Roads, mills, laps

Fight Club - Where is my mind - The pixies
Testcase for youtube linkage. P.S. I love Marla Singer and the Pixies.

Take note: This whole site has moved here because blogger.com sucks.

For Whom the Liberty Bell Tolls. . .

. . . It tolls for me. My daughter woke up with a 102.4 fever today. Her voice is all shot up and scratchy and so we agreed that communication will be her ringing the little Liberty Bell age-group gimcrack thing that I won in the Philly Marathon last year. It works pretty good; I'm convinced it's the only piece of practical race bauble that I own. But I now know what it's like to be a 19th Century servant or a modern day flight attendant: it's not much fun having a bell summon you. I think I'll stick to my current career path: making charts while dressed in business casual, spinning the hamster wheel of life a few more times, watching the sun rise and set, forming tall shadows off of my cubicle prison at differing angles.

"Poverty may be the mother of crime, but lack of good sense is the father." ~Jean de la Bruyere

The City of the Brotherly Boxing Glove

I'm running the Philamaniac Marathon this weekend. I'm out of shape; I'm recovering from a sinus infection and have no expectations for anything other than a mediocre finishing time. The elite coordinator is nothing shy of an incompetent boob. He let me in with a comp'ed entry but it took: 1. An official application submitted on time. I met the standards for a free entry by three minutes. 2. 10 emails to various people running the marathon asking them for a status--all unanswered except one. 3. A call to the marathon office: the voicemail was full (shocker!). 4. An email from a local USATF official on my behalf. 5. A letsrun thread. He made it seem like he was doing me a favor after all I put him through. We always seem like we are inconveniencing these people, us, the pathetic genetic apes who run a million miles in the day and night just to make the entry standard, this is what we get for our year-long efforts--a fucking clown with a smeared frown, giving us the mother of all guilt trips: lovely. The marathon committee has decided to try out a last-minute half marathon to boot (more$ x lotsacattle = $$$$$). The route was just decided upon and it sounds like a royal clusterfuck of Cyclopean proportions. I hear you have to double back 100 feet at the end of it; I hear the fast marathoners are going to get caught up with the half-marathon cattle, swishing away in a 'yay-me!' pose to the Lion King soundtrack; I hear that finishes themselves are all mixed up too. People are going to all over the fucking place. Gu will mix with Jellybeanxballz; underarmour pantaloons will collide with Adidas Adistarclimacool short shorts; earbuds will wrap around six-shooter fluid holsters. Skinny people's ribs will bounce off fat people's jellyrolls, throwing the 2:15 marathoners out of balance, off to the side of the road, into the woods where the broken crack vials and singed pieces of tin foil have collected over the years, where a hundred years of inebriated urination have painted the surrounding vegetation a Nigerian, yellow-cake-like hue. The whole circus will come to a momentary halt as everyone sticks together all clingey-like; it will be like the Schuylkill Expressway during rush hour; elbows will fly; f-bombs will detonate. The fattypuffs will flip off the thinifers. The Civil War that we have all been waiting for will finally start. It's all going to go down this weekend--mark my words. Keep yer powder dry and listen for the call of the thinifer minuteman! ------------------------- To add to this surrealistic insanity, I am going to be getting a ride with a guy who is giving this guy a badly needed ride, down to probably win the 8K. He needed a ride down there? WTF? Don't worry, I'll let him know about it all.

Now Listen To It

Here: listen to this. and this. Get pumped; get educated. Overachieve. Run quarters and throw your arms up at the sky.

Rage Against The Machine - Guerilla Radio See Previous Post. Read about the Beautiful People and the plastic and the me-me, consumeristic, vainglorious fakery there: see them here. Here's one giant Third World educational hors d'ovre for ya. Turn that shit up. (Good intervals music, too.)

