Running for Your Life: 2017 Theme

So it’s so long 2016 and hello 2017.

Lucky seven follows bizarre six.

May you live in interesting times.

Don’t let the door hit you on the way out.

Three more years and it’s 2019.

Days later it's Jan. 1, 2020, marking my sixth decade as an ink-stained wretch

First feature: an article, Summer 1979, for the Prescott Journal about the value – medical and spiritual – of a daily run.

Countless stories, written and edited, in three full decades, and seven-tenths of the fourth. Never looked back in anger. (Well, maybe once or twice.)

Lucky seven goes to Trump.

Obama had eight years but never a seven. A hopeful sign? We’re pushed so far right that we have to reach for something. Better it not be an arm of the swastika . (With a nod to honor the late great cartoonist Mickey Siporin.)

Here’s to a happy and prosperous new year.

We can do a lot worse than Confucius to keep us on our psychic toes. 

When asked how he would describe himself, he said, and I paraphrase:

As a man who was so impassioned that he forgot to eat, so engaged that he forgot to worry and so unaware of the time passing he didn’t notice his old age.

Next: Running for Your Life: Rituals!

Running for Your Life: Little Look Back at 2016

When it comes to year-end reviews, I’ve seen a few. After all, I’ve been in the news business for five decades. And each publication I’ve worked for has had some version of a year-end review.

This time a little story. Call it Chicken Tikka Christmas.

I’ve been dining at an NYC Midtown food cart – primarily on Sundays when the crowds are thin – for years. But this year, 2016, I’ve finally begun a friendship with my once-a-week chef. He is from Bangladesh, and speaks only a little English. But, by and by, he has ventured into more and more conversation with me: primarily about the weather, once about his daughters and my daughter. We have yet to exchange names, but it hardly seems to matter to either of us.

Last Sunday (Dec. 18), the Chicken Tikka chef went all out. We talked more than usual: I let him know that as a long-distance runner I had huge appetite. So he gave me a meal for two, at a price for one. I told him that I would be taking some of it home to my grateful wife as leftovers. That made him beam from ear to ear.

Later that night, after a long shift at The Post, I was standing on the near-empty subway platform with my briefcase containing my prize – the leftover Chicken Tikka for M. I was in a post-work daze when a man – dressed like Peary en route to the North Pole – came up behind me. He said hello – and within the winter hoodie I saw my friend, the Chicken Tikka chef.

We talked some more, on the platform and in the subway car that wasn’t long in coming. We were both Brooklyn-bound. I told him that I had the meal for my wife tucked away in the briefcase.

His smile vanished. “You didn’t like it?”

“Oh, no, no, no. It was fabulous, as always. Just too much this time. Even for me.”

His smile returning, he nodded in understanding. I told him he had much to teach me. That I would love to be able to cook as he does. That he could teach. I said there were many people I knew who would love to learn the finer points of South Asian cooking.

There was a lot said. But mostly what was said was in body language. The respect and joy that comes from lives crossed in a busy city. A simple lesson for those who feel too often like a stranger on a train.

Next: Running for Your Life: Running in 2017

Running for Your Life: Think Different Again

Back in innocent days when you could tell the subject of an advertising campaign in the first screen shots, Apple did this forward-feeling campaign showing seminal cultural figures like Ghandi with the overlay phrase THINK DIFFERENT.

Well, it’s time to THINK DIFFERENT AGAIN.

That is to say, think different about Apple, about Amazon, about Google, about Facebook …

To be comfortable in reality. To reject virtual reality.

Consider what is happening on the internet. Recently I read a frightening multi-book review in the London Review of Books, called "Schadenfreude With Bite," by Richard Seymour.

Here are some highlights:

• ·         What’s so funny about trolling? “Every joke calls for a public of its own,” Freud said, “and laughing at the same jokes is evidence of a far-reaching psychical conformity.”
• ·         Grieving parents are among the easiest to exploit – their rage and sorrow are closest to the surface.
• ·         [Trolling] is a “mass cultural response to women asserting themselves [in] previously male-dominated areas.
• ·         Much of the laughter, [Whitney] Phillips [This is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things: Mapping the Relationship Between Online Trolling and Mainstream Culture] points out, is “directed to people of colour, especially African Americans, women, and gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender and queer” people, while trolling communities disproportionately comprise young white men in Anglophone or Nordic countries.

OK. There is a role for the internet in small doses among close friends and budding relationships. But a deep dive? Fuhgeddaboutit. People ask why I don’t even run with headphones on? To stay real, baby. So much of the internet doesn’t have our best interests at heart.

So, if you’re searching for the latest in tech gadgetry and VR headsets, you got the wrong address. Around here, it’s all running, reading, and ’riting.

Next: Running for Your Life: Little Look Back at 2016

Running for Your Life: Simple Thoughts on the 36th Day of President-Elect Trump

FDR, the sage of the “fireside chat,” broadcast unmediated via radio to foster the New Deal: Medicare, Social Security and a progressive tax rate that topped out at the 90 percentile.

Trump, the sage of Twitter, broadcasts unmediated via social media and is fostering the mirror image of FDR in each of these three areas.

If the 20^th Century ended with the fall of communism, the “Real” 21^st Century starts with the advent of Trumpism.

Next: Running for Your Life: Think Different Again

Running for Your Life: Robert Bolt’s “A Man for All Seasons”

And so our arts education resumes.

What stirs in the ungiving heart but a cold draft and here is what Sir Thomas More, the Man for All Seasons, will not forfeit: the dignity of his faith, private beliefs vs. public duties.

The message here is that strength and honor come from an intelligent, consistent belief in society. That a selfless approach to life – insert golden rule here  – for want of a better term this time of year is the Christmas spirit (leave irony at the door, for once).

It is, hopefully, a time for a revival and renewal, to consider the greats of moral strength and duty who do the right thing. How actions that are driven by a selfless consideration of others are not to be seen as weakness. Rather it is to be, in the language of Trump, the bully of a compassionate heart.

