Poison

In honor of Alice Cooper’s 75th birthday, Powerwolf released a cover of his hit song “Poison.”

I’m glad the track is more uptempo than the 80’s original. It doesn’t add much more than some additional speed, but I still enjoyed it.

“I wanna taste you but your lips are venomous poison.” Damned if that isn’t my thought every time I smell fresh-baked cookies or pizza.

Another random thought when I listen to “Poison” regards the wellness industry as it exists today. They say there’s an industry born from every problem posed. This is true in any capitalist society, and companies are inventing problems at breakneck speed. To have their industry thrive, they must convince you that something in your everyday life, which you assumed to be benign, is actually poisonous. It might even be your natural body that must be cured.

These companies really thrive when they’re able to convincingly exaggerate the danger of the problem.

I’ve seen recent advertisements tell me that tap water isn’t safe, and therefore I must buy some egregiously expensive purifiers. But that’s not enough because the purifiers strip water of all minerals. So, I also need to buy minerals to put back in the water. Well what is the point of living in a developed nation if decent water is only for the aristocrats, and must be paid for with subscription?

Likewise you need air purifiers and various scents because you are constantly breathing in poison too.

There are admittedly places where this is true. There are certainly countries where I wouldn’t recommend going outside without a well-filtered mask, nor would I recommend drinking the tap water. And it’s also true that tap water often contains fluoride and chlorine, which when consumed in large quantities can be bad for your health. But how bad?

A multitude of skincare companies tell us about how harmful the sun is. Stay inside, they say! Or if you dare to venture out, buy their cream and lather it all over yourself first! It’s a matter of life and death.

It is true that the sun may induce cancer into the sedentary office individual who dwells under fluorescents all day (and all too eager to fry at the beach for a week’s vacation). But we somehow survived for thousands of years with a fraction of the sun cancer we see now, and I suspect it’s because we absorbed sunlight in more reasonable daily amounts.

How did we ever survive beyond adolescence before these companies existed?

My point to all of this is that it’s becoming increasingly difficult to decipher the real poisons from the fake ones. Then again, at the end of the day everything is poison if overdosed on, and it’s also true that modern society is causing a lot of individuals to suffer horribly, especially in their later years.

But still, isn’t a better solution to modern maladies to shift culture instead of to simply buy more products?

I’m still convinced that one can live well in a modern developed country at a reasonable budget… if one can decipher truth from the BS, and if one can engage in a healthy community.

The Healing Properties of Food

One of the more drastic changes I’ve made to my lifestyle over the past two years is my rate of cooking.

I’ve learned, in steady increments, a pretty diverse array of dishes. I’m by no means an expert chef, but I am finally seeing the value in cooking natural foods. I am also seeing meals less as acts of shoving food down the throat for the sake of “good feeling,” and more as calming social and artistic rituals.

Through the act of cooking I am also gaining more awareness of the healing properties of various foods (and conversely, the inflammatory properties of most modern processed foods).

On Tuesday I made a Sardinian-style herbal minestrone for dinner and woke the next day with noticeably little fatigue. The aches and tightness I often feel from a week of heavy running were minimized. I felt fresh and significantly more mobile. I had what ended up being the fastest run of my life.

My journey to nutritional health began with an experiment several years ago. I wanted to see what would happen if I ate steel-cut oatmeal every day for lunch (mixed with granola and blueberries), for a period of several months. What happened was remarkable: my health improved by a considerable magnitude in almost every category. My blood pressure, for example, is now the best of my life. My LDL cholesterol dropped from more than 190 mg/dL to somewhere around 50 mg/dL. In short, it went from “higher than healthy” to “very healthy.”

I’ll avoid getting into detail of my current diet here. I will note though that my great epiphany has been that health is nearly impossible for the individual who can’t cook his or her own food (or who doesn’t live with someone who can). Without this ability, you are beholden to industry and its pre-packaged shipped goods. Just as bad, the non-cook forsakes a valuable social ritual in favor of timeliness. Cooking is a physical and mental act; it is an art. It’s also a connection to be made with other people, like writing or painting. A writer needs a reader just as a chef needs a diner. To abandon the ritual surrounding cooking is a great loss.

As I think about my recent affinity for cooking, I also find myself increasingly nervous from how my own path seems to be diverging further from hustle culture and what I’ve seen deemed as the “hedonic treadmill.” I can’t deny that the modern, office-oriented sedentary lifestyle is becoming increasingly less appealing.

