2. It's built into this sunrise running project that some days will have more brilliance and pleasing comfort. You've got to value the full range, perhaps think of a morning like this in terms of "subtle nuance." I put that in quotes not for sarcasm but because I thought of the phrase at the time — I'm quoting my brain — and "subtle nuance" really did help me enjoy the experience. I thought of the analogy to human personalities: Today is an introvert.
3. My AirPods were dead, so I had to run — not in silence — in the sound — the subtle nuance sound — of nature. The raindrops were tiny and soundless. A little rustling wind. Some duck quacking. I think of the music as giving energy, making the run easier, but oddly enough, it was easier without the podded-in music. There was a mindless, timeless feeling. The songs mark out time and they have words that release old memories and draw me into elaborate ideas.
4. There was the sound of conversation — some, not all of the time. I mentioned the idea you see there in point #3, and Meade said something that made me say, "Thoughts meander like a restless wind..."
5. And then there was the sound of singing, not me, but Meade, not "Across the Universe," but "And I'm proud to be an American/Where at least I know I'm free/And I won't forget the men who died/Who gave that right to me...." I said, "Oh, no, you're going to blow my cover," meaning: Remember where you are and be discreet. In fact there was one other runner coming down the path. But don't worry, he said, she's wearing "ear tampons" (i.e., AirPods).
6. If you're going to sing "Proud to be an American," then you ought to sing "You Can't Always Get What You Want." And Meade sang out his version:
I saw her today at the convention7. No one heard that, no one but me, and we made it back to the car without getting our fair share of abuse.
A glass of Miller Lite in her hand
I knew she wanted to make a connection
At her feet was a socialist man
No, you can't always get Bernie Sanders
You can't always get sleepy Joe Biden
You can't always get Kamala Harris or Elizabeth Warren
But if you try sometime, you'll find
You get Donald Trump...
8. Driving home, we had to stop for turkeys — a dozen turkeys making their way across the road. What are they doing here? Why are they not eaten? I rolled down the car window and congratulated them: "Good work! You made it! Thumbs up!"
9. The turkeys survived Thanksgiving and their mindless crossing of the road, we survived the trip home from the sunrise run, and words are flowing out like endless rain, so I'll stop this list at 9.
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44 comments:
Endorphins. Best drug ever.
Fantastic post. You're better than me right now. Last time I ran was Monday. 6 miles. Not conducive to the amount of food I've eaten this week. Oh well.
That is some hostile territory you live in if you have to worry about singing I’m proud to be an American out loud.
Limitless, undying love
Which shines around me like a million suns
It calls me on and I’m proud to be an American
I played competitive amateur soccer until about two years ago. Some of my favorites matches were those played in cold, rainy conditions. My motor runs hot so the cool and rain kept my body at an ideal operating temperature.
It would be amusing and I dare say entertaining to cross paths with you two on a run or walk. We walked at the beach yesterday, it was sunny, cold, and windy, everyone we met along the way was cheerful and friendly. I don't recall any singing, pro-America or otherwise.
"Blow my cover..." Heh, same dynamic as my wife and I in Boulder restaurants
Our Beloved Professor Althouse said...
A little colder — with snow — would be warmer — emotionally
If it's any consolation; it wouldn't have been just warmer - emotionally, but actually Really Warmer!
Just as* a 90 degree day with Low Humidity is cooler (MUCH COOLER!) than an Eighty degree day with 80 percent humidity, a damp 35 degrees is MUCH cooler than a 28 degree day.
Just as* not really Just as, it's for TOTALLY different reasons. Damp air is much more thermally conductive than dry air... So it can suck the heat out of you much quicker; This is why wearing cotton in that temperature will kill you
So it's pointless to ask why did the turkeys cross the road.
A list that stops at nine leaves a vague sense of not being quite complete. I suppose you can argue that this yearning for further enlightenment is the tenth rule.....I don't mean to second guess God, but perhaps if God had only ordained nine commandments that would have in a subtle way endorsed the midrash. We can easily drop that commandment about honoring parents. Okay, boomer.
...and we made it back to the car without getting our fair share of abuse.
If there's a fair share of abuse, when do I get to bludgeon a Clinton-voter with a bike lock?
William confusedly said....
I don't mean to second guess God, but perhaps if God had only ordained nine commandments
Huh?
the 613 commandments
248 Positive Commandments (do's) and 365 Negative Commandments (don'ts)
Please pay attention to Deuteronomy 22:11
Thou shalt not wear a garment of divers sorts, as of woollen and linen together.
Save your GODDAMNED mixed blends for HELL! You fucking Heathens !
"So it's pointless to ask why did the turkeys cross the road."
That's why I said "mindless." They are really very obviously too dumb to know why they're doing anything at all. They're the American dodo, and we could easily catch them all and make them extinct. We're just not hungry enough.
The best way to experience nature, I think, is without music or other distractions. Paying attention with all of your senses, like you were doing.
The experience can be surprisingly rich, if you've never tried it before.
Personally, I'm a great fan of how wet leaves smell. It's one of my favorite things about this time of year.
