After hitting my weekly 30-mile goal last Friday, I held true to my promise to “not do a damn thing” over the weekend. And by not do a damn thing, I mean no hiking, for there are always more leaves to bag, foods to cook, groceries to get, poop to scoop, dogs to tend to, beers to drink, music to listen to, sexy time to have, and absolute shit International football to watch (Gahdamn, I hate International Breaks!).
After my First World mental meltdown concerning aging, being stupid, mobile phones, frozen Apple I.D. accounts, and realizing that I’m 52 years old, offer nothing to society and get the same in return, I said that I would bounce back like a fat kid through a trampoline. Well, I am happy to report that I bounced back and then some by lumbering over 30 miles in 5 days; to hell with the trampoline-breaking fat kid; this week, I was bouncing back like the glutes of Big Sean’s lady friend!
I got out on Monday for a 6.75+ lumber, half of which was done in a thunderstorm, and I have to say it was pretty magnificent. Plodding along through the dark woods with rumbling thunder and lightning overhead and rain pissing down shouldn’t be as fun as it is, but it is. And I only almost pissed myself once with fear.
For whatever reason, and for possibly the first time since 2005, I have found myself uninterested in writing anything about my long-running, mundane, pedestrian, unproductive life. But in the interest of knowing I paid my hosting bill upfront, I am here. So, I got some photos and some October stats—that’s it.
As I type, I am in the middle of enjoying (?) an “off day” from hiking so I could get some lab work done at the hospital. I am also in the middle of Week 4 of increasing my lumber mileage to 30 miles. Because if I can’t go faster (and I can’t, not yet), I must go further. Know what I mean?
The past two, now three, weeks have been busy as I’ve upped my weekly lumbering goal to a minimum of 30 miles [I have 23.49 in my feetz as of Thursday A.M.] until the snow starts flying. Of course, with the combination of the world burning itself down, climate change, and El Niño ’23/’24 in effect, who knows, I might be hiking 30 miles a week in February… in a Post World War III nuclear wasteland littered with ashen, lifeless bodies. NOTE: I am not sure how I survived; I credit beer pickling.
The urge to write anything here has been few and far between as I have come to believe that I repeat stories, themes, and events way too often (mostly because I do the same shit all the time and really don’t socialize or travel much), so today, I have chosen to just post a gallery of snapshots from last week.
I had a good week of lumbering and took the time to tweak some standard loops with different trails to keep things fresh as we get further into the stank scrum of autumn.
Throughout most of the week’s hikes, I had next week’s appointment with Doctor Bob in my head, as well as the blood tests I needed to have done beforehand to check my cholesterol numbers.
After last week’s one-year anniversary of the ’22 Comeback Special/’23 Soil The Woods Tour, I continued on as normal, lumbering through the increasingly fall-like woods of central Michigan.
I still don’t know how or why it happened; perhaps it was the medicine, continued therapy with the O.G. Mindbender, or the unwavering support of B and Wifey. Or maybe the universe just randomly flipped a switch in my mind that made me get brutally honest about the person I was becoming and helped me realize that I am not the sort of person who walks a mile and calls it a hike, eats whole deli hoagies for dinner, washes it down with four double IPAs1, and then spends the next morning staring at the ceiling, regretting every life decision I’ve ever made and one major decision my future parents made in the late fall of 1970.