Erstwhile Okie on St. Mark's Place. "That which hath been is now; and that which is to be hath already been; and God requireth that which is past."
On this Day
29 days until 5k
Garbage day. Did five minutes on the treadmill and just noped out. Can't say why exactly. Was it harder than any of the days before? Did I just not have the mental capacity to push? Who knows. But honestly it's a relief. I had six days in a row where I went further/longer than the preceding day which created a constant pressure to do more. So I'm glad I failed today so anything tomorrow is an improvement. Besides, for the 7th day in a row I got up at 5:30 and went down to the gym.
Weighed in at 178lbs this morning, a not-insignificant leap. But I've continued pigging out with Sammy here. Oh well, losing weight is easy. Much easier than this. Weighing 160 by race day would be a breeze compared to running 3+ miles and I could do it without getting out of bed.
Ah well, very grateful for the day. Waking up in a cool apartment in the East Village with Sammy in his bedroom. It's a dream.
30 days until 5k
Stayed up later than I should have last night to watch the new Rick and Morty at 11pm. But still managed to peel myself out of bed at 5:30am. Had a bit less dread than yesterday.
But stepping onto the treadmill, I felt preemptively exhausted. Even beyond the looming physical suffering is the boredom. I don't want to do anything so monotonous for fifteen minutes.
But I started. Started with Could Have Been Me by The Struts, then Holy Grail (feat. Justin Timberlake) by JAY-Z, then Kashmir by Led Zeppelin, though a couple minutes in I skipped to Knights of Cydonia by Muse.
Same experience as always. No easier or less unpleasant. One-and-a-half minutes in I'm thinking I might just do seven minutes and tell myself at least I got up and came to the gym, that's what it's all about. Or just do ten and say it's a rest day, or maybe do twenty minutes, but with walking integrated.
Then I hit ten minutes and figure I can do eleven, and by then I know I'll push through to fifteen. But will I go longer? By thirteen I know I am definitely not going longer. And the last minute is agony.
I rewarded myself by not doing any other exercise. After I'd gotten my wind back I walked home (after swinging by the corner store for a new can opener). Weighed in at 176.2lbs, 1.5lbs more than before I started running, but as I always say, the numbers are negligible and weight loss is easy if that's my goal. But it isn't; I just want to make sure I have enough in the tank for the morning run and ultimately the 5k. I imagine weight loss will be a natural consequence, but it doesn't matter.
I've wanted to take a cooking class at Atelier Sucré for ages, having walked past it a bunch of times (it's all of two blocks away) and with Sammy being here for a week, I thought it was finally a good time. They say the minimum age is 14, but I sent them a message on Instagram and they said 12 was fine.
It was a small group, just a mom and her college-age daughter and us. The teacher was great. We started by making brioche dough from scratch. While that was rising, we took chunks of premade brioche and put them in ramakins and made a sauce to pour over them. Sort of a bread pudding French toast. Then while that was in the oven, we made another batch of the sauce, took slices of premade brioche, soaked them, and cooked them in a pan.
Great two hours, and all the food we left with was almost worth the cost on its own.
31 days until 5k
Woke up to the 5:30 alarm with something not unlike dread. Setting a goal of daily improvement is terrible because every day is hard and you wake up knowing the coming day will be harder still. And it's embarrassing knowing that most of my friends could probably wake up hungover on three hours of sleep and run a 5k.
Nevertheless I got up, consoling myself that going to the gym and doing worse than the day before is much better than skipping it altogether. On the way out I peeked into Sammy's bedroom and was happy to see his leg peeking from his blanket, dangling over the edge of his bed. Sundays are usually great and awful because I wake and the boys are here, but I know I'll have to drive them back in the evening and drive back alone for another week of work. But I have Sammy through next Sunday so it's the rare wonderful day where I wake and he's here and when I go to sleep he'll be here.
It really was pitiful how much I didn't want to do it standing on the treadmill, dragging out my little stretches. But eventually I started and as always, by 1m30s, I had determined ten minutes was probably out of the question today. Just an endless mental stream of hopelessness, prayer while I listened to Knights of Cydonia.
I was genuinely surprised when I hit a mile, then ten minutes, then each thirty second interval after. It was probably around the thirteen minute mark that I thought I might actually be able to do fifteen, and I did.
Whatever pleasure or satisfaction I felt quickly dissipated against the realization I'd feel like I have to do it again or more tomorrow. And eventually thirty minutes, then faster, then on an incline, then outdoors off a treadmill.
