The trades we make for the gifts we gather

September is hot here in Cuenca, even at 8600’ altitude. Hot for this part of the Andes is above 70F; surprisingly sweaty. Normally my USA brain would be expecting slightly cooler mornings.

I’m old enough to recall when September meant you pulled your high leather boots out in preparation for more frosty mornings. That’s old.

These days we’re lucky to be in boots by mid-October, if the world has stopped burning by then. It burns here too, out in the higher country where the seco (the dry) torches the grass and the trees cry for rain.

Normally I’d be consuming all the preseason and early season football games. Mothers’ milk to me, as my father was Washington’s first TV announcer. Nope.

Here mornings are cool, but not frosty. My apartment has no heating or cooling, as many homes here don’t unless built by or for gringos who cannot seem to deal with more than a two-degree difference in temperature.

A fan controls the afternoon temperature, blows Mika hair EVERYWHERE, and a space heater struggles to warm the main rooms when I wake up around 4 am. These changes invite a very different set of habits.

For example, I now cook in the mornings. The little gas stove quickly warms the kitchen while the apartment fills with the smells of roasting cashews, broccoli soup or chicken thighs in olive oil. Today it was fresh asparagus in butter.

I’ve not cooked in decades. The biggest effort I used to make was to open a bag of prewashed lettuce and pile on the toppings. (These days in America you can’t trust anything prewashed or otherwise). Here, the house is full of good smells at 5 am as I prep for the day.

Fresh fruit and vegetables are six minutes away uphill at Don Antonio’s, an open-window market that has been supplying this Cuenca neighborhood for decades.

My landlady (dueña) introduced me, and now Don Antonio welcomes me warmly as I open my big Osprey backpack for papayas, lemons, pineapple, broccoli, corn, grapes and whatever else is fresh.

Because I was introduced through a trusted customer, Don Antonio makes sure that if I order six papayas, he hand-selects papayas that are in varying stages of ripeness so that they won’t spoil. If I want a pineapple, the ones in the front, with a little brown, won’t do.

He finds me a pineapple big enough to feed six people, with another eight hours to go before peak flavor.

I’ve learned the hard way to curb my enthusiasm for buying one of everything, because untreated produce doesn’t last long here. You eat what you buy within a few days or it’s compost. A great lesson in cooking and prepping fresh, every single day.

The last time I did that was when I grew up on a farm, and my mother sent me to the garden for tomatoes and cucumbers. Nothing else tastes like that.

When I traveled to other countries where passion fruit was common, I used to love to buy passion fruit yogurt. Overseas it’s made with far too much sugar. Here I load up on grenadilla, which is the sweeter local version of passion fruit, and stevia, and mix it with full-fat unsweetened yogurt.

Even better, the local supermarkets have packets of frozen fruit pulp which make creating your own fruit yogurt a breeze:

There are a few fruits here whose decidedly different flavors and textures I don’t care for, but most, loaded with all kinds of vitamins, are part of everyday fare. Eating like this hasn’t just changed my body. I have more energy than should be legal and have zero need for sweets.

On days when I am really, really lucky, my dueña Sole drags me into the house when there is soup. There are few things Ecuadorians are better at concocting. I could exist solely on a soup diet. In the big house kitchen, where I often will drop off a mango in exchange for a few eggs or leave Sole a handful of extra limes for the houseguests, there is always something cooking.

The smells are to die for, and every so often I time an entrance so that I get place at the big table to join in.

I am still struggling to parce a full sentence together in Spanish that’s longer than “I go to fruiteria now.” That said, my Ecuadorian family gives me firsthand lessons in following a conversation based almost exclusively on tone of voice and facial expressions.

There are disappointments, as there always are. The river walk where I take Mika two or three times a day has been completely denuded of leaf cover and flowers. I suspect it’s because it will grow back fast, but entire trees were cut to the ground. The flowers whose scent masked the unmistakable stink of human urine and fecal matter are all gone, the grass is now straw and for me, the walk is significantly downgraded.

At least the wildlife that thrives along the river doesn’t seem to care. The ducks have their chicks and Mike is mesmerized by the tiny balls of yellow fluff.

Es la vida. Not mine to complain.

The beautiful architecture that makes Cuenca what it is is disappearing fast. The old haciendas and grand homes that dotted the original hills are now behind high gates, most have decayed badly and all are likely for sale to developers.

The outer neighborhoods have largely succeeded in protecting their houses.

Gringo housing/huge condo towers have wiped entire neighborhoods of all the original homes. Near me, the old homes are often repurposed just as they are everywhere. The cost of plumbing, electrical wiring in these ancient homes is too much for the occupants, whose extended families - mostly the kids- want the developers’ cash and a condo in the gringo highrises.

It isn’t until much later, after we have sold off the very thing that makes a place a place, that we come back and wonder what the hell we were thinking. We weren’t. All that history, leveled to the ground to make developers richer.

It’s all over the world, including in Nepal where the flood made small work of the Chinese developments.

It takes a minute to learn the less familiar rhythms of life here. Ecuadorians are very noisy people, and they’re also terminally late, which is why they are always speeding, and why you do NOT assume right of way. It’s who gets there first.

Taxis are everywhere. Most are honest and some will take you the long way. On Sundays when I want to shop at the malls, I have to walk to the nearest mall to get a taxi to go to another mall. Otherwise you will stand on the street waving at bright yellow cars for hours on certain days and at certain times.

If it’s raining, plan to walk everywhere. Taxis are impossible, as they are all over the world when it’s raining. Here, the women put so much time into their hair, nails, eyelashes, clothing and makeup that rain is a disaster. So, Goretex and good shoes for those of us who don’t mind the puddles.

Speaking of shoes, I landed here with a brand new pair of Keen hiking boots and Hoka runners. The Keens, which are Goretex, began to crack recently from all the walking. While they are still under the one-year guarantee, sending them to the USA and getting them back would be equivalent to the cost of a new pair.

Here we have something called La Rapida, which is best known for shoe and leather repairs as well as clothing alterations. I took my Keens to them. Two days and forty bucks later I had a pair of repaired boots which looked almost brand-new.

Of course the Goretex is compromised but I have silicone spray. They also repaired a big hole in my riding breeches. It’s imperfect but you can barely tell that a repair had been done.

It’s fair to say that stores like these are sorely needed in the USA, where we throw things away willy-nilly, we rape the world for resources to make more and think nothing of piling our trash in other countries for them to manage.

Just saying. Not that there isn’t waste here, but when taxi drivers get $1.50 minimum for a trip, it puts repairs into perspective. Not only do these shops keep extremely busy but their talented hands do a terrific job of making older things nearly new again.

Then there’s market day. Feria Libre is a sprawling, massive area dedicated to everything you could possibly hawk to another human being (okay, within limits). From clothing to hardware to fresh fish and everything in-between, it’s a visual party, noisy as hell and serious fun.

Some days are crazier than others, and you’re wise to know where you wallet is.

Sole and I spent an hour there today; this is where you go to stock up. The nut and fruit “gorp” I make is considerably less pricey when I head to this mass of humanity, cars, noise and bargains. In Oregon, I can drop up to $25 a pound for raw shelled pistachios. Here, $16.00. Huge raw pecan halves are $10 a lb here, vs. about twice that on average in the States.

So we loaded up my backpack while I merrily followed Sole, who cooks for guests who stay in the empty rooms in the big family house where I live.

By the time we were done, I was a burro de carga, if you will, loaded front, sides and back with bags of heavy fruit, yucca, potatoes, grapes, nuts enough for a million squirrels and enough aural and visual stimulation to last me a few weeks.

Those of you who have traveled are familiar with these markets. The night markets in Asia are famous for their endless variety. I am in love with this part of the world for the colorful fruit alone.

There are things I don’t much like here. To say that I am disappointed by that would be patently dishonest. Paradise has its snakes and thorns, and you show up expecting them or be a fool.

I frankly don’t care much for the general gringo community, a comment that made my Ecuadorian primary care doctor crack up. He understands why. He treats lots of my peers here, and he hears their complaints.

What they complain about is largely what I love. The extraordinary challenge of struggling through a new language while also dealing with the very real grief of a big move from your mother country.

The frustrations of incomprehensible social rules, which most gringos chose to complain about rather than be curious to understand.

The lack of civic engagement, such as groups that clean graffiti off these precious ancient buildings, cleanup done mostly by gringos, and the lack of the sensitivity to things like litter and dog and human waste in public spaces.

Some find these things unfathomable irritants. The lack of a postal system is enough for some to say that they couldn’t live here. To my mind there are worse crimes. Somehow people seem to get all the information they’re supposed to. And all the goodies they order.

If the country had the resources and infrastructure to deal with all these gripes, most economic escapees would have to move to another, poorer country.

My Ecuadorian family does not yet know that I just got my temporary visa status yesterday.

SSSSSSSHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH.

DON’T YOU DARE TELL.

Because here, absolutely everything is an excuse to dress up in a tiara and a long slinky dress and your best makeup. So I did some sleuthing to find out what they love best- sweets, which are THE best gift- and I am going to stage a celebration. Then present them with my visa paperwork.

They adore surprises. Better yet if icing or chocolate are involved. Above all if a beloved person is involved.

It’s going to be a big deal. IS a big deal. Because they will know that now I am serious about sticking around for a while. That family is the primary reason I have felt at home here. I’ve had that decision reinforced daily.

So now I’m legal, for the next 21 months.

When I found out yesterday afternoon and my visa guy and I headed downtown to pay for yet more notarized paperwork, I was physically and emotionally exhausted.

It’s quite impossible to describe the level of stress you carry knowing that the government could say no to you for any reason and at any time, and everything you just did was for naught.

They said yes, so now my To-Do list just went off the charts. I come back to Oregon, crate my art, organize an international shipment while fuel costs have already changed the departure port twice and the costs have skyrocketed.

Life goes on. Es la vida.

Today marks three months exactly since I left Portland with my pupper for Ecuador. I now know that the city Cuenca is not where I want to live. I’m going to be leaving for the countryside eventually.

Maybe even in a house owned by a family friend. A 65 year-old-widow who needs the money and has a home in an area I already love. See how that works? Family and community are everything.

Gringos are paying increasingly high rents by using gringo-facing realtors. I’m going through my beloved family. Something will work out. And if it benefits a family member or friend, that will make me even happier.

These three months have given me extraordinary insight and information on next steps, and the beginning of a plan.

Above all, I came here for community. I found it in this family. This fun, funny, ridiculously smart, well-educated and vast family with these three people at its core. Here we’re celebrating Agustin’s birthday at my favorite table.

I gave up football season. I got family.

I’m playing.

Thanks as always for your patience. I had two huge deadlines these past weeks, and am now gearing up for another series of projects to move my stuff to Ecuador. Then the house hunt, buy a car, all the things. None of it is easy. All of it is worth it. Please consider

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The lies we tell ourselves, and the terrible cost we pay

Dear Reader: I dipped into my older articles from a few years ago. These past two weeks I’ve had big deadlines and two big articles to write. I’m almost done but I wanted to repost this because lately, I’ve been shopping again. This time, with a very different agenda. I love designer clothing, but where I now live in Ecuador there are almost no places to wear it, there are few stores selling it, and you look almost ridiculous walking around in clothing more expensive than some people’s mortgages. That said, there are a few fine times for dress-up, like last night’s birthday dinner for my landlord’s husband. It’s been fun shopping again after dropping twenty unwanted pounds. That said, my closets here are so tiny that you really can’t overdo it. And that’s a gift. This piece was originally published March 17, 2022, while I was still living in Oregon. I’ve updated parts of it for relevance.

I leave for the coast in about an hour. Breakfast in Florence, then I am going hiking with a brand new friend and her very large half-Rottie, who apparently likes me a lot.

Before I do that, though, I have been schlepping some thirty pairs of shoes and boots to a staging area, the guest bedroom. On March 25th, those shoes (with BIG designer names) along with 45 pieces of absolute tippy-top designer clothing, will be loaded into my Honda for a drive to Portland. There, Stacy from the online consignment site The Real Real will be taking my Fake Designer Lifestyle off my hands.

It’s a huge first step, final step after years of buying clothing I never wore for a lifestyle I never led, and costing myself endless fortunes in time, money and despair.

I have more to do. But by the time my beloved fashionista friend Sonja arrives on April 8th, the wardrobe she knows will have been reduced to a minute sliver of its former self. This is how this all started.

I once had eight wardrobes of clothing crammed so tightly it was impossible to get a finger between the hangers. Two hundred and fifty pairs of shoes and boots. Umpteen scarves, hundreds of pieces of jewelry. I had to buy a bigger house JUST for my clothing alone. Really? Yep. Really.

This is what a shopping Jones looks like. I have a tendency to develop Obsessive-Compulsive Disorders. This was one of many. Those of us who had predatory family members and/or a history of sexual abuse know this story.

What the fuck was I thinking?

You aren’t. You’re scratching a never-ending itch.

I once made fun of my Depression-era father who, when the local news announced that there would be a toilet paper shortage, cleared off the entire row of TP at his local Kroger store to line the inside of my folks’ tiny retirement apartment. That was funny.

At least that particular compulsion was cheap. Designer clothes aren’t. My hoarding just cost a great deal more.

But this is much bigger than simply hoarding clothing. Stripping away the fancy duds also reveals the lies that I bought hook, line and sinker from the moment I first noticed how fashionable my mother was, wanted to be, and tried hard to maintain as she aged.

Like all insecure adolescents, I completely sucked in all the available messaging in magazines which featured rail-thin girls in fabulous clothing and shoes. I imagined, as the ads sold, that if I dressed like that, looked like that, I would be worthy of love. Have friends, be popular, blah blah blah.

As I have written elsewhere, I eventually lost a ton of weight, and suddenly I really could wear that kind of clothing. So I threw myself into fashion the same way I go full-bore into everything.

I became an expert shopper, finding very high-end designer stuff at 75–80% off or more, and dressing like I made $500k a year.

One extremely funny incident came out of that: during a year when I barely made $17k BEFORE expenses, I showed up at a conference wearing a Givenchy jacket I had scored at a discount house down in Tucson for $100. It had originally priced at close to $4000.00.

How can ANYONE justify such a price? But I digress.

Duly impressed and utterly fooled by the fakery, one man, who had by that time written many books on diversity, took my card and sent me boxes of his books, begging me to hire him. He was likely making easily twenty times what I was making. This is the cost of being inauthentic. I later found it funny, but I felt exposed.

Should have felt exposed. Because like so many of us who spend way too much money to LOOK rich, I did look rich, and it actually cost me a lot of money. People demanded that I speak for free when for years I was having a rough time paying myself a salary. I dressed like I made seven figures a year. That is just one of the costs of such dishonesty.

Robin Williams would have a field day with such idiocy. I do now, but back then it was serious business.

I learned this mostly from my mother, who was a high-society girl. She married my father, full of dreams, and ended up a poor chicken farmer’s wife in Central Florida. Yet she felt strongly about putting up a good front, as she called it, which was another way of saying how disappointed she was in her conditions. She dressed beautifully, spoke well, knew six languages.

She wanted people to believe her life was perfect. That she wasn’t dirt poor.

Like we all do.

Social media and Instagram culture feeds this most human of compulsions, to be able to show off a life that looks incredible to get the envy of our friends, even as we spend our way to the poor house. A Caddy outside a tumbledown shack, a Louis Vuitton handbag worth an entire mortgage payment that you can barely make as it is.

We are so easily manipulated. I sure was. After incest, sexual abuse and rapes, the blame society loves to place at the feet of victims encouraged me to cover everything up with gorgeous clothing, shoes and jewelry.

It doesn’t matter how pretty the paint if the house has foul foundations.

The richer my life looked, the more people hated me. Especially other women. They assumed I had SCADS of money, men falling all over themselves to date me, blah blah blah. I was incredibly lonely. Well-dressed, wickedly lonely.

I was the Wizard of Oz, in my own way, long before Instagram, trying so very hard to sell a version of my life that had no basis in reality.

What I had was an empty house, SCADS of bills for SCADS of clothing, jewelry and accessories and shoes and boots I would never wear. Nobody asked me out, I didn’t go out, and the gowns went unworn but for the official cocktail parties for work. Those were the silly reasons I kept justifying more purchases for the life I would never lead.

I also went through a period of collecting expensive leather handbags that I never used, because I carry around a Daytimer. It’s efficient, a small pocket carries all my girl stuff. I am not a purse girl and I sure as hell don’t REALLY believe that a bag makes me look important. Stupid.

I never bought any of those, mind you, but I did have a room full of bags which were never used once. All which, at some level in the farther reaches of my mind, I believed would make up for all that I lacked: self confidence, self-love.

This is perhaps why it’s fairly easy to spot fake Influencers. I was never an Influencer in today’s understanding of the term, for it got me nothing, I most certainly tried awfully hard to sway opinion about me. It worked, too, to my detriment.

Lies never work in the long run. The ones we tell ourselves are among the worst. Modern advertising, just like the evilly effective use of chemicals in ultra-processed food, is designed to speak to those taste buds in us most desperately wanting validation.

The Truth Has to Tumble

About ten years ago a friend of mine, well aware of my battle with compulsively purchasing clothing and all the goodies to go with them, suggested that I watch the terrific BBC documentary Century of the Self.

I was stunned. Not only that, I was horrified that I had been led down the yellow brick road by the nose for years on end because of what I had been made to believe I “had to have,” a perennially favorite phrase of the fashion industry.

It isn’t just that my compulsive, deeply insecure habit was ruining me, it ruins the planet, too. We love to go after oil companies et. al. about their environmental abuses. Kindly see this article about the articles we drape ourselves with, and the cost to the earth of our vanity.

So it’s a moral responsibility as well to let go of such nonsense.

I still love designer things, and I love to see the artistic talent of that industry express itself every September. However I stopped buying fashion mags years ago, which truly helped me contain that urge to find The Next Big Thing that I never wore.

In doing this I usher out far more than a lifestyle which acted as a ship’s anchor.

The small closet- certainly by comparison, that I have left, has plenty of room. I am going to be moving some of my adventure gear into it for one simple reason: that IS my wardrobe. That IS my life.

I love, but will never wear, the beautifully-colored jackets and skirts which are now slated for The Real Real. Like all dysfunctional relationships, it serves us to bid a fond goodbye to those habits which cost us, but which also carved us into who we are today. Just as a recovered alcoholic wakes up grateful, I do, too. Those journeys taught me compassion, empathy and deep understanding. Those came at great personal cost.

We pay for our growth. We pay for our realizations, our new ways of seeing, and being able to see a new and better way forward. Life is expensive in that way, and not all of us are willing to pay THAT price.

So while a part of me would sure love those funds back, those compulsions funded an education.

And that, above all, is priceless.

Now I’m going to lace up my running shoes, go out into the day looking precisely like who I really am.

