You know what's a bitch? Running a 2000-calorie-a-day deficit and gaining weight. I can temper that a bit by observing that not biking for two weeks because I was living on the surface of the sun caused me to lose 5.5 lbs... while biking (and eating normally - I've been calorie-counting for six fucking years now) 30 miles a day has caused me to gain at least a pound a day. For four days in a row. How you like them apples? And sure. That's your body adjusting or whatever. And yeah. It's muscle mass or whatever. But fuckin' A. I'm now in a place where eating sparingly enough to lose weight actually causes me to jeopardize my ability to get home. And I've been doing this since may. Shit oughtta be adjusted. Yeah, yoga. Fuck yoga. Yeah, donate blood. Fuck donating blood. Do a bunch of shit that's dependent on other people getting shit to you. That hasn't happened and oh by the way I'm away from home for more than half the year SURPRISE! It's difficult getting in the mental space to do any editing when you're working 10 hours a day, biking two, and spending every spare day commuting 8 hours to see your family for 36. Also, fuck these books. Know what those 10,000 pages tell you? That history is a story of evil fucks being evil to each other, and that victory belongs to the brutal. Also every book is cross-sectional, which means for any given period, you'll go over it again and again and again and again and again because it's like "here's art from 100bc to 50ad" and then "here's religion from 75bc to 120ad" and then "here's politics from 35bc to 155ad" and you get sick to fucking death of hearing of the same goddamn people over and over again and if they're Romans? THEY ALL HAVE THE SAME FUCKING NAME ANYWAY and fuck the Romans. Fuck everything about them. That includes the stoics. Fuck anyone who quotes the stoics, including Marcus Aurelius. Cicero was a stone dick. So was Confucious. So was every fucking asshole in every fucking inspirational quote you've ever shared on Facebook. Fuck them all. It's been a hard goddamn year. Realizing that donating blood was something that gave an organization something to guilt me about fucking sucked. Realizing that bikram yoga was an excuse to smell the armpits of 30 people in a 104 degree room while listening to Bon Jovi fucking sucked. Discovering that to program an android app I had to learn Javascript fucking sucked. And kicking my own ass every fucking day in 104 degree heat so that I can be hit by a car so I can gain weight? That sucks the hardest. Morale is low.The series was written over a span of more than four decades. It totals four million words across nearly 10,000 pages, but is incomplete.
I hear ya. Had to have "a talk" with a doctor today. Turns out they want more blood and I am now eligible to donate blood to the local blood bank. Not gonna happen. Makes me extra pissed at Theranos and all that shit going down. But in a year you will have a wife birthing babies in a building you own an put together. The exercise you do now will make you healthy enough to be there when the kid graduates college. All the long term stuff us guys are sold so that we keep punching a clock and trading time for pieces of paper of, sometimes dubious, value. And speaking of shit that we don't want to do, I have to be on the fucking tay-vee this week. I hate the TV. HATE IT. But I am now a part of something that is worth working for so I get to play the game. One of these years I will make it out your way and buy you an adult beverage, promise.Morale is low.
OK, so here is my WTO story. I was working for [REDACTED] at the time and they put us up in a sketchy place not far from where we were working. It was not far from the Space Needle, on Denny street? way? Anyway, there was a very very sketchy dive bar across the alley from the hotel. Kids in mowhawks, tats in places that should have probably not had tattoos, Everything pierced, Jukebox full of Punk (real punk on vinyl) and cheap drinks. The food there was not bad, and they were open late at night, well they were always open and I was working second shift. So it is me, pasty straight-laced white guy, a 60's burnout ex hippie, and three people who lived their whole lives in a gated community who had never in a million years known that a place like this existed outside of a movie. I knew the bands they played (Bad Religion and Dead Kennedey's were about the most mainstream they played, and they cranked up Cyprus Hill every time a Cop showed up, which was often.) I'm certain at this point that the bar was a front for drugs. One of the groups of regulars were planning WTO protests and I overheard them talk about marches and disobedience actions but did not think anything else about it. Meanwhile I talk to the bartender and cook, share some laughs, ask them what to do and see in town that is not normal tourist crap etc. Then, shit goes down. And my dumb ass is spending his time in a fucking anarchist bar. So we get off work at about 3AM the day of, walk down the street and the whole city is just fucking dead. No people at all, but sirens everywhere and red and blue lights in every direction. We walk up to the bar and there are all the cops there. All of them. Bartender and cook are screaming "DOWN WITH PIGS!" and "FIGHT THE POWER" and shit, so I assume that they got caught with drugs. I walk past the bar to get a look and for one of the few times in my life, guns are pointed at me. Now, I'm in khakis and a collared polo with about a dozen security badges dangling about my neck. This is also pre-smartphone, pre-internet, and I have no fucking clue what is going on. Hands up, people yelling, and one of the three walks up to the cop and in his "rich northern preppie" accent says to the cops "hey sorry for interrupting, but here are our badges, we were just coming in for dinner, sorry ol' chaps." I'm expecting to get the shit beat out of me, having flashbacks to my youth, while the hippie is shaking, and the other three have an air of 'Oh thank god the cops are here' about them. After about 20 minutes of them explaining what is going on we get to the hotel, and I freak the fuck out for about an hour before going to sleep. We got locked in place for a few days and then [REDACTED] told up to collect our gear and bail. Good times, man.
