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There are many, many “firsts” along life’s path and we, as a species, find some degree of comfort in remembering them. Additionally, there is a large number of shared firsts: common events to which we can all relate, such as our first job, our first car, or that first time we climbed Mount Everest naked, alone, and blindfolded.

By some law of symmetry, we also tend to commemorate “lasts.” Like a last trip to a favorite vacation spot, the last day at a hated job, . . . or try this one on for size: just before Sarah turned eighteen and went off to school, my odd sense of humor wanted to find a commemorative Christmas tree ornament for that year, saying “Baby’s Last Christmas.” Surprisingly, they were all out of them at the Hallmark store.

Why do we do this? (Remember our firsts and lasts, that is: not the funny ornament thing.) I personally believe it’s because Firsts and Lasts act as milestones along the road. The term “milestone” is used today almost exclusively as a metaphor. We’ve nearly forgotten that the term refers to actual stones placed in the ground along roads to indicate distance or position. Per Wikipedia, “Milestones are constructed to provide reference points along the road. This can be used to reassure travellers that the proper path is being followed.”

To me, that’s what all our firsts and lasts are. Reference points. Assurance that we’re on the proper path and haven’t inadvertently driven off into a body of water.

With our move to a new house tomorrow (tomorrow!) our family has experienced a larger than normal number of firsts and lasts lately. And each one has caused me to reflect more and more about the time spent in this current house. As a person who’s basically all growed up now, I don’t experience the passage of time the same way I used to. Which means the fifteen actual Earth-years we’ve spent in this house feels more like four or five years to me. In fact, now that I think about it, I’m pretty sure we’ve only been here three years. Maybe two and a half.

I’m fairly certain the move won’t hit anyone as hard as it will Rachel. As the youngest, she holds the family record for “largest percentage of total life spent here.” For Laura and I, it’s just another house in a string of many abodes over the decades. For Sarah, well, she’s lived in a different city for nearly five years now, so although this is the house she (mostly) grew up in, she won’t miss it the same way.

But being only about five years old when we moved here, Rachel’s previous memories are just fading snatches of random images. For all in tents and porpoises, this is the only house she’s ever known. All those firsts and lasts in preschool, grade school, middle school, high school, and now college: each and every one associated with these “four” walls.

Me, I definitely don’t have the same attachment to this structure. When we moved to Austin, we had to do our house-hunting from nine hundred miles away. There were actually two other houses we wanted over this one, but neither one worked out. So this was sort of the “we’re out of time just pick something” house. I never thought we’d stay as long as we did. And maybe because of the way things started out, I’ve never really felt super strong ties to this house, in spite of the thousands of firsts and lasts we’ve experienced here.

But that hasn’t stopped me from ticking off a number of “lasts” this week. My last weekend. Last Monday morning drive up congested Mopac. Last bowl of piping hot mashed potatoes. Last blog post. Last mashed potatoes. Last hot shower. Did I mention the mashed potatoes yet?

And then I think of the stuff I was positive I would have accomplished in the time we were here, and that’s when I have to stop thinking depressing thoughts and maybe make just one more bowl of mashed potatoes. The good news, though, is that big milestone this weekend. First box unpacked. First dinner in the new house. First of seventeen best-selling novels.

I could ramble on for a few thousand more words here, but alas, I am out of time. The movers will be here first thing tomorrow morning. I should probably start packing.

In case you were trying to think of even more ways that Charlie Hills is One Awesome Person, consider the following. I’m part of the first generation in human history who:

  1. Grew up without any internet whatsoever.
  2. Made it to my twenties.
  3. And then, quite suddenly, INTERNET.

Given how the internet has permeated every aspect of our lives, it’s hard to imagine what life was like without it. Granted, the previous generation couldn’t imagine life without television. A generation before that, a life without radio. And a generation before that, well they probably couldn’t imagine life without water.

