I’m doing a post tomorrow on Chris McDougall’s book Born to Run …but found this comment on a YouTube video and thought it was pretty funny…
running is not instinct, and if the gun was pointed at me i wouldnt be a
fucking retardto run away. first thing you learn in marital arts is never to run from the gun. you should only run from knife / cold weapon attackers.· in reply to sargentdix(Show the comment)
If there wasn’t anything going on that might hurt the environment, I doubt I’d ever hear a thing about fracking.
I’d just fill up at the pump with cheap gasoline…or heat my hot water with cheap natural gas….and enjoy the fruits of someone else’s labors. I wouldn’t give it a second thought.
But check out this article featured on the MSN homepage this morning…
…lots of problems….lots of issues.
Now, it’s good to have cheap gas. It’s GREAT to have cheap gas! I love to drive around…love to road trip…love to see the world from behind the wheel of my auto-mo-beeel…..but when you can show a picture of a lady with a mason jar of cloudy tap water that resulted from the fracking in her area…well, you have to consider her as being a little more than just “collateral damage”.
image Noah Addis / for NBC News
I’m not an engineer. I don’t work for the companies doing the fracking. I don’t make any money from fracking.. so I don’t know a lot about it…just the little bit I read.
The trouble with the process that I see is that because of the technology they use, a lot of the people harmed by fracking don’t see a dime from it either. Because the companies doing the drilling go deep and then go across, the damage can be far reaching…a lot farther reaching than the location of the original well would have you believe.
There are a tremendous number of guys who, because of fracking and the jobs it provides, are finally making a decent living after scraping by for a lot of years. Fracking is big business…and it is helping a lot of families who had a hard time before it came around…but I think that it’s hurting a lot of people, too….and it’s the kind of hurt that’s hard to back away from.
We drove through the Dakotas this summer. My mother grew up in a little town called Starkweather, ND…so I have a little familiarity with those states. People joke about there not being a lot up there…and I guess there really isn’t a whole lot in some parts of the Dakotas. It can be kind of bleak.
There are some really great people up there, though…some good lefse and lutefisk eating Scandinavians…and I like them. Somehow, even though I haven’t lived around them for a long time, they’re my people.
It’d be a shame to see them go down because we like cheap gas and are willing to turn our heads the other way when how we go about getting it causes problems.
I was never this tan…or this fit…or this adventurous…but this video makes me wonder…”where’s my cameraman?”.
That’s the thing about these videos…we never celebrate the guy behind the camera…chasing the tan guy up the mountain.
He doesn’t get any props.
But back to me.
Where’s my cameraman? I could plop him down in the back of the mail jeep, he could film me opening mail boxes and putting mail into them (it’s more exciting than I make it sound)….both of us turning into public service mushrooms after years of sedentary work.
It would be a long film…but it would be a good one if you could hang with it.
This video reminds me that we’re really designed to be “good animals”…worked hard and doing something out in the world.
Outside in the world.
Now, my job does get me outside. As jobs go, it’s pretty cool…big box of dog bones, open window, working windshield wipers, new axle u-joints, a sandwich for lunch, a full tank of gas…and I’m good to go. Oh…and don’t forget to put the mail in the Jeep before I head out…it’s a big part of the job.
The thing about my job, though, is that I sit. I sit and drive.
They say that sitting is one of the most damaging things you can do…like your life is shortened by 20 minutes for every hour you sit or something like that. Man….that really stinks. Surely it can’t be 20 minutes? My time is short if that’s the case. That really stinks.
I don’t know if we get any extra longevity credits for delivering an express package.
I don’t know what we get longevity credits for.
The weird thing about newfound sedentary lifestyles is that the less I work my body, the more I hurt. Aches and pains, tightening…you’d think that not working something would allow it to settle into a slack limberness…but it just seems to torque down to a new tightness.