The silver lining of the COVID pandemic, if there was one for me, was that remaining at home illuminated the poisons that hustle culture may induce into its unaware victims. There is a race, but most of the participants don’t know what actually waits at the finish line: obesity, diabetes, heart disease, anxiety, neurodegenerative disease, and excess materialism.

Now that I realize how little I want to participate in the material hustle, I can’t help but wonder: what’s next?

Range of Motion

With each passing day I find myself regaining a little more range of motion in my right arm. Recovering from a collarbone break is a long process that requires patience, but patience is not a skill I naturally have. I’d like to snap my fingers and poof, find myself magically at 100% health. Healing is not always measurable in days, however.

I heard an interesting metaphor for the process of aging: you are essentially stuck in quicksand, and at some point you will fully sink. The most you can ask for is a few tools to shovel the sand away temporarily. Some of these “tools” include diet, exercise, and sleep. Without them, you’ll sink faster.

“Just keep moving” tends to be my own mantra. Or as the bone break taught me, “Use it or lose it.” Four weeks in a sling cost me a great deal of mobility that will take awhile to regain.

To think that I was set back so far from just a month in a sling is eye opening. A life of inertia is surely crippling to one’s range of motion. I see it often in the office: the typical office employee could never dream of running one mile, nonetheless 26 miles. Heck, I’m not sure most can jog 400 meters comfortably. Can the typical employee even kick up his or her feet? It seems doubtful unless supplemented with some sort of cocaine-like stimulant beforehand. Granted, many do not care, as money and career are supposedly the priority, which culture does preach. I also note though that most are oblivious to the gravity of what they’ve lost. I’ll choose mobility any day.

A 40-year-old sedentary type and a 40-year-old routine exerciser are not biologically the same age range. This I’ve seen visibly. Their vitality and appearance are vastly different, almost as though they are not both Homo sapiens.

At running events, for example, it is common to see a 50-year-old capable of running fast speeds for hours at a time. It barely seems possible when first introduced to such feats. I remember running the mile as a child, for example, and winning by default simply because most of the kids couldn’t run the whole thing. Yet it is easy when swept in the excitement of such an event to believe that the norm is to cover vast distances, often at a quick base, with just your feet, and to do so well into your later years. An office will remind you that it is not the norm in America. The norm is a struggle up a flight of stairs. The norm is a pained shuffle from the car to the desk. The norm is a drive-thru food order, or these days, a phone app food delivery service.

As I write I realize the magnitude of my own desire to “just keep going”. Above I mentioned quicksand. Most nightmares I’ve ironically had since childhood involve running, but feeling slowed, or sinking in quicksand. In nightmares that involve swimming, the pool is often too dark for me to see and I quickly find myself lost. Or maybe my goggles leaked water to blind me. This doesn’t surprise me because nothing scares me more than stopping. I don’t necessarily mean stopping a daily exercise routine either. I mean stopping movement. Stopping the bikepacking adventures, the runs, the ocean swims, and the occasional game.

If given the choice, I’ll choose motion every time. Give me a shovel and I’ll see how long I can stay above the quicksand.

Full Circle

The Stephen King argument that life, like the universe, moves in a circular and repetitive motion seems to be holding true for me right now.

I boasted that unlike 2022, in which I spent the final part of the year struggling to walk around my apartment neighborhood, I would finish 2023 with the ability to run farther and faster than I ever had.

Then I broke my collarbone in a cycling crash. I now find myself in the same position I was in a year ago. Walking hurts. Standing up hurts. I cannot tie my own shoes. Walking around my apartment complex is a struggle, with every step triggering pain in my collarbone. I realize now that I may spend the remainder of 2023 rehabilitating.

I can, at least, type one-handed.

The aftermath of this crash feels different than the last one. I know my collarbone will heal, as will the hit that I took to my head and hip. Spiritually, though, I feel a little something lost. I look at my bicycle and thoughts of selling it come to mind. The idea is both heartbreaking and relieving. I doubt I will sell it, but it sucks that the mind can maneuver that direction.

Time heals all wounds, they say. It isn’t true though. Ask a motorcyclist with a broken back. The pain exacerbates with time until eventually it is insufferable and crippling. Some wounds are spider venom in the blood: once they enter, they only spread and disintegrate.

I believe this wound will heal, but I do not know what my risk tolerance will be going forward. I know that I’m anxious to run again already. You can only fall so hard on a run.

Maybe I need to revert my thoughts back to the present. Of course the future holds some dread.

