Running for Your Life: Concrete Utopia

It won’t be up much longer, Concrete Utopia. Jan. 13 it comes down.

A part of the world, a moment in time. Currently on display at the Museum of Modern Art.

Could you find Sarajevo on a map?

Where is Ljubljana?

What borders Serbia to the north?

Split, Croatia? Dubrovnik?

Then there is the library in Pristina, Kosovo … and Ernst Bloch’s definition of utopia, “a hopeful, future-oriented process in a perpetual state of emergence.”

Back in the day (I hesitate to use my father’s phrase, “Back in my day …” but) we’re talking the Third Way, a living socialism, however imperfect, with bilingual signs (English being one) across the so-called Balkan states of Yugoslavia.

In 1984, the year of the Sarajevo Olympics (I have the pin), I was twenty-eight and impressionable, odd the Orwell string, one I’ve not plucked until now.

Age of the concrete – shown in now vintage photos – limns the limits of theory when it comes to the manifold possibilities of disruption through social – not capital – gain.

I look about me here, at the people attending Concrete Utopia, and think:

The immaculate truth of an idea, so last century.

And what, do tell, feeds the dreams of today’s twenty-eight year olds?

Next: Running for Your Life: New Yorker?

Running for Your Life: Faulkner Fix II

Reading “Go Down, Moses” by William Faulkner is like coin-mining an ancient plain, ever so periodically, while stirring pools upon pools of patience that in the early pages seems beyond human capacity because so much of what is put down seems, at first, aimless, even inert, you come upon a gold doubloon, an object of such perfection that your heart skips a bit, to wit:

“Then suddenly he knew why he had never wanted to own any of it, arrest at least that much of what people called progress, measure his longevity at least against that much of its ultimate fate.  He seemed to see . . . a dimension free of both time and space where once more the untreed land warped and wrung to mathematical squares of rank cotton for the frantic old-world people to turn into shells to shoot at one another, would find ample room for both – the names, the faces of the old men he had known and loved and for a little while outlived, moving again among the shades of tall unaxed trees and sightless brakes where the wild strong immortal game ran forever before the tireless belling immortal hounds, falling and rising phoenix-like to the soundless guns.”

Next: Running for Your Life: Concrete Utopia

Running for Your Life: Prospect Park Shoot

On alternate days I run, typically for about 45 minutes – five miles more or less – and like to take a route to the skating rinks in Prospect Park.

For years, from the mid-90s to the late ’00s, M and I would go for morning skates, back when there was an outdoor facility, called Kate Wollman Rink.

Now, it’s a swishy two-rink affair, one under a skylight cover, the other in the open air.

The second ice surface will, from time to time, be commandeered for product photo and video shoots.

I’ve seen Martha Stewart signs, but typically there is nothing outward that would identify the client.

On this day (Dec. 6), I noticed the shoot but kept running along the path near the ice, a route I like because as an avid skater I admire the skate cuts in the surface of the ice, and perchance, be drawn back into memories of mornings past.

Just as I get to the middle of the outdoor rink wall, a woman starts cursing like a sailor, slashing my reverie to ribbons. F-words, S-words, a cascade of muck, pierces the morning cold, the “talent” in the shooting pen is a girl in expensive-looking winter wear, eight years old max, looking wanly on.

When I return on the same path, two members of the shoot crew block my way as I attempt to return along the public route I take every other day for months of the year. Like a good doobie, I retreat and look for a second best way to run home.

Turned away – yet another example of how in our profit-obsessed culture, “your options have changed.”

Next: Running for Your Life: Concrete Utopia

Running for Your Life: Simply “Reporter”

When it comes to making a difference, try this:

Being a reporter.

Not a journalist, not a pundit, not someone who would distinguish oneself through ambition to establish some home truth that separates and divides, builds yet another data and opinion silo that forces the genuflection of the media.

Rather, trust the path followed by Seymour Hersh in his simply titled book, “Reporter.”

I’ve been in a news business awhile. Since 1979, the first four years as a reporter, the balance as an editor.

But there’d be no news without reporters. And rarely is there a book about one dedicated to getting the story with the tenacity of a junk yard dog.

“Sy” Hersh shows the way in this book. Consider this essential reading.

