Running for Your Life: Moderation Nation

It has been a thrilling holiday period, so far.

This may sound contradictory, but this holiday has been heavy on moderation.

Little bit of this, some of that, dollop of wonder, childlike tastes of food, friends and family.

One gift in the household: a bear ornament for a log cabin tree of countable branches.

Heat from a wood stove and tiny Hanukkah flames.

Dim sum lunch on Christmas Day; creamy Bolognese from Thanksgiving turkey stock on Christmas Night.

On the shores of Great Latkes, savory bean dish.

The piece de resistance, an Eggplant Parmesan, courtesy of our loving Italian “mom”’s family recipe, the cumulative efforts of four loving souls.

Wine, Chinese takeout with vegetarian choices.

Because but for the turkey on Thanksgiving, that fed the Bolognese plan a month later, some slices of smoked turkey (again), we are moderating the meat.

Okay, say the words … animal consciousness. Three days after Christmas, we visited a family farm and saw a spunky pig in a barn. Seventeen lambs blatting for milk, for what seemed like attention but was more nine parts hunger, one part fear. All eighteen in line for holiday slaughter.

Call me a citizen in training in Moderation Nation.

Next: Running for Your Life: Resolutions?

Running for Your Life: “Irrationality” Heard From

Question of the day from the London Review of Books, from critic William Davies, reviewing a philosophy book, “Irrationality,” by Justin Smith,”

“How much, if any, of a pre-internet culture can survive in an age where every intellectual exchange can swiftly be derailed by a joke, a personal attack, a cry of victimhood or a strategic misunderstanding of the other’s argument?”

My pal, KN, responds:

“I think it’s because we collectively have lost the ability to sustain any thought too complex to be conveyed in 128 characters. Which leaves what? Jokes, personal attacks, cries of victimhood and strategic misunderstandings. They all fit the space! Public critique is dying because we can no longer sustain a train of thought, or attend with patience anyone trying to form one. Listening to another’s argument demands humility, and we are in a regular humility drought right now.”

And my response to KN:

“What Davies/Smith argue is that the platform giants – Facebook, Google, Amazon – rob us of humility, by rewarding everything but – Davies ends the piece by saying Smith is like the sober, patient person who attends a wild, drunken party who is loath to give up his effort of speaking truth to hype and boorishness.”

Next: Running for Your Life: Moderation Nation

Running for Your Life: Fake News, the Early Days

It all started with the NORAD (North American Aerospace Defense Command).

Fake news, that is.

Back in distant times, there were few news stories that adults enjoyed sharing with their Santa-believing kids than the news coming out of NORAD leading up to Christmas.

Check this out, an official NORAD press release last month:

Peterson Air Force Base, Colo. —
"As the North American Aerospace Defense Command conducts its primary mission
of defending the homeland, it stands ready to continue its tradition of tracking Santa’s
journey around the globe on Dec. 24."

Ah, in simpler times, adults would accept the Santa tracker information with a nod and a wink. After that news cycle, they'd return to their newspapers, radio and broadcast

Fake news being a nonpartisan non-reality in those days.

Fake news now? Fuhgeddaboudit.

Next: Running for Your Life: Moderation Nation

Running for Your Life: Ducks, Newburyport!

Ducks, Newburyport by Lucy Ellmann is not going to be for everybody -- and one can't help but think it doesn't hurt to be a member of a global literary royalty (her father Richard is author of the revered biographies of both James Joyce and Oscar Wilde), but whoa! I can't wait to read it.

Jon Day's review in the London Review of Books, Dec. 5, sold me with this line:

"Ellmann endows her narrator with a language entirely appropriate to her personality: polite and self-consciously self-doubting."

More than most anything else that's what I want from a book these days ... to remove myself for however long it takes into the mind of a narrator who is seen as "polite and self-consciously self-doubting." 

Next: Running for Your Life: Christmas Pineapple

Running for Your Life: Bear Truth

When it comes to a wonderful piece of bear nonfiction by David Trotter (London Review of Books, Nov. 7), which refers to North American grizzlies, aka “Moby-Dick with Claws,” it's understandable the blood gets stirred to write a letter in response.

And so, a letter appears in the Dec. 5 LRB, courtesy of Jane Campbell of Oxford.

Ms. Campbell adds to the conversation started by Trotter's essay. She writes of a passage in “The Biography of a Grizzly,” by Ernest Thompson Seton, that recounts the aftermath felt by a bear cub survivor, injured in his hind leg, from a hunter’s bullet after the man had shot and killed his mother and three siblings:

“As cold night came down, he (Wahb by name) missed (his mother) more and more again, and he whimpered as he limped along, a miserable, lonely, little motherless bear … not lost in the mountains, for he had no home to seek, but so sick and lonely, and with such pain in his foot, and in his stomach a craving for a drink that would never more be his. That night he found a hollow log, and crawling in, he tried to dream that his mother’s great furry arms were around him, and he snuffled himself to sleep.”

Ms. Campbell’s letter continues:

… Wahb survives to be the biggest, fiercest grizzly in the region but never has a mate or exacts revenge on hunters. He dies of old age.

Next: Running for Your Life: How’s About “Ducks, Newburyport”?

Running for Your Life: Ginkgo Dreams

Jill Jonnes’ “Urban Forests” throws some uncommon love on the ginkgo biloba.

We’ve been blessed with more than a few ginkgos in our Brooklyn neighborhood of Park Slope.

It has a wonderful history, with a punk yellow color of Sex Pistols splendor.

