Here I sit, muddle-headed with my second day of the Keto flu, coming off a three-year jag of hard, dirty, unrepentant sugar addiction. Ask anyone who was with me through those bacchanalian years: I could put down a pint of Ben & Jerry’s with the best of them. Sometimes two pints in a day. I’ve walked to gas stations and eaten secret pints while my wife was at work, then hidden the dead carton at the bottom the trash, so when she asked in the evening if I felt like ice cream...why, sure. Sure, I felt like ice cream.

But one can only slump half conscious in midday beds with ice cream cartons hanging out of their arm for so long, I suppose. Even the hardened sugar junkie must cry off eventually, if they’re serious about surviving their forties.

And things were starting to get a little weird.

So. Bird and I are trying out the Ketogenic diet. Switching your metabolism from carbohydrates to fats as a primary fuel source is a bit of trick, especially if the staples of your diet to date are chicken breast, spoonfuls of sugar, loaves of bread, and scotch.

Muddle headed. Weak.

Resilient.

(You’d think I banged dope half my life, the way I’m coming down off of the evil White American Powder--sugar--right now. Christ.)

Now that I’ve updated you on my diet, what else can I tell you about? Blogs are incessant streams of inanities, so...my sex life? The assorted firmnesses and/or viscosities of my last dozen shits?

Sorry: I’m feeling crappy. (Rimshot.)

Here’s the real scoop: I’m podcasting regularly again, a weekly show called Measuring Flicks that I do with my friend and fellow film-nerd, Karl Hartley. We’re watching movies that people probably haven’t seen, or, if they have, maybe didn’t fully unpack. Weird movies. Powerful movies. Complicated movies. Westerns, exploitation films, independent films, foreign films, whole runs of directors (Sophia Coppola and Quentin Tarantino are both on the docket for this season), snapshots of unusual performances by exceptional actors....

You can listen here, or on iTunes.

(I just did a quick search and discovered that you can also listen to it over on Player FM, which is odd, because I did not put it there. Ah, well, the more the merrier.)

The conversations I’ve had over the past month with Karl have been incredible. Edifying and enlightening and mentally acrobatic in a way that I don’t always get to be. It’s a rare bird that can chat its way through the sociopolitical implications of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance one day, and enthuse about the incredible mesmerism inherent in the performances of Nicholas Cage the next. Karl is such a bird.

(Bird is such a bird, more in the direction of comics and art.)

Speaking of Bird (parenthetically. Lord, I’m cheeky today), Karl and I are planning a bunch of episodes with her sitting in as a third set of particularly feminist eyes. The main show is on iTunes, but we’re doing a bunch of Patreon-exclusive episodes as well: stuff that might be a bit too much for the general public, or which doesn’t neatly fit into the boxes we’ve laid out for the first season.

The first Patreon series is going to be all four movies in the I Spit On Your Grave franchise: horror films about horrifically victimized women taking horrific their revenge on their victimizers.

It seemed timely.

So there’s Measuring Flicks. You should check it out, if you like movies (or films, or cinema), or if you like any of the other stuff I’ve done. It really is like putting my brain on display, and I’m enjoying it immensely.

I have other stuff I want to tell you about, but right now, I’m fairly sure I’m dying, so racked am I by cravings for a pint of the good stuff (The Tonight Dough, my drug of choice), a lighter, a spoon.

Pray for me.

If I survive, expect lots more soon.

--Max Peterson
From the top room of an impromptu detox facility somewhere in northern southern Michigan.