Day 35: A Quick Sunday Morning Mind Exercise....

Your body is here but where are you? Immediately upon waking up each morning, the mind automatically switches on and starts broadcasting our familiar programs. Through the habit of surrender, we give it our full attention. We find the content of our mind far more compelling than the actual life occurring around us. Gulping down breakfast and thinking about the to-do list for the day or how the traffic is going to be on the way to work. The next thing you know, you are staring down at the empty cornflakes bowl in front of you, with no recollection of having eaten it. Or maybe not even that, maybe you just keep auto piloting the morning and the bowl goes into the sink, rinsed, in the dishwasher and you start knocking down the day as it comes at you… You missed the wonderful taste and texture of the food in your mouth, not to mention the warm sun streaming in through the window and the beautiful song of the birds outside. Your head buried in your phone while your arm automatically feeds your face… What could have been a relaxing shower turns into a game of coulda, woulda, shoulda about the conversations you had or the ones you will have. You missed the warm feel of the water running down your body and the steam of the shower relaxing you and preparing you for your day. You step out of the shower more tense and anxious than when you stepped in... Now you race the clock to get in the car... Then the drive to work while you’re busy replaying the conversation with your mom from the night before, missing the clouds, the trees, and the beautiful sky along the route. Next thing you know, you’re pulling into the car park at work, with no recollection of having driven there. Inevitably, you’re sitting at your desk or work station, but again, you’re somewhere else—counting the days until the weekend or making plans for your next holiday which you will attend in body but probably be somewhere else in your mind for that too… 

Hello? Are you getting this? Your life is whizzing by you and you’re sleepwalking through it like an automation, a machine… 

Being lost in that past conversation or those plans for that to do list pulls our attention away from the present moment, away from life, away from reality. The past and future have no authenticity of their own. What happened yesterday or what may happen tomorrow exist only as ideas in your head. You made that to do list to stop reminding yourself to do it, not torture yourself on the how, when , where, probably, could be, should be, will be execution of it… For the love of god, relax… You wrote it down, just do the damn thing and enjoy your life while you do it… 

Distractions will cost you the game… Ask a fighter who steps into the ring what they are thinking about… As the punches fly, the fighter thinking about how he wishes his mom would treat him better is going to get knocked out… The fighter who is worried about what is for breakfast in the morning is going to wake up in the emergency room later that night… Any fighter will tell you that focus wins and distraction will get you killed…

Now how do we escape this?

I know, here comes that word you have heard a thousand times, gotten trainings on and have heard so much it is that it has become meaningless and stupid… 

Mindfulness…

Let me just say this one thing about mindfulness and I will be quiet… 

Get out of your head and into your life… Real life is happening while you dwell on what happened and what could happen… Instead of waiting impatiently for the moment to pass so you can get to the next moment that your probably not going to pay attention to anyway, realize that this moment is happening, going to continue happening and will conclude on its own time and you may as well enjoy the ride… 

You can’t make the line go faster, but you could watch people… You can’t make the traffic flow faster, but you can roll down the window, feel the sun on your face and enjoy the music… You cannot make the doctor call you into the back any faster but you could stand up, walk over to the window and watch the world for a little while. 

So enjoy your day and take five minutes of it to not think about the next moment or what happened last night…  Your mind, body and soul will thank you…

Love you all… Mean it…

Day 35 update… All cylinders firing, all challenges will be completed and another week goes down… My life is improving in so many unexpected ways. Today I am thankful.

See you tomorrow….

Day 34... How Five Minutes Can Change Your Entire Life... Free of Charge Advice Because Capitalism Sucks...

As usual, I will start out with pointing out the obvious using fitness levels… The biggest excuse out there for fitness “goals” is the ever popular “I just don’t have the time…” We say “I just don’t have the time” when life gets busy or when we don’t want to feel guilty about skipping something… If we don’t have enough time to work out, it’s easier for us to be okay with wheezing after a flight of stairs or accepting that we need medication for some ailment that could easily be repaired with proper diet and fitness… I know students who work full time, go to school full time and have “the time” to work out a few times a week. There is no excuse for “no time”… As I pointed yesterday, our lives are on auto pilot about 80% of the time. Running from task to task to task without stopping to recognize anything more than hunger or the need for sleep is our normal existence. The only thing we are really paying attention to is the absolute necessities of life like the need to be places, the tasks necessary for being in those places and a machine like life that cannot possibly be rewarding in any meaningful way. When you lie down at night and feel like you have accomplished something, even then, it is a list that does not edify your life, and instead, it simply maintains it enough to keep repeating your days endlessly. Doesn’t that sound wonderful? Don’t worry, we can fix this…

Take my hand and let’s walk through this together because like always, the first part waking up to your continuous mistakes is horror and the first fix for a horrific life is realization… So let’s go realize together…

"I don’t have the time" is bullshit. We waste time every day of our lives and we call that wasted time “self care” when in actuality, it’s really time that did nothing for you because what you probably did was worry your way through it because you know that your priorities are fucked up and you don’t know how to fix it… Instead of saying "I don't have time" try saying "it's not a priority," and see how that feels. Often, that's a perfectly adequate explanation. I don't have time to iron my sheets, it's simply not a priority. When I say “ironing my sheets isn’t important, our brain auto rewires to accept that because you know that ironing your sheets is really kind of stupid…  It gets better though because other things are harder to assign the status of “low priority”. Try saying this to your child: "I'm not going to edit your résumé, because it's not a priority." How about this: “I will play with you later sweetheart but right now, you’re not a priority…” Oh… Now that doesn’t sound so good does it?

