A local man, Howard Purvis, who has out-sourced his sense of self-worth to social media, has been struggling to find a gym with the right lighting. He is after what he describes as, ‘lighting so flattering that it could make Marty Morrissey look like, well, someone else.”
Mr. Purvis has said that neither price, nor the facilities on offer are a factor in his decision and that all he wants is “some lighting deceptive enough to add a bit of polish to this turd,” at this he points to his own face, “For my Instagram”.
He said that he had originally been a member of a gym that met all of his basic lighting needs, however, he had to leave after an unfortunate misunderstanding. “I’ve always had problems with all that ‘gym lingo’. So, I thought I’d buy me a guide to gym terminologies. I got one from this dodgy second-hand book store and, well, it turned out to be a glossary book of homosexual slang from the 1960’s.”
At this, Mr. Purvis gestured to a book, the cover of which bore an image of a muscular and shirtless man under the title ‘How To Spot The Beefy Boys‘. He continued, “Thing is though, the stuff in this made about as much sense to me as what they actually say to each other in the gym, so I didn’t realise. Things took a turn after I asked this other fella if he could, well, I now know what I wanted to say was ‘spot’ me, but what I ended up asking was ‘Could you take me on a tour of the chunk zone, hunkasaurus’. Anyway, security was promptly called and they notified me that my membership would be annulled, so I’m back on the gym hunt.”
Also from the author of ‘How To Spot Beefy Boys’
Mr. Purvis’ friends agree that, for his own well-being, he needs to find a new suitable gym, and soon. Ian Spatchcock, a friend of Mr. Purvis’, described how, without a gym and the allure of ‘gym selfies’ as motivation for keeping trim, Mr. Purvis had for a while “been packing in calories like an animal preparing for hibernation.”
“He said that he was just using one of those fish-eye filters over all his selfies now,” said Ian Spatchcock in an exclusive interview, “But we knew. You could tell he wasn’t. It was all him. To be fair to him though, recently, he’s been trying every diet there is: ‘The No Thursday Diet’ where he skips meals on a Thursday; ‘The Only Thursday Diet’ where he only eats meals on a Thursday; ‘The Kevin Diet’ where he only eats animals that were named ‘Kevin’ and, god, loads of others, ‘The Gulag Diet’… I think he even dabbled with bulimia but he said that his fingers always tasted slightly funny, no matter how many times he tried washing his hands, so he packed that in. I hope he finds somewhere he’s happy with.”
When it was put to Mr. Purvis that perhaps he should be seeking to get fit for his own benefit and well-being rather than purely in the interests of the image he wishes to project to the world, he demurred. “The people wanna see this and they wanna see it looking well,” he declared, pointing at his torso.
“I need to be in the gym. My body is a temple. And the gym is my church and- although… are temples bigger than churches? Would a temple fit inside a church?… maybe the gym’s a… cathedral? And my body’s umm, maybe one of those like multi-faith prayer rooms you sometimes see at airports… So, my body’s a prayer room which is inside a cathedral that also doubles as a gym?… Please god tell me you aren’t going to publish any of that are you?”.
Yes we are Mr. Purvis, yes we are.
Rory McNab