marking time

So I think the seasonal Plum Rains (lit. 梅雨) of May-June have come and gone, and methinks they were probably quite average this year. There have been weak years recently when they weren't all that prominent and strong years when it just rained for weeks on end with no small effect on seasonally affected nerves and lots of chocolate consumption to deal with it (I think there are people who argue the actual physiological benefits of chocolate, opposed to people who argue that chocolate just makes happy). And I think I've discovered that a hallmark of the Plum Rains is their unpredictability against weather forecasts. Has anyone else noticed how accurate weather forecasts have gotten in the past few years? In the course of my life I've always thought of forecasts as general guidelines as to what to expect. Even during my time in Taipei, the guideline has dictated "always carry an umbrella". But for however many years I've noticed forecasts to be surprisingly accurate within hours, with completely wrong forecasts to be the exception rather than the expectation.

Not so much during the Plum Rains. Advanced satellite and model analysis technology still can't factor in whatever the conditions are that make the Plum Rains so very unpredictable. I've had to walk my bike home miserable in the pouring rain twice already because the forecast and my looking up at the sky before heading out both missed it. More times than that I've left my bike home and nary a drop would fall from the ominous cloud cover. I think the Plum Rains are done now, and even with rain constantly and consistently in the afternoon weather forecast (we call it "summer"), there's a certain amount of confidence possible on whether it will actually rain or not in the next few hours I'll be out based on the rain percentage forecast and looking up at the sky.  

So it's summer, and that means it's hot. I haven't determined yet if this is a "hell hot" summer or just a "normal blazing hot" Taipei summer. Truth to tell, I haven't been paying much attention to my environs outside my apartment. I've been feeling unusually cut off and isolated – which isn't necessarily a bad thing, just a descriptive – for whatever variety of possible reasons. I even stopped "forcing" myself to go on 20-mile rides. The Plum Rains contributed to that at first, but then I just didn't feel like it when it started drying up. Once I want or feel the need, I'll go. I wonder if I'll feel like it after the Tour de France starts this weekend. I don't know why, but I just got the inkling to follow le Tour this year. Maybe it's a feeling of wanting to connect with something outside that's familiar.

It's not like I have time for TV, especially since my eyesight has degraded to the point that my laptop screen is too small and I use my flat screen TV as my main computer monitor. I can never just turn on the TV and have it on in the background (like Mandarin news to keep the language in my ears or movies I'm not sure I'm really interested in) while I stare at the laptop. It's one or the other, if I switch to TV, I'm watching a specific program or movie. I do not miss the waste of time that was channel-surfing. So I don't know what I'll do in following the Tour de France. I just know I won't watch the whole thing. Probably not even whole stages. And I should remind myself that watching cycling is inherently boring. You need the passion for the sport before you can watch it, although I'm sure there's an argument for that applying to all sports. Fair 'nuff. I'm gonna stick with the excuse that I'm trying to feel a connection with something about my life from before, despite it being useless, meaningless and futile. That got dark real quick. 

I'm in my third day of a non-digestion/intestinal-related dull ache in my abdomen. It's merely uncomfortable and I wouldn't even mention it if I hadn't recently written about having itchy palms and the surprising discovery that they may be symptomatic of liver problems. Like the itchy palms, I expect this ache to pass in short order, but I feel I should mark these things for posterity. In case anyone's interested in my posterior. 

And again, looking up what the ache might be a symptom of predictably led to liver problem sites, and the liver problem sites were inconclusive with some things that matched and others that didn't. The ache could get intense and occasionally becomes a backache, but that gets intermingled with cycling-related back pain which kept me off-bike for 2-3 days earlier this month. The pain didn't spread to my right shoulder. Other symptoms relate to appetite and inability to eat, but I had those symptoms years ago and nothing ever came out of it. I can now happily eat one meal a day with an optional but usually unnecessary snack from a convenient store. Zero weight loss, I'm sure. My diet and exercise don't explain my protruding stomach, which I described before as a paunch, but per the websites, yes this is more of a protrusion. It doesn't seem natural, like an alien is about to burst out of me. Or like I'm pregnant, which I suppose isn't so far different from an alien bursting out. On the other hand, my father also had a protruding stomach, so it could be genetic. On another hand (look ma, three hands!), he ate three meals a day and lived a sedentary lifestyle with minimal exercise that my mother forced upon him. He didn't drink, either.

Bottom line is that clinically I'd be considered a life-long heavy drinker I shouldn't wonder, if not an alcoholic, so at this point it's not a matter of if, but when. And now might as well be when, but even if now is when, I'm not going to get bent out of shape over it, seeing as I could've seen it coming from years ago, and whenever it does come, it could've come at any time during those however many years ago that I could have seen it coming. And if now isn't when and this ache disappears as I expect it will, well that's just the story of my life. Until it isn't.

I felt an itch on my left palm. An odd place for an itch, I thought. When I instinctively scratched it, it wasn't pleasant. It was a little pins-and-needles painful, and I immediately applied mindfulness practice to not scratch it. Scratching an itch is supposed to be pleasant. It's supposed to give relief to an irritation.

For as long as I can remember, I've always had skin particularly sensitive to scratching. Scratching caused my skin to welt, and there wasn't relief, just more itch to scratch. Before mindfulness practice, there were times I would mindlessly scratch until my entire back and arms would be red and welted. Horrific as it looked for anyone who saw it, I never considered it significant and never sought out what was going on medically. Applying mindfulness practice, I would concentrate on the sensation while completely resisting the urge to scratch and just focus on it until it went away. I'd gotten quite good at it. Whenever it reached a point that I knew it wasn't an itch that would get relief from scratching, I stopped and let it go away by itself. In the case I lost patience before it went away, I still have two tubes of Cortizone-10. I can't recall ever having an itch on my palms and can't imagine Cortizone-10 working on it. 

So it was a bit annoying when it started up on my right palm as well. There was redness along my palm lines, but it wasn't so bad that it prevented me from doing anything. I was able to plunk away at a bass for supposed "ear-training" practice just fine. It was enough for me to look it up online afterwards to see if it was a symptom of anything. What jumped out was that a burning sensation on palms was symptomatic of cirrhosis and of course my first thought was, "so this is how it ends". My liver's about to fail. But then I clicked on the link and of all the other symptoms of cirrhosis listed, none really rang a bell. At least none which I consider novel. Insomnia? Pfft, that's so last year. I've already used the joke that I'm of Asian descent, so no one would know if my skin was turning yellow. 

And since, the sensation has also occurred to the soles of my feet, the feet equivalent of the palms! Oooh! It's irritating. It's annoying. It persists. It comes and goes. If I stretch or scrunch my feet or hands, it's exacerbated and I feel it more intensely for a little while. My bathroom slippers are accupressure slippers and that also intensifies the sensation.

I roll my eyes at this. It's my full expectation that this is not a health scare of either cirrhosis or diabetes, another condition where palms may burn, and will disappear in a few days without fanfare. That's the pattern of everything before that seemed like a health scare. I know better now until it turns out to be something different, and I'll deal with that when it becomes something different.