I do know that our bodies are very adaptable. We become what we need to become to do the task at hand. I feel more and more like the mushroom mail man….sprouted on the front seat of a right hand drive mail jeep, a powerful and unbalanced right arm and shoulder for opening mailboxes, everything else going farther and farther over into the unfit dark side.
But, like Martin Luther King, Jr….I have seen the mountaintop. I remember what that feels like to be running up a hill. I just need to get out of the Jeep every once in a while and strap on the running shoes.
Only watching a tan guy run up a mountain doesn’t get me any closer to the top of the hill, though.
I brought a bowl of crunchy store brand raisin bran upstairs to enjoy the other morning.
The minute I sat down on the couch, our three-year old son was right beside me…asking to share.
A mouthful for me, a mouthful for Nate….”No…more raisins”, he said…”milk….” .
It started a freight train of thought in my head as I sat there sharing my breakfast…why not have a team…why not have a stable…I don’t really know what you’d call it…why not have a bunch of three-year olds that you rent out to people to aid in their weight loss plans?
I know that I get about half of the food I plan on getting when our three-year old sits down to share…maybe other people would have similar results and could reap the benefits of caloric reduction at the hands of a willing child?
You can’t refuse a three-year old. This plan is foolproof.
Empires have been built on lesser ideas.
Now, it may not work the next time you sit down down to enjoy a healthy portion of pickled pigs feet…I think it has to be a food item that’s appealing to a three-year old. If you were planning to eat, say…macaroni and cheese or something like that…the plan would work perfectly.
I’m still working out the logistics…there’s waivers to sign, parents to approach with the plan, lots of groundwork…but if this idea takes off I could see a really exciting infomercial in our future.
I figure that 3 year olds are the perfect employee…maybe a really immature and hungry 4-year-old would work out well, too. Like I said before, I’m still working out the details.
This is an idea that could really fly.
I’m taking applications for angel investors starting now…
I think I hear the little guy getting up now…time to share a bowl of raisin bran (am I looking thinner to you?).
image from the dailymail.uk
“How old would you be if you didn’t know how old you was?” Satchel Paige (1906-1982)
Hands in the air, hands on the keyboard…”it’s your birthday, it’s your birthday”…it’s my birthday today.
53 years old…and well marked on the calendar of my soul.
Satchel would be so proud. He played major league ball into his late 50’s…and minor league ball into his 60’s…I’m still delivering mail and getting up every morning to do it.
But…he’s right about knowing how old you’d be if you didn’t know. I don’t feel my age until somebody asks me if I’d started to have back problems yet…or asked me how my blood pressure, or blood sugar, or if I still had any blood that hadn’t turned to dust , or any of the other “old blood” questions people ask when you start to get up in the years department. Then I start to feel old…or at least feel that I’m dipping my toe into the whirlpool that’s sucking the rest of the folk down into their decrepit state of mind.
I guess misery loves company…I guess we love to compare in the hopes that maybe somebody is worse off than we think we are. A catalog of aches and pains…new indications that we’re no different than anyone else that came before…the club of old.
Did you know that you can join AARP when you turn 50? Holy Smokes!!! What kind of conspiracy is that? Do they want us to feel old before our time? What the heck.
I’m feeling good. I choose to feel good. I am proud to consider myself to be one of the ageless freaks of the world who never grows old…and maybe, by default, never really grows up. ( Maybe growing up is really just embracing all the aches and pains of growing older? It’s hard to say.)
Here’s to endless youth.
Here’s to immaturity.
Happy Birthday to meeeeeeeeeeeee!
image from www.howstuffworks.com
I turn 53 years old tomorrow.
I needed something to write a short blog post about…and what better fodder for an idea free head than another YouTube video.
Check these two fellows out. Right down to the wire, it was a suspenseful 30 seconds of running. It’s pretty impressive, really. I’d like to go out at 100…spontaneously combusting as I round the final turn of a really slow 400 meter race. It would be a dramatic way to end.
