Halloweenomics

It's important to find your niche. I have found my niche, and as a result, have a virtually unlimited supply of candy, albeit one with not very much variety.

I am the one person on earth who actually likes Almond Joys. Every other person on God's Spaceship Earth hates Almond Joy. Growing up, about one in fifteen houses would give out Almond Joy, apparently because they hated children and wanted to ruin their Halloweens by giving them inedible candy. Somehow, all this excess Almond Joy would find its way in my direction. I would get free candy by eating other peoples' unwanted junk. I had found my own economic niche.

But there must be something more to this holiday than excessive consumption of empty calories, acts of vandalism and hijinks, excessive drinking and low budget zombie movies, right? Of course not, and that's why Halloween is the best holiday of the year.

Have a good one.

Digital Anthems

"All this machinery making modern music

Can still be open hearted,

Not so coldly charted, it's really just a question

Of your honesty, yeah your honesty."

-Rush, "Spirit of Radio"

I do not own any vinyl. I will not deny this.

Anyone who owns vinyl will tell you that it is something you need to have, the benefits being the sound quality and, I suppose, being able to look down on people who don't have vinyl. When people tell me "you need to get your hands on some vinyl," they say it as if not owning vinyl is something that I'm supposed to feel bad about. Not that I'm just missing something, but that I'm depriving myself of something essential and doing an injustice to the artist. I have no interest in purchasing or owning any vinyl. Maybe I'm missing something by not hearing the sound so crisply that I feel like I'm front row at the Blue Note, getting a facefull of Chet Baker's spittle, but as a child of a post-industrial America I'm willing to say that vinyl is useless to me.

This goes beyond the fact that I do not own a record player. The way we consume music now is radically different; the entire equation has been changed. Each song is now a packet of digital information that is portable, duplicable, and easily accessed. You can do some of that with vinyl, you can get good at using a turntable and seamlessly switching between songs, but there is nothing that come close to the versatility of digitized music. The way I perceive it, I don't "own" the song unless it is in the same digital library as the rest of the music that I "own." So vinyl, unless I were to convert it into an mp3 file, rendering the vinyl aspect irrelevant, has no value. Yes, we are losing something in sound quality, no one will pretend otherwise. Music is consumed and perceived differently now, ever so slightly. This is not better or worse because it is new. Vinyl is not better or worse because it is old. This is just different.

This is Progress. Progress happens and you might as well make it work for you.

Escape Velocity

"I wanted to be a spaceman

That's what I wanted to be

But now that I am a spaceman

Nobody cares about me"

-Harry Nilsson, "Spaceman"

"So you're a literature major... What do you want to do with that?"

"I want to be a writer."

"So like, what kind of stuff do you want to write?"

"Fiction."

"What kind of fiction?"

"Well um... actually, I want to write... science fiction, among other things."

This is a conversation that I have been having a lot lately. I feel like the epitome of lame when I tell people that I want to write science fiction. I might as well take to playing Warhammer, wear coke-bottle glasses, and frequently describe things as "purely plasmodial!"

Growing up, I wanted to be an astronaut. That was until I first got on a roller coaster and spent the next hour praying to the porcelain gods. I also found out that my eyes are not up to snuff. I am not physically perfect enough to be an astronaut, and I probably don't have the grades either. I am not good enough to be an astronaut. I will never go to space.

Nor will you, most likely. No matter where on earth you are, you are less than 65 miles from outer space. I am closer to outer space right now than I am to Concretestan. It takes maybe ten bucks of gas to get to Concretestan with current gas prices. To outfit, launch, and maintain a space shuttle flight costs somewhere on the order of $1.5 billion. And that won't even get me escape velocity. Funding an Apollo mission in today's dollars would cost somewhere around $145 billion. Building and launching spaceships is incredibly costly and requires more numbers than could ever be held in my brain. I am not intelligent enough to build spaceships. I am not intelligent enough to send people to space.

I know why I write, and that is because through writing, I can make anything happen. I may not be perfect enough to man spaceships (with the exception of my beloved Spaceship Earth), I may not be intelligent enough to build spaceships, but I can write about spaceships. And by writing about spaceships, if I do it well enough, I can take anyone to space.

