Looking for Uplift in a Downdraft

I made it to the 17th last year. This year, it was over by the 11th. So much for my post-a-day routine. I’d feel worse about it, but it was a mercy killing.

It’s one of those things you laugh about shortly after rolling out of bed in the morning. Not always—I’ve had mornings when I’ve awakened feeling every bit as depressed or more when I went to bed. At least I know this is straight-up seasonal.

These are the times when you have to remind yourself you’ve done a couple of things; you’re not entirely worthless. In my case I maintained my Christmas-season streak of repairing or otherwise putting things in order left long undone in my office by taking down and gluing the base of my primary bookshelf. It was on its side in the middle of the floor in my west wing for 24 hours with my heaviest coffee table books on top to hold it fast until it cured.

The view from my office chair Saturday. I was chagrined to realize I’ve lived here long enough for my bookcase to leave an outline on the wall when I took it down. That got cleaned, too. And having made a clean spot....

I regret not being able to show all the wonderful titles here, their placement on the bottom shelf having contributed to the fracture requiring repair, but I needed to angle them for balance.

The bulk of yesterday was spent getting the bookcase back up, with as much of that fine San Luis Valley dust I could remove from the tops of so many books at a time with rapidly depleting cans of compressed air. Everything came together nicely in time for sundown, which I spent twitching in my chair in front of my desk, struggling to focus on my work-in-progress, a years-overdue concluding novel to a trilogy that’s already 351 pages long, but progressing—forgive me, I’m going to say “literally”—one sentence at a time. 

I sat in a daze before my monitor. I started a piece on my oldest cat, whom we’re likely to lose in 2020. Upon typing out a list of sad things, with a break to go downstairs and take some photos of the lonely elderkitty in his bed in the kitchen, I decided that was enough. I’d punished myself sufficiently. More to the point, there was no reason to punish my audience at all. 

Not yet, anyway. Certainly not when I’m in this kind of a mood.

So many little tchotchkes. So much dust.

Two spaceships from different universes reconcile the randomness of existence with the Tower Buddha.

I wanted to blame it all on a desire to break my alcohol and tobacco fasts, but I already knew what was behind that. And if I didn’t drift out when I could have at 8 p.m. and picked up a 12-pack and a deck of cowboy killers, it’s because I knew that, for three or four hours of overindulgence, I’d wake up even more depressed in the morning. Bloated, and with bad breath, too.

Everything back in order and shiny-clean to boot. My favorite music is playing. I can’t get my creative engine to turn over to save my life. My battery’s dead, Jim.

The nights are the worst, and they’re the longest in the winter. But I got through it, and so did Otis the Elderkitty. Today will be one minute and fifteen seconds longer than yesterday. I’ll take it. 

A Most Industrious Midwinter Melancholia

Hey, it happens sometimes. It’s a tough month.

I got a nice smirk going for all that “first full moon of the decade, special energies will be released” pixie dust that showed up in my Facebook and Twitter timelines this week. Yeah, those energies were special, all right.

Seriously, it was something new. I somehow found the energy to not only clean my main bookcase, but glue the base and set it down to cure throughout the afternoon and into the night. If all goes to plan, I’ll reassemble everything in the morning and that’s one more thing I put off too long fixing that finally got fixed.

Yet for all that and a sunny sky besides the day was melancholy. It wasn’t just me; my wife was feeling it, too. She never stopped being busy doing her usual Saturday chores, but there was little satisfaction in it.

A lot of it is winter fatigue. We’ve had snow on the ground since Thanksgiving weekend and it has rarely gotten above freezing for weeks. It’s January, not even the middle of it. Grin and bear it, it’s all you can do. We’re getting stuff done. That’s no small thing.

Sometimes you feel like a lone dented trash barrel amidst the glory of God’s creation.

You pass beyond the barrier...

....only to realize you still have February after this. Ah, well. It’s not like I don’t have a book to finish writing.

Neil Peart, Percussionist, Lyricist, Essayist, 1952-2020

I know it’s crass to rate such things, but Mr. Peart is the biggest one to die in a while.

Link to original Tweet, in case it still works.

If all you knew about Neil Peart was from the write-ups in online newspapers you would think, oh, a drummer for a band. At least he didn’t overdose. That Peart wasn’t a boozy, druggy mess is one thing. 

