My last post, for dummies

My turn to pretend it's my writing and not what's in it that upsets a predictable cohort of people the most

This post has received a startling number of visitors, most via various Facebook sites. I’m not currently on that platform, but according to reports from officials with direct knowledge of my critics’ thinking, a number of would-be analysts simply couldn’t follow the post for its flailing lack of coherence.

Although my e-mail subscribers’ various responses suggested that the post is in fact eminently readable, one particular small chain of Facebook commenters was alert enough to sound the alarm: It ain’t. Between the topic-jumping, the overly lengthy sentences, and all that WTF lol about zombies, I have failed you once again. (To those who have already submitted your entertaining comments and more about that post — input that corresponds remarkably well to the material it addresses, all things considered — I’m sorry to report that you’ve wasted your time, as have I in replying to you.)

I realize now that I should have provided an outline with that post. I did, after all, imply that I wanted to expand my audience beyond people old or curious enough to have read books not written by celebrities. And as some of the critics eager to call themselves writers reminded me, if it’s not presented in glorified agate form — a number to lead the title followed an adjective like “best,” with the “writing” dominated by bullet points — in a credible outlet, it’s not real journalism. Oh, and blogs aren’t journalism, so keep that in mind when you see fact A on a blog and fact A in the pages of SELF or Prevention, because the source matters; outlets like those have no incentive to produce chum, whereas my advertisers and you deluded saps keep me in Chex Mix and dope, leaving me no choice but to publish stuff that everyone wants to hear and I don’t actually think.

So, several paragraphs too deep and thus blatantly defeating the point, here’s what my last post meant to convey. (Honestly, I didn’t major in English, I just want to offer opinions like everyone else, so cut the unpublished blogger crowd some slack and focus on the messages.)

1. I see an effort to sow outrage against Laz Lake, including talk of a boycott, as both unjustified and an already failed venture that needs to die — hence “zombie.”
   

2. I offer evidence that a pair other entities in the running world have done objectively worse things — and without answering for them when an answer would have looked mighty good. Laz explained his own position thoroughly.
   
   2a. Sidebar about the conflict between relentless “body positive” talk and banning body-related talk altogether.
   

3. I said (perhaps not emphatically enough) that I didn’t think it would be right to boycott those other entities because they undeniably do good things, too; hence the idea of canceling Laz is unjustified, not only for lack of cause but also because it would establish a clear double standard.

Owing to the confusion created by my previous muddled entry — accused of living to 10,000 words, but sadly fizzling out at only 3,900 — numerous people who otherwise might have been able to offer substantive rebuttals to these ideas were denied this exercise. One of them did offer this nugget, to the merriment of those in his midst:

I was mostly runcrastinating and ridding my bowels of their contents so I wasn't expecting to soon have to be metaphorically be wading through as much excrement as well.

A Nobel Prize in literature goes to whoever can determine what tense that “sentence” is in, let alone whether he just meant “I’d just taken a shit, and then I waded through this shitty article. What are the odds?” Too many words? But if that wasn’t enough to jam a stake through the heart of the beleaguered vampire named Irony, this was posted on a site dedicated to outing cheaters in a “white guys suck” thread by a notorious cheater who’s known only for that and his lechery. Hey ladies!

I can see how ideas like mine are more of a threat to running than this luminary.

I’m tempted to use the facile “They’re too dumb to get it” dismissal of all of this input (which avoided the topic, yes, but it’s still feedback), since one guy apparently couldn’t figure out what a link containing the phrase “Read the rest” was for and another thought I believed The Long Walk to be a historical event. But labeling your audience too plain imbecilic to appreciate your prose is every writer’s bane. I like to think the hundred-plus actual articles I've had published over the past 20-plus years — most of which had to funnel their way through a more rigorous pitching and editorial process than most anything you see today by me or anyone — attest to my ability to anticipate and appreciate different audiences, but I’m still learning even in my dotage.

So again, to those who fought through all of the purple, self-congratulatory prose and agreed with any of it, I’m sorry to say it was all an illusion. Once more, you’ve all been trapped by the blind and uncouth meanderings of an entitled white male of intolerable vintage.

Look, I know I use a lot of excess words — they’re free and I like to play with them — but I categorically object to the claim that my last post was really that hard to follow for anyone who cares. (Something tells me if it been an equally florid set of ideas about how to conquer whiteness in running, it would have struck the same addled readers as positively Shakespearian.) And more importantly, I am not not to get women, though if I were reading my stuff in the environments people are, laden with the appropriate triggers, I would probably feel that way. A lot of women who have been around running for a minute read this and would be willing to tell me if I were establishing the idea that men have it all under control as a hill to die on. I know I appear to be treating this subject as a lark to some of the zealots deep inside the effort to completely topple running through sheer verbal hectoring and prevarication when it suits. But what I really don’t like, as that last bit may have revealed, is lying and posturing for vainglory and people in the running world eating and shitting out their own for no good reason at all.

I will say again that most of the people I’ve portrayed so far as misguided in their actions on balance have done far, far more good than harm over the course of their visibility in the running niche, but it’s this group that I naturally hold to a higher standard than the, you know, yutzes relegating to sounding off on blogs. More broadly, I don’t believe in the idea of total villains unless people make it clear this is their intended role, and I see at least some of these mistakes as having been done in good faith. If that sounds condescending, I can offer more instead about how I see the bad-faith actors specifically.

My next post is going to be unmissable, because it’s about the New Hampshire Cross-Country Divisional State Meets on Saturday morning, to be live-streamed here. The six races kick off at 9:00 Eastern Daylight (not for long!) Time. The post will be nonmissable mainly because I’m excited about the whole thing, which counts for a lot. I like excitement! If it weren’t for my kids I don’t know what I would do. Subscribers, meanwhile, will get a more extensive, less sarcastic version of this one and an expanded explanation of why I am really doing this. I know it shouldn’t matter, but as the number of paid subscribers grows (and thank you, oh depraved shitbirds and scrap-scrimpers, thank you for every kind word that accompanies the surrendering of those Ben Franklins), I feel the obligation to be more Mansonesque at times.