Running is urnnommmmff

The best–VERY best–part about having an extended family is that, very occasionally, members of it remember that you’re near-broke and send you packages of blueberry pomegranate trail mix crunch via post.

The kind that costs more than a Land Rover and comes in a package the size of a former Soviet republic.

I’ma eat until I frow up.

Running is driving yourself birdshit crazy over the perfectly engineered mixtape: #13

Mix #13: Cubic Feet Per Second

Having left the hallowed, hushed halls of academia (for the time being) and moved to a climate where hot, moist air curls on top of the City of Austin everyday around 2:30 PM like an enormous, radioactive, soaking wet housecat, I’ve spent the last couple of weeks wondering if I’m getting dumber. I can practically feel the lack of annotated bibliography assignments–and the blowtorch of the Texan summer sun–sucking all the smarts right out of me. Or maybe I’m entering some kind of halcyon Cameron 2.0 era, where I emerge from my desert cocoon of bad animal puns and intellectual fakery to grow mutton chops, take up bonsai pruning, and let Zen koans flutter from my lips like autumn leaves.

As I’m currently unemployed (an advanced humanities degree does not a job make, my friends), I’ve been spending my time watching a lot of PBS and getting back into running. And listening to more dancepop and mid-career Springsteen (thanks, Gwynne!) than is probably healthy. And I’ve rediscovered one of the real joys of putting on a pair of trainers and heading out the door: unearthing trails and weird cultural landmarks in a new city. A couple days ago, I got lost in Zilker Park and ended up near the back entrance to Barton Springs pool. AKA the Park’s seamy wet underbelly where I witnessed three different drum circles taking place surreptitiously in the bushes, and almost ran over a crusty punk trainhopper who’d passed out while taking a dump in what looked to be a cluster of poison oak.

I’m mulling over the idea of signing up for the San Antonio Rock ‘n Roll Marathon in November. Even though it seems depressingly corporate and I’m skeptical about the quality of the “rock ‘n roll” that’s going to be served up every mile on the course. I’m picturing lots of white-guy-in-fedora-Dad-rock blues bands and mangled Skynard covers. I’m also increasingly skittish about leaving Austin city limits (zing), fearing the red-state wilderness of Texas-at-large. I’m hesitant to go anywhere outside the safe boundaries of the city, except down to San Marcos to eat yogurt out of Gwynne’s fridge without her knowing about it, or try (unsuccessfully) to nap on her tiny, tiny, tiny couch with my lumbering, man-child frame.

1 / The Hold Steady – Atlantic City (Springsteen cover)
2 / Ghostland Observatory – Sad Sad City (One of Austin’s finer exports, even if their frontman, Aaron, looks too much like an extra from Smoke Signals. Boy sure can swivel those skinny hips, though.)
3 / Ratatat – Wildcat (the song to which all of my future children will be conceived)
4 / The Knife – We Share Our Mother’s Health
5 / DJ Kaos – Love The Night Away (Tiedie Mix) (Perfect poolside. Or, as the typically bombastic Pitchfork notes: “The bongos are pure Balearic disco, and the gruff, assertive, and sincere vocals firmly in the tradition of Italo classics. But the end result is a passionate dancefloor slow burn of intense beauty, an incomparable summer soundtrack.”)
6 / Memory Cassette – Asleep At A Party
7 / Handsome Furs – All We Want, Baby, Is Everything (There is no more direct path to my heart, I think, than the dark, petrol-choked, ice-paved road of Wolf Parade side projects. From this year’s excellent Face Control. And, as Wikipedia reminds us, “The inspiration behind Face Control involves a peculiar aspect of club culture they observed while on tour in Eastern Europe: if party goers wish to reserve a table at a bar in Moscow, they must pay large sums of money through PayPal or with cash; however, their seat is still not guaranteed – bouncers have the authority to turn reserved patrons away from the bar based solely on appearance, which has been coined ‘face control.’”)
8 / Handsome Furs – Radio Kalininbrad (God, this one too–somehow these epic, swirling, shrieking layers reach that pure vein of nostalgic sonic warmness that previously only My Bloody Valentine, The Radio Dept., Slowdive, or somehow stumbling across an episode of The Wonder Years on cable late at night could hit.) <via Winnie Cooper, duh>
9 / Sonic Youth – Tom Violence
10 / Robots in Disguise – The Sex Has Made Me Stupid
11 / Portland Cello Project f. Laura Gibson – Hands in Pockets (cooldown)

