Part six of the Veil War went live today and is now terrorizing its neighborhood, Frankenstein-style. Take a gander over here. One nice thing about this whole novel writing project is that I now have a good excuse to both post on perfidy, and not post on perfidy. Best of both worlds, baby!

And a gentle nudge: for all my readers who have blogs – and I know that a few of you do: the time has come for all of you to link to the Veil War. (cough… Naked Villainy, Murdoc, Rocket Jones, AW1 Tim, Aretae… cough) Just saying. I will ruthlessly mention you on perfidy until you comply.

I’ve been surprised by the amount of traffic that veilwar.com has been getting from perfidy. It’s been a steady flow of refers – not so great a flood as Blackfive’s generous linkage generated a couple weeks ago – but significant. I haven’t had any sort of stats functionality here on perfidy.org for a good long while now, because a) I don’t care that much and b) if I knew, I might be depressed. But I’m thinking that the residual traffic  left over from our glory days must be greater than I imagined/feared.

If you will forgive a little bit of me-time, I am very pleased with how things are going. Blackfive sent about 300 readers my way, right before the third installment went up. As of part five, the last installment for which we have full statistics, there were over a hundred reades. I think that’s a pretty good stick rate, and not bad considering its only been a few weeks since the whole thing started. And I see from followers and commenters that I am just edging into second order readers – people who are being referred by the first wave. So that’s cool. And once I get the ebook ready for sale on Amazon, there will be several new avenues for promotion.

Thanks to everyone who has read, and linked, liked, friended, followed and shared the Veil War. It really is appreciated.

I was flipping through some old notebooks today. Amidst the dross and deranged scribbling, this, verbatim:

Outline for Autobiography

1. Confused from the outset (birth to 1985)
2. Working at apathy (1985-1988)
3. An opportunity for future nostalgia (1988-1991)
4. A legacy of poor personal investments (1991-1996)
5. A moment of clarity (1996)
6. The moment passes (1996-1999)
7. A leap into the unknown, or running with futility (1999-2000)

CHAPTER ONE

It was a dark and stormy night. No, really, it was dark. And it was stormy. It was also Friday the 13th, which Bulwer-Lytton hadn’t the wit to include. Somewhere in the Midwest below an unseen full moon, I was born. The nurses in the maternity ward were joking about Rosemary’s Baby, which was either ironic or eerily prophetic depending on whose side you take.

At this point, my parents had been married for seven years and I guess this was their shit or get off the pot moment. Three years later, they got off the pot and separated. They had met at one of the thousands of fully interchangeable liberal arts colleges that can be found interrupting the otherwise scenic beauty of Ohio with their faux-gothic halls and industrial brutalist dorms and cafeterias.

Dad was in Columbus, pursuing an advanced degree in Russian history, getting a pilot’s license starting a classic car collection and generally hooting it up in a very subdued academic way. My mom worked for an insurance company and got very politely angry.

I began my career with failure. My purpose in life was to bring order and comity to my parents marriage. For a time, it seemed that this ploy might actually work – in this brief sojourn in the sunlit uplands of marital happiness that surrounded my birth by about six months on either side, life was good. My parents were distracted from selfishness on the one hand and passive-aggressiveness on the other by the immediate demands of pre- and post natal care.

But I could only maintain that level of effort for so long. Inexorably, I became more self-sufficient and less time consuming and I could not hold my parents together. Having failed to provide for my family, I went on wild spree of campus protests, martial law and tear gas. This was brought to an end by Governor Rhodes’ ill-fated and ill-considered attempt to be tough like Ronald Reagan in California, the end result of which was the Kent State shootings.

My early career in rabble-rousing was thus strangled in its crib by the sudden onset of the seventies, just as I was getting going. I decided to retreat and formulate a new plan.

***

“Praise not the day until night has come.”

That’s as far as I got. My best estimate is that I wrote that sometime in the Spring of 2000.

Today, my grandfather would have turned 100. He didn’t make it here. Pancreatic cancer got him two decades back.

But I’ve been thinking about him all day, today, every time I see the 11-11.

My grandfather had a thing about numbers. There were good numbers, and there were bad numbers. He’d have my dad get him license plates from the other side of the state because the license plate numbers issued in NW Ohio were better than the ones in NE Ohio. One time, my dad pranked him, though. Told him he’d gotten a license plate XQ-5381. “Oh, no.” He liked numbers that had patterns, or were in some subtle way harmonious. I like to think that that all started because of his birthday, which like today was 11-11-11.

