A brief intermission
Which you can fill by listening to the podcast I totally dominated, though not in the best way
My analysis of Sinead Diver’s 2:21:34 is already among the most widely shared posts I’ve written here about competitive running. (Sadly, no posts in this genre will ever approach the page-view totals of my posts about troublemaking running-adjacent waddlers, or people who happen to be fairly good at scissoring their legs back and forth in a way that semi-optimizes self-translocation but are otherwise self-parodic clowns.)
This has resulted in a spate of new sign-ups, and if you are among these, you’ve probably noticed that I publish almost daily. Thanks to recurring and increasingly urgent need to disengage for short spells from interactive forms of technology—my version of Shabbat, but usually with no traces of celebratory mood—I don’t expect to publish anything this weekend other than this post.
Besides being easily annoyed by what distant others ae allegedly up to, I get sick of the act of typing even when I’m on a rare streak of digital proficiency, and often grow weary of my own words, word choices, and ideas. Sometimes, mining my own lumpy head is just a bad idea and does nothing more than trigger cognitive cabbagefarts. Despite being a profligate word-generator and sentence-assembler, I don’t place much value in what I write; it’s all going to amount to fuck-all, and the process itself is like pissing off a high cliff into a fire raging far below while waiting for either a hard shove from behind or the sense to topple forward into a permanently thoughtless void.
All of that makes today an excellent time to finally post a link to my second remote appearance on The Juniper Lab podcast. The first, which we did right after New Year’s Day, is here. This will give both new visitors and wild-eyed, gibbering old-timers to do besides read, and it’s a chance to become familiar with why I now write about the things I do.
This was unscripted, and although I think it’s listenable, in my mind and probably in fact, I make a bad podcast guest without an outline. This results less from the non-negligible amount of off-topic rambling I do and more from a constitutional eagerness to just talk until someone shuts me up by rhetorical or physical force. My not getting out much is surely an accelerant, but I have always had a tendency to incinerate the concept of dialogue in these settings anyway.
We’re planning to record another episode soon, and it will center on the First Amendment and what it means to each of us as content-generators and American citizens. You’re invited to submit ideas in the comments for specific freedom-of-speech topics other topics altogether, especially after having inflicted on yourself one or both of our previous chats.
I’ll be writing soon about:
The obvious need for Max “I serve gold medalists, not peons” Siegel to resign as CEO of USA Track and Field and how the USATF Foundation—which appears to exist mainly because its founders recognize that USATF itself is overrun with thieves and dingbats—has only allowed him to amplify his grifting.
Why Outside CEO Robin Thurston needs to either staff lame-duck, self-immolating scrublications like Women’s Running, Trail Runner Magazine, and Outside Online itself or simply kill them immediately (and because I pity more than hate the dunglords involved in ruining those enterprises—remove all evidence that they ever existed).
How laughably awful a company Brooks Running has managed to become without being significantly more demoralized than the industry’s other ESG slaves.
Why having babies is a terrible idea and always will be for humankind’s brief remaining lifetime, especially for the rich and the lovely.
Here are some other strong podcasts, also indicative of my orientation toward life in December 2022:
On the matter of Brooks Running and other companies being managed by a gelatinous slate of pro-racism, pro-sloth, pro-cheating cowards and low-level powermongers, The Juniper Lab had Nate Imhoff as a guest last week.
If you follow my non-running “work,” you might also be interested in this Glenn Greenwald video about one of Twitter’s most ardent, creepy censors—the guy wrote a doctoral thesis about all the random ass he ate thanks to Grindr encounters, and better yet, you’re treated to the vanishingly rare sight of Greenwald, who knows exactly how he sounds himself, legitimately mocking a guy for having a whiny, nasal voice. Almost surreal. And this chat between the rapper and public intellectual Zuby and the megacancelled Andrew Tate about how life is really going versus how it looks to a sadly enormous number of observers is great too.
This seems a good place to remind or inform readers that you can elect to receive posts only in the categories of your choice, thereby permitting yourself the illusion that I’m either almost entirely sane or posting from the moon in a diaper. And that is an absolutely stunning day outside, and if it weren’t, I would still declare it so to justify melting into the outdoors.
Whatever my mind fills up with, and it won’t be good, I expect to “return” by Tuesday.