Wear Clean Draws  (because there’s 5 million ways to kill a ceo)

so, i’m slower reading the reactionary mind lately because i just don’t have energy.

was diagnosed with a metabolic condition earlier this year. lately, the medication change seems to be associated with some health issues such as - love this! - 8 lb weight gains in 5 days. a gain that came on top of another 5 lb weight gain a couple of weeks before. Now, if I were stuffing doritos into my face and not exercising, that might make sense. but even if I were, it still doesn’t make sense. 8 lbs in 5 days would require eating 28,000 extra calories in 5 days.Lovers, that would mean, what?, about 12 large sausage pizzas in addition to a normal diet over the course of 8 days. Like I told my doctor, OK. I gained weight. But shouldn’t I have had a LOT more fun than I have had during those five days! Instead, I’ve been exercising regularly and eating, if not a balanced diet, then at least not one where I was eating almost 7000 extra calories a day than I need!

So, I’ve been in and out of doc’s for tests, medication tweaks, etc. For awhile, my heart was racing here and there, issues with fluttery/uneven heart beats, and awaking in the middle of the night or the morning feeling as if my heart stopped. That’s happened in the past but I chalked it up to a stressful lifestyle and the fact that congenital heart disease runs in the family. All my great uncles died before they were 45 and my great aunt and grandma all had heart attacks by the time they were 55.

Alas, in spite of exercising 5 days a week and biking to work regularly, including 1.5 hr rides on weekends, gaining weight steadily. So, I’m on this protein sparing modified fast and have upped the gym routine so that it’s at least an hour of stair mistress and rope training, an hour and twenty when R doesn’t come along, 6 days a week. It’s not the kind of casual stuff that will allow for reading. I’m telling ya, the stair mistress - couldn’t read if I tried on that suckah. Definitely can’t on the rope trainer. It’s one of those marpo kinetics dealios, http://www.marpokinetics.com/. Lately, to mix it up, I’ve been pulling rope up (backward) for five minutes for every 40 minute session. Then, I mix it up with a little kickboxing movement because, as Tae Bo always says, any time you get your knees above your waist, you’re killin’ the abs man. This is kinda fun to do, though kicks my ass, when I pull down on the rope, I kick up pulling knee into chest. Goal: make knee level with boob for the win! Then, I do it on one knee, so I have to balance the pulls. The reason why I do all this rope training business is because a long time ago I heard that it’s good to exercise with arms above heart - good for heart.

It’s also because, being a biker, I get way too much action on my legs. Speaking of which, one of the things I do when mashing the stairs on Stair Mistress is do it backwards. I grapevine it as well, but backwards always gets comments to the effect that people think the old broad is hard core. To which I laugh and say, “no way man. It’s easier.” Last night, some musclehead tells me that’s not true. So I look it up and by damn, he’s right: it’s harder. But I don’t understand why it *feels* easier. To some extent, it may be because you can rest on your arms, making your arms take up the burden of holding your weight, rather than legs. Which was def. true in the beginning. Sometimes, I think it’s just pyschological. Feels easier because it’s different and new. So, you are concentrating on the movement, taking your mind off boredom, pain, clock-watching. This translates into the psychological experience of feeling something is “easier”?

Beats me. Still, I have calves that make guys at the gym drool in jealousy, I’m tellin’ ya. I mean, all muscle heads want calves like chicks have, meatier and more curvaceous. But mine have now developed three tiers of bulging muscle - I know, I brag! — and in the front there is a nice ridge that pops out when I’m bulked up mid-routine. Ab muscles kick ass too. It’s the layers of fat in between them that are Teh Suck! Meanwhile, it turns out that this metabolic condition is so awesome that it makes me gain weight concentrated in one area: the gut! Isn’t that great!? Which is so cool because it increases risk of heart attack. So awesome!

So, the exercise schedule, uh, cuts into the book reading even more than the old exercise schedule did. Of course, since I’ll be riding in the centuries again this summer, I guess I’ll be that much further ahead in my training. Oh, and the other thing that cuts into reading time is the tracking of everything. Looking up calories, entering ‘em into a fitness diary, recording how many minutes of exercise, how many watts, and then assessing mood and shit. ho hum. The doctor said the results of an echo and other tests were all ok, except that she needs to up dosage for the metabolic condition. Still, she also thinks I should wear a heart monitor for a month, to get a little deeper into the whole irregular heartbeat problem. So, no heart failure showed up on the Echo heart test, but she thinks maybe we should weird out another possibility around heart conditions.

So, where the hell was I? Oh, about Robin’s book. It occured to me, in his passage on Hobbes, that one thing that is confusing is that he’s writing about reactionaries and the reactionary mind. As such, he tells us that Hobbes was an example of a reactionary disliked and distrusted by conservatives. Hmmmm. OK. It’s clear that reactionaries are this interesting breed of thinker on his thesis, people who are situational: they react to events around them and, in doing so, cultivate a reactionary ideology. And as much as Robin, in the book, wants to distinguish between reactionary and conservative, I’m afraid that, since he’s trading on interest in *conservative* thinking, then he muddies the water. This is especially true in his appearances on t.v, radio, and in published interviews where, to my mind, he doesn’t do enough to make the distinction. In fact, he appears to be guesting places in order to be the resident liberal expert on the conservative mind. This confusing things because when he starts asking or people start asking, they tend to confuse reactionary with conservatives. REactionaries, on Robin’s view (so far in my reading), are the ones who espouse an activist ideology of struggle to resurrect in modified and radicalized form the past. But conservatives, he says, don’t trust reactionaries. But what happens when he’s asked to speak is that people don’t quite grasp the distinction so that everything he specifically says he’s applied to conservatives. This happened on Up with Chris Hayes awhile back, where he was resident expert on cons, where little was said about the distinction between cons and reactionaries.

Oh shit! TBC. I have to hit the gym because I have dinner date this evening. The company, after making a team of developers work 12 hr days 6 days a week for 8 weeks is springing for dinner out with their families. I asked my boss if he was sure he wanted wives and children to be there. Really? You want dagger eyes to be tossed your way? Reallly? LOL

p.s. one thing that bugged me was the doctor asking if I wanted flomax (sp?) I think that’s the name brand she used. She asked because she said that the diuretic would relieve what has got to be water weight gain. I said, but I want to find out why this weird water weight gain, not treat the symptom. I mean, if it’s heart failure, then it’s blood cells leaking (something like that, google it beeeyotches) which is different than retaining water in my muscles and organs because of, say, a salty diet - for which diuretics are used. Yes, she said. So, wtf recommend fLomax. Hmmm. Grrrrr.