Running for Your Life: Lock And Free

The other day I broke a logjam. I don’t often suffer from writer’s block – as eye-rolling readers of this blog can attest – but there it was.

To dangle metaphors, I’ve been spinning wheels at my home writing desk. Uncertain (more than usual) and making excuses to myself for why it was I wasn’t getting a lot done – as in new writing, beyond keeping up my old-school correspondence with friends and family.

Park Slope is a mecca for street-abandoned arts and crafts: tables, thrown clay pots, books of all conceivable types, paintings, you name it.

I’m walking T, our special needs coonhound mix, when I saw a small wood panel oil painting. It struck me as being pretty cool – but I was in a hurry and at first went past at a fast pace, T leading.

Then I stopped and guided T back the half-block to where I picked up the painting, oils of T brown and scarlet. A still life object in the foreground. The painting fit snugly in my T string bag I carry that is full of plastic bags and assorted canine playthings – and off I went to finish my errand.

Now the painting is tacked to a place of honor above my writing desk. Before putting it up, I resurrected a photo of me as a young man, serene-looking smile on my lips, my left hand resting against the cover of “A WRITER’S DIARY,” by Dostoevsky, a book that brings back a flood of warm memories.

The image is of a brass lock that has been opened. There is no key, so it would be foolish to think of it ever being locked …

Next: Running for Your Life: Notes About Coetzee’s “The Schooldays of Jesus”

Running for Your Life: A “Hump Day” Poem

A Profession *

By Jamie Baxter

The most dangerous kind of waste is the waste we do not recognize.

-        Shigeo Shingo

Thank you for giving me this opportunity          in the world of work

I will endeavor    I will strive   I’ve put hands on parts of my body

and committed   It is a noble pastime to work   few would disagree

though some might shun   not I   Recognizing my own potential

I have become a corporate citizen   The office square fills with workers

at lunch   wandering from their desks into the highest point of the sun

though often in the form of rain   Some days I staple my work to my desk

so I can slowly unpick it   There’s so much to look forward to

like watching Thomas fail    What a thrill it is      not being Thomas

His eyes back    from the bathroom blare     I save files and am constantly

printing or making notes at easily remembered meetings      Sometimes I strip

in the toilet cubicle   only to redress     but there is a moment

I care very deeply about this company    whose name     I will research

My lunch is almost ready to be removed from the photocopier    What a thrill

to receive so many different looks during the course of a day   from the same set

of people     I am very focused on being here    My emails are always leaving

and move through the one language I know     and few others

I’m vaguely aware of    I’m always being asked for advice   how did you

get a job here      how do you define failure or success     When the red

of the clouds fades to pink during the 4 o’clock winter sunsets and everyone gathers

by the windows to take in the view I tut and shout    make sure they get back to work

I’m always making coffee       and throwing it away   I don’t drink coffee

* London Review of Books, Feb. 8, 2018

Next: Running for Your Life: Lock And Free

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?