Thank you as always to my readers and subscribers. In a world where we have choices, choose to learn, choose to question your motives, choose to be kinder to yourself. Please consider:

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Catching up on the joys and challenges of having uprooted to a life overseas

Dear Reader: This is the longest essay I’ve ever done for Substack. It explores what I’ve been learning over the last two months after moving to Ecuador. It may sound and feel like a rant, but it’s not. This is what it looks like when life throws a tsunami of big growth lessons in my face, I sit with them, work with them and do my best to own my shit. I’ve had to sit with some deep anger, including at myself, which was justified, then turn that into an opportunity to redirect in ways that better serve. Observations here validated by plenty of other sources. There’s also a fun ending.

This is especially important if you think that living overseas might be for you. At its core, this is an essay about our humanness and how very little it changes country to country, culture to culture. How stress brings out the deeply human in us all. Above all, what I observe about others, exists in me. I own every single part of this; I signed up for these life lessons, and am grateful.

This past week I took my dog Mika for our typical walk along the pretty Tomebomba River, barely half a block from where I’m living. For now.

Within minutes, my reactive rescue was leaping and dragging me because several people were coming by with their dogs off-leash. As I’ve written before, it makes no difference whatsoever that this is illegal, and that some of those off-leash dogs have bitten folks. There are laws on the books, and laws that people live by.

If you can’t handle it, don’t move overseas.

This isn’t a criticism. Developing countries have different values. You can drive yourself nuts getting angry about such things. Plenty of folks do just that, which is part of this reporting.

The Facebook sites are full of people- including people who have been here a very long time- who complain bitterly about issues like this. Changes nothing, makes you a gargoyle and ages you fast.

Two days ago I began researching kenneling options for Mika. I put the query out on Facebook. Several folks provided suggestions.

City folks tend to prefer small dogs. Mika is close to 70 lbs.

Two got into a nitter about one place, which was clearly only for toy breeds. One person rightfully pointed out that the site was for small dogs, the other person took offense, and there you go. Folks are unnecessarily defensive and rude everywhere.

I dislike Facebook for many reasons. This is one of them. But here and in other immigrant communities the Facebook groups are often key sources of helpful information. And assholes, as everywhere.

I’ve been an asshole online myself, but these days am better at deleting my asshole-ness before it goes public.

Being isolated from the comfort of your culture exacerbates that behavior in some striking ways.

That will vary greatly based on what your expectations are, but the sooner you’re willing to look beyond the promises of an easy life and perfect sunsets, the happier you will be.

This article addresses one of the bigger downsides: how you and I are, at times, treated by other expats.

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This happens far faster than we think it does

Frail (Merriam-Webster)

• Physically weak: Lacking normal health or strength, such as an elderly person or a sick child.

• Easily broken: Delicate in structure or material, meaning it can be damaged or destroyed with little force.

• Morally weak: Easily tempted to do wrong or lacking strong willpower.

(Note to Dear Reader: I put the initial notes down for this piece first. Coming back to it, because right now I am off for 90 minutes of slinging iron. Just saying. Also this is longer because I included someone’s article-length note. Bear with me, thanks)

Two pieces inspired my article today. One is from , whose work on aging well is a continual source of excellent information and common sense. The other is an article saved from Self Magazine a while back on the issue of pre-frailty.

If we disregard the third bullet point from the above definition (which could get an article in and of itself, in this very frail moral climate we inhabit), let’s start with the article from Self, which came out on my 72nd birthday in 2025.

Here’s the title: Early Warning Signs You’re Becoming ‘Frail’—and How to Prevent It as You Age

First, let’s plumb Self’s digital audience:

• Gender: Predominantly female (around 62% female vs. 38% male digital audience composition).

• Age: Heavily concentrated among adults aged 25 to 34, while also appealing to broader millennial and Gen X demographics.

If that doesn’t set you back on your heels a bit, I’m not sure what will.

These two paragraphs lay it out:

When you’re in your 20s, 30s, and even 40s, it’s easy to dismiss frailty as an older-person issue—not something you need to worry about yet. Actually, though, any adult can develop frailty, Dr. Allison says, especially if you have a health condition that starts to slow you down from a younger age. “Although we do see it [more] as we get older, it’s definitely not something that just happens when you’re 65.”

So-called frailty markers—symptoms many doctors check to make a diagnosis using Dr. Fried’s frailty phenotype—can appear earlier than you might expect. For example, a large prospective analysis published in 2018 identified signs starting in the late 30s: Between ages 37 and 45, 38% of women and 35% of men were already considered pre-frail, meaning they had at least one of those symptoms. Additionally, 4% of women and 3% of men met the full frailty criteria by ages 45 to 55.

Frankly, I hope this terrifies you.

When I read the article back in January of 2025, I was about 22 lbs heavier than I am now. I hadn’t been able to train at full capacity since 2018 when my surgeries began. What work I could do was handicapped by limited use of my hands and feet, limbs which are now irrevocably changed by surgery.

I wasn’t frail. I had some forty-five years of gym work invested by the time the surgeries started, a physical bank account if you will that I gratefully drew upon for those seven years.

Of course I lost size, strength, endurance. But there was plenty to lose. As I love to repeat, the body remembers. We just have to invite our best selves back to the party. I’ve been doing that since about April of this year, but in earnest once I made it to Ecuador.

I had work to do. The road ahead was still full of potholes. As with many of us of an age, it was hard to tell what kinds of limitations I’d be living with, given that hands and feet were both permanently changed, I had metal screws in my left hip, osteopenia in my lower back and right hip.

Lots of challenges to address. Nobody gets to 73 without something in their buckets.

Back in January of 2025, it was a few months before my next-to-last foot surgery. I would head to Ecuador (EC) twice that year, take plenty of time to look around the Pacific Northwest to see if a move to EC really was the best option. Turned out, it was.

I’m temporarily in Cuenca, at 8600’, just inside the old city, living behind a huge family home. My small apartment is just perfect for right now.

This is a corner:

Twenty months after reading the pre-frailty piece I’m living eight minutes from my little gym up the hill, set up with a BOSU ball in my tiny living room along with a set of 10s and 15s, a 10 and a 15-lb kettle bell, small weights for rebuilding my wrist and forearm bones and a great deal of motivation. Things are very different.

I’ll get back to that in a minute. Right now, let’s return to the Self article. This is what Self- focusing on 20- to 40-somethings -says is our best friend in the fight against frailty:

Strength training.

From the article:

That’s because, as we get older, it’s trickier to maintain muscle mass—and this can start as early as age 30, Dr. Florez says. “After that, we start declining, and it happens to everyone—super athletes and regular people alike.” Fitting in those twice-weekly strength workouts (whether it’s weight lifting or bodyweight exercises like push-ups), has been found to improve muscle mass and slow frailty’s progression.

There really is a damned good reason I bang this drum so often. I’ve lived it.

Having just gone through total hell with all those surgeries, having had to draw down my physical bank account to manage my way through, I have a very different take on this. Those years were no fun.

We have got to wean ourselves off the “thin is healthy” bullshit. While I am righteously happy to relieve myself of the extra twenty which my bird bones just didn’t need, body shape, genetics and predilections determine whether or not being slim or skinny is actually healthy for you.

As we age, research argues that a few extra pounds- because fat is NOT the enemy and is as essential an organ as our lungs- helps if we have to navigate health issues.

That’s just one reason I didn’t catastrophize about my extra twenty-plus pounds. They served me well while I needed them; the hell with my tender ego. I didn’t like it one bit. But I also knew that my chances of recovery were better served with an extra serving of body fat.

Speaking of servings, let’s discuss how to support our strength training.

writes constantly about protein and how to get enough for our daily needs as we age. If we’re also strength training, and forgive me for banging this drum endlessly, you may well need more. That’s unique to your body, but that’s why getting help from a skilled nutritionist is truly helpful. An influencer doesn’t count.

I’ve loaded up on sugar-free peanut butter, a variety of lower-oxalate nuts, plenty of chicken, fish and hamburger, and lots and lots and lots of eggs and cheese.

I’m not a fan of protein shakes for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is that too many of them have concerning levels of heavy metals.

While there is some moderation in that reporting, bottom line is that Americans in particular have a sour habit of thinking that if a little is good, LOTS and LOTS must be better. Not in this case.

We’re better off getting our protein through better dietary sources if we can, and natch, if we can even afford them, which is a whole other topic.

I am well aware that a great many people want nothing to do with the gym. Fine. Do body weight exercises. Please don’t insult my intelligence with seated Tai Chi and its promise to give you a six-pack. COME ON.

Lift things. Work your muscles. Do pushups, pullups, pick up milk bottles full of water.

There are endless choices to explore, including Silver Sneakers and lots of courses and trainers who specialize in the aging body.

I really don’t give a damn. This isn’t about trying to make you go to the gym. The point is to push your body so that you have strength. The alternative is just awful.

One person I know has a mother in her nineties in hospice. For decades, the mother flat refused to exercise, and is now completely bedridden. She hates that she can’t even stand up, resents her condition deeply and takes out her anger on everyone.

People like , who is marching steadily towards her eighties, focus on all kinds of exercises and movement. We have to find what works for us, but you and I have got to address how to build strength as we age.

On more occasions than I care to admit I really needed my strength. During the seven years I had fourteen surgeries, I lived alone and had to manage without assistance. I used my upper body strength, leg power and my reflexes not only to prevent further injury but just to move myself around the house.

My core strength was critical to safely getting in and out of bed or off the couch after surgery. My upper body and leg strength ensured that even with two limbs in casts, I could safely maneuver in and out of the tub and on slippery surfaces.

That’s no small feat to begin with, but with a hand and a foot down and no help, what moving parts remain better damned well be strong.

I’m beyond grateful for all the years that I invested in my body’s strength, flexibility and endurance.

Had I not dedicated those many decades to exercise and lifting weights, there’s a very good chance that I would have died on my stairs. You need the strength to lift yourself off the floor with your arms, the strength to push yourself up with only one leg.

This isn’t bragging. This is reporting. I get to look back over those years and assess not only what happened, but what I learned. It was often righteous shit to go through. Right now, I’m glad I did. Because now I can report to Dear Reader from first-hand experience: I know what happens when we’re older, and when we’ve prepared to be down. Even down for years.

Now to Luks.

Many of his Notes are actually articles, but I can’t just link to a note. Here’s the whole thing on creatine:

Howard Luks MD

Built to Move, Born to Heal: Notes on Midlife Fitness

Creatine Keeps Getting Harder to Ignore

Let’s review a new paper— even for those who don’t exercise

I’m generally skeptical of supplements. Most promise far more than they deliver, and if you are looking for the next pill or powder that will meaningfully change how you age, the list supported by decent evidence is remarkably short.

Creatine may be one of the exceptions.

A new randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled study included 64 adults aged 45 to 65 who completed a 12-week intervention. Participants received either placebo or 10 grams of creatine monohydrate per day, and some also participated in a structured exercise and weight-loss program. The researchers measured far more than muscle: DXA body composition, strength, muscular endurance, blood markers, and a battery of cognitive and memory tests.

The results were interesting. Even among participants who weren’t in the structured exercise program, creatine increased lean tissue mass and improved strength and muscular endurance.

When creatine was combined with exercise and a weight-loss diet, participants gained lean tissue while losing a greater percentage of body fat. That is particularly relevant as we age because losing weight without paying attention to muscle can mean losing some of the tissue we are desperately trying to preserve. (author bolded)

There were also hints of benefits beyond muscle. Some measures of HbA1c and blood lipids improved, and several measures of cognition and memory favored creatine. But... The cognitive results were inconsistent across the many tests performed, and the authors specifically characterize these findings as exploratory.

Creatine helps maintain the phosphocreatine system that rapidly regenerates ATP, our cells’ immediate energy currency. We usually discuss that in relation to skeletal muscle, but the brain is an extraordinarily energy-demanding organ too. Brain creatine can increase with supplementation, which provides a plausible mechanism for some of the cognitive findings. But… Mechanistic plausibility is not proof.

There are plenty of reasons not to overinterpret this study. It was small, lasted only 12 weeks, exercise participation was self-selected rather than randomized, and many of the cognitive and metabolic outcomes were exploratory without adjustment across the many outcomes tested.

Still, creatine continues to accumulate something most supplements don’t: reasonably good human evidence, biological plausibility, a long safety record, and benefits that are relevant to aging.

It should go without saying: It shouldn’t replace resistance training, adequate protein, aerobic fitness, sleep, and a healthy diet. But as an adjunct to those things, creatine is becoming increasingly difficult to dismiss.

Let’s say that again louder for the folks in the cheap seats.

Back when I started lifting here in Ecuador I bought creatine, and have been taking it in the small, prescribed doses daily. I also work out steadily and consistently.

I began with an hour a day, three days a week, with baby weights. Second week of June.

Baby weights for me are ten-pound dumbbells for curls, and the 45-lb barbell for chest press. Mostly 15s for bench work.

If that seems like a lot, please remember I have been at this for 53 years. What is a baby weight for me, many people my age can’t even pick up. That hurts my heart for the cost to our being able to care for ourselves.

I started with low weights and low reps until the soreness passed. Each week I increased something: either the weight or the reps, sometimes both. But slowly, steadily and with great respect for my changed, older body.

When I increased a weight, I backed off the reps until the weight got easier. Then I increased the reps by only one or two at a time.

Every workout I watched for pain or weakness. If there was discomfort, I corrected my form or changed the exercise. Barbell curls hurt my left front deltoid, so those are off the menu.

Because I am now dealing with some kind of lung or vascular mystery thing, I keep my weights where I can go through the entire movement without exertion.

It’s hard to express how grateful I am to be able to work out at all. Even better, after all these years, I know how to diagnose an issue, shift to a different movement or machine, and know when to stop or push on.

I instantly know the difference between workout soreness and potential injury pain. That is a gift. Those of us who have years at the gym can tell.

I know enough ways to work a muscle so that if one movement is a problem, there lots of others to work that same muscle group.

Above all, I never have and never will take any kind of performance enhancing drug or steroid. Creatine is the only thing I have ever tried, and I am curious to see what it might do.

This next is for those of my readers who share my love of iron, and who walk and talk the work. These are my results after two months of three workouts a day, increasing from an hour to ninety minutes per workout this week:

Today I am doing 25-lb bicep curls and 145-lb bench presses. I’m back up to 30+ lbs for single-arm lat pulls on the bench. Most of my bench work is with 25-30 lb dumbbells for most exercises except chest flys.

Almost back to 90 lbs on the seated row.

I’ve nearly tripled all of my weights from when I began the second week of June. My triceps have tightened, the angel wing flaps are gone. All the striations across my delts are back.

All my workouts are now at or better than what I was doing before the first surgery in May of 2018.

The “deflated balloon” wrinkles of my biceps are gone, filled back out with solid muscle.

Today I was sitting on the bench taking a quick breather between sets. I realized that my shoulders, which had taken a big hit with three rotator cuff surgeries and had lost considerable size and strength, were very nearly back to my 2017 personal best.

I grinned at my reflection. The sweat on my brow, my whitening air, a few extra small folds along my waistline.

By god. All that work. All those losses. And here we are.

Anyone who has ever lifted for years and worked incredibly hard for those gains can tell you how defeating it is to lose your strength. They can also tell you that the potential for regaining all of it and then some is also there. Always will be, barring extreme circumstances.

They can also tell you how it feels to see it come back. Before someone insults my intelligence by calling this vanity, I USE this strength. I USE this power. My strength has saved my life on multiple occasions.

I train for functional fitness so that when I put myself in harm’s way, and I bloody well do because that’s what gives me joy, I can get myself out of trouble.

Who knows what percentage of these gains are from creatine? No idea. Frankly, I don’t care. As Dr. Luks says above, we still have to do all the work.

What I do know, with the exception of the mystery issue with my lungs…

Aging puts us in harm’s way. Marching into our elder years with a strong body allows us a fighting chance not only to survive age’s insults, but to navigate them with humor. While we won’t win in the end, the journey to the end point holds more promise for mobility and options. And fun.

Let’s play.

Thanks to all my subscribers and readers. Despite all the crap swirling around that affects us all, please make sure you are taking care of you first. Humor is our best defense AND offensive, and the devil, however you choose to define that rat bastard, hates jokes.

Life is full of them. Find them and laugh.

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Gathering wisdom among the weights, where some of the real work is done

I can’t speak for anyone else, For me, any gym is a better gym when there are handsome gay men working out in it. That happened to me today at my Cuenca spot, where Lee and Tony, gorgeous (of course) men in their elegant middle age, showed up right about the time I was fastening my lifting gloves.

I don’t often hear English in the gym, so we struck up a conversation. Lee is from London; Tony’s American, or at least he didn’t indicate otherwise. From the beginning, my workout got a lot more fun.

Not only did Tony put on Madonna’s latest track for our workout pleasure, but I was treated to the kind of lively banter that makes a sweaty workout ever so much more enjoyable. Opinions about music, surprise that I could have lived through the Eighties being wholly unaware of Freddy Mercury (sad but true), validation that yes, Eighties music really was, still is, the best.

It wasn’t just that it was great to speak English. I’m normally struggling to cope with fast-moving Spanish, or just keep to myself and my music. Having people to laugh with at the gym between sets is, for me, one of life’s grandest pleasures.

Nothing but nothing makes the gym better than people you can banter with between sets. That makes the gym yours, and a place you want to spend even more time it. Not such a bad thing.

Lee made a few comments that were so striking that I am stealing them for our purposes.

During a lull in my workout, Lee mentioned that a number of their friends, probably also men in their mid-to-late middle age, were “getting work done,” he said as he made air quotes. This as opposed to putting work into their bodies at the gym.

Then he said that his generation didn’t have many examples of aging gay men to emulate.

As someone who grew up during the AIDS era, this really struck home for me. It didn’t occur that an entire generation of young men had been wiped out before they had a chance to age. As a result, Lee’s generation is figuring out how to evolve without role models.

There are obvious ones, such as Sir Ian McKellen, George Takei, Sir Elton John, and RuPaul. Not the same as having, as I did, a close 33-year friendship with a woman who taught me how to age powerfully, working out three times a week with a trainer up until a few weeks before her death at 92.

Role models in our lives, not on our screens.

These men (and women, of course) are, in fact, setting the standard for the next generation, and there are few if any mentors. I found this profoundly sad. I lost friends to AIDs in the Eighties. But this is much more far-reaching and impactful.

Lee’s comment about “getting work done” of course refers to the external. Face lifts, Botox, silicone implants, all the nips and tucks and corrective surgeries intended to roll back the clock.

I can’t criticize this. I’ve had a facelift and my fair share of liposuctions over the years. I have no place to dun anyone for getting a little work done.

Hell yeah. Rare is the morning that I don’t pull back the skin on my face and wonder.

That said, Lee’s point was deeper. In fact, it’s two-pronged.

