Running for Your Life: Why a Journal?

Spied on an office desk of a goss news site where I swear to God you have be under thirty to be on staff: A journal with the title 1970s STYLE LAPTOP.

I can remember why it was that I starting running on a regular basis, going on forty years now. But I don’t remember precisely why I started a journal. Outside of two creative writing workshops, I’ve never been schooled in the literary arts. In college, I didn’t as much as take a single English course, having majored in journalism and political science. If I were going to write it would be for a job. Since 1979, I’ve had nine full-time jobs. Except for a bizarre five-month foray into public relations, I’ve been newspapering, editing and writing.

In June 1983, I went out on the road, planning to be gone from home until the following June. That’s when I started scribbling. On a trip that would take me across the US on a Greyhound bus and airborne to Tahiti, New Zealand, Australia, Mexico and Cuba, before I hitched a right in a four-seater Cessna back north.

In Tasmania two lovely travel companions bought me a journal that they presented to me with some ceremony and with touching inscriptions. It was my first journal. Christmas 1983.

I’ve filled a sizable book shelf of journals in the past thirty-two years. Off and on for awhile, but since the nineties I’ve been writing regularly in a journal. Story ideas, impressions. Pretty much everything you read in this blog was first put down in longhand.

We do things for our mental health. When I haven’t written in my journal for a few days, I feel it. Like a bank of storm clouds. At times the writing is slow, at times just a few notes. But when it comes to getting to a place where I can create, to go beyond the workaday writing and editing of my newspaper life, I need to sit down with my 1970s STYLE LAPTOP. And write.

Next: Running for Your Life: The Burglary by Betty Medsger

Running for Your Life: Mental Fitness

What to say? There is something rattling around up there.

I know if I go more than a few days without running, i.e. hard running, aerobic exercise, my brain feels sluggish. How do you mind your life when your brain is dulled?

Some of that comes down to what we call spirit. But really nothing would happen if not for the release of those delicious biochemical that are stirred when the body is pushed. It’s a different result from the passion that you feel in the arms of a lover, the cut and thrust of an idea shared with your best friend, the feeling of the curtain going up on your favorite play, TV series or movie.

Which is to say that mental fitness as it relates to running is a physical thing. Feeling mildly depressed before a run and, more often than not, five miles of running – not jogging but running – and you’re feeling better. Cold and flu season? That too can knock you off your pins. Feeling a little punk before a run? Four miles on the treadmill and you can actually sense the malaise lifting, the healthy athlete’s body doing its job, ridding you of the virus that so easily enters the mind as depression in the strong cold of deep winter.

Knock on wood, but I literally can’t remember when it was I was last felled by the flu or a bad cold. Is it all because of running, this purchase I have on physical and mental fitness? Seriously, I couldn’t tell you. But I’m not about to take the chance and find out. Suffice to say that four decades ago I unwittingly gave myself a gift that I will cherish as long as it stays with me: the gift of running for my life.

Next: Running for Your Life: Why a Journal?

Running for Your Life: The Jazz Palace Post

It’s deep winter in the city, the five-day weather forecast as welcome as an elevator fart, and by my reckoning there’s been a rise in those, as social decorum frays under dreary skies with yet another Monday storm coming at you, right between the eyes.

That’s why it’s so important to think of . . . spring! And not Groundhog Day, six more weeks of winter, spring. But The Jazz Palace spring of 2015.

Do yourself a favor and clink on this link http://bit.ly/1u2XLhD. It will take you to another world. Have you ever seen such a beautiful object? And that’s just the beginning. The Jazz Palace by Mary Morris (full disclosure; Mary is my wife) is not only the novel of the spring, but the event of the spring.

The Jazz Palace tells the story of Benny Lehrman, Napoloeon Hill, the Gem Sisters. I’ve lived with these characters for years and to quote a friend, the one-of-a-kind drummer Jamey Haddad, they are hip cats, man. They lived the life in Prohibition America. This is a story of tragedy, race, friendship and love. Benny and Napoleon, they howl at the moon. Pearl and her mother, Anna, keep it real. Oh, and music. In deep winter, we need hot music.

