Vlog the Inhaler, or The Occasional Video Blog Musings of Jim Thornton

This has been one of those days wherein sluggishness, Aleve, exertional headache, overdue library fines, sleep inertia, nausea, political dopamine triggered by hatefests on the left and right, poor swimming performances recalled in tranquility, generic Tylenol, self-disgust, dyspepsia, pricklings of anxiety, eye floaters that include a fresh crop of red blood cell b-b's, isolation, neuralgia, stirrings of desire, premonitions of disaster, sneezing, boredom, impossible to resolve ultimati, and a thousand and one other petty somatic sensations and borderline neurotic tendencies have conspired to make me wonder if I should have just taken more soporifics upon first stirring this a.m. and written the whole business off as a mistake to let the conscious mind even briefly surface and skitter about, looking for some vague raison d'etre that does not for the moment exist.

(We have all been here, I am sure!)

But surface the quasi-conscious mind has, breeching the barrier between bad dreams and their awake counterparts, and I am hoping to make it till practice has the chance, at least, to bludgeon me into a better frame of mind and set me up for a repeat.

The silver medalist Bill has included plenty of hypoxic set in tonight's workout, and surely depriving the brain of oxygen can only help!

I understand that methamphetamines are fairly addictive to those with weak temperatments, but I am fairly confident that I do not fall into this category.

Oh, to be artificially awake once more before the Great Resting Reward takes over completely!

Fully, vibrantly, utterly awake and on the edge of my seat tingling with excitement and anticipation!

Who among you has spent your own desultory Monday free of craving exactly this?

Yesterday, we had our first meet of the Allegheny Mountain YMCA Masters Swimming Association season http://www.amymsa.org , for whom the impresario and meet director was the inimitable Mermaid at her "home" pool of the Bairyl Family YMCA in the Wexford, PA area, former temporary home of one Christina Aguilera http://www.christinaaguilera.com/ .

Unlike another AMYMSA swimming venue, the Meadville YMCA, where it is at least possible that the waters in which we race were once shared by Meadville's celebrity vixen, Sharon Stone

there is no possibility whatsoever that Christina Aguilera's body has graced the Bairyl Family YMCA pool, because by the time this was built, she was long long long gone from our hickish region.

In any event, my times in yesterday's meet were terrible, this despite wearing a B70 in the hopes of getting a little tiny bit more life out of it before my times get even more terrible, and the illusion of youthfulness is ripped asunder forever!

100 free 54.07 pretty much says it all, though it is conceivable that swimming a 50 relay less than 5 minutes before my heat of the 100 could have slowed me a bit.

Lordy.

To the list of weasely emotions that begins today's blog, let me just add one more: the weirdly disconsolate sense of self-castigation that we whiners and excuse-makers actually DO feel on some level of our alleged souls, though the fact that we whine and make excuses in the first place suggests that this weirdly disconsolate sense of self-castigation is certainly not enough to make us change our ways.

Waaaaa.