Cycling in the South Bay

Although it’s a fake, materialistic, corporate-created non-holiday, Valentine’s Day makes me sad because in addition to the preceding, it’s the day three years ago that my ex moved out, or better put, it’s the day I told her to leave.

Happy Valentine’s Day.

If you reach my age and have no regrets, you’re a psychopath. Regret is the inevitable consequence of things said that shouldn’t have been, things done that you wish you hadn’t, and their converses: things unsaid and things undone. Regret is the consequence of reflection, and reflection the consequence of a conscience.

The problem is that if you let it, regret can block the way forward. You get stuck in the world of “What if?”, a terrible, endless worm-hole that behaves like a frightening fun house with no exits, or rather with exits that lead to even more distorted mirrors.

Regret tends to function more intensively the older you get because hopefully you have less to do, which means fewer distractions. I think this is why so many retirees orient their waking hours to the TV, #socmed, and the alcohols. Whatifland can turn the golden years into rusted iron, shot through with gaping, jagged holes if you don’t have some way to manage the sadness and regret.

One thing I’ve learned about being up here in the high hills is that you can control your mind, and it’s not hard to do. The only drawback to this technique is that you need the natural world in order for it to work. It doesn’t work indoors, and it absolutely won’t work if you’re looking at a screen. The easiest place to employ it is on a walk. Bicycling can work, but as you’ll see it’s easier and safer ambling along on two feet.

Here’s the trick: go outdoors, and when the unwanted thought enters the room, focus your eyes on some natural feature, whether it’s a bird, a tree, the sky, a stone, a hillock, a flower, an insect … the object doesn’t matter. And then as you focus, consciously ask yourself “What am I looking at?”

You will find it is absolutely impossible to focus on anything but that thing. Our minds are designed to answer this question about the natural world instinctively, but psycho-social stress and the requirements of urban-community living have diverted our thinking into anxieties, worries, and of course regrets. All of these are normal, but having them dominate is not.

When you develop the ability to begin asking “What am I looking at?” you will find that your mind clears instantly as the natural gearing of your senses attempts to make sense out of the stimuli. It is not possible to think a negative thought at the same time you are trying to puzzle out what you’re looking at. This need to understand is central to our existence and our evolution and it can bring extraordinary peace and calm even in the most tumultuous moments.

What’s so beneficial about this technique is that it’s infinite. The more you ask what you’re looking at, the more you will see. Objects you’ve taken for granted will reveal themselves in new ways, and your eyesight will become sharper. In the last two years my vision has actually improved, to the amazement of my eye doctor. Even better, when you return from your mental excursion you’ll find that the other things loom much smaller, or don’t loom at all.

Try it. I hope you’ll like it.

END

I did a search for “Fitness trends 2023,” well, actually my girlfriend Kristie did, well, actually she did a search first for fitness trends in the 1700’s followed by the 1800’s. Only after realizing that nothing ever changes did she forward me the results for fitness trends in 2023, and surprise, nothing ever changes.

If the definition of “old man” is “misanthropic person over the age of 50 who despairs,” that would be me.

And I despair after reading what wonderful new things await us in 2023 when it comes to getting fit, because that would be nothing. The only thing that awaits is more fatness.

Please don’t rail on me for fat-shaming. Being obese doesn’t make you a bad person and it doesn’t reflect on the special inner glow you give off each time a peach-flavored unicorn fart comes out of your ass. Being obese is a physical quality, nothing more, but as the rather mundane field of something called “medicine” shows, we are physical beings and our physical state affects everything else. Lung cancer from smoking doesn’t make you a bad person, it simply inhibits your ability to breathe, generally resulting in death.

Journals with happy titles like “Obesity: The Flagship Journal of the Obesity Society,” and “International Journal of Obesity” are mere drops in the research puke bucket of scientific reporting that concludes in less colorful language what doctors were saying in the 1700’s, which in those days, according to Dutch physician Steven Blankaart, “Exercise, is a most powerful, and prevalent thing to preserve Health.”

Better was English doctor Thomas Marryat: “Exercise is so absolutely necessary, that it is impossible to continue long free from disorders without it: nine tenths of those which are incident to human beings originate from indolence.” Dr. Willich, in 1799, said that without exercise the body and mind become “indolent and lifeless.”

As I’ve often observed here, and the motorized bicycle is but one example, the trend is to do less so that we can eat more, get sicker and fatter and less mobile, and thereby complete the chain of wage slavery as a result of dependence on material consumerism. That chain is built with the links of moving around with motors, greater consumption of food, and greater consumption of medical services to fix what would never have broken if we weren’t so fucking fat and lazy to begin with.

So what are the Fatness Trends for 2023? And will they really deliver on the promise of more fitness, I mean fatness? Yes, they will!

First on the list is wearable technology. Of course it’s first because it requires buying something. My Garmin Nimrod cost $350, and better devices can punch through the $1,000 ceiling easily. How will these things make you fatter in 2023? Let me count the ways. They give you something to fiddle with rather than exercise, which is key. They let you set lame parameters so that your do-nothing routine gives you a backpat for taking, say, 10,000 steps. Walking five miles a day in a sustained, vigorous walk might count as a workout, but the mere waddling around from TV to fridge to couch to toilet isn’t exercise and won’t slim you down, no matter how many steps you take.