My guess (because I can’t know this for sure) is that my experience is quite different from those on either side of my generation. Kids today never knew a life without it. Older folks had it drop out of the sky as some “new fangled” thing. (By the way, does anyone know exactly what a “fangle” is?)

But for me: for my formative, early adult years to coincide exactly with the formative, early years of the commercial internet? Well, this bestows on me a very special title: Grumpy Old Internet Man. That’s right. By no virtue other than being born at a time completely outside of my control, then subsequently doing nothing for decades as the world whirled about me, I have earned the right to yell at the kids to get off my virtual lawn.

I’ll save a full “History of the Internet” for a later blog post, essay, or epic-length non-fiction work. For now, we’ll just look at the good old days. Then quickly begin ranting about how everything has gone to the dogs.

The Good Old Days

The internet (meaning, the underlying interconnected network) as we know it began in the early 1980s. However, The Internet as we now know it wasn’t a thing until The World Wide Web sprang into existence a decade later. Because the two technologies are tightly coupled, the terms quickly became synonymous. But only people from my generation (you know, the correct generation) know the difference and keep them properly straight.

Anyway, the early Internet (which, as everyone knows, is the same thing as the World Wide Web) was used as a way for scientists and academics to publish papers and hyperlink them together. (A hyperlink is the same thing as a regular link, but one that has eaten too much sugar.) This is essentially the origin of what we consider the free and open internet. Had the internet been designed by and built for commercial purposes from the get-go, it would be a very different place now.

These Good Old Days were Good because everything was so much simpler, as Good Old Days are wont to be. Pages were made up of text. Hyperlinked text could take you to other pages. You didn’t have to wait for five, ten, or six hundred seconds as three thousand advertisements, analytics trackers, and spyware loaded along side your content. Instead you waited for five, ten, or six hundred seconds as the carrier pigeons delivered sparse content from the web server directly to your home computer.

These Good Old Days were also Good because everything was new. We were exploring the unexplored and millions of us were all doing it together. This wasn’t an Age of Exploration where we’d send a solitary ship across the ocean and then wait two years for the chocolate to return. No, in this Age, every single day brought us some new form of chocolate and we gorged ourselves on it.

What Happened?

Why I’ll tell you what happened! All these crazies started using the internet too! And then the corporations got their greedy hands on it and ruined everything. (Charlie takes a swig from his hip flask.) And don’t get me started on all the crimmnuls, thieves and hucksters using it! (Swig.) And then there’s these hippies who decided that every ten words of text must be accompanied by ten megabytes of “graphics.” Where are we going, and why am I in this handbasket!?

Welcome, at last, to the first installment of Grumpy Old Internet Man, in the form of an open letter.

Dear Internet,

I get it. Content costs money to produce and your readers don’t pay a dime (to you) to consume said content. Hence, advertising is in all likelihood here to stay. However, I think you can do a better job of seamlessly integrating the advertising with the content. Otherwise I won’t bother with your ads or your content. I’ve got real life kids to shoo off my real life lawn and don’t have time to waste on your shenanigans! It’s time to lay down the law!

  • If I’ve never been to your web site before, and I’ve only just arrived here because of a Google search, please do NOT prompt me to sign up for your damned newsletter immediately upon my arrival. Our relationship has lasted all of two seconds: what makes you think I want you in my inbox seventeen times a day for the rest of my existence!? Geez. At least give me a minute to see how crappy your writing is first.
  • I do not care about Twenty Things Women Do That Men Don’t Know and I seriously doubt that #17 will shock me. I will not fall for your article on Twelve Former Disney Stars Who Ended up in Russian Prisons. (Though, to be fair, I am curious about #3.)
  • If for whatever reason I do click on Fifteen Recipes That Will Make You Rethink Tofu, then you had better put all fifteen of them on one page. If I have to click a single button to get to the second one, I’m gone.
  • This seventy-two year old grandmother does NOT look twenty-five. Seriously, those are two different people.
  • I seriously doubt my faith in humanity will be restored at one minute and twelve seconds into your video. My faith in humanity will be restored when clickbait comes to an welcome, but hardly untimely, end.
  • If the advertisement to content ratio is greater than 100:1, then congratulations: you have a normal, modern web site. And I’m not going to visit it.
  • Once the content loads, just leave it there. Quit making it jump around eight or nine times as the Boxes o’ Spam slowly load one by one, changing the page layout with each new arrival.
  • If someone Rick-rolls me with a Justin Bieber video and I stay on the page for ONE SECOND before closing it, believe me, I don’t want to see 47 more “recommended for you” Justin Bieber videos on my next visit.

