Running Up That Road, Running Up That Hill

I have been running for about eleven years now, (and boy are my legs tired—ba-dum-bum.)  In that time I have found running to be a great metaphor for many things.  It gives me a way to wrap my head around the difficulties of marriage and parenting, the process of developing a good habit, and the work and commitment required to tackle any large undertaking.  I often find that my running life gives me a way to make sense of my non-running life.

Lately I have found that sometimes the opposite can be true, too.  Sometimes my non-running life can give me a unique way to think about my running.  This has happened twice in the past few months here in the hills around Ithaca.  

When life gives you lemons you are supposed to make lemonade (and maybe add a bit of ice and gin).  When life gives you hills, as it does so abundantly here in the Finger Lakes, you just need to build them right into your runs on purpose.  Make them useful.  So that is what I have been doing with a particular beast-of-a-hill called Besemer Hill Road.

After living and running in New Haven, CT for nine years, (elevation 43 feet above sea level), Besemer Hill looks like a mountain.  If I get to the end of the driveway and turn left, then climbing Besemer will not be a part of my run.  If instead I turn right, I know that 1.7 miles down the road comes The Hill.  It is a decision I make in the driveway, without the terrible image of the Hill before me.  Once I turn right, it is already a done deal.  All told, the Hill is 1.5 miles long and gains more than 500 feet of altitude.  The worst section gains more than 300 feet in a half-mile.  It is a killer.

To get myself up and over Besemer without stopping to walk I sometimes have to play tricks on myself.  (Being human, this is very easy to do.)  And this is where I have noticed my non-running life coming in useful to my runs.  One trick I play is to remember a scene from Barbara Kingsolver’s excellent novel Animal Dreams.  One of the characters in the book is a train engineer in the mountain West.  In one scene he describes the difficulties involved in getting a long train up and over a big hill.  Once the front of the train crests the hill and begins its descent, the train experiences gravity pulling it apart from the center.  Both the front cars and the rear cars are being pulled back down their respective sides of the hill and an unskilled engineer can lose the entire train if it uncouples.

To prevent this from happening, there are engines at the rear of the train to provide a push up the hill, but they must be in synch with the front engines providing pull so the cars in the middle are not accordioned.  It is a hard process to get right and requires much skill.  So when I am trudging up Besemer Hill I sometimes take part of my brain and send it on ahead up and over the top.  I imagine it coming down the other side of the hill and back toward the driveway.  And then I trick myself into believing that that part of me that has already made it to the top is providing some pull as my legs provide some push and, together, they get me over the top and back home.  And in that way Barbara Kingsolver gets me over Besemer Hill.

This past weekend I listened to a Radiolab episode called Emergence while driving back from New Haven.  There was a segment explaining how ants seek, find, and collect food to bring back to the nest.  It has to do with order emerging from chaos, and the way this happens in ants is through the pheromone trails each individual lays as it walks.  As individual ants search for and then find a food source, they are constantly secreting chemical trails.  At first these trails are random but over time, as more ants discover the food, the trails in the vicinity have more and more pheromone laid down on top and become stronger and easier to follow.  If five ants have walked the same trail, the scent is stronger than if just one or two have gone that way, making it more likely that successive ants will follow that particular path and in doing so, they will add their scent to the trail as well, making it even stronger.

I had this image in mind two days ago as I got to the end of the driveway and had to decide—left or right?  It was a very long and snowy winter here and I had not run up Besemer Hill since November.  In ant terms, there were no pheromone trails going off to the right and therefore nothing for me to follow that way.  But I knew that I wanted to start building the Hill back into some of my regular runs.  In the end, what helped me decide to go right was thinking about future-me getting to the end of the driveway and sniffing around for a direction.  I wanted that day’s me to get there and be able to tell that the freshest, most recent trail goes to the right and that I should follow that runner who took that trail on Tuesday.  And when I again choose that trail, I will be helping Saturday’s me make the same decision, but it will be less of a decision and more of a built-in instinct.  The trail will get stronger and stronger and the decision will get easier and easier.

Sometimes I love how simultaneously stupid and complex our minds can be.  It is like we are both: the dumb individual ants out in the world basing every move and action on blind instinct, and the larger colony benefiting from the results of all those unplanned, unexamined actions.  In the end, whatever gets me up and over Besemer Hill can only be good.

It Just Doesn't Matter

So the nine Supreme Court Justices have heard the cases for and against DOMA and for and against California’s Prop 8.  Now they are in their chambers, trying to decide how to decide.  From all of the media coverage a person could think that the decisions in these cases matter a lot.  I have to take a different view.  It is becoming clear that the gay marriage train has already left the station for most Americans.  No matter what the Supreme Court Justices rule, society has already passed them by.  Even if they decide to uphold DOMA and Prop 8, these laws won’t stand for long.

