Here we go again

Distance: 3.25 miles
Time: 8.10pm
Stretches: yes
Sit-ups: yes
Drink: Gatorade All Stars(!)
Weight: 170.5 lbs.
Weather: 19º with scant flurries

1980 Playlist
Antmusic* - Adam and the Ants
Ah! Leah! - Donnie Iris
Call Me - Blondie
Enola Gay - Orchestral Manoevres in the Dark
Driven to Tears* - The Police
Transmission - Joy Division
Pretty Boys* - Joe Jackson
Take This Town - XTC
Cooldown: Play For Today - The Cure

Intake
Breakfast: coffee, PowerBar Triple Threat, water
Lunch: chicken & potato curry with rice
Dinner: ribs, salad, sweet potatoes (no seconds), beer

Breakfast disgusts me. Milk, cereal, eggs, beans, whatever. I don't wish to eat, but I am hungry. Even passed on cake at my girl's birthday party, now there's a first.

A few days after New Year's 1995, I began feeling a pain in my lower abdomen (you know what's crazy - I don't know which side) which was aggravated by either a) slipping and falling on my ass at my place of employment or b) joining my last mosh pit seeing Nine Inch Nails. In February I had a hernia operation. I was warned then that I may eventually need another on the other side.

I have had that hanging over my head, or wherever it hangs, for twelve years.

This was also when I began gaining weight. I had yo-yo'ed in size from when I began college. 150 in high school, topping out at 185 when I was 20, dropping down to 145 shortly thereafter, rising steadily to 190 when I turned 22, forcing myself down to 145 again (to play the Elephant Man) a few years later, holding steady at 170 after my first marriage began, plummeting to 150 as it disintegrated, and after hooking up with my wife I peaked on New Year's 1997 at 200 pounds.

A condition that was not related to my weak musculature (well, I don't know maybe it is) made it necessary for me to begin wearing compression pants in 1996. I was around 180 then, and I was attempting some regular exercise, which would leave me doubled over in pain. I thought it was the other hernia, but it wasn't (and no, don't ask) and my doctor said compression would help. I forget how long I wore them. On days I went without a growing ache would develop, and I'd have to get them on as soon as possible.

I remember once going out dancing and I had to stop without whoever I was with at a drug store to buy some because I knew I couldn't do my thing without them. I felt old then. I wasn't even thirty. I assume I would have to wear them the rest of my life.

I can't remember when I stopped wearing them. It was a long time ago. '99? 2000? When our boy died, we both got much more serious about our health, and my new job made it possible to go long stretches away from anything I could shove into my mouth. I weighed, perhaps for the last time, 155 lbs.

I hope I never have to wear a truss again. I have begun doing sit-ups, not out of any sense of vanity (okay, that's a lie) but because I just need to do something to hold myself together.

Hmn.