Those dutifully following the "It's Thanksgiving, ergo I'm grateful" script should step aside and give hollowed-out human husks celebrating sobriety anniversaries this week center stage

For those of us with low and fixed expectations, genuine gratitude is practically indistinguishable from relief

I went to watch a “turkey trot” 5K this morning about two miles from home, the same race I went to watch last Thanksgiving. Like last year, I put Rosie in the car on a sunny and appropriately chilly but windless morning, drove for ten minutes on preternaturally deserted streets, and parked in a lot just north of where most others attending this gathering had parked.

The 5K takes place entirely within a sizable complex of nearly identical office buildings, with these situated in part of town with no residential structures other than a few tents surrounded by spent bottles of liquor and empty potato-chip bags, dreary reminders of what some people’s Thanksgivings—and winters—will bring. So, apart from runners and spectators, the area was deserted even for a weekday holiday.

Like last year, I went to watch this event—which also included a 1K kids’ run—not because I cared to watch people compete, or to attempt to stoke my own competitive fires. I go to these things, and occasionally to other places where distance runners convene in disproportionate numbers, to convince myself that most people who actually attend these gatherings are pretty much the same as ever. That is, despite the entire fitness industry having been hijacked by liars, cheaters, imbeciles of privilege, whiners, cowards, self-anointed shemales, resentful self-hating harridans—and notwithstanding the thousands of social-media stank-jockeys and superfluous podcasters who thanks to depravities both patent and inscrutable back and even suck up to the members of this special-needs militia—I like to confirm that things feel basically the same as they did decades ago. Even in Boulder, Colorado, home to some of the most arrogantly misinformed and misbred people of means in the United States and possibly the world—although the faces of many Europeans, from Ireland all the way to Turkey, appear to have been widely ravaged by generations of over-the-top sibling incest, especially Laplanders.

Like last year, this is exactly what I discovered. I probably saw many of the same faces, but if not, I saw the same biological avatars signifying the same amusing things. At every no-stakes road race in a running-heavy town, at least one group of fastish dudes—not elites, but close—shows up to do a training run while the race is in progress, some of them watching girlfriends or would-be girlfriends (or boyfriends) and others secretly wishing they had entered because they might have been able to win. I saw six or eight other people alone except for their dogs. I saw men and women running with preteen boys and girls who were obviously their kids in various permutations.

I saw an extreme case of an attractive and apparently voracious ass devouring a set of blue bunhuggers on someone near the front of the women’s field near the three-mile mark; last year, the most obvious instance of this transpired with a set of red or maroon bunhuggers, also on a woman and also somewhat near the front of the pack. I can ignore a lot of distractions while running, but I don’t see how anyone can move at all with a garment fused to every pore on her (or his) perineum.

I saw people announcing they were from out of town cracking nervous jokes about the altitude. Rosie was greeted by multiple people walking or jogging alone who looked like they should have brought dogs, but had not.

I saw people having fun. This is contagious, even if you don’t do anything with the cheerful energy you absorb except go home and wait for it to slowly evaporate.

There was also a practical element to getting out there when I did. The weather was supposed to turn crappy late in the afternoon, so it made sense for me to do a run in the morning. Rosie gets fired up around crowds of people yelling, so she was pulling me along with vigor belying her age for most of the 30 or so minutes we spent in the office park. But it wasn’t that bad at 4 p.m., so I did another easy half-hour in my neighborhood.

Last year, 629 people completed the 5K, with 63 of them breaking 20 minutes and 47 averaging better than six minutes per mile. I was pleased to note that his year, the field grew by 16 percent to 730 finishers, although only 60 cracked 20 minutes and only 38 dipped under 6:00 pace. Lee Troop does meticulous and yeoman work staging his road and track events, and like last year—actually, like always—he seemed to be enjoying the stress inherent in his own recognition that a volunteer might screw up and direct runners the wrong way, or that some badly lost patriarch from Ohio would choose that moment to direct the family RV into the Flatirons Office Park.

Troopy is among the 10 percent of the people currently working in the industry who deserves to keep his job. I know many and probably most of the others in that ever-shrinking demographic, whereas most of the disposable degenerates who far outnumber the Troopys—for all their noises about community and such—are dopey trail runners who keep to themselves, with their autofellatio-heavy wankfests thankfully situated far off in the woods where no one can see, hear, or smell them.

Yesterday’s upbeat acknowledgement of having gone seven years without drinking was an argument that runs somewhat afoul of what groups like Alcoholics Anonymous preach, which is that anyone who fails to maintain an appropriately spiritual condition is almost certain to drink again. That is, abstinence without real hope is doomed to at some point fail. I don’t believe that idea. I wouldn’t recommend the “hopeless” path if a different one is available, but it’s possible to a embrace what amounts to a defensive posture. The more clear-headed I am, the less likely I am to fall for someone else’s malignant scheme, be hospitalized, etc.

I should emphasize that while it’s true that I am bothering to stay alive for one reason, that doesn’t mean I’m anxious for that reason to disappear so I can get on with permanently terminating new sensory input and all resulting thoughts. I actually enjoy most of my days, in large part not in spite of being nihilistic about the future but because of it. Rosie makes everything more interesting. For almost the first two years I had her, I was very busy working, or at least busy earning money by typing words while sitting or lying in bed. Rosie was by my side for all of that. She’s taken almost every major or minor road trip I’ve taken in the five and a half years she’s lived with me. She is easily amused. I can’t believe I wound up with a dog this special.

When she’s gone—and I hope it’s a while before that happens—the rest of it does too. I don’t like anything about the society that has been erected and am reluctant to serve it in any capacity even if that means barely scraping by. Anything I can do to divorce myself forever from the pathology of the impressively enfeebled American collective consciousness is a wise move.

