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

Running for Your Life: Tree Gait

My wife M likes to say that I’m built like a tree.

Not that I look like one (we are least able to judge our own looks; me, I’m thinking young Roman pine, skinny with a big head) but that my body is strong, as durable as a healthy tree.

I think about this when I run. How the body I have now is as much about being conscious of how I move rather than strictly what could be accounted for by nature, per se.

A gait, though, is your own.

When I was young, my friends and family said I walked like a farmer with exaggerated high and long steps, as if I were striding over furrowed plantings.

I didn’t live on a farm, but my father grew up on one.

He is justly proud of the life skills, the hard-knock lessons he learned, so I didn’t take the comments as an insult. Rather I thought it was part of my inheritance, an involuntary commitment, a place of pride.

Fifty years later, “Farmer Larry” is keeping pace in a different way. I’m slower now but no less controlled in my gait.

Farmer Larry is much closer to a tree than, say, a racing bike, a scooter, a skateboard. When I run I don’t, as the kids say, get too far out on top of my skis.

I recalibrate, feel the strike of heel to ground, share the impact from roots, to trunk, to crown.

Watch as the tree moves in the wind. The top waves, the trunk gives ever so, the roots are solid.

Or so it seems. You do the best you can with what you know. Trees know more, and to be compared to them is an honor I’m continually working to be worthy of.

Next: Running for Your Life: Emigrant Eminence

Running for Your Life: The Jock Resistance -- A Modest Proposal

An essay describes a “resistance” force of high-ranking aides busily trying to constrain, steer, manipulate, coddle or simply ignore the directives of a president who seems at times to be quite unhinged and barely in control of his own White House.

Call it the Jock Resistance.

Emboldened by the Quiet Resistance anonymous appeal for order in the White House comes this plea from a senior official at the Ninth Street YMCA in Park Slope, Brooklyn.

The poignantly argued position by the anonymous senior official is just the smoking gun needed to alert the citizens of New York to the inordinate time and energy lost to the efficient governance of our fair city by the current mayor, Bill de Blasio, who, the official advises us, spends more time working out at the Y than working on any crucial topic of municipal business.

The anonymous senior official of the Y points out that the mayor exchanges points of view with personal trainers and Park Slope co-op workers alike, all of whom are of like mind and correct opinions, while dodging calls for meetings with such important figures as the current head of the New York City Transit Authority, Andy Byford.

Subways now run as inefficiently as they have since the bad old days of the early ’80s. Maybe Byford should get himself to a treadmill.

What’s more, the mayor refuses to wholeheartedly endorse congestion pricing, or alter his own 12-mile treks from Gracie Mansion to the gym, while seeing himself as a policy leader in fighting climate change.

Surely, as the New York Times did with the White House mole, the newspaper will find it fit to print the anonymous appeal for order, as honestly portrayed by this senior official at the Park Slope Y.

The person in question is a liberal democrat bereft over the squandering of this opportunity for real change from the office of an avowed progressive to show the nation that a liberal path to political and social order is one that is characterized by compassion and brotherhood, bristling with promise that the 99 percent (Remember them?) need not always see their wee-lamb gains gobbled up by giant sheepholders, the kings and queens who will countenance no real threat to the consolidation of their insatiable appetites to acquire more and more wealth and influence, as if society is a simple parlor game of elites, conservatives and liberals.

In a just world, the Times will publish the anonymous letter from the Park Slope Y senior official about the mayor’s obsession with workouts while hope-and-change work goes undone.

Besides, Times, the decision to lead the “Quiet Resistance” has been boffo for paper sales – and advertising.

So bring it on. Citizens must learn of the “Jock Resistance.”

Next: Running for Your Life: Tree Gait

Running for Your Life: Apologize, Me?

“Never apologize, never back down, never admit you were wrong, use every means possible toward achieving your ends.”

- Lawyer Alan Dershowitz, on what the late master-fixer Roy Cohn taught Donald Trump

“That was the biggest f—kng mistake I’ve made. You never make those concessions. You never apologize. I didn’t do anything wrong in the first place. Why look weak?”

- Former White House aide Rob Porter on Trump’s reaction following his “reset” remarks in response to saying that both sides have a lot to answer for in the wake of the deadly white supremacist march in Charlottesville, Va., as reported in Bob Woodword’s “Fear”    

Next: Running for Your Life: Tree Gait

Running for Your Life: The Overstory Story

This is going to be short – and oh, so sweet.

The first words that I read after turning the last page of “The Overstory” by Richard Powers appear in the 1954 Dell Laurel paperback edition (95 cents!) of “Six Great Modern Short Novels,” the preface to “The Bear” by William Faulkner, most of which contains remarks to honor the winning of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1949, to wit:

“It is [the writer’s] privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding [her] of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of [her] past.”

What’s more, “This award is only mine in trust.”

“Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only the question: when will I be blown up.”

“Because of this the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat.”

This is what “The Overstory” aspires to and succeeds in doing: realize the promise of Faulkner’s call for humility in service to the human spirit.

What “The Overstory” does 67 years after Faulkner penned these words is, through agony and sweat,  lift our hearts [and I daresay minds] during the interregnum of our annihilation.

Next: Running for Your Life: Tree Gait