Next: Running for Your Life: Faulkner Fix II

   

Running for Your Life: Harari Heard From

Tech appears to be so awash with guilt for what it is doing to the common good that it would pay thousands in fees to an Israeli philosopher, Yuval Noah Harari, and call him a futurist in order to tag his analysis as commercial rather than academic.

Alas, in America, serious science and fine art must pay homage to entertainment.

Imperial orders organize surrounding bread and circus. Harari ain’t bread, so he must be circus.

Harari, author of “21 Lessons for the 21^st Century,” sees a near future of two classes: elite and useless.

We are so quick to adopt the convenient path before the moral one. We don’t protest or be dubbed a luddite, the phrase, “Your options have changed.” Instead, we regard it as being material to accommodating to the tech-facilitated world.

By this standard, those who go and stay off line accept a lesser life.

Harari rejects this precept. Why? Because he predicts artificial intelligence will disrupt to the point of dissolution of what it means to be human.

Does Silicon Valley clap its ears, or challenge this doomsday message?

No, Silicon Valley invites Harari to speak to its workers.

Why? Surely in order to develop a vaccine to inoculate the virus.

Smart people in power seek a way – above all else – to stay in power.

How best not to neutralize the threat that Harari’s ideas pose but to co-opt them.

Inside, he is pitched to workers as one of them, something to be hacked and, then, exploited.

Even when he preaches the terrible destruction that thrives in the core of the social media tech virus that is bigger than all us.

Next: Running for Your Life: Simply “Reporter”

Running for Your Life: Required Reading

When it comes to writing for a blog, or writing in general, there’s an imperative that lurks unspoken.

That is the writer, as a creature of habit, not of Google algorithms, makes unconscious demands of his readers.

Call it hubris, or nerve, an unrealistic  expectation, but in all things to get the best out of something requires a little work.

It’s actually not selfish but unselfish. You know, the common good, sort of thing.

So, in that spirit, I’m asking you to read two books (or at minimum look them up on Google Nation):

“21 Lessons for the 21^st Century” by Yuval Noah Harari, and

“Reporter” by Seymour Hersh

in preparation for blog posts to come.

P.S. Buy the books if you have the money. It’s part of the message.

Next: Running for Your Life: Harari Heard From

Running for Your Life: Faulkner Fix

Being a native Canadian in America can have its befuddlements … Like trying to figure out US race relations.

Ah, that’s where William Faulkner helps. Consider this theme line in “Go Down, Moses,” that goes a long way to humanizing an understanding from the mind of my kind of Southern Man:

“He’s more old Carothers than all the rest of us put together, including old Carothers. He is both heir and prototype simultaneously of all the geography and climate and biology which sired old Carothers and all the rest of us and our kind, myriad, countless, faceless, even nameless now except himself who fathered himself, intact and complete, contemptuous, as old Carothers must have been, of all blood black white yellow or red, including his own.”  

Next: Running for Your Life: Fall Rhythms

Running for Your Life: Letters and Penmanship

When it comes to disrupting the disrupters, think outside the box, as in outside the pocket computer, tablet, laptop, Alexa, Oculus, Portal+ …

Write a letter. Not an e-mail, a letter, what Lord Byron called,

“The only device combining solitude with good company.”

Not to your “friend” or Congress-friend, but to a loved one: your mom, your BFF, a pal having a hard time of it.

Don’t wait for a reply. Just write another letter.

Buy some correspondence that appeals to you, some first-class, global stamps.

The legibility of your unpracticed script may be on the ugly side in the beginning, but give yourself time. It will improve. And you’ll be so much the better for it.

My advice? Get thee to an artist supply shop and test some pens.

They are not all created equal. Ballpoint can be smudgy; fountain, precious; craftsman, too arty.

I was touched by what I saw in “The Banished Immortal: The Life of Li Bai,” by Ha Jin, about the eponymous hero of this unreadable novel. It seems that some calligraphy has been discovered and attributed to the eighth century poet.

The calligraphy – his penmanship – is seen as a treasure trove for those looking to define the character of this ancient legend to the Chinese.

Sure, Western folks have handwriting analysis, that is associated with voodoo pseudosciences like the horoscope, but Chinese calligraphy study is seen as the real deal.

Find that pen that says your “John Henry” and get down to putting your special words on paper. Yes, the old-fashioned way.

