Duesr

So I have been on a journey for several years now where I have been losing weight. This is a picture of me a little over five years ago when I was 380 lbs:

I have lost a hundred pounds since then and I am beginning to realize that changes in my diet weren’t the only thing that were going to get me to my goal weight of 205 lbs, so I made more changes. Here are some things that I am doing to help myself out.
1.) I gave up Soda and Pop just over a year ago and that was a good idea. I was going through a 12 pack a day which is just as bad as cigarettes. Obesity has been linked to Type II Diabetes which is now diagnosed in more people then cancer in the same amount of time. A couple of weeks ago I also stopped drinking anything but water. I can find all the nutrients that I need in food.
2.) The only meat protein that I eat is fish. I have been doing this for a year and half and I honestly feel better about it. I know that not all meat is bad for you, but this has made it better for me.
3.) No more fast foods. I have done away with all fast food except Subway and the occasional Pizza. I just feel better not eating McDonalds, Taco Bell, KFC, or Burger King.
4.) I have now started walking, a lot. I bought a pedometer which can be found here:
A pedometer is a great tool. One of the best ways to lose weight. A good goal is 10,000 steps a day. The average human being would walk Five miles a day doing this. I attach mine to my belt every morning and I manage to hit the 10,000 regularly.
4.) Make a diary of what you are eating. I found a great site that allows you to track everything that you are eating and allows you to track a lot of things, it’s called Calorie Count and can be found here: I have found it to be very useful.
5.)Have fun with it. What we are talking about is a lifestyle change.

That’s all I have, if you have any more advice on what I should be doing please feel free to leave a comment.

Later Days,
Duesr.

PS. Here is a picture of me now.

“The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” by Ursula K. Le Guin and Harrison Bergeron by Kurt Vonnegut are examples of literature that are cautionary to our ideas about a utopian society. Leguin tells us that when we dream of a perfect society that we will ignore the plight of one person to maintain our own happiness. Vonnegut does something similar but shows that if we ever achieve an equal utopia that we will need to sacrifice individuality. Sacrifice is the key in both stories to explain why their societies are perfect. If no one suffers, then how will we know what suffering is?
The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas is a story of a society that has attained happiness. LeGuin starts the story with great detail about this wonderful city where “With a clamor of bells that set the swallows soaring, the Festival of
Summer came to the city Omelas, bright-towered by the sea.” Leguin continues to tell us the virtues of the wonderful city of Omelas. She goes into great detail concerning how the town has order without a king, religion without clergy, and that because of this they “did without monarchy and slavery, so they also got on without the stock exchange, the advertisement, the secret police, and the bomb. Yet I repeat that these were not simple folk, not dulcet shepherds, noble savages, bland utopians. There were not less complex than us.” Leguin uses the last sentence to then inform us that we should not look at this story as being some far away idea; rather the suffering is here, now, and similar to us. This is important because we are now faced with the fact that story is no longer distant. She continues telling us that every joy imaginable that we could ever want is available to us and that we only have to take it, and that no person would be denied even their most base pleasures. Leguin then describes in detail similar to the joy of the town its lone despair a child who is “about six, but actually is nearly ten. It is feeble-minded. Perhaps it was born defective, or perhaps it has become imbecile through fear, malnutrition, and neglect. It picks its nose and occasionally fumbles vaguely with its toes or genitals, as it sits hunched in the corner farthest from the bucket and the two mops. It is afraid of the mops.” Notice that Leguin herself buys into what is happening and never refers to the child’s name. This is not unlike the Judeo Christian message of suffering to attain a perfect society. The Judeo- Christian worldview is that for us to attain perfection we must first understand suffering. However, we do not feel this suffering, we only see it and then we make a choice. Do we stop it or do we let it continue or do we walk away altogther? All of these are options. Just like Christ, no one stops it. Even his closest friends deny him. This child, like Christ, must endure the pain of an entire society so that they might be able to enjoy life. The suffering is an integral part of how we look at our own world. This is not unlike how Vonnegut looks at the concept of utopia achieved through equality.

