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Mandy’s Tune

November 9, 2010 By longrun 2 Comments

“Now you know what it’s like to get f–ked for money.”

This, left on the answering machine. I guess she means the eighteen hundred bucks for rent and cable to start clean and stay clean. No such luck — she’s off the wagon now, tricking again, heading back to the outskirts of hell.

No one is spared, rich or poor, abused or shallow, broken hearted or holy. The party keeps going, there is always more.

You can hear the city whimper. Another day breaks to a rollin’ steel rhythm, a last minor chord. One more morning with the “can’t get no more, answer the f–kin’ phone” blues.

My city is dying from the inside. The suburbs keep sending the brightest and the best to fill in the ranks. Nobody knows nobody or so they say. The smoke rises, the bodies break, the hometown football warriors, the homecoming queens become ghosts. The war on drugs is just about over. All that remains is the body count and next week’s order.

“You ain’t no addict til you got no dough…”

Aloof, with their blond hair and empty eyes, they were hard muscled, lithe, gymnasts or dancers, before it all changed. Crack, strawberry licorice, cheap whiskey and salesmen from out of town become the daily protocol. The once hard bodies are now host to cold eyes and colder hearts.

_______________

God appears to the broken and the worn and offers his only answer. Faith is what is needed. Faith? they say, You want faith? Just go down the stairs and give the dude on the corner a twenty. Come back up here and we’ll cook that shit. Do you know the dude? No, but I hear he’s got good stuff. These soldiers of god have been on the road to paradise since the day they quit tenth grade and took up residence on the sidewalks, in the doorways, in the cheap hotels, seeking out the holy rock, crack cocaine.

Innocence dies but the body carries on, crumbling to the unsteady beat of a broken heart. Dreams die hard out here. The dead are the lucky ones.

On the stroll the nightly litany begins, “Hey mister…”

One day they start showing the client the ropes and before the sun rises on the next day these beautiful and not yet broken dream queens find their fates. Suck it in slow, steady. Puff, twist the pipe, Pull, long, slow. Get it, hold it. Eyes closed. Lean back. Count to five, let it go. Blow it out, the rush begins.

It’s all high speed, everything moves in slow motion. The streams of blue smoke fill the room. Watch for the small smile, the uncurling, lengthening bodies ready to catch the light, feline, predatory, at the top of the stretch. Her eyes find yours. Relax, she says.

I don’t why I do it. I hate it…Pass me the pipe

The armies of the night take in a new angel of death. Before their twenty second birthdays they have the certain knowledge that the only heaven they will ever know is the kingdom of the fallen children of a merciless god.

You never know when the phone will ring.

Hey, you busy?

No, but I don’t have any dough.

Got any product?

No.

I’ll see you in twenty minutes.

_______________

What do you give the man who has everything, they say. Give him a crack pipe for Christmas. Next year he will have nothing and he will want everything.

Look into their eyes, feel a graveyard wind. Behind ice cold gaze you see them kneeling down in desperate prayer, lost daughters, children, dreaming of proms and homecoming; wanting to go home despite the long worn out hope that one day they will be released.

Will you stop all this lying?

No.

You will be dead in three months if you keep hitting it this way.

I know that, she said.

Photo Credit

“Strung-out” AbigailGeiger @ Flickr.com. Creative Commons. Some Rights Reserved.