As it is, I've been off bike for a couple weeks because the plum rains have arrived. This coming week appears like there might be ride opportunities with drier weather and only chance showers, so it'll be a day-to-day thing, but I have zero concern the burning on either my palms or soles will prevent. For the record and no one's interest but my own, only one weekday in May so far was dry and even sunny (I don't ride on weekends when there are too many people on the bikeways), but I knew from experience that it was too cool for the bikeways to have dried out, so I didn't ride, and that suited me fine since it was a mad windy day. Windy is unpleasant, but more of just an excuse to not ride. It's alright because it provides resistance training. Wind resistance slowing me down to 11-12 mph is still less than gravity resistance on hills where I go down to 8-10 mph. And going the opposite direction, the wind assist is great. I was once flying at a sustained 27 mph on a flat because of the wind at my back (translation: wheee!).

As for my liver, I feel like I've cut down on drinking, and since August 2017 I have. Back then I think I was buying six bottles a week. Only one day per week that I didn't. But I thought I had cut back to a schedule where I buy a bottle every three days. Maybe I was on that schedule since then, but recently I noticed that I'm back to buying a bottle every other day, with reserve bottles at home for when I run out. I always have two tiers of reserve (three actually, a desperation back line of mini-bottles!) to make sure there's never no alcohol in my apartment. Again, I'm talking liquor, not beer.

I don't feel like I've increased drinking, but that's what the schedule suggests. When I leave my apartment every day, that's a drying out period, as is sleep. But when I wake up or come home, there are hours before I allow myself to start. But somehow in the time that I allow it, it has increased. I don't feel it, but the schedule doesn't lie. But that's alcoholism. Or my brand of it. 

I found a blue feather today at the end of a 20-mile ride. It was about the last 100 meters when I saw it; swerving so that my wheels didn't go over it. It was an eye-catching blue and I figured it fell off of a pet tropical bird that I know at least one person owns and takes to the riverside parks to get some flight time. I've seen it. It didn't sink in immediately, but blue feather! As soon as I crossed my finish line I headed back to the area to look for it. Why didn't I stop immediately and pick it up? Why did I have to "finish the ride" first?

Anyone recalling Richard Bach's book Illusions would understand the significance of the blue feather. It's on the cover of the friggin' book! The master is trying to teach Richard something or another in response to one of his questions and ends up challenging him to conjure up something, magnetize it into existence. Richard chooses a blue feather, but fails miserably until later in the evening when he gets excited noticing the milk he's drinking is from Blue Feather Farms or something. It's not an actual blue feather that the master was hoping for, but Richard was pretty pleased with himself. Who wouldn't be?

I'm not sure where I stand on that sort of thing now. I used to believe in it, that coincidences were actually rare. More often things happened for a purpose and not just coincidentally. We bring things into our lives, good or bad, when we need them. Now that's more of an idealized, romantic view of possibility that's best reserved for the youth. Not so much for cynical grown-ups who are beaten down and embittered by reality, lol! I used to look for signs, signs of meaning, signs that could be interpreted to mean something. Nothing ever came out of any of that, now coincidences are just coincidences, but that's not the signs' fault. But that sort of reality manipulation by a master is not far off from what realized Tibetan lamas are claimed to be able to do. Miracles. Masters of reality to borrow a Black Sabbath album title. The historical Jesus may have been one according to some theories speculating he spent years as a young adult studying with yogis in India and became quite an adept, having become quite adept at it. 

It's not that I don't believe in that sort of possibility. It's just not manifest in my perceived reality now; causes and conditions, karma.

I was discouraged when I didn't immediately see it when I looked for it. The wind was gusting and it was possible that it was blown away, or maybe someone else picked it up in that minute or two to finish the ride and go look for it? I covered that short stretch of bikeway several times without spotting it and decided it was no big deal, whatever. But as it often happens, just when I gave up on it, I spotted it just off the paving, picked it up, stuck it securely in the brake cables on my bike headset, called it macaroni and headed home. 

But all this is not why I'm writing about it. Later in the day, I was re-reading one of the books I'm constantly reading and came upon this story that I've read and re-read many times and had to smile when I read it today:

There is a very moving story in the Jataka Tales about fearlessness. Once there was a parrot who lived in the forest, and one day the forest caught fire. Since the parrot was able to fly, she started to fly away. Then she heard the crying of the animals and insects trapped in the forest. They could not fly away like she could. When the parrot heard their anguish, she thought to herself, "I cannot just go away; I must help my friends."

     So the parrot went to the river, where she soaked all her feathers, and then flew back to the forest. She shook her feathers over the forest, but it was very little water, not nearly enough to stop a forest fire. So, she went back to the river, wet her feathers, and did this over and over again. The fire was so strong and hot that her feathers were scorched and burned, and she was choking on the smoke. But even though she was about to die, she kept going back and forth. 

     Up in the god realms, some of the gods were looking down and laughing, saying, "Look at that silly little parrot. She is trying to put out a forest fire with her tiny wings, lol!"

     Indra, the king of the gods, overheard them. He wanted to see for himself, so he transformed himself into a big eagle and flew down just above the parrot. The eagle called out, "Hey, foolish parrot! What are you doing? You're not doing any good, and you're about to be burned alive. Get away while you can!"

     The parrot replied, "You are such a big bird, why don't you help me to put out the fire? I don't need your advice; I need your help."

     When the little parrot said this with so much courage and conviction, the eagle, who was actually the king of gods, shed tears because he was so moved. His tears were so powerful that they put out the fire. Some of Indra's tears also fell on the parrot's burned feathers. Wherever the tears fell, the feathers grew back in different colors. This is said to be the origin of parrots' colorful feathers. So, it turned out that the little parrots's courage made the fire go out, and at the same time, she became more beautiful than ever. - Confusion Arises as Wisdom, Ringu Tulku.

That pretty much sorta qualifies as magnetizing. Finding a blue feather from a tropical bird that recalled the book which introduced me to the idea of magnetizing things into our lives, and then reading a tale the same day about how parrots got their colored feathers. Actually, even finding the feather qualifies, albeit taking 30 years for me to finally actualize my blue feather.

When I got home, I wondered what did I think I was going to do with this dirty, discarded, slightly tattered, beautifully blue foot-long feather (yellow underneath) that I had picked out of the dirt off the ground? It went straight from my bike headset to my sitting "altar". Of course.

personality insight

A cold is a cold, and calling it "low-grade" didn't make recovery any quicker. Recovery from that cold wiped out three ride days last week. Not a bad thing really; that day I went out and abandoned almost immediately was actually unpleasantly chilly from wind and radiant cold despite air temperatures in the 70s. All three days were like that. Three days of 20-mile rides would've added up to 60 miles, giving me a total of 180 miles for the month, leaving only one more ride to hit 200 miles for the month; a loose goal, totally unnecessary, that had looked easily attainable. Without those three days, not so much.

Come this week, I gave Monday one last day of recovery for good measure and the last three days of the month were forecast to be in the high 70s and sunny. Days I would regret if I didn't take my bike out. It occurred to me if I did 25 mile rides, I could break the (totally unnecessary) 200 mile mark. And so it was, no longer sick but still coughing. 25 miles the first day, 26 the second and I only needed 20 miles the third day. What a difference between 20 and 25 miles. It's just 15-20 minutes more, but at my age feels like it's starting to take something out of me. Mind you, 30 miles used to be the minimum of what I considered "a ride". 20 miles will do as a standard outing now, a daily constitutional. It's a quick jaunt and on with my day. Don't even need to shower if it's cool enough.

