Holliday

Did this month's Achilles in honor of the town I grew up in - back up north in Hyperborea :) It was a small town, way up in the mountains, in an absolutely beautiful, very rural area. It basically felt like going back in time to the 1920's... like growing up in some novel like Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury (fantastic book by the way - cannot recommend it enough)... My buddies and I knew that town (and county) like the back of our hand... We spent what must have been thousands of hours exploring it... Fishing and camping as kids with our families... And then driving around every corner of it, every old logging road imaginable, exploring constantly for good party spots as teenagers... and just exploring for the sake of exploring... It literally had every cool, classic small town Americana feature you could imagine... The fairgrounds where they'd do baseball games and the fireworks on 4th of July... The cemetery at the top of the hill where the teenagers would go to try to scare themselves (especially couples) walking around the tombstones at night... The local football field where we all played football.. The secret huckleberry-picking spots up in the mountains (they only grow at super high elevations and only for a few weeks each year)... The giant cliff on the river we'd all jump off of, that was almost like some male "coming of age ritual" in a way, as you were basically expected to jump off it once you got to HS... The old movie theater with the hard wooden seats from the 1950's or something... The lake where high schoolers would go night-swimming or skinny-dipping, and the local golf course we'd sneak onto at night... Tons of rivers to explore... tons of lakes... tons of hiking opportunities... crazy little nooks and crannies and plateaus and secret trails and etc... old abandoned mines and grain towers... It was just absolutely idyllic man. Insanely wholesome. We got to play both regular 11 man football but also 8 man football (a common variant in rural America - the field is the same size though so the scores will typically be way higher, you will see crazy stats like QB's throwing for 700 yards in one game, etc). There was also tons of hunting and fishing and just everything you can imagine. Pretty much the rural small-town ideal that my friend @OldHollowTree always tweets about :) It was a wonderful place to grow up... But in other ways it was also quite stifling I must admit... Small towns put you under the microscope, as everyone knows everyone, and we hoomans just have an unfortunate tendency towards gossip and schadenfreude and reveling in other's misery... Its unfortunate because alot of people move to small towns like that from the city, expecting a really solid 'community' and expecting the vibes to be super positive... But the problem is that in small towns today there's no overarching shared identity or collective need for one another, as it were... I think this would have been different 100+ years ago, because all the people in said small town would need to rely on each other to survive, so there would be a shared mutual identity and tribal cohesion, so to speak... whereas that is no longer the case today, making the situation much different as a result. But with that said, I had a wonderful time growing up there... And I also think it helped boost my WIS score tremendously... Because it was such a small town and sparsely-populated county, you were exposed to every demographic imaginable... I had good buddies in HS whose parents were local lumber or construction barons and lived in $2M houses... And other ones who lived in single-wide trailers with holes in the roof that were heated only by an old wooden stove... We had tons of Mormons, and Mennonites, and old hippy communes up in the hills, and just everything you could imagine... Also massive, massive amounts of poverty and drug addiction... It was sort of like living in West Virginia in that regard, and while there were wealthy folks and yuppy ski bums in Subarus and wealthy boomer-transplants from California, there were also untold trailer parks filled with meth dealers and little old ladies in wheelchairs selling their oxycontin and vicodin prescriptions and etc... I got to experience it all... I was a successful athlete and good student and lived the whole Varsity Blues/Dazed And Confused/etc type experience... but also (eventually) a complete degenerate pursuing every extreme biochemical vice imaginable, spending the majority of my time in said trailer parks... And also just got to do a lot of really hard physical work in tough, blue-collar industries like logging and construction and etc.. So by the time I got to college (and moved into the dorms initially) I would meet all these kids from the suburbs who had lived very sheltered lives by comparison (both for good and ill, in different ways, I suppose), and was just overwhelmed by how different we were. But yeah... overall though I am immensely grateful that I grew up where I did... I no longer live there obviously- I moved away after HS- and am now in vastly different environs here in Chadistan-By-The-Sea... But I harbor a deep and abiding love for that town that I really cannot even put into words... I loved its rivers and lakes... I loved the trees... the mountains... the football field... the trailer parks... the gigantic log homes... all of it :) But yeah... As always: Achilles was two miles of carrying a 70 lb dumbbell in each hand while wearing a 70 lb backpack (broken up into a ton of individual farmer's carries basically)... And normally I combine it with 70 weighted 70 lb pullups, however I'm still recovering from this muscle tear in my upper abdomen and as a result I had to replace the pullups with something else, so I did 600 delt raises instead (with various weights). Appreciate you tremendously my bros and please RT and/or comment if you enjoyed 💪

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