Old Men in Hot Tubs

The gross thing is...

sometimes the old men really look like this.

Once in a while, I'm awkward.

This morning I decided to relax at the gym and sit in the hot tub. There were two old men in the hot tub. It's only a little weird to share the water with them...there's rarely a time the hot tub doesn't have old men in it. When I got in, I focused on the bubbles in front of me and tried to daydream about owning a beautiful house. I finally succeeded when one the of the men's voices broke into my reverie and asked "What's your general take on the world?"

What?

I said "Oh, you're talking to me?" to kind of save myself in case they thought I was shyly eavesdropping. I faltered a bit.

"I...love the world." (oh dear).

"Yeah?"

"Yeah. I love life. That's about as general as I can get." (Did I really just say that?)

Then the other old man said "Well, as I always say, it's better to see than to view! chuckle chuckle Otherwise it's too permanent! chuckle chuckle."

The other man chuckled, too.

I'm sorry, I must have missed something. I just smiled and looked back at the bubbles. In my defense, I'd thought in my half-listening-trying-not-to that they were talking about riding horses, not politics (or whatever it was). Although it was hard to imagine them on horses. Especially the first man because his stomach was so expansive it got enormous before it reached his belly button. And it was so round and smooth, like he was pregnant. It was both hard to look away and hard to look at it.

I felt very young and weird.

After they left, I did a couple lazy laps in the pool, keeping my hair dry. When I got back into the hot tub, the bubbles were gone, but so were any old men, so I readied myself for some pleasant dreamhouse decorating when an old man came up, turned on the bubbles and got in. There goes my dreamhouse! We small-talked...I don't like small talk. I'd rather be quiet. But I obliged, and we talked about how it can be nice to have family in town or something like that. He guessed my age too, which was kind of weird.

Finally he left. I lazed through more laps and then really enjoyed some lonely minutes in the sauna.