Next: Running for Your Life: Faulkner Fix

Running for Your Life: Pittsburgh 2019

I started this blog going on nine years ago.

The impetus, in part, was a decision to return to marathon running after a hiatus of 23 years.

It began in Pittsburgh, where the Penguins, a team I’ve been following since I played bantam ice hockey in Owen Sound, Ontario, play. The Penguins starting franchise goalie, Les Binkley, was a chum of my local hockey star cousin, Bruce Neath.

So, Pittsburgh it was.

A light rain fell on that day in May 2010. I shocked myself with a personal best time, and the community’s outpouring of support – electric garage bands playing under leaky tarps, come to mind – was also the best I ever experienced during a marathon.

I love this city.

It is with determination and a heavy heart that I will be going back to western Pennsylvania to compete in the 2019 Pittsburgh Marathon on Sunday, May 5.

I will run, as I’m sure countless others will too, in the loving memory of those 11 Jewish worshipers who were massacred last month during services at the Tree of Life Synagogue in the city neighborhood of Squirrel Hill.

Pittsburghers will surely be out in force to cheer on those who’ve chosen this city to run in the months after the killings. It is that kind of close-knit town.

Regardless of my race time next May, this marathon promises to be the best in so many ways, far beyond the personal.

Next: Running for Your Life: Penmanship

Running for Your Life: So, You Are STILL Undecided

Hard to know, but it’s possible, just possible, there remain some undecided voters out there in the United States, with the midterm elections coming on Tuesday (Nov. 6).

If you are among those undecided – and remarkably in these days of social media masking for old school print and radio reporting – who have yet to buzz in your respective hive of predigested facts (I’m looking at you Fox and CNN …)

Then do yourself a favor – and read the text below ...

Not advocating any one position, you understand. But this essay by Eliot Weinberger, “Ten Typical Days in Trump’s America,” in the London Review of Books may very well be worth the equivalent of the next five days of 24-7 coverage on US cable news.

Read it – and reap. (Or weep – it may just come to that.)

Next: Running for Your Life: Penmanship 

Read more »

Running for Your Life: Too Early But …

It is too soon. But these days, given the speed at which events cascade like floodwaters in a coastal storm, it is only right. Stay ahead of the news cycle, at all costs.

With that in mind, consider this ghastly thought.

Israel under Bibi Netanyahu is committed to a far-right approach to world order as dictated by religious ideologues and will take zero meaningful action to construct a response to the lack of official American redress to the violence done to those in Pittsburgh – reportedly an ecumenical Jewish-Muslim community of disparate strands of faith – stricken by the bloody massacre of eleven worshipers in a religious house of prayer.

They – Trump and Netanyahu – will stand mutely by and those victimized by their political imperative – those SLAIN FOR THEIR FAITH as the New York Post so rightly shouted out on Monday’s (Oct. 29) front page – will have died for nothing.

Whose names, sadly, will soon be swamped in the endless storm of cascading events.

Next: Running for Your Life: Penmanship

Running for Your Life: Routine Is Boring. Really?

When I find myself equating routine with boring, I think of Thurber, our redbone coonhound.

Thurber’s routine is anything but boring.

M, T and I go out together every morning when we’re home in Brooklyn, T leading the way.

Same time. Same streets. Same stop for coffee. Same entrance to Prospect Park.

Nothing in Thurber’s demeanor would suggest that “boring” is remotely possible. Especially in feral October, the smells in the crisp, cold breeze literally lifting his spirit, throwing a jaunt to his purposeful prance.

Occasionally, he’ll glance back at us, slowly moving, familiar odoriferous bipeds, as if contemplating our reality.

If anything is boring to Thurber it’s how humans walk so curiously.

Thurber’s watered, fed and knows to sit for a treat. That’s the foundation. That makes it possible for him to get the most out of life, to “lean” into his routine.

Me, it’s cut-fresh fruit, regular coffee, eight ounces of cold water. Running every other day without fail. Sparks fly in my mind. I love being on a walk with M. We laugh, reminisce, dig into work questions, talk about our reading lives …

Routine.  Every day. Why disturb this healthy, exciting balance? (I can’t remember when I was last felled by sickness [sound of wood being knocked]).

Thurber, though, is my guru of capital “R” routine. Who is yours?

Next: Running for Your Life: Penmanship

Running for Your Life: Hey, Nostalgia, Been Nice Knowing You

M and I have been enjoying the FX series, “The Americans.”

