Another beautiful day wasted down in the basement. This was the third amazingly sunny warm day in a row and neither Viv nor I had time to go enjoy the weather.

I can’t recall if I blogged this or not, but I bought Viv a decent midmarket treadmill off Craigslist for her birthday. It’s a Smooth 6.25, about six years old, and in pretty good shape, new-looking at first glance.

Both she and I have been using it, and to my surprise I have been using it more than Viv. I was diagnosed with a genetic degenerative bone disease this past fall, and the disease affects my sacroiliac. I suppose it might not actually be a great idea to start running but far be it from me to miss a chance to spit in the eye of God, or fate or the cops or whatever you got.

People who actually like exercise claim it makes them feel good. Ever since I was a kid it only ever made me feel sick, headachey and mad at the world and so forth, so I have no legitimate beef to avoid it these days since that is my default state anyway.

So far, yeah, it makes me feel terrible and sometimes gives me the dry heaves. I run barefoot, and am sort of amused that I appear to be developing calluses on my feet that are superior to my stringed-instrument calluses.

If that isn’t conclusive evidence of a moral crisis, of values that fly in the face of civilization and justice, I don’t know what is.

In other news of poor personal judgement and sketchy moral values, Br. Spencer Sundell handed me my ass on a plate in a spirited discussion of my long-term loathing of the political values exhibited by Neal Stephenson in his high period works, beginning with Cryptonomicon. In essence, he made me promise to read some of the stuff since Cryptonomicon, that bible of Ron Paul cryptofascism. I may start with Reamde, since I gather that the bad guys in that book are war blogger wet dream islamofascists and therefore I can continue to hate on the motherfucker as a propagandizing tool.