You have time… Unless your life is scheduled from 6:00 AM until 9:00 PM at night, you have time for self care, your hobbies, your health and learning something new every single day of your life. Now listen, if you’re the person that I spoke of with the rigidly scheduled life and you’re happy, then power to you. I will even let you off the hook if you’re not busy all the time and not self improving… If you are satisfied with average, by all means, go to it… If you can seriously tell yourself that good enough is good enough, and you are happy, then you can just stop reading right now, because I am wasting your time here. 

For the rest of you, bothered by what you want versus how hard you are willing to work for it, come with me…

Now look, when you take all your desires to improve and make a big (or little, no judgments…) actual list of them… Go ahead, stop now and take the time to do that… Sit down with the notepad on your phone or open a word document on your computer and just list some things that you plan to do in the near future… Leave out the that obvious shit, like take out the trash and clean the kitchen, instead make a list of those things you would like to do… Play a musical instrument, learn a language, read War and Peace (not recommended because Tolstoy is drier than a skeleton buried in the desert for 100 years…), learn to paint, write a book, forge a relationship with your father/mother, get in shape, lose weight, etc… You get the picture and I am sure that the human experience can come up with some really good things that would make us smile. You could explore your kinky sexual side, restore a car, learn to cook Cajun style, or choose from the literally endless list of choices we have to experience life in a personally satisfying way… Fuck, become a realtor and escape your shitty job… Now here is the key… Prioritize them now... Things you truly want and things that can wait... It's okay to be selfish here, because this is your list, not anyone else's... If learning Italian is a priority, then make it one.... 

Get ready, it’s a Bob Perrine enlightenment moment… Instead of taking up all your time thinking that you want to, or “I should”, use that time to do… What? Oh shit… If you just thought “I think about becoming a realtor every day of my life, I fantasize about escaping this shit job and selling million dollar properties but I NEVER DO ANYTHING TO FIND OUT HOW…. Then read on because I want to show you how and I'm not going to sell you a system! I'm just gonna tell you how to do it!!!! Because fuck capitalism keeping people down, I'm tired of it...

Remember a few weeks ago, we discussed the five minute rule? If it takes less than five minutes, go ahead and do it… You can spend three days worrying about what actually takes five minutes or you can waste three days thinking about how that stupid thing that only takes five minutes needs done… Two things happen… First you get it off your mind and give yourself time to get other, more important things done and you accomplish something which rewards your brain with one “Atta boy or Atta girl or Atta me” and all those “hey you did a good job” chemicals floods your brain and you get in the habit of getting shit done because your brain likes that shit...

Let me tweak that rule just a bit and show you how stupid you’re being… For an extreme example, if you read like the average person 200 WPM (words per minute) it will take 46 hours and 46 minutes to read War and Peace. Now, at five minute intervals, that would be 562 days to read War and Peace… About a year and half… Start today and by the end of next summer, you could read Tolstoy’s War and Peace with almost no effort. You could read War and Peace while you shit every day… Think about that… Now, don’t start today, continue to plan to Read War and Peace and you will die thinking about how you wished you read War and Peace... 

5 minutes… Every day… Seriously…

"I want to play the guitar…" Then get a guitar, play five a minutes a day. Sooner or later, you’re going to get so good at practicing your chords, you will start playing longer… Then strum patterns, then finger style and before you know it, you will mixing the chords and styles and making up music… It takes about roughly 34 days in my case… I started out five minutes a day and by the end of week one it was ten to fifteen minutes and week two became twenty minutes and now on day 34, I was early this morning softly practicing and my wife bought me a guitar stool and a strap for Valentine's Day because she saw that my desire had become reality and my excitement grew into something more than a wish…

Why? Because I took the time… 

Want to learn Italian? Don’t have the time? Don’t have the money? What other excuse do you have? How about a free app on your phone and you learn Italian on your commute and then buying a $25 app won't feel like such a waste because you really have leaped to the skill level to actually need it...

Better yet, get the realtor test study books and study it on the way to your shitty job… Come on man, this is a no fucking brainer here. Five minutes a day, that’s an opportunity to make your life so much better! Think about how that person who is studying to become that realtor suddenly has purpose. The job they hate now becomes the useful job they have to help them leap to the job they want. A sense of purpose, meaning and a future where they don’t have that job anymore… 

The person who wants to learn to paint… Five minutes a day reading at free sites online on what they need to acquire to paint, five minutes a day on Amazon until all of it is on the way, five minutes a day setting it up and then guess what? You’re a painter dude… Come on, think it through… 

Five minutes a day and you can change your life so drastically that you will shock not just everyone around you, but yourself as well… 

Now go get to work… It’s only five fucking minutes and I know you’re not that busy… It took you five minutes to read this…

Love all of you… I mean that…

See you tomorrow…

Day 33: For Fuck's Sake Slow Down, You're Missing Almost Everything... Listen to Me, I'm Old and I Know Shit...