Here’s the “nut” graf:

“An abundance of fossils record that the ginkgo tree was among the fauna and flora of North America that were glaciated out and effectively driven into extinction on the continent by the Ice Age. (Talk about a native tree!) … Scientists now know that the ginkgo biloba tree or its ancestors have existed on earth for 250 million years, longer than any other tree now living.”

They aren’t everywhere, the ginkgos … But next time you see one, bow down. Not only have they outlived everything else on earth, individual trees have been know to live for centuries … (Two famous 18^th century ginkgos – one in Utrech, the other in Kew Gardens, are still alive today.)

Next: Running for Your Life: How’s About “Ducks, Newburyport”?

Running for Your Life: Dawn Times

Two years ago I had an idea.

I had spent months that year -- the centennial of the passing of the Canadian artist Tom Thomson -- researching and writing a book of letters. Thomson grew up in my hometown, Owen Sound, Ontario, and his life and times -- especially his final days because his demise remains shrouded in mystery to this day -- have always fascinated me.

On American Thanksgiving, 2017, I finished a woodland painting of my own -- in part inspired by my Owen Sounder forebear. A image of the painting can be found attached to my Twitter page.

The 2017 Dawn Times panel lies in the back of this image; in the foreground, is Dawn Times II.

A third panel is due, yes, in 2021... Perhaps just in time for the Tom Thomson book? Let's just see!

Next: Running for Your Life: Ginkgo Dreams   

Running for Your Life: On Loving the Cold

OK, not exactly loving it.

Or is it?

What did Kierkegaard say about love?

“When one has once fully entered the realm of love, the world — no matter how imperfect — becomes rich and beautiful, it consists solely of opportunities for love.”

That’s what he said.

So, it is about love, isn’t it?

No matter how cold it is, I’ve stepped out the door for a run every other of my adult life.

The truth is, severe cold gets to me in ways it never did, say, 30 or 40 years ago. But I head out the door (the realm of love?) and start to run, regardless of the temperature, the rain, snow.

Running for your love … Corny but, effective.

Next: Running for Your Life: Dawn Times

Running for Your Life: Art?

Critic Colin Burrow in a recent London Review of Books (No. 21, “The Magic Bloomschtick”) writes this and I couldn't agree more:

First, let’s start with poetry from Emily Dickinson:

The Poets light out Lamps –

Themselves – go out –

The Wicks them stimulate

If vital Light

Inhere as do the suns –

Each Age a Lens

Disseminating their

Circumference –

“(Dickinson) is doing what the best poets do, trying to think behind the words they’ve been given, whether those words come from a newspaper, from an essay, from a hubbub on the street, from a story told in church, or on their grandmother’s knee, from a whisper in the ear from the muse, or from another poem.”

Next: Running for Your Life: On Loving the Cold

Running for Your Life: Anonymous Heard From

If you read one book this election year, let it be “A  Warning” by Anonymous.

Okay, you say. I can’t read another word about politics, most especially about the circus surrounding the current president. It just depresses me.

Suppress those thoughts, and read this book.

But if Anonymous were truly courageous, he or she (he and she?) would not hide in anonymity and own the charges leveled in this stunning account of the perilous state of our nation.

Hachette, the publisher of “A Warning,” obviously thought differently. Its trust in the integrity of the message, the truth of what’s in these pages, won out.

There are things about this book that the left doesn’t like. (It is the work of a conservative true believer, not a unreconstituted liberal.) And obviously there are things that the right doesn’t like about it.

But how about us individual, open-minded readers? I submit that “A Warning” is the single-most important book to read for those who seriously want to know what it’s like today in the inner sanctum of the Oval Office.

And “A Warning” must be considered, given the stakes: As Anonymous writes, we are currently finishing Season Three of the US presidency. Read this book and just try to imagine what it will be like during the Final Season of late 2023. That, I find, unimaginable.

Next: Running for Your Life: On Loving the Cold

Running for Your Life: “They Go Low, We Go High”

Here’s a thought that came to me when I was running on Tuesday (Nov. 26).

Famously, Michelle Obama said of the Democrats enemies:

“When they go low, we go high.”

It’s hard to stress just how misguided that marching order has been given the modern media world.

Will the Times EVER go low. Or CNN or MSNBC?

Will they ever consider the lesson of LaCorte News, the brainchild of former Fox News dude Ken LaCorte.

An article in the New York Timers last weekend (Nov. 24) characterizes the news site as one that has proven to be successful in delivering extremist “news” to both the left and the right for a profit after failing to find any business traction with more legitimate news sites.

Do progressives ever go low? I wonder. Progressive find succor in the philosophes: Cicero, Aristotle – those who labored on theories regarding the betterment of man.

Consider this from Aristotle:

“He who exceeds in confidence when it comes to frightening things is reckless, and the reckless person is held to be both a boaster and a pretender to courage.”

Our current brand of leadership ‘conservatives” jones for philosophes of entirely different stripes. Say, Thomas Hobbes, for example: Hey, human nature makes for a life that nasty, brutish and short. So in the time you have on earth, you wanna get yours, Jack.

Also Machiavelli, who is given to suggest – although he didn’t actually write these words – the end justifies the means. (He actually said, “One judges by the results …”)

Guess what, Michelle, the go-lows have the edge. I can’t begin to think that most thoughtful folks will be satisfied with another moral victory in a presidential election, this time in November 2020.

