Walk

I couldn't spend one more day sitting at the table studying. I had to get outside today. I mean, I studied, but then around 6 pm I went outside and walked. It was a slow, ordinary walk, not some mad Olympic track and field race. I just cruised along. I passed my neighbors' PVC fence with the rails that are always falling down. I passed some bamboo that has rapidly raced through the area and is threatening my own neighborhood.

I don't know who the idiot who planted that crap is, but if I find them I'm going to stab them to death with bamboo!

I passed the neighbor with the dogs that always leap through their barbed wire fence and chase me when I jog. And I noticed that the pretense of fence was gone - no posts and no barbed wire - and so were the dogs.

I passed the neighbor who owns about 5 acres and saw him and his 2 dogs walking around in his garage. His German shepherd usually comes out and runs along with me when I'm jogging past, or biking. He loves to have someone to chase. And as long as the batteries in his shock collar keep him from actually getting at me I'm fine with that. He never barks and looks mean. He just seems terribly excited to chase me. I even speed up sometimes just to make it more fun for both of us.

I passed the bridge where trashy people go to dump their garbage into the stream. There was furniture down there. And a gigantic bag of some sort. Petroleum was leaking from the bag in a rainbow-colored wisp that flowed from it. I don't know what was in the bag, but it was doing a bang-up job of polluting the crap out of the stream. The obligatory truck tires were in the water. I walked on.

I came to a smaller bridge and stopped to look into the water before turning around. Someone had dumped things here, too. There was a head gasket for a car engine with 4 distinct cylinders. There was a digital ignition box halfway in the water. And there was a truck axle. What the heck?? This was a low bridge. The water wasn't deep. From the top of the bridge to the bottom of the little stream probably wasn't 3 feet. But somehow someone had managed to dump all their spare parts here from a truck they had either totaled or rebuilt, I don't know which.

At this point I turned back and walked on home. I wasn't in a hurry. I took my time. By the time I reached home I think I had walked about 4 miles at the most.

But my legs felt weak and tired, as if I had run those 4 miles instead of cruising along at a leisurely walk.

I am in TERRIBLE shape.

Paralympics

The Paralympics are on. NBC has them buried deep in one of their offshoot channels, but nevertheless, they are showing a little bit here and there. As you may have guessed, my being a fanatic about watching the Olympics I am of course watching these, too.  It's a bit different than the regular Olympics. There is a lot less ... what would be the word ... standardization? Everyone seems to just use whatever equipment they feel is best. There doesn't seem to be anyone checking that all the athletes are essentially using the same equipment and equal. So the better your equipment the bigger your advantage. And the less your handicap affects you, or the more recent it happened to you, the more advantage you have. I guess I find this odd in light of all the controversy surrounding any athlete accused of using performance enhancing drugs. I mean, what difference does it make if an athlete used EPO if their competitor has a totally different ski sled and poles and a decided leverage advantage as a result of sitting much higher?

Anyway, I didn't come here just to talk about that. I really only came to check in and say "I'm not dead."  There's an irony in this. I started this blog with the idea being that I was going to write a little something every day, no matter how trivial or small the post, and not worry about whether anyone read it or not. And here I haven't written much in awhile and I am blogging just to say "sorry I haven't posted much lately." It's the total opposite of what I set out to do.

So, still very busy and unable to be online much. The telephone answering machine is flashing "F" for Full because so many people are calling. I'm just super popular and in-demand. No, most of the messages are in-laws calling to speak to my significant other and she just doesn't bother to clean off the machine.

So, to tell you what's going on and yet tell you virtually nothing, today I asked the police to fingerprint me and they said "No." I told them "its for the government" and they said "no." What does a man have to do to get the police to take his fingerprints around here?! Dammit!

I cut down 6 or 7 trees in my backyard the other weekend. They all seem to have died all of a sudden and without warning. I had been back there spraying poison ivy and poison oak vines several years in a row and I had worried that I myself might have poisoned my own trees. But my neighbors are all experiencing the same thing, dying trees, and no one is really sure what has killed them. Almost all the dead trees in my yard are Sweet Gum trees. I don't remember the correct name for them, but that's what they are called around here, more often than not. One particularly large one snapped in half mid-way up and is now a jagged pole in my backyard. It's about 3 stories high where  it snapped. The other half went into my neighbor's yard and I don't know what he did with it. I don't own a chainsaw so I didn't exactly race over to cut it up for him. Maybe he got sick of waiting on me and cut it up himself? I really need to buy a chainsaw. The first tree I cut down with an axe. That was a ton of work. The rest I cut using a bow saw. But it's not large enough to cut the really big trees. I'm going to have to buy a bigger one.

