Starting anyway despite myself and despite all the evidence telling me it's pointless. For some reason I thought that this change in scenery might have some effect on my ability to think of things to do or think about but it doesn't seem to be super effective. I sit here in the cool morning air the taste of "Wild" black berries on my breath having picked them after a bike ride. Normally such a ride would be something ... What's the opposite of noteworthy. Mundane, commonplace. But I guess for someone who has spent the last year no make that 2 years not venturing further than the the street in front of the house a good 6 meters if that, it felt a kin to an adventure to come this far from home. The bike was new. I like bikes. Or rather it's safer to say it's a item in the historical record that the love of bikes is embedded into my subconscious. The freedom of movement that the ideal "Bike" provided was something that I found hard to find in any other place or state of being. Bike. But the problem with bikes is that the power source is the human, and the human is awful. Physical exertion has always been a pain. Physical pain, in the bones and muscles. It wasn't pleasant. It never was. And that's all before the sweat. How do people deal with it... I don't know. In my youth (not that I'm too old or anything, I thought defensively at my mental phrasing) while physical exertion still hurt there was more whip-snap to the fast twitch muscle tissue. Tolerance to lactic acid, or more likely a delay to the lactic acid production meant longer before the pain began to set in. Now it is a solid 2 minutes before the burn starts. But what a 2 minutes! It's been little over a week, since the bike had been acquired. The decision to purchase a bike (on loan financed by my parents with whom I live at their expense, to be paid by my girlfriend) had been made a couple weeks prior, and in that time there was quite a bit of flipping around whether to get this or that bike. 3000 dollar budget was decided and loan acquired (6000 total because it turned out my enthusiasm was infectious to persuade my dad that he also wanted a bike. ) for the intention of purchasing an e-bike. 3000 dollars for a bike would put the style well outside the range of low or mid range bikes and well into high end, or a stones throw from near artisan level. But for an e-bike 3000 firmly lands into mid-ish range. I had a specific e-bike in mind however there were some niggles. Not content to compromise with such a large purchase however at the final hour I was convinced by my discontent to do more research. I began looking into a do it yourself build. I had 2 primary criteria which led me to this, 1) I wanted full throttle without pedaling to be an option. This is something that is readily available on many e-bikes at the price point however those all lack the second criteria, which is 2) I wanted the bike to be a decent bike when there was no power. Those which were decent(not great, or even good mind.) bikes all lacked throttle only (and were generally factory limited to 250 watts and 15 or 20 miles per hour. Not that I expect to be going much faster than 15 or 20, because confidence at speeds beyond begins to drop quite drastically. Getting a decent bike that acted as an e-bike with full throttle only and was a decent bike was not hard. All that was required was to have or get a bike which was decent to begin with, then get a motor and battery to attach. Turns out this was easier than I expected in the research department. Although I'm sure I could have done better in terms of price had I purchased the motor kit as separate pars or from a different distributor, but the one I chose to use made it easy. The battery was a place I really didn't want to skimp on and shipping cost included approached 800$ alone. The bike was 1450 because I ended up wanting hydraulic disk brakes and an open triangle frame (which was surprisingly difficult to find locally.) I still don't have the battery but it should be here in 2 weeks or so, at which point the conversion will take place adding the e to my bike. A slightly funny moment occurred at the bike store when I went in to get this one tho. I was sold on it based on reviews and my somewhat arbitrary criteria for specs, but when asked at the store what my intentions were with the bike I was met with the reaction of a closet racist trying to dissuade the black boy from dating his daughter. He pointed at all the e-bikes in the store, he pointed at half the other bikes. Eventually he started talking about the wheel well not being very wide for the motor and how a larger tire would kill a lot of what makes the bike good. This was after a decent 4 minutes or so of constant pressure but I realized the source of concern. No man these are straight edge tats, I don't do drugs, and I went to Stanford. I told him I wasn't going to be using a hub motor at all, and that they were shit. He was confused and asked "But how are you going to make it electric if you aren't going to replace the wheel" and I explained the kind of mid-drive motor that I was planning on using. How it would still be using the normal drive train and wouldn't be putting any super weird stresses on the frame, just "More" in the same places it normally has it. _______________________ I'm gross right now. It's been about a week or so since I last bathed. I know I hate showing daily but I think I might be better off doing it more often than once a week...? Maybe I just need to pass the barrier :p I can feel the sweat around my body tho, and that's the thing that really bothers me. Riding the bike has been fun. I have ridden about 3 or 4 times in the past 5 days. It's much more pleasant than riding without the motor. But idk... I guess the novelty wore off pretty much instantly. When something is going to happen is when I think I want it to happen the most, but once it's happening it just becomes a kind of pain in the ass. I wanted to be able to leave the house and wander around. Get some writing done, but here I am now doing just that and all I can write about is how I intended to be writing, and all I want is to head back home and lay down in bed. I guess right now I'm avoiding home. Last night was kinda annoying. I was sleeping for about an hour or so and my gf woke me up asking me to make some quesadillas I said no and went back to sleep, then she woke me up an hour or so later with the same request... I said no again. She went to sleep after that in a huff, and I guess I feel kind of bad about it. I was unreasonably tired for some reason and didn't care at all about making her happy... So I woke up before her and hopped on my bike and came here. Today was the first time I tried riding my bike bare foot. There was some video I was feeling pretty bitter at where someone was talking about how you should not get hub motors but in drive motors, then proceeded to say that if you want to go that route but don't know enough he can do it because he has a company doing just that. I understand that's pretty much everything on the internet now... It didn't used to