In all reality, there will likely not be another man (or woman) on the moon for the next thirty years. NASA will continue to receive less and less funding, along with the European Space Agency. China, or maybe India, could potentially send more people up, but as of right now their space programs are still nascent.

We blew our wad by winning the space race. We rushed into space exploration without taking time to do things right, and in doing so we missed out on a lot of opportunities. Getting to the moon turned into a pissing contest for national pride, rather than an opportunity to create a sustainable space program that would maintain continued progress. Space exploration is not as advanced as we think it is. Despite the optimism of some scientists, my generation will all be dead before someone walks on Mars, and our children and their children will be dead before we get to the other side of the asteroid belt.

I will be providing the next best thing to going to space. I want to go to space, and I'm sure many others do as well. That is what I want to write science fiction. That is what I want to tell people when I have the aforementioned conversation. But I just watch the wheels turn in their brain as they realize how unbelievably lame I am.

The Insomniac Symphony

"Time is the essence

Time is the season

Time ain't no reason

Got no time to slow

Time everlasting

Time to play besides

Time ain't on my side

Time I'll never know"

Blue Öyster Cult, "Burnin' for You"

Program Notes

Because of my rather disastrous burnout my season is now over. October isn't even over and I'm already taking time off before base building for track. My coach told me to do something that I had always wanted to do, but never could because of my training. I am taking this opportunity to venture into the wide world of insomnia, because it has always been something that I wanted to experience. Here are my observations, in all of their late night/early morning glory.

Allegro: Space-Time

Space time is not something that I fear anymore. If sleep is not important, then I have more time to do things. This gives me a theoretical eight extra hours. I look at the clock, I laugh at the clock. I am laughing at time, because time no longer scares me. And time is the only thing that makes us aware of space, and the distance between things. Therefore I am afraid of neither time nor space. I am not afraid of space-time. I'll fight black holes, wormholes, neutron stars, Higgs-Bosons, whatever the universe throws at me, I'll take 'em! I'll break the speed of light, I don't care if those PhD's say I can't do it. So what, they have their hadron colliders and their fancy lab in Switzerland, but they are still afraid of the very fabric of which they are made. I have transcended science. I am an insomniac, for the time being anyway.

Schertzo: Coffee

It has been several months since my last cup of coffee. My life goal is this: I can only consume coffee if I am in a social situation, and I will have the minimum possible amount of caffeine, short of ordering decaf. I refuse to use caffeine for any utilitarian function. At a certain point, everyone who drinks coffee needs coffee. You know why the best part of waking up is Folger's in your cup? Because you're a fucking addict! "I'm a coffee drinker." "I'm a vegetarian." "I'm addicted to methamphetamine and as a result am HIV positive." All part of the same spectrum. No caffeine for me.

With that in mind, I decided to have four cups of coffee in twenty minutes.

I think I was part of an experiment, but I can't be sure. All I know is that there was a video camera in the room, and I had to sign a release before I could enter. (Maybe they just know that my squiggles will be valuable some day.) I think that the experiment was observing people talking in a room to study human interaction. They lured people in with free coffee and various munchables. There was sugar, Splenda, and powdered milk solid available, but I know that stuff is for pussies. I take my coffee like I take my men! (Oh my, I am tired.)

There were two types of people in the room: those who were there for the conversation and those that were there for the coffee. I was there for the conversation but ended up living by the old maxim: "when in Rome, attend a morally depraved spectacle of gratuitous violence, slaughter and assimilate indigenous people, and eat so much that you vomit all over the the entryway to your home in a proto-bulimic binge-and-purge cycle." So I had some coffee.

I sat there, gulping down bitter liquid. This girl comes in, and once she sees the coffee start to flow into her mug, she sighs and says "ambrosia," her voice quivering as she does so. We really are a society of addicts.

