Tag: atlanta

The Power of Repetition Compels You (To Buy Liquor, Apparently)

PavowskiLeave a comment

We drove out to beautiful Tybee Island yesterday, and while there’s a lot to be said about that on a variety of topics, one thing really struck me funny on the trip.

Around exit 212 heading out of Atlanta, I noticed a series of billboards. Billboards advertising a liquor store.

These billboards didn’t do anything unusual as far as billboards go. In fact, they couldn’t have been more straightforward. “Liquor Store, exit 212,” they advertised. “Liquor Store, just ahead,” they proclaimed. “Liquor Store, just two miles” they slavered.

No suggestive pictures of women. No mouth-porn of frosty beers or bottles dripping with icy condensation. No clever wordplay.

The unique thing was, there were ten of these billboards. (That I counted.)

Ten is a lot, and it’s doubly a lot when they occur within a space of about five miles, and when their sheer number and volume overpowers every other ad in the area. Ten is enough for me to think, that’s a heck of a lot of billboards, maybe I should count them. Ten is enough to make you wonder if you’ve driven out of the universe you know and into an alternate reality wherein instead of a series of fast-food restaurants and dubious tourist attractions and real-estate salespersons, the only thing a town has to offer is a liquor store.

Needless to say, by the time we got to exit 212, the only thing on my mind was this liquor store. How big was it? Did they offer fancy specials, like a free beer cozy with purchase of a carton of imported tequila (worm included)?

But we didn’t go.

Because, really, is one liquor store not, more or less, like another? And even if one store really is unique, is it worth making a special stop for? And even if it is worth making a special stop for, am I really going to make that stop when I have my kids and family with me in the car? Of course not. But the fact is, I wasn’t going to stop even if I was driving by myself. Because a liquor store is one of those need-based excursions (and yeah, I’m not going to get into the complications of saying “need-based” when alcohol is clearly not a need of any sort). You need booze, you go to the store. Nobody goes to the liquor store to schmooze around and shoot the breeze.

Do they?

So it left me wondering. Billboard space on I-75 is not cheap; investing in even a single billboard is a pretty major expenditure, especially for a locally-owned business. Ten (or more) billboards is obviously even more of an investment.

So how much revenue does a billboard for a liquor store generate?

How much revenue do ten billboards generate?

How does the owner of a business make the decision to buy out ten billboards, rather than, say, five? Or seven? Or two?

All that repetition definitely made their store the focus of my thinking, but it didn’t make me pull over and visit, which is ostensibly the purpose of a billboard.

I couldn’t help but wonder whether all those ads — or at least nine of them — were totally misplaced.

And that got me thinking about writing, though I can’t really answer my own question in any useful way today, because I’m a little too sun-baked to really noodle on this stuff (all I can do is idly muse, my thoughts drifting this way and that like a lazy ocean breeze, not unlike the one drifting past our balcony at the moment).

How much can you repeat yourself before you turn an audience off?

First Fall Run

Pavowski2 Comments

It’s the first day of Autumn, and that’s awesome for a runner like me.

Let’s get one thing clear.  I’m not a fair-weather runner.  I say that with all respect and love for the fair-weathers out there — I was one, too, once.  I know that life.  You ponder running in the summer when it’s too darn hot and you say, “well, when the weather cools off a little bit and it doesn’t feel quite so much like my skin is actually boiling off of my body, maybe then I’ll get out and run.”  Or maybe you made the old standby resolution at New Year’s when it was colder than my black, black heart outside and realized that perhaps the forbidding temperatures in the single digits and teens weren’t quite your speed and that, perhaps, April was in fact a much better time to start the whole running thing.

I get it.  But I can’t live that way anymore.

Something happens when you push past the three mile mark in running.  Up until that point, you consider yourself a jogger, maybe, or a sprinter, or maybe somebody who does a little running on the weekends or as part of a bigger exercise regimen, but past 5k it becomes serious.  The training wheels come off.  The drudgery of your bi-daily run has been replaced by some snarling, feral need to run.  There’s no putting it off til April or October.

No, the all-weather, all-season runner knows that he (or she, obvs) will continue to run whether it’s hot enough to literally bake cookies in your buttcrack or cold enough to make buttcrack ice cream.  The first hot days arrive in May and I think, with all the grim inevitability of that deep-voiced guy from the movie previews, it begins.  The last balmy night in November passes and I know that Winter is coming.

The temperature in the daytime climbs steadily from seventy, to eighty, to ninety, and still we’re out there.  The clever ones run before dawn or after dusk, but the lunatics are out there in the full light of day, roasting alive, logging their miles and waiting for September.  But even the nightcrawlers begin to suffer in Summer.  The humidity dragon sneaks in through the door you left open and makes your seventy-degree morning feel like ninety, sees you back at the house following a quick three miles looking as if you’ve just swum the English Channel.  The washing machine gets a workout like it’s never known.  Your significant other turns up her nose when you come in for a post-run smooch.  (Okay, maybe she does that year round, but in the summer, you can identify.)  You start to hate running again.

But today it’s September 23rd, and that means Fall is here, and Winter is coming.  And here in Atlanta, boy, does it feel like it.  This morning it was a delightful 57 degrees, cool enough to put a chill in your fingertips before you get warm from the exertion, but not so cool you even have to think about long sleeves or gloves or any of the mess that comes when the temperature really starts to drop.  Cool enough to slip a windbreaker on the sprout as I strapped him into the stroller with me (yeah, he wakes up at 5:15 now to go run with me… it’s a problem).  Cool enough to make you feel alive with the touch of Autumn and pumpkins and all that other stuff that fills the roughly three weeks before Winter sets in.