As an example, consider the splendid humanity of Bolt’s “A Man for All Seasons.” A universal lesson that these days seems drowned out in a society that values power at any cost.

Obviously, the glory here is not the physical. Sir Thomas More is beheaded for his steadfast unwillingness to renounce his faith. Here is the grander spiritual victory.

More becomes a symbol of pure resistance, the saint for not just this season of hate and tweeting discontent, but for all seasons.

Next: Running for Your Life: Think Different Again

Running for Your Life: Subway Notes

The thing I love about the subway is the rawness of the people energy. What is the promise of an early love of mass transit. Not always realized.

But on days such as this (Dec. 1), my body shot through with adrenaline after a 4-plus mile run in the brilliant sunshine of Prospect Park – marking the classic style of the mature Japanese maple, red and orange leaves, rubies in the shimmering light along the ridge run adjacent to Prospect Park Southwest, beyond Sixteenth Street, a beauty for the residents of Windsor Terrace to enjoy on an everyday morning stroll – I am gasping with the memory of it all, yet another treasure brought to mind and put into my subway journal, a gentle reminder to seek out in these next few weeks  the leaves still held fast in these dreamscape trees.

Next: Running for Your Life:  A Man for All Seasons

Running for Your Life: Holiday Reading List

This blog is not exactly the place to go for listicles, but when it comes to my love of reading (the space being devoted to the three “Rs” – running, reading and ’riting), I’m making an exception.  Safe to say, these titles aren’t your garden variety best-seller variety. Just my faves at the moment, and who knows, maybe there is something here that will light up your soul while you light up your Christmas tree and front porch …

1/ David Constantine, “The Life-Writer,” a novel. Unforgettable voices, gorgeously shaped sentences.

2/ David Constantine, “In Another Country,” stories. Ditto, ditto.

3/ Colum McCann, “Thirteen Ways of Looking,” a novel, stories. Strangely entrancing.

4/ David Szalay, “All That Man Is,” A “page” of music. Wondrously elegiac.

5/ Jarett Kobek, “I Hate the Internet,” a novel  (I’m guessing). Manic brilliance of sloppiness. War cry for our times.

6/ Larry McMurtry, “Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen,” nonfiction. On the simple joys of reading, esp. for those who grew up in a literary desert. A Larry who loves books in the most selfless, inviting way.

7/ Alice Munro. Everything.

8/ Mary Morris, “The Jazz Palace,” a novel. Music IS the page. (Disclaimer: She is my genius wife.)

9/ Valerie Martin, “The Ghost of the Mary Celeste,” a novel. Love historical literary fiction with a twist? This is the best of the best.

10/ Steve O’Connor, “Thomas Jefferson Dreams of Sally Hemings,” a novel. Fever dream of imaginative wonder. Think you know Jefferson? Think again …

Next: Running for Your Life: Subway Notes

Running for Your Life: Irony Watch – Beyond Coincidence

I’m excited to introduce a new feature of the Running for Your Life blog, Irony Watch – Beyond Coincidence.

Today’s item, observed midday 11-29-16 during a single-stop ride aboard the Manhattan-bound R Train, Union Street to Atlantic/Pacific:

Display ad for a meditation consumer service company (I guess …) called Headspace shows a mean-looking millennial woman in buff workout clothes, crooked arm cradling a mini-barbell, amid the following words:

I MEDITATE

TO CRUSH IT

Next: Running for Your Life: Holiday Reading List

Running for Your Life: Leaf It to Me

On Nov. 22, two days before US Thanksgiving, the leaves in the ginkgo trees glow like fire. In the Brooklyn morning, when M and I walk T, our hound dog, the blinding sun of pre-winter morning sparks the flames. Non-ginkgo leaves are down, or speckled in and out of shadow. Like they’ve been gutted in the ginkgo inferno.

It will not always be like this. Ginkgo trees afire, not a single leaf having fluttered to the ground, will soon face the equivalent of the fire hose. A blustery wind that in a hour – perhaps even less – will sweep into our heroes and send them all – in bunches, or ones, twos, threes, into a whirligig dance, pinwheeling on different courses, not one like the other. Literally impossible for the human eye to track their darting and swimming and flatlining journey.

That is why I count it as luck, an omen of delight, when I’m running in Prospect Park and the magical leaves of one of these trees is finally aloft, and somehow miraculously lands and is caught in my outstretched hand.

So far, I’ve caught one leaf like that this season. A wee yellow elm (or poplar? or beech?). But the ginkgos? They are still aflame. But soon, soon, in the next big wind, I’ll be out there, bracing for the tree-gift catch of my life.

Next: Running for Your Life: Holiday Reading List

Running for Your Life: Trump’s Unwitting Genius

Or who do the women who voted for Donald Trump look to for moral authority?

This longtime blog of running tips and whimsical reflections by a 40-year runner has been interrupted by a continuing political emergency: the imminent Trump presidency.

It begins – thanks to the insight of I HATE THE INTERNET author Jarett Kobek http://bit.ly/2gdbuBt – with Ayn Rand (1905-1982), the libertarian philosopher and author of THE FOUNTAINHEAD and ATLAS SHRUGGED.

The unwitting part is that Trump is a self-proclaimed non-reader (which is better than the line of thinking that he does read, with bedside books headlined by a title of Hitler speeches, ie, http://tws.io/2gddWrZ) and hardly an Ayn Rand acolyte. Still, his infamous “locker room” talk that has outraged feminists, mothers and fathers, and pretty much everybody I know who regard it as license to commit unwanted sexual advances, if not outright assault, is pure Rand.

Consider this gem, from Kobek’s aforementioned amazing novel-screed: 

‘… (Supreme Court Justice Clarence) Thomas was a devotee of Ayn Rand, and each year, his incoming crop of legal clerks came to his house, where he forced them to watch the film adaptation of Rand’s “The Fountainhead.”

