There's this old chifforobe in the yard, and I-I said, 'You come in here, boy, and bust up this chifforobe, and I'll give you a nickel.' So he-he come on in the yard and I go in the house to get him the nickel and I turn around, and 'fore I know it, he's on me, and I fought and hollered, but he had me around the neck, and he hit me again and again, and the next thing I knew, Papa was in the room, a-standin' over me, hollerin', 'Who done it, who done it?'

Ack! Ack! It's a sin to kill a mockingbird, a sin I tell you!

Oh my God, help me, quick! I'm being jolted in and out of reality! I don't know what's real anymore. Oh no, here I go again...

Get your stinking paws off me, you damned dirty ape!

We're gonna need a bigger boat!

Wilkommen, bienvenue, welcome in cabaret, au cabaret, to cabaret...

It's getting bad. Anybody know anything about trepanation?

I tell you, the procedure's gotten a bum rap.

It used to be that drilling a hole in someone's head to let evil spirits escape was standard medical practice, but now we use modern, civilized techniques like strapping you down, sticking a rubber butt plug in your mouth, and zapping you repeatedly with 130 volts.

Me? I like trepanation because afterwards, you get to keep the round, 2-inch piece of skull they removed and wear it around your neck. Screw Flavor Flav's clock, who the hell wouldn't rather sport a skull plug medallion?

Besides, chicks who've gotten a burr hole in their skull are a huge turn-on. One more orifice, you know.

The reason I'm looking into cures for madness is because I just bought, for the first time in years, a pile of newsstand bodybuilding magazines and it's like I've seen the Medusa, only I'm being ping-ponged back and forth between madness and relative sanity instead of being turned to stone.

Nah, I didn't lose a prop bet; I just got curious, just wanted to see if paging through the mags could still make me feel the way I used to when I first picked one up years ago.

I used to feel giddy and nervous and anxious at the same time. I'd pretty much drop whatever I was doing and head to the gym to try out some new technique I'd just read about. I'd tear out pictures of the amazing bodies — each different from the other but all incredible — and thumbtack them to the wall. I'd dog ear dozens of pages so I could go back and reference a workout, an exercise, or a diet.

I'd roll up the mag and stick it in my back pocket when I left the house so I could continue reading it while I waited for a bus or in-between bites of lunch.

In short, I used to feel inspired.

But I didn't feel that way when I read through these new magazines. Instead, I feel like the alcoholic Ray Milland in Lost Weekend, only my delirium tremors manifest themselves not as bats but as GH-bloated bodybuilders in a conga line wearing dunce caps.

Why they're congaing, I don't know. Hell, I've gone crazy. You expect me to have rational explanations for my delusions? Oh-oh, here comes another one...

Go ahead; make my day.

Gort, Klaatu Barada Nikto!

Soylent Green is peeh-pul!

I am told you wish to take the gasolene out of the wasteland...

So that's why I started researching the skull-drilling thing. But where, Dr. Freud, should I begin to explain specifically why I went bat-shit crazy?

Granted, the newsstand mags are in a world of hurt. They're besieged by the high cost of paper and Enema Digest probably has more subscribers than any one of the bodybuilding mags.

As such, they have to cater, more than ever, to the supplement companies and their ads. If you removed the ads, the average copy of MuscleMag would be no thicker than one of the pamphlets you get at the clinic warning you about the dangers and heartache of venereal warts.

And that's largely true of all the mags. The line between article and ad is so blurred, the average consumer has no idea whether he's just read an article or an ad. Photos were always a big part of bodybuilding mags, but that's true now more than ever. Too bad the bloated bodies look so much alike.

Sadly, actual programs or informative articles are almost completely gone, and the ones that do appear are little more than window dressing.

The current MuscleMag boasts part 2 of "The Cable Guy," which explains six "new" moves done entirely with cables, including cable skull crushers and cable curls. Whoa, slow down, Harvard!

