Tarmac Meditations

Tarmac Meditations-First Step

October 23, 2010 By longrun Leave a Comment

Whenever I stop running everyday for whatever reason I find it difficult to start up again. My bent is to make it into some grand scheme in need of complex strategies and tactics. My friend Bob told me something that made sense…Get your ass out and run! In the end, that’s the deal. Ran today for an hour. Come tomorrow I will get up and do it again( Jackson Browne reference). I have the idea to think about base building, just running, for the next two months and let my body readjust to all the surgeries, both medical and age related…meaning getting older and slower means re-adjusting what one can do and how fast one can get to a certain point. Come the new year, if the running has happened, when the running happens, I will pick an event to aim for, maybe Napa, maybe Austin maybe New Zealand, and then in celebration I will eat ice cream and put an end to the darkness and chaos in my life that ice cream’s absence brings. (paraphrasing Don Kardong)

Tarmac Meditations-On Not Running

October 22, 2010 By longrun Leave a Comment

Napa before nap time — All these people, they are still running all except one...can you guess?

Apparently I am writing a running journal for a guy who doesn’t run; neither everyday nor do I train for races…WTH. On one side at least I write something everyday. On the other in addition to my typing skills improving, I don’t have to buy eighty dollar gloves with waffle treads and neutral posting for my fingers or faux olympic training jackets for my hands, to which my speedy fingers are attached. I type in my fingers’ aerobic zone, sometimes I do anaerobic-interval like sprints with the necessary repeats involved (correcting errors, like doing running intervals too fast, is typing’s version pulling a hammy or tweaking that achilles). Is there a point to this? Not likely…hungry, didn’t run early likely not to run later, will run tomorrow and now…lunch highlighted by two ibuprofen, a diet pepsi and a handful of unshelled organic salted peanuts( how do you salt a peanut with the shell on and then take the shell off and still have a salty peanut to eat?)…don’t ask, don’t know.

No Pasarans 2

October 22, 2010 By longrun Leave a Comment

I grew up knowing more about Teruel and The Spanish Civil War than most of the adults living through those times. It seemed a beacon for right thinking people. The young and rebellious, the idealists of all stripes and creeds, my father included, flocked to it as volunteers and fundraisers. The enemy was clear, the expected outcome dire. Romantic to be sure but as the world turned colder and wars became an unholy brutality it seemed that the bravery and idealism of the Republican forces continued, even now, to hold their place of noble note...read more

Originally posted at http://lifeasahuman.com/2010/arts-culture/photography/no-pasaran/

Tarmac Meditations-Gonna Run Later

October 21, 2010 By longrun Leave a Comment

Gonna run later. These words,”famous last words” my father used to say quietly, accompanied by a small “not again” shake of his head, much to my constant irritation; up to and including this morning. Of course he wasn’t here but the words, oh my, those words. It was a morning after not much sleep, a kitchen calamity involving both the automatic coffee machine and the fuzzy headed coffee maker along with the added benefit of a shower of muesli from the not properly closed cereal bin. After a small clean up of spilled coffee(not really possible to spill coffee when is being made in a closed container that requires only that the water is in the tank, the coffee is ground and in the filter which is in the filter holder and the cover is closed..except that it is…it has something to do with not putting the carafe under the drip spout, which doesn’t drip until the carafe top compresses it and then, voila, coffee on the counter top) and a “good vacuuming” of the kitchen at 4:22 AM, it was time to run. Said he, me that is, gonna run in a few minutes, gonna check my email. Not much there so I thought to get on top of the photo editing that needed doing and so I did. Well I did get to the editing after I straightened up the bookshelf behind the desk. Then I got a phone message in my email from the cell phone I left upstairs when I came down to my office to edit. It reported to me ( no shaking head here except mine) that I had blown a 7:00 meeting which I was supposed to lead. Not running yet, as you can see. Went, made apologies, came back finished the editing, it’s now later and there is no running still. Gonna lift instead and run twice as long tomorrow. Except for the tomorrow part it is a good plan. Can’t make up “missed” miles you can only run the miles you run which means instead of a rest day this weekend there will be consecutive running days. And so it goes…

No Pasarán: Found Photographs and Lost Eras

October 21, 2010 By longrun 1 Comment

The Story Behind the Images

I grew up knowing more about Teruel and the Spanish Civil War than most of the adults who actually lived through those times. The war seemed to be a beacon for right-thinking people — the young and rebellious, the idealists of all stripes and creeds, my father included, flocked to the war as volunteers and fundraisers. The enemy was clear, the expected outcome dire. Romantic to be sure — but as the world turned colder and wars became an unholy brutality, it seemed that the bravery and idealism of the Republican forces continued, even now, to hold their place of noble note.

And sometimes, in the literature of the times, in Hemingway and Malraux, in Saint-Exupéry and Romain Gary, the best of what my father’s generation grew to understand and eventually to carry forward was revealed, revered and made mine. That it has been tarnished and misused, ignored when most needed is my doing and none of their own. No pasarán, he told me once. They shall not pass. It means that you can overcome your own worst fears, he said, and make better decisions for yourself. It has taken the better part of my life but here I am and I say, no pasarán, m—-f—er, I’m here and it is my time.

_______________________________

The Images Behind the Story

This image above is the result of a failed attempt, one of many, to create a background for my new photo site. I wanted something film-like in the background so I googled “negatives” and came up with several sites that featured negative strips of 35mm film.

One of the sites featured a story about Robert Capa, the famed still photographer whose pictures of combat set a standard for realism that has rarely been matched. Capa’s photos of the Spanish Civil War are the stuff of legend for their graphic humanism in the midst of slaughter. The other item was series of explorations of open-pit mining, images of destruction in the name of a different kind of progress.

I started by cutting and pasting the images in a random way in order to fill in the required [web] space. I hated it. Didn’t work at all. But the more I looked at the image I had accidentally created, the more it spoke to me of something buried, a moment long lost, a connection with my father who died ten years ago the other day. It became memory, something of value for itself.

Photo Credit

“No Pasarán” Photo Collage by Michael Lebowitz, LongRun Photography