For the past year or so, I've been making a concerted effort to not get in worse shape. Some people make resolutions to actually get in better shape, but mine was more simple and straightforward — I'd like to simply maintain my present condition without deteriorating any further than I have so far. I am in fairly pathetic shape for a 51-year-old, but if I just maintain this level of fitness, in 10 or 15 years, I will have improved my ranking relative to my peer group. If I can hold the line, I will be one rocking 75 year old.

As part of that effort, I've joined the local "Y". I use the weight machines at lunch and run on the treadmill and every once in a while get on those machines that seem to be 50 percent stair climbing, 50 percent cross country skiing and 100 percent awkward.

I am not, by nature, athletic. In high school, I ran track for a half a season in tenth grade, but gave up right before a particularly hard track meet. (I was not missed by the team. They didn't get additional points, and were sometimes ridiculed, for having a kid who came in dead last but still had to be brought a glass of water and wet towel for his forehead at the end of the half -mile run. They probably debated sending me a thank-you note when I failed to show.)

So I approached the idea of the gym with a little bit of trepidation. There are two kinds of people there: people who want to get some exercise and then quietly go home, and people (actually, just men) who see the gym as performance art. They strut around like trained bears and grunt, loudly, with every lift. Quite often, they wear handkerchiefs on their heads and rip the sleeves off their sweatshirts to make sure you can see how big their biceps are getting.

My main problem, however, has been with the locker room. I had to use a locker room in middle school, where a gym teacher stood by and verified that we all took the mandatory showers after gym class. (I don't think it had anything to do with gym itself, and was more community housekeeping chore. Middle schoolers, like dogs, need to be washed on a regular basis or they start to attract bugs.) But it was an unpleasant experience, and I can't say for certain, but I think the gym teacher did not have orders to watch us as closely as he did. I swear once or twice I saw him wink. After that experience, I've avoided locker rooms at all costs.

If the locker room was uncomfortable in middle school, it's much, much worse when it's packed with men old enough to be a father, or even a grandfather, to a middle-schooler. There are a number of guys who seem to spend more time strolling around au naturale than they do working out. Some, I suspect, don't even exercise — I swear they come just to air out a little.

One rule every middle-aged man should know — should have imprinted on their brains — is that pretty much no one, probably not even your wife, wants to see you naked all that much. I think at the beginning of time, when our first ancestors invented clothing, it wasn't to keep warm, it was to cover up some fellow cave-dweller guy who had reached middle age but was stumping around the neighborhood completely naked. They were covering up an eyesore.

I realize that you're going to run into a certain amount of nakedness in a locker room, and I accept that. I just think that it should be kept to a minimum. It should follow the rules of trash night. You're allowed to put your cans out the afternoon of trash night, but you need to take them back inside the very next day. If your cans are hanging out there for a whole day before, or after, trash night, and the people across the street have to look at them more than is absolutely necessary, you're just being a bad neighbor.

In the locker room, nakedness should be kept to the amount of time it takes to change your clothes. If you travel more than four feet with no clothes on, you should be called on it. If you're going to use the sauna, or the steam room, or even brush your teeth, you should have a towel around the parts of you that would get you arrested if you were to stroll down the driveway to take out your trash.

Because nobody really wants to see your cans, dude.

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