http://www.seattlepi.com/local/article/Former-home-of-Skoochies-DV8-Cirque-Playhouse-3894066.php Woulda been DV8 back in '99. http://www.seattletimes.com/entertainment/rip-dead-nightclubs-of-seattle/ I think I mixed in about 2/3rds of those clubs.
That place looks way too fancy. I went and did a Google street view of the area and it looks like they razed everything and replaced it with tall mixed use buildings. This place was not more than a block off Denny; memory is fuzzy but I think we were holed up in the Best Western. hard to say as all the building are different. The bar that got raided was not more than 20,000 feet, was a bit run down on the outside and did not have a lot of signage on the building indicating it was a business. The only reason we knew this place served food is that we saw the "A rating" Health inspector sign on the door from the parking garage of the hotel. I'm 90% certain it was on Denny. We walked by that park every night and talked to the drunks and weird kids as we walked from the site to the hotel, so it is possible the place was on Thomas. Then again there is a ton of Amazon offices and a fucking Whole Foods in that area near the park now that was not there when I was working, so who knows. In other news, holy shit has Seattle changed in the 17ish years since I was last there.
Nope. Sorry. Just confirmed with a guy who used to DJ at Skootchies and DV8. The building in question was at 8th and Denny. It was Scoochies until '85, when it became Oz, then a skating rink, then something else, then DV8, then an abysmal interpretation of that gawdawful Polly Esther's/Culture Club franchise bullshit universe, then Amp, then a hole in the ground. The article shows what it looked like as Amp. Here's what it looked like as Polly Esther's: Seattle has changed a lot. Westlake Electric was on Westlake for 40 years, then they moved to Woodinville, then they died. In the time I was mixing in the clubs, the "hot spot" went from First Hill to Capitol Hill to Pioneer Square to Downtown to Ballard to Fremont. The club Real World Seattle went to (after we refused to let them into our club) became a righteous 5-star restaurant and then the home of Go2Net/Metacrawler and now office space.
EDIT! Turns out I did not move the Google Maps slider far enough. Name of the place was the Hurricane Cafe on Bell Street. For those who do not know, when you go to street view, you can click on the date and move the slider to go back in time. Looks like it has been closed pending land use change for a few years. Turns out I was looking at the wrong exit to the parking garage. It WAS a block off Denny. Your picture jogged something loose in the ol' noggin. We walked past that place a few times, I never went in there. That park was awesome when the sun was up; the sun went down and even I was all "let's go across the street, people."
Hang in there pal, stay healthy and work the process. You know that good things come from that. To raise morale, -I really enjoyed that read. I'm going to give it another go on Wednesday. Exciting stuff!Yeah, donate blood. Fuck donating blood.
Donate bone-marrow, to yourself. You'll lose at least a few ounces of weight. I promise :)
I've just spent a month fasting every other weekday (Mon Wed Fri). I drank liquids including mixtures of fruit/vegetable juice with pulp sieved out. I've also put on weight during the month. I didn't increase my intake on food days. I didn't do it to lose weight but you'd expect there to be some reduction.?!??!!? My theory is that actually basal metabolic rate is a myth and that it's all variable and chaotic. I don't think anyone really understands how our metabolism works. You know what's a bitch? Running a 2000-calorie-a-day deficit and gaining weight.
Well, my basal metabolic rate was pretty heavily fucked up by spending my teenage years as an exercise bulimic. At my lowest I was 80lbs lighter than I am now. My theory is that my metabolism is in siege mode most of the time, but when things are actually stressful I go full Stalingrad. And I've been full Stalingrad for about 30 months now.