Confession time!
We'll* see if unloading some stuff I've been holding inside provides a more lasting catharsis this time
When I was driving to go running today, I saw that a kid of around eleven had set up a lemonade stand where the Centennial Path crosses Eisenhower Elementary School. He was by himself. A sign advertised the price of a cup of unspecified volume as $1.00. (I’m amazed by the stoic inelasticity of the price of lemonade served at ad hoc stands overseen by underage workers. One thin dollar has somehow been the right cost of this kind of homebrew for decades.)
My and Rosie’s subsequent run took us past the lemonade stand, as did our drive home from our parking spot near the local infirmary. As we passed the small marketplace for the last time on the day, I slowed the car and asked the kid, “Do you accept Bitcoin?” He shook his head with what I swear was the most forlorn hint of a smile I’ve ever seen on a child’s face. And then I saw something that made all of this fall into place: The kid was wearing an Epstein Island tee-shirt! In the middle of the damn day, close to an elementary school. Well, at least it was Sunday.
I was somehow reminded by this of a run I did in the same general area about ten years ago, Maybe eight, maybe twelve. You’ll see why it’s best I remain uncertain about the exact date. And year. And town.
You see, in those days, I often ran the streets of Boulder after midnight, when far more things go unseen, but when the few eyes watching miss almost nothing.
The run I’m describing proved oddly effortless from the first steps. Two things made this strange: It was probably a few degrees below zero Fahrenheit, and only a few hours earlier, I’d ingested a large meal of pork rinds, coffee, Velveeta, and Kroger’s attempt at thousand-island dressing, a regimen that in fact had been sustaining me for several weeks. I felt bloated, and obviously cold, yet light on my feet anyway. I imagined myself as pot-belled and stem-legged yet startlingly agile; I pictured Babe Ruth circling Major League basepaths with uncanny grace nearly a hundred years earlier, when Colorado itself was in the early adolescence of statehood.
The sound of my footfalls on the asphalt combined with my deep yet quick and deliberate breathing to form the effortless waltz-like rhythm with which all distance runners in a groove, world-class or weekend-warrior, come to unconsciously crave revere: HOOSH-thut-thut-HOOSH-thut-thut-HOOSH-thut-thut, a small, roving symphony of my own creation that seemed to echo around invisible dynamic walls created by the bitter cold itself. Spent metabolites trailed out of my head in a soothing cascade of biological exhaust plumes, visible against the plethora of stars capping the cloudless, windless night over the Flatirons.
At one in the morning, the four-lane road—situated exactly along the unseen 40th line of Northern latitude—was deserted. It stretched without a turn for over two miles to both the east, where the landscape was rolling-to-flat for hundreds of miles, and the west, where the Flatirons on the foothills of the Rocky Mountains loomed several thousand feet above the city—a mottled-gray array of timeless, inward-facing shields cutting off fifteen degrees of the darkened sky from this perspective.
I could hear traffic, mostly trucks, roaming Route 36 less than a mile to the southwest, and I could trace the progress of some of their lights against the stoic rise of Green Mountain, steward of the Flatirons, just beyond. I was on the lone artery cutting through a residential part of the city’s southeastern portion, a neighborhood where most people were twice my age and asleep by ten-thirty. The cookie-cutter shopping plaza a block to the south was dead well before its flagship Safeway closed at eleven, save for a few brave or stupefied hobos lodged for the night swaddled in blankets somewhere behind the supermarket and the adjoining businesses on either side.
As I tried to figure out how long this unexpectedly sublime yet dubiously timed run should last, my steps projected my warming assortment of limbs and innards through the bitter cold. I was aiming my thinking-meat eastward, at around eight miles an hour, for some version of my usual post-crepuscular four-miler that would the skirt the campus of a large nearby state-operated post-secondary educational facility. I ran in a dedicated bicycle lane, offset from the adjacent motor-vehicle lane by a series of flexible vertical tubes that were far more symbolic than protective. Much like exercise itself.
