Death and Iron

It's been almost six months since my last post.  Three months ago, if I am honest, I didn't think I would be sitting here now, typing these words.

I thought I would be dead.

I am not going to get into all of the details - not yet, anyway.  I will save all of that for another post, when I am feeling more of a combination of elegiac and poetic, and when I think I'm ready to write about my declining health, and how it has affected my life in ways - often, amazingly - better, but bitter, as well, than I imagined such declining health could.  

But my health has caused some real problems.  Until only a few weeks ago, I haven't been able to write, and I haven't been able to do the one thing I almost love more than anything else I do on this green Earth of God's: lift weights.

But I am writing again.

And I am lifting again.

Hopefully my health will continue to improve even more, which means even more writing and more lifting.  Often, the more I lift, the more I write.  Or maybe it's the other way around.  I don't really know.  But I know that somehow the two are intrinsically intertwined with one another.  It doesn't even matter if I'm not writing about "lifting matters" at the time - the two are still interconnected.

My son Garrett, taken a few month's back.

Last night - while my eldest son Matthew was at the local gym "priming" and "pumping" his chest and arm muscles with a cascade of cacophonously glittering machines - Garrett, my youngest son, and I decided to do nothing but an old-fashioned "grease-the-groove" deadlift routine in our dungeonous garage gym.  It was hot as hell - to use a much cliched term - outside, and one of the overhead lights went out in the garage when we stepped outside, casting an eerie glow over the whole bar-bending event, as we quickly broke into high-humidity-induced sweats.

Iron Maiden serenaded us in the background as the deadlift bar clanged more times than I could count.  Occasionally, the dog next door howled over the proceeds, whether it was from the iron, or the "new wave of British heavy metal" screaming through the speakers, or simply mine and my son's presence, I don't know.

The bottom line: it was good to be alive.  And it was good to be lifting weights.

And it is good to write once more.