I begin night 1 of a water fast. The fear of quitting—the fear of failure, rides shotgun. As I type these words, I don't want anything to do with quitting. Yet, in these early nights, my resolve will diminish and the temptation will intensify in its seduction, telling me to quit just one more time and push fasting off on tomorrow. But, I'm done with doing just that for this day has been the object of all those yesterdays.

Yes, an adventure is exciting. We celebrate the call to adventure. But where next does the monomyth lead us? It is to either accept or to reject that call.

I am reminded of when I was a teenager and would be flooded with the fear of quitting seconds before I began I jog. Stopping or slowing to a walk along a jogging route was such a distasteful notion to me in those days that I feared it. That said, I never did quit. Today, I feel those same feelings in the vehicle of fasting.

All that aside, fasting is not just this indomitable spirit, this giant Rocky figure and his platitude of "...it ain't about how hard ya hit. It's about how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward." No, fasting is more than forging the spirit to move on to the next night. For me, there is a sense of adventure in a long fast. While passing long shadows against hazy, amber hues, there's a road before me that converges into a horizon for me to explore. It is one part epic score music and one part retrowave. I really don't know is ahead for when I get into day 30, it will be new to me.

In the initial footsteps as I examine a fast, there are times when the prospect of going deep into a fast overwhelms me, as emotionally I grapple with the prospect of not eating, forgetting that the most challenging part of a fast is just the beginning, a time when my will should be the strongest.

Sometime into day 3—definitely by day 4, the challenge of a fast regresses. So, it's not the herculean task of summoning the fervor to go deep, but just enough punch to release off the line of scrimmage.

Superbowl The Superbowl wrapped up last weekend. It was first game I watched all season for a few reasons, no satellite cable this year, and I have limited patience for 1%'ers who protest injustice—think about that for a moment—much less for 1%'ers who run around in kids clothes who believe it is work what everyone else calls play. Pay me the NFL veteran's minimum of $615,000 and "I'm your huckleberry"—dress me up in Oshkosh and I'll run after a ball for a couple hours on a Sunday afternoon for a quarter of the year.

Not that I hate the NFL: I'm a long time Madden veteran; before that, it was Joe Montana football, John Elway, and a couple of Tecmo Bowls. I'm a Vikings fan who added the Patriots into his lineup during their 2001 Superbowl. Perhaps I should thank the Eagles for destroying the Vikings so I wouldn't have to play out a Buridan's ass scenario between the two.

Overall, I just think I'm growing out of that interest. Five years ago, I had NFL Rewind for my iPad and I'd watch every NFL game—that's 256 games for the season. I'd probably watch six full-length games each week and the rest were condensed games. But, today? I mean, who has the time to sit on the sidelines when I'd rather just run down my old Big Wheel from 1983 to go cruising on Sunday afternoons for $39k a ride! I'll even bring a box of monster pops to share!

A wave of emotions ran over me...a deep hurt and a sense of loss of all the people, places, and events that were once so intrinsic to my life—all of that is gone or at the very least, simply out of reach. That which seems familiar and recent is the same that I realize happened years ago.

Is this Vedder's Elderly Woman Behind the Counter in a Small Town? Do "hearts and thoughts they fade, fade away?"

I head out to claim that which was lost. I forge deeply into fasting and refuse to punt into passivity. I leave the freezing of fears and the felicity of foods and head out to the les mauvaises terres à traverser tonight. I cleave the machination mooring and claim the imagination emancipation. I reject the parameters, the purposes, and the purports of others while denying within me the Scarecrow, the Tinman, and the Cowardly Lion animatronics clanking in their uncanny valley.

An empty expanse lays out before me. The last embers of the day shirk into the horizon. The night awaits...