While this week won’t win me any awards for Life and How to Live It, it was a tolerable experience. And during a mid-Michigan March that is frequently filled with 45˚ days, 15˚ days, high winds, snow, ice, bright sun, freezing rain, standing water, mud, gloom, blue skies, spring-time inspiration, and winter-time funks —often all in one day—tolerable is way above average for me. So, yeah, mark it a win, dude.
The best-made plans can often end up being steaming dog poo. It’s a fact. However, there are times, as in this case, that the ruined best-made plan was only a blog post; it was just OK-ish, and instead of dog poo, it just became an unpublished file of word salad on my hard drive.
Thursday night, I made an amazing burrito filled with perfectly seasoned chicken thighs cooked in the air fryer and homemade refried beans made in the instant pot. Despite my apparent aversion to using the stovetop and newfound mommy blogger-like love of unnecessary kitchen gadgetry, I was pretty stoked with how it turned out and devoured the savory log of carby Mexicana like a pack of rabid wolverines near a shallow grave (What?? – Ed.).
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.
Yet another unneeded brief message from the President and CEO of thesoiledchamois.net, and Soiled Chamois Enterprises, Inc.™
Dear Reader,
The following lengthy post deals with my ongoing search for inner peace and self-love (not code for masturbation). There is talk of mental health and depression. I am CLEARLY not a doctor, just a putz with a blog and 50 years and counting of personal experiences dealing with some depression-type shit.
I’ve waffled back and forth on whether it’s in my best interest to post something like this or not, but given the stuff I’ve already written about myself and/or my hatred of the orange buffoon that had been in the White House for four years, I think I’ll be alright. If a potential employer sees this and is offended, you’re not the sort I would want to be associated with anyway.
And if the Google machine somehow pointed you here because you were looking for immediate help, please call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 800-273-8255 or visit suicidepreventionlifeline.org.
— Management
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.
Looking back through my January posts over the years, I have talked ad naseum about my loathing of January, so I will just say, a mid-Michigan January for someone dealing with depression is like throwing a drowning man a dead carp. Sure, it might be funny for a second, but the dude drowns, and you’re out your best dead carp.
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.