Special-made by this old school bike guru. No joke. Very random hookup I got. All I know is the frame is a Raleigh - light enough that the bike can go pretty fast, but still really sturdy. Also a big frame - at 6'6 it's hard to find an appropriately tall frame, so I lucked out.
@Kid McNamara
I don't really look at it as what you're missing out on. For me, it's more about self-love, investment in life as opposed to embracing the death instinct, and the balance between physical and mental health.
I have a cousin I grew up with, we were real close, like brothers. He's a handsome cat, 6'3, in great shape, has a cool aura and shyt. But he's always doing reckless sexual shyt, mistreating his main shorty, sometimes fukking her coworkers. And I keep trying to help my cuzzo understand that the way you treat others speaks volumes about yourself to the rest of the world. Same with the way you treat yourself. You kind of tell the world how to interact with you via your behavior and habits, by how you present yourself every day. And the way we present ourselves and the way we treat others speaks volumes about our own perspectives on ourselves - we confess specifically how fukked up we are to those around us who are attuned enough to the human condition to read the signs.
I don't know if that sounds like a bunch of rambling, but what I'm saying in my cousin's case is he can't realize that mistreating his shorty and fukking mad random bytches is a sign of his deep unhappiness. And any woman worth anything with a sharp mind who could actually benefit his life and challenge him to actualize his potential as a person will likely pass on getting involved with him despite all his charm and good looks. Because they'll see through to the really dark side of his soul. He's putting it on blast and he doesn't know it.
I've always been naturally slim, but because of a back injury and subsequent nerve pain, I had a period of very little exercise and a whole lot of drinking. When I decided to get back in shape - and I haven't looked back - it was more for mental and spiritual health than appearance. You get one incredibly brief shot at a life. A lot of people close to me got that shyt taken away early as fukk (I grew up in a couple really foul areas in 80s NY, lost two of my closest peoples to murder by gunfire) and I watched many others squander promise because when you get off the path of productivity and self-love it's way harder to get back on than most think. I think about those people a lot, every single day, and I'm constantly aware that my life is a brief and tiny thing in this world, but it's still a thing much bigger than just myself. It's something informed by those who have passed through it, and it's something that informs those around me about my personal ethics and beliefs, about how I view the world and my place in it.
I think of two songs that had profound impacts on me when I heard them: one by Cormega and one by this R&B singer from the 70s whose name is totally escaping me right now, but my favorite uncle used to listen to it. The Mega song had one line in it that resonated with me for some reason:
I was a face you never seen with the grace of a king; the R&B joint had a part (later sampled in a Curren$y song) that went
it takes a beautiful heart, and a beautiful mind... to survive in these crazy times.
Fammo, it's an ugly enough world when you peel back the layers. People can really sink to the level of the ugliness around them, or the limitations of their environments, or the narrowness of their imaginations and circumstances. When I get up in the morning and make myself some fresh juice, or a smoothie, or choose yogurt and almonds over some stank processed fast food sandwich that has a carefully constructed balance of sugar and salt and chemicals to trick my brain into a state of addiction that will ultimately undermine it, I'm not thinking about how my body will look to a female. I'm thinking about how all of my choices either reinforce the death instinct or keep me on my preferred path of beautiful heart and beautiful mind and the grace of a king. I'm telling myself with every single decision exactly who I understand myself to be, and then the world is observing me and learning who I am by how I act and how I present myself. I hop on my bike and do 25-30 miles because it brings me peace while clearing my mind and refocusing my perspective. It also reminds me that I have the ability to be disciplined, to avoid the sort of laziness and complacency that can easily seep into all areas of a life when it gets affirmed day in and day out.
And the benefits are not restricted to the aesthetic. I sleep better; I think better; I have better stamina in many activities; my mind feels sharper. I make better decisions. I take no bullshyt, and people try to pull less bullshyt on me. Because they size me up quickly and every little bit of what you do and how you act conveys a narrative to other humans, and they will simply pull less shyt with a person who seems in control of himself and confident in himself and invested in his existence. I send a message to myself and then to the world that I'm
about something; when you do that, you attract other people who are about something. When you show the world you just drifting through life, you attract other drifters. You're often as good as the company you keep, and at this point in my life I don't want time-wasters and bullshytters anywhere near my circle.
I go through my weight routine every other day for several reasons. One is structure: without routine life can seem pointless, vast, empty, out of our control. I remember reading this essay when I was like 19 that said some shyt like "you can have a life, but it will never be the world; or you can live in a world, but it will never be a life." What dude was saying is that both "the world" and "a life" are artificial constructs, and you can't let someone else set the definition of those things for you. My goal is to build the world I want to live in. And knowledge, health, and structure are essential to holding up the walls of my personal world. Ain't too many people outchea gonna treat you well. But you damn sure can treat yourself like a king. And when you get into that habit, others follow suit eventually. fukk being average, breh. Set an example. Shine. The more time you spend cultivating your own personal glow, the less time and desire you'll have left for pettiness, wack people, wasting time, engaging in all the forms of slow suicide that dominate so many moments of the average person's day. Being the best you has nothing to do with getting a flock of women, or looking good without a shirt on. It has everything to do with you understanding that being the best you is a way doper goal than just being an average nikka who makes average choices and treats something as rare and sacred as life carelessly, like it's just some shyt you got to get through instead of some shyt you want to continually enlarge and enrich.
Does any of that make sense to you? It's difficult to articulate something like this, because it's an abstract and very personal philosophy/take on what a life is. But physical and mental health sets the tone for everything else in my life. As cliche as it sounds, you do often get back what you put out into the world. And you also get back from the world a reaction to what you put into yourself.
