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.

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?

Oh the humanity

I wrote a lovely post yesterday. Maybe it was two days ago. Maybe it was on December 31, in the evening, just before the ball was going to drop. In any event, not long ago, I wrote this post. And I wrote it and formatted it and did some editing to perfect and then hit "publish post."

And kerplooee. It was gone. There was an error on the page, there was something wrong with the syntax . . . the computer actually didn't like what I had to say . . . something went wrong and it was lost. Gone all gone.

I shake my fist at you, Blogger. You will feel my wrath. As soon as I disentangly myself from my teammate. Sorry, Chas.

I'll be hitting post now, to see if posting still works, or if my new blog is so corrupt it will eat any post no matter how short and no matter how bizarrely homoerotic.

*slaps button*

Update:  magically, the late lamented post slipped in between the couch cushions, into the Drafts folder.  Rather than getting eaten by the internets.  I don't make a habit of apologizing to inanimate objects but . . . Internet, my bad.