Running is having reservations

Dear Land ‘O Lakes Butter,

My parents go to Santa Fe almost every year. They drive, stopping for lunch in Pueblo on the way, and spend the weekend buying all kinds of stuff. Chili pepper Christmas lights. Ristras. Santos. Navajo rugs with different earth tones mashing up against one another with their polygonal sawteeth. A ladder built from split cords of poplar wood, bound together with plastic animal gut and sinew. Spindly squash gourd earrings, fashioned together with obsidian. Pastel colors. Zig-zag patterns. Dreamcatchers to keep the incubi at bay. Some nights at home, they page through a guide they got off the Internet on Hopi kachina dolls. They buy the ones that interest them and get them Fedex’d overnight and spend thirty minutes looking at them when they finally arrive. Then they arrange them on the windowsill in dramatic poses. Fighting brave under fluorescent track lighting. Angwusnasomtaka next to runner up golf trophy. Crow Mother next to family heirloom Bavarian beer stein. Dancing Bear (with authenticity certificate signed by the artist) juxtaposed with a book on IRA mutual fund options. Jean Baudrilliard could probably write a whole book about that windowsill.

One year on the way down to Arizona for a backpacking trip, my dad and I stayed in a Motel 8 on the Navajo Reservation, in Kayenta. I remember a lot of driving. Some of the Navajos walk. You’ll be thirty miles out from the nearest town on a two-lane road, surrounded by juniper and sage and spindly cattle fences and wild moonscaped terraces of crimson dirt and you’ll see a Navajo just out there walking. On the shoulder. It’s usually the old guys and elderly women, in mesh hats and flannel, or bulky, wool skirts. When we got into town, Kayenta was full of sandblasted Quonset huts, gutted F-150s lying like beached mechanical whales in the arid wastes of their front lawns. It was Easter Sunday and the restaurant downstairs in the lobby was serving a special holiday menu. They served a lamb chop so dry it could’ve doubled as a joke on the BBC, paired with some congealed mint chutney and a pile of wilted endives. My dad ate it all. Then spent most of the night in the can, keeping me up with diarrhetic moaning.

(pictured: Louis Tewanima)

One time, when I went to an advanced placement engineering camp at a local university during high school, I roomed with a Shoshoni guy, about five ten, sixteen years old. He spent a lot of time reading Mad. A bunch of Shoshonis were on scholarship at the camp, learning how to mechanically dissect water timers. I don’t remember the guy’s name. Isn’t that horrible? I think it was something like Ivan. I’ll go ahead and call him Ivan, since I doubt he’ll read this. Anyway, one hot evening, Ivan took a thick bundle of dried sage from his bag and hung it in the doorway of our dorm room with extreme care. Sitting at my desk, unable to figure out how to apply a quadratic equation to an especially nasty geometry problem, I swore. Ivan looked at me.
“Apologize to the sage,” he said.
“What are you talking about?”
“You just swore in front of the sage smudge. Apologize.”
“To a plant?”
“Yeah.”
“Apologize to a plant?”
“Yeah.”
I didn’t.
And I forgot about it until last Christmas, in front of a painting by Sanford R. Gifford or Bierstadt at the Gilcrease  in Tulsa.

Regards,

-C. Turner

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Days streaked: 21

Total Miles: 79.1

Today’s running mixxx: The Dodos, Born Ruffians, and 764-HERO

Running is signs mistaken for wonders

Wrote a long-promised letter to a friend in San Francisco last night.

Two new flickr finds:

Pith helmets (pool)
Cthulu-inspired stationary from a lovely steampunk girl in Belgium

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Days streaked: 20

Total Miles: 74.1

Today’s running mixxx: Jackson Browne

Running is metathesis

Miranda July
PO Box 26596
Los Angeles, CA 90026
USA

Dear Ms. July,

Earlier today, I was putting the finishing touches on the introduction to my Master’s thesis. While discussing the role of animal enclosures in late nineteenth century British colonialism, I accidentally typed “hamster narrative” instead of “master narrative.”

This seemed like the kind of thing that you should be aware of.

It’s even funnier, too, because my thesis is about monstrous animals. And I’m sure there’s got to be an actual monstrous hamster narrative out there in the cultural ether somewhere. I wouldn’t be surprised if Cannibal Hamster Holocaust is playing on TBS right now, actually.

Anyway, thanks for You and Me and Everyone We Know–that scene with the goldfish makes me so wonderfully sad. It makes me want to go out and make gravestone rubbings with my best friends, or have another go at writing fiction again.

