Chapter 255

I woke up around 9 and chilled for a bit, then headed to the gym. I paid for my yearly membership then hit the weights, since we have to pay for the new gym might as well maximize my investment by using their weight room and supplement my BJJ training. I’ll have to be a bit careful and progressively implement this, I’m not getting younger.

I did a push workout, and my bench press is still weak as piss. I’d been doing push-ups for years and my chest got a bit bigger, but I’m still stuck around 155 pounds for flat bench. Ah well, gotta keep working on it. The big Kazakh showed up and spotted me, then went on the treadmill. It felt pretty good to be in a proper weight room again, especially one that was very quiet on a Sunday late morning.

Then I got home, and relaxed for the rest of the day. I watched a four-hour documentary about the history of the Seattle Mariners, a team that has had some of the absolute greatest players in the past three decades on its roster but due to bad decisions, sheer bad luck or some quirky seattleness, they never got a championship. It started a bit slowly, but then it hit its stride and it was a fascinating watch and made me fall in love with baseball again. Well, I never stopped loving baseball, but I also haven’t followed for many years and don’t think I could name a single current player. There are some implicit messages about the magnificient stories of triumph and the rock bottoms that the team and its players hit over the years, and you walk away from the documentary understanding why people care about sports so much.

I also stumbled upon a short segment from a recent Trump interview, and he seemed healthy and well-rested. He was also extremely funny, his comedic timing and wit is something to behold. When asked whether he thinks Joe Biden is going to reach the end of his term, Trump took the high road and said it’s not appropriate to speculate on this, and commented in an acerbic but surprisingly classy (by Trump’s standards) about Biden’s dementia. He said “I know Putin, I know Xi, I know Kim Jong-Un, these men are at the top of their game. But when you have Biden going to meet heads of state and his wife has to call “Joe... Joe... JOE!!! Joe, come here!”, well, it’s not a good look” Regardless what you think about the man and his possible 2024 run, can you say he’s wrong?

I took a long walk with the dog, enjoying the pleasant windy weather. I was almost home when something caught my eye, there are two old apartment buildings just north of my complex, they have been vacated, gutted and left to rot pretty much since I came here. Now, they started demolishing them, a process that will take a few days or weeks. One was half-collapsed and the site wasn’t fenced, just blocked with a dump truck parked sideways, and completely unattended. I walked in and wandered around the enormous piles of rubble and cracked concrete structures with iron rods poking out for a bit, it was cool as shit.

I had a limoncello and went to bed fairly early.