For now, it’s sunny and cool in Saint Louis. One day at a time.

Cellular Renewal

I heard somewhere that the cells in our body are constantly dying and being replaced; it’s a lifelong cycle. Therefore, our cellular composition is different today than it was a decade ago. Our life is a constant process of death and rebirth, all the way to the final collapse.

Our memories are the primary means of linking our present self to the version of us that existed yesteryear. Many of the cells that actually experienced those events in our past, however, are dead. We maintain the memory, not the person who experienced the event.

Similarly, the body has a remarkable ability to heal itself, but even after a repair, it’s arguable that nothing will ever return to a previous state. I tore a foot, and the foot healed, but I don’t think the foot is the same as it was two years ago. It’s neither better nor worse; it’s just different.

Say your body is a CD, and over time the CD accumulates scratches. If one were to find a way to smooth the CD back to its original state, the CD would still not play like it once did. It would look nice, but it wouldn’t recapture the old sound.

How many aged bands struggle to return to the sound of their original album?

I find myself in a quest to mitigate time’s effects on me. I run farther, bike farther, eat better, and sleep better. I feel fresh, like I did decades ago. I’m told by my doctor that my biological age is 19. That’s pretty good, in theory.

But despite de-aging my biological clock, I know I’m not 19. And despite signing up for some endurance running events, something I’d avoided for years, I know that competition won’t mean the same thing to me that it meant in my adolescence. Maybe I can experience a semblance of that old feeling, but the newness of everything that youth experiences can never be fully regained. One can only be reminded of it. Maybe that reminder is enough.

Still, the dopamine rush from competition is close enough to what it was in adolescence. It’s not the same as it was back then, but the feeling of fun is still there. So it’s still worthwhile. There are still things to accomplish and things to improve on. I’m not going to collect another world championship gold medal in swimming, but I can continue getting faster for years, well into my 40s, and maintain that speed well into my 50s, 60s, and 70s. Maybe that’s worth pursuing.

“Matt vs. Time” is not a competition to maintain youth, or even to regain it. It’s an effort to keep the armor intact while time chinks away at it. It’s an effort to keep the CD running, even if it doesn’t play as well as it did on first purchase.

If I am now an aged band, however, there is no going back to the original sound. I have to accept my present state of being.

Fighting “time” is a means of continuing to do the things that I enjoy, without becoming a burden on the people I care about.

At some point, the cells I have at this very moment will die, and they will be replaced with something else. And that version of me will hopefully run farther and faster than the version of me that exists today. I won’t be young, but I’ll feel fresh, and better yet, I’ll be different.

The Bicycle and My Health

I sat in a plush chair that stood in the center of a sterile and immaculate patient room at my company’s wellness center. I faced a television but did not register what was playing on its screen. I waited for the results of my recent health examination.

It had been three years since my last health check at our wellness center. That last check was in 2019, just two months after I returned from China and less than one year before COVID became a thing. I thought about the peaks and valley’s I’d been through in that timespan. What did that journey mean for my health?

The practitioner walked in with a clipboard and greeted me.

“We hadn’t seen you in a long time,” she said. “And to make a long story short… your health is perfect, and it improved considerably. That’s pretty rare for someone over the past few years.”

She then listed off my metrics and how much they improved since 2019.

“Your LDL cholesterol, which is your bad cholesterol, improved from 110 mg/dL, which is not terrible but not great, to 52 mg/dL, which is outstanding.”

“Your blood pressure went from 130/87, a little higher than what we prefer, to 118/73, which is in perfect range.”

“You dropped 15 pounds, though you were not overweight by any standards.”

“I have to ask because I encounter so many patients going through struggles right now: what did you change?”

I told her that I basically only changed one thing: I bought a bicycle and found myself enjoying it. It was supposed to be a new hobby to “get me through the boredom of work from home.” I bought it because I was frustrated by my inertia, frustrated by the new normal of virtual meetings, and frustrated that I wasn’t enjoying life. I told her that I felt my stress increasing over those first few months of the pandemic, and I wondered if a new way of moving could be a cure. Hatred can accumulate with a snowball effect, and I didn’t want to die a hateful person. I knew almost nothing about bicycles or cycling at the time.

And as it turned out, the bicycle cured me. My metabolic age is now 13 years younger than my actual age. By each measure, I am the healthiest I’ve been in my life. My health problems vanquished. I smashed them with my bicycle tires, one by one.

That’s not to say that my health was poor when I returned from China, but that it wasn’t nearly as good as I had assumed at the time. It’s to say that it could have been so much better, and cycling helped me understand just how good health can be.