So twenty minutes and four cups of coffee later I start to notice something: my hands are moving. I am not really aware of this, nor am I consciously making it happen, but I am gesturing at something. I am apparently very passionate about whatever this object of my gesturing is. And I am talking, a lot, and there is just this fountain of bullshit coming out of my mouth. I am moving energy with my hands, I can almost see it! I am buzzing. Off of coffee! This does not make sense but it is happening. I get another cup. I am holding it in my hand. I am holding power in my hand. The energy seeps out of the cup and into my hand, energy through osmosis, my power level is over 9000! Power, there is power in my stride and power in my gaze, or there would be, if only I could look at something for more than a few seconds.

This is how they hook you. This is how and Starbucks and all those other trendy froth coming out their asses places rope you in. You can buy power in a cup. You don't need to sleep because now you can just get your energy over the counter. You get something without working for it, you take a shortcut to your basic human needs. And like anything else that you don't work for, it becomes meaningless, because eventually, it goes away and you're crawling back for more and pouring out your wallet so you can function again. We want the benefits without the sacrifice and we get both.

"Ambrosia." I'm fine with my food for mortals, thankyouverymuch.

Adagio: Panda Sauce

Orange chicken sauce, now that is ambrosia. It is made from everything bad for you: high fructose corn syrup, hydrogenated oils, MSG, and enough dye to render a whale infertile. Nothing tastes better in the wee small hours of the morning (while the whole wide world is fast asleep / you lie awake, and think about the girl / and never ever think of counting sheep) than refrigerated then nuked orange chicken. I don't care if it clogs my arteries, ruptures my pancreas, and turns my balls into barren bundles of oh-so-sensitive nerves, I will allow myself this one transcendental moment of pure indulgence. Because in two weeks, two weeks time, this haphazard existence will end and it will be back to my labors.

Finale: Structure vs. Volume

I live life differently than most people my age. My life is based on a routine. Yes, I may deviate from that routine, but the routine is the structure and the maintenance of that structure, and the benefits of that maintenance, are what motivate me to get things done.

For most other people my age, life is based on events. They get things done so that they can cram as many events into a frame of time as possible.

They measure success by entertainment. I measure success by the process of completing a task. One of these days, things will switch.

They will go into the wide world of jobs and careers and families and garages and bills to pay. If things go as planned, I will live life for experiences and the chance to grow with every misadventure, failure, and rake stepped on. They think that this is their last chance at youth. But that is only if they choose to grow up. (At this point anyway), I don't really care about financial stability and hallmarks of success. I just want to tell stories.

"I remember being that way when I was your age."

"Well I'm on a mission. Were you on a mission? That's what I thought."

IV-V7-I-V7-I

(pause, cough, is it over?)

ba-dommmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.

(Applause)

Burnout

"It's better to burn out

Than to fade away"

-Neil Young, "My My, Hey Hey"

Something is wrong. When I say that, I mean that there is something wrong presently and superficially. I have DNFed my last three workouts with the team, and the last ten minutes of my "long" run last Sunday, ten miles of stumbling, felt as though I was swimming. Everything from biking to calss to getting up to take a leak in the middle of the night feels like a daunting effort. I'm trying to think of an explanation. It is not anemia, I know that. My ferritin count is 61, a number which Bethany says she would give her pinkie finger to have. It can't be mono, because I've already got that out of the way. My sleep has been good. I took three days very easy and that didn't help. I may be going flat, burning out. June 20th was the last time I took a day off. I am fatigued beyond belief. I just want to lie down right here. I want to hibernate.

I may have been starting to go flat the week before the time trial, but three days easy and adrenaline allowed me to gut it out. That may have given me a little shot in the arm that lasted to Interior Concretestan Invite. Kinetic Village probably took a lot out of me, too. Right now my quads are ravaged and I feel as though I am going to collapse just sitting here, watching my laundry dance in the dryer.

Maybe my problems run deeper. The superficial wrongness is simply a symptom of deeper wrongness. I may just have a case of bitch. I am still just a 9:50 guy or a ten flat guy even, who got lucky and now gets an opportunity to try another four or five years of pretending he has potential.

I didn't think I would still be running at this point. I was sure I would be done by the time trial. That was back in April when I was still a nine-fifty-crap two miler and a four-thirty-crap miler. That day at Edward's Stadium I ran through a solid iron door just as it was slamming shut. I considered myself so lucky, I had done the impossible. Now I realize that I had only begun to challenge the impossible. I realize that I may have ended up on the wrong side of that door.