Weighed in at 175lbs, which is more than when I started, but I wasn't surprised since I sort of pigged out with Sammy yesterday, and the losses since I started on Wednesday have all been negligible anyway.
For the second day in a row someone on the street expressed their appreciation for my t-shirt, which says "Jesus Loves You". I need to wash it though as it smells increasingly like old lasagna.
32 days until 5k
Wasn't sure whether I'd get up and go today seeing as it's Saturday and I need to drive upstate to get my son, but it's easier for me to be extreme with a habit; breaks have a way of lasting. And the magical thing about getting up at 5:30 is that it gives you time for anything.
I was uneasy since I fasted yesterday, apart from a post-workout protein shake and some popcorn at Film Forum (went to see White Nights). I did want to try and fast track some weight loss, but mostly I just wanted a reset because I think I've been doing some eating-out-of-boredom lately and taking a day to ignore all cues seems like a good way to reset that.
But I managed to continue the slow gradual climb, and stayed on the treadmill for thirteen minutes. I HATE running. Usually around the two minute mark I start saying there's no way I can even make five minutes. I don't want to do it, I'm uncomfortable. But it ends up being a good spiritual experience as I spend the entire time praying for strength I don't possess to keep going. And every time I hit ten minutes I'm amazed. It's like everything else in my life. I feel totally incapable, but somehow, through God's grace, I manage. It's nice to have such a clear, finite, concrete example to start every day.
Weighed in at 173.8lbs this morning. Interesting that it's essentially the same negligible reduction I've had every day since I started, even though I consumed less than 1000 calories yesterday. Good reminder that it's better or the same to eat healthy rather than fast.
Been going down a rabbit hole of IndieWeb and Fediverse, which is always what I intended for this site: to have the ease-of-use of Instagram or Facebook rather than the burden of a blog, but where I completely own and am in control of all of my content.
As such, I stumbled upon Derek Sivers' /now page movement, and created my own at https://pg.mccullo.ug/h/now.
33 days until 5k
Went to bed at a reasonable time last night and woke around 3:45am from a dream in which I was on a high school band trip with Ariana Grande. Checked my phone and was delighted to see I could sleep for another hour and forty-five minutes.
When the alarm did go off, it wasn't hard to get up. Guess on day three I've started to adapt. Did my shot of concentrated coffee, then headed down, dropping off my daily letter to Averill at camp into the mailbox on 9th Street and 1st Avenue en route to the gym.
Managed 12.5 minutes today, which felt like a decent milestone. Bit more each day. Was pleasantly surprised since I'd gone for a 6 mile stroll last night and felt a bit sore.
Weighed in at 174lbs flat this morning. So down another 1/3 of a pound, but these amounts are negligible. I could eat nothing today and be 176lbs tomorrow, I think.
Test writing from Quill
34 days until 5k
The alarm this morning jolted me out of such a deep sleep I didn't know who or where I was for a couple of seconds.
Yesterday I brewed a pot of coffee with 1.5x the usual grounds, then I put it in the freezer until a lot of ice formed, and I drained the liquid into another container, presumably removing water and making something more concentrated. Did this two or three times and put what was left in a Gatorade bottle in the fridge. Took a shot of it when I got out of bed then went to the gym.
Was surprised to see a red-tailed hawk perched on a fence in Tompkins Square Park. I don't remember seeing one here before. He was tracking a rat blithely strolling in and out of a bush.
I hate the gym. I hate running. I hate treadmills. As always, from the second I started it I wanted to quit and knew I wouldn't be able to do as much as I wanted. Yesterday I managed 10m30s at 6.5mph and felt like I could have kept on a fair bit, so today I'd thought maybe I could manage fifteen minutes, but I knew pretty early on it wasn't going to happen. Felt worse than yesterday, but still powered through to have at least some improvement and stuck with it for 11 minutes. Exercise playlist went through Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger by Daft Punk, Godzilla by Eminem, Go Speed Racer Go by Ali Dee and the Dekompressors.
Used some of the machines after that. Weighed in at 174.3 when I got home. Less than yesterday but negligibly. The amount that could be accounted for by a glass of water.
Yesterday I had a protein shake for breakfast, two pre-cooked chicken thighs with some frozen onion and pepper slivers for lunch, then there was a cookout at church after the evening service where I had two hamburgers, then a small sundae, which I would have foregone but the Grace Church Women's organization put together the sundae bar and twisted my arm.
Picked up baby carrots and pickles on the way home since my understanding is you can eat all you like of those and it has no meaningful impact. Planning to stick more or less to the same diet today.
