Getting Into the Fourth Best Shape of my Life

Let's start this story with an old advertising slogan. One that was popular when I was a youth and used to describe a product I enjoyed then and still do, and that slogan is, "Bigger is better." Where I heard it most was to describe professional wrestlers like Earthquake and Typhoon. It didn't matter that they were fat, they were bigger and that was better. My real idols at the time were Macho Man and Brett Hart. I enjoyed putting my four year old nephew in the Sharpshooter and running around the house in my underwear doing elbow drops off the back of the couch.

At that time I am going to say I was eight years old, and I wanted to be big. I made my mother buy me some dumbbells and I started lifting them as best I knew how. The next time I went to the doctor I asked him how best I should lift the weights. I figured if anyone was going to know about how to get big and strong it was the doctor, but instead of telling me to just work on running and body weight exercises while my body grew he told me to not lift weights until I was sixteen. With weightlifting suddenly taken off the table there was only one path left to me getting big, and that was cramming lots of food down my throat. This could have been done in a healthy manner as well but no one told me that one either.

Driving in Snow: The Most Important Thing I Learned in College

The only real explanation for why am one of the dozens of people in Northern Virginia that knows how to drive in the snow is because I spent four years of my life going to college in Rockingham County. During the winter down there snow was a regular occurrence and everyone knew how to deal with it. There was none of the Northern Virginia escapades of drives either making themselves an obstacle by over reacting or being a hazard by pretending nothing was going on. The normal flow of traffic dropped by about ten miles an hour and everyone went along with it, and when there was an incident the emergency responders knew how to deal with it.

That was my main issue this morning. I knew there would be plenty of idiots on the road and I knew there would be incidents, but I had to be where I had to be and venturing out in this mess wasn't an option. In Rockingham County an army of sand trucks would have been out through the night and plows would have been working overtime to keep the roads clear and nothing would be shutdown for 4-6 inches of snow. It would've been life as normal, but Fairfax County isn't Rockingham County and my only home was that most people would stay in their homes.

Why I Quit on the Job Search

I went to have dinner with a friend last night and during that dinner the talk turned to jobs. My friends and family for the past year and a half have been trying to help me find a better job. I am one of the millions of American that is currently under employed. I have a four year college degree with a major in English and a minor in Political Science and I spent the first five years of my life in the job market enhancing various computer skills. I can program a CNC router using Alpha-Cam or MicroVellum and I am also certified in AutoCadd. These skills as well as my ability to read, understand, and translate construction plans are valuable skills, but I never want to work in the construction industry again.

As the talk turned to jobs and what I could do or where I could find jobs I shied away from it. I, like most people, don't like talking about my failings, and I've found the current job market impossible to navigate. Eventually my friend told me that if he had my writing skills he would put them to better use. That a first person account of what it is like to be under employed in post-recession America would be something people would be interested in reading. For lack of a better term it would be real.

Finished

I didn't sit there staring at the final poem or call a friend and tell them i was done. I didn't even post a message on social media. My 100 days of writing project became a private affair and when I finished I kept it to myself, but it was more than that. I had no feeling of relief or accomplishment. I was finished with this large project that I had poured myself into, and yet when I finished I had no feelings about it. I was done and that was it.

I had planned out the final poem for about a month. I had figured out what it would be about and was only waiting for day 100 so that I could write it. Which brings up the question of when is something written. Was this poem really the work of day 100 or was it from day 70? Is a poem written when it is put on paper or when the idea is conceived? I cannot give the answer to that, but if I had to I would say it is the latter. I do most of my writing in my head. Often times the act of putting fingers to keyboard is a final motion. The draft, first revision, and sometimes the second or third revision have already happened in my mind before my index finger makes that first keystroke.

The Best Game I Don't Want to Play

One of the first computer games I ever played was Sid Meier's Pirates, but I never beat the game. I've owned this game on no less than four separate occasions. It was given to me on a floppy disk and then when we owned a computer without a floppy drive I bought it on CD. After that I ended up buying a downloadable version on one of my laptops and finally I bought the iOS version for my iPAD. I've never stopped enjoying the game, but to me the game wasn't about finding the lost sister. It was about being a pirate and taking over the Caribbean for whatever country I was representing.