So anyway, that's about all I have to update on. Nothing exciting. I've just been chasing cops trying to get them to print me and they won't do it.

Wordless Wednesday - Goodbye Sochi

Its another Wordless Wednesday because I haven't been working out and I am studying my butt off for a test I have to take. Spring is almost here, the races will be starting again, and I'm in totally crap shape.

On a related note, I'm aware that I'm clearly violating the whole idea of "wordless" Wednesday with all my comments, but I'm doing it anyway because I'm tired and I feel like it.

Sochi 

 - a little weird and awkward at first -

 - And so much warmer than we were expecting -

Goodbye Sochi,

I can hardly wait for the next Olympics. 

I wonder what Spring will bring us in 2 more years?

Wordless Wednesday - Wank and Semen

Andreas Wank has been the most mocked Olympic athlete of these winter games, despite winning team gold in the ski jumping competition, due to his obviously funny name. Adding to his fame, a Twitter artist named 'Loony' Photoshopped his image and changed his name to Cunty Spunkfuckshitpiss. The modified image went viral, leading to a barrage of people posting it and asking "this can't be real, right?"

Followed closely behind Andreas Wank ins terms of being mocked, Russia's Semen Pavlichenko is receiving a share of laughter. And when Wank and Semen's images are combined the laughs never end. Poor guys. Well, one of them has a gold medal, so I can't feel too terribly sorry for him.

Olympic Fever

Every 2 years another showing of Olympic Games comes on the TV. One time it'll be the Summer Games. 2 years later its the Winter Games. Each time I fumble in my mind with the interruption of my regular TV watching schedule. I grumble that my show is not on. I miss several events. Eventually I sit down and watch something.

And then I am hooked.

I find myself watching everything. Right now I'm watching some sort of Nordic Combined event, which involves a lot of Germanic people on skis chasing each other, jumping off buildings, shooting things, and ultimate fighting, all while wearing skis and without dropping their poles. This isn't a perfect description of the event. Granted I have missed a good portion of it. I'm having to fill in the blanks on what came before. But I know that they have to do cross country skiing and they have to do the ski jump off that 40 story ramp. And the only people with any chance of winning are of a Germanic background. I'm including Scandinavians among the Germanic people. I don't know if that's offensive to anyone. But obviously at some point Hitler wanted German soldiers to mate with Norwegian hotties because he thought it would help create a super hot 'race' of Olympic skiers or something like that. Anyway, people thought the idea made sense at the time. And the children that did result mostly went on to be supermodels and flying squirrels, er, ski jumpers and downhill skiing maniacs who never crash.

German fashion models, er, gold medal winning athletes

The point I was trying to make is not about the Germans. It is about sports and the Oympics in particular. From the age of 6 I was an athlete. Immediately upon joining my first basketball team I was a maniac. My best friend and I would practice basketball ALL THE TIME. I had a goal at my house (in an age before 'cheater' goals that parents could lower for little kids) and my best friend had a goal at his house. Our dads had measured and set the rims at exactly 10 feet, as they should, and we spent all our daylight hours when we weren't in school or watching Batman on TV dribbling and shooting on those goals. I remember how hard it was to finally start making baskets. 10 feet is a long way up for a 6-year-old, but we made enough baskets to keep trying. I recall in the games we played with our basketball team the final scores usually were somewhere in the range of 20-30 points. I think if a team scored 30 that wasa considered pretty high.

Basketball led me into track and field. My basketball coach had been tasked with getting together a track team for a summer competition. He recruited me. We had been doing various running exercises in PE at school, but nothing quite as organized as this. The summer track meet included every event a normal track meet could have, minus the pole vault. You can't very well have elementary school kids trying to learn to pole vault at a meet, right? I don't know. Maybe you can. I don't remember there being a pole vault event. But at this track meet every event was open. Anyone could enter any number of events or just the ones you thought you'd perform well at. I entered them all. I sucked at the shotput (softball throw.) I jammed on all the running events. At the end of the meet when they handed out the trophy for best all around competitor my name was called. I won the meet! I entered it again the following year and won again.