Today was the day after the day I got my second CVOID19 vaccine… So far, everything they said about getting the second dose is very true… Apparently the two dose vaccine is like two con men, the first one sets you up and then the second one steals your soul…

Chills, fever, an arm that feels like it has been in an arm bar and this general feeling of being sucked into the intake of a jet engine and ejected out the exhaust… there is a really nice brain fog that will make you forget what you are saying in the middle of a sentence, You know, when you start a thought and

So today will be short… Be thankful, usually when I say very little, I make you think…

When I was a kid, my favorite comedian in the world was George Carlin… Not a child friendly comic, but if you mix his records in with your albums, parents have no idea what your listening to… 

Anyway…

Carlin had this bit where he would say that there is a moment in time coming and you should pay attention because it is really important… It’s almost here and if you just wait for it, you wouldn’t regret it… Almost here! Here it comes!

Fuck…

You totally missed it…

Life is mostly just filler folks…  The excruciating minutiae of the day that you operate on auto pilot, never even taking a second to consider the beauty of what is happening around you… Every now and then, life catches you off guard and this beautiful thing happens where you really see a sunset, or everything lines up and you see yourself in someone else’s eyes… You hear the birds and suddenly realize just how beautiful it is... 

Here is the kicker, they're happening all around you, all the time, every day, right now… The birds are always singing, the light bounces off a lake all day long... The moon rises, the clouds are flowing by and there is the bluest sky you have ever seen right there, right above your line of sight and all you have to do is stop, and look up to appreciate it. The wind on your face, and the ten thousand smells of being alive... The reason you don’t see them is because you’re not looking for them. It’s called stopping to smell the flowers… It’s called being in the moment… 

Don’t believe it? Then you don’t want to believe it… Ever see a child fascinated with a bug and there is nothing else on the planet that can move their attention from that scrutiny? You can do that… Every day and it doesn’t even take a hallucinogenic drug… 

Slow down everyone; take a moment to experience the magic of a bug… 

Now excuse me, I’m going to go suffer in silence…

I completed Day 33 in the most lackadaisical, slow and unenthusiastic way that it could possibly be done… Took all day long to complete the challenges… I did miss getting up early, because I suspected that trying to exercise the day after booster vaccine could possibly lead to my early death, but everything else is done…  All on one cup of coffee... Take note, once you commit to something, quitting is not on the list of choices anymore… 

Committed:

A. Finish

B. Finish Slowly

C. Die Trying

D. All of the above…

Love ya all, mean it…

See you tomorrow... May this one pass quickly…

Day 32: The Two Edged Sword of Dispensing Self Help Information...

Short one today… Birthday at my house so preparation for celebration demands precedence over manuscription…   

However… Two thoughts arise today that demand attention… Yesterday, as I was writing, my brain decided to alert me to the fact drink way too much coffee… So this sword cuts both ways folks. I am a work in progress and the things I am writing about come back to haunt me all the time… 

So yeah, while I am recommending that everyone listen to that quiet voice of truth, my starts talking to me and guess what? I had an argument with it… 

Rational Me: You drink too much coffee…

Irrational Me: Hey, I work out, eat right, and take care of myself…

Rational Me: You drink too much coffee….

Irrational Me: Listen, I don’t drink it after 3:00 PM…

Rational Me: You drink too much coffee….

Irrational Me: My sleep patterns have really improved and I’m not experiencing any issues with my coffee intake…

Rational Me… *sigh* You drink too much coffee…

Irrational Me: I get up at 5:21 AM to work out, I need that coffee… 

Rational Me: So drink one cup, not one pot…

Irrational Me: *silence*

Rational Me: You drink too much coffee and you know it…

Irrational Me: fuck… Alright… 

Now you can laugh all you want but this is so close to the truth it’s frightening… My inner monologues about self-improvement look just like this conversation. For the last two months, I have consumed 12-15 cups of coffee a day… I had many ways to conceal that from myself because I knew that was way too much… My giant cup of coffee was actually three cups (24 ounces) of coffee three to four times a day… On top of that, at 5:21 every day I drink a pre-workout drink that has 100 mg of caffeine to kickstart my early morning exercise… 

This monologue started months ago as my caffeine intake has risen to unacceptable, unhealthy levels. Now I didn’t do the math because I knew that doing that would lead to me stopping and I didn’t want to stop. Like anyone else, I wanted to hang on to the boost that caffeine gave me. 

Then I wrote that blog and the two edges sword of trying to help others came back to slice into me...

Then on my lunch hour I went to REV Nutrition for some supplements and a body scan… I discussed with the sales guy that the pre-workout mix I was using didn’t have the kick because like anything, my tolerance levels had risen, and I wanted to switch products. He recommended a product but warned me that the caffeine levels were high and I would need to be careful… He went silent when I laughed and told him that I was drinking the pre-workout drink plus three cups of coffee during my first workout. He said “dude, that’s dangerous…” You see, the real problem is that I already knew that, I just never did the research so that I had clinical definitions and related possible problems so I would be forced to reduce my caffeine intake to safe levels… 

That is a classic case of denial as a defense mechanism… I knew that I was doing something not only unhealthy but at my age, very dangerous… So yesterday I did the math…

