Ten years of intermittent blogging: My first 10 blog posts ever

In August 2004, I had just been sentenced to Florida because I had a girlfriend who grew up near Fort Lauderdale and was re-enrolling at Florida Atlantic University full-time. I hated the place -- my introduction was four nearby hurricanes in about five weeks (Charley, Frances, Ivan and Jeanne) and of course South Florida is a comprehensive outrageous mess of ingtravaginal running conditions, overcrowding, insanely rude drivers, cultural barrenness and giddy corruption. But may companion during my just-under-two years in Plantation and Boca Raton made the overall experience tolerable and even pleasant -- and moreover, uniquely memorable.

Anyway, I was one of the first halfway decent runners with a personal Web site and also one of the first to blog. I emphasized from the outset that the blog was not just about running (this didn't stop the merry asshole who goes by "Carnivore 69" elsewhere for panning the blog because he didn't like what he called my "political agenda") and I like to think this gave it a more rollicking flavor. Hence the name -- "The Pungent Aftertaste of Cognitive Emesis."

The fuccanankel I broke on a trail in July 2012 finally seems to be fully cooperating, so I can now train rather than jog; this renaissance will dovetail nicely with the podcasting project Lize Brittin and I have been scheming about for a while and are currently nudging toward genuine fruition. And I have often claimed that I would return to blogging about running if I thought my running was worth mentioning in any way. I'll get to that in a few days, so for now, here's what I had to say when I still had one or two okay races left in me as an open-division runner who was hot off the racing streak in his life in the Bay Area -- I had no idea I'd be sidelined by a sports hernia for most of the summer of 2005 and then, after moving again in March 2006, more or less lose interest in racing altogether. Right up 'til now.
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Monday, August 09, 2004
Sobering thoughts
Here's a question to ponder.

Imagine that someone in your circle of acquaintances has a longtime hobby (in this case a sport) characterized by a consistently extraordinary level of passion. This individual has been generally impoverished for years owing to a frank, multifaceted squandering of his employability and overall earning potential; he can be high-functioning in romantic relationships, but on the heels of a predictable series of interpersonal upheavals, he's shrugged his metaphorical shoulders, grabbed his literal choad and adopted the mantle of Permanent Single Guy. He carries on in this way for two solid years, pursuing his athletic hobby to various but typically unsatisfactory levels of success, scraping by on odd jobs and a spartan lifestyle, and quietly structuring his existence so as to shun anything resembling intimate contact.

Then, his luck, and perhaps his attitude, changes. He meets Someone Truly Special. His luck changes again and he is recruited for a position that will net him more money than he's ever seen. The job is three thousand miles away, but that's small shakes since he has no real roots to speak of. So he bears the woman of his dreams to the West Coast and takes up the corporate (well, academic) fight, and things get off to a great start. In the meantime, his avocation is returning greater rewards than at any time in his life even though he's pushing 35. Nothing could be better!

If you were this man, would you ditch it all in favor of a protracted, running-amok-in-the-streets, no-holds-barred drinking expedition?

Well, you're thinking (if you're wise), if I were an alcoholic I certainly might. And you're right -- but that's not a sufficient explanation. See, anyone who knows he's bad to drink liquor, has been sober for a spell and picks up a drink in the face of the preceding breed of productivity has more than an alcohol problem in the mix (ha, ha), and please don't say -- not that you were going to -- that working a solid program of recovery (think A.A.) would have forestalled trouble, because that's what he was doing and he still got himself in a hell of a fucking scrape, probably the worst skein of imbibition in his life, with consequences to match.

Where I'm going with this is that seemingly by definition, anyone who would behave in this way has some sort of neurochemical mayhem gripping his forebrain; otherwise he'd have to be plain stupid, or uncaring. There are no grand insights here, but the point is that it's very easy for someone with an identified substance abuse problem to be railroaded into treatment centers and Alcoholics Anonymous meetings as first lines of defense, especially when he manifests no obvious signs of clinical depression, anxiety disorder or what have you. Those may be quality adjuncts for a person meeting the above criteria, but it would seem that intervention with psychotropic meds would be a sine qua non -- and that if he didn't come trembling back from the roaring dead making loud noises about this on his own behalf, some sage counselor or physician had sure better.

