As my wife M put it this week: garden trowel or snow shovel, what’s it going to be?
Almost three weeks into December, the fastest month of the year. In Canada, when I was a boy and a young man, it was the shortest month. In the US, it’s only amplified by the super-late Thanksgiving, with December days filling up with parties and family gatherings and charity events and food-buying and gift-selecting, never enough hours in the day so that about now, Dec. 20, it’s understandable that reasonable people begin to long for January, when time slows, days lengthen, and you can actually get some writing done!
Funny, how when we’re young days and months seen shorter, whereas apres cinquante, they’re faster. December the express train of the calendar year. Blink in the slanted, seemingly never directly overhead light, and it’s New Year’s Eve. The longest and most boring night of the year. (Meet us at Red, White and Bubbly, Fifth Avenue and Union Street, Brooklyn, for a bubbly tasting – and specialty locally made gin cocktails. Yum!)
So what better month to start marathon training than in December. Obviously, in the first weeks of training, faster isn’t the goal. Rather, I’m looking for easy to moderate, even slow is okay. Remember, you’re foundation-building, as in balance of muscle looseness and strength, moderate to high food and drink fueling, modest interval-running, i.e. not overdoing treadmill sprints or excessive stairwork, and mindful monitoring of bodily pains, especially in injury-prone areas (HAMSTRINGS! FOREFOOT PAIN!) So far, so good. I started the first week at my target goal, 30 miles per week, with a 8-mile long run. I plan to increase that long run by a mile every week until the mid-20s. But now, it’s go slow to December’s fast. Yin to its yang.
School’s out. And students, faculty and admin are all on my subway platform, or milling about on the street near my workday destination, just north of Times Square. Millions of them. It’s ten minutes from my Midtown subway exit to "The Tree?!" at Rock Center and fifteen mintues to the Museum of Modern Art, where the de Kooning is still on the top floor, my favorite the Woman paintings, especially one that makes me think of daughter K, “Woman and Bicycle” (did you know that Steve Jobs wanted to change the name of the Macintosh computer to Bicycle? Weird), and I’m there last Wednesday (Dec. 14). So many rooms near-empty, sliding before one after the other like an elf. Not from Santa’s workshop. But an indie.
Here’s a December High: to be blissfully free of politics. Author Haruki Murakami, as reported in the latest London Review of Books http://bit.ly/sBOvlQ, sees culture (political and otherwise) as “fake.” He told a Paris Review interviewer in 2004, “We are living in a fake world; we are watching fake evening news. We are fighting a fake war. Our government is fake. But we find reality in this fake world.”
How else to explain the current iteration of the US Republican Party? Four years ago was bad enough, when January 2008 set off the Democratic Party presidential circus, featuring clown prince Barack Obama and wonk mentalist Hillary Clinton. But the Republicans of 2011-2012? Somehow, Haruki’s “fake” take seems a little dated. Although when it comes to the rank opposite of real, I guess we’re stuck with it. In any event, December is our last month reprieve before the dismal politics of 2012. Enjoy!
Oh, and further on the fake front; who would’ve guessed a half-century ago (1961), when Bobby Lewis’s “Tossin’ and Turnin’ was No. 1 on the hit parade, that today the nation’s No. 1 hit single with the year coming to a close would be “Sexy and I Know It” by Laugh My Fucking Ass Off?
More December Highs:
The coat drive box in the corporate lobby with the never-old picture of the Statue of Liberty huddled in the frigid cold and snow, looking very much in need of a hooded parka http://bit.ly/s1jgPu.
The subway trumpet busker with bowler hooked to the bell with what looks like fishing line, collecting dimes and quarters, dollars and bits and bobs after playing with a waist contraption sound system complete with a Bob Barker-like emcee introductory remark. Less than December High afterthought: Shouldn’t the MTA have metal detectors? I mean what’s to stop . . . Well, you know.
The emptying out of alternate side of the street parking spots from Dec. 20 on.
Sweaters and coats sales that make it very much easier to chuck out your current shapeless ones, donating to the corporate lobby coat drive box, even though in New York City, what with global warming we won’t be needing those sweaters and coats. Still, feel patriotic, doing all that’s left for us to do in the political process: shop. Spending money we don’t have (See Murakami above, re: “fake” world).
Holiday parties (The one time of the year when people have you over and don’t expect you to reciprocate.)
And family stuff. K, our dauther, is coming home. Tonight (Dec. 20)! And staying until well after Christmas! If that’s not the primo note to end on this holiday season, I don’t know what is!
Happy holidays, everyone!
Next: Running for Your Life: Repetition Rant
0 comments:
Post a Comment