“Harrison Bergeron” by Kurt Vonnegut is about the future of mankind and how we are moving towards equality. Vonnegut is clearly against this idea because we see him actually point out the silliness of everything being equal. He mentions that in an effort to be equal that George “had a little mental handicap radio in his ear. He was required by law to wear it at all times. It was tuned to a government transmitter. Every twenty seconds or so, the transmitter would send out some sharp noise to keep people like George from taking unfair advantage of their brains.” Somewhere in our society we became so obsessed with equality and obtaining happiness for all that we began to legislate the very idea of it with nonsense. George thinks of the ballerinas as being not “really very good-no better than anybody else would have been, anyway. They were burdened with sashweights and bags of birdshot, and their faces were masked, so that no one, seeing a free and graceful gesture or a pretty face, would feel like something the cat drug in. George was toying with the vague notion that maybe dancers shouldn’t be handicapped. But he didn’t get very far with it before another noise in his ear radio scattered his thoughts.” Vonnegut does this to point out that we are obsessed with the notion of everyone being equal, but that we are in fact not. He then does the same thing LeGuin does with Omelas. He introduces a character that must suffer. George and Hazel have a son that was removed from by the name of Harrison. Harrison it seems is a troubled child. He is troubled in that he has a strong will and we see this when he makes his triumphant stage debut. He shows the world for a brief moment that they are capable of more. Harrison takes a wife and even has the musicians playing better music for a moment. We kill him. We do this by allowing others in our own society be misused by the system that we set up. When we see suffering we allow it to continue. The people in the story have worked so hard to make things equal that we have gone too far and made everything too equal. So now even when presented with a different option we destroy that which is beautiful. This is might like Christ in Judeo and Christianity and the child called it in Omelas. Both stories present us with the fact that in a perfect society we are willing to let others suffer for our benefit.

The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas and Harrison Bergeron are cautionary tales about how we as a society will let others suffer for us. Leguin and Vonnegut both recognize that in a perfect world we will still allow some to suffer so that we might live our lives in comfort. These situations are not unlike we see happening today in our world. Modern world countries will often overlook the plight of third world countries because of the comfort that our world provides. Despots in the Middle East are allowed to hurt their own people so that we can have low priced oil. This is why these two stories are so important. Not only are they entertaining, they challenge your beliefs. Leguin makes it real and close to us. Vonnegut sets his in the future as a warning of what we could become. Both were excellent.