The idea of antidepressants has been brought before this calamitous chap a number of times, by people inside and outside the medical and recovery communities. But for whatever reason he's always fomented firm if benign resistance, and the idea has evaporated. On the other hand, that tactic has never worked with anything A.A.-related, and he has found himself there, time and again, mainly, it seems, to placate someone.

I'm not sure whether this is painting the portrait of someone in denial, but the point is that our hypothetical protagonist is apt these days to aggressively seek out some sort of pharmacological "cure." He'll surely also do A.A. meetings and do them well; there's no questioning the efficacy of that august program. But it's unfortunate, for him and for others, that for years he's gently but categorically legislated the idea of psych meds -- you know, those drugs that help other folks, people without assets such as a spirited exercise addiction and the undeniable ability to attract quality people and a pronounced lack of germane symptoms -- out of existence, because I fear it about killed him this time.
posted by kemibe at 11:24 PM

Tuesday, August 10, 2004
I'll tell you what's good
Tomato juice with a dash of balsamic vinegar. I suppose you could just sink Bloody Mary mixer instead, but where's the innovation in that?
posted by kemibe at 11:06 AM

Wednesday, August 11, 2004
Can you wrap your mind around this?
I just watched a KFC commercial that unfolded to a country jingle and showed a bunch of cowboy types laying into the grease, having a stompin' good time turning their bellies to mush and transforming the elastic tubes of their coronary arteries into brittle, lumenless straws. As this tableau gave way to a beer commercial, I reflected again on the role of advertising not in emptying Americans' wallets but in affirming their collective inability to be honest with themselves.

That our nation's average BMI has behaved in the past two decades like the Dow in a bull market has laid bare a sad dogma that belies our culture's tendency toward high intellectual achievement: When enough individuals become threatened by the prospect of their own frailty, society as a whole proves highly adept at only one thought process -- the blissful denial of obvious cause-effect relationships. This combination of not-so-niceties is hard to swallow:

Portion sizes have been expanding grandly for quite some time now, with the range of available junk foods growing ever wider.

The average American is growing fatter at an alarming rate.

The U.S. population is experiencing a paralyzing array of morbid conditions directly attributable to dietary profligacy in conjunction with inadequate activity levels. The incidence of so-called "adult-onset" diabetes, in particular, is rising in juveniles at a rate appalling enough to merit the shooting of a scapegoat to be named later, and in this same age group, unbelievably, gastroplasty ("stomach-stapling") has become an accepted mode of obesity "treatment."

An increasing number of people -- exemplified by the cybercesspool of mutual enabling known as "Big Fat Blog" -- are jumping on the "being fat isn't by itself unhealthy" and "you can be fit and fat" bandwagons, whipped into a frenzy by ersatz exposès such as Paul Campos' uproariously biased opus of demagoguery, The Obesity Myth, and ignoring the fact that precious few fat people are, in fact, exercising nearly enough to confer anything resembling fitness.

A frightening number of Americans are convinced that the route to thinness (not that being fat is bad, mind you) lies in...embracing an overwhelmingly popular fad diet rich in fatty foods.
How this country managed, among other achievements, the placement of several of its citizens on the moon in spite of this mass cognitive mayhem is a big fat mystery. Perhaps we strongly believed that it really was a gigantic hunk of tasty cheese.
posted by kemibe at 10:42 PM

Thursday, August 12, 2004
A four-hour mental orgasm
That, in only slightly overstating things, is how I'd classify the reading of a Carl Hiaasen novel. It's fitting, in my world, that the Miami Herald columnist and purveyor of bitingly funny Sunshine State mysteries (including Strip Tease, a much better novel than Demi Moore Hollywood flesh fest) has just published his latest, Skinny Dip, given my recent trip - and I don't make them often, as South Florida and burning outhouses share many commonalities - into his beleagured backyard.