be that way... But now it's the overwhelming norm. Everything is an advertisement, everyone be hustling. So I made a comment like "First they convince you you need a thing then they sell you that thing. I guess it pissed someone off, because they responded like "How is it to walk the earth barefoot" Expecting me to say that I don't obviously. But I do generally for the past 2 years or so walk the earth bare foot any time I can get away with it. I don't like shoes. I don't like how they are produced. I don't like how they feel. I have worn shoes when I rode the bike the past little while but I decided I wanted to stop doing that too, because I didn't feel I needed them while on a bike. Honestly the pedals are a bit rougher than they need to be, but it's not like it's painful. The most painful thing is when I walk on the road outside the front of my house. It's like this really rough sharp rock. But it's not unbearable. The heat from black asphalt in summer is also pretty "Bad" but I don't know. Maybe I have abused my feet enough that it doesn't bother me.. Or maybe I just have a relatively high pain tolerance? Regardless it doesn't really hurt. My mom doesn't understand me being barefoot /in the house/ let alone outside. She steps on some small plastic thing she had dropped and is like incapacitated. It's weird to me how weak can a person be? Anyway I responded that I am barefoot and it's great. So that guy retreated back to " but you still have leisure time and are using that on technology produced by capitalism" as if in my ideal world there is no such thing as technology or leisure time... In reality there is more of both as our leisure time is being stolen by manufactured inefficiencies, as is our technology hampered. Of course I use the best this world has to offer in the ways I can to make my world as close to my ideal world as possible. In order to enforce my vision on others it would take massive amounts of money but I don't think anyone really should do that. It's incredible hubris. I don't think throwing ideas out is bad, but maybe even that's something I should look at stopping. If ignorance is happiness education is cruel... __________________ Talked to an acquaintance today. Someone I hold in somewhat high esteem. He is a philosopher. He has created a huge amount of content of various forms about his life and what he has done in nearly real time for the past 10 years or so. I only recently (about a year or so ago) became aware of him and I spent a decent amount of time just becoming familiar with his content his philosophy. Later I reached out to him indirectly to which he responded that I should reach out directly. So I did. Since then we have had somewhat infrequent contact. He is constantly looking for students. Students are hard to find for someone like him. He isn't interested in making his message mainstream consumable even if it would mean a wider audience. Like myself he has had the idea that if someone is interested in the message than the package it is in will not prevent them from finding it. To some degree the aesthetic of professionalism is anathema to the message and it would ring hollow if done in such a format. How can one preach minimalism when surrounded by all the comforts of a complex life? How can one preach individuality while compromising it with status quo? _________________________ I don't know why I am so terminally tired. Constantly. I have slept about 10 or 11 hours each night for the past week or so, and then still wanted to take a nap after that. Additionally I'm super hungry constantly. I hate being so controlled by these physical limitations. Eating might be fun to do, it might taste good, and such but being swayed by the feeling to the point that it overrides my thoughts and intentions... That sucks. That's just the worst. I makes me feel like just a robot, or automaton. Regardless of whether that is true or not the feeling that it's true is hard to deal with. I generally believe that my thoughts and actions are 100% influenced by my environment. There is no "Real me" what I am is what I was made into and I am that thing regardless of any effort on my part. My lack of motivation is just a reaction to this environment as is my distress at my lack of motivation. The fact that I am writing these words now, that's just the universe playing out it's natural course. Of course thinking about this is like some kind of fail safe, when the feeling of being pointless and rote is distressing I can follow this specific line of reasoning and make it back to out of the nihilist void to a place where I'm ok with the fact that the entire universe is going to end and that nothing will ever matter. So lets just ride out the storm doing what we like to do - the thoughts say - nihilism back to hedonism, and then hedonism can transform itself back into a self improvement productive state. Since that's what I've been taught to like. The fact that I'm overweight and eat too much, it's not really a problem if I am totally ok with dying a slow and miserable death, but I am not ok with that. Pain sucks and the kind of slow death that obesity and diabetes brings is no fun.. That's the prime reason to want to change my habits. Being more attractive, that's just more attention, and I hate the attention that I have (in public.. Online I never really cared...) I don't like standing out and being more healthy, being attractive those make you stand out. Better to just be ordinary... But I can't hide behind that forever if I intend to not suffer the physical effects of that habit. From this point, from every point, the oracle can see the twisting dunes of the infinite futures, sometimes hidden sometimes prominent, and by fixating the minds gaze in one direction or another, some realities become more or less likely. The problem is that I have a strong sense for avoiding certain things, but a weak sense for seeking after things. I think this is a pretty common problem (but that may just be my bias speaking). It seems that humans are much more attuned to understand their dislikes rather than their likes. This would make sense from an evolutionary perspective (if we are going to believe in evolution). When something distasteful happens the likelihood of death must have been near, so being attuned sharply to find those "Distasteful" events is a huge benefit. When something good happens it might be a good day, or extra good day, but if it doesn't happen, it's likely not a huge deal. Of course at the extreme a good thing might be simply having enough to eat, where not meeting that criteria does indeed mean death, but generally the lack of good thing is a survivable event, where as the presence of distasteful thing is possibly not. The modern world takes all this evolution based psychology the human creature has (supposedly) developed and turns it on it's head. Food is beyond plentiful in my environment. Death is extremely unlikely from any of the worst things I may encounter on a daily basis. I have to go out of my way to make death even a .0001% likelihood. I guess that's pretty boring. .