I'm No Hero... I'm a SUPERHero

I believe I mentioned last time I posted that I wasted spent most of the spring and summer walking. What I DIDN’T share with you, is that it was there I first discovered I have a gift, or, dare I say, a superpower.

Laser eyes? No. Telekinesis? No again. I can do something much more amazing. Since those are the only two powers I’m sure most people care about, I’ll stop there. Instead I’ll back up for a second and ask a question. It’s really rhetorical, but you know, answer if you want. 

Anyone but me get really excited by the sound of a crunching leaf? Anyone? Not many greater joys in my life than when I step on a leaf and the sound is indistinguishable from biting into a spoonful of Cap’n Crunch cereal.

KRRRRUUUUUUNNNNNCH!

I love it. I love it so much, in fact, that walking with people is apparently no fun for them. I suppose there can be something vaguely embarrassing about going for a walk with a fortysomething year-old man and have to watch him stomp around the street like Godzilla trying to destroy Tokyo. I can’t help it, it’s my cross to bear in this world. And if you can’t accept that about me, well, then you just can’t accept me as a person. Because that’s just who I am.

At this point, I feel it’s my duty to point out that I have a similar, but unrelated, need to kick any pebble I find whilst I walk. There have been a few incidents where a pebble just happened to be placed right near a dried leaf on the street in front of me. It’s then that I learned that kicking with one foot while stomping with the other is really hard to do. I have the scrapes to prove that.

That is not, in case you’re curious, my superpower.

No, my gift, the one that has made me wonder if I should be wearing a costume to hide my true identity, is my uncanny ability to predict which foot I’ll need to use to crush said leaf without being forced to break my stride.

Please, quiet down. I can’t hear myself type over the sound of your collective sounds of awe. I’ll say that line again so you can know it’s true: I can crush a leaf, as soon as I have it marked with my mental map, by just walking over and stepping on it.

Wait, when I rephrase it, it doesn’t sound that amazing. Let me try again:

If I were to see a leaf from, say, 20 feet away, and I was walking and didn’t want to break my stride, I could immediately tell what foot will fall closest to the leaf. I DON’T HAVE TO STUTTER STEP.

*mind blown*

Imagine the world we’d live in if we all had this power. I shudder at the thought. Is this what Superman feels as he walks amongst mortals? I guess only he and I know for sure.

Happy day, world.

How I Spent My Summer (Hint: Being Lame)

What a summer, eh? Way back late last winter, the paying job offered me a fitbit. In case you’re uninitiated, it’s a little pedometer that you strap to your wrist and it will record the number of steps you take per day, how far you’ve traveled, how much you’ve slept, and a few other things that make me feel a bit creeped out.

I mean, I’m not sure what the criminal underworld would do with the knowledge of how many hours I slept last Tuesday, but I’m sure in the hands of the appropriately evil, it could be worthy of an expose on 60 minutes.

Well, the actual point of all this, of course, from my employer’s perspective, is to make sure I’m fit enough not to drive up our healthcare costs as a whole (joke’s on them, my wife carries my health insurance), and one of the big indicators of overall health is body weight.

I’ve spent most of my life being skinny, way too skinny as a kid and teen, there was a brief period in my mid-twenties where I plumped up, but then another decade (almost) of being skinny through exercise and a relatively strict diet.

Then, around the time I started this blog, I kinda let myself go. I stopped exercising and starting eating a relatively horrid diet. I got pretty big. Early last summer (2013) I managed to drop a about 25 pounds by living off of V8’s for a few months. But that leveled off once I determined it was untenable for me to live that way long term.

Cut to late Feb of this year, and these fancy fitbits that they were handing out at work. At the time I’m still 20 pounds overweight, despite having dropped the 25 I mentioned a moment ago. I think, Gee, I can take care of those last 20 pounds now.

So I start to walk, the target is 10,000 steps per day. For a stride like mine that’s just under 5 miles. Given my walking speed that’s about two hours of walking per day. Well, maybe an hour and a half, I’m rounding here for simplicity’s sake.