I'm Unelectable*

In 1984, I ran for 8th Grade Class President. I gave a speech to a gymnasium full of disinterested, pubescent ingrates (i.e. juvenile boys with an overflow of testosterone--those viscous men-in-waitings, sprouting Teutonic Forests of public hair: pimply half-guys clad in French Foreign Legion hats and Member's Only jackets with one-track minds about confused fumblings in dark bedrooms with sticky magazines and copious wads of toilet paper). I started the speech like Mark Anthony's in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar. I waved my hands from side to side, doing my very best at horrid melodrama. The room went momentarily silent, but about three campaign promises into this disastrous speech, spitballs and heckling began to fly. I stepped down from the dais, holding back tears and subsequently received a whopping 19 votes in the election. The council of elders felt sorry for me and so they made me an 'Unelected Representative' that next year. I got to hang out with the popular folks early in the mornings, when 'student council' convened; I got to consult Robert's Rules of Order like the golden children did. I was one of them, but not really. They were popular: I was a hanging chad. I never 'ran' for any office since then. (I was elected as my high school's Senior Class Treasurer, but that didn't count because the campaign was orchestrated by my mom and my best friend while I was living as a Swiss expat. with my host father, Jurg and his merry band of 12-monkey ecoterrorists. They used a picture of me running in some Zuerich Silvesterlauf 10K as my campaign poster: get it?) Morals of the story: Don't run for anything; if you have to, don't have anything to do with it and have someone else tell the masses who you are, using running as a theme. (Also don't lecture pedantically like a plotting Roman to a stinky slice of idiot America. The simians wanted fart noises and hot teacher upskirt views, not Heston-like melodrama. ) I just don't do well in populist democracies; I thrive instead in tyrannical juntas and cabals. I like revolutions with megalomaniacs standing from atop their bullypulpits, casting down bombast, inciting the masses of nach0-fed cattle to burn down the walls of their neighboring McMansions and storm North Disgrace's Bastille--crying for the overthrow of the vain celebrity runners, pleading the unsuspecting Walter Middies to put an end to this unjust ancien' regime. So I don't think I'm going to Kenya because I'm no democratic politician; I wear no campaign buttons and don't part my Trent Lott-meets-BillyBobFrist-helmethair to the side ; I have no 'har hars' and can't pump a fist; I'm not out to fill my resume up with me-me charitable acts. I can't be a superterrific champion of superhero fakeness. I offer few encomiums; I'm the furthest thing from Harvard's final list of kickass-n'save-the-world candidates. I'm too ugly and too mean for a reality show casting call. I'm can't even smile straight: I'm doubting while I'm doing it, because it never lasts. Don't vote for me. I despise popularity and consider myself completely unelectable; I offer no rubber chicken to put into your pot. All I've got is what you read. ------------------------- Google it; please don't click on the first thing that comes up or else the NSA Gestapo and their Army-equivalent cover-for-status, shadyboy bretheren will come back to read up on me.

Orwellian Moments of Guilt

Tonight I got the impulse to drive 100mph to Barnie and McNobles and buy Orwell's Down and Out In Paris and London. I don't know why I was looking for a book; I'm only half-way through Sedaris and 15 pages into Heller's Catch 22 (Yes, I'm reading two books--slowly, mind you--at once.) I was looking for Orwell's book about his own poverty as well as Graves' King Jesus. There were too many stacks of Da Vinci this and Da Vinci that and so the latter was MIA. They didn't even have Grave's Goodbye To All That, for Chrissakes. They used to have Graves' autobiography, back in 1995, back when I first got attracted to disillusionment, but too much time has passed since then; Anne Rice and Dan Browne have too much to say nowadays--fuck 1918 and those old war poets, those black and white photographs of dead men, survivors of WW1, pushing up poppies (not in Flanders in some gray English cemetery) they have nothing to teach us about wasted wars and the greedy military industrial complex! As I was checking out, the woman asked if I wanted to donate a book, another copy of this book, to a shelter for poor women and children. I looked down at the book, the black and white photograph, out of focus showing a bobby under some sad bridge. I gripped it tightly and got a whiff of guilt; I stared at the sad checkout lady with the puppy dog eyes. But I said, "No thanks." Down and out people need to find their own damn down and out books. I found mine; they can find theirs. When I worked in a shelter, they had Oral Roberts to read. I think he's better to get them out of there; Orwell may force them to stay in the shelter waiting for another classic. --------------------------- I found out today that I am the finalist in this contest. I'm honored that I made the cut; I mean I have no PhD; I am no 2:18 marathoner; I don't work in an inner city school lifting up the downtrodden; I don't fancy myself as an altruistic champion of whatever. I'm just me--livin' in McWorld, driving a hypocritical largeass truck in the middle of a sea of Philashit n' Streetblimps, fightin' the yentas and doing my part to push the (censored for economic reasons) further into the black: chart by pretty chart. I'm the little man in a Cyclopean world, but I'll put my best 1000 words forward and maybe I'll convince the panel to understand that a man down and out in McWorld can best tell it like it is in the most misunderstood continent--the land where the majority live below the poverty line, where those that run fast also live hard.

I don't care that this site is turning into a bunch of youtube links; you need to watch this one. . . Because Radiohead is good for stuck marathoners. The balding, disheveled running man who goes hands-to-ground after his anerobic work; I mean the guy with the wife-beater tee shirt and the matches that have the fetus on the cover, him, he represents me, us--taking it to his mortality, that fucked-up pursuing car symbolizing life's stagnant PRs, life's finality, with a blanched, sickly Thom Yorke playing the part of the angel of death in the back seat. Keep running, everyone. Don't give up; you aren't done yet.

