Songs of Experience

I’m back from my 3-day mountain (actually, it was foothills) getaway and one thing I didn’t do was watch TV. Instead, I read and read and read. I read what may be the best essay on marriage and family I have ever come across … “Alice, Off the Page” a personal history by Calvin Trillin. It was in last week’s New Yorker magazine (March 27, 2006) and it seems I am not alone in my assessment. When I went to search – alas, in vain – for the text (or a link) to share with you, I came across dozens of gushing reviews. Here’s one from salon.com:

http://www.salon.com/mwt/feature/2006/03/24/alice_trillin/index_np.html

Go find this essay (most local libraries subscribe to the New Yorker magazine). It is well worth the effort. Here’s a little taste of the REAL THING when it comes to what we are put on earth to do:

“By now, my wife’s policy on attending school plays (a policy that also covers pageants, talent shows, revues, recitals, and spring assemblies) is pretty well known: she believes that if your child is in a school play and you don’t go to every performance, including the special Thursday matinee for the fourth grade, the county will come and take the child.”

-Shouts and Murmurs, The New Yorker

“There was no doubt about her priorities. Concerning children’s constitutional right to sit down to dinner with their parents every night, Alice tended toward strict constructionism. While our girls were growing up, she hated being separated from them; after a two-week trip to Asia when they were about 10 and 13, she decided that one week was her limit. When it came to trying to decide which theories of child-rearing were highly beneficial and which were absolutely ruinous to the future of your child – a subject of considerable discussion among some parents we knew – we agreed on a simple notion: your children are either the center of your life or they’re not, and the rest is commentary.”

from Alice, Off the Page
a personal history by, Calvin Trillin

“And we are put on earth a little space that we may learn to bear the beams of love.”
-wm blake

I’m heading out of town to the mountains for a few days with no wireless access. Feel free to continue the debate over Karnazes in my absence.

I was thinking of running to the mountain cabin (because its just one of those days where I feel I can run forever, you know!?) but, at 4, Lizzie can’t quite see over the dashboard to drive herself.

Here’s one for all you parents out there … for all of you who are home, in the trenches, every blessed hour of the day.
Erma Bombeck wrote this for you, because she knew.

One of these days you’ll explode
and shout to all the kids,
“Why don’t you just grow up
and act your age!”

And they will…

Or, “You guys get outside
and find something to do –
without hurting each other
And don’t slam the door!”

And they don’t.

You’ll straighten their bedrooms
until it’s all neat and tidy,
toys displayed on the shelf,
hangers in the closet,
animals caged.
You’ll yell,
“Now I want it to stay this way!”

And it will…

You will prepare a perfect dinner
with a salad that hasn’t
had all the olives picked out
and a cake with
no finger traces in the icing
and you’ll say,
“Now this is a meal for company.”

And you will eat it alone…

You’ll yell,
“I want complete privacy on the phone.
No screaming,
Do you hear me?”

And no one will answer.

No more plastic tablecloths stained
No more dandelion bouquets.
No more iron-on patches.
No more wet, knotted shoelaces,
muddy boots or
rubber bands for ponytails.

Imagine…. a lipstick with a point,
no babysitters for New Years Eve,
washing clothes only once a week,
no PTA meetings or silly school plays
where your child is a tree,
no car pools,
blaring stereos or
forgotten lunch money.

No more Christmas presents made
of library paste and toothpicks,
no wet oatmeal kisses,
no more tooth fairy,
no more giggles in the dark,
scraped knees to kiss
or sticky fingers to clean

Only a voice asking,
“Why don’t you grow up?”

And the silence echoes:
“I did”

Erma Bombeck

My two older kids went to the beach with their dad this week. Each packed some tunes for the ride (musicals and Tickle Tunes for the 8 year-old and teenage music for the tweener). I told my almost-13 year-old that I wanted to download a few of my favorite oldies for her i-pod before she left. We searched together on I-tunes (where Sarah Jane had $5.00 in her account to spend) and I clicked around the 80’s music, listening to 30-second snippets from my past. Famefamefamefamefamefamefame … what’s your name; what’s your name? L-O-L-A Lola. P-P-People try to put us down. Talkin’ ’bout my g-generation. Etc. It was a tough choice. What would you pick if you only had 5 songs ($.99 each) to show your children a slice of your musical life? (fyi, the Beatles don’t do I-tunes).

