Albums I impatiently await...

Hooves on the Turf: tUne-YaRds // FIYA from Ray Concepcion on Vimeo.

Week ending 2/27/11

monday: 7 miles in the ice storm. cool. strength training class, 1 hour.

tuesday: 4 miles inclined on mill. 20:00 bike. cable machine strength training. 6 miles in the afternoon, 4 with trainee Jill.

wed: 12 miles

thursday: 4 mile cruise.

friday: 7 miles at university of toledo track. 2 mile w/u, 6X800, 1/3 mile RBI.

saturday: 7 around tuna beach.

sunday: 16 miles. wildwood park with gabbo for a couple. then went exploring ottawa hills neighbor hood for some good climbing. found a lot of short, very steep hills. then went to college campus for more hills, stairs and then a long paved straightaway back to gabbo's.

TOTAL: 63 miles.

Thank god. finally a decent week of training. I've been really busy, too, which makes it feel even better. The bike shop job is going to be awesome, I think. I put together bikes, sell stuff and most important: talk about training with guys who work there. Rob is 42, life-long cyclist and still rides for a few companies, trains very hard year round and has a pretty solid race schedule set up for the year. Good inspiration and good focus for my own running.

It's one thing to read a bunch of blogs, but it's another to talk face-to-face with a guy who is killing it. Definitely feel a renewed sense of purpose and dedication. Which is a funny thing to discover you need. but not "haha" funny.

Running Form

As one can plainly see from this scientific research, a "heel-strike" running gait ultimately produces negative effects on the body, namely, being on fire. Which sucks.

Inspiration Information

this makes me want to dust off my skateboard, so badly. at least the hair and pants do, i guess.

Old Music

my creative output for 2010 was nearly zilch. which is insane. i've been writing and recording songs since i was 13.

my friend and frequent collaborator Eric, created a Bandcamp page for a batch of songs we recorded during a bender over labor day weekend of 2009.

it's here: sundownersfuckoff.bandcamp.com

hopefully this will inspire me to finish a few works in progress and get back on my shit regarding music. i was at least proficient at about 10 different instruments, the other day i could barely play guitar anymore. i remember standing in my dorm room, during the summer with the window open and playing along with jimmy smith's root down album and seriously killing it. i had been playing guitar for less than a year. i started playing classical guitar about a year later. 6 hours/day of practice one summer while working 50 hours a week doing construction. you can imagine the comments at work about my fingernails.

there's a lesson here to be learned, but my useless tarpit of a brain can't internalize and make use of it.

while i'm at it. this is the link to the last batch of songs i recorded in early 2009.

to begin again...

this is just a rehab post. i met with doctor brown (who is black) on friday. several weeks ago, after much badgering of the doctor staff at the clinic, I had put myself on a super aggressive methadone tapering schedule (2mg's down every week). which means, for those whom fractions are mysterious, i am cutting off a larger and larger percentage "chunk" of my dose each week. i was warned by both Dr. Len and Dr. Brown that this was a bad idea. and hey, guess what? they were right. for the last two weeks i've gone back to sleeping very little and having horrendous bouts of anxiety, along with muscle twitching and body pain. ...i thought i'd just tough it out but man...i can suffer through a week, i can suffer through two weeks, but...getting on to a month of feeling horrible was starting to really grind on me. so anyway, i'm sitting there in the office, across from Dr. Brown, an old black man whose skin looks so dry and papery, it's practically mummified and whose eyes are two different colors (one is watery grey/blue and the other is, i swear to god, orangish/green.) He's a great guy. Very sage-like and wise. Basically he told me "You're not going to pull this off. Stop being stupid. There isn't any need to suffer like this, be patient, be smart." so, i've now UPPED my dose from 9mg back to 10mg and will hold at this level until my body adjusts and then go down ONE mg and see how that is tolerated.

while all of this may just be boring medical blahblahblah, for me this back and forth struggle between a fast, painful taper and a longer, methodical taper has been very very difficult. i equate it to whole host of personality traits, both strengths and weaknesses being tested. Am i tough? And which is tougher? to suffer out the quick detox? or make the hard, smart decision to taper responsibly? Or am i being weak to go back to the slow taper? is it me giving in? giving up? I think about this all the time because after having made a few monumentally stupid decisions in the past year, I'd really like to start making some smart ones. so...anyway, i guess i feel good about what happened during that doctor visit on friday. not happy, but at least resolved and ready to move forward. plus, it's not like a single milligram increase suddenly has me floating on cloud 9, humming show tunes...i still can't sleep through the night. i still have anxiety and a frustratingly high resting heart rate (for someone who's in as good as shape as i am, i should be LOWERING my resting HR...not waking up with it beating wildly in my chest. on that note, i can't wait to see how my body finally settles down after all of this methadone bullshit. i have a feeling that come january or so, when the detox is finally complete, i may be in for a pleasant surprise and that all of this hard training will rapidly reveal itself in my running. anyway, this is a long post about stuff that no one wants to read...but i needed to flesh it out in text so as to get a better sense of where i'm at on this stuff.

i still harbor this sense that, despite the extremely high accolades DJ Shadow's albums have accrued over the last decade of internet circle-jerking, on a serious note i think that future generations will look back at "preemptive strike" and "endtroducing" as two of the more remarkable moments in modern music history. no more music talk for me.

One day at a time...

Push it along...

Over this summer, I've been sinking deep into nostalgia for my childhood and by that I mean i've been listening to pretty much only wu-tang, ODB's first solo album and TONS of tribe called quest and de la soul.

on tribe's first record (People's instinctive travels and the paths of rhythm), the very FIRST track is called "push it along." not a bad jammer, to be sure. however, the interlude section in between "push it along" and "luck of lucien" has phife blabbing strange shit over that soul-clap beat and he talks about titling the first song and how he came across a boulder blocking his path and he couldn't pull it...so he had to push it. ...and then i was like "oh shit, i get it now" i mean...for the first time since i was like...what? 12? 13? when i bought that CD?

anyway, it's the perfect analogy for this drug withdrawal process. this is not something that i can "pull" as in put it behind me and continue on with life. no no, this is something i have to PUSH. as in, it is always right in front of me. i can barely see around it and, yet, in order to get through the day i have to push this fucking boulder along. literally every moment i'm thinking about oxycontin. I'll be teaching a class, or talking to you (my friend) or doing the laundry or driving and singing a song on the radio, or having a beer, or eating a delicious meal, or hugging someone, or kissing someone, or making a t0-do list, shopping for food, and yes...even running...and i will STILL have OC on my mind. i mean, literally, it's all i think about. so...what can i do really? stop? just stand there, in the middle of life, and stare at this big fucking ball of drugs blocking my way? or do i just start moving forward again and push it along?

been on repeat for months now? yeesh.

JULIAN LYNCH "IN NEW JERSEY" from OLDE ENGLISH SPELLING BEE on Vimeo.

because you're soooo dirty...

god, i can't believe i didn't think to write this song first! the tub is my SPOT!

toons

cool live versions of cool laid back songs. summer abides.

http://www.daytrotter.com/dt/sonny-and-the-sunsets-concert/20031181-3738321.html