Remember my Misery blog post a couple of months ago? Wait, here’s a coincidence–it was exactly two months ago; anyways, yeah. I had that night again, except in bike form.

The pattern was the same; I was bad with my water intake, I had a beer tonight, I had a crappy dinner. I knew I’d pay the price when I got out there on the bike tonight. To top it off, it has been pouring rain all day, and now everything is soaked and the humidity is through the roof. My bike is already in bad shape, and now that it got really wet, the bearings are shot and the wheels barely spin. If I stop pedaling, the bike coasts about 15 feet and grinds to a halt. The work to get this thing moving has doubled. In addition to that, just like Misery, my music player for some reason stopped working tonight. I have no idea why.  The stage was set for a bad night.

It doesn’t really matter; the point of this is to sweat, work out, and lose weight, not go long distance or set any speed records. Why should it matter if the bike is easy to pedal or hard to pedal? If it’s hard to pedal, that means I’m working harder to move. That’s a good thing, right?

Still, it’s one of those nights where I just want to bitch about it. It hurt, I didn’t want to do it, and I almost turned around before I even started.

In fact, I did turn around after I got to the end of my block. I turned around, and started heading back, and then got really pissed at myself and went right back past my house and kept going.

All told, I got a two mile ride in, and when I got back I was drenched in sweat. I suppose I should give myself a cookie for completing a hard ride that I absolutely didn’t want to take, but I didn’t earn it because I’m being a bitch about this whole thing.

The next week is going to be extremely tough with the Expo Icrontic here; guests are dribbling in. I will have a friend from Norway here tomorrow and a friend from LA as well, and it’s just gonna be more eating bad and making other poor choices. I’ll try to suffer silently.

Blergh.

While my opinion is that no innocent person should be incarcerated, and that we should make every effort to ensure their freedom if wrongly convicted, the recent Supreme Court ruling seriously undermines an inmate’s ability to challenge their incarceration and prove their innocence via new, more advanced DNA testing methods.

The 5-4 ruling denies that inmates have a constitutional right to DNA testing after their conviction and places the states in charge of setting their own policies concerning whether inmates can have access to post-conviction DNA testing or not. What this means is that if someone’s innocent and wrongfully imprisoned for a crime they didn’t commit, and a new DNA test might clear them of any wrong doing, they have no constitutionally protected right to that biological evidence.

So states such as Alabama, Alaska, Massachusetts and Oklahoma that have no laws allowing post-conviction access to biological evidence can arbitrarily decide whether or not someone can have access to such evidence or new, more advanced testing methods. And the states that do have laws often place strict limits on who is eligible, so there’s no guarantee that inmates in those states will be able to exonerate themselves either.

As for the constitutionality of this issue, Amendment 6 states that “the accused shall enjoy the right … to be confronted with the witnesses against him” and “obtaining witnesses in his favor.” And this applies to physical evidence as well. So as far as I’m concerned, the right to, as Reuters puts it, “obtain access to a state’s biological evidence to conduct DNA testing when pursuing claims of innocence” should easily fall under this amendment.

In other words, I think it is a Constitutional issue and I agree with the dissenting justices that “the right to post-conviction DNA testing should not depend on the widely varying laws enacted by the states.” This has got to be one of the most disturbing rulings from the U. S. Supreme Court in recent memory. It’s absolutely unbelievable.

then:

• I would have stared at pictures of her all night
• I would have gotten lost in a sea of memories, reminiscence, and self-loathing
• I would have been mean to other people, snapped back, and been snarky
• I would have taken out my pain in a million subtle ways
• I would have ended the night in tears

now:

• I closed the website of the girl who reminded me of her
• I stopped listening to the song that reminded me of her
• I shut off my computer
• I got on my bike
• I pedaled hard and fast, taking my anger out on the bike and the road
• I came home and wrote this
• I ended the night drenched in sweat instead of tears

Tonight I walked instead of biked; I took my kids skunk hunting.

By hunting, I mean looking for skunks. I see them all the time on my adventures, but for some reason whenever I take my kids out (neither of them have ever seen a skunk) I miss them. Tonight was no exception.

I even went to the usual haunts. The scrubby field by the expressway ramps, the paths along the factories, the bushes and fences they run along, snuffling and searching for whatever it is skunks eat.

Nothing.

My kids think I’m making it all up.

When I go on a long walk, sometimes I pretend that I stepped through a wormhole and instantaneously appeared in another city, another state, another country, or even another world. Did you ever do that? Consciously try to will your familiarity with a place away and try to see it with brand new eyes? Once in a while I can pull it off, and I find myself talking to myself in my head, narrating my fantasy like a bad science fiction novel.

“Where am I? How did I get here? What’s going on?”

“How is this possible? Something has gone terribly, terribly wrong!”

Et cetera.

My younger son said something hilarious though; he must have read it in a cheesy book or a bad video game. He said, and I quote:

“It’s quiet. Too quiet.”