The "duckhead" is the upper left portion of the ride. If I didn't cross that bridge, it's a perfect outline of a duck head:

26-mile duckhead-Waishuangxi-Maishuai:

I caught a low grade cold on Saturday. Then it got cold, moist and gloomy outside for a few days and I used all that as an excuse to stay home for most part and feel sorry for myself (not really, I love staying home all day, the only problem is going out is my excuse to not drink through the afternoon and dry out, which I do like). The cold peaked Monday (the low grade one, not the weather) and today was recovery with a lingering cough, the kind that feels juicy and satisfying but is still a cough, and some wheezing and fatigue. Tomorrow and the rest of the week is supposed to be mid-60s and up and no rain. Sun, actually. I'm wondering if it's stupid to be planning on doing 20 miles tomorrow. Obviously I'll keep expectations low, I won't "time trial" it like I usually feel like I'm doing, and I'll abandon and come home the moment I feel I can't finish it. Thursday and Friday are definite ride days.

I wonder about how I caught the cold. Maybe I touched some surface with some germs on it and delivered them to a facial orifice? I went to a tonkatsu restaurant on Saturday with plenty of surface areas shared with other people. Leaving and entering my building I touch doors where germs can have been left by neighbors. Should I consider this to be my first social interaction of the year? 'Tis the season to carry a handkerchief to open doors.

<in the end>:
- Wisdom prevailed Wednesday and no ride. If I were still young and stupid, I may have pushed to go in a fit of braggadocio, as the pros call it, but I gauged my fitness and thought of consequences to my throat, to my lungs, to my metabolism and decided better not.
- I got out on my bike Thursday, but with the help of unprecedented construction completely blocking the bike path, forcing a 180 not even 2 miles out, I took that as a sign and abandoned. It would've been a disaster if I tried to do 20 miles. As soon as I started I was figuring out shorter routes using which bridges, 13 miles, 10 miles, 8 miles, . . . 3 miles! The construction said go home now, thou shall not pass! Seriously, when I first came to Taiwan, random construction was practically expected. In the past however many years, though, Taipei had advanced to the point that if there was construction blocking a bikeway, detours would be created or alternate routes posted.
- Friday I took the Thursday hint and I'm staying off bike until full recovery. See? We can still learn even at our ripe old age.

marking time

Taipei sending 2018 off cold, wet and miserable. After an earlier long-range forecast that this winter is expected to be on the mild side, it's already as cold as winters get in Taipei (upper 50s). Cold that in recent years hadn't come until at least a month later. That said, the short-range forecast does see temperatures creeping up through the 60s by degrees until hitting the 70s by the end of the week when it's also expected to dry out.

I shouldn't be surprised by this extended stretch of two weeks of wet weather, after all I did just get back on my bike. Of course it's going to start raining! That's what the weather does. I get off bike for over a year and it's perfect weather for cycling or running like I'd never seen during my time in Taipei! I get on bike and it's back to rainy for weeks at a stretch. It's what I used to call "the big joke" of my life. The universe conspiring to taunt and toy with me to remind me that all I am is the bare butt-end of some divine joke.

Not to contradict that mild winter forecast, though, the week before the wetness was sunny in the upper 70s/low 80s and I did ride four days in a row, racking up 80 miles, even applying sunscreen for the last two days after feeling a slight singe on my arms after the second day. Can't complain. And to put the current cold and wet into perspective, I still haven't switched out the floor fan for the space heater, and heating pad is still stowed. Those come out when the cold is protracted and starts defining misery at home.

On one of those 80 degree days earlier I met up with my old Mandarin teacher for coffee. Thought I should mark that since she informed me we had met up earlier this year. I couldn't remember the last time we met up and thought it was some time last year. So I met up with someone socially twice in 2018. Had email contact twice with my sister-in-law as usual. Got out of Taipei once for a day trip to Kaohsiung for some family issue. And those were the only notable interactions I've had with people in 2018. Hermit w/internet and alcohol. 2019, here we come.

After over a year off bike, I got back on this month. I don't know how I feel about it yet. It was slow going, mind you. Not just the riding, but even the getting on the bike. I took it slow; step-by-step. The first step was pulling my road bike out from the corner of the room where it lives and wet-wiping off the layer of dust and spider webs. That was depressing and discouraging. And that was it for that day. And my first forays were on my clunker, daily-use street bike going farther on the riverside bikeways than I have in over a year just to test my fitness.

There are several reasons for doing this. A trigger excuse was getting sick of a growing paunch and wanting to do something about it, but I don't think this my paunch has anything to do with being active or not. It probably has more to do with alcohol. It was just an excuse; a feeling that exercising would be working on the paunch, but it isn't. Hopefully it'll help tone the paunch.

Another reason may have elements of self-punishment for not carrying out my ultimate goal in this time. August of last year I was wanting to stop or get off the conveyor belt of daily routine that got me from day-to-day, and running or cycling was part of that. Over a year later, I'm still on the same conveyor belt, but it's occupied by other neurotic activity getting me from day-to-day that completely fills my time. Forcing more than an hour of exercise into the routine is really inconvenient and it's me telling myself if I insist on continuing being here, it's not going to be just all comfort and convenience and doing what I want.

It's, quite honestly, so stupid. It's totally neurotic. And working on neuroticism is my next mindfulness project after years and years of working on negativity and internal anger issues.

Twenty miles on every rideable day weather-wise is the goal and limit, although knowing myself I will probably extend it to 30 to 35 miles if I persist. Neurotic demands it. The question is whether the neurotic schedule of things that artificially completely fill my time will be overcome by the neurotic drive to uselessly go farther and faster.

20-mile Nanhu Br-Bailing Br loop:

Nice these late autumn days in Taipei. There was a spell of cooler weather earlier with some rain but warmer again currently. I suppose this is the equivalent of Indian summer. Aboriginal summer. Last gasp of warm weather before however we get into winter, ease or plunge I forget.

Yesterday was so nice that after lunch I started wandering and meandering on my bike, thinking of all the possibilities where I could go just casually riding before heading back to my own neighborhood. I didn't get far. With each pedal, the prospect of going further became more unattractive. I've done this before. I know Taipei and there's nothing new to discover by going on; nothing interesting, nothing fascinating, only familiar nothing. Dead to me city.

It's been years and years that I've been doing nothing, never venturing beyond about a two mile radius of my neighborhood. There's been infrequent reason to go beyond that. I know any changes I notice will be changes of the same things. In a similar vein, I can jump on the MRT to some random station to see how things are different in that area and I'll end up feeling how pointless that was.

I used to get on my faithful Giant road bike and go on "rides", so long ago in the past that I can reference them as something I used to do. I would get out of Taipei and ride in the surrounding townships, in the mountains, in what used to be Taipei County. All of those towns and cities are now districts with their same names in one consolidated entity called New North City, literally translated, or New Taipei City otherwise. I explored as much as I wanted to and as much as I want to. There's nowhere I haven't been or want to revisit.

And retreading old ground, supposedly and theoretically this would all be different if there were someone else in my life that I might enjoy doing . . . things. Finding something new somehow becomes fun when it's with someone whose company is enjoyable. Even going somewhere familiar with someone is enjoyable because it's about the company. Even going somewhere familiar with the same person because it's about us going there this time. How charming.

