Gonzo Runner

Yeah you'll be back next year. 3:43 sounds about right. Congrats!

To be fair I don't understand most adults these days either. Maybe I should get one of those monkeys.

As a Deacon in the Church of the Hungover Angry Run, I feel this one. It's so easy to pour another drink, so hard to run the miles to work it off. Drinking through a crisp spring dusk on a park bench is a special kind of living though. Not every experience worth having is going to be good for you.

The kids will save us.

You nailed the Queens/Pepsi thing. Perfect.

Or the definition of insanity. 🤷‍♂️

Get yourself a sweet Madonna Dressed in rhinestones sittin’ on a Pedestal of abalone shell. Doin’ 90, I ain’t scary ‘Cause I got the Virgin Mary Assurin’ me I won’t go to Hell. It’s been a while. Not sure if I remember how this works, but here we go. How do we start again… right, activate your glutes. So I do a squat. Is one enough? I turn around to look at my ass, but I don’t see any activity back there. Great, I probably looked like an idiot doing that, so I do another squat. Does that look worse, two squats with an awkward pause in between? Better do some more. Are my glutes activated yet? Shit now I’m bobbing up and down like some tropical bird trying to impress a mate. Goddamnit this didn’t used to be so hard. My glutes will figure it out, I start running again. It’s a nicer town I run through now. Instead of the occasional garage meth lab blowing up it’s now an over-Xanaxed Stepford Wife or three martini lunching local strip mall magnate taking out a picket fence that I have to avoid. Since their high beams are always on you can usually see them coming at least, which is good because I’m not really any faster after all these years. Just ignore the blinkers, they’re not signaling changes in direction, only the level of the driver’s impairment. It’s just a better class of degenerate around here. Just like way back when I first started, I’ve recently bought a new house in the best neighborhood I can afford. And just like back then I can’t afford to do all the needed work on it because of domestic embezzlement, so I’ve just traded leaking showers for drafty windows. Although since I wrote that sentence I’ve had to disassemble my shower to replace leaking valve stems, so who knows. The really good thing is that the new employment venture I’m pursuing is just as risky as the last one, so as we approach another economic uncertainty with a tenuous grip on income again the anxiety isn’t crippling this time, it’s more like the warmth that courses through the veins of an addict getting their fix. The biggest difference now is obviously The Boy, who loves to run with daddy. The best part of the day is listening to him chatter away from the stroller about his day at school and how Benji was playing with the blueberries and Audrey with the pickles and how he only wanted to do the classroom dishes and didn’t want to do naptime. I often think about how old I’ll be when he goes to college. Maybe gets married. Sometimes I regret waiting so long. But we had to make sure we were ready to raise a kid. Be financially and emotionally mature and stable. Provide a healthy, safe, loving environment. Back home I pause the fight with the jogging stroller latch to shoo The Boy away from the dining room and double check that the door is still sealed so none of the dust from the collapsing lead painted ceiling plaster I can’t afford to fix yet can escape. I follow The Boy into the kitchen and listen as he regales The Wife with stories of the big truck that was parking outside the coffee shop and the lights on the police car and how it hurt his ears as it drove by. She looks up at me and we exchange stale smiles as The Boy continues his breathless recitation. The weight of so much love and so much emptiness in such a small space has turned our crumbly home into a terrestrial black hole, and we’re racing into it at full speed. I’ll keep trying out new talismans to light the way. Maybe I can find one that glows in the dark.

Funny, most of who I think I am is dreamed up in late-night drunken stupors...

Back in the day I was an altar boy. One of the priests, Fr. Kevin, was a heavy smoker. Anytime we had a funeral or other occasion for incense, he'd always go WAY overboard and we'd have to leave the church doors open for a while after mass to help air it out. One of the other altar boys was complaining about this after a funeral we served while we were outside waiting for the hearse to pull away and Fr. Kevin overheard him. He looked at us and said "You know how they teach you that your body is a temple?" We nodded. He motioned back at the church door with wisps of incense escaping and said "Well that's my temple."

