Why Your Dog Isn't Special, and Other Thoughts

    There’s a bird that wakes just before dawn and sends its song, solitary and repeating, ringing through the streets of my neighborhood. We get up at about the same time most days, and I do morning things listening to the sharp notes echo from the houses for blocks around. The neighborhood is empty and lies on the side of a hill. I imagine that once it was a forest. When my friend the morning bird and I are the only ones awake, it’s easy to imagine it that way again.

    Living in a city can be like that, these rare moments of solitude a reminder that one day, maybe not that long from now, this will probably be a ruin. And then people awake and the sound of the freeway begins, and before very long all is motion again, and that’s good, too. I don’t think I would like to live somewhere where it was just me and a lonely bird all the time. I would get bored.

    There are disadvantages. Once I found a substantial chunk of human feces crammed into a wax-paper bag of the sort that usually contains crackers. Another time someone smashed out a window from my car and tried to pull out a bike pump. When it wouldn’t fit through the tiny rear side window the thief had smashed, they decided instead to grind out a cigarette but on the car door and drop it in the back seat. At least they didn’t light it on fire for no reason.

    I would swear to you that once, not that long ago, Portlanders kept their dogs on leashes, as is the law. Now, however, everyone seems to have decided that this law is for other people, people whose dogs are dangerous, rather than harmless, like my dog is — irrespective of his enormous teeth and slavering maw, my dog is perfectly polite and well-behaved, thank you very much. Of course, this isn’t true. There is no dog on earth so completely docile that it can be trusted off-leash in a city. The temptations are too many. When I go running, I am one of those temptations.

    This morning I was huffing down the hill on which I live when a black streak bolted across the street after me. A woman had been standing sort of in the vicinity of this black streak back when it was just a dog, but she hadn’t had it leashed, I’m sure because the dog is her pet and she’s sure it’s harmless. It didn’t seem very harmless as it barked raggedly in full fly. It seemed like an animal bred to kill — which at least some of its ancestors most surely are. I went from a discomfited jog to a dead sprint, leaping over an abandoned tricycle, zig-zagging between bushes, trying to keep anything I could find between me and my pursuer. After about a block — lord knows what would have happened if I hadn’t had a head start of several yards — I vaulted over a picket fence and into someone’s back yard, where I landed in a heap in splintery dirt. The dog barrelled head-on into the fence and fell back, stunned. Then, from what sounded like miles away, its owner called its name. The dog stood, snuffled at the fence a couple of times, and then galloped back to her side. Harmless. I mean, I guess I wasn’t harmed.

    In the end, there were some bonuses to this experience. My ankle, which I have been babying and rehabbing and worrying about for fully six months now, felt fine, and continued to feel fine as a I ran several more miles, though there was one close call as I was going down some stairs. According to my Fitbit, I cleared that first mile much more quickly than I normally would, despite several seconds spent lying in a stranger’s yard, contemplating my own mortality. And I managed to prevent myself from following the dog back to its owner to let her know what I thought, on the theory that perhaps she’s learned her lesson, and yelling at her would probably get nobody anything.

    Now a crow is cawing, and other birds go po-tweet-tweet from trees all over, and cars roar by on Division Street, and everything’s basically fine.

The Knock-Knock Plot

    I’m not supposed to go running today. It’s funny, in my life I’ve run a lot — enough to have crossed the country east-to-west at least twice, since I took it up seriously about seven years ago — and I’ve enjoyed it at various times, but never before have I experienced the feeling of wanting to go running, being physically capable of going running, and having to stop myself doing it. Even in my best shape, right before my second marathon, days when I didn’t have to go running seemed to dawn a little earlier and brighter than other ones. The act of running could be enjoyable or exhilarating or fun or painful or exhausting or whatever, but I never, ever looked forward to it. Never stopped myself from doing it. I always had to force myself to do it.

    My perspective on that has changed over the last five months. I wrecked my left ankle jogging down a gentle slope on a seamless sidewalk back in early October. For reasons I have never been able to piece together, I put my foot down sideways, and then brought my entire weight down on it. I couldn’t walk without crutches for a week. I couldn’t walk without pain for a month. For ages and ages, I could hardly do anything at all. It was then that I began to feel jealous of people I saw out running. You know the people — they’re bounding healthily down the street, trim and neon-clad, enjoying the vim and excitement of using the body. I envied these people so completely that it was a physical sensation — I could feel in my legs and arms the urge to run after them. But I couldn’t.

    Sometime in January, about three months after injuring myself, I started running again. I started very slowly — both in pace and in distance — but it never quite felt right. The ankle didn’t hurt, but it felt stiff and weird, and I was scared to go more than three miles or so at a given time. Then, about six weeks ago, I rolled it again. Very gently, and it didn’t hurt much, but it was a reality check. I was not ready to be running. I had to stop. But at least then I had obvious physical symptoms telling me no — stiffness, a little bit of pain. I returned to rehabbing, which involves doing the most absurd exercises in the world: first, you stand on one foot for sixty seconds; then you bend at the knee, still standing on one foot, ten times; then you hop forward and then backward, still on one foot, ten times. Maybe that description doesn’t do justice to how dumb it feels. Because that rehab exercise requires almost not physical exertion. But it is, simultaneously, incredibly hard. You fall over a lot. You look dumb, hands planted on your hips as you play what looks like a version of stationary hopscotch.

    Last week, I decided to give it another go. It had been five months since the injury, five weeks since the re-injury. I had no pain when walking or standing for long periods. Surely it would be fine. Wouldn’t it?

