After a tenacious pursuit of fasting in 2018, I'm shelving it as I gear up for another direction. While I love everything about fasting, my failings in it never achieved the results I wanted in this quarter of the year. Sure, I could keep pushing on and there's a part of me that wants to do just that, but ultimately, I don't want to reach the halfway point with just a rollercoaster ride to show.

Sometimes to go fast, we must go slow; sometimes a right turn leads to a left turn.

Thus, I enter Day 3 of a nutritional / training program I created. I go into its details elsewhere on this site, so I won't belabor it here. So far, I've added a good deal about its nutritional background and makeup though I have yet to codify its training approach. I love hybrid approaches and have a general idea in mind, but the challenging aspect is meshing up its rpm to me. I have a tendency to go with a zealous approach, as if I was 18 again in my parents' garage. And sure, there's a place for that in due time, but not in the beginning of a program. As an 80s movie once said, "your ego is writing checks your body can't cash." Big picture: what good is a hard-hitting training program that leaves me unmotivated to start its second week? I want results fast—who doesn't—but again, sometimes to go fast, we must go slow. I'm building something that can last beyond 3 months, not something that sputters out after a week.

As part of that program, I haven't changed my desire to bring in ChiRunning and foster a lifestyle that regularly engages in races, not for the external competition, but internal pursuits and the general community that can be found in those environments.

I'm planning on a return to Facebook in about 22 weeks from now. Perhaps long gone are the late nights at a greasy spoon or hours spent in a coffeehouse, but we need community nevertheless. And like Bonnie Raitt sang albeit in a different contact, "Let's give them something to talk about."

YouTube Link

As a new owner of a PSVR, I was delighted that Leo released this video. Whether it was intentional, I like the B story foray into our existence as a computer simulation.

If you had known me in college, you might recall that I possessed a metalhead aspect—or I must have found AMAZING deals on KISS paraphernalia and Van Halen vinyl (I didn't). I'd hammer hard Metallica, AC/DC et al. In those days, I felt like some of the best love songs were found in '80s power ballads from bands like Def Leppard, Bon Jovi, a little Skid Row—clearly, Don't Know What You Got (Till It's Gone).

Metal was a journey through the surface of the cool waters of an INTJ personality deep into the fiery turbulence below. I liked the genre for the reasons of how Leo portrays it. There remains a virile aspect of me that retains that passion. And yes, Leo is a goofball, but unlike "college Bill," thirtysomething me developed into that as I took myself a lot less seriously.

In another convergence between music and gaming, I've been watching my kids play my new top-ten favorite video game character of all-time AND I haven't even played the game! The Starlord from Lego Marvel 2:

...and because of the game, I now have Redbone's Come and Get Your Love as an earworm: "come and get your love, come and get your love, come and get your love"—well, you get the idea; that's now stuck in my head.

If I were to use a handful of words to describe this phase of my life, nostalgia would be on that list. Whether in cinema through throwbacks and the new interpretations of the old like Stranger Things, Adventureland, and even the mood of Into the Wild—that was me in 2004; or in music with developing playlists to bring in old favorites or my exploration into synthwave, I find organic attraction within this nostalgia. I'm reminded of earlier times and the feelings they evoked: those endless summer nights that were carefree with infinite possibilities before us. When you're young, you live a life that is a bunch of nothing until it's something, all within the backdrop of the distant call of a future to realize...

...then one day, you're suddenly old and life is no longer malleable. Questions have been answered and we ride the gradual descent to the grave with a slow data dump to our offpring. While I yearn for more, there is a sobering realization that this is all that there is—on this side of eternity anyway— I'd take a stab that this nostalgia is fueled by this realization. I find myself somewhere between Eddie Money's I Want to Go Back and Howard Jones's Things Can Only Get Better.

While I've never had a problem with my own death and even have great expectation of it, I don't rule out the possibility that this nostalgia is a pushback against some sort of chrysalis formation. Perhaps, I am at the Great Divide: the Atlantic and the harbor of civilization behind me, the Pacific and the unknown before me. In that sense, perhaps it is not a whole lot different than those endless summer nights, but instead of being driven by external events, there is the inward journey, something that is by far more endemic to truth and superior to our culture's hopeless infatuation for all that glitters: coin, stardom, power et al. I suppose if I sit back as a detached observer, I'd conclude that our culture's focus is just a youthful fumbling and failing to meet the pinings for the eternal.

But, what does that have to do with me? I look in the mirror and see what I was and what I will be and its subsequent double-mindedness with all that numbs the soul, before I head out the door to embark down the journey to the Pacific. Ultimately, I wouldn't jab the reset button on my NES, because it would be a hollow hell.

I appreciate nostalgia for what it is: an idealized, feel-good vibe like a hot chocolate on a cold night.