In a sense, the bicycle gave me a second life. It’s a meditation, an exercise, a hobby, and a thrill ride all in one. And in a sense I do feel reborn. I don’t feel as angry as I used. I feel content to just “have a good time,” which is all I really want. Cycling is my time to just be me and enjoy the day.

So for me, it seems, a lot of it was about the bike.

Weekly Plunder: Week 22 - Snow and Ice

A winter storm hit Saint Louis this week. What started as a light rain on Tuesday soon froze the ground with a sheet of ice as the temperature dropped. Then several inches of snow and sleet piled over this icy blanket over Wednesday and Thursday.

After doing my standard rehab exercises for my right foot, I went for an outdoor run on Wednesday through the snowy downtown landscape. The foot kept stable and I found that the snow actually provided a soft layer of cushioning. Contrary to what most might think, I believe outdoor exercise is the best possible remedy for my foot. Allowing the foot’s muscles to adapt to the angles, crevices, and curvatures of nature will give it more stability, not less, provided I’m reasonable with what I put the foot through.

I largely downplayed the injury to most people, but it was severe. It was several weeks before I could move all of the foot’s toes and several months before I could bend the foot for a “squat” type pattern of movement. My podiatrist and physical therapist told me this is because the muscle damage and inflammation interfered with the bone’s natural movement pattern.

I’m doing squats now. I’m also jumping. I have minor aches, but the aches, like so many material things, are fading with time.

Most people I encounter do not prefer to exercise outside, especially not in a winter storm. Many don’t go outside at all.

In fact, adapting yourself to uncomfortable conditions is good for both the body and the mind.

Note the ana, a group of Japanese female deep sea divers. They spend up to four hours a day at sea and often plunge into freezing water that would be intolerable to a Westerner (and possibly give a Westerner hypothermia). They complete up to 150 dives each day.

“We found that Japanese pearl divers have significantly less arterial stiffening,” says Hirumi Tanaka, director of UT’s Cardiovascular Aging Research Laboratory. This means they have less risk of health issues including hypertension, stroke, and kidney disease.

The average age of the ana is now a whopping 65. 65! Compared to westerners, what I’ve read is that diseases and cancers are much less prevalent in this group of divers. How many 65-year-old Americans do you know that can dive at all?

Numerous studies show that exercising outside improves brain function and mental health (and conversely, staying inside exacerbates mental health). It makes sense. Not only does fresh air and sunshine give a natural sense of peace and quietude, but the added challenge of navigating terrain gives the brain something further to focus on (and constant focus is required). In a gym, there is nothing but screens and machines. The mind can revert to “autopilot” mode. Trail running, in contrast, gives the brain a new stimulus to consider and calculate with every step and every turn.

There is good reason why most people in gyms need headphones—their routines are dull and predictable. Nothing is learned or gained but the linear movement patterns that metal objects and their pulley systems provide. The gym is often (not always, but often) a dull and diluted mimicry of what our ancestors once did naturally.

Nature, in contrast, is a constant zigzag. I prefer the zigzag, even on park rides that make me vomit.

What I’m watching: All of Us are Dead on Netflix. A zombie show with some fun twists and turns. What is it about zombies that fascinates us enough to keep them embedded in popular culture for generations? There is a certain horror in the possibility of living without a mind, in being powerless to a simple bite or an airborne pathogen, and in being stripped of the soul so that only an animal remains.

What I’m reading: The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry. This book celebrates the slow life and enforces its principles with Christian philosophy, which is often profound and underrated in the posh modern world of TikTok, SnapShit, and trend-seeking urban yogis.

What I’m listening to: “Call Me Little Sunshine” by Ghost. I really can’t get enough of this band and I’m seeing them live in two weeks.

What I’m doing: I bought a flip phone, a Punkt MP02. I specifically bought this because it has an installable version of Signal (Pigeon), an encrypted messaging app that I’m more comfortable using than the other messaging apps out there. I still have a smartphone for some tools. They do have their uses.

And, I’m running in the snow.

Killing Comfort

Comfort kills.

So many people only experience the weather in brief stints. For these people, the weather is often just a nuisance during a brief 30-second jaunt to the car, which then transports them to work in an office with a chair and a desk. The day is therefore spent sitting in a car with air conditioning, followed by sitting in a chair under air conditioning, followed by sitting in a car with air conditioning again. All environs provide optimized comfort and entertainment. Maybe, at some point, the day involves easy movement in a gym, again with air conditioning, as well as rows of tv screens to combat the boredom.