I can’t help but feel nostalgic. Watching how the producers recreate the early ’80s, at the dawn of the information superhighway, that to protect themselves, a broken system of patronage and slough, Russian spies infiltrated science hubs in order to inform “the center” of what would be possible in terms of military – invasion, insurrection or both – actions to address the most worst outcome of a Reagan-led (read: Big American-owned business) attack on adversaries in foreign lands (aka despotic prisons of no hope).

It makes me wonder.

Will each generation be cheered by the nostalgia of a past era?

Don’t we equate nostalgia with what we would call simpler times?

Nostalgia for me glows most in the first decades of my human awareness, the ’60s and ’70s.

I wonder how my daughter K will look back at her nostalgia time, the’90s and ’00s.

I sense favorably in the ’90s, the days before the ubiquitous pocket computers. But the ’00s, post 9/11?

Ten years after 9/11 there was Occupy Wall Street.

She wasn’t an Occupant, but she was raised and schooled to question authority.

Will she be nostalgic about Occupy?

How about children born in 2018?

Will my grand-niece and grand-niece be nostalgic about the 2020s, the 2030s?

Is nostalgia not something that like novels will be written about as something that can be killed?

If so, who do we charge for its murder?

Next: Running for Your Life: Routine Is Boring. Really?

Running for Your Life: Got a Hero?

Have a hero? Subscribe to a tribe.

Act on a heroic idea in humility and quietude? Subscribe to better angels, the best about humanity.

America is founded on a principle, e pluribus unum, or “out of man, one.”

We have long fallen short of this idea.

In fact, thanks to the disrupters who monetize what used to be ours, or at least we could be persuaded to think that we were free to choose what we do, what we think, what we say, who we are influenced by, etc., without being mediated to the nth degree by the likes of Facebook, Amazon, Netflix and Google (FANG!), we are reduced to being market units, carved up in smaller and smaller slices in the incredibly expanding universe that is the media and entertainment business.

(Not culture, BTW, entertainment; that is what stands for culture in the global marketplace. America First! Canada Last! Check out the new NAFTA, USMCA – only reason Mexico gets one letter and Canada two is to differentiate from the US Marine Corp. [USMC]. You can bet the Trump folks love this front-loading situation: Branding is 80% of the message, folks.)

My emerging calling? Disrupt the disrupters. We’ll be a small but lively band of pious folk who value humility and quietude over messianic grandstanding. But it’s where I see myself, come what may.

Next: Hey, Nostalgia, Been Nice Knowing You

Running for Your Life: Tax Facts

The New York Times doubled down on its Trump dissent with a gold-plated special section screamer this month (October) that outs the president’s family for decades of fishy tax-avoidance schemes, some of which stink of out-and-out money laundering.

No bodies turn up, so not mob-like in that way, but you get the drift.

Damaging? Yeah, but …

Much is made about the American Revolution.

Other notable political and social revolutions – French, Russian, Nicaraguan, Cuban – at least pay lip service to change that will address the problem of the poor, a lack of nominal justice toward them. How those revolutions evolved in trading one bad situation for another is beside the point.

Rather, the acknowledgment of the poor masses is central to the liturgy: Socialism is a pathway backed by pious priests (think the late Archbishop Oscar Romero of El Salvador), a righteous approach to addressing the needs of the have-nots, a compelling theory for millions.

The American Revolution, by contrast, rises from a tax revolt.

Its leaders, the slave-owning landed gentry, balked at taxation without representation.

But central to this liturgy is a fear of Leviathan government, what happens with taxes collected. Where are they spent? Whom do they serve?

American frontier spirit isn’t with the taxman. The revenuer.

Run him off the land with your shotgun, your rural militia, drink corn whisky till you black out at freedom’s dawn.

Trump’s family cracks that code; it’s the American dream, a family getting the better of the revenuer.

What your average American family sees as the bedrock of our nation: the pursuit of happiness come hell or high water – even better if it’s done by sticking a finger in the eye of the revenuer.

Next: Running for Your Life: Got a Hero?

Running for Your Life: Unfunny Cartoon

Editorial cartoon (with the drawing)

Ornate paneled door, lintel sign: Justice Chambers

Left foreground, pinched-faced Justice Ginsberg, with faces of Justices Sotomayor and Kagan partially visible at margin.

