This blog, with its weird name, has been running for a couple of years. I wanted to move away from the obsessiveness of another blog, Big Decade. which preoccupied me for five years from my 60th birthday. Now, on my 67th birthday, after what they euphemistically label a “health scare,” I need to complete the ten years of that decade. So I won’t post here any more (at least until…
I jotted in my journal this morning: “My concentration levels this morning were superb. I can do this!” The last six days have been of this ilk. The reason? Rising at 5 AM. Such an early morning can feel rough at first but I sleep better and the day goes blink, blink, blink, each segment fit for purpose.
After my brother had a health scare (a quadruple bypass) a few weeks ago, I went back to a referral, tossed aside, for a CT-CA scan, one that gives a “calcium score,” a measure of how much calcification of arteries I might have. A week and a half ago, the resultant calcium score of 591 (“moderate risk” is 101-400) sent me scrambling to obtain a triaged appointment with an…
There are plenty of ra-ra-ra motivational gurus around but the only one I listen to is Steven Pressfield, a consummate novelist but also author of seven “how to write: craft and motivation” books. His latest, which I’ve just begun reading, is Put Your Ass (Where Your Heart Wants to Be), and it is exactly what it sounds like … and genuinely stimulating. Pressfield also has…
Today a CT-CA heart scan gave me a calcium score of 591, at 70% of the risk spectrum for a heart attack (I’m as yet unsure of prospective timing in that judgement). I’m reeling but am forewarned early. Whatever happens now does indeed represent turning over a new leaf (another cliche). Tomorrow: begin confronting the news.
I’m writing about the formation of the International Atomic Energy Agency in 1957, on the back of a huge Geneva conference in 1955. I’m reading aloud Amor Towles’s The Lincoln Highway, America a year earlier. And I realized: I was born during that Geneva conference.
Every cafe-cum-home should have one.
Melbourne winter is mild, not all that cold really and not beset with fog, and my friends laud clear-sky, crisp days, but I’ve always hated the three months of dreary cold. Chilblains, that’s what I endure. Over the past half decade, I’ve managed to find a way to spend at least a strategic fortnight in warmer climes, but not this year. The most challenging aspect of winter for…
My gym: Visions Fitness Centre. I’ve been going there seven years. Today I went early and had a tough session because I’d fasted yesterday, but, amazingly, at the end of it, I realized I thoroughly enjoyed it. Second thought: this is the first time I’ve enjoyed it, in all those years! For seven years I was obedient. I went. I lifted and stretched and grizzled. Why am I…
This is a poor photo from our balcony and the point of it is that was taken when the world was still dark. Lately, I’ve been sleeping in until 7 AM, enjoying warmth and ease, but the result has been short days and a feeling of despair (among many sources of negative thoughts these days). I’m now down to see a therapist to clarify why, amidst a blessed life, a little shadow has crossed…