King Kamali's "secret" to building giant calves is doing the traditional lame workout of 3-4 sets of 1-15 reps of standing calf raises, donkey calf raises, and seated calf raises.

If only you'd known the secret to giant calves was doing the same lame routine any poor schlub who walks into the gym for the first time would instinctively try and keep on trying for years, despite the fact that his calves still look like the Kraft cheese sticks that come wrapped in cellophane!

Some dude named Abbas Khatami lists his favorite bodybuilding recipe, which consists of ground beef, pasta, tomatoes, mushrooms, onion, and tomato sauce. Hmm, I think I recognize that recipe. Seem to remember it from one of my great grandmother Olga Luoma's cookbooks.

Oh yeah, it's called fucking Chef Boyardee!

We're also giving a heap of inspiration by the following quote:

"... going to the gym should be work, hard work. That's why they call it a workout, not a playout!"

Thank you, Deepak. Oh no, here we go again!

You weep for Santiago and you curse the marines. You have that luxury. You have the luxury of not knowing what I know: That Santiago's death, while tragic, probably saved lives. And my existence, while grotesque and incomprehensible to you, saves lives.

Whew! That was a doozy. But back to the subject. MuscleMags' sister mag, Reps, features a Q and A column supposedly by Bob Kennedy. I stopped reading after the first question from some mope in New Orleans who wrote that he was embarrassed about his skinny neck. He wanted to know how to shorten it.

Jesus wept.

Then, similar to MuscleMag, were the chest routines of the stars, all of which varied only slightly from the following routine:

• 5 sets of decline barbell presses, 6 -10 reps
• 4 sets of decline dumbbell presses, 8-10 reps
• 3 sets of cable crossovers, 10-15 reps

Yep, that there's the secret to building a Herculean chest. The same shit done by every lame stockbroker on his lunch break is how you build up your pecs.

Then there are huge ad spreads for various ambiguous products with testimonials similar to the following from an impressive number of professional bodybuilders:

"With Product X, my veins just pop out of my skull and I get an incredible urge to lift a Buick and hump a tree, but not necessarily in that order."

— Beef Jorgenson, the world's most hyperbolic bodybuilder

Is any one alive still stupid enough to believe that any pro bodybuilder achieved his monster-osity through the use of a particular supplement that he didn't have to inject into his striated ass?

Let me tell you a short story. When I ran MuscleMedia 2000, I conducted a little experiment. I called several high-level bodybuilders and asked them to endorse my creatine product, my creatine suppository product.

I called it "Ene-mass."

Sure, shove it up your ass and get 300% quicker delivery of creatine.

They all agreed. Never mind that they'd never tried the product, they felt absolutely no qualms about admitting to the world that they shoved a large creatine suppository up their ass before each training session! And I used to wonder at Bob Dole and Rafael Palmeiro for letting the world in on their erectile dysfunction!

So are you really going to believe that bodybuilders have any integrity at all when it comes to endorsing products?

And since when did bodybuilding mags set the wayback machine to pre-1990 and stop mentioning the existence of steroids?!?

All the mo-fos pictured in the mags are still using hyugge amounts of drugs and there's nary a whisper about drug use! Who are you trying to fool?!?

Next in my stack of mags was the venerable Muscle and Fitness. So remedial was the information in this pile of cellulose pabulum that hardly anything registered with my brain.

I did, however, experience one profound emotion, one epiphany.

I realized I would like to stick my penis in Julie Lohre's butt.

This was prompted by pictures of the little red-shorted vixen doing ass-to-the-grass squats, but such was the degree of her ass-to-the-grassness, so far back was she sticking out her butt, that it looked like her wondrously tight and round gluteal spheres were about to snatch a quarter off the gym floor.

So learning something important like that about yourself is a valuable thing. You can't spit at that, so I'm grateful to them.

Then there's Flex. The mag features much the same generic weight lifting routines described in the other mags, such as the H.U.G.E. Ham Routine, which consists of Romanian dead lifts, lying leg curls, and seated leg curls, each done for roughly 3 sets of 8-10. That's the kind of info you shelled out 7 bucks for!

