It is starting to feel good to write again.

How often I say, I can’t complain
and then complain.
My apartment, if you’re reading this
is bigger than yours.
Not to brag.

I asked for the smallest thing they had
and they said here
A place so big you can haunt it.
Watch the sunset through the trees
over my climate Mediterranean balcony

way deep into November.
Even doing it now. Pink light
through spiky little fingers
of pine needles. Yeah, 
yeah I got trees,

they're older than me 
And a cat
so very very very
very fat 
and 

happy?
And I’m not that far behind
and yet
this body always runs
when I ask it to run.

This body always stands up 
when I’ve asked it 
and one day I know
It won’t.
But, baby, you should see me run.

I’m not good, 
but imagine a pony, 
the dumbest 
the dumbest pony you can imagine.
On a beach, happy to be there

just running
running
running
running like it is all it ever wanted to do and all it will ever be happy to do.
Just the happiest and just dumbest fucking pony

heels 
clicking in the air on the up-swing.
Dumbest; happiest 
between miles one and three
this body runs

like it wants me to be happy.
And I know it always won’t.
And I can’t complain 
because sometimes I drive back from the Target
and see this big old hawk hang

big old heavy up there
big old heavy in this white ocean air
Big Old Heavy just lives up there and I
just live out here 
alone 

and just
haunt this big old place and 
I can’t complain
I often say
this place is haunted

I often say
but I can’t complain
Because the square footage and the hawk,
and the Target nearby, and the ocean, the good running.
How often I say 

I just though

can’t complain.

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Just a simple little piece of writing.

 
Today I:
made a comic strip people
like using

nothing but my brain at 5am.
Did yoga using nothing
but this old body, these old limbs.

Worked and worked work for
eleven hours on a Monday
even though no

one made me even
though I know 
no one will remember 

today.
Ran a 5k I didn’t even mean to,
but the light was a nice purple,

the dirt mostly sand and 
I didn’t see 
another person for forty-five minutes.

Made a simple
dinner that wasn’t even sad,
only remarkably plain,

and today I wrote
this and even though
it ‘s no good,

I still made it 
today. 
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The Kind of Week It Has Been.

Okay, so mixed results.

I had really good days Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. Every day I worked and my work days were reasonable. Every day I went running, every day I did some writing, every day I read, every day I did yoga, every day I did some resistance training, every day I ate healthy and clean. Good days.

Yesterday, Thursday, I was worn the hell out. Tired all day. Sore. If I tried to do anything with my right arm that approximated a biceps curl, my arm simply refused to comply. Walking was not great on account of the tightness in my hips and calves; I logged almost 20 miles of trail running in three days and my body retaliated with quiet refusal.

That’s all okay. I too a recovery day yesterday. All I did was yoga and clean eating. After work I basically took a nap for like an hour and that’s okay.

Life is mostly about boom & bust cycles. Plus, this is a pattern in my life: I overdo it, which prevents me from doing it well. However, lately more and more I find solace in the political concept of the Overton Window. The real goal here is not to make stunning change all at once, but rather to drag the narrow window of the possible in the proper direction.

This is what it has always been like with my weight. It tends to fluctuate within a window of about 6 pounds. That has always seemed like a lot to me, but I have lived in this body long enough to simply know that is what this body does. So my goal is never to lose weight exactly, my goal is to drag that window of six pounds lower down the scale. Yesterday (while not running) I looked back through my journals from 2019 when I was living in Arizona, when I had time to run and go to the gym every single day. I consider this to be a time when I was in pretty good shape (or at least healthy) and my weight then was experiencing a heavier window than it is now. Granted I had somewhat more muscle then. I also went back through some very old pictures of me when I was in my early 20s and VERY heavy. I didn’t even recognize that guy. And I had to remind myself that I didn’t even start running until I was 30. 

There are times when I have to remind myself that all of life is a kind of Overton Window. Beyond the edges of the window is a person we don’t even know. My window no longer includes that short 250 pound guy with a mustache (what was I even thinking????).

I have made progress. Not just this week, not just this month, but since February when I decided I needed to develop a plan, that I needed to build a staircase I could start climbing up. I haven’t stopped climbing it, but yesterday I paused to take a breath. And that’s okay. 

Today I will start climbing again.

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4 Week Self Check-in.