But no, I get bored. Boredom is how I got to where I am now. Even enjoyable company will eventually become boring to me, and that makes it pointless. It's pointless to continually find new enjoyable company who I know will eventually bore me. That pursuit, knowing its pointlessness, would become an attachment to enjoyable company. I dislike that kind of pointless more than I like enjoyable company. The kind of pointless into which you have to put energy. I'm fine with the pointlessness of my life in general because I don't have to put much energy into it.

I do remember when Taipei wasn't boring, when there was always somewhere new to go and discover, whether by street bike in Taipei proper, road bike further afield, or MRT or bus along whichever lines they went. Early on, some of it was done with classmates or that Korean chick, but most of it was on my own. Then there was that visit by Sadie in 2013 where it was that enjoyable company thing.

Now I look at google maps and I'm not even curious about anywhere. I just look for food places in and around a two mile radius. Hell, when I first got here there was no google maps, I bought a paper map at a bookstore to decide where to explore. That's indicative of the changes, but the changes are more than that. The world and society has changed and moved on to become a place that isn't mine anymore and doesn't interest me.

I haven't kept up with changes. Mind you, I still don't have a so-called "smart phone". I put that in quotation marks, but for most people that would be like saying I don't have "lights" at home. What do you mean you don't have lights at home? (I don't have lights at home). What do you do for light at home? (I just don't need lights at home). You just sit in the dark? (Computer and TV screens provide all the light I need). I do have lights, but transpose that to a phone.

What do you mean you don't have a smartphone? How do you live? How do you breathe? How do you exist? Are you even here? In a few decades, that may not be hyperbole. And "smartphone" is a word, it's not spell checked as an error. That's how much the world is passing me by. I may not even be a qualified English editor anymore.

I imagine a virus that is only transmitted through staring at smart phone screens and which is time activated and then kills the user. There would be a mass die-off of humanity. I would survive. Who else? You? Would I be the only adult surrounded waist-high in children. Not even, as I read an article about how most kids have phones now. Me and homeless people shall inherit the earth. I haven't seen any homeless people with smartphones. Yet.

I digress. Whoa, do I digress. Well, never mind. I was just going on about how the world and society has changed and transformed and I didn't even notice nor care. Come to think of it, I totally saw it coming, too. And still don't care. It's not judgment, just description.

current status

Alcohol: I haven't quit completely since August last year when I had that great, wonderous, earth-shaking revelation for the umpteenth time that alcohol wasn't going to kill me and it therefore served no purpose. I was drinking almost a bottle of liquor a day with some beer in the mix because beer make happy. I cut down to a bottle every three days or less plus beer still in the mix because beer. The plan was to eventually totally get off the sauce, but that didn't happen because alcoholism.

That makes me question my mindfulness practice which believes quitting completely is not only possible, but even easy when mindfully applied. On the other hand, the reduced consumption (a schedule I've been on many times before in the name of cutting back) hasn't been making me feel like crap like the bottle a day did. There just hasn't been anything compelling to make me quit completely, but like my months at a monastery, now well over a decade ago, I theoretically could stop completely if I had to and not even think about it. Same as it ever was.

Sleep: Insomnia really went away with the reduced consumption of alcohol. Coincidence? The thing is that I've been on this reduced schedule of consumption before during years I've had insomnia, so they shouldn't be related. Psychological? I still always need music on to fall asleep with a timer set to shut off. Sleep is unsettled towards the end with multiple waking in the morning, but I turn on the music and reset the timer and that gets me back to sleep. If I don't turn on music, I don't fall asleep. Average 6 hours sleep with lights out between 1:30 and 2 a.m. and getting up in the 8 o'clock hour for morning sitting.

Exercise: It was full stop on even any thought of running and cycling since August last in the same realization as stopping drinking. Why am I doing this? So much effort and maintenance required, so much pain and risk of injury, so little satisfaction as performance declines. My bike is covered with dust and cobwebs, tyres flat. I don't even want to check how the last pair of running shoes I bought are doing.

Interesting how stopping exercise and stopping drinking are totally different things. Entropy working differently in either case. Or not. I'm kidding, entropy isn't at play at all (or is it?), but I'm realizing my jokes are too abstract, obtuse or just not funny. I realize now I should've been pointing out all along when I'm joking, which is even less funnier. Yes, that was a grammar joke. Yes, that was me pointing out that it was a grammar joke. Yes, it wasn't funny initially and even less funnier pointing it out. Oy vey.

Eating: Appetite has remained completely stable since August last. Faboo. Also alcohol related? Who knows? Maybe not. Maybe it was alcohol related at that time. Which still means it was. The Korean food obsession that started last November lasted until May or June when it relented. Literally Korean food almost every day. I still go for Korean when I think about it, but I no more have to think about where was the place I went least recently to decide where to go. Aigoo.

So what have I been doing? Reading and mindfulness practice has been the all-permeating focus. But mindfulness is more of a Zen thing and I've been playing and fiddling more with Vajrayana, so I should just say practice, mindfulness being a part of it. Pushing the teachings and my understanding the best I can without a guru. No great, mind-opening, satori-like breakthrough, but that's not a focus; not something I'm striving for. More slow immersion into my understanding with tangible, experiential moments of getting things. Applying whatever whenever, focusing on energies. Everything is energy. Energy equals emcee squared (on a total aside, to date there surprisingly has been no notable rock band that has named itself E=mc², but there was a white rapper who went under the name MC Squared).

K-pop girl group obsession and immersion has remained unabated. A lot of time spent watching YouTube videos. But with YouTube videos it's not just K-pop. I watch science lectures and documentaries. There's a "World Science Festival" channel where I watch videos on cosmology and astrophysics.

I watch a channel called "Asian Boss" which features vox pop videos in various Asian countries (at least once in the U.S.) asking people on the street about various topical topics. I think they edit videos for the most intelligent responses, which is refreshing and totally opposite of U.S. talk shows where they do the vox pop thing asking simple questions, but then air the most ridiculous, stupid-sounding people.

I also pay attention to a channel called "China Uncensored", which has sarcastic "news" videos about China-related topics, mostly pointing out China's hypocrisy and unfriendly or hostile relations with other countries. The sarcasm makes the outrage palatable. I like sarcasm, in case you haven't noticed. Wait! Was that sarcasm?! Was I being sarcastic talking about sarcasm?! Good grief. I'm having a crisis of (being) meta.

Back to the South Korea fetish, I follow a few South Korean YouTube vlogs. Apparently professional vloggers. They make money off of it. It's totally voyeuristic watching these people going through certain days they decide to video and narrate. I don't know how I feel about it. It's fascinating watching slices of these people's young women's lives, but it's not prurience. True, they are attractive but that's just the dressing, the bait, the aesthetic. It's the same with K-pop. I'm sure the boy groups are putting out just as good music as girl groups if it were just about the music, but for the pop genre, my aesthetic leans towards the girls. Same with golf, mind you. You couldn't pay me to watch men's golf, but I'll watch LPGA tournaments when sports channels choose to air them (NB: they won't if there's men's or motor sports or such boring bullshit to air).

It's the lives that interest me, the living life that they are doing which I'm not. The relating with other people, the moving through their cities/lives/world, neither of which I'm doing. They are reminders of what I'm not doing, what I may have used to have done when I was younger but don't even want anymore. And there is that tension between feeling I want to be a part of something and the reality that I totally don't.