Each cup (8 ounces) of coffee has 91mg of caffeine…

5:21 AM / 100mg caffeine from pre-workout supplement

5:45 AM  – 6:15 AM  / 273mg intake during workout

7:30 AM – 10:00 AM / 273mg intake during work morning

11:00 AM – 12:00 PM / 273mg intake pre-lunch 

2:00 PM – 3:00 PM / 273mg Finish Pot afternoon 

Being painfully honest here now… the pre-workout and first 910mg are on an empty stomach… I fast every day from 6:00 PM until Noon the next day… My excuse? Well caffeine is an appetite suppressant…

I think I should be dead… Every single day I have consumed 1,183mg of caffeine… Sometimes I even went to Starbucks and finished up my home brewed coffee while I was waiting in line for my Starbucks…

Last night after my inner monologue also reminded me that when I was a child, I watched my neighbor die from stomach cancer that his doctor claimed that was caused by drinking a pot of coffee a day for a decade… That guy was never without a cup of coffee… 

So let’s take a quick look at this again… Just for a quick re-cap…

I knew…

My inner monologue reminded me…

I had the information I needed and ignored it…

A myriad of excuses let me continue even in the face of evidence…

Then, when faced with the simultaneous inner monologue, outside confirmation from an expert and the remembrance of a death led to the final surrendering to doing the research and gaining the tangible evidence that I should have gathered long ago…

Last night, I told my wife that I would be limiting myself to 273mg of caffeine a day… When I told her that my intake had become dangerous, she scolded me and then told me that she was proud of me for my dedication to my health… 

So there ya go… I have trouble listening to that inner voice just like everyone else…. On my way to work this morning, I sipped my coffee instead of gulping it and my work coffee pot sits empty and cold. This is going to be a long ass day…

That second thought… 

One of the greatest lessons that I have learned in my life occurred to me recently… If you are waiting for circumstances to change… Waiting for the economy to change… Waiting for your paycheck to get bigger because you are relying on a raise to come through… Waiting for SOMETHING to change… Listen to me, nothing will change until you do. If you want change in your life, you must be the agent to change yourself. When you change, EVERYTHING will change for you and when you get better, your entire life will get better.

Add value to your life and others will find you more valuable. You must work on yourself more than any other project because you are the foundation for all of it. How powerful your life is depends entirely on how healthy, focused, holistically well you are. Take time every day to work on you no matter what the cost. Imagine yourself as a structure that’s sits on a strong foundation and no matter what comes along, you will weather the storm without damage. Get strong. Be strong. Stay strong.

Today and the rest of this week and maybe next week I will struggle to adjust from toxic levels of caffeine and the energy that it produced to a natural energy… I’m guessing that my broken sleep patterns will normalize, and I will wake up with energy instead of pouring a pot of coffee into my body…

This life is a work in progress and if you continue to learn, continue to gain knowledge, and have the courage to apply that knowledge then stopping you will not be possible…

In the words of Dave from 2001: A Space Odyssey… “Something is going to happen… Something wonderful…”

Well Day 32 now has the addendum Day 1 of coffee reduction… I feel like perhaps I should have stepped down from 1200+mg of coffee to the 373mg… The jitters, teeth grinding, shakes, blurred vision and brain fog have already started… Even though this is hard, it’s a faster method to detoxification and feeling better. I would much rather go through a week of this than a month of withdrawals… 

Exercise was strange without the extra kick of caffeine and I imagine tomorrow will be the worst yet. I get the second Moderna COVID19 vaccine today… Everyone is suffering on the second dose… Time will tell, but if I have to do a pushup, take a nap and then do a pushup 100 times, so be it…

What? Stubborn? Me? Nah… 

Have a beautiful day… Love ya, mean it…

See you tomorrow…

Day 31: Accepting When Life is Nudging You: Recognition of Profound Moments

Let’s get philosophical…

If you are open to accepting that the way you think, believe, act and live can radically change with the simple act of recognizing a moment in time as a wise sage that wandered by to teach you something, then you will understand today’s blog. Maybe I write too much about epiphany, but personally, I cannot think of any other single event in the human experience that has the profound effect that epiphany can have on a person. The most important thing about these moments is your willingness to accept the process of acquiring understanding and knowledge through thought. In these experiences you are given teachable moments and it requires either a hunger for awareness or humility to accept them. Some people are so hard to teach that even when they come across truth in their own heads, they reject it because it might force them to change and change is hard… Have you ever had the experience of arguing with someone and they are blatantly wrong and refuse to accept the truth? Probably the most frustrating thing about interactive relationships is when one partner just refuses to see that they are undeniably wrong…. Now imagine just how individually conflicted a person has to be to reject some real epiphanic, SELF EVIDENT truth that they themselves realized? My opinion? I don’t think a human can fully reject their own realized truth. In my own experience, once a powerful epiphany creeps in, it doesn’t go away, even when I continually reject it. Instead it causes cognitive dissonance until I accept that I am wrong and change or accept that I am wrong and continue with my wrong behaviors acknowledging that I am in fact, thoroughly wrong. When you identify with your addiction, you say “vodka drinking is a part of my personality.” And then the thought arises that vodka drinking may be a part of your personality but it is detrimental to your health and is robbing you of the full experience of life. Now those two thoughts conflict. We have two truths that come up against one another and therein lies the cognitive dissonance. Stopping drinking will alter a fundamental part of you. Stopping drinking will terminate relationships or at the very least, minimize them. “If I change my behaviors, then my relationships with others will change” is a scary fucking thought, not only for you but for the people in your circle. Go ahead and tell your circle of friends you are thinking of stopping the activity that holds you all together… You will get negative feedback…

This doesn’t just apply to substance use either… The angry person who doesn’t want to be angry anymore… The overweight person who suddenly realizes that the entire problem lies within them…. All of these people have one thing in common, acceptance of inner truths. 

