Blood, ink, words and goodbyes

God, has it really been two and a half years that I've been writing this thing? Longer if you throw in the time at the old sports blog? When I first started at least three people told me I'd last three months tops and then forget about it. I know a lot of people who don't know me very well, I suppose.

Psychology is the discipline to which I am in the process of dedicating my life, but that is a conscious choice made as an adult about future plans. Long before that, before I had dreams, before I knew where I wanted to go in life, before I even thought I could go anywhere- there were words. The first love of my life has always been words and language and the ideas they carry. I've tested my whole life in the 99th percetile on virtually all language-related tasks; I spoke at a very early age as well. My SATs were 780 on the verbal section, and I had a 104 degree fever at the time and ended up in the emergency room afterwards, so I think that's a bit low. It may be arrogant to say so but I have a greater natural affinity for, and ability with, language than almost everyone; and I take as much pride and enjoyment in that as I ever can for something that's not the product of work. So as loath as I am to speak much about the institution of blogging and the supposedly magical effects it's going to have on our political and social framework, I will say that the creation of blogging as a technology and form has given people like me- lovers of language with no interest in writing as a career- a chance to write and self-publish and use language for something other than private journals, and there is some value in that. I've gained a lot from it myself.

I started writing here those 2 1/2 years ago because I was trying to become something. At the time I'd been kicked out of college because I was too depressed and anxious to make it to class, but that depression was finally lifting for the first time I could remember, and I was beginning to take the steps necessary to get my life moving again. Practically, for the most part that meant filling out applications and forms and doing interviews to get back into school, all of which was necessary. Like icebergs, relationships and the CIA however, a lot of the real work was being done out of sight- much of it here. This is part of what I wrote in my first post:

"...the purpose [this blog] serves is of allowing me the opportunity of using writing to clarify my thoughts in some cases, express a different side of myself, and perhaps in some way begin to chip in on a few life goals of mine about raising awareness and consciousness around some issues. We'll see where it all goes.

The blogspot ID name, for the record, is the title of an obscure, oblique Paul Westerberg song done under his goofy, pseudonymous alter-ego of Grandpaboy. Having a song like that cover this end of my blogging appeals to my sense of irony."

And that's roughly what it's been for me. It's in writing that I learn how to think about things, and eventually what I think; it's in writing that I learn to pull that together into a form that I can use to make myself understood to other people and perhaps convince them. Writing for me is like the Thomistic idea of love- in doing so I become ever more myself. Put another way, it's training for my mind the same way the running is training for my body, and just as necessary. I'm not sure where I would be without it.

Or maybe I am, because that, I think, is a lot of why the last six months with my ex were so hard on me. Reading, thinking and writing seemed necessary things to give up to try and keep that relationship together, because if I read something I thought about it, and if I thought about it I wanted to write about it, chase ideas until I caught them; but once I did, there was always the threat of another fight and another discussion of how awful I was around the corner. Everything had to be kept in such a narrow little band of opinion to be acceptable; I'd have discussions with her, with her roommates, with her friends, and it would be 2, 3, 4, people all sitting around agreeing and telling each other how right they were. Some of that, maybe most of it, was the natural product of people who believe similar things associating with each other; but some of it wasn't. I remember being called a men's rights activist, being told I was thinking about the male perspective too much; I remember the week-long freezeouts after disagreements, and I remember how so many of them would lead to another discussion of how terrible I was. And so I just...stopped. Stopped reading, stopped writing, stopped thinking, stopped talking about anything important. Bunkered down and hoped some day we could talk like friends do, and got very depressed and gained 40 pounds and developed blood pressure that no one should have.

Whatever my faults in this life, I'm not a stupid man or an unthinking one; and imitating one did me no good. In fact all it really did was send me back to where I was before I began writing here- scared, weak, drifting, uncertain. Being little and weak and boring to keep the peace, hoping that if I just didn't say anything unexpected I might be left alone. In first starting writing here and for the year I did so before meeting her, I learned a great deal about how much words and ideas really mean to me, more even than I'd ever known from just my raw ability; in losing all of that again I learned it a second time. It's a lesson I won't forget. I don't want to be the person I was three years ago or in those last six months; I want to be better.