Here were my picks:

Subterranean Homesick Blues – Bob Dylan (he’s was rapping when rapping wasn’t cool)
Love Shack – The B-52’s (best dancing song, ever)
We Got the Beat – The Go-Go’s (I had to include an all-girl band)
Werewolves of London (ah-ooooooh!) – Warren Zevon

and, lastly, The Stones – I tried to talk her into a ballad (Wild Horses) but she over-rode me with – of course – Satisfaction.

Your turn.

Does this sound familiar, Mr. K-Karnazes?

Karacters, by F. Scott Fitzgerald:

“A Portrait: She will never be able to build a house. She hops herself up on crazy arrogance at intervals and wanders around in the woods chopping down everything that looks like a tree (vide: sixteen or twenty short stories in the last year, all of them about as interesting as the average high-school product and yet all of them “talented”). When she comes near to making a clearing, it looks too much to her like all the of the clearings she’s ever seen, so she fills it up with rubbish and debris and is ashamed even to speak of it afterwards. Driven, ordered, organized from without, she is a very useful individual- but her dominant idea and goal is freedom without responsibility, which is like gold without metal, spring without winter, youth without age, one of those maddening, coo-coo mirages of wild riches which make her a typical product of our generation. She is by no means lazy, yet when she chops down a tree she calls it work – whether it is in the clearing or not. She makes no distinction between work and mere sweat.”

*
Many moons ago, I posted a short rant about the ultramarathoners who were featured on 60 minutes.

Well, ultraman himself, Dean Karnazes, came to Chapel Hill yesterday … and, somehow, my co-coach of the local Pacers running club (ages 7-13) lured the mileage maniac/celebrity to talk to our kids after his official speaking engagement at the University. I was pleased for my colleague to score such a coup (this guy is the hottest ticket in running town), but I bolted from the track as soon as I saw Karnazes’ leathery, self-promoting, GQ face. And I took my children with me. I did not want them to hear his warped message of running addiction.

Later, I searched for some ammunition on-line to support my strong opinions about this man. His fans call him a “family man” and a spokesman for our beloved sport … yet, every fiber in my being cries, “Bullshit!” How can a man who runs 100 miles every week-end spend any quality time with his children? It’s physically, chronologically impossible. I was afraid if I stayed to listen to his little chat I would have shouted, “Oh, grow up!” like some drunken heckler at a comedy club.

So, I will take the coward’s way out. I will heckle on-line. In my blog. I’m a bloggler.

Here’s something I found in an article about Karnazes from 2004:

Earlier, Karnazes had theorized that his running addiction involved more than just an endorphin fix. “There’s something about being unencumbered,” he’d said. “To have nothing on you but your shoes and shorts. It’s the primitive need of a human to be wild, in a sense.”

As we got to the Golden Gate Bridge and headed back toward San Francisco, Karnazes looked forlornly at Highway 101 going north. “Don’t you just want to keep going and run all the way to Nicasio right now?” he asked with a winning smile. “Can you understand why someone would want to do that? Don’t you just want to go?”

I could see how badly he wanted to run another 40 miles, but there was no way I could make it. Later, I asked him what he would do when, one day far in the future, he was too old to run.

“It’s naive and ridiculous, but I don’t think I’m going to get old,” said Karnazes. “If I was forced to stop running, I don’t know what would happen. I would be miserable. I’d probably drive everybody around me crazy. What would I channel it into? I don’t know. An intellectual pursuit versus a physical one? Potentially. But I don’t think I’m as good at that, truthfully.

“I still feel like a teenager. I know it’s irrational. But I honestly think I’m never not going to be able to run.”

That’s right, buddy. You ARE a teenager when it comes to taking responsibility for being present in the lives of your children.

And what about the wife? Here’s what she had to say:

Sometimes, however, Karnazes’ balancing act takes its toll. “The not sleeping can be bothersome for me,” admits Julie. “You reach for someone, and they’re not there.”

All I know is when someone I love reaches out for me, I intend to BE there.

