Somewhere between miles 1 and 434 of my drive home from Pennsylvania last week, I made the executive decision to start writing and posting here more frequently. And I did!
Then I didn’t.
As I’ve mentioned previously, getting our bank account pillaged in early August threw me for a mental loop that I’m just now starting to see fade. None of it was my/our fault, and the bank promised our money would be returned, and after 3 long months, it has, but something about it just crushed me. Beyond the feelings of being violated financially and the helplessness of the situation, there was something else that grabbed me and pulled me down into the mire.
I think that I was forced out of my comfort zone of goofball silliness and plunged into adulthood, and I hate that! I mean, one minute I’m going for a ride on my bike, and the next I’m masked up behind a plexiglass COVID-catcher in a small bank office, trying to explain that I did NOT spend $3,000+ on sunglasses, nor did I take multiple Uber rides, book nights at various Airbnbs across the country or feast on outrageous amounts of food delivered via DoorDash. I had too much on my mind to think about such trivial things as bike rides or writing this shit.
The worst thing about all that, other than our savings being pilfered for fucking sunglasses, was that I was riding a late summer high of increased mental energy, riding, fitness, and weight loss that immediately went out the window like a cat in a bag.
Being thrown off my workout and nutrition routine came right as I anticipated Fall gravel riding and expected to be down another 10 or 15 pounds by Thanksgiving, looking and feeling more myself. Instead, I lost my appetite for almost everything but my nightly beer rations and the want to veg out in front of the TV and be distracted by virtually anything until it was a reasonable hour to go to bed. To be honest, I’m lucky that I didn’t gain all of the weight back.
In the past few weeks, even through a slight bout of vaccine-tempered COVID, the resulting quarantine, being off of antidepressants, and fucking Thanksgiving, I’ve started to feel some of my old silliness come back. I’m still being good about my food intake, limiting my beers to “a lot,” getting out for photo walks (as seen here today), and have even started up short daily rides on the magic Zwift machine as a way to burn a few calories and get my taint used to the bike saddle after a couple months of nothing.
I’m still struggling with more than a few things in the Self Loathing Department. And there are still Christmas holiday travels, a pandemic going nowhere, and the long Michigan winter to get through. Still, I am kinda sort of confident that come spring, I will be ready to take on the world like the head of a constipated turd nearly freed from its nemesis, the sphincter.
Later.