Between changing my laundry over from wash to dry today, I walked over to the local tattoo parlor to get some information, the same one where I got my first work (warning: image is huge) done about three years ago. I've been thinking for a while about getting a second piece done and now seems the right time. It's interesting being in there and seeing all the art on the walls and the customers, pictures of people living and dead, far-off cities, abstract patterns, random shapes; I suppose all of that has meaning for whoever gets each individual piece. For me though the only things which hold an interest are words, and the ideas behind them. Words that mark the passage of time, words that open the path forward, true words well-spoken, carried with you forever. Many things have come full-circle now as my life begins to change again, and I think new words are needed. To bookend honor- the duty owed to others and the world outside- I'm going to have "Stay True" added, because I owe that duty to myself as well, and as a reminder to never give up that much of myself again to anyone. Our bodies tell the stories of the lives we live, each scar and mark, each line and wrinkle; my body is the story of the words which mattered and were true.

And this is the last thing I will write here. Two and a half years ago I was like a child with broken legs, learning to walk all over again without having really learned the first time. Writing here has been personal and excellent for teaching myself how to think, how to write, how to trust my own understanding. But so many things are changing quickly now for me, and so many of the memories here are bad now, memories of all the things I didn't write and didn't say and tried not to think to keep someone else happy. It's time to move on an open a different chapter. I'm going to try and get back to sports writing at the old place, since it's the candy of writing for me, fun empty calories; the personal stuff, writings about music, etc. will be at the livejournal, which I much prefer for that purpose due to its post availability controls. And sometime soon I'm going to find a third place to write, one where I can use what writing here taught me, where I can chase ideas down to wherever they lead. Where I can read, think, write, and stay true to myself and my own understanding, look outside and write about the world and what I think matters.

So thank you to everyone who read anything here over the years, who gave me advice, who told me when I was full of shit. It's been fun sometimes, heartbreaking at others, useful always. See you over the horizon.

"....but what I've done's alright!"

Evil in Iran

Absolute, unmitigated, complete evil. Few measures of the worth and civilization of a society are more accurate than its treatment of its female citizens, and Iran fails on this measure as on so many others. I have immense sympathy for the Iranian people; but their leaders, to a man (and they are all men) should be shot.

It's all connected

Scientists describe huge object

I love the human mind. Only we could look at something 200 million light-years wide composed of, among other things, entire galaxies and describe it as "an object". What possible meaning does that word have in this context? My suspicion is that it's purpose has a lot to do with how we think, as it's absolutely hard-wired into the human brain to look for connection and patterns in all sorts of phenomena. It's probably most noticeable in social situations, where it's part of the mechanism underlying cognitive heuristics and prejudice ("well, if one thing is like this, and two things are like this, maybe they all are..."), but it crops up all over the place. It's part of why optical illusions work- we keep looking for patterns, even ones we can be consciously aware aren't really there. It's fascinating to see it work on such a truly galactic scale; as far out there as we go, we bring ourselves and our thinking with us.

I'm in love with that voice

"Cross"

Get set.

"Angry"

Runner's stance.

"Mad"

Pick a route.

"Upset"

Lean forward into it.

"Mis-or-a-ble"

Beat kicks, gun it and go.

I've been listening to a huge amount of ragga again- dancehall reggae. It's the one genre of music which I absolutely love, and which no one I've ever met really shares or even understands my affection for. Eminem raps about killing his mother and 50 wants to sell you crack, Bob Dylan writes about his drug dreams and how his grandfather spent Sunday afternoons, the Strokes put out three straight albums about being really, really bored- and all of this makes sense to people. But dancehall? Why do you LISTEN to that stuff? And there's a story in that, as there is in most good things we stumble into in life.