    It wasn’t. The ankle felt weak as I ran, and then throbbed all through the night. I had to stop again. It was reluctant — I went out one more time on it before I decided I had to stop — but I did it. It sucked.

    The major problem with actual life is that it has no plot structure. One’s life can consist of nothing but rising action with no crescendo, nothing but incident without resolution, all denouement without real crisis. People who seem like main characters end up as bit players. The love interest moves back to Pittsburgh, or gets back together with an ex, or is simply surprised to find that you consider them a love interest at all. (Or the unnerving opposite, when you discover that some coworker or friendly acquaintance has cast you in a major role in their life.) People die before they resolve their estrangements. Things get rapidly out of hand and then disappear. You rehab your ankle, and rehab it, and rehab it, and it never really gets better. If this were short story that third try at running would have been lovely, pain-free . . . and then its consequences would have been emotionally devastating, somehow. We call that the knock-knock plot. It’s also a solution for insanity.

    But I went running earlier this week, and for some reason, everything actually was fine. I ran four miles. No pain, no sprains, no lingering ache afterwards. Then I did it again the next day. And again yesterday. Which is how I find myself here: there is no immediate, physical reason why I shouldn’t go running today. Everything feels fine — better than fine. Great. I can finally take pleasure in the movement of my legs again.

    But. I have been told again and again: the easiest way to re-injure your ankle is to over-exert yourself when you come back. (Second-easiest: give up on rehab when you feel better, which . . . yeah, I’ve been doing that, too.) I have to stay off it. I have to stay off it today so I can use it tomorrow. And it’s driving me insane.

Bummed Out

    You may have noticed that my output on this blog has been a little spotty the last few days. Or, who knows, maybe you didn’t — maybe there’s no you at all, here, maybe this is just me writing bullshit and putting it on the internet, where it will disappear like a drop of water sliding into an ocean. Maybe you is, ultimately, me. That’s a depressing thought.

    Anyway. The reason my output here has tapered is because I’ve been spiralling ever since I hurt my ankle. Maybe it’s more accurate to say I’ve been spiralling for years, and as a result I don’t cope very well with adversity. Maybe not. The problem, in the short term anyway, is that not being able to run has affected my happiness — already tenuous — very seriously. There’s a fair body of research that indicates serious exercise is as effective as antidepressants in lifting one’s mood. For me it’s been more effective. Antidepressants have never helped me one whit, as far as I can tell, but running helps me stay thin, it gives me a sense of accomplishment, and I’m convinced it positively changes the chemistry of my brain. It makes me happier. Not running makes me less happy. I haven’t been able to run in eight days.

    I’m realizing, too, that I had placed a lot of weight on running this upcoming marathon that it really couldn’t — or shouldn’t — bear. I last ran a marathon before I went to graduate school. In graduate school I was deeply unhappy, in a way I hadn’t been in a long time. I gained a lot of weight, I became very socially isolated, and I think it’s fair to say I barely scraped through at the end, when I was so depressed I had difficulty getting out of bed and going to class. Then, at the end of that experience — just days before my oral exams — my life was interrupted by a grisly tragedy that felt sort of like my fault. I left, and was given a degree basically because people felt bad for me. I moved back to Oregon, and started piecing my life back together. I think I had placed all my hopes and expectations — hopes of returning to normal, of making friends, of learning how to be in a committed relationship, of drinking less, of finishing my novel, of getting a real job, etc — on getting back into marathon shape. If I could just traverse those 26 miles outside Tucson, everything would be fine. No, it wouldn’t bring my neice or my foster brother back to life. No, it wouldn’t get me hired by NPR. No, it wouldn’t win me a National Book Award. But maybe I could stop feeling like shit about that stuff all the time, the way I have for a while now. Maybe I could look at myself in the mirror without thinking, What the fuck is wrong with you? Or something.

    All of this was probably unwise, of course, for a lot of reasons — not least of which was that this, injury, was always possible. It’s become clear to me now that I’m not going to be able to run a marathon in two months. I’m not able to run across the parking lot without severe pain, and if you can’t train, you can’t race. This is the third straight time that injury or illness has arrived at almost exactly the same moment, when I’m getting into the serious distance training, to derail my plans. I’ve now failed to run more marathons than I’ve succeeded in running. And the let down — the let down is terrible, not least because of how freighted this marathon training had become for me. I’ve had surging feelings of anger and grief over the last week or so, feelings that seem unrelated to a bad ankle sprain, but which I think kind of are. Not only do I not have the good brain chemistry mojo going right now, I also have this overwhelming feeling that I’m failing at my life. I’m never going to get any of it sorted out. I’ve screwed it all up forever. That’s what it feels like.

    When I hurt myself, I knew this was possible. I was jogging down Burnside listening to The Gist on my headphones, when my foot landed sideways and I brought down the entirety of my weight on my turned ankle. I felt a grinding, and then heard an audible pop, so loud it penetrated the podcast. I collapsed into the dirt. The first coherent thought I remember having was, I’m not going to be able to run this marathon. It’s all over.

    And so here I am. I am on edge all the time now. When people are loud in a bar I am disturbed, and then angry. When my cat wants to sit on my lap I just want her to go away. When I try to read a book by James Salter I think, I hate all these fucking white people. When Bernie Sanders comes up in conversation it pisses me off that idealists like him so much. Last night I dreamt I challenged Donald Trump to a fistfight. I am so fucking sick of the overtanned hippies in this town. I just wish that I could be someone else. Someone happier and thinner and less afraid. Someone less angry. Or, at the very least, someone whose ankles were stronger.

