Running for Your Life: Internet Addiction

Item: Nokia slashes price of Lumia 900 Windows phone to $49.99 with a two-year contract.

Item: Young man in Prospect Park flogging cut-rate mobile-phone service near-interrupts me, thrusting a promotional postcard, while I’m on a fast-paced run.

It’ll get you, Internet addiction. Read the “iCrazy” Newsweek cover story, if you dare. http://bit.ly/LDSy5j, as in:

Item: The brains of Internet addicts look like brains of drug and alcohol addicts.

Item: A researcher on aging and memory selected 12 experienced Web users and 12 inexperienced ones and passed them all through a brain scanner. The difference was striking, with the Webbies showing fundamentally altered prefrontal cortexes. The novices went away for a week and were asked to spend a TOTAL of five hours online. The brains of the novices had rewired and were similar to the Webbies.

Item: The average teen processes 3,700 texts a month (123 texts daily).

Item: Teens fit some seven hours of screen time into the average school day; 11, if you count the time spent multitasking on several devices.

How hypocritical of me. People turning to this blog – either on a mobile device, a PC, a Mac, etc. – are adding to their screen time. And too often every day I find myself checking to see how many visits my blog posts have attracted. I’m typing into a computer screen right now, my rewired brain piqued by the rush that I’m attracting readers, maybe even followers.

In the event of followers, listen to this: Log off. Go out for a run. Pet the dog. Pick up a pen and journal and write. Call a friend and make a plan to play tennis, or golf. You can be assured that Facebook and Twitter – and yes, Running for Your Life – will be there when you get back.

Next: Running for Your Life: Reverse Aging

Running for Your Life: ‘Wish You Were Here’

Once long ago (I’ve been keeping this twice-weekly blog for two years now) I wrote here that this Web log would touch on three R’s – running, ’riting and reading. But for a good stretch of that time I’ve actually been fixated on a fourth: racing.

That is, when I was focused on running the Boston Marathon in a sub-3:30 in order to time-qualify for New York in November. That didn’t happen, 4:03:27 did in the sweltering April(?!) heat that would Boston 2012.

Now that I’m on an extended break from race-training, I’m turning to reading. And in the case of good reads, writing about them.

I read and loved Graham Swift’s “Waterland” http://bit.ly/LPIjuH, a sprawling wonder of a thing that merits being in the category of such set piece historical/mythological works as Ann-Marie MacDonald’s “Fall on Your Knees” or Rose Tremain’s “Sacred Country” or “Shadow on the Wind” by Carlos Ruiz Zafon or “World’s End” by T.C. Boyle.

“Wish You Were Here” is no less brilliant than “Waterland.” In contrast, though, the novel taps the blood of rawboned Jack Luxton, a farmer-turned-seaside caravan operator. Jack reminds of the rural stalwarts of my youth; the friends of my father – and my father himself – sitting stone-faced during my at-home reading from my memoir, Tip of the Iceberg http://amzn.to/NmujdH, in the Main Street bookstore.

Jack, or so he thinks, has only Ellie, his wife. Whose voice sears in a chapter that – very surprisingly – delivers on the significance of the title.

Secrets and pacts and what we can never know. Jack and Ellie. I feel that what Swift did with the fens in England he has done with the tortured love of Jack and Ellie. An equal wonder.

Next: Running for Your Life: Internet Addiction

Running for Your Life: Running And Poems

I never know what will come to me when I run. How it will come. The “it” I’m referring to are ideas, often so fleeting that I don’t hold onto them.

Often, not so much ideas as images. Daydreams. Sometimes it’s a memory, perhaps a memoir morsel that, later, I write down in a journal. Sometimes a phrase, something about a movie that I saw a week ago, a month ago.

I have to get down these ideas, images, sensations. Sometimes just a quick sketch, dash a few lines. No, not the computer, or the laptop. Just pen and paper. (studies show a third of smartphone users go online before getting out of bed in the morning; that brains of Internet addicts scan a lot like brains of alcoholics; that the average teen processes 123 texts a day) and yes, if I had time that wasn’t circumscribed by salary work I’d take these ideas and writing fragments and devote hours to the construction of stories, memoirs, novels, plays and poems.