There are some good things that have so far come out of this new life schedule that I have built. 

I feel better. Not like life-changing-ly better, but just better generally. That should not be a huge surprise, because I was feeling pretty busted and burnt out there for a while. The schedule has forced me to feel a kind of responsibility to myself. I think that is a good thing. Life being the what it is, it is easy to forget to look after yourself.

I’ve been running more. A LOT MORE! Not as much as I’d planned on, but significantly more. I’m so appreciative of the recent time change; I have so much more light after work. I’m budgeted for 90 minutes of running, but lately I’ve been going for more like 2 hours. I have gotten to do so much more exploring! Yesterday I ended up on top of a hill and I could not only see the ocean at the horizon, I was high enough that I could see the ocean itself spreading out giant and dark blue all the way to the edge of forever.

Slowly, very slowly, my body is getting better at sleeping. For a while there (months) I couldn’t really get to sleep or stay asleep, but I’m getting a little better at it. The running helps because by the time it is time to crawl into bed, this body is worn out.

I have consistently been doing my silly little stick figure drawings each morning and while there there is not much in the way of great artistic value to them, few things in life feel better than having a project that takes a very very long time. I have no idea how long I’ll keep doing those, but I just so enjoy starting the day by doing something … anything … even if it is just an embarrassingly simplistic drawing of a zookeeper giving a goat a hat.

This here blog. I have been pretty consistent about writing here. Now, same as above, the quality ain’t nothing to brag about, but I’m sitting here and I writing this and let me tell you, that isn’t nothing.

My diet is better. At least during the week. It is pretty standardized and what it lacks in spontaneity, it makes up for in for in reliability, ease, and not-being-junk-food-ness. I’m slowly learning to enjoy cooking … a little.

There is, however, much I am still failing at. My shoulder and arm are still giving me trouble and so the morning yoga has just been out the window lately. Yesterday though I was finally able to schedule some physical therapy appointments! AND they don’t start until AFTER I get my second shot, so that’s good.

In the evenings, running long and then cooking take up more time than I’d expected, so I have not been writing as much and I have not been reading as much. After work is supposed to go: run, clean up, make dinner, write, read, sleep. I’ve found myself running out of time to fit all that in after work, but I’m working on it still. I may need to adjust the schedule a little, but I’m not convinced of that yet.

The weekends: I still haven’t worked out a good schedule for managing my weekends. I want to allow time for laziness, but right now that’s all I’m allowing for. I need a better plan than this.

I will tell you though, the single biggest achievement to come out of all this effort, is that I have made some progress toward de-centering work in my life, which was a big part of the point of all of this. If I am not on the clock, but find myself getting stressed out about work, I will tell myself, “Jamie, that is not what this time is for,” and I will redirect my attention to the schedule and whatever I am supposed to be doing right then. That, that freedom right there, is perhaps why I have been feeling better generally. I feel more like a person, as much as one can under the continued quarantine circumstances. 

You know, the number of things I have read that said like, “The keys to being happy and healthy are to have a routine, eat healthy, exercise and get sleep” would blow your mind, but you know what, I don’t know that I’d ever actually understood that those things were not being prescribed all hippy-dippy by someone selling healing crystals. They were being prescribed as a discipline; eat healthy doesn’t mean “no junk food” it means eat healthy. Sleep doesn’t mean, “Make sure you get some” it means prioritize it. And like any discipline, it’s hard. One would think that attempting to be better should trigger some instinct in the body that makes it easy to do, but the opposite is true. It’s not hard to change oneself, it is hard to improve oneself. The two are not the same and I think I always kind of thought they were.

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The Wisdom of The Crowd.

 

This will have to be a short post today because I am running a little behind schedule this morning.

BUT NO! The crowd shouts, HOW WILL WE GET THROUGH OUR DAY IF WE DON'T KNOW WHAT YOU ARE COMPLAINING ABOUT???

Well calm down, that is why I am here at all.

OKAY, SORRY FOR OVERREACTING! The crowd shouts back in unison.

 So I did a pretty good run yesterday, about 7.25 miles and I got really far out into the wilderness and there was ALOT of going up and down hills. And the day before I did a respectable 6.67 miles and that was similarly rough terrain, but add those two things up and last night my body just threw in the towel. Even my hips were like, “Nope, we are done working for the day, sorry.”

