As I usually do the night before a workout day, I had gathered all my gym clothes and set them in a nice pile so that when my alarm went off, I had everything ready to do. (If you don’t do this, I highly recommend it to keep your motivation alive.)

But this morning I was up before my alarm and with good but scary cause: my heart was palpitating like mad.

It’s pretty rare when this happens so I rode it out in bed for a while hoping it would get better.

It didn’t for hours as you can tell by the chart above. In fact I had to switch to my Wyze watch because all the checking of my heart rate drained the battery on my Series 7 Apple Watch.

By about 9am, the palpitations had subsided but my resting heart rate was still not normal: I’m usually at 55-60 but was measuring 70-80. As of this post, I’m around 60-65 which is still high for me but better than 140 bpm.

And no, I didn’t make it to the gym and will probably take the week off until I know I’m 100% better.

As to why this happened? I’ve read that having them now and then is completely normal or that sometimes they can be caused by stress. That’s when the epiphany hit me.

Stress? Not in my personal life but definitely at work.

The merger continues to unfold with people being let go regularly, and there’s a lot of uncertainty with what the next moves will be. As for me, I recently found out that parts of my job will be handed to AI agents in the very near future. I just hope they don’t want me to train them because that’s not going to happen.

I’ve been spending most of my nights doing job searches and haven’t gotten any bites yet, just rejection letters. That’s no fun.

On top of all that, there’s so much going on around us today that I can’t keep up anymore. Y’all thought the first term was bad? Oh no. This is much worse.

So I think that subconsciously, all of the aforementioned reasons had been swirling around my brain for a bit and this morning it all finally came to a head in the form of crazy palpitations.

In that regard, it was an awful day. But what made it better? AWS (Amazon Web Services) going down for a good portion of it.

Before the alarm went off, Ann had told me that our Alexa unit wasn’t working and because our internet had been going down sporadically a few weeks ago, I chalked it up to that. Then I checked DownDetector and said, “Ohhh, that’s why.”

A ton of services were down or experiencing issues for the day including many of the things we use at work — yes, even their AI platform.

This made me very happy. Why? Knowing that my days may be numbered due to AI and seeing that all it takes is an outage to take it down was vindication for all the things I have been warning people about. It’s being pushed down everyone’s throats right now but a simple outage took that shit out like nobody’s business.

When I found this out, I paused a moment and smiled — and literally shed a few tears of happiness. It was like I felt God’s hand on my shoulder reassuring me that everything I had said about AI had come to fruition, even if nobody wanted to believe me.

So while today started off bad, it ended up being a reasonably good day considering. What made it better was as that with so many tools down due to the AWS outage, we had nothing to do because nobody could access anything.

What could have been a stressful day ended up being one of relaxation at home — and it was exactly what I needed.

Current heart rate: 63 bpm.

I have been a member of Planet Fitness for close to two years now, even longer if you count my previous stints. I had to cancel in 2018 after Ann was diagnosed with kidney cancer because we were unsure of what was going to happen and I stayed around to make sure she was okay. I joined again in 2022 once we were sure.

I enjoy their no-nonsense approach to working out, the “everyone is welcome” philosophy, and low monthly rate. I’ve made it a habit to go a minimum of three days a week (M-F) and have stuck to that, plus I walk 5 miles around the neighborhood one day and rest on another. It’s the one schedule I actually adhere to.

The facilities are typically roomy and there are enough machines for everyone with few exceptions. I can get a good workout in before I head to work whether I’m driving to the office or working from home. In short, Planet Fitness works for me.

Except for one thing: the toilets.

You see, my location has a mere two stalls in the men’s room and one of them is often out of order. It’s been working lately but in the past it was a nightmare if you had to wait for the only open stall — even worse if the person in the stall was on their phone.

How would I know this? Simple. The recessed lighting in the restrooms throw hard shadows and their phone is clearly visible in said shadow. And if you had to use the restroom badly and the only stall wasn’t being used…yeah. It’s not a good situation to be in.

It got me so annoyed that I planned something devious: to make a sign clearly stating that phone usage was not acceptable in the restroom stalls. Actually, it goes against PF’s policy to use phones in general anywhere but the lobby but people do it anyway. (There’s actually a guy at my location who live streams his workouts and does a Q&A at the same time, which is super annoying when he’s using the machine I want to use next.)

But I wasn’t just going to scribble something on the flap of an old Amazon box and tape to the inside of the stall. No way. I was going the extra mile to make sure it was convincingly accurate so that everyone would think it’s real.

I started by studying the signs. Most locations have several of them with styles that have changed over the years. This one, for example, is an old one as is evident by the extensive use of the meshed gears, distressed font in the body copy, and outdated icons at the bottom right:

As the designs evolved, they became much more clean. The Rockwell font was still in use but no longer distressed, and it’s also worth noting that body copy on the older signs was exclusively in lower case in keeping with their trademarked, stylized company name. Kind of like “it’s a small world” at Disneyland and the opposite of LEGOLAND which is trademarked in all caps. The one constant of each sign was the yellow border and dominant purple background.