So, I wasn’t able to give up alcohol for Lent (maybe next year, when Lizzie’s in Kindergarten … there’s that phrase again … it’s beginning to sound like “when the iceman cometh” – do people still read that play?). Instead, I gave up talking on the cell phone when my kids are in the car. Good thing, too, in light of what just happened at our local coffee joint:

Apparently, the driver was on her cell phone and even after jumping the curb, smashing bricks, crashing through the window and into “Carrboro’s livingroom,” she was still had that phone glued to her ear … waving people off who came to her aid (mouthing, “I’m on the phone”?).

Or, as my doctor-friend who tried to help her said, “that fucking phone.”

I stole Hemingway’s title. This will not be a post about the great minimalist writer – though when I was reading around in The Crack-Up this week, I did come across something silly Fitzgerald said about his friend’s stripped-down writing style: “We are happy to announce that his work will appear in future exclusively on United States postage stamps.”

My favorite Hemingway line goes something like this, “Forgive my long letter; I didn’t have time for a short one.”
And this is pretty good, too:

“For a long time now I have tried simply to write the best I can.
Sometimes I have good luck and write better than I can.”

So anyway (my brother always pronounces that “Swenny-way”), today’s blog entry is not about a feast, but about a work-out that is moveable. I do, however, often refer to a really hard work-out - good hard, you know? – as a meal. Don’t you know runners who spend all their running “calories” on snacks? Lots of 5-6 mile runs at 85% effort, long runs with way too many stops (for water, shoelace tying, potty, goo, view, etc.), intervals with way too much recovery (a 400m jog is too long, people!). I believe every training phase should incorporate a break-down period so that you can build up to greater fitness (and racing potential). Now, of course, this can be taken to an extreme (because, after all, distance runners are addicted to fatigue) and runners can spend an entire season, nay their entire racing careers, broken down. (I’ve always wanted to use “nay” in a sentence).

Swenny-way, the following work-out can be done in winter spring summer or fall (all you have to do is call). It has speed and strength and, depending on how fast you run the downhill recovery, can be aerobic as well. The up-and-down ladder element makes it an excellent mental work-out and the fact that it is on just one hill (vs. several) means you could do it anywhere (even in flat Florida, on an overpass). Anytime, anywhere …. moveable.

Warm up 15 minutes.
On a not-too-steep hill, run hard up and then jog down (back to where you started) like so:
45 seconds, 60, 75, 90, 2:00, 90, 75, 60, 45 seconds. Cool down 15 minutes.

On each of intervals on the first half of the ladder, mark the spot where you made it to so that when you come down the other side of the ladder you will have a goal to aim for (and, hopefully, surpass). This keeps your effort honest – especially if you are doing this work-out alone. It’s amazing how hard you’ll push to eek out another two feet, just to make it past this arbitrary mark.

When coaching kids, it’s fun to give them each a piece of chalk to mark the pavement if they are running the hills on a road. I have used pine cones, sticks, rocks, roots … and yesterday, one of my seejanerunners marked hers with horse “poo” that was on the trail. She didn’t actually touch the poo; she just noted that on her first 45 seconds UP, she made it to the big poo.

And on that note ….

Bon appetit!!

It’s been a while since I’ve written about my “elite” running days, but while I was re-reading The Crack-up after my search, I came across a date I’d scribbled in the right-hand margin, “Feb.18, 1986,” so I immediately traveled back twenty years in my memory …

What was going on in my life in 1986? Who was I? I was just 2 years out of school, trying to “make it” as a professional runner outside of the the structure and support (what I call the “college cocoon”) that is NCAA competition. I was living in a house full of runners that only cost me $149.00 a month rent but, oddly, none of us trained together. We all had separate work and running schedules that made for an eerie, specterous existence – souls floating in and out of The Ranch at odd hours of the day and night to run, and eat, and shower, and then disappear behind closed doors. There were a few memorable communal moments – like the time we lost power in a snow storm and were forced to huddle together around the light and warmth of a fireplace in the living room. I don’t recall what all we talked about but I can still see their faces over the glow of candles – smiling, joking, debating … being together. When the power returned, we all snuck back to our rooms, our caves, our singular lives.

