Exercise

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Whatever.

Well, it’s Monday, the beginning of the first full week of April in 2023.  I walked to the train today.  This was not out of any cross-training notion or related goal.  Rather, it was a consequence of something that happened on Saturday.

When I arrived at my destination train station after work on Saturday, walked to where my new bike was double-locked to the bike rack right at the main entrance of that train station, and where people are coming and going and waiting for trains all day on the platform, I found that my bike seat had been stolen, post and all.  Since I am nowhere near good enough a rider to bike back to the house in a standing pedaling posture, I had to walk the bike back to the house on Saturday evening.

So, that’s that.  I give up.  I’m not going to get a new seat or anything; just flush the money I spent on the bike down the toilet, and good riddance to it.  I’ve mentioned before that I don’t like relying on external, physical mechanisms, because worrying about maintaining them makes me tremendously stressed out.  Well, that was true, and this whole debacle has driven that point home.

I don’t mind relying on my computer only because computers are so comparatively easy to replace nowadays, and the information in not solely locally saved but is online in various senses.  If all of that goes haywire, the problems will be very large scale indeed, and personal irritation and inconvenience would probably be only a minor part of the situation.

Anyway, I’m writing this on the train now—not the first or second train of the day, but still one earlier than I would have caught if I had taken the bus to the other train station.  I’ve already walked five miles, so that’s good exercise, at least.  I have a new spandex knee brace on my left knee, because that knee has been given me some trouble with all the walking.  I think the brace is doing me some good, so far, but I’ll know better at the end of the day.

I don’t really see too much point in trying to avoid pain.  I’m never going to be able to avoid it, anyway, and my attempts to do so seem often just to trigger worse pain of new kinds.  Not that I think I deserve any better, but pain does get in the way of some things.

There’s only one way to escape pain completely.

I’m trying to read and listen to some heartening books and/or podcasts and so on, but it’s getting harder and harder for me to find books or podcasts or blog posts—or shows or videos or anything else—that are interesting.  The world basically feels like a wasteland; it’s dry and barren and dusty and dismal and as far as the eye can see—my eye, anyway, and its paired partner—there is no source of life, no oasis, no water or food.

It’s not even particularly hot or cold; that would make it more interesting than it is.  It’s just stupid and pointless, and so am I.  I’ve failed at all the things that matter the most to me in the world, and at many things that matter less.  I’m no good at taking care of myself, and frankly, I don’t feel motivated to try.  I’m just eroding and decaying and cracking into bits, slowly but inevitably.

I should be angry about having my bike seat stolen.  I’m mostly just discouraged and fatigued.  Not but what I think whoever did it should be punished, though I doubt they ever will be.  I sometimes think I would gladly kill the person who took it if I could do so without any chance of facing legal consequences.  I recognize that it would be out of proportion to the specific action, of course, but little, petty thefts like these undermine the very substance of civilization, and lead people like me steadily and inexorably closer to despair, and for what?  Someone gets a new bike seat for which they didn’t have to pay.  Maybe they pawned it for a small amount of money and used that to buy drugs or alcohol.  If the former, I can at least hope that they got something laced with enough fentanyl to kill them.

I probably wouldn’t kill such a person even if I could get away with it, to be honest.  I have very strong impulse control, and as I think I’ve said before, I don’t think I have any right not to be uncomfortable.  The inability to feel self-righteous prevents a lot of terrible deeds in the world, I think.  So many atrocities are committed by people who believe they are good and are doing good, or doing right, or think they are justly vengeful because they think have been wronged in some real, important way.  And so they will wrong others, propagating cycles of cruelty and revenge and malice.  It’s pathetic.

The world is a shithole, and there are fewer and fewer things in it that make up for that fact for me.  But it’s not as though I deserve anything better.  I give up.  I’m not going to try to improve or grow or entertain any possibility of reclaiming or rebuilding my life.  The Second Law of Thermodynamics always wins, anyway.  It always will.  I’m tired.  I’m tired of trying.  I’m just about out of gas.  And the week is only just starting.

weird wasteland

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Socket to me!

Well, my socket wrench set was delivered yesterday—actually, it was delivered less than an hour after I left the house, apparently, while I was still en route to the train station—and when I got back to the house last night, after my eleven plus total miles of walking*, I opened up that set, found the right wrench head, and tightened the seat down tighter than Cameron Frye from Ferris Beuller’s Day Off**.

So, this morning, as I rode to the train, I felt not a budge in the seat, which is nice, because it’s not as though I’m the too-skinny kid I was in high school and college anymore.  I’m nearly two of him.  Hopefully all this walking and biking will make one (or even both, I’m not picky) of those people disappear.

It’s somewhat amusing just how tight and thick and heavy one’s legs feel at the end of a mere five mile bike ride when one has not been biking regularly for a long time.  Also, now that it’s the next day, I can feel that my walking yesterday caused my left knee to play up a bit, which is a relatively new irritation that I know is caused by walking because it started to come out well before I got the bike, and was not noticeably aggravated earlier this week when I rode.

I suspect the left knee problem is at least partly related to the right ankle problem I have, which no doubt leads me to walk slightly asymmetrically, favoring the right leg a bit at the expense of the left knee.  These things would probably all be much less difficult if I were as skinny now as I was in high school or college; the extra weight is clearly not going to help the load-bearing joints.  At least biking, being low-impact, will mitigate that somewhat.  Hopefully.

It does, of course, trigger lots of little, new pains, which are irritating surprises layered on top of the old, two-decades-long pain that comes attached to me every day.  It would be so nice and lovely if I were able to find a way not to have that pain, or at least to have less of it.  It would also be nice if I were able to get rid of some of the weight that is surely part of triggering my new pains.

I have definitely lost some weight—I know this because I’ve had to go up two belt holes just since this year began.  I nonetheless still feel like a tremendous, hulking burden, one that I am forced to drag around.  Believe me, I am not worth the effort.  I’m not something I’d feel the need to bring with me on vacation if I could only choose to leave me behind.  I certainly wouldn’t want to pay to check myself as luggage.  I’d rather take the attitude of, “Well, if I need it when I get where I’m going, I can always pick one up locally”.