Joseph Agonistes

    I’ve always been kinda proud of the various little injuries I’ve sustained from athletics. Jammed thumbs, broken toes, swollen joints, pulled muscles — these are the battle scars of the first world, of safe societies where we no longer fight literal battles. Maybe this is because nothing truly terrible has ever befallen me. I’ve never broken anything bigger than a toe. The gouges that have left scars on my knees and hands have been, in the long run, not much more than owies.

    For a few minutes yesterday, I was worried that my run of good luck had come to an end. I was jogging down a gentle slope on E Burnside toward 39th when, for no reason I can figure out, I planted my left foot on its side and brought down the entirety of my weight on it. The foot rolled inward. Hard. The popping noise it made was so loud that it penetrated my headphones. I collapsed onto the sidewalk, and crawled into the dirt, screaming so loud that I roused some guys from across the street, who wandered out to see what was going on. I told them I was fine. I wasn’t sure it was true for sure, but I just didn’t want them to look at me while I was in pain. I had a sense that this wasn’t going to be one of those dings that I felt proud of later. I was just plain hurt.

    I think I was yelling so loudly in part because I knew right away that this marathon I’ve been training for was in jeopardy. I didn’t know yet if the ankle was broken, but it was at least badly sprained. I’m 9 weeks out. If I don’t get to run this marathon, it’ll be the third in a row that I’ve missed because I hurt myself or got sick with about 2 months of training left. I kind of couldn’t believe it. There wasn’t a pothole or a rock or anything — just an awkward step, on what was supposed to be an easy, 4-mile jog, and everything was in danger of falling apart.

    My emotional responses remained all out of whack for a while. I limped to a nearby park and called an Uber to take me home, and as I was sitting there on the curb, I started to cry. Not because I was in pain — the ankle was swollen but basically painless, at least at first — but because running this marathon had been something I’d pinned a lot of hopes on, without even quite realizing it. It was giving me purpose, the training was helping with my weight, and I was even enjoying it, painful though it sometimes was. But more than that, if I could run this marathon, it would mean I had returned to normal, after several years of not-normal, of bad, of depression and grief and feeling lost. And that might be gone.

    A day later I have a better perspective. The sprain is bad — I’ve been on crutches — but the fact is, if I can’t run this marathon, I’ll run one in February or March instead. It’s going to be okay.

    Now it’s mostly about the embarrassment and hassle of getting around injured. People look at you differently when you’re on crutches. Some people seem to feel pity, which is bad enough — but worse are the ones whose instinct is to shy away, as though whatever you did to yourself might be catching. Now, I seem to have come down with a cold, so I do have something that is catching. But the injured leg is distinctly non-communicable. Don’t worry, I’m not going to hurt you.

    The apartment has got messy, because cleaning sucks when you can’t really walk. It makes simple things more complicated — forgetting your wallet, say, or trying to decide whether to put on fresh pants after a shower. I’ve discovered that I own a lot of hot sauce — at least six varieties, all of which I appear to have put on stuff over the last couple of days, but couldn’t bring myself to haul back to the fridge. (Problem: how do you carry stuff on crutches? Solution: in your teeth, a lot of the time.) I ran out of plates this afternoon. How many plates can one person use in 36 hours? Do I not own enough plates? It’s always felt like I owned too many plates, at least to me. Now it would be nice to have an infinite supply.

    Anyway. I’m going to finish watching this Pirates - Cubs game, and spend the next two days icing my ankle. Should be boring, but whatever.

Some Failures

    I probably ought to be seeing a shrink. This has been apparent to me for a long time, but the fact of the matter is that I’ve had bad experiences with shrinks over the years and I’m not deeply motivated to repeat those. I also don’t want to go on antidepressants, because in the past they’ve made me fat, caused trouble with my sleep, and screwed up my sex life — all without seeming to do much for my mood. Three different times I’ve been put on one SSRI or another, each for about a year, and the only thing I have to show for any of those experiences was weight gain.

    But I’ve got habits that need modification, and I’ve come to the conclusion that trying to do it on my own, having not worked yet, is not likely to suddenly start working now. These habits include (but are not limited to): eating too much, drinking too much, never quite quitting smoking, talking myself out of pitching radio stories, getting angry in the supermarket, and being a dick to people on the internet. I’m told that this new-fangled cognitive behavioral therapy can be useful for these sorts of things. I’d like to give it a shot.

    But part of the problem with having difficulty with motivation, social anxiety, and depression is that these things make it hard to take the necessary steps to get help. I just really, really don’t want to call a shrink to make an appointment, to the point that I will put such a thing on a to do list, and eventually hide the to do list so that I don’t have to see that item on the list.

    That’s it. I would go on, but you’ve heard it — and probably felt it — before. Plus I might have exhausted my writerly gas tank by pushing through that too-long tangent I was talking about the other day. It’s finally done, at about 10,000 words, which is about 8500 words longer than it should be. But the only way out was through; now we’re through. Now I have to go back to writing the real book. Which I’m feeling a little bummed out by.

    My feet hurt in a really specifically familiar way. I’m worried I’m not going to be able to run this marathon.

    I’ve been obsessing about things that make me unhappy.

    I just remembered that I was going to write about Livewire in this post. Oh, well. Maybe I’ll remember tomorrow.

