Today I was bad and had a snack that technically put me over my goal for the day. It was still better than spending the day stuffing cakes into my mouth, but still. I was not overly active, either, though I did get out to the store. Exciting adventures all around.
I was down but will likely be up tomorrow due to weighing myself earlier in the morning and also that snack thing.
Weight: 164.6 pounds
Body fat: 18.6%
The Gate at Lake Drive by Shaun Meeks
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
One of the benefits of this kooky ebook thing is how it’s made it easier than ever for new authors to get their work out before the public. What was once a terrifying trip on roads filled with insane drivers, followed by navigating the madding crowds at the mall before arriving at your favorite bookstore outlet to look for and purchase a new book–hopefully they had it in stock if you didn’t call ahead–is now just a couple of clicks on a website. You can do the entire thing with one hand, even, like so many other fun activities.
The ease of getting books out there and the much more variable pricing–many new authors opt to discount their books well below what typical bestsellers go for as enticement–means the reader has a greater selection of choices than ever before.
All of this can be summed up as: sometimes I see a book by an author I’m unfamiliar with and the price is low enough that I am fine with taking the risk that the book will be a stinker.
The good news is that the eminently affordable The Gate at Lake Drive is not a stinker. The less-than-good-news is that author Shaun Meeks would have benefited from a sharper editor and another pass to strengthen recurring problems with the writing, primarily the use of unnecessary modifiers that serve to sap the strength from the prose. Told in the first person by monster hunter Dillon, the writing is often weakened by unneeded verbiage. I’m not saying adverbs are a prime evil as Stephen King would have you think, nor do I believe that every story needs to be written with a Hemingway-level obsession with being lean to the point of minimalist, but The Gate at Lake Drive is filled with equivocation, describing things as slightly this or somewhat that, giving the prose a mushy feel. Sometimes it’s better to just be direct and not worry that your writing will come off as spartan.
The Gate at Lake Drive is set to be the first of a series of books featuring monster hunter Dillon, who brands himself as a monster detective. His rationale is presented thusly: “And calling myself a monster detective beats the hell out of monster exterminator or buster or whatever else you want to call it. A detective seems slightly more serious in my opinion.” But he then adds “I called my site Monster Dick, knowing that eventually people will run a search on it and then BOOM, there I am in front of you.” The contradiction here–wanting to appear “serious” then using the terrible pun of “monster dick” to lure in potential customers (do people seeking large male members online often have monster problems?) feels less like a character quirk and more something the author thought was funny and simply determined to make work.
Now, with this pun being so prominent, I expected the story to be presented in a light, funny manner. And it is, sort of. The tone is light, with Dillon making regular sarcastic asides, but the humor never feels fully committed to. And that may be my biggest issue with the book. On the one hand, Dillon is a veritable dervish with his daggers and magical demon-fighting equipment, slicing and dicing and dispatching monsters with ease, yet he is also a paunchy virgin who somehow attracts a burlesque performer and instantly they fall for each other because who knows why? All of this is great material for an absurd, over-the-top story, but it never really takes off and the main reason is the way the character of Dillon tells the story. He is a cipher (there’s a twist) but also kind of bland. Meeks doesn’t exploit the the conflict between his bad ass monster-fighting and his allegedly awkward way around women. Instead, there’s an instant romance, sex (mercifully not described) and none of it connects because there’s no work done to connect it. It just happens.
A stronger editor would have helped, too. As someone who regularly bumbles through his own rewrites and misses things that are glaringly obvious, I can appreciate the fresh eyes of a skilled editor to see things an author doesn’t. There are numerous typos and other errors, problems with continuity–Dillon dons gloves at the beginning of one scene then mysteriously doesn’t have them on later in the same scene–that should have been caught and corrected.
The Gate at Lake Drive has the ingredients to be a fun romp but the different pieces never fit together as well as they should. The romance is the very definition of tacked-on. It almost feels like an entire subplot is missing. It’s obvious Meeks enjoys the character of Dillon, though, and with a stronger editor, I’m certain his next entry in the series will be an improvement.
Today was my cheat day. I took in what would be considered a normal (non-diet) amount of calories for a typical guy (2000). I had a donut.
I felt bad afterward. This is a good sign.