My own schedule consisted of sleeping in too late, lingering too long over a second cup of coffee, and then rushing out to get my “morning run” in before noon. After lunch, I would try to read or work on my masters’ thesis (ha) but I was often way too jittery to sit still so I would do mindless chores around the empty house or make phone calls to other runners I’d met on the road racing circuit – for inspiration? connection? Finally, after I’d killed enough time, I would get ready for my second run of the day. I had all these bizarre rituals to try to psyche myself up. I’d take a shower before running (a “spritz-off” I called it) and then drink more coffee – at a coffee shop – while reading some running magazine to see how other runners made it, then I’d play some U-2 music in the car on the way to the track, then I’d run an absurdly fast warm-up before launching into full-on anaerobic intervals that were like a bunch of little races in a half hour. Once, a fellow “elite” did a set of 12 X 400 with me and commented, “Why haven’t you run faster than 9:06 (for 3k)?” Because, as they say, I was leaving it all on the practice track.

My whole life was running in circles. I needed, as Fitzgerald said in the section where I wrote in the margin, “a clean break.”

“This lead me to the idea that the ones who had survived had made some sort of clean break. This is a big word and is no parallel to a jail-break when one is probably headed for a new jail or will be fored back to the old one. The famous “Escape” or “run away from it all” is an excursion in a trap even if the trap includes the south seas, which are only for those who want to paint them or sail them. A clean break is something you cannot come back from; that is irretrievable because it makes the past cease to exist. So, since I could no longer fulfill the obligations that life had set for me or that I had set for myself, why not slay the empty shell who had been posturing at it for years?”

My clean break was helped along by an injury – my one and only injury in 25 years of running. I eventually moved out of the running ranch and left that empty shell of being just-a-runner. I know others have no problem adjusting to the running bum lifestyle but, like Fitzgerald, I am a midwesterner, raised with an American work ethic and a strong moral impetus to “do something important with my life.” Running in circles – literally (or should I say “running in ovals”?) – just wasn’t cutting it. I needed to find the reason WHY I should run.

Like Oblio, I needed to find my point.

Scooter and mis_nomer asked about the context for “a pocket of broken glass.” Angier’s essay was entitled The Origin, Procreation, and Hopes of an Angry Feminist and here is the paragraph from which I pulled the expression:

“When I was a teenager, and by then having moved from the Bronx to a small town in Michigan, my mother and I decided to start a consciousness-raising group of our own, and we invited a ragtag collection of friends and neighbors to join us. But after a few weeks, I began to feel that our meetings were off-track. We weren’t talking about important things, notably the Oppression of Women, or how pissed off we were by that oppression. We were, or rather the other women were, gabbing. They were talking about their daily lives, their kids, their husbands, their in-laws. And they weren’t even angry about anything! What was the point? This was supposed to be a CR meeting, not a bridge club!

So I began to complain. I began to rant. I scolded the others for not passing the feminist purity test, for neglecting the political in favor of the personal, and for wasting their time on trivia. I didn’t want to discuss the minutia of when and under what amusing circumstances Barbara had nursed her baby the other day. I wanted to know why Barbara assumed complete responsibility for child care and let her husband off the hook every time! And then a funny thing happened. After a few weeks of being put down, the women wouldn’t put up with it anymore. They kicked me out of the group. I was a founding member, but they asked my mother to ask me to leave, and she did, and I did. In truth, I don’t blame them. I didn’t even blame them back then. I knew I was a pocket of broken glass.”

Does that help?

In the book I am currently reading, The Bitch in the House (NO comments, please!), Natalie Angier uses an expression I’ve never heard of: “I knew I was a pocket of broken glass.” What’s the origin of that!? It sent me on a Google search … goin’ on a bear hunt … for the text to F. Scott’s Fitzgerald’s 1936 Esquire essay, “The Crack-up” where he descibes himself as a cracked plate, “the kind that one wonders whether or not it is worth preserving.” I found most of the text here, but let me give you the opening lines and a few choice nuggets in case you don’t want to click through:

“Of course all life is a process of breaking down, but the blows that do the dramatic side of the work – the big sudden blows that come, or seem to come, from outside – the ones you remember and blame things on and, in moments of weakness, tell your friends about, don’t show their effect all at once. There is another sort of blow that comes from within – that you don’t feel until it’s too late to do anything about it, until you realize with finality that in some regard you will never be as good a man agian. The first sort of breakage seems to happen quick – the second kind happens almost without your knowing it but is realized suddenly indeed.”