I grew up in New York where this music, like just about every kind, is part of the local culture. Some of it you soak up by just living here which is another of the many advantages we have over places from the Topeka, Toledo, Omaha class of cities where the Caribbean is someplace your aunt went for a week 8 years ago and made you look at the pictures once. What's more than the transplanted yardies though, we had- The Box. Oooh, The Box. I have no idea if it still exists, but back in the early 90's it was a revolutionary little music video channel which would- get this- actually play music videos. Ones you could call up and request! And apparently, for at least the two summers I spent mezmerized by it, the only people in the entire 5 boroughs calling were homesick Jamaicans. And so you could sit down and hear 2 or 3 hours of wall to wall industrial strength reggae from the first golden age of the dancehall. Supercat and Heavy D told you that Dem No Worry We, Shabba Ranks was Wicked Inna Bed with a Trailor Load A Girls, Terror Fabulous had the best name ever and wanted Action, Chaka Demus and Pliers had the real Murder She Wrote, Mad Cobra said FLEEEEEEX, it's time to have SEEEEEEEX. At 12 or 13 I was hooked for life.

When non-fans listen to dancehall, two things drive them away I think. The first is not understanding the lyrics; the second is understanding the lyrics. Nearly all of this stuff, especially the more roots-influenced stuff like Buju Banton, Capleton or Sizzla, is done in a very thick patois. If you're not natively fluent in it it's a big hurdle to get over, though if you listen to enough you can get the majority of the lyrics in time. If you do understand them though, well- I'm not going to try and defend all of this stuff. This is the genre that gave us a hit song ("Chi Chi Man" by TOK, on the Sashi riddim) about firebombing gay nightclubs. Much of it is homophobic, violent, angry, and occasionally very stupid. Some of it is also clever, inspiring, and beautiful. Whether that's enough to redeem the rest is in the mind of the individual listener I think, though getting lectured about lyrical morality by people who think Eminem is the coolest, which has happened to me, is very ironic; some people seem to think rhetorical exaggeration for effect is the exclusive preserve of disaffected white dudes from Michigan. Hint to Em fans- even he admits he's three-quarters a Big L biter. If you don't know who that is, go find out and thank me later.

What drew me to dancehall isn't the lyrics though. It's taken me over 10 years of fandom to even understand that 50%, and I'm still mostly hopeless with someone like Sizzla*. What drew me was the voices. There's no really adequate way to explain what it is to listen to a guy like Shabba Ranks; it's an auditory experience. The best I can say is that it's the voice of command, absolute self-confidence. On the intro to the song "Ram Dancehall", Ranks yells out "who is not with this program he a sucks!". And you BELIEVE him. Probably 100,000 people worldwide bought that record, and for just a second you'll believe they're the only people on earth who don't suck. It's uncanny. Someone like Supercat, relaxed almost to the point of sleepiness, is no exception; his musical voice, half-sung and half-chatted, is the dancehall version of Clint Eastwood's slit-eyed relaxed menace in all those early westerns. Supercat, Junior Cat, Nicodemus and Junior Demus (I believe) put out an album called "The Good, The Bad, The Ugly and The Crazy". It was a perfectly chosen title. The acme of this is Bounty Killer, author of that distinctive Cross, Angry, Mad, Upset, Miserable intro. Listening to him is like listening to the voice of a wrathful God- he is not to be fucked with, ever. He knows where he is going and will let you come if you ask nicely, but do not get in his way.

But like a great number of dancehall artists he doesn't make the mistake of assuming that command is bellowing, living in the bass range and trying to sound angry all the time. Bounty is known for his trilling half-falsetto runs up the vocal range; TOK are a 4 man vocal harmony group who started in R&B; Beenie Man, Supercat and a huge number of DJs- even those locked into the bad man pose like Ninjaman- sing as much as they rap/chat. Barrington Levy essentially does scat singing ("skittli-diddli-diddli-diddli-woOOOooooOW"). Buju Banton covers just about every part of the vocal range on most of his songs, from Cookie Monster growling to this incredibly high, pure almost tenor voice that's truly beautiful. There's no telling what Elephant Man may do. What brings it all together other than the obvious unique rhythm stuctures of most Jamaican music is the absolute conviction of the performances. The song could be about Baby, Come Back or Baby, Let's Have Sex or Homeboy, I Will Blast You If You Fuck With Me or Guys, Check Out My Cool New Dance, or Let Jah Be Praised or Isn't Marijuana Awesome?- and it really doesn't much matter. You will want to be the person singing that song, Elephant Man or Bounty Killer or Lady Saw or Macka Diamond or whoever. Yellowman convinced an entire generation that being an albino was the sexiest fucking thing ever (his greatest hits is entitled "Look How Me Sexy!") because he believed it, and because he did, it was true. You have to respect that.