I love to listen to music, but really don't understand the concept of wearing AirPod devices when outside. It seems dangerous to me to be unconnected to the outside/real world in which you are walking, running, sitting.
You (generic you, not anyone in particular) are unaware of what is going on around you and can get hypnotized by the inner world in your head. Situational awareness is important.
Plus, to me, the beauty of a nature walk or run IS the sounds of nature. Birds singing in the distance. Wind sighing through the trees. The beating sounds of surf on the ocean rocks off in the distance. The screaming of gulls and barking of seals (yeah. I just got back from a trip to the coast :-) The sound of water riffling through a stream. Water fall in the distance. Why disconnect from that music of nature, when you can listen to other music or podcasts any time?
Avoiding the danger zone: you can hear the footsteps and voices of people approaching. Traffic. Bikes. Horses. Dogs or the sounds of animals that aren't necessarily friendly or which can be very dangerous.
I don't get it. To each their own.
"If there's a fair share of abuse, when do I get to bludgeon a Clinton-voter with a bike lock?"
I don't know but you can fight a terrorist with a narwhal tusk. Wait. That's my next post. I gotta get out of here.
Brrrr! Cold here in Arizona too. Thanksgiving cold wave; had to turn the heat on a month early.
Its the closest thing to slapping thr knight with the fish.
I've never tangled with either species, but from what I've heard turkeys are considerably meaner and more dangerous when threatened than the dodos were.
Similar IQs though, to your point.
Remember where you are and be discreet.
Madison, WI: The most liberal city in America....or so it is said...
"Thoughts meander like a restless wind" Here's another one: "The sun arose as calm from virtue springs." In both, Nature trumps philosophical language.
Wild Turkeys don't taste all that great and are quite tough to eat. Mean too!
I'd have to be pretty hungry to want to shoot one, clean it and cook it. Not there yet, thankfully. The pheasants and Canadian geese are much better ;->
At least you know Madison is Liberal. In Georgia we elected a stealth RINO as Governor because Trump endorsed him. And now we know the truth and will pay a price for it until the next election.
Running in the rain can be great or miserable, it really depends on wind, temperature and how well dressed you are for the conditions. In the Summer, when it is raining hard, I will run shirtless (it just becomes heavy and chafe-inducing anyway), with a baseball cap to keep the water out of my eyes. In the Fall, it becomes meditative, all I can hear are my footfalls, breathing and the patter of raindrops on the piles of dry leaves scattered-about.
"4. There was the sound of conversation " This reminded me of something from a short Thanksgiving run on our nearby bike path. I was approaching a couple coming from the opposite direction and they were not exactly arguing, but let's say they were having an animated discussion. There was a brief window of time when I was close enough to over-hear a snippet, and it was the man who said, "I just don't think we ought to sell anything that I've made."
I have made a fair number of furniture pieces for our household and at least once for my in-laws, but what came to mind was this:
https://getyarn.io/yarn-clip/26c9df9f-6e3e-47c8-8fe7-cdf3df432355
"I Don't Play Golf For Money... Against People."
At least you know Madison is Liberal. In Georgia we elected a stealth RINO as Governor because Trump endorsed him. And now we know the truth and will pay a price for it until the next election.
A sheep in wolf's clothing? Nothing worse than electing a warrior and discovering he's a pacifist.
I went swimming in the rain last night. There's no use fighting the wet.
Only Althouse could concoct a semi-believable spin on running in Wisconsin in this kind of weather.
The reason those turkeys survived is that they are, for the most part not eat’en turkeys. I remember Thursday wondering where the dark meat was, in the turkey the SIL was carving. It was mostly white. Which was fine with me, because I am a white meat type of guy. My partner, on the other greedily grabbed one of the drumsticks, because they constituted much of the dark meat. Real turkeys, like the flock that migrates through the yard across the street a couple times a week, can still fly, which means that they are scrawnier, and have a lot more dark meat.
I joke with my partner that we really don’t need to go to the grocery store at least for food. We have turkeys across the street, and deer in the front yard. We do live inside the city limits, so they have silly laws about discharging firearms. The obvious solution is the use of either a regular bow or a crossbow, which while only quasi legal for use, have the advantage of being quiet. The problem being the gas station a half mile away where the state, County, and city cops all hang out. On thanksgiving, we were all late going about the grandson who had “borrowed” the Polaris ATV, and roared down there for midnight munchies. Both the boys were a couple months short of having driver’s licenses. Worst place in the county to have gone.
Shooting firearms within the city limits, even for the Thanksgiving table, is illegal in the city limits. A friend though who lives outside the city limits has the sort of place you want to live, if the SHTF. He has an elk infestation problem. We are talking 60-70 migrating through on a fairly regular basis. Both he and his wife get deer and elk tags every year, and taking the screen off the window in the kitchen is always on his fall honey-do list, so she can take hers from the kitchen table. MT has a nice thing where you can get the officials to essentially declare an elk infestation problem, and get additional tags. They have to do that every couple years, esp when the elk get too aggressive trying to get the horses’ hay.