“… I began to realize that for two years my life had been a drawing on resources that I did not possess, that I had been mortgaging myself spiritually and physically up to the hilt. I had realized that in those two years, in order to preserve something – an inner hush maybe, maybe not – I had weaned myself from all the things I used to love – that every effort from the morning tooth brush to the friend at dinner had become an effort.”

“… and in a real dark night of the soul it is always three o’clock in the morning, day after day.”

It’s as if Natalie Angier picked up the broken pieces of the cracked plate (that is herself) and carried them/it around in her pocket; was she preserving the anger? Is a pocket of broken glass a grudge you hold onto? Is it a way to keep a shattered self secret?

Very curious, indeed.

There’s a scene at the end of EB White’s classic short story, Once More to the Lake, where a father watches his son wade into an August lake right after an evening thunderstorm. He spent the whole story detailing an idyllic summer vacation in America, how nothing had changed since he was a boy (and how reassuring that was), how he had difficulty distinguishing himself from his son in “this holy spot” of boyhood memories (“I had trouble making out which was I, the one walking at my side, the one walking in my pants.”) … so the ending comes as quite a shock – the perfect shock, if you ask me, the kind of shock all great short stories must provide:

“When the others went swimming my son said he was going in too. He pulled his dripping trunks from the line where they had hung all through the shower, and wrung them out. Languidly, and with no thought of going in, I watched him, his hard little body, skinny and bare, saw him wince slightly as he pulled up around his vitals the small, soggy, icy garment. As he buckled the swollen belt suddenly my groin felt the chill of death.”

On Saturday, I ran a local 5k that I have raced over a dozen times in my life. It ushers in spring every year and serves as a marker for my fitness – how does this year compare to last, and the year before that, and the year before that? I ran a fine time for an old gal (18:04) and was pleased to note my consistency over 5 years as a masters runner – from age 40 to 44 my times ranged from 17:42 to 18:12. Still under 6:00 pace! But THIS year, something was different about my annual ritual … all three of my daughters were racing too. 12 year-old SJ in the 5k, and Rosie & Lizzie in the fun run (which turned out to be not-so-fun as both crashed to the bricks – amassing skinned knees, a fat lip, and a broken left pinky).

On this beautiful spring morning, my own effort was a bit of an afterthought. All during my race I was wondering how Sarah Jane was faring behind me in her first solo 5k (I’d run side-by-side with her in previous outings) and after I crossed the line I tore back up the road with water and gatoratde in hand (should she need them) to witness the final stretch of her race. I didn’t have to wait long; there she was!! A full 3 minutes faster than she’d ever run before – rolling down the hill, beaming, sweating, grunting, “No. Thanks.” when I offered water. “Do you want me to run you in?” I asked/yelled. “No. – I’m. – Fine.” One-syllable utterances, I always tell my runners. If you can say anything more than one syllable, you aren’t running hard enough.

And she was. Fine. Alone and striding powerfully toward the finish line. HER finish line, not ours. Not even mine anymore. From here on out, I will look back over Sarah Jane’s race results (and then Rosie’s and Lizzie’s) to compare their times over the years – to chart their improvement.

Mr. White, I’d say I felt the chill of life out there on Saturday – not death.

… but, then again, maybe we felt the same thing.

My spring Janes 2006 season is in full swing, so today’s blog entry will overlap with what I sent out to my seejanerunners in week #5’s e-mail. Each Sunday, I send out the week’s work-outs (what, where, and how fast, etc. we’re going to run) along with a reading to think about and, perhaps, discuss in the 20-minute “circle time” we have before running. I choose a theme for each season [last season it was "nature"] and this season we are focusing on FOUND things … found literature, found art, found ideas (i.e. one Jane said she found reading for the first time in her adult/mothering life). Over the week-end, I had a cool “found’ expereince.

