As my 70th birthday draws nearer, I find myself beset with considerable uncertainty. The immediate primacy concerns the daily walking regimen that I have set for myself beginning October 12 ─ I am supposed to begin attempting to reclaim some of my old facility for very extended walks.
As a younger man, I had a strong reputation among family, friends, and acquaintances as someone who would walk many, many miles on any given day ─ I daresay that no one knew even remotely just how much walking I often engaged in.
Of course, back then it was all about the fitness; and when the walking was done during daylit hours, there was also the benefit that accrued from exposure to sunlight.
I definitely want to see a significant increase in my fitness with this new undertaking. However, I am also deliberately engaging some risk-taking, for ultimately I will find myself in parts of Surrey where I might well meet with the threat of serious harm ─ especially since most of my weekday walking would be done in the hours well before dawn, for I abhor the busy bustle of the day.
I can no longer run from danger like I could have done of necessity as a younger man. The detachment (a full avulsion) on November 1, 2010 of my left thigh's quadriceps tendon ─ and the November 5, 2010 surgery to reattach the tendon to my kneecap (patella) ─ robbed me of the proficiency that I still had at running.
I have ever since been too self-conscious to try to relearn how to properly run, for I have nowhere affording me the privacy that I am psychologically unable to dispense with in any prolonged bid to learn how to run once more.
I do not drive, so I have been a prisoner of my environment in all this time.
As for the potential danger I speak of in developing the skill of extended walking, I am putting myself at this risk on purpose. If this debt-crushing life that my retirement has become is all that I am to know, then I would prefer not to be here to experience a 71st birthday.
If God or whatever Creator there may be has indeed written me off, then there really is no purpose in carrying on with a pointless life.
But today's post is not intended for this sort of self-pitying wallow in the mire.
Embarking on these walks may well curb my work on my websites and my blogs.
Where the websites are concerned, each post I make in any one of them in the recent couple or more years takes me at least two weeks of work, with a minimum of around three hours of work on each of the days involved.
Often, I become distracted in that work, and thus I might actually find myself sitting here at my computer for four, five, or even six hours on a daily basis while ─ more or less ─ working on one of those posts.
To illustrate, today I was distracted a few times while researching content for the post I have nearing completion.
The longest distraction came when I happened across an article first published back on March 1, 2002 at TexasMonthly.com and titled The Day Treva Throneberry Disappeared.
In the mid-eighties the cheerful high school student vanished. After more than a decade had passed, her friends and family in her tiny North Texas hometown of Electra had no idea where she was—or if she was dead or alive. They certainly didn’t know that almost two thousand miles away her fate was kept secret by a teenage girl named Brianna Stewart.
How could I resist an article like that? And it was long and detailed!
Upon finishing reading it, I then had to research to see if there was anything more recent concerning the extremely bizarre case.
The last report concerning Treva Throneberry / Brianna Stewart apparently involved events that took place in 2016 ─ my relatively brief search turned up nothing of more recent vintage, alas.
If Treva still lives, she is now 50 years old; and she would surely be looking very much that age.
I haven't anything else I care to talk about in this post, apart from reporting that for the third consecutive day, I gave up a plank after holding it for several seconds beyond nine minutes.
I had risen around 2:00 a.m. after retiring just ahead of 10:00 p.m. last evening, but not easily finding sleep.
I rose to work on my latest website post, but broke around 4:30 a.m. to tackle that plank.
I think that I was back in bed by approximately 5:15 a.m.
Naught else today is worth speaking about.
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