Ochotona curzoniae
c/o “Plague of Desert Rats”
Gurbantunggut desert
China
March 28th, 2009
Dear black-lipped pikas,
I can’t tell you how sorry I am that we’re subjecting your species to one of my species’ eugenics programs. Especially since we already guillotined your American cousins a few years ago thanks to climate change; pikas, apparently, aren’t having one your best decades. Human beings, while we’ve invented ingenious things like democratic socialism, salad shooters, and putting machines with automatic golf ball return, can be profoundly stupid sometimes. I don’t know why we’re building you an enormous, metaphorical Habitrail that ultimately dead-ends in a windy land of darkness and forgetfulness, but hey, I guess the monolithic Chinese state knows what it’s doing when it comes to environmentally responsible economic growth, desertification mitigation, and species protection.
Not.
Hang in there and don’t eat any weird-smelling pellets you see lying around,
-C. Turner
P.S. I was going to include some kind of tasteless joke about how you might consider converting to Catholocism, giving yourself an “out” with the whole contraceptive thing, but that seemed too sad. Pikas, you might also consider soliciting help from these guys in Qinghai.
Today’s contribution to my impending tinnitus while running:Bowerbirds’ Hymns for a Dark Horse, highly recommended for fans of Devendra Banhart, Beirut, Fleet Foxes, and Horse Feathers. Even their websites’ news updates are life-affirming:
“It’s spring and babies are being born everywhere. The airstream is shining silver and is at times more like an oven than a home. We have field mice, which is wonderful. They give us a strong sense of community while we go about our daily activites which include, but are not limited to, making things.”
To the roommate who stole my Chefmate manual can opener six weeks ago only to suddenly and without reasons replace it neatly in my drawer this morning, baffling me while I was rummaging through said drawer, searching for the big oatmeal spoon:
I’m writing this because I have a surprise for you. I have taken the liberty of hiding my can opener—the grey-handled wonder I purchased at a garage sale in Boulder four years ago, which separates can lid from can body as effortlessly as a laser beam fucking up a brick of marshmallow—in a place in my room downstairs where you are unlikely to find it. (Although, frankly, if you’re going through the crustiest substrata of the layered dirty clothes in my hamper in search of it, we might consider re-instituting the weekly “house talks” we used to have last Spring when we were experiencing community-wide trust issues over condiment theft from the refrigerator.)
I still haven’t figure out who the culprit is. But I have my suspicions. Excepting Jens. Jens is cool. I have a hard time believing that a German guy getting his doctorate in Natural Resource Economics who I’ve hefted upon my shoulders to slam-dunk a basketball at the middle school’s hoops near the house is our household’s Benedict Arnold.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m happy to have it back. Really. I was worried when it went away. And it’s not like I didn’t look for it. Within minutes of its disappearance from my (emphatically: my) drawer, I was tearing apart the cabinetry, upending drawers and spilling their contents like entrails onto the countertops, raking through them with numb fingers and fiendishly muttering, Where the fuck did I put that, like one of those oh-shit-I’m-in-trouble junkies in a Danish coke flick who’s rooting through his entire apartment to find some huge stash of money he’d rolled up like little cigar and stuffed in a flashlight’s battery cavity only to find, wait, get this, that the FUCKING MONEY IS GONE and he’s going to end up getting dissolved in a vat of car battery acid if he doesn’t head for the fire escape stat, because that’s how the Russian mob takes care of its “unappreciative customers.”