Wouldn’t it be nice if we could do that?  Maybe it’s just me.

What I really need to do is find a way to stop using eating as a form of “stimming”, which is really kind of the way I approach it.  I almost never actually feel hungry, and when I do, ironically, it doesn’t seem to drive me to want to eat.  It’s actually just kind of an odd, curious sensation in my stomach and abdomen and less so in the rest of my body.  It’s not entirely unpleasant; it’s a sharp, alert kind of feeling, and I rather like it.  Whereas, when I eat, I almost never feel truly gratified or even sated afterwards.  I usually just feel groggy—less sharp, less alert, more fatigued, and even sleepy***.

Ah, well.  There’s only so much I can do all at once to change the nature of reality itself.

In the meantime, at least tomorrow morning, I’ll be able to get up and leave a bit later than I have lately and yet still should be able to get on the first weekend train of the day rather than the second, and get to the office in time to relax a bit before everyone else arrives.  Maybe I’ll even play some guitar.

Ha ha ha ha haaa!  That was a good one.  I’m kidding, of course.  I doubt that I’ll ever play guitar again for the rest of my life, which will hopefully not be very long, anyway.  It’s not like I have anything left of importance to do.  I’d like to lose some weight before I die, just so that the last memory of me won’t be of quite the monstrous state in which I currently find myself.  I’m working on it, and I’m making progress, so wish me luck.

In the meantime, I’ll continue to write these blog posts, including one for tomorrow, since I am working tomorrow.  That is not an April Fool’s joke.  I hate April Fool’s Day.  It’s such an irritating “holiday”.  I hate pranks in general, and I despise people who play them, or at least I despise the behavior of people who play them.  I would gladly disintegrate any person who carries out a mean-spirited prank on such days, and would consider myself to have done right.

Oh, well.  Maybe more on that tomorrow.

socket wrench

*Which did not give me any new blisters, and which only caused modest aching in my feet, but which had collectively taken more than three hours of my day.

**This is the character about whom Ferris said, “If you shoved a lump of coal up his ass, in two weeks you’d have a diamond.”

***This can help me fall asleep at night, but it doesn’t last long, unfortunately, and it contributes to reflux, so I don’t recommend it in general.

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Like a beard without a grizzle, like a steak without a sizzle; rider in the drizzle

Well, it’s Wednesday morning again, and I’m comparatively upbeat today, as I’m pleased to inform you and I suspect you’ll be glad to learn.  After much effort, some WD-40, and the helpful supplying of a wire coat-hanger by my coworker, I was able to get the seat post out of the frame of my new bike, and with the help of my boss and another coworker—one who does a fair amount of biking—I was able to get my new bicycle together and ready to ride.

I rode it to the train last night, and then from the station to the house, with a mild, modest drizzle pleasantly dampening the way for a bit.  That latter portion is about five miles, as I’ve said before, but on the bike it took me just over half an hour, rather than an hour and a half.  That’s decent speed for my first time riding any bike in many years, and it’s also what it took me this morning in the other direction.  It got me to the train station in time to catch the train that I used to ride back when I took speedier—yet less healthy—means to get there.

Even though I’ve been walking as much as twelve miles a day, and so my endurance is pretty good, biking is a different experience.  I suppose that’s pretty obvious, but still, coming into it is something of a surprise.  It’s clear that, on roads at least, to bike is much more efficient than to walk, and one can cover the same ground with much less expenditure of energy.  But I would definitely estimate that, while it took about a third as long, I doubt that it burned only a third as many calories.

Maybe it’s because my riding is inefficient, but my legs definitely felt the more intense expenditure that riding entails, and my breath definitely came much more rapidly than when I walk, which is a very good biological indicator of the rate of energy expenditure.  The buildup of carbon dioxide is the primary driver of respiration*, so I am producing it much more quickly when biking than when walking.  This is good, I suppose; it will improve my conditioning.

But boy, I feel it in my buttocks; I feel it in my legs**.

Still, there is, as hoped, less joint pain associated so far with biking than there was with walking, and that is huge.  I need to make a few minor bike adjustments, I think, before too long, but it’s not bad overall.  I have some issues with bike seats—when the seats are high enough to, supposedly, make pedaling more efficient, I find myself feeling very awkward, because my feet don’t easily reach the ground.  Maybe that’s just a function of me not feeling all that secure on a bicycle; my coordination is not superb, especially when my legs are fatigued.  Already, I’ve nearly overbalanced at least twice already while getting off the bike, because my legs felt quite heavy and recalcitrant when standing after pedaling.

Presumably, I’ll adapt to this, and may then find it easier to raise the bicycle seat.  We shall see.  I don’t particularly like having to worry about maintenance and adjustment of the bicycle—that’s one of the reasons I haven’t had one, and why I don’t even feel the desire to drive a car or even my scooter.  Such things not only don’t tend to stick in my mind, but they actively stress me out to the point of causing me literally to bang my head against walls.  A bicycle is more straightforward, though, and in south Florida, there are many bike shops about, since people ride all year round***.

Well, we’ll see how things go over the next several days and possibly weeks.  I suspect my legs will strengthen, and my short-term, higher intensity endurance will improve.  In any case, my available time will grow.  Last night, I got back to the house while it was still light out, and not just because the daylight is lengthening.  I arrived almost an hour earlier than usual, and that happened this morning again.

I doubt it will work very long as a boost to my mood, but maybe I’ll be pleasantly surprised.  I don’t think it’s likely to push things in the other direction, do you?