If you think that’s all I have, you’re quite mistaken. There will be more in the future. I’d keep on going now, but I really need to watch the Top Twenty Banned Commercials (#12 made me throw my computer off the roof).

I knew It was possible. Perhaps It was probable. But I continued to rest well with the knowledge that I’d always have the tools and the talent to avoid It. I might come close to It but I would never actually let It happen.

Long time followers of mine know that returning to Onederland was my primary goal for many years. Onederland? Oh you know, that blissful state where your weight (in pounds) begins with the number one. When your number begins with a two, or three, or more, Onederland can be as wonderfully alluring and painfully out of reach as the fabled city of El Dorado.

A nasty bout of cancer four years ago thrust me back into Onederland in just a matter of days. And I was okay with that. You may or may not know it, but cancer kinda sucks. But this aspect of it was okay. And at that moment I swore on six bags of Hydroxydaunorubicin, that I would never squander that golden opportunity.

I came close to screwing it up at the end of 2012. At that point in time I had, for just one day, crossed the line back into Twoderland. Panicked, I got my 0.10 ton butt back into gear and successfully avoided disaster. Since then I’ve marked “195” as the Edge of the Forbidden Zone. If I find myself creeping back up and hit 195, all the alarms go off.

Fortunately, I did more than just “avoided disaster.” I even did so well during 2014 that by Thanksgiving I somehow found myself below 175. “Holy crap!” I thought at the time. “I may just have this thing licked!” Sadly, in 2015, the “thing” I had “licked” turned out to be 147 gallons of ice cream. My diet for the most recent twelve months has been a very strict alternating regimen of “try” followed by “fail.”

As mentioned on this here new blog, I’ve been under additional stress this spring and that has not done a body good. Still, though, I hovered in that 190 to 192 range and even though things were bad, they never got Bad.

Until this week: 193. 195. 197 . . .

What the hell . . . the Forbidden Zone . . . are you kidding me? What kind of universe do we live in where a guy gains weight after eating only fifty thousand calories every week!? Does nothing make sense any more?

Then It happened. On Wednesday morning. After seeing 197 on Tuesday I kinda figured it’d be 197 again. (I tend to hit the same weight for several days in a row.) So imagine the child-like wonder and delight I expressed at seeing 200.0 glaring back up at me. Three pounds overnight. Perfect.

After blinking in disbelief for all of one and a half seconds, I then made a lot of weird noises and said a lot of bad words. I ran downstairs, grabbed my phone, and snapped the picture accompanying this post. And in an instant, The Switch was back on.

The next day (just yesterday, May 26) I hopped back on and had returned to 197. So maybe It was just a fluke this time. If so, it was the fluke I needed to get my 0.10 ton butt back into gear. Again.

The good news? This is it. Oh, I can feel it. Diet #120 will definitely be the one.

I began preparing for this week’s blog post on Wednesday night. As fate would have it, this is not that blog post. No, the real blog post will have to wait another week or two. Fortunately for you, gentle reader, this is probably the better blog post anyway.

The original plan for today? Publish another opening chapter. I’ve got two of them under my belt already and, thought, “What the heck! Why not just keep going?” As I sifted through my remaining manuscripts, I decided on Ronald.

