Those pics are from Hard Times, aren't they? I liked that movie a lot.

Busto.

Yeah it’s Hard Times.


Where you going to look for work?

The old office in New England wants to take me back. It's close to my folks, who are in their 80's now and won't be around forever, which means if I stay out here, I wouldn't be able to see them many more times in this lifetime.

I think I'm heading back.

Don't sweat it sj, we know how this story ends.
All the best.
You're not leaving us tho, right?

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Ok makes sense. I was thinking maybe work remotely for them but yeah being back with family makes sense. Good luck with whatever decision you make.

One thing I have learned from these last 3 years is that I enjoy writing in this blog. I will continue to do so as long as I continue to find interest in things.

Why I Shouldn't Tell You About My Exercise Routine, Part II


My high school exercise routine ended in my senior year with the final whistle of our football season, a whistle unheard beneath the roar of 8000 fans losing their **** over our epic last minute goal-line stand to hold out against our bitter rival on Thanksgiving day.

A game winning goal-line stand was about as good as it got for a defensive lineman like myself. My counterpart on the D line had made two sacks that season, but the coaches had yelled at him for both of them.

In high school an interior defensive lineman's job is to plug up the line. If he's instead lumbering around deep into the opposing backfield trying for a sack, it means there's now a big hole back where he should be, something for the faster, more agile opposing running back or QB to run or pass through for big yardage. Pro defensive linemen are allowed more leeway in this matter, as they are the fastest and fleetest 320lb (145kg) behemoths in the world over short distances.

Anyways, we won the game, but I could not celebrate at first because the crowd stormed the field and jumped on our backs. I was not worried about myself, being heavily padded up, but I soon noticed that a boy--probably around 10 or 11 years old--had gone down a few yards away from me. He was starting to get stepped on, and my blood went cold at the sight of a kid who was about to die from being trampled at a high school football game.

On average, I had 3 or 4 people hanging off me at that time. I say on average because each person would stay on for just a few seconds, but as soon as one person slid off me, a new person would jump on, forcing me to fight to stay standing while being smacked into several different trajectories.

To go after the kid, I put forth possibly the greatest physical effort of my life, lurching myself and my jumpers-on through the scrum and over to the boy, who was curled up and feebly trying to roll away from the kicks and the stamps he was collecting.

I couldn't free my right arm from a hanger-on, and bending over to grab the kid by his collar with my left arm was prohibitively tough with several people jumping on and off me. I came perilously close to toppling over, but somehow I kept on my legs and I caught hold of the kid's shirt and I managed to straighten up, hangers-on and all, while pulling the boy up to his feet.

Once we were up, the jumpers-on had either gotten their fill or had finally realized what I was trying to do. They all slid off of me, and I was able to frog-march the kid out of the turbulent scrum. The boy ran off without glancing back at me.

You're welcome, kiddo.

Did I appreciate then how being fit and strong could have lifesaving benefits for myself and for others?

Not at all. I had recently found a new place to hang out and smoke cigarettes after school that wasn't the gym--a friend of mine, a fellow smoker, had turned 18 and had gotten his own apartment--so I was done with working out. I was too slow of foot to play football at the college level, so why bother with the workouts?



I was working at a low-level retail job, and in between shifts I took classes at a university that routinely made Playboy's annual list of the top party schools in the nation. I fit right in on campus, and my heavy drinking and routine drug use showed on me.

I wanted to start working out again, and to get back to my old form. My old strong and fit form had taken me a year of steady workouts to achieve, but I remembered that I hadn't really worked that hard over the course of that year, so the answer, of course, was to work really hard this time, and in this way I would catch up quicker.



Muhammad Ali was my inspiration for that run. I pushed, and I pushed, and I pushed, and through this work ethic I made excellent progress in only six weeks, and six weeks is also how long my exercise routine lasted. I was sore all the time, and miserable, and as much as I loved planning the routine, I hated the execution of it. I marked it off as an unfortunate failure of will and I moved on.