No, I didn’t think so.

bike newer changes

*Not the need for oxygen, as you might suspect.  With normally functioning lungs, in typical Earth atmosphere, oxygen is basically in a constant, fairly good supply for the body.  It’s the carbon dioxide that has to be blown out, both because, as a waste product, it pushes back the equilibrium of metabolism if it remains, and also because, in the blood, it partly links with water and dissociates a hydrogen atom, becoming carbonic acid, decreasing the pH of the blood, which interferes with many functions.  In a person with working lungs (and kidneys) this pH drop never happens to any detectable level; the body is too good at regulating it, and the drive to blow off carbon dioxide is powerful indeed.  However, in people with rather severe chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, their hypercapnic drive can be markedly blunted by chronic inefficiency, with the kidneys taking up some of the slack.  In these patients, the respiratory drive can be shifted toward being oxygen-driven, and that creates a serious catch-22 for them, since they often need more oxygen than they can get readily from the air, but supplemental oxygen blunts their distorted respiratory drive, and they can rapidly go into respiratory acidosis.

**The original, but wisely discarded, opening lyrics to Love is all around.

***Interesting side note—when I first tried to write “round” in that sentence, I initially typed “young”, which is not conceptually much like the word “round” at all, but does have the same three middle letters.  The first and last letters are not even quite next to the correct ones on the keyboard, though they are in similar relation.  I’ve made typos like this before.  It seems that my brain encodes, or indexes, words that I type by the overall shape of the word at some level, with the middle letters dominating.  I wouldn’t have thought that, but then again, I don’t think I would have thought anything else, either.

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Move along; there’s nothing left to see. Just a body. Nothing left to see.

Well, it’s Tuesday morning now, and I’m writing this while already at the office, because I didn’t leave last night.  I should have gone to the house on my new bicycle and ridden it to the train this morning, but unfortunately, there were snags.

First of all, the bicycle was delivered after our normal business hours.  Amazon allows us to put time constraints into the delivery instructions, and we have done so, so it would be nice if they attended to them and made sure to get things to their destinations during delivery hours, especially when they are expensive items.  I waited around after work for it arrive.  Then, unboxing it, I saw that it wasn’t technically the color I had ordered, but it wasn’t too far off, so that didn’t bother me all that much.

Then, after reading all the way through the instructions once before beginning, I then began to reread and do the necessary assembly.  However, the bike seat post clamp, or whatever it’s called, turned out not to be the kind actually described in the instructions, and as I was realizing that there was no slot in mine for an Allen key, I fumbled about and the seat post slipped and fell down into the frame of the bike.

It fell deep down.  And though it slid in quite easily, somehow, it does not slide out nearly as readily.  Indeed, it doesn’t seem to want to slide out at all, not even a millimeter.  The company’s website just recommends turning the thing upside down and using a rubber mallet or something similar to hammer at the base until the post falls out.  It hasn’t budged so far.

This is a problem that has been occurring frequently for some time, apparently—there are complaints or inquiries on their site going back three years and more—yet there has been no such simple preventative fix as to, for instance, put some kind of barrier in the structure so the post can’t slip past its top into the frame.

Of course, if I had put the seat on the post first, this wouldn’t have happened, but the instructions tell you to put the post in first.  I’m not sure why.  I’m not sure if there is a reason.  This does, apparently, occur often enough that people in YouTube videos advise putting the seats on first.

It’s maddening.  Anyway, I was working on the stupid thing, trying to figure out how to dislodge it, until far too late to catch the last train back toward the house.  So, I “slept” on the floor in the office again.  I just wanted to have the bike to ride home; it was the first thing to which I’ve looked forward in I don’t know how long.  My coworker said it’s literally the first time in 2023 I’ve said there was something I was anticipating positively.  He’s probably right.

Also, yesterday we missed another potential palindromic number sequence in our recording numbers for verifications.  Don’t worry about the specifics too much, just know that I decided that, if one would come up before too long a time had passed, I would take it as a message from the universe* to try to decide to live.  But the chance passed, yet again, not to my surprise.

And this last Saturday was the “anniversary” of the destruction of the One Ring in The Lord of the Rings.  I wish I had just killed myself then, as I considered doing.  I’m so frustrated.  I haven’t been able to get anything right in I don’t know how long.  Like the song True Love Waits says, “I’m not living.  I’m just killing time.”

And time is killing me, but it’s doing it too damned slowly.  I’m tired and I’m in pain and I’m trying not to give in, but it’s so much effort, and there’s no fucking payoff.  Am I just staying alive today so that I can just stay alive again tomorrow, then the next day and the next week and the next month and the next year…just staying alive because people think that’s what you’re supposed to do, and biology builds those drives into everyone?  What is the point?  I hate myself, anyway, and all that I’ve become.

Oh, and in case you’ve recently joined the readership of this blog, you should know, this isn’t about the bike, per se.  I mean, the bike is frustrating because it was an instance of me trying to do something proactive and positive, and then via fumbling, stupid mistakes I made it go wrong and made it more frustrating than it ought to be.

It’s not that I don’t think I can fix the problem.  Obviously, I can fix the problem.  I just don’t want to have to fix the stupid problem.  I’m tired of fixing problems.  I’m tired of effort, of trying to achieve…well, anything at all.  I feel like my life has been a constant attempt to build a sandcastle while the tide is coming in.  Oh, and there’s a hurricane coming.  And I don’t have any tools.  And the sand is basically really gravel.  But mainly, I’m just rotten at it, and I don’t seem to be getting better over time; rather, I am getting worse.

Oh, well, enough melodrama.  Sorry, everyone.  I really ought just to bring the show to a close.  It’s pathetic.  We’ll see, I guess.

distortedbike

*Though I don’t actually believe the universe sends messages; it’s just a conceit, a sort of reverse Russian Roulette.

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Dreary is as dreary does, as we say in…well, nowhere. But it’s true nonetheless

Well, it’s Monday morning again, and I’m sitting now at the train station.  I seem to be getting in better shape.  Though I left at the same time as usual, I’ve arrived at the station in time for the train earlier than I usually catch—only to hear the announcement that this particular train has been cancelled.  That means I’ll be catching the next one, which is likely to be more crowded because of the cancellation of the prior one (and I really hate crowds) though there seem to be rather few people waiting at the station than usual.