Two speech balloons, one which contains these words:

“Yo, Notorious! Run out and get me an ice-cold can a’ Coke the way I like it – and a kegger of Sam Adams for my new friend here!”

The other balloon reads:

“Heh heh heh”

Next: Running for Your Life: Tax Facts

Running for Your Life: The Bay Ridge Half, Baby!

Results are in – and I’m pretty psyched!

Oldest dude (63) across the finish line at the Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, Half-Marathon, on Saturday, Oct. 6, breaking the 2-hour barrier (just! 1:59:55, thanks to a final kick of sorts), and not so worse for wear, leaving my return to Boston Marathon plans intact, shooting for the 65-69 age category qualifying time, in fall 2020, of 4 hours, 5 minutes.

Slowing some, granted, since I managed a personal best half-marathon of 1:43.12 in the 2011 Manhattan Half at Central Park, but I did manage to improve from last year at the Bay Ridge Half, a 2:05.37, when it was especially hot and humid.

It sure feels nice to be on the right side of 2 hours: 137^th finisher of 361 runners! Run for Your Life, all right! Still feeling I can reverse that age ... 

Running for Your Life: Unfunny Cartoon

Running for Your Life: Minimalist Golf

An elderly golfer is briskly bag-walking his seven clubs – 3 wood, long iron, 5-iron, 7-iron, 9-iron, wedge and putter –  on his home course, playing his typical 36 holes.

A man half his age drives up in his golf cart, a bag twice as big in the back, and addresses the old fella:

“Say, I hope you don’t mind me asking … but, how old are you?”

“Ninety-two.”

“Seriously? Wow, you look so great. I’d love to look like that when I’m you’re age.”

“You could start right now.”

“No kidding. How?”

“Get out of your cart and start walking.”

This exchange reflects some of what I read in a book by Mark Cucuzzella that has a great title:

“Run for Your Life”

Cucuzzella doesn’t restrict himself to just running tips (Sound familiar?). And in one chapter he talks about how he’s a believer in minimalist golf – as in, just how the 92-year-old plays the game – the old-fashioned way.

I can relate. As a boy I caddied for my dad, carrying his clubs around our city golf links. For me, golf was like the tennis I played (on municipal courts) and street hockey.

Once you got your swing down, the mechanics of compact power, you are off to the links. Playing in soft-soled shoes, hitting the ball true and long and spending time looking at the treetops, the scudding clouds across the sky, as you strided up the course. Hole after sweet-release, energy-fueling hole.

Next: Running for Your Life: The Bay Ridge Half, Baby!

Running for Your Life: Cool, It’s October

There is something about October.

If April is the cruelest month, October is the feral one.

We’re near-civilized out of this state, but it’s there.

Take a deep breath, feel the brace of morning cold.

For days in October, don’t overdress. If you work protocol permits, wear summer clothing.

Shorts. Feel the cool air in your hairs on your arms and legs.

Got a working dog? Check out its manner. In the case of Thurber, my nine-year-old coonhound, he’s loaded for bear.

We’re bound in space, especially we urban office trolls. Not trolls. Drones. Trolls feel the feral in the air. Their very survival depends on it.

October is the first taste of winter. Instinctive (if we modern humans are still capable of basic instinct), we take stock. Our brains are piqued. There’s an extra lift to our step. Each breath of air more vital than the lethargic summer one.

Forest fauna are booking it: storing nuts, fattening up, digging earth for burrows.

Make no mistake. Bred in our bones lies early human DNA. Feel it. In every breath you take.

Next: Running for Your Life: Minimalist Golf

Running for Your Life: NAFTA notes

OK, there’s a Canada-US-Mexico trade deal. But here is the backgrounder:

Recall that NAFTA was formed to govern all trade and business relations, including sports and the arts.

In the case of sports, there are lessons that conceivably translate into other areas: manufacturing, natural resources, agriculture …

How in the world can the US and Canada find common ground, agree on even the basic terms of to come to a trilateral agreement, if

1/ In Canada’s national sport, ice hockey, the social-political axis spins on facts like this: The last preseason game been pro teams in Ottawa and Montreal served as a platform to report that in a week the team, players and fans had led efforts to raise more than $300,000 for those in need following freak tornados in the Ottawa region. The money would be used to address two areas: food security and mental health.