I'd really rather go buy and devour this tome rather than reblogview Hiaasen for you uninitiated sad sacks, but such an attitude tends to dissolve the already rickety purpose of maintaining one of these time-bleeders, so I'll give it a shot. The guy's worth it. Perhaps Hiaasen's greatest gift is his ability to develop characters, particularly villains, who are simultaneously credible and absurd. (If he had a parallel among mystery writers, it would be Kinky Friedman.) Seven-foot hit men water-skiing across Biscayne Bay in their underwear, henchmen filled to the brim on horse steroids - these are a few of Hiaasen's favorite foils. On the flip side, one of his recurring good guys is a fellow who goes by Skink, a self-exiled former Florida governor and star quarterback who lives in the woods, scampers around in a kilt, lives on a steady diet of roadkill and serves as an ambassador to the environment. That makes him the perfect enemy of most of Hiaasen's criminals, for the newspaperman's novels are truly thematic, taking on and (barely) satirizing the shady land developers, corrupt politicians, theme-park visionaries, drug dealers, strip-mall builders, and yes, tourists who have merrily fucked up his home state. Hiaasen's protagonists, on the other hand, are generally underdog types on singular, noble (if not necessarily innocent) quests of one kind or another; Skink typically materializes to shepherd them along wherever necessary, adding both vim and levity to the proceedings.

I don't remember which of Hiaasen's books I happened upon first -- and to be honest, I can remember neither most of their names nor most of their plots -- but whichever one it was led me rapidly to the conclusion that I would be getting my eyes on whatever remained in circulation. It may well have been Tourist Season, Hiaasen's first novel, which featured a rogue crocodile with a hankering for retirees (from New York, of course), whom Hiaasen deftly paints as roundly unsavory (unless you're a reptile). Perhaps my favorite, and one I've read several times, is Skin Tight, which centers on a private eye who lives on a stilt house and becomes the target of one of a handful of especially colorful shitbags. In Lucky You, the heroine is a big-lottery maven whose winning ticket becomes the quarry of a pair of predictably energetic peckerwoods; the chase ends on an uninhabited island, with one of the rednecks, forlorn and defeated, left staring tiredly at his sunburned, shriveled manhood, thinking, that certainly doesn't look like a millionaire's cock. Most recently, Sick Puppyfeatured a small cadre of aggressive environmentalists running amok across the state; Hiaasen's passion for his own stories crosses the line from wryly moral to fiery-assed in this one.

The beauty of a Hiaasen novel is that while you're under its spell, you're alternately laughing, shaking your head and raising your eyebrows, but enjoying every second of it; only afterward do you realize you've been snookered along for his ride and taught a straight-up powerful lesson.

Eight thumbs up.
posted by kemibe at 11:32 AM

Friday, August 13, 2004
The kindest cut
So my girlfriend went out and got her hair cut. And it's short. Not shorn; just short. We're talking Anne Heche, not Annie Lennox. And it's not as though she started with long hair to begin with. Somehow, she usually manages to cut her own hair (I do the same but come on, we're in apples and oranges territory here) and she keeps it right around shoulder length, where we both like it.

Before you start shaking your head and muttering about what a waste of a friggin' post this is, let me get to the point, which is not the precise condition of my girlfriend's 'do. The point -- and I admit it's still not in downtown Profound City -- is its effect on me, her dearest but most concerned observer-critic. Ask me what I think about women and hair and I'll respond that while yes, different manes for different Janes and it takes all types and all that, I myself instinctively imagine my preference being a nice, luxurious spread, long enough to run my fingers through and perhaps wipe my nose on at the same time. (Think Jennifer Aniston during the bulk of the Friends years.)

Yet a modicum of introspection triggered by my honey's latest presentation leads to the quick conclusion that this belief regarding my own inclinations is the result of nothing more than basic societal conditioning. Because when I think back to other women I've dated, I understand that for the most part, I've been most apt to swoon when mates have wandered home with unusually close-cropped coifs.

And this is not a mere analytical consideration. As it is I quite naturally follow my ladyfriend around at a close distance at all times. Now, it seems, I'm a virtual shadow -- except that shadows don't ravage, buss and molest their primaries with alacrity at every opportunity and then some.

Frankly, I don't know from whence this sartorial bent arises (I could provide a picture of Mom, I suppose), nor do I care. The long and the short of it is that it's a titillating turn-on, replete with warm fuzzies -- and extensive consequences for both of us.
posted by kemibe at 6:03 PM

Saturday, August 14, 2004
Bridging the years
It states at the top of this page that this is, in the main, a running-resistant blog. That’s true enough (he said in the blog's infancy, when he couldn’t possibly corroborate himself), but today is a special day, rife with perambulatory pathos. It was one year ago today, or at least a year's worth of Saturdays ago, that I racked my hip at the Bridge of Flowers 10K in Shelburne Falls, Massachusetts, putting me out of commission for almost a month and thereby heralding not only my one significant injury since a metatarsal stress fracture in April 1995, but for all intents and purposes the end of a powerful dream.

