Moments ago, I weighed in for the first morning of this fast. Though the fast kicked off more eight hours ago, what preceded it is now spoken in hallowed tones in the feasting hall of Valhalla. My wife gave a feast to literally end all feasts. You want barbecue? You got it. You want Taco Bell? Hey, there's that, too! Do you have a hankering for Pancho's Cheese Dip? Got that covered. Perhaps you want to tap into that top 1% Neanderthal DNA and just gotta gnaw on some beef jerky...bingo!

That meal alone ought to last a couple of days for me; no need to go hunting for awhile! This is the part on the nature show where I lay on the ground with a content face while my offspring poke me with sticks until I take a swat at them.

When I stepped up on that scale, the numbers were like me, a bit inflated. But hey, there's nothing but love here for that scale. I invested in a medical scale a couple years back because I've bought an armful of bathroom electronic scales at $40 a pop and they always turned out wonky. I may not like the number on the scale, but I know that if I got off the scale and hopped right back, there would be a +/- 3 lbs.

The great thing about having salt as a major driver of those numbers is for tomorrow's weigh in, that number is going to invoke 1987 and absolutely plummet like Black Monday. My personal best in losing weight from one morning to the next is 5 1/2 lbs. You can go and pencil in the win for me on that one. Of course, none of that is impressive. Like George Strait, it's Easy Come, Easy Go. That said, go ahead and cue the Scorpions into the queue, for 63 nights from now, I'll Rock You Like a Hurricane!

Mere 59 minutes from the sunset safety of that last fast's Night Three, the tempestuous tentacles of food lashed out upon my foot, pulling my soul as my fingers anxiously grasped for the lifeline of the deep, foreign forest, those nightwoods of satiety safety.

It wasn't the first time I have fallen off the wagon. As anyone who has campaigned into and through this foreign forest can attest, lightning raids happen. The body contrives its own maligned logic to woo me with the forbidden fruit. When I am backing away from my weakest, it strikes. It's not when I am at my weakest. When I am at my weakest, I have a battle-hardened focus as I breathe the moment. It is only when I back away and lose my vision am I prone to fail. Paradoxically and a little Orwellian or Pauline, with fasting, in weakness, I am strong.

I fired up the Wayback Machine to revisit some old sites of mine, hoping to see if it indexes images lost by hard drive failures and careless Linux installations. I read what I wrote 16 years ago—stylistically, there was an obvious lack of em dashes, ellipses, and semicolons. I approached my audience a little different in those days and there are things I that the last sixteen years have taught me.

However, I was reminded how in all of those past years, there have been many fast attempts. Some hit their mark; others failed—ok, most were categorical failures. I invested a lot of thought and emotional stamina in their pursuit. Sometimes, it can come off a bit like Groundhog Day. My motivations have been the same whether 2018 or 2008. Will I be doing this in 2028?

A perspective I've actualized is while our bodies slide into entropy, we remain who we are, albeit one that grows less in tune to the parameters of pop culture...clearly, we are linear creatures and I'll plop down here William Blake's Songs of Innocence and of Experience.

No, I won't be doing this in 2028. All of what I have been doing in all these years, leads up to this very point in my history. All those epics fasts of the past, my first fast at 28 days in 2003, the 29 day in 2006, the 4+26 in Europe in 2012, the 22-day in Alaska in 2013, and all the single and double digit ones along the way that don't immediately come to mind, intersect at this point.

I use this reset as an opportunity to change elements of my approach and this website. Instead of a different album genre each night, I am running three: Nightscape (3 nights), Epic Existence (2 nights), and Dealer's Choice (2 nights). I also want to bring to the top the things I am doing, so that it can be a quick-to-access status page. I won't update the dates of my past posts to incorporate into this new fast. They are a reminder that when I am stronger, failure lurks in the shadows.

So let's go: the sun has dropped below the horizon and there's the road before us with the city in the distance.

I enter Night Two with an inviting cup of broken-leaf Darjeeling tea at the conn. It is from an inexpensive sample from Upton tea that I didn't know I had on hand. There just remains sad, tinny knocks in the canister of my typical Darjeeling, Badamtam Estate 2nd Flush FTGFOP1 from Upton. It's a simple luxury that I steep twice to cut the costs in half. And if I'm pressed, I don't know if I could justify paying the double per cup of my usual fare.

I began drinking tea in 2011—wait, I've been drinking sweet tea my entire life, I did mention the southern thing, right? I've been drinking loose leaf teas since 2011 as I was in grad school. I don't recall what unplugged me like Neo from that bagged tea nonsense. I can remember where I was when I first began drinking coffee (a late bloomer at age 20), but I don't recall the details with tea. In a way, it was counter-cultural as an American and/or not a grandmother. Yes, the plucky, non-traditional, MA student fighting the Man by taking shots of grandma's rose tea—seriously, it's actual rose petals and its Odin-awful!

Sometimes when I don't buy a 100-125 oz bag to refill my stock, I'll order a mass of $1-$2.50 samples that I've never had. Each packet generally provides enough leaves for 10 cups total if it's just a single steep. Then when the shipment arrives, it's like a geeky party of one! No vomitorium required!

It's not that I dislike coffee. Coffee is...like arena rock. It pounds; it screams; it explodes into a pyrotechnics. Tea is a laser light show with a fog machine. Tea sinks into my mind, twirls, and swirls through my consciousness whereas coffee slaps me across the face like a scorned lover.

I've been fighting off the trials of fasting by...SURPRISE, drinking tea. Earlier tonight, I wore a helmet of headache. It's never something I look forward to because like in other pursuits of life, I don't enjoy beating myself over the head with a tack hammer. Tea has largely kept those hounds in abeyance. Furthermore, this has been one of the smoothest transitions away from the ordinary world that I've experienced. There has been a lot of setup for it—this site and such, but it seems to be pushing me over into successful territory. Indeed, it is challenging to deny ourselves a pleasure that we literally feast on 3...4...5 times a day. But, unlike a 2003 fast, at least I don't have friends who swing by my place to heat up a Papa John's pizza in my own oven as I watch them eat it before they leave.

True, the water fasting purists glower at me, but I just hand over a tack hammer and tell them to go open for AC/DC.