Sometimes as someone who works with children I recognize that certain children like to play the game of 'I'm a little monster and I will be bad and you are authority and you will stop me.' Which, unless the kid is incredibly charming, is a real drag and no fun to play. It's tiring and not very rewarding to regulate someone else's behaviors. I prefer to be around people who take responsibility for their own actions and regulate themselves. Or so I thought. For so very long.

But maybe those annoying kids are on to something. Maybe they're aware that on some level it's really lame to regulate yourself and internalize authority. Become your own jailor, so to speak. Or maybe they intuitively understand the old Christian idea that to try create your own reality is to create Hell for yourself and that's why you need to give yourself over to God. 

I don't know. I think a deep part of me actually loves being the authority of myself and being self-contained. 

The idea of 'being bad' as something that is punished externally I think honors or recognizes in some way that whatever was bad is a real part of the self. And that being 'well-adjusted' and educated and civilized forces you in a physically non-violent way to reject parts of yourself. To kill parts of yourself. And I think it's worth being skeptical of. At the very least.

life is largely about narrative building

 humans basically process everything through narrative. we aren't logic based creatures. we're story based creatures.

and in my case,

when I think about squats

the story I tell myself is that I'm a medieval peasant who was caught stealing from the king's pantry to feed my family and I've been thrown in a dungeon and my punishment is that every week I have to squat a weight 5 times in a row and do that 5 times and every week the weight goes up by 5lbs until I am crushed. And I imagine me as a peasant, clinging to life. forcing myself to get stronger so that I can live another week but knowing that the week just prolongs the dread of knowing that I will eventually be crushed. But maybe I can squat so heavy that the king's men and the king's horses won't be able to find an apparatus heavy enough to crush me and I'll be able to go free and see my wife, Honda, and my two children, Civic and Accord once more.

some comics I made 10 years ago

these hold up

 

pop punk

 here's what I'll say. 

Say what you want about the year I was born in, but it was a great time to grow up experiencing pop punk. That's something I was there first hand for that people older than me and people younger than me just don't get. 

Did it tend towards being soulless and commercial and exploitative? Of course it did. It's the music industry. 

But I was there.

I was there for sum 41, blink 182, fall out boy, green day, paramore, panic! at the disco, my chemical romance. 

Did they stand for anything? No not really. Just some lowest common denominator angst and romance and government approved rebellious nature. 

If the main form of participating in society is tasteful and conscious consumption, if your record of existence is judged by the media you consume and assimilate into your being--then that's a bad setup. You can't be doing that. You have to unironically  have bad taste to show that you are self that exists independent of what you consume

No but what I actually think is good art grows like a mushroom.

the best things in life are free but are the worst things in life also free?

 Even a little bit of poop in any meal completely ruins it. Therefore, if things that are free contain the extremes of experience, we should avoid them at all cost. Pun intended. Everything should be free. Including bones. With my new bones premium plan, we will make sure that you are never without your bones. We have a customer service hotline that you can call at any time to speak to a robot.

There should be one food that's always free and it's illegal for anyone to charge money for it and it should be asparagus. And it should be a great honor to grow it and distribute it but you can never ever charge money for it. Asparagus should always be free.

 Growing up on Saturday mornings Maw Maw would come pick me and my sister up in her little red car and on the way to Timberville we would stop at the Hardee's. Or sometimes we would go all the way to New Market for the Burger King. 

Today I was feeling pretty tired. More tired than normal. It took me a long time to wake up. But the thing that really woke me up was I driving to this park where I do my workout on Wednesday and I caught a left at the light that I never catch. Bare minimum I have to wait one long cycle and it's not too uncommon to have to wait two cycles. And that's after waiting two cycles at the light before it.

But I caught that green today and I felt the endorphins immediately flooding my brain. 

I think if I was trying to come up with an idea for a company I would try to find a way to make people have to pay a subscription fee for their own bones. Probably what it will be as that as a parent you sign up for a plan for your child to have bones and then when they turn 18 they have to make the bone payments themselves or the bone collectors come.

Your bones aren't free. They aren't even yours.

I don't think I'll ever have a meaningful experience in my life that involves a pelican. 

It's my responsibility to make peace with that. 

I've also set up my life in a way where I don't interact with large vats of things. Nothing that I could fall into and undergo a fantastic transformation. That's not the hand I've drawn. 

I think vats are full of potential. 

You got bats, cats, fats, hats, lats, mats, gnats, pats, rats, tats, and vats. And then eats and oats. 

I want the kind of friendship that eats and oats must have.

I think a mistake millenials made as a generation was hating on clowns. 

"Oh clowns are scary! I'm so scared of clowns!"

"I hate clowns."

They were wrong. Clowns are back. We need clowns more than ever. Expand your knowledge of clowns and clowning! Ignore my advice at your own peril!

as I was leaving Wegman's last night this guy was sitting outside playing little blues riffs on his harmonica and the air was warm and still and I thought I should just sit in my car with my groceries in the back seat and the windows down and listen to this guy mess around on his harmonica

and I didn't because I had frozen food and because I am sleeping my way through my life and if I was really awake I would've sat and listened and basked in the beauty that life so generously offers every day and my only solace is to write it down and imagine a world where I did that.