The frisson of this discussion derived from the juxtaposition of Thomas’s history as a person known for practicing the art of sexual harassment and the presence, in the mandatory film and the novel, of a rape scene.

Here’s Ayn Rand in a letter dated June 5, 1946, describing the rape scene in a letter to Waldo Coleman. “But the fact is that Roark did not actually rape Dominique: she had asked for it, and he knew that she wanted it.” ’

Therein lies the moral authority, folks. Who are the female standard bearers of this sick anti-women’s rights twist on human affairs?

Let’s start with Laura Ingraham (a finalist for Trump press secretary, the press tells us) and Ann Coulter, whose far-right ideas suddenly win the imprimatur of the White House.

And many more to come, but these two are the line leaders.

Next: Running for Your Life: Leaf It to Me

Running for Your Life: On Being Political

A brief history for Day 2 of President-Elect Trump

Back in the distant past, I went to college. I was a family anomaly, and while high school teachers advised me to indulge my love for the liberal arts, my working class instincts took over. Rather than pursuing Shakespeare and theater arts, I opted for what I saw as a parallel profession and studied journalism, with a concentration in political science.

My first big news job was at the Windsor Star. As assistant night news editor in 1985, it was my job to rewrite stories – even the critical front-page ones, when necessary ! – and come up with snappy headlines. I loved that type of work. I still do – although now at the New York Post – thirty-one years later.

I remember when – for the first time at the Star – the top editors decided to lead the paper with political poll results. I was shocked and outraged. Before then, polls were regarded as stale window dressing. Meaty reporting on ideas, themes and relevant social-political history was what I loved to sink my teeth into. Damn the day, I thought at the time, when polling of the people who actually answered the pollsters – the bored, the lonely and the depressed, as a childhood friend of mine who freelanced for a polling concern had told me – would account for serious journalism.  I felt so strongly about it that I began to resent being associated with a public service that stooped that low, was that lazy.

I wasn’t alone in this line of thinking. One of my favorite quotes from a politician was by former Canadian Prime Minister John Diefenbaker (1895-1979). He wasn’t doing as well in these new polls as the pundits expected, and he was asked by a reporter about what he thought about this emerging fixation by news outlets.

I paraphrase: “Every dog should piss on one.”

Next: Running for Your Life: Leaf It to Me

Running for Your Life: Please Come

Fifteen years ago the flow of foreign visitors didn’t stop. In fact, in seeming solidarity toward us New Yorkers in shock over the unspeakable Twin Towers attack, a vast majority of people didn’t cancel their travel plans to the US because of security concerns. They came to show their support. So that, as we said at the time, we would not let the terrorists win.

Today I feel a similar sense of shock, a numbing flashback. Never has a presidential candidate seemed so at home with sexist and racist language, bullying, and encouraging the same, if not worse, from his supporters. What’s more horrifying, the ugly tactics have paid off.  That candidate, after the results of Tuesday’s vote, is now president-elect. He will be inaugurated in January.

My simple plea? Foreign visitors, don’t cancel your travel plans to America in protest of this vote that appears to speak to the worst side of human nature. Now, more than ever, those of us who lived through the nightmare of US Vote 2016 – so damn similar to a terrorist attack on our very moral soul – need your support.

Don’t cancel your plans. Come to America. Like beloved Yogi Berra famously said, it is Déjà vu all over again. We need to see the compassion and intelligent understanding in your eyes  just like we did in 2001.

Next: Running for Your Life: Leaf It to Me

Running for Your Life: One Day More!

Pardon the Les Miserables song reference, but isn't it apropos to conjure up images of revolution in the hours before we Americans go to the polls during this bizarrely contentious election cycle?

Here’s what it boils down to in my mind:

If politics are forever infected with false news, those who would stop at nothing to erect as sacrosanct a partisan view of the truth, what is the public interest? Or has it always been a hollow construct serving the lie that there is validity in truth-seeking?

A T-shirt that is making the rounds in Trump America gives me pause as I tap out these thoughts. ROPE. TREE. JOURNALIST.  Some Assembly Required.

And so we vote. And if you think Nov. 9 will bring sunshine, strawberries and a clear path ahead, then I’ve got a stone-arch bridge over the East River I’d like to sell you.

Next: Running for Your Life: Leaf It to Me

Running for Your Life: Sand County Almanac

It’s five days and counting until the US election, and yes, for reasons that I won’t get into here because EVERYONE and his dog is getting into it, this is the most important election the modern world has ever seen. (I know, but believe it or not, grandiosity is called for).

That’s why I couldn’t be happier to be reading for the first time Aldo Leopold’s nature classic, “A Sand County Almanac.” http://bit.ly/2esfyey Here’s the theme, as written by Leopold 67 years ago:

“It is a century now since Darwin gave us the first glimpse of the origin of the species. We know now what was unknown to all the preceding caravan of generations: that men are only fellow-voyagers with other creatures in the odyssey of evolution. This new knowledge should have given us, by this time, a sense of kinship with fellow-creatures; a wish to live and let live; a sense of wonder over the magnitude and duration of the biotic enterprise.”

Get that? A kinship with fellow-creatures? Wow! Live and let live? Not, fight dirty and dirtier. Brook no quarter. Don’t be a loser.

Be a winner this election season. Pick up a copy of “Sand County Almanac” and take a quiet breath, if only for the length of time it takes to read this 226-page treasure.

Next: Running for Your Life: Leaf It to Me

Running for Your Life: Trolls at Halloween

What Halloween would be complete without a little scare – well, actually, a big scare.

That would be trolls. The internet variety.

A big pre-election thanks goes to writer Jared Keller and the Village Voice for his cautionary tale on trolls. http://bit.ly/2eNhE9r.

When it comes to just what makes news these days (Yes, I’m a member of an endangered species: the newspaper worker), look no further than the trolls.