I began this story in 2013 and really fleshed it out during NaNoWriMo that year. I didn’t win, ending up some nineteen thousand words short of the finish line. But I did like the story. Like all Draft Zero manuscripts, it needed a ton of work, but there was definitely something there.

It’s the story of a writer who (ha ha) can’t get his book published. After years of rejection, he happens to run into someone who can help him, but not in any way that he ever expected. But more on that later, when the first chapter gets cleaned up. (As of this moment, it’s severely boring.)

But back to today’s topic.

When I hit the 31,000-word mark, I also hit a dilemma. How long should this story be? The general answer to that question is always: a story is as long as it needs to be and not one word more. (Or, as the tired old simile goes, “It’s like a miniskirt: long enough to cover the important parts but short enough to keep everyone’s attention.”)

So just how long does this story need to be? I had originally planned to take this out to a full-length novel. But the more I thought about it, the more it became apparent that I needed to start killing a few darlings, not padding it out to unnecessary lenghts. Longer isn’t always better, with Exhibit A being Ron Howard’s How The Grinch Stole Christmas.

I began to think “short story.” Short stories are definitely short. Based on guidelines established by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, a short story contains fewer than 7,500 words. That would mean cutting over three-quarters of the manuscript. Not impossible, but not exactly trivial either.

So on Wednesday night, I decided to go check out some short stories. My idea was to read a few and to get a better feel for my goal. I clicked on my internets, went to the googles, and searched list of popular short stories. My search terms quickly led me to this page where I scanned the list, picked a story at random, and sized it up.

This first short story was indeed short: only in the two thousand word range. So I decided to try a second one. My eyes caught the title The Old Man and the Sea. “Hmmm, Hemingway? I didn’t know that was a short story.” Turns out it wasn’t. I read the title wrong. This short story was called The Old Man of the Sea by W. W. Jacobs.

I popped it open, selected all the text, and pasted it into my text editor to get the word count. Once I had the count, the internet distracted me (again) and I forgot all about my find. That is until later when recovering from my distractions, I started closing up browser tabs and stopped dead in my tracks:

You’ll either see it immediately or you won’t. As it so happens, my brain is highly tuned to this pattern, so my eyes immediately darted to . . . “Charlie Hills.”

Wait. Wut?

My first thought was, “Did I fill out a comment or something on this page?” No. Of course I didn’t. A quick scan of the page revealed all. This perfectly random, hey-let’s-check-out-a-sample-short-story, the-second-one-I-looked-at just happened to contain a character named Charlie Hills. Without a doubt, that’s the weirdest thing to happen to me all week.

I like learning. I like it a lot. I like stuffing my head full of knowledge, both useful and useless, as much and as often as possible. This is so when that one-in-a-million chance comes along and I appear on Jeopardy, Alex Trebek will read the clue, “This rubbery, orange-colored ball is what someone in Indiana might throw through a basketball ring,” and I will respond, “Um . . . what is a hockey puck?”

My response will be followed by Alex Trebek staring at the floor, shaking his head slowly in sad resignation. I may like learning, but “learning sports” hasn’t happened yet.

But I do like history. I like languages. And I like the history of languages. I’ve stuffed my head rather full of linguistic knowledge, both useful and useless, and it’s high time I share some of it with you. Mostly because: 1) I will never be on Jeopardy and 2) I have no idea when these facts are going to start falling out of my head.

Part One: Digraphs

Today’s topic: thorn. No, not those pointy things that make handling roses dangerous. We’re talking about the letter thorn. Never heard of it? Well, then this is your lucky day. It’s time for this blog’s first Useless Knowledge Transmission. (Stick with me for the mind-blowing reveal at the end of the post.)

When we (as native English speakers) see the letters T and H next to each other, we stick our tongue out slightly, place it firmly below our upper front teeth, and blow air out. (You’re doing it now, aren’t you? The person in the cube next to you is watching, you know.)

You will also notice that we execute none of these oral gymnastics when we say either letter alone. Try saying “two” or “hat” and compare it to “this” or “that.” (Go ahead, it’s okay. Everyone is still staring at you.)