I think I'm good at coaching because I've learned enough tricks from doing it long enough to know how to structure a practice and keep things moving but mostly because I try to see people for who they are and celebrate that and show support in ways both direct and indirect and I think when I've been a positive part of people's lives it's because of that.

Real attention and genuine support are like gold.

"they got Jimmy Deans! these are the GOAT!"

 quote from a boy in the frozen food section while I was grocery shopping tonight

this guy named Arthur Jones basically invented weightlifting machines and he's got a quote about the squat that I really like

Arthur Jones: The squat is the single most important exercise ever discovered by man — and one of the most dangerous. The mafia have a saying: “If you can't lose, you can't win.” The squat provides you with opportunities that are unprecedented by any other exercise you can think of — but it's dangerous as hell. So you have to ask yourself: is the opportunity worth the danger?

Done properly — which, to me, is a barbell squat — it need not be all that dangerous. But of course, very few people do them properly, so they become dangerous.

The barbell squat is capable of producing degrees of muscle mass increase that cannot be produced by any other exercise, or any other combination of exercises. The squat, as an exercise, is almost a miracle — and it's dangerous as hell.

but you gotta listen to him say it: squat propaganda

what a character.

today I deep cleaned my apartment

 it felt good to do

big day today

 I was at the climbing gym for like 10 hours today. 

I showed up a little after 10am to do my session and saw a friend I hadn't seen in a while and then had one of my best moonboard sessions ever. Then I did a private coaching lesson for an hour. Had a very short lunch break. Then coached two sessions of club over 3 hours. Then stayed around and climbed and hung out with folks after.

A good day but I'm hungry and need food!

thoughts on running form

 The track and field world championships are taking place and one thing I've been doing in every race video is watching the stride of the runners in the replays. When they land their leg is basically straight or only very slightly bent. I've taken video of myself and realized that I land with a pretty bent knee. 

My guess is that by landing with a straight leg your center of mass travels more quickly over your foot and you engage your glutes and hamstrings more. I think the form that I've developed is more reliant on my quads and instead of pulling through with each stride I fall into each step and then push at the end to reaccelerate. Sometimes when I watch video of myself running I think that it looks like I'm running with flat tires. I never really knew why that was the case but now I think it has to do with running with squishy bent legs. 

Into the fall and over the winter I'd like to focus on straightening my leg while sprinting and strengthening my glutes and hamstrings. My hope is that by cleaning up my form I can make a big jump in speed and performance.

I think about maw maw every time I write on this blog

 It means a lot that she reads this and believes in me. I don't take for granted what a gift that is.

I had an experience today

 this was my experience.

for many years of my life I have bent over to attempt to touch my toes. I have not always been able to. But I have worked at it and now I can touch my toes while keeping my legs straight. But that was not the significant part of today's experience. I was stretching and touching my toes and normally when I stretch like this I either feel something in one of two places. I either feel it entirely in my lower back or I feel a pull on my hamstrings like they're going to snap. Today I felt a pull at the top of my glutes. It was neither my lower back nor my hamstrings but my buttocks. And then I had a feeling afterwards like, the only way I can describe it was that it felt like my butt was online for the first time. Like it was connected to my legs and the rest of my body. I don't claim to know the significance of this or if anything actually occurred but for a brief moment this afternoon something was happening. We will see.

Also it's raining. And that's nice. We really needed it.

I love Geordie Beamish because he's made a career out of winning races he's not supposed to win

 indoor mile champion in college

indoor world champion in the 1500

and now world champion in the steeplechase. what a guy. what a true racer.

he's said multiple times, "I don't want to run fast. I don't like that running hurts. I just like running a fast last 200 meters."

the last thing that made me cry

 on Saturday I was scrolling Instagram and saw this video of this guy who was streaming and playing the video game Backyard Baseball and he was hitting as the character Kenny Kawaguchi who uses a wheelchair. And he gets a hit and the guy starts screaming in Spanish for Kenny. He's screaming his lungs out. And Kenny makes it to second and then gets caught in a pickle but the 2nd basemen misses the throw so Kenny scores an inside the park home run and the whole time the guy is just losing it and he's so happy when Kenny reaches home, the whole video is only like 30 seconds long. and then after Kenny scores the camera that's been on this guy's face goes to full screen and you see that he's in a wheelchair. And he does like the tiniest adjustment roll in his chair back and forth. 

First I laughed out of astonishment and then I watched it like 5 more times in a row and then tears were streaming down my face.   

I think it's dumb to not believe in magic and miracles

 I think it's a lazy and improbable world view to think, 

'yeah it's all boring and rational and everything can be explained so nothing interesting can ever happen.'

That can't be true. Maybe that's a straw man argument but I think a kind of rational pessimism is a horrible view. Unless it's funny. It could be made funny. But even that kind of has this transformative quality to it. 

You're gonna find what you're looking for. 