Branching out of those videos, just recently I did a brief spate of watching videos of people showing their apartments in Seoul (still the Korean fetish). Again, it's just the look at and fascination of the lives going on. All those people doing something. Is there anyone doing the worthless nothingness I'm doing?

There's a class of apartments in Seoul that I don't think we have in Taiwan called goshiwon, which are tiny, basic apartments originally meant for students cramming for national exams. Mostly foreigners and students on a budget use them now, but they remind me of my ideal when I first moved to Taiwan. I wanted to live a simple hermit-like existence, and a goshiwon would've fit the ideal perfectly.

Now I look at my apartment and all the stuff I've accumulated and this is luxury compared to tiny goshiwons. This is my karma. I haven't torn myself and my ego down enough to deserve living in a goshiwon. I probably couldn't survive a goshiwon. I'd be like, "I gotta get out of this situation", and I could because I could afford it. I live in an apartment where I had the luxury of being an insomniac and baby it. Luxury of all my perceived problems without the added stresses of the perceived inconveniences of a goshiwon.

What made me think I could be a monk? I didn't deserve it. I haven't karmically earned it. My karma is still such "bad" enough that I tend towards comfort and luxury. In another life, I could easily become the hungry ghost my mother is in this life. That's the harsh possibility. Wow, that escalated quickly.

Last and least, since last December when cable TV went down for two months (I don't know if it's related; could be), I've been spending at least two hours a day with a bass in hand, plugged into my Korg PX5D and connected to iTunes and working on ear training along with K-pop songs. Why? I don't know. I'm not trying to do anything, it's not about making music or practicing bass or being a musician or anything. It may be closure to my discarded "musician" identity. I recognize now that I was never good enough to be a musician. I'm not talented, I never learned music nor got to know it, and I certainly never practiced near enough to be a musician. And if not any sort of "formal" musician, it behooves me to admit that despite my love of music and trying to make it, I was also not passionate enough to be any sort of musician.

Maybe it's an afterglow goodbye gesture towards musicianship. Ear training is one of those things I never got and never practiced as a skill. I'm just trying to see if I can improve my ear training, and that's it. It's not going to make me a musician, it's not going to make me know music. It's just training to listen to notes and develop a sense of what intervals sound like, where to go for the next note. I daresay it hasn't been a totally hopeless endeavor. It has been evidence that if I had started ear training early enough, in my teens, I could've been OK at it. I have good sessions where my fingers find the right notes without even thinking, and bad days where I feel hopelessly tone deaf and flounder about the fretboard hitting notes only after the second or third guess.

K-pop is particularly good for this because the songs are written by professional musicians applying theory, meaning there is a structure to the progressions, unlike rock which a lot is by feel and if theory is followed it's just happenstance. The theory-following structure makes a lot of K-pop predictable (they love their circle of fifths), which is good for ear training, but the writers are interesting enough to put in lots of twists and surprises to challenge ear training.

Ah, it all comes back to me. Another YouTube channel I pay attention to is ReacttotheK, a group of classical music students who react to K-pop. I generally avoid reaction videos as pointless and varying degrees of stupid, but it was interesting listening to people who know music, who pronounce "timbre" correctly, who know the difference between a piano, horns and an elbow, and had something intelligent to say about the songs.

Hearing them use music terms I recognize but have forgotten reminded me how lacking my music education has been, including ear training. That's what inspired me when cable TV went dark to at least try to do some ear training as a last gasp of musicianhood. I can grasp ear training, whereas I couldn't get music theory even if Kim Jong Un threatened to nuke Seoul unless I mastered music theory. I would pretend to try to do it and stall as long as I could to buy time for Seoul to be evacuated.

And bam, I found the gateway video that hooked me:

(It resounds, reverberates and resonates: I don't need to be here anymore, I don't want to be here anymore. Same as it ever was.)

I broke out of my dearly-held daily routine today and did a recon of Taiwan's northwest coast. It only recently became easier to get to the northwest coast when the Taoyuan Airport MRT opened last year. I didn't pay much attention to it because it didn't affect me. From where I live, it's still easier and quicker to take the express bus from nearby Songshan Airport. But it turns out the MRT can be used to get to the coast.

My interest is in shorelines. Getting to the northeast coast is easy from Taipei, but the northeast coast is too cluttered and developed, too many people. From any point, look left, look right, there's something right there. The north coast is only realistically accessible for me by bike, and that's no longer an option. I doubt I have the fitness to even ride the 18 miles to Danshui, the start of the north coast. The north coast was ideal once, but only that once.

I have been to the northwest coast on bike before. Once, on what I remember as a pretty epic ride before I had a bike GPS so I don't have a record of it. It must have been among the longest rides I've gone on ever, riding up to the mouth of the Danshui River and then down the northwest coast and taking me past Taoyuan Airport to get back to Taipei. But the coastline struck me as very appealing as not so crowded with development. Just no way to get there.

The airport MRT came into my consciousness about a month ago when my mother was here, and I realized the last stop before reaching the airport is only about three miles from the coast, where I'd been on that bike ride years ago. Three miles, about an hour walk. I can manage that.

I decided to go today because there's been a dip in temperatures. The past month has been too hot to make the six mile round-trip walk realistic or without risk. I also got a bug in me to do something different from my dearly-held daily routine. I went out without full commitment to the journey and was prepared to turn back at any point. That was reflected in details that I missed: forgot to bring my GPS, wore the wrong sneakers, didn't do time calculations. I didn't even bother eating. Whatever I did, it was not supposed to be trying nor tribulating.

And there was nothing noteworthy about the trek except that it was way out beyond my daily life scope of the last many years. The MRT was just an MRT ride, the walk was just a walk. Good decision to go on a not flaming hot day, as that would've been quite miserable. On any other day this past month, I might have stepped out of the Kengkou MRT station and said, "nope". Not walking six miles in this.

My destination was Zhuwei Fishing Village. I didn't know about it on that bike ride years ago, but remember diverting there when I was passing by. There's a bright red bridge you can't miss, and on bike I couldn't resist exploring.

This time, once I got there I didn't linger. I underestimated the time and just did a quick walk-through before heading back to the MRT station. I didn't explore the coastline because it looked like there was work being done to it, perhaps development to make it more of a destination for visitors. Access wasn't immediately obvious.

I might do another recon in a month's time with better planning. Leaving early in the morning to avoid the heat and allowing for inspecting the shoreline further south of the fishing village. I also learned from this recon that Kengkou MRT isn't the best way to get to the coast. The stop before it, Shanbi MRT, has both YouBikes and buses that run to a stone's throw away from the fishing village. I think the bus is the better option.

All those things I was griping about have been abating. So . . . that wasn't how it was all going to end. Sleep has been returning, but not perfect. It's not relentless insomnia anymore. Recovery sleep still wrecking.

I've been able to eat, but limited. Gastrointestinal issues, the least I know anything about, are likely chronic but have abated.

I may even try exercising again after the debacle last time over two weeks ago. There's a psychological barrier that appears when something unpleasant like that happens. There's both the unpleasantness aspect as well as the feeling that I shouldn't be doing this anymore because I can't. Which in my defense, at my age, is fair.

If I can't manage even 3 miles at a super slow pace, whatever. I have no problem quitting trying. I don't even know why I'm even trying.