-C. Turner

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Days streaked: 19

Total Miles: 71.1

Today’s running mixxx: Efterklang

Running is driving yourself birdshit crazy over the perfectly engineered mixtape: #9

Mix #9: TRANSCENDENCE

As a very bedraggled 2008 desperately claws its way to a close, I thought it was high time to share the songs that have best accompanied my running over the past several months. The following is the crème de la crème of countless hours spent agonizing, experimenting, separating sonic wheat from muzak chaff, and physically abusing my iPod in search of the CONSUMMATE RUNNING SONG. These are double fist-pumpers and heart rate accelerators, searing and ear drum-savaging, salvific and–in at least a couple cases–pure coitus continuous. Enjoy.

1 / The National – Available
2 / Radiohead – All I Need
3 / Colossal – The Serious Kind (I probably listened to this more than anything else while doing long runs out to Mogul and back. It’s my jaaaaaaam.)
4 / The Strokes – What Ever Happened (Before someone attempts to fasten the Enormous Tri-Corner Hat of Hypocrisy onto my skull, let me defend myself here. It’s true that, at one time, The Strokes were one of my favorite musical punching bags, because they wear dingy v-neck t-shirts; write catchy, occasionally vapid songs; and probably have given a number of STIs to everyone and everything in Williamsburg and Red Hook. But the squiggly, blood-curdling guitar line [HOW on EARTH did they get that tone?] in this song is enough for me to forgive them everything.)
5 / +/- (Plus/Minus) – Leap Year (the fill-heavy, PERFECT drumming and aggressive 7/4 time signature on this, coupled with James Baluyut’s nasally, mesmerizing baritone are often enough for me to want to stop running and lay down beneath some sagebrush and watch contrails for a while.)
6 / Wolf Parade – I’ll Believe in Anything (Whoever mixed Apologies to the Queen Mary should be up for canonization. I’ve never heard anything so thick and reverby that sounded so good in headphones. It sounds like you are inside this band when this song goes into a full-blown, rabid froth a couple minutes in.)
7 / Xiu Xiu – I Luv the Valley OH! (As good as this album is, it further convinced me that I would rather gnaw my own face off than get trapped in an elevator with Jamie Stewart. The guy has got a World Bank-funded monopoly on creepy.)
8 / Do Make Say Think – The Universe!
9 / Sonic Youth – Hey Joni
10 / Black Black Ocean – S!M! (I still mourn the passing of this late, great Denver band, thanks to whom I’ll probably need a series of hearing aids when I’m an octogenarian. “The Eagle knew not / time nor space / His hunger knew no end / A dear, a bear, a horse, a man / All feared his cry on the wind.”)
11 / Matson Jones – Italian Song (speaking of bands that make me horribly homesick . . .)
12-13 / Fugazi – Turnover and Waiting Room (for yam-bear and her wounded Portland paw, because these two songs–and ESPECIALLY the first video–still make me want to burn “AGRICULTURAL NEOCOLONIALISM” in gasoline letters on the lawn in front of a Taco Bell and release all the rabbits at Cover Girl labs into an enchanted forest. Actually, most Taco Bells don’t have lawns. I have no idea what I’m talking about. But I’m sure as parsnips worked up about something.)

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Most recent run and atmospheric conditions: Evans Canyon in late afternoon shadows to much of The National’s catalog.

Workout: seven miles or so at fuckthisshitit’sbeenalongweek pace.

Total Mileage to Date: 756

i

Running is a well-sharpened knife: #3

In our wintry economic climate, I’ve been increasingly interested in (read: panicky and obsessed over) how to cope with my wildly uncertain financial and vocational future. As many readers know all too well from personal experience, most of us post-graduates in the humanities aren’t in the English literature business because we’re confident that one day we’ll end up like Scrooge McDuck, performing our daily ablutions in gigantic swimming pools full of Spanish doubloons. We’re more likely going to end up screaming about socialism while trying to sell urine-stained poems written in Crayola in exchange for pennies and secondhand copies of Lorca on the streets of Kansas City (see, for example, Will Weston’s future).

Anyway, where was I? Oh yeah. So the economy doing a  convincing impression of Emilio Estevez’ career path. I’m desperately trying to figure out what the heck I’m going to do with my life next year with my advanced degree (“Welcome to Chili’s! My name’s Cameron, can I get you guys started with some drinks?”). And after gazing into the blood-curdling pineal gland of this maelstrom I’ve decided to play it safe by becoming as frugal as a Dickensian ragpicker.

Look, I’m not trying to be any more of a tightwad than necessary. I’m not at the point where I’m dumpster diving for packages of dental floss, or using a sun oven to bake casseroles. There is a very thin line between a life of self-reliant frugality, and one that involves reading Soldier of Fortune in an Idaho compound while cutting your own hair with a machete, or starting up a Victorian counting house named “Marley & Marley”. I’m just saying that saving money right now by not spending it on dumb things is probably a good idea. Oh, and being frugal is actually better for the environment than switching to a Prius, or shopping/trysting with your spicy Pilates teacher in the shadier produce aisles at Whole Foods.

