Doktor Shoveoffngo

7 miles in 48:35 (6:56). I was boxed in today from a childcare perspective and so I stuck this run in tonight on the treadmill. Tomorrow, I'm going Caveman. ~Fac Fortia et Patere ---------------------------------------- There comes a point in time when we realize that the minutes of our precious life aren't worth wasting on a book that isn't catching fire. I am 34 and I have officially reached this point. No more games. I have to endure long runs; I don't have to endure dusty books. I am therefore putting down Nabokov's Speak, Memory about 50 pages into it. The thing, while having moments of vivid imagery, is akin to Sundays spent with my host parents in Switzerland. They used to get in their car and drive to various shifty friends of theirs: peddlers of illegally smuggled flora and fauna from the Florida Everglades*. Not really knowing what to do with me, they'd throw me into the back of the car and hand me a Toblerone bar to keep me quiet. We'd then show up at some guy's house. This guy would meet us at the door looking like a cross between John Muir and Nabokov: peering down from behind thin spectacles and pulling at a long, flowing beard. He'd usher us inside and then we'd sit in his dusty parlor and sip his high-octane espressos. After 30 minutes of pleasantries, Jurg, my host father, would reach into his shirt pocket and pull out his standard pack of unfiltered Gauloise death sticks and start dragging on them, exhaling cancer, chasing it all with cupfuls of that hair-raising coffee. I'd just sit in the corner and chew on my chocolate bar wondering why the hell I got stuck with these people and sent to the flattest, most boring part of Switzerland for a year on my own. I'd listen and then stare out the window, watching the sun make its migration across the sky. Four hours into it, I'd excuse myself to the bathroom and piss away the coffee which was symbolic of the pissing away of my youth. Once Jurg was right wired, he'd suggest that we move into another parlor room where everyone would get drunk on cheap house wine (always a deep red) and nibble on Maiskolbchens (always too cold and too freaky looking). The conversations were fast in that guttural-yet rhythmic Swiss-German dialect about this orchid or that. Everything was dry, uninteresting and typically Swiss: impossibly precise, leaving nothing to the imagination--boring. Temperatures of such and such yielded this flowering plant at this time of the year. Water treated with whatever must be mixed with .05 ml of Shagenhogenstein (don't look it up) and then gingerly dropped in with a dropper at an angle of 30-degrees give or take one degree. The men in the room would sip their wine, their faces turning flush, their wiry fingers, continually pushing their glasses up to their noses during all the dramatic pauses. During the pauses, they'd look at each other as if all of them were but one elusive sentence away from turning the world into one giant orchid. The conversations never turned to smuggling, which is a damn shame because just to hear these jacked-up Swiss men use secretive German nouns would be well worth the tortue. I suppose those nefarious affairs were handled in the back room of the greenhouse while the wives and I were diverted by being forced to stare at thousands of photos of the Florida Everglades and every possible species contained therein. I'd put my hands behind my back and mutter the same, forced, High German pleasantries again and again: broken record. It's such a Teutonic thing to put your hands behind your back. I learned that over there. When all else fails, put your damn hands behind your back and you will calm the room down; you will become an intellectual, one of them. Us Americans don't put our hands behind our backs. We are always in motion, in between breaking something or pointing at something. We got to be running the show not admiring it. Noch mehr Maiskolbchens? Nein, danke. Sehr schoen! Toll! Super! Super Wunderbar! Ach! Das ist wirklich sehr, sehr schoen! Wo haben Sie diese Blume gefundet? Flordia? Nein! So this was Nabokov's life as he laid it out in his autobiography and I don't care to be a further party to the madness. By page 50, I was in his Slavic parlor and he was telling me about his mom--a zany, progressive, bluestocking--and her study of various species of edible mushrooms. He did all this using untranslated Latin, French, and Russian as well as 10-cent English words like 'Baconian acrostics.' I don't care, Vladimir. It's dusty, boring, pedantic drivel. Unlike Switzerland, I can get up from my seat in the middle of this uninteresting conversation and show the dinner guests as well as its host, Herr Nabokov and his butterfly collection, my middle finger. Time to move on to something that moves faster than a flittering butterfly on a warm Russian summer's day. Time to fall into the chasms of the Khumbu Icefall and leave Mount James Joyce for some other slower period of my life. ---------------------------------------- From the turd-for-a-quote files (money grubber section): Exhibit A: "....races are no longer final exams--they are parties to be thrown to celebrate the completion of our training." ~John "The Penguin" Bingham Exhibit B: "When people insert walk breaks early enough and often enough in the marathon, I've seen an average 13-minute improvement." ~Jeff Galloway** ----------------------------------------- *This ragtag army of Swiss 'conservationists' reminded me of that radical environmentalist group in the flim Twelve Monkeys. I always got the feeling that these enlightened people were going to set up their own Everglades commune somewhere west of Zuerich. I thought about them this way: since many Americans, specifically Floridians are backwards lards who can't spell the words 'recycle' or 'green' it was up to them, the Swiss ecosuperheroes, to pretty much haul the Everglades--one endangered orchid and snake at a time in special, Pablo Escobaresque smuggling suitcases--to a place where it would all be safe from the uncultured, paving barbarians. **Empirical data located here.