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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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Tarmac Meditations #117: Work in Progress

March 24, 2013 By Michael Lebowitz Leave a Comment

The minister’s granddaughter had a laugh out of a Toulouse Lautrec poster. You make me laugh she said that first night. I better, I said, otherwise it’ll just get weird. Frank Zappa said that.

“I’m glad to hear that you are writing” she said. After a considerable silence, she added, “What a horrible price I’ve paid for your writing.”

I put the phone down and wondered, not for the first time, who was this person I had married one day last June. “Are you kidding me?” I thought later, slouching like DeNiro but just feelin’ tired. There is plenty more to say but before all that there is a price to be paid. Did she know that words are priced in blood and virtue, in boredom and in sin, that words cost the earth and more until they want to be found and then, harder still, until you are ready to hear them.

From the start there was red and orange glowing. At the end there was fire. Leaving before the embers had died required making a shady deal with an enlightened Beelzebub. Jane Gowan said that a long time ago, when I was foolish enough to think that I was ahead of the game. I still like it even if I don’t know what it means.

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Tarmac Meditations #116: Didn’t Run. Wrote.

March 17, 2013 By Michael Lebowitz Leave a Comment

Charlie went down to the market later that afternoon. Outside the rain kept coming. Cold, gray, hard driving rain from the north. Winter rain. Charlie stood outside the market with his groceries, tried to remember what he knew he had forgotten, gave up and ran to the car. On the way out of the lot he remembered.

Prescriptions.

There was no one at the the drive up. He pulled into the lane and up to the window. Charlie sat there, looking at the rain. Not letting up he thought, gonna be a long winter. “Layla”, Clapton and Duane Allman, screaming riffs looking for the quiet inside the passion, was on the box,slipping into his mind, coloring an already gunmetal day. Across the the hills rose up in the mist. The driving rain and the mist coated the hillside of ancient cedar, made it a far off place, he thought, like the mists of Avalon, or the hobbit place or maybe the coast of forever. He thought of Sometimes a Great Notion and how the NorthWest Coast in the winter felt like a place where hard living met the end of things and everyone bunkered in to wait it out ’til the spring. There was anger inside it and loss, everything broken and drifting, but for all of that there was survival too, a hold out, hold on at all costs, never give a goddam inch way to go.

He remembered another driving rain, another hard rain in the big trees, remembered how the ferry rolled and the waves slopped up on the car deck. There was no horizon, just rain and wash and diesel roar. The end of the road, he thought, at the end of the world.

They were going to visit some place he had never been, a cabin on an island where an old school friend of Marlene’s, his wife, had taken up residence. He had met the woman before and liked her swagger, the length of her legs, the dirty innuendo in every sentence. Thought things might get crazy, you know threesome crazy… never had done that, but there was always a first time.

Charlie didn’t remember how it went that first night. They drank and drank, cheap stuff, raw, bad for everything stuff. Smoked some weed, did some lines, got wasted into the deep night. The rain didn’t seem to let up at all that night.

When he came out of the room the next morning the firebox was cold, the wood pile low. He put on a heavy wool jacket he found on a hook, grabbed his handmade wool hat, went out into the rain. He had noticed on the drive in that a little ways down the road there was a small side lot where there was some wood to be bucked and quartered. The lot was covered by dead-fall cedar, three maybe four big tree pieces, enough to keep the place warm for a couple of months. He thought, Hell, I’m a guest everywhere I go, got to pay my way.

He didn’t know it then or for several more years but that was the beginning of an ending. He cut the wood for hours, borrowed a pickup and hauled it back to the cabin. He and Marlene and the others got into it again and by the time they surfaced a few days later, all that had been right with the two of them had gone wrong, liberation had broken their bond, never to be repaired. The skies cleared briefly on the ferry ride home but their house, as if in a mirror image with island they had just left, was winter cold, they were out of wood and out of whiskey and very shortly thereafter they were out of time.

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Tarmac Meditations #115: Three Easy Pieces

March 10, 2013 By Michael Lebowitz Leave a Comment

Interior Design

That’s a great cabinet.
Where did you get it?
You like it?
Yes I do, I have an interest in interior design.
Really, interior design?
Yeah, that and domination.

Lately

I was reminded of a conversation we once had.
You yelled down the phone line and kept on yelling.
I was sure that your love would fade as would mine.
Lately, I haven’t been right about much of anything.

Journey

In this naked night I knew that at the beginning of things, as in this fleeing moment, I am here alone.

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Tarmac Meditations #113: Why I Shoot Ultras – Part 1

March 3, 2013 By Michael Lebowitz 5 Comments

I pitched an idea to both Marathon and Beyond and iRunFar about following several runners as they ran four one hundred mile races over the period of sixteen weeks. When I am not writing Tarmac Meditations for Life as a Human I am a race photographer who loves to shoot ultras and a writer who likes to write about shooting images, photography and running; that is when I am not wandering around in a dream state about the Great American Novel. To my delight both entities thought I had a good idea-following these two non elite, middle of pack folks and telling their story.

So there it was. Commissioned article and photo stories and the year wasn’t two weeks old. That was too easy, way too easy. Ask any freelancer and they will agree. The catch? No travel expenses, no sponsorships for the pieces, nothing that might compromise the journalistic integrity of the work. Oh my. Sad face. But wait!

Kickstarter, the Internet crowd funding entity was a place to go with projects like this. Happy face. But no! You can’t really use articles and photographs for legitimate magazines as sales pieces, reward in Kickstarter lingo, without compromising the whole thing. For every one involved.

It didn’t take but a minute to realize that the stories for the magazines were the necessary motivation to look at the bigger picture. Just as many books are generated from magazine articles as way of expanding the scope of the story, a book could be built on the story of these several strangers attempting the 2013 Ultra Grand Slam an event begun in 1986 to encompass ALL of the one hundred miles races in existence at the time: Western States, The Vermont 100, The Leadville Trail 100 and The Wasatch Front 100. Without knowing each other they were already becoming a band of brothers/sisters in pursuit of something magical. A Facebook page emerged and the participants showed up one by one.

My little idea had suddenly become big enough to encompass writing a book. Back to Kickstarter. Photographs and books are great rewards for people who support the efforts of writers and photographers. It all made sense now. Raise the money to travel, research, photograph and produce a coffee table book and Bob’s your uncle. I don’t know who Bob is by the way but I take it to mean that all the pieces were in place.

Remember the image at the head of this piece? These are runners in the Javelina Jundred 2012. I caught them in the very early morning. A line of individuals, not talking to one another for the most part, concentrated fully on the task at hand. The back lighting darkens their faces and in so doing raises them above their individual personalities, creating archetypes, meta runners, representations of everyone who ever laced up and set out for something “over yonder”, someplace down the road, one peak too far. I kept looking at this image and recognized that it is a journey for the runners captured in the lens, and equally for the photographer behind the lens. Our lives have brought us to here and where we go from here will be, in part, the result of what happens this day and night.

My job is to bear witness, to tell the story, to paint their images on the walls of metaphorical caves(this generation’s social media)in much the same way as the cave painters of early humanity told the stories of the hunt and their glorious adventures scratched on the walls of real caves.

Come have a look at the Kickstarter proposal. There is an ad in the right hand column of this magazine. Check it out. Let your own dream factories go to work. Keep your eye the Grand Slam this year. There are some wonderful stories out there just waiting for the 24 runners and for me. I can’t wait. It’s gonna be a time for all of us to celebrate the most precious gift we have been given, our lives in this particular time. Let’s go get it.

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