Let’s take a look at a made up epiphany and look at some choices that could be made from it…

Often, an epiphany begins with a small, everyday occurrence or experience. For example:

In the middle of a typical argument with his wife, a man realizes he has been the one causing every single argument, and that in order to keep his marriage, he must stop being such an aggressive person.

In this example, the man’s epiphany is prompted by an everyday argument. The revelation, though, rises above everyday thought: he realizes he must change his attitude in order to fix his marriage. Now he has a choice: Either stop with his aggressive behaviors and mark the event as a teachable moment or go to war with himself and end his marriage because at best change is difficult especially when you have to admit faulty logic and declare that you are the problem. That takes courage…

The Epiphanic moment is the judge in your head slamming the gavel down, the moment of truth when you realize that you are the agent of change in your life. “I need to be a kinder person” is not a death sentence to your personality. It isn’t a sign of weakness that you have a realization that you need to change. The moment you have thoughts like these are freeing you from your self-imposed prison. Maybe it hurts to change, maybe it will take some time, but stop arguing with patently obvious truths that you personally birthed. When you get a thought that stops you in your tracks, celebrate that moment! Let yourself experience that flash of self evident reality fully. When the nagging suspicion lights up in your head like a marquee sign on Broadway, you just got a gift.

Stop handing yourself excuses…  Excuses give failure merit and when you are failing at something that you know you can do, excusing it compounds the issues… The student who sees the poor grades on a report card and says, “Classes are so hard…” instead of “I need to buckle down and study more…”  The overweight person who says “My metabolism is too slow…” instead of “I am out of control…” The smoker who says “I’ve tried everything and just can’t stop smoking.” Instead of “I need to make a list of what I have tried so I can see what hasn’t worked and try again with a different approach….” This list could go on and on but the thread that ties them all together is the similarity that all the excuses are self-defeating nonsense that could easily be reframed if you truly WANTED to change…  Most people with these or comparable problems already know that the issue lies with them, they refuse to accept the hard truth so they hand themselves a load of bullshit, stay the course of disaster and blame the problem on something beyond their control. 

Continuing unhealthy behaviors is like skydiving without a parachute. You put on a backpack and the pilot says, there is no parachute in that and you say “I know but it will work out for me…” You get in the plane and lead skydiver says, that isn’t a parachute, it’s a backpack and you say “I know but it will work out for me…” You step up to the door and right before you leap, someone screams that you’re killing yourself and you give a thumbs up, scream “It’s fine, I know what I’m doing!!!” Right before you hit the ground at 120 miles per hour, your last thought is “I should have listened…” The smoker diagnosed with lung cancer, the obese person diagnosed with diabetes and the substance abuser with liver cancer all have the revelation that they should have fucking listened…

Let’s go back to the man who realizes that his behaviors are causing the arguments with his wife. Now imagine that when that thought crosses his mind he stops and asks his wife if she will help him stop being a dickhead about everything. Imagine the obese person waking up and cleaning out the cabinets and going to the store to fill them back up with healthy food. Imagine the smoker, laying down the pack, or the alcoholic emptying the bottle into the sink… (or in my case putting it in the garage and by the way, it’s still out there on the shelf… I ran into the other day and laughed…) Think of the power that you could show over the things that you once considered overwhelming. The C student who suddenly devotes three hours a day to their studies gets straight A’s for the first time. 

It’s all on you, reader… I’m not saying you won’t require help or that it will be easy, but I am saying that I can’t help you up if you don’t first reach out…

Day 31… For the first time ever, I punched through the 30 Day Challenge wall… I have never taken on anything longer than 30 days when it comes to challenges so I am in new territory. Did a quick scan of the physical body today and although my joints ache a little from the abuse, all is still a go…

Listen to yourself today, evaluate what you have been trying to tell yourself and listen because you really do know what is best for you… 

Get to work…

Love ya, mean it…

See you tomorrow…

Day 30: Allow Me to Reintroduce Myself... The Upside of Catastrophe....

Today marks 30 days of this 90 Day Life Change Challenge… One third done… When I started this journey, it was my intention to do the first blog about why I named it “I Can Breathe Again…” but like all things that are based in creativity, a good creator follows what comes to heart and not what they want to say… That in and of itself explains a lot about the style, direction, and randomness of my sharing with you… Like Tony Horton tells everyone, "You’re welcome…"

This morning during exercise, whatever decides my path gave me the go ahead to explain the name of the blog but first, like Jay-Z said, “allow me to reintroduce myself…” How apropos…

I don’t think I have ever really introduced myself on this platform of mine… So here is a little about me on this  day of my journey towards the inevitable… 

I was born in the mid 1960’s in Charleston WV… My dad wasn’t there when I was born… Always on the road, he called and asked that my mom name me John Wayne, which, she didn’t… I remember my maternal grandmother taking acre of me growing up but not my parents… I think my grandfather was more annoyed by me than anything, but I think he loved me…

One of my first memories of my mom is her making me hide in the closet so my dad couldn’t have weekend visitation. It would have more of a visitation with my dad’s new wife more than him, but it was still a dick thing to do. One of my first memories of my dad was him reaching into the driver’s side window of a Ford Maverick and punching my mom in the face with me in the back seat… When I reconnected with him in my early twenties, he told me that immediately after that, he went and got a six pack and sat on the courthouse steps of our small town drinking it and waited to be arrested, which he wasn’t. 