Now, 26 years after Pirates was first released there is a new pirate game and my feelings about it are much the same. I am talking about Assassin's Creed IV. I've played the game for a bit now and I should be deeper into it than the fifth chapter, but I don't want to play the actual game. I want to roam the Caribbean causing mischief and mayhem. I want to take down ships, improve my ship, and then take down bigger ships. I find the game extremely fun, but the main quest feels like a side adventure in the life of a pirate, and as of right now I've left it far behind me and have spent much more time pillaging and raiding the Spanish Main.

The hallmark of a truly great open world game is that it gives you the freedom to create your own game. All the times I've played Pirate my game was to take over the world. I turned it into a game of Risk with pirates and as of right now I am playing Assassin's Creed IV in much the same way. I don't know what will happen when I have the ship fully upgraded. I am sure I will finish the main quest. It hasn't gotten that intriguing but I am generally curious to see where it goes, and you have to play the main quest to unlock some of the better equipment in the game.

Some of my feeling about the main quest line might be that I enjoyed Assassin's Creed III immensely and the best innovation in that game was the combat. That is gone in IV and Edward Kenway plays much weaker than Conner. Conner flowed through combat and taking down large groups of enemies wasn't much of a challenge. There were more than a few times that my entire play session involved me running through the wilderness reenacting scenes from The Patriot.

I found the combat to be the best part of that game, and that is what I find lacking in IV. With all that being said I think I am going to enjoy IV more as a game. The navel battles and the joy of being a pirate are what make it fun. The Assassin's Creed part of the game feels like it is almost an afterthought, and I am ok with that, because like Sid Meier's Pirates years ago I don't need to even play the game to have fun playing the game.      

The Government Shutdown and the Dystopian Future

The current state of American politics is like something out of a science fiction novel, and not a particularly good one at that. I can almost see a down on his luck writer sitting in the SciFi Network offices pitching this story about how one day the United States government collapsed because they just couldn't get along anymore. The entire point of politics became too much about figuring out which side was more to blame than getting anything done and then nothing got done and before you knew it mountain lions were roaming the streets of Washington DC. In real life there is allegedly a mountain lion roaming the streets of DC.

This is a great symbol for the current state of things as the biggest aspect of the government shutdown so far is that national parks are closed. That means the government has deemed the Grand Canyon closed. Think about for a second. The Grand Canyon is closed. Bull fucking shit it is. The Grand Canyon is huge. private helicopters can still fly over it so people can see it and I am sure hikers could get past whatever flimsy barriers the government has put up. If they really wanted to close national parks they would fill in the Grand Canyon with concrete. Maybe put a strip mall on top of it. Tarp over the waterfall in Yosemite and put a cork in Old Faithful in Yellowstone. Now that is a real shutdown.

Braving Whole Foods

Whole Foods wasn't always the hip trendy hell hole that it is now. It once was called Fresh Fields and it sold all the organic foods and that type of thing but without being overpriced and pretentious. My mother used to like to shop at the Fresh Fields in Springfield for produce because you could find things there that you couldn't get anywhere else. They had star fruit and kiwis and mangos before they became vastly popular and could be found everywhere. They also had a wide variety of melons and other exotic fruits and vegetables. They were basically nothing like they are now. It was mostly the worlds largest produce section. They didn't have much else and definitely didn't have all the growler filling stations of food preparation stands. They were a small operation grocery store offering specialized food that was hard to find at other stores.

Then other gourmet stares started to pop up and they offered all of the produce plus other things. I remember the first time I went into a Harris Teeter I thought it was magical and then I went to a Ukrop's and eventually a Wegman's. Each experience was better than the last, and each store was offering more and more and going to them was more like an event than grocery shopping, and then Whole Foods took it to another level. Fresh Fields was re-branded and was now going to be the organic super store of everything wholesome that would make you and the world healthy, and people bought in. Saying something is organic is a quick an easy way to double the price of anything. Going to other gourmet grocery stores may feel like an event for the shoppers but Whole Foods actually tries to make it an event.