Running is Engelbert and The Young Generation

Engelbert Humperdinck
The Office of Engelbert Humperdinck
P.O. Box 16493
Beverly Hills, CA 90209

March 27th, 2009

Dear Engelbert Humperdinck,

You really are the King of Romance! Early this afternoon, I received an email from my better, freckled half in Texas, enigmatically titled “Don’t Miss It!” The only thing in the body of the e-mail was a link to Ticketmaster’s offerings for your highly anticipated June concert at Reno’s Silver Legacy Casino.

Gwynne and I are both big fans. We can’t wait for the show, to say nothing of our first dance to “I Believe” at our wedding. You couldn’t be more right when you say that “applause is the food of the artist.” But then I got to thinking–how much more fun would your trip to Reno be if we could spend it together? Wait, don’t answer! I’ll tell you! Oodles of fun! If you’re going to see the real Reno while you’re here, and have a really good time, you’re going to need someone whose steely nerves, ironic wit, and photographic memory have mapped every filthy, square inch of this town. My friend Neely is going to be out of town, though, so it looks like you’re stuck with me. Don’t worry–I know Reno pretty well, and, as your #1 fan, I’m going to show you one hell of a good time.

My faith in the basic good nature of human beings some days is only held aloft by the fact that a guy named Humperdinck with mutton chops the size of small continental landmasses glued to either side of his melon has managed to score as many babes as you have over the years. I think there really is a higher power in the universe. That higher power is, of course, the wine glass-shattering, corset-loosening potency of your robust three-and-a-half octave range. To use an analogy popular here in Reno, your man-bellows are to lounge singing what Gravedigger is to Monster Trucks.

After consulting the “All About Enge!” page on your official website to figure out what you might like to do while you’re here, I’ve come up with a brief itinerary for our afternoon and evening together in Reno. None of what’s below is set in stone, of course, but please do forward your suggested changes ASAP, as I’d like to head down to Kinko’s later this afternoon and print out smaller, laminated versions to hang around our necks while you’re here.

11:30 AM: The lumbering Humperdinck tour bus arrives as scheduled from Vegas. It parks in front of Frank’s house. (Frank is my ornery, geriatric next door neighbor who occasionally lets us borrow his rototiller when he’s feeling generous. He won’t mind and there’s plenty of room–I know, because the old man keeps his gigantic Airstream there, which runs off of baby seal fat and the broken dreams of progressivism).

11:45 AM: Humperdinck and I ride downtown to the Washoe County District Court Building, where I legally change my name to Engelbert Humperdinck.

12:30 PM: Humperdinck and Humperdinck go antiquing on South Virginia Street, which is fun except for the part where newly-minted H.k makes the other H. buy him entire set of ultra-rare Magic: The Gathering Beta series cards. Older H. can do nothing but acquiesce, begrudgingly breaks out his wallet, saying something like, “This isn’t what I signed up for.” Both H’s leave the antique mall bickering.

1:10 PM: I diplomatically buy Humperdinck Arby’s for lunch. Older H. pounds down a couple Big Montanas. Then he settles back in the plastic booth to rub his swollen abdomen with his fingers in a practiced, oily motion. I silently raise my eyebrows and spread my arms slightly in a maternal, Are you happy now? motion. Humperdinck, after a moment’s hesitation, nods.

1:30 PM-2:15 PM: Nap time in the grass at Idlewild Park under that freaky, enormous Native American head chainsaw sculpture.

2:15 PM: I wake a protesting Humperdinck up by cramming fistfuls of leaves into the open billows of his shirt, shrieking, “Humperbutt!! Humperbutt!”

2:30 PM: I promised my roommate that he’d get at least twenty minutes to pitch his small business idea to you–while he’s keeping it pretty much under wraps, I did see a sample “Schubert & Humperdinck, Ltd.” business card left casually on the coffee table a couple days ago.

3:00 PM-5:00 PM: Kayaking.

5:00 PM: Arby’s again.

5:30 PM-6:25 PM: In the waning hours before his scheduled performance at the Silver Legacy, Humperdinck is a guest lecturer for my summer session, English 102 class. Humperdinck, wearing tweeds and smelling strongly of scotch, gives a lecture entitled “New Master Keys to Personal and Financial Success: The Seven Highly Effective Habits of Engelbert Humperdinck.”

6:45 PM: Humperdinck greases down his sideburns with Crisco and performs as scheduled at the Legacy.

