I lost nearly everything

In praise of ferocious, all-consuming apathy toward the grid, even if I'm not even halfway up the fence myself, let alone over it

At the onset of summer, I disclosed that I had gone a little heavy on the peanut butter one weekend and found myself temporarily saddled with an unseemly gut and man-boobs to match. I described how, annoyed but fearless, I went running anyway and within a few days had dropped back to my usual level of leanness. I wasn’t going to openly brag about this like Dean Karnazes does, because the story spoke for itself, but I too have a unique metabolism among humans.

I also didn’t overtly state the obvious about the pitfalls of my rogue intracellular enzymes, which is that my ability to shed dozens of pounds of flab in days can go the other way: If I skip even one meal and continue to exercise, I pretty much turn into a scarecrow overnight.

This is what happened last week. I finished a late-night run—as was my wont during a recent five-day stretch of temperatures at or above 95 degrees American—and was so dehydrated after I got home despite the air being “only” 78 degrees that I after I chugged almost two liters of warm bong water out of the reservoir of a household virus-zapper I had repurposed at around mid-“pandemic” (whenever the fuck that was), I fell right asleep and pissed the bed while dreaming of Sha’Carri Richardson’s most recent last-place outfit and the full range of what that fabric must have seen.

I paid for this error. By not immediately replenishing those hundreds of scorched calories—which nutritionists claim look like sand-grains and smell like lard—I forced my slumbering and THC-addled body to eat away at its limited stores of myocytes, adipocytes, and phallocytes. When I woke up close to the crack of noon and wandered into the bathroom, I was horrified to see how skeletal I’d become. I must have weighed between 114 and 117 (American) pounds, inclusive.

Worse, the man-boobs had somehow returned, larger than before despite a seeming absence of fleshy substrate. You see, I have long been a staunchly occasional devotee of push-ups and crunches. (The U.S. Army taught me the value of doing push-ups properly, but also of doing sit-ups that don’t stress the abs at all, so I do my own belly exercises these days.) But I’ve had long lazy periods when it comes to upper-body work, too. After my peanut-butter fiasco, I built back up to four or five sets of 50 push-ups a day…for a while. Then I got depressed because no one cares how nice my chest looks even when I shave and tone it, and I quit.

So there I stood in front of my bathroom mirror last Wednesday morning, looking at a body with broomstick limbs, ribs sticking out everywhere, and what looked like two water balloons hanging from a sunken chest. My nipples were precisely on either side of my obnoxious navel, which a kind observer once remarked “looks like a rolled-up condom” (you should see the fucker unrolled).

I was horrified. My mortification only grew when I bounced lightly on my toes and watched as my tits rose and fell, the nipples reaching as far as my waist on the downswings and as high as my clavicles on the upswings. I could imagine little Lego people using my breasts as bungee cords.

This was nuts. I had to do something; and that thing I had to do was run. And I didn’t have a single shirt to wear, because every top I own was covered in some combination of sweat, bong water, and urine. (I swear I’m not usually so gross, but whenever I am, I insist on being honest about it.)

To start offsetting some of the freakish metabolic damage, I drank a “shake” consisting of two liters of mostly de-fizzed Mountain Dew and a couple of cans’ worth of tuna fish for protein. It tasted awful, but unless your whole diet is just stuff you eat to satisfy cravings, which are base animal impulses, you’ll come to see nourishing yourself as an almost divine process rather than a chomping, slurping, belch-inducing, fecogenic quotidian obligation. That is, it ain’t always about how good your food tastes.

Thus fortified, I sullied out the door and into the early-afternoon warmth in nothing but socks, shoes, half-tights, and sunglasses to hide both my identity and my lazy eye. It was very sunny, which I noticed had compelled others to shield their eyes in a similar fashion. But as I started lurching up the road at a “trot,” I could nevertheless sense people sneaking furtive sideways glances at me from the opposite sidewalk while their kids openly gawked, mouths agape, And I admit it, I really was a sight. You see some chicken-chested old characters gamely shuffling around the Boulder path network, but none have as unique a metabolism as I do.

