I am loving my new opportunities at the gym I joined on Friday night. It solidifies that this weightloss journey is not just a temporary chase, but has reached a place of legitimacy for me to bring it public. If I wasn't serious about it, I wouldn't have joined a gym—I don't chase good money after bad, even if I got a smokin' good deal even finding a coupon to waive the $30 enrollment fee. Just straight up $30/month.

However, I did set up another monthly purchase for my gym time. For $10/month, I subscribed to UFC Fight Pass—it's the Netflix of MMA. It allows me to watch most of the fights of a particular fighter across the promotions: UFC, Strikeforce, K-1, etc. I brought my iPad into the gym and caught a few McGregor fights (Alvarez, Diaz II, Brimage, Duffy). The other night, I watched UFC 1, something I haven't seen since I rented the video cassette from Hollywood Video sometime back when I was in college. The UFC has evolved so much since then...the first UFC is laughable now: bare-knuckle fighting with the only rules being no eye gouging, groin strikes, or biting...and back then, no real application of a ground game until Gracie single-handedly morphed the sport. Today's game is brilliant to watch as I applaud its chess match of strategy and application. And unlike basketball, football, etc., the game is never in a place where an opponent can't win, even when a fighter is behind on points, they are just a knockout or a submission away from winning.

...and for my purposes, it's good for my cardio...though I wouldn't be opposed to re-upping my Netflix subscription when I'm ready to move on...though I don't care how much I love The IT Crowd, it's never gonna jazz me up to train hard.

Speaking of training hard, I'm still dealing with a whacked up left foot. It affects my Fitbit count but the time I've been spending on the elliptical (45 minutes yesterday, 80 today) hopefully makes for the loss time. The thing about weightloss, even 70+ lbs, is that I don't feel a whole lot different. Sure, I'm lighter on my feet and move my body more effectively; I get to notch holes into my belt—there's all sorts of that kind of stuff, but I haven't reached a place where I feel I have changed. And it makes sense—I'm just not there yet. I can't even think about victory until sometime in March next year. And even in that context, I'm not done; it'll be all about what can I do with my body and how to never again pack on unhealthy weight. But, all of that is for another time.

Today, I eat my foods and train toward an objective, maximizing motivation and minimizing risk.

Summer 2018 is now a memory. It was a season of sweaty workouts, suntanning, backsliding, and rejuvenation.

Ignoring the sweltering weather of a September in the South, fall is now upon me. I love the fall—not for the reason why people love this season; falling leaves don't exactly enamor me, sure the palette color shift is superior, but I've never been a green person.

Why do I like fall? Fall has always been that season of change. Sure, spring has similar qualities, but it's more of rising from the dead, technically change I suppose, but I'd classify it more as something completely different; the crescendo aside, spring and summer are the same thing, but only quantified by the delta with respect to buckets of sweat. Fall is great: it turns off the growth of grass thereby marks the end of the yard mowing season and lessens and eliminates the need for A/C thereby saving mucho dinero, compadre.

Fall is the romance of yesteryear. Fun memories are wrapped up in this time; times of beginnings and opportunities; and the promise of acquiring more knowledge in a discipline.

And perhaps what I LOVE most about the fall is when the temperatures fall off a cliff. Perhaps its those Scandinavian roots emerging, but I love a brisk day. Now, if I'm in the mood for a warm day, the perfect temperature is 63F. I'm the type that when I'd teach college, I'd walk to class in December in shorts with an iced tea in hand.

A Change: Gym Membership(s)!

As the fall is upon me, a new change: I'm a new member to my town's gym. My health insurance has a deal that for $30/m, I can visit a network of 11,000+ gyms. It's specifically called Fitness Your Way. Now, it's a pretty sweet deal for me, because I was already planning on spending $50/m for my gym membership. Those are the kinds of deals that are actually deals. I'm never one to fall to Black Friday hype. If I'm not planning on buying something but a "sale" compels me, then I'm not saving money.

It's not only just for one gym, but it allows for more memberships elsewhere as well. Unfortunately as to where I live, the next gyms are 20 and 30 miles away, like, well EVERYTHING else—it's not unlike when I lived in Williams, Arizona, the only difference is that there's not an I-40 with a 75 mph speed limit connection here. Still, when I am in the mood for something different, the option is there.

Now why would I grab a membership when I've got my home gym? Well, I took a hit when I lost both my elliptical and recumbent bike. While my treadmill remains a solid piece of equipment, my left foot is banged up and I'm feeling the my old Miami injury. I still have a solid, open space with mats, my resistance equipment, and heavy bag.

Thus, I'm using the new gym to supplement my routine. Apart from lunges, I don't have much in my home gym for leg resistance, so there's a big difference there! And as I further development, there's some bodyweight exercises that I'm looking forward to doing.

I look forward to what direction it will take me. I suspect I'll naturally push harder and the 9 ½ mile drive will make me that more devoted to my craft.

So this is fall. Change is in the air, even if I gotta reach out and drag the cooler temperatures here.

...and I cannot forget another aspect of how I've found consistent success this year: the atmosphere. More specifically, synthwave, retrowave, outrun, cyberpunk et al music and culture, some sort of mesh between neo-80s and high-tech visions. I appreciate them because I find myself somewhere in the juxtaposition between an out-of-reach past and a brave new world future. The music is of Stranger Things, arcade gaming, and Ghost in the Shell/Bladerunner-type universes. It's the music of night drives through a city nightscape. Even the genre's color scheme pulls it altogether.

It's a bit of a geeky niche.

It's a bunch of unknown artists creating music for the sheer love of it. You won't find 100m YouTube visits. They are a bunch of Bandcamp and Soundcloud artists. But from my perspective, what does recognition matter? When I look at the Global Top 50, I only recognize a few names—HOW is Maroon 5 still popular...aren't they the '00s equivalent of Tonic?

Well, clearly, popularity is not my focus. And I don't mean to disparage baseline, appealing to the lowest common denominator, popular music. The metric is a numbers game that relies on the propensity of teen-into-college consumers to roam in herds—and that poor thirtysomething who grasps after the wind that is youth, but it is as silly as when this same tricenarian wears the clothes of their juniors.

I don't know if it applies to everyone, but there reaches a point in our lives where we do our own thing apart from the mainstream. It's like that huge shift that occurs from high school and leaping into the freedom that college provides.

As a college freshman, I was so used to the early morning regimen of my public schooling that I scheduled 8AM classes; thereafter, I kept backing that up. Toward the end of my undergrad, all I wanted was night classes, preferably the 3-hour, once-a-week variety. Now, grad school was a different beast altogether as I HAD to take once-a-week courses for the majority of my coursework with a few online classes thrown into the mix...well, there were those two summer classes that I took abroad for a month.

Flying back to the tangent, my point is that we reach a point where we do our own thing in the spirit of matching our own sensibilities.

...and furthermore, this has also led me to find a lot of success with my weightloss.