What the HELL is wrong with old men?

Get in the WAY BACK MACHINE and let's go back to December 3rd, a week before I tore my quad.  The last cross race of the season had taken place and I was able to pull off the ultimate coup by giving my wife a surprise 40th birthday party and having it actually be a surprise.  That night at the party, a good friend, the Chef, who helped me pull off this coup, and I had made plans to start swimming laps in the mornings before work at the swim center.  Maybe it was the beer talking, maybe I hurt my head in my crash at the cross race earlier that day, I don't know why that seemed like a good idea, but I was committed and come Monday morning we were going swimming.

Monday morning comes and the Chef and I roll to the swim center and we're in the water by 5:30.  Did I mention that the Chef was/is a swimmer?  No?  Well, he is.  He's a fucking fish.  I'm more akin to a manatee or a walrus, moving slowly but methodically through the water.  That first morning I was able to eek out 10 laps or so with a LOT of breaks.  I think the Chef peeled off 20 laps.  This morning there were a few other guys in the pool swimming laps and the Chef and I were the youngest people in the pool BY FAR, and this will be a very important fact soon.

The only shot of Gimli you'd ever care to see...

So, the plan was to go for somewhere around a half an hour so we can get cleaned up and off to our respective duties for the day.  Around 6 am, we roll out of the pool and head to the locker room.  When you walk into these locker rooms there's a small hallway for a few feet, then you turn right where a swim suit dryer and the showers are.  Past those are the lockers, where we need to go.  As we enter the locker room, I turn the corner to find a man, looking somewhat like Gimli from Lord of the rings, standing there BUTT-ASSED-NAKED with his swim suit in the dryer, standing full-monty looking straight at us.  What the hell?  And let me tell you something, this "dryer" just is like your washing machine on spin cycle, so imagine the jiggling and shaking going on while this head dwarf dries his suit out.  Fucking disturbing.  But I think it is just an anomaly.  Boy, was I wrong.

I think you get the visual...

After this first week, my quad injury happened, so I was out of the pool for a few weeks.  Once I got back to the pool, I found out that Gimli was the rule and NOT the exception for this geriatric exhibitionist behavior.

Gimli was there in his round bellied, naked glory, but it didn't stop there.  There's this other guy, we call Galapagos, who spends an inordinate amount of time washing, um, well, himself, if you know what I mean.  (He's called Galapagos 'cause, well, it's like a tortoise head sticking out.)  Then to round out the group, there is Cannonball.  He's one of those cats that has one eye that looks one way and one that looks the other like Dr. Nikolas Van Helsing in Cannonball run.  He's that guy that wears "aqua socks" into the pool.  He doesn't swim laps, but just walks through the Lazy River with the water walkers.  He likes to stroll around the locker room with nothing on but his aqua socks, his man-meat hanging down like an empty sausage casing. 

From these descriptions, you might think I like to look at this nonsense, but nothing could be further from the truth.  It is just so blatant, in your face nudity that even if you try to NOT look, you can't avoid it.  I've asked around at what age does this happen to men?  (And from accounts from the women's locker room, there are a bunch of grey-beards running around naked in there too.)  General consenus is 67 years old, which means I've got another 27'ish years until I start running around locker rooms in a full on naked-manatee glory.  Which also means you've got a 1/4 century to prepare yourself.

(Michael McIntyre says it WAY better than I do.  It is simultaneously reassuring and disturbing that this happens everywhere, not just here.)