The night was chilly and crisp. Crisp being that annoying word that authors use to describe something in spite of the fact that it means very little. Crisp is not really a word that one uses to describe the night, rather it is a word that you use to describe apple pie. So I guess that what I was trying to say was that the night was chilly and like apple pie. Which makes little sense to me or anyone else- fuck it-the night was cold. Ohio is almost always cold though, even in July you could believe that you might wake up one morning and find yourself in the middle of a snow storm. However, it was now January and you could bet that it was going to be very cold. I stood outside my work smoking, which is dumb considering the weather but so is smoking. I worked along the Cuyahoga river in one of those old warehouses that at the height of the Industrial Revolution hummed with noise. Now the humming in this area comes from the dime store hookers and that’s something that I don’t even want to mess with. I work for barely better then minimum wage, but the company has great benefits and with kids you can never have enough benefits. I started here about five years ago when my wife and I got a divorce. Turns out that she found a younger man that was more her style. He does not have a job, but it’s cool because my alimony and child support pay for their crummy apartment down in Lorain. Lorain was also one of those great cities that you hear about where the rest of the country raped it so that they could drive affordable luxury vehicles and ship their goods for cheap. The city was once a shipbuilding powerhouse and now it barely survives. The heartbeat is there, but just barely. Once in a great while another company will show up making promises, but secretly they are raping the citizens with tax breaks and then they leave for greener pastures. I was one of those people. I worked at the Ford Plant there for seventeen years before they moved all of it to Louisville, Kentucky. I was stuck here with an ailing mother and an Alzheimer’s ridden father. My dad had retired from Ford and like so many of my neighbors I went there to work as well. I thought, “ I could retire from here, put in my thirty and I would be set.” Things did not turn out that way though, instead we got shut down. I took the buyout and tried to go back to school, but well to be honest I have never been a school kind of guy. The first time that my Psychology professor mentioned Operant Conditioning I knew that I was not a college guy. I got an A and three D’s that semester. The A was in pottery. I am good with my hands. The next semester I enrolled in the local community college’s welding program and that is what I am doing now. I weld. MIG, TIG, you name it I can weld it, even squirrels. So here I am, Fourty-Nine, welding in Cleveland, divorced, and smoking in the cold. This is really the start of my story.
I was sitting there on that cold, crisp night when I saw a meteor in the sky. Not unusual on a night like tonight, but still interesting to watch when it happened. I got hit by the meteor. Not a small one either, a rather large one. One that by all means should have killed me instead it only knocked me out permanently. I now sit in a hospital at the Cleveland Clinic where I am technically comatose. The good thing about my job was that I had great insurance and so the insurance company had to keep paying my bill as long as the doctors thought that I was going to be able to come back. The bill did not come back to my kids at all. They were too young and my wife was my ex, so she had no worries. The state was going to take care of her anyway. Instead I was just sitting there in limbo, or so I thought. You see that meteor hitting was not by accident. Instead it was quite on purpose. I had been hit by meteor because I had a new purpose on Earth. I was now the Angel of Death. No seriously, a middle aged man from Lorain, Ohio divorced with little future who was now laying in a coma was an Angel of Death. Don’t be shocked or amazed by it. It happens. Turns out that a lot of people in coma’s become Angels of Death. It’s protocol in Heaven. At least that is what my boss tells me. Yeah, I got a boss. His name is Frank and well we don’t really tell each other our last names, that way if we ever become sentient again we won’t look each other up. I guess weird things happen when you do that. Somebody told me that the last time two of us met after we woke up was about the same time that Nero burned Rome. I say that it was mere coincidence but no one is willing to second guess procedure. That’s the craziest part of all this, I go into a coma and now I am in an office job. I realize that I have not really told you my name either, it’s George. That’s right, you can call me George, Angel of Death. I am specifically the Angel of Death for Lorain, Ohio. I am the only one for Lorain, as there are currently only about fourty thousand citizens here. I know that it may seem odd that Angels of Death use human boundaries, but we find it easier that way. Cleveland has at least twenty agents and New York has a couple hundred. Lorain just has me. It’s cool though, the job is not that hard and I have good friends. Nancy is the Angel of Death for Vermilion, Phil in Sheffield Lake, and Lisa is in Avon. Lisa is smoking hot too. Too bad Angel’s can’t reproduce because I would love to get in her skirt. Ow! Sorry, impure thoughts are kind of a no-no in this business. You get zapped for that one. So now you know my life story. How I got to where I am. What I am and what I do. Now it is time to pick everyone up. I run a tight schedule and I have to hit all of the funeral parlors in the city. That’s where most people stay. You see, people are kinda attached to their bodies and to be completely