Vigilantism looks better and better every day

I'll try to describe an event that took place on Saturday without littering it with too many editorial comments en route. That way, I can pack almost all of my unrestrained hate into a few dismal paragraphs at the end, where all of you who read that far will be punished for your morbid fascination with the words of someone who fantasizes about depositing all but nine of you into massive porta-john and launching it toward the moon, using powerful binoculars to ensure seeing the septic projectile smash into the surface of our only natural satellite with lethal force amid a silent but awe-inspiring explosion of shit, plastic, bungwipe, blue chemical, and -- count on it -- a few stray cell phones.

I left home at about 11:20 to watch the Jerry Quiller Classic, the first of two home meets the University of Colorado hosts every spring. Because C.U. (and it really should be "U.-Col," in the spirit of "U.-Conn," since nobody asked) doesn't enter its best runners and no good teams show up -- which understandable because the college indoor track season officially ended just a week ago and mid-March rarely presents good racing conditions -- this would be an easy one to pass on watching. But a lot of my friends were entered, it was actually nice out, and Rosie likes to be out from under a roof and moving around as much as possible. So a cheerful obligation this became.

Although Potts Field is only a mile away on foot and I run past the track early in my runs (meaning, near the beginning the middle or the end) at least once or twice a week, I decided to drive over in jogging garb and do a run at noon, after the 1,500-meter races and well before the other distance events. (When one usually considers 5 miles to be a full day's work, one finds the challenge of "squeezing in" runs laughably easy.)

As is often the case on somewhat ill-fated adventures, this one started off on a series of positive notes, which I believe amounts to a positive melody or at least an optimistic arpeggio sound. (Just as often, people who run into problems describe everything in the previous hour as some kind of omen. Retrospective analysis is great because anything you think might be correct, you can declare true by incontestable fiat.) We did the first part of this on the Skunk Creek Path east of the track, then merging onto the Boulder Creek Path and heading under Arapahoe Ave and the Foothills Parkway. We jogged along with some people who had just raced and some others who were going to. We met John and Linus, one of whom is a dog named after a scientist and the other a chiropractor with a 3:42 1,500-meter best. The day was cloudless and almost breeze-free and the midday sun was warming the air quickly.

The city recently put a new footbridge across Boulder Creek about a tenth of a mile east of 30th Street. To approach from the northern side, you have to cut through a parking lot off Marine Street that seems to be a repository for buses owned by the University of Colorado University. (I realize that these arcane details are no more than a distraction to most of you, but I a unmoved by your collective plight, and I'm only doing this to keep the details better organized in my own mind.) Along the way, there is a sandy trail running along the north side of the creek for maybe 200 meters.

When Rosie and I started along this strip, two unrestrained pit bulls shot into view from some bushes on the creek side of the path. Their presumed owner was shambling along in their wake and making dumb bleating sounds intended as commands, a leash balled up in each claw, yet another freewheeling cock-splotch playing the "I know it's illegal to let them run free in this spot, but I'll roll the dice 'cause no one's really gonna come this way in the next five minutes" game. (OK, so much for not editorializing on the fly.)

The owner, a hominid life form about the size of a typical human adult male and without a doubt a victim of pernicious aneuploidy, was screaming at his dogs before they even get to Rosie, which I took as a bad sign. There was no pretense here of "Ah, she woan' hurt im," even the stupid kind that shitbrained people who have no idea what their dogs are in fact capable of usually offer in the hope this turns out to be right. My mind processed these things as best as it could as I started to guide Rosie, obviously on a leash and also with a Gentle Leader around her snout, and me through the gauntlet. I had already decided at this early stage that it would be gratifying to take a newly sharpened lance and drive it through the owner's temple with the sort of unlikely force even people in comic books in the throes of PCP cannot summon. Then, using the same unlikely Kill Bill level of triumphant vigor, I would fling the corpse with a powerful flick of my shoulder and lat muscles into the creek, where it would bob toward the local hospital and beyond it the Humane Society of Boulder Valley. All I wanted in that instant in my 50th year on the planet was to punish someone for fucking up all I really wanted out of this day, which was to run with my dog and watch people run in circles. I guess it's good I was not carrying a newly sharpened javelin, though I probably would have chosen a more benign course of action had I been.

