Whoa. What a menacing name, right? I know you can just feel your knees a-quakin’ just thinking about what exactly is an Vlad the Destroyer. Tremble with fear, peasant, for you are about to make the acquaintance of one of the most feared, most loathsome, most despised, and most irredeemably wicked of fitness torture devices ever thought up by the fitness gods or devils.

But first….

NEW FITNESS TOWELS!!!!

hospitablizing your fitness

I am a member of an elite club. A club that only the finest members of society are accepted into. A club that is so exclusive, that even most people I know are not members. What high society organization is this, you may ask? It is called Amazon Prime, and I probably should not even utter its name here in a public forum, for fear that the Elders may come and whisk me away to be flailed with hot possum tails.

Amazon Prime allows its members, much like the Freemasons, certain advantages. The main one is exclusive deals on hot products like Martex Hospitality Hand Towels. Besides a sweet deal, the esteemed members of Amazon Prime also receive FREE 2-day shipping. It is truly a miracle.

See, the JFZ, while I do enjoy it more often than not, does not provide its members with towels for personal use, like drying off the taint region. The JFZ is not an ancient secret society like Amazon Prime, and it apparently cannot afford luxuries like this to just pass around willy-nilly as though they were jujyfruits.

Unlike a lot of guys, I genuinely love a new towel. The feel (soft, but still just the tiniest bit abrasive), the smell (the new towel smell is almost as recognizable as the new car smell. and it’s definitely easier to acquire), and the overall cleanliness just make me want to get that new towel and put it over my head and pretend that I am Lawrence of Arabia… or at least Clark Griswold in the desert scene of Vacation! where he has his pants on his head. When I was a kid, I’d take towels and put them in my bed to sleep with and wallow about on.

As I got older, the lure of fresh terry cloth waned, but I still like it. The tactile sensations that I thought were so amazing as a kid have been replaced with things like booties, beer, and…. some other B word… …. ummmm….. garbanzo beans.

Still, I like to have a nice little towel to take to the gym to use ot wipe off my sweaty brow and neck, and to wipe down the whirly bird. And it must be a little towel also. You never see someone come (ghost)busting up in the gym with their big Harley Davidson beach towel. Why? Easy. A large towel is a hazard. The large towel must be stored somewhere whilst fitnessing, otherwise you’d hafta have it draped all over the whirly B like some sort of…. drapes or something. Then you might trip on it and hurt yourself and be forced to sue the JFZ outta business. Then where would we be? At the Y or some other beefcake gym, that’s where. A place where us wildebeests would truly be impotent against our enemies.

These towels came in the mail because I used my Amazon Prime membership privileges. At first, while browsing Amazon, I typed in “fitness towels”. Right after the complimentary beejer that comes with Prime membership, it displayed a list of overpriced towels with pictures of Hardbodies on their labels. These types of specialized equipment are targeted at dumbass stay-at-home moms who feel like, since it says “fitness towel” on the label and has a Hardbody on it, that it will somehow help them to lose more weight and look better than us shmoes who must “make do” with just the standard white Martex Brand Hospitality Hand Towels. It’s like the people who useta think a pair of Air Jordans or Pumps would magically make them able to dunky a basketball into the hoop-a-doop.

The specialized fitness towels were priced the same for one that I paid for about ten of my new favorite towels (sorry, Typhoon Lagoon towel). Plus, it’s ALWAYS fun to get a package in the mail. Gifts from myself, to myself. I love myself.

Ok, so…. drumroll please…

It is my pleasure to introduce my personal trainer and Grand Inquisitor….

Vlad the Destroyer!!!!!!!

(I wanted to put an audio file right here for you to play as you were reading this, but I can’t seem to upload music from my computer. I think you hafta pay extra for that. Anyway, crank your speakers up, click the link below, let it open in a new window so you can listen to it while I describe Vlad the Inimitable)

VLAD’S ENTRANCE MUSIC

VLAD, DESTROYER OF SOULS AND MUSCLES

Yes, Vlad is a kettlebell. But not just any kettlebell!!! Vlad is an official RKC kettlebell, and that means that he was born of fire and iron and sweat and blood and the lamentations of the women. I’ll get into how, exactly, Vlad does his dirty work of whooping your flabby, pale, xbox live ass into hard sinewy death at a later date. I really just wanted to introduce him and tell you a little about his history and how he came to reside in my home and in the hole that he left when he decimated my mortal soul.

Vlad came to me all the way from Russia (I am going to resist a Yakov Smirnoff joke here. send me a piece of gum in the mail if you appreciate that) in a heavy-duty box mailed to me by Odin from the Halls of Valhalla. Or at least that’s what I thought at first. In fact, Vlad came to me via a wealthy philanthropist friend of mine who was more than a tad interested in seeing me get into rock-hard shape. He was packaged with various materials meant to instruct my mind on how to fitness properly with him and not tear myself in half in the process or chuck Vlad through the teevee.

I pulled him out of the box and closely examined his strong, masculine features. My first thought was, “Holy shit, a cannonball with a handle.” Which is pretty much what kettlebells are. My second thought was that this was not something made for metrosexual fitness guys. This was something that was intended for use by Viking warriors, Popeye the Sailor Man, and those Russian guys with handlebar moustaches who are all upperbody and look like an upside-down triangle (on the flipside of that, I currently resemble a mushy upside down apple). Like guys who look like this:

Comrade, your weakness sickens me.

Since Vlad was so obviously a commie russkie bastard, I figured I should name him something vaguely-Russian sounding, especially since we were about to be such close pals and all. If not Russian, at least Eastern European. I quickly scanned my room and saw this guy hanging on the wall.

Vlad the Impaler

Surely a distant cousin, right? Even though Vlad the Impaler was from Romania, he had one thing in common with his future descendant… they both enjoy torturing their victims to death. Where as Dracula may have impaled his victims to death, Vlad the Destroyer tears their muscles to shreds inside their bodies. In Capitalist America, kettlebell throws you. (sorry, couldn’t help that one. feel free to cancel the gum.)

Here’s a family portrait:

the two Vlads, together again for the first time

Somehow their enemy, Punkin Puss, slipped up behind them and photobombed the dogshit out of them. Big Bobber, the floating cooler, just happened to be walking by and looked up at just the right moment, but Punkin Puss did it on purpose. Shame on you, Punkin Puss, you should know better. For that, you will have your guts removed and your shell carved into a grotesque face.

Do people even still collect these McFarlane toys? I never really got into them too much (though I do have this entire line. 6 Faces of Madness or something like that. Real-life killer-dillers like Vlad and Jack da Ripper). I think these things useta be a really big deal amongst Dragon*Con types, but it seems they have fallen from grace or something.

Tomorrow we will put Vlad to work. Or rather, Vlad and his mystery partner-in-crime will rip us a new one.