L’esprit du jogging

    In attempting to remember some other French, I just encountered a fact that I had once known but since forgotten: French for “jogging” is jogging, pronounced with the soft J. I believe — correct me if I’m wrong — that the verb form is faire du jogging. Meaning, “I go jogging” would be rendered, Je fais du jogging. I don’t know why this tickles me so much, but it does. France is sort of officially butt-hurt about its language's loss of stature in the post-WWI period; once the language of diplomacy, it has been thoroughly displaced by English.* There’s a cadre of old white dudes who gather in a room somewhere in Paris to issue official directives about what is and what isn’t the French language. One of the things these guys get hot-and-bothered about are loanwords. I’m not hot-and-bothered about them at all, but I do find them hilarious, especially in contexts like this, in which a resolutely ugly English word has been Frenched up a little bit. It also has to do with faire’s status as an all-purpose verb that means something like “do”, but also means “make”, and a bunch of other stuff — anyway, a transliteration of Je fais du jogging might be, I make some jogging. Which . . . anyway, you get it.

*Here I’ll plug Helen Zaltzmann’s podcast, “The Allusionist”, especially the episode “The Fix (part 2)”, which is about the bizarre pidgin spoken by EU bureaucrats.

    There were a lot of reasons I was looking this up, but one of them is is that I often have really good ideas for this blog when I’m out running, and one of two things happens: they leak out of my head, or when I get home it turns out they’re actually pretty stupid ideas. For obvious reasons I can’t give you any examples of the former. The latter usually boil down to dyspeptic screeds that lack much substance. The one I was thinking about today was an incident this morning at the store. I had hot food in my hand, and got in the shortest checkout line. Only two people. I figured I was fine. Instead, the checker spent several minutes having a conversation with the person she was supposed to be checking out. I have this thought often when simple tasks are going undone due to lack of efficiency or dilligence on the part of people who do things like operate cash registers for a living: Yes, I realize we’re all very stupid here, but this is beyond the pale. I had been thinking that for a while before I realized — this cashier wasn’t too stupid to operate her register. She just didn’t care to. I stood there burning my hands because she was just having a fine ol’ time with somebody else.

    See, what’s the value in that, other than to further my ongoing project of making sure my loyal reader doesn’t think too highly of me? There is none. But there you have it. This is the kind of thing that seems like a good story when I’m out running.

    I assume you’re seeing what I’m seeing here: if the ideas I do remember are so bad, what are the odds that the ones I don’t remember are any better? And rationally, I’m with you. But there’s something tantalizing about those esprits du jogging that wink out of existence as soon as I’ve had them. I can’t help but think that there’s great work just leaking out of my ears a lot of the time, leaving me with hostile drivel like the cashier story. When I was younger I carried notebooks with me all the time, and wrote down my every stray thought. Sometimes this seems like a terribly self-centered practice, to assume that your every errant thought is worth writing down. At other times, it seems like simple good practices for a writer. Maybe I should be doing that again.

    Anyway. Here’s a list of podcast episodes I’ve listened to this week: Love + Radio — “The Red Dot”; Fangraphs Audio — “Dave Cameron Extends a Metaphor”; TBTL — 2.5 episodes; Home of the Brave — 4 episodes, including the first two of “A Tour of Burned Churches”, which I highly recommend; Vulture TV Podcast; You Must Remeber This — “MGM Stories, Part 3: Buster Keaton’s Biggest Mistake”; A Way with Words — “Burn Bag”; The Allusionist — “The Fix (part 2)” (good), “Dancing about Architecture” (boring); Criminal — “No Place Like Home”; The Gist — 3 episodes; On the Media — “Pope-ular Opinion”; Freakonomics Radio — “How Did the Belt Win?”; This American Life — “Return to the Scene of the Crime” (parts — I skipped Dan Savage because sometimes he annoys me)

Detours

1.

    I had sworn to myself that I was going to finish this draft of the novel — something close to the final one — by the end of this month. That gives me tomorrow and the next day to wrap it up. It’s not going to happen, I tell you what. Not because I haven’t put in the work — I pumped out 64 manuscript pages this month, which amounts to about 80 pages in printed form, which would bring the book in for a landing at about 390 pages, which is about what I was shooting for.

    Unfortunately, those 64 manuscript pages include a still-unconcluded detour in the plot that I assume will be cut out on revision, but which I don’t think I can move on from until it’s finished. The novel is ostensibly about a 32-year-old former investment banker trying to get over a bad breakup, and it’s told in a florid, keyed-up first person that I landed on in an attempt to simulated the kind of anxiety that I experience a lot of the time. The problem, in no uncertain terms, is the first person aspect of it. I’ve never really liked writing the first person very well, the evidence of this blog aside; I find it limiting and tiresome after a while. I’ve been working on the book for five — almost six — years, and I’m heartily sick of my main character’s voice. So when he sat down across a table from someone else and began to hear their story, I knew I was probably going to wander off track for a bit. I just didn’t expect the wandering to go on for 8000 words, and a week and a half of work. Now, instead of writing the final scenes of the book, which were finally starting to seem inexorable, I’m following another character, a minor character, for page upon page upon page. I can’t decide if I should worry about this. The fact of the matter is that I’m no longer in a place where writing at all is a surprise. I need to be finishing this thing. Ugh.

2.

    When you run a long distance it pays to map out your route so that you finish close to your front door, or at least close to an easy way to get back to your front door. I failed to do that yesterday, and it was . . . well, it was awful.