I think I’ve grown out of the opportunity to be precocious…maybe it’s time to finally grow up? Or maybe it’s just time to lace the running shoes back up and hit the road for another go round?
I love videos like this…it gives me something to shoot for in the future.
I was watching a documentary about financial troubles in the United States of America on a free preview of HBO the other night, and this guy’s music was featured.
One of those “who the heck is that?” moments that come along every once in a while.
It has kind of a timeless quality…new and old at the same moment…good stuff.
Here’s a Wiki write-up of him here
Another good one…check him out.
.
I deliver the mail.
Understanding sometimes comes through repetition…so I’ll say it again, even though I’ve said it a couple of times before in this blog…I deliver the mail to provide us with the money we need to make a living.
My job involves a lot of driving. I see a lot of faces passing the other way on the roads I travel. I get to interact with a lot of different kinds of people. I like that part of my job quite a bit.
The other day, I passed a guy riding a motorcycle. It was a tricked out Harley, expensive black leather saddle bags…a Harley load of chrome and black metal badness.
He was all patina and wind chapped skin…black leather and white beard….a stern look of concentrated coolness on his face.
I waved at him like I wave at everyone. I wave at everyone like some needy little puppy…hurt and surprised if I don’t get the expected response of a “wave back”.
This guy looked me right in the eye and zoomed past.
He was a pretty tough guy.
I drove around shoving mail in mailboxes…thinking about this guy and what it means to be tough.
My father was a different kind of tough. He wasn’t the “look at me” kind of tough…he was a pretty quiet man.
When I was 15, I came home from school and discovered my mother at the bottom of our stairs. She’d fallen as a result of a spinal condition that she’d been diagnosed with a couple of years earlier. I guess the condition had made her lose her balance and she’d spent the day at the bottom of the stairs waiting for someone to come home and find her there.
I called my father at work, he called the ambulance, and Mom went to the hospital for the summer.
For the next 15 years, my father was her caregiver. Caregiver is a strange way to put it , really. My father was her husband. My sister and I were her children. We all took care of each other.
That was my example of a tough man.
It wasn’t someone who rode a wild-looking bike…it wasn’t someone who got in a lot of fights in the bars or had a lot of women…it wasn’t any of the things that some people think are examples of toughness.
It was just a quiet man who took care of his family even when it was hard…or maybe especially when it was hard.
A child supposes that the parent’s dream is to serve the needs of the child. Sometimes, it feels like maybe children just assume that the parent didn’t have any purpose or aspirations before the child entered the world…like the assumption is something like, “here I am…now you can start living”.
I know that my father had dreams. He told me once that he’d wanted to go to Australia and become a veterinarian. That’s pretty “out there” to want to go down to the Outback . I’m sure there were a lot more things that he’d dreamed of doing that I never heard about.
I know that, like all of us, my father had dreams that he owned independent of his family.
I hear talk of a life of quiet desperation…but I wonder if one of the signs of real toughness is letting your family enjoy a life that, for the most part, is as much “business as usual” as possible…no matter what your dreams for yourself are?
Toughness has a lot of faces. Steady and calm is one of them…but it’s one that’s easy to take for granted because it’s not very dramatic or confrontational.
My father was a tough man.
It’s a sure bet that if I’m posting another YouTube video that I’m so completely uninspired to write a blog post that I’m desperate for content.
Completely uninspired…fuzzy headed early morning survival mode…not a good place to be if I want to come up with something to write about that has some “meat” to it.
Then along comes Amos Lee.
We almost named our son “Amos”…I told my wife, “how about the name Amos?” ….and she really liked it….but my daughter said the kids at school would turn it into “Anus” so we chickened out. Man….it’s a great name, though.
This song is like a soundtrack to the world opening up…Spring is here and windows are rolled down.
So…even if I don’t feel like writing much this morning…thanks to Amos Lee it’s a complete attitude reversal.
Windows are rolled down.
Indeed.
What more can I say?
Happiest of Easters to you.