I couldn’t find the damn thing anywhere, which means that you physically removed it from the environs of the kitchen. I spent hours in the subterranean gloom of my basement bedroom puzzling over reasons why you might need a can opener elsewhere in the house, and as no one has painted anything using a big container of Dutch Boy recently or made paella over an open flame in the backyard, it means that you probably let your girlfriend borrow it. What the fuck. As an increasingly militant vegetarian, this means my can opener is, as far as I’m concerned, tainted. For all I know, you were letting your lady use it to slip open endless cans of corned beef hash, or pound pork loins into submission, or gut an elk carcass in the backyard (Gareth, I’m looking at you). I busted out the antibacterial Ivory and scoured every square inch of the opener, but even then I’m not convinced that things are back to normal. Still, I must begrudge you that, pragmatically speaking, the return of my can opener is a relief. It means that I no longer have to wrestle mightily with Jens’ poorly manufactured one from Spain, which not only mangles every piece of aluminum it touches like the Jaws of Life, but also causes me to break a sweat, both from nerves and physical effort, every time I try to crack open a container of garbanzos. No longer will I wonder if I’m going to douse the kitchen in a neon-red, arterial spray every time I want to jive with cream of mushroom soup.
You, aware of my overactive imagination and predilection towards all things supernatural, probably thought that I would think my can opener was abducted and squirreled away into our house’s woodwork by mischievous Japanese house spirits. Or maybe you thought you were doing me a favor, imagining that I’d mosey over to K-Mart and finally replace that electric can-opener I hastily donated to Goodwill a year or so ago, because it emblematized horrible memories of a recurring debate I had with one of my ex-girlfriends over the merits of an automated can opener versus ye olde hande crank kinde. (Full disclosure: Sarah, you were right. But only because the manual can opener consumes less energy, making it more environmentally sound. Not because the sound of the automatic can opener is “serial killer creepy”). In any case, I labor under no delusions. I know that, like the Israelites passed into bondage in far-off Egypt, you so snatched away one of the few things that make cooking recreational and spirit-soothing, rather than laborious.
Don’t think for one motherfucking second that this is over. I’m running a kitchen here, not a public library. If you want something, ask. And you know what? Unless you’re Jens, I’ll say no.
Uncordially,
Cameron
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Days streaked: 3
Total Miles: 12.2
Today’s contribution to my impending tinnitus while running: Jets to Brazil.
Imagine, if you will, that it’s 1994. This might be a little uncomfortable. Bill the Thrill is hitting all squirrely high notes on the sax in the West Wing and Al Gore presides over the awkward, yet mercifully bodily fluid-free birthing of the Information Superhighway. Nancy Kerrigan’s femur is wiggity whacked at the Olympics, causing my mother to denounce figure skating in general as an arena for immorality, violence, and oversexed, homoerotic costumes. The sweet siren song of Ace of Bass’ “The Sign” inspires a dramatic rise in sweaty, flannel-clad, behind-middle-school makeout sessions. Bowl cuts. Boyz II Men. Global GUTS (d-d-d-do you HAVE IT?!) Watching 1990’s Arachnophobia as a 9-year-old in Jef(f) Ruane’s basement makes trips to the can fraught with sheer terror, and inspires a interlocking set of anxiety complexes and psychologically crippling night terrors that take me years to work through.
I am also beholden to the Yemeni Yambear for providing the following datapoints in reconstructing exactly what it was like in 1994: Double Dare, What Would You Do, playing kick the can (although, to be honest, Amber, this makes me think that somehow the UP didn’t leave the Great Depression until 1995), dresses like this, tubers ‘n zots, and “GRAPE ESCAPE!!!! HOLY MOTHER FUCKING GRAPE ESCAPE.”
And, as an effete, bespectacled third grader who enjoys things like geography trivia and writing/illustrating books with titles like “Gregory the Badger and the Uranium Mine” (fact), I am completely crushed by my failure to meet the draconian standards of the Presidential Fitness Award.
Ah, Presidential Fitness Award, how you haunt me still! I think the only standards I managed to meet were the mile run and curl-ups. Which sucked. Nothing threw down elementary school street cred quite like having your mom sew a PFA patch onto your acid-washed jean jacket. Right between your Smokey the Bear patch, and the one you got in the Black Hills, South Dakota on that one awful family car trip.