This is because “Th” is a single sound represented by two different symbols (or “glyphs”). The technical word for this literary phenomenon is “digraph” which comes from the Latin words “dig” meaning “literary” and “raph” meaning “phenomenon.” Other examples of digraphs are “ph”, “ng”, or my personal favorite “xq.” Okay, that last one isn’t real, but it should be. I want it to be pronounced like “spl.” My contribution will make a real xqash in the field of linguistics.

Anyway, the ancient Romans didn’t have a single letter in their entire alphabet to represent the Greek letter theta:

Θ

When a native Greek speaker sees that symbol, he or she will stick his or her tongue out slightly, place it firmly below the upper front teeth, and . . . well, you get the idea. When a Greek did that in front of a Roman, the Roman would be all like, “Waaaaa?” And when that Roman had to write down what he just heard, he decided, for whatever reason, “T and H oughta do it!” (Why we don’t write TEETH simply as TEEΘ is beyond me. I mean, if you’re going to borrow a sound, why not borrow the whole dang letter to go with it?)

Part Two: Runes

Now this is where my story starts to get interesting. Any modern-day fantasy buff is familiar with those strange shapes called runes. It’s what you carve into stone to make your audience say, “Ahhh, this is where the dwarves live.” It’s what Disney does in Frozen to hint at the setting of their Nordic story:

runic screenshot from Disney's Frozen

Man, runes alone could easily be the topic of an entire series of blog posts here, if I’m left unsupervised. However, for this post, we’re only interested in the one they call thorn:

Þ

There’s a definite link between the Roman and Runic alphabets. Letters like F, R, H, I, and T look strikingly similar between the two. But there are many key differences too, like thorn, where the Early Rune Guys decided the Greeks had it right when they created a single letter to represent Th.

Part Three: Abbreviations

Fortunately the thorn didn’t settle down forever in the runic alphabet. Among other places, it found its way into Old English. Why? Because all the cool letters were doing it back then. “Check me out!” the letter would say. “I’m in somebody else’s alphabet now.” And you know what else is cool? Abbreviations. Humans are in such a hurry to get from Point A to Point B that they come up with all sorts of ways to shorten the trip. Why waste all that time writing “Mister” when “Mr” will do just fine?

The need for some abbreviations are obvious: it’s much easier to type i18n than “internationalization” even if the uninitiated have no idea what you’re talking about. But other abbreviations seem to be completely gratuitous. Honestly, was “road” so long that we needed to shorten it to “rd”?

For me, the worst case of this unnecessary shortening happened in Middle English when those Middle English people found the need to abbreviate the, this, and that. Seriously. But it gets worse. Keep in mind that in Middle English, they had merrily adopted thorn into their alphabet. So these words were already pretty damn short: Þe, Þis, Þat.

The abbreviated forms used superscripts and dropped unnecessary vowels. So the, this, and that were actually written like Þe, Þs, and Þt.

Even better, while all this was going on, the letter thorn slowly changed shape:

Evolution of the letter thorn

Hang on! We’re almost there!

Part Four: The Whole Point of All This

By the time Early Modern English came around, those Early Modern English calligraphers wrote the word “the” (using the now-evolved thorn digraph) like this:

example of early modern English 'the'

And by the time we were type-setting this abbreviation for print, it looked like this:

ye

So the next time you’re hobbling about town and you hear someone read the sign “Ye Olde Sweet Shoppe” out loud as “YEE old sweet shop” you can kindly point out to them, “Excuse me, but that’s pronounced THE old sweet shop.” Then perform your best “dismayed Alex Trebek” impersonation and point them toward this helpful blog post.

Oh, and don’t get me started on how “Ye Olde Anything” is just a modern construct that never appeared in the so-called Olde Times.