Tarmac Meditations-No Plan is Not a Plan

November 7, 2010 By longrun Leave a Comment

If you have no plan, and I mostly don’t, then training is where you find it. When you are young and working out physically at both work and play, as I was, training kind of happened. When I swam competitively or ran track the training sessions were there to be attended, the events a matter of finding the competitors entrance after you got off the bus. The years gone by come to require more planning. The Internet is filled with training plans for runners. The gal in the picture probably hasn’t read one of them. She trains with the Joe Henderson Marathon Team; she has trained with them now for nearly six years. The long runs, the key to both the program’s success and the intense loyalty of its participants to the marathon and the coach, are on Sundays. She, Jean, has shown up for nearly all of them. She has run 17 marathons, some faster, some slower, all steady as she goes. Her plan requires balancing kids, her mother, her job, her commute, her social life, her fabulous chocolate chip cookies and like that. A life. I have read all of the training plans although I quit that after I started to run again for the pleasure/pain/ prayer-like aspects of running into my sixties. It occurred to me just now that I haven’t been running long( long distance) since my surgeries, but it is time to remember no plan is not a plan; that a plan can be simple. And I ought to have one. Run a mile, see how you feel is a plan. Run every weekday for a mile or more, take a day off every now and then and run longer by twice one day on the weekend is a plan. Run long on the weekend, increasing by 5% if every week, by 10% if every other week is plan. Run daily, run slowly, don’t eat like a pig is a plan. Ernst Van Aaken said that. Part of any running plan is to go to a good running store, assess if they know what they are doing; one criteria is that there are all types of people (bodies) selling, it is quiet, there is a sense of running history in the place, there is treadmill or other such for stride analysis, there are running groups for all levels that are organized out of the store. So why say all this? On account of I need to remember what I know. I took a rest day on Friday, felt lousy yesterday, Saturday, and worked early this morning; it will be three days without running, let alone running slowly or long, and the eating like a pig thing, well, it was not my best food weekend. So. A plan. Run daily, write it down. Run slowly, as if I had more than one speed. Write it down. Run long, two hours building to four on the weekend. Rest the other day. Write it down. Don’t eat like a pig; keep track of the fuel input says Matt Fitzgerald so as to support the output for more fun and better health. Write it down. Going to lift now, chop wood later, and write down my goals for the week. Now’s there’s a plan, inside the other plan if you see what I mean.

Tarmac Meditations- Rest Day

November 5, 2010 By longrun Leave a Comment

Rest day. No running; well no running unless I can’t stand it. A good bet for now. Migraine, bad juju I think, too much thinking, not enough acting, too little clarity, too little, too often. “…Too much of nothin’ makes a fellow mean…”( The Mighty Quinn according to Bob Dylan)On the other hand, it is what I have made of it, the running, the writing, the shooting and like that. So it must be in my own hands to at least do the footwork…seat of the pants in the seat of the chair, quit yer whinin’ and write something, anything. In an hour or two you can go chop some wood, literally and then you can rearrange the weights, move the bench, do the laundry, sell something to some one , anyone, eat lunch a spoonful of complex carbs at a time, vacuum the living room, edit the last post, drift across the universe in a facebook space module, quit whinin’, send out the rent check(late), hang the micro fibre, dry the other stuff, gaze out the window, gaze at my own navel, shift the fleet up the coast ( as if), write some more. Nap. The road leads somewhere, even when I can’t see for looking. Keeping the faith, lifting your eyes to whatever you believe in, taking your medicine, literally and otherwise and keeping it tight. A rest day? Not so much.

Tarmac Meditations – Miami was not like this, she said.

November 4, 2010 By longrun Leave a Comment

Ran the straights today, walked the curves. My body is sore from the cross training regimen of chopping wood and hauling water. The water part is just for the rhythm of the sentence. Yesterday I walked and ran a little in the afternoon as promised. Took my camera and saw my neighborhood getting ready for fall. The late sun lit it up like gold hiding in pasture not yet gone to winter grey. This morning, in addition to an ambivalence about love and life and its demands, my stomach said enough of the muesli, let’s get back to eggs. Despite all the physical grumpiness, distance was run, time put in under a star filled sky, whose constellations played hide and seek with a rolling fog that is still hard upon the valley. M was not there to describe the celestial journey but B and R took note. My favorite local Russian coaches were there again, wondering at the fog but warm weather after the days of rain. Miami was not like this she said. No, it was hotter and more humid he said. Then they laughed and started yelling out splits to their proteges. I was reminded yet again that running with purpose is not necessarily the same as training for an event. Sometimes the reward is in the distance, or the surroundings. Sometimes it is in the time over distance and sometimes it is in the companionship of other seekers out there before daylight. For me it is a commitment to continuity and self expression requiring nothing more than a pair of shoes and an opportunity to take the first step.

