Joshua Thorin Messer

I am having a lot of thoughts right now. It’s hard to keep up. This is absolutely an off-topic post, just rambling, more of a personal thing.

I think I’ve become so overweight I can now begin to use the term morbidly as a modifier when describing my condition. I’d decided things where getting out of hand when I tipped 210. Recently the scale has crossed over to 230 and I had a bit of a crisis. That’s really out of hand. It’s absurd. I remember how difficult it was to get up to 160, lo these many years ago. I guess I’ve gotten older and completely instead of mostly sedentary.

Of course there’s more to it than just that. My diet has changed radically, going from lacto-ovo vegetarian (ok, I mostly ate cheese and falafel) to a coke-swilling steak addict. I’ve also learned to love butter in a way that is unsettling to say the least. Let’s not talk about mayonnaise. Well, enough. Having to do something, and not having even the shred of self-discipline needed to get my fat ass to the gym—heck, I don’t want people at the gym seeing me in whale-form—and not having the dough to shell out for a bicycle just now as I’m saving for a trip to Italy in the fall, I decided to do more walking.

I’ve just returned from the first deliberate get less fat walk. Luckily I’m so out of shape a simple stroll around the neighborhood gets me panting and sweating. The heart definitely worked harder than usual. But most importantly, on a simple 1/2 hour walk up into the hilly part of Los Feliz, I encountered:

• 6 Cats
• 4 Dogs (three of them just at the very end of the trip)
• One skunk

I suppose I also came across numerous people, but I see people all the time. The cats were all roaming free, and as an excercise let’s see how many of them I can recall. First was a solid black cat with a black kitten nearby. As far as I could tell, the adult was totally black, but I didn’t check it’s paws really. The kitten had a blaze of white on the chest. They both had medium length fur. Next, quite a bit later, one of those fuzzy orange and cream sorts. This cat was in close proximity to the skunk. I didn’t linger. Nearby, I came across a dark grey cat being run off by another I didn’t get a good look at. I think it might have been kind of tan, but it was dark, and I didn’t get a good look at either of them. I can’t remember anything about the last one except I remember counting it.

The dogs I didn’t pay that much attention to. Two were fenced in, one was actually gazing sagely out the front window, and the last one was, like me, being taken for a walk by it’s uncompromising overlords.