Wednesday, March 21, 2018

Thoughts and fake Lucky Charms

I went down the cereal aisle at the local Acme today.  I haven't gone down that aisle in a long time. My, how things have changed.  The number of sugar sweetened cereals has increased exponentially 

WOW, dude that is some cereal! All flavors of cheerios! Oreo everything. I scored some generic Lucky Charms and having not had them in a long time, am typing this while sugary coma high on those wonderful, sugar coated, colored marshmallows. 

Sweet lord! That is some sugar pulsating through me. And kids are munching on this all the time and then they get literally hooked on sugar. I can see why. Its, I don't know, its sweeter. It's like this sweeter than any sweetener chemical taste that mixes with the milk  and hooks you, and makes you a little sick at the same time. I mean, the best marketing ploy in the history of marketing is marketing candy soaked in milk as part of a "complete breakfast". Imagine if you ate it every morning in your freakin' life like some kids that are adults now? You'd be obese or diabetic or your moods would be up and down and there are tons of people that have done it and now they pass it onto their kids. 

You can't, even if you are a little dense, think that its good for you to give Lucky Sugar Oreo Crunch with a prize to your kids in the morning. Seriously, wondering why the country has issues with this shit is not hard to recognize. All the cheapest, sweetest stuff is readily available and marketed out the yin yang. I'm starting to see, more than ever that all the stuff, from social media to the TV to everything we watch and pretty much all we see on t-shirts and billboards is marketing, image, buy, buy, buy. 

It has now become a type of identity for people to wear a company's name all over them while paying money for their clothes all the while advertising for them at the same time. 

I can't say that I have fallen for much of the materialistic, brand named stuff . I have to admit that a Remington 870 shotgun holds a special place in my heart, but that's because of its performance for me, not because the logo looks cool. Then when it performs, I wear the hat. Then I am proud to advertise, but it's after the proof , not just because all the other sheep are wearing it. As far as fishing goes, most of the time the big name stuff is the best stuff. That's why they are still around in that industry.  The pretenders don't last.  Let me see, I did have some Frye Boots on the 70's when they were all the rage in my town, but they were a free hand me down from a kid my sister knew. I felt stupid in them, anyway. Clomping around. 

Let's see. I don't read popular books or watch any network news, ever.  Haven't for a year or two. Feel slightly addicted to Instagram, but all my sites are my interests  so it doesn't irritate me too much. So I am at the point right now in my life where I can honestly say that I don't know what is "in" at all anymore, although in the weight room I do hear the atrocious noise that is masquerading as music and it is disheartening. When I check my Yahoo Mail I purposely try not to read the headlines because it anything catches my eye that pisses me off, I am in a bad mood for a while.  I try to avoid it. I look at outdoors stuff online and heavy metal stuff online and I read bodybuilding sites and watch Olympic lifting videos and hunting and fishing videos on youtube. I watch documentaries unless I start one and it is like, MEAT IS BAD and they have folks espousing the horrors of meat looking the whole time like they need about 5 years of hard labor at the local Nautilus Gym. 

Then I turn it off and watch RX Muscle and Muscular Development and I see the ads  there and wow, its easy to fall for that stuff if you were a kid these days! The preworkouts are dangerous as hell, and a bunch of that stuff has no research backing it up. Reminded me of when I was a kid and pretty much fell for everything that the Weider athletes were selling, especially Belknap and Platz until I started drinking that awful concoction that he was selling and literally puking it out at times while running to the bus stop in the morning. I saved up many weeks of allowance to buy that junk. Some salesman have no shame and these companies couldn't care less about the kids and they couldn't care less about the side effects of the stuff that they sell. 

It is a shame, this trail of obese, sugar addicted , people that have to wear some dude's name on their glasses (who lives in zillion dollar house and laughs at the minions wearing his name all over them), to feel important is now here to stay and the health problems keep on and the ads get more shameless and you just gotta turn it all off, gotta get back into your head and what you know is right by instinct, not what some flashy ad told you about that you gotta just have this product or act or vote this way because this is what they think is right or all the rage. Screw that. We have become so watered down as damn men and what society now thinks is manly that I am sometimes at a loss for words...but that is another column altogether.

All About Being a Lifer

What's a Lifer? Someone who isn't in to something for just a day, a month, a year...it's for life. Whether its training or your family or your job...it doesn't matter. You work at it, you build on it, you see the big picture . You don't miss workouts because it means something to you. You are like a Shakespearean actor- no matter what is going on in your life, you block it out when it's time to train. You walk into the weight room and all else disappears. Worry about it later.