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Ok. There's not a lot of things I know extremely well. But Gym Culture (so-called) is something I'm very familiar with.

Having been a loner gym rat since the early 1980s - not to mention a Certified Personal Trainer for 10 years (a title I kinda wince at now) - I have seen my share of trends, advances in training equipment, the lauding and debunking of certain modalities of training...and the various type of folks who dwell in the gym.

This episode breaks down them down into categories:

The Muscle Dudes (otherwise known as the Roid Droids)

The Know-It-Alls

The Creeps

The Malodorous

This is Part One of what could be a two or three part series.

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You ever wonder why folks engage in small talk? If you're being honest with yourself, is it really that enjoyable?

Standing around, shooting the shit with someone because you feel you should. That makes no sense.

If you don't seriously have the inclination to speak to anyone, it doesn't mean you're anti-social or a misanthrope. You're just comfortable in your own skin, and enjoy the silence. If someone else is visibly uncomfortable because you prefer a cessation of verbal activity, that's not your problem.

This episode salutes our ability to not say a goddamn word if we don't wanna.

For more of The Unemployable Man, please visit the TUM Substack page:

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Ryn Gluckman is the Nursing Director in the ER at Martha’s Vineyard Hospital. During the summer season — thanks in part to “Vacation Brain” — there are a lot of preventable injuries (some pretty horrific).

With more than 18 years’ experience working at off-island hospitals, Ryn has seen her share of “what is, but should never be” when it comes to safety — or the ignorance thereof.

I had her in for a bit of a “post-game analysis” of the goings-on in the emergency room at the island hospital. And while she couldn’t get overly specific (patient confidentiality and all that), she did give a solid snapshot of how too many folks do a disservice to the young ones by not leading by example. Subsequently, there are a fair amount of head injuries and — not surprisingly — alcohol-related trauma.

For more of The Unemployable Man, please visit the TUM Substack page:

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Mostly all of us do it - Put off until tomorrow what ought to be done today. It's The Someday Standard."

Why do we do that? What are we so deathly afraid of? Or, if we're not fearful, we figure there's plenty of time to do...whatever it is you've been dreaming of your whole life.

I'll bet there were a lot of folks in the North and South Towers of the World Trade Center who thought the same thing. I think about those folks every day — literally.

Having said that — and to not only honor ourselves, but those poor souls — let's try to do NOW what we've been sitting on for years.

For more of The Unemployable Man, please visit the TUM Substack page:

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We've all fallen prey to the treadmill... of life. We graduate high school and a lot of us fall lockstep behind one another and traipse off to institutions of higher learning. If we had the ability — or confidence — to truly search our souls back then, we probably wouldn't have done so. Way more than half of us ended up doing something we didn't study for as a lifelong career (and some of us didn't graduate).

Finding our purpose in life sometimes doesn't arrive until retirement age. And that's a wonderful — and not regretful — thing.

For more of The Unemployable Man, please visit the TUM Substack page:

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After a life's worth of hand wringing and trying to be acceptable to, well, EVERYONE - you get a reprieve after you get past 60. You begin to care less about the small stuff. And if you've gone through therapy (as most people ought to - if only to feel more at ease until they get there), you'll wonder why you ever gave a shit about certain people, places and things in the first place.

For more of The Unemployable Man, please visit the TUM Substack page:

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Being a Boomer (or someone on the cusp between Boomer and Generation X), there's a lot of dismissive comments made from the younger folks, and that's fine. But this strutting and preening of generational pride we're seeing on social media has got to stop.

For more of The Unemployable Man, please visit the TUM Substack page:

https://substack.com/@raywhitaker0214