Here’s the thing about the Presidential Physical Fitness Award: it’s totally impossible to earn. I mean, just look at that chart. Only bionic Raelian clones from the future, or freakish, government-created man-children like Michael Phelps stand a chance of attaining all those standards.
Especially the sit and reach, an event which conjures up perspiration-soaked, traumatic memories involving ringworm-infested gym mats.
A product of the Eisenhower years, the PFA was initially created out of mass concern about the physical fitness of America’s children relative to their European counterparts. (Fact based on personal experience: this fear is well-founded, as German fitness fetishizing remains both more intense, and creepy, than anything I’ve ever encountered in America.) The history of the program (available here) is both fascinating and kind of horrifying, and carries more than whiff of Soviet-style nationalism about it. I’d argue the program’s high water-mark probably occurred during during Bush Sr.’s administration, as “Great American Workouts” were held on the White House lawn and The Presidential Sports Award recognized the first family to earn the “Family Fitness Award.” Who, exactly, that family was, my research has yet to unearth. But I can’t help but imagine it was a toss-up between the “Macho Man” Randy Savage clan and Laird Hamilton and his wife’s austere, Nordic-surf beauty.
As time has worn on, and the Presidential Fitness Award’s popularity has waned, its standards relaxed, I’ve got to admit that I’m concerned about the health of America’s youth. What will our increasingly butter-stuffed kids do without the shame and humiliation foisted onto them by the vaguely Huxleyian, caste-creating process of the PFA? Especially in an era when “exercise” in America has become synonymous with shuffling to the mailbox and back, doing “light stretching” or “modified yoga poses” on airplanes, or extending a greasy paw to retrieve your small change in the Hardee’s drivethru while mouth-breathing laboriously.
So here’s the deal. I’m going to take the President’s Challenge Fitness Test for Adults. Repeatedly, if necessary. I’m going to blog about the experience in (probably uncomfortable) detail. But I’m going to beat the snot out of it. Then I’m going to earn the Adult’s Presidents Champions Gold Award. And then I’m going to wear it everywhere. I’m going to wear it to bed. I’m going to wear it in Will Weston’s apartment and I’m not going to let him touch it. I’m going wear it at Christmas and I’m not going to tell my grandma what it is. I’m going to wear it showering. I’m going to wear it teaching and consider punishing my students with its blunted edges. I’m going to wear it while doing six hundred push-ups in my basement with Gwynne sitting on my back and listening to Jock Jams on cassette. All in the fervent hope that this powerful talisman of sportsmanship and unrepentant faith in American meritocracy and Nietzschean individualism will singlehandedly turn the economy around, inspire mass jogging to erupt in the streets, ensure that the next Star Trek movie isn’t a total wash, give Obama teleportation powers, and erase our trade deficit with China.
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Most recent run and atmospheric conditions: Fridge/Rancho loop through my neighhhhhborhood.
Workout: three slow miles at dusk, watching the sky turn creamsicle-orange over the Washoe Valley and listening to very, very violent hip-hop.
Mix #8: FUTURESHOCK, or the mix I swore I’d never make
Hey gang. This week’s long-percolating, shade-grown mixture of sounds is posted here with some hesitation on my part. Mostly because the bands, artists, and general ethos of the following are mostly things that I’ve spent a lot of time pretending to hate over the past few years: the vacuousness and narcissism of many scenesters and their championing of meaningless hook-ups; MySpace “friend” making, the most recent wave of indie plastic soul’s tendency to cop black rhythms and affects without giving due credit (what I like to call the “Vampire Weekend” school of reinterpretation, as opposed to a more honorable “Graceland-era Paul Simon” approach); and a general dislike of kids from south suburban Denver who are “into underground hip hop.”
But look here now, chilluns. I write you today happier than a walrus who’s awoken to find himself in an abandoned Van de Kamps factory. America restored my faith in her tattered ideals last night. A country whose promise is now not only possible, but demonstrable. The Obama wave has ushered in an era in which irony, aloofness, judgmental distance, and cool detachment (often veneers for deep-rooted insecurities about conformity and personal identity) are a repugnant mode de vie. While it’s often necessary to bear some degree of skepticism towards the world and the (usually awful) things that happen in it, to be an unbending cynic is both morally exhausting and intellectually lazy.
