Is what I'm feeling age or disuse?

Omaha and I went camping this July, earlier than we usually do, and for the first time in my life I experienced a new sensation I had never had before.

I felt old.

Like, I’m 54. People who have been following me from the beginning know that I started blogging and posting to Usenet in 1992, 28 years ago when I was 26 years old! And yet, I’ve never felt old. Prior to the COVID-19 crisis I worked out regularly and was well on my way to being able to squat my own weight, which would have led inevitably to pistol squats and other knee-threatening exercises.

The Crisis deprived me of a weight room and the need for a break from the day. I’m at home; as much as I’m “living at work rather than working from home,” I’m finding that being in my home means that I can take mental breaks at any time by stepping out onto the back porch or walking through the overgrown belt of forest behind my home. I no longer ride my bike to the train station for a ride into the city.

After four months of that, Omaha and I decided to take some “moderate” hikes, starting with a 4.4 mile that turned out to be exactly in one direction: up. The Big Creek Trail is listed as a moderate difficulty loop that’s exactly 2.2 miles uphill to the top, cross the creek on a wooden bridge, and then exactly 2.2 miles downhill to the trailhead.

When we got back to the tent, my legs felt unfamiliar. I was very familiar with the burning sensation of working my leg muscles in a long-distance hike, and I know what it’s like when they’re fully exhausted and no longer want to move anyway, but this time they felt something else: they felt heavy.

I am not heavy. I weigh 185 lbs at the moment, smack in the middle of the “175lbs - 195lbs” range for a 6-foot tall adult male. I have a small amount of liver fat, the typical spread of a 50+ male, and according to my doctor it’s less than most guys my age. 62.3% of men my age are overweight; I’m not. Not yet, at any rate.

But my legs felt like they were wooden logs I was carrying around, and it was a disturbing sensation because of its unfamiliarity. It was like they belonged to someone else. (I promise I’m not developing Body Integrity Identity Disorder. That's something that hits in childhood for the people who experience it at all.)

To me, this suggests an experiment: if I work at getting my legs stronger once more, will that sensation go away? Is the sensation I experienced due to age, or due to the general flabbiness this working at home thing has done to many of us?

I’m gonna need to run that experiment hard.

My ADHD didn't bother me when I was far away from 4G.

I discovered something important this past week while I was out camping in the woods. I had no Internet and no network connectivity. What I did have was a folder full of math papers and a notebook full of story ideas, and while Omaha and I did spend a lot of time either hiking, cooking, swimming, or playing card games, I also spent a lot of time just reading. Mostly trashy stuff, but reading.

It’s also important to know, perhaps, that I didn’t take any of my ADHD meds with me on this trip. I didn’t think I’d need them. And you know what?

I didn’t.

I’m starting to think that the kind ADHD described by normal people, that is, the ADHD which impacts the witnesses and not the person with the condition is, like depression, triggered by the environment in which we live. That its utility, in moments of hyperfocus and manic productivity, is swamped and broken by the regimentation of modern schooling and the conflicting multifaceted demands of office work.

I came up with four great story plots. I also grokked something deep and important about the fundamental theory of computation, something that links the Kleene Algebra to everything from regular expressions (where they’re most commonly used) to the basic descriptions of what a programming language is. (I could hyperfocus geekily on this right now, but I’ve learned not to.)

Omaha and I agreed not to discuss the world while we were out. It was impossible to keep that promise completely; sometimes, while driving from the campsite to an active trailhead we’d pass through a zone with radio and snatches of what was going on in the world would filter into my imagination. I don’t know about Omaha, she’s the event-driven, extrovert type; but I learned just how long it takes to get my imagination back into the groove of whatever it was I wanted most to think about.

The answer, sometimes, was all day. I’d have to go read something ridiculous (I read a lot of Lovecraft) just to flush all the world’s anxieties back out of my head.

I’m currently riding high on a week of being well-rested as well as alcohol and drug (even prescription drug) free, at least for the cognitive drugs. (I still took my statin and allergy meds, duh.) I gave my future self a list of to-dos that, so far, future self has agreed are sensible and workable. Some are more challenging than others, and today has been little more than “get re-aligned with all projects, both professional and personal, after being off-line for 9 days,” so we’ll see how far I get on any of them for realz of course.

This is a thing I have to remember, this is the thing all those “do your big thing first thing in the morning before anything else” stories are about: you do your best work when your mind is uncluttered, and the one thing the black slab in your pocket and the email queue on your desk want to do, the one thing they want, is to grab your attention for their purposes not yours, and if you have any intellectual life at all, there are a lot of processes out there vying for your attention.

They create the very clutter they’re trying to break through and, in the process, they deny you your rightful control over your own attention.