In 1972, my mom got re-married and I was moved to Arizona at the ripe old age of 7. My mom forged my dad’s signature and I ended up being adopted at age 8. My step-father meant well and that’s all I will say about that. 

Insomnia let me listen in on those late night arguments where he called her names and the walls shook when she bounced off of them.

I met Evil Knievel when I was in the third grade at a Pro-Am Golf Tournament and when I asked him for his autograph, he pushed past me and I fell … I went home that day and threw my Evil Knievel toy in the trash.

In the fourth grade, Mrs. Allen noticed that I was far ahead of the other kids in my class and recommended that I be placed in a progressive new school with no curriculum. My IQ test said I should have been, but my parents said no. I always wondered what that freedom would have been like, but my parents were not progressive.

I was taught not to be a bully by a kid named Eric Gabbard I bullied in 8th grade and I ended up stealing my mom’s sunglasses to hide the black eye. 

I learned at a young age to work hard, even when the praise wasn’t there, the feeling you got from completing the job was enough…

I got my first kiss over the handlebars of my bike from Mary Ann Mertz on a hot summer night while visiting my grandparents.  

I lost virginity at age 15 to a 25 year old woman at 3:00 AM in a park in Phoenix, AZ. She got me drunk on Mickey’s “Big Mouth” beer and took advantage of me and dropped me off at the hotel we were staying in. Facing my parents drunk wasn’t great, but I had just gotten laid, so the trade-off balanced out. I sketched my first landscape on the drive back home the next day. I drew Picacho Peak, (the Arizona one not the New Mexico one…) and I remember wanting to show it to my mom, but the timing was bad…. 

I played high school football with Rodney Peete… He went on to become quarterback for the Detroit Lions and later in his career, the Dallas Cowboys. 

My parents sold me my first car at 15 that I paid for by working as a dishwasher in a five star restaurant in Tucson… Charles Bronson used to eat there, and I once sat with him, at his request while he got drunk at the bar and told me stories about Hollywood. My boss allowed it because he was Charles Bronson. I think my stepfather was more agitated that I succeeded in paying him back, I think he wanted to teach me a lesson about failing but he missed that he taught me to pay back what I owed.

Joined the Marine Corps, fell in love, moved back to West Virginia, had kids… Almost passed out in the operating room when my first child was born and then caught the fourth one in the dark hallway of an old farmhouse in a place called Alum Bridge on a cold, icy November night.

Got divorced and struggled like everyone does. Learned those hard lessons and like my dad, I did things I regret, but everything had its lessons to be learned.

In 1999, at the height of my second marriage, I moved to California. Almost 2 months to the day of my arrival, my 7 year old boy was killed by a teenager in an Audi doing stupid things. He killed his best friend, my boy and did irreparable damage to my oldest son, my wife and me. I broke 37 bones that day if you include me spitting out more than a few of my teeth and I now understand why Evil Knievel didn’t want to sign autographs, that many broken bones never stop hurting. They tell me that Jake was still breathing when they pulled him out of the car, and I like to think that the last thing he saw was that special color blue that the sky is in California on a late afternoon in early September.

My body is full of metal from my neck to my ankles… I feel that if Humpty Dumpty were a real person, I could relate to him…

I stumbled onto philosophy after a couple of years of struggling to understand why that happened to me… I took an elective class on basic philosophy and the first thing I ever heard on the subject was the professor walking in and simply stated, “everything is fucked up until it’s not…” I felt like I got punched in that moment. I realized that the accident didn’t happen “to me” but it occurred, and I just happened to be there… I switched majors…

It took me twenty years to get through college between raising my kids, surgeries and dropping out to help people get through their messes… 

Back and forth to West Virginia a few times…

I think that’s a good place to place a bookmark on my autobiography because I wanted to talk about the name of my blog and how that came to be and this is a natural break in the story to explain that... 

Not everyone knows they are sick… I didn’t know I had PTSD… I was raised to believe that if you experience trauma, get the fuck up and get on with it… After the accident, I became addicted to painkillers and instead of feeling those emotions and dealing with them, I drank, smoked pot and took painkillers. Now listen, my addictions arose out of real trauma and while I am not excusing myself, I am telling everyone who judges people addicted to pills that many if not most of them got started because a doctor handed them their first relief… The addiction lead to anxiety which lead to more pills and then the realization that I had to stop… 

When I stopped the parade of pills, my symptoms of anxiety and depression reared their ugly heads like a cobra out of a wicker basket… Then the gasping for air started… I was one of those people who would silently sit and gasp for breath like a goldfish lying on the carpet after it jumps out of the bowl… I would tell myself to suck it up, be a man, be a fucking U.S. Marine… 

I would like to tell you that I operated like this for a short period of time but that would be a lie… My life was a roller coaster of alcohol, drugs, sex, constant maneuvering to adjust to the anxiety, switching sides of the country, broken relationships, and a 15 year struggle to catch my breath… The pressure would build, and I would move, only to find the pressure start to build again… Excuses, one after the other… Switch jobs, switch relationships, switch states… I found solace in truck driving and drove hundreds of thousands of miles trying to escape the feelings of panic, overwhelming meaninglessness, and depression… 

Then came that Saturday morning almost two years ago now… I was sitting in the chair gasping for breath, in a panic trying to find some thought, some philosophy, some “thing” that would stop this insanity in my head… 

I told my wife I needed help and burst into tears and suddenly the years of not asking for help looked ridiculous and the dam of stubbornness and stupidity broke and I realized that I needed help that by myself, I couldn’t find.