It is so weird that this body can be running up the side of a hill and then an hour later I can barely stand up from a sitting position on the sofa.

YOU CALL IT A SOFA? The crowd shouts.

Yeah, what do you call it?

WE CALL IT A COUCH! WE ALL AGREED. The crowd shouts.

My grandmother used to call it a davenport.

WELL FUCK THAT NOISE! The crowd shouts.

Anyway, I guess that all I’m trying to say here is that having bodies is weird. I have spent most of my life trying to make my mind big and make it work good and only the last ten years or so have I even been aware of the fact that a body - even one as C- as mine - can do cool stuff like run up the sides of hills or backpack up into the mountains or propel a kayak out into the ocean. Yet here we are, where doing that makes one unable to bend down enough to turn on the bathroom faucet.

And look, of course I’m joking. I’m lucky for the body I have. I’m surprisingly healthy and my legs work and my eyes work, etc. I’m not actually actually complaining. I think what I’m saying is that I’m aging and it makes me want to squeeze all the luck I still can out of this body while it can still do stuff. There are so many hills out there that I haven’t run up the side of yet. Part of aging is the realization that a life simply isn’t long enough for us to get to run up and down every single hill out there, but I’m happy this body has time enough still to run up a few more of them.

WE CAN NEVER TELL IF THESE POSTS ABOUT RUNNING ARE SUPPOSED TO BE HUMBLE-BRAGS! The crowd shouts.

No, they’re really not, it’s just that these are the things I think about and no one reads this blog anyway and none of you are real, I made up the whole crowd.

WELL NOW WE ALL HAVE EXISTENTIAL ANGST BECAUSE WE DON’T ACTUALLY EXIST! The crowd shouts.

Believe me, I know how you feel.

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Ups & Downs All Day.

 

Yesterday was one of those odd days where I had a terrible work day, but the rest of my day was actually pretty good. I felt a little more resilient than normal, likely because I have been taking these measures to de-center work in my life.

I don’t want to talk about work other than to say it is difficult right now for a lot of reasons. BUT! I had a pretty good morning and even though I got stuck at work for an extra hour, I still went running, and the run was really good.

As tricky as it has been to adjust to the time change (was this possibly exasperated by quarantine do you think?), those extra hours of sunlight at the end of the day really do make a difference.

I live next to a huge “national monument” (basically a giant nature preserve) and it is crisscrossed with webs of hiking and biking trails and lately more and more I have been running straight out into the thing. Rather than sticking to the routes that I’ve learned, I’ve been going out deeper and deeper into the crazy open wilderness of it.

Yesterday I went straight out for about 4 miles. Up and down ridge lines and through little valleys. It was a really enjoyable run. By the end the sun was starting to sink through the treeline and the light out here this time of year is a wonderful bright orange and yellow late in the day. It really was beautiful.

The other nice thing about getting to do these longer runs is that the running actually starts to feel better and easier the longer you’re out there. Runners will sometimes say, “The first mile is the worst” and that is very very true if you’re a determined but not terribly good runner like me. Yesterday I did six and a half miles and that is pretty good for me. When I lived in Arizona a couple years ago, I’d routinely do ten miles at a go and sometimes (just for fun) I’d do 13 miles just to knock out a half marathon all by myself. It should be mentioned that every time I did that, those last two miles were excruciating, so obviously there is some up and down in the feeling-good part of a run.

When I’m out there, sometimes I don’t think a lot. I usually have a podcast on that I sort of half listen to, but one of the things I’ve always preferred about trail running (as opposed to running on streets and sidewalks) is that you’re brain has to always be busy because you’re literally on trails and you’re constantly having to hop over things and adjust your stride depending on the terrain you’re crossing. Trail runners say, “Every stick is a snake until proven otherwise” and holy shit is that true. 

So you don’t think much because your brain is constantly engaged in making sure you don’t break your ankle or fall on your face trying to cross a bank of sand. I really love it. You’ll be busy trying to get to the top of a hill and then you get there completely out of breath and you have to pause to slow the thundering in your chest, so you look around and you realize you’re standing on top of a hill miles away from anyone and the view is amazing and there ain’t anybody else out here doing this, so you get to just savor it for a few seconds and so then you get to think and so you think something like, “It’s good I did this. It is good to be here. It is - in fact - actually good to be alive. To be in the world.”