I'm old now. I'm not on any teams anymore. I quit soccer after my last trip to the emergency room courtesy of a psychopathic midget who got sexual thrills out of hurting male players for absolutely no reason. I'd been to the ER several times and I was sick of it. More than that, I was sick of people like him. And I was angry that my own teammates didn't have my back at all. They'd done nothing while I was down on the ground. They didn't even say anything to him until he hurt another player on our team. Then they got mad. Yeah, hurt me and that's fine. Hurt the other guy who played my position and that pissed them off. So it was time to say 'goodbye.'

The thrill of victory doesn't always look like ecstasy

Now I'm sitting here watching a man from Norway crumpled on the ground trying to soak in the realization that he's just won the Gold Medal in his event. It's ironic that I said what I did up above because the final results are 1. Norway 2. Norway 3. Germany 4. Germany. Anyway, I had a point to all of this. I'm sitting here watching these dedicated athletes, the best in the world at what they do, and all the agony and the ecstasy depending on how the event goes for them, and I'm remembering what it was like to be so enthusiastic about something in my life. And to train as much a that. And to agonize over every little mistake that cost me a victory. Or to jump for joy that I had won. I remember all of that. And then I think, what the hell happened to my life? I never went to the Olympics. I didn't even compete in college. My freshman year of college I approached the track coach about trying out for the University track and cross country team. He informed me that he had just been told the University was canceling the track and cross country program. The team was eliminated. I had long since given up basketball in favor of soccer and track. I wasn't good enough at soccer to try out for the University soccer team, or so I believed. I ended up trying out for and winning a scholarship to be a male cheerleader.

There's no cheerleading in the Olympics.

I stand corrected. Sochi does have cheerleaders, but not in competition

Watching the Olympics makes me happy. But it also makes me wonder what might have been if I had been more focused and dedicated and determined to do something with my athletics. Several of my track teammates went on to the junior Olympics. I didn't even know about this until many years afterwards. How did I not know about this? What might have happened if I had entered? Could I have gone on to qualify for the US Olympic Team? Probably not, but its the "what if" that bothers me. I say probably not, but the truth is that I don't know. And now I never will.

What might have been?

Valentines Day

Happy Valentines Day!!!

Wordless Wednesday - Bellybuttons

"Look, I'm all lumpy around my bellybutton!"
"Wow, me too!"

I have no idea if this Nashville thing is going to be permanent. Right now it's temporary. But I had hoped it would turn into a long-term change. Today I was reminded that it is a 3-month situation with an option to make it long-term after that. But nothing is guaranteed. It would suck to return to Memphis. Especially after I turned down a pretty good offer there in order to do this. But it all remains to be seen. In the meantime, it sucks working out in my room without any weights or equipment.

I think I'm finally well. Whatever that crap was that I was sick with for so long seems to have cleared out of my system. Except for this weird weakness in my legs every now and then which seems to have no explanation and appears out of nowhere. Today I brought a gym bag with me to work. But I had to work late and then I remembered that I am out of food and had to go to the grocery. So that gave me a reasonable and believable excuse not to go into that tiny little closet they call an "office gym" and try to get on the one treadmill they keep in there before anyone else could grab it. Seeing as I was late leaving work my odds weren't good anyway. But there are some tiny iron weights I could have lifted 1000 times to try to equal 2 real weights and maybe slow the massive shrinkage of my arms and shoulders.

Sam's Club - too much chicken

So tonight for the first time I made use of my brand spanking new Sam's Club card and went grocery shopping there. Here's the thing, I really only needed to buy enough boneless chicken breasts for one week. The problem is, Sam's only sells food in massive giant quantities. So I ended up with waaaaay more chicken than I could fit in my pan. Or the Tupperware container I put it in after I cook it so that I can eat it every night for a week without having to cook every night. So now I have my Tupperware stuffed full of freshly cooked chicken and the rest of the package is wrapped as tightly as I could and stuffed into my tiny little freezer. Another problem: the freezer was already stuffed full of TV dinners, so now it's ... well, it took a lot of science and mathematics and calculations, but if you open the freezer door it will explode at you like an atom bomb.

Chicken catastrophe