Back in the golden age of Back to the Fridge, I posted five days a week, Monday through Friday. It was a brutal schedule (for me, anyway) mostly because my blog wasn’t a typical blog. While I’m not sure if there’s a formal definition for a “typical” blog, in my head it was the kind of blog where the author simply wrote about whatever happened to happen the previous day.

I got up early today and fixed a bowl of oatmeal. Here’s a picture of my oatmeal. I then exercised. Here’s a picture of the treadmill. I went to work. For lunch I had a salad. Here’s a picture of the salad. When I got home I made some mashed potatoes: enough for six people, but I ate them all myself. Here’s a selfie of me feeling stuffed. Have a great weekend everybody!

It’s not a bad format. And it’s definitely a popular format. Lots and lots of blogs like this have lots and lots of followers. For me, though, I just wanted to do something different: like, not have lots and lots of followers.

So I made my posts different (both different from other bloggers and different from each other.) I wanted each to stand on its own. No two would be the same. Every day would be something completely new. It was a challenge and I enjoyed it.

But it was a brutal schedule. I remember talking to my mom about it one day, comparing my life as a blogger to a weekly newspaper columnist. “They’re so lucky,” I said. “They have an entire week to come up with just one stupid column. I have to do that every day.”

Except I didn’t “have to” do that. It was just a blog. It’s not like I was under contract or anything. But the idea of “once a week” stuck with me and when I started this blog, it was settled. Once a week. Every Friday. I’ll have hours and hours and days and days to prepare. Easy peasy.

I climbed into bed last night, tired after another day of the usual busy-ness. As I began to drift off, it hit me. “Crap, is it Friday already?” This thought ignited a heated internal debate.

“Yes, it’s Friday already. You have to write a blog post.”
“I know, I know,” I replied to myself, annoyed.
“What are you going to write about?” I pressed.
“No clue.”
“No clue?” I ridiculed myself. “You’ve had a whole week to prepare for this! What’ve you been doing?
“I’m not even going to dignify that with an answer.”

In the end, I won the argument and I went to sleep with a single thought. “I’ll think of something in the morning.” Whelp, it’s Friday morning and here you go. Clearly I couldn’t think of anything.

Tenner Heed was a first for me. It was the first time I realized that the best way to deal with a creative dead end was to teleport out of it and do something completely different. It seemed like a wonderful and refreshing idea when I first thought of it. “I don’t have to finish this mess! I can just go start a new mess!” And that’s why I now have six unfinished manuscripts in progress instead of just one.

I invested a lot of time on world-building With the original Celdaran Tales stories. I worked on geography, history, linguistics and all those interesting details that I truly believed were “absolutely necessary” to make a story really work.

It’s not without precedent. That’s exactly what J.R.R. Tolkien did to kick off the modern fantasy genre we all know and love. With a single volume of text, he suddenly catapulted readers from stories that began with “Once upon a time there was a princess” to “Once upon a time there was a princess who was the eldest daughter of Tar-Surion, who himself was the third child of Tar-Anarion, who himself was the son of the first Ruling Queen of Numenor, Tar-Ancalime.”

Hundreds of characters from dozens of cultures spanning thousands of years together made our collective heads spin with a single thought: this seems so real.

And that’s exactly what I tried to do myself, until I got so bogged down in it, I couldn’t even continue. So in 2008 I teleported out of that and said, “Let’s try something else.” (I talk to myself a lot like that.)

Tenner Heed actually began as The Gratuitous Adventures of Grock Johnson and the Cheeseburger Brigade. I intended there would be minimal world-building: just enough to get to the fun. And (as you may have guessed from the title) this was supposed to be fun (if not funny).

But as I began writing, it turned serious again. I changed his name, changed the mood, and plowed ahead on a manuscript that sadly dribbled off after 120 thousand words. There’s some good stuff in there, but not enough to make it worthwhile. And no ending to speak of whatsoever.

