the completed suite

I spend the major part of every day now doing things that are beneficial for me. The list includes right exercise, right food, rest, and household maintenance.

This is partly informed by a need to make up for all the years when I spent the major part of every day doing things which were destructive and catabolic for me. These included working a job in which I was under constant stress, eating very little, and eating the wrong things, smoking, and until 1994, being intoxicated.

That year I declared a personal fatwa on all mind-altering substances. Or so I thought, because the fact is nicotine and caffeine are mind-altering, and anyone who tells you different is blowing smoke at himself. But I digress.

So today, after an early haircut from the world's most beautiful barber (I really should get it cut more often), I went to the club here in Point Utopia to do my new thing, the cardio workout and lifting. The stationary bike and treadmill are boring and a pain, but nobody can argue with the way they make you feel afterward.



Strip away the mayonnaise, lettuce, and excuses and life becomes very simple. Instead of eating pizza, which is bad for us, eat something that's actually good for a body instead -- something green, or bright orange. Instead of doing what's not good for a person -- lying around the house in the dirt being bored, for example -- do that which furthers: yoga and cardio workouts.

I didn't begin to learn any of this until 2007, when I was already past 60, and when my last wife and femme finale kicked me out. It started with a thought: "I wonder if I'd feel better if I ate an orange every day?" and ended in a condominium in Point Utopia, in the enchanted coastal rain forest of Washington state.

I wonder how many others besides me experienced tectonic shifts in their lives in 2007, the seventh year of a new century and new millennium.