When I was younger it was impulse. Craving. I grew up in places where winter was cold, and I couldn't run in cold weather because I'd get asthma. But once spring came along, I would get antsy if I didn't start running. It felt like something I had to do.

It's definitely not something I need to do now. As for cycling, I filled the tires on my bike two weeks ago, telling myself if I hadn't gone on a ride in two days, I'd deflate them. I've done neither, but I think I'll be deflating them this evening.

Whatever I do, it'll wait until the end of the Tour de France which I've been following on TV. The last stage is tomorrow. When I was younger, but older than running days, watching the TdF would have inspired me to get on my bike, but not now. Tackling climbs? Why?!! Looks painful, and I know how painful it is.

Morning sitting is still out. It wasn't too long ago that I would wake up and think of not sitting, but then think it was the most important thing I'd be doing that day and proceed with it.

I, of course, wouldn't mind getting back to it once the impulse or inspiration hits, but so far I haven't noticed anything different in my daily mindfulness whether I sit or not.

I don't think I could ever abandon or decry the benefits of sitting meditation, but perhaps the lifestyle I've chosen whereby I'm just waiting to die and have no social contacts or substantive attachments is by nature mindfulness practice. Don't need to pull myself out of something I'm not even sucked into.

The question still persists why I'm still alive, though. I'm still working on that. I've taken to focusing on certain body parts – a finger joint, or where an internal organ likely is – and asking what it has to do with me. There's a bone in here, is it me? No. Why should it exist? Why is it in any way important? It's not.

I still stare into mirrors and visualize and imagine the skull that is the basis for my head appearance. Strip off the outer flesh and all skulls look the same. You can't look at a skull and identify the person it was. It's the vanity of identity.

And as I've done many times before, I remind myself that the purpose of distancing myself from any and everyone has been to lessen any impact of my death. To make it theoretical, rather than emotional.

I hear about people dying and the emotional response by their loved ones, and I've worked to minimize that for when I die. There's just no proximity of any kind whereby anyone can be substantively affected by my dying.

Not physical, emotional, not even communication, any sort of connection, there's no proximity by which anyone could claim to be affected by my death. I've done well I must say so myself.

Insomnia may be abating, but recovery sleep is also brutal with difficulty getting up and general fatigue. My life is so fucked. Fuck my life. There are no words and no limit to how much my life is fucked.

Now that I've got that out of my system, at least I have and have had some modicum of control over my life and destiny. Even if it was just to fuck it.

Eating is fucked. All I ate yesterday was a bakery pretzel. Today just a simple portion of plain noodles, during which I knew it was the only thing I was going to eat for the rest of the day. No hunger or appetite otherwise.

Yesterday I woke up with my calves sore even though I haven't done any exercise in two weeks. It was odd. But even though I haven't been feeling great lately, I decided to try to go out and at least walk my three mile course.

I ended up plodding through it with full intention of stopping if I felt any discomfort anywhere. It was a woeful 10:56 average pace, but I've done worse in the past few months.

Afterwards I started feeling really bad, like I was going to pass out. I was too weak to even do cool down stretches. As I slowly trudged my way home, I seriously, at times, wondered if I was going to make it or if . . . this was how it was going to end.

Of course, I did make it home and ultimately alright. But it did give me a thought. I recently saw a video of a bull being killed in a Spanish bullfight. The fatal blow had already been dealt.

The video was showing how brutal and inhumane bullfighting is. Ironically, this was just a few days after news of a top bullfighter having died from his injuries from being gored. I'm sorry to say I had minimal compassion or sympathy for him.

But the video chronicled the bull's death and how blood loss was leading to its major organs shutting down and struggling until it collapsed and died. It gave me insights on what it might be like to die of untreated liver failure.

I haven't been able to find any description of what that experience is actually like. But drinking the way I do, I should expect liver failure at some point down the line. Of course it's a matter of personal physiology and there have been people who drink like I do who live to ripe old ages.

But drinking about a bottle a day (liquor, not beer) can be expected to progressively impair liver function. They say the liver is a very resilient organ and if the drinking stops, the liver can repair itself to a certain extent.

So it's not easy to push it over the point of no return, but once the liver loses its functionality, once it stops playing the role of "one that lives", the effects cascade. Other organs start shutting down and as parts of the system fail, the whole system eventually fails.

With the liver, it's not immediately critical like a heart attack or stroke or bleeding out. I gather it's more a matter of toxicity in the body rising until it gets critical. But then once it's critical, it's "immediately critical".

Is it painful? Probably. But it's also probably brief. If the system can't function, you die possibly quickly. If a person can be rushed to a hospital, there's a possibility of revival and recovery. But if I'm not counting on that, if I've abused my liver for so long without any expectation of living beyond its ability, it's possible that when it goes, I go.

If it happens in public, while I'm out, after or during a jog, I'm likely just to lie down somewhere as indiscreetly as possible and let the public and authorities figure it out. I never carry ID with me, so good luck to them.

I felt bad after that three-mile plod. I wondered whether I could make it home. But I took it moment at a time and proceeded as I felt I was well enough to.

At some point in the future, I might not feel like I could go any further. I may become disoriented and too weak. And the realization that I seriously don't think I'd be making it home and just find somewhere indiscreet to stop.

This gives me great comfort over the possibility of dying while writhing in agony and misery at home because I decided to eat something that day.

I'm having trouble just chilling with insomnia these days. It feels like I'm under attack, and along with eating and stomach issues and the questionable continuation of trying to run, quality of life has taken a dip.

Weather, too. Every year a benchmark is when air conditioning is turned on and off for the season. It came on the last week of June, which means it's starting get buttcrack hot in Taipei. And that's a plumber's buttcrack, not a lingerie model's.

And to be even clearer with the visual, that's a male plumber and female lingerie model, not the other way around. Can't make assumptions these days, for better or worse.

It's been more than a year since I tried to start running again. I didn't expect much, but then surprisingly started showing signs of improvement in speed and distance by last October.

That was all interrupted by having to go to New Jersey in November, and when I got back I pulled my Achilles tendon my first time out. Since then it's all been bad with no improvement in speed or distance, long periods of rest trying to recover, and shin splints on top of Achilles threats.

I'm ready to call it. Weather is clearing for one more attempt and even though my cardiovascular fitness has been holding me back for the past few months, I'm not going to baby my legs from injury. Any shin splints or tendinitis, I'm done.

Finally, morning sitting has stopped for what feels like weeks. If I put my mind to it, I can probably start up again, but part of me is wondering what's the point?

I haven't noticed any difference in my mind or days whether I sit or not, but I'm sure there's a difference, and it's a matter of noticing it. One sitting may do that.

SHIN SPLINTS!! I took almost three weeks off and that was probably a very bad idea. It was primarily because of weather and mood, as well as the lame excuse of deliberately downgrading my fitness in order to force myself to go slow (stupid!). I should have maintained discipline and gotten out for jogs.

When I did go out again, I cut the initial 4 mile slow jog short at 3 miles because I knew I was suffering. I decided to do a week of slow 3-milers, but it was all downhill.

I knew there was likely an underlying issue regarding the fact that I haven't been able to eat enough and not getting required nutrition for any sort of exercise. Not being able to eat itself doesn't bother me as much as it did a few years ago, but calories and nutrition aren't negotiable when it comes to exertion. I may not care, but physiology does.

