When I rolled off the lot in my then-new Saab, almost eight years ago, I remember being impressed by how smoothly the car drove. Waxed and shiny and black as night, my four-wheeled chariot hugged the road through Lake Bluff like it had grown out of the pavement, gliding quickly and soundlessly. It still runs relatively well, I suppose, with nary an incident in the past few years, but the cracks are starting to show.
Dutch warned me about days like this. He warned me particularly about the Big One–catastrophic electrical system failure–that has yet to happen. What has happened, however, is a fuel gauge prone to wild swings of inaccuracy. It drops to empty after I top it off, every time. Reads three-quarters full, when truth would place the tank closer to a gallon. To fix this issue would call for a few hundred dollars, which doesn’t seem like a good use of a few hundred dollars. More than the incident itself, though, is the potential for other incidences, greater misfortune portended by a fuel gauge on the fritz.
I know what the real fix is here, plain as day. I should get a new car. I wouldn’t want, like, a Beemer. Something slightly snooty and quirky instead. Hell, I’d probably get another Saab, were they not bankrupt. This time, too, I’d negotiate far, far better. But I choose to ignore the new car option, and in place of a malfunctioning fuel gauge will be a greater reliance on my odometer to determine my distance to empty. Deep down, a part of you wants to believe that your vehicle is different. Yours is the one that will last forever, even as the delusion erodes and you ride it into the ground, hand on the wheel, gaze to the horizon–the Captain of Decay, the Lord of Rust.
In the spirit of keeping our standards as low as possible, let me begin by saying I’m pleased there’s an actual website to which we may post tonight. Tuesday’s gaffe still stings, as you can tell, but I’m sure it’ll get better with time–and then scab right over and fester. It’s been another long day. Turns out my exercise regimen happens to coincide with my blogging schedule, at least for now, so be assured that every keystroke will be extra ponderous for the foreseeable future. Has all this physical activity been worth it, though? I’m not so sure, honestly.
The original plan seemed simple enough. I had it all worked out. My deskbound lifestyle had reached a kind of armistice with my food choices, with my weight in equilibrium. Nuke a bowl of oatmeal in the morning, eat horribly during lunch, and then cook pasta and veggies for dinner. Follow this trifecta, and I’d have an unspoken understanding with the bathroom scale. I thought that adding regular exercise to this equation would be a surefire way to drop some pounds, but this simply hasn’t been the case.
On some days, in fact, I’m even heavier. No idea why. I’d like to think I’m building muscle, but that’s unlikely. Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m not going to let these numbers deter me. I’m staying the course and sticking to my regimen, if only because I always feel great after a workout. Today’s match was a grueling two-hour affair that ended in triumph: 6-1, 6-1, and then a 1-5 deficit brought back from the brink to a 7-5 win. Service is better, though still not quite there yet. I used to be dismayed at my atheletic amnesia, where I seem to start at the ground floor, every time I get back into a sport. But maybe the pleasure is in the remembering.
There are three cardinal sins that could sunder our weekly blog covenant, and I’ve committed two of them in just under a week, likely a new record. The first sin is to write nothing. That was Thursday, basically. The second sin is to miss an annual hosting payment. This would be the equivalent of getting your utilities shut down, and it has yet to happen, fortunately. And finally, the third sin is to forget about domain name renewal, which is kind of like getting evicted. This happened from Friday until tonight, apparently, and I’m aghast at the mistake.
Indeed, you may have experienced it firsthand, for which I apologize. Sometimes, when you misspell a domain name in your address bar, you are whisked away to a boring page with a mess of links and a stock photo of some fresh-faced chick. This is precisely what happened when I went to secondhandrants.com a few hours ago, only it wasn’t a misspelling. There were links to secondhand hats, secondhand farm equipment, secondhand books, and other gently used merchandise. Our decade-long legacy had been cast into the forgotten corners of the Internet.
But we’re back in business now, after a payment of $11.59 and a frantic repointing of nameservers. I blame it on my recent exercise. I’ve been mulling over the best way to deliver this topic when it comes up in normal conversation, and initial tests for my current punchline have been promising. When you walk into a Planet Fitness or a GNC and take in the marketing materials, the wording is invariably cheery and hopeful–some bullshit about a “new you” or other such contrivances. No! No. I reject this school of copy. I’ve been exercising to slow the decay of my body. Nothing more, nothing less.