Running for Your Life: 2017 Theme

So it’s so long 2016 and hello 2017.

Lucky seven follows bizarre six.

May you live in interesting times.

Don’t let the door hit you on the way out.

Three more years and it’s 2019.

Days later it's Jan. 1, 2020, marking my sixth decade as an ink-stained wretch

First feature: an article, Summer 1979, for the Prescott Journal about the value – medical and spiritual – of a daily run.

Countless stories, written and edited, in three full decades, and seven-tenths of the fourth. Never looked back in anger. (Well, maybe once or twice.)

Lucky seven goes to Trump.

Obama had eight years but never a seven. A hopeful sign? We’re pushed so far right that we have to reach for something. Better it not be an arm of the swastika . (With a nod to honor the late great cartoonist Mickey Siporin.)

Here’s to a happy and prosperous new year.

We can do a lot worse than Confucius to keep us on our psychic toes. 

When asked how he would describe himself, he said, and I paraphrase:

As a man who was so impassioned that he forgot to eat, so engaged that he forgot to worry and so unaware of the time passing he didn’t notice his old age.

Next: Running for Your Life: Rituals!

Running for Your Life: Little Look Back at 2016

When it comes to year-end reviews, I’ve seen a few. After all, I’ve been in the news business for five decades. And each publication I’ve worked for has had some version of a year-end review.

This time a little story. Call it Chicken Tikka Christmas.

I’ve been dining at an NYC Midtown food cart – primarily on Sundays when the crowds are thin – for years. But this year, 2016, I’ve finally begun a friendship with my once-a-week chef. He is from Bangladesh, and speaks only a little English. But, by and by, he has ventured into more and more conversation with me: primarily about the weather, once about his daughters and my daughter. We have yet to exchange names, but it hardly seems to matter to either of us.

Last Sunday (Dec. 18), the Chicken Tikka chef went all out. We talked more than usual: I let him know that as a long-distance runner I had huge appetite. So he gave me a meal for two, at a price for one. I told him that I would be taking some of it home to my grateful wife as leftovers. That made him beam from ear to ear.

Later that night, after a long shift at The Post, I was standing on the near-empty subway platform with my briefcase containing my prize – the leftover Chicken Tikka for M. I was in a post-work daze when a man – dressed like Peary en route to the North Pole – came up behind me. He said hello – and within the winter hoodie I saw my friend, the Chicken Tikka chef.

We talked some more, on the platform and in the subway car that wasn’t long in coming. We were both Brooklyn-bound. I told him that I had the meal for my wife tucked away in the briefcase.

His smile vanished. “You didn’t like it?”

“Oh, no, no, no. It was fabulous, as always. Just too much this time. Even for me.”

His smile returning, he nodded in understanding. I told him he had much to teach me. That I would love to be able to cook as he does. That he could teach. I said there were many people I knew who would love to learn the finer points of South Asian cooking.

There was a lot said. But mostly what was said was in body language. The respect and joy that comes from lives crossed in a busy city. A simple lesson for those who feel too often like a stranger on a train.

Next: Running for Your Life: Running in 2017

Running for Your Life: Think Different Again

Back in innocent days when you could tell the subject of an advertising campaign in the first screen shots, Apple did this forward-feeling campaign showing seminal cultural figures like Ghandi with the overlay phrase THINK DIFFERENT.

Well, it’s time to THINK DIFFERENT AGAIN.

That is to say, think different about Apple, about Amazon, about Google, about Facebook …

To be comfortable in reality. To reject virtual reality.

Consider what is happening on the internet. Recently I read a frightening multi-book review in the London Review of Books, called "Schadenfreude With Bite," by Richard Seymour.

Here are some highlights:

• ·         What’s so funny about trolling? “Every joke calls for a public of its own,” Freud said, “and laughing at the same jokes is evidence of a far-reaching psychical conformity.”
• ·         Grieving parents are among the easiest to exploit – their rage and sorrow are closest to the surface.
• ·         [Trolling] is a “mass cultural response to women asserting themselves [in] previously male-dominated areas.
• ·         Much of the laughter, [Whitney] Phillips [This is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things: Mapping the Relationship Between Online Trolling and Mainstream Culture] points out, is “directed to people of colour, especially African Americans, women, and gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender and queer” people, while trolling communities disproportionately comprise young white men in Anglophone or Nordic countries.

