Leg Day

 

As we age, our balance tends to get worse. There are reasons, and chief among these are that leg strength lessens, and fast-twitch muscle fades. If you stumble or trip, slow-twitch muscles might not be quick enough to recover. 

Most injuries to the elderly involve falls, and, really, you’d rather avoid that. 

It is important to note that while the bigger muscles — quads, hamstrings, gluteus majors, calves, and core need to be worked, so too the smaller stabilizers we tend not to think about. There are stabilizers all over one’s body, but here I speak to the southernmost.

Here’s a simple way to see where those little ankle, leg, and hip muscles are, and what they do: 

NOTE: ASSUMING GOOD HEALTH, DO THE FOLLOWING WITH SOME NEARBY SUPPORT — A WALL, A CHAIR, SOMETHING STURDY IN CASE YOU LOSE YOUR BALANCE. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED.

Stand with your feet shoulder-width apart.

Shift your weight onto one foot, lift your other foot, doesn’t matter how high or what angle, where you keep your hands, just so all your weight is on the opposite foot.

After a few seconds, longer if you are fit, you’ll probably notice some adjustments your body makes to stay standing. Little motions, in the ankle, or knee, maybe the gluteus minimus, the hip. These are the stabilizers, and while they get worked with squats, leg-extensions, or -curls, calf-raises, they might need more. 

If you can’t do this unaided, you can put one hand on a support until you can hold it, then move toward doing it without the support. When you hold the position comfortably, you can switch your weight to the other foot. Do this a few times, increasing the time you spend balanced on each side. 

Keep your eyes open. There is another test with eyes closed, but not useful for walking around, since the sighted among us tend not to walk with their eyes shut. 

Get good at this, then you can add weights. 

Hereunder, a variation of a farmer’s walk. (Aka farmer’ carry — basically walking around holding a weight in each hand. This is good for legs, hips, torso (core,) shoulders, hands, all like that.)

Stand on one foot, switch, repeat, holding a dumbbell or kettlebells in each hand. Start with light weights. Count reps, or set a timer and go back and forth. I like to do five seconds, then switch, for a minute per set. Your mileage may vary.

There are things one can do to get better fast-twitch dynamics, tai chi, plyometrics, but that’s a different post.

Guitar Clerk's Bane (1969)

 

When guitar players go into music stores, they tend to want to pick up the axes and play a few riffs. The more popular a song is, the more likely it is that -- if you are a clerk in a guitar store -- you will quickly get real sick of hearing it, because every wanna-be who comes in will sure as hell play it.

Recall the sign on the guitar store wall in Wayne's World? No Stairway to Heaven ... 

Now it's different, but back in my day, it was Deep Purple and Led Zep and Beatles, and for the acoustic guys, Mason Williams.

I thought it would be fun to put together a little parody of this, so I came up with this. Did it about … twenty years ago, when I was still playing guitar and ukuleles still
a few years in my future.

A mash-up of the oh-crap-not-again! pieces the guys behind the counter at Music City were hearing in the late sixties: Smoke on the Water, Stairway to Heaven, House of the Risin’ Sun, Classical Gas, Blackbird … 

Inaccurate

 

Getting a lot of posts on my feed from gun-guys, praising the civilian shooter who engaged the killer in Twin Falls during the In-N-Out mass-murders Saturday.

To be fair, I don't fault the guy's bravery -- he stepped up. I believe that having the civilian and an off-duty Highway Patrol office firing at him almost certainly caused the killer to back off, and thus saved lives. Points for that. 

That the gun guys are having orgasms because a good-guy-with-a-gun was there? If he fired multiple times at a killer and missed hitting him? And the off-duty cop didn't do any better?

Nothing to brag about there. Where did those stray rounds go? 

If you are going to take a shot in a crowded area and you can't hit your target? Don't shoot. 

Wyatt Earp supposedly said, "Speed is fine, but accuracy is final."

As the late Bill Jordan -- a man who could pick aspirin tablets off a table with his duty revolver -- said: “The history of gun fighting fails to record a single fatality resulting from a quick noise.”

Temper your enthusiasm, guys. He missed.

Writing: Person and Tense

 

A brief explanation of two writing constructs — person and tense.

When you tell a story, the first thing you have to decide is, Whose story is it?

Person goes to the viewpoint character(s): First-person, Second-person, third-person. These can be limited to a character, a camera-view, or omnipotent viewpoint, depending on whose head you want to get inside to hear their thoughts. Can be one, none, or all.

These viewpoints are, respectively, “I,” “you,” “he/she/they.” Mixing them up in a single work tends to confuse readers.

Tense, goes to time — past, present, and future. 

Combined, they give you a way to offer your tale.

Most commercial fiction is told in third-person, past-tense: Somebody did something, it’s a done deal, and the writer is telling readers about it.

“He traveled in another dimension.” This gives you options to switch viewpoint from him, to her, or them.

First-person:

“I traveled in another dimension.” Limits you to one person’s interior.

Second person:

“You traveled in another dimension.”

That’s with past-tense.

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Present tense, first-person:

“I am traveling in another dimension.”

 

Present tense, 2nd-person:

“You are traveling in another dimension.” Thank you, Rod Serling. Don’t see this one a lot, but it has its uses. Choose-Your-Own-Adventure or Time Machine YA books, for instance.

Present tense, third-person:

“He/she/they are traveling in another dimension.”

Present-tense can give you a sense of immediacy — things are happening now. 

____________________

Then one gets into future-tense, and future-perfect tense which tend to be a can of worms:

First-person:

“I shall be traveling in another dimension.”

Yadda, yadda, yadda. 

____________________

Now I told you all that so I can tell you this: 

I am not a fan of first-person, present-tense for a novel.

First-person, past-tense works really well for mystery stories, and a lot of the best ones use this. You solve the crime using only what your investigator knows. But first-person-present-tense? A lot of mainstream fiction uses this, and, to me, it always feels artsy and pretentious, trying to compel a reader to see the actions as deep and meaningful. It seems more about the writing, and less about the story. The first story I sold started out this way, got rejected several times, and when I redid it in third-person-past-tense, it found a buyer. 

Now, that said, I have read and enjoyed books done in this style, but the caveat is that — for me — they are few and far between. So if pick up a book and it is written this way, it has two-strikes against it, and if it doesn’t pull me in on the first page or two? I am likely to put that book down.