I'm a New Hampshire native, but was living in the Roanoke Valley at the time. The 10K was one of four races I had scheduled for my four-week tour of New England –- a stay that wound up signifying my tentative return to decency after an early-summer slump but was peppered with malefic sideshows. My grandfather, stricken with pulmonary disease, had fallen gravely ill in June, and my family knew it was unlikely he would survive the summer. I'd hoped to see him one last time after he entered hospice care in Concord, N.H., but by the time I could make plans to scurry to his bedside from my lodgings with the Decker family in Yarmouth, Maine –- where my trip started in the form of a fairly-well-run Beach to Beacon 10K and a brief but prodigious training binge with fellow Olympic Marathon Trials aspirant Byrne Decker –- he'd slipped away at 85. He quite likely would not have recognized his own grandson in extremis and I’d had a good conversation with him the last time I’d seen him, in April. Nevertheless, my missing his passing despite being in the general area trips my guilt meter and digs at my psyche to this day.

Meanwhile, a good friend of mine from Massachusetts, a fairly young guy, was hospitalized with an array of troubling maladies, which was the chief impetus for my making the trip in the first place. So the non-running corners of my mind were kept well-occupied during this stretch.

With my grandfather eschewing services, I traveled from Maine to Durham, N.H., where I stayed and ran with Al Bernier, the description of whose character is a blog unto itself. Al is a talented runner, generous, earnest, flaky, bright, mellow, wise, guileless and blessed with his very own brand of humor. He’s also tall and skinny. We spent a week running and bestowing the secrets of a happy life upon one another before heading to Shelburne Falls for what transmogrified into one of those events the literary somber call a “fateful endeavor.”

In my quest to qualify for the Trials –- I planned to take my shot at the 2:22 standard in Chicago in October –- I’d been getting coaching from two-time Olympic Marathoner Pete Pfitzinger in exchange for building and maintaining his Web site and was racking up around 120 miles a week. I’d had success getting in good shape since hooking up with Pete at the beginning of the year; I’d run a solo 1:49 and change for 20 miles (about 2:23 marathon pace) in the rain three weeks before the Boston Marathon, but was unable to see things through to fruition in Beantown when temperatures spiked and I abandoned the race, as they say, at 12K. By the time I made my midsummer trip back north, I was sniffing at that sort of fitness again, though with a dearth of racing and workouts in the Virginia heat, it was difficult to tell.

In any case, Pete gave me schedules to follow comprising blocks of about four months. These included buildup races of my choosing. Originally, the Bridge of Flowers race wasn’t even among them, but several of my friends, including Al, were planning to run, as it was part of the local USATF Grand Prix series. So about a week in advance Pete and I mutually manipulated things so that I would run the 10K at 20K effort and then race a 5K in Manchester, N.H. five days later. I say 20K effort and not 20K pace because few runners exist who could run their ideal 20K pace on the Bridge of Flowers course even while busting three nuts. There’s a kilometer-long hill right at two miles that reaches a grade of about 14%, and it’s normally hot and humid since the race is in, not surprisingly, mid-August. There’s a downhill almost as long and steep at the three-mile mark and then it’s generally flat to the finish.

We got to Shelburne Falls in plenty of time, but for whatever reason, I found myself hitting the woods for the last time just a little too late. Trotting toward the start on the eponymous bridge, I heard the starter counting down from ten through a bullhorn and realized I was not going to make it. My second missed start of the year –- fortunately, neither of them at events of import. When the gun was fired I was still about 50 yards from the starting line and heading toward it. I stayed off to the side, trotted to the line itself for honesty’s sake, then turned around and joined the throng.