Running On Empty

November 4, 2010 By longrun Leave a Comment

Running to Fight Addiction and Stay Clean
At first I ran to hide addiction. Now I run to stay clean.

By Michael Lebowitz

Newsweek-May 14, 2007 issue

I’m an addict/alcoholic. Pretty much everything I do reflects this part of me. Perhaps the best way to describe the nature of me in the world is to say, in a phrase from the Eagles, that I’ve wanted “everything, all the time.” It has been a hard way to live. For folks like me, and there are an awful lot of us, addiction is best described as taking a normal activity and doing it abnormally in response to what’s going on inside. One such activity for me has been long-distance running.

I started running the way all kids do, down the block, around the corner. In college I ran on the track team in order to stay in shape for swimming. Running was about fitness as much as it was about competition and courage. I learned early on in the ’60s that I was free to indulge in drugs and alcohol and sex if for no other reason than to try to be included in my generation. I did my part. Running changed for me—it became my way of balancing the hard living, of “sweating out” the whisky, of clearing away the cobwebs of the drugs. The more I used, the more I ran, 70 miles a week for years. The inevitable disaster took the form of a cocaine-induced heart attack at the age of 50. The irony of it is that my heart sustained very little lasting damage—the result, the doctors said, of all the running. I was invulnerable, it seemed, and foolish. I went right back to the drugs and hard living. Complete collapse—broke and jobless, out of time, out of hope, alone, beyond despair—came five years later, in 2001.

I went to treatment in Texas. The facility frowned on running as an activity in early recovery because the activity itself was part of the disease; the endorphins created a masking effect, a running away from self. Maybe this was true. It didn’t really matter. The loss of running, while poignant, was simply one more loss among many.

Two months into my stay I went out one morning to do hill repeats, which require running up and down a hill many times. After all, what did the doctors know, I thought—running is good for me. Repeats are an activity that requires training, fitness and care. I had none of those. My choice to do them and my attitude are absolutely typical of addiction and early recovery. I not only didn’t run very well, I finished in the ER of the local hospital, having pulled my Achilles tendon. The weeks of limping and moaning that followed made a strong case for the doctors’ point of view. The lesson was clear enough. My way wasn’t going to work. I was going to have to start from scratch, to re-invent everything in sobriety before I could return to even the most benign of activities.

Two and a half years into recovery, I was ready to run long again. I was aware, finally, of the need to invest the activity with the lessons of recovery that I had learned. I set out to train for a marathon, six months away in June 2004. I had to start slowly, take it a day at a time, follow a plan, allow myself the opportunity to succeed, have the discipline to overcome a poor day. My running had to be an addition to my recovery; running had to be running for itself, for its restorative quality, a time for reflection, an opportunity for gratitude. For the most part it worked out that way.

In the course of training for the marathon, I found myself thinking back to the days in Toronto when I ran in the early morning with a group of guys and gals. We thought of ourselves as the Road to Ruin Runners Club (RRRC). My growing addiction took me away from all of it—the running, the friendships, the feeling that life would be all right for me. Early on in the Texas training, it came to me that I was the Texas chapter of the RRRC. It got me out the door most mornings. I reconnected with most of the RRRC and discovered that the running and the friendships had survived the worst I had done. I ran the marathon in Anchorage; not well, not fast, but all the way to the end. Along the way I made a promise to myself to write about it. Not long ago my article about the RRRC was published in a running magazine. I have run six more marathons since Anchorage.

Running is different now. For one thing, I’m older and I’m slower. The other morning I realized that things had changed in a more meaningful way. I was out for a run before 5, as is my habit. The rain-wet morning streets that used to be my battleground, home to my desperate search for any means of escape, had become my “cathedral,” home to my daily prayer. I have discovered that I run now because running enables me to fight my limitations, to endure the pain, to fight the evil desire in me to hide; it teaches me every day not to give in, to keep on keepin’ on, to believe.

Mr. Lebowitz lives in Eugene, Ore.