What I'm Doing With My Evenings

I don't think I told you, did I, that I'm training for a half marathon. That would be the Oklahoma City Marathon half marathon, which occurs a little over a month from now, on April 27th.

For those of you not up on your mileage calculations, a half marathon comes out to be 13.1 miles, while a full marathon -- you guessed it -- tops out at 26.2 miles. I've been concerning myself with the former, though, figuring that one should ease one's self into what my wife calls the Thunka Thunka Lifestyle. (Thunka Thunka being the continual and neverending sound of one's soles on the pavement/treadmill/insides of your brain as you sleep; it's the runner's equivalent of the Buddhist Ohm.)

Training goes like this:

Monday run. Tuesday run. Wednesday "crosstrain on your own" . . . which means rest on the couch and nurse your sore calves. Thursday run. Friday run on your own. Saturday run a long long way. Sunday rest.

That's a goodly amount of Thunka Thunka.

I was telling one of my fellow runners yesterday that when I was a little chubby band geek in junior high, I had no good concept of what being athletic meant. Physicality was so tied up in the seventh grade caste system that I not only didn't participate, I discarded the idea of being active completely. It was for either the King and Princes of the homecoming court or the guys who rumbled in the parking lot at lunch. Neither of whom were part of my group. I played percussion, and on the weekends played D&D. That's a lot of sitting in chairs and thinking about things, but not a whole hell of a lot of moving around.

So you grow up not believing your body. What it tells you and why, beyond some rudimentary indications (I'm tired, I'm hungry, I'm drunk, I'm horny, etc) is almost always unrecognizable. At the same time, when called upon to perform in some specific way -- like football out in the yard in the summer, or onstage practicing your pratfalls, or trying to remember the steps to you and your wife's first dance -- I can tell you that there is a fervent moment of prayer: Body, don't fuck this up!

At that point, trying to throw the spiral or not cracking your skull on the parquet is more about risk than habit. For the D&D band kids, it's the risk of social humiliation. For the Homecoming King and Princes, it's really just habit born of hours and hours of practice.

All this means is, to discover that you can communicate with your body outside of simple declarative sentences is really kind of astonishing. And in your thirties, when all the blitheness is finally gone and you're more aware of what's coming down the pike than you might have been (and what's coming down the pike is your 40s!), it's the right moment to hear what a deep breath sounds like, or to feel each muscle in your calf after running five miles up and down hills. And after that long weekend run, to come back, eat a huge breakfast, take a shower, pad around the house in your sweats and feel one limb after the other loosen up and sag until you're asleep on the couch.

It's astonishing, because who knew I could do this. This isn't about achievement, not a "look ma, straight A's on my report card" kind of not thing. We're not filming Chariots of Fire here. It's more, look at what this vessel that carries around my brain is good for! Look at all the new gears I just discovered, and look what they do!

Is it impolite to say that I just got a new toy, and the new toy is me?

Mashup Candidate

My wife found another one. A piece of viral weirdness out there in the Netiverse about Obama. I have no idea where it came from but it's jaw-droppingly weird, and strangely uplifting at the same time. Take a look.


On one level, it's really not much more than your standard web artifact. It could be any DJ playing around with Garage Band and Final Cut Pro, sharing via the newest app for sharing, and getting some feedback. The pallette is pretty familiar.

Of course, we'd seen another mashup not more than a week or two ago, this one from Will. I. Am. It was such a strong web meme that it spawned a sharp satire of the McCain candidacy by a poster called John. He. Is.


There're other images out there, too. For instance, the one done up by the OBEY GIANT people:





Here's a poster that I saw several times in Chicago, one that I've started to mentally call "The African School Teacher."





More cribbed from around the web:




There's even ObamaofDreams.com which has come up with some compelling sportswear for the Obama-supporting baseball fan.



Of course, it's a Presidential election. Image controls the country at this point, and it's certainly no surprise that Team Obama has piles and piles of media out there for consumption. Hillary and McCain are also undoubtedly right there with him, their own printing presses going full steam to churn out the message, minute by minute.

What's becoming apparent, though, is that Obama has achieved meme-hood. He's a presidential candidate, of course, and the reality of his candidacy is its own thing and exists in its own political world. But his branding is so strong and his core message is so solid, that he's now not simply political, he's societal. He and his candidacy are a thing in themselves within our culture, separate from the race for the White House.

What this means is that his image is free to be mashed up. He's deconstructable, reinterpretable. Illustrate him as Che Guevara, illustrate him as Steven Biko; illustrate him as FDR, illustrate him as Malcom X. Do a little spoken word song with his speech in North Carolina. Put him in his own Bollywood video and chop up videos of his speech so he's singing in Hindi.

While there's no straight political line from Bollywood to FDR, the conclusion might be that Obama is already so deeply embedded in our culture that he signifies something else as well besides the next 4 or 8 years. That there's a Platonic ideal forming out there, The Candidate Obama, that we can refer to going forward, and to which the actual real life individual, Senator Barack Obama, and his historical trajectory might not always compare favorably to.

A stretch? Perhaps so. He's not been around long -- I know, I know, no need to remind me -- and on a cultural scale, not to say political scale, he's been around even less. He's got "phenomenon" written all over him, and we all know that that can lead to nowhere but eventual disappointment (cf. Bill Clinton). But looking at the things that people are creating around him -- and because of him -- makes me really wonder whether he's hitting a vein of something for which he alone among the candidates seems to have the correct shovel.

Three Things About Driving in Oklahoma

The Indians have surrounded Tulsa with turnpikes. Bottom line is: you must pay to enter or leave.

Winter sunsets are beautiful and desolate in Oklahoma, and show nothing but these endless hills. Inevitably, back away from the highway, someone will be burning something, but you'll never get to see just what.

I've never seen so many roadside memorials than here in Green Country. Makeshift crosses on the shoulder or median, marking the place where Travis or Bethanee
or Luis drove their Escort into a tree/a ditch/oncoming traffic.