It’s not an auspicious way to begin the week, though I suppose an optimist might think that it’s likely only to improve from here.  I am not an optimist, however.  Maybe I used to be, but I’m not one now.

Anyway, I’m on my way in to the office, one way or another.  The blisters that had formed on my feet when I wore the shoes that I’ve since thrown away have mostly resolved, or are on their way out, and they certainly didn’t trouble me on my walk this morning, though my right ankle is twinging.

That’s my old injury from college, acting up.  Ithaca, New York, it turns out, can be a perilous place to play an aggressive game of catch, because the land is hilly and irregular, and if all your weight comes down on your right foot after it’s reached an unexpected dip in the ground, well…let’s just say that when it happened to me, it made a sound that my friend, with whom I was playing catch, heard from where he was, quite a ways away.  We thought my ankle might be broken, but it was just a very bad sprain.

Of course, student health was partway up Libe Slope, so it was good that I had friends back then to help me hobble up.

Today my new bicycle is supposed to arrive, so I don’t expect to be walking back from the train station this evening, but rather to be riding.  I’m sure there will be at least some minor soreness related to using a bike for the fist time in nearly a decade, but at least it’s low impact exercise, and I’ll gain some time back from my walking.

I’m still listening to The Lord of the Rings as I walk, though I also listen to some podcasts sometimes.  This morning I heard the entire chapters relating Merry’s and Pippin’s meeting of Treebeard, all the way to and through the end of the Entmoot, and on into the beginning of the next chapter, to just before Aragorn, Legolas, and Gimli meet “the White Rider”.  It’s an exciting part of the story, and we’re approaching the bit that I usually like best, the battle of Helm’s Deep.

Unfortunately, I found myself feeling very melancholy as I listened this morning.  That may be partly because I’m starting a new work week, even though Saturday was supposed to be a day of portent*, and I was really hoping for something momentous or dreadful or revelatory to happen to me.  But at least part of my melancholy is just that The Lord of the Rings was a love I shared with my ex-wife, and I have a hard time still enjoying the things we used to enjoy together.

That’s rather dreary, I know, but I’m just not the sort of person to make deep attachments easily, and especially not to be able to let them go easily, and without much severe pain.  Reminders of them make me rue my ongoing life.  Certainly it hasn’t been worth much since at least the time I was invited to be a guest of the Florida DOC.  I have experienced much more negative than positive since then, and really, it was mainly negative (though with more positive to counter that) for quite a long time before then.

Alas, I have not yet been cast into a volcano, but we can always hope for something of that sort to happen.  There was a time, as I said, that I was relatively optimistic, but now I feel just worn out, and in pain, and even my attempts to get into shape cause issues for me.  And before me I face only the rolling, grinding, dreary passage of the weeks to come, doing the same pointless things, which bring no ultimate benefit to anyone.  I don’t write fiction or play music or draw or anything of that sort anymore, and I don’t have any friends, and I don’t see my kids, and the rest of my family is far away.

I really ought just to call it quits here.

Of course, I’m hopeful that I’ll enjoy riding my new bicycle enough that it’ll at least give me some fun for a bit.  I don’t want to get my hopes up too much.  But at least it should give me some extra time, and a bit of freedom to go farther in the time that I have, while still exercising, and that’s something, at least.

Of course, what I really want is to go very, very far from where I am, so far that I can never return, even in principle.  But I’m a bit of coward, and I also don’t want to be rude.  So, instead, I’m trapped where I am, hoping for illness and/or accidents.

It’s annoying.  And, again, it’s a dreary way to start the new work week—as is, no doubt, reading this blog post.  I can only apologize; but I can’t pretend to be other than as I am.  What would be the point?

glass-spilled-water

*Nothing interesting happened then, though.

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Wheels and heels and blister peels, alive, alive-o

It’s Friday day, or whatever that annoying song says, and I’m in a slightly better mood than I was yesterday.  That’s not a high bar to clear by any means, but clear it I have, for what it’s worth.

I’m at the bus stop again this morning, having arrived almost an hour before the bus is due, because I decided to give my feet one more morning of rest.  Yesterday wasn’t too bad—I taped up my most egregious blisters—but the atypical walking I did because of the blisters led my back pain to flare up quite a bit relative to its usual baseline, so I was a most unhappy camper.  However, I tolerated the walk back from the train at the end of the day, and my total mileage yesterday was right around eight, so it wasn’t as though I took it easy.  Nevertheless, this morning, though I’m wearing reliably non-problematic shoes, I figured I’d still give myself a slight break, though I’ll walk back this evening.

This weekend I’m off work, so that will help give a further comparative rest.

Given the difficulties with my tootsies, and the simple issue of time—I leave the house before five and get back after eight at night, giving me no chance to get a full night’s sleep even if I were not an insomniac of high order—I decided to break down and order a decent bicycle.

It will arrive at the office on Monday—that’s where I have my tool box—and I’ll assemble it and ride it to the train and thence to the house.  A five mile walk takes around an hour and a half, but a five mile trip on a bike, even at a relaxed pace, shouldn’t take more than about half an hour.  Although bicycles are welcomed on the Tri-rail trains, I don’t intend to bring it to work during the day, once I have it set up; I’ve done that before, and it’s a pain.  Instead, I have also bought a very good, double-lock system, and they have bike racks at the bus station well under the eye off all the other travelers, so it should be secure.  I’ll leave it at the station in the morning.

A bicycle is also good for shopping and the like on the weekend.  As I’m pretty sure you can probably tell, I’m not too intimidated by distance when it comes to walking; if it were not for blisters and time, I’d be happy to walk a marathon a day and more.  But walking takes a lot of time, especially if you want to go any significant distance.

I think, for instance, about trips to places like zoos and museums.  If traveling on foot, one would perforce simply use buses and or trains at least part of the way.  But, for instance, the Morikami Museum and Gardens, one of my favorite places, is about 40 miles from the house, and there aren’t good public transportation routes near it.  It’s in Palm Beach County, and the bus system there is a deep pile of crap, especially on weekends.