Going to a 5:40 after a 5:20 at mile 3 calls for my favorite movie of all time

Vapid 5-mile tempo calls for Wildcat

Apologies to Nabokov's geist

I'm going to change his quote around a bit; I made one substitution, but it's all good: the Lolita-penning butterfly man will grant me the license from the grave, I hope. Having nothing in the legs can equate to stupidity sometimes, I suppose. "My loathings are simple: vapidity, oppression, crime, cruelty, soft music." I ran a 5-mile tempo today. I went out at 5:20 pace and fizzled into 5:40s, throwing my arms akimbo like some washed-up Circus-Circus clown on a bad acid trip. As luck would have it, I stumbled across this interview today* and, upon watching it, I immediately felt a sense of commonality with Deena. So I'm thinking of doing what she did to overcome malaise and that poopy feeling that comes with throwing your body out on the streets day in and day out, that pounding of your fibias(sic), that suscepting of your lateral malleoli (If you have time and are so inclined, check my Latin plural here and report back with your findings on that as well as every grammatical mistake honing in on dangling participles, brazen typos with wanton disregard for blooger.com's shitty spellchekr, malapropisms, and every WW1 historical fallacy since this blog's inception, please.) to an endomorphic 170-pounds of Mongolian ankle bone shooting. I'm going to do the subelite wannabe equivalent, the single dad-living-in-a-van-down-by-the-river equivalent. . . I'm going to write: (Picture McWorld behind you with a few yentas peering out from their windows---with their eyebrows crinkled voyeuristically seeking a vicarious life--for a backdrop, not some Mammoth Lakes mansion in the woods with a million square acres of pristine forest-for-a-lot backdrop.) ~~I was over in Europe getting ready for my track seaon~~ I was over in my cubicle, smelling the 'redolence' of half-digested lard--squeezed out from between pimply, sweaty-with-lots o' sticky hair-buttcheeks--wafting across the open-space work environment, staring at the local 5K schedule on my monitor. (...censored) 1. ~~Cancel entire track season~~ Cancel Barnie Fife Run 4 The Cure/gimmiecrack corn 5K season. Let the first place, 16:XX spoils go to some wannabe Quentin Cassady collegian who's out to heelstrike his feet into a closet full of plastic bauble, who's out to pump his pubescent BO-wafting arms into a scrapbook full of unread local newspaper rags . 2. ~~I went on a little vacation to Italy with my husband~~ I went on a little vacation down to my cinderblock basement with my Id, my pan of Goya brand eggrolls, as well as my case of Heineken (purchased in the dark cavern from the shifty man with the baseball bat). 3. When I got back I really went to the 'grindstone?' of acupuncture, chiropractor, massaging, stretching, ice baths twice a day. . . basically the entire day was filled with trying to getting ME, ME-ME-ME to feel better and get my legs back under ME. When I went back upstairs, it was 6am (wow was I hungover and bloated with MSG-infused saturated fat!) and I really went to the 'grindstone!' of making my daughter's breakfast, walking the dog and picking up his shit, off in the condo association's official 'green-space,' in a Wegmans' brand plastic sack so that the dilligent yenta police don't report me to the Gestapo or to Mr.Wiggins, paying the bills, driving slowly across a backed-up sea of cellphone-wielding Philamaniacs and Dunkin Donuts-pimping streetblimps, and smelling my cubemate's farts while listening to him discuss that damned Eaglez' dropped ball vis-a-vis his fantasy football team's prospects. . and so I did everything to get my legs back under me at 11pm, doing my 6-mile double, staring at my little white wall. 4. ~~And then one day I had a great run at the Lakes basin(sounds sexy as hell)~~. One day I had a great run on a treadmill in the middle of Philashit, but the next day I felt terrible again where it was filled with trying to get me-me to realize that I won't feel better, because I have come to realize that this sport is nothing but feeling shitty and acting selfish--that running vapidity can equal stupidity. ------------------------------ *Fantastic website, by the way (watch Goucher doing his very best Tang Soo Do** impression, as well as Salazar moving about like a Family Circus cartoon***.) **See Chuck Norris or this nifty site with a nifty MIDI for details about all things Tang Soo Do. ***This is what I mean.

Given The Yentas' Druthers, They'd Choose Toll Brothas!

