Mental Notes & Random Musings

As a “bodybuilder” I can say that I like all other bodybuilders hate a plateau. I have devised my own methods to get past the doldrums of a plateau, and I learned them from other “bodybuilders” like myself. Now of course I am not off to win any Mr. Olympias any time soon, or any time ever, but what I do is for the purpose of building muscle. I weigh in at an impressive 170 lbs. and I am 5’ 8” which again means I am nothing all that impressive aside from the fact that I consistently have a bodyfat that hovers around 15% a 30-to-32-inch waist depending on the day, and a 44 inch chest, all wrapped into a 55 year old body, that I build.  I say these things because people have stigmas about the word “body building” and often I just say “strength training” so the completely ignorant will at least listen to me for a minute or so before they brush me off. I am not speaking to those right now I am speaking to the novice, or even the person that is an intermediate which I consider myself and...

The hardest thing about getting healthy or living a healthy lifestyle is the fact that human beings can lie. More to the point most human beings are intellectually dishonest with themselves and outwardly dishonest to others. This is nothing new, and I am sure that the first caveman bragging about the size of their club, or the size of that mastodon they killed was nothing compared to the whoppers going on back in the cave when Ms. Caveman asked her sister if her ass looked big in the mastodon pelt. I am in no way innocent f this but my honesty to you is that I had to get over it and did, so I know you can do it too.  The hardest part about getting honest about your health is all the enablers that want to hear your lies about why you can’t accomplish health. It gives most of them hope that either you may find the way to get healthy without doing healthy things and can share it with them, or at the very least it will normalize the excuses and lies as to why it is impossible. This is ...

Going off last week’s theme I figured I would give you all the “showing up at the gym” or the “returning to the gym” starter packs. I will at least try to normalize this for anyone that is still on the fence about whether a more active pursuit of personal health is worth it to you. I can just take you back to the thirty-year-old me that gave up on fat dumb and happy and went back to the gym to stop hating what I had become.  Phase 1. Aerobic exercise.  Yes, we hate this, and the average person still has nightmares of a leotard and Richard Simmons. Aerobic really means anything that increases your heart rate. If you are a psycho gym fanatic like me then you will do this every day, but most people only need to do it 3 times a week assuming that they are doing the other two phases. If they are not, then it requires 60 minutes each day to maintain the figure of a healthy individual. 60 minutes of aerobics a day would make me wish to be unhealthy quickly, so here are the real thing...

Today is the first day of my vacation. I always wake up on the first day of any vacation with a zeal to hit the gym. In my case since the covidpocolypse, “the gym” means an eight-foot by twelve-foot room at the end of the hallway from my bedroom. I was lucky, or smart, depending on how you look at it, that I had been garbage picking for gym equipment for years before the covidpocolypse hit so I had a serviceable set up with everyone else’s poor decision-making skills, and lack of space filled up for me. It included a used twice, maybe, Bowflex Ultimate with the leg extensions and even the 400lb upgrade. A set of Power Blocks that I did spend hundred bucks on from someone else’s poor decision-making bargain bin. I probably had spent another fifty bucks on accessories to make the Bowflex more gym like.  Yes, my vacations are dedicated to spending two to four hours a day working out instead of the usual hour and a half and a lot of walking around at work. Many would call this a waste ...

I understood Twitter, and I didn’t like what it had become, but when it gets right down to it, Twitter was a great platform before it became X. In the days when piles of us would watch Redeye, load Tweetdeck and troll, was some of the greatest times. Sure, we had the font of all racism running the country, and getting participation trophies because he was black and we all were racist, but we had a platform that just posted everything as it came in, and with hashtags you could see it all flow in the way you wanted it to. There were hundreds of add-on tools that would make it work the way you wanted it to. There were different apps that would help you post to Twitter, out of Twitter, or even use your feed to post back into Twitter. It was the most user friendly, manageable platform, and before Dorsey went mental, it was the freest speech platform at the time. I think this helped it stay together as long as it did and made it all that much more painful when they went full communist. Now t...

The switch between the 80s and the 90s was sudden and not very subtle for me. My irresponsible teen years melted into my irresponsible twenties. The music shifted from girl crazy glam metal pop, to winey everything sucks grunge metal. Speed metal and thrash metal was starting to mainstream, and movies were starting to become a pile of sequels with a banger now and then to then become a pile of sequels. The country had been under the leadership of republican presidents for the entire 80s, and the 90’s started two years away from being guided by a democrat that sat under a confederate flag while he was a governor, lecturing us for the rest of the decade about inequality. All, in all the 90s were still good compared to what we have been dealing with for the last couple of decades, but it was still radically different than the decade before it.  I was not particularly political at this point in my life, but I knew I did not like my two candidates. I voted for Andre Marrou in the 1992 e...

This was officially the last time I am going all-in for a Lighten-Up contest. I do well usually, and I am competitive and all, but the fact of the matter is I am just too old for this. This last round started affecting me in ways that I hadn’t noticed before. The creatine that I had been taking and stopped taking so I could drop all the water weight, appears to be more than just a vanity enhancer when I lift weights, but something that keeps my memory sharp too. This shouldn’t be any surprise, as despite all the shitheels trying to sell you some fountain of youth supplement or a memory enhancer, the only thing that has been proven to help memory as you get older, is creatine. It doesn’t hurt to help you keep your muscle, either. Musculature is no problem really, I can enhance my protein intake and get keep most of my gains, but for the love of God did I get sluggish and dare I say, absent-minded during this starvation session. I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t lived it. I was gen...

Some weeks aren’t as easy as others. Five years into the second century of my life, and I still overwork myself for short periods of time with the caveat being that I will rest and relax afterwards. This was a good plan as little as ten years ago, when I would give my all until my next vacation and then recover from giving it my all. This week was bad in that regard, as I was only on my third, twelve-hour day, and woke up to do my fourth twelve-hour day and was legitimately feeling exhausted. I was walking around in a sort of semi-consciousness working out my chest and arms and I couldn’t get to my usual set weights from Sunday. On Tuesday when I was working my back and shoulders, I had no deterioration from the previous Saturday. It was a dramatic drop off from second day and fourth day. It is one of the advantages of strength training six days a week, as I have a gauge for health step-backs.  Well, if we take diet into account, the twelve-hour days help me out a bit here because ...