Getting work done on the outside is just that. No matter how many times I stretch the skin on my face or take up the slack on my belly or remove love handles, if I’m not willing to do the hard work of better dietary habits and regular exercise then I’ll simply have a slightly more attractive corpse.

And likely be one sooner for that matter, if my primary focus is limited to skin deep.

Tends to backfire badly. On one hand we’ve got lots of folks spending lots of time and dime nipping and tucking and sucking away the fat, while inside their bodies aren’t getting good nutrition or the kind of exercise which would actually better guarantee a healthier aging process.

Western society is so focused on the superficial that we can fool ourselves that we’re in perfect condition while inside, we are actually rotting away. A great many skinny people honestly believe that being skinny is enough, that being fat is far worse. I beg to differ.

A fashionably thin body- being made far more trendy now with all the fall models showing up looking like concentration camp survivors- can mask all manner of terrible illnesses from wasting disease, drug use, eating disorders or deadly diseases.

Then there’s the community of the appearance of the super fit, who die very badly very young because of all the pills and potions and extreme “maxxing” to achieve the appearance of perfection.

Ask any of those fitness influencers who worked SO hard on their outside looks, selling the promise of health while brutally ruining their guts and hearts and livers and brains.

Oh wait- you can’t. They’re dead.

All they got out of the deal was millions of followers saying Miss u bruh before those same millions winked off to follow someone else’s fitness idiocy. Google it. There are too many deaths to list here.

The appearance of health ain’t health. Only the practice of it is. And to Lee’s point, gay men of a Certain Age have little for reference, healthy and vibrant gay men thriving into their elder years.

It’s a heartbreaker. Which is why Lee and Tony’s generation is carving out their own paths and finding out what lies beyond the weeds.

The other side of Lee’s point is the inside work that we do that makes us better humans.

In our dash to be flash, our need for speedy results, in our desperate desire to beat the clock, thrash aging and all the other morbidly stupid choices we make, we all too often forget that the only work that really matters is the work on the self.

Here’s where it gets woo-woo. If I’m willing to take on the deep work of self reflection, the hard work of taking myself to task and doing so with respect and affection, then the care and feeding of this aging body, brain and whatever brawn I may have left to me are all a lot easier.

It’s not compulsive.

Not done to prove a point or to demonstrate superiority.

Body work isn’t punishment for the crime of aging, it’s an act of love for the gift of life this body has given us.

It’s just care and feeding- challenging what we are, to become what we can be, in the best of all possible physical, mental and emotional shape as the inevitable takes its toll.

“Getting a little work done” is just fine, unless it replaces the real work of thoughtful eating, dedicated exercise, and the exercise of the brain and heart and soul.

I’ve been pounding out the weights at my tiny gym now since the second week of June. I’m approaching 74 in January. In the last two months I have watched with some amazement as my strength and size have returned with gusto.

It’s a fine reminder that the body never forgets, and it will joyfully return to vibrant health if you get the work done on the inside.

Getting the work done for me has been all about patiently rebuilding. Taking the opportunity to completely overhaul how I cook, locate fresh foods and spend much of the day walking. Building a different life in a brand new place, with all the challenges and losses and opportunities that entails.

Yes of course I want to look good. How you and I define that as we age is going to vary, but in my vernacular, that doesn’t automatically mean to look younger. What communicates youthfulness are energy, vibrancy, joy, and humor- all the results of inside work.

Getting old vibrantly is an inside job as well as an outside job. Getting old with joy, for me, means not being terrified of the wrinkles and the grey hair.

But look, if a little nip and tuck cheers you up, go for it.

Let’s just make sure that the real work is being done on the inside.

Let’s play.

Thanks to Lee and Tony for such a fine time at the gym today, to Lee for his wise observations and inspiration, and to all my fine readers and subscribers who keep the lights on. Please consider

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In search of the familiar, of family, of….freedom, perhaps

The Latin root of familiar is familiaris, meaning "of or belonging to a household or family". This comes from the base word familia (household or family), which traces back to famulus, meaning "servant" or "slave.”

Larry K, the 1971 Winter Haven High School class president, starts sending invitations early, because we forget. Not only do we forget, we often forget that we ever went to high school in the first place, until faced with the absolute proof of it when reunions come back around.

Mine are held in the once-very sleepy Central Florida hamlet of Winter Haven. Winter Haven was home, home to my family, familiar. Still is, for the most part. I can still find my way around town after all these years because the lakes dictate how you do that. There are still lakes there.

For some folks, those were our absolute best years EVER. The weekends at Daytona Beach, midnight parties in the orange groves, the homecoming dances. The celebrations of early victories, early beauty and athletic prowess, young love and being at the pinnacle of popularity.

I had absolutely none of that. Not once not ever. I have no such memories, I wore no crown, and I most assuredly won no popularity contests. I did gain some fame, however. My name was permanently scraped into the ugly grey paint of the girls’ bathroom wall, with insults that are unique to the young. They last, too.

Here’s a piece of karma for you. One popular girl wrote that I was a “skag,” a popular derogatory term in the 1960s-70s. That line stayed at eye level for every girl child with a full bladder to see for decades until the Powers That Be painted the metal stall walls.

That term meant ugly and promiscuous girl.

The girl who scraped that insult into the paint was beautiful and graceful and popular, someone whose approval I desperately desired. She died young after years of heroin abuse.

There’s a poetic justice to this: the term skag is also used to describe heroin, the very thing that killed her. Karma sucks sometimes.

Part of me is sorry. The less-than-generous part of me, well. I’m not proud of that less-than-generous part. It exists in us all, that part that wants others to pay for the pain they caused us. She wasn’t free of pain, otherwise drugs wouldn’t have been her escape route.

When people die, lots of folks suffer for it: kids, family, everyone. Taking pleasure or righteous pleasure in the death of someone who likely had zero memory of ever hurling the insult isn’t just puerile. It’s ugly.

That said, when a reunion offers the chance to observe that you’ve got a rotten tooth you’re pushing with your tongue, that is indeed a chance for freedom. Or be famulus to that pain and resentment forever.

Reunions aren’t a reconnection with the people they were in their teens. That said, previous reunions for my school often involved a great deal of teenage behavior if not outright attempts to recreate what was long gone. There’s that. Many, many of those people are now long gone.

Larry K is saddled with the very difficult job of communicating those deaths to the rest of us. I admire him for it.

Our reunions are every five years now instead of ten.

This year, the reminder email landed right about the time I was buried to the biceps with preparations for moving to Ecuador. For some unexplained reason, other than perhaps old habit, the organizers hold the event on a weekend in early August.

This is Central Florida, people. It was 92 F with exceptionally high humidity, pushing the felt temperature well over 100 degrees. Speaking as someone who moved to Oregon to get away from such weather, this is torture.

It’s one thing if I’m on an adventure to some remote part of the world.

This is just hanging in hot, humid weather and trying to frame it as fun.

One reunion I remember heading out in late afternoon from my motel room to attend that evening’s event. Or trying to. The setting sun was so hot that the glue holding the room number to the outside of my west-facing door gave up the ghost. The number slid to the walkway and got stuck in the door jamb. It took the maintenance department a while to get the door freed.

I really dislike Florida for so many reasons. Climate is just one of them. Heading to this part of the world to spend two days with folks who likely don’t remember you at all and who may well resent the hell out of you isn’t what I call a great time.

Here’s what I mean.

The last time I attended was in 2017. I turned the trip into an exploration of my old Central Florida territory, with the reunion just one of many activities. Proximity to Disney World is part of the attraction. That has made the entire state little more than billboards, broad highways and tourist traps.

In 2017 I was 64. In the absolute best shape of my life.

That year I learned a really good lesson: if you show up drastically different from how you’re remembered, prepare to be shunned. People don’t like unfamiliar. They will outright attack it, in fact.

I have two photos from that reunion. This one below, and one of my standing in front of an old high school flag. I was excluded and then strategically removed from every other photo from the entire event.

If you looked at the photo collection from our 45th, you’d never know I was there. People have creative ways of expressing their opinions of you, don’t they?

That said, if there are zero positive memories of this time of your life, a wise person would point out to me that returning to the scene of such distaste is an exercise in self-flagellation. They’d be right, too.

There is no do-over available here. Nobody is ever going to apologize for something they don’t recall, especially when they are nursing their own hurts from insults they received as a teenager.

Given that great and unhappy truth, why the hell ever go back? What am I searching for? An historical rewrite, a validation that you weren’t that fat-stupid-ugly girl that people mocked?

Is returning to your home town seeking something you never had to begin with, buried in familiar landmarks which themselves are transformed?

The Ritz Theatre, where I saw 2001 A Space Odyssey at the age of fifteen, is now a cultural landmark.

I recall hurtling out the front door, righteously terrified after having watched Day of the Triffids, forever after utterly spooked by hollyhocks. I was eight.

I’m still scared of hollyhocks, despite that movie’s being one of the stupidest sci-fi films of the century.

What am I looking for as I walk past the old Woolworth’s building where I bought white lipstick, made popular in the 1960s during the British Invasion?

You see the idiocy in this. I sure do. Writing that paragraph caused me to laugh out loud. Yet there are folks who want just that.

I’ve been writing about do-overs and reboots lately. The reunion was perfectly timed. Really: why on earth go back to the town of your birth and hang out with people you don’t remember, who probably aren’t any more interested in you now than they were back then and if anything, may resent you for the life you chose instead?

If you were in the upper echelon of your high school strata, I suspect that returning to your home town and old buddies means being welcomed no matter what you look like, what shape you’re in, whether success had kicked or kissed you.

Of course if you end up hugely successful people will forget whatever you might have been when acne was still the main topic of concern. One of our own ended up as the CEO of Walt Disney World, right up the street, which does kinda qualify as successful. He is also gay.

I’m not sure the mostly Trumpist community that is my high school class has quite embraced that. Some have. To their credit. But the way they vote is much more revealing than whether or not that particular classmate was begrudgingly accepted.

I have to wonder if he hadn’t become the CEO of Walt Disney World if he’d have received that pass. I’ll never know.

High school connections never end. They morph, somewhat. Sometimes people actually grow and change. Sometimes they reach their peak at 17 or 18 and stay in town hoping that the shine never wears off.

It’s familiar, and with that familiarity comes an implicit -and dishonest- promise that what made you so special back then won’t disappear.

We can end up a famulus, a slave, to memories, to the idea that staying in town will perpetuate our role as the guy who saved the season with that catch.

The shine does disappear. And with it our identity, if we can’t grow beyond our attachment to a certain chapter.

High school never leaves the person- especially when they never leave town. Here is where familiarity can suck the life right out of life. Until we head out beyond the boundaries of what is known, we rarely discover who we can be. Those boundaries vary with each of us, true. For my part, seeking the unfamiliar is a life’s work.

As more and more adult children end up staying in their family homes and never evolving into their own lives and personalities, they risk becoming famulus because they don’t benefit from the mistakes, pratfalls, face plants and successes that life on our own delivers.

Nowhere is this better underscored than at reunions, when we see who and what we have become, the sum of all the choices we’ve made, the events and stories of our lives.

I am now left with one high school friend, other than the erstwhile-but-never-quite-released class president. That friend, a particularly interesting, well-read and deeply thoughtful man whose left/independent-leaning politics got him in trouble in the legal world where he excelled, has turned out to be the best of the bunch.

We were both odd ducks. Turns out that apparently, I was kind to him. People remember. Just like we embed the viciousness which left scars.

However we might choose to feel about childhood and school experiences, early popularity is not indicative of later successes.

As for returning to the familiar, if we are determined to “fix” the past, we’d have to erase the kindnesses as well as the ugliness. We don’t get to cherry-pick. We’d also erase everything that led to who we have become, for better or for worse.

Folks who stuck around, stayed in Florida and were within driving distance are sometimes still connected, as with many rural communities. Part of me would love to know what those classmates did, other than marry and produce children. Plenty probably had interesting lives.

If we cut ties with town, afterwards all we find out is when people died.

Town is changing these days, too.

Polk County, once the home of Cypress Gardens, the first non-beach tourist trap in Florida, is now a hotspot for Americans seeking cheaper housing. The lazy lakeside roads which curl around the endless lakes are part of the attraction. Lakeland, Winter Haven and surrounds are now destinations for young families desperate for cheaper housing.

Massive old trees with yards of Spanish moss swaying in the breezes are part of what made my parents fall in love with the place, along with the Chain O’ Lakes old-timey charm.

Hurricanes aren’t part of that charm. Or the bugs and snakes and spiders and fires and alligators and all the other fine things that Florida offers. Those are familiar to those of us born there.

Familiar to me isn’t safe. If anything it’s dangerous to growth, which is why I find myself in another country, struggling to learn a new language, figuring out the culture and feeling, at times, completely uprooted.

So perhaps the reunion isn’t so much about the people, the school, closely-held and nurtured insults that never healed, or the desire for the “popular kids” to finally invite you into a fold you wouldn’t want to be a part of anyway.

Maybe all those feelings surface because this is a year where I drop-kicked my home country, not just my home town. I booted my culture, my connections to place, and all the familiar trappings of what it means to be American, a Floridian, a Winter Havenite, a Southerner, a child of the Deep South born to displaced Northern parents.

They sought the unfamiliar, too, and often took it on the nose for their civil rights beliefs. They were shunned and ostracized as well. In retrospect, that was brave. Took me a while to see that. To appreciate what they left, lost, and how hard they worked to ensure that their children were exposed to great literature and classical music.

My Facebook feed now features videos from the 55th high school reunion, mostly folks just sitting at tables listening to the same old songs from our class band. For some reason that was just heartbreaking for me.

Nobody dancing, as though getting up and shaking a leg was just too much at 73.

But then, look. The outside temperature was effectively 100 degrees. I’d be in a stupor myself. At any age, for that matter.

One video features the band an old Stones classic, “This Could be the Last Time.”

It could very well be. Which is why I choose the unfamiliar. I don’t want to become a famulus to what is familiar while there’s still adventure ahead.

The horizons beckon.

Let’s play.

As always thanks to my subscribers and readers. I read your thoughts, appreciate your time and your support, and hope that my musings are useful. Please consider

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On starting over…and over…and over

God I hate do-overs. Hate editing, albeit I sure get dedicated to do-overs after I’ve hit the Publish button and realize, oh shit. Typos.

Hate rewrites, getting lost and driving the same road several times over. Having to start over. And over and over and over.

That, however, is very much life, especially after fifty, especially after lots of physical activity. Injury, accident, disease- notwithstanding just life, which these days involves fire, hurricane, tornado, tsunami and Trump, just saying.

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The do-over that really is possible

wrote this morning- and I agree (because I’ve said the same thing)- that every single day is a potential reset. So very true. There is never ever EVER a time when we cannot choose to be different, because second-to-second we can choose to change our minds.

That of course is the most powerful of all changes from which all else flows. Nothing truly changes but that we first decide to change our minds about it.

We get to follow up with work, commitment, dedication and discipline, of course, which many don’t. That said, the chance to change is available every day of our lives.

After making a rather substantial series of Big Changes myself recently that includes moving to Ecuador, I am faced with constant small and large adaptations daily. Robyn’s comment made me consider a few things.

Right now I’m in the middle of negotiating terms with some health issues. Because there’s no real clarity about what I have, there is also no real clarity about how to make the appropriate changes to deal with what’s different.

I have a good baseline, so it appears, so far. I will be able to either solve the issue outright or at least be able to make some adjustments which will allow me to continue to live at full-throttle. That’s the hope.

That said, there is this marvelous opportunity to lay new groundwork, establish new groundrules for What’s Next. This is ever so much bigger than New Year’s Resolutions.

Here is where I’m going with this.

All of us, like it or not (and I don’t) have to work with a changing body as we age. For millions in America in particular, physical ailments, disabilities and diseases which used to accompany a number are now showing up among the very young. This ranges from colon cancer to severe Type II diabetes as well as all kinds of other cancers and lifestyle ailments.

So this article, while written by a 73-year-old, isn’t just addressing those of us well past fifty. It’s for all of us who have any intention at all of living any kind of life.

Consider the gauntlet thrown down, please.

After writing a TMI-type health article yesterday to make some points about using AI to help me figure out what ails me, a number of you wrote.

Among them was fellow adventure traveler/wander , whose fantastic photo albums and wonderful journeys with his wife kept me energized and hopeful as I trundled through my seven years of surgical repairs and recoveries.

Randy wrote:

I am headed to Chile in January for about 3-4 weeks of hiking and travel. Also traveling to Cape Verde in early November for about 3 weeks. I'm trying to keep doing the hiking oriented travel for as long as I can!

Randy’s no spring chicken either. He’s sent me his ankle and foot workout programs for when he and his wife hiked the Dolomites. He speaks for me, and for many of us who simply want to keep our physical options open as we age.

Randy prepares, he trains, he eats carefully. Those choices serve his dream.

What is your dream, and what kind of reset are you going to need in order to accomplish it?

My most recent invitation for a physical reset button was a diagnosis. At first glance it appears to be at least a little bit questionable, as I engage the help of very competent doctors across a variety of specialties here in Cuenca, Ecuador.

I’m in the market for prevention. That said, no matter how hard we work at it, life, genetics, sheer bad luck and in my case sheer stupid choices and other factors will sometimes deliver us challenges and potholes. Those demand that we rewire, redirect and reset.

It’s also all too often easier to chase symptoms and not take the time and make an effort to get a solid health baseline. That tells us precisely where we stand right now.

We can be remarkably dishonest if not utterly delusional about our physical agency, telling ourselves and each other that we have capacity and are in better shape than we really are.

That’s a recipe for disaster. We’re building our plans on platforms made of rotted timber.

I’ve been wanting a baseline for a while now. In the USA, admittedly it’s not so easy. As a vet, it’s a whole other story again.

As I found, working with the good people at the VA, trying to find someone who was willing to get you ALL your basics, ALL your numbers, order the series of tests which would give you the most accurate snapshot of where you are right now was impossible.

The system is not set up to create healthy veterans but to sustain the illness of those vets who will keep the budget expanding. The shtick doesn’t speak the truth.

Healthy veterans are good for PR but very bad for business.

The VA, especially now, is a mealy-mouthed bastard spewing all kinds of woo woo nonsense about your health and prevention. But show up asking for preventative care? I did that in 2023 when I sought to see a nephrologist because I had a history of kidney stones. I got triaged out of the building.

When I went to the ER with my fifth kidney stone a month later, I got the referral- but I’d also had to file a Congressional complaint. You see my point.

The VA, and increasingly the American Sickness Extension and Wellness-Prevention Complex, are not interested in prevention.

Prevention is a bullshit talking point unless you’re an influencer with snake oil. That’s just one reason so many of us go looking for talent elsewhere. Down here in Ecuador I’m getting the chance to do a complete reset.

I’ve been creating a health infrastructure which can support uber-health, whatever that looks like with this body, right here, right now.