I in no way want to diminish the importance of marriage equality and I know that there are real people who will suffer real harm if DOMA is allowed to stand and if Prop 8 remains the law in California, even if just for another year (or two or three).  For them, the decisions of Chief Justice Roberts and his cohort matter very much.  But as for the long-term American project of expanding just who is actually covered by the protections of the Constitution, this particular court cannot throw it into reverse. 

Under our system, people who are part of an officially sanctioned marriage accrue many rights and protections not offered to people who are not part of an officially sanctioned marriage.  This is a fact.  In fact, it is the only relevant fact to consider.  Some of the Justices seem to be asking, “wouldn’t it be moving too fast to allow for gay marriage?”  This is the wrong question and it is not the one most Americans are asking.  Most of us are asking: “Is it unconstitutional to exclude some people from some rights because of who they prefer to kiss?”

The people defending DOMA and Prop. 8 are left spouting platitudes about the sanctity of marriage and the procreative imperative.  They are arguing from the religious point of view, which, in this case, runs counter to the ethical and constitutional point of view.  This is a nation of laws not a nation of religious teachings, and therefore it should be clear even to Antonin Scalia that gay marriage is protected by the Constitution.

Some opposed to gay marriage are employing the slippery slope argument: “If it is okay for two men to marry, then what is to stop people from bigamy or even bestiality?”  As far as bestiality goes, the animal cannot give consent to have sex with the human, so that would be rape, plain and simple.  Marriage without consent has never been protected by the Constitution. 

Bigamy is a different story.  There have been times and places where religious leaders have preached the necessity of plural marriage.  There are countries today that allow men (mostly) to have more than one spouse.  However, this has never been the case in most of the United States.  If, someday, cultural norms change drastically, (possibly in response to some catastrophic event that kills off large numbers of men), then maybe American states will begin to consider allowing plural marriages.  This seems highly unlikely to me, but you never know.  If that happens and there is growing consensus for the approval of plural marriage, then the Supreme Court can take that case and make that decision when the time comes.

This “slippery slope” argument holds no water.  It is the same strategy used by the NRA in their fight against any and all regulations on firearms and ammunition.  I find it entirely insulting because it says that we are incapable of making distinctions.  It says we are too dumb to see the difference between a shotgun and a machine gun. It implies we can’t see the difference between two women committing to spending their lives together and a man fucking his goat.  (Maybe the advocates of the slippery slope argument are really just telling us how they see these sorts of equivalencies…)

In any case, as important as the outcomes of these two cases seem, in the court of public opinion they are already decided and what the nine Supreme Court Justices have to say just doesn't matter. 

Steubenville

I just watched a twelve-and-a-half minute video from YouTube and it made me angrier than I have been in a long time.  It was of a high school boy making tasteless jokes about the girl who was raped repeatedly at a party he was at in Steubenville, Ohio.  The case made the news and has started a national dialogue about teenagers and alcohol and rape.  The boy in the video clearly does not understand how horrific the experience was and will be for the victim.  He is a teenage boy callous in the way that many teenage boys are—in the way that I probably was as a teenage boy at an all-boy school, playing on the football team.  His main refrain, “She is so dead,” is delivered each time with a laugh and something approaching admiration, (though for who or what I cannot say.)

My high school days are long past and I no longer make rape jokes or call people “faggot,” but I certainly used to when I was 16.  This is not something I am proud of.  I am sure my parents and teachers would have characterized me as a good kid, and I WAS a good kid.  But I also laughed at jokes about rape.  At sixteen I did not have enough experience of the world to understand just how awful a thing rape is. 

And there were not enough adults in my life helping me to understand. 

Now I am 47 and I am the father of a 13-year old daughter.  She is not yet drinking alcohol or going to parties where boys are drunk and adult supervision is lax or non-existent.  But she will be at some point in the not-too-distant future.  And watching that video just now has scared the shit out of me.  It made me commit to opening a discussion with my daughter, no matter how uncomfortable it might make us both.  I need her to know just how shitty boys can be sometimes.  A little bit of naiveté can, in this domain, wreak lifelong damage.

Much of the national reaction to this case has tacitly apportioned some of the blame to the victim for getting so very drunk at a party with football players.  Of course I don’t want my daughter to get that drunk as a teenager (or ever, really).  But I also don’t want her to feel like any girl or woman EVER has the blame for getting raped.  I want her to see the “What was she wearing? Why was she so drunk?  Why was she at that bar at 2 am?” line of questioning for the bullshit it is.  Blaming the victim of a rape in any way serves only to relieve men and boys of the responsibility to control their own actions.