And for me, that was it. Growing up as a fat kid with no idea how to act and fit in socially, I latched onto this like you wouldn't believe. I wanted to have that voice, I wanted to be that self-confident. I wanted to be as weird and out-there as dancehall often is and make it all work with that "fuck you if you're not up enough to respect it" look in the eye. There's not so much confrontation in my affection for the stuff these days, more respect for the amazing vocal artistry; but some of that first hook remains. There's a reason Bounty Killer is still some of my best running music.

And frankly, this stuff is just FUN. It's preserved the affection for the unique, the weird, the offbeat, the unexpected that used to make hip hop great until hip hop become as uniform as a gray three piece suit and everyone decided they had to be a gangsta. This is a genre that created the Signal De Plane dance, that has artists named Voice Mail and Busy Signal (who seriously need to do a collabo sometime soon- possibly a dancehall cover of "Answering Machine" by the Replacements?) and Harry Toddler and Terror Fabulous and about 5 people named after tools (Tenor Saw, Lady Saw, etc), and Egg Nog and Looga Man and Mr. Vegas. It's got Zumjay opening all his songs with "ZOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!!!!" It's got awesomely weird riddim names- Scoobay, Project X, Di Nipples, Saddam Birthday Party (Packaged 2-for-1 with Jailbreak), Coolie Dance, Fowl Fight, Mad Ants, Old Truck, Forensic, Golden Bathtub. Resident ultra bad-bwoy Bounty Killer once did an entire album, Art of War, based entirely on insulting and mocking fellow DJs. The album opened with the Imperial Theme from Star Wars. In other places he's proclaimed himself "The Black Darth Vader" and threatened to pick up a girl by "beam[ing] her up like Star Trek". I swear to God, he's the world's toughest sci-fi nerd. He and Beenie Man have been after each other like Jamaica's Biggie and Tupac for like 13 years, except they just keep mocking each other and no one gets hurt. And Elephant Man- there's just no explaining him. He's Elephant Man. Hell, even some of those awful lyrics can be funny- Beenie Man "defended" himself against charges of homosexuality with "me no Bat Man, and me no Robin' guys"** at one point, and even I had to laugh.

There's nothing else like the dancehall, no other music that's quite so vibrantly and unashamedly what it is. I can't recommend it highly enough. Days when I'm down and everything's burnt at the edges, this is the stuff that brings me back and cheers me up, reminds me to respect myself. Because like Shabba told us all those years ago- who is not with this program sucks. Some times we all need a strong voice to remind us of that.



* (Who is toasting? Oh my God bear is toasting, how can this be?)
**Batman/batty man is slang for male homosexual.

Lou Dobbs

Leftist radical. Sample quote:

"The matter will likely be resolved in court. But it stands as a metaphor for a 21st century America that is no longer secure in the claim to be a nation of laws."

Ah, boxing

I love this sport. It's venal, it's corrupt, it's stupid, it's violent, it's ridiculous, it's awful, and every so often it's the greatest thing on earth.

It's Mike Tyson gnawing off ears like the Brooklyn caveman that he is. It's Larry Merchant saying "this may be the end of Western Civilization as we know it" during Naseem Hamed's entrance for the Kevin Kelley fight, and it's the 6 knockdown in 4 or 5 rounds that followed. It's Meth and Red rapping Roy Jones to the ring, and it's Jones going down like someone removed his batteries against Antonio Tarver. It's angry old man Bernard Hopkins kicking people's asses far past his 40th birthday. It's Barrera/Hamed- "o rly? vs. ya rly: the boxing match", and it's Barrera slapping a half nelson on Hamed and banging him headfirst into the ringpost pro wrestling style. It's Hagler/Hearns- clash of the demigods. It's that completely unbelieveable right hand Thomas Hearns anihilated living legend Roberto Duran with. It's the passion and glory and horror of Evender Holyfield's career. It's George Foreman's improbable comeback and heavyweight title win at age 45. It's Paul Williams, the 6'1, 147 pound southpaw who looks like he was assembled from random pages in a catelogue. It's that cutman no one knows the name of who always wears a ship's captain's hat in the corner, it's that other cutman who wears the Burger King crown and no one can say why. It's Barrera vs. Morales, it's Fan Man, it's the immortal Sugar Ray Robinson. It's James Toney and his eating disorder telling Don King to kiss his ass, he's going to Burger King (possibly with that cut man) after beating "Bodysnatcher" Mike McCallum.