What’s left out is that Neil Peart was not merely a drummer, but a percussionist admired by none other than master jazz drummer Buddy Rich. Peart was in the top-tier among his fellow instrumentalists, a peer only to Bill Bruford, Carl Palmer, and the late John Bonham. Peart’s drums did more than keep the beat, they spoke their own version of the story in the song.

A story, incidentally, he wrote. Another omission in the obituaries is what put Rush over the top as a band, namely, Peart’s thoughtful and erudite lyrics. Peart was not wailing for love lost in his songs (although I’m sure he turned out one or two among the dozens he helped write). He was a storyteller who knew how to finesse a complex line. 

Peart also kept an entertaining blog of his motorcycle adventures taken while the band was on tour. If he wasn’t the last man of music and letters to pass away, he was among the last. Rest in peace, Neil Peart. Sic transit gloria mundi.

Random Notes I Made on Music While Drunk

First in a series? I dunno. I’m just going through old journals and picking up stuff. Also, scraps of paper with bold proclamations boldly scribbled in multi-colored felt-tip markers, from back in the day when I took more from the beer than it did me.

I used to be dead-set against the idea of death camps. Reading music magazines in the mid- to late-1990s cured me of that sentiment. To blazes with any given yappy little nuisance insisting I trash all of my lifetime favorites in deference to the Almighty New Thing Ascendant, in this case, the 10,000 names of electronica, now EDM, soon to become synthwave. Ten years earlier I was hating the punks for that same eliminationist Year Zero attitude. All such people deserve a “Holiday in Cambodia.” 

Seriously, how about I like what I like, and let me make up my own mind on whether I like this stuff you like? We could agree to disagree. The best music, like the best comfort facilities, is always in the privacy of your own home.

I’ve noticed the above sentiment is still alien to people even older than my developmentally arrested self. The ride never stops.

******* 

I realize most people can’t or won’t remember it as such but post-Nirvana radio was a freaking joy to listen to in the Clinton years. It was a Silver Age of Popular Radio, much like the Golden Age of the mid-1970s, when you could hear a song representing any given popular genre. Grunge, power pop, acoustic pop, diva singers, synth bands, and even the big band/swing revival and the Latin-tinged stuff all over 1999, closing out a decade that started with a surge in New Age ambient pop and Gregorian chants. It was all there.

* * * * * * *

The guy who sang lead for the 70s R&B group The Spinners was the William Shatner of R&B singers. This occurs to me while listening to “Then Came You,” the collaboration they did with Dionne Warwick in 1975. It’s not the cadence, it’s the attitude. It takes a certain type to pull it off.

* * * * * * *

The Cardigans’ “Cloudy Sky” from Emmerdale recalls Frank Zappa’s “Peaches en Regalia.” Nice trick for this Swedish power pop outfit.

I would know something about Frank Zappa. Among others.

Returning to the present day, I’m enjoying my new music setup. It’s quite something to be able to throw complete albums at a playlist—a three terabyte hard drive provides options a single gigabyte MiniDisc cannot— and decide which of the deep cuts are just too awful to be borne. In some cases, I’ve left off the obvious hits, along with a lot of songs I’ve been listening to for years and years and needed a break from years ago already, lest I begin to hate them.

I’m hearing new songs by old favorites, and it turns out the best of these old favorites can’t go wrong. It’s energizing to be excited about music again after so long. I might have to write some more on this later.

Where two complete albums by 1970s’ outift Big Star meet the nigh-complete discography of Cocteau Twins. (Cocteau Twins’ first album is just too hard on the ears.)

350 Pages and Counting

It’s been a very good start to the New Year.

I’m still struggling with the last scene in my novella-within-my-novel, in which Agnes, A.J., and Elyssa are taken into Abundant Life. This will be the final component bridging the early narrative to the present, allowing me to jump back to where I’d left off in Act III of my five-part drama. I’m so close, but I need a dramatic transition.

Detail from a painting my wife did promoting Grace Among the Dead.
Copyright © 2020 Cynthia J. Aiken.

When in doubt, the dead attack is my motto. The Wrong Kind of Dead is a novel in which the living dead are presumably the primary antagonist, although, as with all post-apocalyptic scenarios, it’s your fellow survivors who tend to threaten your survival as much, if not more. It’s always a challenge making an attack by the living dead as unique as it is suspenseful, especially when you already know this is a backstory and your heroes’ success is assured. 

