My Go To Is to Go, Too
NaBloPoMo Day 4: Your Energy
Today’s NaBloPoMO Prompt: Do you think one side of your face photographs better than another?
Glib Answer: I tend to put the viewfinder up to my right eye more often than my left eye, so I guess I should say yes.
Actual Answer: my right ear is missing a fold in the cartilage, and I have a small blemish on my cheek just to the right of my nose. But when I smile, you can see that my left lateral incisor is recessed, which in high-contrast photos can look like it’s missing altogether. So it all depends on lighting, angle, and sartorial influences.
Today’s NaBloPoMO Photo Prompt: Your Energy
I get my energy from running. (Mostly I get it from the music I listen to when I’m running). Also, when I’m done running, I have no energy left. So I guess it’s a bit of an oxymoron, the whole running energy thing. Suffice it to say that when I am running, I feel energized, and that’s the very in-the-moment type of thing that grounds me. (Except when I have wicked leg cramps).
NaPloBoMo Day 3: Your Feelings
I don’t know what my feelings are. I feel like maybe doing only Instagram photos for NaPloBoMo could is a good thing. I feel like I should discuss running more often. I feel like sometimes what we feel is a manifestation of the clothes we force ourselves to wear, the friction that inevitably ensues. The difference between want and need. Emotions, we’re learning, are associated with a mental body map. And everyone (EVERYONE) suffers from some degree of body dysmorphia.
I go for a run. I sweat. It gets in my eyes. Next time, I wear a hat to keep the sweat out of my eyes. I take it off and it’s left marks on my forehead. I look crazy. I look angry. Therefore, I must be. I’m crazy to think that running is going to anything to improve my body. I’m angry because I know this and run anyway.
Thankfully, I love to run. I love to blast loud music in my tinnitus-stained ears. I love it when my body is so immersed in synchronizing rhythm and carbohydrate oxidization that my brain checks out completely. The body map disappears and with it, feeling.
I want to run, I need to run. That’s synchronicity, the best feeling.
The Sky Is In The Ground
Postaday for January 26th: Free Association. Write down the first words that comes to mind when we say . . .
- home
- soil.
- rain.
Use those words in the title of your post.
There’s a smell in the air like cherry-flavored magnesium citrate, or maybe that’s the tequila on his breath. Last night was the last night he’d dedicate to doing the things he wouldn’t be doing anymore until he decides to do them again: liquor for his bowels in glass bottles with screw caps, pharmacy bought, chugged and chased with medicine for his head, a thirty dollar fifth for a sixth of his day. Thank god for math, thank god for four hours of darkness before dawn. The sun rises too damn early this time of year.
Clouds and trees argue in his peripheral vision and his sweat’s a thing for stinging his eyes back into focus. Blues in his ears, reds in nostrils, greens in his guts, yellows in his spine because old age is chasing him with fangless mandibles, incisors lost to the sweet decay of not finding laughter funny anymore.
Running three miles but call it half a ten K since he’s training for a 20 K which is half a marathon.
His woggling belly, his belly woggling, the way his belly woggles, the woggles in his belly. Aforementioned and never forgotten, a weight like the moon and his greasy innards an ocean that waxes his orbiting gut and wanes any hope of having ever been been young.
Mystery loves inconstancy and the clouds win, whip the trees, pelt the streets suddenly, sweetly. He cuts through a park to hide beneath the loser boughs, and as the sky penetrates the ground he shivers, longs for that easy chair, that tequila bottle, that ability to feel at home in his own body.
Half a Towel is Still a Towel. I Think.
Postaday for January 25th: Enough Is Enough. When was the last time you were ready to throw in the proverbial towel? Did you end up letting go, or decided to fight on anyway?
I thought I was going to be running a half marathon next Sunday. I had run one, a month or so ago, with a friend, and feeling high from our accomplishment, we agreed to do another one. This one came up, and we agreed to do it.
But I never signed up, and neither did she. I should have suspected something when she didn’t call to do a few training runs. SHE should have suspected the same thing.
I figured I’d show up and limp through the course and be a good friend. Supportive and all that. So I sent an email asking if we should car pool, and she admitted she hadn’t signed up, and I could only think, THANK GOD.
This friend of mine, I have to explain, is a very busy person. She’s got a lot on her plate, and the last think she needs is trying to coax ME along this need-to-run path. So I don’t blame her in the least. And I know for a fact that if I HAD signed up, and if I was going on Sunday, she’s sign up right there and run it with me.
She’s a better runner than me, and wouldn’t need as much training as I do. I know this. And I could have, even though we hadn’t signed up yet, asked her to go ahead and run with me anyway. And she’d do it.
But, like I said,I was relieved. My training has been abysmal. I could survive the darn thing, but only just. I’d much rather skip this one.
