Isn't It Ironic?

Photo: Foxtongue, Flickr Creative Commons

Yesterday I wrote about how I'm falling apart. Then, I go to tennis practice yesterday afternoon, go running with a few of the players and pass all of them except the kid who plays above his skill level purely by being able to outrun his opponents' shots and keep doing that for the duration of the match. That kid's in crazy good shape. Still, my fat ass managed to outrun some of those stick-thin bastards.

Seriously, I'm 246 lbs. as of this weekend. I've kept within a very narrow range (243-248) for the past five years or so, and this is basically the weight I've kept since I was about 21. During a bout with Weight Watchers and gym membership back when I was 23, I got down to about 210 and kept it there for about six months before gradually putting the weight back on. When I was 20, I spent a summer running three miles every day and got down to about 215.

Now, for most of the guys I know, 246 would be freaking blubbery, and I'll admit that I'm most definitely overweight by a few tens of pounds, but I'm 6'3". I'm not exactly qualifying for the Truffle Shuffle... yet.

I actually surprised myself a little yesterday. I haven't done any formal running in a few years. Like I said, back in college I managed three miles a day for one summer and I managed this jog at a pretty good clip. Of course, if I could keep it up and drop a bit of my excess weight, I'd be better off. I'd be a better tennis player. Quicker. Slower to tire. I'd be able to shorten the amount of time Mickey has to wait on me when we go hiking on a steep section of trail. I'm willing to admit my shortcomings. The only way I'd be able to keep up with Mickey on the hardest trail sections would be if I had a fairly strenuous workout schedule and kept to it at least a few days a week. The guy is a freak and I'm not willing to dedicate hours a week just to be less emasculated for the short steep sections on our shared hikes once or twice a year. Personally, I think he may not be real, but I haven't been able to prove it yet.

As for exercising for my health, fuck my health. I don't give a good goddamn about my old age. I'll deal with that when I get there. I'm just not going to give up what I enjoy now just so I can be a little less decrepit when I'm old. My family history is full of active senior citizenship with worse lifestyles than mine anyway.

It'd be interesting to see if I were able to keep this running thing up, even increase the distance. Get back up to a couple of miles a day. I could easily go for a little run after tennis practice during the week. It would only keep me for a few more minutes than I already have to stay, and I'd obviously be dressed already for exercise.

Of course I know this won't happen. I get urges at times to start up an exercise regimen, to put up the chin-up bar on the bathroom door frame, to go for a run, to get back to doing nightly sit ups and push ups. That always seems to pass when I remember that I'm incredibly lazy. I could blame the masters classes and tennis practices and demands for quality time from my wife and child, but honestly, I'm more active now than I have been since my first two years out of college when I still had a gym membership and actually used it. Even if I were to go running tomorrow after practice, after a few days or weeks, I'd hit a day when I just didn't feel like it or couldn't squeeze it into my schedule, and I quickly fall out of the habit. This isn't whining, it's just admitting who I really am. I'm relatively dependable when I have to do something for others. I suck at keeping promises to myself. I'm too damn forgiving. Someone want to pay me to exercise? I'll show up every day and on time to make sure I'm not taking your money unfairly.

Maybe I should sign up for a 5k. I'd have to train for that. Signing up for my first tennis tournament and having to play at high school practices got me obsessive about playing tennis again. Maybe paying money to run and not wanting to embarrass myself would be a motivating factor to keep running. Time to go a Googlin', I guess.

The Inescapable Decline into Dust

Photos: Hryck, Flickr Creative Commons

I may actually be getting older. I don't remember it taking so long to loosen up my knees on the tennis court last year. I hobble around on stiff legs for about five minutes until the grease in the joint warms up and everything gets nice and lubed up. I've had to be careful with my footwork since I took up the sport again about three years ago. I step wrong and I'm punished with a stabbing pain in my knee. I'm a quick study, so I usually keep my feet under me and steady so I'll go hours of play without feeling it. I always know it's there, however. I think I screwed up my knee by sitting on my foot at work back at the newspaper right after college. Whatever the reason, my knees have been creaky and poppy and occasionally painful since I was 22.

I got old before I could rent a car. I think big people might be like big dogs. A great Dane is lucky to see its tenth birthday while a chihuahua is still going strong in its teens. Unfortunately, I have good genes. I'll be alive and in constant pain in my legs, back, and neck well into my 90s. Or maybe it's just the fact that I ate like shit last week. Country fried steak with rice and gravy, strip steak with balsamic cream sauce (although that was just with broccoli as a side), lasagna, fried chicken, and a giant freaking steak that took two days to eat. Most of those were various birthday meals, but the rest was me being a fat ass.

I spent this weekend doing stuff more appropriate for my advanced state of decay than play tennis or any of my other more active hobbies. Saturday was the first round of the Six Nations rugby tournament. BBC America is running one game a week for the duration of the tournament so I got to see England gradually snuff out Wales. Rugby kind of spoils American football for the me. You've got 40 minutes of commercial free action followed by halftime and then another 40 minutes without commercial breaks and that action is nearly continuous. They don't have downs in rugby so the only things that stops the action are the ball going out of bounds or a penalty. Watch too much rugby and all of the sudden football gets painfully choppy and slow. Luckily for me, the Super Bowl last night was a good game and seemed to fly by. I don't know the last time I've seen a game with such little input from the referees.

