Orts aplenty
On the first Friday evening of 2018, a couple of bastards from Texas tried to screw me. This was not a complete surprise; bastards (and here I mean this word maliciously, not descriptively or even truthfully) are everywhere, and bastards, at least by my definition, attempt to sexually penetrate others with tiresome regularity. In this respect, and indeed in others, they resemble fuckers; some even dabble in motherfuckery. Just yesterday, I tracked the bastards* down and shot them both in the back of the head, double-tap, splat split, with a plastic pistol loaded with my own septic urine, and now the show is over; every falsifiable sentence in this paragraph is true except for this one.
Now that I've weeded out the lightweights, some quick background: I just replaced the mirror that was mortally wounded in this episode, and was reminded by the crass negligence of the unknown perpetrator of an incident that took place at about 7:30 on a Friday evening early in the 2018 yare. In that instance, I was at the wheel of a friend's car and, while preparing to ease out of a parking spot onto the quiet street, was lightly side-swiped by a passing minivan. There were no witnesses. Neither I nor my passenger, the car's owner, was hurt, and it was unimaginable that anyone in the other car was, either. My friend either called the non-emergency police number or stuck her head out the window and yelled "NEED SOME FUCKING COPS OVER HERE, PLEASE!"; I think it was the former, but as fucked up as I was on bath salts, my memory is shaky, other than knowing with certainly the precise details of the incident I am describing here. I do know that my friend had put me on her insurance policy at some point because I drove her car so often, but this turned out to be irrelevant.
The minivan pulled over about fifty yards ahead. I got out and approached the vehicle, from which the passenger side of which emerged a pleasant-looking gentleman with an apologetic look on his face. He turned out to be the husband of the driver, who was jabbering about having had a green light at the intersection she'd driven through a second before clipping me. In fact, this was wrong on two counts: There wasn't even a traffic light at the intersection in question, and she hadn't driven through it, she'd made a right-hand turn from the cross street, where she almost immediately encountered the Camry I was driving. There were two teenagers in the back seat. Both looked quietly uncomfortable, more downcast than irritated, the way people might look when authority figures who routinely champion the value of honesty are plainly lying. Or maybe they were just put out.
I had not changed out of the shorts and windbreaker I'd run in before making the drive to downtown to pick up my friend from work in her own car (parking, and assholes in the shape of human beings driving cars, can be a significant problem near downtown Boulder). This might have been ill-advised given the near-freezing temps, but I hadn't planned to get out of the car at all. After I picked up my friend, we stopped at a home about five blocks to the east to feed a bird, not randomly but at the specific request of the bird's owner, one of my friend's coworkers. The bird was a cockatiel or a cockatoo or some other cocky creature, and I had encouraged it without success to recite profane words during our brief time together. Maybe this is why God sent the bastards in the minivan my way. God has no sense of proportionality, relevance, or anything else when dispensing justice, which is why I would stone him to death if I could. If anyone deserves divine retribution for his sins, it's that plagiarizing celestial douche bag.
Now aware that this situation was likely to mushroom into a sizable pain in the ass, I wondered: Why would anyone so frantically try to create a bullshit story over a trifling fender-bender? Was I dealing with an uninsured driver? They minivan was a recent model, and I assumed in my not-knowing-fuck-all way that at worst, the driver might experience a slight bump in her insurance premiums if she admitted fault.
Then, as I took a closer look at the minivan to assess it for damage, I noticed that it was a rental. I guessed right away that the couple who had rented it had rolled the dice and decided not to get the optional rental company insurance. Most people I know who rent cars do this. I've done it. I didn't get into any accidents when I did, though.
The husband was quietly attempting to not be a part of any conversations that might have just gotten underway by default. To the extent that I can read other people worth a shit -- and sometimes I can't because I am crying and having violent, unplanned anal sex with them, usually but not always penetrative -- I could see that he knew exactly what had happened, and also knew more or less what his and his wife's story would be and that he had enough of a conscience to feel conflicted about this.
The cops took over 50 minutes to arrive. Despite this incident being within blocks of a Boulder PD substation, I wasn't surprised. As is the case, I reckon, in most municipalities, the good cops around here are excellent, but most are not good, and the bad ones are completely disposable both as police officers and human beings. I don't envy what they do, but then again I don't envy anyone with a real job. One talked to me and my friend while the other conversed with the minivan occupants, so I couldn't hear exactly what kind of bullshit the bastards were offering. I don't know if the daughters were recruited to participate in the charade. I figure they were, in at least a nominal sense.
When I told my friend what kind of shit had been spilling out of the driver's mouth when I first got to the minivan, my friend was upset but not aghast. Same as me. Most people will lie if there is anything financial at stake and they think they can get away with it. I think some of the same people who would rush to return a $5 or $10 bill to the person who had just unknowingly dropped one on the sidewalk would lie to the cops about something more substantial, because most people are basically cunts.
The two cops, still in no hurry to do much other than fuck around in their warm clothes, told me that the driver claimed I had pulled out in front of her. As he transmitted the false details the driver had fed him to me and my friend, I wanted to remove a gun from the glove box, shoot both cops in the face (one wasn't saying much, but he was complicit just by being there), and then walk up to the back of the minivan with the shotgun my friend keeps in the trunk and start firing blasts through the rear windshield until I was fairly certain that I had killed or seriously injured everyone inside without being able to see them (it had been dark for well over three hours at this point). But lacking a shotgun, sufficiently strong inclinations toward serious violence, and the desire to participate as a defendant in a lengthy criminal trial I instead merely claimed that the people were lying. The cop was young and not good at keeping a poker pace and his quasi-rueful expression strongly suggested that he agreed but that his hands were tied. His hands were not in fact tied, and he could have walked right back the minivan along and emptied his service revolver into it with no change in expression, like Michael Madsen's stunningly sociopathic character in Tarantino's oft-referenced Reservoir Dogs. Or maybe fired a round into the building across the street in the general direction of the uncooperative, newly sated shitbird somewhere inside. But sadly, he chose to act like a typical traffic cop instead.