I gotta be honest, he's pretty easy going as far as kids go. It's not easy of course, but he sleeps and eats well and is a pretty happy kid. Which I guess means he'll be the leader of an auto theft ring in high school or something, but I'll deal with that when it comes.

Nice deep cut there with the hissing cars, had me dusting off that album. I recently discovered a tarmac track nearby also, excited to check it out.

Twisted Dune! I played there on my bachelor party and am told I enjoyed it. I don't miss the spring weather down the shore, makes the running all the more impressive.

I remember the day well. My normal route at the time took me along the bike path for a bit then out to the water before turning back past the kid’s amusement park along the Keansburg boardwalk and finally wound its way through the meth soaked part of town on the way home. On this day though, I was stretching it out. I was taking a few extra turns through the neighborhood to get an extra mile in and make it my first longest run ever. To this point my running was a consistent 3 mile loop in cotton sweats and the socks and undershirt I wore to work. My last cigarette was by necessity the one on the drive home from the train station lest The Wife find out I still smoked, so my lungs were nice and fresh from their 12 minute break each and every time I laced up and headed out the door. But if you’ve ever smelled Raritan Bay or a leaky basement drug lab on a hot summer night, my Camels really couldn’t have made things any worse. I remember I planned it for a weekend because I was expecting to be wiped out from the extra effort. 4 miles may as well have been 40, and immediately upon deviating from the normal route my body began its protest. Knees burned, lungs felt like they were breathing gasoline, teeth tingled. But I survived and at the end of it I looked down at my iPod with the Nike Plus foot pod add-in and saw I had done 4.08 miles. I’d gone a full third longer than I’d ever done before. And I immediately wanted to go further. I felt like I’d just learned a new language and been rewarded with a first class ticket to that tongue’s native land. I thought about signing up for a race and maybe entering the NYC Marathon lottery and seeing if there was a cross country league for adult alcoholic chain smokers. I’ve been thinking about this run lately because there’s a new 4 mile loop I’ve been running, and one day I happened to end it on 4.08 miles. As I panted and wheezed from a distance that was not that long ago just a pre-workout warm up I thought about how far I’d come. This distance once made me feel like I had all the potential in the world. Now it reminded me of the fitness and abilities I once had. I had quit smoking long ago but was still breathing just as hard. I had plenty of time to think about this as I stood in the prickly shrubbery to maintain the necessary six feet of social distance while waiting for the dipshits walking their rat dog to casually stroll past on the sidewalk. It dawned on me that the original longest run ever had happened during the similarly apocalyptic Great Recession, and I was then too figuring out how to live with a new human (Wife then, Son now) and wondering about the permanence of my employment. And all of this got me thinking. What has really changed? All the years of 60 hour and 60 mile weeks, learning how to feed this new person in my home, speedwork and coupon clipping and long runs and office politics and seemingly endless fucking planks had gotten me where, exactly? I live in fewer square feet and still feel in over my head domestically and worry about my job and still might puke after 4 miles and HOW MANY GODDAMNED KALE SALADS DOES IT TAKE TO GET RID OF LOVE HANDLES?!? How have I come so far and gone nowhere? Then I remember the highs. Crossing the line in Chicago. The first time I did a 16 x 400 workout and didn’t have to stop. Getting into NYC. Running in a lead pack for the first time (yeah fine it was a dinky 5k in Bumblefuck, GA - back off Jack). Writing my best man toast for my brother’s wedding while on a 10 miler the morning of. Maybe none of it matters and we’re all just going to end up back where we started. Who knows. Futile as it may be though, there’s at least something in the effort, even if it's only a dream. I'm going back to the ones that I know, With whom I can be what I want to be. Just one week for the feeling to go And with you there to help me Then it probably will. - from With You There to Help Me, Jethro Tull

UBER. Or Lyft, whatever. Driving in Atlanta is a nightmare, the drivers themselves are awful, traffic exists for idiotic reasons like "there's a pothole", and parking is awful.

Nothing like a little type two fun.