It has been hard to remember that some days, especially on the bad days of the last year. On the lonely days and on the really dark ones. Being reminded of it from time to time really matters

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Taking Stock: Week 3.

Okay, so where are we?

This is Tuesday of Week 3 of my Getting-My-Shit-Together Plan.

Last week was rough. I got my shot on Monday and I experienced a lot of fatigue as a side effect. Last week was also the time change which didn’t help with that. Also last Friday was a big high-stress event at work that I’d been preparing for for awhile and so work kind of ate my life. 

So not a great Week 2. But I still did SOME of my Get-My-Shit-Together things: I showered every morning (funny how that helps), I did my daily drawings every morning (find those on Instagram @standard_kink), I did three of five of these daily morning posts. I ate healthy almost every night.

The weekend was still too lazy, I still don’t have a good plan for the weekends. I spend most of Saturday thinking about the film “We Bought a Zoo” and making random Twitter posts about it for my four followers. I also cleaned up my herb garden by getting rid of anything that was dead and planting some new seeds (I also bought a couple more succulents at the grocery store) and did my family Zoom call on Sunday. So not a waste of a weekend, but still not as effective as I need weekends to be.

Yesterday was Monday and I worked and went to the doctor in the afternoon and that ate up so much time I didn’t get to run. The doctor gave me a referral to physical therapy for my shoulder, so that’s good, but I kind of don’t want to do that sort of frequent close-contact stuff until I get my second shot, so I’m not sure how to handle that yet.

Today work will be a lot of meetings and I just hope there is time in between to get things done. We are going to plan on going running right at 5pm when I clock off. That means I have to clock off at 5pm. With last week being all weird, I haven’t gotten to enjoy the upside of the later sunsets (ie: more running time), so hopefully that will start today.

That’s where I will focus this week: just getting out the door for those longer runs.

The one area where I have COMPLETELY failed is in the mornings. I’m supposed to be getting up at 6am and doing a half hour of yoga and I have been consistently not doing that. The mornings here have been just the right kind of cold where I can’t quite bring myself to crawl out of my nice warm bed. I’ve also been waking up tired because even though I get in bed on schedule at 10pm, I am not going to sleep. I blame the phone. I know! I know! No blue light in bed, but the thing is I haven’t been TIRED at 10pm. But that’s what the runs are for; you make the body that good kind of tired so it can drag the brain off to sleep.

Okay, so that is the stock taking today. Let’s see how this goes.

Sorry this blog post is boring, but I needed to write it.

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Along the Way.

Okay, so today marks the beginning of Week 2 on my new life schedule. So far, so good.

I learned some things last week and need to make some small changes, but overall, I think I did a pretty good job designing it. I’ll give the schedule itself 4 out of 5 stars.

Me, on the other hand, I had some trouble getting on board entirely. I give myself 2 out of 5 stars. Most of my own problems so far have been related to the ongoing shoulder pain. This has made it hard to stick to the schedule. For instance, I’m supposed to be doing yoga in the morning right when I wake up at 6am. I only managed that ONE of the mornings last week because the shoulder is just too stiff and painful in the mornings. I did not do the yoga this morning, but I after being very gentle with my body and getting a lot of sleep over the weekend, I am willing to (cautiously) say that I think the shoulder is a little better today.

Similarly, in the evenings after my run, I’m supposed to make dinner and then spend time writing and reading. Most of my evening time is currently scheduled for these activities, but I’ve had trouble with these because after sitting at a desk working for 8 hours during the day, it hurts the shoulder to then spend more time sitting at this desk typing away on a different keyboard. Reading is a little easier, but it has been difficult to concentrate when the shoulder intermittently starts to throb and/or spasm. So that has been fun.

Under normal circumstances I would have already gone to the doctor, but these are Covid times and going to the doctor just isn’t worth the additional risk that would create for myself and others. So I have been doing the little arm exercises I learned in physical therapy a couple years ago when this happened. I do my little “spider walk” stretches up and down on the wall throughout the day. I do the one where I put a rubber band on my fingers and open and close them. That all seems to help a little.

So what’s ahead for this week? Well, I need to dial in the schedule a little, but I also need to get ready for the time change next weekend. This winter has been hard and I don’t know that I have ever been as adversely affected by a time change as I was by this last one. It was dark when I started working and dark again by the time I finished. I’ve really appreciated these last few weeks where I could at least get an hour of running in between the end of the work day and the sunset. 