10:45 PM: Younger Humperdinck picks up Older Humperdinck in his Honda at the Silver Legacy’s loading dock. The latter is most of the way through a handle of Tanqueray, and demands to be “taken whoring” at the Mustang Ranch. A gentle, but insistent Younger Humperdinck pries the gin bottle from the Elder’s weathered, tanned hands, and silently replaces it with a tattered copy of the New Testament. Elder Humperdinck, instantly chastened, apologizes and asks if we can hit the Arby’s drive-thru on the way back to the house.

11:30 PM: Lights out. Older Humperdinck gets the sleeper sofa in the living room.

2:14 AM: Older Humperdinck awakes with cold rivulets of sweat running down his brow, the wet curtains of Arby’s roast beef and lukewarm gin churning angrily inside him. Humperdinck noisily makes use of the upstairs bathroom before collapsing into the bathtub, clawing at and dislodging the floral shower curtain before slipping, finally and thankfully, into a dreamless sleep.

Again, let me know what you think. I love you, Engelbert Humperdinck.

Sincerely,

Engelbert Humperdinck

By the way, anyone in Denver on April 9th should check out RunColo’s information on the Beyond the Epic Run screening, “a feature film documentary about a husband and wife who sold all their belongings to literally run around the world.” I’m not officially endorsing the film, because I haven’t seen it and I’m not sure what kind of political response I’d have to it, but hey–it seems like it’s at least worth watching.

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Days streaked: 6

Total Miles: 23.2

Today’s contribution to my impending tinnitus while running: The Swedish lounge stylings of Jens Lekman.

Running is the transcendental alchemy of steam, beaded perspiration, and tiny crotch towels

As the Gregorian calendar has abruptly rounded the corner into fall, the air here in Reno is taking on a sharper, acrid edge. Autumn’s brisk chill is a welcome change from the primordial, post-apocalyptic heat of summer in northern Nevada. However, it’s also made my daily mile-and-a-half bike ride to UNR’s campus feel like a trip into the freezer-burned bowels of Dante’s 14th century version of Hell (fortunately, I’ve yet to see a tree lining 12th street on the way to school spouting blood, but I imagine it’s only a matter of time. After all, I am in Reno).

I’ve got class at nine in the morning on Tuesdays and Thursdays, when the temperature hovers just under fifty degrees. It’s all downhill to campus. Vrroooom! I love the crap out of it. Here’s the thing: I tend to ride my bike a bit like I imagine a tequila-drunk, moderately well-trained lemur might (zipping up my hoodie with both hands while making sharp turns; fist-pumping to Judas Priest rattling my ‘phones while crossing state highways, eyelids fluttering in 80s Butt Rock rapture; not paying attention to oncoming traffic because I’m busily tonguing a masticated, gooey bit of bagel free from a molar; etc.). Because of the unsafe speeds, erratic swerving, deliberate aiming for puddles, and freezing tailwind, my ride has become downright cold recently. I feel like an early twentieth century polar explorer at the end of it: wild-eyed, hollow-cheeked, white crusty hoarfrost covering my beginnings of whiskers. I’ve had to layer long johns underneath my pants and dig out my extra-thick running gloves, both of which are drenched in nappy sweat by the time I roll into the office (full disclosure: yes, this arrangement forces me de-pants in my cubicle, hoping that my department head doesn’t come wandering in to get some paperwork to find me with my pants around my ankles, checking student e-mail at 8:45 on a Thursday morning).

Going back home at the end of the day blows even more ass. I have to deal with going uphill and Reno’s nigh-Biblical early evening wind, which is crazy and mighty enough in this town to conceivably make even a stiff-jawed, Twister-seasoned Bill Paxton head for the storm cellar. This one time, a recycling bin on Washington Street was lifted free off its curb by a merciless gust of gale-force Sierra winds and promptly broadsided Jens, my German roommate, in his grill while he was riding his bike, causing him to go endo and totally wreck his shit. The wind here does not goof around.

As you might imagine, when I get home after a day of maddening, arduous, satisfyingly brutal bicycle commuting, the last thing I’ve wanted to do is venture back out into the primal elements with a pair of running shoes on. Especially since it’s usually cocktail hour by the time I get back to the house.

