I Can't Get No...

I am disinterested in today's prompt, which seems more a prompt for a sci-fi/horror short story than it does a blog post. So I guess that's not my inspiration today.

I am sore. I exercised yesterday, but not today, not officially: today, I spent the bulk of my after-work energy de-stinking a room in my house where my dog has taken to peeing if we're not around. Our landlord is coming in for an inspection in a few days, so it's pretty critical that it not smell, but more than that, today, I simply could not get used to the smell. There's that whole febreeze (I think) commercial series about how people who go "nose blind", which is clever advertising. Normally it takes me a few minutes to overcome whatever smell is happening in the house-- with an old, fat dog who cannot clean himself properly after going to the bathroom, and a baby, complete with diapers, there are plenty of them. But today, I couldn't get over it.

Dan would say that the sizable amount of moving, bending and lifting I did in the room to clean both rug and the floor underneath it (necessitating that I move nearly everything out of the room first) would count as exercise, and the ache in my joints tells me he's not entirely wrong. My retort to him would be that I don't get any real satisfaction out of exercise unless I break a considerable sweat.

When I say satisfaction, I don't mean the rush of endorphins that cause you to feel great and powerful after a workout-- a "runner's high" or whatever the elliptical equivalent of that is. I rarely feel more than just the faintest effects of endorphins. Really, what I mean by satisfied is...no longer feeling this persistent guilt that I didn't work out.

This is a running theme in my life; that, lacking any meaningful satisfaction, I instead assign the word "satisfaction" to something that is probably more closely related to "relief." Just...getting rid of whatever negative thing was associated with not doing something.

When I post something here that ends up being unexpectedly well-written or enlightening or both, I feel the actual satisfaction that I get, at this point in my life, only from accomplishing something creative. When I post this in a few minutes, I'll feel the other kind of satisfaction; the, "alright, now I can go to sleep" satisfaction. In other words, very nearly nothing.

However, the point of this post, as so many before it, is to continue my streak. At the end of the thirty days, if I've managed to post every day, it's very possible I'll feel that real satisfaction, that I set a goal and stuck to it. And, you know, that some of it was passably good.

So it's exercise enough to keep my writing muscles sore. Which, actually, I'm not sure why that's a good thing? Maybe the better word, though it doesn't fit the callback, is "limber." Or maybe my mind is getting old, much the way of my poor knees.

Day 14. On with it.