After years of sitting at a desk and getting zero exercise, I was in my early 40's and I was in terrible shape. I would huff and puff over two flights of stairs. One day I merely rearranged my books, and the next day I woke up terribly sore, and that soreness lingered for two more days after that.

I bought some weights and I started a routine, working hard and gradually adding exercises and reps and sets and weights. After eight weeks of hell, I was stronger and I felt better, but I could barely notice any progress with my look. I still had my beer gut and my set of manboobs. Welcome to middle age, I supposed. I was done. I gave up. I marked it off as an unfortunate failure of will and I moved on.



Two years ago I found myself here in Las Vegas, in my late 40's, and in somewhat bad shape. I walked around 2 miles every day, but it wasn't enough. I had brought my weights with me in the move, and it was time to break them out. This time, however, I was going to act on what I'd learned from my previous failures. I started out nice and easily, this time without any great expectations for a rapid and fundamental visible change in my body.

After two months of a steady routine, I thought it might be safe to start pushing it a little, adding some weight, and some reps, and some exercises. As per usual, I went a little overboard, and I tapped out after another three or four weeks. I marked it off as an unfortunate failure of will and I moved on.



Do we see a pattern here? I am not Muhammad Ali. None of us are him. Muhammad Ali was one of the most remarkable athletes of the 20th Century, of any century. He was wired differently. Pain was an incentive for him. It is a disincentive for most of us.

Every time my routine has started to get tough, I've started to hate it. Why should I make it tough, then, when my longest run and my greatest success by far came from my year in high school, a year when I was just going through the motions at the gym so I could have a smoke break afterwards?

Many of the exercise mottos and affirmations out there have to do with minimizing or mitigating the pain of working hard in order to get us back to the routine the next day, and all the days after that. I say that this way of thinking about exercise is fundamentally flawed, at least for those of us who do not sit on the far right of the pain acceptance bell curve.

At this point, I would like to draw attention to the title of this post, because I'm not an expert and I'm probably wrong, but in any case I am experimenting this time around with a routine that is short and easy.

As it goes on, I will add to it, but I will do that very slowly and carefully this time, and if at any point even the slightest amount of dread of the routine starts to set in, I will be dialing the routine back, rather than writing it off as an unfortunate failure of will, giving up, and moving on.

Six weeks ago I started out by doing six (6) push ups. If I'd pushed it that day, I could have done perhaps eight or ten, but I would have been much more sore the next day, and the dread would have set in early, and I would have had to talk myself into doing the push ups again the next day, and then the same again for every day after that.

Instead, I did just six, and the next day I did eight push ups, easily, and without having to talk myself into it. The day after that, I did seven, as an eighth one seemed like a stretch on that particular day.

Today I did twenty five push ups, easily and without strain. If I'd been pushing myself, I might instead be up somewhere in the low thirties, but I know myself and my history very well by now. If I'd been pushing myself again, I would be dreading the exercise, all day until I finally did it, and every day I would be trying to talk myself into taking days off: first one day a week, then two, then all of them. As it is, I have not missed a day of push ups in six weeks, nor have I wanted to miss one.

Last week, I added a few dumbbell curls to my routine; nice and easy. I will not add another exercise to the routine for at least a month. If at any time a new exercise causes strain, I will drop it immediately and without regret.

The goal is to still be doing this routine in a year's time. If I take it easy, I will not be surprised to find myself doing fifty or sixty push ups at a go, without straining, by this time next year. If I push myself, I know that I will be doing zero pushups a day by this time next year. It's a certainty, given my history. An easy fifty will be much, much better than a guilty zero.



Arnold's philosophy here gets me away from Muhammad Ali and leaves me closer to what I'm attempting. If I'm successful in the long run, it will be due to a change in how I think about approaching exercising, which is one level up from merely psyching myself up to perform an arduous task every day, a task which I have previously found myself unable to do over a long period of time.

Gain without pain. Is it feasible, and is it sustainable? I am on the case.

Re: your football story



Good luck on the move back to NE, if that's what happens. Glad to hear you'll still keep the blog up.

