Riding a motorcycle through the desert during the winter does interesting things to one’s mind. You think about the strangest things. That’s especially so when you decide that it’s not as interesting to listen to music through your Bluetooth helmet, but rather to take in yet another book on tape. Lately I have very much gotten into listening to one book after another, mostly because of the time I spend each day on my treadmill and in my little garage-based home gym. I find that some books listen very easily and some books not so much. I recently started Andy Weir’s book, Project Hail Mary, which caught my attention from the trailers of the new movie by the same name starring Ryan Gosling. Andy Weir is the guy who produced the great story of The Martian, with Matt Damon, struggling to get himself back from being stranded on Mars. In Project Hail Mary, Ryan Gosling is similarly stranded, but this time on a mission to another solar system to save earth from something called Astrophage (something Gosling’s character named), which is a new cosmic algae, which is eating the sun’s energy. Weir’s unique capability is to make strange science fiction be just familiar enough to be plausible. His medium also seems to be to put himself in the voice of a man who is by himself, struggling to science the shit out of whatever problem he seems to find himself in. His colloquial manner feels very familiar and is therefore fun to listen to. He also makes a point of educating us along the way, particularly on things biological and in terms of evolution.
I don’t want to ruin the Project Hail Mary story for people because I certainly think it’s a book worth reading (or listening to) and will likely be a movie worth seeing on the big screen, but it’s the story of a somewhat unwilling astronaut (Ryland Grace) and a very long space mission where he encounters and befriends an alien who has a similar mission to save his species from the same Astrophage debacle. In both of Weir’s stories, his hero encounters, the problem of finding sufficient food to allow him to continue his journey in the endlessness of space and time. In both stories, the lonely heroes are botanists by training, so they have as many tools available to them to figure out their food problem as a person could. In The Martian, the combination of Mars dust, water, human feces, and a stock of potatoes, solves the problem for a while. In the case of Project Hail Mary. it’s more difficult because there’s neither dirt nor any live plant matter like potatoes from which to grow things. Anything consumable that would have the proper mix of nutrients has to be chemically created. This gives Weir the opportunity to talk about the evolutionary process of life in the context of food. He makes a point that I found interesting and worth noting in that almost 100% of man’s efforts before the time of the industrial revolution had been directed towards obtaining sufficient food to survive. It’s pretty easy to agree with that notion when you consider the rest of the animal kingdom, beings that do not have access to technology. They all spend their entire lives, focused on survival, and that means doing only two things, procreating and finding food. It’s worth noting that they don’t even procreate unless there is sufficient food to support them and their offspring. So what Weir is telling us is that life equals food. It’s a very fundamental concept and not necessarily one that we in our modern lives of plenty can relate to so very easily.
When you’re on a motorcycle ride, alone in your helmet, riding through the desert in the winter and you’ve been on a six month quest of significantly reducing your food intake, it’s hard not to have that concept of life equals food stop you in your tracks. And remember, I am listening to Project Hail Mary through my Bluetooth connection to my iPhone while riding on a BMW motorcycle that has more computer technology in it than anything on my desktop before 1990. What that reminds me is that it’s science and technology which have created the opportunity for us to self-actualize to the point where I have the ability to listen to Andy Weir‘s book on a motorcycle while riding through Death Valley this winter. If you stop and think about it, that makes science and technology almost God-like in the context of human evolution, and it makes food a primary color of life. Wow. Add on top of that the fact that my Zepbound and it’s GLP-1 attributes are causing this disassociation between me and food and you have the basis for quite a mind blowing ride through the desert (or is that dessert?).
In addition to all of this pondering about food and God, I have also been struggling lately with an unexpected sore right foot. I woke up a few days ago with a feeling like I had almost sprained my right ankle or foot. I’ve had this feeling once in a while in the past, and I’ve always attributed it to some quirk of the body or some atmospheric change that afflicted me with something with a weird old-fashioned name like lumbago or something. But this time the pain in that foot was quite sharp and persistent for two days. It caused me to do some research and self diagnosis with the help of my AI engine. I narrowed it down through repeated questioning to either an isolated rheumatoid arthritis attack or gout. My reference point as I age for all things having to do with my body is the experiences of my centenarian mother, who happened to have suffered occasionally from mild arthritis and, as I recall, a touch of gout. There is no easy way short of a blood test for uric acid levels to be certain of the presence of gout and I neither drink nor eat lots of red meat, but the described symptoms sure sounded familiar to me. The good news was that all the literature about gout implies an attack will last only several days before dissipating. That meant that as I headed off on my desert motorcycle adventure, I should see some natural reduction in the symptoms. Also, I have generally found that walking through the discomfort actually helps with gout because it helps break up the crystal structures that form in the joint (my version of a home remedy). I figured that just giving my foot a rest on a motorcycle peg for a few days might help the condition pass, but what I wasn’t expecting was what happened. When I got off the motorcycle at lunch, I realized that I felt no pain in my right foot any longer. It had been there when I woke up, albeit less than on the prior two days, but by noon, it was gone… completely gone. Go figure. My conclusion is that the vibration of the motorcycle peg did a better job of breaking up the remaining gout crystals than anything I had done through my walking the past several days. I’m so excited about this conclusion that I almost feel like I should write an article for some medical journal, explaining my newly found health benefits of cycling while aging. That may be a stretch, so I’ll stick to how a funny thing happened on the way to Death Valley (the multiple entendres abound).