We're having spaghetti tonight. I don't even have tortillas.

 

I was but an idealistic little whelp when I failed to vote in 2000. My mother, dear she is, was going to pick me up at college and drive me to the polling place, then back again, so I could vote. All because I couldn’t get my shit together enough to apply for an absentee ballot, yet I was insistent on voting in my first ever election. 

I was frustrated and crestfallen when mom's 1990 Honda Civic ran into difficulties and neither she nor I got the chance to vote. Just as well, as Ralph Nader and the Green Party failed to reach their minimum percentage which was critical and would have allowed them to... something. I don't know. It was do or die at the time but I barely remember it now.

Four years later I had grown out of the "both sides bad/lesser of two evils" equivocation used to justify so much apathy. Only cowards remain eternally cynical, and I was nothing but heart half gone at the bar with my crestfallen friends in slurred and slack disbelief that so many could be so foolish as to give that warmongering global embarrassment four more years.

2008 felt far less dire, and instead of fear I watched with hope as the results came in. But, as hope is a far fuzzier key to the table of memory, I have no clue what I was doing that evening. Likely a burrito was involved. I remember how I resonated with joy and appreciation at the historic moment I participated in.

In 2012 I was exhausted and busy, putting a roof onto our home in the hours before I'd go to work for my second-shift factory job. In my rush I'd managed to split my pants, and having lost track of time I had to rush off to vote with some breezy britches. But I also don't remember much from the evening. Likely a gin and tonic was involved.

2016 was a different beast altogether. I clung to a balance that required holding disbelief that such an obvious fraud could win and horror at the prospect that he could. I remember well how I sat on the floor at a gathering in a friend's house, all of us bringing snacks and drinks while we watched the results. It was still light out when the first unexpected state fell red. Was it New Hampshire? No. North Carolina. I knew everything was about to go sideways. One of the other guests spoke of firewalls and kept shifting the goalposts of hope in his heart. Our hosts, a gay couple, visibly shaken, opined over what would happen to their marriage? My partner and I, we left early. 

I didn't sleep for hours into the night, clinging to my phone as if the next time I checked it I would realize that I'd just hit my head. I was in the hospital. This was all a bad dream. At work the next day someone brought in victory donuts. I refused to partake on principal. I started what would be a four-year habit of checking the news constantly. What would our new world look like? How bad could things get?

I'm struck today at how traumatic that night was. How deeply I've internalized this lingering uncertainty and dread. Nearly everything in my life has changed since then, mostly for the better, yet I feel both tender and numb from what our nation has been and is going through. It has changed me, and likely most of us, in a deep and hard to articulate way.

It's nearly six in the evening, not yet time to even fret over returns. My household voted weeks ago. At the moment I'm at the mercy of inertia. I pass beads on a string one by one through my fingers. I check the news again. I remind myself that dread is grief borrowed from a possible future. I don't feel the same fear as 2016. The horrors are no longer unknown. In that, I find a strange comfort, at least.

Yet I am restless and wary of hope. And fuck if I don't want a burrito right now.

Absurdities in Dream, No. 2

 I awoke angrily from a dream in which tonight's presidential debate was going to be moderated by Al and Peg Bundy. Not from the show as they were, but as they would be now had they aged. I was furious about how lightly the survival of our democracy was being taken. 

But, being awake, I realized I would absolutely watch that. I also was compelled to search to make sure it wasn't actually true.

They Face the Storm with Sticks all Raised and Voices Hoarse

What happened to September?

If there’s balance to be had, I’m not sure where to find it. Is balance a privilege? 

Three weeks ago I felt called and compelled. This is the most important election of my life. I fear it may be the last legitimate presidential election of my life, depending on how things shake out. I decided to put my money where my mouth is. I decided to volunteer for Biden/Harris. They said their most valuable/needed area was phone calls so I signed up for that. 

Even though I hate phone calls. 

I took the training. I was nervous and excited. Stick to the script, they say, it’s tested and proven. You’ll get a lot of hang ups and a handful of hostile calls. That goes with the territory, they say. And though I wasn’t excited at the task, for the first time in over half a year I didn’t feel helpless. I had a touch of control. The smallest mote of influence. 