OK. There is a role for the internet in small doses among close friends and budding relationships. But a deep dive? Fuhgeddaboutit. People ask why I don’t even run with headphones on? To stay real, baby. So much of the internet doesn’t have our best interests at heart.

So, if you’re searching for the latest in tech gadgetry and VR headsets, you got the wrong address. Around here, it’s all running, reading, and ’riting.

Next: Running for Your Life: Little Look Back at 2016

Running for Your Life: Simple Thoughts on the 36th Day of President-Elect Trump

FDR, the sage of the “fireside chat,” broadcast unmediated via radio to foster the New Deal: Medicare, Social Security and a progressive tax rate that topped out at the 90 percentile.

Trump, the sage of Twitter, broadcasts unmediated via social media and is fostering the mirror image of FDR in each of these three areas.

If the 20^th Century ended with the fall of communism, the “Real” 21^st Century starts with the advent of Trumpism.

Next: Running for Your Life: Think Different Again

Running for Your Life: Robert Bolt’s “A Man for All Seasons”

And so our arts education resumes.

What stirs in the ungiving heart but a cold draft and here is what Sir Thomas More, the Man for All Seasons, will not forfeit: the dignity of his faith, private beliefs vs. public duties.

The message here is that strength and honor come from an intelligent, consistent belief in society. That a selfless approach to life – insert golden rule here  – for want of a better term this time of year is the Christmas spirit (leave irony at the door, for once).

It is, hopefully, a time for a revival and renewal, to consider the greats of moral strength and duty who do the right thing. How actions that are driven by a selfless consideration of others are not to be seen as weakness. Rather it is to be, in the language of Trump, the bully of a compassionate heart.

As an example, consider the splendid humanity of Bolt’s “A Man for All Seasons.” A universal lesson that these days seems drowned out in a society that values power at any cost.

Obviously, the glory here is not the physical. Sir Thomas More is beheaded for his steadfast unwillingness to renounce his faith. Here is the grander spiritual victory.

More becomes a symbol of pure resistance, the saint for not just this season of hate and tweeting discontent, but for all seasons.

Next: Running for Your Life: Think Different Again

Running for Your Life: Subway Notes

The thing I love about the subway is the rawness of the people energy. What is the promise of an early love of mass transit. Not always realized.

But on days such as this (Dec. 1), my body shot through with adrenaline after a 4-plus mile run in the brilliant sunshine of Prospect Park – marking the classic style of the mature Japanese maple, red and orange leaves, rubies in the shimmering light along the ridge run adjacent to Prospect Park Southwest, beyond Sixteenth Street, a beauty for the residents of Windsor Terrace to enjoy on an everyday morning stroll – I am gasping with the memory of it all, yet another treasure brought to mind and put into my subway journal, a gentle reminder to seek out in these next few weeks  the leaves still held fast in these dreamscape trees.

Next: Running for Your Life:  A Man for All Seasons

Running for Your Life: Holiday Reading List

This blog is not exactly the place to go for listicles, but when it comes to my love of reading (the space being devoted to the three “Rs” – running, reading and ’riting), I’m making an exception.  Safe to say, these titles aren’t your garden variety best-seller variety. Just my faves at the moment, and who knows, maybe there is something here that will light up your soul while you light up your Christmas tree and front porch …

1/ David Constantine, “The Life-Writer,” a novel. Unforgettable voices, gorgeously shaped sentences.

2/ David Constantine, “In Another Country,” stories. Ditto, ditto.

3/ Colum McCann, “Thirteen Ways of Looking,” a novel, stories. Strangely entrancing.

4/ David Szalay, “All That Man Is,” A “page” of music. Wondrously elegiac.

5/ Jarett Kobek, “I Hate the Internet,” a novel  (I’m guessing). Manic brilliance of sloppiness. War cry for our times.

6/ Larry McMurtry, “Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen,” nonfiction. On the simple joys of reading, esp. for those who grew up in a literary desert. A Larry who loves books in the most selfless, inviting way.

7/ Alice Munro. Everything.

8/ Mary Morris, “The Jazz Palace,” a novel. Music IS the page. (Disclaimer: She is my genius wife.)

9/ Valerie Martin, “The Ghost of the Mary Celeste,” a novel. Love historical literary fiction with a twist? This is the best of the best.

10/ Steve O’Connor, “Thomas Jefferson Dreams of Sally Hemings,” a novel. Fever dream of imaginative wonder. Think you know Jefferson? Think again …

Next: Running for Your Life: Subway Notes