This week’s quote is from a book I FOUND shoved in among a stack of cheap, shiny-covered novels at a coffee shop in Raleigh. We’d stopped in after our races and St. Patty’s day parade (on an 80-degree day) for some raspberry smoothies and air-conditioning. The book is called Blue Highways (a journey into America) and its one that I’ve always wanted to read but somehow forgot that I always wanted to read it. Does that make sense? It got lost in my memory. I do think this book found me yesterday… so I went up to the coffee-shop lady and asked her if the used books on the shelves (with the bald backgammon board and missing-pieces chess set) were for sale. “Yes,” she said. “How much?” I asked. “However much you want to pay.”

Here’s the quote (I’m sure there will be more from this book. I am only on page 26!):

“I came to a ramshackle place called Smitty’s Trading Post. Smitty was a merchant of relics. He could sell you a Frankfort, Kentucky, city bus that made its last run down Shively Street, or an ice cream wagon made from a golf cart, or a used bulldozer, or a bent horseshoe. I stopped to look. Lying flat as the ground, a piebald mongrel too tired to lift its head gave a one-eyed stare. I pulled on the locked door, peered through windows grimed like coal-miner’s goggles, but I couldn’t find Smitty. A pick-up rattled in. A man with a wen above his eye said, “Smitty ain’t here.”
“Where is he?” I was just making talk.
“You the feller wantin’ that harness?”
“Already got one.”
“What’d you come for then?”
“I don’t know. Have to talk to Smitty to find out.”
“That’s one I ain’t heard,” he said.”

Two things strike me about this passage: 1.) when he says, “I stopped to look.” (think about that for a while, busy busy moms – myself included, of course) and 2.), that he was waiting for a person to give him/teach him what he wanted. You can’t FIND unless you seek, and you can’t seek unless you are open in your daily life.

Food for thought.

Here’s my submission from last year.

The theme for the community art project in 2005 was “DREAM” and I took one of my daughter’s Barbie’s heads off and replaced it with a plastic television. I then printed out a tiny photo of Paris Hilton from the internet and glued it onto my plastic screen (you can’t see it in this photo). Next, I ran a home-made plug to the outlet on the bed. I called my piece “Dream vs. Reality” because of all the reality TV shows that seem to fill up our imaginations. What’s the last thought you have when you lay your head down on the pillow at night? Too often it’s an image from the screen (be it TV or computer) and not real-life.

***

DCP_0150.JPG

Originally uploaded by davemabe.

I am planning to submit this log (or a chunk of it) to the Chapel Hill community art project entitled Lost and Found. Last year nearly 300 people offered submissions … which says we are either a creative community or a deluded one – like the folks in the classic, You Can’t Take it with You. I have to include an “artist’s statement” with my piece, but I haven’t yet written it (the due date is today!). I will say something about finding this amazing flower, imprinted by God, in the center of a sawn log while out running on a trail. I guess I could tweak the facts a bit by saying I was LOST on a trail and then FOUND this art … but I know every inch of trail in Chapel Hill so that would be, a-hem, lying.

Or, more “poetic license” JP and KC?

I went to hear Joan Didion speak the other night. It was a packed house (the last time a writer pulled in a standing-room-only crowd at UNC was when Maya Angelou filled Memorial Hall with her sonorous voice). Everyone was there to hear Didion read from The Year of Magical Thinking and she didn’t disappoint. Opening with the now-famous:

“Life changes fast.
Life changes in an instant.
You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.”

Didion went on to read the entire first chapter of her book (which describes, in astonishing detail, the proverbial “last chapter” of her husband’s life … his moment of death).

I write all this as prelude to a revelation I had the other day while I was – where else? – out on a run.

Didion re-played the scene of emergency medical personnel trying to resusciitate her husband:

“I was thinking as small children think, as if my thoughts or wishes had the power to reverse the narrative, change the outcome. I had to believe he was dead all along. If I did not believe he was dead all along I would have thought I should have been able to save him. No eye was on the sparrow.”

Wait. What was that? No eye was on the sparrow?

While running, I was thinking about this and about how my athlete, John Hinton, had a disappointing race over the week-end and that I hadn’t been able to phone him yet. I was feeling guilty because the WORST thing a coach can do is ignore a runner after a bad race. It’s easy to marvel at a bird in flight … but its the fallen sparrow who needs our attention, yes?