I did try eating some fruit after one jog, but ended up going catatonic as has become pattern when I try to eat more than once a day. And once coming home from a jog limping for no apparent reason and then being afflicted by multiple excruciating cramps in my feet and toes was an indication of things going wrong.

When the shin splints became apparent, it wasn't just a mild "uh-oh" warning of pain and to watch it, but full-on "Hi, let me introduce myself, I'm Shin Splints" (apparently Korean since last name comes first). Both legs and obviously shin splints, practically screaming to stay off for at least a week.

On the other hand, the planned forced week off coincides with weather getting better for cycling. So the conflict will become if I can get off my lazy ass and get my bike prepped and suited up for preliminary fitness rides. To be sure, it's a conflict of laziness.

I haven't gone jogging for almost two weeks. Part of the reason has been weather, either rain or cold has prevented. The rest of the reason is probably weather-related as Taipei is transitioning into spring.

Temperatures have been poking upwards, but it's still been pretty dreary, contributing to depressive states, and part of me is waiting for a weather breakthrough to get out jogging again. Sunlight would be nice.

This prolonged break also serves the purpose of lowering my fitness so that when I do go out again, I necessarily have to go slow and not press speed and risk injuring my Achilles again.

I'm still committed to several months more of jogging (9-minute mile range) 4 mile courses. I remember starting last summer persevering through sluggishly slow (10 minute+ miles) 3 milers because I had to; I couldn't go any faster. So I have to be patient before trying to go faster.

My fitness is at a point where I could go faster into 8-minute mile range runs, but my Achilles would risk injury at that pace. In a way it's kinda nice being able to force myself to go slower.

I'm also keeping an eye on when to get on my bike again. I think I might be bored with cycling, but I want to give riding another go. Daytime temps and rain are what will control cycling. I've also changed my sleep since last year so that I can ride in the morning hours and be back home before the preventative afternoon heat. I'm assuming the scorching past few summers is a trend and not about to let up.

I know I said I was done with running, but I didn't mention a mitigating circumstance surrounding the re-injury to my Achilles. That one run that caused the injury, the first run after returning from the U.S., was on a pair of new sneakers that I bought when I was there.

It was a pair of "natural running" branded Nike sneakers. My brother and sister-in-law knew I was shopping for sneakers and after I bought them I told them I went back to the "evil empire", and they both went "Nike?"

The appeal was that I had been reading about "natural running" and I had been experimenting for several weeks or months with shifting from my natural heel-strike to a "natural running" mid-sole strike. I knew I had to be careful after previously trying the "Pose method" (forefoot strike) to disastrous effect on my Achilles.

Whenever I shifted to a mid-sole landing, I only maintained it for about 20 steps before going back to my natural form, but I was eventually convinced of the inefficiency of heel-strike running. There were times when another faster runner would pass me and I would switch to a mid-sole strike and I was able to maintain that person's pace until I laid off to prevent injury.

The Nike were very comfortable, snug and light, and they are, I maintain, a very sweet pair of sneakers. But after the injury, I wondered whether they were the problem in that my feet may need the cushioning and support that my previous Asics Gel-Nimbus 16 provided and kept me from injury the past several months.

So it's possible my telling myself that I was done with running was a psychological measure to keep me from even trying to run before I gave my Achilles enough time to heal. Today, more than three weeks since the injury, I bought a new pair of Asics Gel-Nimbus 18.

I'm still wary. I ain't gonna get my hopes up. I'm gonna get started by just walking three miles daily for a while, and when I'm confident enough I'm gonna go through the same regimen as before: slow and easy. Three miles daily, easy jog or plod and build up from there to see if I can avoid injury.

Since the injury, I have gotten on my bike three times in December anticipating no more running. I'll try to continue getting on my bike; I won't not ride in order to run like I did before. I'll do both now with the main doubt about riding being whether I'm bored with Taipei area riding. I might be.

Back in Taiwan. Back to reality. Back to my world.

(I - Nov. 25-present)
I got sick while I was in New Jersey. That makes this the third year in a row that I've gone and visited New Jersey and come back sick. Going to New Jersey to visit means getting sick.

It didn't feel too bad, truth to tell. I got it just as I got the house all to myself for the week. It was all just relaxing time. It's not like I had to go to work or tend to a family or raise kids, like my brother and sister-in-law. It felt like a great week. I remember it as a great week. I did what I wanted, ate what I wanted, went over to my brother's for dinner every evening.

Just in time for my flight home, the cold morphed into a nasty cough that at times was like I was either going to cough up a lung or wanted to cough up a lung. Or puke trying. I literally bought maximum strength cough suppressants at the Walgreens at Washington Bridge Plaza before hopping on the shuttle to JFK from there.

(II - Dec. 4-Dec. 6)
Aside from the cough, the flight home couldn't have gone more smoothly. Less than 24 hours from door-to-door. My brother drove me to the shuttle in Fort Lee which was ready to go just after I bought the cough medicine, no traffic to JFK, non-stop 16-hour on-time flight to Taipei, my luggage unbelievably came out almost right away, bus to Taipei proper, MRT to home. I left after dinner on Sunday night, and by the time I got home Tuesday morning here, my brother's family were probably having dinner on Monday evening.

My father on the greatest adventure of them all, godspeed his journey is as smooth.

(III - Dec. 7)
Cough notwithstanding, I wasn't feeling sick anymore otherwise and I went for a three mile run the day after I returned. My left Achilles tendon pulled within 50 meters of the end of the run.

I think that's pretty much it for running. It's over. The frustration of dealing with a running injury is not something I'm going to accommodate or deal with anymore. And it was going so well making it through the entire summer and even improving beating all expectations.

I don't know what that was all about. All that striving, all that nursing. Hopes arising, hopes dashed. Story of my life. Everything I've written about running since June is now simply negated.

(IV Nov. 17-ongoing)
Insomnia kicked in as soon as I got to New Jersey, but it wasn't a bother. Same as being sick. If there's nothing to bother (aside from the sleep itself), then it's not really a bother. Sleep was all bad the whole time I was there. There was a lot of waking up shivering cold soaked in a heat generated sweat.

No jetlag going there or coming back. Insomnia makes jetlag a non-issue, irrelevant. Maybe it's there, but it's completely overshadowed.

(V Dec. 12-13)
As long as everything else is going wacko, why not add a bout of epic hiccups? The most screwball of all the things that could possibly ail me. I know it's a bout of epic hiccups when I can't suppress them right away by my tried and true method of holding my breath.

When it's epic hiccups, I expect them to last for about 48 hours. Fortunately, this bout dwindled after about 40 hours. But what a reminder of how shit things can get. When it's epic hiccups, I consider it being sick. It's a feeling. It feels like something's wrong. It feels like being sick.

(VI - epilogue)
It doesn't bother me that my father died before me. I even think I'm benefiting from the experience. In the past, I maintained that I wanted to die before my parents, but actually it's just my mother. She's the one I think needs to experience the death of a child, not necessarily my father.

I don't mean that callously. It's an old discussion that I don't want to rehash. For some reason it may sound odd that my mother would ultimately benefit from experiencing the death of a child, but in the totality of considerations, it makes perfect sense to me.

I don't think my father would have benefited any from my dying before him. I don't think he would have been affected profoundly by my dying.

