Some Salient Facts

I don't have much to say, but typically that means that there's too much to say. If you know me, you know that silence isn't my natural condition. I'm my Mother's child; like her, my brain is like one long playground slide. Ideas start at the top and don't stop till they've flipped out my mouth, sometimes at a speed that defies actual articulation. With luck, I'm glib and a bit of a charmer; without it, I'm a mush-mouth idiot.

I'm three and a half months on from my last post, and you'd think a mangy blog like this would've crawled into the corner and starved to death. Blogger doesn't pull the plug, though, like I thought they might, and lo and behold, Bark:Bite is still here. And lo and behold, I'm back at the keyboard thinking -- knowing -- I should be typing something.

So what you should know before we go on is that three and a half months of things have happened and we won't be able to go on until you understand that:

• I'm still employed at the same hotel but only moderately successful at my job. I'm currently chalking this up to the utter failure of my employer to offer any reason whatsoever that I am any more than interchangeable with any other moron out in the world. I'm also currently ignoring the suspicion that this is both a dead end career and I'm meant for something entirely different.
• Who knows what that is.
• I finished the OKC half marathon in under two hours. 1:57 to be exact. I was so nervous I forgot to take off my warmup jacket and track pants. I beat the time I'd set out to run, so consider it a great success. Enough of a success that I decided like a fool to sign up to run the Chicago Marathon in October.
• And promptly injured myself, though it took me a good month for the symptoms to catch up with me enough to keep me off my feet entirely. And it's taken me another three weeks to pinpoint the problem (part of the left Achilles tendon structure) and to start working it out. Meanwhile, time marches on, and my training schedule gets farther and farther behind.
• What that means is, I have to heal my sorry ass and start running seriously again.
  
• Barack Obama is now the Democratic nominee-elect, and if we're lucky the next goddamn President of the United States of America. Ron Paul, it should be noted, is nowhere on any ticket. I still think he was a true gentleman, though, to encourage me to vote my conscience way back in March.
• Tulsa is demoralizing in myriad large and small ways. Almost every day there's something new and dispiriting to absorb -- whether it's the weather, the backward geography, the provincial and small minded people, the ironfisted fundamentalism that seems to underly almost everything that's done here; the redneckism, the head-in-the-sandism, the little-c-conservatism. It's a neverending suburb, is our Tulsa, but tragically is only the third best Vanilla in the store. Even other places do suburbs better.

I suppose that's enough to start with, but there's always more than one reason why things are the way they are, and the way things are today will need some explanation still. Be warned: this list will grow.



Also: hello again.