    I had it plotted out, I thought, so that I would hit mile 15 somewhere around the intersection of SE 26th and Clinton, about six blocks from my apartment, which would leave me a brief walk up a gentle slope to cool down before I collapsed in a heap of sweaty clothes and sore muscles. Instead, I got sidetracked somewhere in northeast Portland, and found myself huffing to a conclusion at the base of a bridge more than a mile from home. This is an awkward distance. I can’t bring myself to call a cab to take me such a short distance, and catching a bus would probably only prolong the journey. So I had to walk it, limping, grimacing, and swearing the whole way.

    I’m trying to remember if the long distances were this awful when I last was doing serious running. Yesterday I spent the last two miles exhorting myself out loud, “C’mon, goddamn it, you can do this, fuck, do it, come on, you’re going to make it,” over and over again, as I shuffled a couple of 11+ minute miles. I don’t remember hitting that point until I was going much further than 15 miles before. But then again, I don’t know if I would be doing this if I actually remembered what it was like to do it before. I remember being thin and having a lot of energy and feeling good about myself and dating a lot. I think it’s possible that I simply forgot how fucking hard it is to run a marathon. And it is. Hard.

    Then again, maybe yesterday was just one of those days. By mile five my left ankle was bothering me. By mile seven this muscle that’s been bothering me for weeks — the tensor fasciae latae — was really starting to burn. This muscle is near the hip, and it’s obscure enough that I’d never heard of it before it started hurting me, but I sure as hell know what it’s called now.  By mile 11 my pace had seriously slackened. As I was coming over the river, still 2.5 miles go, I’d reached the point where it felt like I was running in slow motion. Even if my pace was off, how is it that those last 2.5 miles took more time than some years of my life seem to have? I was checking my watch and the GPS on my phone every few steps. And sometimes you just have those days. Last week I felt pretty good for the whole long run.

    I don’t really have much else to say about that, except that I feel better today than I did last Monday, despite the run itself having been far worse. Who knows, man.

Short and Stupid: Half-Marathon Edition

1. I knew the course was going to be too long by the second mile. My GPS device was already registering mile markers well ahead of the course.

2. If I never run another race around a golf course — no matter how beautiful the surroundings — I’ll be fine. I don’t live in the Pacific Northwest so that I can spend all my time jogging through manicured stands of pine trees scattered between mowed lawns that happen to be close to some mountains.

3. I almost threw up at the end. I was worried some people who I’d passed several miles back were trying to run me down, so I attempted to sprint the last 200 meters. Then I thought I was going to die; then I noticed they weren’t back there; then it took everything in my power to keep from ejecting the little food I had in my stomach.

4. We did veer out of the golf course and run through Roslyn, WA, where the exteriors of Northern Exposure were shot. Northern Exposure was probably the first adult TV show I ever got into, when I was early in high school and the show was late in its run. I remember I used to flip back and forth between it and an MTV soap opera called Catwalk, which was about a band of some sort.

5. A quick glance at Wikipedia tells me that Neve Campbell may have got her first big break in Catwalk, so maybe I wasn’t being as silly as it sometimes seems in memory.

6. Here’s a picture of the medal, in case you’re a cynic:

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I never know what to do with these things.

7. It was, far and away, the worse race I’ve ever run in. Worse, even, than the Crater Lake Rim Run, which was a marathon run at 7000 feet through the southern Cascades, which had a two-mile-long hill at the 22 mile mark. It probably didn’t help that my GPS was telling me that I was over half a mile past where I should have stopped. I was fantasizing about shouting at the person at the finish line who handed me the medal, but luckily for him I felt like I was going to barf and I didn’t think barfing on him was a proportional response.

8. Dumb Idea #1: Staying in a hotel 35 miles away from the finish line.

9. Dumb Idea #2: Not booking a second night at that hotel, so that I could lie around eating Ritz crackers all day, which is what I wanted to do.

10. Dumb Idea #3: Driving five hours to Bend that afternoon.

11. At least I got some fish & chips out of the deal.

Recipes for Despair & Joy

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1.    Wake up first thing and go into the bathroom. Feel a little bloated and think you should eat less salt. Wonder if you have a headache because you drank three beers last night or because you have cancer or what. Tap the scale with your toe. Its little digital screen lights up and flashes glyphs that mean nothing. Stare at it and try not to think about how your whole life is this, this same dumb drama playing over and over again on a stage in your mind. ACT I: I weigh too much. ACT II: I eat too much. ACT III: I drink too much. ACT IV: I’m wasting my life. ACT V: I weigh too much. The glyphs clear and flash zero. Step on the scale. Prepare yourself for disaster: it could be as high as 203 pounds, picking a number you’re sure is much more than you weigh. The screen goes blank. Hold your breath. The screen lights up again, with a real number: 202.9. Almost as bad as your worst case scenario.