On the other hand, I'm glad to experience the death of a parent if only to confirm that I wouldn't get bent out of shape by the death of a parent. I never thought I would be affected by their deaths, and now I know it's true.

There wasn't any big turn around or revelation or realization what I lost or took for granted. Par for the course, dad. He didn't ever do anything to mean anything to me, and when he died, it didn't mean anything to me. It's an intellectual exercise to mull and contemplate.

I want to say something crazy happened with running in the past week or two, but maybe it's perfectly natural and normal and the result of a (finally) good training regimen. Suddenly I'm running at a surprisingly brisk pace (for my age and health/diet) and injury seemingly being kept at bay.

I've kept expectations at rock bottom since I ventured back into running two and a half years ago when I joined World Gym; a week into which I injured my Achilles tendon. Both Achilles dogged me for the entire two years of gym membership. Never both at once, always one or the other; and not the whole time, but the worry was always present.

Recently, not just improved speed and lack of injury, but extended distances beyond the almost daily 3-milers and occasional 4-milers and even rarer 5 miles. Things were going so well I ran 6 miles for the first time possibly since I was doing 10k races in the Bay Area in the late 90s!

I don't know if it's a fluke. I'm still worried about injury. I'm constantly monitoring any sensations of possible discomfort in my Achilles tendons and knees. Knees were the problem back in 1999 which stopped me running after my second San Francisco Marathon and had me switch to cycling.

It's a little strange the way it happened. After my gym membership ended in June, I decided to just fuck it and hit the riverside bikeways and try running short 3 mile distances as slow as comfortable but as often as possible. That might be the training regimen that's working if this holds up.

All summer I've been plodding and jogging along at whatever pace was comfortable, slowing down even more if I felt like vomiting, which was often. I was hardly impressed by my performance or improvement. Sometimes I'd put in a respectable run, but then go back to mostly jogging.

Then a couple weeks ago I went out not feeling great, but every runner has experienced not feeling great at first but then doing pretty well, and vice versa. How you feel going out doesn't determine how well you'll do. So not feeling great didn't deter me from going ahead with a planned 4 mile course. It was slow. I felt it was slow and wasn't gonna get any faster. But my principle was to go however felt comfortable, so I kept plodding on and didn't let it bother me then or after the fact how slow I was going.

And it was really slow, averaging 10:30 miles. When I started in June, I knew I was going to have to allow for 10+ minute miles, but after four months training I wasn't doing much of those anymore. I could at least break the 10 minute mark. And mostly I was jogging in the 9 minute mile range.

The next day was a rain-out, but the day after I went for a 3-miler which was easy and averaged 8:28 per mile. *blink, blink, blink*. OK, I have done 8:30 mile range runs over the summer, it wasn't beyond credibility. But they never felt as easy and they were one-offs, and this was probably, too. Then the next day, 8:14 miles easy and feeling fresh. Then the following day telling myself to slow down to avoid injury, 8:41 miles easy. 

I was feeling so good that the next day I decided to do 6 miles. I don't even have a 6-mile course except in theory. The theoretical 6-mile course just goes past the bridge I cross for my 3-mile course (coming back on the other side of the river) to the next footbridge, and it turns out that it meshes so perfectly with the 3-mile course that the ending points are just meters apart. I won't say six miles was la-la-la easy. I was pushing against slowing down (meaning going against just being comfortable) and in the end I did it averaging 9:19 miles. Which is far better than the 10+ miles I was allowing for. Every time I've upped my miles this summer my expectation was over 10 minute miles and that was usually the case.

And since then, every run I've gone on has been in the 8 minute range, including a 5-miler. Individual miles have even fallen under 8 minutes. I am a bit astonished. I would never have thought I could feel like a runner again, especially with my age and alcoholism. It doesn't mean anything. I can encounter any number of injuries I'm prone to at any time. Injury might even get me back on my bike and try a winter season now that summers are too hot to ride in. 

It's not like I'm trying to achieve anything. It's just what I'm doing for however long it lasts. And I don't expect anything to last. That's more of a reality than ever.

The blast furnace summer heat of Taipei ended in September with three typhoons in quick succession. It's still hot, just not intolerably so. Summer was just about going miserably from one air-conditioned space to the next.

Jogging, sometimes running, continues with times improving with ever-so-slightly cooler weather. Running over this summer, even in the evening, was still a bit crazy in retrospect. It was still quite hot.

I had 3-, 4-, 5-mile courses which all ended up near Rainbow Bridge, a footbridge over the Keelung River near Raohe Night Market, which usually had healthy breezes to help cool down. 30+ minute cool downs were not uncommon.

Jogging times have been upticking again lately, though, I think due to health matters; alcohol related I assume. It may be nothing, but I've just been feeling worse in general to the point that my usual activities like reading for hours have become untenable due to discomfort.

I've gone through episodes like this before, I suppose, and it'll probably pass. And it always feels bad enough that I wonder if maybe it really is finally getting out of control, which is fine and expected. I just kinda wish it would be more fast and dramatic, and not this languishing in ugh.

A current nasty bout of insomnia probably isn't helping my mood or outlook. I have terms for types of insomnia: "front end insomnia", "back end insomnia", "total insomnia". I've found ways to deal with each accordingly.

But I want to call this "devastating insomnia", which may be compounded by the health issues to make it extra hard to deal with and get through days with any semblance of homeostasis.

I have a maybe interesting anecdote about insomnia and memory in case some researcher wants to study me. Unfortunately it forces me to reveal how anal I am about my iTunes music collection and how I listen to music.

I sync and re-load my iPod Shuffle every three days, and the first thing I do is manually load three iTunes pages of the oldest last played songs; the 90 oldest songs that played to be exact. With an iTunes collection of over 19,300 files, this forces the oldest last played songs to be played and keeps files from not playing for years and years, as would naturally happen if at random. How's that for anal?

And an indication of what over 19,300 files means (I am trying to pare it down), the current oldest songs played are in March 2015. Anyway, every night, I don't know why, I like to go through those 90 songs and try to identify which of the songs played. Don't ask me why, I don't know why! I get a kick out of it.

It does become a memory thing. More songs are listened to before the next sync and I continue to try identifying songs. I'm usually pretty close. There are usually a few songs I missed or thought had played but hadn't. That's besides the point.

During insomnia this time, I listened to my iPod Shuffle for two hours lying on my bed in the dark. I always listen to music while trying to fall asleep, but only on devices that have a timer and will automatically shut off.

But my brain was so stuck in the "on" position, I was sure I wouldn't fall asleep while listening. In fact, I kept track of each song to make sure I wasn't falling asleep or else I would turn it off. Later when I reviewed the 90 songs, there were a few fuzzy ones, some "I think so", etc.

Finally when I synced the iPod and looked at the songs that actually played, I missed a whole bunch of them. But when I saw the songs, I do remember listening to them, I have the actual memory of lying there listening to them.

So I was fully conscious when I was listening, but the memory of listening to them failed when tested independently. I couldn't remember that they played, and still couldn't, but looking at the song names and the fact that they played, I have an actual memory listening to them.

I wasn't in any sleep state, but during insomnia the memory of my experience of listening to music became . . . an abstraction. Later experience wouldn't remember it. But when faced with factual data I had listened to certain songs during that time period, I had a concrete memory of the experience.

Well . . . fuck you, it blew my mind!