35 days until 5K
To be clear, I recognize that 5Ks are not a big deal. My older son ran one without any prep and finished in 26 minutes, which is probably beyond my capabilities, even with over a month of preparation. But it's still more than I've tackled before, so we'll pretend it's a big(ish) deal.
That said, I've had periods in the past where I woke at 5:40am and went to the gym every weekday. It's been at least a year since I've gone with any consistency, and a couple months since I've been at all. My routine lately has been getting out of bed just in time to put a shirt on, get the kettle going for the French press, and slide into my morning stand up with nickel slots for eyes.
On the flip side, I'll be up until 1 or 2, in bed scrolling TikTok or Instagram with Roku TV playing in the background.
So last night, I set my alarm to 5:30 with very little conviction and prayed with similarly little conviction that God would give me the inclination to rise with it, if I felt like it. To my astonishment, when the alarm went off, I said "well this won't be any more appealing tomorrow" and I got up and dressed and walked to the gym, just a couple blocks away.
I didn't have high hopes. 10 minutes at 6mph has always been my absolute bear minimum baseline, which I should be able to do at any time (though I remember working up to it when I first started messing about with treadmills in 2021), so I set it to 6.5mph, and ran for 10m30s.
I could have pushed for more, but opted to not kill myself on the first day back. Hopped onto the chest press machine after, then came home. Had a pot of coffee, protein shake, vitamins, showered, shaved, dressed, Duolingo, Bible reading (Colossians), and now sitting down to work.
Like anything else, I hate getting up early, I love having gotten up early.
Weighed in at 174.6lbs this morning. Not terrible. Would love to be down to 160 by race day, but not focusing too much on weight loss. Tracking it anyway...
My friend texted me today asking if I wanted to run a 5k at the end of August. He's a fairly serious runner and I mentioned a couple of years ago that I'd been getting into a running routine (on a treadmill) and he said we ought to do a 5k. We never did and I've long since stopped running.
But I agreed and am glad to have a real, concrete goal. Gives me a reason to get back on a daily regimen which I always mean to do and never bother, and also something to use this space for. Small daily updates on my progress.
The 5k is in 36 days.
Testing post scheduling. Not sure how it will work since my free-tier of Vercel limits cron jobs... Scheduled for Monday, July 20, 5:32am...
Vivid dreams lately.
Two nights ago: I'd found some grand beautiful house in New Jersey I was thinking about buying (though I knew I couldn't afford it). Two friends suggested, as an alternative, that I look into affordable housing in New Jersey and guided me through a tour of a dim apartment with narrow halls filled with piles of clothes and black cats. It was depressing.
Last night I dreamed that I was staying with an older friend and sitting moping on his couch. He was trying to cheer me up telling me I wasn't going to die and that I should have breakfast. So I put some oatmeal into his microwave, but thoughtlessly had it in a metal cup so it started sparking and the oatmeal expanded and was pouring out of the microwave. Then my friend collapsed, clearly having a heart attack. He put me off calling for help, but eventually gave in and I ran outside to get a signal and luckily there was a parade of nurses going by. A couple went in to help, then more and more until the house was packed and one of them started to say it was too crowded and lamented the fact that there was no doctor among them.
Just exposed to this quote by the physicist Paul Dirac and love it: "the aim of poetry is to state simple things in an incomprehensible way." I love obfuscation, hence my obsession with incomprehensible Old Testament stories. I think it gets you closer to truth.
How to Self-Promote Your Novel
Had fun doing the last video so figured I'd do another.
How to Write a Novel on a Manual Typewriter
Transcribing a novel with my manual typewriter is most of what I've been doing with my free time. Today I had the day off for Juneteenth and no kids so thought "if I'm doing something cool and I don't make a video and share it, did it even really happen? Et voila."
Something I've appreciated about writing out a book long hand is that I can put a bracket around each section I write at a time, and put a date to it and sometimes a note; "Written in the lobby of a Charleston Hotel", or "On a free weekend while the boys are visiting their grandparents".
Transcribing it this morning I hit a striking bit. One section I noted was written at my then-girlfriend's apartment while she worked from home. The block ends abruptly because she finished work and we were free to go out for the evening. I wasn't always very disciplined or diligent with the writing because the next block is two months later and notated that the relationship had ended.
Of course anything you read that gives the illusion of a single cohesive telling was in reality punctuated by thousands of bits of life, but it's striking to be able to see it spelled out. To know that on a girl's dining room table I wrote "from where I lie" and then I closed my notebook and clicked my pen, not to reopen the notebook or click the pen again until two months later when I'd sigh and scribble down "I heard the shuffle".
