16 miles out in VF. Easy pace. ------------------------------------ 66 cumulative in 4 days. ----------------------------------------------------------------- 1989. XC dual meet. Clint and I at #1 and #2. I'll write about this race and picture later. ----------------------------------------------------- The bug, my girlfriend, and moi during the glory days. The bug ended up being pushed down First Street by a bunch of pissed off teenagers; the girlfriend dumped me one month into my West Point travails by writing me a Dear John letter which was found by some upper-class Nazis one night and posted on my door--for all to see--like Luther's Theses. In the background, behind the bug, is another VW that I haven't written about yet: my father's 1963 Karmann Ghia. It was once a fine car until one of my brothers decided that he'd tried to ford it across the Sacramento River Delta one night. I got it starting again (my largest mechanical feat), but it was never the same. I'd floor it and go about 1 mph down the street. The car's weight increased by 50 pounds from all the Bondo we slapped on it; my other brother hit a cat one day going 50 mph down our court. We thought the cat was ok and so we turned around and parked the car. The cat wasn't ok. Still, it always was a haphazard, jerry-rigged death trap--so typical of all things in my gene pool; the door hinge was broken and I remember my dad used an Ace Hardware door chain as a substitute. One of my first adrenaline rushes was as a five year-old child, on the way to soccer practice, flying down the road with my dad. I leaned against the door to test the chain out and as I flew out the door, my dad reached over and grabbed the bag of soccer balls that I was clinging to. So you had dad with one hand on the wheel and the other grabbing a mesh bag of balls--me, grabbing the mesh bag, hanging out the door looking at the highway below. It was a chain of desperate struggle and a fight for survival, against those immutable centripetal forces. -------------------------------- The XC picture. This is one of but a handful of running pictures that remain from my high school career. It's a picture of my fellow running companion, Clint, and myself at about mile 1.5 of a 3 mile dual meet. I think we went 1,2 that night and I can't remember who got 1 and who got 2. But I do remember that the course was 3 loops with 1 giant hill that came your way fast. The picture is us crossing the stream in the park before heading back up the beast. I also remember my same coach with the same Grace Slick-Econ. teacher affair. He didn't bother to give us splits or any salient advice; he'd stare down at us behind Blue Blockers and rest his hands on his Bike shorts and say something like: "You guys go out and kick some ass ok?" We were $500 or whatever the school district paid for him to babysit us--that's all. His $500 was earned peering down behind the Blue Blockers saying insipid things or putting his feet up on his P.E.-issue swivel chair in his office with the pictures of Joe Montana on the wall, eating an apple, telling us to just go out and run something like 4 or 5 miles--whatever. I also remember him getting pissed off because we used to sit in the back of the bus and go out the emergency exit in all our meets which would require some government form that had to be routed up the bus driving chain of command and probably threatened subsequent $500 checks that were to be used for hot, philandering, surreptious sex in Benicia's only fancy hotel. Clint was good shit; he motivated the hell out of me and was a better runner than myself. I was a Senior and running only bolstered my over-achieving college application. Running was yet another thing to be used to get into the 5-star school to make lots of money, become an ambassador, backslap people but remain Machiavellian behind the scenes, join the Rotary Club, and raise 2.5 kids on my way to a kick ass retirement package. To him, running was more; it was what it is for me now. It was magical and intangible. Clint would call me up at night and push me to go for a run. Almost always, I'd opt for other things--most of which are not going to be recorded here for a million prurient cyber strangers from India. I regret how I treated Clint; he looked up to me to some degree. He came from a broken family and was a single child growing up in true 1980s latchkey style--in the decade of Michael Douglas' famous "Greed is Good" quote. I was the big brother who never seemed to give a damn. He was used to get me to run a 10:17 2-mile so I could be the captain of the Cross Country team. That was about all. Now he's just a faded picture and a major regret. ------------------------------- F bomb time. I don't ask for much. I have served my country for five years and pay my taxes promptly. I file my taxes by paying for software out of my pocket so that the tidy 9-5 government employees in their beehive hairdoos and gnawed-on pencils sitting behind gray walls with plastic GSA clocks somewhere within the beltline, will leave me the fuck alone. Not so this year. I get some note today from the IRS telling me to substantiate the taxes withheld on my 1040 that was in the fucking W-2s that I provided in the first place. At this very minute you got offshore Ken Lays chillin' with babes and pineapple slices; you got fat worldcom poops somewhere in L.A. wearing Fiddiecent's baseball cap as he drops it down low at the private concert, but the IRS has the time to send me a fucking letter asking for SOMETHING I ALREADY PROVIDED??!!! I also have to put a self-purchased stamp on the return letter as well as cut out a piece of paper with the return address and make it fit inside the envelope.