2/ In America’s national sport, football, courageous players kneel during the singing of the national anthem to protest the country’s crisis in social justice, and rather than the act serve as a hero’s call to address the problem, it divides the country and worsens its social and political divide.

Nope. Nothing to say to each other here. Whatever was signed isn’t worth the paper upon which I’m writing this note.

Next: Running for Your Life: Cool, It’s October

Running for Your Life: Ant Heel

On a run in June 2016 in Italy, I had a thought. Here’s what I wrote in my journal:

We newspaper editors are the worker ants of journalism.

No matter what, we gotta do it. Whatever is required.

Backwards, frontwards with diligence and skill, working without rest, and, yes, we constantly attempt more, take on tasks beyond expectations, big, bigger, biggest, with experience that should tell us that it will not be noticed by the queen when the task is finished.

Alas, the human doesn’t set aside hope of being noticed. If only we could learn from the example of the worker ant, that there is dignity in the simple task itself.  Work to be done. That is enough.

Next level: That we newspaper editors in our worker ant selves serve the queen and her court but we fail to notice that the queen is not as she was before.

She is corrupt and perhaps mad.

What was once a benevolent system is now one that serves no such purpose.

We are building a Frankenstein monster but we, the worker ants, cannot stop in our task.

Think deadlines. Worker ants work as if a deadline is always in place. Do it right and hurry. If it doesn’t work that way, try another. Whatever you do, don’t stop.

Otherwise, you’ll be noticed. And for worker ants that can never end well.

Next: Running for Your Life: Cool, It’s October

Running for Your Life: Paper Mate

In June 1983, I began the practice of writing in a journal.

That’s more than 35 years ago.

Granted we’re not talking about daily journal-writing for 35 years, or 23,000 days, give or take.

But I don’t let any of it go. Once written in a journal (ringed-paper variety these days for ease of flat-surface writing) the treasure is kept on a shelf in my home studio.

In that workspace I’m literally surrounded by pages and pages of cursive writing.

As I mine material for a new memoir I find myself re-reading journals.

Dipping into the past I see the younger me, desire for connection, observations from the surprising to the mundane.

Themes emerge, passions, some lost, some still budding.

I’m in a subway car as I write this. (I transcribe – and edit corrections – of my journal-writing in this space). I use a carefully chosen black ink craftsman pen.

Each letter is owned, idiosyncratically mine.

At times a face in the crowd attracts my attention and I pause with a few strokes on paper, capture something about that person, a mood, with the simple goal of showing one defining  feature.

The sketch, with accompanying script, makes a distinguishing mark on that brief occasion, both about the subject and me.

Max Ferber, a fictional character in Sebald’s “The Emigrants,” says, “Time is nothing but the disquiet of the soul.”

Maybe that is what I’ve done in this half-lifetime of journal-writing. Put in words, in this most modest way, an account of the disquiet of the soul.

Next: Running for Your Life: Ant Heel

Running for Your Life: Sebald -- Content and Structure

There is so much to love about W.G. Sebald’s “The Emigrants.”

The roots: It celebrates two places, the home and the new home. If you predominantly identify yourself as an emigrant then you’ve not let go of your homeland.

The term emigrant implies that you close your eyes and feel the spirit of your native place.

The trunk: Immigrant, on the other hand, empowers the new home. While some practices are obviously primarily class-related, the phenomenon of an immigrant as more of a stranger in the land they entered and are in (“im”) than the one they exited (“em”), and more likely to be standing in line at a Western Union, sending money home to a family in need, seems true to me.

Emigration is a deep well that we’re sinking our rope-line bucket into, replete with treasures of memory. It traffics in emotions.

Immigration, an economic particle, what is subject to legislative policy.

What is the difference between science and art.

The crown: As an emigrant myself, I’m thinking of sitting down with my father, who has never left home.

What are the stories he would tell me, the reporter-writer returning home, what would culminate in being there with him, composing a Sebald-like Ambros Adelwarth-like story?

What he sees and feels about his life as he’s lived it, let the story unfold slowly and without judgment.

Next: Running for Your Life: Paper Mate

Running for Your Life: News, Not Snooze

How often do you encounter news that surprises you with its bona fide quality of serving non-elites – something about a newsmaker, say, who has a genuine radical vision not beholden to a plantation-style master?