So I won’t bore you with all that this week. But in the spirit of sharing that is the new me, here’s the first chapter:

Read the Excerpt

If you feel so inclined, click the link and then come back here to comment on it. Next week we’ll contrast or compare the two chapters already posted. Unless someone else thinks of something more fun to do. In that case, suggest a few gratuitous adventures in the comments and we’ll see where things go.

I didn’t want to talk about dieting too much around here. And I especially didn’t want to talk about it two weeks in a row. (“Hello? 2008 called and it wants your old blog back.”) But I feel the need to do so just this once. I swears!

When we left off last week, I had just decided to wrest control of my life back after having basically no control for the last few months. In all the busy-ness, my weight started to creep back up toward the Danger Zone. I had to do something.

Thus began Diet #118, but without any clear plan. I mean, who needs a plan? Plans are for people without any imagination. In fact, most of humankind’s greatest inventions (Slinkies, microwave ovens, democracy) all happened simply by winging it.

Alas, Diet #118 ended up a disaster. Nothing changed. I tried (and failed) to start logging foods again. I tried (and failed) to start eating less. And exercise? Well, I didn’t even bother trying that. So at least in that respect, I met one goal:

Don’t Exercise: ☑

So just this past Monday (April 18), after only one week on Diet #118, I began Diet #119. Except this time, I had a plan. Plans are for people who actually want to accomplish something. In fact, most of humankind’s greatest inventions (the printing press, telecommunications, pizza delivery) all happened by careful planning.

Day One

The Plan: Don’t eat.

Yep, that was the entire plan. The first thing I like to do after over-eating for an extended period is to simply fast for one day. I don’t have any scientific evidence to back this up, but I really feel like it helps me reboot. (If nothing else, it gives my pancreas a much-needed rest.) I ended up going twenty-two hours on this fancy low-carb, low-fat, gluten-free, vegan diet before it all ended in a giant plate of spaghetti.

Day Two

Hang on, I forgot something. “Don’t eat” wasn’t the entire plan. I also added the step “check blood sugars” because that’s very important too. I began Day One at 113 mg/dL and I ended Day One at 95 mg/dL. If I can get the start of every day at 95, I’ll call it a success.

Fasting yesterday went so well, I tried it again today. This time I caved after only about twenty hours. It’s funny how after a while of not eating you just don’t feel hungry as much.

Day Three

This time I ate at noon, so only about a fourteen-hour fast. I see where this is going. In a few weeks I’ll be back to eating every seven minutes.

Day Four

Whelp, I’m down five pounds this morning. I think my total caloric intake for the prior three days was less that one day on the see-food diet. I see where this is going. In about six months I’ll be down to my goal weight, just in time for The Holidays where I’ll undo it all. So sad.

Day Five

That’s today! And since I had to write this post last night, I have no idea what today will bring. Although, if history is any guide, I’ll gain five pounds overnight. I’ll let you know how things turned out in the comments. In the meantime, I’m hungry. I think I’ll order a pizza.

About a month ago, the internet found me trying and failing to hold it all together. In that post, I talked about how everything was all cattywampus (while simultaneously admitting I had no grounds to complain about anything). I’m happy to report back one month later: I found my drill. But then I lost it again. Oh well.

Today, much has happened since that post and I’m also happy to report that things aren’t anywhere near in the state of disarray that they were then. However, for whatever reason, I still find myself trying and failing to hold it all together. I’m sure this condition won’t fully pass until we finally move. And then settle in. And then unpack that last box, sometime in late 2021. So until then, things will remain cattywampus to one degree or another.

The ongoing cattywampusness applies to many (if not all) areas in my life, but none more acutely than our most favoritest topic of all time: health and dieting.

I went an entire month or more without logging foods. (Unheard of.) I went nearly as long without a single weigh-in. (Waaaay unheard of.) I ate basically whatever I wanted whenever I wanted. (Okay, that’s quite heard of.) And the thing is: I couldn’t care less. If someone said, “Did you hear that a blade of grass standing in a field in Finland got bent?” I would say, “No, I did not hear about that. But I would definitely place that on my list of Things I Care About above my health.”

