Running for Your Life: Alone Together

I’m struck by the idea of relevance. A new e-mail publication, or paid content that lights up your inbox on a regular basis, called Inside Hook, is devoted to the idea that men in their 40s need the equivalent of a social director on a cruise ship (presumably because in your 40s, as opposed to your 20s, you are saddled with non-hip responsibilities, aka, a wife, children, a dog, an income-producing job . . .)

This is why, it seems to me, Barney Rosset (see picture at right, and previous post) never failed to amaze me. As far as I was concerned, Barney, who passed away on Feb. 21, was always doing the equivalent of sitting on a park bench and reading manuscripts while the likes of Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso looked on. Another martini? Why the hell not? When you are the outlaw/badass of Manhattan publishing, what the hell do you need with the Inside Hook? You are the Inside Hook . . .

Running for Your Life: The Life of Barney

The crows are circling high above the tree line, and the Quaker parrots that I always hear but rarely see are ruffle-feathered, a pair outside their condo nest, the morning after Barney died. Barney Rosset. Aged 89. Today (Feb. 22) is not just another day.

We, his family and friends, didn’t expect this. Not now. Just this past weekend we were all there in Manhattan’s civic chapel waiting area on Worth Street. Barney was too much a storyteller of the here and now to say our wait was like Godot. Still, to mention it would elicit that naughty, subversive, snake-like smile. (In an interview, Barney called himself “an amoeba with a brain.”) He wasn’t one to hold a grudge against someone for making such a lame reference.

Running for Your Life: Intrepid Route

Musings from the road: 60 days! before the Boston Marathon.

Here’s a snippet of a post from last year at this time. Mid-February:

“My right leg, still tender, if I didn’t know better I’d be thinking blood clot, the pain is so sharp at times, but I’ve done my bit, stretched and strengthened like never before, and as I head out again – six-miler, easy pace, fifty/fifty-five minutes – right away feel the inner-thigh muscle tighten, not easing as it always does, it’s the cold, I tell myself as I slow down, listen to my body, as the running mavens say, and the muscle holds in its tightness; a drummer knowing the tone of the bass drum is off, the tension too tight, but not so that I can’t get through the set. I need this gig. It's Week One, and the show, if there is going to be the show in April, must go on.”

Running for Your Life: Chasing the February Blahs

What is it about February? Even this one, a third over and temperatures have been closer to 50s than even 40s. Not balmy, of course .¤.¤. For the past three months not able to go out the door in anything but an overcoat of some kind; this uniform that we all wear: the navys and blacks and charcoal grays, in New York commuting for as often as I do the subway company I keep more funeral parlor than rumpus room.

Why do we grow up and into these Beckettian uniforms from the primary colors of kindergarten? (As a toddler I had a smashing ruby red shorts and harness outfit that I wore when tooling around on my fire-engine red tricycle .¤.¤. Now I don’t even own a stitch of clothing that’s red.)

Running for Your Life: Notes from the Long Ones

Marathon training – now up to 38-plus miles per week – tests your mind as well as your body. On my runs through Brooklyn and Manhattan, especially on the one day a week that I put on extra miles (this week I’m up to 14 miles per long run; I plan to bump that up a mile or so every week for the next eight weeks before Boston), I see the darnedest things:

 On Sixth Avenue in Brooklyn at about 22nd Street, a modest two-story whose shoulder-height eaves are post-holiday decorated with several incredibly lifelike icicles that only reveal themselves as fakes under close inspection.

 In Brooklyn Heights, a skinny girl with long hair struggling to carry a Zappos box that’s half her size.