It was almost 90 degrees already and in percentile terms more humid than that. I bided my time, reminding myself that this was just a workout. I was moving along decently and, considering the self-induced mayhem of the moment, was feeling relaxed. Right at the start of The Hill I came upon Al walking; not his day, obviously. I picked my way up the piss-awful incline and was feeling good enough to lay into the downhill with aplomb, by my standards anyway. By the time I reached the bottom I was feeling a twinge in my right hip, but paid it little mind, aiming only to get to the finish in the prescribed manner. On another, smaller downhill in the final mile, the twinge had become more of a pinch –- significant enough to keep me from sticking with the small pack I’d been with. I finished the race, reconnoitered with Al and a few of the Central Mass Striders ladies in attendance, and set off for a cool-down jog. Nothing doing; the hip was too sore. By the time the two-hour car ride back to New Hampshire had ended, I was unable to walk.

And so it went –- for several days, then a week, and then, after I returned to Roanoke, three more –- a stretch of blind melancholia in which I lay about eating potato chips and gummi bears and musing over the fact that the Chicago Marathon was not going to happen and that there was no way I would be able to get in shape for a legitimate Trials attempt elsewhere, even in a best-case scenario. Ultimately I got a massage, although by that time my symptoms, treated with ibuprofen, light stretching, and ichor, had largely abated on their own. The massage was intrinsically a fine experience and inspired a Running Times article on the subject, and a few days later I was back on the roads, light as a donkey. Ultimately I made plans to run a November marathon, but those were not to be, and on the day I was to make a last-gasp effort at a 2:22 marathon I strained my calf. Game over. It was a long shot to begin with, I told myself. I still do.

But that was December, and this post centers on an anniversary. My life changed remarkably between last August –- when I’d been languishing, albeit pleasantly for the most part, in Virginia, not doing much of anything or seeing much of anyone -- and today. Through the kind of fortuitous circumstance that is perhaps responsible for the forming of more unions than most of us acknowledge, I wound up in the company of one of the six or seven women walking this earth who would dare call me a soulmate and mean it. I took a job three thousand miles away and righted my running –- overcompensated, even, running a series of personal bests at distances ranging from 5K to the half-marathon between February and April. I again learned to trust in my abilities and in other people. I had the opportunity to work in a guiding role with an incredibly determined underdog whose spiritual and physical gifts took her to the women’s Olympic Trials Marathon in St. Louis in April. Perhaps I could rue my body’s sense of timing, having missed my shot at the Trials only to embark on the best stretch of racing of my life, but it really didn’t matter. I’d been given far more since 2003 than the great feeling lining up at the Olympic Trials in Birmingham would have provided.

At the moment, my running, just as in mid-August of last year, is in the shitter, albeit for more ineffable reasons. But that, too, is irrelevant. The opportunity to reflect on the events of the past year –- to say nothing of those events themselves –- brings a smile to my face even as I bring this opus to a close.

Winston L. Blake

Winston Lewis "Win" Blake, 85, of Concord, died Monday at Pleasant View Nursing Home. He was born in Nashua, the son of Rodman and Marion (Hunt) Blake. He lived in East Pepperell, Mass., Nashua and Hudson before moving to Concord. He attended schools in Massachusetts, Nashua and Hudson and graduated from Nashua schools. He served in the Navy during World War II. Blake worked for J.F. McElwain Shoe Factory and later worked in radio broadcasting for stations in Vermont and New Hampshire, rising from announcer to manager. He worked for Evans Radio for nine years and for the New Hampshire Fish and Game Department for 11 years before retiring in 1981. He also served as state director of the U.S. Army Military Affiliate Radio Systems for 14 years. He enjoyed radio broadcasting and was a licensed ham radio operator and an advanced class operator. He used the call letters WIFTZ, which were retired after his retirement. He was a member of the Masons since 1951. He served as master of the Eureka Lodge No. 71 F&AM in Concord in 1973. He also served as secretary for 25 years, during which he received an award citation and later received title of secretary emeritus. He also served as district officer in 1975 and was given honorary membership to the Harmony Lodge No. 38 in Hillsboro, the Corinthian Lodge No. 82 in Pittsfield and the Doric Lodge No. 78 in Tilton. He served on many Grand Lodge Committees, including the Committee for the Restoration of the William Pitt Tavern, the Ritual Committee and the Committee for the Prevention of Drug and Alcohol Abuse Among Children. He served as organist in four lodges and occasionally played for others. He was a member of the York and Scottish Rites and received a Fifty Year Veterans' medal in 2001. He was also an honorary life member of the New Hampshire Police Square Club. He was a member of the United Baptist Church in Concord. Survivors include two sons, Karl Blake of Concord and David Blake of Ohio; a daughter, Martha Beck of Concord; two brothers, Richard Blake of Salem and Leonard Blake of Connecticut; two sisters, Beverly Burleigh of Hudson and Mildred Carta of Nashua; eight grandchildren; great-grandchildren; and nieces, nephews and cousins. His wife of 52 years, Rosamond (Urquhart) Blake, died in 1992. Calling hours will not be held. Affordable Funeral Cremation Services Inc. is in charge of the arrangements.