So whatever. These songs are fun and infectious and bubblier than a Eurotrash foam techno party. The people who listen to them are generally pretty allright, and most of them probably helped Obaminate the Republican party and its gay-hating, turkey gobbler-chinned cronies last night. And much of the following is hip-hop, anyway. You know. The underground kind. And because I’m feeling especially un-crotchety this week, for the first time I’m making the mix 120% downloadable for you, yes you, my gorgeous readership, to listen to while running. All of you at once. Make it happen. The fine print: I’ll probably take the link down within the week, since I don’t want stern, vaguely undead-looking east coasty lawyer goons from the RIAA showing up at my door bearing cattle prods and an S&M mask. And if you use the mix to do anything *other* than run, I’m going to know about it. And I’m going to be gravely, gravely disappointed in you. Like sad Abe Lincoln looking disapprovingly at you disappointed.
One last note: this mix is decidedly un-kid friendly. So those of you with lil’ uns’ (bless your soul!) might want to keep them away from the Outkast, Beep Beep, and Teenagers tracks, in particular (the lattermost in particular, which, uh, skewers–I hope–transatlantic flings between shallow, insipid high schoolers). Actually, much of the list, come to think of it, might not sit well with those of you who worry about your children’s moral development.
Track list and suggested listening order below.
Download Mix #8 right here.
1 / Justice – D.A.N.C.E.
2 / Spoon – I Turn My Camera On
3 / The Golden Hands Before God Conducts Incredible Magic Band & The Spirits – Communist Party
4 / The Teenagers – Homecoming
5 / Of Montreal – Don’t Ask Me To Explain
6 / Los Campesinos! – You! Me! Dancing!
7 / Siouxsie and the Banshees – Cities In Dust
8 / Outkast – Slump
9 / Beep Beep – Electronic Wolves
10 / Mos Def & Talib Kweli – Thieves In The Night
11 / The Wrens – Boys, You Won’t
12 / The Album Leaf – Brennivin
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Most recent run and atmospheric conditions: Tempo run through the blustery beginnings of a blizzard on the Steamboat Ditch
Workout/whether or not I heaved: 8-9 miles
Total Mileage to Date: 666 (those among you who’re seeing Obama’s election as a sign that the End Times are nigh can go ahead and count this among your omens)
My name is Cameron and I did the Denver Marathon on Sunday, October 19th, 2008. Most of you who are either masochistic or devoted enough (or both) to have been reading along with my drivel the past five months have probably been bracing yourselves for this entry. You know. The one where I wax poetic about the timelessness of the human spirit in competition; the beauty of athleticism; the joyous, Emersonian possibility of self-improvement; and something about “focusing on the journey, not the destination.” I would devolve into a silent fit of guy-crying that would bring to mind a number of scenes involving Mel Gibson in films about patriotism. And I’d thank everyone for supporting me in a million little ways, often unknowingly, as I’ve ran several hundred miles over the past season. Then I’d show you all something like this:
and we’d do some serious team-building exercises (human knot, I’m looking at you!) and probably end up in a big, cinnamon roll hug. And then go get Orange Juliuses at the mall.
But I’m not gonna do it (well, except for the part where I thank people like Tater-Terror-Bear, Buffy, Simon, hottpants, kg, padre cactus, measuring woman, etc.). And here’s why: running (and, by extension, writing about running) isn’t something that stops just because it’s the middle of October. Unlike the teleological conceits of major league sports, American politics, Leninism, and midwestern megachurches urging their congregations to make helmets for the Rapture, I’ve long maintained that running, enjoyed in its purest form, is something that frustrates any notion of end purpose. (Reader alert: get ready for some overblown, self-indulgent, probably specious rhetoric that involves a number of lame gastronomical metaphors. Sorry.)