He also liked writing on things. He annotated his physical world. When I was five, he took me down to his cabin in Tennessee. We went hiking over to Cumberland Gap, and he made me a walking stick, just my size. He whittled a handle for me, but he didn’t stop there. He took a pen and wrote

Cumberland Gap, Tennessee
8-26-1974

I may have the date wrong.

My mom sent me a picture today. There was a beautiful tree on the hill behind the farm house he retired to. Grandpa posted this warning:

I miss Grandpa.  I wish he could have lived long enough to meet his great-grandchildren.

Yesterday was a happy day, for I am finally south of 230 pounds for the first time in well over a decade.  That 230 had seemed for some little while now to be like the speed of light – something that can be approached but not exceeded.  I’ve been as close as 230.5 a few times in the last couple months, but just couldn’t get any further.

I have blamed the stagnation on my wife, circumstances, children, cosmic rays, the Jews and always the never to be sufficiently damned herring eating Norwegians.  But the was just one simple cause, really – lack of focus and consistency.  So it was my fault, I guess.  The last couple weeks I have been much more strict in my paleo diet, and I’ve started lifting again.

I have to say that even just a little into the new exercise regime, I am very pleased with it and the the results.  I’ve combined the super-slow methodology that I was introduced to by Aretae with a collection of body-weight exercises, and it pretty much kicks my ass.  Which is what you want in an exercise program.

The first day’s program was arms and shoulders.  I was surprised at how much more difficult push-ups are done super-slow style can be.  My arms are strongish, thanks to the six months of weight-lifting on machines I did last fall and winter.  The push-ups gave me a nice burn there, but the next day I could feel everything around the big muscles hurting, and even more, I could feel the pain in my abs.  I think this new program will be a lot more effective.  The best thing about the You Are Your Own Gym book is that he gives you lots of ways to adjust the difficulty of the exercises, which makes it easy to adjust each exercise to hit the 90-second-to-exhaustion target for super slow.

For the next few months, I’m going to be doing about seven minutes of lifting a day, four times a week.  I think this, along with a strict paleo diet, will get me down to an optimal body weight sometime in the Fall.  I’m not sure exactly what that will be, exactly, because I’m not sure how much more muscle I’ll get; but I definitely want my body fat percentage down to at least 10.

I do have one more resolution, but it’s really a part of the diet/health resolution.  At the end of the year, I let my membership at the gym at work lapse because, well, it was a shitty gym.  I am feeling the lack of exercise, and I don’t like it.  I don’t have any decent weights, gym equipment or even reasonable facsimiles at the homestead here, so I needed to either find a new gym or think of something else.

Seeing as part of the budget is to not spend money, I decided to think of something else.  Which meant google.  I found a book, You Are Your Own Gym, written by ex-SpecOps trainer Mark Lauren.  It’s all about using your own body weight as resistance.  I’ve skimmed it, and it looks like a decent program – I just need to adapt his method to a more super-slow style, and I’ll be set, I think.  I’ve been doing some pushups and sit-ups just to be doing something, so I think I’ll be able to segue into this as soon as I have time to adapt his exercise schedules and play around with it a bit.

An update on progress in resolution world.

• Dieting.  Tragic fail.  Gained ten pounds.  There are lame excuses reasons for this one.  First was the baby. I’m starting off blaming young Anneliese for things beyond her control a little early, perhaps, but best get started now while she has no defenses.  The arrival of the baby was certainly the cause of chaos, and that made eating correctly more difficult.  Second was the diet plan itself.  Ferriss’ idea is that one day a week is a cheat day, eat whatever the hell you want and basically be paleo the rest of the time.  This does not work for me.  Sure, I can cheat like all get out on Saturday, but switching back to paleo is all the harder.  There’s usually leftover cheat food that I am sorely tempted to eat – after all, I picked it on the basis that it would be food I would really enjoy, but can’t normally enjoy on a paleo system.  Also, throwing carbs and wheat into my body just as its getting used to not having them makes me feel sick and fatigued and a bit depressed.  So, I’m ditching the 4-hr body plan and going back to the more straightforward paleo that lost me much wait last year.
• Blogging once a day.  Tragic fail.  Still want to go with this one – and now that the new baby is calming down, this may be more feasible.
• Time consuming hobby.  Started accumulating stuff, but haven’t had time to dive in.  I still want to carve out an evening for this, but this one’s on hold.  Incomplete, abandoned.
• Read thinky books.  Started all of the books I mentioned, but haven’t finished them.  Also started reading the Great Mortality, about the Black Death.  Fascinating.  Will have reviews soon.  Incomplete.
• Almost done with Volume I of the great books.  I hope to pick up the pace there.  Incomplete.
• Made progress on book catalog – all the history and military history books are catalogued.  I’ve found digital copies for some, but some of the books are rather obscure and I’m not finding digital copies easy to, uh, find.  If anyone’s interested, I’ll post the list.  Incomplete.
• Passports: tragic fail, no progress made.
• Made a budget, win!  Following budget, win!  I will be debt free, God willin’ and the creek don’t rise, on or about Friday, Jul 8.  Still need to rein in random spending a bit, but things are proceeding nicely on this front.
• I think I am definitely a better person than I was six weeks ago.  No closer to taking over the world.