It’s going one sentence at a time. What’s interesting about the process now is I used to do so well making the connections while drinking beer and smoking during the designated night time hours. Unfortunately, as with any psychoactive supplement, more beer and cigarettes were required over time. Every morning I woke up feeling worse and worse with little to nothing to show for it.

New Year’s Day I went cold-turkey, and though I’ve had my anxious patches, I’ve suffered the precise opposite of being blocked in terms of creativity. If I can’t write one sentence more on my novel, I write a blog post. I make notes in my journal for other things I want to do; these things are often the blog posts of the future.

Then I come back and write one more sentence. Sometimes I can blast out an entire paragraph and then some. Sometimes it’s just a sentence. I’m always coming back. I don't leave until I've left something.

I’ve got this strange, powerful energy that wasn’t there before. And now I’ve crossed the 350-page mark, and I stand to make a few more before I make the long march out to the end.

Once more into the breach. There is nothing else.

The Elasticity of Time

Just when you thought you were back to normal— you never left.

Remember how excited you were just two weeks ago tonight? That is, assuming you’re excited about Christmas Eve. Yes, that was just fourteen days ago.

How about just one week ago tonight? New Year’s Eve, party time, baby! Remember how that felt?

I know, I know. Might as well have been a year ago.

It’s said that black holes in space have such powerful gravitational pull that they can bend light. The Christmas/New Year’s holiday season bends time itself. Most people don’t think about these things. I’m not most people. Sometimes I wish I was. 

This isn’t one of them. 

The Yellow Submarine isn’t the only one that got lost in the Sea of Time. It survived with all hands to surface in the Sea of Christmas, so there was a happy ending.

Losing All Kinds of Weight Throughout a Season of Acquisition, Part 1

...and acquiring the best gift of all, in a twist we all see coming a mile away. We’ll start with the literal weight loss and move on the figurative.

I gave myself the mother of all bellyaches on Thanksgiving 2010, and that was before I could even get all the way through the main course. I’d dismissed it as a mere stomach bug then, but it didn’t go away. After a few more meals I realized I could feel the exact part of my intestinal tract when the food reached it. It felt like something sharp twisting as the mass worked its way through. 

As much as I enjoy eating, the anticipation of pain encouraged me to limit my portions. Boasting of my weight loss over the Great Holiday Overindulgence Season was the only pleasure I got from shedding those initial pounds. A visit to the doctor sometime in the midst of all this revealed I had diverticulitis. There was medicine for the inflammation, but it was up to me not to inflame it so much. 

Pain is a powerful motivator. Its bowl-grade coaching brought me down from a Class 2 Obese pork gorgon with 36.5 BMI to a mere high-end Overweight BMI of 28.9. It took 50 lbs (22.6 kg) to get there, and it made a striking visual difference. I felt better, too. I no longer needed the CPAP machine to breathe throughout the night. My cholesterol was fixing itself and I could quit taking the statin blockers. 

My assigned care provider, or whatever we’re calling doctors these days, was a fit lady who was not in the least impressed by my 50-pound weight loss when I came in complaining of a sore knee I got from landing wrong after pull-ups. (I’d torn my ACL.) As she saw it, I had 40 more pounds to go. 

She was correct, but I was happy. I was working out and feeling good. I had a lot more self-control in regards to my eating, that one necessary component to weight loss that most “fat activists” absolutely refuse to learn. I had the smug assurance of one who had leveled up, who had left some people behind. (“Hey, at least I don’t look like them. Ha!”) I didn’t feel it necessary to go the rest of the way.

This state of affairs went on for nearly five years. What did I do throughout that time? I was coming into my 50s, so I wrote my first novels, walked around the neighborhood, watched both children graduate high school and go their ways. The usual stuff. 

It was the day after Christmas 2015 when I got on the scales and saw I was up to 194 lbs on an empty stomach. A feeling of dread came over me. If I were to cross 200 lbs again would I ever return to normal weight? Of course, if I let myself go all the way back up to 200 again....

Portrait of the artist as a 240-lb pork gorgon in a suit, MCing a Toastmasters contest in April 2010.

I was not going back. I was not going to be one of those people who backslid and then accepted that most asinine and false notion that “diets don’t work.” The point of failure is the person on the diet who refuses to put in the non-effort of not eating because it’s too uncomfortable. If so many people fail it’s because weakness is more common than strength, sloth is easier than industry, etc. (I’ve often wondered if we treasure Good for economic reasons, i.e., it’s rarer than platinum.)

