Timothy Williams ⚴

Samhain blessings from @primaldruidry and me ✨

Samhain blessings from the Shrine of Sulis Minerva on Venice Beach 🦉 🎃 For full-strength blessings, you have to watch the video and listen to the song. That is how the ritual works. Otherwise you will only get placebo. Still better than nothing because who else is casting even level 1 Samhain blessings on you? Please cast some back on me, because I have a concerning amount of partying to survive tomorrow.

When the gym feels like a tea party, you can lift like Alice, or you can lift like the hatter. If possible, would you kindly introduce me to someone else who deadlifts ten reps on one breath? It’s such an exploit that I know I’m not the only one, and I need to compare notes.

Issuing the Keltenmuseum a takedown notice on behalf of Gorm the Young, myself and Donald Sutherland

When you miss the chance to compliment someone, speak it to heaven instead. They will often enough pass it along.

The treatment failed

Some of you are going to love this song but for the rest of you, there really is no hope. One thing I didn’t expect from German Volume Training is my hair going full Bozo the Clown with a mohawk and I am fully leaning into that.

After the 6th set of 10 of 10 squats, my whole body suddenly funked, brainstorming excuses to short the work order. The conspiracy had nearly reached execution when my prefrontal cortex kicked down the door. Then ensued a familiar scene as my stronger self rushed to the deathbed of my weaker self. Timothy: “What the hell? Get up!” Tim: “I can’t… my name, it is from the Latin “timēre,” to fear…” Timothy: “Damn it! We’ve been over this! Timothy means “honor the gods” in Greek! Don’t you quit on me Tim. Don’t you quit on Athena. Tim…! Tim! Timmy!!!” Tim: (manflu noises) Well, you understand I had to let that bastard die. It was him or me!

A fifth of fermented bison liver hits like a quarter in an arcade cabinet, and it’s a damn shame you’re not hopping in on Player 2.

Having written the first lines of the Aeneid into last week’s sandcastle, we continue the inscription this week as an urgent offering to Hera because reasons. “O Muse! the causes and the crimes relate; What goddess was provok'd, and whence her hate; For what offense the Queen of Heav'n began To persecute so brave, so just a man; Involv'd his anxious life in endless cares, Expos'd to wants, and hurried into wars! Can heav'nly minds such high resentment show, Or exercise their spite in human woe?”

Iliad Book IV Part V: Ajax duels Hector. It’s so exciting, you might hold your breath.

I wanted to listen to the Iliad to help memorize it, but all the audiobooks were terrible, so I had to record my own. I did Pope’s first four books in just under four hours and posted it on YouTube where one other guy did like it. Here is a sample. Maybe you have your own version to listen to and that’s fine. Just don’t waste good money on Beeb garbage until you try mine.

The Iron Sombrero is a 45-pound hat I wear to the park, poised to fling with deadly effect like an occidental Oddjob. Strolling a few miles with it is like crumbling up a rock of testosterone and smoking it on foil, and I just like to party, damn it.

One feels not jealousy but despair when one’s wife’s male acquaintances are occasionally deltas, but reliably omegas. There is no great Agamemnon to seize her by force; no conniving Paris to seduce her by night. Where then is one’s conquest? Can we talk about this? I think we can, because anthropologically, a man’s worth is in facts, not feelings. That worth is measurable and discrete whereas women’s value is mysterious and unbounded. Male brains are simple because evolution reduced them to three essential functions: Protect, Provide and Parent. That is all man’s reason for existing: to create the material conditions for life. I didn’t make these rules, but did get lashed to them like a Procrustean bed. If you disagree, take it up with the Thunderer. “Dear Skyfather, two of these duties are agreeable, but do exempt me from the third.” If my beloved were assaulted — such men could only stand and watch. If she starved in a general famine — such men could only share her misery. Nor are they fathers themselves, but childless. Yet I love these men like overgrown schoolboys. Surely the middle-aged youngster must soon become a man! I must help them somehow. Steroids to me are noxious poison, but for them, maybe a little TRT to grease the wheels…? Ah, but that is the poisoned chalice from which my evil twin Brian drinks. One cannot foist responsibility on a man. He can only draw it for himself, like Excalibur. Nor needs the heroic man to practice discipline, but the gods will devise trials to demand it of him. How lonely those men who endure none of the gods’ trials!

The sandcastle was untouched overnight and the inscription intact. That is a rare and auspicious omen, so I offered prayers and laid a right isosceles base for the citadel when this jacked West African looking dude grabbed my attention. “You shouldn’t shovel with your back,” he admonished me. “You should use your leg, like this.” And he demonstrated a hip flexor throw. I was delighted. Unsolicited shovel advice? To me? Are you literally Bad Badtz Maru, bro? Because you’re fucking kawaii. “Oh, I see! Here’s a shovel. Can you help?” And he jumped in chopping the vertical while I drenched the hypotenuse in an atmospheric river of sand, and you don’t need to explain the Pythagorean Theorem when you’re living it. I explained that the more precise the angles and straighter the lines, the taller the apex. “That’s way over my pay grade. I am just here to move sand.” Now I was sold on Patrick. Perfect Dr. Watson energy. We shut up and got to work as men do and just built the damned thing. We turned it over to a group of children who acted like they had won the lottery and immediately began breaking shit. “Will you be here tomorrow?” Patrick asked. “I’m with my kids then, they are bored by sandcastles,” I explained, exposing my fatherly shame. “But I’m here Fridays and most Saturdays. Do you live around here?” “Lucky man. I’m homeless,” he confessed with mild embarrassment. “I met my best friend here. He was homeless and on probation and asked if he could dig. Couple years later he’s got a job, an apartment a girlfriend, reconciled with his family, and this year he was the best man at my wedding.” “So a lot of people come through here, but I can tell you’re going to be okay,” I assured Patrick. Indeed, if it wasn’t for homeless people, our empire would never grow, as anybody who has played the 4X side-scroller Kingdom will understand.

Before Ukraine it was Turkey. I only pulled this to amuse Trierarch but thought that you might dig it too.

You thought you had seen my repertoire, but give me three minutes and I will give you a platoon-sized trench, inscribe it with the first four lines of the Aeneid, and turn it over to Vestals Lily and Luna to consecrate it exactly. You remember Lily and Luna. Of course my sandcastle has Vestals. It is a crap sandcastle that has none. So I’ll just be out here again tomorrow morning building imperium and you don’t have to help, but it’d be pretty cool if you did.

Shirtless Fridays must not be a one-off, but a weekly institution so ingrained that seeing a man clothed all day arouses suspicion. What’s he hiding? Grandfather, what do you mean you didn’t have Shirtless Fridays growing up? How did you know whether a man was creditable if you couldn’t read his torso? And how could such etiolated men, bereft of sunlight, make wise decisions? Exactly, my boy. Had we as a nation observed Shirtless Fridays in the twentieth century, I would be vastly more powerful than I am today, and your uncles and aunties more numerous still. So I made that change in the world before you were born, because without Shirtless Fridays, we never could have had Balls-Out Saturdays.