Category: walking

Fitbit Progress

Reviewing my Fitbit YTD, I found that I’ve walked over twenty-eight hundred miles, averaging 7.85 miles a day.

I was wondering about it today because as I went to walk, part of me whined, “Do we haft to?” in its best three year old voice. “Can’t we take the day off?”

With a grudging grimace, I imitated Mom and said, “Let me think about it.” That quieted the quitting part of me while I checked my numbers. I hadn’t done that in a while. Yes, I check daily to see what I did the day before. Once in a while, I look at the weekly total. I always have a general feel for how much I’ve done without getting into details, but I don’t really look at the ongoing cumulative numbers.

After checking the numbers, I felt pretty good about my average and agreed to the partial day off. We’ll see how it goes tomorrow. Maybe with an extra cup of coffee in the afternoon, I can make up today’s shortfall.

 

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Friday’s Theme Music

More weather dictated theme music. I’m planning to dress, looking out the window, checking the temperature and forecast. Hey, fifty-one, windy as hell, but sunny. So, I’ll be walking in sunshine.

It was an easy jump in the stream to Katrina and the Waves and “Walking On Sunshine” (1985).

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The Change Dream

Alone, I was coming down into a valley, leaving forests behind me. The end of an exhausting journey, I’d been walking through the mountains for a long time. It’d been stormy and chaotic up there. I’d been drenched to the skin through my clothes but now I was dry. Even though it was almost the day’s end, it was warmer down here in the valley.

Mountains edged the broad, green valley. A wide river wound through it. The sun’s final beams pierced the clouds in a space where the mountains were lower. Clouds still loitered but there wasn’t any threat of a storm. It was an idyllic, calm scene.

Weary, I slowed to regard the valley, although I still walked, not really thinking of anything but which the direction I should take and my next steps. With that happening, the sun winked behind clouds and mountains, making it instantly chillier. Past the clouds, stars began making their entrances.

Hearing a thunderclap, I started and turned to my left. A huge purple wave raced across the valley, It had a sole peak of amplitude that seemed about ten stories high.

Shock and alarm bolted through my me as I struggled to get a handle on the wave. I was thinking, “What was that?” I answered myself, “It was a wave. Yes, but why?” While I answered, the wave reached the valley’s far end and burst. A white flare arced into the night.

It was the wave that exploded, I thought. That’s a good thing, I decided, smiling to myself. Wasn’t it? Yes, I felt. It meant a big change had taken place. Not sure what had changed, or how, confidence surged into me.

I resumed walking, looking forward to the future.

The dream ended.

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Thursday’s Theme Music

I awoke with Outkast’s “Hey Ya” streaming in my mind, but another song replaced it. The lyrics, sung by a woman went, “He’s the last of the secret agents, and he’s my man.”

I thought, was that Nancy Sinatra? Sure sounded like it to my brain. Thinking about Nancy granted permissions to stream “These Boots Are Made for Walkin'”, followed by a duet with Frank Sinatra, “Something Stupid”. Hearing Frank made the stream believe it was okay for him to join in, so I heard “Winchester Cathedral” and “Fly Me to the Moon”.

I’d decided I was becoming a basket case, which opened the ports for “Basketcase” by Green Day, followed by “Boulevard of Broken Dreams”. Thinking, enough, I went through a little of “Enough is Enough” by April Wine, followed by “No More Tears” (Streisand/Summers).

By then, I knew that it had been Nancy Sinatra streaming “Last of the Secret Agents” (1966). I never saw the movie, btw. Anyone know if it was any good?

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Future Me

I read a recent article about how we see ourselves. The article’s essence was that a study showed that people could readily see how they’d changed, but didn’t think they would change in the future.

That’s an odd conclusion. Looking back on how and why I change, I can appreciate how the world changed, forcing me to change. Mentors, friends, and family members have died. Their influence remains, but it’s faded.

Sometimes, I think of it like dominoes. I’m in a long row that’s been set up to fall over when tapped, part of a pretty design. Matters that tap me over include my changing body. My hearing is damaged and my vision has lost its acuity. My metabolism has slowed, as has my physical energy, and my muscles are weaker. My joints are stiffer, and my athleticism and coordination have diminished. My sleeping patterns have changed. I endured illnesses and injuries which changed my trajectory. I’ve gained weight and developed gluten and dairy reactions.  I mostly bloat. Before I bloated, I didn’t understand what people meant when they said, “I feel bloated today.” Now I understand.

Our food chain has changed. What impact that has on me, I probably won’t ever know. I was introduced to new foods, and dishes from other cultures, and I was introduced to better quality food, increasing my awareness of what quality means, and how it influences me.

