Running for Your Life: Straight Talk

You can straight talk all you want but when compromise is treason you won’t be changing any hearts and minds.

Which, of course, goes to the essence of the pathetic rhetoric of modern warfare, that by displaying our immortal truth of American exceptionalism, we, as a people, can declare with apparent certainty that we are in the business of changing hearts and minds. (See: Bush/Cheney war on Iraq; subset: search for weapons of mass destruction.)

No, straight talk (consider a newspaper column named Fist Amendment) is only good as a sermon to the converted. The best you can do is conceive the smartest damn sermon on a topic (say, climate change, #MeToo, Trump/Russia) and deliver it to the faithful. Let ’em cheer, fall over themselves in appreciative agreement and then take the message to the street. Hallelujah?

Problem is straight talk is not truth. (Regardless of what a blue blood newspaper says in its promotional advertising.)

President Trump’s fixer, Michael Cohen, delivers straight talk, and the myriad “churches” in America write sermons on a particle of truth in what he says (or doesn’t say but implies) that excites the faithful in what seems an infinite number of ways.

No matter, get on with your straight talk. The internet will take care of it. Consider this quote from Patricia Lockwood in the Feb. 21, 2019, edition of the London Review of Books. (I couldn’t say it any better …)

“A few years ago when it suddenly occurred to us that the internet was a place we could never leave, I began to keep a diary of what it felt like to be there in the days of its snowy white disintegration, which felt also like the disintegration of my own mind.”

Next: Running for Your Life: Eighteen Miler Ahead!

Running for Your Life: Tree Light Wordplay

The wind blows

Blue like unexpected hope

Crisscross black tracks

Sky so close

Cold but not like

Home

Can’t touch me here

The park

Is something

I can’t live without.

Next: Running for Your Life: Straight Talk

Running for Your Life: “Dying of Whiteness”

Book titles don’t shock anymore.

Take this title, a Basic Books one written by Jonathan Metzl, a medical doctor with home ties to America’s Heartland, that is due to come out in the spring (2019).

(Fuhgeddabout the fact that in 1990 I began – a since abandoned – book of essays on American travel, with the working title, “Travels Across America’s Waistline.”)

If Metzl’s main title isn’t shocking enough, get a load of the subtitle:

“How the Politics of Racial Resentment is Killing America’s Heatland”

So many books, so little time. And some, like Metzl’s I find myself reading the introduction and the conclusion, in part because, well, of the first sentence of this paragraph …

Here’s the money quote from this book, which if you may not have the heart and the stomach to read what stands as a reasonable assessment about just how intractable the problems seem now …

“Why would someone reject their own health care, or keep guns unlocked when their children were home? Yet because of the frames cast around these and other issues hued with historically challenged assumptions about privilege, it became ever-more difficult for many people with whom I spoke to imagine alternate realities or to empathize with groups other than their own. Compromise, in many ways, coded as treason.”

That last line nails it. When next you wonder how we can be as deeply partisan as we are think of this phrase: Leaders, thinkers on both sides of the spectrum see compromise as treason.

Next: Running for Your Life: Straight Talk

Running for Your Life: More Choice Stuff

At 63, my choices today can seem as exciting as a house painting renovation: slow and methodical but dead-satisfied with the results.

I’d argue that choices I make now sustain a narrow range because they are the product of years of – for want of a better word – experience in choosing practice.

Akin to find your passion and make it happen.

I’d alter that to a choice rather than a finding.

We come across so many pursuits, activities, causes, crusades in a long life. Those who make the right – or at least a reasonable – choice about which one of these actions will occur based on perfect moments defined by your imperfect self.

A life at best is a story.

If you’ve been blessed by enough resources to make choices, you’ve only yourself to blame if your own personal story is boring, and not to others, God forbid, but boring for yourself.

Next: Running for Your Life: “Dying of Whiteness”

Running for Your Life: Mind Your Health

Keep your mind in shape.

What is the allure of a new language.

At my bedside is a French learner novel and a pocket French-English dictionary – more so English-French in daily life, given the weakness of my French vocabulary, normally curious about French equivalents to English words but instead what helps to get me out of bed in the morning is the harder challenge of French to English.

Reading a sentence in a foreign language that requires me to look up a minimum of two words a sentence in order to follow the storyline of the novel.

Test yourself, seek out a challenge that will better yourself and give you pleasure.

The right choices in everything are the surest antidotes against the scourge of boredom.

I do understand that depression, anger turned inward, is not something that can be walled off.

Imagine this, though. Putting your choices on a spectrum between very happy and very sad. Hone your choosing skills (this based on the cruel premise of the fortune of birth) in a way the will give priority to the “happy” side of the spectrum.

Next: Running for Your Life: More Choice Stuff