Wednesday, August 6, 2003

posted by kemibe at 9:15 AM

Sunday, August 15, 2004
I have some questions, dude
I've just spent a few days away from San Francisco for the first time since landing on that planet in February, and I have to admit I'm having some adjustment problems. Specifically, I'm a little nonplussed by the behavior of Earth people and their environment. So help me out...

Why do most people here seem to have a place to live? Why can I walk outdoors here without smelling Asian cooking? Why do shopping carts appear to be confined to your shopping centers? Why are there no sea lions about? Why are most of the people in your city parks awake and upright? Why is no one here trying to sell me a Central American plant while a cop writes a traffic ticket across the street? Why are so few roads here built on fifteen-degree inclines? Why are the flags here so boring? Why do so few of your roads have metal embedded in them? Why is visibility here greater than a mile? Why do people in this town limit themselves to a half-dozen languages? Why haven't I seen anyone protesting anything since noon? Why do the men here insist on standing so far apart? Why is there only one Starbucks here per city block? Why do none of the tall buildings here taper? Why are there fewer than two tourists here for every resident? Why do so many of you insist on showering regularly? Why don't your sidewalks come pre-stenciled with cryptic liberal propaganda? Why don't any passerby ask me if I happen to be carrying U.S. currency? Why do people here only hold conversations when others are present? Why does it get warmer here as the day goes on? Why are so few of your hotties pushing strollers?

And why haven't I heard the word BALCO in over ninety minutes?
posted by kemibe at 7:37 PM

Monday, August 16, 2004
Suspended animation
I remember the days when the pool of top-tier African – and especially Kenyan – distance runners was small enough so that keeping track of all of them was not difficult, even for those fans thrown by anything not expressed in straight English (i.e., all Americans). When I started following along in the mid-1980’s, there was Zak Barie, Simeon Kigen and Michael Musyoki on the roads, while in the latter part of that decade and the beginning of the next, Said Aouita, John Ngugi and a relative small handful of others claimed the track and turf; Henry Rono, though inactive by then, was still a prominent figure. This all changed in the 1990’s – I still remember when a “random” Kenyan named Philip Mosima ran 12:53 as a junior -- and today, if you scan the results of a race like the Weltklasse Zurich 5,000m, you’ll see a slew of virtual no-names hovering around 13:00 to 13:10 and banging out 8:15 ‘chases. Only the most ardent aficionados have a handle on things beyond a depth of around a half-dozen Kenyans in any event. Also, no one really cares anymore if you hail from that part of the world and can run a 2:08:00 marathon.

I view the explosion of positive doping tests among track (not field) athletes as a parallel phenomenon. At one time, it was easy to keep tabs on every athlete turning in “dirty urines,” and each one was treated as a bona fide scourge. At the Seoul Olympics, there was Ben Johnson, of course, no facile spokesman for his own cause, who wore the pariah label with uncanny skill for a long, long time. Throughout most of the 1990’s, positive tests involving marquee names were few and far enough in between to make each singularly newsworthy. More importantly, the relative dearth of top talent fingered for chemical chicanery helped propagate an aura of absurd denial in the mind of Johnny Trackfan, who really believed (because he wanted to, not because logic was whispering to him) that these caught athletes were the exception, and that cheating in track was hardly the rule. After all, we’re talking about runners here, not bloated linemen or ululating chuckers of metal objects.