Next: Running for Your Life: Anonymous Heard From

Running for Your Life: Why Run (the late November version)

Before my run today (Nov. 26), I wasn’t feeling it. It’s been a busy run-up to Thanksgiving, lots of errands, personal matters, of course, work.

But I run every other day, and this one, was a beauty. Shorts-wearing weather, and sure enough, off I go. It’s what I do.

Pretty much every run for – I don’t know how long – I go past a kite that has been trapped in a tree in Prospect Park, Brooklyn. (Remember, if you are one of those folks of a certain age, Charlie Brown’s kite in a tree? That’s what I’m talking about.)

It’s been at least a couple of seasons, but the colors of the kite have not dimmed appreciably. In fact it is just beautiful, and in pristine shape, and I start to think about the simple wonder of leaflessness. For months at a time I can’t see the kite because it is obscured by the leaves in this healthy oak tree.

Further on, I thrill with the look, the glistening quality of the larch at the bridge overlook of the park’s boathouse: the golden aura of this monument pine.

Next: Running for Your Life: “They Go Low, We Go High” -- Discuss

Running for Your Life: “The Testaments” and You

Here’s a “Testaments” truth for you …

In reference to the novel by that title by Margaret Atwood, a sequel to “The Handmaid’s Tale: Documents written by principals in a coup or even in a “legitimate” democracy aren’t enough to merit the undoing of a corrupt, even society-destroying command.

This observation was made by “The Testaments” reviewer at the London Review of Books, Deborah Friedell:

“If 'The Testaments' were truly a novel for our times, after Aunt Lydia and her allies had succeeded in getting the documents out, after having risked, as they do in Atwood’s book, discovery and death in almost every chapter, journalists would write about them; and nothing would happen. ”

Next: Running for Your Life: A Word on “A Warning”

Running for Your Life: Lonely Hearts

Times columnist Nicholas Kristof write about loneliness being a silent killer (11-17-19).

How people, depressed in a crushing solitude, have lost their way in the dog-eat-dog world that is modern life.

Conversation is one thing but continuity that comes from listening, from paying attention, what Zen followers call the sincerest form of gratitude, that will set us on a path to good health.

“Without:” that is the active ingredient that defines the inactive life “without” energy.

Without love, without meaning, what is a life?

Sorrow yields a living death. Isn’t that why we pepper our fiction with zombies – the sci-fi manifestation of the oblivion of without?

Smile and then what? Recover? Why?

Because when you believe in yourself, in the work you do, that you continue to do, you show the natural joy and boundless energy of, yes, the dog.

It is too bad that Kierkegaard did not write about the moral lessons of a dog, a dog’s nature, her behavior.

Oh, wait a minute, maybe he did. (This line courtesy of “Kirk” – my pal Kirk Nicewonger, that is):

“When one has once fully the realm of love, the world – no matter how imperfect – becomes rich and beautiful, it consists solely of opportunities for love.”

Next: Running for Your Life: Yes, David Jones!

Running for Your Life: Still Running

Here’s something that lies at the heart of this blog.

Running, of course.

Not every day but every other day. It’s surprising how many times I’ve been asked this question: “Are you still running?”

I say, yes, of course. To the literal question. God bless, I am still running. I turn 65 next October and have been running since my early 20s. For the most part, every other day: Nine marathons, seven finishers (and six of those in a row).

Lately, though, I am thinking about my mental state when I run. Never with headphones, always just me and the road. Much slower and deliberate than I was years ago.

Still, that is. Still running. As in that word definition: deep silence and calm, as in the “still” of the night.

And so I hope it will continue. As it does in my other pursuits: still reading, still writing …

Next: Running for Your Life: Lonely Hearts

Running for Your Life: Alt Right Readies for the MF of All Political Campaigns

OK, so the other day I saw it, the weaponizing of political campaign messaging, a bumper sticker on a truck in my neighborhood, Park Slope, known as one of the most left-wing Democratic neighborhoods in New York City. Usual voting record: 94 percent blue.

The bumper sticker? Get this:

FIGHT FOR TRUTH/PUNCH A JOURNALIST

That, combined with this, from the gut-wrenching nonfiction book by Douglas E. Schoen, called “Putin’s Master Plan,” published 2016 (before Trump) by Encounter Books, page 68, makes for a woolly time ahead, 51 weeks and counting till America Votes 2020.

“RT (formerly known as Russia Today, which Putin started in 2005 and which has expanded substantially since its original English-language-only focus. RT now broadcasts in French, German, Arabic and Spanish; it has dedicated stations in the US and English; and it has styled itself as an alternative news source to Western media. The Kremlin invests $136 million a year in promoting Russian media abroad, with considerable success: RT has close to 1.2 billion views on YouTube, second only to the BBC. RT’s video arm, Ruptly, looks to compete with Reuters and the Associated Press.”

I can hazard a guess that the “journalist” targeted in the bumper stick doesn’t work for RT ….

Buckle up, folks. This isn’t going to be pretty.

Next: Running for Your Life: Still Running

Running for Your Life: Remembrance Day Mood

Remembrance Day stirs different emotions for me from its brother event in the US, Veterans Day.

In Canada, where Remembrance Day is commemorated (never celebrated), on this date, Nov. 11, people pause to reflect on the impact of war on family members.

Growing up in small town Ontario, Canada, I literally didn’t know of a single family who did not suffer significant loss(es) from the horrors of foreign wars.

In my case, my Uncle Earl, whom I never met, died as a young man, leaving his wife and baby children without a husband and father, when the troop ship he was on was attacked and sunk in the North Atlantic.