If only – like the kiddie trolls who come to trick or treat at your door tonight – they will vanish with the dawn. But as Keller warns us, unless there is a hard reckoning of common sense, the trolls of the internet will continue to bear down on civil society like a late season hurricane.

Next: Running for Your Life: Sand County Almanac

Running for Your Life: Pace Setting

Next year I will mark a milestone: my fifth decade of running every other day, or at least three times a week.

In that time I’ve entered eight marathons, finishing six of them, including Boston in 2012. I didn’t try my fourth until well into my 50s.

In those years, my pace has slowed some. I have taken to heart that I will never post a better marathon PR than 3:33:08 (which I managed in Scranton, Pa., when I was 55 years old).

Still, the other day I ran four miles and felt like I was in my thirties. I didn’t run the route as fast as I did in those days, but my body felt as good. Or at least that is what my brain was telling me.

If there is a secret to any of this, a lot of it comes down to being sensible about pace setting. The “setting” of your body as you run.

That means working on your running posture. You are not going to change the way you run. That’s bred in the bone. But look around you and you’ll see what I mean.

Most casual runners of all ages will lean forward and run out in front of their hip fulcrum. In so doing, with each footfall, the force of the stride falls disproportionately on the knee joint, and isn’t shared by the lower leg and ankle in the way that allows for optimum power efficiency.  After years of running in this way, injury often results.

What to do? Last year at this time my knee blew out because of those years of pounding. My pace “setting” was off all that time. For months in physical therapy I worked strenuously to correct that imbalance by doing lunges and squats to strengthen the knees – and equally important – the butt and lower leg.

For example, doing the squat and lunge appropriately (watch as people do them and often the case they are cheating the exercise and thus the good it can do) builds butt muscle as well as the knee and lower leg. But keeping the weight behind the knee as you do the full lunge and full squat, you are not overstraining the knee as you exercise. Rather you are training the body to distribute the weight of your body – and the pounding as you run – more evenly with each exercise lunge or each training stride.

Okay, that’s the Rime of the Ancient Marathoner lesson for the day. Next up and soon! is the plan for my next half-marathon. With my No. 9 marathon a realistic goal in the not too distant future.

Running for Your Life: Pace Setting

Running for Your Life: Yeah, That Addiction Thing Again

When it comes to appeasing liberal guilt in an age of tech dominance of public policy consider this:

The American Academy of Pediatrics has just released guidelines on cellphone use for our youngest users. I saw the news item about it as part of a national TV broadcast over the weekend (Oct. 21-23). Here are the highlights:

• ·         No screen time for children under the age of 2
• ·         No more than one hour of screen time a day for those between 3 and 5
• ·         Older kids? Guidelines get vague

Where to begin. While laudable, it’s hard to think of a more meaningless gesture. Imagine guidelines being set for children re: smoking. That they are cautioned against cigarette smoke intake while their parents chain-smoke through the day – and even during bedtime stories, or in their own bed, the blue light of the screen dumbing their faces as the child wanders in the room, awakened by a dream not stirred by looking into a phone.

I will believe the likes of politicians’ promises when they are not affected by the fortunes in campaign dollars being funneled to them by forces in Silicon Valley. When serious guidelines are published and distributed to warn adults against the dangers of overuse of mobile phones. Until then, do yourself a favor and read The Deep State. http://bit.ly/2eyEL9j

Would that we could get serious about informing people of the deleterious effects of cellphone addiction. That is a cultural climate change that I’d like to see.

Next: Running for Your Life: Pace Setting

  

Running for Your Life: Mo’ Canada

When it comes to my adopted country’s political season, where best to look for moral direction than Canada – my home and native land.

For those of you who didn’t see it on Facebook, check out this post

http://wapo.st/2epGSsp

Are Canadians too smug in their modesty? We’d rather not stake such a claim.

Consider my recent post about the quote I discovered from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.: “Hate cannot drive out hate, only love can do that.”

My childhood pal Frederick Harrison points out that this quote – and many many others –  received wide distribution in Canada in November 1967 (and to radio listeners around the world from the dynamic ideas program, The Massey Lectures on CBC Radio).

Here is the link to those lectures: http://bit.ly/2eL2a7g

As I wrote to Frederick in a recent commentary, the Massey Lectures have been truly formative in my thinking, travel and have shaped the way I see the world.  Most important for me was the 1984 Carlos Fuentes, "Latin America At War With the Past" that I listened to during the days I was employed as assistant night editor at the Windsor Star. Just a few months before I'd returned from three months living in Mexico (with a one-week tour of Cuba). In January 1985, I was back in Cuba, and in July, to Nicaragua where I wrote news articles during the sixth anniversary of the Sandinista revolution.

Next: Running for Your Life: Pace Setting

Running for Your Life: Ed Whitlock Rocks!

OK, I had planned to post today about pace setting. Not in terms of racing, but just for those looking for guidance on an overlooked part of road training. Going out too fast. How do you stay within yourself? Listening to your body. Feeling comfortable with slow.

Then Ed Whitlock came along, courtesy of my pal in Canada, Susan Wright. When it comes to Running for Your Life, pause a moment to read this article and consider the last forty-plus years of Ed Whitlock's life. (I started running in 1976, so my forty-plus begins in January ...)

http://bit.ly/2dZ4IeH

Rime of the Ancient Marathoner, indeed !

Next: Running for Your Life: Pace Setting

Running for Your Life: If the Greats Were With Us Thursday

Imagine if Dr. King were with us. For a fleeting moment I felt he was this morning, when I saw the quote below on signage in front of a Catholic Church in Gowanus, Brooklyn:

"Hate cannot drive out hate, only love can do that." -- Martin Luther King, Jr.

Something our political leaders (and wannabe leaders) should show. If only.

Next: Running for Your Life: Pace Setting

  

Running for Your Life: Deep State S—t

Here are some uncheery thoughts.