The major drug casualties of the past ten years – Mary Slaney, Dennis Mitchell, Linford Christie, Dieter Baumann, Merlene Ottey – have been spaced far enough apart to allow for the illusion that performance drug use is not endemic to the sport. However, the coming to light of the BALCO scandal has heralded an unprecedented series of doping offenses, with almost too many American names to count falling domino-style; longtime suspect Regina Jacobs’ positive test has all but been lost in a somber shuffle that has included Kelli White, Jerome Young, Torri Edwards, Tim Montgomery and others. This has cast doubt not only on the future but on the past, with Olympic medals won in Sydney as well as 2003 Paris World Championship medals thrown into question if not stripped outright.

The truth is that followers of the sport have long claimed that such a housecleaning is exactly what is needed if the sport is to march on with any semblance of purity; given the introduction of testing honestly aimed at catching cheats, such an apocalyptic purging is a natural consequence of a sport long believed to be saturated at the top with drug use. There can be no other way. Nevertheless, watching the whole show unfold is a joyless process for one-time pollyannas and I-told-you-soers alike.
posted by kemibe at 10:37 AM

Tuesday, August 17, 2004
House arrest
(Warning: This is one of these really personal blog postings with content that only three people on the planet might find interesting. It isn’t nearly literary enough to compensate for its lack of broad-based appeal, so don’t expect to be entertained, edified or otherwise charmed.)

In 1978, my family moved all the way from the South End of Concord, N.H. (2004 population: about 42,000) to its very outskirts, a translocation of some eight miles. This was traumatic for me; I was about to enter third grade comfortable in my niche at Conant School, and now I'd have to adjust to a completely new peer group out in the sticks. Worse, I'd surely never, ever see any of my old friends again.

As it happened, I survived, and in fact found both the Eastman and Broken Ground elementary schools to my liking before re-connecting with my old playmates at Rundlett Junior High School in seventh grade. And looking back, it’s funny to think that even an eight-year-old would have had a problem moving from a very ordinary – and old – two-story duplex near downtown into the brand-new log cabin duplex my mother’s parents had commissioned a contractor to erect. (All told, my parents would rent living space from my maternal grandparents from 1973 through my grandfather’s death in 2003.) Built atop a pile of sand owing to the swampy nature of the nine acres my grandparents had purchased a quarter mile from the city boundary, that house would shepherd me through my pre-adolescent and teenage years and serve as a base of operations during times I returned to Concord after leaving the area for scholastic and other reasons. My grandfather furnished the property with a satellite dish sometime in the mid-1980’s when such things were state-of-the-art, lending an amusing “the-old-and-the-new” flavor to the gestalt.

The house, which I last graced just under a year ago, never seemed to age, perhaps because it is still, in fact, a young building, perhaps owing to its unique exterior walls. Initially it included a fireplace, but this eventually ate a layer of bricks and gave way to a more efficient if less quaint woodstove. My parents and sister claimed the two downstairs bedrooms while I had the only upstairs one, granting me, in my mind, something of an asylum from the rest of the household; the young have a permissive definition of an “isolating” distance. It was balls hot in the summer up there (until my parents hooked me up with an air conditioner, that is) and butt cold in the winter, but it was mine, and I used to sit up there and dip Copenhagen and record phone calls with girls right off the line on this fancy piss-on-the-FCC unit I got for Christmas one year.

I came home every summer during college – which I finished in 1992, several months before my maternal grandmother passed away – and then headed off to grad school. It was then that my mother rented out my room to a co-worker in need, leaving me with no true home base on the increasingly rare occasions I would wash up at the house that was now old enough to operate a motor vehicle in the state of New Hampshire. I’d come home from time to time and crash on the couch; still available were all of my favorite running routes from high school, when I’d taken up the activity. I think some of those jaunts through Canterbury and “Snap Town” and the westernmost reaches of Loudon (the only place I’ve seen a bear during a run, and it’s happened twice) and up and down the power lines on snowmobile trails will always be among my favorite all-time runs, even if I never run them again, because they mark the loci of my ascent toward athleticism. Memories are powerful in those woods: Only a few years ago I was running by a dilapidated farm house in Canterbury waiting for the nasty three-legged cur that lived there to give chase – until I realized that I’d last been chased by that dog in maybe 1988 and that it wasn’t likely to have survived into its twenties, as I had.

