I didn’t know it at the time, but my last squat workout was on May 1^st, 2017. It was an easy workout, 225lbs for five sets of five, but my knees cracked and popped on each rep, and I had trouble walking out of the gym.

The pain never got better. This wasn’t typical leg-day soreness. It wasn’t muscular pain. This was an issue with the joins themselves. Days, weeks later I still had trouble walking and taking the stairs.

My wife finally bullied me into seeing my doctor, who ordered X-rays and an MRI. The images showed two torn ligaments, a torn tendon, bone spurs, and “floating bodies,” whatever the hell that means.

Last Friday I met with an orthopedic surgeon, who told me two things: one, I had degenerative osteoarthritis in my knees, and two, that I would never squat again.

I’m thirty seven, but I have the knees of a seventy-year-old man. I’m not a candidate for surgery, so the best they can do is pain management. And now I’m not sure what to do. I’m not sure what I am.

I’ve always been strong. Lifting weights, being bigger and stronger and better than I was yesterday has always been a core part of my identity. But now my own body is betraying me, and I’m not sure who I am anymore.

I have other things. People I love, activities I enjoy, skills that I’m proud of. But I don’t have “being strong” anymore, and without that, me isn’t one hundred percent me.

I suppose I can join the masses, throw on a pair of sweatpants and skip leg day for the next thirty years, but the rack will still be calling my name. I suppose I can get back into Yoga and calisthenics, become good at a different kind of strong, but the iron was and always will be my first love, and I’m going to miss her.

I don’t have a whole lot of wisdom to impart about this. I’m still kind of processing myself. But I will say four things:

One: Don’t do stupid shit. Unfortunately this message will be lost on the people who need it most. I think a lot of my issues started in high school, when I was quarter-squatting six hundred pounds because I thought I was awesome, or when I raced with the other guys on the team to see who could do the most leg extensions with the full stack in one minute. Or hell, even running cross-country in the off season. Two hundred pound men do not run cross-country.

Two: Learn good form. It’s an old saying, but it’s true: squatting doesn’t hurt your knees, the way you squat hurts your knees.

Three: Don’t train through pain. Pain is a signal that something’s wrong. Sometimes, pain is injury entering the body, no matter what your friend’s shirt says.

Four: Enjoy yourself while you can. Chances are you’re too young to be worried about the end of your career. So am I. It still happened. Every once in a while take a moment to appreciate the fact that you are, in all likelihood, one of the strongest people on the planet. Sure, there are hundreds or thousands of professionals that are stronger than you, but the vast majority of humans on this planet don’t even bother trying to improve themselves. The fact that you’re even in there, that you’re under the bar and trying, puts you well ahead of the pack.

Here’s how medical billing works in America.

Let’s say you’re hungry. You schedule an appointment with your General Chef, who confirms that you are indeed hungry, and that you should indeed eat. The copay is $25. You tell your Chef that you really want a Big Mac, but Burger King is the only restaurant in your network, so they write you a prescription for a Whopper.

Three weeks later, you go to Burger King and order your whopper. They won’t tell you how much the hamburger will cost, but the co-pay $75, payable at the time services are rendered.

A month later, you get separate bills from the grill operator, the bun technician, the lettuce placement specialist, the tomato manager, the condiment dispenser, and the owner of the building the Burger King operates in. None of the paperwork tell you what services are actually covered by the bill. The total is $5,000, and despite the fact that you presented your insurance card before receiving your hamburger, your insurance was neither informed of nor billed for the food.

You submit the meal to your insurance company, but they have forgotten who you are and deny the claim. You fill out form 137-B(i), Appeal for Denied Burger Coverage, and wait. Thirty days pass, and now the bun technician and condiment dispenser have applied late fees to your account.

Your insurance provider remembers who you are, and pays the negotiated $125 for the $5,000 hamburger. This satisfies the bun technician, lettuce placement specialist, tomato manager, condiment dispenser, and landlord, but the grill operator, despite working at a facility that is covered by your insurance is not covered by your insurance himself, and his portion of your meal is again denied by the insurance company. You pay the grill operator $145.

All told, your Whopper cost $245. The various players in the burger-making exercise claim that it cost $5,500, and write you off as a $5,355 loss. The cost of the insurance that sent you to Burger King when you wanted McDonalds was $10,000 for the year.

Democrats claim that medical billing is too complicated and medical procedures are too expensive, but instead of a Single Payer system, they set up a Tiered Hamburger Acquisition system. The Platinum Plan allows you to eat at any restaurant you want, and reimburses 90% of the cost, but can only be afforded by families making more than $100,000 per year. The Gold Plan allows you to select from a variety of well-known chain restaurants, and covers 85% of costs. The Silver Plan allows you to choose between McDonalds, Burger King, and Wendy’s, and covers 80% of costs. The Bronze Plan, which is the only plan feasible for low-income families, forces you to eat at Arby’s, and covers 75% of the cost.