Political campaigns may just be the leading growth business in post-industrial America. (Hurry! Please donate today to CAMPAIGN _________. There has never been a greater threat to civilization as we know it than the prospect of a ____________ Party victory. Don’t delay! Pony up today!)

And what do you get for that investment? Hope and change? Or more of the same?

Surprise! More of the same. That equates to trillions spent on defense and foreign policy prerogatives that have been proven failures, at best, and elitist pet projects, at worst.

Do politicians earn the right to represent us after filling their pockets from coins from our pockets? Yes. Do they actually control (or even mildly have influence to fiddle with) the levers of power in such a way as to earn the trust we put in them by our honest investments in their business. No. Not even close.

I read a lot of books: novels at home and nonfiction – primarily political and social science books – during my daily commutes to and from my paying job. Hands down the most interesting I’ve read this season is Mike Lofgren’s THE DEEP STATE http://bit.ly/2e4U19B.

DEEP STATE s—t is scary s—t. As scary as Trump being president? Well, no. But scary enough to warrant a new wave of folk considering asylum in Canada if its central messages were to be given wider distribution.

In our daily news feeds, the deep state doesn’t get discussed much. Consider what J. Edgar Hoover did in the 1950s-1970s (See THE BURGLARY http://bit.ly/2ebfJrr )  What Dwight D. Eisenhower complained about in his famous military industrial complex speech in 1961.

In the Hill-Pill debates, what time is given to balancing privacy concerns with national security? What gets classified? We know that Hillary used a personal e-mail server but do we ask the question: What does get classified? Who is in charge of those policies and practices? What are the checks and balances?

The deep state – the Washington, DC, Puzzle Palace – is in charge. And democracy? That’s the fastest-growing civilian business in post-industrial Amerca. It’s like melting gold and pouring it into an unused well in coal country.

Fraud, baby.

Next: Running for Your Life: Pace Setting

  

Running for Your Life: Faceplant or Face-plant?

Hmm. One word or hyphenated?

Current Merriam-Webster shows the word as hyphenated, to mean a sudden face-first fall.

In word use the hyphen has a way of dissolving – usually over a long period of time like forest rock giving way to matsutake mushrooms. But that process can be hurried by constant use.

In my case that applies. It just so happens the “faceplant” has emerged as my own private injury method. On Thursday, Sept. 29, only two days before my scheduled half-marathon in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, I managed my second faceplant in two years. The first one occurred when I faceplanted while walking the dog: one hand holding a hot coffee, the other the dog leash, and Wham!, I tripped over Thurber’s back leg and went down chin-first on pavement.

Seven stitches later I went to The Post to work on a Sunday.

Then, on that last Thursday in September, I’m face-first again, this time while on a final training run before the Oct. 1 race. While on a Prospect Park trail I was zooming along, feeling no pain, when I tripped on a tree root – Screw You, Tree Root, my daughter K rejoined – and fell even harder than the first time: Right on the same spot as I’d injured during the dog-tripping incident. Then off to the clinic: 12 stitches this time (because the collision was harder, my teeth opened a wound in the roof of my mouth.)

The upshot? No Bay Ridge Half. And yes, this result in the spelling of “faceplant.” It’s on my mind so much now that when I close my eyes I see the hyphen dissolving like Alka-Seltzer in water.   

Next: Running for Your Life: Deep State S--t

Running for Your Life: Yeah, That Addiction Thing

Okay, so you didn’t drop everything and read the “Put Down Your Phone” essay by Andrew Sullivan that I posted last month. Don’t worry. Here’s another, this one in that swishy new Economist lifestyle magazine that continues to find its way to my door at home.

This report, by Ian Leslie, is called “The Scientists Who Make Apps Addictive.” http://bit.ly/2dusGxV. Redeem yourself and stop everything to read THIS article. These Internet addiction pieces do seem to be piling up, like leaves falling year-round in our so-confused climate.

Some beauts. For those who insist on keeping their phone in their hands, rather than convince themselves they have time on the hands.

• When motivation is high enough, or a task easy enough, people become responsive to triggers such as the vibration of a phone, Facebook’s red dot, the email from the fashion store featuring a time-limited offer on jumpsuits.

• Respondents spent all their hours thinking about how to organize their lives in order to take pictures they could post to each persona, which meant they weren’t able to enjoy whatever they were doing, which made them stressed and unhappy.

• No matter how useful the products, the system itself is tilted in favor of its designers. The house always wins.

And finally:

• In theory, we can all opt out of the loops of incentive and reward which encircle us, but few of us choose to. It is just so much easier to accept and connect. If we are captives of captology, then we are willing ones.

Next: Running for Your Life: Deep State S--t

Running for Your Life: If the Greats Were With Us Thursday

Today’s “Greats” honors Dwight D. Eisenhower. Why? For the greatest political speech in post-TV American history.

His topic? On what now we take as a vested interest that will never be torn asunder: the military-industrial complex.

(And this speech in 1961 occurred long before the military- and defense contract-serving NSA got its act down on tracking every shred of the people’s social and political lives.)

Consider these ideas and just try to imagine them being uttered by any one of our current leaders, in or out of office:

• We must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

• It is the task of statesmanship to mold, to balance, and to integrate these and other forces, new and old, within the principles of our democratic system -- ever aiming toward the supreme goals of our free society.

• We pray that peoples of all faiths, all races, all nations, may have their great human needs satisfied; that those now denied opportunity shall come to enjoy it to the full; that all who yearn for freedom may experience its spiritual blessings; that those who have freedom will understand, also, its heavy responsibilities; that all who are insensitive to the needs of others will learn charity; that the scourges of poverty, disease and ignorance will be made to disappear from the earth, and that, in the goodness of time, all peoples will come to live together in a peace guaranteed by the binding force of mutual respect and love.

If only Eisenhower were with us. Alas, he is not. But these ideas are sound and the MIC much more threatening to our “democracy” than it was in this great American’s day.

Talk about making America great again! Let’s do something about the unstinting control exercised in our lives by the MIC of 2016.

