14 miles --easy pace (7:30s) out in VF. ------------------------------------------ My Manichean Monde. The comments are on a roll. Let's keep it up. Partial list below. Bad guys: Skicrackers and self-pitying back-of-the-packers, senile, child-hating condo association misanthropes and American Idol-watching-mopes, inept, anti-social running store businessmen and emoticon-spewing cattle with a profound lack of ken, cowards and shirkers, Petraeus and General Douglas Haig, New Years swish-swish and cars hauling ass to buy a singing santas, super size slurpers and People Magazine poopers, greedy Penguins and snakeoil salesmen--both peddling garbage, running expo hawkers and Grace Slick librarian wastoids, innocence-corrupting adults and stale realists, Shaq's autobiography and the new, dumbed-down version of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, 99% of the American entertainment industry and 100% of anything on TV between the hours of 11am-3pm (weekdays), The View and Star Jones, The show Friends and all the actors from the show Friends, Jack Johnson and Dave Matthews, Anderson Cooper (YO, AC-360 babeee) and the Foxnewsbabemachine, Foxnews video game sound effects and the IBM Fishkill rec. center, Simon and Gary Gygax, Jane Austen and her 1000 pages of painted dandies in pantaloons (that I haven't read but care not to)..... Good guys/good things: Panda bears and Pandu, flowers and painted clowns, beautiful daughters and dogs, Bill Rodgers and Brian Sell, mountain climbers and explorers, Shackleton and Stanley, Masters and Van der Post, mom and dad, brothers and sister, World War 1 trench lions and forgotten Marines clearing Baghdad houses -- both led by career-minded donkeys, giant used bookstores with endless library discards for $1(discarded by Grace Slick wastoids in favor of Shaq's autobiography), C.S. Lewis and Tolkien but also Graves and Sassoon, bitter disillusionment with power and people fighting against the odds, Team Cutters, Seinfeld repeats, Arrested Development and most other things directed by Ron Howard, Wes Anderson and Bill Murray, all of Bill Murray's characters in all of Wes Anderson's films, complex people with onion-like conflicting layers of personality and people that question things instead of grazing in the field of life, followers of Aristotle and Socrates, short running shorts and Brooks T-4s, moaning Martin Gore and jaded crooning Morrissey, Fitzgerald and Twain, Jack London and Graham Greene .... Regards to this being a sermon, you're damn straight it's one. Feel free to stand up and leave the church of the Holy Manichean monde whenever you damn well please. That's right, you, leave as you please. Go! Now! Reduce my bloglines.com subscriptions to manageable levels, lighten my comment-approval responsibilities, help me deconstruct this soapbox back to a gray screen with a textbox. Better yet, use all your time spent reading this garbage and create your own Manichean world, display it on your blog and seek to increase bloglines.com subscriptions while driving up the price of your blogshares. Or, use the time to meticulously check your statistics every 3 seconds to make you feel as though you are indeed making a kick-ass mark on this world as the seconds pass and the days grow shorter, as you move one step closer to a life of mediocrity and of nights watching Simon chastize the beautiful person out to sing their way into a large-size cemetery plot. Best of all, go running. Bye-Bye. ------------------------- Tomorrow, this. The best part of this story is that I'm buying some XC spikes to run it in due to all the rain last night as well as my fear of getting injured on the single-track trails. I am buying the spikes from a former All-American who has recently opened a local running store. I've been lucky enough to run with him on a couple occasions and I will try to give him all the business I can. I've never owned XC spikes before and so I just told him to pick something out: whatever. There was a pregnant pause on the other end of the phone but it was only 3 seconds pregnant. The third trimester came when I asked him if the XC spikes came with the spikes already in the shoes or if I had to buy the spikes and the wrench-thing seperately.