The Massage

As I may have mentioned before, my workplace is going through a health kick phase. Each week, we get to meet with a personal health consultant who is, basically, a very enthusiastic, muscle-bound dude named Mace.

In order for me to become healthy, according to Mace, I must eat no more than 23 calories a day and run to Oshkosh Wisconsin and back every morning before work.

This morning, I had to drive to the far west suburb of Aurora and back. (For those of you who don’t know, Aurora is where Wayne’s World takes place. Remember?)

I made it back in time to have a healthy salad of greens and grilled chicken because today is my “Mace day” and I wanted to be all healthy for our consultation.

But today is just not any old Mace day. Today, he’s bringing a massage chair and we each get a 15-minute neck-and-shoulder massage; the kind you see them do at Whole Foods Market.

I hate massages. I really do.

It’s not so much the massage that I don’t like, but it’s that I’m super-ticklish on my ribs. As a matter of fact, I have written documentation of it.

About ten years ago, I was doing a summer internship at a substance abuse treatment center. Each of us was encouraged to participate in all the activities that were inflicted upon the patients as part of our internship.

I had a session of individual counseling and the counselor made me cry within five minutes. (She was good!) I did a couple of hours of the ubiquitous “basket-weaving.”

I even played a game of volleyball which was about the saddest thing you’d ever want to see. Every time I moved forward to hit the ball, I would fall, face down, really hard. Bam! It was so pathetic.

But, I was also subjected to one session of massage therapy; a real massage with your shirt off and massage oil and everything.

I told the therapist that I was really ticklish on my ribs. “Don’t go near the ribs!” was her dire warning.

Of course, every time her hands went anywhere remotely near my "ribular area", I’d leap a couple of feet off the table.

“Boy, you are ticklish,” she said.

I TOLD her I was ticklish. Obviously, she thought I was just making it all up, for her hands kept going where no hands should ever go.

By the end of the session, I was like a cat hanging off the ceiling by its claws.

At the end of my internship, there it was in writing. My evaluation read, “He does not benefit from massage therapy.”

So, I’m going to warn Mace, again, not to go near the ribs. At least if he does, I can throw him out of my office.