Month: August 2016

The A-Hole Runner

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A couple of times a week, I see this runner.

It’s kinda funny seeing runners when I’m out driving; once upon a time they got on my nerves (look at this guy/girl, out flaunting the fact that they’re BEING SO HEALTHY, why don’t you get on a treadmill or better yet go watch some TV and eat some chips). These days it makes me a little jealous. I could get one of those awful bumper stickers — you know, I’d rather be running or some other obsequious crap — and it wouldn’t be a lie. I see other people running, and I really do think, dang, I wish I was going for a run. Even when it’s 80+ degrees out. Something, as I may have pondered before, is wrong with me.

But not this runner.

This runner is an a-hole.

I say that knowing full well that I’m guilty of many a-hole runner behaviors myself. Holier-than-thou minimalist apologetics. Tree-huggery every-run-is-a-good-run fawning. Interminable gear-heading with all the electronics. Smug humblebrags about waking up while the rest of the world is asleep. Endless talking about all things running.

Jeez, I’m an a-hole runner.

But not as big an a-hole as this a-hole.

Because this a-hole runs in the street when there’s a sidewalk right the fargo there.

Now, look. I understand. I’ve read the scientific-sounding articles about how running on asphalt is better for your feet than running on concrete. (Apparently, asphalt will compress underfoot, while concrete won’t. Though how much it actually compacts under the paltry weight of a human is probably less than negligible.) And yeah, okay, he’s doing what you should do when you run on a road, which is to say, he runs against traffic, so that you can see him coming and he can see you coming. And yes, I will admit and can even attest that running on a sidewalk can be more hazardous than you might expect.

But all that goes out the window when you’re running down a main drag during rush hour in the dusky dawn light, where shadows are long, eyes are droopy, and everybody and their mother is texting and driving on their way to the daily grind.

This is a two-lane road serving virtually all the traffic going from our little Atlanta suburb to the next little Atlanta suburb over. Not exactly the artery of I-20, but certainly a capillary of substantial size. And too many times, I see this dude trucking along the edge of the road, head down, shuffling blithely into the oncoming traffic with all the concern my dog has for the screen she doesn’t know I closed behind the sliding glass door.

I don’t understand it. There’s no rational explanation I can find for it. The cars going North have to dodge into the oncoming South lane to avoid splattering this poor bastard, and the cars coming South have to slow down to avoid hitting the cars dodging into their lane to avoid splattering this poor bastard. The man is literally a slow-moving roadblock. He backs up traffic in both directions. I’ve seen him at various points along a 1-mile stretch, which means that mile is part of his regular routine, which means he’s putting his own desire to run in the street above the desire of possibly hundreds of drivers to use the road as intended every morning he goes for a run.

AND THE SIDEWALK IS RIGHT THERE. Literally less than five feet to his left. A quick little hop and he’d be on it, happily out of everybody’s way. Happily not endangering his own life and limb. Happily not being a total a-hole.

And yet, on he plods. With his high socks. And his fargoing white headband. And his blatant disregard for anything approaching common sense or decency.

So plod on, a-hole. But know that, even though you’re running, I’m glad as fargo I’m not you.

And that’s saying a lot. From one a-hole to another.

 

Watch This

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I’m one of those guys who still wears a watch.

I know, right? Older than old school. Positively ancient. Not only do I wear a watch to begin with, but I don’t even wear one as a fashion statement: I wear the tacky digital kinds (one of those backward primates who still thinks digital watches are neat).

Why bother? When we have what are essentially supercomputers tucked in our pockets, what’s the point of having an outdated piece of tech strapped to the wrist?

Well, regular readers know already that I’m a little bit preoccupied with time as a concept. I wrote an entire novel (still in edits — okay not in edits yet, but slated for it soon) about time-traveling teenagers. There’s no telling when that phone in your pocket will run out of juice or kick the bucket all on its own (as the technology increases, so does the crash potential). Not to mention the fact that — and perhaps I’m showing my teacher stripes here a bit — I find it enormously tacky whipping your phone out as regularly as breathing to check anything: social media, e-mail, the time, the weather. I’m guilty of enough of that without resorting to the phone to check the time several times an hour.