And good on you with the exercise program. I think you're doing it right to build up a little at a time.

Trying to do a little bit each day is important. I've seen too many people not be willing to do anything, because they can't get a full-on workout in.

If you haven't already, think about adding a stretching routine too. Will help as you age to stay more flexible.

Thanks golddog!

I can provide some further insight into the kids running away after being saved phenomena, because I was that kid, once, when I was stuck clinging to a ladder in Action Park's infamous wave pool, aka the Grave Pool.

Despite being a strong swimmer that summer, the waves in the pool beat me down pretty quickly, and I barely made it over to a ladder, and when I got there I didn't have the strength to climb it.

A helpful adult grabbed my wrist and pulled me out of the Grave Pool, and then I ran away without looking at them. What was going through my head? Mortal embarrassment, and believing with all my heart that some adult was going to yell at me.

When you're a kid, it seems like you get yelled at every time an adult is around to witness you getting yourself into some sort of peril. Whether it's your fault or not, you get yelled at.

Who needs that? One good thing is that you're allowed to run away from adults who are strangers and not, like, teachers or police officers. So it's a simple and elegant solution to avoid being yelled at.

gg SJ.

I know the feeling of going back!

I also find it impossible to repeatedly muster the will power to stick to a workout regime, I really don't know how people do it.

The only way I can stay in shape is with exercise which I enjoy, ie, I cannot run for the sake of the exercise because its just too hellish, but I can run myself into the ground chasing a soccer ball around a field and love every minute. Likewise I can't lift weights or do pushups or any of that stuff, but I can go rock climbing.

Also +1 to stretching.

Good luck with the next chapter SJ

Great post, Suited. Remember that when it comes to doing push-ups, quality is more important than quantity.

Ty fid.

Yep. Back to the oar. A little older; possibly a little wiser, definitely more well-rested.

Thanks Rebus! I enjoyed rock scrambling up at Red Rock years ago, and that's an excellent way to stay in shape. but at this point in my life it would be too rough on my knees.

This is good material for my daydream of hustling push up prop bets at New England poker rooms around this time next year. My marks are going to want to see proper push ups from the fat middle-aged guy before they hand over their money.

Levelling and Addiction, an Exploration. Part I

I was planning for this piece to be the third in a series of essays on different levels of thinking about things: the previous two subjects being dreams and exercise routines. Unlike those two, however, I have not cracked the case on addiction. I had definite ideas about those first two subjects--they may have been wrong ideas, but they were definite--however, I'm still working out the addiction angle, so I'm going to muck about with this one a bit more than I did with the other two, and hopefully I'll discover something good along the way.

Let's start with a story:

One night around eight years ago, Tom and Manchester and me went out to the New London pubs, and we did what we usually did, we caught ourselves a nice buzz chilling out to the sounds of a good bar band, and drinking pints of various high-end craft beers.

On the way home we blasted tunes in my company car, a little late-model hybrid with a decent stock sound system. With all the rocking out going on, I missed the turn to Tom's house, and a few hundred yards down the road I tried to flip a quick U-turn, but I understeered and hopped the opposite curb and buried the hybrid's low-friction tires firmly into a muddy field.

"Let's just go," I suggested. "We'll cut through the woods and up to Tom's house. I'll sober up a bit, then I'll <redacted>."

My friends were not on board with this idea; they wanted to walk back to Tom's on the road. I split off from them and headed out for the woods, falling down heavily within the first two steps of reaching the trees, stubbing my big toe so badly that the nail turned black and fell off a few days later.

I stood up and I took a leak. When I was done, I noticed the police lightbar blues and reds flashing against the trees. I turned around and saw the cops interviewing my friends. I sighed mightily, and I walked back to join them.

"Why were you hiding in the woods?"
"I wasn't. I had to pee."
"You weren't trying to hide?"
"I am here right now, am I not?"

That was my first and only DUI. A friend of mine with more experience in this matter recommended a certain lawyer. I had an okay job and I had some money socked away, so I was in the market for purchasing extra justice. The lawyer told me that he needed $3000 up front, and in return for that he would make the lion's share of my problems go away.