Running is a latte problems

Thursday, April 9th, 2009

Dear Caffeine,

Ours was a long and torrid affair. As we go our separate ways, my heart will still (literally) ache from our final months together. The ink stains of memory are darkest when they are freshest. I will find it hard to shake the fetters of remembrances of our terrible last days. My increasingly whiny dependence on you. My tempestuous bouts of man-child irritability after spending my Wednesday mornings downing two whole pots of coffee. It was fine while the high lasted. I flitted effortlessly as a hummingbird between grading, research, Peggle, and fist-pumping triumphantly at my computer to the latest venom heaped upon James Wood by the judicious pen of Edmond Caldwell. The inevitable crash in the early afternoon, as I would twitch bodily in a kind of tarantella in my socks and boxer briefs on the couch. I’d be wrapped up in crippling dread, too wired to nap, and too tired to do anything but further my love-hate relationship with Suze Orman, the television’s volume level dialed down almost to mute.

With the passing of time, though, these memories will grow dusty and faded, like the furniture in the forgotten dens of our grandparents, and I will be left with sunnier echoes of our time together. Do you remember the halcyon days of my freshman year of college, when we subsisted purely on a diet of six Mountain Dews a day, Robert Smith’s voice, and Top Ramen? I was as whip-thin and jittery as a greyhound on a crash diet. My diastolic pressure and insulin levels are both pleased that we moved through that difficult phase, but I remember it now as though it were a daguerreotype of a field of daisies, hung softly and sweet in the hallway of my mind. I remember, too, the night in eighth grade when my friend Dan M. decided on a dare to shovel an entire package of Pixie Sticks into a 20-ounce bottle of Surge!!, then poured it down the hatch. Dan spent the rest of the night Greco-Roman wrestling his dog, a 125-pound lab mix, to “Master of Puppets.” The dog loved it.

Part of the problem is that I’ve also grown to detest, with all the fire of my loins, people who make jokes about “not being a morning person,” or who have bumper stickers about coffee on their Volvos. You know who I’m talking about. These people generally read Ziggy and wear big sunglasses over their normal glasses when they drive.

Caffeine, don’t cry. It’s ok. We’re saying goodbye for good. You can still come by my crib on weekends to borrow my Battlestar Season 3 box set. Actually, I’ve switched from coffee to green tea the in past few days after our break-up, and so far that seems to be going okay. I’m concerned that entirely giving up caffeine will raise my eventual risk for dementia. I’m terrified I’ll end up “cracked,” as the English say, pottering about the garden in my tweeds, mistaking laurel bushes for my grandchildren. I’m hoping that the switch to green tea–which Japanese television tells me will also help me find friends on public transportation–will help offset my eventual health risks. Plus with its antioxidants and the fact that it’s au courant to carry a bottle of the stuff around urban apartments that have lots of stainless steel accents and exposed brickwork, I want in on a cut of the tea action. Tea might be the best thing since the eucharist was invented. I don’t know. But I want to find out.

I also grew disenchanted with the fact that you’re one of the worst goddamn commodity crops in the world, both in terms of global environmental sustainability and social justice. And, while I could’ve continued to buy fair trade and continued my nerve-splintering life of insomnia, dry mouth, and cuspid staining, it just wasn’t worth it in the end. These nights, I sleep like a parakeet with a black velvet curtain over its cage.

Yours,
C. Turner

P.S. I’m going to a pie party tonight, and you’re not invited. Yeah, that’s right. A pie party. As in a party where everyone sits down and eats pie and uses other Anglicisms, like “oi, this is sich a loverly pie, innit?” Mincemeat and black pudding may or may not be involved. (The number of Dickensians in my graduate program has waned in recent years.)

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Days streaked: 18

Total Miles: 68.1

Today’s running mixxx: The Acorn and The Magnetic Fields.

Running is a Roman Holiday

Herrrro long-patient tulips! A little over twenty-four hours ago, I shook the dust from my sandals and emerged like a bespectacled naked mole rat into the bright, painful sunlight of reality. Yes, chiles, my fetters are sprung! My face is towards the February sun and my hair is being playfully ruffled by the coy childfingers of an unexpected spring wind. The long, hibernatory exile of preparing for, and taking, my comprehensive exams came to a horrific, nerve-flaying close yesterday. I’d rather get gut-stabbed in downtown Reno’s post office than take another comps exam: an eight-hour orgy of vacuous academic posturing, run-on sentences, and impoverished exegesis of a number of books involving ape-men and Royal Bengal Tigers with British accents.