My childhood memories are of my grandfather, a veteran of the WWI parading on our small city’s main street, wearing his dress war uniform with attached medals. We watched solemnly, silently from street side. Proudly, yes, but also deeply saddened by the grim, resigned look on the faces of all those straight-backed older men and women marching past.

Tis in Remembrance that Canadians gather still in honor of those who served, and in that the day mirrors the respect shown in the United States for those who fought to uphold our way of life.

But it is a deeper “Remembrance” that resonates with me, and it is why, generations later, millions of Canadians wear pins today (Nov. 11) in the colour and shape of red poppies to honor the untold number to those – many of whom were of the age of today’s millennials and Gen Z’ers – who died and are buried in European soil where I’ve been blessed enough to see the poppies growing across fields as vast as the feelings I’m writing about.  

Next: Running for Your Life: Alt Right Readies for the MF of All Political Campaigns

Running for Your Life: Subway Mood

It’s darkly interesting to chart the loss of community consciousness in the subway, where in the past several years of doing this journal (including drawings not seen here, part of a separate work-in-progress project I call, “TRACK WORK”) I’ve noted a marked acceptance of the pocket-computer as self-immersion device.

Kierkegaard has a handle on this, to wit, “the self is a relation which relates itself to its own self, or it is that in the relation that the relation relates itself to its own self, or it is that in the relation that the relation relates itself to its own self; the self is not the relation but that the relation relates itself to its own self.”  

Got it?

Where is the community of souls I used to ride the subway with? Today (November 5), a conductor makes a humorous announcement and not a eyelash signals awareness. Where is the hope in the wasteland of aloneness, especially given the power of evil forces – Zuck, Trump, Bezos and Putin – who have moved so far beyond market share and stomach share to brain share, and in the case of Putin, absolute power? (Dictators see “share” as a liberal power grab.)

Next: Running for Your Life: “The Testaments” Meets “Motherless Brooklyn”

Running for Your Life: Flanerie Meets NYC Marathon

Here are 3 tips on “Flanerie,” the art of being a flaneur.

1. Slow down

2. No, that's not slow enough

3. Slower. Still

Here’s a thought after watching (and cheering!) along the NYC Marathon route (7-mile mark in Brooklyn)

National characteristics are astonishing in the way they are reflected in the responses of runners who have chosen to wear the equivalent of a name-attached flag in the race, ie, “Italia” and “France.”

Lusty cheers of “Italia” to those patriots pretty much without fail spurred an appreciative response, from fist pump, to smile, to sprightly step, while lusty cheers, to “Viva la France,” stirred but one “Merci” and an hour of too cool nothingness.

Oh, and yes, this runner is bound and determined to run in the 2020 edition of the NYC Marathon. 

Finally, 10 years after resuming this pursuit in Pittsburgh in 2010. It will mark my 10th marathon; so let it be in my hometown. After three decades of living here, a New Yorker to run in New York.

Next: Running for Your Life: Emotional Rescue

Running for Your Life: Photos Shot

Just back from traveling and felt the need to post this lament in the face of so many picture takers that my head was frequently swimming.

“Everyone is a photographer; no one is a Photographer."

Next: Running for Your Life: Emotional Rescue

Running for Your Life: Leafing It!

This blog post is going to be short.

You know, not something that the kids can tag as TLDNR … (too long did not read, to the uninitiated).

But I caught my leaf – actually three leaves!

Every season, as close readers of this blog may know, I run in the park amid the swirling leaves and, without stopping, I attempt to catch in my hand a leaf in mid-air. It is not to be trapped, and the only leaf treasures are those that have not touched the ground – a gust of wind that frees already-fallen leaves into the air are not fair game.

Today’s leaf was caught before a dreaded nor’easter, which is expected tonight and is certain to blow down millions of leaves in my jogging path.

Try it yourself. It is some fun – and gives an inordinate amount of surprising pleasure.

Next: Running for Your Life: Emotional Rescue

Running for Your Life: Zuck-ing Sound

It’s time for some straight talk.

Consider this reportage * about Commissar Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook:

“[He is] being photographed jogging in Beijing’s reeking, toxic smog, asking Xi Jinping to name his daughter (Xi declined) and making sure he has a copy of Xi’s arse-numbingly tedious ‘The Governance of China’ on his desk when Chinese journalists visit Facebook. (‘I’ve bound copies of this book for my colleagues as well,’ Zuck says. ‘I want them to understand socialism with Chinese characteristics.)’ ”

Here is the master of the Western Hive Mind genuflecting before the King of the Hive Mind, Xi Jinping, head of the CCP (Chinese Communist Party).

On Tuesday, the Democrats will gather for yet another all-candidates debate, aka, the kumbaya circle of like-minded cultural elitists.

Who among them will call out the Zuck for bowing down to his hive mind master? Who among them sees the existential threat from this pole of “executive” power – Zuck in his anti-democratic drive to manipulate millions for profit as dangerous to the commonweal (You are the bomb, Xi!) as the current resident of the White House?

Republicans are silent while Trump flouts democratic norms, and Democrats – at least in these critical national forums like the all-candidates dance – are silent while Zuck flouts democratic norms. (Anybody want to talk about the peril of a truly free press as Facebook drains advertising and readers from daily and weekly newspapers so that the number of even two-paper big cities is down to the single digits in a country as big and as powerful as the United States … ?)