Football actually ended for me as a fan back in the first week of January. I'm passionate about college football, not just my favorite team. In the NFL, once the Falcons are done, I'm more or less done. I didn't even watch a playoff game until the NFC Championship Game. The Winter Olympics are another story entirely. I love all things Olympic. Bring on the curling! No, seriously, I actually love watching curling during the winter Olympics. Curling is awesome, especially if the Johnson sisters are on the US women's team this year. Straight women and gay men should probably stick to the hockey and speed skating ice, but I'll always have Cassie Johnson. Well, it's Porter now, but who cares.

I'm So Bored

Photo: Cindy Funk, Flickr Creative Commons

I know that I sometimes sound like I hate where I live, and it's true that at times I do actually hate it. There are a lot of drawbacks to living in such a rural area. There's very little access to quality cultural, entertainment, and educational opportunities. The nearest movie theater is more than 40 miles away. The local restaurants are lousy unless you want fried chicken. The barbecue places are even slightly subpar (by barbecue joint standards, anyway). When Gandhi gets older, there'll be plenty of athletic opportunities for him through the local recreation department, but if I wanted to get him lessons for tennis, I'd have to drive hours each weekend to get him lessons with a real teaching pro. Same goes for music. Forget private lessons if he shows any real talent in that area. Every year, the county's best and brightest (along with those from the neighboring counties) leaves for college and most never come back. The ignorant and the stupid linger and breed.

Despite that, I don't really hate where I live. Honestly, after two years I'd probably be anxious to leave behind any home I ever made. That's been my life trend anyway. The truth is this is where I grew up. This town and the surrounding area are a part of who I am. I guess that means I'm at least partially composed of gnats, mosquitoes, yellow flies, and rednecks, but it also means I'm partially made up of live oaks older than the United States, long leaf pine savannas, and old homesteads built off the ground to avoid the the swamps when heavy rains temporarily allow them to reclaim their historic territory. Oh, and one of the benefits of living in a place that was only tangentially affected by the Industrial Revolution is that the local watershed is so clean that the EPA doesn't care how much fish you eat out of our rivers and streams.

If I ever get around to writing the novel or screenplay that I know I'm too lazy and unmotivated to ever write, it will be set here. I've even got the general outline written out. The town would go by another name and all of the warts and moles would be there in the story, dark and sprouting strangely thick hairs, but it would be clear that deep down I really do love this place. In some strange way, I'm actually proud of where I live. I don't want to be here now, but I want to be from here.

Every Day Is Exactly the Same

Photo: Gilles Chiroleu, Flickr Creative Commons

Three decades. I've got another two and a half until I can retire. You'd think my department head would have realized that I've been teaching for six years now instead of just two. Dammit woman, I've managed to live an entire second lifetime since I was in ninth grade and was your student instead of a colleague. I didn't just cease to exist for the eight years I spent living elsewhere before I came back to this craphole town four years ago. Of course, you freely admit that you have very little grasp of the concepts that numbers embody. I'm cool with that. I'm pretty good at math myself, as long as you ignore things like addition, subtraction, and multiplication. I'd put division in that list too, but everyone sucks at division. Sucking at division doesn't make you special, unless you're a zero.

Of course none of this really even matters. I don't believe in number magic, but it's good to pretend.

Water, Profanity, and Beer

Photo: Navin Thakur, Flickr Creative Commons

"Jake, get up. We're running out of water."

"Shit, did it freeze last night? I didn't realize it was supposed to freeze. God dammit."

Yes, I really do talk like this in real life, especially when I'm irritated. I'm really not surprised that when little Gandhi was playing in a book store and the toy train derailed that he started saying "My train came off the tracks. Dammit. Oh dammit." The mothers around me looked on in horror at the hideousness their little daughters had just been exposed to and I had to get on to the little guy even though I wanted to laugh. Jesus, people. It's just a word and not even a word that really means anything bad. I do have to say, though, that if he'd learned it from me, I suspect the language he chose would have been harsher. I'm not usually satisfied with a little dammit. That's more his mom coming out. I'm more of an all or nothing kind of guy. I'm either going to keep it clean or drop a fuck. That's how I roll, bitch. I have to express myself and my emotions match my frame. Ain't no dammit going to get out all that rage.

But getting back to the water thing, I roll out of bed earlier than normal knowing that I may have to make the drive out to my parents' house for a shower. My body really digs the production of lipids so I can't go without a shower in the morning or I'll look like I just came from an Orthodox baptism. You know, oily.

