Running from the facts: "My rock bottom was when I caught myself at a nice dinner" edition

Also, this is no longer technically a for-profit enterprise, as running and other cultural phenomena are not worth my attention

Lindsay Crouse wants to come clean about being a professional liar posing as a source of inspiration to other neurotic and air-headed women of privilege. At some lingering, almost-human level, she doesn’t want to be a piece of shit anymore. But shit is what she is, so rather than experience a “Come to Facts” moment, she continues to offer more slop, platitudes, and imaginary personal revelations, demonstrating why she’d have been fired from The New York Times long ago in a vocational-cultural climate where journalistic ethics and writing ability mattered at all.

Consciously opening an essay describing your own transformation into a better person with the words “My rock bottom was when I caught myself at a nice dinner,” as Crouse did on Friday, is a good strategy only if you’re trying to evoke laughter at your own expense—that is, when the piece is intended as self-satire. That’s the kind of trick cuck-comedians like Patton Oswalt rely on, because their dribbling, nasally delivered anecdotes about shambling through life being shit on by women and others play out quite naturally.

Otherwise, it’s a sign you have no idea what a foul fucker you are and that you’d be incapable of fixing this even if made aware of it. And even when your audience is mostly other foul fuckers somehow willing to pay to read material published by The New York Times, you should occasionally dabble in trying harder in the event you ever decide to take any of your professional responsibilities seriously.

Crouse is neither a satirist nor oblivious to how she’s perceived; her public image, in fact, is all she cares about. (As she sits down to “write,” she probably diddles herself with a rolling pin hard enough to create yeasty plumes of crotch-smoke, imagining herself as a somehow desirable character on Sex in the City’s “Zombie Chicks Rule” reboot.) That’s why she lies about her own accomplishments, either inventing these outright or inflating their importance in context. And her columns—while on the surface intended to interest the masses in a zeitgeist—are invariably reflections of what’s bothering her the most in the twenty-odd minutes she devotes, apparently during drunken cab rides or mons-waxings, to composing each of her haphazard laments.

In her latest burst of horseshit, Crouse discusses triumphing over her addiction to technological features she doesn’t understand and has plainly never even used. It therefore appears to be nothing more than a harried effort to address this roll-out of arrant falsehoods without coming close to admitting to being a liar.

You can decide for yourself whether Crouse choosing to ramble about ditching her Apple watch is a response of sorts to my email in November, or whether it’s merely another example of a brain-dead narcissist trying express gravitas and instead revealing galactic levels of cluelessness and laziness. But it seems relevant that she made her Strava account private at some point after I sent the NYT my complaint.

Also, you would have been hard pressed to find writing this bad in a major daily until recent years. Raw, thought-free slop—stuff clearly composed on a smartphone during a subway ride an iPhone on a subway is everywhere now, especially in the NYT, but Crouse’s breathless dribbling carries a special dysentery-in-a-yoga-studio funk:

I had metrics on things I didn’t even realize my body did: lactate thresholds, VO₂ max, Heart rate variability.

Really? You didn’t know your body “does” heart-rate variability?

I’ll give the bitch this—she might as well be this lazy for the rest of her shitty career, because she has none of the raw tools for being an effective communicator. She is a garden-variety idiot, like most of her bovine colleagues, prematurely weary and wide white women who sway and moo in blind accordance with whatever direction the political winds happen to be blowing.

Crouse is of course one of dozens of sloppy, ignorant, adversarial, egomaniacal, and mostly sedentary pundits circulating within and adjacent to running hoping to lure people into her diseased and feeble world view. It honestly amazes me how weak and useless the individuals who have risen to the level of scion in this watered-down version of a sport are.

Like Crouse, Alison Desir enjoys bragging about her “rock bottom” and wound up at an Ivy League school despite showing little evidence of a functioning cerebrum, and continues to fail and flail around with a significant following. Desir is a race-grifter who is managing to become increasingly pathetic as she runs out of contrived grievances.

I bet this moron really does maintain such a list. Please try to wrap your mind around the absurdity: Someone who—in addition to being mystified by the dearth of black trail runners in fucking Montana—treats the misspelling of her name as an act of hostility, and asks Twitter for a solution, offers mental-health counseling services. That is honestly more absurd than me teaching Sunday school or seminars on how to treat fuckheads and dingbats with respect and restraint when writing about their antics.