It was barely four years ago, and all I remember was that terror- and shame-driven dedication. I’m not sure how I actually started losing weight other than simply not eating. I’d become aware of intermittent fasting, and I know I did test myself to see how long I could exceed the 16-hour mark (20 hours with only coffee and water is my personal best).

When I saw my weight down to 189 lbs I realized I’d never imagined getting down to the 180s. Not even 189. I had been content to camp at 190. I was chagrined to understand my physician’s crossness with me. Having repented my weakness and sloth, I maintained my course.

The lowest I got was 159 lbs, after a 24-hour stomach bug. My wife and I were in a hotel room with four cats awaiting the paperwork to buy our house in the San Luis Valley and I more or less let myself go. It took me a while to drift out of my 160s. I wasn’t weighing myself at all, just happy that my pants fit.

4th of July 2016 in Manitou Springs, on the high end of normal weight for my height. Once again, I would let myself coast...but hey, I’m looking so much better than I used to, right? This is where we set the trap for ourselves.

Until they didn’t. It was Super Bowl Sunday night when I struggled to go to sleep, but had panic attacks every time I drifted off. I felt like I couldn’t breathe. When I weighed myself I saw that I’d risen back to 180 lbs. It was 10 lbs less that 190 but bad enough to bring back my sleep apnea.

To think I was happy at 190 lbs. Now I was feeling sick creeping up on 180 lbs. In the course of losing so much weight I’d raised my standards in regards to what I would tolerate. Also, I had demonstrated the fallacy of set-point weight.

Like many self-described “activists,” fat activists have a raft of pseudo-science to excuse their sloth and gluttony, one of which is the notion of a set-point weight that we’re all somehow genetically programmed to be at. No matter how much you try to lose weight, you will always fall back to that set-point. There is no escaping your genetic destiny! Indeed, should you dare disobey the dictates of your (grossly bloated and distended) body, you will fall into “disordered eating” and gain even more weight. So don’t try. No, seriously, don’t. It’s dangerous. (They really talk like this.) NO DIET TALK, IT’S TRIGGERING! Accept yourself as you are, a grotesque, malodorous mess of unfettered compulsions, ill-fitting clothes, labored breathing, etc.

Well, check me out, re-setting my set-points. Once it was 240 lbs. Thanks to the encouragement of diverticulitis, my set-point became 190. Thanks to sheer terror of approaching 200 again, it became 180. This “weight-loss journey” (yeah, I know) has covered the entire last decade, and I still have 30 more pounds to go before I hit my sweet spot. And guess what year it is....

If you’ve gotten this far, you’ve completed a journey of your own. And, all the infantile happy talk aside, anything you’ve set as a long-term goal is a journey. I say let’s make it sound more heroic—that part isn’t wrong, if you’re one of the very few, not quite so proud who have vanquished an addiction to food or drugs—and call it a quest. You’re not merely working towards a goal, you seek a prize, a boon.

No matter how heavy you are, whether you’re 240 lbs or more as I started out, wherever you are, I would challenge you to lose no more than ten pounds. Just ten. You’ll notice two things. First, you’ve turned back the age clock and acquired superpowers along the way. You will feel so much better, so much more energetic, not merely healthier but happier. It’s one heck of a drug. Try it.

The second thing is you’ll be content to stay where you are. You will creep back up over time. Count on it. Oops. Guess diets don’t work. Either that, or re-activate your dead program, the one that made you feel so good when you were just ten pounds lighter. 

We know how most people will roll. Nothing to get fussed over. It’s human nature to take the soft option. I’ve done it.

Then I got tired of doing it.

There’s a Bible verse that, whatever your religion—and I count atheism as a religion, too; it’s as obnoxiously evangelical as the worst of ‘em so shut up, already—applies to this. Something about the narrow and rocky path few take versus the wide, smooth one that everyone else does.

I trust you get the point. It’s slow going, but what’s a quest without setbacks and obstacles and all that awful stuff you’ll be laughing about when you’re done?

This morning, after a small breakfast of scrambled eggs and chorizo. Six days and nights without beer (or tobacco!) has made an incredible difference. Only 25.6 to go ‘til goal. I’ll be within the high-end for normal weight for my height in 11.6.