They really ought to be ashamed.

The Tri-rail trains are always good, but their stations are toward the east end of the county, and the Morikami is toward the west.  But forty miles on a bike, once one is accustomed to it, is not insurmountable—perhaps three or for hours of riding, even for a plodder like me.  Or one could take the Tri-rail to the beautiful Boca Raton station and ride from there.

I’m not suggesting that I’m going to be making regular trips to the Morikami, though that would be nice.  I’m just using it as a comparatively extreme example.  There are much nearer potential places—from grocery stores, to malls, to movie theaters and even science centers*, like the one in Fort Lauderdale—to visit.  Also, it can be good just to be able to get out and about to more distant places, like the beach and parks and so on, without having to worry about parking cars and catching buses or trains, or being in much of any way reliant on the structure of society and the acquiescence of humans.

We’ll see how it all works out.  Anyway, knowing me, the bloom will probably come off the rose very quickly, but I at least envision possible quite long journeys, once I become more accomplished at biking, as I used to be once upon a time.  As you can tell if you look back a long way on my Facebook account, before I was interrupted by my stint as a guest of the Florida Department of Corrections, I biked quite a bit, albeit on a cheap bike that contributed to two separate shoulder injuries when it went over on me.

I have to take some blame for at least one of those events—there were wet grass clippings in the path, and I took a bend far too quickly.  Also, I was using a leather shoulder bag, like a very large purse, rather than a backpack, so I was quite unbalanced.  I have much better backpacks now!  Also, the new bike has a cargo rack thingy above the rear wheel, so I can strap stuff there.

The only major downsides not already mentioned will be maintenance—which tends not to be my strong point—and fact that rain is slightly trickier to accommodate on a bike.  I’m not worried about getting wet.  I’ve ridden a 650 cc scooter on the highway in tropical storms, for goodness’ sake; I have excellent rain gear.  I’m more worried about getting my computer wet in my backpack.  But there are ways to waterproof that, so I’m not all that worried.

Anyway, on too rainy a day, I can always walk and carry an umbrella.  Walking in the rain, frankly, is very nice.  One doesn’t need to worry overmuch about sweat, for one thing.

Well, that’s enough of that, for a comparatively optimistic and forward-thinking post from me.  Sorry to disappoint you, if you enjoy the darker aspect of my personality (it is a major one, I’ll admit).  I’m sure it will return.  Why would it suddenly be cured, after all?  Still, hopefully I’ll have a comparatively restful weekend, and my blisters will largely heal themselves, and by Monday morning I’ll be able cheerily to take what may be my last regular morning walk to the train station.

And you might as well have a good weekend, if you can.

guyonbikealtered

*The trouble with science centers, for me, is that I don’t really want to go to such places alone.  Mostly, I tend already to know the stuff they are presenting, and so—though it’s at least a bit of fun to see the exhibits—I don’t get the joy out of them that I did when I was younger, or when going with kids and so on.

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For a blog of powerful trouble, like a hell-broth boil and bubble.

Hello and good morning.

It’s the first Thursday of Spring in the northern hemisphere, and of Autumn in the southern, so I’m writing my more traditional Thursday blog post, though there will be little to set it apart from all those that I write on any other day.  For that, I apologize.  I think my writing must grow tedious after a while (if not sooner).  My own words are nearly always tedious to me, as is my own thought.

I’m sitting at the bus stop, today, because yesterday I decided to re-try a pair of shoes I haven’t worn in a while.  They are quite nice in that they are lightweight, and also because they are porous, and so “breathe” well.  However, after my eleven miles of walking yesterday, they gave me several new blisters, albeit small ones, and that’s terribly frustrating at this stage.

I’ve treated the blisters, more or less, but they are still annoying, and today I’m wearing my Timberland boots, which at least didn’t give me blister when I last wore them.  But they definitely don’t have the porosity of the other make of shoe, and they are heavier as well, though for boots they are remarkably light.

I threw away the shoes I wore yesterday, and the other pair I have like them.  I don’t want to be tempted to try them again after a few days.  They had done their time, in any case, and the soles were getting rather worn.  They weren’t bad shoes, by any means, but for longer walking—at least if you’re using my feet, about which I have no choice—they seem to cause trouble, even after long months of use.

I know, I know, this is all very boring, and again I apologize.  I’m a boring person; what can I say?  At the very least, I’m certainly not pleasant.  I’m just a glitch in the program, a flaw in the crystal, a smudge on the written page, a grain of sand in the bottom of a shoe, or a spot of bird droppings on an otherwise beautiful painting.  I might be a curiosity for a bit, and even, from certain angles, seem to add something here or there, purely by chance.  But after a while, there’s only so much interest anyone can have in looking at feces on a canvas or tolerating the effects of buggy computer code.

Before long, everyone who is very close to me much of the time gets weary, and they go away, to save their sanity or their mood or whatever.  Apparently, I’m something of an emotional toxin or allergen.  I’m even allergic to myself, frankly—which makes me a sort of mental autoimmune disorder.  Well, I can’t change the nature of reality, I suppose.

This Saturday is the 25th of March.  According to Tolkien’s calendar, that is the day on which the One Ring fell into the Cracks of Doom and was destroyed, causing the final downfall of Sauron.  It’s an auspicious day.  Regrettably, there are no handy volcanoes in Florida—nor anywhere reasonably close to Florida, as far as I know.

I think I’ve heard that people in Japan sometimes throw themselves into Mount Fuji, but I may be misremembering that.  Anyway, falling into an active volcano is not a peaceful sort of thing, unlike what happens to Gollum in the end of the Peter Jackson movies.  One doesn’t have a soft, gentle landing on the surface of the lava, to sink slowly into it, apparently not even quite realizing what’s happening.  No, this is molten rock we’re talking about.  It is much denser than any flesh, and a human—or other animal—will not sink into it at all.

