Today I want to write about something a little bit different. When I went up to the gym to lift it was a very hot day and humid to boot. So I took a frozen bottle of Gatorade with me to drink. While I was lifting the Gatorade was slowly melting on the counter where I laid it. About half way through my lift, I started shaking the bottle up until I started getting the consistency of a frozen smoothie. And since I was sweating pretty bad and there was no air-conditioning in the gym, my body temperature had to be above normal. When I started drinking this frozen concoction I noticed that no matter how much that I drank I could not get one of those brain freezes. Everybody has had one of these. The frozen headache that comes on when you eat or drink something cold. So I guess that I have just discovered that you can prevent a brain freeze by just busting your ass, before you eat or drink something cold. Wow I must be really onto something. I guess this is sort of like life in general. If you bust your ass doing anything you can prevent a lot of pain by being the aggressor in the competition for your emotional state. If you relax too much, smaller and smaller things bother us. But if you actively peruse challenges the small annoyances in life tend to disappear. And I find myself struggling with this reality. God I don’t want to be a man without dreams. But sometimes the daily routine of the job and the everyday bullshit in life wears me down. And if I find myself worrying about petty crap, its time to find the next challenge. A lot of the time I am not even sure what I am looking for. Sometimes just running 4 miles on an empty stomach puts me into the zone where the world clarifies itself to me. Something as simple as throwing a new piece of linoleum on the kitchen floor can put me into the zone of pleasurable comprehension. Someplace I wish I could stay. It would be nice to know that there was a certain 50 step plan that I could follow to stay in my zone. But life in America cannot be like that, there are so many possibilities. And to be a player in this life you have to consider a good many of them. That is why that at least in my consumption of things, I can simplify. With the possibility that if I truly find my niche, my consumption could be boundless yet controllable. Like taking a sailboat throughout the Caribbean to all those islands and pushing my grain philosophy while I am working and playing at the same time.