I swear the first ten hung up on me just based on my voice alone. Crack? Meth? Adrenaline. I took several breaths and tried to slow down, but the auto-dialer keeps them coming, one after the other, only seconds between calls. Some were good. Most were short. The script was impossible to stick to. The impatience of a person answering the call of a stranger is the most potent of bouillons, salt palpable on your tongue passed up the waves and wires by the time they’ve asked “who’s this?” The scrip is paragraphs. People want keywords. 

I can’t say it was a negative experience but I left it shaky and sweating and I’ve struggled to motivate myself to do it again. I don’t feel that I was the best fit for that particular job, more likely to dissuade than persuade. 

And with that went the momentary sense of control. 

It felt so good, those few days that I was going to drop my shoulder, straighten my back, dig in, and push. 

So, in chase, I write a bit, but what to write about that isn’t the dire throes of democracy on the brink of global climate collapse? And how to make that a good book or poem? 

I play a video game and I smile a while, but before long the smell of kids in cages sneaks in. I play some music but by song three everything is punk rock broke string and blister bleeding. 

I sit with my family and feel their warmth and love, but the evening sets in and soon I want the biggest stick I can wield to protect them. 

From what? 

We all feel the pressure drop. We all feel the unease in the air. So many of us waving our sticks in the air, not knowing which way the wind is about to bend but ain’t raising your arm in holler better than nothin’? 

My phone rings ten times a day. 

I don’t recognize the number. 

They never leave a message. 

I never pick up.

Probationary

Ninety days.

Three months to determine if I am a right fit for this position. Today finished my first week at my first job in tech. Each day I shadowed the senior DBA and watched as they wove together queries and joined and altered and if begin and end and… and…

I remember when we first covered databases in bootcamp. I was so excited. “It’s like Excel, with extra steps,” I beamed. In group projects I always volunteered to set up our databases and was usually in charge of any scaffolding we had to do. One recruiter asked about my hobbies. Photography. Recording music. Writing. They laughed. “Are you sure you’re not a front-end guy? You sound like a front-end guy.”

Yet here I sit to play among the tables. Some day. But not today. Turns out SQL is Excel with extra, extra, steps. I felt fairly-well prepared by bootcamp. I knew my crud functions. I knew my UPDATE and DROP and INSERT INTO. But this week I was quite humbled. If bootcamp introduced me to cooking and taught me how to make a grilled cheese sandwich, I’ve just been hired to train as a sous chef in a busy kitchen.

Which is not to say bootcamp didn’t prepare me, or that I foisted myself upon them with false promises. This employer knew my skillset and has hired fresh grads from this specific bootcamp before. And, after this first week, I’m all the more grateful to them for being willing to invest the time and money necessary to train someone up.

Eighty-five more days. I’ve got my requisite 900 page book on SQL server administration that I’m four chapters into. Drier than a slice of bread topped with salt and that desiccate packet that’s in the bottom of your junk drawer. Seriously, why is that thing in there? What are you going to use it for? I’ve got my bookmarks to the documentation and to tutorials. I’ve got a study plan and a notebook. And I’ve got eighty-five more days to prove to this company that they didn’t make the wrong decision.

I’m nervous. But, I hope, the right amount of nervous. Nervous enough to keep me motivated. Scared not of failure, but of the implications of searching for another entry level job after clearly failing out of the first one and in this climate to boot.

It’ll be a busy eighty-five days. It was a busy 25 days of job searching and networking after bootcamp. It was a busy 75 days of bootcamp. But it will be worth it, to have started a new career in such a short amount of time. Maybe my perspective on this journey will help others. Maybe it will be a nice memory to look back on some years from now. Maybe it will prove an excellent distraction as we careen towards the most important election in our lifetimes.

Ahem.

What was I saying?

Oh, yes.

Eighty-four days.

Big Day

Today, Oct. 26, I finished the rough draft of a novel I've been working on intermittently since the summer of '09. The word count comes out to somewhere between 65,000 and 68,000, depending on the software.

This is exciting for me because it's the culmination of a lot of hard work. It's also the second story I've ever actually seen through to completion. The first, which I was also excited about and proud of, was a rough draft of a short story that I wrote over a week in August while taking a break from the novel.

