desire and avoidance

A very active day today, smashing the pedo record with over 18000 steps, and very heavy steps too some of them, left the house at nine am, got home after eight pm, the whole day spent shifting Karen into her new La Luna house, loading trailers, guiding the route of whitegoods and wardrobes, while noting and wondering at the splendid growth of tomatoes and cos lettuces. I felt better for it too at the end, useful and relaxed and communitarian. None of this is going to help my belly though, sorry to dwell on this but it needs special exercising.

Returning to yesterday, also a physical day, I’ve done the bulk of ripping up Sarah’s super-rampant potato vine, and thrown most of the vines over into my yard. My vague idea was to mulch all this stuff, though it’d take ages to do so manually so I’m thinking of buying a shredder. Can’t really afford it of course. And with the shredder, starting a compost pile. Just a simple ‘cold’ pile at first, till I develop expertise and confidence. Will I need a bin? Not necessarily, but it’s perhaps neater. Try to ensure a mixture of nitrogens (grass and manure) and carbons (leaves, dried hay, twigs), and if you’re creating a ‘hot’ pile, the ratio should be as much as 30 to 1 carbon to nitrogen. No mention, very surprisingly, of adding soil to the mix. Anyway, composting and mulching will be big-time outdoor activities for me from now on.

My most recent New Scientist informs me that there’s ‘astounding variation in response to exercise’, with a minority apparently obtaining no benefit in terms of fitness. This seems incredible, but for now I’ll assume I’m not in that, surely tiny, minority. After being put through a strict 20-week endurance training program, 742 volunteers, many of them related (so they looked at genes too), improved their maximum oxygen consumption (just the sort of area in which I need to improve) by an average 17%. However there was a sliding scale from ‘most trainable’, which is to say most subject to improvement through exercise, and least trainable. The most trainable got a forty-plus percent improvement, the least trainable got nowt.

You pass by behind her, silently, she’s bending over searching for something, retrieving something from her car, your eyes graze over the exposed flesh of her lower back, capillaries just beneath the surface, slight discolorations, – but what is the right colour? – folds of fat. She’s no spring chicken. But these features are not familiar to you, it’s all unexplored territory, full of new occasions for devotion, you’re delighted to revel in a body others would encounter with indifference, but you know you can never express this fervour, or can you? Face it, you’ve never really given up, that would be death. And you feel very much alive, and focused, utterly concentrated in your desire. And you revel too in your ability to hide all this, to seem indifferent, to pique her sense of wonder, her endless desire to be desirable, it’s this that enfolds you in hope, flimsy and pathetic though it might be…