Maybe I should receive threats more often

So last night I went to the gym, and what an amaz­ing dif­fer­ence some good (or bad) moti­va­tion can do! It was unbe­liev­able. For a while after Vik­ki and I split I would watch myself in the mir­ror telling myself I was build­ing the body SHE CAN’T HAVE. Which was great. It kept some fire in me and I made some pret­ty decent progress in a short while.

This tech­nique helped a lot of things. One of the rea­sons that Vik­ki said that she did­n’t want to be with me was because I was such a fat­so. I’ve learned to not take any of what Vik­ki said at face val­ue; she seemed to have some trou­ble being hon­est with me, but the point is that trans­form­ing my body helped me to heal a lot of the bad feel­ings I had about myself about my body. And mut­ter­ing to myself to keep me moti­vat­ed along those lines was mucho helpful.

The trou­ble is, as time went on, I start­ed to have big­ger prob­lems in my life than Vik­ki, and I have a body that is accept­able. I don’t look the way I’d like to look, but after drop­ping a quar­ter of my body mass it’s pret­ty much time for me to be focused on adding mus­cle rather than los­ing fat. The thing is, that I don’t have that insane pang of shame when I look in the mir­ror as much, and that whole line of stuff does­n’t work as a moti­va­tor the way it did. Also, while Vikki’s loss is still present in my con­scious­ness, it’s more like a bit­ter taste in my mouth than the pick­axe stick­ing out of my chest which it used to be. So using the «Vik­ki can’t have this body» mantra isn’t doing what it used to. Con­se­quent­ly, I’ve been slack­ing off at the gym, only going once a week and some­times skip­ping that once. Since I go so long between work­outs, I strug­gle to keep up with the lev­els I had reached instead of adding on and doing more.

Then Sun­day, some anony­mous shit­head sent me that threat­en­ing post (check respons­es for a cou­ple days ago). Unfor­tu­nate­ly, I had IP log­ging off, but I’ve fixed that now. Even know­ing that some­one who would sent an anony­mous threat is a cow­ard­ly puke who would­n’t ever dare come after me, there’s fear and adren­a­line that comes with that. Just nat­u­ral­ly, my fight-or-flight instincts kick in, and no amount of know­ing that the lamer is harm­less will alle­vi­ate it.

So I get into the gym and while I was warm­ing up on the tread­mill I maxed the tread­mil­l’s speed twice for over 90 sec­onds each time (I do inter­vals on the tread­mill. I fig­ure that as long as I’m doing some­thing as lame as run­ning in place, I might as well take advan­tage of the con­trol I have over the pace). I was watch­ing myself, look­ing into my own eyes and think­ing over and over, «you’ll need to hit a mov­ing tar­get, ass­hole, and this one can hit back. Bet­ter take me out in one shot.» and stuff like that. I did 25% more «dis­tance» on the tread­mill than the last time I was there in about the same time.

The rest of the work­out was the same. I upped my old lim­its on the machines and burned through sets. I did­n’t try to push any lim­its on the freeweights since I did­n’t have a spot­ter, but I usu­al­ly don’t do freeweights at all with­out a spotter.

I breathed through my nose as much as pos­si­ble, one of the — well, actu­al­ly pret­ty much the only one — advan­tages of the surgery I had this spring is that I can get more air in through my nose. The phrase entered my head, «sur­gi­cal­ly enhanced for opti­mum per­for­mance,» and I envi­sioned myself as some dime-store sci-fi char­ac­ter. I guess that’s the appeal of tran­shu­man­ism, but I don’t think I’ll take it any further.

That line made it onto a poem I wrote on BART. I’m real­ly appre­ci­at­ing hav­ing the New­ton with me all the time. I’ve been able to jot down a lot of stuff to use lat­er. I guess a 79 cent note­book could serve the same pur­pose, but what the hell.

It was great talk­ing to Dan last night. Good to be clear on a lot of things.

One thing I real­ized yes­ter­day that may have an impact on my depres­sion is that since I’ve been stay­ing with Des­tiny my prayer and med­i­ta­tion prac­tices have fall­en off. I don’t have any real pri­va­cy here and I guess I’m a lit­tle embar­rassed to do some of this stuff while he’s here.

There’s some per­fec­tion­ism mixed in with it too. My med­i­ta­tion rou­tine includes chant­i­ng, and I real­ly don’t feel com­fort­able chant­i­ng while Des­tiny is here. But I can med­i­tate with­out chant­i­ng, and I can cer­tain­ly pray with­out chant­i­ng. There’s no good rea­son for me to have dropped the prac­tice off entire­ly. Clos­ing myself off from my high­er pow­er has not proven to be a par­tic­u­lar­ly use­ful strat­e­gy in the past.