DOUBLE DRENCH
When it comes to basic, high-yield experiences, emptying more than fifty percent of the fluid from the drinking-vessel proves encouragingly difficult
It rained almost every day last week for at least a few hours in the afternoon, which is when I've been doing my first (and occasionally, only) run of the day. On Wednesday or Thursday, I looked out the window all morning at dry, or at least drying, pavement as I completed indoor tasks I could have delayed until that evening, but decided to attack when the urge struck because I never know when I suddenly just won't give a fuck for a spell of unknown duration.
I dressed for rain, but didn't hope for it. But when Rosie and I were a quarter-mile up the road, it started pouring. My first thought wasn't “Nice move, dipshit, you had clear skies all morning” but “Damn, Rosie always balks at even light rain, but not today.” Rosie, in fact, was keen for some reason on heading directly for the pedestrian tunnel a half-mile yonder leading to the East Boulder neighborhood. This usually signals a desire to hammer northward on a rec path that passes through a series of increasingly dense colonies of reliably indignant prairie dogs.
“They'll be underground in this crap,” I reminded her as we slopped through an otherwise deserted city park, watching her ears flap and flop in incidental proportion to her manifest joy. And when we arrived at the first colony, sure enough, no heads were peeking out of burrows and unleashing the usual cacophony of taunting expletives.
Gone too were the humans normally peppering this strip of path, which runs alongside a limited-access parkway that bypasses most of the city. I was reminded of the early-spring days in New Hampshire when I was regularly “forced” to do 10- to 20-milers in freezing rain because I was following a schedule with high mileage totals and little tolerance for skipped days.
65 degrees and raining? Compared to a replacement-level running scenario, this was a gift, given Rosie's unexpected enthusiasm and our near-sole ownership of the Foothills Path. The only downside was an increased likelihood of chafing and the assurance I'd be doing laundry that day.
That night, at maybe 8:30 when the sun’s light was fading but ample, I headed out alone in my other running uniform for a planned half-hour to supplement the 30 earlier soggy minutes with Rosie. The rain had relented hours earlier and the sky had largely cleared itself of clouds. Yet once more, I was just easing from a shuffle into a patter when it started raining again. I laughed. I also recalled my own recent smugness over barely beating instead of immediately greeting a few May rainstorms, also by happenstance; it seems that this shit, like a lot of uncontrollable shit, simply evens out over time.
It is tempting to observe that I choose to be optimistic when it comes to my exercise habits. This niche-level optimism is legitimate and unforced, but it's not a choice. It's a product of sufficiently valuing—naw; treasuring—an aspect of my everyday life so that I'm psychologically obligated to spot and, if necessary, exaggerate whatever the highlights were: feeling strong and spry and rhythmic even while climbing, happening upon kids just learning to ride bikes, getting smiles from oldster-couples who have seen hundreds of runners—most of them transplants like me—barrel or bumble past them since the 1970s.
As a child, as a teenager, and as a younger adult, my sense of ultra-wealthy people’s view of the world was comically naive. In fact, I'm still filling in gaps. I'll save most of that for a later installment, but for now, I'll just note how perplexing I find it that some people are so devoid of any applicable concept of freedom and fairness that they believe that actively trimming the global population to a half-billion continuously bio-monitored H. sapiens specimens is a good and necessary project.
My dudes, you're worth $50 billion-plus and that's your best idea? Why behave both soullessly and dicklessly at every opportunity? I suppose I could be accused of answering my own questions in the asking, like a cable-”news” host. But whatever pathologies drive the Klaus Schwabs of planetary civilization, they are as implacable as termites and have the same effect on structures with reach—social as well as physical. Because I'm just as relentless despite myself being a teapot-denizen, I'm not done with them either.
It says something about my natural persistence, priorities, choice of associates, and luck that I wound up shitcanning everything I had multiple times between my mid-twenties and still wound up a healthy daily runner in a place with favorable weather, where numerous people I count as my oldest and closest friends also live. All of us are living tolerably enough, facing circumstances none of us foresaw four years ago.
It's important to me to reassure these beings face-to-face how much they have changed me and sometimes my thinking for the better. Loneliness is the new normal for an alarming number of Americans spanning the age and gender spectrum. As a single person, I largely associate with other single people. Now that I have formally conceded to the desire to extend my own existence for a while, I have resumed exchanging wages for labor, most of it remote, to ensure the availability of comfortable living space and things I can shovel into the dynamic aperture in my head that keep the intracellular ATP coming.
I'm not comfortable with being overly idle even when I can afford to skate for a while. I watched my dad go to work without calling in sick to different jobs from the time I was on enough to notice until the day I moved away. His employers would eventually compel him to use accumulated vacation time in bulk, and he'd use the time for home-improvement gambits.
This the kind of thing people often internalize without realizing having done so, because in the only childhood frame of reference I had, the men around simply did what was required to maintain family security. (I have no brothers.) And not only did I never once hear my father say, “Hey, look how great a thing I just did there!”, but I can't even imagine him seriously expressing such a sentiment.
Over time, I figured out the great parts of him all the same. But like him, I keep those entirely private. I seem at times to have combined my dad's quiet cynicism and sensitive bullshit-detector while my mother's penchant for homing in on power-hungry members of the blowhard elite. Surely we* have, or can create, purposes for people like these somewhere.
Think of this post, if you must think of it at all, as part one of an unending series of sporadic concessions to personal sustainability for other rage- or ennui-paralyzed optimists.