It's the nicknames: Juan "The Hispanic Causin' Panic" Lezcano, Bodysnatcher McCallum, "Southern Disaster" Dominick Guinn, Sechew "The Iron Horse" Powell, "Hands of Stone" Roberto Duran, "Galaxy Warrior" Nate Campbell, Bonecrusher Smith, Stevie "Little But Bad" Johnson, Andrew "Six Heads" Lewis (no, there was no good explanation), Jean-Marc Momeck who held a poll of fans to give himself a nickname ("The Marksman" won), Almazbek Raiymkulov- "Kid Diamond". It's the Klitschko brothers and the doctorates they used to get into a business where you make money by being hit in the head a bunch. It's that time Hamed came to the ring on a flying carpet. It's Raymond Joval and that dyed-blond horizontal halo of hair he had when he fought Fernando Vargas. It's Arturo Gatti's entire career. It's Cory Spinks' baffling dance routine on the way to the ring, it's Leon Spinks' inexplicable win over Muhammed Ali, it's Michael Spinks the heavyweight champ. It's the Zab Judah Chicken Dance. It's Nicolay Valuev who looks like King Kong dipped in Nair. It's Diego Corrales vs. Jose Luis Castillo when it was great, and when it was a farce. It's Kostya Tszyu's Russia-to-Australia accent and his awe-inspiring power. It's Don King, Don King's hair, Don King's reputation, and Don King's manslaughter conviction. It's the bodyshot Roy Jones knocked Virgil Hill out with, still the best I've ever seen. It's Sithchatchawal vs. Monshipour, the best fight this year that no one's seen. It's the unified rules of the association of boxing councils- JIM!!!

It's Arturo Gatti slipping and falling on his back, and then kipping up while wearing boxing gloves- during a fight. It's Ricardo "Finito" Lopez. It's the budybuilders in hoods with giant axes who used to follow Bernard Hopkins to the ring. It's Rocky Marciano retiring undefeated. It's all the spectacular fighters no one remembers these days, big names like Sam Langford and Henry Armstrong and smaller names, too small to even be recalled now. It's the unreprentant ethnic warfare of the sport, Ingerland vs. Mexico vs. Puerto Rico vs. the Irish vs. Jewish America vs. Italian Americans vs. African Americans vs. Africans vs. anyone else who shows up. It's the way cheating becomes an art form, until people call it "gamesmanship". It's the children of fighters becoming fighters, and Laila Ali maybe being the best of the current crop. It's the godawful beauty of watching a punch land so perfectly that the victim can be both unconscious and still standing all at once. It's Butterbean. It's people STILL booing Richard Steele 16 years after Chavez/Taylor. It's a Stadium Azteca crowd ripping their seats out en masse and filling the ring with them after a Chavez fight ended in a draw. It's Larry Merchant.

Boxing is the only sport unafraid to be as much of a ridiculous and glorious mess as the rest of life, and that's a huge part of why I love it. Baffling, insane things happen regularly; amazing, inspiring things do too. You never know week to week if tuning in for the fights will have you leaping from your seat in excitement or throwing things at the television or sitting there wondering why you have to sit throug the same round 12 times, which is a lot like life as well. I love this goddamned sport in all its silliness and awfulness and wonder, because nothing else in athletics is quite so true.

Stevie "Little But Bad" Johnston vs. "Vicious" Vivian Harris is on this weekend, and it all starts again. I can't wait.

(JIM!!!)

US calls for mideast cease-fire

A few days ago the idea was to allow the fighting to go on with a more or less blank check for Israel's military operations, in order to change the fundamental situation; now the idea is a cease fire with a vast new pair of armies composed of third-party foreign troops to...more or less reestablish the status quo ante. After all, how long will it take Hezbollah to reappear once those vast foreign armies leave? Especially with chunks of southern Lebanon devastated? How long can those armies remain, and on whose dime? This is not inherently an awful idea, but the sudden change in policy exposes the US to ridicule, especially since this plan has to have been in the works for a while; you don't just ring up Turkey and Egypt on a Sunday and ask for thousands of troops to be sent to a politically, ethnically, religiously sensative and volatile war zone. And there is of course a strong risk that none of this will come off, that it represents yet another attempt to impose a solution resented and distrusted by all parties on the situation without the muscle to back it up.