Right away the lawyer discovered that when I had refused a breathalyzer back at the station, the cop on duty had not filed the paperwork correctly for that scenario. That fact, when aired at my first court hearing, would save me from having my license suspended, which is the standard punishment in that state for refusing a breathalyzer.

The state then tried to pull a fast one by mailing me the notice of the time and date of my license revocation hearing very late, so that it arrived in my mail at 10 AM on the day of my 8 AM hearing, but my lawyer was too savvy for that, and he showed up at my hearing on time and without me.

As my only "punishment", I ended up having to take a counseling course, at the completion of which my record would be sealed, as long as I never picked up another DUI.

As part of my state-mandated course, I was made to attend one Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, and that's where I encountered the first level of thinking about addiction.

More on this in Part II.

Quick note:

If in the previous post I gave the impression of being an unthinking, entitled shithead, then I was conveying things accurately and correctly.

Dont worry about it, glad enough to see the fred is going in the right direction again after all that H&F supernerd stuff

Wots an H&F, precious?

Also, I'm at least half supernerd, so that kind of stuff is going to get posted if I'm going to be true to my roots.

Levelling and Addiction, an Exploration. Part II

"Four years ago, I killed three people in a drunk driving accident." I saw the pain in his eyes. I could see that the pain was a thing that will never leave him alone.

I wasn't watching him give a speech up on a podium; we were talking one on one. He was the first person to whom I'd spoken at the AA meeting, after I'd cased the place and tagged him as one of the guys in charge, one of the people who could sign the form from my DUI course as proof that I had been to a meeting.

"Four years ago, I killed three people in a drunk driving accident." It was the first thing he said to me after he told me his name. I hadn't told him why I was there. I'd only said my name and mentioned the fact that it was my first time at a meeting.

At the time, I didn't think about how this was a lot of baggage for him to unload on me, a stranger, or how foolhardy he was being to risk bringing down another's scorn and hatred on himself at the very first moment of meeting. I didn't wonder whether he'd done any time in prison for his crime. I didn't think about how I might live my life if I was in his place. What I felt was Level One stuff--his direct experience, and his pain, if only for a second before my defenses kicked in. The whole thing came down as an awful, unwelcome surprise, and it was exactly what I needed to hear, at the exact time that I needed to hear it.

SJ you may have covered this but don’t think you did, why did you originally choose Reno and then Las Vegas? Just curious, you originally wanted to play $2/$5. Figure playing back in New England area at the new what is it MGM or Wynn in the Boston area combined with Mohegan and Foxwoods would be better options? Maryland probably another good choice, maybe Florida, California? Nevada doesn’t seem to be the place to grind low stakes unless you’re combining with some other +EV gambling which you seem to have dabbled in the past on.

Strippers.

You are a good man, you have not yet found that cesspit. It's a dark place, where tortures unknown to man are glorified. Some manage to return unscathed but many take more sessions than as with the AAs before they return to be semi-productive members of society if they can do that at all.

I haven't played poker since the pandemic, so I'm not sure if I have the street cred to even be posting on this forum. But if I see a guy doing push ups in any of the New England casinos after I get my second shot, I'll be sure to come over and say hi

I liked Reno a lot, but I felt that the town didn't have enough $2/$5 and $5/$10 games. I didn't know at the time that I would fall into a $1/$2 promo/freeroll grinding rut in Las Vegas. If I had known that in advance, I might have just stayed in Reno.

Yep. Nobody wants to hear about my exercise routine. Push up and other proper exercise form videos have now crept into my YouTube algo thanks to me watching Sheep's video.

I just found out that Massachusetts poker rooms are still closed due to various health restrictions. The closest one, MGM Springfield, at its best was barely more than an oversized slot parlor, so it'll be touch and go as to whether they reopen the poker room once the state restrictions ease up.

No I get and you explained the move from Reno to Vegas.

I’m curious why you originally chose Reno though? It seems like there’s probably better options for $2/$5+ in a lot of other markets.