By the time I reached the end of the park a half-mile yonder, I was starting to fill out nicely and I didn’t have to cup my titties in my hands to keep them from slapping against my gradually less-concave belly. But at one the end of this park is a basketball court, and on this court were some standard-issue college gals having what looked a slam-dunk contest. To be honest, most of them couldn’t even get net, let alone rim, but a few of them could actually dunk from the free-throw line, and they were just having fun.

Anyway, one of them noticed me and “subtly” signaled the others in the group to take notice of the scarecrow dude with the long-neglected chest.

I sighed. I have my limits; shit was about to get real.

About fifty yards from the flagging dunking contest, I dropped to the grass and began doing push-ups. Usually I can’t do these in front of an audience, but after the first twenty, I was in the zone and didn’t give a damn. My boobs had been smashing into the grass thanks to sheer momentum, but after number 25 they were already more muscle than fat and mostly stable in oscillation. When I got to forty, I was tiring, but was galvanized by the way my pecs were toning up in real time—and it’s not just my freakish anabolic-catabolic potential that creates this, it’s my impeccable form.

So I pushed on. Fifty. Sixty.

He persisted.

At number sixty-five, my arms and outer chest felt rubbery, but the damage was already undone. I stood up, and although things weren’t quite “symmetrical” yet, I was looking exceptionally fit.

The small crowd of coeds had stopped their bumbling foray into above-the-rim hoop dreams and they were just staring at me, their arms at their sides but mischief in their minds, showing no more expressive restraint than the five-year-olds up the street had. It was impossible to tell whether their shock was attributable mostly to how rapidly my appearance had changed or mostly to the deliciousness of that appearance. Also, at some point in the push-ups scramble, my half-tights had split at the crotch and the waistband had given out, and I was standing there nude except for my sunglasses, socks, and shoes.

But I was tired of being scrutinized when all I was after was the sweet release of exercise, so I ran through the nearby pedestrian tunnel under Route 157, grabbed a pair of ratty jeans from a shopping cart some temporarily wayward billionaire must have parked there the previous night, made myself more presentable. As unlikely as it sounds, I wound up doing 17 miles at 5:54 pace. I chafed the hell out of my inner thighs, and I’m not sure if that was mostly because of how soiled the jeans were (MD 20/20 and vodka in some combination is my best guess at the liquid stains) or because it’s a dumb idea to run in jeans, period. I’ve been doing this for 38 years and I still make rookie mistakes.

You should notice two things about the preceding material: Almost none of it is true or credible, and almost all of it is more credible than the signature claims of Karnazes, Shelby Houlihan, Latoya Snell, any transgender activist, and anyone who thinks women turn into mountain goats at age 40 thanks to motherhood alone. I am obviously no good at attracting positive publicity compared to these rightfully idolized and respected athletes, a reality I couldn’t be happier about. I have no idea what it’s like to wake up bathing in the miasma of my own fraudulence every morning and having my first impulse be to reach blearily for my phone to set about ratcheting up my own already stratospheric grifting, whining, blaming, and tendencies toward proudly antisocial behavior and terminal sloth.

One annoying thing that actually did happen recently was me losing six pieces of ostensibly important plastic two Mondays ago. I haven’t carried a wallet for years, operating on the idea that it’s harder to misplace everything at once if I just carry a thin stack of plastic in a pants pocket. I used to lose my wallet about once every two years in my drinking days, along with multiple laptops, phones, and other things that are often helpful in negotiating a typical Earth day.

I didn’t buy anything or drive anywhere last Tuesday, so it wasn’t until Wednesday that I detected that my pieces of plastic—a driver’s license, a debit card, and three credit cards I have never even used—were missing. I still had the one credit card I regularly use. Although this discovery ignited instant panic and frustration—I was supposed to meet someone downtown in half an hour, and I had to cancel—this distress wasn’t as pronounced as it has been in various times in the past. I was able to determine that I had to have lost the batch of cards on Monday, and since no one had yet used any of them, I had either hidden them on myself in the house or the car or someone was holding them for me.