Depressing, and worrying.

Examine your assumptions

"I'm heartened by the fact that many Arab countries are uncomfortable with Hezbollah as well - the Sunni-Shiite division is one the West should exploit as shrewdly and relentlessly as possible to further our interests in the region."

- Andrew Sullivan, today.

In principle, I'm not in disagreement with him. But practically speaking, there's an unexamined assumption here, namely that the exploitation of the Sunni-Shiite divide will present avenues for the promotion of American interests. That may be so; it may also lead to us getting dragged into both cold (Iran vs. everyone) and hot (sectarian conflict in Iraq) wars in which both sides resent us for our frequently hamfisted attempts to use their own internal difficulties for the sake of our own interests. At every step in that process we run the risk of overplaying our hand and inducing a unification of radicals if their distaste for us exceeds their hatred for each other. America has played something like this game before in the foothills of Afghanistan, and we're still in the process of cleaning up the resulting mess. I remain dubious of anyone but the most skilled manipulators making a go of this as a major element of policy.

Checkmates and balances

American Bar Association condemns signing statements

Slowly but surely, the Imperial Presidency in force since 9/11 is being rolled back, as the country awakes to what it does and does not mean. Many times before during periods of crisis, the American system has bent and allowed extraordinary powers to the executive; but those powers were never formalized and never intended to be permanent. Lincoln violated the constitution to preserve the union, and got away with it because he had a clearly defined end goal, a clear way of achieving it, and because the time from when he assumed such powers until when they were no longer needed was only slightly more than a single term of the presidency, less than the nearly years of the "war" on terror so far. FDR assumed radical powers to fight first the depression and then the second world war, but was restrained eventually in the first instance by a strong judiciary and the failure of his court packing plans and in the latter posthumously by the 22nd Amendment's restrictions on reelection.

The powers Bush has assumed- of which signing statements are in many respects the most formalized and potentially dangerous to the fabric of the republic- are being increasingly recognized as out of scale with the nature of the conflict with which this nation is now confronted. The war against terror- more truthfully the war against a fascist form of Islam- will likely be fought in a manner not dissimilar to the cold war. Already we speak of containing Iran, making direct appeals to the people above the heads of their rulers, of the need to free captive states like Lebanon, of fears of internal agents of foreign powers. The powers previously extended in times of crisis to the executive should not and cannot be sustained over the length of a long, slow, decades-long grinding conflict as this one is likely to be. The effect on our democracy and the separation of powers would be radical and dangerous, and we would run an unacceptable risk of losing much of what makes the American system great. The executive cannot be allowed to become dictatorial; this nation needs no Caesars.

What once in previous years was radical speech is becoming increasingly mainstream. The ABA is no fifth-rate campus organization selling "Bush=Hitler" t shirts, no angry far-left blogger, no disgruntled Democrat body still bemoaning the outcome of the 2000 election. Increasingly the matter is not about this administration in particular even if their lust for power has provoked this debate, but about the nature of our government. I happen to detest Bush; but I would be no happier about a McCain, Clinton, Gore, Obama administration with these sorts of powers available. It is, I think, unquestionable that our judiciary is prone to overreach, that our congress is corrupt by ingrained habit and sustained by gerrymandered electoral districts. I will freely admit to a great deal of fear at entrusting the fate of this nation in wartime to the people produced by such a system and busily engaged now in the sustaining of it. But those fears are a call for pressure to reform and redeem the system as has happened before in American life, not to abandon it wholesale for the blandishments of safety from an increasingly unaccountable and uncontrollable executive.