Over the past few months, I’ve tried to reduce running down to its intense paradoxes and conflicting notes, as one would a giant stockpan full of tubers and roots and spices from the Indian subcontinent. The acrid and sweet syrup of questions that has resulted as I gaze into the blackened pan is what has flavored the musings of my daily runs and my writings about them: Why spend hours upon hours every week in an activity that involves pain and ultimately disintegrates your knees if done cavalierly? Why run very quickly in circles until you throw up your Lunchables in Lane 7? Why are runners both passive-aggressive jerks and endlessly supportive of one another? Why, for a sport that remains intensely fair in terms of gender participation, does competitive running still carry noxious whiffs of misogyny? Why spend hundreds of dollars on NASA-engineered, high-impact foam rubber shoes, when the world is seemingly teetering on the precipice of economic and moral collapse? Why, for such an ultimately narcissistic and heavily commercialized sport, does running still carry a strong sense of community and a potent collective identity? Is running really all that “free” of an activity when, as Foucault would be quick to point out, it might be seen as an internalization of repressive social norms concerning the regulation and discipline of the body? Why fetishize the edenic idol of running’s mustachioed, “purer” past, when that image is at least partly illusory and ignores its potentially unpalatable features?
I dunno. It’s kind of like asking why Knight Rider’s KITT is both kind of like a car and kind of like a person. But chewing on the resistant fibers of these dialectical nightmares is, I think, what twins running (and c’mon… you had to have known I was going to end up here) and literary criticism. As my fave corporeal feminism scholar, Elizabeth Grosz, says about the art of criticism:
In refusing to seek answers, and in continuing to pose questions as aporias, as paradoxes—that is, to insist that they have no readily available solutions—is to face the task, not of revolution, i.e. the overthrow of the old (whether capitalism, patriarchy, binary oppositions, or prevailing modes of radicality) but, less romantically or glamorously, endless negotiation, the equation of one’s life with struggle, a wearying ideal but one perhaps that can make us less invested in any one struggle and more capable to bearing up to continuous effort to go against the relentless forces of sameness, more inventive in the kinds of subversion we seek, and more joyous in the kinds of struggle we choose to be called into.
-Space, Time, and Perversion: Essays on the Politics of Bodies, 6
In a similar, ambivalent spirit, The Belfry will stumble onwards. Anyway, most of the old stuff that I used to blog about elsewhere (beer, humans in animal costumes, literature, jeremiads about education, love letters directed at Kevin Costner) have made their way into this space, so they may as well stay.
I’ll provide a substantial review of my trip back home to Denver later this week once it’s had time to sink in and my legs become functional again. I’ll say this much though: I qualified for Boston, and I’m thinking about heading to Massachusetts in April. Look out, Liberty Bell. I’ma eatcha.
(full Denver results available here)
And I’ve clearly got more important things to write about in upcoming months. Like wondering what kinds of styling product Luke Walton uses.
At the factory I worked
In the fleck of rubber, under the press
Of an oven yellow with flame,
Until the border patrol opened
Their vans and my boss waved for us to run.
“Over the fence, Soto,” he shouted,
And I shouted that I was American.
“No time for lies,” he said, and pressed
A dollar in my palm, hurrying me
Through the back door.
Since I was on his time, I ran
And became the wag to a short tail of Mexicans–
Ran past the amazed crowds that lined
The street and blurred like photographs, in rain.
I ran from that industrial road to the soft
Houses where people paled at the turn of an autumn sky.
What could I do but yell vivas
To baseball, milkshakes, and those sociologists
Who would clock me
As I jog into the next century
On the power of a great, silly grin.
-Gary Soto, from A New Geography of Poets. Eds. Edward Field, Gerald Locklin, and Charles Stetler. Fayetteville: U of Arkansas P, 1992.
