Tag: sugar

Monday Morning Wake-Up Call

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Perhaps we should abandon resolutions, if only to not make ourselves suffer more. One alternate pledge we might take up as we stare down 2025 might be to forgo the upright vows to spend hours on a treadmill or never eat sugar again, and attempt, instead, something like making peace with our own foibles and failures. This does not require us to stop seeing ourselves for the flawed beings that we are; merely to indulge those flawed beings every once in a while, or at the very least to keep their failures in proportion.

As I head into the new year, I have no shortage of opportunities to catalogue my own faults – and if I forget, there’s a chance some of my relatives will do so for me. But I hope to treat them as I might treat an old friend, one whom I can see clearly and still feel a certain warmth towards. There will be no moment in the coming year when any of us, I or you, are unburdened of our defects. Instead, we will keep on being what we have always been: irascible, messy, stubborn, selfish, lazy, impulsive and alive.

— Moira Donegan, from “My new year resolution? Abandon new year resolutions once and for all” (The Guardian, January 2, 2025)

T.G.I.F.: Easily, best news of 2024.

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Thank you Ray for sharing…

T.G.I.F. Oh, so true…

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I acknowledge there is no sweetness
that doesn’t leave a stain
no sweetness that’s ever sufficiently sweet …

— Stephen Dunn, from Sweetness in New and Selected Poems 1974-1994. (via @readalittlepoem)

And most recently, we’ve (aka “I”) been gorging on Brookside Dark Chocolate, Acai Blueberry by the handfuls…and can’t seem to get enough…

Walking. High on Sucralose.

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I walk.

1055 consecutive (almost) days on this daybreak walk at Cove Island Park. Like in a row.

43° F. Spring is in the air.  Heavy fog is lifting.  A runner, a pair of kayakers, the ever present Canada Geese to remind me where I came from, and me.

I walk.

I circle back walking the wind swept shoreline, and there are my footprints, my Heavy imprints.

“You’ve gained a few pounds since your last annual physical.” We’re both masked, she’s looking at me, and my eyes lock in on hers. I don’t bite on the “few pounds” slight, I know exactly how much weight I’ve gained, and I wouldn’t describe it as “few.”

“Could it be triggered by the medication I’ve been taking since December?”

“No chance of that,” she says, the response coming way too fast and way too confident.

There’s a moment or two of silence, my body temperature surging, I’m broiling in shame. I don’t respond. Continue reading “Walking. High on Sucralose.” →

Sunday Morning. Yehi or!

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No, it’s not my morning walk @ Daybreak @ Cove Island Park. Not yet 831 consecutive days, like in a row. It’s too damn early for that. 3 hours and 12 minutes before sunrise, to be precise. And here we are. As Ocean Vuong states in On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous: “Let me begin again.”

I thought about that for a moment. “Let me begin again?” or, “Here we go again?”

2:36 a.m. I snatch the iPhone and check Sleep data: 5 consecutive days < 4 hours sleep. I check the Dark Sky app: Clear skies.

Sully pauses his snoring to open an eyelid. His big brown eye looking through me: What is wrong with you Man? He turns his head, and falls back asleep.

I slip out of bed, head downstairs, my bare feet pattering on the hard wood floors, careful not to trip over myself in the darkness. I step outside, scanning the skies. There you are. Waiting for me.

It’s quiet. No Metro-North train whistles in the distance, the last train passing an hour ago. No dogs barking. No critters scurrying in the shrubs. Just me, and the cool grass under my toes, and my mind whirring.

Continue reading “Sunday Morning. Yehi or!” →