One of the two dogs cut in and head-butted Rosie, who let out an aggrieved whelp, while I capered around and hollered in a way I never would have dared do had only my own perceived well-being been at stake. I had already determined that these dogs didn't mean real business or else shit would have already been far uglier, but I still reckoned things could get plenty bad even with only mildly malevolent intentions in the mix. As if to affirm this, the other dog, who looked like a very muscular pile of neopolitan ice cream, darted in noisily and delivered a hip check to Rosie. This time, Rosie, although clearly distressed, was ready and lunged back, leading with teeth and a howl. The pit bulls could have torn her apart, but a Doberman is not a wise choice of animals to fuck with, either.

One interesting aspect of confrontations between dogs whose owners are nearby is that the owners have almost little to no contact. Usually, both parties are trying to intercede on the fracas and are yelling either at their own dog(s) or the responsible dog(s). In this case, the other guy, to his dubious credit, was, by all appearances, as pissed off at his dogs as I was. He yelled their names, neither of which I remember, and they paid him no mind, but seemed more intent on driving us away than attacking us per se. They were basically romping around us in slowly widening circles while I continued trying to make progress west along the path, toward the bridge that was about 100 meters away around a gentle bend.

I was trying not to trip over the leash or Rosie herself while looking back over my shoulder to see if the overall threat was receding. I saw the guy produce a small chunk of wood and fling it at one of the dogs, whose fault it clearly was that they didn't have leashes on and were no good at responding to voice commands. I was not at all surprised to hear a deep Dixie accent in the guy's shouts. While the majority of Southerners I have met don't do stupid-ass shit of this sort, when people have already identified themselves as being doers of this sort of stupid shit, they stand an extremely high chance of being from the South, which is also where a startlingly high fraction of rescue dogs come from, another indicator than people from Jesusland have a difficult time doing anything right. But to tell the whole truth, has this guy been an outlier, I wouldn't have gotten as upset as I did. It's part of an unchecked pattern, and the beaming well-to-do yuppies around here are just as negligent as any out-group of my choosing, even if I am supposed to pretend otherwise.

A few seconds later, maybe 45 seconds at most since the whole episode started, it was plain that the pit bulls had lost interest in us, as they were busy running back toward the creek, the fact that they were still heedless of their owner's yelling no longer our concern. We had gotten away. I let out a few adrenaline-powered curses and florid suggestions about how to best master the intricacies of leashing a dog, and after that the only sign anything had even happened was my own elevated heart rate (elevated beyond whatever 7:30 a mile gets me to already, that is) and sputtering of misanthropic miseries. Rosie, bless her sweet face, acted as though nothing unusual had happened, and was already scanning the scene in front of us for squirrels and other alluring fauna.

I may not support violence as perpetrated by the state, but when I read about citizens or citizen mobs targeting hopelessly unruly shitheads like this, it is hard not to experience a measure of gratification. This is admittedly stupid. I'm sure I'm not the only one who revels in florid death-fantasies in the heat of various moments; those who channel this productively wind up directing movies like Pulp Fiction or being comics from the Boston area named Doug Stanhope or Bill Burr. And like most people, when I chill out and become more contemplative, I roll back my background blood-lust accordingly.

But damn, we are a fucking loutish pack of animals. The murder of 49 people in New Zealand the other day was a terrible event from any angle, but worse was the collective reaction of people in the good old U.S. of A. No one really gave a shit or will the next time, whether it's Muslims in a Christchurch mosque (a weird phrase, that) or conservative Christians in a clapboard church in Texas or teenagers cowering under the bleachers in a gymnasium. Instead, we were treated to the spectacle of Chelsea Clinton -- whom I actually like but who, given her profile, should maybe consider not weighing in on every fucking public matter unless she wants to occasionally look dumb and spend half her life parrying the opprobrium of the imbecile class -- being blamed for the shooting by a small coterie of agitated college students in New York City. This was owed to Ms. Clinton chiding a Muslim congresswoman for recently making anti-Jewish statements (statements that were arguably not anti-Jewish at all, but that's another issue). But the real clincher was people -- including some in the media -- seizing on this to foment the idea that Clinton was being widely blamed for the shooting, when in fact only one or two assholes actually did so.