Next: Running for Your Life: Deep State S--t

Running for Your Life: Screen Grab

The backlash is on!

Ex-blogger extraordinaire Andrew Sullivan fired the bazooka in this week’s New York magazine, to wit:

http://slct.al/2cP3Nww

There might be a few of you who bookmark this essay – or more radically – set aside time RIGHT NOW! to read it. Do otherwise and yes, as they said in The Sixties, consider yourself part of the problem – not the solution.

Readers of this blog have seen these thoughts here before. In fact, I’ve been running without headphones – more interested in achieving a meditative high than an adrenaline high – for forty years next year. On July 17, 2012, I wrote:

_______________

“Item: Nokia slashes price of Lumia 900 Windows phone to $49.99 with a two-year contract.

Item: Young man in Prospect Park flogging cut-rate mobile-phone service near-interrupts me, thrusting a promotional postcard, while I’m on a fast-paced run.

It’ll get you, Internet addiction. Consider the following:

Item: The brains of Internet addicts look like brains of drug and alcohol addicts.

Item: A researcher on aging and memory selected 12 experienced Web users and 12 inexperienced ones and passed them all through a brain scanner. The difference was striking, with the Webbies showing fundamentally altered prefrontal cortexes. The novices went away for a week and were asked to spend a TOTAL of five hours online. The brains of the novices had rewired and were similar to the Webbies.

Item: The average teen processes 3,700 texts a month (123 texts daily).

Item: Teens fit some seven hours of screen time into the average school day; 11, if you count the time spent multitasking on several devices.

How hypocritical of me. People turning to this blog – either on a mobile device, a PC, a Mac, etc. – are adding to their screen time. And too often every day I find myself checking to see how many visits my blog posts have attracted. I’m typing into a computer screen right now, my rewired brain piqued by the rush that I’m attracting readers, maybe even followers.

In the event of followers, listen to this: Log off. Go out for a run. Pet the dog. Pick up a pen and journal and write. Call a friend and make a plan to play tennis, or golf. You can be assured that Facebook and Twitter – and yes, Running for Your Life – will be there when you get back.”

_____________

So consider this shout-y protest as a grab for your screen. I am not so arrogant as to think that my way is better. (I use a flip phone that gets less smart by the day). Rather, I’m happy to have more company in the forefront of the backlash against the screen that mirrors your brain.

Next: Running for Your Life: Deep State S--t

Running for Your Life: September!

Back to school on Resolution Row: weigh less, drink fewer bottles, exercise more.

What fades in summer under the weight of humid air, lazy days, beachcomber malaise revives in the cool air of September. The extremes of the heat dome may return but it is more cap than cover. Soon to be swept off in the cold of October, the bite of November. September, that elegant pause between.

While summer is now, fall triggers memories. Action movies give way to emotional dramas, character driven. The dog, Thurber, taps energy that for months lay dormant within him. In Prospect Park, the New Doggy Beach is open. He is like a pup again.

The air conditioner is off. For days at a time. Weeks and weeks it whirred and rattled, making for unsound sleep. In September, subway platforms are no longer murderously sweltering. Sweat doesn’t bead on your forehead as you read a book, waiting for the express. You remember what you read, even pull out your notebook and write down an idea.

Celebrate September! Your friends are back in town for the season. Make a date for a coffee, a beer, an ale instead of a pilsner. Drink up (but not much, you’re on a diet). Raise a toast: It’s September!

Next: Running for Your Life: Screen Grab

Running for Your Life: And the Weak Suffer What They Must? By Yanis Varoufakis

So you live in a nation where either Anthony Weiner or Donald Trump command the headlines – not just in the tabloids but in the papers of record too.

Americans may be racing to the heavens in Silicon Valley (SpaceX and Blue Origin, a colony on Mars, anyone?), but in political, economic and social news, it’s a race to the bottom. That’s not so much a comment about American global power or domestic economic health. Rather about the quality of its news and commentary.

Then there is “And the Weak Suffer What They Must?” by Yanis Varoufakis, a onetime finance minister of Greece. In a single volume published by Nation Books (Hachette), Varoufakis follows the money in a well-written expose of surprising literary flourish on the modern global economy, with the US and Europe at its center.

Consider this splash of wisdom, in which he quotes from Thucydides’s Pelopennsian War, a portion that was underlined by John Maynard Keynes:

“There it was underlined in pencil, the famous passage in which powerful Athenian generals explained to the helpless Melians why ‘rights’ are only pertinent ‘between equals in power’ and, for this reason, they were about ‘to do as they pleased with them.’ It was because ‘the strong actually do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.’”

A harsh concept. But words to learn by. You won’t go wrong in getting a firmer grasp of where we are – and where we are heading – than by sitting down and reading this book.

Next: Running for Your Life: September! 

Running for Your Life: Keeping Up the Blog

Why write?

A reasonable question. For someone like me, a lifelong newshound, it’s something I care dearly about. Back when I started in the newspaper business, readers began the day with the paper that was delivered to their home. And many writers, like me, found a future in finding, selling to editors, and then writing stories in those papers for you to read.

Now readers get their news from places sourced by Google and Facebook. Ad dollars always chase readers, that’s how the business works. Facebook and Google represent 72 percent of all digital ad revenue outside of China, according to a leading research analyst.

With readers migrating to the Web and mobile platforms for their stories, some writers like me have taken to blog-keeping as one way of reaching readers. In my case, this blog works as an idea forum, a place to make contact with old friends and new friends, and a spur on to, as Nike says, Just Do It. In my case that's Running, Reading and Writing.

Keeping up the spirit of the chase for new ideas and different ways to convey them, if you will. (Not in the vein of Keeping up With the Kardashians – there is a meaningful book, or an idea of merit in any of that? If so, please advise.)

So here goes. Delivering on forty years of writing experience, not in the pages of a newspaper, but in the digital space of a blog. For more reasons to write, please take a moment. Read a blog “back issue” below. My hope is, there will be something of value in those previous posts for you. A lesson, a wise thought. An occasional bon mot.