Next week is going to be awesome! I will get an extra hour of running time! Last week I was doing 3 or 4 or 5 miles. Once the time changes I can start working toward the longer runs I really like: 6, 8, 9 miles. I haven’t run a half-marathon since 2019 and I was in much better shape in 2019, but low key it is my goal to be able to do that again all on my own and I have plenty enough trails right outside my door to be able to do it. It will take awhile though to get my body back into that kind of state though.

Also this week, I have to figure out a plan for the weekends. I feel I’ve had enough success with the schedule I built for the weekdays that I could probably figure out at least a broad template for the weekends. I’m not sure how to do this yet. It’s funny, when you start to think of your time as your own, as something you can spend however you want, you are forced to ask yourself what you, in fact, WANT to be doing with your time. So it becomes not simply a question of time, but really a question of values and priorities.

These are the kinds of problems I enjoy solving: the kind that do not come with a clear set of instructions and which require some real work and evaluation. For most of quarantine all I did not the weekends was eat pizza and drink red wine. Turns out that’s not actually what I want to be doing, but I had to actually stop and pay attention in order to realize that.

So we will see. I have the next 5 work days to work out a solution to the weekends.

Like I said, so far so good. 

Not great, but you can’t get to great without passing good along the way.

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Easy and Fun, but the Opposite.

They saw it takes 2-3 weeks to build a new habit, but let me tell you, it only takes 2-3 days for your body to go into a very unhappy kind of shock when you try to build a new habit.

This is day 3 of my new daily life routine and my whole body hurts. 

Not all of this is the fault of my new schedule. I jammed up my shoulder pretty bad last week and have been experiencing some very real low grade pain since then. A reasonable person probably would have waited for that to heal before trying to completely reform their physical and mental routines, but I have never been accused of being a reasonable person!

So right now my shoulder is throbbing pretty much all the time, weird parts of my body are sore from the new yoga routine yesterday morning, and my legs are all knotted up from the last two evenings of trail running. I’m just kind of physically miserable, but here’s the thing: that’s probably good.

This is the kind of miserable that comes from actually DOING THINGS. The shoulder pain I could do without, but the fact that last night I fell asleep faster than I have maybe since the start of quarantine, it seems like that’s a god thing since I’ve been plagued by bad sleep for months.

I slept in a little today because I don’t think my body could do anything this morning, but also because I didn’t wake up already stressing out about my job and already disappointed by the thought that the day ahead of me was already a waste of time before I’d even gotten started with it.

So it seems like that counts for something. I’m 3 days in and even though I feel absolutely terrible, I actually also kind of feel … better? All this soreness, all this unpleasantness, this is what it costs to make changes. What did I think? That I was going to alter how I live for the better and that it was just going to be easy and fun? If it was easy and fun I would have already been doing it, because easy and fun is like my favorite, but it’s not necessarily good for me.

So here’s to sore muscles and tight calves and good sleep and actually feeling hungry for food for once. Here’s to goddamn trying. Here’s to sticking with it.

I’ll keep you posted.

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What I Think About When I’m Running.

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That Time I was a Bad Blogger.

Because I am a terrible blogger, here are some of the things that have happened lately that I had meant to tell you about except that I kept getting distracted by bumblebees or shiny things:

- That time I ripped my pants dancing.

- That time I didn’t go to Las Vegas.

- That time I ran like eleven miles.

- That time I was (nearly) attacked by a goose.

- That time I went to Ikea alone and everybody looked at me like I was the saddest and loneliest person in the whole world.

- That time my car broke down.

- That other time my car broke down.

- That time I wanted to bitch that it was too hot to go camping.

- That time I had the best chicken ceasar salad in the world!

- That time I stumbled into a homeless camp while I was out for a run.

- That other time I stumbled into a homeless camp while I was out for a run.

- That time I decided to be more careful about where I go running.

- That time I went to that museum where they had this cool box that you pumped and then it ejected a smell like flowers!

- That time I sort of drunkenly berated a capitalist who was just trying to hit on my friends by telling them how many cars he owns.

- That time my cat ran away and I was sad until I discovered it had been at the upstairs neighbor’s the entire time.

- That time I tried to build a lamp.

