The difference in Gyms

The crowd that hits the Palm Springs World Gym polarizes along three axes: young and old, good dressers and bad dressers, and steroid bunnies and modest. It is kinda spooky actually.

The Bally's in Chicago is a place where pretty much everyone in community goes, more or less, and while there is definitely skew towards the young and gay, there is a continuum of patrons.

Here, there is youth (but no one under the age of 25; I guess they don't make it this far into the desert) and there is the aged (I am not being callous: these guys are 60-80 years old). Kudos to them, I say -- in a weird way, I hope I am still going to the gym when I am 70. However, I do hope that I have better fashion sense than they.

Let's take this opportunity for me to describe my top gym fashion faux pas.
All time #1 with a rocket: tight, short shorts. Bleck (Do not, gentile viewer, be fooled by the hottie in the link - no one ever looks like that in real life.) If your shorts are a perma-wedgie and you can see the outline of Mr. Jones, they are too small. And, like the travesty that is a thong, if you could possibly pull it off you would look so much better is something else.
#2. Strappy Tank-Tops that show off your tits. I am all for a basketball style tank-top, but the ones that are just barely strings of cotton that your boobs poke through. Nope. Again, these fashions are strictly for the lean and muscular which accounts for about 5% of the strappy tank-top wearing crowd. This gets worse when the wearer has excessive hair (esp. back hair) and fat rolls. When in doubt, don't do it.
#3. Excessively patterned clothes.. Again, you make think these camouflage something, but in reality you just look like a Piet Mondrian painting processed in a blender.
#4. Matching ensembles. It is usually combined with one of the offending above -- overly matching isn't bad in and of itself, but combined with something questionable, it amplifies the offense.
#5. Gym wear that isn't meant to be sweat in. Okay, this is not so much a fashion faux pas as it rankles my sense of utility. I see lots of guys (at Bally's they show up in the evening, Palm Springs all day) that wear A&F type pants or fashion shirts that are cool but were never intended to go through a heavy workout. For them, the gym becomes a fashion show, so being too fashionable gets demerits in my book.

Safe gym outfit: Loose fitting cotton t-shirt, baggy shorts that come up 1-4 inches above the knees. Can't go wrong with that.

Anyway, back to the comparison of gyms.
Perhaps it is just this World Gym in Palm Springs, but I have never seen a higher concentration of steroid meatballs. Being really pumped seems to be really in vogue out here, even in the aged. There are guys who would be wrinkled prunes (excess sun damage anyone?) if it weren't for the copious amounts of HGH or other synthetic hormones inflating their muscles.

All in all, I think I like the World Gym out here a little better than my trusty 7th floor Bally's in Chicago. The gym is more modern (machines that work!), clean (machines that aren't gooey!), and lively (machines that face commercial-free music videos with the sound through the sound system!). But alas, WG comes without my homies from Chicago.

I guess they will have to move out here.