I turn on the hot water in the shower. It's coming out, but with only half the pressure at most, so I shower more quickly than normal expecting the water to run out while I'm still soaping. I bathe in shifts. Wash a small area, rinse the area, move on to the next area. The water never stops. I can't figure this out. It's 44 fucking degrees outside. I know good and well the pipes didn't freeze. Water is obviously still flowing. If the pump wasn't working at all, the water would have stopped long ago as we drained the tank out at the well. I have no idea what the problem is. It's like my house has an enlarged prostate.

I brush my teeth, get dressed, and eat breakfast before I even bother going outside to see what the problem is. I know I won't have a clue even if the problem is obvious. It's not even cold this morning. Maybe the ants, who've been pushing their mounds up out of the ground trying to escape the water table just inches below the grass blades, decided to play chicken with the electrical box. They've done it before. Certain species of ants seem to be drawn to electronic suicide like dogs to antifreeze and that urban legend version of lemmings to ocean cliffs. I look. I poke around. I don't see anything. I call my dad. He's retired and needs something to do. I'll let him come look. He actually has some competence as a fix-it man and if he can't figure it out, he'll know who to call.

Even if he doesn't get it fixed today while I'm at work, I don't care what the problem with the well is. It will get fixed eventually and I got almost $2,000 back from my student loan that I didn't spend on tuition this year and I only spent $60 on books. I'll even have the money to pay for repairs, borrowed from my future self of course. I'm an American. That's just how money works for us. Even if it's not fixed when I get home, I am still driving to Atlanta and drinking me some beer this weekend. No way I'm going to let weak water pressure keep me from some cask ale. Beer may not cure all ills, but I like to drink it.

In the Time of Chimpanzees I Was a Monkey

Photo: s-a-m, Flickr Creative Commons

Of course, I was probably the type of monkey that sneaked into troops of my larger, more intelligent cousins and ate their fucking babies while the mothers wept their silly little ape tears and the fathers raged, smashing logs against the ground and flinging their poo wildly in a vain attempt to find the stealthy burglar of their genetic future. I'd watch the show from the shadows, their offspring's innards my popcorn.

Bullshit. I was the monkey that got eaten by those tailless bastards on one of their hunting forays. I'm not the kind of guy who takes chances. I'm the kind of guy who clings to the stable and guaranteed and dreams of the riskier options that require more guts than I'm willing to make available.

I'm starting to accept that. At least I hope I am. My only other two options are manning up and self loathing. I'm not fond of either.

Lately, I've been considering quitting this whole blogging thing. My doubt has been nothing serious, at least not yet, but I've just not been feeling it lately. It's been more than a year since I posted something every day and I was feeling like this was actually worth doing. Now, it's just starting to feel a little silly. I started taking blogging seriously as a way to reconnect with some of my college friends, and for a couple of years there it really worked. Gradually they've seemed to fall away from their blogs and at times it feels like I'm the only dork still tick-tacking away to produce rambling tripe that no one wants to read. Building a large audience for this blog was never one of my goals coming in and it never has shaped any of my decisions concerning the site, but I have to admit, the fact that it feels like almost no one is reading sure makes it easier to consider just letting it fade into something I used to do but no longer bother with.

Of course, I'm apparently in an awkward phase at the moment. I even feel a little ridiculous and unsure of myself at the tennis courts after school, and coaching tennis for the last three years has been the only part of my job that I actually loved.

This will pass. Maybe my darker thoughts about the blog will too.

It's funny how writing works. I didn't start out writing the post you just read. I started writing about this topic, but I had intended it to be a joke. I even wanted to work in another line from Beck's "Loser" for the clincher. How I was going to work in "get crazy with the Cheez Whiz" I'm unsure, but that was the plan. Apparently, this is what wanted to come out instead. Sometimes you just have to let it come and set your plans to the side. Things are easier that way.

In Which the Mutilated Corpse of Kermit Makes Me Wax Philosophical

Photo: Moon Rhythm, Flickr Creative Commons

I found a dead frog on the ramp leading out to my carport this weekend. It's a little strange to find a cold blooded animal hanging out in the middle of January, even if it is dead, especially after two weeks when the temperatures plunged well below freezing every night earlier in the month. Of course those two weeks were followed by a week of spring. That woke the frogs back up and they've been singing for days, even Saturday when the weather was overcast and 40 something.

I think the cat had caught this on in the bog next to my pond. When I found the frog it was on its back and I wasn't even sure what it was until I flipped it over. All of the legs and most of the underside of the animal were missing, chewed away by the cat, but when I turned the thing over, the frog was so fresh that it still looked alive. Surrounding the amphibious corpse was a scattering of a wet black grainy substance that looked a lot like caviar on a smaller scale. Of course, I know what frog eggs look like, clear jelly balls surrounding tiny black dots and, later, tiny tadpoles waiting to break free. Some egg masses are actually long tubular strings of jelly punctuated by those same tiny black dots. This stuff surrounding the dead frog didn't have the jelly. It couldn't be unlaid eggs.

But then had I not known what frog eggs looked like I would have probably guessed that this was frog roe violently freed before it was time to be laid and I would have just as likely been correct. That's the irony of knowing stuff. Sometimes it makes you just as stupid as you would have been had you been entirely ignorant.