In 1997 I returned to Concord and moved back home for a spell. I stayed in my sister’s old room downstairs this time; my room upstairs had been slowly torn asunder by various forces and was no longer habitable. And there was no longer an air conditioner up there. Before long I got a puppy, and together we lay waste to my sister’s old room too. Then we got our own place.

I remained a Concord resident and visited my parents and grandfather often in the late 1990’s and early oughts. By this time my grandfather’s health was failing and the issue of what would become of the property with his passing was a tangible one. In the spring of 2002 I moved to Virginia, making trips back north every few months and of course always swinging by the homestead, sometimes spending a night or two there. Then, in the summer of 2003, my grandfather died, and the house ultimately fell into the sole possession of my parents.

My father has a 40-mile commute to work and it’s not the most pleasant, especially come winter. Maintaining a half-empty duplex home on a nine-acre property is not high on my folks’ list of recreational endeavors. And so, about a month ago, they made the decision to sell the house and move into a detached condo closer to the coast. In the current real-estate climate, that log cabin will command fair coin and, more importantly, sell in a trice.

I’m quite a bit further from New Hampshire than Virginia these days, and sufficiently preoccupied so as to guarantee I’ll never see the old house in Concord again while it’s still in the family. While I can accept this as part of the natural order of things, the fact that I’m not going to get to bid it a personal farewell engenders a sense of melancholia not entirely distinct from that I felt when I didn’t get to my grandfather’s hospice bedside in time.

I have a different home today; I’ve had quite a few of them. The crown jewel of them all, my nest, playground and meditation chamber, is, for my purposes, no more.

Take damned good care of it, whoever you are.
posted by kemibe at 5:23 AM

Wednesday, August 18, 2004
Don't touch that dial
One of the reasons I enjoy watching and following track and field is that it fails to reflect news from the world at large, especially at the Olympics, when everyone is in peak form and raring to put on chillingly powerful displays of physical and spiritual prowess. I watched an uncharacteristic amount of national television news coverage over the past three weeks and was reminded of why I generally don't. Paraded before me in a grimly busy rotation was a smorgasbord of unpalatable items: the Scott Peterson murder trial, the Kobe Bryant sexual assault circus, the killing of Lori Hacking by her husband in Utah, the grisly Deltona murders, Hurricane Charley, various not-untimely celebrity deaths, and pretty much anything arising in Iraq.

This is why I'm glad I can take refuge in the world of athletics, which just lately has featured a crippling array of drug positives both foreign and (mostly) domestic, the murder-suicide of former Olympic triple jumper Robert Howard and his neurosurgeon wife, the Kenteris-Thanou doping-test-dodging/motorcycle-accident-that-apparently-wasn't fiasco that shamed a nation, the withdrawal of 2000 Olympic Marathon Champion Gezahenge Abere of Ethiopia from this year's race, the seemingly likely withdrawal of two-time defending 10,000m champ Haile Gebrselassie from that event in these Games, the controversial removal of Geb's and Abere's compatriot and 2003 World 10,000m Champion Berhane Adere from the Athens women's 10,000m, the withdrawal (and subsequent retirement) of world champion mountain biker and 2000 Olympics silver medallist Filip Meirhaeghe of Belgium from the Games after a positive EPO test, rumors of a Paula Radcliffe calf strain, the crashing of triple Sydney gold medallist Leontien Zijlaard-van Moorsel of the Netherlands in Sunday's road race, and (though this isn't necessarily bad news) the thumping of the U.S. men's basketball squad by Puerto Rico. Puerto Rico? Is that even possible? Isn't that kind of like an American team being beaten by one from Vermont? Also, I'm starting to think EPO really does grow on trees in Belgium, or perhaps in the shit of large quadripeds, as occurs stateside with psilocybin mushrooms and, evidently, modafinil.
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Oh well. It's early yet -- plenty of time to turn things around, or more likely drive them straight into the frigging sun-baked Mediterranean ground. At least China, with 10 golds after only four days of competition, is on pace to exceed its stated 2004 goal of 20, so there's your feel-good story. And there's always the Olympic Trials to hearken back to; the photo below, courtesy of Alison Wade and fast-women.com, was snapped in the final three laps of what was probably the finest race I watched during the two days on which I was able to make it to Sacramento -- the women's 5,000m.

posted by kemibe at 6:48 AM