I think, though, if there is a single literary expression that best approximates running for me it is poems. Running is poems. What is an attempt at the universal, the precision of life and language. Close, close again. And beautiful. Small and large and perfect. And simple.

Can’t wait to try to reach that perfection again.

Next: Running for Your Life: “Wish You Were Here”

Running for Your Life: Hot Is In Your Head

I didn’t run for long today (Monday, July 2). Forty minutes – at my eight-minute mile lumber that’s five miles, which is what I did on Saturday (June 30) north of Milwaukee, Holiday Inn Express, Brown Deer, Wis., while visiting M’s mom, R, who turned 99 and a half on the weekend (when you get as close as R to 100 years old, you could the year in portions – only six months to go).

It was hot in Wisconsin. And hot in Brooklyn. In the 90s. Humid on Saturday, so I ran on the Holiday Inn Express treadmill. But a light summer breeze arose late Monday morning, so I chose an outdoor route.

When you’re fit enough you know how much you can do in the heat. When I threw open the kitchen window and felt the breeze, my mind was made up. I’d run in the park. The breezes in the shade of the trees would amplify the cool relief. Rather than run in the direct sunlight I’d run the woodland paths, connect the dots from shade to shade to shade.

Because here, in the “Summer Breeze” http://bit.ly/u8qAw of that Seals and Croft standard, hot is in your head. Your heart might be working a little harder, but, if you pay attention, the rewards are manifest. After two days of heavy humidity, the birds and squirrels are out in force. The treetops alive with sound and movement.

On this day I see a wee downy woodpecker on the forest floor and heard but didn’t see a songbird that was new to me, just missing as it darted higher into the trees.

In Wisconsin at dusk Sunday, from a picnic table in Brown Deer Park, M had told me of a blue heron she inadvertently startled into flight, and what she thought must be scarlet tanagers.

M and I are under the first full moon since being romanced by the one rising above us at Notre Dame de Paris and that night – Sunday – we are apart, and now today (Monday) after the run in the heat, where because of the breeze it didn’t feel like anything at all, just a light sheen of sweat, I think that M will be home tonight after saying goodbye for now to her mom, and we will be under a full moon once more.

Next: Running And Poems

Running for Your Life: Keeping It Real

Consider the letdown over. Paris – despite the picture at right, the moonrise over Notre Dame – is no longer at my fingertips. In some respects, it’s been hard to be back home. The working life, the lack of open endedness of our days.

It’s summer and although my mind is a beginner’s one, one that seeks flow and as M and I have declared, “The Summer of Stories,” the excitement and possibilities that come from creation, from new work, I’ve also returned to responsibilities: salary work, finances, family obligations, etc.

On running, I’m often asked, how do you keep it up? How do you keep it interesting? I can understand it with team sports, like soccer or softball, even individual sports like tennis, but how do you pick yourself up and got out for a serious run as often as you do?

“Rock of Ages,” starring Tom Cruise as Stacee Jaxx, is a musical-farce, rock-concert of a thing (think Tower Records as Celluloid Cathedral). At its heart rock god Stacee Jaxx seduces/confides in a Rolling Stone writer that he is on a never-ending quest for the perfect song: rock ’n’ roll secular salvation.

In my case, I run. And some runs, some races feel near-perfect. But I’m not there. It’s like some reverse Doomsday Clock. Joyce has Bloomsday: a near-perfect fiction that is immortal, a work to plumb and plumb some more.

Running has some of that for me. Runes-Day. A kind of magic charm.

I say reverse Doomsday Clock because it turns the How It Ends http://bit.ly/MC5nP0 thesis on its head. That during a run, or while inside a Joyce sentence, the concept of end, for a moment, in a burst of ecstasy, ceases to exist.

It is, as I used to say among friends in high school, about keeping it real. When we – all of us – still believed that we could not only have dreams but we could live them too.

Next: Running for Your Life: Hot Is In Your Head