Next: Running for Your Life: And the Weak Suffer What They Must? By Yanis Varoufakis

Running for Your Life: Slow Mo

It is no surprise that the older you get the slower you become. Takes some getting used to. Muscles are stiffer. You don’t rise from sitting or prone positions with quite the speed and vigor that you did in days past. Clear the sixty-year-old threshold as I have, and folks only a few years older than me, smirk when I say I intend to keep running just like I always have. Just wait, Larry. Your day will come too. They don’t as much as say it outright, but the knowing look says it all: You’ll be Walking for Your Life, pal.

In my thirties, I have to admit I liked to see my reflection as I ran past plate glass windows on urban streets. I was running, baby. Long-legged with a kick of a pace. Eight-minute miles and under. Thirty minutes = four miles. Then off to work, scooting along. Imagine cartoon puffs of air behind my feet.

That was then. Now when I pass a plate-glass reflection, I see a scaled-down runner. Not yet a jogger, shuffling along. There is still pop in the step. Not a speedster – but a steady-ster.

I still carry that “Beat Yesterday” feeling into a run. But I’m not going to get there again. Not even close. But in slow mo. Maybe even back to marathoning. I haven’t given up yet. The writer and the runner combining in the long poem:  the Rime of the Ancient Marathoner.

Next: Running for Your Life: Keeping Up the Blog   

Running for Your Life: More Summer Reading

A word of warning: This is not your typical summer reading list. Truth is, this is more a bucket list of books that I’ve been meaning to read and summer, being the season of reading, they have inadvertently found their way to this blogpost of More Summer Reading. Don’t consider this to be a list of any particular order.

My Struggle, Vol. 4 by Karl Ove Knausgaard. I typed Karl “Over” at first. Which is true to a point, but I’m in through the previous three volumes, so given my tendency to stick with it, I’m bound to take this to the end. (Now, you’ve got a sense of what kind of reading list this is; you’ve had fair warning – run for your life, indeed!)

The Power Broker by Robert Caro. This guy, Robert Moses, was a tyrant and a real builder, in comparison to Donald Trump, Republican nominee for president, who is a tyrant and a fake builder. In any event, I’ve been fascinated by the life of Moses since I came to New York in 1988. (This book was published 14 years before that …)

Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann. A great literary friend of mine recently recommended this novel to me. Freakishly, I’ve been turned off McCann after the author wrote a feeble commentary in New York Magazine years ago, but happily that cloud has lifted.

The Untouchable by John Banville. This guy can write. And we just happen to have this paperback lying around the house.

Grendel by John Gardiner. For the point of view, as per the brilliant suggestion of my wife, M. Who isn’t somewhat tired of Knausgaard-like narrators?

That should take me to November or thereabouts … Am going to be trying VERY hard not to let the political drama crowd out these page-turning ones !

Next: Running for Your Life: Slow Mo

Running for Your Life: Core Values

I might have written about this before. But isn’t a blog a conversation? Tell me, how many times does your spouse (best friend) bring up the same subject? There are two response threads. One: Don’t bother me with that again. Second: Really? I’d love to hear what you’re thinking about (subject here).

Which brings me to core values. It bears repeating. I firmly believe that I would not be looking forward to competing in a half-marathon in October (Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, under the Verrazano Bridge! More likely I’d be making like Malcolm Lowry and be “Under the Volcano”) if I had not seriously taken up the strengthening and stretching exercises that my physical therapists thrust on me after my knee gave out last October.

That means core strength: lunges, squats, leg raises (both front and back, in order to engage butt muscles), sit ups. Run on Day One (typically from 30 minutes to an hour), do a hard 30 minutes of core strength exercises on Day Two.  Repeat.

Simple stuff, huh? Today, I ran for an hour before work. Tomorrow, I’ll write and stretch-strengthen. The proof is in how you feel. When I finish a run and begin the big cleanup before work, I’ll close my eyes and ask myself how old do you feel. Thirty? Twenty?

These core values have worked to keep a dream alive for me. I couldn’t recommend more highly the idea of such a regimen.

Next: Running for Your Life: More Summer Reading

Running for Your Life: The Summer Book

At a slim 170 pages, The Summer Book by Tove Jansson – beloved author of the Moomintroll comic strips and books – is the beach book of, well, every summer.

Jansson wrote The Summer Book in 1972, and it was translated from Swedish to English in 1974. (Yes, the same year that Richard M. Nixon resigned from office.)

Much simpler times. All the more reason to pick up and read the island stories of Sophia and her Grandma. What happens? A road is built, there are storms, a bird-killing cat, a subdued girl visitor who takes some getting used to …

A sample. (Imagine the road to be Trump’s wall …)

The Road

It was a bulldozer: an enormous, infernal, bright yellow machine that thundered and roared and floundered through the woods with clanging jaws. The men from the village scrambled on and around it like hysterical ants, trying to keep it headed in the right direction. “Jesus Christ!” Sophia shrieked without hearing what she said. She ran behind a rock with the milk can in one hand and watched the machine pluck up huge boulders that had lain in their moss for a thousand years, but now they just rose in the air and were tossed to one side, and there was a terrible cracking and splintering as pine trees gave way and were ripped from the ground with torn and broken roots. “Jesus, help! There go the woods!”

Next: Running for Your Life: Core Values

Running for Your Life: Trump Cabinet, the memo

Russian e-mail intercept, Trump campaign

Memo: First Draft, Trump Cabinet Wish List (Core Group)

Secretary of State

Yosemite Sam

Defense Secretary

The General (General Insurance dude)

Treasury Secretary

Mr. Burns, from The Simpsons

Federal Reserve chief

Ludwig Von Drake

Education

Miss Grundy

Health and Welfare

Flo, the lone Progressive

Labor

Fred Flintstone

Trade

Hisself

Attorney General

Bugs Bunny

Agriculture

Porky Pig

Next: Running for Your Life: The Summer Book

Running for Your Life: Run for Fun

What do you do for fun? Catch ’em all with Pokemon Go (said to be OK for folks, in part, because it gets them out of the house and at least walking around)? Play games on your phone? Zone out before a blasting A/C, watching bad TV?

