After the last week’s physical debacle, I was stoked to wake up on Saturday morning to near darkness and rain pissing down. That meant I could sit around like the mentally challenged obese sloth that I am and rest my back and shoulder without guilt. And ditto for Sunday, thank you very much.
When Monday and the start of another week of fresh hell arrived, I was eager to do something physical and returned to the gym for some time on the treadmill and light strength training.
After Wednesday’s 5-mile hike at Deerfield (my second within a few days), I was feeling pretty good about myself. “So what if I’m older, fatter, and ‘on a break’ from my bike? I can still push myself and have fun in the woods in other ways,” I thought as I drove home.
Last week was a pretty sweet week of “doing stuff.” It contained multiple trips to the gym to lift heavy things for no reason and nearly 20 miles of hiking and creeping around the woods with my camera.
Then there’s this week.
After my 3-mile hike at Deerfield Park on Sunday with my old beat-to-hell Canon s95 point-and-shoot camera, I was eager to get back for more hiking and shooting with something, not a 12-year-old pocket camera. However, first I would have to suffer through some time in the gym on Monday to make me feel like I’m not following through on past threats to slack through my AARP years while waiting for the dogs above to call me home.
This is part two in a nine-part travelogue devoted to a recent two-day trip to Boyne City. I jest, it’s two parts, and you are under no obligation to read a word. Part I is HERE. — Management.
With no job, dogs, or kid to be up for, Wifey and I took our time getting out of bed the next morning. Then it was off to Lake Charlevoix Coffee for, well, coffee.
As this needless blog’s author, it is vital that I come up with new and fantastical ways to convey stories about my trivial life. This was super easy when racing bikes or at very least riding them. But these days, I am just another fat middle-class white guy on the conveyor belt of life looking for the tiniest shreds of happiness to get me through one day and on to the next. Goddamn, I love the smell of hyperbole in the morning!!
All semi-truths and joking aside, as much as I love writing this shit show, and sharing photos, some weeks I struggle to post anything at all. Some of that is laziness, some of that is time restraints, and some of that is a raging case of why can’t you just be like everyone else in the world and post your photos, kooky opinions, and unfunny sophomoric witticisms on Twitter, Facebook, TikTok, and Instagram?
This post comes to you with all the enthusiasm of a blind man entering a strip club. Of course, based on some of the strip clubs I’ve unfortunately been in during the early “bachelor party days” of my life (looking at you, Hi-Way Playground in Washington County, PA, circa 1996 with your free stage-side pizza), that’s probably a good thing. I digress.
It’s been a minute or two years since my last Macro Monday post, and I’m not going to start today. Mostly because it’s Wednesday, not Monday, and I took the photos on Sunday, which means Monday has fuck all to do with anything.
For the first time in my life, I found myself in Manistee, Michigan, for a reason other than riding my bike, even though the Lumberjack 100 was coincidentally going on just up the road at Big M at the same time. With that in my head, I struggled to hold back my desire to regale Wifey with tales of my ONE Lumberjack 100 finish in 2009 (and multiple DNFs in later years) but instead focused on our little pre-planned-spur-of-the-moment day-trip to the beach.
Like Al Camus (not that one, the Al Camus that works at Marty’s Bar washing dishes) once said, “sometimes you have to look over your shoulder before you can fail.” And that, my friends, is why I am here today.