New resolutions?  Well, I still have quite a list.  If I can wrap up the resolutions from last month by the end of this month – doable, certainly, then I will consider new ones for March.

I succeeded on the most important of my goals – the budget.  I consider the tragic fail on the diet to be a partial success, in that it was an experiment and I gained useful knowledge, which I can use going forward.  Three incompletes, but given time constraints and a newborn baby, not so bad – I did make some progress.

Twelve years ago today, I made a good decision. I wasn’t sure that it was a good decision at the time. But that was only because most of the decisions I’d made as a nominal adult had been, on the whole, tragically unwise. This one, though, was wise, and by far the best choice I’ve made.

A dozen years of marriage was incomprehensible to the younger me. It has been more than I hoped, but harder too. I have more joy in one day of my life now than I did in weeks or years before. Not necessarily more fun. But more joy.

Life is good. My wife is the biggest reason why.

[wik]: Our anniversary is on Valentine’s day by accident, not some sort of sappy design. And while I admit that not being able to forget my anniversary is a plus, it’s annoying to hear people go, “aaww” when they find out.

Sure you would. And its only one, anyhow; me, Kasey and baby Anneliese:

At 2:07 this morning, #3 daughter came into the world, delivered by me.  Granted my wife did most of the work, but I didn’t drop the baby, so we’ll call that a win.

The midwife arrived about a half hour after the baby, and pronounced everything good.  Funny, through the years I’ve had a fair bit of emergency training, but baby delivery was really the last thing I expected to have to deal with.

I’m thinking I’m going to something slightly different. I’m going to do resolutions this year on a month by month basis, and report on my progress before issuing the next set of resolutions. Obviously, some of these will be repeating month to month, but I want to be a little more granular – and keep more records of my progress.

So, here are January resolutions:

• Follow the 4-hour body diet plan for the month.  This diet is in large part identical to the paleo diet that I followed from July through Thanksgiving.  I lost just shy of 40 pounds.  I want to lose another 20 pounds.  The main difference with the new plan is that it actually encourages cheating, one day a week.  I’ll throw a post up later with some more information on the diet, and other stuff from the book.
• Post on Perfidy at least once a day.  And I don’t mean average at least one post a day, I mean post at least once every day.  Hopefully more, and get this habit locked in.
• Start a new, time-consuming hobby.  I’ve always teased my wife that I need a hobby that sucks time as much as her band, just to even things out.  I’ve decided to start studying physics.  I was a physics major, once, and I’d like to sharpen my math and science skills.  The early part will be just catch up – elementary physics refresher courses from a variety of sources, and math as well.  There’ll be a post forthcoming on this, too.
• Read one thinky book a week.  SF doesn’t count.  For January, I will read the 10,000 Year Explosion, The Mystery of Capital, The Long Summer (How Climate Changed Civilization) by Brian Fagan, and Keegan’s First World War.  (Having unpacked my books for the first time in four years, I’ve found lots of books that I want to read that I never got around to.)
• Read Volume I of the Harvard Great Books.  This one will be easy, I’m already half done.  There’s fifty volumes, so that’s over four years at that pace.  But, I hope to increase the pace.
• Catalog my books, and start getting digital copies of them.
• Get passports for the family.
• Get a budget in place, and automate as much as my bill paying and finances as I can manage, to reduce craziness.  The last few years have been difficult, what with layoffs, uncertainty, etc.  But now that I’ve relocated, cut my housing expenses in half, and have a small measure of job security, it’s time to get off the paycheck to paycheck life I was kinda forced into by the necessity of juggling payments and such.
• Become a better person and take over the world.

And I think that’s enough for one month.