Another change to the design was “thank you!” being changed to the Lobster font. Remember folks, I was an art major in college. Don’t ask why I’ve wasted nearly 20 years of my life proofreading, okay?

Once I thought I had all the pieces I needed, I started by composing the copy in a loose yet effective tone. I then grabbed my iPad, found the Planet Fitness logo in PNG format, opened Procreate, and messed with two designs for about a week, fine tuning them after each gym visit. And here they are.

Sign 1 (newer style):

Sign 2 (older, lower case style):

I wasn’t really sure which one I was going to use since both of them have different messages but drive home the same point: shit or get off the pot. Ultimately, I decided against my guerilla art project and left both files on my iPad, never to be seen by anyone — until now.

If anything, it was a fun exercise in seeing what I could come up with as well as a way to blow off steam over something so problematic. Oh, and the part number on the bottom left? It’s an Easter egg: our anniversary date.

Fortunately, I haven’t encountered this problem lately but should it become an issue again…I’m ready!

But as 2016-2020 proved to us, the world is a strange place and sometimes things go terribly awry. That’s where I’m at now as my keyboard charges and I tap-tap-tap away this post on my phone with 56% battery life, trying to tell you about our Sunday night/Monday morning adventures. So gather around the phonograph, children. It’s story time!

I had purchased tickets for the Foo Fighters concert months ago, almost a year if I recall. So long ago it was that I thought the day would never get here. But Sunday was it and to sum it up, the show was a-maze-ing as always. Thankfully, my situation wasn’t nearly as awful as it was when we saw them back in 2021. You can read about that dreadful month here.

The show ended at 11 pm and Anthony and I waded our way through the crowd and directly into the smell of bacon-wrapped street dogs wafting into the warm night air. If you go to shows in LA and don’t do this, you’re committing a cultural crime and should be punished accordingly.

We walked by the Coliseum, host of 1932, 1984, and 2028 Olympics and home of the Dodgers for a short time, while munching on our oh-so-delicious hot dogs. Shit’s better than any gourmet steakhouse, I’ll tell you what. Afterwards, we headed out to the USC/Expo Metro station for the ride home.

A little background. Unless absolutely necessary, I don’t drive in LA. The Metro lines are adequate enough to get me everywhere I need to go, a big plus when attending events like these that charge upwards of $50 for parking. This concert was no exception and paying $7 round trip via train for both of was is a bargain.

But there are some drawbacks, like leaving well in advance of the event and trains not running as frequently in the late evening. This was the case as we waited for ours to arrive at USC/Expo so when it did, we boarded and waited to get going. But something was amiss.

We left the station and proceeded to USC/ Jefferson. Before we could approach it, the train began to slow down and finally came to a complete stop. It happens. But then it began to go back to USC/Expo where we boarded.

“This ain’t good,” I told Anthony as we stopped at the station. He agreed as we sat there for a good 10 minutes before departing again — and the pattern repeated only this time, we saw a fire truck go by us as we headed back. Passengers were beginning to get annoyed because no announcement was made or so I thought.

The guy next to us said they had made one, stating there was an accident on the tracks. Maybe the ringing in my ears was so bad that I couldn’t hear it because we did, after all, just leave a Foo Fighters show.

It’s entirely possible because at the stop, people began to exit with someone else telling us the same thing. And when we saw the conductor standing there, we knew we were screwed.

“Huh, so that’s interesting,” I told Anthony.

“Yeah. So what now?”

With an accident on the tracks, that obviously means the trains in that direction aren’t going to run but we had to catch a connecting line back to where we parked near home. I looked up the distance: 2 miles to the Pico station.

I had to download all the ride share apps because — you probably won’t believe this — I have never in my life used Uber or Lyft. I may have worked for Lyft as a driver for one day before realizing that shit wasn’t my cup of tea but I’ve never used them as a consumer. This could have been the night.

I started to check rides and couldn’t believe it. $50+ to take us a measly 2 miles? Really? Y’all are crazy paying that but some train passengers did as a line of ride share cars began to appear across the street from the station. Even Anthony said that was price bullshit.

“The Pico station is 2 miles from here. You up for it?” Anthony grinned.

“Let’s go.” It’s now just past midnight in downtown Los Angeles and the two of us are literally walking the streets to the Pico station. Under normal circumstances, both of us would be carrying some form of personal protection while in that area but being we just left a concert, we were most definitely traveling light.

As we walked, Anthony saw some scooters and suggested we both rent one and ride it to the station so I downloaded the Bird app and saw that you had to prepay a minimum of $15 to start using them. For something we’ll probably only use once, we weren’t willing to pay that, so we continued to beat the streets.