But I’m emancipated! Free to do whatever I want, whenever I want, to whomever I want, all of the time, everywhere, forever and ever! I’m going to watch Braveheart on VHS! I’m going to follow my stoic German roommate/landlord, Jens, around the house in ominous silence with a clipboard! I’m going to eat an entire jar of bean dip AND a whole muhfucking box of Mike ‘n Ikes! I’m going to learn how to blow glass! I’m going to continue to refuse to listen to Vampire Weekend, for good reasons. I’m going to thrifting for a french horn, and then I’m not even going to learn how to play it. I’m going to beat the green foresty snot out of The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker for the thirty billionth time. I’m going to build a HAM radio (possibly entirely out of ham). I’m going to photoshop Will Oldham’s mustache onto a photo of a cat’s butthole and print it out on two hundred fliers. And then I’ma mail them to Nevada’s governor, Jim Gibbons, to finally give that pasty drool factory at the helm of this great desert state a nasty piece of my mind about continuing to let Nevada’s higher education system commit seppuku. I’m going to carve “Turner + Middleton” in girly, i’s-dotted-with-lil’-hearts cursive into every piece of furniture in the house. Because I can finally, finally, FINALLY spend some quality time boring myself straight out of my skull.

And most of all, I’m going to get back to running. And pretending to write about running. I finally bit the bullet early last week and continued my ongoing contributions to Pearl Izumi’s coffers by purchasing (through a remarkably skeezy, possibly selling-pirated-shoes-from-a-mob-warehouse-in-some-Baltic-state, discount internet wholesaler) my third straight pair of Synchro Pace II trainers. The downer is they didn’t have the color I wanted: that retina-searing shade of pale, Phoenix Suns-ish-orange (think insane, dessicated pumpkin) of my first pair.

It is, in fact, wholly necessary that I now rechannel all available intellectual and physiological capacities into running. And also into finding pictures of sweaty, middle-aged marathoners in squirrel (“skwerl,” if you prefer) furry suits on Flickr to illuminate blog posts.

Why? Because G. and I are (most likely) running the 2009 Soroptimist International of Fort Bragg, California 25th Annual Whale Festival 10K Run and Walk in mid-March. And, powered by the seismic potency of distant whalesong and the intense oxygen concentration in that brisk, seaside California air, I’m going to AIM FOR AND ECLIPSE my father’s 10K personal record, a 36:35 set at a 1979 race in Lake Tahoe. Thus, the vaguely Freudian undercurrent that’s run silent and deadly under the Belfry’s placid surface will finally be stilled and grow cold.

With that athletic Telemachiad dutifuly concluded, however, I’m a little freaked that I won’t have anything to talk about here. What, if not petty filial anxiety, will prove to be the hot, tortured engine of my running?

Thoughts are also beginning to percolate about my next marathon. Including whether or not I actually want to subject my psyche and hip joints to another marathon. If I do line one up, it’ll probably be Austin a year or so from now, since that’s where I’m moving to be with gwiggles in June. But I’d also really love to do Denver again. Hrrrrmmmmmmmfffg.

(photo courtesy of Sugar Bush Squirrel, International Superstar and Squirrel Model)

Running is a well-sharpened knife: #1

It all started, as most life-changing decisions usually do with me, with regrets about eating shitty food. While taking in Burn After Reading (captivated by Brad Pitt’s incredible, skunk-stripe, blowed-beyond-dry hair and Madonna-inspired gyrations), I drank roughly a gallon of Cherry Coke, pawed greasy little fistfuls of popcorn (with extra yellow topping!) from an oversize bag into my maw, and, uh, “ate” an entire package of these:

Confession: the only reason I purchased and consumed an actual package of Nuclear Sqworms was so that I, apparently a 22-year-old man-child, could utter the words, “Yes, and I would also like Nuclear Sqworms, please” and mean it.

Bad idea.

If you can’t tell from the picture above, the Rocky Flats-styled psychedelic nightcrawler mascot for Nuclear Sqworms is wearing a hardhat emblazoned with the international symbol for radioactive materials. This is less a marketing ploy than an actual, very sober warning. Beware! Beware, indeed, to anyone impulsive enough to put these things into his/her GI tract that doesn’t have the well-seasoned stomach lining of a 12-year-old boy who eats 2 cubic meters of candy a day. As a squirmvivor, I can attest that the half-life of Nuclear Sqworms is, roughly speaking, 3 hours. That’s how much time elapsed between the Sqworms’ initial penetration into my gullet and my collapse onto my recliner, breaking into a feverish cold sweat, curled into a comma shape, feeling like someone had poured the contents of a car battery into my abdomen. When I awoke the next morning, the taste in my mouth was something like a Sorel boot marinated in high fructose raccoon feces.