So I have a confession: I’ve been racking up miles on the treadmill at UNR’s rec center in mid-afternoon between classes. Now, look. I could launch into a sophisticated, haughty ethnographic study of the UNR gym-going population (let’s just say gigantic drainpipe basketball shorts, tanning sprays, and kanji tattoos are popular). Or I could talk about wanting to vom all over my treadmill’s LCD display whenever Sarah Palin’s vacuous, alarmingly content-free “thoughts” are repeated ad infinitum on CNN. But really I just want to talk about how much I like running at the rec because it gives me an excuse to patronize the gym’s sauna after my run. (Important note before we preceded any further: Glam-Yam-Bear’s gonna kill me if I don’t gently inform the reader that it’s pronounced sOWnuh, not sAWnuh. Like the “ow!” when you stub a toe against the nightstand. And, as she’s approximately 130% Finn by blood, I trust her judgment). The UNR rec sauna is almost always empty. I can stretch out on the bench, close my eyes, and try not to fall asleep while the heat sinks deep into my skin and I breathe in the hyperborean, vaguely Coloradoan odor of the superheated cedar planks lining the tiny room.

The experiences of the long run and a long spell in the sauna probably have much in common psychologically speaking. They both ritually invoke the power of purgation, self-determination, and engage with problems of the will, alternately effacing and stroking the ego. I think both are ways of obliquely brushing up against humanity’s place in nature by reminding us of our ridiculous, animal bodies that do things that both delight and abhor us (take a good, close look at your dermis in that freaky jaundiced light in the sauna and you’ll see what I mean). Finns are, in fact, good at both. Type A, pseudo-masochistic people are attracted to both forms of recreation. They are, I think, ultimately solitary, even ascetic, pursuits that allow retreat and, by clogging our brains with delirium, serotonin, and metaphysical thought-ellipses, somehow make us feel as though there’s more to life than microwaving yet another Frito pie at the end of a workday while numbly awaiting the next episode of Grey’s Anatomy and balling up socks on the settee. I feel new all over every time I emerge from the sauna or wind down a run, or, better yet, do the former just after the latter.

But hey, you don’t have to take my word for it. Let’s consult the shibboleth of the Belfry, the incomparable Mountain Gazette. In “Confessions of a Sauna Junkie,” from issue #70, Jack Aley writes:

I am a self-confessed sauna junkie. Two or three (sometimes even more) times a week, I simply must fire my small cedar-lined room with the double-glazed window facing west (for natural evening light, of course) and endure the heat of hell. If I do miss just one sauna night, I get restless. If, for some (ungodly) reason, I miss two or three in a row, it’s cold turkey for the kid. I get cantankerous and more obnoxious than usual. My joints begin to freeze up; my eyeballs’ humour starts to congeal and my head turns to cardboard. Life ebbs out of me. I start barking at my Constant Companion and start kicking the kids and the cats, whichever get in my way. The only cure is a couple of hours in the box… undergoing that mysterious, sweat-induced metamorphosis of soma and psyche. When I emerge from the hellish rite, all squeaky clean and beaitified, I’m fit to live with again. The kids and the cats can relax for a couple days until the saunatropic urges begin building in me again. The sauna is my pot, my boob tube, and the monkey on my back.

Like many restless Americans of my generation, I lived in Colorado for a while after my futile schooling and took to the mountains whenever I could. It was there, in the quasi-Bavarian movie set of Vail (of all places!) where I first ventured into a sauna. It wasn’t real, of course. Nothing in Vail (especially the orange Saab police cars and the mustachioed Marlboro men who went with them) seemed real . . .

That winter, I gleaned a glimmer of understanding about the nature of the process I was learning to endure so happily in the sauna. I went so far as to reason the process had some relationship to literature. I was teaching a high school English course at the time in which I used the nature of chemical bonding as a tool for interpreting drama. The spiel went something like this: The more energy released in a chemical reaction—that is, the more explosive it is—the firmer the resulting bond of elements; ergo, the more intense the literary experience, the more powerful and sublime the resolution of it. Sophomoric, perhaps, But the kids seemed to dig it, and I figured I had to do something, someday, with a double-major in pre-med and English. God, I even reduced King Lear to a case study in inorganic chemistry: “See kids, Lear loses both his clothes and his sanity on the raging heath (the crucible, of course) before Shakespeare permits him a serene death. In contrast, Old Prufrock is unredeemed and unrewarded because Eliot makes of ‘Do I dare disturb the universe’ a rhetorical question.” I understood this stuff intellectually, I think. But it was not until the initial saunas that the paradoxical curves of extreme experiences compelled me emotionally. All this suffering for redemption crap had something to it. At one sublime extreme, there was Lear on his heath. At the ridiculous other extreme, there was Aley in the sauna. Important things were becoming clear… if not particularly reassuring.”

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Most recent run and atmospheric conditions: 4 miles at Lombardi in extreme, weird, indoor humidity.

Total Mileage to Date: 555

Days remaining to Denver: 17

Oh, and I also have documentary evidence of what I can only assume is the Swedish Bikini Team utilizing a sauna, mostly for the continuing edification of Will Weston: