep himself in shape, playing football and squash, and going to the gym three times a week without fail.

But there’s more to Frank than just his height, pecs and glabrousness. Here, let me break it down for you.

10 Frank Facts

1. Frank drives a mint condition Lancia Fulvia.

2. Frank wears very expensive suit, but no tie.

3. Frank looks a little like Neil Strauss of The Game fame, but unlike Neil Strauss, he is not a complete tool.

4. Frank gets up at every morning at 6am, meditates for 20 minutes and then prepares breakfast for himself, his wife Emily (beautiful) and his little girl, Abbey (precocious), before driving to work, where before he does anything, he spends an hour pumping his body into a state of masculine perfection in the office gym.

5. Frank has run 12 marathons, including the London marathon last month, which he finished in exactly three and a half hours.

6. When he was 15, Frank became a Satanist and frightened his friends by speaking in tongues and etching an inverted crucifix into his forehead. He is now half-Buddhist, half-Zoroastrian.

7. Frank rarely watches films or reads books because ‘Life’s too short. I could be wind-surfing!’ (Actually, I’m tempted to take back Frank Fact #3.)

8. Frank has six hearts.

9. Frank was born in Bermuda.

10. Frank has a minuscule penis.


OK, this last fact is not literally a fact. It’s actually more idle conjecture, inspired by ugly, ugly envy. (Oh, the heart thing isn’t true either.)

....

So we met again yesterday in Brockwell Park, and we went running together. Now I usually run for just 12 minutes before collapsing. I have a little circuit around the park worked out and I’ve been running that same route for three months now and nothing has changed. It hasn’t got any easier and I haven’t got any quicker. Frank said, ‘It never gets any easier. But you have to push yourself. It’ll still hurt – it’ll hurt more in fact, but the more you do, the further you’ll get, the quicker you’ll recover and the fitter you’ll get.’ We were already running at this point. I had started wheezing, which is customary around the three-minute mark. ‘Today you push yourself,’ he said. And he sped up.

I was in quite a bit of pain by the time we finished, and it took me a little while to recover. I’d definitely run a lot faster than I do on my own. I felt well pushed.

Frank said,’ OK, let’s go.’

I said, ‘I beg your pardon?’, genuinely curious to know what he could possibly mean.

‘One more time around,’ he said. ‘That was just the warm-up. Now you need to start burning some calories.’

I laughed in his face. ‘Ha ha ha.’ Like that.

‘Come on,’ he said, unimpressed, and off he went. I suppose it was a lot to do with pride, which is apparently not a good thing, but I couldn’t just give up. I had to give it a go. So there I was, running again.

Probably around halfway through the second lap, the rain came, hard and cold. It mingled with my sweat and stung my eyes. As I half-ran, half-stumbled along, I found myself grabbing at my sides in an attempt to hold off the stitches which were coming now in gangs, like a girdle of pain. I stopped, bent double, gasping, ‘Stitch. Stitch.’

Frank stopped and said, ‘Catch your breath. Then we’ll carry on.’ He said, ‘Breathe into the stitch. Deep breaths. As deep as you can, and guide that breath to where the stitch is.’

Then I was running again. A minute later, desperate to slump to the wet earth and die, I began to wonder how anyone could possibly run non-stop for three hours. ‘They push themselves,’ said Frank. Whoa, that was odd. Had I said that or just thought it? I looked up at him as we ran. He was looking straight ahead. Did that actually just happen? I thought. Or did I merely imagine it? ‘You merely imagined it,’ said Frank. ‘Keep going. Sprint the last stretch.’

I did as I was told, to the best of my ability.

Lying on my back in the mud, I felt a strange sense of achievement. If I survive this, I thought, I’ll probably end up feeling better for it.

I survived it. And today I can barely walk. My calves are bleating like Christians.

But it feels good. It’s a healthy pain.

....

So as may be obvious by now, Frank is my new hero. He is also my adopted Life Coach. I’ve never had a Life Coach before, as the whole idea is anathema to me, but what the hell. Frank is perfect Life Coach material because he says things like, ‘You can do anything you want to do, be anything you want to be’, and he really seems to mean it.

He means it because he's one of those self-made swine. He was a bank manager in his 20s, but then he got bored, so he changed direction. ‘When I first started out in banks, it was different. Banks were banks in those days and customers were terrified of them. Then it all went soft and people realised they had rights and dignity.’ He spat the last word out like a fishbone that had been trying to choke him.

Frank is either deliberately outrageously amusing, or he really is a ginormous arse. At the moment my money's on the former. But we'll see.

‘Today, technology is the new religion. Still fresh enough, and powerful enough to be feared by the ignorant. So I learned technology. Now I’m a member of the digerati.’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘I’m a digital strategist,’ he said, ‘and I’m one of the best.’

He explained what he actually did. It sounded like marketing to me. And we all know what Bill Hicks said about marketing. ‘No, Stan,’ said Frank. ‘It isn’t marketing. I’m a digital guru.’ He said it like he meant it too, which I really admired, and he even pronounced ‘guru’ so that it chimed not with ‘voodoo’, but with ‘Baloo’. The man has balls of reinforced concrete.

So I asked him, ‘Why did you get in touch with me, Frank?’ And he told me, ‘Because you’re putting yourself out there, you’re trying to make a difference to your life, and I like that. Plus I like what you write. And I think I can help you. And that’s that. Isn’t that what life’s all about?’

I just stared into his steely blue eyes and nodded, like a big breathless simpering gay freak.

(I'm not gay.)

....

Now I find myself seriously considering joining a gym. I’ve always hated the idea, and instinctively loathe the kind of people that go there, considering them horrible, vain, vacuous vermin. Ab rats. I’ve always thought that they have their priorities in life all wrong. But look at Frank. He might not watch as many films as I do, or read as many books, he might work longer hours on the whole and spend 10 hours a week stuck in traffic, but just look at his biceps.

I want biceps like that.

I’m going to look into it.

(Ugh. Tip: never do an image search for 'weightlifter'. Unless of course the sight of giant hernias is what you're into.)

Now I must lie down and eat chocolate. Adios.

The Game #1: The Science of Seduction

So I’ve spent the last couple of weeks reading The Game, and looking into the online pick-up network which inspired it, and I find myself fascinated and repulsed in equal measure.

The Game is a ‘non-fiction’ book about how journalist Neil Strauss went from AFC to PUA, then found an LTR with an HB10.

(AFC = Average Frustrated Chump. PUA = Pick-up Artist. LTR = Long term Relationship. HB10 = Hot Babe with a high rating on the physical appearance scale. Yes, there is an awful lot of jargon in pick-up, and most of it is a little embarrassing.)

So it goes like this: after years of fearing rejection to the point of not even being able to talk to women, Strauss is commissioned to write a piece on America’s burgeoning pick-up community. Consequently he becomes immersed in this world, addicted even. He meets all of the pick-up gurus – including (allegedly) the guy on whom Tom Cruises’s character in Magnolia is based. He learns all of their tricks of the trade – their demonstrations of value, their false time constraints, their peacocking, their NLP games and traps – and basically he becomes transformed into some kind of soulless seduction machine, a kind of bald, ripped, RoboStud.

The Game, also branded by other PUAs as Real Social Dynamics, is basically an attempt to make a science out of seduction. Furthermore, naturally, it is an attempt to make a profit out of that science. The money-making aspect is important. This is not philanthropy, as many of the gurus attempt to imply. It’s business.

Here however, is the part of the book that - despite myself - hooked me:

’When we walked into the dim sum restaurant, I was shocked by what I saw waiting for me. David X was quite possibly the ugliest PUA I’d ever met… He was immense, balding, and toadlike, with warts covering his face and the voice of a hundred thousand cigarette packs.’

That was the point I thought, OK, maybe I can give this a go. Maybe it’s time I got Game.

So.

Apparently - because the Game is all about manipulation through deception - the first thing I need is a name that is not my own. A seduction name. A pulling name. Strauss is told early on in the book, ‘It’s not lying. It’s flirting.’ It’s something he repeats to himself every now and then, usually before he tells some great big horrible lie. ‘It’s not lying,’ he says. ‘It’s flirting.’ No, it’s not, Neil. It’s lying. And you know it.

Just as I know, of course, that I’m never going to be able to do it. Certainly not to the extent that the various characters in the book do it. Not to the extent whereby the attempted seduction of a woman becomes instinct, an habitual reaction to seeing an HB in the street. (Sorry. If it’s any consolation, every time I use the expression ‘HB’, a little bit of sick gets stuck in my throat.)

However, there is definitely a lot I can learn from The Game. Most of it’s fairly obvious stuff that only a moron wouldn’t already know of course: look good, feel good, learn a few magic tricks to make yourself look good. But there’s some other stuff too, stuff about learning routines and patterns – basically all the rather dodgy neuro-linguistic programming stuff used by magicians and shysters and conmen the world over. In seduction circles, we’re talking trance words, triangular gazing, the Yes Ladder, and so on. I could use some of that.

But first, yes, a name. Ideally it has to be something that makes you cringe every time you say it. Neil Strauss for example, became Style. The guy who took him under his wing and guided him deep into the seduction community - Eric von Markovik - became Mystery. Some of the other names of main players in the community are: Vision, Papa, Herbal, Rasputin, the Matador of Love… You get the idea. I would say it’s one step above McLovin’, but I’m not so sure it is.

So. Despair? Bulk? The Matador of Cellulite? OK, OK, I’m not trying, I know. What about Presence? Seriously. I reckon I could get away with that. I can see it now…

HB10: ‘So what’s your name, big fella?’

Presence: ‘Me? They call me Presence.’

HB10: ‘Wow. You’re making me horny.’

Presence: ‘Yep. That’s what I do.'

Next step I think a little background reading. A bit of NLP, some magic tricks, a book of openers and routines maybe. Or else of course, I could just grow the fuck up and get on with my life...

Meh.

Of course I’m already doing what I can to improve my physical appearance. The diet is already in full swing and going well, stomach cramps and bad breath aside. And the exercise routine is picking up. I ran twice over the weekend, and I even did about half of a home-gym workout from the execrable Men’s Health magazine.

And tomorrow, tomorrow I’m going to have a haircut.

My main concern with The Game and the whole science of pick-up thing is that a) it’s practised by morons, b) you’d have to be a sad and desperate, at least slightly misogynistic moron to even consider it, and c) the only way this would work on any women is if she happens to be a moron.

But I guess the only way to know for sure is to actually try it.

So what I need to do is actually start talking to women – in real life I mean. I should force myself to talk to as many non-virtual female strangers as possible so that I am no longer afraid of rejection. That's what Style did at the beginning.

I need to get to the point whereby when I approach a woman and open my mouth to speak, my heart isn’t beating like Lee Chapman in my chest.

The Spring then. Before or after the speed-dating, I'm going ‘in field’, I'm taking some Game-style techniques with me and I'm talking to women.

And then when I’m swimming in HB sauce, getting more ass than Beth Ditto’s knickers, I’ll have Neil Strauss to thank.

Kill me now.