The Explorers' Club, № CDXII

Old Sarum, the rottenest of the "rotten boroughs" in the Parliament of the United Kingdom, justly consigned to the ashcan of history by the Great Reform Act of 1832.







Operation ÖSTERREICH | He's Dead, Jim
Last weigh-in: 339.8 lbs
This weigh-in: "Err"
Difference: +/- ? lbs.

The battery has been changed but the song remains the same. Though human error remains a variable that cannot be eliminated from the equation, I find it impossible to believe that I'd doing anything substantially different from what I'd always done. I strive to stand still, yet the digital readout continues to swing wildly from the three hundred twenties to the three hundred fifties. What undetectable movements could possibly account for such thirty-pound swings before the by-now inevitable "Err" code? I will change the battery once more, on the slim chance that the old battery was exhausted & the new battery is malfunctioning, but I am resigned to the fact that acquiring a new scale, or access to a new scale, will probably be necessary. Fie!

In the meanwhile, before a cold forced a week's sabbatical, I'd just begun a new exercise regime encompassing walking & the shooting of one hundred basketball free throws. The aim of the free throws is not so much direct physical fitness as the development of self-disciple & habits that will lend themselves to physical fitness, that is, responsible stewardship of this body I have been gifted. I shoot exactly nineteen per cent (19%), which is atrocious but not together unsurprising, given that it had been literally years since I'd shot a basketball. This percentage has been remarkably consistent over the four sessions conducted pre-cold (caught from my mother, who brought it back from her yearly girls' trip/wine weekend to the Sodom that is the Windy City): eighteen per cent (18%), nineteen per cent (19%), twenty-one percent (21%), & eighteen per cent (18%) for a precise average of the aforementioned nineteen per cent. I've thus far utilized two different baskets in the Rec. Center & two different balls, always the same basket & ball combination. With ball № 2 & what we'll call basket № 1, I've twice shot eighteen per cent; with ball № 9 & basket № 2, I've shot nineteen & twenty-one percent. I wonder if I should request ball № 9 or continue to use whichever ball fate & the clerk conspire to give me.

I enjoy shooting one hundred free throws. I like confronting directly frustration & discouragement & choosing consciously to reject their false relief, those wily tricks of old Beelzebub. My runny nose has cleared enough & my cough has subsided enough. It's time to get back to it.