I won't say what it's about. To anyone. Even the mistress.

I'll tell you this though. There is still a lot of work to be done. What's going to happen now is I'm going to spell check it, format it nice and double space it, print it out, put it in a binder, and put that binder on a shelf for another day.

After some time passes, I'll come back to it, read through it, and take lots of notes about things I like, things I hate, and things to change.

Then I'll prop that bidner up on my desk and I'll re-write the whole story.

Then I'll print that out, set it on a shelf. Sometime later, I'll re-read that version, make notes, then prop that binder up and make those changes.

Then, maybe, if I'm lucky and I work very hard, I'll have something worth showing someone.

Until then though, I'll just be proud of doing something that just a couple years ago I would have assumed I'd never do.

Oh, also, I might have forgot to mention:
I didn't get into any schools so the mistress and I quit our jobs and moved in with her dad out in the country where someday she might get some land that we hope to build a house on, deep in the woods, where we can keep bees and raise chickens and goats and garden and just kinda be ourselves but in the meantime we're both broke and working part-time jobs and generally questioning the wisdom of moving in with a man who eats one meal a day that consists of a can of ravioli and half a bag of croutons.

Countdown

No time for carnelian and white.

Cell Phone Camera, Vol. 1

When it came time to upgrade from my first cell phone I wanted to find a phone without a camera. It was 2006, and I had theretofore never felt my cell phone's lack of a camera was a hindrance in any way. At the time, you may have heard me say something like "pshaw! To shoehorn the functionality of a camera, great though it may be, into the convenient package of a cellular telephone would be to ensure that neither performs its best. Furthermore, I see as much in having a photographic device on my telephone as I would in having a phonograph on my toaster*."

Fast forward to present day where I have a phone upon which I can access my personal and work calendar, my personal and work email, run an ongoing chat session, play any number of games, read and compose documents, navigate via online map service using GPS, stream music, browse the internet, and yes, take pictures. Shit, I can point the camera at a bar-code and it will scan that bar-code, then tell me what I scanned, then tell me where I can get that thing and for what price. Damn.

It does so much, but it doesn't do that camera thing very well. The Droid's camera is only happy under ideal lighting conditions, and there are no user tools to help decide how to expose. In the dark, the camera's sensor goes crazy with noise and you end up with 5 mega-pixels worth of picture that looks like a capture off a turn of the century webcam.

Still, I use it, and the best thing about taking photos with a phone is that I always forget about the pictures I took. The means that I get to have moments like yesterday, when I realize my phone is filled with a lot of little gems. Though I'd venture to say only one or two of these is what I'd consider a "good photo", here are my favorites, touched up from "crappy" to "eh" as well as I could manage.






















































* I call trademark on Toasty Trax!

Countdown

You won't see me in maroon.

Countdown

I won't be wearing orange.

The Summer Pretzel

There was a time between my stint in college and my current full time employment where I found myself listless, uninspired, and depressed. That did not preclude me, however, from the ability to find kinship in the most unexpected of places, such as hot pretzel display at Taco Bell.

As the months lumbered by, my friend and I would get together with a couple of other friends who moved to a town off the beaten path, about 45 minutes away. The commute sucked, but one of the perks of their location was their proximity to a Taco Bell.

This wasn't the greatest of Taco Bells, mind you. They didn't have a fryer and that meant no Chalupa shells, among other minor inconveniences. Also, no free drink refills. Still, the closest alternative was a crappier Bell location thirty minutes away.

This Taco Bell happened to be part of a three store complex that featured an ice-cream counter and a pizza shop, neither of which were franchises. It had all the feel of a truck stop with none of the curious conveniences like post cards, third rate books and movies, mini televisions, cb radios, and of course multi-pound bags of beef jerky.

We never bought ice cream, we never ordered pizza. Taco Bell all the way. Minus the lack of refills and a fryer, it was fine faux mexi-merican fast food. There was an oddity, however: between the Bell counter and the Ice Cream stand was a hot pretzel display. In the hot pretzel display were, of course, pretzels - but not many. They looked rather pitiful, that handful of doughy knots in slow orbit under a 400 watt sun.