The initial impact of a fall onto lava seems likely not to be much gentler than a fall onto solid rock.  And then, of course, it is very hot, searing and boiling the flesh that hits it almost instantly.  There are YouTube videos in which you can watch this demonstrated (not on a live creature, but on a bag of stuff that’s roughly the same composition as a living animal), and it pops and skips about, flaming and sputtering like splashes of water dropped onto a very hot pan bottom.  Only worse.

One wouldn’t suffer for long in such a situation, of course, and it would certainly be quite spectacular, though I doubt a participant would appreciate the spectacle.

But anyway, though the Ring might of course first rest gently on the surface of lava before melting into it, Gollum would not sink at all.  He would, rather, be incinerated violently.  In this, interestingly, the makers of The Rings of Power, seemed to understand volcanoes better.  They trigger the initial eruption of Orodruin by rerouting a river so that its water flows through underground tunnels before emptying into the lava chamber and boiling explosively, setting the whole thing off.

It wasn’t quite a realistic depiction of such an event—I think if water fell on a flat, placid lake of lava such as we see in the show, it would certainly boil, and probably explode, but I don’t think it would trigger a general eruption like we saw, since it was above the magma, and would remain so, because of comparative density.  But they had to make it clear what was happening, so I guess we can give them some slack on that front.

Also, I don’t think the surface of the lava would actually be red hot liquid, unless it was actively flowing.  If it were exposed to the air, as it seemed to be, I would think it would crust over a bit, with the very surface darkening.  But I might be wrong about that.  I suppose that depends on just how hot it was.  I’m no volcanologist or geologist or whatever, so if anyone out there is an expert, I would welcome your input.

It doesn’t really matter, though.  I’m not going to be encountering any volcanoes, I shouldn’t think.  And though I have often toyed with idea of going to stand before the entrance to the Palm Beach courthouse, dousing myself in lighter fluid and gasoline, and setting myself on fire, I don’t think I have the willpower to do it.  It’s an intimidating prospect.  It would be hard for people to ignore, I have to admit, and maybe it would make people stop and think about the horrors perpetrated upon so many people by Florida’s badly managed criminal justice system, and the flawed priorities of such systems in general in the modern world.

More likely, people would just think I was crazy.  They would, no doubt, be correct, as far as that went.  But that wouldn’t necessarily mean my other points were wrong.

Anyway, I don’t expect that I’ll do that; I’m a bit too much of a coward.  But it would be nice if something momentous happened this Saturday.  I won’t be at work, so I won’t be writing a blog post, which means I’ll basically be lying around with nothing of interest to do.

What else is new?  Hopefully the rest of you are enjoying the beginning of the new season, whether it’s Spring or Fall.  Some major holidays are fast approaching, at least among the western religions.  If you celebrate them, and have family and/or friends with whom to share them, I hope you look forward to them and enjoy yourself tremendously.  You might as well.

TTFN

volcano 3 in 3D

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A rough bot slouching through the murk

It’s Wednesday morning, and though it’s actually slightly after six o’clock, I think it’s still reasonable to add, “as the day begins”.  Certainly the sun is not yet rising; the eastern sky isn’t even lightening yet.  I’m waiting at the train station, as I was when I began writing yesterday, and I’ve already walked five miles so far today (having walked a total of about eleven yesterday).

My endurance is definitely improving over these past few weeks, which is good.  It would be puzzling and perhaps even distressing if my endurance were getting worse.  I can, however, imagine my ability to walk long distances deteriorating because of injury or arthropathy—also, blisters and similar, and indeed I’ve had to deal with those over recent months, which is why it has taken me so long to get even to the point at which I currently reside.

But I think I’m getting past that particular barrier.  In fact, this Sunday, while my clothes were washing, I walked to the local convenience store barefoot, just to see how sturdy my feet were*.  It was fine, though I walked more slowly than usual.  I also, apparently, walked quite differently, with my left foot at least, than I do when I’m wearing shoes, because my left foot and hip got quite achy and sore a bit later that day, as though I’d put unusual strain on joints and muscles.  It’s an interesting realization, and it makes me want to experiment a bit more with barefoot walking.

One good aspect of all this walking is that I can listen to audio books and, to a lesser extent, podcasts as I do it.  I like audio books; the experience of listening to an audio book is very similar for me to the experience of reading a book in print.  I tend to read books in a very “audible” way, in that I tend to sound out the words in my head as I go along.  I think they call that “subvocalization”.

Apparently the old “speed reading” concepts recommended against this habit, but I disagree completely.  I don’t read particularly speedily, though I don’t read slowly, either.  But I do read deeply.  My ex-wife was always a very fast reader—she even took speed reading courses when she was younger—but she often did not recall many details of the things that she read for very long.  At least, she didn’t recall them the way I recall them.

I think one learns better with the combination of visible and audible (even if imagined audible) processing of the information.

That being said, even when solely using audible input, I of course form visual images—not of the words, usually, but of the ideas, or of the scenes, or what have you, depending on the subject matter.  There are also books and podcasts that I’ve listened to multiple times, and I think—as I do with books—that I get more out of them because of the repetition.  It may not be super-fast or anything, but I am pretty sure that I understand the things I take in more deeply than many people do, and I make connections rather easily from one area of knowledge to another.

Today I listened to Sean Carroll’s most recent podcast—about artificial intelligence, which is of course an au courant subject.  I also recently listened to a “Making Sense” podcast by Sam Harris in which two AI specialists had a discussion with him, and I subsequently bought their most recent books:  Human Compatible, by Stuart Russell, and Rebooting AI by Gary Marcus and Ernest Davis.  I’ve read the first and begun the second.  It’s certainly a fascinating subject.  I don’t think it’ll ever be as interesting as fundamental physics, but that’s not a terrible insult.  What is, after all?

It’s all pretty pointless no matter what, but at least it’s distracting.  I need something to pass the time, since I don’t have any friends or anything—other than “work friends” I guess, but that’s not exactly the same thing.  I’m still very discouraged and despondent, and I see no future** for myself.