Today, while trail running through chilly canyon updrafts and looking for Basque arborglyphs on Peavine Mountain, I witnessed a red-tail, on the wing and flying faster than greased electricity, sink its talons into some grey sparrow-ish bird.
This made sense at the time, as I was listening to Iron Maiden.
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Most recent run and atmospheric conditions: decidedly autumnal: cold and gorgeous with a sharp wind and even sharper sunlight. I ended up as rosy-cheeked as a gin-blossomed hobbit.
Workout/whether or not my innards gave way : eight slow, rolling miles with everything downstairs feeling relatively tranquil.
There’s a widespread assumption floating in the cultural ether that putting on a pair of foam-and-cloth shoes, some thigh-revealing shorts, and sweating for a half hour somehow sharpens one’s mental shears. Running’s supposed to be a wonder drug for mental acuity. Some people claim that it evens out circadian rhythms and produces a level of stoic tranquility enjoyed by people like Richard Gere. Maybe this is true for high-powered, tight-ass hedge fund brokers who use their runs to forcefully echo something like “I am not a victim. I am not a victim.” through their internal monologues while they jog. But I’m pretty sure running’s been making my thinking even more jittery, testy, and elliptical lately.
Maybe it’s because Google has effectively taken a fire axe to my attention span. Or maybe there’s a freon leak in my building and I’ve been unwittingly huffing in chlorofluorocarbons the past few weeks. Or maybe I’ve found it hard to concentrate ever since my sense of the world’s underlying morality was disemboweled, drawn, and quartered by Fyodor Dostoevsky’s little-known “A Nasty Story,” a squirm-inducing, hard look at class, pretension, and the illusion of self-worth.
Anyway, the jigsaw puzzle upstairs has got a few pieces missing, so to speak. Some of which I’m beginning to suspect were ingested by the cat, and which I’ll never see again. I’m increasingly thinking/speaking in cryptic fragments. So instead of a long, exhausting jeremiad about running this evening, I thought I’d just point you to things on the inner-net I’ve found recently and let them do the talking for me:
Don’t ask about the long, lightless path I had to tread to find those. My postcolonial/ecocritical sensibilities have been horrified and provoked by a recent story in the Guardian on a tiger being hanged by irate Bengalis in the Sundarbans. I’ve been listening to the Wrens’ 2003 heart-arsonist magnum opus, The Meadowlands, on an endless rotation, along with some wonderful covers I’ve discovered on mashup music blogs, like Death Cab doing pomade-soaked justice to the sleepy Penguins hit “Earth Angel” (as made famous in Back to the Future). And Islands treatment of Why?’s “Broken Crow.” Elliott Smith covering Hank Williams, Sr. And, notably, a Leonard Nimoy version of “If I Had a Hammer.” Of such stuff are nightmares made. I also heard a ridiculous remix of Le Tigre’s “Decepticon” at Strega last night involving some French chaunteuse singing/rapping and have been trying to find it ever since to no avail. (Yambear: you would literally kill someone for this track. Probably even someone like Ron Howard. You’d probably even kill Ron Howard by beating in his skull with your sewing machine. It’s that good. Like really good. For real.) I’ve been boostering my friend Eric’s cat, Miss Maisy, in her run for the 2008 American Presidency. So far the polling results have been decidedly underwhelming.
I’m also in the process of writing Thomas Kinkade an acerbic open letter where I refer to his pastoral New England paintings as “church porn,” but I’ve only allowed myself to work on it when I’m at least two beers deep, so it’s going slow. More on that as it develops.
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Most recent run and atmospheric conditions: medium-length run along Steamboat Ditch among sagebrush and rabbitbrush in full bloom. Reno’s a pretty place to run in for approximately 3 weeks out of the year.
Workout/whether or not I bilged my stomach-works: 9 quick miles/no, although i did get some weird, fuchsia stains on my socks from the run. Not sure what’s up with that.
Total Mileage to Date: 534
Days remaining to Denver: 21