I can't say I took much notice of the pretzels beyond that, however, until the number in the display shrank to one. One solitary pretzel that remained, paraded slowly in front of all who passed. The first I saw it I thought "oh hey, I guess there was a run on pretzels. Didn't know people actually bought those." I then thought nothing of it until the following week where, again, there was only one pretzel. "How odd" I thought.

Two more weeks passed where only one pretzel circled and I began to wonder aloud about the possibility of it being the same pretzel every week. My friends had already presumed that was the case but I, ever over-estimating humanity, didn't want to think it so. It's not like the place didn't see a moderate amount of traffic, and I didn't want to believe that the staff was that lazy as to not throw away that one last pretzel.

So I went to the case and I studied it; looked for any distinguishing marks that would set it apart from any potential replacements. It didn't take long to find what I was looking for: a thumb print, pressed into the dough, breaking through the brown crust and leaving just a bit of the whiteness below to peek through. I had my clue. All I needed was time.

Time, of course, took care of itself and the next weekend saw me back at the case where I would see the same indentation on the same pretzel in the same spot on its sad and lonely rack. My friends were unimpressed. At first. But the weeks spun and so too did the pretzel, presumably dry as a stegosaurus turd, un-bought, uncared for, unloved. Was employment there so abysmal an existence that the simple restocking of pretzels presented a challenge that could only be tackled after years of counseling and pharmaceuticals? Or did this display inhabit a neutral zone, a No Man's Land under neither Taco Bell's or the ice cream shop's jurisdiction? Was it a buffer between warring nations, or was it simply the pretzel case that time forgot?

I didn't appreciate it at the time, but that pretzel was my mascot for the summer. My kindred spirit. Was it plucked from it's aluminum vine and given the final indignity of a curt disposal, or was it finally sold and consumed by some unknown rube to some other unknown rube who, I could only hope, had a taste for dusty pope-farts? With salt?

Regardless, the pretzel, my unemployment, that summer, all were destined to pass; and so it was.

Word of the Day Quote

What's unfortunate is that it doesn't carry the same weight spoken as it does written. Written, you see this magnificent thing: stinkard, but spoken you hear stinker with a fumble on the end, possibly due to a piece of stuck food coming dislodged and, by chance, forming a hard consonant on its way out of your mouth and perhaps onto a friend or, one could only hope, a co-worker.

More Shit I Got to Deal With

If you write an email to me "just checking up" on a project, then you really mean "will you please hurry up" on my project.

This is valid.

If you write that email to me to "just check up", but also CC not only my supervisor, but my supervisor's supervisor, without warning, and without having checked up with just me first...

then you are a fuckhole.

Week 4

My first failed week.


Last week I continued on my 2 days per week, take it easy on my legs plan, and it was working fine. Over the weekend I thought that if I still felt good after Monday's run, I'd try to go back to 3 days per week.

Instead I was home sick Monday with some stomach issues, and I wasn't feeling it Tuesday or Wednesday. Wednesday night I hurt my knee bounding down the stairs, so I pushed it off until this morning, whereupon I decided bed was too warm.

Next week I have to kick it off strong or I'm in danger of falling out.

Damn. Sports do make you stupid. What the fuck does the above sentence even mean? I can't even imagine a scenario in which I can take myself seriously as those words, in that order, come out of my mouth.

Kick it.

Week 3 Day 1

I was bargaining with myself. Or debating. One or the other.
The debate was to run today or to run tomorrow and sleep in today. I mean, since I'm only going to do two days a week for the time being, why not do Tuesday and Friday to maximize the time between runs? On the other hand, if I keep my schedule of waking up early Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, even if I don't run on Wednesdays, it will be easier to integrate that third day when I'm ready.

Really what it came down to though was this: I didn't want to wake up early today.

I'm glad I did though. Today was the first time I had fun since day one. There was still soreness in my ankles, but not as much, and for the most part I was able to keep good form. I had also decided to halt my advancement down the Couch to 5K Chart, but instead of dutifully timing my jog times at 90 seconds, I decided to jog until I was uncomfortable, which felt more natural.