Avoiding the dreadead “What happened?” conversation is akin to a mother (or husband or anyone you love) giving you the silent treatment. I would call John as soon as I got home, I vowed. And then … you won’t believe this … right there on the side of the road where I was running was a dead bird. A dead sparrow, to be exact. It was fatter than most sparrows – bloated, I guess, but it was a sparrow … fallen. Dead. And my eye was on it.

Even if you don’t believe God’s eye is on us (as, apparently, Didion doesn’t), you can be the person … maybe even the only person to somebody … who sees. You can be the one whose eye is on the sparrow as mine was, IS, on John should he fly or fall.

I did call John Sunday night and we talked about what happened. His legs were tired from the gun; he should have backed off more on Wednesday (I should have seen to that); 64 at the quarter felt like 60. We were both disappointed because at age 44 there isn’t time to “try again next year.” He might never get the record. We do run out of time, and life, on earth.

I advised John to immediately get out there and race again (a 5k road race, for fun, on Saturday). We shared the “blame” for his bad race (his off day) and made a plan for the next three weeks. His legs will rebound quickly and his sort-of(?) broken heart will heal. John will soar again and I will see it!!

No eye on the sparrow …. pshaw.

http://www.cyberhymnal.org/htm/h/i/hiseyeis.htm

I can’t tell you how much your comments have helped me. Thank you. I think my problem stems from feeling boxed in by the blogging form (hence, my silly shaped poem). pjm says he mostly posts for his own sanity … and I agree this is part of blogging’s appeal … but I also write out of an impulse to find/speak/record something original. ME-blogs are a dime a dozen. Who wants to read yet another list of 31 descriptive flavors of Joe or Jane-Blogger? You know, like in One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish:

My hat is old.
My teeth are gold.

I have a bird
I like to hold.

My shoe is off.
My foot is cold.

My shoe is off.
My foot is cold.

I have a bird
I liked to hold.

My hat is old.
My teeth are gold.

And now
my story
is all told.

Maybe I’m trying for the us-blog (as in all of us, not you-and-me us). In one of Bob Dylan’s songs (Brownsville Girl, I think), he pleads, “If there’s an original thought out there, I could use it.” We all could.

Says Griffin, in the Griffin & Sabine: An Extraordinary Correspondence mis_nomer inspired me to buy (for only 89 cents, used, on Amazon!):

“I crave an art that passionately transcends the mundane instead of being a device for self-deception.”

I expect all of you to call me on it if this blog deteriorates into a narcissist’s mirror.

(more…)

Well, I’m back from my blogging mini-break … did anyone miss me?
Techie Dave has informed me that I now have 100 subscribers to Songs of Experience (affectionately nicknamed SoE) but sometimes I feel like Oblio (from Nilsson’s 1971 classic, The Point) when he sings “Hello? Is anybody else here?”

Life Line
by Harry Nilsson

Down to the bottom,
Hello
Is there anybody else here?

It’s cold and I’m so lonely,
Hello!
Is there anybody else here?

Hello (Hello, Hello, Hello)
Won’t you throw me down a Life Line?
I’m so afraid of darkness,
And down here it’s just like night time.

Oobelie, Ooobely, Oogolie, Oogolie,
Oohs..Are all around me.
Hello!
Will you please send down a Life Line?

Down,
And there isn’t any hope for me,
Unless this dream which seems so real,
Is just a fantasy.

*
All blog and no play makes Joan a dull girl.
All blog and no play makes Joan a dull girl.
All blog and no play makes Joan a dull girl.
All blog and no play makes Joan a dull girl.
All blog and no play makes Joan a dull girl.
All blog and no play makes Joan a dull girl.
All blog and no play makes Joan a dull girl.
All blog and no play makes Joan a dull girl.
All blog and no play makes Joan a dull girl.
All blog and no play makes Joan a dull girl.

Now, here’s a man whose fixin’ to run the rat right out of his house and onto Tobacco road.

… this Saturday night, 9:00pm
Good Luck, Roy!
Go Heels!!