Look, there are cultural differences; most of these doctors don’t see women their mother’s age walking in with bodybuilder’s muscles and asking for highly specific supplements, care and training.

I’ve found, however, that once past the cognitive dissonance, they are completely on board. As I wade through all the insurance paperwork (it’s an unholy mess but I’ll get there) to learn the system, I’m learning who’s in town. Who’s got the reputation for working with athletes.

Who wants to play high and hard, which means giving up ageist prejudices and assumptions.

Who also speaks English, at least until I have a working knowledge of the language. Meanwhile, with the help of another couple who has lived here more than a decade, I got my hands on an visual Spanish/English dictionary. It shows you color pictures and the Spanish terms for things like body parts. Immensely helpful and you learn as you go.

Cuenca is home to a great many athletes. Living at 8600 feet, the advantage such training gives you is considerable. As a result, there are plenty of specialists who address the training, cardiovascular and musculo-skeletal challenges athletes have when we push ourselves this high.

It was the same when I lived in Colorado.

That means that as I create this late-in-life reset, I have access to one hell of a lot of talent. I’m tapping it. That’s extremely exciting.

I still have dreams. I want to ride horses in Bhutan, hike to Annapurna Base Camp. There are a thousand thousand places I still want to go, and some of them are going to require a better fitness level that my lungs currently have.

I want to go some of the places Randy’s been. And beyond.

Those locations also going to require that I rebuild the pistons in my legs that took me up some pretty spectacular peaks.

Right now I can’t do that kind of training because my lungs stop functioning efficiently as soon as I begin to exert. Not a function of altitude. Something physical. So today I see a sports pulmonologist to begin that line of inquiry.

I’m building a big fat red reset button that I can’t wait to push.

The baseline that I build as a result of seeing top-rated cardiologists, pulmonologists and the like will tell me what they think I will be able to do, how to train for it and how to prevent problems.

They’re likely to be conservative. I’m not. I get to challenge their recommendations and assumptions and see what I can really do. Either way, I end up with a reset based on facts, not opinions.

Your reset button might come as a result of a huge medical issue. has decided to stay in her coastal home after a recent heart scare, but her reset has much to do with how she spends her time. Answering emails or cutting the cord on her considerable book productivity?

One new writing friend here in Ecuador just moved from his high-Andes mountain rental cabin to the coast, where he takes kite-surfing lessons and is helping people build their homes. His reset button acknowledges that his days of kayaking Class V rivers might be over at 60 (that’s his call, not mine), and he’s considering a whole new life.

is turning sixty and returning to lifting weights.

Your reset button might come from a grey divorce, finally realizing that being free means breaking free of family, or the sudden realization that time is bloody well running out on your life.

If you’re going to do that thing, do it NOW. If you’re not in shape for it yet, then that’s your next big thing. Do it for YOU and everyone who cares about you.

After realizing that fear had been driving too many of her life decisions, my bestie Melissa, turning 68 this month, has returned to international travel. This is someone who has done Kilimanjaro and Bhutan. Yet for reasons she still doesn’t quite fathom, she became fearful, and eschewed travel.

It happens. Headlines happen. We allow life to beat us down, beat us up and beat the dreams right out of us.

This October she’s heading to Japan. That’s what a reset looks like.

The first thing all of us needs for a really big reset is to know the most we can about our health basics. Not the compulsive measure-the-size-and-shape-of-your-bowel-movement bullshit, but our absolute basics. Not the measure your sleep, measure your nose hairs, measure your (who cares). But what kind of shape are our organs in?

Where are the weak spots? Where are we vulnerable? If we need to address something, what’s the plan? If we work the plan, what can we hope for?

How do we get to visualize and then put into motion a better life? It begins with knowing our bodies. I’m not saying you have to adventure. Just be healthy enough to live the life you really want, whether it’s an occasional bike ride with friends or like Randy, damned near any mountain range will do.

What do we need to know in order to tell the truth about our physical capacity right now, and what is it going to take for us to get to top shape for this body, this age, this time of life?

If this isn’t worth an investment, I don’t know what is. As I stumble through mounds of unreadable paperwork, sit for yet another test, walk to another doctor’s office and deliver more test results, I am building my infrastructure to support maximum health.

That’s the adventure I’m on. Rather than be terrified by symptoms I don’t understand or a diagnosis that may not be accurate (it wasn’t), what a magnificent opportunity to create a whole new life in this whole new place.

You don’t have to move to a new place, new country like I did. We might just need to move to a new place in our heads and hearts.

That’s new country enough.

Let’s play.

Kind thanks to all my readers for your support, to my subscribers for hanging with me and for those of you new to my work. All of you rock. Please consider:

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The journey to find out what’s wrong, and what can go wrong along the way

Recently I wrote about discovering that I had an aneurysm in my ascending aorta. It’s fair to say that a diagnosis like that is terrifying. Without much luck, I was trying very hard to maintain some semblance of quiet sanity about treating it.

I leapt into the research with my typical energy. I also used some of the tools commonly available to those of us with computers. Here is where I made my first big fat mistake.

Keep in mind that I’m not a regular user of AI but for how Google effectively forces it down our throats on searches. With that in mind, this:

The weekend that I was rather forcefully reacquainted with my April diagnosis was a tough one. In normal circumstances, a diagnosis of an aortic aneurysm that isn’t already big enough to require surgery isn’t that big a deal. You live with it, manage your blood pressure and all the other life adaptations.

You can continue to train hard. There are plenty of fora where you can find other weight lifters and runners who live with an aneurysm. The Mayo Clinic is one. The information there validated what I was already doing.

Lots of NFL and NBA players live with them. It’s not a death sentence. You do need to adapt.

I was already breathing through all my weightlifting exercises as I have been for decades at altitude. That’s just proper form.

My challenge was exacerbated by the fact that I had moved, literally overnight, to 8600.’ That kind of altitude changes everything. The heart and lungs have to work much harder. Because it wasn’t a gradual shift, that alone places real pressure on our VO2 system.

However, my body has always adapted swiftly. As someone who has climbed big mountains in the recent past (Kilimanjaro, Everest Base Camp, Macchu Picchu, Mt Kenya and plenty of Colorado fourteeners), altitude has never been an issue.

I’ve trained very hard at altitude for decades, and all the research said that I should have been able to immediately adapt because of that training.

When I go to another country to climb a big mountain, I’m ready in days. Last year when I spent some seven weeks in Ecuador including riding up to nearly twelve thousand feet, I had ZERO issues.

This time around, I had begun to wheeze as soon as I began to jog. That’s the red flag that made me seek out my medical records, and how I was jolted into remembering I had this diagnosis.

The expat as expert problem

Of course, everyone’s a doctor here. Everyone has health advice because they’ve lived at altitude. Everybody is an expert because they can spend forty-three seconds online and then dictate medical advice, which is just regurgitated AI these days.

I’ve done it myself, and it embarrasses me to admit it.

Everyone here doesn’t know shit on a shingle any more than anyone anywhere doesn’t know shit on a shingle. They don’t have your body, they don’t live your life. Forgive the obvious, none of them are cardiologists or pulmonologists either, but everyone sure can tell you how to lift weights at altitude despite not doing any of it themselves.

Again, I’ve made this error myself. That doesn’t make it any less invasive or disrespectful.

As is the case for humans everywhere, people take their own bodies as gospel for everyone else’s and project their experiences, which are utterly meaningless.

Well meaning, but ultimately meaningless.

The first mistake I made- and I share this with a sense of humor and the absurd because frankly, I should have known- was that I trusted the Internet.

I punched in my test data, and AI responded with information that turned out later to be just wrong. It also catastrophizes just like stupid people do (and I catastrophized when I read the catastrophizing, just like stupid people do). Boy did that send me into a spiral.

AI told me that my aneurysm as pressing on my windpipe. I bought that lock, stock and barrel.

The good news is that I didn’t stop there. This is where being a journalist and someone who writes about health and fitness really serves. I want answers, and I want GOOD answers. Above all I want to get back to a full training load.

There are lots and lots of athletes here. Native-born or immigrant, plenty of folks just like me at any age train hard, and like me, some of them are going to have some problems. Naturally, you’re going to have a raft of specialists who focus exclusively on us.

Even better, it doesn’t take ten months of begging and pleading to get in to see them only to have insurance deny you. Here, my visits cost from $40 to $65. With the exception of the MRI, which was $600, the tests were incredibly inexpensive.

And as I wrote before, you get the results first, so that you can dig through all that information and walk into your next doctor’s appointment ready with good questions. I am loving that.

Here in Ecuador, access to top medical professionals is nearly overnight. Within a day or so I took the aneurysm information to my primary care provider and we made a plan. Within a week I had a CT scan of my thorax, an MRI and a spirometry test.

I also had an appointment with one of the top cardiologists in the country two nights ago and got an EKG. More tests are coming to establish both a baseline and to figure out what’s wrong and a treatment plan.

The test results rolled in.I had access to them first and translated them line by line. That exercise, not just the translation, but also taking the diagnoses and running them through Google’s AI was a fine exercise in learning how to use that tool.

As a rank rookie, as most of us are with LLMs, I made the classic beginner’s mistake in believing the damn thing without subjecting it to critical questioning.

The more I used the Google AI, the more I saw the inherent flaws. The more I saw the flaws the better I got at putting in information to guide it elsewhere, and to tell it to shut the fuck up and just give me facts.

That practice, along with the test results, took me somewhere very different indeed.

Every single test so far has been normal, and also underscored that I am in exceptional health.

But for two things: first, the initial reading on the USA CT scan was inaccurate. Yes there’s a widening of the base of the aorta but nowhere near as much as the initial scan indicated.

That alone was a relief. First, I don’t have to give up on living at 8600.’ Second, I was already training the way I needed to, breathing through each dumbbell lift so that I didn’t strain the heart. Moderating my morning jog to a walk-jog as needed.

No big deal, Lead on, McDuff.

My heart is in perfect condition, not just for a 73-year-old but for someone much younger. There is some widening at the aortic root. Yes, you do need to maintain low blood pressure (which everyone needs to do no matter what shape we’re in).

Mine is a steady 120/80, smack where it should be. My resting pulse, normally about 52 at sea level, is 60 here-which is also normal for that sudden leap to altitude.

The lung tests were also normal, but for one thing. There is no aneurysm pressing on my windpipe. Again, that’s patently bullshit. That’s the kind of garbage that AI can feed you if you’re not careful.

I hadn’t been careful, so was working off garbage until the tests came in. And I was stressed absolutely to the max. I was already managing a variety of other things and this was like the proverbial straw on the camel’s back.

That’s why we verify.

Something in my lungs has changed since April’s testing. Simply put, the tiny brachii are blocked, which means that as soon as I begin to exert- and this would be true at any altitude- they can’t efficiently deliver oxygen to my body.

As soon as I’ve built up a little jogging speed or hit the 25th step out of 50, my oxygenation drops from a solid 95% to 85%. As a result, I start wheezing and struggling for breath.

This isn’t the aneurysm at all. This is something physical happening deep in the lungs. It’s also why spirometry tests are so critical. That’s the test which showed the sudden drop in oxygenation as I was doing a treadmill exercise.

My new cardiologist has scheduled an echocardiogram for next Wednesday. I have an appointment with a sports pulmonologist tomorrow morning. Between the two of these, I will get further information about my heart as well as my lung functions.

After all that, I’ll be setting an appointment with a sports specialist whose job is solely to get me back to peak performance.

This isn’t just a relief. It’s a full breath of fresh air. Once you separate yourself from bullshit AI information and the well-meaning but dead wrong advice of people who have no knowledge or experience but for ten minutes online with the same idiot AI that you just shitcanned, things sure get a lot better.

Yes, there are some changes in my heart. This is true for every aging athlete, period. No matter who we are and how we use our bodies, a series of tests like this is a gift. It’s a snapshot in time so that we can see inside, figure out what’s working and what’s not, and get a solid plan together for the next phase of life.

And yes, a sudden move to 8600’ will place more demands on that heart and VO2 system, but that’s not the issue. When I was here before I had zero problems with the altitude. The change in the aorta size didn’t happen overnight. I had this condition all last year, when I was spending time here in Cuenca.

Something changed in my lungs, possibly even as simple as a bronchial infection that can be cleared up over time and with the right antibiotics. That’s just a smidge different from an aneurysm pressing on my windpipe.

Fer crying out loud. For a miserable weekend, I bought that bullshit.

I allowed a flawed human system created by deeply flawed people to scare the shit out of me.

There are four questions I get to investigate here, and I sure as shit am not depending solely on AI for my answers:

My new medical team and I are going to be investigating

1. Is the problem in my lungs a temporary adaptation or a new condition?

2. Are the blocked brachii an allergic response to a move from living in the fresh-air-infused woods to living and running next to heavy traffic and pollution? This is my guess, but I could be wrong.

3. Is the condition treatable, permanent or will it be alleviated by moving out into the country, which is the plan?

4. What are my training options so that I can get back to full cardiovascular training and health?

Artificial Intelligence lied through its virtual teeth. It’s only as wise as what’s fed into it, and it’s only as smart as what it can access.

I let what I found on line cause me one of the absolute worst weekends of my entire life. Based on information that was, wait for it…

Patently bullshit.

Honestly, this was an excellent exercise. I’ve turned what felt like life-altering news into an adventure.

Now I’ve got damned good doctors who are completely on board getting me back to training on the steps that are everywhere in this grand old city.

Tools are just that: tools. Tools created by fools are dangerous as hell, if we are fools enough to believe them outright. I was a fool and I paid for it. Now I get to share that story in the hopes that you don’t do that.

For my part I am grateful for this exercise and the chance to see my mistake.

Using AI for medical information is one of its better uses. But it’s still full of falsehoods, bad information and just plain garbage. For what it’s worth, use it wisely. Question everything. Verify verify verify.

I’m off to play with a horse today. At altitude. I will wheeze, but I now know why. Soon I’ll also know what to do about it.

Let’s play.

Heartfelt thanks to all those who offered me kind words, support and good thoughts last week when the proverbial shit hit the fan. Now I’m using all that as fertilizer. Please consider:

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Things big and small, and how they shape a new life

I’ve been up since 3:30 am, which is typical. It’s also typical for me to shower well before everyone else. Even though my apartment has a separate on-demand hot water source, I still share it with two other back-of-the-house guest apartments, currently full of people.

So I shower before five. Not today. No hot water.

This happens a lot. To get a technician to help you, get in line. There is a great deal of money behind putting up huge new gringo buildings. All the technicians are over in that part of town. Lights, water, plumbing, everything…wait your turn. Es la vida.

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This is Nurit. She’s 79 as of yesterday.

She sent me this photo at my request, because she had already told me she was going to take a few shots to mark the anniversary.

Almost eighty. Some of you are past that. Some of you are close. At 73, I can see it coming. She’s training for ninety. I’m training for eighty. I hope I make it looking that good. Feeling that good.

All of us are training in one way or another.

Nurit and I have been corresponding for some time now. She lives in Haifa, so her life has been under fire quite literally for several years. I’d had a trip planned for us to sit on the shores of the Mediterranean and a month before my flight, war landed first.

Meanwhile, Nurit has been taking care of business. She coaches and trains people who are in terrible shape mentally, physically, emotionally, spiritually. People who have been through more wars than we can count, and in so many regards are now at war with their bodies.

Here’s what I will share about Nurit (there is much more to her than just this, but for the sake of this article, what is most relevant)

Nurit is a bodybuilder who competed in Canada professionally at 48. At a time when so many women have utterly given up the ghost on their bodies, and things go south, north, west and east all at the same time, Nurit threw herself into workouts and managed to place in her age category, and then some.

She learned something from this experience- part of it a great deal about how diet, exercise, lifting weights and getting strong can give overworked, over-stressed and deeply anxious people a whole other kind of life.

So she has made a career out of it.

Nurit moved to Israel. Her sister Diane moved to Ecuador, where we are also building a friendship. Two extraordinary women.

Here’s my photo, a copy of the one I sent Nurit this morning:

Those of you who have been following me know that this represents a major improvement from three years ago, when I was still in the middle of a series of some fourteen surgeries. For several years I could barely walk, much less jog, hike, bike or outright run. I couldn’t use my hands, either, from surgeries.

I languished, gained weight, fretted about it, got angry and frustrated about it, accepted it for a while and cycled through all of that. Fourteen times.

Anyone who has ever been or identified with being an athlete and who lost it knows precisely how this feels.

Now look. I know I have shared some of these photos repeatedly, but always in context. I don’t do many selfies, so I don’t have many to choose from, and only a few which are the equivalent of Nurit’s on-stage look, above. So bear with me, this is for the sake of making a couple of illustrations.

Here was my high point at 64:

In early 2023, at 70, this was where I stood:

I’ve lifted now for my entire adult life. The last seven have been spottier than most but I never quit. Down times were long. My body paid the price in lost bone density, sarcopenia and VO2 capacity to say nothing of an extra 20-25 lbs, some of which I don’t need.

Then I too moved to Ecuador, where I settled in, for now, at 8600 feet.

Jogging is a bit of a joke right now but getting back to the gym was a breeze.

Pronounced good to return to weights again and very eager to rebuild my strength, flexibility and endurance after that long hiatus, I’ve been going regularly since the second week of June.

My new gym is nothing to brag about. It’s a single room, invaded by ear-splitting Spanish rap music, but with all the gear and machines I need. I’ve got 53 years of hard labor in such facilities, aided by Olympic competitors who trained me on form, breathing and recovery.

Form, at this age, is everything.

So is patience. You put your big fat delicate ego aside and start with baby weights. For me that’s about ten pounds and lots of reps to get the movement back. Given all the surgeries, I also have to explore range of movement to see where there are catches, pain or limitations that might require additional physical therapy.

Once past that stage and with my body kindly reminding me that it’s time to work again, I’ve been steadily increasing the weights over the last few weeks.

It doesn’t hurt at all that I am surrounded by great food sources, fresh fruits and vegetables and lean meats and better choices. As a result the pounds have been, forgive the pun, inching off.

If you interpret any of this as bragging or grandstanding you are missing the point. I am inspired to do what I do because of a woman 33 years my senior who taught me what extraordinary aging looked like. If we are extremely fortunate those people are right in our lives, not media personalities separate from us.

My mentor died at 92, working out with a trainer three times a week right up to the end.

Here is where, for so many of us of an age, there is such profound hope. The research underscores again and again that it doesn’t matter when you start, just that you DO start.

The moment you lift a weight, your body will say yes and it will start building muscle. The moment you make your lungs work they will respond with expansion. Do it gently and respectfully, giving yourself time, and things do change.

Lest you be tempted to take me to task, please read about Dr. Charles Eugster, who didn’t discover lifting weights until he was 87. I’ve also written regularly about Joan MacDonald, who didn’t start until 70 and now graces magazine covers as a fitness influencer at nearly 79.