- That time I failed at building a lamp.

So can we just all pretend that I told you about that stuff and ignore the fact that I really didn’t? And we’ll just not talk about what a terrible blogger I am and how no one reads this thing anyway? Cool, thanks.

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Unicorn Dream Diary.

I have not had the opportunity lately to update you on how exciting my life is!

That is basically because it isn’t.

Not right now anyway.

But thanks for stopping by!

I had gotten myself into a nice little routine, working and exercising and doing a lot of reading and generally being healthier, but then I fell ill, it was tragic and all that. I missed two days of work - and I don’t miss a lot of work – and although I’m feeling somewhat better now, it has been difficult to get back into the swing of things.

This year has been weird like that so far. Almost exactly a month ago I woke up one Saturday morning and simply felt TERRIBLE. I had gone to bed fine and woke up like a wreck. My head hurt, my stomach hurt, my back hurt, it was all hurt and blah. I spent a whole weekend like that and even missed work the following Monday by sitting in Urgent Care. It was the day of President Obama’s second inauguration actually, I remember because I watched it sitting in the Urgent Care waiting room. The various tests and such came back and declared that there was absolutely nothing at all wrong with me. The doctors were nice enough to say that I possibly had a “viral infection of some kind”, but it was totally a consolation prize.

So I sat myself down and had a little heart-to-heart with myself and decided that I would try to just healthy-it-up for awhile. Not that I was doing anything terrible or entertainingly immoral or illegal, but there was a lot I could do better, so I started. I won’t bore you with the details. It is mostly just about eating better and sleeping more and trying to be more happier and more fit. As you might imagine, the ‘happier’ part has been the most challenging, but I’m working on it.

Since I am basically a girl, I have also started keeping a cute little diary! It is just a notebook with notes about the day. Interestingly, I have read on running blogs and backpacking blogs and writing blogs that one should keep a daily journal of some sort. One of the running websites called it a “lifestyle journal” and so that is what I have been calling it to myself. The runner-up was “my unicorn dream diary”. I have created a far more complex than needed system for keeping track of how to best keep track of how many days I have been tracking things in my dream diary … I mean Lifestyle Journal. I have also been doing that 30 Day Shred thing (that angry, yelling, lesbian fitness robot woman Jillian Michaels hates me BTW and is trying to kill me) and so I keep track of my weight and which day of that I’m on and how it all went. I also keep track of what I eat. Sometimes I draw little pictures.

So all of this should confirm for you how FRICKEN’ BORED I am lately.

You know, I know other bloggers who get hate mail. Yeah, HATE MAIL. That’s interesting, right? Would it kill you people to send me so hate mail occasionally? Here, I will get you started:

Dear Jamie,

Thank you for finding yourself so fascinating that you pay sixty bucks a year to host a blog about how bored you are.

In case it was unclear, the above ‘thank you’ was ironic.

Also, we hate you and we’re going to murder you.

Sincerely,

Your Future Murderers

Here is a page from my dream diary … I mean, Lifestyle Journal.

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Post of Pictures.

Recently I have come across some pictures on the internets which I would like now to share with you. I’m not one who enjoys just reblogging crap, but with the rise of Tapiture and The Chive and the like, men have more and more opportunities now to waste their time online doing something other than watching porn.

Anyway, please enjoy these pictures, I did.

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Not a Winner.

Flannery O’Connor said something once that struck deeply but which I can never quite remember. It was something along the lines of, “ I sit down at my typewriter everyday not because I am inspired everyday, but because I want to be ready in case inspiration comes.”

I’m sure she said it better, but you get the idea. Well I have been trying to remind myself of that lately and so here I sit at my little white desk with my little black laptop … waiting. Well, I have to be honest with you folks, I do not think that tonight is going to be a winner. I’m tired and still a touch sick, though I did go running tonight. It was very, very cold and it wasn’t my best run, or my longest run or my fastest run, but it was a run. So I’m proud of myself in the tiniest sort of way. And I’m looking forward to a good, deep sleep tonight; my body is tired in a good way and that always makes for a good sleep.

Since I am all tuckered out tonight and can’t exactly remember that Flannery O’Connor quote, here is one from the inimitable John Hodgeman:

Stories hold power because they convey the illusion that life has purpose and direction. Where God is absent from the lives of all but the most blessed, the writer, of all people, replaces that ordering principle. Stories make sense when so much around us is senseless, and perhaps what makes them most comforting is that, while life goes on and pain goes on, stories do us the favor of ending.