honest I can’t blame them. I am attached to my body. Besides it just makes things easier in the long run. My first stop is usually one of the smaller places in town. It’s called LeCharles. The name is meant to sounds French, but the truth is that the owner is about as French as I am Japanese. Which considering my grandfather was straight from Ireland does not make a lot of sense. I walk into the home and find a single soul there, her name is Renee Staunton. Renee is a fourty-five year old gunshot victim. She was a good woman. Her husband died a few years back after a year or so of Chemotherapy. They had a good house in Avon Lake, but she had to move out and the bank foreclosed after the hospitals took the insurance money from her husband. She was living in a small one bedroom apartment in Lorain now. She was going into her house when some guy wearing a hockey masked mugged her for the twenty or so dollars that she had made that evening in tips. He shot her once in the head when after she willingly gave him the money. Shame really, I hope gets in. I meet her at the front desk, she is wandering in her corporeal form not really aware of what is happening. Her funeral is tomorrow and I approach her.
“Hello.” I say.
“Who, who are you?” She replies
“ I am George. I am here to guide you to your afterlife. “ I reply back.
“Oh, so that is what this feeling is, I am dead?” She asks
“Yeah, sorry to say it, but you have passed. I am here to collect you and send you to the great beyond. You’re the first for me today.” I inform her
“Oh, so are you an Angel?” She asks.
“ I am, the name is George.” I offer her my hand. People always like a good hand shake.
“ Hi, George.” She says with a smile. She has one of those great smiles where you just think that must have been the real killer for her husband. Not to say that she was unattractive, but it was one of those smiles. I liked it.
“Hello, Renee.” I reply. “Are you ready or are you going to need more time?”
“You mean I don’t have to go right away? I can stay?” She asks.
“Oh yes, some of my cases can stay as long as they want here on Earth. Gives them time to sort out things for themselves. Most people just stay until shortly after their funeral. It’s nice to hear all of the things that people say about you after you are dead. Some people leave right away because they just want to move on to the next thing and some, well some stay around for a long time. You call them ghosts, we call them travellers” I answer.
“I never knew that.” She replied
“Well, you have never been dead before.” I jokingly answer. She gives me one of those astonished looks. Sometimes my humor goes too far. I get pinged from Heaven for that one. “Sorry, I sometimes go a little far.”
“It’s okay, you must have a difficult job. Is Eddie here?” She asks. I flip through her file quickly. Eddie was her husband.
“I have already taken him to the other side. He stayed with you for a couple of years, but eventually we have to take everyone in and that is exactly what happened with him.” I say. It’s true, because well I can only tell the truth. “Says here that he is waiting for you. Says that he made it in. So do you wanna stay or go? Your choice.” She leaps when she hears about her husband.
“I want to go see him.” She smiles.
“Alright, well hold on right here.” I open the small golden box that is part of my job. It’s got really long name that is written in an angel language that will make you ears bleed. On Earth we just call them teleporters, like in Star Trek, only cooler. I think God has a funny bone too because when James Doohan aka Scotty died he gave him control of the thing up there too. I place the box on the ground and have her touch it three times signifying that she is ready. She is “beamed” up and I am ready to move on. The day goes on fairly easily. Seven deaths today, four of them leave immediately, one decides to wait until after the funeral, one decides that he never got to California and now that he pretty much floats he is going to do exactly that. I have to file a little more paperwork and let the California branch know that he is coming but that should be that hard. Then there is the last one. This one is a bit of a bastard. Turns out in real life that he was a child pornographer and frankly the Heaven types don’t really like that and when you die, you know. So usually they run and cause all kinds of havoc. Ever have one of those days where you’re pretty sure that you are being spooked? That is probably one of them, or you’re just crazy. This bastard was a bad one and he is on the loose in a junk yard. Mean cuss too. Guy was about 6’3” and weighed nearly three-hundred fifty pounds. Of course this is part of the fun too. The scythe that you are always seeing is real and we get trained on how to use them by Michael. That’s right, Michael the Archangel, God’s Vengeance. Guy is built like a brick house. We get Angel of Death training boot camp style from him. Have you ever seen Full Metal Jacket? Imagine him as an Angel only younger and seven feet tall. That’s Michael. So here I am tracking this guy down and he is throwing everything that he can at me, literally. Have you ever had a truck thrown at you? I have. Not a pretty picture. I have to stop time so that I can a cleanup crew in here. Yeah we have cleanup crews as well. They are these small creatures that are about two feet tall, strong as hell, and live to clean. They were literally created for this job. I finally find the guy hiding behind a Volkswagen. He is crying, realizing now that his life was pretty messed up. I read out of the good book and a hole opens up in the ground. He resists quite a bit, but eventually I get him into it. I close the ground after him and look for a cigarette. Damn I can’t smoke anymore. I get zapped again.

“Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” by Joyce Carol Oates is a story based on two things, the song It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue from Bob Dylan’s Bringing It All Back Home and the serial killer Charles Schmid.(Wikipedia) Oates uses the real life story as a backdrop for her villain Arnold Friend. The main difference in Schmid and Friend being that Friend is a metaphysical character.
Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been? is the story of Connie, a fifteen year old who believes that she has the entire world figured out. Connie shows us that she is naïve when she says “‘She knew that she was pretty and that was everything’”(225). She leads her life differently than her mother, a stay at home mom, her sister, a plain looking girl who she despises and her father, who borders on negligence. Connie cares little about her friends and is often flirtatious with others. Her flirtation leads to her meeting Arnold Friend. Friend becomes the antagonist for Connie and her values. Arnold’s style is the perfect foil for Connie, ultimately leading to their confrontation at the end of the story.
Arnold Friend is by nature a metaphysical character. He is the rake of our story. Arnold is unnamed by the author in his first meeting with Connie. Connie views the man as boyish and despises him based upon his style not his moral character. Arnold does make an impact when he shakes his finger and says “ ‘Gonna get you, baby’”(226). The statement is not a stated in a way that suggests that the character has made a guess; rather it is stated that way so that the character is aware of future events. Arnold is telling Connie that they will meet again, that he has foreseen it, and in spite of her dismissing him that he will have the upper hand the next time that they meet. Arnold is also patient. He knows that everything will work to his favor in time. He does not have to commit to an action. He has already committed the act. Arnold’s foreknowledge of the event is the key to his being metaphysical.
Arnold continues to let us know that he is not of this world when he tells Connie specifics about what her parents are doing at the party. He tells her that “Right now they’re-uh- they’re drinking. Sitting around”(232). Oates even points out that he was “squinting as if he were staring all the way to town and over to Aunt Tillie’s back yard.”; … “Then the vision seemed to get clear and he nodded energetically.”(232) Oates makes it clear in this statement that Arnold was experiencing this happening, not feigning it. Arnold even goes into further detail when he mentions the color of her sister’s dress “There’s your sister in a blue dress, huh? And high heels, the poor sad bitch-nothing like you.”(232) Arnolds’ reason for making the statement was not only to show that he knew about what was happening at the party, but also knew about her disdain for her sister. The feelings that she had were not shared with anyone other than the reader. She did not openly share with her mother or her sister that she disliked June. Arnold could have only known this information if he was capable of reading Connie’s mind or by empathically knowing this information. Connie does not want people to see her as a bad person and would not openly share her feelings about her sister. Arnold knows this information and because of this he knows how to manipulate Connie. The key to any great metaphysical character is that they know how to manipulate from real experiences. Arnold is not unlike Satan in Milton’s Paradise Lost. He uses his knowledge of Connie’s character faults to entice her into wanting to come with him.
Oates also gives a wink to the fact that Arnold Friend is not of this world when she at last allows him to become discourteous to our protagonist. Arnold has exacerbated his talents. He shows to Connie that he knows not only where her parents are located, but also the nature of what they are doing, still she resists. Arnold is frustrated at this situation. How could a woman relent so much? Arnold appears to have done this before, to entice a woman. The apple that Arnold is now offering is freedom from what Connie’s mundane life. Arnold much like Satan in Paradise Lost is trying to ply her from her own ignorance. He is giving to her what she thinks that she wants. Eve was given the same temptation. The apple this time is freedom from her family, but unlike Eve, Connie is not easily bought. Arnold threatens her family “You don’t want them to get hurt.” Arnold Friend went on. “Now get up, Honey. Get up all by yourself.” (235) Arnolds’ statement makes the case that she loves her family, but that she is alone in this decision. She must make the right decision or her family will be harmed. Arnold knows that for all of his powers that she must make the choice. Connie cannot be forced to do make a decision. It must be her choice. Arnold Friend, like Satan, is unable to force the decision; Connie must make it.
Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been? is an excellent story about how every person must deal with the choices that they make every day. The unknown element of an Arnold Friend in this story or a Satan in Paradise Lost is part of all of our lives. The character of Arnold is described as trying to appear as something that he is not. Friend is foil to our everyday lives. We must make decisions on a day to day basis. We can be influenced by what others do and say but ultimately it is our choice. The world will give us obstacles that we must overcome. The obstacles may not even be of this world, but ultimately it is the choices that we make that make us the people that we are. Friend or no Friend.