My weight was unchanged and my body fat was down so slightly as to be meaningless. I shall cherish the very tiny drop nonetheless.
Weight: 165.2 pounds
Body fat: 18.4%
I had chicken strips and fries for lunch today but did enough walking to work most of it off and managed to avoid all snacking for the day. I ended my eating with a light chicken dinner and managed to come in under my calorie count.
Tomorrow if the weather plays nice I may try doing a full walk at lunch like back in the olden days of two months ago.
I was down 0.7 pounds today as well, which if nothing else is in the right direction.
Weight: 165.2 pounds
Body fat: 18.5%
Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free by Charles P. Pierce
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Idiot America is a book filled with little that will surprise anyone who has been watching the devolution of U.S. politics, debate and public thought over the last forty (or more) years.
Pierce uses a series of events–the war in Iraq, the Terry Schiavo life-support battle, efforts to give “intelligent design” (creationism) equal footing in public schools–and couples them with observations and actions regarding the necessity of intelligent government and an informed, educated populace from the founders of America to paint a bleak picture of the current state for what passes for discussion (he argues there is little to no actual debate) in the current U.S. landscape. It is a relentlessly bleak picture, punctuated by the occasional triumph that shines like a diamond in a bin of coal.
Pierce presents his premise as such: intellect and expertise have somehow become regarded as undesirable qualities, things to be mistrusted or rejected outright. It is more important to have a president you’re comfortable having a beer with than one who can make nuance, evidence-based decisions on matters of foreign and domestic policy. The soundbite is better than the essay, hair is more important than the brain that resides beneath it.
Pierce argues that the gut (or Gut, as he calls it) has come to dominate thinking, with emotion displacing rationality and logic, where cranks who once had an audience no larger than the people passing by listening to them exhort their conspiracy theories on a street corner now have the wide reach of cable television and the instant access of the Internet to project their lunacy. At times caustically funny and by turns surprisingly lyrical, painting scenes with the care of a novelist, Pierce offers example after example of how idiocy has become ascendant.
As I read the book I found myself alternating between a sense of frustration and outright anger. The length to which people–who should be intelligent adults–fully and completely reject intelligent thought for ridiculous, easily-debunked hokum, is at times astonishing. If some fabrication is repeated often enough, Pierce says, it takes on the patina of truth. If enough people believe and believe fervently enough, it becomes indisputable fact. Actual facts no longer have any effect on these believers. People simply stop listening. There is no debate, there is no reaching out, there are only sides yelling at each other over who is right.
This is a depressing but important book. As I said at the beginning, there are no real surprises here, but Pierce catalogs the problems and hammers his points home. Given the circus that is the current group running for the Republican nomination for president, and given the wholesale manufacture of fiction in the guise of endless reality TV shows, it’s hard to believe that the situation is improving, but perhaps we can draw some hope that it can hardly get worse.
I had two small chocolates at work today but compensated somewhat by doing a lot of running around between buildings. According to Fitbit I burned enough extra calories to write the chocolates off. If I can go to bed without stuffing a coconut cream pie into my face I should be good.
I was down slightly, from 166.2 to 165.9 pounds. It’s a start, even if it’s within the range of a rounding error.
Weight: 165.9 pounds
Body fat: 18.5%
Today I cheated a little. After ingesting fewer calories than recommended for a healthy diet, I rounded out the day with a handful of chips (an actual small handful, not three full bags that would fit in the palm of a hill giant) and a Clif bar. This still kept me under my calorie count for the day and I resisted any kind of snacking until after 8 p.m.
I’m reasonably confident I can keep on track. Reasonably.
Today’s starting stats:
Weight: 166.2 pounds
Body fat: 18.5%
Sometimes when I sit down to write something on this ol’ blog, I do it early in the evening, when I’m just arrived home from work or shortly after dinner, when I am full, content and still reasonably alert. Occasionally I will post during lunch, if I’m feeling especially zany. I do not very often feel especially zany.
More often than I would like I post later in the evening. For example, right now it is 10:47 p.m. and after writing this post I will be off to bed and a night stuffed full of weird dreams, as has been the case of late. The reason I say more often than I would like is if I put off my blog entry until the end of the evening I find my mind has gone mushy and I sometimes stare at the blinking cursor and the only thought that comes to me is, “That cursor sure is blinking there.” And so I post an amusing cat image, because there are about 640 million of them to he had on the web. Cat images easy, writing a semi-intelligent blog post late at night hard.