Wearable technology is key because it continues to expand and sensitize the market to virtual reality exercise, which is the Holy Grail for consumption. Once you can stop looking at your real self and focus on the avatar in the goggles, it doesn’t really matter how many more bags of Doritos you scarf before your second breakfast.

Next on the list of fatness trends is the home workout/home training module. This requires you to buy home workout equipment and tie it into the dumb technology of your watch/phone/computer. Remember how you lost all that weight working out at home during covid? No? Well it should work even better this time because all the equipment will be new.

When I think of home workout equipment I think of the guy who lives down the road from me. He has an amazing Nautilus home gym. It is in his backyard. It is covered in rust and bird shit. The only sweat anyone ever broke over that thing was the day they lugged it down the stairs and dumped it in the yard.

Home workout equipment also makes me think of a guy I once shared office space with, Bruce Brusavich. He was a tiny, skinny-fat old guy, soft and puffy and lazy and the kind of person who looked like he would keel over if he had to jog around the block. One day he put up a sign that said “Home workout equipment–free to a good home” or something like that. It was so perfect, an anemic guy who’d probably spent $10k on a bunch of unused junk that he now couldn’t pay anyone to take. Rest assured that your new home gym will end up as yard furniture or as a donation, it’ll be pristine, and you won’t have lost a single pound.

The third most popular fatness trend smells an awful lot like the first one. It’s called “virtual reality fitness.” How this differs from wearable technology is unclear, but what’s certain is that although your mind can be tricked into thinking you’re a kung fu guru, your sagging ass and drooping belly will still get exhausted after three or four tepid punches, requiring more gels, gus, and cookies.

Virtual reality fitness was created by the same cynics who coined the word “e-sports.” You know, where people pay to watch other people watch a screen. It makes perfect sense except for the word “sports.” How it differs from “watching TV” is unclear except that e-sports are now more popular in many schools than PE, a trend expected to continue, enhanced no doubt by virtual reality fitness.

Don’t think that fatness trends are predictable, because number four, “building a smart home gym,” sounds crazily identical to “home workout/home training.” How do they differ? Well, with home workout/home training you get fat because it’s boring and you give up, and with a smart home gym you get fat because it’s boring and expensive and you give up. See what they did there?

Of course there are other trend lists, and the SEO competition is tough out there but Bustle.com seems to know all the cutest algorithms. Their list is impressive in a different way. Whereas other lists recycle the same old crap that didn’t work last year, either, Bustle has a list including events that actually redefine fitness.

They start with “workout stacking,” the idea that it’s just as effective to do six 10-minute workouts during the day as it is to do a single one-hour effort. Now we all know that if it’s a royal pain in the ass to get ready for a single barely-motivated jiggle session on Zwift, it’s going to be even more impossible to do it six different times. But that’s okay because “stacking” sounds powerful and strong, the opposite of you.

Along with “group fitness” Bustle discovers that 2023 will be the year of “gym as community.” Because there’s just been so much hard core badass workout-ery at the gym, where people never even have time to exchange personal porn, so in 2023 it’s going to become much more social. A “hang-out space,” for “post-sweat bites” and (again) “hangouts,” there will be “lounges” where you can “work” or “chat” before workouts.

If you can repackage something to be something that it already is, you are a marketing genius, because if there were ever a synonym for “meat market,” “gossip shop,” or “social media scroll place,” it’s a fucking gym. But at least they’re honest, admitting that after burning 76 calories you’ll be all fired up for a killer burrito with guac and all the trimmings.

As the folks at Bustle were bustling about to make the deadline for this stinking pile of dogsnot, someone came up with two great ideas. 1) Movement as exercise and 2) Rest & recovery. This first one is more genius at work. Take the normal things you do in a day like open the car door, bend down to get the Cheezits out of the pantry, lift a thunder thigh to pull on a sock, raise a flabby arm to firm up a ponytail, and call all of it “exercise.” In addition to not needing any equipment, you don’t have to do anything at all. You can even program your wearable technology to record squats down onto the couch as a “customized workout.”

Yet … we also have “rest and recovery” as … exercise. And to show that Bustle is NOT racist or into fat-shaming, they have a photo of an obese black woman sitting on a pillow “chillaxing.” Give Bustle an “A++” for truth in advertising, because sitting your ever-widening ass on a comfy pillow and not moving is going to make you look just as enormous, immobile, and unhealthy as the model.

Do any of these things work? Of course they don’t. America is fatter, sicker, less mobile, and more dependent on overpriced healthcare than ever before, and all indicators are that this is only the beginning. Even the word “obesity” has lost its meaning. Whereas it once meant “disgustingly fat” it now means “pudgily healthful.” And all of this fatness is accelerating even as the ways to lose the blubber proliferate.

I’m still waiting for the ultimate fitness workout, which will be something like this: firing up the obesity engine in sixteen easy daily meals, turning you into a roaring furnace of digestive power!

Of course the one trend that will never make the list because it’s not for sale and no one knows where to get it, is “motivation.” This true unicorn lives in the unlikeliest of natural habitats, a preserve called “necessity,” long razed by the Industrial Revolution and turned into a Trader Joe’s parking lot. Motivation is of course the one fitness ingredient that makes the actual activity irrelevant. You can get fit in prison, for example, with nothing but a floor if you’re motivated to avoid your daily ration of beatings and rapes.

And motivation is the one thing that all these gizmos and faux routines are designed to fake. But you know what?

They can’t.

END