Running for Your Life: Words to Live By

Love trees, like dogs; human beings need a lot of work.

Next: Running for Your Life: Poem in Porto 

Running for Your Life: ‘Gateway’ Drug

Every once in a while a book comes along and you just gotta crow.

That’s the case with this one: “Gateway to the Moon” by Mary Morris, an amazingly gifted writer who happens to also be my wife. Disclosure noted, please read on.

First the blog post, and then the book. (Please note the publication date: April 2018.)

If only America could see its way to favoring books instead of deadly opioids as mood-altering drugs.

Mary has done it before, of course. Written books that readers love, the most recent being “The Jazz Palace” (winner in 2016 of the august Anisfield-Wolf award for diversity [aka, the black Pulitzer]).

“Gateway,” may I be so bold, rides even higher on the mood-altering scale. “Gateway” never flinches in its focus of a coming to America, our nation’s very foundation, that imagines Columbus’ journey to the New World in a way that seriously will blow your mind.

So, mark the date in your calendar: April 2018. The “Gateway” drug arrives. And, please, watch this space for more news in the weeks and months ahead on this astounding literary event.

Next: Running for Your Life: Poem in Porto 

Running for Your Life: Copy Editing, Anyone?

So you want to get into journalism? Howse about the reputed biggest name in news magazines, TIME? (Full disclosure: I’ve proudly served on the rewrite desk and as a copy editor at newspapers through five decades … kinda scary when I put it that way, but …)

Not as scary as this, though. The SETTING THE RECORD STRAIGHT column in the Oct. 30 issue of TIME magazine. (Just inside the THE GODDESS MYTH cover, in about 5-point type … Barely legible and when you get a load of it, you’ll understand why the “editors” wanted to try to keep this under wraps.)

Here goes:

SETTING THE RECORD STRAIGHT

“In the View* (Oct. 16), we mischaracterized the climate on Mars as being similar to the desert near Dubai. Mars is colder than Earth. In an Oct. 23 interview with Dustin Hoffman, we misstated that his character in The Graduate seduced an older woman. In fact, she seduced him. In the same issue, in ‘Next Generation Leaders,’ Sebastian Kurz was described as a favorite to be elected President of Austria. His party’s Oct. 15 victory is set to make him Chancellor. In ‘Google Searches for Its Voice,’ we mischaracterized James Giangola’s previous work experience. And in ‘Ivana Trump Has Her Say,’ a photo caption misidentified her as Marla Maples.”

* Blog keeper's note: the standing TIME column is actually called The View.

Next: Running for Your Life: “Gateway” Drug 

Running for Your Life: Read, Read, Read

It pays to read. Especially these days.

Try one of my favorite reporter-writers: Matt Taibbi, now in Rolling Stone:


that America gets the karma it deserves.

Brutal but essential.

Read, read, read.

Then Jill Lepore in The New Yorker, Oct. 9:


the lead Talk of the Town cuts to the chase on what it means to be an unreconstituted liberal.

“[Free speech] is a long and strenuous argument, as maddening as the past and as painful as the truth.”

Read, read, read.

In the same New Yorker, Jon Lee Anderson boogies like no one else on the “border wall” with Mexico.

“[NAFTA’s] created 53 million very poor people for whom the only solution is to emigrate to the United States and send remittances home.”

Read, read, read.


The White House treats Puerto Rico’s US citizens in an offhand way? It’s no accident the American president (emperor?) lives in a capital “W” white house.

How “white” has the nation been since its founding?

Consider the story after story after story in the epic tales of the Indian Wars with the over-sentimental title, “The Earth Is Weeping,” by Peter Cozzens (see recent blog post here). Many treaties were signed only to be broken, with the dog whistle command of government (during these years of unrivaled growth in land and economic wealth for white citizens) being:

“The only good Indian is a dead Indian.”

Read, read, read.

Next: Running for Your Life: “Gateway” Drug




Running for Your Life: After the Half

It took me 2:05:36 to finish, if you’re counting, and to tell you the truth, I wasn’t really, and if there is any secret to a long life (40-plus years!) of running, I put it down to that. For most of those years, I haven’t kept track.

Sure, in 2010, I shocked myself with running a marathon – twice as long as what I did on Saturday (Oct. 7) – in 3:33:08, and started to think different. About my time, that is.

I started to train harder and improve, with hopes of doing better. Why not? Beat yesterday, as the kids say! It seemed back then that a faster personal record wasn’t out of the question. That a 3:33 marathon time was good enough to qualify for Boston, which I ran in 2012, despite a near-running threatening hamstring pull in 2011.

Ah, but three injuries later – return of The Neuroma, knee collapse and faceplant – and finally I’m back to where I was when I started running in the mid-1970s. Listening and looking and going inward.

In Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, on Saturday, a waterside route out and under the head-spinning Verrazano Bridge, I watched a stray cormorant skimming the rippling current, followed the fairy dance of a wayward solo Monarch, tilted as if at windmills, running toward the trees on the horizon, and after, the fishermen casting their lines into the ocean waters, pausing to glance as we pass, puzzle-pusses, etched by the collective insanity of four hundred lightly clad souls huffing and puffing, beet-red in the punishing heat and humidity, so much like Hurricane Sandy weather that I can’t help but think it is on these men’s minds such a horror it would have been here almost five years ago to the day when that superstorm struck.

This then is the clean and well-lighted aftermath of the half. The ego eased with my second wind. When the run is pure, “time” and the pressure of time, of “beating yesterday,” simply vanishes like the morning mist above the Verrazano.

Next: Running for Your Life: Read, Read, Read

Running for Your Life: Shap! We Hardly Knew How Much We Need You!

What is it about Denis Shapovalov?

That, at 18, (he won’t be 19 until April, by the way) he is excelling at arguably the most amazing mass-market solo sport imaginable: Men’s Single Tennis.

That he does it while wearing his goofy teenage identity; What me? A star? Nah, let’s go get some grilled cheese and craft root beer, or maybe a cream soda, and talk about anything but that.

On anyone else that backward sweat cap, with the gappy extension band square in the forehead middle, would look ridiculous and W-A-A-A-Y pretentious. On Shap, it looks just right.

That he’s a Canadian. Can’t you see him asking these bears to leave his property …. http://bit.ly/2yKWOhp ?

That he’s now a regular court catch on the Tennis Channel. If he’s playing, I place the set on mute and watch. And, yeah, all these thoughts that I’ve just put down come into my head as I smile with the vanishing of my worries, if only for as long as he is playing the sport that demands power, touch and intelligence in equal measure … at 18 years old !!

Next: Running for Your Life: After the Half !

Running for Your Life: Chairman Zuck

A lot has been written and speculated about what Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg is doing, re: his presidential-like tour, pledging to visit each and every one of the fifty states, and in so doing hang out with regular Americans.

Wow, no way in hell a Kardashian (excepting political hopeful Caitlyn Jenner, perhaps) would do that!

Zuck will in 2020 be old enough to be eligible to serve as American president. (Although, trust me, the current president wouldn’t be above conducting a birther campaign to accuse Z of using a fake ID. CARD HIM! Trump loyalists will be barking.)

No, don’t believe the bunk that Z is priming the populist pump for a 2020 presidential run. When you’re the planet’s Big Brother what in hell do you want with the world’s most undoable job: being the US president?

Next: Running for Your Life: Shap! We Hardly Knew How Much We Need You!