Running for Your Life: On Going Long

I thank my lucky “starts” every other day.

That’s what I do. Run every other day since 1977 – or thereabouts.

There are times when I’m just dead tired. Or a little sick.

But I lace up the shoes and go for a run. Without fail.

Thirty minutes, the absolute shortest period of time. Or up to an hour and a half, given my current fitness level.

I’ll be pushing that in the weeks ahead, when the weather gets a little warmer, the sun stronger.

Knees, check. Hammies, check. Back, check. Wind strength during steep uphill, check.

Out the door in compression socks, patella bands, orthotics. Much slower than I was in 1977.

But steady. And ready. Every other day.

Next: Running for Your Life: Lock And Free

Running for Your Life: Physics? Really?

You never know when it’s going to happen.

An insight. The charge that breaks up the logjam.

It’s why I read. And read.

Not as an completist. As in, start something and take it to the end every time.

I’ll skim so much. Content being what it is. Pure surface, if you can handle that oxymoron.

The other day Pankaj Mishra wrote what I thought would be a throwaway review of a book of canned essays by Ta-Nehishi Coates. It wasn’t.

Rather, Mishra’s piece was a clear light of intellectual radiance. It is called, “Why Do White People Like What I Write?” and yes, it was a review/essay in the London Review of Books, my readers’ guide to our cockeyed galaxy.

I won’t reprint it here. Look it up and do so yourself. Or don’t. It’s all the same to me.

Know this, though. That reading Mishra (yes, I did a blog post in praise of Mishra’s “Age of Anger” book last June) gives me the clearest explanation of why it is I find myself so disgusted by and dismissive of politics and corporate journalism that I long for something better to feed my brain.

Thus, physics and maths. Here in the past few months I’ve started (and finished!) the following titles:’

• ·        Innumeracy by John Allen Paulos

• ·        A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking

• ·        The Jazz of Physics by Stephon Alexander

• ·        Reality Is Not What It Seems by Carlo Rovelli

And a few years ago, a book I return to:

• ·        Ripples on a Cosmic Sea by David Blair and Geoff McNamara

And a favorite,

• ·        Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity by David Foster Wallace

Read pure and applied science. Make calculations. Get excited about something real! Something divinely human! Throw off the cynicism! Be great again!

Next: Running for Your Life: On Going Long

Running for Your Life: Check Your Premises

Life liberty pursuit of happiness.

Individuals! Wherein does that foundational premise yield to the idea of a social contract overriding individual freedoms?

A president is nothing but a God-given freedom facilitator who, when able, broadens those freedoms.

A nation founded on suspicion of the intentions of a higher, superior authority holding sway, wielding power of “subjects.”

Americans never subjects!

Current presidency just the latest iteration of the erosion of a dirtier and dirtier word, sanitized by foreign (read: enemy) agents who would abase American values to see that word, “government,” as something more than a giant scam of lazy takers out to steal all the hard-won gains of noble individuals.

The war on government? Isn’t new. Rather bred in the “patriotic” bone.

Next: Running for Your Life: Physics? Really?

Running for Your Life: CURLING 2018

I am a fan of curling.

In the milieu in which I work and play in New York City, I am in the definite minority. In fact, for the most part I feel I’m in a field (or rink) of one.

Call it an accident of birth. I haven’t curled since the 1970s and 1980s after moving to from Canada to New York City in 1988 where curling is more likely to be ridiculed as sport punch line than an object of curious interest.

So, imagine my delight that, as a business journalist in Gotham, where all eyes are turned to the financial cable networks that one of them – CNBC – broadcasts after the markets close the Olympic Curling game of the day.

Whoa! Draws to the button, to the four-foot, setting up guards. Is the ice keen? She needs to throw takeout weight, not Second Avenue weight … (The weight that we dubbed the hardest you could throw on a curling rink in Owen Sound, so much so that if your shot didn’t hit the target rock, it would leave the ice surface and crash through the wall and go barreling out on to Second Avenue.)

So bring it on! Oh, and if you have any curling questions (save your jokes for social media, where they belong), feel free to comment below !

Next: Running for Your Life: Physics? Really?

Running for Your Life: The Culture Column

SCENE: Canada 1985

NAFTA talks bog down on definitions: Canada insists on calling an area of dispute, “Culture,” while the US insists on the term, “Entertainment.”

SCENE: Brooklyn 2018

Season 2, Episode 6 of the Scandinavian TV series, “The Bridge”

On a run today (Feb. 13) I come to the realization that the crime show we are watching is so compelling because “The Bridge,” although a concrete reality, the actual bridge between Copenhagen, Demark, and Malmo, Sweden, it is also the bridge within. The most defined characters are simply not as they appear, and that if you dare, the journey into the darkness (as well as the light) of the human heart is a most rewarding and fulfilling experience (not to mention menacing and scary).

I submit the European “Bridge” is in the spirit of that 1985 NAFTA-talks era “culture,” a standard that makes for more thrilling art than simple “entertainment.”

The US is capable of such multi-layered art – “Breaking Bad” being the most recent example.

As always, Oscar Wilde best hits the mark. During his famous lecture tour of the US in 1882, he said he believed that the only hope for American art and culture would be if women took over (as read in the incisively observed book, “Making Oscar Wilde” by Michele Mendelssohn, an Oxford Press book due out in July):

“The inequalities between American men and women startled (Oscar). In modern life, a clear division of labor was emerging: women were becoming the tastemakers, men the moneymakers. ‘It is only the women in America who have any leisure at all,’ Wilde observed. Enterprising and creative women were pouncing into the foreground of American cultural life. Meanwhile, men were receding into a hinterland of bank balances and Broadway stores. He believed they cared too much about steam engines, hot-water apparatuses and telephones, and not enough about art, leisure and culture. All work and no play made American Jack a very dull boy indeed.”

Next: Running for Your Life: CURLING 2018