LOOOOOOOOOONG story short, I went to a crisis counselor, then found a counselor and spent nearly a year with her and she gave me peace… 15 years ago, meditation, counseling, forgiveness, and acceptance of myself sounded like something for the weak… Today all those things are the way I operate…

Now a lot of you might find the next sentence peculiar, but listen… Breathing easily is the single most wonderful feeling a human being can have… If I were forced to choose between orgasm and easily taking a deep, full breath, I wouldn’t hesitate… I can breathe again after not having had that ability for one and a half decades. Yes, I would miss the orgasms, knowing me I would just fetishize something else anyway… You can’t replace breathing but you can dress up like a giant bunny rabbit and on a person dressed like a giant beaver and get off if you are so inclined… I have learned that my thoughts don’t have to negatively affect my body and now, out of therapy for 8 months, I can have an anxious thought and breathe at the same time… 

Now you know... The blog "I Can Breathe Again..." is a celebratory experience...  

I still had issues and my therapist let me have them. When she asked about my drinking and drug use, I was truthful, and she said I should consider what I was doing may not be healthy. She didn’t berate me, or demand anything except that I think about it…

She was right…

My alcohol and drugs were coping mechanisms and I knew it, but I wasn’t ready to put them down… 

It has been 21 years since the accident… 21 years of loss, compounded PTSD starting in childhood, denial that led to nightmares, addiction, anxiety, dysfunction, and a titanic struggle to accept my growing dissociative mental illness and cope with and control my addictions… Yes, I am one tough old man, in fact I may be the toughest old bastard you might ever meet, but no one is hard-hitting enough to deal with such catastrophic damage…

I’m better now, not healed, nor do I have the hope that I will ever wake up and say “well, that was hard, but I’m all better, let’s go for a walk…”

Sorry to get so personal today but this is 30 days of a clear head that is still awakening to the fact that  the years I spent denying drugs and alcohol were actually just compounding the problem. I was caught in a loop of “my pain, my insomnia, my anxiety all need this drug or this alcohol to manage them…” When in fact all of them were just being fed and even magnified by my usage of them… 

30 days clean and 60 days to go in the Life Change Challenge… I am overwhelmingly curious as to just where all this goes and I am excitedly making a list for the next 90 day challenge…

Well, fuck, I already know where this all ends...Inevitably it ends in my eventual demise… I know that but you know what I meant…

Challenge update… Killing it…  14 out of 14 yesterday and on track for the same today… Feel good, look good and discovering that a sober life has advantages I could never have imagined… I have quit before, plenty of times to get clean for drug testing but never have I quit with the intention to stay clean… Intention is a powerful thing… Maybe one of the most powerful forces on the planet... You can go to jail under the right circumstances with intent... Think about that one for a minute or two... 

Love you all… Mean it…

See you tomorrow…

Day 29: I Know a Thirteen Year Old With More Dedication Than You...

No shit… I do… Since the pandemic started and I have been working from home, I make it a point to walk up to the mailbox. To get to the mailboxes, I have to pass this little patch of grass that has swings for the apartment complex kids and a large grass area like a little park in the middle of the apartments. A large percentage of the time, no lie, I have seen this kid in the park practicing soccer. I watched him for a couple of months and I usually waved at him and we exchanged nods and he went back to his footwork and I got the mail… Then I noticed that he was out all the time… He has equipment like cones and weird soccer shit spread out in the field. Occasionally he would be in the pool area trying to fish his soccer ball out of the pool… Always a smile, always a wave and one day I stopped to watch him and he stopped to see what I wanted. I asked him if he did this every day and he smiled really big and said “yeah”… I told him that his dedication was inspirational and I have never seen anything like before…We talked about daily workouts and diet and before we parted ways that day, I told him that his perseverance was amazing and he would do great things if he stayed the course. .. He is out there every day guys… I have watched him since last March… Rain, cold, heat, and fog… The fucking kid is out there dribbling that soccer ball through those cones, doing footwork, practicing, practicing and then practicing some more… Doesn’t matter the weather, and I’m guessing doesn’t matter how he feels… It was the only conversation I had with him but we still nod at one another because he knows my dedication to fitness and diet and I know his… We are like comrades in arms; a mental toughness that doesn’t know quit and doesn’t have much time to waste but I imagine if he does “waste” time, it’s on a soccer video game… I admire this kid… Over 12 months I have yet to fail to see him at least twice a week and I know he is out there every day… Yeah, admiration is in order here, he is like one of my inspirations in the fitness world and I see him doing great things because he has a mind to do it. A committed, dedicated, and focused approach to something he obviously loves… 

So what do you love that much? I certainly wish that I had become aware of success at his age… They say it is never too late but the superstars of our world don’t start at age 55… 

I don’t like to point out the obvious when it is painful but this is a child who has more focus than 99% of the adults I know. He isn’t supposed to have self control yet and you, as an adult are almost required to have it. He is kicking your ass… A kid… Internalize that for a minute. Sit back and consider that a child is out there every day, focused on something he loves to do and every day he gets a little better at it. Once I saw him walk circles around an older boy laughing as he did it… He dribbled the ball, kicked it between the older boy’s feet and did it with such ease it was amazing… It was the only time I saw anyone else interacting with him and I imagine many people don’t because no one likes to get their ass handed to them, especially by a much younger, obviously much more talented kid…  So as much as I do not like to say shit about people, when I compare most of the people I know to this kid, there is no comparison… If there is such a thing as “merit” this kid is worthy of every positive comment we can make about him. 