To be honest, the only silver lining in all that was the Not Caring part. Because caring about it would have made things a thousand times worse. Further, not caring gives special insight into one’s persona more than one might obtain otherwise. For example, I never realized it was possible to find the need to head to the pantry for a snack during the long thirty-second period while my dinner was warming up in the microwave.

So Now What?

It’s time for another Day One of course! Let’s see . . . where are we on those? Ah, here we are. This is Day One #118. My starting weight is: doesn’t matter. A while ago I stopped posting actual numbers because they’re only a distraction. Relative numbers mean much more than absolute numbers.

Relatively speaking, though, I’m twenty pounds over my lowest weight from November 2014. Ouch. But on the plus side, I’m somehow still where I was four years ago, during chemo. So I guess that’s two silver linings: four years later, I still haven’t Gained it All Back™.

Come to think of it, the third silver lining is how little I gained in the last month while all that not caring was going on. The first time I stepped on a scale (about a week and a half ago) I braced for the worst. And I was down a pound. Momentarily confused, I realized it was due to the fact that I’d been extremely active. Eighty hours of housework a week sure makes up for the see-food dieting. It’s only in the last week and a half when all that slacked off that I popped up a few pounds again.

My plan this time?

I have no idea what to do. After 117 earlier attempts one thing is perfectly clear: I have no idea what I’m doing.

Any suggestions?

Pat Metheny is a jazz guitarist, composer, and all around fantastic musician. If I could do anything in life one tenth as well as he plays guitar, then I’d be ten times better than the thing I’m best at now. His career spans forty-two years. He’s recorded so many albums that his discography page on Wikipedia itself links to additional discography pages. He’s won more Grammy awards than Paul McCartney.

If you’ve never heard of him (or, heck, even if you have) just listen to about a minute of this:

Many years ago, my friend Eric told me a story. He’d run into someone somewhere and they got to talking and somehow Pat Metheny came up in the conversation.

“Pat Metheny!?” the other guy objected in disbelief. “That guy is terrible!”

“Terrible?” Eric replied, somewhat shocked. Sure, no genre of music is universally appealing and everyone hates something. But even if you don’t like it, you can still appreciate its artistic merit. “Why was it terrible?”

“It sucked. It’s like he can’t even play an instrument,” the other guy described.

As the conversation continued, it became apparent that the one (and only one) Pat Metheny song the other guy had ever heard was this one:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=3Jsbc1LrE4U%26t

It’s called Forward March and it’s the opening track on his album First Circle. The song is (clearly) a joke. The group had some fun in the studio and threw it on there because (in Pat’s words) “it seemed like a good idea at the time.”

April Fool!

My April Fool’s joke last week brought my long-time character of Mr. Sanders back to the forefront once again. Like Pat Metheny’s Forward March, I ran the risk of people opening conversations in the future like this:

“Charlie Hills!?” the other guy objected in disbelief. “That guy is terrible!”

Unlike Pat Metheny’s Forward March, I didn’t have a vast body of work and legions of fans who would be able to pick up on it immediately. Still, I thought it was funny. 🙂

Book Excerpt

But that brings us at last to Charlie fulfilling his promise. My fer realz excerpt is from the novel-to-be that bears the same name as my erstwhile blog on writing. I now present Chapter One of Elsewhither. It’s a bit long (for a blog post). So grab a drink, a lawn bag full of popcorn, and give it a go. Then let me know what you think. And on that last note, there’s just one rule: BE HONEST.

Pretend you’re Simon Cowell and I’m the sad American Idol contestant whose “friends” all told him he could sing but in reality he couldn’t carry a tune with a handle on it. You’re not doing me any favors by “being nice.”

If you like it, say so. But if not, especially say so. It’s the only way I can improve. Don’t worry: I’m a grown up, I can take it. 🙂

Read the Excerpt

Click the above and then feel free to come back here to discuss.