My Medium/Substack buddy who at 74 and 85 lbs overweight decided to overhaul her health, and handed herself a slew of new life options.

In fact, Eugster, a self-proclaimed horny old man, was interested in impressing all those young 70-year-olds, and realized that his deteriorating body wasn’t going to do it for him.

The world’s oldest competitive female bodybuilder was the extraordinary Ernestine Shepherd, now 90 and still going strong. She never picked up a weight before 56.

Nobody with half a brain cell (barring influencers) will tell you that you’ll get your teenager body back. But you can likely, depending on your situation and your condition, improve your lot. By a lot, in many cases.

Which is why working with someone like Nurit who has the chops, the long life experience and who has been through much of what we have been through, can make such a profound difference.

As with so many of us of an age, I’m in the middle of negotiating terms with a condition which may or may not be limiting, depending on how the tests turn out. That said, whatever I do find out, workouts at the gym won’t stop.

They may need to be adapted, but they won’t stop.

Readers like , who is also negotiating terms with conditions, understand how deeply frustrating it is to not be able to physically do what we like.

I’m off for a long walk in the high Ecuadorian sun. Grateful to be alive, doubly grateful to be back working out, and triply grateful to have examples like Nurit who just don’t quit.

The body comes back with work.

There’s always hope. Where we take care of ourselves first, when we feed and move and take time for us, we create hope.

Let’s play.

As always thanks to my subscribers and readers. Things were particularly challenging this past week, that happens, and we move on. Please consider

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A day in the life, more lessons learned

The afternoon sun was hot. It was 70 degrees F here in Ecuador; you laugh, but at this altitude, 8600 feet, that’s bloody hot. There are heat advisories on my computer for when it gets over 67 F.

It’s remarkable how hot it can feel when you’re this close to the sun, the air is dry, and you’re exerting.

I was walking at speed, another kilometer or so, from one medical office to another. My primary doctor had told me that spirometry appointments were walk-ins.

Perhaps.

Not when the office is under construction, a fact that isn’t noted on the website, something you get used to here in Ecuador.

That’s not a complaint. It just is. And since I don’t speak Spanish I can’t just call. So I photographed the sign on the door and walked over to their temporary digs.

You could legitimately argue that I could translate a message and send it via WhatsApp, which is what everyone does here. But that isn’t yet as automatic and instinctive as it is for locals and long-timers. There are features, like the translator, that I can’t figure out yet, and certainly can’t do at speed.

So I walked yet another km or so on the busy streets of the city, dodging sidewalk hot spots and doing my best to stay in the shade.

Some days the dragon wins.

In this case, utterly minor inconveniences which lead to longer walks along a pretty river with plenty of big trees.

After all, I’d just been seen by a new dermatologist that morning who went over me inch by inch with a camera, a magnifying glass and a number of exhortations about double SPF twice a day, hats, scarves and SPF clothing.

It’s serious here. Potentially deadly, if not managed. As a born and raised Floridian, I am of the generation who thought nothing of baby oil and iodine and baking our bacon to a crisp in the noonday sun to look like the Coppertone commercials.

These days the results of that stupidity are being carved or frozen off my person. Bet lots of us of an age can relate.

Some days that dragon wins, too.

By about 3 pm, closest to the hottest time of the day (right around 4 pm), I finally sweated my way into the hospital where a kind receptionist, whose English was enough for us to communicate, called the office for me.

Appointment only. Back at the original office location. Tomorrow.

No worries. I shrugged on my backpack, tightened the straps and headed back out.

I’ve gotten to know this neighborhood bit by bit. All my doctors (so far) and services are within an easy walking distance. The PCP, the vet, my dentist, the specialists whose tests I’m now organizing, all within a 25-minute walk, most often along a tree-lined river.

Right now, I’m trying to figure out what’s up with my lungs. And heart, for that matter. Okay, well, everything.

I got a diagnosis just before I left for Ecuador, one which I frankly forgot because my sea-level based doctor told me no worries. If in fact I do have an aortic aneurysm, suddenly moving to 8600’ creates a cascade of effects, some of which I may be experiencing. Managing an aneurysm at altitude is very different than on the coast of Oregon.

People have been asking why it’s been such a big deal, since plenty of folks live with them. It’s easy to forget that I just ended my entire existence in the US, moved myself and my dog to a new country, and have been doing my level best to negotiate a great many very difficult, competing and at times heartbreaking decisions.

The reality of the diagnosis, which is potentially complicated by the high altitude, was the last straw.

Somedays a bigger dragon wins, but we don’t know that yet.

Besides, there’s always the possibility that the diagnosis wasn’t accurate. That’s of course after I’ve already had a meltdown about it, done the research and prepared myself for a somewhat truncated existence.

Hope for the best, plan for the worst. If the diagnosis was wrong, and it may well be, then anything that I claw back is a gift.

Here’s what I've learned:

According to the research, I should have acclimated in 2-3 weeks. That is most certainly my long experience, so when shortness of breath continued well beyond my norm (what other people experience has nothing whatsoever to do with anything), that’s when the alarm bells went off.

So now my PCP is putting me through a slew of tests. Everything that was tested before I left for Ecuador came up normal, but for a CT scan that indicated the aneurysm.

I’m old enough and trusting enough to believe the people who read the results. This is where the dragon slips in.

Once I processed my overreaction to the aortic aneurysm diagnosis, I remembered this:

Around 2018, my then-female PCP in Denver, who worked for the Veteran’s Administration, required a series of tests because my lady parts were giving me fits. When we got the test results back, we read them on her computer screen.

The problem is that this kind of incompetence is increasingly widespread. So while I initially took the aneurysm news seriously, and did all the necessary research to find out what I needed to do to accommodate it at altitude, I’ve also got reason to believe it might be a false positive.

So now, everything else is largely on hold until I get a bunch of tests done. That process is where things are now and where there are all kinds of lessons.

Right before and since moving here I’ve had a variety of baseline tests, like a new DEXA scan to identify just exactly how well a certain bone density medication is working. It wasn’t. I’ve got exactly the same osteopenia in my lower spine and hip as nearly two years ago.

But here’s the piece that touches every single one of us as we age: our bodies change. That particular bone density medication narrows vascular walls. If I do have an aneurysm, I can’t be taking it.

As an aging athlete living at 8600’, I shouldn’t be on anything that narrows vascular walls because the heart and lungs are already working harder to deliver oxygen, and that’s without exercise.

This is the kind of surprise side benefit we can get from a sudden diagnosis- it can force us to look at everything we ingest, even if the medication was the best possible response to a previous condition.

When things change, that medication may, as it was in my case, be a potential dragon.

It reminded me that so many of us go along blithely taking meds that were prescribed for a condition that a) we may no longer have, that has resolved, or in fact b) has been eclipsed by something else entirely.

A regular review of all our meds isn’t just necessary, it could be life-saving.

I wouldn’t count on our doctors to do this for us, either. Sometimes they are the dragon- certainly without meaning to be, but the medical system in the US is not designed around thoughtful care, assessment and individual attention. It’s designed around profit and insurance company shareholders.

More than ever, our health is now is our job, and the job of those who love us if we can’t do it for ourselves (another topic entirely). This isn’t good news, either.

Medical mistakes are among the biggest killers in the USA. This problem is made far worse when we’ve got radiology techs telling us that long-removed body parts are oddly-shaped, and the overworked and rushed doctor is expected to function on that dangerously-flawed information.

Some days the dragon wins big.

The older we get, the more we need to be able to count on the medical systems that are in place, the more terrified I have been of needing to trust them.

I’ve got a number of friends who have aged mothers in hospice or long- term care. We are trusting their lives- and eventually our own- to this system.

This diagnosis is a superb opportunity to have a more engaged conversation with my providers, with more in-depth information available before the appointment.

For example, when I get a CT scan (or anything else) here in Ecuador, the results aren’t sent to the doctor. They’re ready for us within a few hours. That way we get to conduct our own assessment of the results long before we speak with the doctor.

For the first time I’m getting data I can respond to and use, not information processed through my doctors and made nearly impossible to access in the first place.

Let’s just say that trying to get two years’ worth of critical medical information from the VA website was an exercise in rank futility. If you know, you know.

So we had to start over, which isn’t such a bad thing.

Some days the dragon wins, and it’s a good thing.

With the tests in my hands first, and plenty of time to study and review, I’m getting a clear picture of my bones and innards and what, if anything, I need to do about them.

At 73, nobody expects a perfect set of internal organs. Especially if we’ve been unkind or brutal to ourselves. The inimitable Joan MacDonald, who remade herself at 70 (and yes it took five years), still has questionable kidneys.

She had seriously BAD kidneys, now they’re much better. She’s the ideal example of how you can take a body that the dragon has nearly destroyed and by god stage a comeback. We won’t be perfect but we have pulled more quality life back.

Part of that’s age, part of it’s bad choices, part of it’s genetics. All our organs are going to wear down over time, some faster than others.

That’s not the dragon’s winning. Joan’s story is about how we win against the inexorable dragon of time, and eke out a bit of a better, longer, more lively existence even as we face the inevitable.

Most of the news so far has been pretty good. Some hasn’t. Because of the years of surgeries and all that down time, I now have some conditions that need addressing.

My doctor here suggested certain standard medications for bone density. To his credit, all he did was list the medications and send me off to do the research. You gotta love this guy.

As a hemophiliac and a kidney stone former, those conditions automatically rule out virtually all of the commonly-prescribed medications for bone density alone. That and extensive jawbone surgery mean that most of those meds are off the table.

The only one left was the one that thins the vascular walls. That bottle went walkies last weekend.

Sometimes the dragon wins.

Exercise and diet remain the best options, which for many if not most of us are the best path anyway. And.

Some of us have to take medications; in my case it’s potassium citrate which has meant I’ve been kidney-stone free for three years.

Sometimes exercise and diet keep the dragon at bay. Sometimes we need assistance.

This morning I did another hike to get a spirometry test. All normal, even at 8600 feet. Tomorrow at midday I get an MRI. By late afternoon tomorrow I’ll know definitively if I have that aneurysm.

Meanwhile I’ve set appointments with a top sports cardiologist and am researching sports pulmonologists. Why not? They work with aging athletes who have to deal with the same challenges I do. The same dragons.

This process began with what felt like a death sentence, and frankly, it has turned into quite the adventure.

Working with a very different healthcare system is an education in contrasts. Not speaking the language adds a layer of complexity, hilarity and constant opportunities for cultural stumbles.

We’ve all got dragons. Some of them are lying in wait in our heart ventricles. Some ambush us from our genes. Others waylay our nervous systems late in life with terrible, heart-rending efficiency, ripping away our mobility and our agency.

We all have dragons. Too many we feed ourselves with lifestyle habits. Others we can hold at bay. In the very best of worlds, the dragons can be our best teachers.

As I was finishing this up tonight, I was reminded of the Netflix movie Damsel. It’s a fun re-telling of the classic old tale, but this time the pretty princess, bloodied, unbroken and seriously badass, ends up having the dragon work with her.

That’s a fairy tale I can get behind.

Let’s play.

Thanks as always to the many supportive comments I’ve received since last weekend, and heartfelt thanks as always to my readers and subscribers. Please consider

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The above photo strikes fear in the hearts of many. How about you?

Dear Reader: Nothing in this article should be construed as medical advice. As with all things related to your body, please seek medical advice first so that your unique body is well-protected. As with all my work, every single bit of this (barring any links that I didn’t write) is 100% human-produced. Pardon my French, but SCREW AI. Ahem. This is a lengthy read. I hope you enjoy it.

The petite woman stood behind her gate, dwarfed by the delivery man. It was the first time I’d seen the person who actually lives in the house across the pasaje, or narrow alleyway, on which my current home in Ecuador sits.

She’s a gringo. Likely in her late sixties or seventies. The home had originally been owned by members of the family from whom I currently rent.

Life moves on. I’d heard that the house was for sale. Because of its proximity to the river and relatively safe location, it was $350k, which is an absolute fortune here.

I’ve been at this house since June 4th and not seen hide nor hair of anyone, but I recognized the uber-aggressive dogs baring their teeth at me from behind her picture window.

One dog is so aggressive that her dog walker has to put an open umbrella in front of it so that it can’t see other dog walkers and their doggos along the river.

So that’s whose dogs those are.

I walked over to greet her and asked if she was the owner.

“Was,” she said. “I just sold the place.”

I was delighted for her. That’s no small thing here, for gringos trying to sell pricey properties.

While I’ve no clue how she leapt to the next topic, she told me that she’d broken her hip. Having done that myself three years ago I shared that. She immediately wanted to know how I recovered.

This is where I’m not sure I will ever learn to keep my fat mouth shut. I told her: Six weeks after the surgery I started going to the Oregon Coast to run the sand dunes.

She was aghast. Such a thing was impossible for her to even imagine. I forget- unfortunately all the time - that many people simply do not want to do the work to get better. Not that kind of hard work, anyway. I’m wired differently.

That does not make me right. It means I’m wired differently. I will likely always choose the hard path. I like where it takes me.

She explained the PT she was doing, and the light exercises that her therapist had her practicing.

I said, foolishly, “Stairs are your best friend, because they work those big strong muscles in your legs.”

She recoiled as though I had struck her.

I hadn’t known that stairs are how she broke her hip in the first place. Now, apparently, she’s utterly terrified of them.

Look, I don’t blame her for that reaction. For the vast majority of older people, stairs are among the worst everyday obstacles, and sadly, the source of far too many injuries.

Hell, some of my own worst injuries are from stairs, but I also combine that with stupid. Like tossing a fifty-pound pack over my right shoulder and failing to notice that the stairs were uneven.

But for aging folks, far more commonly, stairs are the enemy in part because of these factors:

• Weak leg muscles

• Poor balance

• Side effects from medications

All three are preventable.

PREVENTABLE.

Some of the factors which aren’t so preventable include:

• Arthritis and joint pain

• Vision changes

• Dizziness or vertigo (which could be side effects from medications)

• Neurological or cognitive conditions such as Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, or dementia

In such cases, those people who are deeply attached to their family homes with stairs may well be signing their death warrants. Pain, neurological effects, diseases and other profound changes to our ability to safely maneuver our homes can be not only dangerous but deadly.

While I know this is terribly hard, to say nothing of emotionally and financially difficult, a safe and healthy future might require that we sell and move to a better-designed space. Or wall off/rent the upstairs entirely and move to the first floor.

Or, like the young Queen Victoria, only navigate those stairs with someone surgically attached to us. Of course back then there were yards and yards and YARDS of ridiculous dresses to hold out of the way of our feet, so there’s that.

This article is only going to touch on what we can do about our relationship with stairs, with which all humanity has had a complex relationship.

One option, which this woman is exercising, is to sell the house with the stairs and find a place that better serves her condition.

Depending on the condition you’re in, this might be the best choice. That said, it depends.

When my local friend Vicki was viewing condos here in Cuenca, the one she and her then-husband preferred had stairs. Vicki didn’t want stairs, which turned out to be a strategically-critical decision.

Her husband later developed a neurological disorder. Stairs would have made managing his illness vastly more difficult if not frankly impossible.

A simple reminder that no matter how lovely a place might look, how gorgeous the stairs might be, the realities of life and the aging process - to say nothing of life’s terrible hard balls- have to be taken into account.

We don’t plan to be sick. Well of course not. I didn’t plan to end up with an aortic aneurysm either. But I have one now. Such things are going to demand adaptation, the word my long-time reader loves for this year.

The other, and this is where I prefer to live, is to get back on the horse that threw me. To address whatever physical changes that we can indeed directly address ourselves, which in fact are many.

Until of course we can’t, which is a truth for all of us at some point. I’m not there yet.

All too often we already believe we’re past the point where intervention can help. I’ll bet you that you’re not there yet. Not most of us. That’s why attitude is often so much more important than any other factor when it comes to aging.

I get that this isn’t for everyone but bear with me here. There might be something in this is for you.

My last home in Eugene, Oregon had stairs, a double set of twelve leading to my basement to the garage and laundry. There was a dearth of single-level housing, which I was seeking. Back in 2020 I was planning on dying in my new state, in that house, and was taking into account the realities of extreme old age.

For me that meant my nineties, if stupid didn’t come for me sooner, which is ever the possibility.

What did come for me while I lived at this split-level house was surgery. A lot of them, including four on my feet, which mean some highly inventive accommodations. My fireplace was upstairs, wood was in the garage.

You learn to deal. In my case, thank god for a canvas wood carrier.

I butt-scooted up and down the stairs with the wood carrier around my neck. Frankly, it was funny.

As soon as my doctor cleared me to exercise with the repairs to my busted hip back in 2023, I drove straight to the Oregon coastline to hike the sand dunes.

Of course it hurt. Of course it was hard.

That discipline also led to my hip’s getting better faster, stronger and in a far prettier place than some PT’s office. Again, this is not for everyone. But it is for those who want to get better fast, and who also want to strengthen and prepare for more years ahead.

Let’s review the three bad operators which can lead to terrible stair accidents, but which we most assuredly CAN do something about starting today.

Stairs are often one of the best of all sources of training for the weak leg muscles that too many of us cultivate as we sink more deeply into our recliners as we age.

Our leg muscles aren’t the only victims when we sit too much-everything suffers. Heart, butt, bones, muscles, brain, mental acuity…everything!

Well before we age, for that matter. Health issues that used to be considered the realm of the fifties and over have invaded the world of the young and even the very young.

Heart attacks and other serious coronary issues are striking the young as well. One of the primary factors? TOO MUCH SITTING.

Just saying. Stairs are our friends, but so is any kind of movement.

Walking up and down them while using the banister, wearing shoes that have sturdy soles and something to grab the carpet or wood or tile so that we don’t slip, can be one of the easiest and best ways available to build leg strength.

Notice I didn’t say sprint up and down the stairs in stockinged feet. Or barefoot. Walk slowly, have a hand on the banister (and if there isn’t one please install one if you can), and develop the leg strength slowly.

When we trade daily walks, stair climbs, hill climbs, cycling and the like for constant sitting, the cost is huge. We make ourselves invalids long before our perfectly-designed body was ever intended to become a couch pillow for the cats.

Poor balance/side effects from medications

These are so often connected at the hip, let’s address them together.

As we age in particular, doctors and slick advertisements convince us to pile on the meds. I’ve written several times about this recently so won’t repeat myself here, see the link. Please do your own research with your own doctors as it pertains to your body and your needs.

Most importantly, what meds can you stop if you’re more active and eat better?

Aside from the RX- and over-the-counter, drug-induced balance and other issues, what can you do?

regularly posts her exercise routines and she regularly addresses balance. You can go to many YMCA or other civic centers and find balance classes specific to your age group, or you can turn to YouTube.

Whatever you do, please start small and start safely. Balance exercises you can do at home will get you started, but if I may. Please make sure that you’ve got something safe to grab if you totter. The dog doesn’t count unless it’s a Great Dane. Or a small pony.