Each morning I go out it's closer to night time darkness. It's amazing how rapidly that change seems to happen when you witness it a few times a week. To the west was the nearly full moon and to the sun was below the horizon but coming quickly. It's night when I leave, day when I return. Cool all around.

Also, there's something about those shoes. The novelty's worn off by now, so they're not on my mind like they were two weeks ago. When I slip them on though something magical happens. It's like I've been granted super feet, my feet with super grip powers and super tough soles.

I don't know. I haven't had any coffee this morning and I'm beginning to realize that this post is a mess. But hey, for what it's worth, at least I didn't squeeze the Charmin.

Week 2

The Blue Zipper caught up on my writing about my attempt at running and offered me some advice which I could be sum up to be "slow down."
I wanted to heed this, but more-so, I wanted to just push myself on the self discipline front and not have to worry about injury, but after running Monday I knew that I had to change my plan up somehow. The muscles in my lower legs hurt too much and I was slowed to a shuffle. Having not ever really injured myself with a strain or a pull, I wasn't sure what the warning signs were and I didn't want to find out the hard way.

So Wednesday the Mistress and I went on an early morning walk instead. Much less strenuous and it kept me on my wake-up schedule.

Friday I ran again with modest success. My legs weren't happy, but they felt recharged compared to Monday, and it makes sense. So, my plan from here, I think, is to pause on the schedule where I am (90 seconds of running, 2 minutes of walking, alternated for 20 minutes) until my muscles build up in my calves, feet, and ankles.

Luckily the reign of blisters has ended.
I haven't given up yet.

Week 1 Day 3:

I got out the door a bit earlier today, so I saw the sunrise. Kind of. Again, I only really saw brilliant orange clouds in an otherwise dark sky due to buildings and foliage but man, it's something to see. Somehow it's very different than sunset.

The blisters felt better today. Not great, but better. It was the legs that were hurting. My ankles and calves were so stiff that after 10 minutes I almost decided to head back for fear of hurting myself, which of course, I don't want to do. I pressed on because I'm afraid that the first time I bargain or cut myself slack will just open the floodgates for further, weaker excuses. I made it, and as of lunchtime here, I'm not feeling any ill effects.

Except, of course, from being tired. One day a week of good sleep is not nearly enough.

Week 1 Day 2: Whose Genius Idea Was This Anyway?

I fully expected the first day to be the worst. This was incredibly shortsighted and foolish. Today sucked more by a high order of magnitude. Day one was all nerves. Day two? Day two was all pain.

My run was more of a fast shuffle today as the springs were worn and rusty. The thing, whatever it is, that connects my heel assembly to the calve muscle, or maybe that's just more calve muscle, was very sore. It was tight all of yesterday, but I was hoping a good night's sleep would allow it to heal up a bit. Unfortunately I haven't had good sleep recently.

It was hard to tell which part of me was dogging it and why. Was it getting too little sleep every day of the week but one since like, forever? Was it the sore legs? Was it the seams rubbing against raw skin with each step?

The blisters were both not as bad and worse than I expected. I never knew the proper way to deal with blisters was to pop them. I thought they were to be treated as pimples: just let it be. My feet felt much better after I mauled them. I tried popping them Monday night with a needle, but the needle wasn't sharp enough to go through my tough foot skin, so I had to wait around for a pair of sharp scissors to boil. Yeah, you read right, I hacked at my blisters with a pair of nose scissors. Splort!

(Warning, don't read the above while eating. Especially don't read it if you're about to use mustard and that little bit of yellow mustard juice just ran out onto your sandwich because you forgot to shake it enough. Yeah, don't read the above then think about that.)

The blisters on my big toes felt pretty good today. Not peachy keen, but easy enough to ignore. The blisters on the inside arch of my foot, however, were on fire. Friction every step. In the end I couldn't wait to get back home, stretch again, shower, and... go to work. I could have gone right to bed, to be honest.

Thing is, today's run almost didn't happen. To describe it, I wish there were a way to measure discrete amounts of will, and in addition, that there was a way to adequately communicate the experience of having just one little bit of that will left to do a thing. Then giving that up. That's where I was this morning, round about 6:12. I'd woken up at 4 and was awake well past 5, so of course I was good and sleepy when the alarm went off at 6. After snoozing a couple times* I rationalized. I'm really tired, yeah? Like, it's probably unhealthy for me to try to exercise without proper sleep, not to mention running on such stiff legs. Yeah. You can always run tomorrow. Turn off the alarm. Sleep in.