There's also a revolutionary diet program from Chris Aceto called the "50% Off Fat-Burn Plan."

Here's an example: Say you have 4 slices of bread and 8 egg whites for breakfast. With Aceto's plan, you have 2 slices of bread and 8 egg whites! See? That's like, 2 fewer slices of bread, or for you MIT types out there, 50 percent off! Hence the title of the plan! If I'm lyin' I'm dyin'.

The last magazine in my stack is, get this, blathering on and on about the merits of declawing and how to eliminate fur balls... Hold on. Somehow a copy of my wife's Cat Fancy got stuck in with my bodybuilding mags. Never mind.

Oh-oh...

Made it, Ma. Top of the world!

Open the pod bay doors, HAL.

Say "hello" to my lee-tle friend.

Despite the madness, despite bouncing back and forth between reality and movie reality, I'm glad I looked at those mags. They inadvertently prompted me to a new level of commitment.

I'm now paranoid about getting to the point where, like the newsstand mags, like the vast majority of the websites, we just start phoning it in, where we just start slapping up random assortments of words and calling them articles, all as sad window dressing to supplement ads.

Granted, I believe wholeheartedly in Biotest supplements, but that's beside the point. I'm a journalist and despite thousands of examples to the contrary posed by my colleagues in the world, I've got a responsibility to put out a good, honest, product.

Dan John has said that when you plan on doing something dramatic, whether it's going on a radical diet, training for a meet, or preparing for some contest of strength, tell people about your plan; it makes it real. It compels you to actually carry through with it.

So, in that spirit, I'm going to make a new commitment. Right here, right in front of the world.

We're going to take Testosterone Muscle to the next level. In addition to doing first-class training, diet, and nutrition articles as we have in the past, we want to regularly march out articles in a number of categories.

First, I'd like to reinvent the whole notion of interviews; they shouldn't be love fests with the interviewee. They should be hardball. The late Tim Russert will be our role model. His signature technique was to catch interviewees in a contradiction or lie. To do this, he had to do his homework: read or watch previous interviews with the subject and perhaps interview the subjects' friends or colleagues first in an effort to get information that the interviewee might not readily divulge.

We'll do more undercover reporting in an effort to shine some sunlight on the ugly or crooked side(s) of the business. We'll get out from behind our desks and do real reporting. If it means selling smooth-skinned Nate Green to gay white slavers in order to get a story, we'll do it. If it means Chris Shugart has to get a job waxing the nads and cooters of competitive bodybuilders in order to get the inside scoop, we'll do it.

Likewise, we'll do more consumer reporting to let readers know we're looking out for them. We'll do behind-the-scenes reports to let you know how the supplement industry works, ranging from how Biotest does things to how the rest of the industry does things. The analogy that comes to mind is the old one about sausage: you may enjoy eating it, but you don't necessarily want to know how it's made. Screw that. You should know how it's made.

And we won't give short shrift to underground drugs and supplements. They may be illegal, they may be dangerous, but you deserve to know about them all the same.

Above all, our underlying theme will be to destroy dogma. This industry, unlike almost any other, is infected with myth, fallacy, lies, and downright bad information... and there's no end in sight. We pledge, like Hercules in the stables of Augeias, to clean up the horseshit.

Lastly, we'll strengthen our commitment to Testosterone, not only the website, but the hormone and the philosophy we've wrapped around it; the notion that maleness is good and that masculine virtues are a mighty fine thing that should not only be preserved, but exalted.

And you'll help us. When a Roman general had slain five thousand of the enemy, he was given a "triumph" where he rode on a gold chariot wearing a purple-and-gold tunic and toga, clutching a laurel branch in his right hand and an ivory scepter in his left. But just so the general wouldn't get too full of himself, a slave would ride with him holding a golden crown over his head while reminding him in the midst of his glory that he was a mortal man.

We don't know if we'll need the forced humility, but it's good to have a fail-safe.

Ahh, the madness is gone.