That door is made of something heavy and metallic, but wherever I am is certainly not metal. I am not sure of the size or the scope of this chamber, or if it is any kind of enclosed space at all. It is a place where everything is moving quickly yet subtly and being still for a moment will get you crushed, smashed, mangled, maimed, exsanguinated, defenestrated, or just have the life force sucked out of you by some vaguely human but obviously alien proboscis. This is the place where we live now. There is no sky or floor, only a forest with strange machines filling up any empty or habitable spaces. Welcome to living the dream, asshole!

So since I am here now, what do I do? I am in a place where I have an opportunity. I may not be on the pleasant side of those hungry iron doors, but I am on the side where I can better myself. Most people are on the pleasant side where they can afford to make mistakes and afford to live a life with little routine, live a life without standing on the edge of physical reality and leaning forward. They can find little meaningless gems of meaning in the wee small hours of the morning. I know these people and love these people, but I cannot be one of them, at least while there is still work to do, while there is still an opportunity to better myself as best I can.

A week ago I had a dream. My dad was driving me to the time trial, and we were arguing about the same bullshit we always argue about. At some point, I challenged his masculinity. He pulls over and says "oh yeah, well look what I just bought!" as he reaches for the glove compartment.

He pulls out a Glock.

"How does just having a gun make you a man?" I ask. "Or are you trying to compensate for something?"

"It's not the fact that I have a gun," he says. "It's what I'm about to do with it." He puts it right up to the back of my head.

"You're too much of a bitch to pull the trigger," I say. "You're trying to prove yourself but you can't.  You're too much of a bitch."

Then he points the gun at my knee and fires ten rounds right above my patella. "Good luck with your running career now, asshole!"

But in the real world, I am still intact.

Pacific

The Pacific Ocean is the edge of the world. A hundred, maybe two hundred miles out, you run into sea monsters and then the world just stops, water spilling over the edge. And if you sail too close, you'll be going over with it, if the sea monsters don't get you first. There's nothing really pacific about it. All of us came here to its shore because we, or one of our predecessors, were trying to escape something and then ran out of room in which to run. All the great cities on the western edge of the New World: Vancouver, Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Guayaquil, Lima, they're nothing more than dumping grounds and shantytowns for people who wanted to keep pushing on to something but ran into the edge of the world instead. Now we invent and augment our cultures and keep on keeping on while the sea monsters look at us and laugh.

Kinetic Village/Revelation Lake

"But I don't need to bother you, no, I won't play that part

I just want access to the inside of you heart Access to your thoughts on the way that I should be So I could start to change and maybe you could access me"

-Phish, "Access Me"

I realize that this post is a little late in coming. You get what you pay for. If you want me to post when I say I will, cut me a check and I can guarantee any number of subsequent posts (based on how much you pay me) will be up with all due expediency. But until one of you steps up, you will have to deal with this after-the-fact bullshit. Enjoy

Sometimes you have to cut your way through every layer of bullshit to stab at what you are looking for. This was relatively easy in Spaceship Earth. The dimensions were right, the shape was right, the thoughts just bounced around and the AI would get inside your head, break down the barriers and the inhibitions and, as they say, you could talk some real shit. You can call it a heart to heart or opening up or a sencere discourse or even a mutual expounding of truths of the mind and soul between two or more consenting parties. But it all reduces to "talking some real shit."

You could do that inside Spaceship Earth. It worked to a degree even after the ship itself died and only its brain in a jar was present. But the brain is still alive and sitting in someone's room. He is someone who needs it. New Gibraltar needs Spaceship Earth. But dammit, so does St. Collegeberg. Everywhere needs a brain of Spaceship Earth, but there is only one brain of Spaceship Earth and it is sitting in someone's room in the town of New Gibraltar, which is located in Greater Balboastan. (If you do not know what these places names actually are, try to figure it out. If you do I will give you five ozonebucks, which are good for, well, absolutely nothing.) I am currently away from the brain of Spaceship Earth, in a town called St. Collegeberg, which is located in the northern regions of concretestan. The area is known as Ferdinand's Folley. Ferdinand's Folley is about a five and a half hour drive from New Gibraltar. Can you figure out what these places are actually called?

