On Wednesday, I took myself and my newfound, much-cherished improved mindset out for a walk with my camera. I took the Nikon Z50 with an old DX zoom lens mounted with the FTZ adapter. I also took an old 105mm f/2.8 Lester A. Dine macro lens; that way, if things looked stale, I could kill some time with some manual focus handheld macro shots.
Last week was another “lost week” for me; every bitterly cold gray day seemed exactly like the one before, and I couldn’t seem to find the point to anything or figure out what the hell I’ve done with my life. I could easily bore you (again) with the finer details of just how horrible that feels, but instead, I will just say that come Friday morning, I finally felt the urge to lace up my boots and head out into the sunny (SUN!!!) 9˚ morning for a hike with my camera.
Why I keep this blog going is anyone’s guess. Back in the Google Blogger days, it documented my sub-par attempts at training for and racing endurance cycling events, however with age, medical issues, a complicated relationship with my bike, and a raging case of depression-inspired slack, it has degraded into I don’t know what.
Blogging Times once referred to The Soiled Chamois as “unintelligible sophomoric word salad dotted with the occasional photo that doesn’t completely suck, written by a careerless, unlikeable misanthropic middle-class white guy.”
All I’ll say about that is that if Blogging Times was a real thing, and I didn’t completely make their disparaging comments up, they would not be wrong. Yet here we are.
The week after the Christmas holiday, I was back on the Dreadmill in the Not So Stankment, pounding out daily 3-mile lumbers and intervals. After what seemed like months of being ill in one form or another, it felt great to get my heart rate up and to sweat again without a 101˚ fever.
So, after 21+ miles of lumbering nowhere slow, I was stoked to get back on the magic Zwift machine last Monday and get my legs back to doing what they do best. Or at least do better than running.
Anybody that has hung around this blog for more than a few seconds knows that I don’t have the sort of personality that celebrates a New Year. Or anything else for that matter, at least not without one eye looking at the half-empty glass about to fall onto the floor and break. And this year was my best year yet of non-celebrating: a few beers, some TV watchin’, food eatin’, and in bed by nine while Wifey fumed and mentally cursed me and my worsening attitude in the living room below.
Friday always has that “I might get laid tonight” vibe to it, even though, for me, Friday night usually means drinking a few IPAs in my comfy chair, some crap white trash cooking, and in bed alone by 9 PM because there’s nothing to do that hasn’t been done before, nothing to watch that hasn’t been seen before, and nowhere to go that hasn’t already been gone to or sullied by the never-ending pandemic and its variants.
I promised I don’t know who I would try to keep things more positive here rather than dwell on the revolving door of suck mental and physical health that I’ve been stuck in for weeks now. So, I will just say this week has not exactly progressed how I would have liked; in fact, it regressed in many ways, especially in the mental health department.
Wow, that was way easier to write than the 750+ words I wrote and rewrote earlier before saying, “Nah.”
My post COVID creep back into the world started on Wednesday with a short “Last Day of Quarantine” solo hike in the woods of the Sylvan Preserve. Then, I made it official on Thursday when I returned to the cold, sagging, well-milked bosom of society with a trip to Meijer to buy groceries. It was all very anti-climatic and soon forgotten.
What was that I said about things staying the same?
So far, my September has been better than my August was, but that’s not to say that I feel all pantsless and fancy-free.
“The more things stay the same, the more nothing changes.” – Me (I think)
Not much has changed in life since my last post here. The whole bank card fraud thing is still hanging out there as the bank conducts its investigation, and in the meantime, we’ve been given the money back as “provisional credit.” I will sleep much better when it’s officially our money again. But I’ll save that for my other blog, Consumer Banking Today.