Although like any attempted athlete I usually feel most efficient as a runner when making as little noise as possible, under these preternatural conditions, I enjoyed being responsible for every sound I heard myself make: breath-puffs, pavement-smacks, the occasional snort. I relished the way the sluggish-yet-biting aether magnified the clamor in a way that happened just a few times a year, at least at precisely 40 degrees North latitude at an elevation of nearly 5,300 feet above sea level.
There was no moon, the waxing-crescent version of same having sunk behind the Flatirons just before midnight, when like most normies I’d been sipping cold coffee. I took in the sight of the long line of streetlamps to the west, beads a few hundred feet apart on invisible string. Just enough light to see where I was going and little else.
Almost perfect conditions, inside and out. When a runner feels twice as fit as she expects to at the start of a run, this pretty much obliterates any issues he or she might normally have with extreme temperatures, precipitation, or strong winds. Pretty much.
But now that I was five minutes from his bathroom, and layered up against the chill with tights and an outer layer of Sporthill pants, I realized I had to take a dump. This vexatious occurrence—being tricked into starting a run with excess ballast only to quickly learn it required offloading—seems more a function of cold weather than of the odd hours I’ve been known to keep, as I notice it more often during the winter. And, in another first-world example of Murphy’s law, the urge to shit always strikes just when it becomes apparent that a run is otherwise destined to be ESPN-Plays-of-the-Week smooth, with otherwise chattery data—subzero temperatures, work stress, another criminally gruesome Tinder experience—reduced to background-pings against the hum of a well-flowing machine.
Although I wasn’t running competitively at the time, no distance runner ever wants to stop when feeling good, let alone when it’s in the single negative Fahrenheit digits. What if the magic didn’t return even after the relief provided by having dispense of a pound or two of noncontributory roving mass? In fact, what if that magic never returned, and my last lifetime memory of a good run was one that ended with me doing my business with my narrow, pale ass cheeks hanging cheerlessly inches above an icy, grainy patch of battered pavement?
That would not do.
Or wouldn’t have, had I really had more than one option. I was perhaps ten seconds at most from shitting my pants or shitting the road, at some lazy level troubled by the vexatious combination of aerobic supremacy, gastrointestinal malignancy, and sartorial overload I was experiencing. I needed to stop. Immediately.
I came to a stop in the bicycle lane, peeled off my gloves, looked along both sides of the road as I fumbled and danced around trying to gain purchase on the tights and Sporthills at the same time, so I could get the waistband around my ankles and bunch them up there so my soon-to-be-hanging ass wouldn’t be above any fabric. Maybe. Holy fuck, was the air cold. When people use word like nippy and biting to describe extreme cold, they should have consulted someone who’s effectively stood naked outside in subzero weather. If such a person has balls, it feels as though they have been dunked in a bucket of rubbing alcohol mere minutes after a scrotal-shaving session.
Although a dissident corner of my forebrain briefly lobbied for the rest of me to reconsider this mission, the lizard within had already won out. Maslow’s hierarchy of needs was not in play for me at the moment. I immediately determined that the flux of material through my crack was not merely unusual but epic. I was briefly alarmed I would soon find myself sitting on my own mound of still-growing excrement; or, more likely, that I would prove too heavy, and the effect would be like trying to force too much soft-serve ice cream into a small dish, except from below instead of above. I would immediately be engulfed in my own waste, like an unholy version of quicksand, and found frozen to death after dawn in a block of my own diabolically traitorous feces.
Nothing like that happened. But I certainly did leave an impressive signature in the bicycle lane of that unnamed road. I pulled the fabric amounting to my pants most of the way up and started shuffling away as quickly as I could, not because I was afraid I had been or would be seen, but because of the innate, disgusting criminality of the act and aftermath itself. I looked back once and saw what looked under the alabaster glow of a street lamp like the silhouette of a partially deflated soccer ball. Res ipsa loquitor.
Within a few minutes of jogging, I felt okay again. The magic wasn’t going to come back, but I still accumulated about a half-hour of running, not including the minute-long bung-scrabble. There was one other oddity; when I passed a Winnebago I’d seen parked on a dead-end side street on a few other nights in recent weeks, I swear I could hear people giggling and copulating forcefully somewhere inside. Or maybe one person, having an unusually good time with himself or Lord knew what. Hashtag Boulder.
