We came to the great gambling and marriage destruction hell, known as Nevada. To look at it from the air it is just that—hell on earth. There are tiny green specks on the landscape where dice, roulette, light-o-loves, crooked poker and gambling thugs thrive. Such places should be abolished and so should Nevada. It never should have been made a State.”
-Harry S. Truman, 1955
I knew that sooner or later the initial euphoria of returning to running would melt away, a bit like a lump of margarine gently cradled in John Goodman’s hirsute navel. And so it has. I could blame a lot of things. Mostly school, which has left me feeling as worn as an old piece of Nevadan state highway blacktop. Indeed, the scholastic madness of grad school has swung back into giggling, nightmarish display–the 80-hour working weeks wherein I attempt to educate the Fellini-meets-George Romero character cast populating my classrooms; the endless bloviations of literary theorists that I’ve been reading to get a sweaty handle on my comps list/thesis, and, most distressingly, the kraut-drama at home, as my German roommates have decided to call it splitsies. All of this is turning me into an inadvertent Basement Person. I’ve spent enough time nestling into my reading Lay-Z-Boy to suspect that I may have impregnated it. (SofaBabies! Ahhhggghh!) I’ve, regrettably, gotten back on the Mountain Dew/sesame tofu train (farewell, my sweet, time-intensive, quinoa-and-sauteed-bok choi dinners!). Not even the schadenfreude of handing out Fs to students whose thesis in a weekly response essay is “teh bible is gay” has sufficed. And when I do mysteriously blunder, a shocked somnambulist, into a period of free time, I’ve increasingly found that the last thing I want to do is lace up my kicks, put on a dayglo-lemon tank top and windshield-sized Taiwanese sunglasses, and freak the bejesus out of Reno suburbanites nervously hosing down their driveways while listening to Kenny Chesney. My psyche is, in short, dissolving into a hungry dark sea of Foucauldian paranoia, cheap fusilli, and the occasional can of Budweiser borrowed from my cowboy roommate, which to be honest I don’t really intend on paying back. I am not wearing water wings. The waterlogged shade of Ian Curtis is tugging at my pantlegs and encouraging me to look into ordering generic Ambien off some shady part of the internet.
Running, it turns out, is susceptible to the same geographical determinism that underlies most things here in Draino. We are, after all, perched on the extreme western edge of the Great Basin: that hungry, fissured, salt-lined sink into which snowmelt and the very rare rain disappears, to permeate giant, dark aquifers thrumming far below the desert floor. I’m beginning to think that this entire landscape maintains a similar metaphorical power to suck psychic energy dry. My friend Eric, who along with myself is quickly resembling the Platonic template of a burned-out PhD candidate in the humanities, chalks up this town’s general listlessness, moral bankruptcy, hypocrisy, and crumbling, Tel Aviv-inspired architecture to “bad vibes.”
Ok, so on the surface, Reno really does suck, in all the literal and figurative ways we can possibly construe the verb. I want to go home as soon as I can. But there’s still water, so to speak, lurking hypnotically far beneath the rabbit brush, leopard-print casino bedspreads, desolate salt pans, and megachurches. And searching for it–attempting the arduous feat of attempting to know Northwestern Nevada by dowsing for the hidden ocean of redeeming, sublime things that lie far beyond superficial sources–is perhaps best accomplished via the slow footfalls of a long run, sending plumes of yellowish dust up to coat the calves.
But maybe it’s best that things are this way. That this is a place which can only be known through the fierce, often repugnant beauty of absence. Lately I’ve taken to running across the dirt bike-choked expanse about a half-mile west of my house. It was only last week that, while showing our new faculty hire some bike routes to take to best survive northwest Reno on an old city map, I noticed that this dirt-and trash-choked open space had at one point been a reservoir. Now the contours of the landscape make sense: the flat, stoned-lined bottom of a small valley; a few, desiccated tree trunks; and, most noticeably, the loveliness of abandoned machines. I can’t really live here, I don’t think–I can never learn to call this barren place home. But maybe the Great Basin makes the point that there will always be some distance between consciousness and the land it perceives, that nature remains unknowable and affrontive, and that the only way we can interact with it is its modification, until we reach a point at which our own creations speak to us, ghastly and too-natural, from the same, distant void. And that’s the only reason to keep running through the dross and sand-lined detritus, ears pricked up.
(four ways of looking at the Fridge–King’s Row, Reno. Taken while running. Shadows, to the best of my knowledge, are my own.)
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Most recent run and atmospheric conditions: got new shoes on Wednesday in Fleet Feet in Carson City (the only running store within driving distance, if you can believe it), so I drove up US-50 to South Lake Tahoe and went for a quick run along the lakeshore, enjoying the pines and clear skies.
Workout/whether or not I heaved: 4 miles/nope, although I came awfully close during Tuesday night’s track workout.
Total Mileage to Date: 460
Days remaining to Denver: 35, which, more importantly, is only a few days short of the official start of the 2008-2009 NBA regular season. In which I fully expect Baron’s superheated bodily musk to set his new Clippers jersey on fire as he casually hits approximately 3218923 3-pointers in his first game in LA.
Addendum (9/13): If anyone feels like they literally have nothing better to do with their time–and honestly I’d suggest mashing up a bunch of turnips or shaving your cat before clicking on the below link–I’ve indulged myself by posting the most recent draft of my thesis prospectus and comps list. For the record, there’s a two-drink minimum for this link–trust me, it’ll help. And, if nothing else, there are pictures of animals and colonial minutiae to accompany dry, overwrought prose. And a very intense photo of Fredric Jameson looking at what appears to be the skin of a giant porpoise.
Further Addendum (also 9/13): Simon posted something that’s pretty awesome about the prospect of buying running insurance. Better pony up.
