20 mile single run at about 7:20-7:25 pace. It felt easy and relaxed. -------------------------- I will start listing the cumulative mileage during the week for those that care about such things. 51 miles in 3 days. The foot thang was wished away; I mentally told it to leave me alone and so I feel no more tendamithryethysnarkyisis. I feel wonderful again. I just laced my Excalibur flats too tight the other day: that's all. Lesson learned. --------------------------- I wore a heartrate monitor on the first 8 miles of the run today; I'm done with heartrate monitors. They are instantaneous biofeedback that I don't need or want. I held about 140 at a 7:20 pace. Amazing! TADA! The whole run was done with with my shirt off and that black, bro strap makes me pity women runners--big time. Done. Stick a fork in those stupid things. It's Durden-existential time; it's time to grow that spaded, ascetic beard and wear a cheap watch smelling of stale shower soap mixed with crusted sweat; it's time to hit it hard for hours on end--casting fastidious GPS gadgets and that bullshit science into a dustbin belonging to those that can't dream, those that are anchored to science, running tables, lactate ATP giggamawhatty and .00000000038487834 per mile times pi divided by the median heartrate of a sleestack orgy in heat. -------------------------- For every semicolon in a Fitzgerald novel, there are five colons in a Greene novel. The guy liberally flicks them all over his pages like some newly ordained, overzealous Mexican priest on his first Easter morning mass with a holy water wand. Reading them every sentence causes me to pause and think: why? -------------------------- Tonight in K-mart, a man ahead of me in line, chewing on some sort of sandwich, bought a cd called "Fabulous 21s." He was asked by the cashier--himself looking at at the ceiling, refusing eye contact, thinking of other things as he half-gnawed on a pencil--if he wanted to apply for a Sears card. The man buying only the "Fabulous 21s" cd by now had half the sandwich in his mouth and just shook his head in the universal sign of 'no.' The sandwich became an extension of the man's mouth and exaggerated the response--it was a moment arm of rejection; the cd was placed in a plastic bag that would act as the carrier of the profligate "Fabulous 21s" cd for about 10 seconds and then tossed into some trashcan to eventually fill some McWorld hole; it was now my turn. The whole thing was surreal and it is a scene that is being acted out in countless K-marts across the fruited plain at this very moment: Fabulous 21 cd desired, no new credit card thank you, Fabulous 21 cd into plastic bag, plastic bag thrown away--the end. Next. Repeat. -------------------------- The room got quiet for some reason. Mr. Miller, the underpaid and overworked director of a disparate group of kids and volunteer teachers, sat up momentarily from his wheelchair and moved his left hand in his token gesture of thought and focus. Everyone has these silly word-whiskers or mannerisms that, if an observer pays close enough attention to them, provide a snapshot into the very soul of that person. Mr. Miller moved his fingers and tightly gripped the microphone. The kids all went surprisingly quiet. It was the end of his goodbye; it was his exclamation point. His eyebrows moved and knitted themselves into passionate fabric, his left hand formed that same circle that it always did when he spoke to the children--the index finger touching the thumb and the thumb moving back and forth in perfect tempo with his words: "...You see, the sole purpose of life, children, is to use the gifts you have been given for good....for GOOD." He let the echo of the last letter, D, pass across the room and then put the microphone down resting his head against the padding of the wheelchair. What he said took an enormous amount of energy. The kids all stood up, pushed their plastic chairs into their desks and walked out of the room to their classes. The noise, that boisterous normalcy of childhood that fills every school hall, resumed: hands and feet flew; screams and laughs poured back in; kids began to chase one another again. The weight of Mr. Miller's words wouldn't land on them for another 20 years. But they landed on me. I was in the back of the room. My arms had been crossed; I unfolded them, placed one hand on my chin and rubbed my stubble: my silly mannerism, my snapshot of contemplation and deep analysis, my typical pause to let profound things sink in, to let things order themselves into successive layers of guilt, then selfishness, then shame. Shame. Mr. Miller sat in his wheelchair still across the room from me. He was now talking to a small boy and smiling. The kid placed a huge flower arrangment at his feet, hugged him, and ran upstairs to his class. Mr. Miller, still smiling, still rubbing his left fingers together, then wheeled himself in the opposite direction, on the way to the elevator. I continued to rub my chin and stayed there though my class was already well on their way to their classroom. The room was empty and quiet now. I was alone; I was the only one still pinned down by the weight of his words. I still am and always will be.