2.    Come home from running feeling shot but kind of good about yourself. Don’t drink any water right away, though you know you ought to. Lie down on the bed and feel yourself sweat for a while. Remember or forget to stretch, it doesn’t really matter. If you remember you will also remember how, six years ago, it wasn’t necessary, and wonder if this is because you weighed 40 pounds less then or if it’s because you were twenty-nine years old and totally invincible in a way you’ll never be again. If you forget you will simply forget. Eventually you stop sweating. Get off the bed and go into the bathroom. Make sure you urinate, even if what comes out is only a foul-smelling, orange-tinted trickle that means you’re dehydrated. Step in the shower with your running clothes on and turn the water on cold. Scream like a banshee. Frighten your neighbors. Feel the icy thrill of water on the places you’ve chafed. Slowly peel off the clothes and leave them in a wet pile on the floor of the bathtub. Later you will forget to hang them up to dry. Wash yourself off. Dry yourself down. Dry you hair especially; your hair might hold water, and water weighs a lot. Tap the scale with your toe. Its little digital screen lights up and flashes glyphs that mean nothing. Involuntarily remember a time several years ago when you were dumped and didn’t eat for a week, and how, through the haze of heartbreak and misery you felt kind of good when the scale told you that you weighed less than 160 pounds. The glyphs clear and flash zero. Step on the scale. Prepare yourself for disaster: it could be as high as 203 pounds. The screen goes blank. Hold your breath. The screen lights up again, with a real number: 199.5. Try to forget what you used to weigh, and feel good about this.

It Always Devolves into a Grumpy Rant Anyway

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I think the technical name for this is "irony".

    I sat down just now to write and found myself composing a list — not an interesting or fun list, just a list — of stuff I don’t like. I didn’t get too deep before I stopped myself, but still. I suppose it’s a sign of a grumpy mood that I was already down to “vocab-shaming on Reddit”, maybe six items deep, before I thought, Hey, this isn’t a recipe for a good afternoon.

    I think I’m in a grumpy mood because I’ve overtaxed myself with exercise. I know this comes close to that most heinous of complaints, the humblebrag, but it really is what’s going on in my life lately, so it’s what’s on my mind. I ran 11 miles on Saturday. It was terrible. I mean, really, much more terrible than that kind of distance usually is; by the end I was, for all intents and purposes, walking, taking close to twelve minutes to push through mile after painful mile, and when I finished I found I hurt in all kinds of unexpected places: my armpits had chafed, as had my thighs; when I slumped dejectedly into the shower afterwards a searing pain went shooting up my buttcrack. Ah, the joys of endurance athletics.

    I think this is happening because I’m fatter than I was the last time I did this sort of thing. My first year of graduate school (just four years ago), I was tipping the scales anywhere from 159-165 pounds, and a men’s medium shirt billowed out around my midsection and flapped like a sail in the wind. I’m not going to tell you what I weigh now, but it’s a lot more than that. A lot. And that’s even after I managed to peel off about fifteen pounds in the last few months.

    The upshot is that I feel like I’m running around hauling a backpack full of bowling balls sometimes, as I did on Saturday. It’s a conundrum, because the only way I have ever been able to lose weight and keep it off has been sustained, massive amounts of exercise. I know people who would take a diet every day of the week and twice on Sunday over exercise, but that’s not how it works for me, for whatever reason. It’s not as though I have no will — I wouldn’t be able to haul my fat ass eleven miles, even at a slow clip, if I didn’t — but that will doesn’t extend to abstemiousness. I can manage a diet for a week or two, but it always falls apart. For a long time this meant that I was just doomed to obesity. Then I discovered exercise.

    Most of the time, massive amounts of exercise also have the perhipheral benefit of improving my mood massively, keeping me out of the black doldrums and cycles of self-recrimination and doubt that sometimes prevent me from moving forward with my life. Or is that the primary benefit? Maybe it is. Anyway, the point is — sometimes you can overdo it. I took a day off after the long run, but I tried to go out on a leisurely, very short bike ride this morning, and it instead turned into a grim, grueling slog over low hills that felt like mountains, into a light breeze that might as well have been a hurricane-force gale. I got home and promptly went to sleep — for two hours. I didn’t really have two hours to spare; I have two radio projects and a novel to finish. But then there I was, waking up with half the day gone and composing a mental list of things I don’t like.

    Including: The radical misapproproation of adjectives in Oregon’s food culture (I’m sorry, food doesn’t have “integrity”, it’s just not possible); people who don’t leash their dogs in urban settings and then act as though you’re weird when said dogs come tearing after you hell-for-leather and this upsets you; people who assume you agree with them politically and talk as though you do, making it too awkward to vocally disagree; Orphan Black and Dr Who, which are both awful shows for different reasons but which it sometimes feels like you’re not allowed to criticize without being called an old stuffed shirt; superheroes, which, ditto; people who say “thank you” when you agree with them, as though this were some sort of personal service to them and their identity that you have performed for their benefit; golf on television; vets who refer to me as my cat’s “dad” (gross); people under 40 who listen exclusively to classic rock; most classic rock; acquisitive hippies; people who stand outside the 7-11 smoking and mean-mugging everybody who walks by; big families including many children too young for school who come to brewpubs and treat them like their rumpus room; assholes in big trucks — it’s always assholes in big trucks — who don’t make any room at all for cyclists even on completely open highway; people who define themselves by their hobbies; clueless liberals who believe that Bernie Sanders is going to be anything other than another far-left stalking horse who gets sloughed off like a bad haircut when the general election comes around; clueless conservatives who think Ted Cruz is anything other than a crazytown bananapants nobody; Donald Trump; people who bitch about immigrants; people who reflexively rally to the side of cops who shoot black people; the MLB All Star Game; people who think golf visors make acceptable everyday headwear; people who run sprinklers that mostly water the sidewalk; climate change deniers, anti-vaxxers, gluten fearers, and other people who mistake being stupid for “thinking outside the box”; and, of course, giraffes.