That’s all for now – gotta freshen up my Instagram account.

*John Lancaster’s review of two new books about tech, China and surveillance, in the London Review of Books, Oct. 10, 2019

Next: Running for Your Life: Leafing It!

Running for Your Life: A Subway Poem

Since I came to live in New York City in late 1988, I’ve had a primarily positive experience riding in the subway.

Some of this has to do with the circumstances of my work commute.

As a daily journalist tied to an evening deadline, I’m currently obliged to take midday trains to Manhattan, and evening trains home. Off-peak trains mean that I am typically able to get a seat and be alone with my thoughts.

That means working in a journal. I either write notes about books I’m working on or reading, or draw people who capture my imagination.

I call these images my “Track Work,” some over the years I’ve painted or collaged … One day I will collect them and see what I have, maybe put them on Instagram the way the kids do these days.

The other day I wrote a poem, that speaks to some of what I’m talking about here, giving a sense of wonder I still feel thirty-one years after calling New York my home.

IN THE SUBWAY

There is a joy to watching

out of town folks riding the

subway, making for a

fresh outlook

on just how unique

this trip can be,

a moment’s glance

and memory erupts,

a recollection of

my first days here

of first days everywhere,

the wonder that is

awareness of your surroundings,

the comfort that travel,

an open mind transports

mood, takes you away

to a new place where time

stands still, or seems to.

Next: Running for Your Life: Leafing It!

Running for Your Life: Prosperity and Amity

When it comes to good titles, this one, by journalist Eliza Griswold scores big-time.

Because these two towns a few hours drive out of Pittsburgh deserve the ink that Griswold spills on this book published in June 2018.

The subtitle, “One Family and the Fracturing of America,” takes away the guesswork.

Want to get a taste of what it is really like to be on the front lines in America’s resource growth economy?

Do you feel, at the end of the day, that local, state or federal governments are working to your benefit?

Does it stand to reason that the same old arguments from the same old political parties will find any traction in a places like Prosperity and Amity, where families are fractured, not in the way that so many commentators feel free to posit, i.e., as a matter of character of strength – by being strung out on opioids in jobless wastelands?

In what seems the endless campaign, we are less than 13 months away from the next national election.

“Prosperity and Amity” is no “Hillbilly Elegy.” This is the real deal. These are real heroes here. Told in a slow-moving book that pays homage to the noble character of the family members who Griswold came to know during her years writing about natural gas developers and their neighbors.

Next: Running for Your Life: A Subway Poem

Running for Your Life: Every Other Day Since 1977

That was 42 years ago, 1977.

In 1976, I had the misfortune of contracting a serious ailment that I’ve written about before on this blog: a blood clot in my leg that traveled to my lung. Following a long recovery period, I returned to my young man routines a shadow of my former self. My left leg twice the size of my right one.

I had never jogged before. A hockey player in the winter, softball as a kid in the summer, I had never been a runner. But in order to keep my leg circulation in check, I found that if I ran (really not much more than just shuffling along in the beginning), it helped a lot. Pain and swelling went down; for months I had trouble sleeping; after I started running, my sleep improved as did my healing.

Back then, I started running every other day. Every day put too much strain on my left leg, but every other day seemed about right.

That was nine marathons ago … And since then I have run every other day for 42 years, and my leg is still a problem but not at all what it was.

Yep, Running for Your Life. Those can be words to live by.

Next: Running for Your Life: Amity and Prosperity (Not What You Think)

Running for Your Life: Two Days Short of 9/11

Notes on 9/9/19 ….

Let the ‘9’s be wild on this date, two days short of the 18^th anniversary of 9/11.

Never 9/11/01, the shorthand likely to hold for generations.

It is true that the professionalism of words and images is mooted by the glorification of the self.

What is popular in terms of “messaging” exaggerates the individual. Her smarts, her athleticism, her wit, her knowledge.

We undervalue the drivers of ‘soul’: doubt, kindness, empathy, and most egregiously, humility.

What is the phrase that long amused my dad? “I’m so good, it’s hard to be humble.” What’s telling here is an awareness of the elusive objective: humility. That’s the core of the joke.

Instead, today, to be humble is to be weak, to be unheard, to be exploited, jeered at. Like that “SVU” episode about rape trauma. “I’m a nobody,” the victim says, “are you a nobody too?”

In the fantasy of the episode, the rape victim is victorious; we are given to believe that she has a chance to rise out of her special circle of hell.

We are given stories, myths, that make us believe in society; that an essential goodness will prevail if we choose to be essentially good.

Truth is not a factor; but love and faith are.

Next: Running for Your Life: Every Other Day Since 1977

Running for Your Life: On Beauty

FROM “The Book of Time,” an excerpt, in Mary Oliver’s book of poems, “The Leaf and the Cloud”

“Whoever shall be guided so far towards the mysteries of love, by

contemplating beautiful things rightly in due order, is approaching the last

grade. Suddenly he will behold a beauty marvelous in its nature, that very

Beauty, Socrates, for the sake of which all the earlier hardships had been

borne: in the first place, everlasting, and never being born or perishing,

neither increasing nor diminishing; secondly not beautiful here and ugly

there, not beautiful now and ugly then, not beautiful in one direction and

ugly in another direction, not beautiful in one place and ugly in another

place. Again, this beauty will not show itself like a face or hands or any

bodily thing at all, nor as a discourse or a science, nor indeed as residing

in anything, as in a living creature or in earth or heaven or anything else,

but being by itself with itself always in simplicity; while all the beautiful

things elsewhere partake of this beauty in such manner, that when they are

born and perish it becomes neither less nor more and nothing at all

happens to it.”