And to my great surprise, I found that I liked it. Turns out that I get about a mile per day just doing things like walking to the bathroom and piddling around the kitchen at home. The rest is something I’d have to do on purpose.

To rephrase that, the rest is me walking on purpose – for no reason. None at all. At first it was a bit tough, having to remember to walk, even if I had nowhere to go. My dogs appreciated it, they don’t mind walking with no destination. For me, it was a learning curve. I grew up believing that if you start going somewhere, well, there should be a somewhere you're trying to get to. You can’t just go off and wander about aimlessly. That’s the devil’s playground, or something.

Soon, getting 10,000 steps in in a day was too easy. By May I was regularly hitting that many by lunch. Putting in 10, 11 miles in a day wasn’t unusual. If I could only get a time machine and go visit the younger me that said he’d never consider ‘walking’ as an exercise, I’d show him.

So it was great. The spring came and went, and before I knew it I was in the middle of the dog days of summer. August came in with a whoosh and I was still at it. Maybe not quite putting in 20,000 steps per day, but still churning out 10k without a problem.

We’d purchased a fancy digital scale a couple of years ago, to better document my descent into Jabba-the-Huttness. I realized that I’d not weighed since I began my walking regiment.

Wow, six months. I had a routine when I weighed before. Same exact time every day, wearing the same thing, just to take out any possible things that might cause me to get a weird result (Like a big lunch). I had no problem getting ready to weigh in.

I stepped onto the scale last week. Wondering what 6 months of clean living would mean for me. These fancy scales don’t work like the old ones used to. I liked stepping on it and seeing the numbers spin by, slow, go in reverse, slow again, then start counting forward, and back and forth until settling on a nice number.

No, this one sucks. It just spits out a number, down to a tenth of a pound (as long as that tenth is an even number) and that’s what you are.

How’d I do, you ask?

I gained 8 pounds.

Sonuvabitch! I’d been wasting 3 or 4 hours every day, walking in the hot sun, including weekends, and in the rain, and when the mosquitos were out for vengeance, and when I wanted to just stay in and read a book, just to get fatter?

And with that it all came crashing down on me. I’ve been living a lie. Walking isn’t exercise. Younger me was right. It might be exercise when I’m 80, but it isn’t now.

So, whatever.

IWSG: The Blogfader

Hi all, it's been a while since I was here. But it's IWSG, brought to you by the indomitable Alex J Cavanaugh, whose dreams of a day where writers can blubber about all that scares them have come true, at least on the first Wednesday of each month.

This month, like every month, I'm really interested in talking about me. But instead of discussing my never complete manuscripts, or my paralyzing fear of rejection, I wanted to talk about a thing that I think is real, except I don't recall where I heard it from, so it's at least possible I made it up:

Blogfade

It's a term I made up (if you think it's a cool term, if you think it's lame, then I'm just borrowing it - I heard it elsewhere) to describe people like me who just sort of slow down blogging to the point that they're sort of fading into the night.

I'd complained for a very long time about the real world keeping me away from the interwebs for so long that it's tough for me to visit anyone nowadays. But the truth of the matter is that I think I'm at a spot right now where I probably could start blogging again.

But I haven't.

Like a lot of things, I have choices to make with my time. I've dreamt of being a big-shot author for a long time now. I talked about writing for many years before I actually wrote, and it's been about 10 since I wrote my first draft of a novel (A novel, btw, the blog is named after).

And about 5 years ago I decided I was really close to being a super-famous author and decided to start this blog. And in that time I managed to self-publish a few short stories, have one or two appear in the occasional anthology, and that's about it.

I started this as an investment. In a belief that I could commit to this and just make it part of who I am. Now, I'm starting to think this is the sort of thing that I just won't be keeping up for much longer.

I'm going to try to pick it back up. But it's there in the back of my mind, that one day I'll look up and it will have been a year since I posted, or two, or ten. It makes me sad. Especially since I'm not exactly moving on to bigger things.

So, wish me luck.