A casual reader of this blog knows that I’ve been running every other day for going on forty years. I have to admit there are days when, as I’m suiting up to run (in the old days, I was a diehard road warrior, both in heat waves or blizzards; now I opt for the gym treadmill in extreme weather) that I don’t think it’s going to be fun. And some days it just flat out isn’t. When that happens, I put in the time and while I can’t say that I go out the door smiling but my body – from my toes to the top of my head – is voting yes. That was good for now. We’ll have fun the next time.

And you know what, I do. I’m not looking to “Beat Yesterday,” as the rock-solid training types promote. Rather, my simple goal is to smile as I run, to hear the cardinals cheep-cheep in a Prospect Park glen, to see a rainbow after a summer storm, to feel the first sting of a cold shower after an hour of summer running.

Out on a run. A promise of forever, in body, mind and spirit.

Next: Running for Your Life: The Summer Book

Running for Your Life: Election Protection

Comes a time when the right mind comes to the right topic at the right time. That happens in the essay that follows from the current Harper’s magazine. Enjoy (at least from the standpoint of giving concrete, critical form to what we are watching, dumbstruck, upon the political stage …)

DON THE REALTOR

The Rise of Trump

By Martin Amis, Harper’s August 2016

Discussed in this essay:

Trump: The Art of the Deal, by Donald Trump with Tony Schwartz. Ballantine Books. 384 pages. $16.99.

Crippled America: How to Make America Great Again, by Donald Trump. Threshold Editions. 208 pages. $25.

Not many facets of the Trump apparition have so far gone unexamined, but I can think of a significant loose end. I mean his sanity: what is the prognosis for his mental health, given the challenges that lie ahead? We should bear in mind, at this point, that the phrase “Power corrupts” isn’t just a metaphor.

There have been one or two speculative attempts to get Donald to hold still on the couch. Both Ted Cruz and Bernie Sanders have called him a “pathological liar,” but so have many less partial observers. They then go on to ask: Is his lying merely compulsive, or is he an outright mythomaniac, constitutionally unable to distinguish non-truth from truth — rather like those “horrible human beings,” journalists (or at least spiteful, low-echelon journalists), who, Trump claims, “have no concept of the difference between ‘fact’ and ‘opinion’ ”? PolitiFact has ascertained that Donald’s mendacity rate is just over 90 percent; so the man who is forever saying that he “tells it like it is” turns out to be nearly always telling it like it isn’t.

Read more »

Running for Your Life: Promise of Paradise Found

Miola, Puglia

June 2016

When you find the perfect place

And you’ve been searching your whole life long

There is a moment

This one under the pinos in a hummocky field cleared of rocks, the mura antica,

kissed by cool breezes that waft over us in the shade

from a pitiless sun, essential for the plants, the citrus and flowers,

so numerous that it would drain

the pen dry to put down.

And, yes, the breeze now stirs to a rustling wind, chases off the fly

And so keeps the promise of paradise found.

Next: Running for Your Life: Election Protection

Running for Your Life: Puglia Poetry

Polignano a Mare

Cold of the sea surf washes over us

As we sit on a rock

A Wicklow man

rescue team member on mountain trails

trains his eye

on a boy

gangly and good natured

shy to be the center of attention but relief

washes over him as our Wicklow man rises

out of the sea like

an Irish god, yellow locks

wet down an ample back that the boy is soon

making sweet use of as the act of mercy is performed

on the shifting rocks, the boy hopping on one foot, smiling

even now

with his Italian visit in tatters, his ankle, what has drawn our

hero’s eye, swollen to three times its normal size, something

the boy has not seen or felt before

but known all too well by the Irishman of the Wicklow trails.

“I have seen a fair thousand of these,” he says with a light

glowing from somewhere inside, not leaving the boy until

the story takes a turn toward a direction that is familiar and sound.

Next: Running for Your Life: Promise of Paradise Found

Running for Your Life: Puglia Puglia

It’s been about a month since being in Puglia (Apulia, in English), but the magic of the land, the light, the air stirs within me still. That is saying something, given the month of tragic headline news we've had back in America.

M and I never fully grew accustomed to where we were living: a masseria, or fortress farm, built in the early 1700s and renovated three centuries later. (In the vein of receiving a phone call from the Pulitzer committee – My response: Are you sure you have the right Larry O’Connor? Chances are …)

No, our two-week masseria, with a late eighteenth-century fresco in the farm’s former chapel (now drawing room) was not meant for someone more deserving. It was for us. Two writers who didn’t know how much we could take advantage of a sanctuary retreat like this one.

Inside the fortress farm: courtyard piazza, converted cow barn (with feeding station plaques and birthdates for three cows who lived there – Contessa, Principessa and Bianchina) to game room, where M spread out her latest novel manuscript on the netless ping pong table; a cheese room with vintage fireplace; second story sleeping quarters, with back deck for night sky watching. The door leading upstairs has a lock on it so old that it has to be turned with a metal key the size and weight of a small dog.

Puglia, in southern Italy, is not on the tourist trail. In the hills where we stayed, it is a place of sunny days and cool nights. Lemon and orange trees. Olives and capers and cherries and almonds. Primitivo red wine made with the grape that when it migrated to Napa Valley put Zinfandel on the map. But Primitivo in the terroir that is Puglia Puglia tastes nothing like the food clobberer that is California Zinfandel.

Looking for an Italy that is not Venice, not Florence, not Rome, not Tuscany, not Umbria? Consider Puglia Puglia. It will stay in your blood long after you leave it.

Next: Running for Your Life: Puglia Poetry