Mere 59 minutes from the sunset safety of that last fast's Night Three, the tempestuous tentacles of food lashed out upon my foot, pulling my soul as my fingers anxiously grasped for the lifeline of the deep, foreign forest, those nightwoods of satiety safety.

It wasn't the first time I have fallen off the wagon. As anyone who has campaigned into and through this foreign forest can attest, lightning raids happen. The body contrives its own maligned logic to woo me with the forbidden fruit. When I am backing away from my weakest, it strikes. It's not when I am at my weakest. When I am at my weakest, I have a battle-hardened focus as I breathe the moment. It is only when I back away and lose my vision am I prone to fail. Paradoxically and a little Orwellian or Pauline, with fasting, in weakness, I am strong.

I fired up the Wayback Machine to revisit some old sites of mine, hoping to see if it indexes images lost by hard drive failures and careless Linux installations. I read what I wrote 16 years ago—stylistically, there was an obvious lack of em dashes, ellipses, and semicolons. I approached my audience a little different in those days and there are things I that the last sixteen years have taught me.

However, I was reminded how in all of those past years, there have been many fast attempts. Some hit their mark; others failed—ok, most were categorical failures. I invested a lot of thought and emotional stamina in their pursuit. Sometimes, it can come off a bit like Groundhog Day. My motivations have been the same whether 2018 or 2008. Will I be doing this in 2028?

A perspective I've actualized is while our bodies slide into entropy, we remain who we are, albeit one that grows less in tune to the parameters of pop culture...clearly, we are linear creatures and I'll plop down here William Blake's Songs of Innocence and of Experience.

No, I won't be doing this in 2028. All of what I have been doing in all these years, leads up to this very point in my history. All those epics fasts of the past, my first fast at 28 days in 2003, the 29 day in 2006, the 4+26 in Europe in 2012, the 22-day in Alaska in 2013, and all the single and double digit ones along the way that don't immediately come to mind, intersect at this point.

I use this reset as an opportunity to change elements of my approach and this website. Instead of a different album genre each night, I am running three: Nightscape (3 nights), Epic Existence (2 nights), and Dealer's Choice (2 nights). I also want to bring to the top the things I am doing, so that it can be a quick-to-access status page. I won't update the dates of my past posts to incorporate into this new fast. They are a reminder that when I am stronger, failure lurks in the shadows.

So let's go: the sun has dropped below the horizon and there's the road before us with the city in the distance.