Next: Running for Your Life: Two Days Short of 9/11

Running for Your Life: TLDNR (On Trying to Keep Up With the Kids These Days)

Climate change is one thing: Arctic fires, disturbingly high nitrous-oxide emissions from permafrost (12 times higher than expected), stable crops will become less nutritious …

When it comes to cultural change, here’s a breath-stopper.

TLDNR is what kids today say when faced with acquiring knowledge:

“Too Long Did Not Read.”

That said, one does find encouraging trends of cultural change in the other direction.

Yesterday (Sept. 16), while moving along the subway platform in Brooklyn, I noticed a man in a hoodie and dark glasses, standing next to a wooden bench. As a daily commuter in Gotham subways over three decades, I tend reasonable precautions, so instead of ignoring strangers’ conversations, I listened closely to what this man was whispering to his suit-and-tie companion:

“Here, you start with turmeric and ginger … “

Next: Running for Your Life: On Beauty

Running for Your Life: What’s Up With the Mid- to Late 60’s?

Okay, call me a Boomer Nostalgist …

And sure our generation is responsible for a host of horrors – the stark failure to do what’s required to slow the impact of climate change being the line leader.

But, give me these words, this from Bob Dylan (in 1965)

‘Now the roving gambler he was very bored

Trying to create a next world war

He found a promoter who nearly feel off the floor

He said, “I never engaged in this kind of thing before

But yes, I think it can be very easily done

We’ll just put some bleachers out in the sun

And have it on Highway 61.’

-- From “Highway 61 Revisited”

These words from Claude Levi-Strauss reflect on the 1969 moonshot

‘and then I am glued to my set, even though it is boring, always the same and lasts a long time. Still, I can’t turn away. In this sad century, in this sad world where we live, with the pressure of population, rapidity of communications, the uniformity of culture, we are closed, like a prison. The Apollo shots open a little window. It is the one experience – vicarious, but we can follow it on TV – the one moment when the prison opens on something other than the world in which we are condemned to live. The moon is the inverse of Columbus’s new world – not an earthly paradise, but a desolate, dead, inhospitable place.’

Which starts a meditation on a world in which “smart” referred to its creative geniuses and deep thinkers and the “smart” of motor vehilces, home appliances and little computers we walk around with and stare at.

Next: Running for Your Life: TLDNR (On Trying to Keep Up With the Kids These Days)

Running for Your Life: The Underappreciated Value of Being Smart

In his remarks during the unveiling of the Triborough Bridge (Now call the RFK Bridge), super-bureaucrat Robert Moses took pains to note writings from Samuel Johnson in delivering a five-star diss to Washington, DC, counterpart, Harold Ickes, in 1936.

Moses referred to the “finest pieces of polite vituperation in the annals of English literature” when alluding to the “help” he received from Ickes …

Here’s what Moses was getting at, as per “The Power Broker” by Robert Caro:

Johnson to Lord Chesterfield, after Chesterfield sought to represent himself as Johnson’s patron seven years after rebuffing the scholar’s request for financial support for his great dictionary project:

“Is not a Patron, my Lord, one who looks with unconcern on a man struggling for life in the water, and when has reached ground, encumbers him with help?

“I hope it is no very cynical asperity to be unwilling that the Publick should consider me as owing that to a patron, which Providence has enabled me to do for myself.”

Next: Running for Your Life: What’s Up With the Late 60’s?

Running for Your Life: Kind Approaches to Humanity? Really?

Notes on the road, from a diary note, June 10, 2019:

Kind approaches to humanity are not in keeping with commercial publishing.

So call it vanity publishing, the private realm.

How the “other” will never have purchase in secular life.

If I have a “calling,” it is in the spiritual realm. What I feel when running, doing tai chi, drawing, writing poetry.

To give is to give away parts of yourself on a spectrum that runs from bright visibility – think brightness on a mobile phone screen – and invisibility.

It is not lost on me that what I’ve done in my writing is to entertain the idea of honoring those who keep the faith, hold the center, be not the resume one but the order of service one, he/she whose destiny is to give until they vanish into sweetly, scented summer air.

Next: Running for Your Life: What’s Up With the Mid- to Late Sixties?

Running for Your Life: Warning Labels in Politics

We have warning labels on cigarettes, vaping gizmos, where hot coffee is served in cafés. These things will be harmful to your health.

We tell buyers of packaged goods what’s in them. Are they gluten-free? How many calories? Is that “natural” product, well, made from whole foods? Or loaded with preservatives and sugar? We care about what we consume.

I’ve encountered few arguments across the political spectrum that these kinds of regulations are unnecessary. Indeed, they’ve become “normalized,” as the kids like to say. We expect to be informed, in minute detail, about the stuff we eat and drink.

Okay, so let’s take this example and apply it to what we consume in political advertising. If we are serious about keeping our democracy healthy, as in, insuring that when a vast majority supports basic rights, like, access to reasonably priced health care, good, fully funded schools for our children, assault weapons off the streets, then we should pay to regulate political advertising, using a nonpartisan government agency that issues warning labels on political advertising.

Soon, we are going to be bombarded like never before by political advertising. Untold millions will be spent through “dark money” channels in order to attempt to shape public opinion.