These days, one can “pause” or “freeze” bank cards rather than cancel them outright, a handy option in cases of suspected self-fuckery. So, after making a sweep of the establishments I had patronized on Monday, I rotated through my online accounts and froze the accounts. And since I have a clear photo of my driver’s license, I was going to drag my feet indefinitely on that one. I quickly reached a point where I was temporarily content to do nothing. I don’t know how long I would have maintained this “resolve” to sit on my ass, but it didn’t matter, because one of the places I’d checked on Wednesday to no avail turned out to have all five of my cards a few days later when I arrived for caffeine and comestibles and a more alert employee was working the register.

Part of my lassitude and resignation after losing these “important things” was driven by the baseline state of chagrin in which I’ve existed for a couple of years, especially when it comes to banks or really anything related to commerce. Who cares if I don’t have that crap? I can prove who I am and one credit card with a generous limit is really all anyone needs in life.

Some of this “don’t stress” attitude, however, was more reflective. For one thing, it does me no good at all to get riled up about making common mistakes that I used to make far more often when my brain was marinating in ethanol. While I often allow myself the dubious luxury of justifiable anger (that’s cribbed directly from Alcoholics Anonymous literature), I won’t let myself wobble far in the direction of “once a fuckup, always a fuckup” anymore. Once a human is probably more like it.

For another, just days before, I had written this:

The human moment. I don’t know how many obviously struggling people you see while running. I see a lot. I see encampments, active and abandoned, under every overpass that includes a path and many that don’t. Boulder has always been a draw for homeless people who inaccurately perceive it as a left-leaning, open-arms place. But this phenomenon is happening everywhere. What’s happened in my hometown of Concord in just the past year is really, really heartbreaking.

In adulthood, I have spanned the prosperity range from comfortable to a basically null existence. I always had a home to go to if I was sober, and I turned my back on that opportunity, conservatively, dozens of times. These days, I am content to live on savings and a persistent lack of alarm about the future.

Many of the people living on the street haven’t had a valid government-issued ID in years and the notion of a credit account, or just a bank account, is probably not a major player in their parade of daily thoughts. And it’s not a comforting thought to consider that society automatically deems people like me who have been assigned useful pieces of plastic to be more trustworthy and responsible than those who can’t produce these on demand.

This isn’t really related, but since this is a “me” post, I should report actually recording a run longer than 20 minutes. I’m too lazy to copy and paste text and data from my burner Strava account, which is under one of my deadnames, so I’ll just create an image of that text and data instead.

Now that I’m doing Strava like a boss, I can try to make sense of these numbers.

My average heart rate for the 45 minutes was 129. I know my heart rate on a typical easy run is in the high 120s or so, because the Move IQ function on my watch automatically and continuously captures HR data. So, this run was pretty typical, maybe a little harder toward the end.

My maximum HR was 187 at age 34, confirmed by a treadmill VO2 max test. If this figure has declined by about a beat per year, then it should be about 161 now. If this is true—which it may not be, and I have no desire to engage in anything that would yield a firm number—then I was running at around 80 percent of HR max (129/161 = 0.80).

Operating by the 20-percent “rule” that applies to everyone my age in Boulder, 7:24 pace at age 52 at 5,300’ translates to a run at about 6:10 pace at sea level in my physical prime (444 seconds/1.2 = 370 seconds). 80 percent of 6:10 is 4:56. That’s not quite as fast a pace as I could have run for 10-12 minutes as a younger dweeb, but it’s surely as fast as I would have gone with the amount of speedwork I've been doing for the past few years—i.e., zero.

I get that these numbers are inexact, but there is no way to get around the fact that I haven’t completely fallen apart and that all my ambitious jogging in the past few years has at least set me up to embarrass myself with some panache should I decide to compete, rather than this resulting in unmitigated humiliation and another slide into balloon-boob hell.