 Sometimes I'll see like a stain on my counter or like a small mess or whatever and then I'll just try to ignore it, I'll feel my brain try to not pay attention to it with the belief that at some point it will go away and then I'll have this weirdly heavy commandment type voice say, "IF YOU DON'T CLEAN THAT UP IT WILL NEVER BE CLEANED UP" and it's like the sparkling water version of facing my own mortality. 

Anyway we have this planter box on the shared patio area of the apartment row and there's pea gravel around the planter box in this raised brick rectangle thing and I think kids or somebody likes to take the gravel and just throw it all over the place. Maybe it's a little animal or something. I don't know. But today I sweeped it up and made a little magnet to put on the planter that sees "Please Don't Disturb the Rocks. Thanks pardner" and there's a little drawing of a cowboy on it. 

There's no one coming to help you but you can be the person who goes to help someone.

 I was watching this video and this guy offered a definition of nihilism that was, "speech that's indistinguishable from silence."

And it reminded me of this rule I have in the van I drive for camp about talking. You can't talk if what you're saying could be replaced with barking. 

 today this kid I was coaching was doing a lot of negative self talk and they were climbing well and doing a lot of things right and I was just pulling out all the stops, trying all the phrases I know, trying all the reframing techniques--doing everything I could to set-up a positive mindset. And, y'know, the thing about a kid being upset is that talking about mindset and self-talk isn't going to make them not be upset so there's not a lot of levers you can really pull. Especially in climbing where it's a sport about close misses and finding things that you can almost do but can't quite do. If you can't frame failure in a productive way then it's really hard to get anywhere. 

Anyway, I was doing my darndest and at the end the mom who had stayed to watch the practice came up to me and thanked me for speaking the way I did and basically said that how I acted was not the norm for youth sports and that meant a lot. Normally I find parents observing kind of stressful but hearing that made that effort worthwhile so that was great. 

I'm like ancient, ya know?

 Oh you put stuff on a blog? A blogger blog?

That's like putting words down an ancient scroll. Hieroglyphics even. Runes etched in stone buried in a cave covered with ash from the humble fires of early man. A dusty pile of bones sat upon a throne of bronze that when disturbed rattles and shakes and ekes out a husky message from a time long forgot.

I'm like the complaint tablet to Ea-nasir going on and on about sub-standard copper. A living example of the idea that just as things must perish, some things must also persist. Persist against all reason and sense. 

a sunny day is an old thing. an incredibly old thing. ancient. beyond time. beyond memory. a timeless timeless timeless rite.

I did ten sets of ten pull-ups today!

 I don't think I've ever done 100 bodyweight pull-ups in a single workout before so that was great!

Not to count my unhatched chickens before they don't ever hatch but I think I will complete about 70 of the 78 v4 benchmarks on the moonboard. I'm up to about 60 or 62 today and I dropped the last move on Squincher twice and I've done Astro Creep in two parts. Some of the climbs just seem so hard. But that's not really a bad thing. 

Something about my personality would rather work really hard on the v4 that everyone says is v6 rather than doing the v6 that feels more like a v4. At the end of the day you still pulled a challenging move. 

Anyway I've now coached the comp, training team, and club and they all seem good. I feel like coaching has gotten better every year and I've built on what I've learned and done in the past and that's really rewarding. 

There's some great kids out there who like climbing. 

Pull ups. Here's what I'll say about pull-ups. Recently, in the past year or so, I learned how to pull from the bottom position. I used to do pull-ups in this kind of two part motion and then I watched people who were really good at them and realized I'd been doing them wrong. And it's not like I wasn't relatively strong in them. I just wasn't pulling from the bottom position. 

And that's my motto now. Pull from the bottom position.

a week straight of AC off windows open

 we're in peak season baby. the inside is the outside. it don't get no better.

rate my fridge

 

reviewing walking

 Hi today on the blog I'm going to be reviewing walking.

Today I went on a walk and I did my normal loop that I do around my neighborhood and under the highway and through the park. I used walking as my mode of transportation. I was barefoot and recently the road near my apartment has been given some fresh asphalt so that was really nice on the feet. If you're looking to get into walking I think the main benefits that people will tell you are:

-safety. You'll often hear the phrase 'walk. don't run.' And that's because walking is one of the most deliberate ways of getting around. At any point it's very easy to stop and you're able to easily take in everything that's happening around you. Because walking doesn't generate a lot of momentum compared to running or skipping, it's also less likely to result in slipping.

-efficiency. You can walk for a really long time. Maybe if you've trained long distance running for years and years you might prefer to run a given distance over walking but if you have to carry much at all you'd still be better off walking.

-contemplative potential. Walking is often a great time to look around and think about things. The poet William Wordsworth famously used to compose his poems while pacing back and forth and he would use the meter of his footfalls to give rhythm to his lines. 

I give walking a 10/10 honestly. I think it's a great way to get around. I think when you make the decision to go far a walk you're signing on for a little quiet adventure. 

If you're looking to add a little excitement to your walking you can fill up your water bottle and play a little drinking game I invented. Take a walk on a warm sunny day and whenever you feel thirsty take a drink of water. Try it out. It's pretty fun.

link to a video of my dad's ebike

 https://youtu.be/sFEPK5yCnC4

YOU GOTTA GET ONE OF THESE UNCLE MATT