Try this. A piece by rogue reporter (ie, old school muckraker, undeterred by establishment interests) Matt Taibbi fits the bill. About none other than Bernie Sanders.

https://rol.st/2QPFvG7

Wanna know what’s truly in the public interest?

Read the link above. And think about why it is this populist idea doesn’t get more exposure.

Think the Washington Post, owned by Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, will do a deep-dive probe about this underreported story?

That I would like to see.

Next: Running for Your Life: Paper Mate

Running for Your Life: Pursuing Happiness

A journal is a good place to start. “Journaling,” by name.

Recently, I received a note from a special friend. She wrote to acknowledge a kindness, and then told me that by following my example of daily “journaling” she has been “sustained in many ways.”

“Making you an important role model for me,” she wrote in closing.

I had a moment of clarity with my journal the other day. Largely because of the sense of my life as a thinker and a writer.

What I’ve learned in thirty-five years of journal writing, some bits leading to essays and blog posts and short stories and plays and novels and memoir junks and prose-poems, is, ahem, humility.

I write, choose words in an honest attempt to connect within a world that I’m knowingly a minuscule part; hold fast to what I know, have learned, expect nothing.

You are born alone, and you die alone.

We have love, lost love, love reborn. Family, bloodlines are only the most consistently reliable source of love.

Why, when the well is dry or poisoned or worse, we, as people, suffer.

What is the cost of a broken heart? Neglect that leads to disease and injury, costly care, early death.

Pursue happiness, and never stop. Only through love. There is nothing else.

Next: Running for Your Life: DIY Training

Running for Your Life: The Rex Factor

It will come down to dogs.

It won’t be his womanizing, nor his collusion with the Russians, nor his belief in lies, tissues of lies, that there is no lie that he won’t marinate in his child-mind until it spews into public, elevated to the false altar of a sacred truth.

No, it will be his distaste for dogs that will be President Trump’s undoing.

If fixer Roy Cohn were alive, he would advise his one-time protégé to be seen with a dog, playing in the Rose Garden. A photo op with his new pet.

“For God’s sake, Donald,” Roy would bark. “F—ing Nixon had a dog. Checkers.”

It’s hard to imagine the name that Trump would choose to call his dog.

He couldn’t fathom one that would thoroughly reflect his magnificent glory – and, of course, not in the least upstage him.

If he had a sense of humor, how about Vladimir? Who is the pet of whom, right?

Sessions would be funny. So would Stormy. Mueller.

(Imagine Lou Dobbs if he were to get wind of a White House mutt called Mueller? Such a self-satisfied smirk you couldn’t get out of your head no matter how you tried.)

A boxer looks a lot like a sour-faced Trump. But I wouldn’t foist that on such a majestic breed.

The boxer, that is.

Dogs stand by you through thick and thin. You value loyalty, Donald? Get a dog.

Trump adopts a dog stranded by the calamity that was Hurricane Florence (and calls the bitch Flo), and he wins his Supreme Court nominee fight, tees up the GOP to win both the House and the Senate in the midterms.

That is, if Roy Cohn were alive. He’s dead. So is the likelihood that any of this is going to happen.

Rather, Trump’s son is trash-tweeting the woman who came forward to out the high court nominee for sexual assault during the latter’s high school years.

Better a dog, Donald, than attack dog Donald Jr.

Next: Running for Your Life: Pursuing Happiness

Running for Your Life: Émigré Eminence

W.G. Sebald (“Vertigo, The Emigrants”) makes much of bloodline rituals, of being rooted in place, yes, but also in bloodstream.

Yet not in the obscene way of a rigidly viewed superior, more the faith of doubt is teased out among those who share relations.

Take the fleeting memory of the Émigré Eminence, Great Uncle Ambros Adelwarth in “The Emigrants.”

There is a seed of Sebald here; something that presages for him a path out of the ordinary. Not a stranger, a person encountered in a book, but someone who shares a common lineage. One of them.

Sebald was one who had to read, think, reflect on what he knew, then dip all that into the vat of his capacious, serum-enriched mind of aggregate knowledge and experience, capture the byproduct – not just mental – but spiritual and physical, a charge of feeling, say, or a shiver of awareness, if not certainty.

Next: Running for Your Life: Bye-Bye Facebook