Anyway, that is not my point. The point is, the world needs people to be sencere both with each other and with themselves. You could do that in Spaceship Earth.

And now that we have no intact Spaceship Earth, how do I do this?

Well it just so happened that I went on a vision quest.

The vision quest was a rite of passage used by the Sioux Indians. Men would sit in a hole for three days with no food or water and would have dehydration and hunger-enduced visions. I did a vision quest-lite. Less fulfilling, but better for you. I went out in the woods for a few hours. The whole team did this during our stay at Kinetic Village.

The place I am referring to as Kinetic Village is a town whose population is less than its elevation in feet above sea level. It is a beautiful place with lots of trees, endless trails, spectacular mountains, and very little oxygen.

Even though I went up there to train with my team in the weeks before class starts, I won't talk much about the running. Most people will not be interested in hearing about my running, and this is not a Flotrack blog, where I could talk about my running and the life lessons I learn from it and how it's so damn important and trancendental with some sort of metaphysical construct placed precariously on top, or if it is Ryan Hall's blog, an awkward paragraph about how his tempo run related to Hebrews 11. Running is not something that is complex and philosophical. It is the opposite. It is life stripped of everything complex and philosophical.

I will talk about the radio stations in Kinetic Village. Kinetic Village and its greater surrounding area are very sparesly populated. Therefore, these radio stations really dont' have very many listeners, and therefore generate very little advertising revenue. These radio stations therefore get to play whatever the hell they want. I don't mean that they can play the slightly less popular Nickelback songs or the uncensored versions of songs that are labeled as explicit. I mean that they play whatever the hell they want. A set could go from a country western ballad to a smooth jazz porn groove to early Jefferson Airplane to a Texas blues. And this was common. One station had the classical hour every morning at eight, followed at nine by the speed metal hour. One show was operated at the hands of an old man who played mostly Old-Timey music and sounded like he was having a stroke when he was talking. He also seemed to have seen most of the artists he played live and in their heyday.

In mainstream America circa 2009, you don't play a song because you like it, or even because you think it should be played. You play it because it's what people want to hear it. People want to hear it because other people want to hear it. This may be a bold statement, but I doubt that more than 10% of the people who consciously listen to the song "Birthday Sex" actually enjoy listening to it. It's popular and it has novelty. And what about when people want to sing along? You put on "Don't Stop Believin'," because we all know the words and it's catchy and singable. I'm sure that a lot of people, in the rare moments when they are honest with themselves, don't really like "Don't Stop Believin'." They like it because it is a cultural common ground, something that everyone can agree upon. But when you go up to Kinetic Village, where the air and population are spread thinner, you get DJ's who really don't need to rely on what people want. It's a beautiful thing, if you don't mind having your relaxed mood, created by listening to the Bach Cantatas, suddenly interrupted by "Enter Sandman."

My vision quest involved a lot of climbing rocks, for some reason. It was something I wanted to do. I saw a cleft on a rock face, and wanted to get there. By the time I got there, I had decided that it wasn't cool enough, and wanted to go to a cleft that was higher up, and would therefore require more climbing. I had a notebook with me to write down my thoughts. I kept climbing up these rocks until it got really steep and I had to carry my notebook in my teeth so as to have two free hands. I ended up yelling at myself a lot, and singing Phish's "Access Me" for some reason. I realized that Phish could have been recognized as a really good band, and not just a really good jam band, had they taken their studio efforts more seriously. As I knocked loose rocks hundreds of feet down, I was reminded of the Chinese proverb about moving a mountain by moving small stones, and how I could theoretically move this 9,000 foot peak if I just had enough time on my hands. I saw the entire valley as this sphere and I was swirling around in it. I climbed up to a cleft and looked out at the mountains in the distance and knew that on the other side there was nothing but desert and casinos and concealed UFO crashes. I knew that behind me lay a subcontinent that I call my home, but that I will never truly understand. I didn't see the ghost of FDR, I didn't speak in tongues, I didn't see the face of the Virgin Mary on a tortilla. I just knew that being afraid was pointless, even though the slightest clumsy motion could send me falling hundreds of feet, and that I would die wearing those stupid sweatpants with snaps on the side so that you can rip them off. I yelled at myself because of all the things about myself that I hate, and how I am inheriting all of my family's problems and shortcomings.