Also make sure that if you do topple, there’s something soft to land on.

No matter what you might have done in your youth, including gymnastics, if you’ve stopped, your skills decay. Conversely, the best news is that especially if you’ve been an athlete in your lifetime, the body never forgets.

NEVER.

You may well have to coax said skills out of hiding, but they’re still there. Patience is the key word as well as a sense of humor.

For the better part of nearly two years, one of the skills I worked on while in recovery from all my surgeries was balance. Even with sore feet-and boy did I have sore feet after four surgeries and serious nerve pain-I worked on a BOSU ball at my YMCA in Eugene Oregon.

I had walked in one day and watched a young woman, clearly a ballet dancer, walk up to a BOSU ball, stand up one-legged, and strike a beautiful pose.

“Ima gonna do that one day,” I sez.

Here I was at 71, both feet had been reconstructed and hurt like hell pretty much all the time, and both had metal embedded in the bones. And I’m going to do that?

Three weeks later I was doing just that. I sure as hell didn’t look like she did, but the work paid off.

Here’s what I did:

• Moved a BOSU ball close to a wall where there were rungs I could grab when I tottered, and I tottered plenty

• I got trained on how to properly, safely mount the ball

• I used a tall wooden dowel to keep me steady until I no longer needed it

• If there was any question about safety I got a spotter

• I ran all my exercises by my physical therapist, who corrected my form

Up until I quit the Y in October of 2025 because I knew I was moving, I was on that damned ball nearly every day. I had one at the house, used one at the Y and kept expanding how I used it.

It ain’t pretty. Nobody is going to give me style points, but the balance work was terrific. Then I stopped. Had to. I packed the house (and the ball) for Ecuador, and everything is in storage for now.

I’ve not been on a balance ball since October. The body remembers- but you and I have to wake it up gently.

The one I have now is inflated more, so it’s harder to balance. It’s placed strategically in the middle of what would otherwise be a small living room in my apartment, now cleared out for workouts.

I’m standing on it one-legged for a few seconds at a time until I am used to the feel of the thing. Weight work and fancy-schmancy stuff comes later, after I’ve got my BOSU skills back.

The skills didn’t go away. Just napping.

If you were ever an athlete, your muscle skills and balance are all likely just snoozing until you’re using them again. It’s almost impossible to describe the joy we feel when we invite that skill back into our lives and remember what physical competence feels like.

My soon-to-be ex-neighbor may well be moving into one of Gringolandia highrise condos across town. The services, conveniences and access to what she needs are all included. Most have doormen, it’s easy to get a taxi, many have gyms. Doctors and hospitals are all nearby.

There’s no long-term care, however. That, for all of us, is the ultimate question that demands to be addressed, and can’t continue to be put off as bad news someday. My parents, wisely, planned for their final days long before they needed help.

What many of us may miss is that today’s senior communities are not our parents’ and grandparents’ old folks’ homes.

They can be lively and engaging and challenging and full of options and remarkably better-off people. People who often say that they should have made the move at 75, not 85, so that they could have spent more time doing fun things as opposed to say, mowing the lawn, fixing the roof, painting the house, fixing the plumbing… Just saying.

It’s one reason I won’t buy here in Ecuador. Options.

My neighbor, while a fall down the stairs cost her a busted hip, is lucky. Her beautiful home sold and she can make some thoughtful moves. She’s doing her PT, and likely will end up in a single-floor spot better suited to her.

What will you and I do?

You and I can organize our lives around increasing limitations, which in some cases is absolutely necessary as life throws us challenges.

Some of us are going to accept them and hope for the best.

Some of us are not going to accept those limitations and will choose to work hard to create the best.

Both are perfectly viable options. From where I stand, wobbling on my BOSU ball on this lovely Ecuadorian morning, I choose the hard work.

Hard work may often offer us different options.

Options allow us to play.

So, however you decided to do you, let’s play.

Thanks to my subscribers, readers, and the many commenters whose words I take in with much gratitude. Please consider supporting my work, and heartfelt thanks to my newest subscribers.

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Where the hell did this wheezing come from? Oh…..I forgot.

Christ, I thought. WHAT IS WRONG WITH ME?

Mika and I were jogging lightly down the riverside path to the Tomebomba River here in Cuenca just as we’d had since about June 8th. It’s high here, 8600’ or thereabouts, so the air is quite thin.

I’d lived at altitude in Colorado for fifty years. I’m moving about as fast as a Galapagos turtle. I love high, thin air. Why can’t I get a breath? What is wrong with me that I haven’t acclimatized by now?

I spent my entire adult life at altitude. If anything I prefer the thin air.

I’ve made progress in extending this embarrassingly short jog by a matter of inches instead of miles. Still I was impatient. I should be doing a couple of miles by now.

Sprinting was out of the question. Yesterday as I hiked a steep hill to get to a ranch, I had to stop and catch my breath.

For someone who has trained very hard on stairs at high altitude at Denver’s Red Rocks for years, whaaaaat?

Two weeks ago I had my first visit with my local primary care doctor. He heard wheezing in my lungs. So had a pulmonologist late last year, but we blew it off to something minor and moved on.

Then we took another CT scan just before I left for Ecuador. A scan that I’d completely forgotten about, including a conversation with my PCP at the VA just before I left.

Both had gotten swallowed by the enormity of preparations to get myself and my dog ready for the move to another country.

My VA doctor said that it wasn’t large enough to be hugely concerning but it was apparently large enough to be mildly obstructive.

I was treating my lack of deep breath as an annoyance. I just needed to push past.

An aortic aneurysm isn’t something you push past.

In fact, had I tried to sprint my way to better cardio health I might have just sprinted myself to an early grave. That’s how grave this can be.

Even one as small as what I have can burst, and that’s all she wrote.

On top of that I moved to much higher altitude, which means the heart has to pump that much harder to circulate oxygen, so blood pressure goes up. Precisely what had caused the aneurysm in the first place, and precisely what I don’t want ever again.

The seven years of constant surgeries, extreme pain, little relief and too many fights with the VA and community doctors had left me with a little, erm, reminder. The level of stress I’d been under had cost me mightily. That’s one reason why they call these problems invisible.

Such complications in certain people are ticking time bombs.

Well, shit.

How can you forget news like that?

Well, try moving yourself and your dog to a brand-new country. You will likely drop more than a few key details which seem obvious later.

Today I had the second of my appointments with my new doctor. It’s taken me all of those two weeks to locate, request and secure the tests, results, notes and lab work he requested.

That’s when I stumbled across the notation on my CT scan.

Shit. I forgot.

I bloody well spaced it entirely.

I’ve done a slew of research in preparation for my meeting with the doctor. Meanwhile I go to the gym, where my exertions now have to be dialed carefully back. No more holding my breath. No more big grunts (which I never did anyway but still). Lower weight, higher reps.

Absolute control of that blood pressure.

For now, no more trying to run faster, at altitude. I can jog, lightly and steadily. Hiking and biking are also fine. But the days of extreme effort- these days know ludicrously as MAXXING- are over.

No more straining. ( A reminder to those who strain on the toilet: THAT COUNTS AS STRAINING AND IT IS NO LAUGHING MATTER)

I also found out that my fondness for steep hills might have to be modified, and my days of heavy backpacks may also be numbered.

Only time and testing will give us some answers. For now, until we absolutely know what we’re dealing with, everything is ratcheted back.

Part of this article was inspired by yesterday’s read:

Can I Do It Alone?

Do You Ever Want to Blow Up Your Solo Life?

For the first time in my life, I’m thinking about retiring, joining the other 70-somethings who are not stuck to work schedules and associated tasks. After all, I have not done much since the end of May and the world didn’t end…

Read more

a month ago · 68 likes · 29 comments · Sue Fagalde Lick

One quote from that got my attention was

Sue had a bad time with a rough heart diagnosis. As she sorts out returning to all those emails or, as I have done, turn at least in part towards non-blood family to fill some of the heartspace gaps that being solo underscores, her health journey has forced her (and many Dear Reader) to think hard about what’s next.

Neither of us has family. The older we get, the greater this question becomes as “society” tells us that family needs to take up more of the slack. And for those who have none? Screw you, I guess.

I moved to Ecuador. Stressful as hell and it’s hardly settled yet. That said, what I got out of that move are things like this:

My doctor’s office sent me a note at the last possible moment to ask me to come an hour early. I don’t have a car and it’s a 20 minute walk. My family here threw me in their car and saved the day.

If I need a coffee (which, sadly, these days has to be decaf) they’re always ready to sit down at our favorite table, gossip, or drag me to a new store.

My dueña admired a new merino wool sweater I’d scored from Banana Republic. I went to their store and got her the last one in her size. She drags me to the one cent copier around the corner by car, saving me an hour’s walk.

I get hugs and kisses all day. Never had that in my life ever. Along with my doggo, these things tend to drop your stress level in a big way.

Sue writes:

I want to love another dog, I want to visit the members of my family I usually only see at funerals, and I want to drive Highway 20 from Newport, Oregon across the country to Boston and come back via Route 66. But I have to lie down after a trip to the grocery store.

There is nothing but nothing like a health scare to get you to take notice.

In my adventure career, I have nearly died on multiple occasions. It is impossible to underscore how profound those experiences are, how they retool your attitude about life. Sky diving, scuba, horses, bull sharks.

I don’t recommend this for everybody. But extreme sports, and the inevitable accidents that come with them, sure as hell teach you to appreciate life. Ask Lindsay Vonn about that one.

Health scares do that too, they are scolding and scalding and terrifying and humanizing. If you are fortunate, you get another shot.

What you do with it, what you want next, is the question. What are we willing to work for in order to have a different life?

As an athlete, I’ve worked extremely hard to make sure this aging body can take me into extreme old age. Sue’s life is full of community, choir, singing, lots and lots of writing and billion details we can hardly recall at days’ end, all making up time we don’t get back.

Does she really want to go back to answering all those emails with the limited time she has left? Frankly, that’s one hell of a good question.

Right now we’re both facing realities. My recent diagnosis may well mean that my dream of climbing Annapurna is out of reach. Most assuredly, if I did do something like that again I’d have to take some pretty extreme measures to make sure that I don’t come down the peak as dead weight.

Is it that important? I’m asking that right now. If some options are no longer available, what options are? Sue asks:

My experiences were for seven years, through fourteen surgeries and involving both a shitton of 24/7 pain and no promise of a recovery (which did come, eventually), Sue’s experience was briefer but in some ways far more dramatic.

My body was left with some bone density losses, VO2 capacity losses and other signs of mild decay. Most of those are recoverable with hard work. I’d gained weight, lost tone. The aneurysm, though, is a lasting reminder of the cost of extreme stress over years, not just a frustrating phone call.

My new doctor, a high-energy gerontologist, is ALL IN on helping me get as much back as I possibly can. I am very lucky.

In so many ways I got to watch what happens when we go from five workout days a week AND sports AND cardio training to a fraction of that, bookended by too much stress eating for the energy expended.

Much of that is indeed being transformed right now, and I am beyond grateful that my body largely supports this recovery.

But an aortic aneurysm doesn’t get transformed by better life habits. At best you can keep it from getting worse, but your lifestyle is much changed. How much remains to be seen.

Sue’s energy levels may well return. There may be rough days and there may well be an end to the tiredness so that a big road trip is in fact on the menu. We don’t know until we try.

Like Sue, I have no idea about the landscape ahead. Neither of us quite knows yet what’s possible. And out of what’s possible, what do we even want to do with the time we have left?

What do I still want to do with my life?

What CAN I still do with my life?

This I believe is universal. Each one of us at some point gets to face mortality and say WAIT I’M NOT DONE YET…like Sam Neill who died at 78, there were so many things he still wanted to do. I can relate. I know he’s pissed right now.

I don’t want the waters to drag me home before I’m done.

My job is to rebuild so that I can. So I am off to the gym.

If we do get that shot at a little more time, what itch do you need to scratch?

What then? Whatever that looks like for you,

Let’s play.

Thanks to all my readers and subscribers. I hope this day finds you hopeful and with plenty of reasons to be grateful. Please consider:

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Found on Substack this morning, courtesy of

Me, in Mongolia, 2019, at 66:

Be that confident.

Go out and do the thing.

Just do it now.

Let’s play.

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The casualties of our self-importance when we move overseas

My dog Mika was watching something. I was looking down at her on the walking path next to the river. Minding my own beeswax, thank you. Suddenly something flew by me at speed. Next I knew I was flat on the ground with my back twisted by the leash.

A couple had come by, their pit bull unleashed. The pittie had made a run at my doggo.

Scared the holy shit out of me. I got Mika under control. Myself, not so much. I was mad because I was so scared- scared for my doggo, scared for my own physical safety. Anger is a perfectly normal response.

I barked at the couple casually walking along the public river walk with an unleashed animal, and they responded in kind. Neither of us understood the other but the sentiments were clear.

Shaking, I walked Mika further down the river where I could sit down. To calm my nerves I looked up the law. Not to take action. It gave me something to do while my dog and I got unjangled.

I wanted to know what might happen had their dog come back to finish the job. Why? Because I am a minority here. My rights aren’t the same as the locals.

Read more

What really, truly ages you swiftly

Dear Reader: It’s close to 5 am here in Ecuador. I’ve got some topics on my mind but I decided to share an older piece from my time at Medium, which includes references to writers there. I’ve updated it for relevancy, but it’s an evergreen piece.

This is a long, long piece about aging with a lot of links. Don’t invest in this if you have no interest in a full, healthy life long before you ever step up to your 99th birthday cake. If you do care, nibble at this at your leisure. I hope you enjoy the journey.

Today I read yet another article by a person turning fifty. I’m not going to link to it for I don’t wish to have anyone feel that I’m criticizing them or their point of view. I’m not. I am, however, troubled by the choice of wording, the language used, as in “suddenly old” at fifty.

As though a number, any number at any point of life, by virtue of that number, delivers decrepitude. Over the course of my 73 years I have watched that number slide lower and lower and lower.

At one point, elderly used to refer to those in their eighties or nineties. A short while ago, some wag who has money to make from causing us to be terrified, shifted elderly to mean anyone over 65.

Back in 2020, my previous Colorado governor, Jared Polis, intoned that those over 60 are “vulnerable.” This was said about the healthiest state in the nation, full to the brim with senior athletes, senior Olympians and folks who leave their 30-ish compatriots in the dust.

As have I on more than one occasion, hiking mountains all over the world.

Now that age has apparently skidded back another decade, to fifty.

Dear god people, why do we buy into this bullshit?

Well, all due respect to that writer, they do not speak for me, nor my friends, nor my increasing circle of active, engaged, healthy, opinionated, smart, successful (on their terms, not necessarily society’s terms) friends.

Most are well past fifty, some are much older. None considers themselves “old.” None considers themselves elderly, although society would term them that, which is tantamount to a death sentence. It IS a death sentence in this country.

Some of you take issue with my choice of the world “old.” As a professional wordsmith and someone who wrote a prize-winning book on the power of words, it is how our society views the word and how it uses “old” to demean, undermine and attack an entire growing community of often vibrantly healthy people that I am addressing.

It’s how we ourselves internalize the term.

Folks past fifty aren’t vulnerable in any sense of the word, but for how society treats them past a certain age. Especially when folks saw the pandemic as a way to clear out all those old folks. Really? Honestly?

I have a message for you: wait a while. Wait until you hit a Certain Age, feel terrific, have taken care of yourself, have endless energy and joie de vivre.

Then suddenly every asshole in America from your new doctor to your new friends are trying to stuff you bodily into the old age/vulnerable/elderly/decrepit/ancient/useless box.

My fellow Medium peep Lisa Wathen referenced this recently when she discussed what her new doctor suggested to her- now that she’s all of fifty. Fifty doesn’t determine our state of being. The individual does.

Lisa’s active, busy and engaged. My guess is that her body isn’t exactly falling apart, nor do I think that the assumptions too many in the medical profession make about women and aging are accurate. Sure has been my experience.

Talk about not going gently into that good night. Not on your life, Sparky.

Aging is the single thing that we all have in common, as all our current crises call out racism and viciousness. Ageism strikes us all, and makes us all equals.

You’re old. The one accusation which, barring early death, is going to slap every single one of us in the face.

Is there any wonder at all that younger people today have a fear of aging when we by our example use negative language to discuss aging? It is a natural process to have things like eyesight change or diminish, go grey (which can happen at any age) to lose some of our sharper faculties.

However, far more a factor in our quality of life, far more a factor in terms of how we are able to embrace each day, is our attitude about aging, which is increasingly affected by media. Media with a vested interest in our terror of turning thirty.

My generation didn’t trust anyone over thirty. However, for me, 43 years ago, age and decrepitude weren’t the issues.

We feared the arteriosclerosis of a youthful attitude.

Age doesn’t age us anywhere near as swiftly as our choices. While there are some things we can’t control, like the passage of time, accidents, genetics and some MAGA hat ICE asshole who takes our lives for Trump points, our aging process is about 70% squarely in our hands.

OUR control, not that of popular media or of medicine. If anything, in this regard, too much of the Western medical community is for me nearly a sworn enemy, but for those few who speak my language of health and prevention, exercise and proper food for fueling the body, and NO pharmaceuticals unless absolutely necessary.

(Please note: I am well aware that poverty, access to health care, race, availability of decent food and many other critical factors come into play; this article doesn’t seek to address that. That’s a whole other piece. Stay with me here.)

Here then are many of those ways that we age ourselves swiftly, suddenly, by far younger than fifty.

We age ourselves swiftly by what we eat, how we eat, and our sedentary habits. We age through causing constant inflammation in our bodies. Please see:

Chronic inflammation

Body-Wide Inflammation

Inflammaging Update

We’re not shy of knowledge. We’re shy of the willingness to apply the knowledge that is at the fingertips of so many of us.

A while back I had an excellent opportunity to test the inflammatory foods hypothesis. I had some slices of pepperoni pizza. Pastries for dessert. I was sick for three days, my guts in an uproar, my energy flattened and my strength diminished. I don’t need further proof.

Want more about why inflammation is so very important? Please see:

How Inflammation affects our mental health

We age ourselves swiftly through extreme dieting, including strict vegans who don’t adequately supplement with Vitamin B12.

Please see:

The four stages of Vitamin B12 deficiency

Because we get so focused on weight loss, we too often miss what our body is screaming at us.

Early, mild symptoms of stage four vitamin B12 deficiency include:

• Fatigue

• Depression

• Anxiety

• Loss of appetite

• Pallor

• Hair loss

• Numbness or tingling in the hands and feet

• Poor memory.

Kindly, all typically attributed to aging. No.

This is caused by diet. Food is medicine is food. The right foods, by definition not the average American diet.