When I went to the 5K last Thanksgiving, I wondered if I might wind up running it this year. That was one thing that was different about today, as I had no such notions of possibly entering next year’s version or any other running event. But I also remember thinking last year that I doubted I’d even be in Boulder by late 2023. I thought I would be out of money by now and didn’t see myself doing anything to fix that because I didn’t see any value in purchasing time in the world among so many ostentatiously useless human creatures, from the religiously intoxicated (the Wokish, Christians, Zionists, Muslims, and Buddhists, with all of these groups inimical toward one another but united in grandiose, childish delusions and a desire to violate other people's assholes somehow) to the secularly depraved (Wall Street, the media, the White House, U.S. Congress, the intel community, the entire public-”health” complex, and much, much more).

In late 2019, I was firming up plans to travel to England for the first time in late 2020. I’ve actually never been very far off the North American mainland. Although I kind of wish I had sneaked that in pre-”pandemic” since that trip will never happen now, I’m not sure it matters. People are the same gullible tools the world over, and someone should probably take a wrecking ball to Buckingham Palace, Windsor Castle. and the rest of the stone-heaps erected for the benefit a long line of retarded-looking clowns in crowns, many of whom obviously bore children by first-degree relatives. And definitely to Scotland Yard. Any nation that directly gave rise to the one I live in is automatically suspect, and there is no applicable statute of limitations. On the other hand, without the existence of Britain, I wouldn’t have more than four songs to listen to.

My perspective slowly deteriorated between around April 2020 and the fall of 2021, when the mRNA shots were out, clearly not working, clearly causing side effects. This was after a year and a half of contrived racial strife, chicks with dicks popping up in the gamut female sports at every level, increasing censorship, and an obvious monopolization of the public conversation by liars and screeching waterheads. An IQ of about 80 and a yen for anti-white, pro-obesity diatribes suddenly became highly coveted assets.

It was around this time that I realized that a fair number of people I had credited with being somewhat discerning were in fact just retards as well. Once people who know nothing about microbiology or statistics started arguing with me in ways indistinguishable from the low-grade Bible-bopping swamp-bumpkins defend the idea of a 10,000-year-old cosmos, I realized it was all lost. I was better off just resigning myself to the world being what it is—a home to eight billion mostly confused, easily misled, and breeding-distracted apes—and doing my best to stay amused and out of trouble until I could grant myself permission to leave.

Nothing has changed since. I am grateful, or maybe just relieved, that my own attitude means I don’t have to be afraid of the same things “normal” people do. I’ve never been interested in impressing human beings at scale, simply because the things most humans are impressed by are things I find objectively repugnant. Just the television programs most people get hooked on make me embarrassed to be a member of the same species as the organisms transfixed by such garbage.

I haven’t been sick or injured in a solid four years. If I had covid, I was unaware of it. If I do wind up getting it, I won’t care because I’m not a big sack of pussy who trembles in fear of the sniffles, and I’m also not a dupe scampering off to get injected with thrombogenic and carcinogenic substances. I guess I’m just lucky that way. Whatever the case, it’s a big deal because I like to run.

And I really do enjoy the activity of running itself. I must, because I make time for it every day, sometimes twice, yet am not strictly reliant on it as I’m known to take a few days off a year owing to weather or very occasional bona fide lassitude. I don’t love it enough to imagine looking forward to it for much longer, but I love it enough to know I have something to do besides play with my keyboards. If it helps keep me healthy, great. It’s just as easy to stop your heart when you have a VO2 max of 70 mg O2/ml/min as it when you’re dismally out of shape.

I’m grateful I was born no later in history than I was. In fact, I wish I had been born maybe 30 years earlier so that I could have lived a normal lifespan and still croaked before “the pandemic,” Wokism, and the capture of too many minds—weaker, more dilapidated ones than I ever knew in too many cases—in the heads of people too close to me by malevolent actors. I have no desire at all to know what life will look like in ten years, and I am deeply relieved that I won’t be joining my forever-single or widowed Gen X peers in senescence, incontinence, and deepening, crushing loneliness.

I’m grateful I had parents who actively and passively taught me the value of reading and supported whatever I was interested in as a child, and my interests often included some weird things for a kid my age. I say “had,” but they’re still around and have been married for over 54 years. In short, I’m glad neither of them ever blew excessive amounts of smoke up my ass. Well, maybe my mom did, but that’s a big part of a mother’s job.

I’m relieved not to be alone in the reasons for my angst, even if my similar-minded friends see more reason than I do to try to adapt to the refitted-and-beshitted rules of being a good citizen, which have expanded to include “Anyone who calls for a cease-fire is an asshole.” No, anyone who watches cable news or reads The New York Times and somehow believes their ears and eyes is the uncontested asshole, and almost no one who wasn’t already aware of this years ago seems to accept this reality. One result is being routinely peppered with emails and comments by adults making as much sense about relatively complex as four-year-olds and being even more peevishly overconfident in their erroneous claims and conclusions.

Finally, I’m grateful I can perceive other people’s lives as incredibly meaningful, and appreciate their determination to overcome obstacles despite no longer attaching no stable meaning to my own existence. I believe that it’s possible to evince humanity toward at least a few others while sparing none for myself. I’ve had it with pretending I care to go along with the new requirements for being a “good citizen.” But with that comes a certain janky, restive freedom: There is no need to even seek a lasting niche in a society this pointless, moribund, and degraded for my purposes.

I’m just glad there’s no heaven or hell. These would be indistinguishable to me—just never-ending reruns of crap I never wanted to see in a normal realm, let along a sacred or superheated one. I desire an “afterlife” about as much as a normal person desires a case after-herpes.

Hope I didn’t blacken anyone’s Friday! Happy shopping.