So let’s talk about groceries.

I’ve got to admit that cutting back in this department was excruciating. Gone are the halcyon days when I would blow a hundred simoleons at Trader Joe’s on dried fruit, lil’ pizza-ettes, cheese, wine, and cleaning products that were so green that they probably planted tiny adorable trees inside drainpipes on their way down. Full disclosure: I’ve dropped my weekly grocery bill from roughly $95 a week last spring–and that’s a guess, it might’ve been even higher–to a calculated average of $32.16 a week so far in November. That figure’s so sharply precise because I actually called my mother (hi Mom, if you’re reading this!) and had her e-mail me her Excel budget spreadsheet (the cheerfully nicknamed TurBud). The one she’s used to calculate family expenses ever since we purchased our first PC, back when Kris Kross was still on the radio. I’ve modified it somewhat (It’s now saved as TurBud: The Next Generation on my desktop), and it’s been the guiding light as I’ve begun the arduous, unpleasant process of figuring out where exactly my paycheck goes each month.

I manage to save such an obscene amount of money mostly by buying things in bulk. baking my own bread, and going to WinCo (think Costco, but creepier). But also by making a *huge* pot of something involving grains, vegetables, and protein every Sunday night, which then provides sustenance throughout the week. Here’s the recipe I made last week, which I doubled, and whose basic template comes courtesy of our lovely friends at the Post-Punk Kitchen.

Amitav Ghosh-darn that’s a pretty good curry!

Ingredients

(I double the amounts and omit optional ingrediants, but hey–they’re your tastebuds)
3 tablespoons olive oil
1 small onion, sliced
2 cloves garlic, chopped (or more–you really can go pretty hog wild with the garlic and ginger on this dish, if you want)
2 teaspoons grated fresh ginger
1 teaspoon ground coriander
1/2 teaspoon ground cumin
1/2 teaspoon ground turmeric
1/4 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1 1/4 lbs pumpkin, peeled,seeded and cubed (about 2 ½ cups) (you can also use yams or sweet potato–OR you can buy sketch canned pumpkin at WinCo that probably comes from sweatshop pumpkin mines in Guatamala)
1 tablespoon hot curry paste (2 if you truly want to test the mettle of your intestinal lining)
2 ripe tomatoes, chopped
2 dried red chilies (canned anaheims work here, too)
1 1/4 cups vegetable stock
1 3/4 cups canned chick-peas, drained
1 large banana (for a HILARIOUS prank while making this dish, you can pretend that the ‘nana is a telephone, make it “ring,” call your German roommate into the kitchen, and tell him that the INS would like to speak to him)
optional:
1 tablespoon chopped cilantro or parsley
1/2 cup pine nuts, to garnish

How to make this thing
1. Heat 2 tbls. of the oil in a saucepan, add the onion, garlic,red pepper, ginger and ground spices, and fry over a medium heat for 5-6 minutes until the onion is lightly browned.
2. Place the pumpkin in a bowl, add the curry paste (add a bit of hot water to thin it out) and toss well to coat the pumpkin evenly.
3. Add the chopped tomatoes, chilies and stock to the onion mixture, and bring to the boil, simmering gently for 15 mins.
4. Meanwhile, heat the remaining oil in a GIGANTIC frying pan, add the coated pumpkin and fry for 5 mins until golden.
Add to the tomato sauce with the chickpeas, cover and cook for 20 mins until the pumpkin is tender.
5. Peel the banana, slice thickly and stir into the curry 5 mins before the end of the cooking time.

Stir in the chopped cilantro or parsley, and sprinkle the pine nuts over the top.
Serve immediately and eat. Repeat for the next six nights, to the point where you’re so sick of curry that you threaten to burn your copy of Midnight’s Children both to keep warm on these chilly Reno autumn nights, and, ideally, to insult the entire nation of India.  

So what am I doing with all this extra money that I’m squirreling away, you ask? Naturally, I’ve converted it into gold bullion and piled it up into an enormous money-ziggurat in my bedroom. I now nest in it. Like Smaug in The Hobbit.

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Most recent run and atmospheric conditions: quick workout at the rec between long, long reading and writing sessions today at the library.

Workout: 6 miles.

Total Mileage to Date: 700-something. I’m writing from the office ‘puter tonight, and don’t have access to my running log. Which is also berthed in an Excel file, entitled “TurRun: The Voyage Home.“

Days remaining to Boston: 153