Movement

Let's talk running. I've been back on my regular program, or the latest version of it, for about five months now which is enough to have settled in fairly well. It's amazing when you get back to it after a period away how much you relearn your own body, remember what it can and can't do, how to make it run at top output. For the middle three months of this stretch I was dealing with some fairly severe retraining problems: a little bit of my old back issues, and a lot of newer overuse injuries involving my legs- shin splints severe enough to make me research stress fracture symptoms, and a recurring numbness problem with my right leg. The pain didn't bother me much, but I wasn't able to get out as often as I wanted or for as long as I wanted, which was becoming a problem.

Thus, problem solving. I do a lot of semi-instinctual analyzing of my physical movements while out running, enough so that I can tell you, say, that I expend more energy carrying my CD player in my right hand because I tend to make larger movements with that arm when it's weighted, throwing my upper body motion off and making it less efficient. So after a few weeks of figuring out when and where I experienced the worst of the pain, I worked out that I was making a couple of particular right-to-left cuts as I ran (I run on the streets, so I'm always dodging something) which involved banging my right shin into the back of my left calf. I've dropped those cuts, enhanced my pre-run stretching, and lost more weight and lo and behold the problems have abated. All the numbness is gone and the shin pain is maybe 30% of what it was. I've met several people in my life who've said something to the effect that they regard their body as something other, alien, out of control- an enemy or a problem. I have a feeling that if it wasn't for the running I might be among them, but because of it my relationship to my body is a lot more...friendly, almost. When you spend several hours a week with nothing but music and the experience of your body working it gets very difficult to think of it as something other.

Even though my program's shifted this time around towards more runs for less miles each time, I'm getting back a lot of what went missing while I was gaining weight. The biggest things of late have been my weather adjustments and my overdrive. I actually run very different styles in winter and summer- winter is slow and steady to keep body temperature up, summer involves a lot more short sprints and movement, partly because it has to with more people out on the streets. That's where the other part comes in, the overdrive. Some sprints are forced- I will go at top speed from this point to that point, regardless of how I feel, because that's part of the program. I've got a regular slot in my long run (Park Slope to Union Square, 5-6 miles over the Brooklyn Bridge) for that on the final third of the bridge section of my route. But there are times, when I'm reasonably fit and free of injury, where I just WANT to sprint, for the sheer love of moving- where I know I'll not put a single foot wrong, when I'm moving far faster than my usual top speed. where I'm completely and totally happy in a way I rarely am elsewhere. People talk of runner's high, but this is a bit different- this is the love of what your body can do.

I've never really been comfortable thinking of myself as an athlete. Somewhere in my head I've always still been the fat boy who hated gym class and changed in the bathroom for 4 years of High School because he was ashamed of his body. If I still have some weight to drop now though, one of the heaviest things and first to go has to be thinking of myself that way. I AM an athlete at this point. I love to run and do the various other exercises I do, I love the feeling of pushing my body to its maximum, and I love all of this for its own sake. I've seen people who exercise "for the sake of"- for the sake of weightloss, for the sake of health, for the sake of looking more attractive, for the sake of being strong and able to defend themselves. And all of those are good reasons, but in most of the people I've seen who exercise solely for those reasons there's always something joyless about it; it's something they do because it must be endured to get what they want. For me the running's never been like that, maybe even less so now since I lost it from my life for a while. In my mind the mark of an athlete has always been the love of being athletic for its own sake, and for the first time I feel comfortable including myself in that.

I ran four miles today. 2:30 tomorrow, I'll be back out there again.

Letting it go

I've tried two or three times of late to try and write up a summary of all that went on between my ex and I; another attempt to get it all out of my system and completely move on. I'm giving it up now, though, for the simple reason that I don't think there's any way of doing it honestly. Too many good memories are black and painful now because of the way things ended, and it would be unjust to both of us to see the whole year that way alone. Some day the pain will ease and I'd rather be able to look back at the good times, what there were of them, and think pleasantly of them. And to be honest I have only one true regret from the year, albeit a large one: all those conversations we had about how terrible my life was and how awful a person I was.

Those, in the end, are why I think of the relationship as abusive. I'm not sure where they came from though of course I have my speculations; the cause is really immaterial though. They happened and they still hurt and I'm still working on getting all of that out of my system, which is vastly the more important consideration now. It hurts when someone you love and who says they love you tells you over and over that you have no passion, your life is terrible, you're not going anywhere, you're not thinking the right things, you're not doing enough, etc. and always ends it with some variation, implicit or explicit, on: now prove me wrong. No one deserves that. When you've heard it enough though, when it becomes about every aspect of your life, you start to think maybe you do; maybe I am as stupid and weak as she says I am, and if I am I guess I deserve to be treated this way. No one else is going to love me. This is the best I can do, and maybe if I just do what she wants, some day it'll get better. I just have to prove it to her.