I feel rather as though I’m walking in a metaphorical fog.  I don’t even have any image of my immediate surroundings, nor of anything that lies ahead.  As far as I can tell, there is nothing that lies ahead.  There is certainly nothing toward which I can make any deliberate path.  I know the ground about may well be treacherous, with pitfalls and cliffs and quicksand and even dangerous predators; and I am not-so-secretly disappointed that I haven’t encountered any of the f*cking things yet.  Dangerous wildernesses aren’t what they used to be, it seems.

Well, that was a wholesale slide into clunky metaphor overlapping with reality and with slightly abstract conceptual space, and it’s a bit opaque, I’m sure (though I guess that is appropriate, given my metaphor).  Sorry about that.  Even I’m not sure what I mean.  I’m not sure about much.

I need to quit this stupid world.  Every day, its idiocy seems to grow—“the best lack all conviction, while the worst / are full of passionate intensity.”  But no revelation is at hand, I’m afraid.  There’s nothing waiting to be revealed.  Behind the curtain is just another curtain, and another one after that, ad infinitum—row upon row of tattered, moth-eaten, pseudo-velvet, gaudy and tacky material.

Wait, what the hell do I even mean by all that?  Sorry, I’m just indulging my own stupidity here.  Try not to let it bother you.

foggy road

*I brought a pair of crocks with me to put on once I got to the store, because they don’t want people without shoes to come in.

**Though I do pay rent.

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Add title – reduce heat to low – go for a walk

It’s Saturday morning, and as I warned you, I’m writing a blog post today.

I’m at the bus stop this morning, because I wanted to give my feet a bit of a break*.  They were quite achy and tired when I got back to the house last night, and I decided that, unless they felt perfect this morning, I would take the bus.  I’ve got change in my pocket for the fare**, since I let my bus pass lapse, and I have no intention of renewing it.

I suppose I shouldn’t feel too disappointed about the fact that I needed to cut myself some slack here and there.  It’s my first week of full-on walking, and since Monday I’ve already done about 48 miles.  Since last Friday, it’s quite a bit over 60 miles.  That’s not too bad.

In epic fantasy novels and such, people just up and leave home and start walking to go on some quest—I guess they might ride a horse or pony at least part of the way, sometimes—but you never really hear about them needing to get in shape as they do, and you rarely hear about things like blisters or soreness or other exercise-related troubles.

I guess, to some degree, that’s reasonable, since the people in those fantasy worlds—e.g. the hobbits of Middle Earth—don’t have cars or anything of the sort.  They walk most places they go, so they’re not at all strangers to what we would consider quite long walking in our modern, advanced world.  Hobbits always go barefoot, but then again, so would our own ancestors have done while they hunted and gathered over the course of scores of millennia.

It’s really striking to realize quite how much we’ve fallen off from our more natural tendencies to ambulate.  Humans are built for tremendous endurance in hot conditions like sub-Saharan Africa.  As I understand it, we have more sweat glands per square inch of skin than any other animal known on the planet, extant or extinct.  The bushmen of the Kalahari are said to bring down big game largely by running it to exhaustion—they can’t overtake an antelope on a straight run, maybe, but they can just keep following it until it drops from exhaustion and overheating, and then they can spear it and bring it back to their camp.

Meanwhile, in our more advanced societies, we’ve made ourselves dependent upon devices—like cars—that not only cause issues for the environment, but actually weaken our bodies.  In many parts of America, there simply is no good way to get to a job if you don’t have a car of your own.  Public transportation is only decent in select, quite big, urban areas.

I heard a podcast once in which someone discussed technologies that improve our abilities while strengthening us, and others that improve our “abilities” but weaken us in the long term.  The interviewee compared, for instance, the abacus to the electronic calculator.  Masters of the former tend to have superior arithmetic skills—even without their abacuses—while regular users of the latter tend to suffer atrophy of their basic math abilities.  He also compared the automobile and the bicycle.  A bike definitely allows one to go farther, faster, than one ever would have simply by walking or running***, but it nevertheless keeps a person exercising and in great shape if that person does it very much.

We all know, if we’re paying attention, that going everywhere using cars does not tend to improve our physical conditioning.

If we developed a culture of only using public transportation for longish distances, and walking or biking everywhere in between, I wonder how much the rate of insulin resistance—and therefore of hypertension, of heart disease, of stroke, of cancer, of dementia—would diminish in the developed world.  We could keep the fruits of modern technology; for instance, we’d still have all the medical care that prolongs our average lifespans despite diminishing physical fitness, but we would probably need much less of it.

How much healthier would we be?

It would probably also be good for reducing atmospheric carbon dioxide.  Now, it is a fact that humans do emit carbon dioxide as a waste gas, so we’re not carbon-negative or anything.  But very few of us eat food that’s derived from fossil fuels, so the carbon we expel was recently taken from the air (by plants) before it got to us.  I suspect that, just straight food-wise, we’re carbon neutral.  However, the transportation of our foods and various other aspects of it are run largely on fossil fuels, so that’s an issue.  But that’s addressable.

Imagine if we all only used mass transportation when we had far to go.  First of all, of necessity, public transportation would be better by far than it is.  And we’d all be in better shape, and probably would have better mental health, if we walked or biked for “shorter” distances.  Getting people to give up their cars might not be easy, but making it much more expensive to drive—with various taxes, and then frankly, just with the fact that the fuels to run cars will have become rarer and thus more expensive over time—can push people toward alternatives, leading to new equilibria.

I’ve often thought that it would be nice if, in public gyms, we paid people to ride exercise bikes attached to generators, which could then feed the produced power into batteries of one variety of another.  It wouldn’t pay very much, maybe, but imagine if someone who was down on his or her luck could—instead of, for instance, donating plasma—go into a public gym and earn money by biking.  Nowadays, the ambitious pay a lot of money to get exercise into their schedules.  Might they, and others, not do it more if they could be paid?