That’s deep, right? Well, keep in mind that he is one of the most brilliant living absurdists and also said, “A stopped clock is correct twice a day, but a sundial can be used to stab someone, even at nighttime.”

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Cutting The Tags.

So I’m just here cutting the tags off of my new running belt. I haven’t been running since I got back from my Christmas trip. I got sick in pretty short order and am still fighting it off, though I think the worst of it is over. So – I think – out of a sense of guilt and a feeling of flab, I went and bought a new belt last night. It wasn’t wastefull though, I did need one.

To be clear, a running belt is just that: a belt one wears when running. It usually holds some kind of water bottle and has a pocket or two for your iPod or some energy gels or a small crack pipe (assuming you run to get your crack, and who doesn’t?). This new one holds two little water bottles and has a pocket big enough to hold my phone. So I am basically all set. I just need to feel a little better. Hopefully tomorrow I will be able to go out there in the world for a bit.

I’ll be honest and admit that over the past year and a half or so (or since I started doing things outside other than walking to and from my car) I have experienced a deep but quiet joy over owning very specific stuff. I HAVE A RUNNING BELT! I also have TWO different kinds of lightweight camping stoves! And FOUR sleeping bags! Although one of those was given to me, but STILL! I just like having these things that are activity-specific. Owning them makes me want to go out and USE them. That is a pretty new experience for me. I have been writing my whole life, bt there really isn’t any gear for that. The giant dork in me wants to wear my running belt all the time. When I’m not running I’ll loosen it so that it hangs at a big angle like Han Solo’s holster. And then people will come up to me and be all like, “Oh, is that a Nathan Trail Mix 2 Energy Belt?” to which I won’t even say anything. I will just nod slowly, somberly. A calm and no-nonsense acknowledgement. And the person asking me about it will nod quietly too. That nod will mean, “Respect.”

Though for any of that to happen I need to run more than I have been and need to log more miles than I do. There was a time last year when I was logging a lot of miles during the week, but it was also the summer time and the sun was up forever. Lately it is dark before I even leave the office. But hey! I own not one but TWO backpacking headlamps! I should totally be a night runner by now, but alas, I am not. But I will get there.

I have been reading Runner’s World magazine recently. It is stupid expense but I can’t yet bring myself to subscribe to it. I feel like they would somehow KNOW that I don’t measure up to their standards. Anyway, I have been reading it and reading interviews with real runners and reading all of these stats and all of these training plans and all of these special diets and all of the other nearly narcissistic stuff that gets published in such a sycophantic magazine and it all makes me realize how very little I know about this stuff. Basically I put on my shoes (and my belt!) and go run. I have to hope that for a guy like me who just looks like a normal person (albeit an awesome one) maybe that is good enough for now. Although, as I flip through the glossy magazine pages I’m besieged by photos of the long, lean, slender bodies of all of these runners. I’m honestly quite envious. So envious really that it takes me out of my head and I have to step back and go, “Whoa there buddy, why SO envious?”  

I guess I have just always been short and bald (rocking male pattern baldness since 1998-ish!) and while I am fine with that and make it look pretty good, there is a part of me that would like to not be so soft around the middle. So I’m working at it and will continue to. My philosophy though is basically the same as Kevin Spacey’s in “American Beauty” when he goes jogging. He’s asked what part of his body he wants to work on and replies, “I just want to look good naked.”

So yeah, maybe one of these days I will try that protein shake that Runner;s World told me about, but really I would just rather be able to NOT do that. I would like to just be able to go running and find some quiet meditative grace in it (grace or some sort of graceful form is still a distant goal of mine. When I run I basically look like three-legged beagle trying to flee a pack of wolves across a river of cake batter.)

So yeah, I would like to look better and I would like to run better. It seems to me that the only way to accomplish those goals is by actually going out there and running. I guess that is often the answer to these things, isn’t it? That’s the whole idea about “Just Do It” right? I never really knew.

Oh! And also, I would like to be able to wear my running belt out in public and have people mistake me for Han Solo. That’s not too much to ask, right?

And speaking of Han Solo, here is a picture of a bunch of women dressed like Princess Leia. You’re welcome.

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