April 23rd, 2012: This has been the period of paradoxes. I haven’t put up numbers this poor since I started the program. In two weeks, I have had an overall loss of 1 pound. Yet, I haven’t had as much energy or felt this good since I started. I know what’s worth more to me in the long run. 279 again today. If only those progress pictures graphically portrayed non-scale victories.
So much of life is a head-game, ain’t it? I quit fighting fires when I was 27, and very quickly gained weight to unhealthy levels, probably by age 30. Right now, I’d bet you that my 37-year-old self, who makes better choices than the younger version, could outrun, outhunt, outfight, outthink, outmotivate, outhike, outswim, outride, and basically do everything better than my 30-year-old-self. I’m out to prove a new theory of reverse aging!!! In 3 years my 40-year-old self will be better than my 21-year-old self. I know it. Who says you have to get slower as you get older? It’s all in your head. All of it.
April 23rd, 2020: My heroes have always been cowboys. And rock stars. Sometime around 1994 I started trying to develop a cowboy-rock-star approach to all of life. I thought that mostly as a cowboy you’d better have brass balls, and as a rock star you’d better have a loud mouth, and be able and ready to drink and smoke around the clock, on a regular, if not daily, basis.
I achieved most of those things, but what I failed to realize is that rock stars have millions of $ and cowboys have horses. The former, I’ve never had, the latter I used to own. So really, what I ended up being was a brass-balled, loud-mouthed partying machine. You can only do that for so long and it’ll point you in the direction of the cemetery. For me, it just exacerbated all those mental issues that simmered beneath the surface, and eventually alcoholism and anxiety became symbiotic.
Sometime in the early 2000’s, several years after Guns N’ Roses broke up, I read an article about the bassist, Duff McKagan, and how he had taken up mountain-biking to get into shape. Along with that, he quit drinking and was generally getting back into physical and mental shape again. I read something similar about Joe Walsh of the Eagles. This really got me thinking. I did buy a mountain bike shortly after, and rode it two or three times, but that was about it. There must have been a latency factor though, like a decade, because I still think of the about-face of a couple of my favorite rock-stars when I’m trying to maintain the healthy way of life.
Cowboys, they don’t need to change, rock-stars who quit drinking probably only needed to adjust that lifestyle. My heroes will always be cowboys and recovered rock-stars. People can change into someone new, but mostly I think you change back into who you really were, rather than someone you never will be. That person that you were is probably pretty cool.