And, yet, there is no way of assigning a “democracy health” grade to the message. It’s not the place here to detail how the warning classifications would work, although fact-checking of the message(s) would be involved, and similarly, a label that assigns a tag like “rhetoric” or “bombast” could be entertained. Say  a message contains 5 percent fact, 80 percent rhetoric and 15 percent bombast would be one way to go.

You get the idea. No matter what, something needs to be done. And a nonpartisan regulatory agency to try to get to the truth in political advertising would be the place to start.

Next: Running for Your Life: Kind Approaches to Humanity? Really?

Running for Your Life: Joseph Campbell in 1955 … !

Joseph Campbell offered graduating seniors at Sarah Larry College more than sixty years ago these uplifting words:

“To know that you are a sparrow and not a swan; or, on the contrary, a swan and not a sparrow...gives great security, stability and quality of harmony and peace to the psyche...”  If you are always wondering what you will become, "you will soon become so profoundly implicated in your own psychological agony that you will have little time or energy for whatever else, and certainly no sense whatsoever of the bliss and wonder of being alive."

Now those are words to live by …

Next: Running for Your Life: Warning Labels in Politics

Running for Your Life: Country Lines

The idea is to keep your eyes, your ears open … What did Henry James say? Strive to be someone upon whom nothing is lost …

“In the morning light, a caterpillar is hanging by a thread,

bobbing and squirming and zig-zagging in the summer heat.

‘now that’s core strength,’ K says, then

‘poison, don’t touch it,’

with your finger, exposed flesh.”

_______________________________________________________

“We’ve slashed, machete’d dead

limbs, rangy branches, topped by thin-point leaves,

like a desert plant, but no, this is too true north for olive trees,

And behind, the hidden figures of (his/her) place,

Mustard-yellow willow and the dead-spacey little green apple tree,

Two hummingbirds touch down, flit to orange blossoms, a gold finch, fat cardinal,

the telltale ‘cheep,’ what was covered, enmeshed, the mountain stream bank,

a wand touch upon the River Styx, where darkness, fright had spilled, before we cleared the brush

and let the light in.”

Next: Running for Your Life: Joseph Campbell in 1958 … !  

Running for Your Life: Nutrition Notes

In summer, it’s about hydration. More water than colder months, yes, but I’m a big believer in fresh fruit, especially now. Coffee and a fruit feed, then a modest morning run.

Afternoon pasta with shrimp and vegetables (is my personal favorite), more water and, yeah, fruit. I favor bowls of food, carbo-load with an eye to how often (and hard) you are running.

In the evening, a light meal: stir fry, no red meat, beer or wine.

Sugar? Am lucky that I don’t have a sweet tooth, but frankly, I think that fact has more to do with my body’s evolution, how its needs determine how much, and what, I eat, drink, and more to the point, crave.

I don’t know if this approach to nutrition and exercise has anything to do with the fact that I do not suffer from any food allergies; feel bloated and thus get a lift out of gluten-free products.

Nevertheless, this practice has served me well, and I’ve been blessed by having the means to be able to follow this diet to the best of my ability.

Next: Running for Your Life: Classic Country Lines  

Running for Your Life: The Car Show, 2019

On Saturday (Aug. 10) we went to a car show at the 31^st annual Otisville Country Fair (best line of the day: “The Petting Zoo Was a No-Show,” which spurred this mediation:

The 1963 white Impala convertible with red leather interior, chrome grille work, white walls, rear tire walls, low slung to the ground.

What was Uncle Gord and Aunt Gloria’s car. Working class, pride of ownership, the identification of personality – and automobile. When Uncle Gord is behind the wheel of his Impala (was it golden??), how sexy and in command of his life did he feel?

What do you feel when you go to a car show at a country fair in 2019?

You reach out and touch something deep inside. Which car is for you? And why?

Sadly, cars today do not seem like extensions of the self. Something is lost.

A person’s connection to their car is seen to be an aberration, a broken thing, a maladjustment.

There is no human bond to the car brad, size of the world, how not one place, one group of workers – men and women – built it, own it.

The only place I’ve seen my reflection this weekend is in the lustrous finish of the 1972 Chevy Nova, painted darkest brown with a hint of red, a promise of burgundy …

Next: Running for Your Life: Nutrition Notes

Running for Your Life: Joan Mitchell, Lady Painter

On July 12, impressions left by Joan Mitchell show, entitled, “I Carry My Landscapes Around With Me.”

What is yellow? Orange frenzy

To winter sun yellow, a child’s

Innocence, passing through to

Torment, clutter, what’s lost

There is no easy way to hold

On, but in the painting you can

Cheat. Dive in and hold.

Blue, black, violet, again

Vortex of black to a white

Center, dare to enter if you

Will. There is danger to be found

In the least unexpected places.

Drip. Drip. Drip, the four-panel

“Dark” one, mostly light blue, violet

Some dashes of the dark blue,

The Midnight Lake

The light one: Bananaman!!

Next: Running for Your Life: Nutrition Notes

Running for Your Life: Home Truths

Beyond the RED LINE of economic-racial segregation:

How the tyranny of a million YouTube videos threatens an informed democracy. Yes, the poor will get poorer, the rich richer. We are but a podcast-puddle of untutored, selfish minds.

“Total liberty for the wolves is death to the lambs.”

