Pork Belly—Fire to My Soul!
Monday, December 12, 2022
As the clock ticks down 2022, I consider again returning to Facebook and connecting with friends...again. It's sad when I think that friends only exist in a virtual space. Just avatars. If I may apply the Goo Goo Dolls here, "Don't it make you sad to know that life is more than who we are?"
And a part of me is fearful of what I may find there. Who now parrots what is said from the cool kids table? And today our society seems to promote such outlandish things; it would break my heart to hear the same from my friends—who are they trying to impress?
I guess I ought to check again, but I still haven't seen that scoreboard in the sky.
That's the thing I really love about the Bible, somebody like Paul says something 2,000 years ago and he might as well be sitting in my living room.
Morality aside, I know music today is AWFUL if artists pushing 80-years-old are filling up arenas! Gosh, that would be an 18-year-old me in '96 rocking out to an Andrew Sisters' gig, a packed house swaying to some Boogie Boogie Bugle Boy or Pistol Packin' Mama! I mean, Mick Jagger is 79; Steven Tyler is 74; and Paul Stanley is 70. Sorry kids, but this is whatcha get with the pretty people.
And may that be the segue to my running through the albums of all these years...
Those questions that were 2004 began to be answered in 2005. I picked up another salaried job and eloped to Vegas that year. While my interest in mainstream current music had been circling the drain for several years leading up to 2005, it was that year it drained empty. As 2006 arrived and I found myself in Arizona, I began to explore better music at ages 28 and 29; I listened to a lot of The Cure, The Smiths and as a carryover from my Cornerstone Festival experience in 2004, there was an armload from the Christian indie scene. There were bands like...
...Cool Hand Luke with its moving, Nobody Hugs a Rose:
...The 77s—I'd put Ba-Ba-Ba-Ba against any of that era:
...mewithoutYou; their two first albums, are among my favorites across genres as I LOVE their lyrics, including Wolf Am I:
...if you want the Christian band equivalent of getting into a 70s Trans-Am, try Disciple's Shine Down:
...then there was Demon Hunter, a band whose "slow/soft" songs I adore, songs like One-Thousand Apologies and this one, The Tide Begins to Ride:
There were plenty more, Anberlin, Emery, The Wedding, House of Heroes...well, it could go on. I was in Arizona, but never fitting in...I was doing lone wolf tech support at a resort...my sister and her husband began to fade away from me...my Mom was moving on with her life with new suitors. I just thought of Tennessee and the way things should be...
Fitness Update
I continue to be surprised how this VR approach makes for an engaging while challenging workout. On Saturday, my sweatshirt had its back literally soaked with sweat. I did hit in excess of 200 BPM at one point, remarkable as I only have two controllers in my hand! I'm gonna have to dial things down a little; but, hey, it underlines that my will is there!
On my Fitness page, I reference my strategy. I gotta admit that Les Miles segment does wonders! This past week, each day I repeated its Full Body Blast, 25 minute intermediate workout. It's a good grab bag of stuff to do and I was fortunate that each day, I was able to beat the prior day's success. Yesterday, I kicked off something new with the 20-minute Complete Knockout intermediate program followed by an advanced, six-minute routine with Box Flex.
And lastly, I have ended my romance with bacon...sorta. I have moved on to pork belly! OK, so they're related. As I write this in the early hours, I have 4.7 lbs of the stuff cooking via sous vide at 165 for 10 hours. It'll help offset the copious amount of Kerrygold I now ingest!