More Cowbell
“All our times have come
Here, but now they're gone
Seasons don't fear the Reaper
Nor do the wind, the sun, or the rain”
― Blue Oyster Cult
Left alone by the process to diagnose my own medical condition I suppose it's important to put everything on the table. About 5 months ago I decided my overall fitness was worth rehabilitation due to the fact that I had gained more weight than I ever had. The bout with pneumonia and the flare-ups of sciatica through the winter did not help me stay fit. I was officially a fat-body. If I was still in the United States Air Force, back in the day, my commander would have sent me to dancing bear class. Snowflakes beware…it's going to get bumpy.
Stepping on the scale in the morning put me at 223 lbs and if we do the stupid BMI calculation, I was cresting at 31. If you scroll a lot of Facebook or Instagram it's no secret that the GLP-1 drugs are all over the internet. Oh, oh, oh Ozempic, started this amazing trend in the weight loss industry. Never before have individuals who were overweight had access to such a powerful method to drop pounds. And oh by the way, it works. It's magic. It's like the Fountain of Youth of weight loss. The discipline to lose weight, that all of us lack, comes to us in a very simple subcutaneous weekly injection.
My desire to lose weight was not one of vanity, although I was starting to look away when I caught myself in the mirror, heading into the shower at any number of Marriotts. I don't know why the Marriott has so many mirrors. But that's a different story. Suffice to say it was time to lose weight…and as I began playing more and more soccer, returning to fitness was my number one goal. You'll even see it on my list of New Year's resolutions on the whiteboard in my living room. Get better, lose weight, return to soccer, read more books, write more essays, be nice to my sister. I failed to be nice to my sister yesterday. I yelled at her. I think it's because of the steroids I'm taking. I apologized.
As for the other things I'm doing quite well. I stopped reading and writing last year because I was deprived of one of the greatest motivations I had for reading and writing. I love posting reviews on Amazon. Amazon however felt obligated to sensor my reviews and kick me out of their community practice for violating some rules. They never told me which rules so I was left to try to figure that out on my own. I had just read a series of books related to the takedown of Osama bin Laden all the way back when Seal Team 6 put a bullet in that bastard's head…and several more in his body. If there ever was a douchebag who deserved to die it was OBL. The books I had read were”No Easy Day” under a pseudonym by one of the seals who was on the assault team, Mark Owen. The second book I read was “Sea Stories” by Admiral William McRaven, The 3-Star commander of JSOC at the time.
It's been 10 years since “No Easy Day,” was published and the author received an unbelievable backlash in publicity for publishing a book. Simply stated seals don't write books. It's an unwritten law of being in a quiet community of professionals. Yet the author found his information pertinent to the American people. Also, the necessity to recount the events of a monumental event, is made somewhat sweeter, if that event is observed by an individual with a talent for recording what they witness accurately. A scribe was present. He wrote down what he had witnessed. In my personal experience I find that witness testimony from an individual who can write more accurately captures the event, then an individual who is just present. Brains work differently. A brain that's in the habit of journaling, is already writing the story, as things go down.
Such was the story of Mark Owen. And this scribe wrote his story down very early. I bought the book in the years after the takedown and amid the controversy. I never read it because I'm also in the category of belief that seals don't write books. I did not want to read the book and find any classified information in there lest I take sides in the argument. I did want to commemorate the event because we all wanted OBL in the grave.
What I found fascinating by reading both of those books was that in the early one, how to take down OBL was described from the tactical level. The training of the assault team and how they actually put the plan together and executed the raid.
Admiral McRaven on the other hand, wrote his book years later and came at it from a direction someone at the National level of leadership would construct. How is this all put together strategically? What were the things that were necessary to put the planning together in order to get a seal team in position to pull the trigger? McRaven didn't get anything close to the scrutiny of Owen…yet still seals should not write books. McRaven also violated that principle.
As I went through the details of the raid at both the tactical and strategic level in both the book reviews that I posted on Amazon, I couldn't resist the necessity to add the colorful flourish in both accounts, that OBL was a douchebag who deserved to die. Am I right, in this context? Ed, Julie, Hucker? Well the Amazon community of practice voted me off the island for hate speech. Fuck me. After 25 years of writing for Amazon, as an amateur, and book review enthusiast. After posting 127 book reviews, some of those in the number one position, reading above tens of thousands of others, all were eliminated because of my hate speech. I was writing book reviews back when Amazon was only selling books.
