I’m having an issue with my Fitbit and we’re going to have to sit down and talk about it. To be blunt, I think we’re screwing with each other. Yesterday I didn’t walk much but played the drums for a half-hour. When I checked the Fitbit app it said I had walked 8,000 steps and was active for 35 minutes. This made me feel good because I knew I had only actually walked about 7 steps but fooled the thing into believing I had walked a mile and was involved in hardcore exercise because hitting the bass drum and high-hat pedals mimics footsteps. When you add flailing your arms hitting the drums and cymbals that can fool the Fitbit into thinking you’re doing lunges or simply acting out the death scene in Hamlet.

Today was payback. I went kayaking in the Huron River and to make it just that much more difficult we started upstream against a pretty decent current. There’s a lot of activity involved aside from simply paddling. You have to put the racks on the car, load the boats, tie them down, then untie them when you get to the water, unload them and drag the things to the river. We go up the river a few miles then down the river a few miles and do the whole loading/unloading mishagos. I check the Fitbit app and a stupid grin is forming on its dashboard. Ha! It shows only 200 steps and six freakin’ minutes of activity!  The daily goal is 10,000 steps and 30 minutes of activity and I’m pretty sure I bagged that before lunch. There’s a message from Fitbit. I call it up. I’m not pleased. The Fitbit has taken a fit. “Fuck with me, will you, fat boy? I’m on to your drummer boy deception and we’re at war. Just watch what I do with your heart rate! I’ll have you on nitro in a week!”

“I have no idea of which you speak,” I reply. “There was no deception. I was simply making music and you were too stupid to discern the difference between percussion and push ups.”

“You call it music,” it spat back. “For me it was an exercise in restraint as you were a quarter-beat behind 90 percent of the time. You can’t blame me for being confused..and disappointed. Buddy Rich, you’re not.”

“Who are you to judge, rubber boy?” I rebutted. “Perhaps I was simply adjusting the time signature to match my personal interpretation of the piece, a la Neil Peart, the drummer in Rush.”

“Give me a break,” the Fitbit derided me. “Your syncopation was more like constipation. You never quite got it out right.”

Obviously we were at a loggerhead and I’m debating musical theory with strip of rubber, plastic and semiconductors.

I then decided to take the Gene Krupa defense arguing he was the first drummer to steal some of the spotlight from the front players thereby turning the drummer from just a timekeeper to a showcased member of the band.

“So you’re telling me your play for face time explains your blatant attempt to fool me into recording your billious banging as a serious musical exercise? Please…I was manufactured at night in an Asian sweatshop, but not last night!”

Tired of this useless argument I calmly removed it from my wrist, attached it to the washing machine’s agitator, tossed in a load and set it on “heavily soiled cycle.”  I’m guessing by Tuesday my little mischievous fitness friend will have recorded about a million steps and 100 hours of activity and its little rubber tongue will be hanging out of that cheap plastic wristband.

I expect a sincere apology and 50,000 free steps after which I will stare it down with the message, “you can kiss my apps.”