Twenty

In the last two days, I've biked twenty good miles after work and it's almost medicinal in how good I feel afterwards. Trashed and exhausted but in a good way.

Physically, I've broken through the 240 pounds I've weighed forever and am in the lower 230s. The suckage is wardrobe: my work clothes are too big and I hate shopping for clothes. I suppose it's a good problem to have.

Mentally, the rides are cathargic and help clean out the mental poisons if only because I'm too whupped to think about anything other biking (during) and sleep (after).

As warned, I am getting bored with this blog and may delete it soon. For now, I'll post only when something unusual happens.

Mondays

The previous entry was written in the dark of night. I went on a 22-mile ride later that day.

As Heinlein is frequently quoted, "there's no such thing as a free lunch," and I paid for the ride by losing Sunday. Saturday after the ride, I felt great. Tired was to be expected but I was good from the accomplishment and pretty inwardly pleased.

I didn't wake up at all on Sunday and drifted from minute to minute. Looking back now, I should have had breakfast and gone back to bed but it was Father's Day, a Hallmark Holiday I don't enjoy nowadays and a day my daughters traditionally treat as an afterthought (proof: compare and contrast to Mother's Day). So I tried to deal with that as a zombie would: lurched into it. Not much success there.

The Saturday was great, though. It was a glorious Spring day and I was thankful to be mobile enough to get out into it. There were the usual aches and pains, and my new eternal nemesis, The Wind, was blowing hard even at 10:30 but this enemy is best ignored with a lower gear and fiercesome determination. In all, two hours on the bike. I can still feel it.

Stream of consciousness: lots of thoughts during the ride that, for the most part, centered on the ride and the feeling of being outside on a good day. No complaints.

Word of the ride: muscular.

Midnight Hour

It's actually 3:00 AM here in the city and I'm partially awake for no particular reason. This happens fairly frequently and the periods of semi-consciousness can last the duration of a good piss up to a couple of hours. The reasons can vary, too: tonight, the bedroom was hot and stuffy despite both windows being open.

Someone said stick a million monkeys in a room with a bunch of typewriters and eventually one will write Hamlet (a critic responded that with the internet, we can see that'll never be true). I myself struggle with the idea of fate and destiny versus chaos. Does God have a plan for each of us? Or do our significant decisions spawn alternate paths and realities? Perhaps this is why I like time-travel stories so the players "fix what once went wrong."

I am approaching the half-century mark and like most males my age, I am spending more time looking back and evaluating choices. On the one hand, I know things are locked and unchangeable yet I wish that I could go back and make up for the mistakes I've made that have hurt those near and far. A voice in my head says it's not too late for that but in some ways it is. Some hurts cannot be salved and some days cannot be redone and changed.

I would have done better if I cared more for other people than myself.

Venting

I do not and will not comment on my day job here but I will say one of my major character flaws among many is I don't let things go. I will dwell and mull something until the horse is dead. And buried. And resurrected. And it dies again. You get the point.

I let something get to me this morning that shouldn't have, and I chewed on it until I was in a lather. The upside is I recognized the symptoms and took it out on my MTB versus doing something stupid at work (I hope). It was only a mile from my house to office but I feel better. Let's see how the afternoon goes.