Obsessive Joy in Normal entries

My two obsessions this year have been fitness and marijuana. Incongruous? Maybe. The fuck do I care, it could have been politics. I might have fucked up and had to move to 1600 Pennsylvania avenue (for those not reading this in other countries that’s the address of the white house). What makes mid-Michigan preferable to Washington DC? Heh. Well, Washington has two weeks where it’s very pretty, um, where the parts where people don’t live are very pretty. There are years when Michigan only has two weeks like that too, but they are spread out over the year. Also, DC doesn’t have any good riding trails, though they have some, and you can’t smoke dope in the white house (though I’m sure the young Carter and Clinton, I mean the kids, beg to differ. The Bushes were snorter’s, doesn’t leave a stank except in the users’ nose.).

I’m not real big on smoking dope. I used to be, like 45 to 42 years ago, before the whole super dope sinsemillia thing happened and everything went skunky. I might be wrong about this, but I think I’m right; Sinsemillia was created when Nixon had the DEA bomb Mexican dope fields with paraquat. Paraquat didn’t kill the plants, it just made smoking thing make you real sick. Here in Michigan most of our weed came from the other side of the Gulf of Mexico, by the time I left for good (or so I thought) you could still get Columbian gold and panama red here. The high was mellower and the taste was rich and savory, sort of like the difference between mushrooms and LSD only the other way around; Mushrooms tasted horrible but was a goofier high. Um, also the other way around for me, I did a whole hell of a lot more LSD than mushrooms. According to allegedly scientific reports in the seventies doing LSD more than ten times at a dosage of 100 mics (I forget what that stands for, but it’s like a pin prick dose) would cause irreparable brain damage. Heh. I should neither be alive nor able to type. On the conservative side, I did more than five hundred hits at an average dosage of five hundred mics a hit. I wrote a lot. God is merciful in that all that writing is gone or, possibly, in a box somewhere.

Ok, fitness and obsession. Sounds like a healthy and reasonable thing to do, right? Two weeks ago I bought three bikes on eBay and one in a local brick and mortar. Fortunately, two of the bikes I won on eBay flaked out. Ok, one flaked out and took down the posting, the other took my money and disappeared. eBay will reimburse me and, honestly, 21.74 was a ridiculously low price for a new carbon fiber trail bike with free shipping from China.

Biking isn’t really about fitness though, it’s about joy. The fitness tracker makes it about fitness, but I’ve cycled for years without a fitness tracker. I’d forgotten how much joy there is in cycling. I took it back up because it’s one of the very few cardio things I can do with a herniated disc in back, two bad discs in neck, a bad rotator cuff and nerve damage in left arm and no cartilage in right knee. I have much more of my life behind me than I do ahead, and whereas I’m not afraid of dying, I’d sure like to go gracefully. Portland was a city, hard to define the population without gross oversimplification. Here not so much. It’s mostly students and the elderly, the bell curve looks more like two sides of a triangle than half a circle. On my morning rides it looks like the impossibly young and the elderly exclusively. If I sat on the couch all day watching soaps and eating bon-bons while overweight seniors with surgical scars on their chests were out jogging I’d feel bad about myself. I hate soaps.

Fitness trackers sort of assume everyone wants to lose weight, and, whereas I’ve lost 25 pounds since January and have no disdain for bon bons or my relationship to them, that was not my motivation. I’m too fucking old to die young, but I am shooting for a good-looking corpse. Whatever little shots of vanity I have are completely subjective. I don’t think of my fat ass as fat (it’s an expression, my ass is perky and delightful, it’s my tummy whose grasp exceeds its means — feel free to edit that to make sense. Perhaps grasp exceeds its reach?). I feel great after a ride for a couple of hours. I can extend that by either continuing to move or getting high. Both work equally as well and here in the age of medicinal marijuana professionals and lay medical advice givers are loathe to say marijuana is an unhealthy alternative to … just about anything. Heh. It’s a great alternative to sobriety. If weight were my concern marijuana is much better than alcohol. My BMI would suggest I’m morbidly obese. Naw. I’m built like a pit-bull; dense. I have no idea what my fat to muscle to bone ratio is. I don’t care. Just suggesting it probably doesn’t suggest morbid obesity. Though I certainly can be morbid. I might be melancholically chubby. Or depressively pudgy. Shit, now I want a marijuana donut. Heh. There’s this one dispensary with marijuana sushi. No fucking way am I eating raw fish a thousand miles inland.

Ok, the upside to both obsessions? I learned how to make a great topical with marijuana. I don’t mean a great topical for a novice or for what I have to work with, I mean the only topical, OTC or prescribed, I’ve ever used that actually works. So say I and everyone I’ve given it too including my elderly mom who won’t take anything if it has a potential side effect and who has, among other things, crippling arthritis. With my latest bike I hit almost thirty miles an hour downhill. That’s got nothing to do with nothing except how very cool it feels to go that fast on two wheels without an engines carnal din. Fitness wise the average speed and pace is a better indicator but boring. The new 29” wheel set jacked up my average speed too. I might get a craving for a road bike but they are going to have to improve the roads. I’m damn glad to have mountain bike shock absorbers on the fucked-up roads here. I do have to remind myself, with uncomfortable frequency, that I can only ride one bike at a time.