--Caveat, I made liberal use of the subject matter in the following cattle show for artistic effect and to prove a point. The prisoner and the "V" bomb. There's a great book out there by a man that led an unbelievable life --The Prisoner and the Bomb. In summary, it is about a man who survives a Japanese prisoner of war camp and then uses his experience and knowledge of the Japanese culture to substantiate, through his experience, the dropping of the atomic bomb. Why? The Japanese worship the sun. The militaristic, jack-booted demons running WW2 Japan would never have surrendered because Japan had never lost a war in its recorded history and had never been invaded. Sadly, dropping a bomb imitating and resembling the sun on a country that worshiped the sun was the only thing that would force Japan to surrender and prevent Operation Olympic (the mainland invasion of Japan) which would have unquestionably led to more Japanese deaths (and Allied as well). There, I just did a horrible job summarizing a wonderful, and out of print book by a man that did more with the fingernail shaving of his cuticle than I will do in my whole life. What the hell does this have to do with running? Allow me yet one more analogy. Two minutes into my four mile workout on the work treadmill, I was shackled to a video torture session straight out of a Van der Post's prison. A woman hopped up onto the adjacent treadmill and turned on a show called, "The View" at decibel level 99. Besides that, she made sure the closed capturing was on. For the next 30 minutes, I was stuck watching the biggest load of American cattle food served across all daytime programming. I felt like I had woken up from a bad dream, walked downstairs hoping to make myself a bowl of cheerios and mistakenly entered a kitchen that wasn't mine. The kitchen was designed to not look exactly like the average audience's sitting in their trailers eating cheetos and smacking their unplanned waste-of-earth's-resources rugrats into submission. The women sit at the counter and sip their chai-lattes passing judgment on such intellectually-stimulating subjects as whether or not Brad and Jen had sex more than once a day. June Cleaver ain't there, but neither is Margaret Sanger. Instead, what we got is the evolutionary trainwreck of model lady-like behavior. Brad and Jen's coital relations becomes passe' and the ladies move themselves to a $20,000 sofa and recline to further discuss gratuitous subjects that the lost runner scratching his ass trying to find a bowl of cheerios in the wrong kitchen doesn't want to hear. Unmentionable subjects come to the fore. Packing for business trips lead to what to bring on business trips lead to giggles behind $80 coffee mugs and mentions of clandestine visits to questionable websites to find the best tickle. Anonymous ordering techniques are discussed, the Enola Gay hovers, and I do a double take as I read the captioning below the screen seeing the bright pixels of the word light up the gym. The 'V' bomb is dropped. I can't escape my prison camp. I resort to a technique not offered to Laurens. I find 4 songs on my ipod to listen to at the highest possible volume. These guys come on during interval workouts done alone. They are my reaction to the bomb. I'm not surrendering. Here they are: 1. Pantera's -Straight Hate 2. Pantera's -Walk 3. Pantera's - I'm Broken 4. NIN's - You Know What You Are The lyrics scream. The headphones shake. The F bombs reply to the V bombs and the woman next to me laughing at the effects of the v-bomb in the kitchen looks at me in disgust as she hears the f-bombs coming from the guy who turned up his treadmill to 11.0 mph to get the fuck out of there. ----------- All that being said, I am ready to go. I feel pumped and recovered for this thing. I'm going to take tomorrow off and try to convince my daughter to run the kid's race. She refuses to wear running shoes and socks so she'll be clapping along in 30 degree temps with Bjorndal clogs. Stubborn and illogical. Now that's my girl. --------------- Now that we skipped fall and went straight to winter, I see that my running caps are packed away in some warehouse in Connecticut. So I went back to Grand Theft Auto-land to visit the New Balance store. The dollar store which usually supplies my gloves and socks did not have running caps, so I said I'd treat myself to a 500% marked-up hat at the New Balance store. I envisioned a huge store in a huge mall with huge people with huge dreams of weight loss in their head being led around by sleek, shifty runners sporting soul patches and making liberal use of the word "like" trying to convince the huge people to buy 500% marked-up shoes with all the bells and whistles that they will leave in their huge closet in their huge house . Instead, I entered a dark store about the size of a grocery rack in a convenience store. I caught the sales kid lifting up his shirt in the mirror checking out his 0% fat iliac crest. The movie "Dazed and Confused" was on the monitor above him. He saw me, dropped his shirt, and embarrassingly asked me how he could help me. I felt like a father who had just caught his son in the tub of vaseline, muttered "hat," picked the first thing off the shelf and walked the hell out of there. They need to send Khannouchi or Downin there to go clean house. The store sucks and is a damn blight on an otherwise fine, narcissistic shopping mall.