When you come out of it, it starts with "hey, I'm not THAT bad". You start arguing with them in your head, trying to prove that really you are doing the right things, that you have the right to your opinions, that you do have passion; and that feels better sometimes. But it's not right, and it's only a start. The truth is that no one has a right to attack another person over and over that way. No one has a right to demand that their lover live their life to prove something to them. I could have been everything she said I was and I still wouldn't have deserved that treatment; you don't owe anyone in this world a justification for your life. In the last conversation we ever had, she said to me that she'd lost respect for me because I had agreed to her request to let her sleep with someone else as well as me, and for just a second, I almost agreed with her- because in my mind I'd been beaten down to the point where I just assumed no matter what that anything I did had to be wrong, and anything she said had to be right. It took about a year of constant wearing down but that's where we'd ended up.

I think, in retrospect, I understand her. I think from other things she said she was a little terrified of how much I was willing to compromise; I think on some level she wanted me to tell her to go fuck herself when she brought that idea to me. She seems to run on the idea that you take from people until they say stop, and everyone has very clearly defined boundaries. I'm a greater believer in there just being some things you do not ask people for, but at the same time when you truly care for someone you do almost anything for them. We were not a great match in that respect. When I knew her she had been with no one since her own abusive relationship 7 years previously, and I think a great deal of what happened between us came from the fear of ever going back into one of those. As she said herself she was not ready to do the kind of serious relationship I wanted, and felt was probably necessary to justify all the flying back and forth. In knowing that, ultimately, I forgive her for what happened so far as it's my right and place to do so. As hurt as I still am, it's not as though I hate her.

As is so often the case in my life though, I have more to offer someone else than I do myself. I remain very angry with myself for letting all of this go on, for losing the ability to live my life and love it, for ending up in such a bad place for so long. And that's just going to take time to fade, the same as it's taking time to relearn something I've always believed strongly in, that there's many kinds of beautiful, worthwhile life to be lived. My ex will likely have a wonderful life; and it's one that will be very little or nothing like mine. And that's ok. There's no reason we should ever have to tear each other down and denigrate what matters to the other person to "prove" something about ourselves. A really strong and secure person knows that, and now I have to teach it to myself all over again. My hope is that when I've done that, when I've learned to love myself again, then the pain will have faded entirely. I don't know how long that's going to take but it's what has to be done now, a little bit more everyday.

Article on intelligence, twins, heritability vs. environment

Absolutely fascinating article; I'm tempted to see if I can go pull the original research being mentioned. The primary intellectual interest for me is as a reminder that there's a great danger in becoming overly familiar with and accepting of standardized dichotomies and understandings within any given field, particularly those relating to the study of something as complicated as people. We've all heard this particular debate summed up as "nature vs. nurture" a thousand times, but the evidence exists as this article attests to suggest that what that phrase provides in succinctness it loses in detail and accuracy.

Politically, there's also a very strong kick to this, obviously. For all the hand-wringing about The Children in this country, as often as not actual measures which could help children are not undertaken. I disagree with the author that much of this, in the modern age, is out of a conviction that some people can't be bettered; I tend to think the issue is more with a reticence on one side of the political aisle to countenance government-based solutions and an inability on the other to properly manage the same. In addition, all too often our political debates about how to provide on a societal basis for children are tinged with an element of unreality. Children are excessively idealized and so much of the time the discussion skews along the lines of how to prevent the abuse of innocence- witness the perennial violence on TV and in video games hysteria which crops up every few years. Measures such as those advocated in this article- universal pre-school, Head Start, and I would argue as well universal day care for working mothers- are all immensely practical and beneficial reforms. We have as a culture a great love of viewing any issue relating to children through a moral lens; I can only hope the manifest moral imperative to provide the practical necessities to allow as many children as possible to reach as much of their potential as possible will become harder to ignore.