Running for Your Life: Make America Scrape Again … and Again

With smart-ass firms scraping data from social media networks, i.e. buying habits, political leanings, private associations of every conceivable type deposited in the most phishable of spheres, so that true to the police or national security thriller that is your current favorite download there are many folks who can conceivably be blackmailed into behavior that could risk both fortunes and reputations, isn’t it ironic that we weak humans would persist in scraping our brains of conventional social behavior in order to continue to provide the raw data necessary to broaden and deepen the privacy mining that will, if the current narrative holds, upend what we know as social democracy, which of course was always an ideal but now one best seen as a quaint artifact of the pre-personal technology age?

Next: Running for Your Life: Wolf Spirit

Running for Your Life: Take the Long Way Home

Here are a few thoughts for Holy Week/Passover” 

• Convenience isn’t always your friend. Make time to take a different (i.e. longer) route to work, to your morning coffee bar, to your appointment with 1/ prospective employer, 2/ loving spouse, 3/ therapist . . .
• Buy some stationery, stamps (both national and global) a better-than-average pen, set your smartphone aside, write a note and mail it, surprising 1/ mom, 2/ your best friend from high school, 3/ a pal waiting to hear from, say, a publisher about a book she’s written, or a woman about a job.
• Log on to YouTube and listen to “Take the Long Way Home,” to wit,“Does it feel that your life’s become a catastrophe?/Oh, it has to be for you to grow, boy/When you look through the years and see what you could have been/Oh, what you might have been,/If you’d had more time.”
• Also listen to Neil Young’s “Cripple Creek Ferry.” Repeat.
• Let this be the last list you read all day. Listen to your heart. Listen to your heart some more. Think about what you heard.
• For longer than you thought possible, don’t “do” anything.

 You smiling yet?

Next: Running for Your Life: Wolves and Bearst.

Running for Your Life: What Must Not Be Said

There are things that cannot be said.

For example: that considering the number of strongly disapproving citizens, especially those in the deep pockets of evangelical America, the theocracy that liberal America holds in contempt, of the homosexual lifestyle, it would seem that group would focus on what it viewed as the distaste of Anderson Cooper’s intimate personal life than what it views as the more conventional vulgarity of the porn star, during that much-hyped 60 Minutes interview on Sunday (March 25).

Not making any moral judgments here, you understand. Simply drawing attention to why it’s possible that a vast number of American voters might find a way to distract themselves from the story of the president and the porn star. Also, given the story is at its root bedroom voyeuristic, it seems fair game to mention Cooper’s openly declared sexual preference.

So this part of the story goes off the liberal mainstream: to Fox News, to white supremacist news sites … the partisan divide widens and deepens every day. There is no single topic we will not pollute as partisan, agreement is illusory with contempt the way of the land.

Next: Running for Your Life: Take the Long Way Home

Running for Your Life: Keep On Keeping On

Am running and stretching out the twinges, the muscle tweaks; am there now.

What is true about the evolution of type; man and wolf, the mind and muscle, the development of muscles.

What do the anthropologists call it, morphology, the branch of biology of the structure and form of animals and plants.

Eons of routine behavior, of course, in the event of early man and wolf, they must, in order to survive, be true to their learned responses; to hunt to live, the skill in tracking, in concert.

The ultimate selfless effort, each, the wolf and early man (The First Domestication http://bit.ly/2IQczK1); has a role to play in displays of strength and wisdom, the success of this aggregate knowledge is nothing short of survival.

If only early man’s conquerer, Euro-man, were to carry on with this methodology; man and wolf together as compatible social systems; then the wolf would not be sidelined in the way she is today.

She becomes like all other allies, co-opted by Euro-man the destroyer. Not the disrupter because in the event of that there is an acknowledgment of a power threat that one is looking to frustrate and hopefully upend.

There is no endgame but to acquire.

Consider, though, the Elon Musk option. There is some hope that he will/could yield to his science/genius side when the time is right.

Although watch how those with vested interests act to such a threat to their power, their very lifeblood.

(How NCAA student-athletes will never be honored with the dignity that they deserve; lawyers, college endowment funds and most tellingly, broadcast media elites will never cede that power. The capitalist order of moneyed “nobility” will never yield.)

Next: Running for Your Life: Take the Long Way Home

Running for Your Life: A Word About Knees

Take care of them.

Sounds simple, and yeah, given that I’ve been running for 40-plus years, pounding these essential joints into what should by rights be sundered to ligament if not bone dust, I’m one to talk.

But after my Halloween 2015 knee collapse on a treadmill during which I was pushing this 60-plus body to 30-plus speeds, faster, stronger was my motto for those first 39 years of running.

The way I came back from that knee injury, something I’ve spent a good deal of time writing about in this space, changed all that.

Now I try to take care of those joints. With better, less worn running shoes, compression socks to ease leg pounding (No shin splints!) and Velcro patella straps to help keep the knees stable from foot strike to foot strike, stride after stride.

Oh, and as I slow down, know that my butt is more aligned with my stride below, rather than behind it, with my chest pushed out, in sprint mode.

Relax. After all, this is Running for Your Life.  

Next: Running for Your Life: Brooklyn Calling