Technology has advanced, enabling me to hear more music, inviting me in as a witness to more amazing events and moments. I usually have a laptop or tablet nearby to keep me connected to others. I’ve never met many of the people who are in my circle of friendship. Science has advanced, giving me more to think about. Researchers, psychologists and sociologists have gained insights into how our bodies, societies, and civilizations function. Engaging TED Talks and blogs help socialize new information. Big data analytics keep expanding on what we know, or what might be going on.

Our society and government have changed. Events like 9/11 changed us. I make more effort to understand the world than I used to make. After traveling and living outside of the United States, I became more watchful about politics, equality, justice, and our environment. As our politics have changed, and groups like white supremacists and Nazis have grown, I’ve been forced to question what I know. Likewise, revelations of sexual assault, news of murders, and lies by politicians and others sharpen my desire to know the truth and understand.

I’ve read many more books since I was young. I’ve written books. Both activities encouraged thinking, and from the thinking has come change in my views, approaches, appreciation, and understanding.

My brain has changed, apparently from triggers built in at some genetic level. I’ve become more impatient. Lessons learned through betrayal, resentment, success, and failure have fostered changes to my behavior. I work on improving myself more than I used to, when improving myself meant working out or taking classes.

I’ve lost hair on my head. My hairline recedes and my baldness expands. My hair thins and grays. Meanwhile, the rest of me becomes hairier. With my aging and changes, I became more invisible to a larger segment of population.

Or maybe that’s just me and my perceptions. They can change.

I can extrapolate some ways that I’ll probably change. I think I’ll be more withdrawn, speaking less, and enjoying small talk less. I hope to be writing and publishing more, but that’s a hope that I’ve been nurturing for over twenty years. My future diet will probably be more limited, I’ll be less active, and pop culture will seem more alien. I’ve always disliked talking on the telephone, and avoid it when I can. I suspect it’ll be hard to get future me on the phone.

I’ve been fortunate that I’ve escaped being caught in disasters. That luck can change. It feels, sometimes, like the hazardous air from the wildfires of the last few years have changed me. Certainly, that smoke, combined with the blazing heat, increased my depression, depleted my energy, and sapped my will. It certainly changed my summer and expectations.

Then, there are the other people in my life. Their changes, illnesses, success and failure will change me, too. That’s one constant that’s not likely to change.

All these variables will cause changes in me. I don’t know what I’ll be like in the future, but I don’t think that who I am now is who I will be.

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Thursday’s Theme Music

Continuing a newly established trend of using my walking to inspire my theme music instead of my dreams and pets, this song popped into my head today.

I’m not an amazing walker, but I usually manage to walk seven to ten miles a day, typically in three or four segments. I like walking as part of my writing rituals. But once I’m done writing in my head, my thoughts wander. Sometimes, inspired by the writing or editing process, a song pops in.

So it was today. Finishing with my phantom writing/editing and feeling happy, I told my muses and myself, “That’s it. We got it.” That prompted the drumming intro to the popular hit by The Go-Go’s (a spelling which maddens me, as I think that it should be The Go-Gos, but whatever), “We Got the Beat” (1982).

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Wednesday’s Theme Music

I heard this song a few years ago, on its first release. I still hear it once in a while, and sing it to myself as I walk about Ashland in my pre-writing and apres-writing walks. The song’s beat and lyrics are marvelous complements to my natural stride.

Here’s Alice Merton with “No Roots” (2016).

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Monday’s Theme Music

Today, after awakening, rising, and feeding the cats, I began streaming a Bee Gees song called “Lonely Days” (1970). Don’t know what prompted my neurotransmitters to order this song today. I think it might have to do with rain. It was raining as I awoke, and stayed in bed, listening to it for a short period before thinking, “Must have coffee,” which prompted me to get up.

“Lonely Days” always strikes me as a rainy-day song. Something about its timbre reflects a gray, rain-swept landscape to me, a feeling that intensified as I walked on damp pavement and light drizzle.

Here you go. Have an excellent day.

 

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Grounding Myself

Here we go, more self-indulgence. What’s new? This is a vanity blog with a primary purpose of understanding myself and my thinking through writing and coping with my writing efforts, with secondary purposes of entertaining myself and sharing ideas with others.

I struggled with how much to share today. I’m telling what the series, Incomplete States, is about. I decided that I typically don’t have many visitors, so I have little to worry about. I expect this post to get eight views and five likes, and perhaps two comments.

I was thinking about all of this in connection with where I stand with editing and revising the second novel, and by extension, the series. I felt a need to ground myself about where I’m at in the series, where it is, and where it goes.

To begin, consider three questions.

  1. Do you ever feel disconnected from your life, as though things have happened that you don’t remember or understand?
  2. Have you ever thought, didn’t I already do this?
  3. Is there ever a time that you feel like you’re a completely different person, resulting in a struggle to fit in? Perhaps you think, I was a male, and now I’m a female.