Even the sun, the very thing that allowed for creation in the first place, is seen as a threat to the body (and industry provides sunscreens to lather over the body as a “fix” to the problem). The sun causes squinting, or sweat, or potential sunburns. Homo sapiens have existed for give or take 250,000 years, and only in the last 100 years has the sun been classified as “dangerous.” Since this odd diagnosis of sun as bad, an industry of “sun protective creams” has emerged.

Living life in a vacuum, the modern body feels plush cushions on the derrière and back while sleeping, cushions while eyes are glued to the television, cushions while eyes are glued to the phone, and cushions while engorging the stomach in a never-ending paroxysm of gluttony (true hunger is rare in the Western world).

The modern brain isn’t bored while browsing the phone for “stimulation”. Boredom should not exist in the modern world because boredom is another potential discomfort. Silence should not exist because silence runs risk or boredom. So kids and adults sit on their asses and TikTok or whatever the hell is the trend of the year.

“But the modern lifespan is longer,” I’m told as a counterpoint. And to that I say, how many of those extra years are actually spent living? Heart disease kills by the millions annually. By 2028 the long-term US nursing home care industry is expected to reach 1.7 trillion US dollars, provided an annual growth of 7.1% (Grand View Research, Inc.).

1/3 of Americans are either diabetic of pre-diabetic. Almost half of Americans struggle to climb a single flight of stairs (studyfinds.org). Even our conveniences become more difficult: the stairs were once invented to make climbing easier. Now the body needs something more automated than stairs to transport it vertically. The modern concept of being alive seems eerily close to the undead version of life in any zombie film.

There is a universal law that nothing is created without having both intended and unintended consequences. The unintended consequences of industry and the drive for growth are simple: an overly-medicated and largely miserable population that cannot process or experience discomfort.

The modern Western human, often addicted to these comforts and the obsession with the elimination of all danger, cannot accept pain, cannot accept suffering, and often cannot accept danger as a necessary component to a meaningful life. Every sickness must have a cure that can be paid for. Erasing all threats is a matter of a savvy Google search.

I imagine myself living thousands of years ago, a persistence hunter, preparing for a hunt via a long run. My body evolved with the capacity to run and breathe with stunning efficiency. My tribe can hunt a deer (or its predecessor) not with speed, but with endurance. There are risks involved with the hunt. We don’t need trendy shoes with arch support or technical gym shorts: we just run. We compete with other predators, and other predators decide whether we humans would also make a decent meal. There are real threats, not the modern vain “what if my car gets a dent or my sweater gets a stain” type threats. My belly is often hungry. My legs are often tired. But ironically, I do not feel any form of depression, not in the modern sense. I focus on my feet hitting rock and sand as the heat pummels me and my thirst for water increases. The deer will collapse soon and hunger will be sated.

This morning I thought about comfort, my biggest existential threat, as I embarked on a bike ride. The temperature was 19 F (minus 7 C). With the wind chill it was 5 F (minus 15 C). The wind lashed me with its ice-coated whips of air as I pedaled toward Grant Farm. The Gravois Greenway was mottled with ice patches that my gravel bike often slid over. One bad fall and my right foot, I knew, would be done for. I slowed a little as I crossed each ice patch. The trail took me over icy bridges, through white-sheeted forest, and alongside bleak highways. Sunlight filtered through the dead tree branches and brushed my cheeks. I pedaled as my heartbeat raced, mile after mile, hour after hour, and I felt life in pain. Time slowed. Two hours on the bike felt infinitely longer. Silence enveloped me, though there was certainly plenty of ambient sound.

I live in the same weather as more than one million other people in the city, but many of them do not understand the full magnificence of the weather. That to me is a great tragedy.

I am finding that as my foot heals, my competitive tenacity is also returning. It is ruthless, the sort that punished competitors as severely as possible years ago and has long-since hibernated, but still lurks within. My inner “Terry Silver”. The type that, as a swimmer, grabbed ankles and twisted them when lapping people at practice. This inner warrior knows that a successful hunt requires ruthlessness and resolve.

I feel cynicism when I think of how the quest for comfort can lead so many into a black hole of materialism that sucks the essence out of the soul. Give me the dragon. Give me the struggle. I have one fear, my greatest fear: an end in a nursing home. Let me be devoured by the dragon instead of a devourer of comfort.

Better to fight the dragon and lose convincingly.