So let’s talk about dedication for a second…

Primarily, and most importantly, dedication is love. This is obvious. You cannot dedicate your life to something if you do not love it and I mean really, really love it. If you don’t love something then you have no chance to be dedicated to it because of the time and effort it takes. Yesterday, Tom Brady showed us the lifelong love of a game by winning his seventh Super Bowl…  By himself Tom Brady has won almost 13% of every Super Bowl ever played… I think we can say that he loves football.

Passion comes next… You can love something and not be passionate about it… Dedication requires passion. You have to be excited about what you are doing, about the process, about the planning and about the results.  There is a rush when you are really dedicated to doing something and you succeed.  When you want to lose weight and the scale says that you are. When you perfect that spaghetti sauce or the notes ring out true from your guitar… That rush is what keeps you from quitting. No passion for what you want? Then you ain’t gonna get it, cowboy… No passion means half hearted and half hearted means mediocre performance… Nobody wants to go to see an event called “Really Average People With No Passion Get Together and Do Shit They Don’t Care About and Aren’t Good At…” 

Dedication is time, a whole lot of time in fact.  You don’t become dedicated to something by paying it lip service. You realize dedication because of the amount of time you spend doing it. You wouldn’t be considered dedicated to something if you spent just an hour a week on it; time and dedication go hand in hand. That kid playing soccer every day of his life is dedicated. I am dedicated. A couple hours a day spent bettering ourselves. Every day, no day off, no taking it easy… 

Dedication is a parent who stays up all night with a sick child and works an eight hour shift. Dedication is getting up before the sun to exercise, or practicing in the rain. It’s bleeding, whether literal or metaphorical… Dedication is working out when you’re sore, playing guitar until your fingers go numb… 

But mostly, dedication is about being proud of yourself. You may never rise to the performance level of Tom Brady, have musical skills like David Bowie or be ½ as famous as Matthew McConaughey but you can damn well have their passion…  Find what you love and do it with all your heart, that’s all it takes. If you love to play the piano, imagine what 5 hours a week, 20 hours a month and 240 hours a year would give in skills? About 45 minutes per day and pretty soon, you will be impressive… 

I dare you to give it a try… 

Just a little about The Life Change Challenge that I am currently drowning in…  I’m still working on a way to explain the cataclysmic upheaval in my life because of this last four weeks without sounding magnanimous about it… I haven’t won a Super Bowl and my name isn’t known worldwide but I would like to make the claim that I feel as physically good as any athlete can and as mentally healthy as I have ever been. That’s quite a assertion I know… 

These last few weeks I have been:

1. Getting up at 5:21 AM (alarm at 5:21 and rise at 5:30 AM)

2. Doing a ½ Murph (150 squats, 100 Burpees, 100 push-ups, 50 pull-ups)

3. Doing P90X3

4. Plank Challenge

5. Daily meditation (15 to 20 minutes)

6. Daily guitar practice

7. Daily blogging 

8. Fasting from 6:00 PM until 12:00 PM the next day

9. Not over eating

10. 100% whole food, plant based diet

11. No drugs

12. No alcohol

13. CBD Oil daily for inflammation 

14. Daily vitamins and supplements

This is just my nature and I, even though suffering greatly for the first couple of weeks, have never been happier or prouder of myself than I have since taking this on… Now listen, this is years of preparing for this level of performance. I wasn’t lying on the couch 30 days ago… I have been creeping up on this event and preparing mentally for it for 6 years. I didn’t start out with anything more in mind than, I looked and feel like shit, and thought “this has to stop…” That’s all I had, man, seriously. I didn’t know a thing about holistic health and truthfully, I was a Neanderthal about health when I started… A whole lot of mistakes, misadventures, failure and injury came before this challenge. Ask me sometime about the $250 pineapple some time…  This isn’t the last challenge either… The success of this one simply made me ask myself that if I can do this, what the fuck am I capable of? This has been a chain of events springing from one to another until I realized something … I have abilities that I simply did not know I had and guess what? ALL of you do too… You have something inside you that will astound you. Fuck being amazing in the eyes of others… Not important… Amaze yourself and you will find a joy you never knew… 

I would venture to guess that with investigation of diet, health and self care, exercising and researching holistic health that I have spent roughly 10 hours a week working on this… For six years… That’s about 3,120 hours… 

They say that if you invest 10,000 hours into something, you will become an expert…  At this rate, I will be an expert on holistic health in about 12-13 years… 

I have the time…  What the fuck else am I doing?  Hahahaha

Love ya… Mean it!

See you tomorrow…