Further, something about my bare wrist bothers me. Hard to nail down why, but my unadorned body kinda skeeves me out. I wear all kinds of stuff, preferably the kind I don’t have to take off, just so that my naked skin isn’t just flapping in the breeze. Rings on both hands (I’m down to just one on each hand these days). A three-year-old glow-in-the-dark bracelet from a 5k. A really rather sharp man-chain necklace, a gift from my wife in our first year together. I even, back in times we won’t talk about, dabbled in earrings, and in my really dark days, an anklet. (I know. I KNOW. It was the nineties. God.)

And then there’s my watch, which is the only functional accessory in the lot.

I dunno, I think there’s something elegant and classy about being able to track the movement of time — time, dictated by the very movement of the planet around the sun, or, in a less direct sense, by the actual vibrations of Cesium electrons (and yes, okay, they’re not “Cesium electrons” but rather electrons in orbit around a Cesium atom GOD this isn’t a science class) — just with a flick of the wrist, an adjustment of the sleeve. Plus, and I know I’ve mentioned this before, I’m a teacher, and teaching types live and die by the number of minutes left in the period, so I like to have that information handy. (I am so sorry. No I’m not. Every pun is deliberate.) Seriously. Digital watches are neat.

And my watch broke the other day.

Well, the band broke. And with the caliber of watches I traffic in, that basically means the watch is dead to me, because it costs only slightly more to buy a replacement watch than it would cost to buy a replacement band, not to mention finding the right band and fiddling with microscopic screwdrivers and tiny pins and pieces that can barely be seen with the naked eye. No thanks. Plus, that battery will be going soon, for that matter, and … yeah. It’s quicker and easier to shell out $20 for a new watch than to sink time and repair into the old one. (#firstworldproblems, I know.)

How did I break the band? Fair question. Here’s my humble-brag: push-ups. Apparently my wrist bulges like an inflated python, and after — man, how long did that watch last? let me ratchet this humble-brag up a step — let’s say a few thousand reps, that thing snapped like a fat man’s belt at a Vegas buffet.

So I have to muddle through a few days, watchless.

20160816_205727.jpg
Don’t look at the tan-line too long. You could go snow blind.

And it’s painful. Because I have no idea what time it is, outside of knowing that it’s generally night or day based on the light coming in through the window. Sure, I could check the systems clock at the bottom right of my computer screen — or the digital display on the cable box — or the Roman-numeral-analog job hanging on the wall — or the other digital display on the stove — or the one in the dash of my car — or my alarm clock that shows the time TWICE (once on its face and once projected in foot-tall letters on the bedroom wall — OR OKAY FINE MY PHONE — but no.

NO.

I needs my watch.

I feel naked without it.

So naked I’m thinking of putting an anklet on my wrist.

Please, think of the anklets.

No, wait. Don’t. Don’t think of the anklets. EVER.

Harry Potter and the Unfalsifiable Speciosity

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Yes, “speciosity” is totally a word. (I googled it after I decided that I needed it. Sometimes things work out in your favor. Oh ah.)

‘I’m sorry, but that’s completely ridiculous … You could claim that anything’s real if the only basis for believing in it is that nobody’s proved it doesn’t exist!’ – Hermione Grainger, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.

author J.K Rowling

Thanks to the Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe for reminding me that there are things to love about the Harry Potter books that go way beyond the whimsical. (The SGU wraps up every episode of their (really quite excellent) weekly podcast with a skeptical quote, and I was pleasantly surprised to hear this one.)

What? My commute is over a half-hour each way. I listen to a lot of podcasts these days. (To be fair, I listened to this episode while running. BTW, it’s still effington hot out there.)

Happy Sunday!

The Weekly Re-Motivator: Right Place, Right Time

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Yesterday was a rough day for a run. Long week at work, the spectre of even more long days next week (auditions are going to start up, so that’s after-school hours, HOORAY), and the general fatigue that the summer months and the summer heat have left me with — all of them took their toll. The alarm went off, and I’m not too proud to say it. I fell asleep again.

But something woke me up again, and I don’t know if it’s just the fact that I had set a goal to run four times this week or if something unremembered was tickling my subconscious, but there I was. I knew I had to get up. No cashing in my slacker tokens for a Friday sleep-in. It was time to lace up. (Okay, so I don’t “lace up” anymore since I’ve basically given up on running shoes, but it sounds cooler than saying “time to pull on my goofy-ass foot-gloves.)

And it wasn’t a miraculous run or anything. Pretty much as rough and unfun as any run for the past month has been. I almost don’t remember what comfortable running weather feels like — in my nightmares, it’s always 76 degrees with the relative humidity making it feel like 90. And then I wake up, and that’s the actual temperature. But at least the sky was clear.