So, are you tired of winter? Make The Jazz Palace Web site http://bit.ly/1u2XLhD you’re pre-spring destination. Make it a favorite, share and retweet these few words of mine. Come to the events when they come to your ZIP, or a ZIP near you. Oh, yeah, in April. When the book is available for sale, get the book. You won't be sorry.

Because it’s The Jazz Palace. You don’t want to miss it. Because it can’t miss.

Next: Running for Your Life: Mental Floss

Running for Your Life: On Reznikoff

From Charles Reznikoff’s “Rivers and Seas, Harbors and Ports,” published in “Testimony,” Objectivist Press (1934):

a cargo of sandalwood at the Fiji Islands and at Guam a quantity of beech de mer, betel nuts, and deer horns; ivory rings for martingales; a cargo of copper ore, shipped in Chile; sperm and whale oil, sperm candles and whalebone; pigs of copper; six seroons of indigo; pigs of lead, moys of salt, and frails of raisins; seal skins, prime fur and pup skins, from seals taken at the Falkland Islands; a cargo of tea, fresh, prime, and of the finest chop, quarter chests of tea, hyson skin and congo, with the present of a shawl from the hong merchant in Canton; cases, trunks, bales, casks, kegs and bundles

Here’s a big shout-out to Eliot Weinberger, whose “Poet at the Automat” piece in the London Review of Books, Jan. 22, 2015, introduced me to a writer I’ve known about for years – but have never read. This Charles Reznikoff (1894-1976) seems, in Weinberger’s smart and considered interpretation, a kindred spirit. Some reasons why:

“There was the legend of Reznikoff, the invisible poet, walking twenty miles a day in New York City, writing down his observations in a little notebook, meeting cronies who never knew he was a writer at the Automat, publishing his own books of perfect poems for more than fifty years. A sweet, elderly man who was maddeningly self-deprecating. George and Mary Oppen told me about a reading in Michigan, at the end of which the audience was on its feet, wildly cheering. Rezi, as they called him, was heard to mumble: ‘I hope I haven’t taken up too much of your time.’”

It is an aspiration of mine to be seen as a kind and self-effacing man like Charles Reznikoff, a writer who until his mid-sixties published nearly all his books himself, setting type for many of them on a printing press in his parents’ basement.

Charles Reznikoff is an American original, a writer’s writer. Please note: This is not an Amazon published writer. Rather, Reznikoof is a man who self-published and continues to be read and discussed in the most learned journals of today. After Weinberger's timely introduction (I am not yet in my mid-sixties!), I can’t wait to sit and read his work.  

Next: Running for Your Life: Mental Fitness

Running for Your Life: The Big Outdoors

Okay, so these shoes (see second last post) have changed everything!

Heretofore I’d been writing that winter running poses too many risks for a runner in his sixtieth year, i.e. icy pavements, black ice on asphalt, wet slushy corners, especially those of the calf-deep variety that come about in the too-soon thaws that follow a blizzard, leaving streets with gallons of mud-colored soup at the lip of every sidewalk cut made to advantage the disabled, who you have to wonder where the disabled have gone and how they’re faring in the days (weeks!) it takes for Brooklyn sidewalks to be clear.

Which means the big outdoors, cross-country skiing in Prospect Park, and running ! in my new shoes, the ones that promise sure footing and relaxed spring, that somehow, miraculously, have helped to calm the fat leg from my DVT I’ve been feeling in recent weeks, worrying me some but, then, in these new shoes ! the feeling is just as it should be, and I’m back, right where I want to be, floating along these hard and too smooth surfaces.

Back to looking around as I run in the cold and on the snow and ice, falling into meditation. Second winds coming when they should, actually back to the sublime idea that I will go on a run; in winter, or summer, the season doesn’t matter, all with that indescribable feeling that I could run forever.

Next: Running for Your Life: On Reznikoff