What a strange night.

And I would do well to remember that.

When, at mile 2, you start burping and belching, you know something is wrong. We cheaped out tonight, got lazy, and got pizza for dinner. Now, I could make excuses about having company here, or having no food in the house due to lack of proper shopping, or what-have-you, but instead I’ll just own up to it and say: We got pizza tonight and it was not good workout food.

Yesterday, today, and for the next couple of weeks, I’ll be biking with my friend Greg. He’s in much better shape than I am, due to a less slovenly lifestyle and also being a mailman. My intense biking workout is, to him, a pleasant evening stroll. Still, he gamely coasts along behind me, even though I can feel him itching to plow ahead on the pedals and turn it into a real workout. It’s nice to have someone along, even though it reminds me how far I have to go. But that’s a good thing.

Tonight’s ride was definitely better than the last, pace-wise. My technique is not to set any speed records, but to make sure that I am pedaling and working for the entire ride; I’ve found a good gear setting which makes it relatively high resistance on flat ground but doesn’t completely exhaust me. I can maintain my pedaling at a fairly consistent rate (the goal, if you look at my BuddyRunner charts, it to maintain as flat a “pace” line as possible–that indicates consistency over the miles). The idea is that I will eliminate the bike as a variable by keeping it at the same gear whether it is optimal or not. Any increases in pace can therefore be seen as improvements to my own power and speed rather than optimization of the machine I’m using.

The way I see it, if I can pedal for basically the whole ride, I’m getting a good workout. My muscle fatigue and dripping sweat tell me that I am indeed working out.

And the sweat is starting to pour.

I knew these days would come; the days of enjoying the crisp cool nights, where even though I was vigorously working out I kept cool because of the weather were destined to end. I knew that the humid Michigan summer would kick my ass.

I was right; it’s starting to get hot, it’s starting to get humid, and it’s just going to get worse.

I did a lot of yardwork the last couple of days. Yesterday I mowed down a hill in my back yard with a roto-tiller. Doing this is like going to the gym and having a major upper body workout. You are constantly fighting the heavy machine as it tears its way through roots, hard soil, and rocks. Your job is to keep it level and keep it moving. This involves a lot of pulling, pushing, grunting, and in my case, sweating.

Today I finished my final phase of transporting and deploying 31 bags of lava rocks for the tree box in front of my house. I have planted Lantana, a couple of petunias, some sage bushes, and a basil plant. I repotted a Ficus that inherited from my grandmother years ago. Things are starting to shape up.

I didn’t bike the last couple of days. Tonight I got back to it, and I knew it would be rough from my weekend with lots of alcohol and my breaking of routine these last couple of days. I did make sure to stay hydrated throughout the day, and accordingly, I seriously picked up my water consumption. That, and the sweaty yardwork I did today were probably the only things that saved my ass from collapsing on my bike ride. My pace sucked, it was the worst ever, and each pedal was a struggle, especially for the last mile. I also really need to do some maintenance on my bike; it sounds like a damned jalopy. It squeaks and moans all over the place.

Bleh. Anyways, I got it done. 3 miles, dripping sweat, hot, miserable, and painful. Sounds familiar? It sounds like when I started my walking blogs, doesn’t it?

More yardwork, and another bike ride tomorrow. See you then.

It may be the incredibly mild and beautiful Michigan spring, it may be the fire in my belly from my LA trip, it may be a bunch of things, but the end result is that I have been working like a fiend lately. I’ve gotten so much work done for Icrontic (my day job) lately; the kind that makes you look at the clock and see that it’s 1am and you realize you’ve been essentially working for 12 hours straight without getting tired. I think they call this “in the zone”.

So yes, I’m in the zone. I didn’t have the same rah-rah go-getter attitude that I did last night when I got on the bike tonight, and I started off dragging ass for the first few minutes, but by mile 1 my pace was back on par with last night’s great ride.

If I could just channel this determination into my diet, things would be unstoppable. I could make excuses about lack of healthy food in the house, and the “bare essentials” grocery shopping that got done today, which was mostly bread, ramen, and boxed food, but that would just be … making excuses. I mean, it’s not like I’m completely off the wagon, but I could definitely do better. I am still eating way, way better than I did before but then my roommate goes and does shit like… make fresh chocolate chip cookies and buy delicious loaves of fresh baked sourdough bread. And I hate him. And I love him.

I still get that thing where I look in the mirror and don’t see any difference. It’s like I’m losing my weight in strange places in my body, like my arms and thighs. My belly, my neck, and other places where I’d really like to see a difference are still looking the same. It’s discouraging. Don’t get me wrong, 20 lbs (probably more by now) is still 20 lbs. I am still able to fit into pants that I haven’t been able to fit into for years. I am still down two pant sizes. It just doesn’t look like it. At least not to me.

When I get like this, I go back and read my first few days of blogs, and I remember just how fucked I truly was. I could not walk to the end of my block. It still boggles my mind just how out of shape I was.