And now, alone in my apartment on a holiday I type them out continuously as a single sentence.
Heck to BMW, heck to everyone. LIRR to eastern Long Island to get my car back
I started getting ads on Instagram for this fancy watch last year. I thought it was lovely and it was cheap-expensive. People online that actually care about watches said it was garbage, but the only things that would have earned their approbation would have been 100x more expensive. And I have never had a problem with things that are attractive with questionable inner-workings. And I was making decent money so I bought one as a 40th birthday present for myself. It was the only one I got. I wrapped it. Then a month or two ago it stopped working. For once in my life I didn't just accept the loss and was pleased to find I had a 5-year warranty. The company is in England so there was quite a bit of back-and-forth about shipping throughout which I was constantly looking to my wrist and not seeing the time. But yesterday the replacement finally arrived and I am whole once more.
I picked up Charles Baxter's THE FEAST OF LOVE last August at a real low point because a stranger told me it was their favorite book. I always ask people their favorite movie or book and they typically say either that they have lots of favorites (wild how few people know the definition of the word favorite) or else they give some sort of mock-embarrassed shrug and name something popular and trite. But this person said THE FEAST OF LOVE so I bought it and have been reading it in drips and drabs for nearly a year.
It bounces between the perspectives of different ordinary people. It's lovely and moving but wasn't especially engaging. There's a woman who is sleeping with a married man and then starts dating someone else. She ends up marrying the latter but fails to fall out of love with the former so they divorce and she goes back to the married man. It made me irrationally angry, as every affair in a book or movie always does. Which made me wonder why I always relate to the cuckold rather than the lover.
Anyway, it was well done but I doubt I'll give it much thought.
Rainy Pentecost at Little Poland.
I don't have any real justification for it, but when I was about to start on my latest novel in February of 2025 I decided I was going to write it out longhand, which I'd never done before.
Maybe part of it is that I spend all day in front of a computer for work and didn't want writing to be more of the same. And maybe the speed and ease of typing makes me more inclined to fill space with things that aren't necessary. But ultimately I probably just thought it would be neat to have a whole book written out by hand.
Well, 15 months later, I finished writing it out. It shouldn't have taken that long but there were long gaps where I let the notebook gather dust for months at a time. It was only after my break-up when I stopped going out or talking to people that I started putting every free minute into it and got across the finish line.
Phase two now, which is equally fanciful and hard-to-justify, is transcribing it with my manual typewriter. I'm not doing any meaningful revisions as I do this. It's just kind of fun and produces what I think is a pretty cool-looking manuscript. I guess it does force a pretty close reading to remind myself of anything I may have forgotten about.
Hunter S. Thompson supposedly typed out The Great Gatsby once just to absorb the style. Don't know how that relates to my situation but it does pop into my head.
Replying to @newyorker.com
The New Yorker@newyorker.comWith declining birth rates, fewer high schoolers will apply to college in the coming decades. “If my kid does want to attend college in 2035, how many schools will she actually have to choose from?” Jay Caspian Kang asks. newyorkermag.visitlink.me/3nSh6i
That's one way to look at it. Another is "my dumb kid is gettin' into Harvard!!"
Periodically, I'll see this couple pop up on Instagram doing these very stripped down covers of 70s songs ("Goodbye Yellow Brick Road", "Rich Girl", "Movin' Out") with great harmonies. Just last week I saw one again and it actually prompted me to see if I could find any full versions on YouTube Music. Then, Monday, I got an ad for the couple doing a show in NYC. I've never been a huge fan of live music, but I've been more isolated than usual lately, so I clicked through and found the venue was two blocks from my apartment and tickets were all of $20.
I still went back and forth on it, but eventually bought a ticket. Went last night (the couple's band's name is Wendlo) and it was nice. I actually liked the opener even better than the main event. A solo singer-songwriter, Georgia Parker. Didn't get any videos of her, but I really loved the song she opened with: Pit Stop. Sort of stung hearing it; there's a line: "I met someone new he is kinder than you are / But that isn't that hard to do" which I don't like to imagine people I've known justly saying about me.
Full disclosure: this post is largely just to test my improved video upload tools which should also send the video to my Bluesky and Mastodon accounts...
Replying to @newyorker.com
The New Yorker@newyorker.comDespite its widespread popularity, the N.F.L. draft still comes down to something of a crapshoot.
www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...
Anyone else read the first sentence and assume it was a Trump quote re: selective service?
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The boys have gotten older and more handsome. I have done one of those things.