To our credit, we’re going to go for a shorter run on Sunday, anyway. So I guess we’re only half throwing in the towel. Or throwing in half the towel. It’s a proverbial towel, so we can rip it proverbially in half, I guess.
Grunner and the L’Elf
Postaday for January 24th: Once Upon a Time. Tell us about something that happened to you in real life last week — but write it in the style of a fairy tale.6
All good stories start with “once upon a time,” and this one is no different, except for the first five words, which don’t count, as this opening is nothing more than a lampshade. By happy coincidence, our hero is called Grunner Lampshade, and he was, as our story begins, the saddest hairy bunny bear in the land.65
One day Grunner was running through the streets of Seattle. The sun was shining and the breeze was laughing. But poor Grunner, he didn’t even notice. He was desperately searching for something. And the more he looked, the more he ran. And the more he ran, the more anxious he became. Would he ever find what he was looking for?
There was sweat on poor Grunner’s brow, and a fire in his hair bunny bear chest. But all seemed lost. And then, as he made his way along Roosevelt, just south of 65th street, having spent so much time climbing up from the depths where Harvard ave runs into Eastlake, can you guess what Grunner saw?
Why, it was a Liquor Elf! “Hello!” said the l’elf.
Grunner finally stopped running. The l’elf was dressed in nothing more than a pair of shorts, which for this story we’ll call a loincloth. He smelled of booze. “Hello,” said Grunner, cautiously.
“Can you help me? I am lost,” said the l’elf. “I come from a far away land called Las Angeles. I am here visiting a friend. I went for a run this morning, and now I can’t find my friend’s house!”
Grunner put his hands on his hips. What he didn’t say was, “You smell like booze, Liquor Elf! I bet you just woke up in some stranger’s house after a night of excess and glee.” Instead what Grunner said was, “Okay, I’ll help you. What do you remember?”
The Liquor Elf scratched his curly crown. “Um, 94th and Dayton?”
Grunner smacked his head. “Oh no! That’s three miles from here!”
The Liquor Elf smacked his forehead. “Oh no!”
But then Grunner forgot that he was looking for something, and said, “Well, I guess I can take you there. Come on!” And off they went, running west instead of north like Grunner had been running before.
Up one hill they went, and then down another, and around a green lake (called Greenlake), and then up a very steep hill, until they arrived.
“Here we are!” said Grunner.
“Oh, thank you so much! I never would have find it without you!” the Liquor Elf said. He waved, and disappeared behind a small house.
Grunner went up the hill a little further, to Greenwood. He decided to walk to his house. And you know what? He found what he was looking for! A great big smile, the whole way home.
The end.
Hand Cramps and Leg Cramps and Head Cramp, Oh My
Postaday for January 17th: Pens and Pencils. When was the last time you wrote something substantive — a letter, a story, a journal entry, etc. — by hand? Could you ever imagine returning to a pre-keyboard era?
November, 2007. NaNoWriMo. It’s possible that someone who reads this blog doesn’t know what NaNoWriMo is. But not at all likely. (Actually, it’s not at all likely anyone reads this blog at all.)
My “novel” was about a guy who works for a corporation and has a wife and likes to run and gets a cramp. The whole novel was supposed to be about the cramp. The corporate job was just background, not worth really examining, like describing someones shoes just so you know they’re not barefoot. Same with the wife, who was just there so you know the guy’s got no interesting characteristics. A straight dude in his late 30s, as plain as they come. I didn’t even give him a name.The point was to focus on the cramp, not the guy.
Or so I thought. NaNoWriMo is a community thing, really, and someone advertised a local meet-up for writers to come work on their novels together. So off I went, expecting we’d all sit around and smile at each other and ask how the process was going and in general be buddies.
WRONG! I got to the crowded cramped tea-house and found no place to sit. Most folks were at this big table in the middle, while others were huddled at smaller orbiting tables. Nobody smiled. Nobody even asked my name. And I had purposefully NOT brought a lap top! Didn’t they see the cool hipster notebook in my hands?
I found a small chair squashed in a corner, one without even a table next to it. Opened my notebook and stared at that blank page. My hands started to cramp even before I clicked my pen. This was stupid. But I drove all the way here, I thought, and eventually wrote: “He’s addicted? Fine. He’ll go to a meeting.”
My hand cramped up a lot, but I kept going, and eventually found a groove. NaNoWriMo suggests you write 1667 words a day, so that you can hit a goal of 50k in one month. So that’s what I did, using breaks to count words and let my hand rest. Took about an hour or so.
I never finished that novel. I DID, however, turn that day’s writing into a short story, which you can read if you want. I much prefer typing, but it does strike me as ironic that the only part of the whole crap novel that was salvageable was the part written by hand.
Could I ever imagine returning to a pre-keyboard era? Imagine, yes. But I know I’d write a lot less often.