If you feel that you’ve experienced these things, it’s possible that you have an entangled LERE. A LERE is a Life-Experience-Reality-Existence. Entangled LEREs are caused by Chi-particle issues. Chi-particles are imaginary quantum particles that are lack mass and energy and travel faster than light. As they slow, they acquire mass and energy, becoming a fundamental quantum particle before devolving into some aspect of classic physics. Chi-particles exist as isotopes and variants just as elements often exist as isotopes and variants, which affect their behavior.

This is the situation that my characters experience in the four book series, Incomplete States.

I was exploring and thinking about the series as I walked this morning. Specifically, I thought, oh my God, what have I done? 

No, that’s not true. That was inserted for comedic effect. It’s sometimes true that I think this, but that wasn’t the case today.

Today brought a more rational review of the books and the story arc. I’d conceptualized, what if there is only now, no past, no future, and no cause and effect? What if the arrows of time are a convenient commodity we use to explain our existence (including our Universe) because it fits with our organic biology and creates a simple framework for being?

When I think about this, I’m forced to think about multi-verses, but also to challenge the ideas that our Universe is expanding. We believe we observe its expansion through light shifts because that cause and effect is the prevalent belief of our existence, along with the arrows of time that go from the past to the future, shooting through now. In my reality, E = mc2 is a fallacy that we cling to because it fortifies our foundations of being.

We hang onto the concepts of a greater being in the same way.

None of these things are easy to lose. Grappling with not accepting them and actively rejecting them is hard to keep in mind when you’re writing. I kept wanting to return to cause and effect and our universe’s foundations.

As I played with those concepts, I introduced characters who were undergoing the symptoms expressed in the opening questions. Unlike you, they often also remember what else happened. They remember other worlds and other lives that they lived and then come to a grudging grasp that they’re still living in these other worlds and lives.

All of this is told through their stories. Throughout, the things that happen to them cause gaps in logic, cause and effect, and expectations. They endure twisted memories and confused understanding, resulting in a knowledge vacuum.

Humans dislike vacuums. We always want to explain what’s going on via some mechanism. That mechanism can be via magic, religion, science, and technology. Those are the broad categories. People also suspect they live dream existences, but struggle to understand which part of their LERE is the dream existence, and which is the reality, coping with the possibilities that maybe both are dreams, or maybe both are realities. They struggle with plots to explain what’s happening to them, plots that involve governments, conspiracies, virtual realities, and other intelligent life forms.

The existences, experiences, and coping become a huge matrix, but the matrix is different for each of the six main characters. The delta between their matrices fluctuates.

That’s where the tension resides, evolving into wonder about which theory filling the vacuum is correct, and how the stories will resolve.

I had several writing rules I employed while writing these four books. Chapters were addressed as episodes. Cause and effect can be perceived, but readers can’t depend on it. Consistently inconsistent logic would be employed. Life — or reality — is a vacuum, and our search for understanding and explaining it all is a farce. What we interpret as life through our experiences forms a reality that’s a slice of existence that doesn’t linger.

I don’t treat my science as junk science. I treat it seriously in the novels. I don’t expect it to hold up to scientific reviews or validate string theory, loop quantum gravity, or the theory of everything. I offer no math to support my science, although I’ll point out that in my concept, anything anyone offers to support or tear down my science is wrong because of the inherent observer’s bias held by being in and part of this universe.

Yeah, it’s fun. It makes me laugh. That’s what writing’s all about, innit? Entertaining ourselves.

Hopefully, after reading the series, the typical reader will think, “I see.” And then they’ll wonder, “But what is it that I see?”

 

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Thursday’s Theme Music.

I guess this is a throwback Thursday. Of course, many of my days are throwbacks. Some are throwaways.

I found myself streaming some ZZ Top as I walked this morning.

Jesus just left Chicago and he’s bound for New Orleans.
Well now, Jesus just left Chicago and he’s bound for New Orleans.
Yeah, yeah.
Workin’ from one end to the other and all points in between.

Took a jump through Mississippi, well, muddy water turned to wine.
Took a jump through Mississippi, muddy water turned to wine.
Yeah, yeah.
Then out to California through the forests and the pines.
Ah, take me with you, Jesus.

h/t to Lyricsfreak.com

Why this song, today? I don’t know. Maybe a smell that I didn’t consciously notice triggered a memory, or two neurons ran into each other on an axon and reminisced about the old days. Perhaps I whiffed someone toking up and connected that to  ZZ Top. Perhaps, in worrying about the present and future, I subconsciously longed for the past, and dredged up times that were simpler and happier for me. Maybe there’s no logic at all, but just random impulses.

The world may never know.

 

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