I should soon have more to say regarding my writing, however, and who knows, eventually I may even resume running and have updates on that. There’s probably a spambot out there somewhere just itching for me to mention running shoes by brand name again, hoping to get in a helpful comment (and link) to some amazingly affordable knockoffs and/or male enhancement pills.
My inbox is now filling up with notifications of great Cyber Monday deals, which, by coincidence, are pretty much exactly the same as the Black Friday deals. This and another four weeks of Christmas music everywhere you turn.
It’s not that I hate the holidays or anything…but I kind of do. Christmas in particular–you know, that nutty holiday originally celebrated as the birth of Christ–is now like U.S. elections, seemingly never-ending. And there is no subtle context here, no need to dig to find the reasons, it’s simply because the retail sector wants us to buy their junk and if they can convince you to start Christmas shopping in September, I guess they figure you’ll buy more stuff rather than just get your shopping done three months early and spend the rest of the time annoyed by the millionth playing of “Jingle Bells” on any store’s music system.
The best part about my complaint is that A Charlie Brown Christmas pointed all of this out 50 years ago, and It’s a Wonderful Life did it 19 years before that, in 1946. I’m pretty sure there are cave drawings of carolers being attacked. This is to say that not only is my complaint not new, it’s as old as the universe itself, or pretty close.
Anyway, as part of the Black Friday consumer madness I went out and bought groceries, none of which was holiday-themed.
Then today I went out and bought an Apple Watch. But I did it because my partner also got one and somehow that made it seem logical and proper. Plus today is neither Black Friday nor Cyber Monday. So I’m good.
Yep.
(I’ll have my thoughts on the watch in a few days or so once I’ve gotten used to it. I got the smaller 38 mm model and will say already that it’s lighter and more svelte than I had expected, so that’s a plus. I kind of think Steve Jobs would have hated it, though. More soon™.)
It’s late and I cannot muster the brain cells required to make a post. You know what that means.
This year I started out tipping the scales at a portly 171.3 pounds before slimming back down to 150.4 pounds in early August, less than half a pound away from my target goal of 150.
Today I weigh 164.5 pounds, still down for the year but ballooned up like a Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade float compared to where I was in the summer. What happened? Well, obviously I started taking in more calories than I burned. Coincidentally, my weight gain picked up at the same time I stopped running due to my leg injury (I now have separate leg and foot issues I need to address before I start running again but I will go into the waist-down details of that in another post).
Running has tow bonus effects when it comes to weight loss. The first is, of course, the calorie burn. Each run I would typically burn anywhere from 700-1200 calories. Consider that right now I am trying to stick to 1500 calories a day and you see how this can make a pretty big (ho ho) difference. The second benefit is that the time spent prepping for a run, doing the run and then undoing the run (showering, etc.) is not spent eating. In fact I will usually end a run with my appetite almost suppressed, though I may be thirsty if it’s hot or humid out. This means on run days (normal schedule three times a week) I take in significantly fewer calories while also burning off more.
But the return of fat has not come mainly from a lack of running. It comes from a decided non-lacking of snacking. This is to say that I regularly open my mouth and shove all manner of not-exactly-low-calorie edible products into it, ranging from potato chips to snack bars to cookies, muffins, cake and occasionally even reasonably healthy low-cal stuff like yogurt and fresh peas.
But mostly cookies, strudel and other deliciously awful foods. I’ve decided to get back on the non-snacking wagon again but instead of making it a New Year’s resolution, I’m starting on December 1st, which is in four days. When the first week has passed I will report back with my inspiring tale of success in weight loss.
A few days ago I posted the following:
The Black Friday nonsense seems to be on the wane, though that may be partly related to the U.S. Thanksgiving coming so late this year. I’ll take what I can get.
I can now verify that this was entirely related to the U.S. Thanksgiving coming so late this year. My inbox is stuffed to the proverbial gills with Black Friday deals. I don’t know if it’s years of Steam sales featuring numerous 75% off deals, but none of these bargains are tempting me in the slightest. I am a bad consumer.
However, if I win $20 million in Saturday’s Lotto 6/49 draw I promise to buy many things and help kickstart the national economy.