thump

sunrise. coffee. scones con blueberry. fruit of the monkey. hooded wool and cold feet. creaky, achy calves slowly warming to the idea of what i am proposing. interwebs to help awaken. warm up the trail truck while checking to see what i'm wearing for this deal. trail head. find a clever place to hide the key. start slowly, wondering how i'm going to run anything at all, but having been in this place thousands of time before, i know the cadence will smooth out. lightening up, i start to move. my focus wakes up as the chemicals kick in. chippies seem to get out of my way just as my foot is about to hit them. taking the bermed turns when permitted, the climbing starts. i start to feel my breathing now and the ache that sits in our quads no matter how slow or fast we run this makes it's presence known. the creek beside the trail is quiet, done moving snow towards the falls. sweating now. the sun opens more of the trail up to me and i decide to forgo further shirt coverage. happy valley is a welcome sight. three young bull elk get up and run towards the treeline. one big mamma elk just stays where she is, eyeing me. i think we've seen each other before, so she knows why i'm here. passing over the bridge. and into another section of trail, i realize, again, how beautiful and enjoyable the purity of this all is. no race number. no goals. no watch. just taking advantage of what is available to me instead of making excuses or putting it off for another day. weaving past an old miner camp i cross another creek before starting my descent. fresh sawdust and missing section of ponderosa opens up the pathway from the spot across the trail where the big pine fell. moving into the sunlight and shale rock on this descent, taking in the little secrets of this place that i have been taught and found on my own. knowing when to look forward, and when to look back. broken top looms, jagged and pale without it's snowy coat. tumalo mountain offers the same. the sound of whooping and rotor rub breaks the trance and i run ahead to a spot to step aside for a few two wheelers who want to talk and ask for directions. i wasn't in the mood for tour guide, but i helped anyway. moving off, i followed the skidmarks of the tourist bikers through all of the turns, totally overcooked and tried not be judgemental and sad about it. the spell of the experience having been broken, i trotted back to the truck and headed in. all good. happy to be back. morning yearning quenched.

Incell

intergalactic vibes. storytime from the past. my grandfather always had a tight flow. i could listen to that dude for hours. i can't talk to him anymore, so i played some recordings i made last fall prior to his passing this past january. he certainly saved the best stories for last. those which were untold were never asked about. the southern way has evolved from passing along spoken word, family history and tradition into grizzled silence and sheltered privacy.

shaking this nocturnal existence slowly. it is nice to see the sunrise without the fog of sleep in my body.

saw a baby fox this morning. couldn't have been more than 8 inches tall, tail already bushy and thick. small face, like a kitten. tall ears. trying in vain to catch chipmunks. he'll learn. he was curious about me. i could see him sniffing the air, going through his generational catalog of instincts to figure out which category this biped falls in to. he finally found his answer and trotted off slowly to sit in the grass until i was out of sight. i heard him returning to his killing fields in an attempt to catch a trophy to show his momma.

i thought about those instincts while listening to my grandpa's words this evening. i wonder how much we shared. what he was like at my age in ways that he didn't talk about. did he have trouble sleeping. did he enjoy coffee and silence. i know he was a prodigious reader and his attention to detail on anything he built with his hands was second to none. i hear his words coming out of my mouth. sometimes, in ways no different than reciting a good line from a movie i liked, except his words are mine now...

war

despite what the column to the right says, i am actually perusing several texts at once. it's a habit i've always had in order to keep from blowing through books to quickly. i do like a good re-read, but this makes me slow down and really take more from the story being told.

i woke up last night, 2 am. total unrest in play. cracked the ceremonial bullet of ninkasi and tee tee and i settled into my chair. she's as used to this routine as i am. she knows when she follows me downstairs, waits by the chair for me to return from the kitchen and either steer us out to the back porch or head towards the comforts of the reading chair. no sooner is the book cracked that she settles into my lap. i think there is comfort in the routine for both of us. it comes from almost 14 years together. it's her way of "being there". she's doing what she knows she can do when armies of demons are at play within me.

the great unrest comes from a bevy of places. none of which are super important, but keep me engaged on my desires and dreams. i know shit's not right when i come up with a grand scheme one day, the completely flip it the next and replace it with something else. total unrest. i've been a junkie since my last journey. there has been no silver lining in the physical injuries at all. the spiritual and emotional are all connected. i've learned that.

partaking in the text of the evening, i came across a passage that spoke volumes to me and stopped me cold.

"I still remembered how to negotiate the long, horrible process of physical collapse. It starts with pain, of course, but the pain is at the edge of what I thought of as a deep, dark valley. At the bottom of the valley is true incapacitation, but it might take hours to get down there, working your way through strata of misery and dissociation until your muscles simply stop obeying and your mind can't even be trusted to give commands that make sense. The most valuable thing I knew from my running experience was that when you start hurting you're not even close to the bottom of the valley, and that if you don't panic at the first agonies there's much, much more of yourself to give." --sebastian junger, war.

and with that...i remembered and realized.
tonight i bet i sleep like a baby.

tao of tyler

franti

(photo by bobby czzzzzzzzzzzz)

i don't think those fellows knew what hit them when the locals decided to take over the kickoff of the bachelor party. thankfully the groom was huckleberry.