Just as the massacre of 26 children and teachers in Newtown has pushed the discussions of gun control and mental illness to a new, harder-to-ignore, level I hope this case in Steubenville will push the discussion of rape out into the open and get us as a nation to look more closely at how we talk (or don’t talk) about dignity and respect and rape with our middle school and high schools sons and daughters.

Excellent commentary on the reaction to the Steubenville case by blogger Lauren Nelson

Good article by Kim Simon on teaching our boys to be kind.

I LOVE my phone company

I am not a big consumer.  In fact, I would much rather make due with a semi-functioning item than buy a new one.  I once told my wife that if I ever have a mid-life crisis it will not take the form of an affair with a much younger woman or the purchase of a motorcycle.  No, my crisis will manifest as a giant giveaway of everything I own.  I really do not like stuff because of how buying and owning make me feel.  As one of my favorite writers, Peter Matthiessen, once said, “We have outsmarted ourselves, like greedy monkeys, and now we are full of dread.”

One way this aversion to consumerism shows up is my reluctance to wear any item of clothing that has a visible label.  My teenage daughter feels it is a bit ridiculous, but I contend that companies should pay the wearer for advertising when we walk around with big labels visible to the world.  (Being human, I do allow myself an exception in the case of Converse Chuck Taylor high tops, since I have worn them forever and the circled star logo is invisible when I wear long pants.) 

These quick comments are here simply to establish my bona fides as an anti-consumerist.  Nobody would ever call me a shill for anything.  Having said that, I would like to make a public declaration of adoration for a phone company. 

I love CREDO Mobile.  They have been my long distance phone company for at least 15 years and I have never once been tempted to leave them.  Erica has strayed from Credo a time or two, but each time, they have welcomed her back by buying out her old contract and finding other ways to sweeten the deal.  As we have become a 3-phone family, they have adjusted our plan to make sure we are paying the very least we have to while still having unlimited texting and no roaming charges ever.  When you call their customer service number, you get to a real person very quickly.  Their customer service representatives are empowered to make decisions without checking with a manager or passing the buck in some way.  They have never been anything but pleasant and helpful.

Can you say that about your phone company?

As if that weren’t enough, they are a corporation with a huge sense of responsibility.  Their mission is to build a for-profit company that works for progressive social change.  Since their beginnings in 1985 they have donated over $70 million to progressive causes around the world.  Customers get to vote on how to disburse donations each year. Every once in a while we get a coupon with our bill that entitles us to a free pint of Ben and Jerry's.

New York State recently made same-sex marriage legal.  Mitt Romney famously said, “Corporations are people, my friend.”  Now, if only New York would allow bigamy, so Erica and I could marry Credo…

If you are unhappy with your cell phone company, consider switching to Credo Mobile.  They rock.

Looking For a Few Good Books

Lately, I have been living in another world—a world  imagined and created by Haruki Murakami in his novel 1Q84.  The book is almost 1000 pages long and as I neared the end I slowed my reading noticeably so that I could spend a few more days there.  The plot involves an emergency elevated highway escape ladder that leads one of the protagonists into a parallel world.  The other protagonist arrives in the same parallel world through his involvement as ghostwriter for a novel called Air Chrysalis.  Somehow, the world he creates for the novel becomes real. 

Over the past five years I have fallen in love with Haruki Murakami and his oddly moving novels.   While I liked 1Q84 very much, it is not the novel of Murakami’s I like the best; that would be The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle.  Both books create worlds that share about 95% of their DNA with the everyday world we already inhabit.  The magic lives in the 5% that is unique to Murakami.  I feel like I am travelling when I enter his books.  I go to another place and live there like a tourist on an extended visa.  It can sometimes be hard to leave his books and re-enter this world.

Finishing 1Q84 made me think about other books I have read that have transported me the way Murakami does.  It is a rare enough reading experience that I was only able to come up with roughly a dozen books that have affected me this way in my 35 years as a real lover of fiction.   Below is a list of those books.  If you have others that have taken you in, chewed you up, and spit you out gasping for air and changed in some small way forever, write the title and author’s name in the comments.  I am always looking for a great book.

Native Son by Richard Wright

Possession by A.S. Byatt

Gospel by Wilton Barnhardt

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami

Animal Dreams by Barbara Kingsolver

Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie

Game of Thrones by George R. R. Martin

Nickel Mountain by John Gardner

Jitterbug Perfume by Tom Robbins

The Book of Laughter and Forgetting by Milan Kundera

Waterland by Graham Swift