The next morning, awake but not yet alert at the crack of ten, I had to re-up my coffee supply before I could attend to anything else. When I got outside the house, the sky was clear and azure-blue and the air had warmed to perhaps 20 degrees Fahrenheit. Also, I could see emergency vehicles at the intersection of my street and the four-lane about a quarter-mile yonder to the south. That was different. The intersection had long been a mess, but because everyone knew just how awful it was—mammoth potholes, misaligned lanes, ancient pedestrians “dodging” fossilizing motorists—everyone was careful and the area was for the most part free of motor-vehicle mishaps.
When I got to the intersection, some rubberneckers had gathered near a bus shelter and were pointing across the four-lane street. One of the two eastbound lanes on the other side of the raised median had been coned off, and police officers were consorting with EMT types. The bay doors of an ambulance parked in back of the coned-off area were open, but facing west, so I couldn’t have seen what was in there even if I hadn’t been eighty meters away.
Then I noticed something at the near end of the coned-off area: A mangled bicycle. And, parked in the bike lane so far ahead of this ill sign that I hadn’t yet noticed it, an F-150 pickup truck with a man sitting in the cab behind the wheel. He had his head in one hand, across his eyes, and was talking into a cellphone. He looked more defeated than unhappy.
I approached and corralled one of the rubberneckers by the bus shelter, a guy about my age.
“Any idea what happened?” I asked.
“Ah, from what I could pick up a cyclist wound up getting clipped. He wandered left into the car lane for some reason and that big Chevy supposedly got him good.”
It’s a Ford, I thought, but I didn’t say anything. I had no interest in the make and model of the truck that had (supposedly) run over a cyclist who had suddenly “wandered into” the adjacent auto lane. I was interested in the exact location of the coned-off strip of asphalt, which was where I had been squatting alone in the abysmal freezing old and silent darkness about nine hours earlier.
I knew what almost had to have happened. The temperature of that massive mound of turdlike matter I’d deposited into the bicycle lane had not taken long to plunge from 98 degrees of so Fahrenheit to the temperature of the air around it. At temperatures well below freezing, a chunk of human feces may as well be a brick of mortar or a cinderblock.
The cyclist had been riding east. At 9 a.m. or so in midwinter, the sun would have been right in his face. (I took it as an article of faith that the rubbernecker was correct about the “him” detail.) Any real chance of him noticing a big hunk of shit in his path would have been destroyed by the glare-factor, and on top of that, he may have done something along the way to seriously and irreversibly offend God. Probably rolling along a close to 20 miles per hour, his front bike wheel had smacked into my shitheap—not my MINI, which I did not yet possess, but a real one—and he had been tossed in front of a heavy vehicle on a busy road at the tail end of rush hour.
A part of me thought that I should approach the civil servants ambling about on the other side of the road, because I possessed information that I was certain would be of at least some interest to them in their investigative efforts. A much more important part of me was, however, far more intent on avoiding the consequences of my actions than assuming any responsibility for them.
Probably for the best, the more important part won out. I intentionally and, I admit, nervously avoided local news for a few weeks after that. And if the authorities ever attributed the death of this guy—whoever he was, and to his family, my bad—to anything other than cyclist error, I didn’t hear about it. And over time, I gradually shifted any blame I felt from myself to the cyclist. Whoever he was.
The thing is, we can’t do this. If our conscious actions harm others, and we know it, and we do it over and over and over again for admiration and profit, it’s up to us to root out toxic behaviors from our suite of personality accouterments. We can’t lie for gain or perverse pleasure. We have to stop keeping secrets, justifying needless harms done, scapegoating randos, ignoring due process, and using other strategies that allow us to subtly cling to parts of ourselves we’d be wise to shitcan if we want to feel better instead of just “look good” to a limited segment of society.
When we pretend the past doesn’t matter merely because the voices of those we helped maim or kill are now shouting from Hell through a silencer, we do a disservice to humankind as a whole.
I can only hope we start internalizing the right messages and walking the talk—now.