If there’s a perfect temperature for running, it may well be 57 degrees.  After months and months of cooking inside my skin just from stepping out the door for a run, 57 degrees feels like an ice bath after a sunburn.  A cool drink of water after a mouthful of habanero salsa.

I only wish the fall weather would last longer, but as any Atlanta resident knows, we get maybe three weeks of it before the bottom drops out.  Time to suit up and get out there.

There Are Good Runs, and Then There Are Exceptional Runs

PavowskiLeave a comment

This summer has been a bit of a running renaissance for me.

I got my latest start in running a little over two years ago, flew a bit too close to the sun back in January, crashed and burned at the beginning of the year and have been clawing my way back, clutching at gnarled roots and jagged cliffsides ever since.  Today, I went for my first “relaxed” 10k run in more than a while, and I’m happy to say that I feel damn good afterward.  But it’s not the run I want to talk about.  Er, rather, it’s not the distance.

In trying to get myself out of the injured dumps, I’ve been running this summer with a mind toward becoming more complete: running more trails, especially, but also varying my workouts and working to stay healthy rather than just trying to spin the wheels on the odometer.  I think it’s paying off, but more importantly, I think I’m really getting to enjoy my runs again, rather than facing each one with the fear that the next step is going to injure me again and set me back for a couple months.

This morning found me on the Atlanta Beltline, a series of paved “trails” that wend through and around downtown Atlanta.  It’s been much-touted by colleagues of mine and runners I know in the area, but is one of those things I just hadn’t gotten around to doing (man, that’s a long list).  Mainly I’ve avoided it because it doesn’t jive with my minimalist philosophy of running to drive half an hour just to go on a leisurely run; I prefer to just step out the door and go.  But a facebook group of local runners scheduled the event for this morning; said group is composed of some folks I know from high school and some others I’ve not met yet, so it seemed a good time.

Just by the by, does anybody else have horrible luck when signing up for casual “events” on facebook?  I’ve tried this one or two other times and everybody seems to bail at the last minute.  You see where this is going.  I pull up to the meeting spot at five minutes til the start time and I see a big smiling crowd of zero people.  Yep, ten people signed up as “definitely going” and I was the only one.  Except for my pal from high school, J.  He hops out of his car and hits me with a warm grin and a hearty handshake and a “great to see you.”  We chat for a few minutes about how pitiful it is that nobody else has slogged their butts out of bed on a Saturday (seriously, what are you doing that you can’t get up at 5:45 to go for a run??), then, after allowing enough time for any reasonable latecomers to show up, we’re off.

We set an easy pace — J’s a lot faster than me, but he’s logged a lot of miles this week and wants to relax a bit, and I’m a bit jangly over attempting my first six-miler since a race I ran (and probably overran, to be honest) a month ago.  And my first six-miler ever in my Vibrams, for that matter.

A lot of people, when recounting their runs, like to give a breakdown of each mile, the highs and lows, the hills and the hurts, but that seems silly to me.  I could no more recount each moment of a good run — let alone a good long run — than recount every bite of my breakfast this morning, and it wouldn’t be good reading besides.  (Now, whether the alternative makes for good reading…)

First, a review of the trail.  The Beltline is a very long series of trails, I found out, but we ran a stretch of it from Piedmont Park East over to Ponce de Leon, then doubled back and took a tour of Piedmont Park.  The line is a very well kept, spacious jaunt through residential areas and commercial developments, under overpasses and through great sweeping vistas of the Atlanta skyline.  Nearly every overpass or concrete wall is adorned with the sort of tasteful graffiti that almost feels like an art exhibit.  And the line is so popular that it’s absolutely bursting with runners, bikers, walkers, rollerbladers.  We must have passed or been passed by a hundred people or more in our four miles on the line.  I’m sure that’s nothing new to regulars in the area, but for a guy like me who runs out in the burbs and, on a good day, glimpses maybe three or four other runners in my heavily trafficked zones (none at all otherwise), it was a welcome sight.  Made me feel less like a lunatic on an island and a little more like maybe a guy in a bodysuit at a convention.  Still not totally normal, but at least at home among the other freaks.

Then, the fact that I was running with a guy I’ve not spoken to in any meaningful capacity for oh, about fifteen years (please kill me).  We ruminated a bit about running, a bit about life, a lot about people and marriage and kids and pop music and only a little bit about work, with the kind of easy, unhurried conversation that would have been impossible to achieve otherwise.  You bump into somebody in line at the DMV or at the grocery store, and he’s got someplace he’d rather be, something he’d rather be doing, and he doesn’t want to waste time getting there and doing it.  You settle in for an easy six miles and you find there’s no need to rush things, you let the talk drift where it will.

To top it off, as we hit the turnaround and headed back for the trailhead, I look up and see my young Padawan cruising toward us.  This is a guy who saw me start running and lose thirty pounds two years ago, then took up running himself and has since lost in the neighborhood of one hundred pounds.  He now runs races about every other weekend and is a big contributor and participant with running groups in Atlanta.  Unfortunately, he lives on the opposite side of town from me, so we’ve never actually had a run together — and we didn’t today, because he was hustling along, late for a meeting with his running group.  Still, seeing him in action was just another shot of good vibes on an already good morning.

An hour passed faster than it had any right to.  The run finished, we headed back to our cars and agreed to try and meet up again soon.  I like to think it was the sort of agreement we’ll follow through on — it’s hard to lie and be phony after you’ve just run six miles — but whether we do or not, I’m thankful for the time we had today.  Running is one of those things that binds people together in ways that don’t even make sense a lot of the time, and it certainly brought J and me together today.  I’m one of those hippy-dippy people that thinks there is no such thing as a bad run; that every time you lace up you accomplish something.  But even if there are no bad runs, certainly some runs are better than others.

Today’s was exceptional.