A friend of mine worked in construction in Hawaii for decades. One client of his, a man in his fifties, went on a strict vegan diet. My friend watched him steadily lose weight, spending more and more time in a lotus pose in his expensive back yard on Maui.

Then one day he just died. He’d ignored all this body’s signals that it was missing critical nutrients.

In other words, many of the diets we engage in to lose weight, or to demonstrate our moral superiority are actually killing us off. My hand is up here, having been anorexic/bulimic for forty years, nearly starving myself to death, suffering a heart attack. Talk about aging fast.

Please note: if you are overweight (by your body standards, not by Vogue’s), are diabetic and on metformin, you have another issue that needs to be addressed. Metformin has been shown to interfere with the body’s absorption of B12.

Metformin has also been framed as an anti-aging drug. Be very careful here.

If you have decided to become a strict vegan on top of being overweight and diabetic, can you not now see how each of these things can combine to create a perfect storm? EVERYTHING interacts. What we choose to ingest or not ingest has an impact.

Instead of running to the doctor for another pill to fix us, may I please suggest that you begin with a serious assessment of your body, your eating habits, get a full panel that tells you what nutrients you may be lacking.

So very often what you and I interpret as aging or sickness has far more to with what we’re ingesting, or nutrients we’re not getting through our food choices.

Above all, your body is a completely different, unique universe that responds in its own sacred way to everything. What works for Smith does not work for Jones does not work for Gonzalez does not work for Chu. Learn YOUR body.

We age ourselves swiftly through bad habits like smoking and drinking.

By the time I was nineteen I was up to five packs a day. I quit cold turkey and started jogging the same day. Hurt like a sonofabitch. Thought I’d cough my lungs out. Next day I did it again. And the next. And the next. Never looked back, never smoked again, and completely reversed what I had done to my lungs.

Smoking ages your skin and face at warp speed.

Drinking ages us swiftly, too. Let’s start with skin.

That’s the tip of the iceberg. How does alcohol age you rapidly? Like this.

You can moderate the effects by drinking water or juice in between your tonics. The honest truth is that no alcohol is the only good alcohol, other than to get potential virus sheds off your skin.

I realize that is a useless approach in today’s world, but it’s also one reason why my face hasn’t aged the way my parents’ faces did. They were lifelong serious drinkers, as was my brother. By the time he got to his fifties, he looked seventy-five from the combination of alcohol and cigarette use.

No amount of legislation or research will change the fact that alcohol is here to stay. However, how you drink, how much and how often all have much to do with how fast you age.

Then there’s our compulsion to do the right thing way way WAY too much.

We age ourselves swiftly through brutally extreme exercise regimens in the very effort to fight off age.

I’m a big fan of training, but when we push too hard, it can cost us everything.

The best of the best, even as we laud them for being such serious badasses, are often seriously damaging themselves.

In other words, extreme endurance training does the complete opposite of what you want it to do. It can kill you young by aging your heart, not making it stronger.

We age better at any age when we rest between training sessions. Over-training can actually damage or kill us. It certainly can age us far faster than we believe it can.

But wait. There’s more.

We age ourselves swiftly through taking prescriptions and over the counter (OTC) meds which have horrible interactions, dangerous side effects, and turn people into doddering ancients, causing us to fall and suffer traumatic brain injuries, among other things.

All doctors ask us how many times we’ve fallen in the last six months to a year. It’s a standard question after fifty.

Being a fall risk IS NOT ASSOCIATED WITH A NUMBER. It’s associated with our habits. Such as drug use.

Because of drug abuse. Sanctioned drug abuse which feeds a for-profit medical community which only benefits if we are ill. There is no such thing as an American health system. Only the American Industrial Illness Conglomerate.

Shareholders lose if we thrive. America makes money on our misery.

Polypharmacy results in symptoms that look like age, but aren’t. In many cases they’re side effects, results of drug interactions or overdoses.

Here’s what Harvard Health says about meds that mimic aging.

Here are a few key killer Over the Counter drugs.

Need I point out that any overuse of any drug at any age is going to cause you issues? These are not the problems of the old. They are the problems of people, period. Including very young people, whose obesity causes diabetes, which is an inflammatory disease.

Inflammation ages us.

We age more swiftly through air pollution.

Who doesn’t suck in smoke from the world’s wildfires right now? Who doesn’t live where pollution at least shows up once in a while? Here’s how that affects us as we age, and how it exacerbates our natural aging process.

From the article:

Air pollution in urban areas, much of which comes from traffic, includes tiny particles called PMs, nitrogen dioxide (NO2) and chemicals such as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs). “What is very clear is that PMs are a problem for skin,” said Krutmann, whose work has shown PMs increase age spots and wrinkles.

Air pollution has also been linked to diabetes.

In poor areas of the world where people live close to air pollution like busy highways, rates of diabetes are much higher. Folks want to blame their food habits, but it’s more complex than that. Nowadays, air pollution affects all of us and it shows in our bodies, faces, lungs.

Anxiety ages us swiftly.

Not only do we age from anxiety itself, but anxiety causes us to eat badly, smoke, avoid exercise, take drugs, and engage in all the habits that cause inflammation, which increases our anxiety.

Phobias and fear age us faster, the study suggests.

This one we all know, and all too often, live: Loneliness.

We age far more swiftly if we are lonely.

Loneliness is not limited to being old. It’s affecting more of us all the time, younger and younger.

If you thought smoking was bad, loneliness is worse.

Our fear that we aren’t worthy, aren’t enough if we aren’t young, perfect, thin, white, rich, or whatever the lie may be causes far more age-inducing anxiety that necessary.

On top of all that, and this would be hilarious if it weren’t such a growing thing, we have a real issue with gerascophobia, which is fear of aging itself. THAT causes anxiety, which leads folks to drink, smoke, take drugs, do stupid shit….

…all of which ages us ever so much faster.

What we ingest, what we smoke, the drugs we take, the habits we engage in which cause inflammation, all age us far more swiftly than age itself.

It is an easy argument to make, and a hard one to impose, that if more of us ate better, moved more, drank less or not at all, didn’t take drugs or otherwise treated our bodies with a modicum of respect, we wouldn’t be aging so fast.

However, you can-and should- also make the argument that a poor healthcare system, food deserts, grinding poverty, terrible anxiety (as a result of Existing While Black, Hispanic, etc.) lack of education, access to decent housing and intense pressure from corporate marketing to EAT THIS EAT THAT and the cheap availability of poisonous food make health damned hard indeed.

Add to that the current move towards dismantling any and all environmental progress to clean up our air, our water, our oceans and food sources. Especially toxic Superfund sites where the marginalized are forced to live. But that’s another issue.

Finally, in a sincere effort to counter those arguments that people make when I write about those things that you and I can affect, I offer this thoughtful and sobering piece by Joseph Davis.

I agree wholeheartedly that the emphasis on anti-aging, the focus on how we should defeat age as though such a thing were possible, the arguments that age is a disease to be treated like cancer are not only ridiculous, but hopeless.

Sells a lot of stupid shit, but it’s hopeless. You do not stop time. You cannot stop the aging process. We can learn to negotiate fair terms and even enjoy it.

Through our own choices, our own actions, we are aging ourselves far faster than necessary. We are buying the bullshit that we are old at fifty when in reality we are extending our life expectancy.

How is that a good thing when we hate who we are at thirty? When many of us still have six more decades or more ahead of us, all the while hating ourselves more each day for doing the one thing people want to do: keep living?

How insane this is.

Let’s wait, please, for our turn to get elderly. It will come soon enough. You and I are forever in training for our eighties and beyond. When we get there, I hope that the experience is a rich one.

Davis’ piece from The Hedgehog Review might cause all of us to think more carefully about this gift that is given us, should we be so fortunate: extreme old age.

From Davis’ piece:

It’s a provocative, kind, thoughtful piece that asks hard questions about how we age, not whether or not we can stop it. We can’t. Since we can’t, then perhaps the greater journey is to stop doing everything to speed it up.

Much of the above are habits that others make money from, by the way.

Most of us have choices. We all have the choice of our attitudes.

We might wish to do our level best to improve our quality of life as we age, do all we can to eat well, move much, love even more and have a purpose. Those four stool legs form our foundation.

Age hate does none of us any good. Age fear does us no good at all. We will diminish. We will die. How we get there is very much up to us.

In 17 years when I am facing 90, my dear hope is that I don’t focus on exercise for its own sake, but to improve the quality of my days. That I don’t focus on food to stay slim, but to improve the functions of my aging body. That I increasingly enjoy the lack of societal competition and comparison. That I take even greater pleasure than I do now in the rising starlight of the end of my many days, days lived in the best health possible, loved by people I love in return, and the gratitude for the time I’ve been given.

As the No Country article above notes, the gift of wisdom has far more to offer me than any great musculature or fad diet. At some point, the care we’ve taken of our hearts, our bodies and our souls potentially allow us to enter our final years with fewer pains, diseases and the insults that great age can carry, but don’t always have to.

Better care of ourselves today far better ensures an easier aging process when we do indeed become elderly.

Finally, from the article:

The social orientation of the evening of life need not be individualistic, but toward family and the localization and strengthening of social relations. Similarly, the view of the life cycle need not take its bearings from youth and middle age but from roles and identities appropriate to old age, with their own norms and rewards. These norms and rewards need not be defined in terms of active striving and productivity, but in terms of release, such as from social climbing, and a more contemplative attitude toward the world. Surely, in the last stage of life, health and longevity need not continue to be treated as ends in themselves. Rather, they might be set within a larger framework of limits, a recognition of our vulnerability and dependence, and the ethic of a well-lived life. There are other possibilities, and if we are to free ourselves from the iron cage to which our cultural logic consigns us, we must look to them for direction.

Precisely. When it’s time.

For the time that is given us, please, let’s play.

Such lengthy articles are an act of love, and part of who I am as I also age. Before I head out on this cool Ecuadorian morning to jog with Mika, I ask again that if such work is valuable to you, please consider supporting my efforts. Whatever you do, don’t fear the clock. Instead, do something about the time that is given to you.

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Yet another brilliant article for those of us who care deeply about how we age

OMG it’s been a week for reading and sharing terrific material.

Once again, I came across another piece that is so relevant for those of us who care and are mightily committed to vibrant health as we age. In this case, it’s our beloved (and my case, rather battered) brain.

Here you go:

Better's Substack

Harvard Scientists Studied 200 Aging Brains for a Decade — One Daily Habit Made All the Difference

In neurology clinics across the country, a quiet pattern has been showing up on brain scans for years. Patients in their mid-thirties — not elderly, not genetically at risk, not injured — are walking in with cognitive profiles that look nothing like what their age should produce…

Read more

2 months ago · 252 likes · 13 comments · Better Within

Two quotes from this article that nailed my attention right away:

Passive scrolling — the thing most people do for three, four, five hours every single day — trains your brain into a state called low cognitive load. Your eyes track content. Your thumb moves. But your prefrontal cortex — the part responsible for deep thought, planning, and sustained attention — goes dormant.

When you scroll, you are not “relaxing.” You are putting your brain’s most important region into standby mode — for hours at a time, every single day. This is not recovery. This is atrophy with a user interface. (author bolded)

And this:

Your brain’s comfort zone is where synapses go to die.

Please kindly read that again.

I’d suggest that doom scrolling in particular is guilty here; I have to wonder how much scrolling for research qualifies, but that’s just me.

This is why the recent article by The Atlantic called the lack of real reading- BOOK reading- a real crisis. It most assuredly IS a real crisis.

Discomfort is the handmaiden of growth. While our lazy-ass brain loves to create shortcuts, it loves challenges more. It rewards us for taking risks, working harder and choosing the higher path of difficulty vs. comfort.

This is why I recommend ’s The Comfort Crisis: Embrace Discomfort To Reclaim Your Wild, Happy, Healthy Self.

It’s why I love ’s new book The Way of Excellence: A Guide to True Greatness and Deep Satisfaction in a Chaotic World.

Everything that I have read, everything that I have put into practice in my own life in terms of better eating, more reading, more deep discomfort underscores the lessons in all of this.

All these things are connected. Those of us who read voraciously AND we exercise AND we mind our nutrition and social circles are likely not only to have very vibrant lives, but also, we don’t likely have medicine cabinets chock-full of medications and OTC drugs.

As for food, ever the question for those of us interested in both prevention and better brain care, this landed squarely for me. I wrote a book back in 2010 which discussed the toxic aspect of words. Social media has risen as one of the top sources of that kind of brain sewage to which we dedicate far too much time every day.

Cognitive decline terrifies all of us. It should. But it is no longer limited to the realm of those of us past a certain number.

The above article nails that reality. It’s an issue of brain rot at thirty, forty. It begins as soon as someone starts doom scrolling. Real cognitive decline decades before you’d expect it.

In us. Our kids. Their kids.

None of us has to suffer, but we have to do something about it ourselves. Far more importantly, parents have got to decide to actually parent, as opposed to handing their kids a device that sucks the brains right out of their bodies.

wrote the definitive book on how to feed your brain. For those of us who are well past sixty and who are terrified of anything that smacks of dementia, it’s an investment in not only prevention but also better management even if you are experiencing symptoms.

She writes regularly on Substack. I’m a fan. For those of us who are- as we should be- concerned about our brain health and are possibly watching some symptoms arise, the first first FIRST order of business is what goes into your mouth as everyday nutrition.

Second, the next order of business is what you’re putting into your body in the form of Over The Counter (OTC) drugs. We’ve been taught to believe they are safe.

I know I’m repeating myself here from other articles but we forget. When we don’t bother to check the acetaminophen content on LOTS of other drugs, we poison our livers. And worse. OTCs are not safe.

In fact, some of the side effects mimic what too many lazy doctors say are “just aging.” Know the most dangerous ones for those of us over fifty.

Truly good doctors want to know every drug in your medicine cabinet, every supplement, every single pill bottle you carry in your purse. They also want to know your diet, because while food doesn’t replace medication in some cases, food most definitely IS medicine in the highest sense.

Those OTCs often interact dangerously with whatever meds you’re taking for your conditions. When properly used, OTCs are safe, but when mixed with certain drugs, including alcohol, they can be damaging or even fatal. We may know this, but we also can forget. We’re human.

Again, such mixes can mimic age-related symptoms or other conditions, for which we all too often are prescribed yet MORE drugs which add insult to injury or end up potentially fatal.

AARP is a great resource for this kind of information. That said, I’m a fan of being healthy enough that you don’t need all those RX medications in the first place, just feeding yourself better, moving more and spending vastly less time on line.

That said, many of us, and my hand is up here, still need medication for a condition, which is why we have to be even more mindful of what we ingest.

A friend of mine has been using AI in one of the better applications of its strengths- organizing and presenting information. His website, zoimetrics.com,* addresses these very concerns. The site lays out common medications and the kinds of foods and/or supplements which can have harmful or even fatal interactions.

That kind of information is woefully under-reported. In fact, with so many fake influencers offering fake and pseudo-science and so many folks buying into that garbage, the chances are many of us are doing ourselves great and lasting harm. Websites like this, which clearly outline what to eat and take and what NOT to eat and take if you are on certain medications, will be increasingly essential.

Let’s just call this out: the raft of idiot influencers who have zero medical backgrounds is taking advantage of our distrust of the medical community and our desire for a quick fix.

Any time some damned fool tells you to strip down and expose your butt hole to the sun- something that Mother Nature NEVER intended or she’d have put our assholes on our heads (which kindly, she has, for that matter, for billions of us) PLEASE. Run in the opposite direction. Please.

In many cases there is no quick fix, just a gradual un-doing of previous damage, and better management going forward. Regaining our health after years of abuse takes years. I’ve had to do it myself after forty years of severe eating disorders; I’ve paid the price. The health I have now is the result of years and years of regular, small changes.

The incredible computing power now at our fingertips is as much a danger as it is a giddy opportunity. Like giving children the nuclear codes. The best example of that is sitting in the White House right now.

Bathe your brain properly

I had a conversation with a friend yesterday who reminded me that before I left for Ecuador last June, I had been complaining of a bit of brain fog. This was more than just not recalling why I was in the basement, or why on earth I was staring in my fridge.

I didn’t feel sharp.

It’s that logey, uncomfortable feeling that the world is on the other side of a shower curtain. This is commonly blamed on “just getting older.”

Bullshit.

First, a callback to an earlier point in this article. Here are common medications that cause brain fog, all too often pooh-poohed by our medical community and written off as a side effect of aging.

Again, bullshit. Look at your meds list FIRST AND FOREMOST.

Second: look at what you’re eating. Here’s a list of foods and liquids which can cause brain fog as well as real damage.

Again, read people who know what they’re talking about, like Maria Cross.

Here’s what happened to my brain.

Those of you who are fans of Arthur Brooks, who also writes for The Atlantic, may have read his book, From Strength to Strength: Finding Success, Happiness, and Deep Purpose in the Second Half of Life.

He has some ideas about how our intelligence shifts as we age, and suggests that we stop considering it a decline but rather a remarkable refinement:

Brooks refers to two kinds of intelligence: “fluid” intelligence and “crystallized” intelligence. He defines fluid intelligence as “the ability to reason, think flexibly, solve novel problems, and is associated with reading and mathematical ability.” Fluid intelligence tends to peak early in adulthood and “diminishes rapidly starting in one’s thirties and forties.”

On the other hand, crystallized intelligence is “the ability to use a stock of knowledge learned in the past.”

Crystallized intelligence tends to increase with age through one’s forties, fifties, and sixties—and does not diminish until quite late in life, if at all.
Crystallized intelligence represents a person’s knowledge gained during life by acculturation and learning. When you are young, you have raw smarts; when you are old, you have wisdom. When you are young, you can generate lots of facts; when you are old, you know what they mean and how to use them. (author bolded)

Brooks’ work doesn’t address the fact that far too many of us cease to chase plenty of newness, new experiences and the like, which continues to push our fluid intelligence.

In midlife, when many have kids, the need for stability and predictability for them and to be able to plan for our own futures typically causes many if not most of us to stop chasing lots of new experiences. Both good and bad- the latter, because we stop demanding that our brains grow and evolve.

I believe that fluid intelligence is available our whole lives but we have to work at it. Being willing to take on deep discomfort takes balls.

Here’s what I did: I put myself into a 24/7 sheep dip of fundamentally different demands from visual to language to physical to food. Every day I am pummeled by something new. I struggle to find the right words in a world where English is not the primary language. I’m making new friends and writing and reading. I upgraded my diet, the quality of fruits, vegetables, meats and cooking oils, and walk absolutely everywhere that’s within a 45-minute hike.

Absolutely everything is different. Sometimes I am overwhelmed. Those days I pull out my Kindle and go back to reading Don Quixote (a break from my crime fiction, indeed). Mika and I bask in the sun, I drink dark, rich Loja coffee laced with dense cream, and I watch the shadows march across the small garden space in front of my apartment.

My brain is loving it.

