Searching for Gold’s Gym While Life Sends Me to Radiology

Last night I dreamed I lost everything that usually pretends to be me. I woke up on the grass of a high school football field wearing only gray gym shorts and an empty wallet—no phone, no keys, no biography. From there I drifted into a wealthy Los Angeles neighborhood and became a kind of genteel vagrant, squatting in rich people’s basements and back cottages in exchange for handyman work. I had no idea how I knew what I was doing, but in the dream I somehow inherited the skills of an Italian drywall contractor I once knew as a teenager. My one obsession was finding Gold’s Gym, which in this fevered geography had become a holy site—Oz, Mecca, and Lourdes rolled into one. The belief was simple and insane: if I could just work out there, I would be saved.

I never reached the gym. Instead, I wandered through mansions, luxury malls, and restaurants dripping with spectacle—giant half-naked fashion models leering from every surface like pagan idols of commerce. The excess depressed me. All that gloss, all that money, and not a shred of peace. I didn’t want the riches. I didn’t want the scenery. I just wanted enough handyman gigs to scrape together the cash to hire a guide—some benevolent Virgil—to lead me to the sacred weight room. In the dream’s logic, salvation required a spotter for the bench press and the squat rack.

Then I woke up and reality delivered its own sermon. My left shoulder—the one recently diagnosed with a torn rotator cuff—was throbbing like a bad memory. I shuffled through the morning ritual: steel-cut oats, coffee, three ibuprofen, email. There it was—my doctor recommending an MRI and a steroid shot. So I did what every rational modern patient does: I watched YouTube videos of people being fed into MRI machines like cautious astronauts. The claustrophobia hit immediately. That narrow tube might as well have been a coffin with better lighting. I thought, there is absolutely no way I’m volunteering for this kind of psychological hostage situation. Surgery isn’t even on the table—so why stage a horror movie? I’ll pass on the MRI. I’ll take the steroid shot. I’ll stick with the practical mercy of pain relief.