I had that one last atomic bit of that resolve to actually get out of bed, go outside, and do the pain thing. And as my hand was on its way to relieve me of it, my phone's alarm, which I set just in case the regular one isn't getting my attention, went off. I begrudgingly got up.

I still have to say I love the shoes. I wish I were wearing them now, though if I were, I'd be tired of answering questions about them, and I do think my blisters would protest. Also, the morning sky is quite a thing to behold. I only wish it weren't obscured by so much urban muck and that I could actually see a horizon.

Let's see what Friday holds.

Week 1, Day 1: Blisters and Hills

I had a lot of anxiety about my first run. First of all, I the plan was to get up at 6am, be back by 7.

That sucks.

Second, I was going to be outside. In town. Where there are other people.

That too sucks.

I like working out in private. It's a very solitary thing to me. I feel very self conscious doing it, and the prospect of being in public only made it harder to self motivate.

I'm talking serious anxiety.

Which kinda melted away when I took in a cool breath of air and I saw the orange morning clouds and the blue behind.

Down the corner from me is a student I know. He's very involved and he was standing on his porch in a suit, checking the time. I startled him when I said hi. After all I was in a sweatshirt with the hood up, and besides, what was I doing out at 6:30 anyway?

The first week is three days of the following: a 5 minute walking warm-up followed by 60 seconds of running and 90 seconds of walking, which alternate for 20 minutes. During the warm up I was itching to start running. I was ready.

Running felt... effortless. Really. I mean it felt good. That is, until I ran out of flat land.

At some point I had to go up or down a hill. Both suck. Uphill really kicked my ass and the downhill, well, that sucked because it's just hard. Jarring.

When I read reviews of these shoes online, people were amazed at how they could feel everything on the ground. The textures and everything. I was not impressed in this regard, and I wondered why until realized that I've been wearing the same pair of shoes pretty much daily for the past year and a half, and the soles are wafer thin. I guess I've been practicing.

They say your feet will be sore and tired because they're going to be used to the support of shoes, which lead to weak foot muscles. My feet feel fine, except for the blisters (which I suppose are to be expected). It's my calves which are tired (which is also to be expected, since they're absorbing the body's shock). I had a lot of meetings to walk between today and believe me, I took my time getting to each one.

My spiffy heart rate watch worked the whole time and it was cool to see where my heart-rate was.

I wish I had a flatter place to run, but there's nowhere to go that isn't a drive. It's almost time to pop some blisters, but for now, check out this kicks man.







I was going to get a pair in black, or at least brown, to attract the least amount of attention possible, but really I like the blue pair the best. I just wouldn't have had the guts to buy the blue ones if they weren't the only pair left. On a related note, I'd like a percentage of any pools that open up to bet on the date I get beat up on account of these.

Prologue

I decided I'd give myself a birthday present.
This is the culmination of many factors.
I've always wanted to.
And so the plan came together.

I've always held a watered down disdain for runners, solely for the fact that I couldn't imagine what they were getting out of running. Running? Really? My feelings could be summed up in a single line from Back to the Future III, spoken by an incredulous drunk native of the 1800's, upon hearing Doc's rambling description of the future. "People run? For fun?"

I've always been a chubby kid. I don't know if I'd say fat, but I remember I got to a certain age and noticed that I was bit more rolly and polly than average. My pants were always called "husky." I had tits. Then came gym class: changing in front of my peers, followed by swimming: no way to hide.

My favorite personal indignity: Boy Scout camp. The showers were a concrete pad, surrounded by walls, cold water only. And like many bathroom sinks they had to be held on. Being homophobic shy young men we avoided to shower and I think at a certain point we were forced to go. Why else would we have all gone together?

The unspoken agreement was everyone showered without removing their underwear. This is how I found everyone my age wore boxers. Everyone except me in white. Tight. Briefs.