Anyway…it hurt me to the core and my motivation to write sunk to a low level. I am trying to pull that back. My New Year's resolutions were my first attempt at getting back in the saddle. Imagine my consternation a few months later, after I was voted off the island, only to discover Jeff Bezos awarding Admiral McRaven some ridiculous amount of money, $20 million, for being a great American. The incongruent application of that level of double standard is yet another reason this country is pissed off at itself. Bezos continues to create incongruency and chaos that hopefully Karma, or a guy named Earl, will one day land on his doorstep and kick him duly in the nuts. By the way if you've ever been voted off the island by Amazon, try to talk to a human about it. Not going to happen.
OBL was a scumbag who deserved to die. I'm glad he's dead. “No Easy Day” contains no secrets that compromise anything related to national security. Seals should not write books. Enough said.
For me, to play soccer well, I need to be at a trim 185 lbs. That's my fighting weight. If you do the math I was carrying 38 lbs of unnecessary body weight into battle. A standard racing bike in the Tour de France weighs in at 15 lbs. I was trying to play soccer with a racing bike locked over each shoulder and a sack of Idaho potatoes strapped around my waist. Oh, oh, oh, Ozempic was in my future however I didn't go with that GLP-1. I went with the second generation compound called Tripeptide. The research shows that the side effects from the original products had been reduced significantly. And some positive side effects have been achieved in the new products. Those side effects included reduced appetite and a shout out to increased mental acuity. The negative side effects that everybody seemed to be discussing were the potential to reduce muscle mass and nobody knows what the rebound looks like once you stop taking the product.
I jumped into the pool. Through the magic of modern medicine, or is it the internet? I was immediately in a video chat with my assigned doctor. Then quickly being scheduled for blood testing, and the assignment of the pharmacy that would do the compounding. My product arrived within days in a styrofoam cooler with instructions for use of the product and enough small insulin syringes to start my own methadone clinic.
I began giving myself a tiny subcutaneous injection of the product in the range of 15 mL once a week. And then I tracked my progress. Without doing anything my weight dropped at an amazing rate of 4 lb a week. Within 6 weeks I was under 200 lb.
From the standpoint of appetite suppression this product does exactly what it says. I didn't want to eat. And even better it made me hate carbohydrates. I could eat a small amount of carbohydrates but if I did something silly like eat pizza or pasta my body hated me. I was craving chicken and salad. But not chicken salad…I hate mayonnaise. From the standpoint of improving mental acuity, my memory was improving and strangely big words were jumping straight into my head to augment my already rich and colorful vocabulary. Fuck-an-a-bubba. The shit works. Both my boss and my primary care physician gave me the thumbs up to use this product.
Long-term use of the products however continues to come up in the conversation. What happens when you get off of it? What happens if you stay on it for a long period of time? But these questions will have to wait as I stopped taking the products about 4 weeks ago. The point of writing about it today however has nothing to do with the killing of that scumbag OBL, it has to do with my diagnosis. I'm still trying to figure out what's happening in my L45. Is it possible that in the reduction of muscle mass in my core, and the muscles that contain my spine, I lost just enough of my strength, struggling to hold in a lifetime of back abuse and poor posture. My back muscles summarily shit the bed on me? I've got nerves on bone with no cushion and no ability to compensate with cooperative musculature. That's pure speculation.
But it does fall in the category of things that make me wonder what is going on. Still I might just be getting old and I've neglected my core. Tomorrow however I must push forward and I must not fear the reaper. It's no too late to add more cowbell to my core.
Today when I was practicing my 90-year-old gait, both hands on the walker, butt low, thighs out, torso bent, pelvis shoved into the posterior pelvic tilt, and my legs screaming--as I was essentially walking slowly in a low burpee position-- I needed more core muscles. I had run out of cowbell. My PT, we will call her Brittany (but I call her Hope Solo because she played goal keeper for Wesleyan college in Virginia Beach) magically pulled out an elastic and velcro corset. Basically a fat band of elastic that wraps around your core and helps you with those tiny silly muscles meant to keep your spine erect. After three laps around the basketball court, with the ability to relax my own clinch on my ass and lower spine muscles--the corset was doing it for me--I began to loosen up. One might say my back was experiencing a Benjamin Button. There was a breakthrough happening. I was beginning to straighten out and my gate looked more like that of a 70-year-old versus the 90-year-old I had started with. I still couldn't move off the midline…any shimmy left and right and I was in excruciating pain. But my gait was returning. And I was beginning to wonder about the negative side effects of GLP-1.