Gay Rights and the Chimes at Midnight

    It sometimes feels like the last of my political idealism burned out from the inside a while ago. It wasn’t the Bush Administration that did that, either — eight years in opposition served mostly to provoke a righteous rage in me.  No, it’s been the Obama years that have attacked my idealism like Dran-o going after the clogs in a pipe. His election was a geat sign of progress, it’s true. When I was born there was no way a black person could have been elected President. But his administration has brought the ugliest instincts of blinkered people to the surface, where — despite what one might have hoped — the sunlight has not killed them. There’s a perfect storm that caused this to happen, I suppose. I’m not going to be the guy to tell you about cyber cascades, to talk high and stiff about Fox News. It seems transparent to me that a lot of people don’t like Obama because he’s black, and that the noise about his religion, or his alleged leftist agenda — all of that shit is just a costume people put on their hate and contempt in order to make it seem less like what it is.

    I guess, really, the truth about this is that all this stuff was always still there. Obama’s election didn’t create it. It just brought it to the surface. And it was my luxury as a white dude to kid myself into believing it wasn’t. Perhaps it means that my political will was always weak if all it took was a few years of looking reality in the eye for it to slough away.

    And it’s not just the race stuff — not just the way that black people can be killed with near-impunity by cops and a self-righteous, mostly-white crowd will congeal in the cops’ defense — though that’s been the hardest to swallow. There’s the usual depressing littany that we’ve all pored over for years. Dysfunction on Capitol Hill. The consistent abuse of religion for political gain. The way that liberals and conservatives not only don’t but seemingly can’t talk to each other anymore. It’s bad, guys. All of this stuff is bad. And I don’t really believe there’s a solution. It sucks and it’s going to keep on sucking.

    But I was thinking about my first stirrings of political awakening this morning, waiting for the Supreme Court to hand down a decision on a gay marriage case that had all the signs of becoming a landmark in our history, like Brown v Board of Education or Loving v Virginia. This has been the one road of progress these last few years, progress so sudden and shocking that it’s left me a bit in the dust. But the discussion about it, too, had been largely depressing. One Texas man threatened to light himself on fire if gay people were allowed to marry. Another Texas man actually did light himself on fire in part because he felt he hadn’t done enough. This is the country we live in. We are literally burning for our politics.

    But the first political issue I became aware of was gay rights. I was 12 years old when Ballot Measure 9 was being duked out — often literally — in Oregon. Measure 9 was reactionary garbage that equated homosexuality with pedophelia and sought, basically, to make it as easy as possible to fire gay people from government jobs in order to prevent them from “promoting” homosexuality, whatever the fuck that meant. I’m not 100% sure why this issue resonated with me so deeply, except inasmuch as I wasn’t totally sure about my own sexuality, but I had a really visceral, negative reaction to it.

    Marriage wasn’t even on the table in those days. We weren’t far removed from a world in which homosexual acts were criminalized, in which the opinion that gay people were sick (as opposed to illegal) was seen by some as dangerously radical. A lot of people assumed they didn’t know any gay people, largely because the gay people that they did know didn’t feel safe to come out of the closet. The homosexual “agenda”, back then, was mostly about reducing anti-gay hate crimes, convincing people that not every gay man had AIDS — really, convincing straight people that queer people were, you know, actually people.

    It often seemed to me like it wasn’t ever going to work. I was a freshman in college when Matthew Shepard was murdered. That was just the most famous in what seemed like an endless array of gay bashings — literal bashings, with fists, sticks, bats, whatever — that you heard about all the time. Two men beat up and robbed outside a nightclub. A restaurant owner left in a coma. One time I was walking down the street with a couple of friends and a car came by. A guy about our age leaned out the window and screamed, “FAGGOTS!!!!!!!” at us, and then fired a glass soda bottle in our direction. I remember how the sun glinted off the glass, and I remember thinking, Oh! It spirals like a football! Thank God it was poorly aimed, or I would have just watched it zoom in until it hit me. There were so many mysterious things about that incident, not least of which was how the guy had decided that we should be the targets. It’s not like we were standing on the sidewalk shoving our tongues down each other’s throats. But that seemed minor, really, when compared to a bigger question: what was he so ANGRY about? And wondering about that made me angry in return.

    That all seems so long ago now. I want to be clear: the work isn’t finished just because two guys or two girls can go down to the courthouse and get hitched if they feel like it. It wasn’t that long ago that Jadin Bell hanged himself from a jungle gym because he couldn’t take the homophobic bullying he was receiving in school. That was right here in Oregon. But at the same time it really does feel like the soul of the country has shifted. Equality is law, if not yet reality. It feels, for once, like we’re winning.

    I was out running when I saw the news. I pulled out my phone at a crosswalk and Googled the phrase “gay marriage”, and there was a torrent of celebratory news — people hugging, crying, waving flags. And I felt good about it. But for some reason I didn’t feel elated the way I had expected to — not the way I did when I got to vote to legalize gay marriage in Minnesota, or when the court struck down sodomy laws in Lawrence v Texas (which was 12 years ago today, by the way). Was it because I was fairly sure this was going to happen, after the wave of pro-gay-rights legislation and court rulings over the last 12 years? I don’t know. Maybe it’s that.

    And maybe it’s just the way I am now. Hollowed out. Immune to good news. Or maybe I’ve just heard the chimes at midnight, as Falstaff said. So much of what I remember seems so long ago.

A Short Story about Running and the N-Bomb

    I was out running about half an hour ago, only half a mile to go, feeling a little worn out and looking forward to stopping. Running through the summer will acquaint one quickly with the atmospheric patterns of a place: in Portland, no matter how hot it’s going to get, if you’re out before 9 AM, you’re fine; in New York, you’d better leave before the sun comes up or you’re going to suffocate. I had failed to make the 9 AM cutoff and was sweltering pretty badly as I came down 33rd Ave behind Cleveland High School, just entering my neighborhood.

