If you’re in the Dallas area next weekend, join me at the Cox Building Playhouse in Plano for this.
Special “Meet the Artists” Events July 19
Playwright Stephen Massicotte from Canada
and Painter Duncan Larkin from Philadelphia
will discuss their work and The Great War in a
moderated discussion after the matinee and
be honored with an after show reception
that evening. Mark your calendar now!
My 10-year-old daughter has recently fallen for the Beatles (much better than Hosanna Montana!). In helping her upload the Fab Four’s song “Help” onto her Wrigley’s gum-shaped, antediluvian iPod Shuffle, I noticed that the song’s length is 2:22.
Considering the great many emaciated Don Quixotes with visions of sugarplums and shared USATF-provided hotel rooms in their heads and Brooks racing flats on their feet (the guys who struggled to qualify for the old U.S. Olympic ‘B’ standard–2:22:00–by running millions of miles and endless track repeats in the hopes of banging out sub-5:25/miles for 26+), I thought this coincidence worth a post.*
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Beck is back: His new album, Modern Guilt, is worth picking up.
And…after a painfully long hiatus that left many of us desperately clinging to his haphazard Doc Bushwell postings, he’s also blogging again, thankfully.
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*Since you didn’t ask: “Norwegian Wood” is 2:11 which goes quite well with Frank Bjorkli and “With a Little Help From My Friends”, 2:46, fits nicely with my 2005 Miami debacle. Oh, and “Nowhere Man” is 2:44 which was my 1:17/1:27 apocalyptic (meet the Newton Hills by bending over) positive split at the 2005 Boston Marathon.
I toiled around the greater West Chester environs today; I flailed my big arms and slapped by fat legs on the asphalt for about 11, painfully slow miles. I’ve resigned myself to endless amounts of music to help me break up the boredom and the monotony. Running long just doesn’t have that spark like it used to. I’m inclined lately to think about all the better things I could be doing with my time while I’m out dodging cellphone-wielding soccer moms and reclining, spliff-smoking gangstas out on those crazy streets.
But it’s not all that bad: I started getting into Arcade Fire (especially this and this) they’ve got me through the worst moments of those what-the-hell-am-I-doing-with-myself miles that seem to come more often than they go.
At the end of the run today, I had to pass through a gauntlet made up of mentally ill bus riders, gawking skinheads, legless, half-dead alcoholic Veterans pushing themselves across West Chester’s cobblestoned streets on carts with rollerblade wheels, and Sponge Bob. Some guy paid to dress up in a yellow suit and underwear was stepping off the curb waving like a politician to every car that drove by. One of the watering holes in town, Barnabys, came up with this idea. Some marketing genius snapped their fingers at the thought: a desperate, minimum wage person stuck inside a silly suit with a sandwich board stuck between his tightie whities.
Around tax time this year, I saw a pregnant woman dressed up like that famous version of Libertas in New York. She was leaning on her torch. Her crown hung around her neck like a spiked dog collar. The sign for Liberty Tax service (inside K-Mart) tilted and sagged. It reminded me of that famous gorilla a few years ago.
The whole concept of businesses dressing up desperate people and making them hold a sign is disgusting. If Marx lived today, he’d certainly add that to the footnotes of Das Kaptial’s Volume III.
But just because poor migrant workers and gangling teenagers are exploited doesn’t excuse them from tailing me during mile 10.5 of my sad trek across the West Chester hinterland. It doesn’t excuse them from putting their hands up in the air and pointing at me as if I’m the real circus clown; the town’s jester. It doesn’t allow them to summon the drunken customers of the bar to chant things like “FOR-EST; FOR-EST!” at me as I hobble by.
Most runners want to be left alone. We are out there to escape and to withdraw; to be at peace (and if not that, to at least be tormented by our own psychotic, troubled minds).
We don’t deserve heckling; we don’t deserve being chased by bored costume characters. We are sick to death of smelling Capitalism’s odors. We’re sick of jumping over its slag heaps (its garbage on the side of the road) and its unfortunate wastage (rotting roadkill with blown bellies and viny entrails); we’re sick of hearing its industrialized tocsins.
There aren’t many places to run to truly escape for a run. The half-driven cars and the garbage and gauntlet of sign-holding cartoon characters are around every corner. I suppose there’s the national parks, but from what I’ve read about those places these days, our beloved, brush-clearing, wanted-dead-or-alive, one-braincell for a “Texan” has sanctioned clear cutting them and has opened them up to quad cycles, snowmobiles, dreadnought-esque Trucks with deer spotlights, land speculators, and armies of blaze-orange wearing Gutbubbas out to find, kill, and pose next to anything with two lungs, pediciles, and black eyes.
Makes me want to go vote–today; makes me want to collect all that garbage and throw it on the McMansion’s Chemlawns(TM); makes me want to corral all the wild ruminant mammals and teach them self defense; makes me want to run up to the drunks and tip over their beers; makes me want to suckerpunch Sponge Bob–that great exploited victim in need of a lesson from the angry runner who’s just searching for a little solitude.
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oil on canvas