A year from now, I’ll look back and think the same thing about this very moment.

Literally.

While I wouldn’t consider my last week spent in Los Angeles to be a “week off” exercise-wise, it certainly wasn’t a dedicated, focused effort either. I spent the week covering the E3 conference in LA and our hotel happened to be 1.25 miles away from the convention center; I’ll estimate that we walked at least five miles every day between hotel trips, meetings at other locations, and general floorwalking in the gigantic LA Convention Center.

At any rate, before the trip I got sick with a cold; I had it the entire trip, and I still have it. I was kind of out of sorts between the change of atmosphere and routine, the sickness, the timezone changes, and the crappy air in LA. I got back late Friday night and I’ve had trouble getting back to EST and reality.

I knew that my biking adventure would be an either/or proposition tonight; it was either going to be stellar, or it was going to be shit. I rolled the dice and left.

Luckily I had good music with me. It rained all evening here in Detroit, so the humidity was exceptionally high. I started sweating almost immediately in the thick and heavy air. Still, I am in awe of how fresh and clean everything smells here compared to Los Angeles. Michigan air has the warm and seductive scent of flowers, trees, and leaves. The rich scents of late spring are thick in the air.

I cranked my music and took off. Normally my biking goes like this: pedal pedal pedal driifffffftttt pedal pedal pedal drifffffttttt. Tonight it was constant pedaling with no drifting. I set a firm pace and stuck with it. I went 3.5 miles and kept up the pace. If you’ve been keeping up with me on BuddyRunner you’ll see what I mean–my pace this evening was the most even it’s ever been, and it was the best I’ve ever done.

When I got home, I was dripping, but extremely satisfied with how things went. I needed this to clear my head and get out of this funk.

It’s good to be home.

Okay, I’ll admit it; no exercise tonight: I am sick as hell and I NEED TO GET BETTER BEFORE I GO TO LA FOR FIVE DAYS.

That said, I will still blog.

I had a wonderful conversation tonight with a musician friend. His name is Reggie Smith. He was the lead singer for an up-and-coming Detroit-based band called “Bloom” several years ago, and I was a fan. My wife and I would go to see as many of their shows as we could, as they were one of those bands that you just had a sense about—you know, one of those bands that was just… too good to be playing in this or that crappy bar. They were meant for bigger things.

Things happened, and they broke up. Same with me; things happened, my wife and I broke up. Time passed.

A few years back, as a newly single guy, I saw Reggie again at a local brewery that I started to hang out at. He was now fronting a band called The Afterparty. Again, Reggie stole the show and really knew how to work the crowd. I became a fan all over again.

Over the years, I became friends with Reggie, and we started talking alot. Reggie didn’t know that I was a musician. Recently, I had let on that it would be an honor to jam with him.

Tonight I flat out told him; we need to play together. I’ve got funk in my soul, music that is dying to come out of my fingers, and he is going to help me with this. We had a grand talk, full of ideas, inspiration, and downright badassery. Tonight the foundation was laid for another reawakening in my life; that of the music that died inside of me way back when.

It’s in there. I have been a bass player for 16 years—secretly, clandestinely, privately. I don’t mean to brag, but I have reached that skill level that allows me to express myself adequately through my talent, and it needs to come out. I’ve got music in my soul, and it wants to sing.

So tonight, the path opened up to me, and I’m going to jump on it. So I have begun meditative exercise, so I have begun physical exercise, so I have begun dietary exercise, and so I shall begin creative and artistic exercise as well. The music that lives inside of me shall be free.

I remember a time not so long ago when I made choices for the better; I would go out and decide I was going to do a certain distance, or turn at a certain corner, and then when I got to that point, I decided that instead of taking the easy path I would continue to push myself and go farther, faster, or higher.

That’s where I was tonight; I have a cold (RIGHT before I go on a weeklong trip to LA. Fantastic), and I wasn’t feeling like exercising. Still, I got out there and got on my bike and started up with a one or maybe two mile trip in mind.

When I got to the halfway point, I decided to just say fuck it, and keep going. I ended up going 3 miles, which is my normal distance.

I kind of lost sight of the fact that I was just preaching a month or two ago to make better choices on a moment-to-moment basis. I remember now; I need to make better choices every moment.

My roommate said that willpower was like a muscle, you just need to keep exercising it and it gets stronger, but damn if it doesn’t take a long time to notice a difference. I think that’s where I’m at right now; discouraged by my lack of willpower over the last couple of days, I’m in danger of falling into a rut of going back to my old lifestyle, except I still exercise every night, and I’m still thinking about my food choices, and I’m still drinking far more water than I ever did. I swear, it’s like I got all excited about losing 20 pounds and then boom—my motivation plummeted.

I’ll shake myself out of it; I know that I’ll return from LA invigorated and full of new ideas. Perhaps that will carry over into my personal life as well and I’ll come back motivated to continue my fitness quest.