The footage of interviewees on the ground in New Zealand, even those who had not witnessed the event first-hand or lost any friends in the violence, threw the cultural differences between that nation and this one into a bright and ugly light. To a one, these people were horrified. Kiwis, and most others in "advanced" countries around the globe, are essentially virgins when it comes to the kind of bloody shit that erupts here with such regularity that even the most innately sensitive Americans have become inured to it to varying degrees. This choleric noise-machine of a republic stands zero chance of returning to such levels of complacency and innocence.

We respond to horrors with smarm and flame-wars. I'm obviously not a voice for much of anything other than reluctantly tempered cynicism. But maybe, in being blase', we have the right idea. Might as well just accept without getting too loud about it that a significant fraction of human beings just want to see lives end, and a few of them are sufficiently detached from the consequences to carry out ghastly-ass plans. Eventually, this will cause loss of human life of a magnitude not even approached by the combined death tolls of all of the world's previous official and unofficial wars.

I know it seems like I'm always pissed off about something, but that's not true. Normally, I exist in a state of bemused contempt, grateful to be free of the burden of worrying about my own death yet feeling unaccountably guilty, as if others are missing out by not devaluing themselves to the point where they imagine driving their ugly heads into a concrete surface hard enough to make both explode. Instead, I just have a preference for writing about things that make me angry. If something even remotely upsetting happens and it has anything to do with running, I'm sure to write about it here in needless detail. Since pretty much everyone not living in a vacuum experiences something worthy of getting outraged about at least a couple times a week, I can live a comparatively quiet life and still never run out of negativity fodder.

I mean, I'm not going to take the easy route and drone on here in a sunshine-and-rainbows way about all of the furtive yet amazing blowjobs I've gotten from some of the local housewives just since Christmas or all the things I say that make me giggle after I've smoked enough weed to set off the fire alarms in the school up the street and am not sure which hole in myself to stuff a bag of Sour Patch Kids in, one by acidic one. That prattle invariably comes across as boastful, and as much as some people may cringe at my carefree references to the termination of superfluous human life, no one likes a braggart. Above all, I enjoy the very act of ranting, of trying to summon the most caustic, hateful, yet somehow entertaining language imaginable without the whole screed collapsing under the weight of its inevitable cliches. I rarely if ever succeed, leading to the maintenance of a convenient reservoir of resentment and ill will.

On balance, it was, despite the apocalyptic language of the preceding passages, a fine weekend. Two of the people I work with ran great races, a couple of others nailed vital workouts, and a number of my Run Boulder AC mates turned in strong efforts at the aforementioned Jerry Quiller meet. If you've been around running for long enough, you know that the chances of even half of a randomly selected group of experienced competitors notching unusually good races or workouts in the same short time frame is actually very low.

Rosie and I had a superb Sunday. We participated in a Saint Patrick's Day Puppy Parade hosted by the Humane Society of Boulder Valley, Rosie's last stop on the way to her permanent home last June, and then we put in about eight and a half unhurried miles that included a stop at the nearest dog park, where Rosie took her first mini-swim of the year and got along famously with some literal young pups despite the travails of the day before.

Parents must feel an especially intense love for their sleeping kids after sports contests and mass social events, because the now-slumbering Rosie looks especially dear after a very complete day of parade-watching, running, swimming, and dog-park romping.

As soon as I get some repairs done on my car, work I could probably continue putting off for as long as I can justify zipping around on almost bald tires, I am heading off on an extended road trip. I'm probably not headed your way, so don't break out the guns or the gift baskets just yet.