Republicans, on the other hand, want to cut taxes, so they dismantle the Tiered Hamburger Acquisition system and replace it with the American Hamburger Act, which charges a family making $12,000 a year $6,000 for a Catastrophic Meal Replacement Plan. This plan only provides food in case of extreme duress, and states are allowed to opt out of covering patients who became hungry due to lack of eating. If you don’t buy into the plan and become hungry, you aren’t allowed to eat for another six months.

Meanwhile, in Canada anyone can go to a Tim Horton’s whenever they feel hungry, and their taxes have already paid for the meal.

Fuck. And. Yes.

The first novel in the Adventures of Johnathan Rose!

When Jenni woke up, her hands were covered in blood and her neighbors were dead.

Jenni thought she was going crazy.

She wasn’t that lucky.

Jenni has been targeted by a mysterious man, a man whose face can’t be seen, a man set on using Jenni to spill enough blood to wake up a centuries-dead god.

But John Rose, a mysterious man with a dark past and frightening powers, has other plans.

The Demon in Keystone Apartments is available on kindle.

Read the first chapter now!

Alex Reagan: Last week, on The Black Tapes, HOLY FUCKING SHIT I CANNOT FUCKING BELIEVE IT CORALEE IS ALIVE I MEAN I KIND OF KNEW SHE WAS BUT JESUS FUCKING CHRIST SHE PULLED UP IN A VAN AND SAID COME WITH ME IF YOU WANT TO LIVE LIKE SHE’S SOME KIND OF GODDAMNED BEEKEEPING TERMINATOR WHAT THE EVEN FUCK IS GOING ON ANYMORE, Amalia told us Keith Dabic’s face was cut off by evil monks and stapled onto some homeless guy’s head, Richard went into exhaustive detail about a fake Gospel nobody’s ever read, and I tried to convince Nic to pay for a trip to the mythical landing site of Noah’s arc. Spoilers, it turns out even shipping me with postage bought from Stamps.com was beyond our budget.

Some Government Stooge: So guys, I’ve been thinking: Superman murdered like ten or eleven thousand people when he destroyed Metropolis, right? And then kicked off an African civil war because his girlfriend is an idiot? And then he leveled a good chunk of the city fighting the cave troll from Lord of the Rings? And he’s the good guy? But what if he wasn’t? What if he went … evil?

Amanda Waller: The fact of the matter is, Metahumans are real, they’re dangerous, and they’re the next step not only in human evolution, but also in warfare. We were lucky that Superman was just careless, but the next guy might actually be malevolent, and right now, we do not have a plan to stop him.

General Tightass: What exactly are you proposing we do?

Amanda Waller: Form a team of people with superhuman powers and well-documented mental illnesses, give them access to the most advanced weaponry available to the United States military, set them lose, and hope for the best.

General Tightass: This sounds like an excellent plan and I see no potential downsides.

Alex Reagan: Hello, Wayne Coats? I understand you have some shocking revelations about Richard Strand’s youth, secrets that he would refuse to tell me and details that he would be loath to have broadcast to the public, and I was wondering if you’d care to share all of those intimate details with me, my tape recorder, and our thousands of listeners!

Wayne Coats: Why, I’d love to tell you all about my childhood friend, Richie Strand! First, you have to understand that he was always the quiet type, never dramatic, never calling attention to himself. Second, you should know that he was absolutely fearless and totally loyal. Finally, you need to remember that he gained terrible psychic powers through some dark pact with an infernal entity intent on channeling the forces of the apocalypse through young Richie’s soul.

Alex Reagan: Could you go into a bit more detail about that?

Wayne Coats: Sure! See, there was this one time when some bullies knocked me down and tried to steal my bike, but Richie, who was like five years younger and outnumbered ten to one, stood up to them, never blinking, refusing to back down! Even when he was a kid the guy had cantaloupes the size of, well, cantaloupes.

Alex Reagan: No, I mean the inexplicable powers obtained through dark magics.

Wayne Coats: Oh, of course! Silly me. Well, you know about the Boy in the River, right Bobby Maimes, who was kidnapped and murdered in our home town? Well Richie had this terrible dream, a dream that showed him the ghost of a boy and a fork in a river, but that was all a metaphor. See, the ghost boy was a representation of our innocence, and the fork in the river was how our destinies were all being changed by this terrible event. But it was also pretty literal, because a demon named Tall Paul whispered terrible secrets into Richie’s ear while he slept, telling him how Bobby died and where the body was hidden.

Alex Reagan: So … PNWS boom?

Nic Silver: PNWS boom.

[PNWS Boom]

Nic Silver: Hi Alex! Great news! I’ve used my super sleuthing hacker skills to track down incredibly important information about Thomas Warren and the Exorcismatron 2000!

Alex Reagan: You mean you Googled his name and actually read what was on the second page of results?

Nic Silver: …anyway, I found out that Thomas Warren sits on the Board of Directors of a company called Lucaternica, which is a wholly-owned subsidiary of DevaCorp, and their most important product is …

Alex Reagan: Oh! I know! I know! Giant demon trapping machines used by shifty men in shady black suits performing bizarre exorcisms while supervised by incompetent medical professional!

Nic Silver: Close! They make pachinko machines!

Alex Reagan: …Are you sure MereKatnip doesn’t want to help with our investigation?