Running for Your Life: Keeping a Journal

I can’t remember when it was I started writing in a journal. Certainly not in childhood. That would be too much like school. Even in university, where I chose journalism – the science of journals? hmmm – as a course of study, not because I was especially taken with the idea of being a newsman, or had a strong desire to express my opinions on the issues of the day. Rather, I was first inclined to take up acting, but when I learned that greater than ninety percent of professional actors were out of work, the very idea of college as a place to find, feed and care a passion, if not more than one that you will cultivate for the rest of your life, maybe even make a living out of, all central to the experience, the college years as Odyssey, discovery, a track as foreign to me as cricket. In my case, think table hockey, a narrow shallow slot from center to just below the faceoff dot, no surprises; go to college with a task in mind, a job at the end, and although Carleton University journalism was nothing to be ashamed of, quite the contrary, I entered its halls with no illusions: come four years and I’d be working in a job, and sure, let it be writing and reporting, and no it couldn’t just as easily have been computer programming, or accounting, or surveying, not anything further afield because my mind was made up, like the right wing riding up and down the table-hockey slot, just staying the course, the very idea that there was anything more to say about what I would do with my life not exactly a sacrilege because I didn’t prejudge myself, didn’t allow myself the luxury. In small-town Canada that greater sense of self, or a higher destiny, might suit in a confession to a girlfriend, or in my best pals from childhood, but any specialness like that had best be hidden away, you didn’t write any of it down in a journal, because to do so, to feel that you were worthy of such consideration could only mean one thing, the dreaded: Who do you think you are?

*

“Well, you could take up hand-rolling pasta.”

– K, when presented with my impression that it’s long since past the time when I should be expecting to elicit any sympathy from the retelling my injury tale of woe, and the concomitant mental anguish, and that if only I were to put my mind to more productive pursuits, (read JOURNAL WRITING!), particularly given that my body may be broken but my mind is whole, so consider a hobby why don’t I? Something that I can do now, yes, and maybe even the rest of my life, a building block for the me who may just have to consider not running in the way that I’ve become accustomed, and anyway isn’t that a limiting, reductive vision, one seen through a runner’s high, a me-filter in which I may not be expanding and growing like I would if I were taking Italian, or studying cosmology, or learning to swim, or volunteering at a hospital for sick children, or much more to the point, picking up the phone and talking to my parents, K’s grandparents, in Canada, and not just once in a blue moon but at least once a week because I love them and they’re no going to be around forever.

*

It didn’t just rain last night (April 16). M and I started out in Vanya, my 1993 Volvo 850 sedan that has a notorious tic, like a lovely but impishly unpredictable uncle who in polite company will blurt out in extremis and without warning, “YOU STUPID M-FUCKER, HATE YOU AND YOUR ASS IN THOSE TOO-TIGHT PANTS. WHAT IS THAT GET-UP? tic, tic, suddenly and inexplicably Vanya is dead in driving rain, a wind tunnel ahead, the rise up to the Brooklyn Bridge, Manhattan now an infinity beyond the East River as I stare at the dashboard lit up like a Christmas tree, M her hand to her mouth in fright, snap on the hazards because the tic is infrequent but not unknown to me (See, R4YL: A Congressional Run), and the hazard-snapping-on gives time for cars behind me because up until now at least in New York this tic, a year-old this week, but every time Vanya’s M-FUCK’D me it’s been remarkable, almost uncanny, how it’s somehow manageable considering the sudden stall-outs have happened in almost every conceivable circumstance – at 70 mph, idling at a red light, pulling up to the entrance to the Goethals Bridge, a quarter-mile from the US border crossing the Thousand Islands, and here, at the widest expanse, the eastern porch of the Brooklyn Bridge, where because of the near-zero visibility drivers are crawling their way forward so it’s Vanya’s loud, dirty joke to stall-out here, where odds are M and I won’t be rear-ended and if so at such an impact that it’s not likely to kill us, although if I am any kind of a lesson-learner it’s fair to say that this kind of fatalist thinking reminds of what was going through my mind about my tight hamstring muscles, and how it made sense to that then-runner-fatalist to just gut it out, run through the discomfort because I had a history of running without pain, was “Born to Run” wasn’t I? and what better strengthening was there than a six-mile run one day, a thirteen the next, then a quick tune-up sprint on the third day, once around the outside of Prospect Park, and now (April 17) here I sit at a desk in Sarah Lawrence College library, M doing a make-up class, Easter Monday will be four full weeks since I did anything cardio, and don’t you think I shouldn’t be playing Russian Roulette with a car that can stall out anywhere, like a shoulder-less parkway, the FDR, every other car hurtling by, tons of weight and force that could very easily if Vanya M-FUCKS us once and for all, really make us pay. The idea of not-running the very least of my worries.

I’d like to think, of course, that Vanya has a mind of its own, that he wouldn’t be a party to harm. But those are thoughts I can ill-afford. I do believe you make your own luck. The Boston Marathon (April 18) has come and gone and I can’t even run to the corner. This season I’ve learned there is a very thin line separating luck and folly. Don’t mistake it; pay attention.

Next: Running for Your Life: On Beshert