And as I entered the first leg of my loop, I remembered — that’s why I wanted to run today. The Perseid meteor shower. I’m a little bit fascinated with the universe and with space in general, so celestial events like this hold a special obsession for me … even if I rarely get to see them. Living just outside Atlanta — one of the most light-polluted areas on the east coast — kinda puts a damper on any of those majestic sights. It would take a near supernova-level blast of light to penetrate the haze of ambient light that hangs in our night sky.

Still, every time a meteor shower rolls through, I cast my eyes skyward in hopes of seeing something, anything — a bit of first-hand evidence that there are bigger things out there, that the cosmos is still pushing and pulling at us. I’ve been disappointed every time. But this time, I saw it. A tiny flicker drew my attention up toward the southeast, and then, while I was trying to figure out if it might have been a meteorite or just a passing plane, it happened.

A shooting star. There one second, gone the next. Streaking across the sky like lightning late for a date. Blazing a glowing white scar in the black sky. Impossibly fast and impossibly bright, and then, just as impossibly gone. It was over so fast, I’m almost not sure I didn’t imagine it.

It was the only meteor that I saw, and if something hadn’t drawn my eye up at just that moment, I would have missed it.

I always get mixed up at things like this. The quiet, ineffable majesty of the cosmos works on me in ways I don’t properly understand. It’s easy to see how people mistake this sort of thing for the divine, how they read the machinations of a deity into these things that seem too awesome, too powerful, too magical for beings such as we to understand. And I could certainly fall into that trap myself, too; intimating meaning where there is none, insisting upon significance in the meaningless collision of a couple specks of galactic dust.

But things don’t always mean things. The universe doesn’t rearrange itself in order to inspire us or shock us or overwhelm us into epiphanies about the meaning of life. I just happened to be in the right place at the right time, looking up at the right part of the sky.

But just because the beauty isn’t designed, doesn’t mean it isn’t there. Just because the falling star wasn’t set in motion for my benefit, doesn’t mean that I can’t benefit from it.

I finally managed to see a meteor — and a doozy, at that — not because it was my time to see one. I managed to see it because I’ve wanted to see one for years, and I keep doing the best I can to try and make it happen. This time, it worked out. Maybe next time the Perseids roll around, it will, too.

And that’s life, innit?

This weekly remotivational post is part of Stream of Consciousness Saturday. Every weekend, I use Linda G. Hill’s prompt to refocus my efforts and evaluate my process, sometimes with productive results.

Trees and Shrooms and the World is Awesome

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I listened to a brilliant podcast the other day. This one: the most recent offering from RadioLab, a podcast I don’t always listen to, but which never fails to fascinate when I do.

In short, it’s about trees, and you read that and you think, wow, trees? Really? Instant snore, and you’d be right, except the podcast isn’t really about trees, it’s about the magic behind trees. About how we (meaning you and me and the rest of the undereducated public) don’t actually know sharknado about trees.

So, with trees, there’s literal magic going on at the microscopic level, which should come as no surprise at all but it surprised the hell out of me. Turns out that trees are only able to become trees because they get a crazy amount of help. In fact, a tree on its own would never grow into a tree at all — it would only grow about knee high. But there’s this fungus that isn’t really what you think of when you think of fungus at all, and that fungus lives basically in all the dirt everywhere, and that fungus synthesizes and assimilates itself into the roots of a tree and turn it into a fargoing superhero.

But that’s not all: this fungus is not content just to piggyback on one tree like a remora swimming beneath a shark for a bit of mutual fin-scratching. This fungus is a hive-mind governmental distribution system. It can literally take excess nutrients from one tree and transfer them to another malnourished tree. It can detect distress signals from one tree and divert resources to other trees in the area. In some cases, it can even decide which trees get to live or die when resources become scarce.

And hearing about that, of course my brain kicked into overdrive a little bit, because the world is one big metaphor, right? Everything is connected, things always mean things. And if trees can only become trees by standing on the figurative shoulders of a literal fungus, then maybe there’s something in that about how everything in my life feeds my writing one way or another, or about how running is the glue that somehow drains me and energizes me all at once.

And those connections could be drawn, probably.

But sometimes it’s better to just let a thing be what it is.

I learned about a nearly miraculous situation which is happening literally underneath everybody’s feet, every second of every day. And I think today, that will be enough.

Are you listening to RadioLab? You should be!