    That’s when I saw a guy across the street waving at me. He called out something that I didn’t quite hear through the music I was listening to. Under better circumstances — if my legs were feeling better, or it were about ten degrees cooler — I would not have stopped, certainly not so close to home. But honestly? I was glad to have an excuse today. So I pulled up, took out my headphones, and made obvious from my body language that I was listening.

    “Hey my nigga!” called the guy. He was ill-dressed, standing next to a broken down Trans Am that wore every one of its 30-odd years in its paint job. “Do you know where Martins Street is?”

    Now. This is not the first time I’ve been called nigga. But it’s not the tenth, either. If you haven’t looked at the photograph on the front page of this website, I’ll just tell you that I’m a pasty-faced white dude with hair that was reddish-brown until it started going prematurely white, at which point all the red iced over. I don’t tend to run with packs of white people who are so clueless as to think it’s cool to refer to one another in this way, though I do know those people exist. The only times I can remember being called nigga before this were by black friends of mine, who were mostly doing it to glean humor from how uncomfortable it made me. And they were right, it probably was pretty funny to watch this whiteboy squirm when confronted with a word so larded up with meaning.

    All of this is tumbling through my mind in the split second after the dude across the street asks for directions, and — simultaneously — I’m trying to figure out if my interlocutor is white or black. I’m wearing sunglasses, non-prescription, and he’s pretty far away.

    “Uh, Martins Street?” I say.

    By now the dude is crossing the street. A couple of things are becoming clearer: (1) he is definitely also white; (2) he’s in much rougher shape than I initially realized — unbathed, clothes dirty.

    “Yeah, my nigga.” He’s also inebriated in some way — probably not drunk, because he smells overwhelmingly of cigarettes without a whiff of alcohol anywhere — and he’s gaining some kind of weird pleasure in using this word. The count of times I’ve been called it in my life skyrockets past 20 as I look up Martins Street on my phone.

    “Yeah, there are these huge trees down there, 34th and Martins, they’re cutting them down,” he says.

    Here I bang into some more bad mental calculus: I’m guessing that this dude is homeless and intends to use the wood from the fallen tree for . . . something? But then:

    “I guess there’s gonna be a big protest down there, nigga.”

    I’m thinking maybe I should say something about this dude’s casual use of the word, but my innate social awkwardness leads me to fear his reaction, so I keep staring at my phone, wondering if this is just some clueless guy or what — wondering what that relish is in his voice, when he’s saying nigga over and over again. But then he says, with radiant enthusiasm:

    “Did you hear that Obama said it on television yesterday?”

    There’s no question what it is. It actually wasn’t on television, it was on Marc Maron’s WTF podcast, and he didn’t just casually toss out the word for funsies. This is what he said:

“Racism, we are not cured of it. And it’s not just a matter of it not being polite to say nigger* in public . . . That’s not the measure of whether racism still exists or not. It’s not just a matter of overt discrimination. Societies don’t, overnight, completely erase everything that happened 200 to 300 years prior.”

*I put a lot of thought into whether or not to blankety-blank out this word, spelled this way, and I decided not to. There are a host of reasons, but the main one is this: dashes, asterisks, n-words or no, we all know what it is. And the point I’m going to make below kind of depends on that.

    When I heard that n-bomb drop while listening to WTF yesterday, I kinda knew what was coming. I think a lot of us did. Probably the President did. A huge amount of the coverage of the interview has been about Obama’s use of that word. (Let’s be clear — the interview was a little boring. But I doubt it would have changed that much if the President had just opened up his brain and let all the crazy out. This was the easy soundbite.) A lot of the right-wing media reacted with OUTRAGE — “double standard” is a phrase I saw thrown around some.

    Of course, this is all missing the point, in the most depressingly typical way possible. Because the other operative word in that sentence, as fas as I can tell, is polite. These people don’t really believe that Obama said or did anything racist. And if they desperately want to use racist language themselves, they’ll actually find — surprise surprise — that if they use it in an abstracted, thoughtful way, the way Obama did, it will probably make some people blanch, but the cavalry of bleeding hearts and PC warriors they’re worried about won’t actually show up. What’s got them up in arms, really, is how impolite it is for anyone to say the word nigger out loud. It just makes you take a deep breath. You can feel the floor sinking away from you, and it seems like the drop — into culture, class, history and race — might be infinite.

*

    Some inchoate version of all of these thoughts bloomed in my mind over the course of this interaction, along with the dawning realization that this dude had got the wrong message, somehow, too — that because the most famous black guy on earth said it, now we all get to (should?) say it all the time. That’s clearly not the point, either. But somehow this feels less insidious. I guess because it’s less calculated. Or more correctable? But then, someone would have to step up and correct the guy.

    I sure didn’t do that. I gave him directions — possibly wrong — to Martins Street. Then he shook my hand. His skin was callused and cracked. Then he decided to hug me, which brought me in close contact with his powerful tobacco smell. Then he told me, “You’re doing a good job, man!”

    As I was jogging away, wondering idly if I’d given him the wrong directions, I glanced back to where he was crossing the street. His traveling companion was a woman in a gray sweatshirt, who I hadn’t seen before. She was leaning up against the Trans-Am, smoking. She was also black. And that, ladies and germs — that, I have no idea what to make of.