That wasn't bad compared to what came from the mouth of a young man who had a learning disorder, the kind of which led him to say whatever observation came to mind, much in the manner of Ralph Wiggum's classic "my cat's breath smells like cat food." We were all soaped and showering, doing our best to avoid eye contact and conversation, when he turned to me and said, almost joyfully, "you look like a sumo wrestler."

Some months ago I'd read an article espousing the benefits of "barefoot" running. I use quotes because it was really about shoes that protect the foot from rocks and such while being as thin as possible to mimic the feel of running barefoot. Apparently thicker sole running shoes are designed to minimize heel impact through padding, though their shape necessitates running on your heels. This, they say, is the cause of many running injuries. The alternative would be to run more "naturally" by taking away heel padding to make it painful to strike hard on the heel. Just like running barefoot.

I'm a very skeptical person, and I don't buy into anything new-age-y easily, frequently, or much at all. I was surprised at how much sense this article made to me, and how much I wanted those shoes just to walk around in. I love walking barefoot, I just hate cuts and broken glass and being thrown out of pretty much any commercial establishment (1) (I've grown fond of service(2)).

I forwarded the article to my friend Tyr who I knew would enjoy it, and that evening he'd purchased a pair. Soon after The Blue Zipper sent me a similar, if not the same article (I can't remember), which I thought was aneat coincidence. Then, some weeks later an author, Christopher McDougall, was on the Daily Show. In the roughest of summaries by memory: he'd been studying an ancient people in Mexico who, when the rest stayed to fight the Conquistadors, fled to safety. They live in the middle of bf nowhere but are now being threatened by drug lords, those sons a bitches. Well, what's notable about these people is that they run a lot, and they're super happy, and they don't have cancer or suicide, nor do they have knee or other running related problems. Also, they may or may not fart rainbows. Why? Because they run barefoot.

Now that's not very scientific, but in lieu of some new-age conspiracy afoot (he he) to plant a bunch of articles and books and such to promote the same product at the same time, I took it as further confirmation and pined again for those shoes. "It's a shame I don't run" I thought.

Also, shame they're so ugly.

At one point in my life, I was in relatively good shape. On and off through the years I've done weightlifting routines. Then, one summer I worked as a "meter exchange ... something", and in the summer months I'd hoof it around changing electric meters while wearing long pants, a t-shirt, a thick long sleeve fire retardant shirt, and pounds of tools. The dude training me was a bit of a, uh, dumbass, and when he went on about how much weight he'd lost and how much I'd loose doing the job I just blew it off as bull.

Three months later I was down from 215 pounds to 180. This was still overweight according to that BMI thingymaboob, but it was good. I could wear a large t-shirt and not feel self conscious. It was the first time since that adolescent doubt first began that I started to feel good about how I looked.

I stayed around that weight for a good few years. Then college ended, unemployment and a 4 hour block of Star Trek on Spike TV set in(3). Somewhere along the way I also learned to cook for myself, which has presented a challenge at times. Fast forward to now. I'm around 225. My pant size has gone from 34 to 38 or 40 (depending on stretchability), and I'm pretty self conscious about my gut. I look like a sausage in a large t-shirt, and I have a lot of cool shirts that don't get any love anymore. Hell, there are two I bought that I love and I've never worn them.

I want to wear them.

Then, a few weeks ago, walking side by side with my lady, I had a moment. I thought, in that moment, (though I was listening to everything you said D. Mistress, I swear), I want to run. It was a calm, serene feeling. I'm gonna do it. I thought.

I found this Couch to 5k program which is scheduled over an 9 week period, and I figured hey, if I start in mid September, I could be ready to run a 5k by my birthday. What a cool birthday present that would be, huh? Start feeling better, start losing some weight, stop feeling like a fancy sausage.

So I bought the shoes.
And I printed out the program.
And I dug my sweats out from the closet.
And I dug my larger pair of sweats out from the closet.
And I set up the cool heart rate monitoring watch I got from woot.com for twenty bucks yeah!
And I opened up the door
and I set off into the sunrise.




(1) This hasn't really happened.
(2) Services and goods.
(3) ...it was worth it.

I don't know but I've been told

don't eat no melons that been growin' mold.