Tarmac Meditations

Tarmac Meditations #122: Ripples

May 12, 2013 By Michael Lebowitz Leave a Comment

Thinkin’ about Dennis Aslett, a former Marine I met in Idaho a year and a half ago and saw again last October. Before he ran the 100 miles in front of him, we talked long about how he rode a 50cal north of Danang and I rode the steel rail west to Vancouver, about how choices last a lifetime, about how we got it wrong, each in our own way, about how we got it right, about how the truth was that if you make peace not war then love will follow so long as you stay in, stay steady, stay alive.

Shooting a 50k in the woods come Saturday I’ll be keepin’ it real for myself and for those who are “out there”. I’ll be done when they are. All I can do is the best I’ve got and most days it seems to work out. People ask me why I stay all the way to the end, shoot images of every runner and I tell ‘em something like “it’s my job” or some other non-answer. I stay because until every one of them comes in “we” have people “out there” and we leave no one behind. It is not military or fake heroics; it is built into the fabric of ultra running. I’m privileged to be a part of it.

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Tarmac Meditations #121: Yesterday Is Where You find It

April 28, 2013 By Michael Lebowitz Leave a Comment

Sure doesn’t look like what it used to be, now does it? Barbed wire and uncut grass under a lowering sky doesn’t a field of dreams make. Maybe it does. I suppose if you listen close enough you can still hear the ball leaving the bat, the ‘gone’ in the swing, the passing whisper of a dream.

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Tarmac Meditations #120: In the Moment

April 21, 2013 By Michael Lebowitz Leave a Comment

Said a friend when they saw this picture: “Well, Michael, she is indeed one of the prettiest women I know and she is an absolutely wonderful person and yes, she is a heck of a runner…”

I don’t know her. I took the picture because she was smiling at me from behind the espresso coffee machine and I had a camera in my hand. We were both working, so to speak. Who knew she could run like the wind?

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Tarmac Meditations #119: Never Fades Away

April 14, 2013 By Michael Lebowitz 2 Comments

I wrote this awhile ago. It was a much longer piece then but over the years I have kept cutting it back. I think I wanted to make it more universal in the sense that while it is just one encounter between two people in a specific context, the image I wanted/want to explore is the complexity of war for all involved, at whatever distance, for whatever their reasons. Maybe it does this. Maybe not. I thought about it while running this morning because a flight of F-16s flew over head, their approach heard before they were seen. Even in the peaceful morning rain, the terror that is implied in war planes overhead was palpable. I came back and looked at this and said what the hell, maybe time to put it out there.

A War Story

When I saw her this morning I asked her how she was. She is a graphic artist from Yugoslavia and she works in the office downstairs.

“How was your weekend?”

She said she watched CNN just like she does every night since the Peacekeepers started bombing Belgrade.

In that moment she looked like someone Picasso might have met on the outskirts of Guernica.

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Tarmac Meditations #118: Heavy Gates

March 31, 2013 By Michael Lebowitz Leave a Comment

I threw her out again last night. I am sitting here this morning thinking that since she isn’t here I don’t have to get high right now. And if I don’t have to get high right now maybe I won’t get high all day.

Fat chance.

For an instant it felt like the heavy gates opened, like the light is shining through the crack. Like it is time to wake up. It’s better to wake up they say, better that than to come to.

According to local rules, you can’t get to heaven without going to hell. It seems that I made an easy deal with the Devil, a “handful a gimme/ a mouth fulla much obliged” kind of deal. It was a very long time ago. Here I sit with an empty pipe and no more stories left to tell.

It has been a hard row to hoe and my friends are hard to find. I have discovered that looking for salvation can be damn near lethal.

Come some distant sunrise, maybe I will give up all hope of changing the past.

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