So. I’ve decided that I’m going to try to eat better. No more Mike ‘N Ike/habanero bean-dip/soy milk dinners. And I should say that this impulse isn’t coming out of a desire to lose weight–I’m actually the most svelte I’ve been since high school cross-country right now, which is to say that I’m rocking the Macaulay Culkin-meets-Skeletor look. Rather, the Belfry Real Food Project is motivated by the following: (a) not killing animals and eating them, thereby superficially and somewhat lazily doing something about climate change and my own ethical arguments about animal representation in my thesis/comps, (b) spending less money on things like XXL Fishbomb Burritos while out on the town, and in the process saving dough (zing!) to buy things like Phil Elverum records and sweaty locks of Gabriele Anderson-Scheiss’ hair off of eBay, (c) avoid further trauma to my threadbare stomach lining, as seen in the above episode, and (d) most importantly, do something to lighten the glowering raincloud of my mood.

Yes indeed–let’s talk about sadness and running and food! I’m thrilled to tell you that my faithful copilot through the ennui and meaninglessness of life, The New York Times, recently reported that exercise doesn’t do squat for depression:

Dutch researchers studied 5,952 twins from the Netherlands Twins Registry, as well as 1,357 additional siblings and 1,249 parents, all 18 to 50 years old. They recorded survey data about the frequency and duration of exercise and used well-validated scales to uncover symptoms of depression and anxiety. The study was published Monday in The Archives of General Psychiatry.

Studying twins allowed the researchers to distinguish between genetic and environmental effects, and they found that the association of exercise with reduced anxious and depressive symptoms could be explained genetically: people disinclined to exercise also tend to be depressed. One does not cause the other.

I’m tempted to look a little askance at these findings because they involves the Dutch. And, as anybody who has even a passing acquaintance with our good friend in Boulder, M.B. Postma, can attest, the Dutch, considered as a people, are suspiciously lanky, cantankerous, enjoy bad film, have goiter fetishes, and wear too-small, garishly colored underwear.

Ok, so running isn’t going to turn the U.S.S. Weltschmerz around. And neither is moping underneath an afghan in the basement, morosely selecting the most bedraggled-looking Cheez-its out of the bag, while listening to the entirety of Louder Than Bombs for the four hundredth time. So what will?

Foooooooooooooddddd! Real food, that is! Gastronomie! The sweet science! All hail Alton Brown! Silpat! Gentlemen, start your salad shooters! Procrastinating on grading papers by making tulip-shaped, toooottalllyyy great Parmiaggiano crisps! Thaasss right-we’re adding a kitchen onto the belfry! So once a fortnight or so, I’ll spotlight a recipe. They’re original. I will attempt to try to make a literary pun on each title. You should make them! They’re liable to be affordable, edible, and runner-friendly! (in that they won’t cause your stomach to break into an impromptu Cirque du Soleil show every time you’re out for a jog–see, for example, my post-supper 4-miler experience with ramen, coffee, and two nectarines last week.)

Here’s what we’ve got on the smorgasboard this week:

The Grain Gatsby: A Salad (since, you know… uh… radishes are aristocratic? And rice vinegar is disillusioned about hedonistic materialism?)
Salad
1 1/2 cups quinoa, cooked according to the package. Or not, if you’re feeling risky and also want to end up with bad-tasting quinoa.
1 cup green onion, white & green parts; finely chopped
1 cup thinly sliced bell peppers–yellow and orange ones work the best here
1/2 cup radishes, thinly sliced
1/4 cup tarragon leaves, fresh

Dressing
Whisk together the following really, really well:
1/4 cup rice vinegar
1/4 cup pure sesame seed oil
1/4 cup soy sauce

Make dressing separately. Then, in a large salad bowl, toss everything together. I’ve also tried this with 2 cups of quinoa and cucumbers from the garden out back, and it was ok. It’s even better with wild rice instead of quinoa, but then you’re missing out on protein. Make extra dressing if you’d like, following the same proportions. Stick in fridge. Wait impatiently for an hour or so. Eat with too-large, novelty Thundercats spoon. This shit is the delish.

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Most recent run and atmospheric conditions: To Mogul and back along Truckee River Path/West 4th Street. Nice feeling to run from one town to another. Harassed briefly by asinine, X-TERRA-champ cop who pulled over along 4th after sunset to glibly inform me that “20 miles is way too short to get a *real* workout in.”

Workout/whether or not I heaved: 21 miles/no, but I could barely roll myself out of bed this morning.

Total Mileage to Date: 523

Days remaining to Denver: 25