Well, that’s enough pie in the sky for today.  I hope you all had a nice, if minor, holiday yesterday.  My bus should be here soon, and I’ll be walking back from the train in the afternoon, which should bring this week’s total to about 55 miles, not counting last Sunday.  That’s not too bad, but I’ve got a long way to go…so to speak.

walker on dirt road

*Not that kind of break.

**I ended up accidentally overpaying by 50 cents.

***As long as there are paved roads and/or paths, but then again, you need those for cars, too.  Feet are, in many ways, much more versatile than wheels.

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A surreal golf dream to launch Saint Patrick’s Day

Happy Friday and Happy Saint Patrick’s Day!  I’m working tomorrow, but that’s okay.  I feel less weary today than I did yesterday.  I went back to the house last night, and the walk back from the train was not as tiring as it had been before, after a night’s and morning’s physical rest.

I may even have a beer—perhaps a Guinness—this evening, in celebration of the day, though regrettably I don’t think I’ll be able to enjoy any corned beef and cabbage, and I indeed regret not being able to have the red potatoes that often come with that meal.  But, be that as it must.

Not surprisingly, I slept pretty deeply last night, though not as long as my body would have liked to sleep.  In fact, I was awakened by my alarm, which is an infrequent occurrence.  I was, what’s more, disturbed in the midst of a dream, and that happens rarely indeed.  I don’t recall the last time I had a dream that I remembered, though neuroscience suggests that I must have some dreams most every night.

It was a strange dream (though that’s perhaps redundant).  It involved a peculiar game of golf that went through a mysterious forest along a narrow path, with low but rather steep hills surrounding a thin, mostly straight main trail, which were part of the apparent “fairway”.  There were many small trees, which were nevertheless quite “shady”, though much of the game seemed to take place at night.  I don’t think I was present in the dream as myself per se, but was if anything a spectator.  It seemed almost like a set, as if for an elaborate play, though there seemed to be open, starry sky overhead.

Then, of course, an even more absurd turn of events happened, and the final shot of the golf round before the dream was interrupted landed in a changed landscape that seemed to be the interior of some impossibly huge mega-store, spread wider and higher than any real store could surely be.  It reminded me of a Meijer’s Thrifty Acres, a superstore that I think still exists up north, and that was always much more wholesome than any Walmart has ever seemed to me.

The latter stores always feel dismal somehow, rife with disorder and despair, ill-tended and bleak, with shelves rising not into displays of plenteous goods that signify prosperity, but with stereotypical discount items, things of poor quality and bare usability.  I say that only as an impression, not an actual review of the goods available in the store.  In fact, the best dress shoes I’ve ever owned I got at a Walmart for $10; the $120 Ecco shoes I was replacing with them had caused me terrible foot and back pain.  Also, the arts and crafts sections of Walmart has often surprised me with the quality (and low expense) of the materials you could buy there.  I’ve found good quality acrylic and watercolor painting supplies at Walmart for remarkable prices in the past!

Meijer’s, though, has always felt almost like a wonderland, with almost anything a person might wish to buy all under a vast, high roof that seemed too spacious to be a structure made by humans, but appeared rather like a miniature version of the sky itself, unlike the dreary overhead of gray, bare structures seen in most Walmarts.

I like Target stores, also; they tend to feel cheerier and to have higher quality stuff than Walmart (except their groceries) and they have some arts supplies that Walmart doesn’t, including a few nice options for alcohol-based colored markers.  But they remind me too much of shopping trips with my children (and with their mother), and I avoid going into them; they make me feel very sad.  I have similar trouble with Publix, and even with Walgreen’s drug stores, though I still prefer the latter to CVS, which always seems cold and detached and uncaring.

These are weird impressions to have, I’m sure, regarding chains of retails stores, but as I’ve always admitted, I’m a weird person.

Speaking of weirdness, the last shot of the dream golf match—by the apparent protagonist of the dream, who I think was a woman, though I can’t be sure*—landed on what appeared to be a checkout counter, with nondescript impulse items, a conveyer belt, and a cash-register.  The hero (or, if you prefer, heroine) got up on the counter-top, ready to hit the ball with a truly absurd, wide and fat and tall wedge club that looked almost as if it had been crafted from a snow shovel.  She was a lefty, if memory serves.

And then, I was awakened, literally, by the sound of a rooster crowing.  My morning alarm call is the Beatles song Good Morning, Good Morning, which—appropriately—starts with a cock calling out the start of the day.

Such was the start of my day, today.  I rose and showered and walked to the train while listening to The Fellowship of the Ring, from the end of the Council of Elrond until just after the fellowship is driven back by snow in the Redhorn Gate and by the cruelty of Caradhras.

It’s a brilliant story to listen to while walking, as I think I’ve written before.  One can almost feel that one is on a great adventure oneself, a quest of deep and heroic import, even though I’ve read the book so often that I can frequently recite it along with the recoding even as I walk.  And certainly, the style of the writing (and thus the reading or listening) influences the style of my own writing, as might be evident from this post.

Well, that’s enough for now.  I hope you all have a nice day, and enjoy a Saint Patrick’s Day celebration if you celebrate it.  It’s Friday, so if you like, you can even have some beer (green beer, if you must, though I think that’s perhaps a bit silly), and a lovely, appropriate meal, ideally with family and/or friends.

I’ll be writing a post tomorrow morning, barring the truly unforeseen, so, you’ll be “hearing” from me then.

saint patrick day

*I guess this isn’t surprising.  LPGA golf has always been more interesting to me than PGA golf—I’m not sure why.  It’s not just because the ladies are nicer to look at for me, as a man, than the men are.  I feel there’s less ego and snootiness among the ladies.  Lydia Ko is one of my favorite sports figures of any field, gender, time, or whatever.  She’s as enjoyable to see play—as are her competitors—as ever was Tiger Woods in his prime (though his first Masters win was amazing!), or even Michael Jordan playing basketball with the Chicago Bulls.  I’ll admit, however, that few sporting events were better than seeing the Pistons live, playing—for instance, given that this is St Patrick’s Day—the Celtics, back when they played in the Silverdome, and tickets were obtainable and reasonably priced.