According to that Seattle Times article, Desir has also changed the title of her prospective racialist book from The Unbearable Whiteness of Running to Running While Black. I have no idea what prompted the change, but a less overtly racist title is not going to turn anything from this warbling goober into literary gold or anything with a valid or even coherent social message. Desir just wants to get paid for a brand of flatulent grousing and jiggling around like a coked-up bullfrog that has fortuitously turned out to be profitable for certain folks.

The public face of citizen running, which is whiny and sad and bloated and overflowing with dishonesty and scamming and conflicts invented and created by gelatinous sit-at-home Twitter shitwads, is a joke. I have no need to pay attention to it anymore and should have bailed decades ago. Insatiably maladapted basket-cases guzzling Wokesterbrau by the Big Gulp mug and belching the resultant bitterness into the faces of anyone with the sense to abstain are not my kind of peeps. The propagation of tricked-up butthurt continues to be an inadequate substitute for expertise, experience, and most of all rational conversations, with countless slovenly and illiterate fat fucks now calling themselves coaches and journalists.

Dumbasses being dumbasses in the joggersphere, however, is not what has me most defeated about writing about or observing real people and events, period. It’s that all I see when I look about is people being the obnoxious, greedy, fundamentally shitty animals humans by nature are. I won’t explore the details in this story or in this one, but if you can read them for comprehension and decide human civilization is a good idea, and that the babies currently being loogied into it are going to become part of a generation of happy, informed, critically thinking people, then you and I disagree, and I will chalk up your reluctance to having tangible investments in life that I do not and actively shun. I might be occasionally entertaining to listen to, but I don’t entertain myself.

I hate anti-speech people more than anything, especially when those people are the fucking liars. I want them attacked with bats and other weapons. Words. contra the Wokish, are never “violence.” In fact, words are a substitute for violent actions. People who think that others should not even speak out against their grifting and thieving—or merely because we fucking feel like it—deserve to die screaming of some kind of cancer while acid is applied with a turkey-baster to every available moist surface.

Glenn Greenwald’s words about Chelsea Clinton—who looks and tweets like a woodchuck with Down syndrome, and who managed to turn out even uglier and more diabolical than both her mother and her drooling, Parkinsonian hillbilly of a father—exemplify why I hate Democrats as least as much as I ever hated the religious American right wing:

Chelsea Clinton, who lamented that Substack is profiting off a “grift.” Apparently, this political heiress — who is one of the world's richest individuals by virtue of winning the birth lottery of being born to rich and powerful parents, who in turn enriched themselves by cashing in on their political influence in exchange for $750,000 paychecks from Goldman Sachs for 45-minute speeches, and who herself somehow was showered with a $600,000 annual contract from NBC News despite no qualifications — believes she is in a position to accuse others of "grifting.” She also appears to believe that — despite welcoming convicted child sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell to her wedding to a hedge fund oligarch whose father was expelled from Congress after his conviction on thirty-one counts of felony fraud — she is entitled to decree who should and should not be allowed to have a writing platform.

I have disabled the option for people to subscribe to this “publication.” All of the posts I write are free anyway, and people sending me money obligates me to continue writing here, and I don’t want that obligation. I know that few people care about how much I publish, or if publish at all, but I feel better doing this rather than just tapering off to nothing or disappearing overnight.

I basically hate everyone and everything, and I would rather spend my time watching or reading things other people have already produced and either uploaded to the Internet or shipped to a bookstore. I’ll probably start driving semi-aimlessly around the country just so I don’t have to look at the same shitmonkeys in this anovaginal fistula of a city anymore.

Also, I don’t even really look at professional running results anymore. I follow some high school and college action and only when I know those involved. I don’t have any social media accounts, so I know a lot less at any instant than the average serious running observer does. I prefer it to stay that way. So, I’m not even informed enough to be writing about whatever dopers or bug-eyed, polygendered bulimics are crossing finish lines first. There are real sports out there, even if they’re also full of shitheads.

I admit that I am an unpleasant person. All the time. This site was never intended as a seminar on how to enjoy your life from someone who’s been there. Every cocksucker I’ve maligned, today and previously, is likely to outlive me, or at least I hope so.

That’s about it. Please feel free to unsubscribe, and to share this post with others so that they also know better than to subscribe. Oh, one last thing. It would be great if a sniper blew a hole one of Nancy Pelosi’s overstuffed, ancient tits and the bullet managed to pass through the silicone and lodge itself in Mitch McConnell’s wattles.

Oh, and mask up. America leads the way in Caring About Others.