Bench Pressing the Bureaucracy

By the time we get to Chapter 3 in Jordan Castro’s Muscle Man, we get the sense that its protagonist English professor and aspiring bodybuilder Harold is having a sort of mental breakdown. His disconnection from colleagues and students alike has caused him to retreat into his self-created bodybuilding ecosystem where he soothes himself with fitness apps, macros, and hypertrophic training phases. In this regard, Harold is following the footsteps of Samuel Wilson Fussell’s descent into madness, acute anxiety, and misanthropic paranoia, which was chronicled in Fussell’s 1991 memoir Muscle: Confessions of an Unlikely Bodybuilder.  

In Harold’s case, department meetings are particularly odious and affect him like kryptonite. After a meeting, his gym workouts are like purgations of the silly meeting indoctrination and in his best workouts he exorcises the academia demons from his system and enjoys temporary relief before returning to the academic hellscape. 

Part of the hellscape is the constant flow of campus emails informing him of “investigations” and “alerts” for a myriad of on-campus crimes. Violence, theft, random deaths, and perversion is chronicled in these emails so that the campus is less of an academic institution and more of an abandoned bus stop in the Land of Nowhere.

To add to the absurdity, Harold receives follow-up emails about violent crimes on campus that use the violence as an opportunity to explore systemic causes of violence and “to consider new ways of thinking about how we might better relate to and understand one another.” 

The students’ illiterate emails add to the hellscape. The students never ask for ways to improve their work. Rather, they demand higher grades in typo-laden emails that contain no punctuation or coherent sentence structure.

Harold is inundated with a flood of thousands of emails that overwhelm him and expose the fact there is no such thing as free time, but a life imprisoned to bureaucratic thought manifest in a deluge of meaningless and absurd emails that demand attention and guarantee that your life will be squandered and rendered into nihilism. 

The campus is less an educational sanctuary and more of a manifestation of comedian George Carlin’s famous observation that when you’re born, you get a free front-row ticket to the freak show. 

For Harold, that freak show has all the bruising force of a compound fracture. His only painkiller is the gym: the curling bar as Percocet, the glute bridge as Prozac. Without the dumbbell’s cold salvation, Harold would drown in the bureaucratic sewage of his academic nightmare.