It’s now way past midnight. Barely a soul out save for the homeless encampments on the sidewalks that we had to steer clear of since they were pouring into the streets. Heads on a swivel, we kept moving and barely paused for anything to be safe.

Except maybe for the rats that darted by us. And oh, the cockroaches too. But those were easily defeated in one fell swoop of a Nike.

A few people were shadowing us as we walked but we stayed alert. They ended up walking other directions as we stayed on Flower toward the Pico station.

We kept talking and stayed loose but definitely ready for anything that might have happened. Fight or flight, baby.

Finally after dodging rats and roaches, we saw the Pico station drawing nearer. It was now close to 1 am and there was a train sitting there waiting with passengers.

We had come this far and we weren’t going to miss this train back home — so we made a run for it.

No time for pictures or stopping for red lights; this was serious. It was a long night and we just wanted to get home so we sprinted to the station with me almost twisting my ankle on the rail. Up the ramp and onto the Blue Line. We had made it.

But so did the train that we were on. Literally minutes after we sat down, the train from USC/Expo had arrived. Anthony knew it was the same one because he recognized one of the people on it who was also at the concert.

So in the end, we could have waited and it wouldn’t have made a difference, but what fun would that have been? We can now say we walked the streets of LA at nearly 1 am and survived.

And by the time we reached our final stop, drove to the mini mart for a drink and then home, it was 2 am.

And after all that, we still hit the gym later that morning.

It was a long, memorable experience that lasted just about as long as the concert itself but something we won’t forget for a while.

Thanks again to Foo Fighters for putting on an epic show.

And with my phone battery now at 44%, this post is complete!

Ha suckers, I knew you’d be back!

Anyway, I don’t have much to say except for the following:

Meta products (Facebook, Instagram, Threads) are all down as of this post, which also coincides with Election Day here in California and other 15 states plus one territory (American Samoa).

Coincidence?

Perhaps. Perhaps not

If you’ve been reading this blog long enough (and I can’t imagine who would have been), you might recall that strange evening in 2018 when a process server came to my door looking for some deadbeat dad from Texas who was behind on his child support payments. The dad’s name was the same as mine and the process server had my SSN on the paperwork.

But his picture wasn’t mine. A-ha! Regardless, the letters kept on coming and I finally had to hire an attorney in Texas to clear my name while presumably the search for the real guy went on. What I learned from all this is that the Texas Attorney General’s Office couldn’t catch a cold and was run by a bunch of morons who would have difficulty using self-checkout at Walmart. So x-dollars and numerous calls later, my name was cleared and I hoped this type of garbage would never happen to me again.

Then one day I got a letter from Ohio’s Attorney General. What the actual fuck now?

And much like Texas, a state I’ve learned to loathe even more considering what their Astros did in 2017 to my Dodgers that I nor any baseball fans outside of Texas should ever forget or forgive, I have never been to Ohio. Let’s just say that if I had a list of states I wanted to visit, Ohio would most likely not be on it. Because Ohio.

Anyway, the first time I got the letter, I sent it back because technically, the person it was addressed to did not live at my address because it was addressed to my first name and middle initial — but Ann’s maiden name. Interesting. So I gave it back to our carrier and explained and also told Ann that I wasn’t going to worry about it because it’s not mine.

The letter returned a few days later with my carrier explaining that if I returned it again, all mail service to our address would stop. Weird but a chance couldn’t take even if a bulk of our mail is garbage. So I had no choice to accept it and then open it.

[Image of letter not posted after some consideration]

It was bill for almost $400 that someone still owed for their criminal case. But before I gave it a second thought and even got angry, I calmly picked up my phone and called the phone number on the letter.

I sat on hold for a good 20 minutes. When my call was finally answered, they asked for the reference number on the letter and my name (our real last names have been replaced below).

This is where my face suddenly sprouted a huge grin.

“David A Smith,” I said with a smile she could probably hear.

Typing sounds in the background…

“Sir, the last name on this reference number is Johnson,” she replied.

“That’s correct, and that’s not my last name. It’s Smith,” I said matter-of-factly. “I don’t know what this is about because I’ve never been to, have had business in, or even have friends or relatives in Ohio.”

I continued to explain.

“This isn’t the first time something like this has happened to me. I had a similar thing from Texas and had to hire an attorney to fix it. I’m hoping that’s not the case again.”

The voice came back on, more typing in the background.

“Okay…so what I’ve done is remove your address from our database. You will not get any more letters from us about this and I do apologize.”

And that was it. As simple as a call to fix things, whereas Texas had me jump through hoops with no results for a month before seeking legal advice.

So, after it was all taken care of, I called Ann and let her know.

“Oh and by the way, I’m changing my name. Maybe this shit will stop once I do.”

I won’t but goddamnit, if I get one more letter intended for some fucking loser criminal that isn’t paying their debts, I’ll seriously consider it.

Maybe.