On going viral

About a month ago, I went viral. It was the first day of a three-day heat wave in New York, and I had just completed a Cross Fit hero workout—a twenty-one-minute partner AMRAP of rowing, lateral burpees, and power cleans. I had my pump on, as the gym bros say, and was nice and sweaty. Last year I posted half a dozen shirtless selfies on Instagram, but I hadn’t yet posted any this summer, and it seemed time. Not least because I was going to be turning fifty-nine in a couple of weeks, and one likes to flex a little, in such a circumstance, as a matter of compensation. In the plate glass entrance next-door to the gym, I took a pic of my reflection. For a caption, I wrote, “Why work out when it’s 102 if you’re not going to post a thirst trap afterwards?” “He’s not wrong,” the curators of my gym’s Instagram account commented, in sharing my post. I chuckled and biked home. By the time I got there, the post was doing numbers that may not have been enormous by influencer standards but were…