In the end, I was given a ticket for an improper start from a parked position (something that is usually handed out after some redneck or teenager decides to "burn rubber" and gets caught). Ultimately, I did not plead guilty to this; in an unhappy compromise with the City of Boulder, I paid a fine for a no-points offense (driving with a headlight out, or with my bare ass hanging out the window while driving and honking, or some such nonsense). The only real fall-out after that was getting a bill in the mail a few weeks afterward from the car rental company's billing department for over a thousand dollars; it turns out the bastards -- who proved to be from the Dallas area and may have been in town for a college visit (just a guess; these looked like well-off people in addition to being bastards) -- had told the rental-car company that it wasn't their fault. Why not? They'd gambled on the optional insurance and now they had a chance to weasel out of paying the price for getting that wrong by lying instead. I was having none of it, and called the number on the bill. When I explained that, contra what she told me, I was not admitting any sort of fault in what had happened, she said "Well, this is just the billing company, we don't handle the disputes side" or something close to that. I remarked that this was pretty damned convenient, and said that I wouldn't be paying and hung up. I also road "Not my fucking fault" on the bill and mailed it back to the proper address. I heard nothing from the other party or anyone connected with them after that.
If I want to, I can find all sorts of examples in my life of people going out of their way to choose being upright over being mercenary and sleazy. But when you consider how the average person behaves toward strangers in situations like the one I just described, it becomes more obvious that anyone who is discouraged by the notion of a full-scale thermonuclear holocaust is deluded beyond conventional measure. The lesson here is to cultivate deep, meaningful friendships and relationships with people who agree with you that all of this (sweeps hand dramatically in a 270-degree arc) would be better off if reduced to an irradiated hellscape. Anyone who embraces the very concept of a "mulligan" is surely with me on this one.
My and Rosie's running streak remains intact at 131 days, although yesterday morning represented by most significant episode of cheating since the whole unplanned thing got underway. I went to Denver and ran with a guy I advise who is fast enough to win some of the local races and has been in the 15s at sea level. He and his wife have a 110-pound Bernese named Watson, and Rosie stayed at the house with Watson and my friend's wife while I and my friend ran about 8 miles through Cherry Creek -- not through the water itself, mind you, but the municipality. Then we collected Rosie and ran about three more miles. I hadn't run more than ten miles since October, so there is that. I felt some mild knee twinges about 7 or 8 miles in, but these abated.
This photo fails to adequately convey Watson's considerable heft.
At the just-concluded NCAA Indoor Championships in Birmingham, Ala. -- where no indoor track is necessary, making it all the more impressive one exists -- C.U. junior Joe Klecker came in second in the 5,000-meter run and third in the 3,000 meters the next day, with Australian Morgan McDonald of Wisconsin winning both events. On the women's side, junior Makena Morley, who has been making it to national championship races every year since she was in ninth grade, scored for the Buffaloes in those same two events; she was seventh in the 5K and sixth in the 3K, and the second and fourth American.
When people consider the impact of non-Americans on the NCAA distance events, most of them probably think first of the Kenyans in the system, but I would bet at this point that the number of top-notch foreigners from Europe, Oceania and Canada combined now far outpaces the number of Kenyans running for D-I schools.
While I have no issue with non-Americans competing for U.S. colleges, I have to offer a nod to the Buffs program for maintaining a squad consisting entirely or almost entirely of Americans throughout the time Mark Wetmore has been in charge. This is not a "patriotic" position (which requires not merely liking the U.S. but being a nominally Christian gun-happy moron who heaves his misshapen bulk to his feet and drools stupidly whenever and wherever songs like The Star-Spangled Banner are played) so much as a "Hey, this guy is operating a championship-caliber program while steadfastly giving American 18-year-olds a chance instead of dipping into the 21-year-old overseas well." A coach at a school like the University of Colorado rejecting the concept of foreign talent is kind of like a world-class runner not being on the doping train: Maybe they'll be less good than they could otherwise be, but in a way that commands a certain passive respect.
Colorado is often maligned in pidgin English by pimple-popping semi-literates on "the" message board (which means little, because so is everything else) for allegedly not producing standouts in track the way they do in cross-country, as do, for example, Oregon and Stanford. What these posters -- many of whom probably lick the pus from the popped pimples off their fingers while fumbling at their crotches with the opposite hand -- miss is that excelling in the track distance events is largely an individual circumstance, whereas people credit the Buffs for being successful in cross-country because of the one-off phenomenon of winning, not because they tend to produce individual champions or championship contenders. (Dani Jones won an individual title in leading her team to the championship last fall).
This differential success also scales to the difficulty in prepping for a one-off, team-first, one-off 10K cross-country race versus every runner on every team having multiple shots at multiple distances over a track season. Also, the Buffs are somewhat hampered on the track by being at high altitude for the same reasons this probably help them in cross-country: It's just very, very hard to train in a way that assures the critical turnover needed at the end of a typical NCAA championship-style wait-and-kick track race. At least it looks that way. And if you could put Colorado's top five from a title-winning cross-country squad up against anyone any four others teams' top five on the track six months later in a strictly grind-it-out 5,000 or 10,000 meters consisting of 25 bodies, I would bet on the Buffs squad to prevail if the race were scored cross-country-style.