37 minutes out in Valley Forge. The legs are back on track. I've bounced back after a couple 9:30 bedtimes, candied orange slices, and some mental daba-doo. I do have some residual soreness in the right adductor, but since it's just that now, I can soak it up with my mind in the next few days. It will be gone. If it doesn't go away, it's just the freaking adductor; come race day, the endorphins will conquer it. Good stuff. ------------------------------------ The lower lot at VF today had transformed into some scene out of the movie Charade. Granted, there was no Seine, but there were balloons and folks holding hands out on fresh air constitutionals. Some young guys have a bike rental side business going on in the lot. They were listening to the Doors while throwing thousands of bike helmets from a large trailer into the back of a rusty pickup truck. Jim Morrison's deep voice, followed by the characteristic long organ solos of all Doors songs, reverberated off the rock walls and shot up into the clear blue sky on their way to reunite with the Lizard King atop his cloudy aerie. A group of seniors from a local rest home were picnicking within earshot of all this. Gray-haired men in wheelchairs sitting in front of picnic tables stuffed neatly trimmed peanut butter and jelly sandwiches into their mouths. Their handler, an East African with a continuous smile, would occasionally roll the men to the bathroom and back. He smiled; they frowned and did more stuffing. What a shame. Funny how it's the smiling Africans that wipe our asses and feed us neatly trimmed sandwiches when we get old. The rest of the country is too busy with maximizing margin on Powerpoint charts and getting disgustingly rich, to suck up the golden years dancing and buying shit for themselves while procreating little families to do it all over again. The families are too busy to care for the parents because they need to get rich and dance and buy cool shit themselves. The older parents get tucked into neat, piss-smelling spaces at $10,000 a month where they eat at little picnics and wither under the hands of smiling Africans who get paid $2 an hour to wheel them out in front of the impatient, hoarding kids during the zoo's visiting hours and back and forth to the bathroom. Retta, my Ethiopian friend from the Westchester Track Club and a sub 2:20 marathoner, plays a vital role in this chain. Instead of wheeling people around though, he smiles and swabs the floors at the rest home in the middle of the night for pittance. ------------------------------ Proving things is damn near impossible sometimes--just ask the prosecuting attorneys of the OJ or Michael Jackson cases. But correlating the recent receipt of dumpster-sized volumes of spam delivered to the only email address link around these parts, with recent battles, makes me pretty damn suspicious. ------------------------------ Thoughts on pi, the golden rectangle, and the sun dance. I love books and TV shows that discuss historical connections or similarities across cultures. One of my Social Science teachers used to wheel in a VCR and make us watch a show called Connections, where a hyperactive Englishman with an afro (in the 70s he had one) runs all over the fucking place, speaking at 100mph, going into how Henry VIII's pubic hair, found under Anne Boleyin's pillow in the Tower of London, led to us putting a man on the moon. So here's some things that fascinate me: 1. Bows and arrows. All civilizations used bows and arrows. 2. Pyramids and the stars. Ancient civilizations like the Egyptian and the Mayan both built pyramids and both nailed the movement of the stars down cold. 3. The golden rectangle. See here. Craziness. 4. Suffering and rites of passage. From the Native American sun dance with its grisly wood skewers, to 14th Century Christian flagellants with their leathern scourges, to ongoing centuries of Shiites marking the day of Ashura with their bloody zanjeers, to those of us today not wearing nip guards with a cotton tee shirt at a cold, February marathon...rites of passage....blood and pain....leads to enlightenment....leads to the pillow in the Tower of London...leads to THE MAN ON THE MOON! BRILLIANT! --------------------- I left off all references to David Blaine and his bubble and Hesse's Siddhartha with the falling stone in that last essay because it all burst in front of a million of us on PRIME TIME. Actually, his fake SEAL team workout was the dead giveaway that magic Buddhaman wasn't going to make it. Naturally, if he made it, I'd have a different take on the whole thing--that's how I roll. -------------- I got my greasy palms on RHCP's Stadium Arcadium today. "Dani California" kicks the most ass so far. I listened to it today while running and thought about the video for Under the Bridge. This video is the vendetta taper incarnate. During the vendetta taper you need to run like Anthony Keidis does, in your black Levis, with your long hair flowing and your Indian tattoo on full display, with an atomic bomb exploding in the background. You need to be the guitarist with his Nepalese sherpa hat, pickin' and chillin'. You need to stand in front of a mirror and flex your canyons making exaggerated daba-booba hand movements. This is the V is for vendetta taper anthem, where you think about dark days and cold nights, where you remember steaming breath, 20 milers, and 3 layers of race shirts in minus 10 temps, fueled by anger....egged on, remembering stupid people with no patience who give you no hope....who close the door of their warm, elitist house on you and return back to counting their money. Good shit, man.