Yesterday I took a 40-minute mixto (truck transport) to a farm in the Tarqui valley where I spent an hour working on a newly-gelded horse. That was six months ago and he was still VERY full of himself. IFYKYK.

I put him through some paces, which he didn’t like, and resisted, which is why we’re doing it. It was hard work, and by the time we were done, Sheru and I were buds. I was challenged to keep my patience and my hands light but insistent, and he was challenged to listen to a new rider and respond to massage he’s never had.

Then, tired and dirty and hungry, I got on the wrong bus, missed the last possible stop near my place and had to figure out where I landed and manage my way home.

Brain food.

I am constantly faced with something new. Emotionally this can be irritating as hell because I am out of my element. Master of nothing. I am constantly reminded that I don’t know shit (never did anyway, but this is on steroids). My brain is bombarded, constantly challenged and working overtime.

I haven’t had the slightest tetch of brain fog since April of this year. If anything, since arriving, I have felt sharper, more youthful, more alive than I have in years.

This is exactly how my brain feels right now:

I’d bloody well give anything to have a similar photo of a seventy-ish woman doing the exact same pose on Unsplash.

There is indeed joy in getting old and older, especially when we feed our brains the right food, challenge our brains with the right problems, love our brains with the right respect and stop berating our brains for not being young.

What we have as we age is infinitely better than raw smarts, which often leads to very stupid outcomes.

When I write articles like this, this is not about bragging. It’s about watching what’s changed- being aware and awake to those changes. When there are good articles which make sense of what I’m seeing, especially those which tell us how to be better, how to feed ourselves better, how to live more vibrantly within the boundaries of what we have, I’m going to pass them along.

The above resources are all books, with the exception of Maria Cross’ Substack. There are great writers on this forum, and they also in many cases, as in mine, have produced books.

Books change lives. READ.

There are plenty of people out there getting it done a lot better than I am.

There are plenty of people out there who don’t give a shit, too.

Those aren’t my people.

My people are going to want to be reminded of what we already know and too often forget to do, like stop scrolling. My people want reminders that there is always improvement available, and that the inconvenience and/or discomfort paid are worth the price of feeling seriously, wickedly alive.

They aren’t stopping. They’re still growing. No matter what the challenges, the roadblocks, the physical issues we carry.

At any age.

Let’s play.

It takes considerable time and effort to produce, research and deliver articles like this, and they are in every way a work of love and respect. If you get value from my writing, please consider supporting my work:

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*zoimetrics.com: I’ve known the author since 2008 and trust their integrity. No financial relationship to him or the site. I am a huge fan of what they’re doing as it is both long overdue and very necessary.

So that’s what’s going on….finally someone explains

Menopausal? Post-menopausal? Cutting calories and gaining weight or staying the same while starving? Fat moving around to places it’s not welcome? I’ve got some reading for you. And while I hate having to say this, PLEASE do not respond to this as though it is solely about weight loss. It isn’t. That happens to be a potential side effect of eating more, eating better.

Every once in a while I will stumble on an article which does such a great job of explaining something that sometimes feels insurmountable that I just want to shout. So I am, by sharing this. Please, if you’re menopausal or post-menopausal and are dealing with symptoms that your physician pooh—poohs, read this article.

Please:

Victor

After Menopause, the Rules Changed. Nobody Gave You the New Rules. Here They Are.

You are standing on the scale. Same time you stand on it every morning — after the bathroom, before the coffee, before the day begins and the number gets absorbed into everything else. The number has not moved in 4 months. Maybe 6…

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2 months ago · 686 likes · 153 comments · Victor

I stumbled on this piece right after I finished my workout at the gym about six blocks from where I am currently living here in Ecuador.

This quote got me right where I live:

Sat right down and inhaled the article. If the above quote gets your dander up because it’s too familiar, I invite you to read it. I was delighted. This article explains why this is so personal to me: not just because I have done most of my hardest physical training after menopause but because what the author describes has been my journey.

After landing in Cuenca, I took about a week to get myself organized. Found a gym. Been going religiously three times a week, starting at super low weights and lower reps and slowly building back up. That was back mid-June.

Those of you who have followed me for a while know that I’ve been a serious bodybuilder (not a competitor) for 53 years. Through thick and thin, and I’ve been at the extreme ends of both with overeating and extreme dieting, I’ve lifted.

The gym is my second home, my sanity, and has been my great friend through some very rough physical challenges.

For the last seven years I’ve also undergone fourteen surgeries, put on some 25+ lbs which likely helped the surgery if not my ego, and have come to grips with some of the challenges that all that brings.

My training was sporadic, driven both by recovery and PT demands. Suddenly I had a muffin top, my waist was five inches bigger than before, and my hips ballooned. All of you can likely relate.

I’d still been able to keep off most of the 85 lbs I had lost in 1987, but those years of being unable to train, run, hike and bike were tough. Also, towards the end I was dealing with food noise for the first time in nearly 40 years.

The sudden and most unwelcome appearance of Krispy Kreme donuts in my local Kroger was NOT helping.

I’m now 73, nine years from when this photo was taken:

Like many of us, there is that one photo that we look at and say, SHIT. Where did that go?

Not far, it turns out. Stay with me, I’m going somewhere with this. This isn’t about bragging. It’s about hope.

I am doing precisely what Victor writes about: the additional protein, the resistance training, all of it. It works. You will not get your 20-yo body back but you can buy god build muscle, power, strength, drop weight, tighten up and fall back in love with your body. After menopause.

Yes you can.

Forget what most doctors say. Frankly most are clueless.

The last seven years have been tough. Two surgeries a year, my hands and feet not functional for months on end. No fun at all. Busted hip. I’d work my butt off to get mobile as fast as I could after each surgery. Research shows that getting off our butts fast gets us healthy sooner.

Still, my body changed. No running, hiking, swimming, cycling. I’m a stress eater, and despite my best efforts, goodies made a comeback.

There were plenty of times I looked in the mirror and was horrified. I’d make a little progress, get my gym rhythm back and then undergo another surgery. I couldn’t train for weeks. It felt like all the progress was lost.

It wasn’t. Sure felt that way.

The yo-yo-ing of my weight wasn’t helping healing. I eventually settled into the larger version of me, kept training for strength. I figured look, focus on getting well. Stay strong.

Once the surgeries are over with, then let’s see.

Perhaps one of the greatest gifts I got out of this was to simply accept this chapter of where my body was. I might or might not regain some of what I’d lost but for the time being, conditions just weren’t right.

Resisting wasn’t making anything better. And being judgmental made things far worse.

For those of you going through illness or depression, haranguing yourself over your body shape is a recipe for additional pain. Frankly I had a very hard time with that lesson. Eventually I did relax about the shape I was in, at least to the point where I knew that when the surgeries were done, it would be a new journey to see what might be available.

Without training hard five days a week, I saw some muscle loss and the shriveled balloon effect on my biceps. Sarcopenia. While it’s inevitable, the rate at which you lose muscle is not. I lost some, but retained most- because although training was sporadic, I still trained.

Among all the lessons I am taking out of this period of my life, that was one of the biggest. I still trained. And I had been training for fifty years.

That history counts for a great deal especially as we age into our elder years.

Here’s another article quote that explains the muscle loss perfectly:

Here is the math that nobody does for you: each pound of muscle burns approximately 6 calories per day at rest. Not during exercise — at rest. Just existing. Lose 5 pounds of muscle over 5 years (which is modest sarcopenia — well within the 3-8% per decade range) and your body burns 30 fewer calories per day. That is 10,950 fewer calories per year. That is approximately 3 pounds of fat gained per year — without eating a single extra bite. Not from overeating. From under-burning. Over 5 years, that is 15 pounds of fat that appeared while you were eating the same food you always ate. (author bolded)

Kindly, if that isn’t a huge a-HA for many of you I don’t know what is. It also underscores why I have pounded the drum for weight training for the last 53 years. It matters.

The starting gate for me

My last foot surgery was in January of 2026, the day before my birthday. Healing was swift. Suddenly, I was free…no more looming future procedures.

Finally, the future was mine to determine again, in terms of how I decided to get back in shape. The first order of business was packing and repacking some 300 heavy boxes and get all my belongings into storage.

I’d lost little of my strength. What I had lost came back with the daily demand of constant lifting and moving.

By April I received word that my house was under contract. That week, the food noise turned off. It was time to throw myself into the actual process of moving, and there was still an unbelievable amount of physical work to be done.

I was hauling, stacking, packing, moving, constantly. Cleaning, repairing, shoveling, stacking, schlepping. My sweets appetite shriveled, and I leaned heavily into the protein. More work, more demand on the body, more protein.

The weight sloughed off. I went back to one main meal a day, with multiple protein snacks and fruit early and then later in the afternoon. I eat big spoonfuls of peanut butter without sugar for fats as well as protein.

I’m the poster child for having overeaten and then for years, over-compensated by under-eating.

You and I cannot do this after menopause. The Victor article explains what’s going on inside you and why, and how to eat to fix the physical confusion after years of caloric restriction.

I’ve rarely seen anyone address that absolute reality for all of us women who so badly want our goddamned WAISTS back.

Look, I’m not a scientist, a doctor or a nutritionist. That’s for experts like and people with the right degrees who won’t shrug and say oh well when you say what the hell? I appreciate it when someone explains the science and then says DO THIS.

I’m doing a great deal of what the article suggests and it’s working.

Watch what happens when you try giving your fast-changing body the nutrients it so badly needs after one of the biggest hormonal changes known to womankind.

It’s being kind instead of being brutal by restricting even more foods. It is exhausting to starve ourselves and watch the scale effectively flip you the bird. You and I need more, and better, food.

This article does a far better job than I ever will explaining why post-menopausal women struggle with weight loss and why fat travels to new locations and sets up pup tents.

And what to do about it.

I don’t have the appropriate background to tell you whether the science is accurate. I can tell you that this has most assuredly been working for me. I like to share things that work, and hope that they do for others as well.

As of today, I am back within about seven pounds of the above photo. My waist and hips are within an inch each of where I was when the above promo photo was taken. But it’s not about being super slim.

I wanted my strength, power and endurance back. That the extra pounds have melted away is an additional gift.

And with it the energy that you enjoy when you are properly fed and not starving yourself. Aren’t you tired of that? I sure am.

Nobody ever promised us a teenager’s body after menopause.

There are those women (grrr) whose genetics guarantee them that. For the rest of us civilians, however, we get to be curious, concerned, and compassionate.

Read the article. See if it offers you a way forward.

Let’s respond to those profound, hard-earned changes with the care and feeding that our hard-working, long-suffering bodies deserve.

Tell me what you think. Above all, stop starving yourself.

Let’s play.

Mika and I are off for a late afternoon jog along the river. I hope this article gave you a new direction and clarity. Please consider

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And before anyone barks at me for the lack of photos older athletic women, kindly go tell Unsplash. We don’t even exist in their universe, but we sure are out there in the gym punching iron.

My fireplace, March 16th, 2026.

This is one race we’re all going to lose

Some chapters flame out. Some die out. Some just die. A lot of that is up to us, and some isn’t.

Either way, time catches up to us.

Just before I left on a trip to Africa in the summer of 2021, one of the huge firs just inside my then-property line began to list towards my neighbor’s roof. It had died. I was about to discover just how expensive it was to live in big tree country.

By the time the tree removal people were done, I had hired someone to slice the great tree pieces into pie slices and move them to my property, then hire a crew to cut it up and help stack it into firewood, it was a $7000 investment.

Look, that’s cheaper than had it fallen on my neighbor’s house. Still, that was a hit. Two adventure trips’ worth, in fact.

The above pictures give you an idea of what one tree can produce. I had three pallets stacked high. At the time it looked like I had firewood for forever.

At the time I had no idea that the tree was an hourglass for the time remaining for me at that wonderful house. Almost five years exactly from the moment I first saw the tree leaning dangerously over my neighbor’s roof, in fact.

The opening video above is a shot of the very last of the logs from that great tree, burning in the fireplace in my great room.

In the final weeks of my time at that gorgeous house, the great room was devoid of the art, the furniture (but not the dog hair) that made the place my home for nearly six years.

Time catches up to us.

Fast forward to July 2026. Six years ago this month I had just found my new home in Oregon and was getting ready to sell my place in Denver. Both had fireplaces. I love them.

This is what I have for now, in my small apartment in Cuenca, Ecuador.

The plan I had initially hatched four years ago during the summer of 2022- barely two years into my time in Oregon -is now finalized. Back then I’d damned near been bankrupted by Medium’s change of payment for its writers, and tried to sell the house.

I was never able to recover financially, which put me in the same situation as many other people facing old age and strictly limited resources, no family or community as a safety net.

That summer, I’d looked at Colombia. Thailand. Visited, explored, and realized, nah. South America was still a good option, but my home staunchly refused to sell. I chose to recommit rather than take a bath with the home price.

For a while. But the seed was planted.

Moving and living overseas weren’t new to me. I’d always wanted to, had done it before. It isn’t a Once In a Lifetime thing. Lots of people have done it, their reasons as varied as fingerprints.

Different when you do it well after sixty.

Time catches up to us.

I have friends here who remind me that mere weeks ago I was utterly lost trying to figure out certain aspects of WhatsApp, which is about the only way people communicate in most of the world. I am still exceedingly clumsy, I mistakenly send people birthday greetings and it’s taken me a while to figure out how to delete them.

Now I not only know how to edit and delete, I even know how to forward and translate, albeit not very well. Tagging for those of us grey hairs who are indeed becoming more tech savvy.

A few weeks ago I didn’t have a doctor, a vet, a dermatologist, a gym, a dentist. Didn’t have new friends or know my way around the neighborhood.

Do now.

Sand through the hourglass.

Time catches up to us.

This week I was heartbroken to learn that Sam Neill had died. For whatever reason that hit harder than some of the other celebrity passings. He was 78, had been declared cancer-free.

Not long ago he was quoted as saying that he’d be annoyed by dying because there were still things he wanted to do.

Annoyed. I love that. I absolutely get it. It’s just one reason why this grey hair is punching weights again at my tiny gym up the hill from my house.

Yesterday I spoke with my friend Melissa in the States. We were discussing how we often settle for what we have for reasons we don’t always challenge, or even understand, for that matter.

She and I have both spent a lot of time with people who were neither kind nor respectful, among other things, because we got something out of that connection.

Not what we really wanted or even could have, but it felt acceptable at the time.

We settled, in other words. The harder work of clearing the table and allowing the universe to deliver something much better felt like too much. We’d have to go without (whatever it was we thought we had) but clearing off meant work, discomfort. In some ways, starting all over again.

Of course, you could legitimately argue that this is part of where many grey divorces are born. You’d be right, too.

That leads to a lot of things: freedom and options for some, terrible regret for others. It all depends on how you’ve taken care of your body, your finances, your heart, your attitude and your social life, how those next years go.

There are those of us who have “overpriced” ourselves for the very judgmental singles market to which we are returning. Sometimes that experience is life-changing in the worst possible ways. Sometimes it’s celebratory.

Sometimes after we make a decision, we realize it was rash. Sometimes we find out that said rash decision was absolutely the right thing. Most of the time we have no clue, and that cluelessness soothes us to stay static.

So before you assume you’ve settled, make sure that you do a realistic and fair assessment of where you are, what you want, and whether what you want is even possible. You might well be perfectly situated exactly where you are, and with whom, but only need a few tweaks here and there to make things pop again.

I could have settled, not comfortably but at least for a while, for my gorgeous home in the woods. Settled for a lonely life, surrounded by beauty and access to the Coast, which I adored.

Sure I could. Sure thought about it often enough.

I could have made it work well enough, until the sheer cost of upkeep and maintenance and all the rest forced me out. That happens to too many of us who push the critical decisions off because we’re comfortable enough, it’s not painful enough.

But time catches up to us.

It caught up to Sam Neill. He’s annoyed now, because he still had things to do.

Do you?

I sure do.

As the last of the great chunks of fir burned to ash in my fireplace, I already knew that discomfort was coming. My house was a pitcher plant, as I’ve written. So much easier to stay, settle and relax.

Then perhaps I realize someday that my health or my bone density or my finances (especially those) would no longer support whatever dreams I might have left.-

If I had any dreams, or the time in which to realize them, left to me.

Time catches up to us.

Earlier this morning right after my jog-walk, which has gotten slightly longer and slightly easier as I adjust to 8600 feet, I got an email from my 1971 high school class president.

Another one of my classmates had passed. Seventy-two.

Lord that sounds young.

I looked her up. She and her husband ran a Golden Corral restaurant in my home state of Florida. She clearly ate there a lot herself. Only a few months ago there was a photo of her, a big girl.

Not a criticism. Statement of fact.

She married bare minutes after high school graduation. She won’t make it to the 55th, barely two weeks and only seventy-three and-a-half miles away from her town.

Time, and our habits, catch up to us.

Recently, fellow single-Substacker-over-sixty wrote a series of hair-raising stories about getting deathly ill in a small coastal Oregon town far away from exactly the specialized care she needed.

Another Substacker in the same basic age neighborhood and with some similar issues concerning isolation and access to healthcare, Sue Kusch, has been dealing with and writing about the very real consequences of not dealing with reality.

A visit to her aging parents underscored not only their utter inability to imagine not being self-sufficient (her dad fell asleep in the car, in Arizona, in 110F, because of meds) but this raised the question for her own life.

Sue lives too far out. Her much older neighbors are in complete denial of their situations. Gorgeous rural Washington, but just too isolated.

Sadly, disaster awaits those who wait too long.

Time catches up to us.

My buddy JC, who is the marketing director for Hawthorn retirement communities, reports that while their target age for their active communities is 75, most folks wait another ten years.

Ten years.

For too many, a spouse has died, a parent is afflicted with memory issues and the kids are forced to force their folks into a community they didn’t choose and don’t want.

Sue F and Sue K and many more of you are all dealing with exactly these questions, and for our parents.

By the time the last log from my mighty fir tree had burnt to ash, I knew my next chapter. Whether it’s my last, who knows?

What I do know is that by moving to Ecuador, I have a small apartment that nearly spits me out every day to get out and DO things, meet people, expand my world again.

By moving here I am making my brain, my intellect and my body work full time to adjust, often with real difficultly and sometimes annoyance, to a million new things, the most challenging of which is that I can’t speak the language.

Yet.

I’d be annoyed as hell if it was my turn to go tomorrow. I’ve got adventures ahead and horses to ride and languages to learn and a million things to do. Countries to visit and sports to try and lots and lots of laughs waiting to make my stomach sore.

Just like Sam Neill. Like you. Like my old classmate in Florida who didn’t make it to the 55th reunion, only two weeks and 73.5 miles away.

Time catches us all.

Let’s play.

Thank you as always for your eyeballs, comments, encouragement and for subscribing. I hope you’re inspired and I hope that you make time for the dream that still shimmers for you. Please consider:

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