 – Isaiah Berlin

Next: Running for Your Life: Nutrition Notes

Running for Your Life: Routine 66

• ·        Run every other day (in all kinds of weather, with possible exceptions: electrical tempests, tornados, blizzards, hailstorms).
• ·        Do 60 REAL push-ups every night; even when you have zero energy for it.
• ·        Stretch! There is (are) at least one (OK, two) stretches that will yield the kind of outcome that will stave off injury. Do these exercises twice a day (no excuses).
• ·        Tai chi core movements: I do three sets, ten minutes per set. Set aside the time: three times a week at minimum
• ·        Meditate: Put down you g-d phone and let your body drop into full relaxation mode. Best results: When long-term memory shapes to such a degree that you actually feel that you’ve reverse-aged decades.

Next: Running for Your Life: Home Truths

Cool Underside, a poem

There is a rhythm

To my days that

Leaves room to stop

See the fat caterpillar

On the cool underside

Of the large tire rim,

The car parked on First

Street, Mary with me

And she doesn’t walk

On, rather she gathers

The caterpillar into the palm of her hand

And deposits the yellow fuzzy beauty

Into a green, leafy garden bush that is

A welcome shelter out of the harsh sun.

Next: Running for Your Life: Routine 66

Running for Your Life: ‘REPORTER’

Here’s the best takeaway from one of the best memoirs of the reporting life I’ve ever read:

From Sy Hersh’s simply named, “REPORTER,” in characterizing the circa-2013 state of the US media”

“Twenty-four-hour cable news was devouring the news-reporting business, TV panelist by TV panelist.”

Next: Running for Your Life: Routine 66

Running for Your Life: Hot Weather Mullings

What comes to mind during a long run (in July). Hot but not too humid.

See the Revel moped and consider this straight talk, shoutout.

Download and ride, all you need is a valid driver’s license.

Am struck by the idea when it comes to roadway rules and regulations, the paramountcy of capitalism, the advance of these ‘sharing” transportation businesses overrides the concerns of public safety.

Certainly that is the mark of the self-driving thrust.

Imagine a day when people take to their pedal bikes or mopeds and find themselves in danger of being in a collision with a “robot” car. What guilt, or compunction, does the robot “feel” for running into and killing a human aboard one of these unregulated contraptions ...

Could these developments will yield more rather than fewer traffic deaths? Isn’t it possible that the unemployed or underemployed person, chronically depressed and high on prescription drugs, will be aboard one of these downloadable, unregulated vehicles and when presented with the opportunity swing their rig in front of a fast-moving robot-controlled car, choosing this way – not a bridge leap or a gun or a pill overdose – to end it all, knowing full well that they won’t be leaving their vale of tears with any guilt feelings they may have had for the poor innocent soul driving on our highways today.

It would be a clear conscience way to go; remember the old wood burned shingle hanging in a family cottage back in the day: “Goodbye Cruel World” of a man standing inside a toilet throne, with his hand on the pull chain …

Next: Running for Your Life: Routine 66

Running for Your Life: Summer Screen Screams

Here’s a short film idea:

• ·      Cast a small comedian as a Harp Marx lookalike who is dressed in exaggerated runner’s wear.

He is attempting to run along a designated jogging path in an urban park that is chock full of people staring blithely, obliviously, into their smartphones/gadgets and he continually “blats” his rubber-bulb horn to clear a path in their startled midst so that he can run a relatively straight line through them.

• ·        Consider the problem of doing a remake of “Candid Camera.”

Alas, it wouldn’t fly because such footage of behavior that embarrasses or calls out social and personal gaffes is no longer of interest, cannot be seen to be entertainment, not in a culture in which the majority of people have moved beyond being shamed for conducting themselves in a way that would shock their mothers.

Next: Running for Your Life: Routine 66

Running for Your Life: “We Give to the Point of Extinction”: Country Porch Notes

I was sitting on the recently screened-in sun porch of a historic country house this past holiday weekend (July 4-7) in Cuddebackville, New York, thinking about men, spiritualism and empathy.

The superstitions of warrior-men. What they carry with them. Consider re-reading “What They “Carried” by Tim O’Brien. Think of the ecstasy of Ryan O’Reilly, winning the sports medal of sports medals, the Stanley Cup.

How men, poor sodden souls, cannot help but be seduced by the idea of help that comes from somewhere beyond now. So much asked of you, the universal man, the household god, grow into the role, not just of provider but for the love of mother, the need of wife, the respect of daughter.

When we stop we die so we never stop. The sun begins to fall into the rectangular spaces of the porch, the sun the top of the dog’s head. He wants something from me, this coonhound, the feel of his paw on my leg like a soldier’s grasp. Pay attention, man. Yield to what’s necessary. Now the sun is overhead. From here the front door is open and I’m content to think that the cabin was never more than a three-room space with the sitting, sleeping room built off the fireplace/stove on the other side of the central fireplace, a place to hang a kettle (pot) to boil water, erect a grille to fix meat and vegetables, a country sink for rinsing food, washing up. Your outhouse, I like the idea of the half-moon cut in the window, wondering where it was located, high ground, of course.

Imagine a love nest, the children arriving like animals secure in their owned life in this special hollow, a valley, a sling of living and ghostly things, you being just one with them, all you need do is sit and listen, and, thank God, empathize, taste the tongue feels, touch at your fingertips. What is country when ownership is the furthest thing from your mind? Sin of pride? Absent.

Empathy …. What’s the distinguishing factor that defines man. Ergo, that we would defy the law of nature, and risk our lives for others. Jumping in to save a drowning stranger; the body chemicals that engage when a traveler comes to our door, seeking advice, assistance. We give to the point of our own extinction …

Next: Running for Your Life: Routine 66