I could resurrect Spaceship Earth, the whole thing, enough mind power and willpower and it could be whole and functioning and one foggy day we could get in and then go, some place. Even if you go in circles in Spaceship Earth, you are going somewhere. You figure things out. We can talk about what happened on the day when the windshield of the world was smashed and a whole new reality rushed in. You don't know what I'm talking about and it's better that way. I just want to figure it out. But I can't. Everyone has a demon, some event that haunts them. And my problem is that my demon is someone else's demon.

Some runs will make you faster. Some will challenge you. Some will make your quads stronger. Some will reveal secrets. Some will show you things about others. Some will tell you what you lack. Some elevate your mood or crush your spirits. But there is one run that reveals who you are.

There is a lake near New Gibraltar. The trail around it is a fourteen mile loop which gains a net total of at least 1,000 feet of elevation, possibly closer to 1,500 feet. I ran this loop four consecutive Sundays this summer, and I saw who I am. I do not like who I am.

But in Kinetic Village, I saw what I can become. And I like what I can become.

Then one day I'll come back to New Gibraltar and chase the demons out of all of you.

Preparing to Elevate

"And we all got to ride this river

And we all got to feel the rain

And we all dig what we're given,

Even the pain"

-The Yellowjackets, "Even the Pain"

It's time to go to altitude. I guess everything I'm doing is not hard enough, it needs to be done with less oxygen now. I will be going to "Kinetic Village" with the team for a week. We will live and run at 8,000 feet, and we will be thinking much more about the latter and very little about the former. And this will drive me crazy. I am already losing it. I need to talk to some people that are not runners, I need to talk about something other than covering ground quickly on foot and how to do it better. I will not find that in Kinetic Village. We will probably have daily quoting of scripture from Once a Runner and will most likely also discuss many factual runners. If I could go back a year in time and tell early September, 2008 me what I was going to be doing, he would be extatic. Now that my perspective has changed... wait, scratch that. Now that I have perspective, I realize that the best way to get good at something isn't to think about it all the time. Sure, you pour your heart and soul and blood and nuts into it, you can even live the lifestyle and center your life around it, but if you can't focus on anything else, you will not accomplish anything.

I want to sit down with the people I know, I just want to have those conversations we always would have, where we talked about everything and nothing at the same time, where stories were swapped and hypotheticals were discussed and allegations of dude-kissing were made. Even on runs, I want to talk about something other than what we're doing. I miss my old team, with Brondello's childish spirit and wit, Robert's racist ramblings, Baffi's comments that were nutted by the line that separated the lewd from the philosophical, Ross's attitude of a 400 meter runner, Colby's contrapuntal opinions, Bongman's occasional gems, and Budge's depraved sexual fantasies. I never thought I would miss that but I do.

I need real people. I'm sure that everyone on this team is a real person, but the problem is that there is only one thing that unites us: we are runners. In high school, your whole team grew up together, you lived in the same town and you had to bullshit for the same teachers. Now we're just a bunch of kids from all over the state who have one talent and interest in common.

And the workouts, they all make me so tired. So much damn running, drills, abs, even stretching takes a couple lifetimes. I'm eating healthy, which means nothing that you enjoy eating. My calves are shredded, my quads are twitching, my hamstrings are tightening, my hip flexors are quivering, and my butt is, well, let's just say I feel like I've been dropping some proverbial soap quite often.

So what do I do in times of adversity? Do I take advice from my pianist Joe Zawinul and cry out "Mercy, Mercy Mercy!" No, I grin and bear it, because I know that I can put up with bullshit for longer than the universe can throw it at me. Have you kicked aversity in the balls today? Because I have, and I shall continue to do it on the daily.

Major bonus points if you got the "Mercy, Mercy, Mercy" reference.