More land has been sold down the road from where I live. Toll Brothers arrived on the scene and snatched it up, lickety-split; Indian families and old people are walking around looking at plots, scratching their heads, pointing to churned up ground, standing where the living room is supposed to be; they got their blueprints upside down, but their dreams of artificial elbow room right side up. Thick guys in hard hats holding shiny shovels stand around waiting for flat bed trucks to arrive and deliver brobdingnagian concrete donuts that will be lodged in the ground to facilitate the flowing of torrents of shit, chunky toilet paper, and an occasional happy meal doll into an underground Mississippi-size confluence of other neighboring McMansion brown water streams. This turbid mass of discarded waste raises the water table at the local sewage plant; the Happy Meal toys sink to the bottom, but the lighter turds stay at the top and escape the overloaded sewage plant, making their way into the Brandywine River where they are confused by Red Man-chewing anglers for keeper-sized Brook Trout. Fresh servings of Mexicans stand down the road waiting to be picked up by parasite landscaping companies who will hand them gasoline-powered leaf blowers in the fall, ergonomic snow shovels in the winter, and five crisp dollars a day. Bulletin boards will rise up from the sides of the new roads into disposable luxury land, advertising the sequel to that movie Hoot: Hoot 2--Hooting For the Good Guyz . Toll Brothaz families will drive to the new movie theater were just built in the deforested, windswept field where they will root for the displaced owl with the big eyeballs; they'll jeer the evil developers in the movie; they'll boo them and compare them to those greedy assholes down the road--those guys who are dismantling Farmer John's old barn brick-by-brick and erecting those gaudy McMansions. Made in China blow-up santas are being packed (with their plastic air generators) in large container ships by emaciated Chinese laborers with hand-rolled cigarettes dangling from their sagging mouths. The containers sail the seas, enroute to their ultimate destination: the front of these new palaces. Toll Brothaz spray-on green lawn gunk seeps into the blow-up Santas, making him look like the Grinch. A Mexican with a leaf blower accidentally trips on the blowup generator cord thing while trying to blow a stubborn leaf stuck in Santas ass; he breaks his neck and dies a few days later; a nervous parasite Landscaper pays a shifty 'illegal handler' to dump the body in the last part of the forest (itself under contract for development next year). The Mexican decomposes a year later; excess runoff from deforested lands washes out the the Mexican's shallow grave and carries parts of his skeleton down the Brandywine river. A rib lodges in a rock in the river. One of the red man-chewing fishermen slips on a turd (thinking he had landed a brook trout) and catches his balance by grabbing onto the rib. A ~~fibia~~ legbone thing flows five miles further down the river and ends up blocking a grate that goes into the water treatment plant. Because of this stoppage, a tooth (one of Hector's molars) makes its way into the wrong pipe and travels into a series of tubes that lead to McWorld part Two. The tooth winds and tumbles along until it finds itself in a pipe belonging to the house where the Mexican died; the tooth pops out of the outside spigot at precisely the right time when the old man with the Bush n' Eaglez sticker is washing his Suburban on a warm spring day. The tooth flys out of the hose at 50mph, ricochets off the suburban, and pops a hole in the blow-up Easter Bunny on the guys front lawn; it finally lodges itself in the tire of a car across the street. The tire deflates; the car sinks down to its rim like a dying beast; the man with the hose raises his fist in euphoric exaltation because the car belongs to the neighbor's girlfriend who had parked it there in wanton disregard for the unwritten McWorldPart2 'code' about parking rank and privilege. The man with the hose had been in that development since it was a churned up field and so it was justice served to see her car with a flat--'Goddamn newbies,' the man mutters under his breath as he inspects his Suburban for a dent, spitting into his hands and wiping across his enormous vehicle. The man walks over to his shriveled Easter Bunny and tosses it into the trash. The molar had lodged itself in the tire and when it was repaired, the tire guys at the new tire store next to the movie theater didn't spot it. After all, they were just grease monkeys--wastoid potheads, high school dropouts out to help deal anything from black tar heroin down to shrooms to the white dads with the secret lives, who lived in the single-family mansions on the top of the hills. The white dads also liked gimps but they couldn't get them at the tire shop; they had to go on the internet for them. So the molar went wherever the car went; it rolled and rolled making fast circles. Some days it made a clanking noise when it pulled into McWorldPartTwo, summoning the yentas to their windows, causing them to call the other yentas and make gossip about that car with the funny noise. To be continued, maybe. . . .

800m Repeats Means Beck

What Do You Want From Me? Part 31

Searching on ye olde 'Duncan Larkin blog' then going to my narcissism page. ------------------- (Vf Services Inc) California, San Leandro, United States, 31 returning visits Date Time WebPage 7th November 2006 12:49:39 PM www.duncanlarkin.com/http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=duncan larkin blog 7th November 2006 12:50:30 PM www.duncanlarkin.com/pics.html www.duncanlarkin.com/ 7th November 2006 12:51:22 PM www.duncanlarkin.com/http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=blog

Mr Show - The Civil War Re-Enactments
800-meter repeats calls for posting my favorite Mr.Show skit.

American Pride VOTE TODAY
These guys want to BLOW UP THE MOON. VOTE THEM OUT!

Breakdancing Facial Expression Lessons
800-meter repeats on atrophied legs calls for THIS.