Thinking about all this, yesterday was Black Friday. Mostly, we have too much junk already, and the last thing we need is more of it. But we have a Cabelas two miles north of here in AZ, and that required a trip there. Spent more than I wanted to, but did pretty well: 900 rounds of 5.56, 500 of 9 mm, 200 of .40, and 50 of 10 mm (the cheap stuff from Stevensville, MT - I had to, since I was wearing my Blacksmith Brewing Company hat from Stevensville). Need to start hauling a bunch of it up to MT next spring, since that is where I would want to be if ever the SHTF (remember how this started, with turkeys across the street?). Besides, if Bloomberg is elected POTUS, and we need to hide anything, the county is 3k sq miles, with a population density of 4 humans per mile (many more edible ungulates), and most of the humans live in small towns in the bottom of the valley.
Oh brother Tradguy,
So Kemp wants to elect a woman to the Senate. I'd rather have Doug Collins too, but don't imagine for a second that we'd be better off with Stacy Abrams.
Kemp's fine. And the woman might be fine too.
“I joke with my partner that we really don’t need to go to the grocery store at least for food. We have turkeys across the street, and deer in the front yard.”
I should explain that the reason that this is a joke, is because she hand feeds the deer. The local JP, who used to be a game warden, was apoplectic about this when I mentioned it in a shooting class I took from him last spring. She is agnostic about the turkeys though, never having been a fan of poultry after having raised chickens at one point in her life. Her son, living by Tucson, had them for years, and had an especially aggressive cock for awhile that would attack anyone who got too close to his flock. It wasn’t too long though from when he ended up in the dinner pot that some coyotes got the entire flock in one night. Any case, her position is that if I shoot them, I clean them. Hence, an impasse.
Watching the morning football guys at Minnesota today. Go Badgers!
Blogger hawkeyedjb said...
Brrrr! Cold here in Arizona too. Thanksgiving cold wave; had to turn the heat on a month early.
We're coming home from Chicago tomorrow AM. It will feel warm.
“I'd have to be pretty hungry to want to shoot one, clean it and cook it. Not there yet, thankfully. The pheasants and Canadian geese are much better ;->”
Or just be white trash. My partner’s ex has almost half a section farm a bit down river from us in MT, and the guy across the street used to come onto the property routinely for turkeys and deer. Not something that you would usually do in MT. After the neighbor left part of the fence down at one time, having had trouble getting a deer through, her ex went across the street, and explained the facts of life to him. He (the ex) is rather oversized, and can probably still toss railroad ties weighing more than the neighbor. The predation ceased. He had some of the other indices of being white thrash, such as toothlessness and was having kids with his first cousin. Better than siblings, but still...
"Good work! You made it! Thumbs up!"
That's hilarious. Yes, the bad makes the good more enjoyable. But i still would rather have less bad in exchange for less enjoyable good. Just give me, boring low level good.
In the last ten years there's been a turkey population explosion. I wonder why. Maybe people have gotten so rich, we don't care to kill/eat them.
They're the American dodo, and we could easily catch them all and make them extinct.
Urban turkeys have figured out they're relatively safe. They are seldom killed by automobile traffic and they aren't hunted. (I'm skeptical of the conventional view that they're unusually stupid. On the whole, birds are surprisingly intelligent, some corvids rank up with the great apes.) Turkeys in the countryside are remarkably stealthy and wary. Folks who hunt turkey go to considerable trouble to bag them.
The picture reminded me of the Edmund Fitzgerald.
"I love to listen to music, but really don't understand the concept of wearing AirPod devices when outside. It seems dangerous to me to be unconnected to the outside/real world in which you are walking, running, sitting."
Perhaps you should turn down the volume a bit. :-)
I walk, run, and ride my bike on the road while listening to music on my idevice. The volume is high enough that I can hear the music but not so high that I don't hear cars approaching or dogs barking or woodpeckers doing their thing.
some corvids rank up with the great apes
They can recognize themselves in mirrors, and they play games and tricks on one another. But to suggest that corvid intelligence is the equal of mammalian intelligence, especially ape intelligence, is traitorous to your animal family, and potentially even to your genus if we ever get around to fixing taxonomy.
I was training for the Birkenbeiner and I had a playlist where “Cannonball” by the Breeders would kick in at the top of the hill and with the right snow would synchronize with the topography of the downhill plunge. Transcendent or close enough.
Also got to recommend barefoot running, which is insane but ecstatic.
“ A list that stops at nine leaves a vague sense of not being quite complete. I suppose you can argue that this yearning for further enlightenment is the tenth rule.....I don't mean to second guess God, but perhaps if God had only ordained nine commandments ...”
I stopped at 9 because I was writing within John Lennon’s universe.
Number 9, number 9, number 9...
“ Only Althouse could concoct a semi-believable spin on running in Wisconsin in this kind of weather.”
Oh, it’s all true. The only tweak was putting “socialist” for “footloose “ because I couldn’t remember the word that went there and socialist was in there somewhere and my address to the turkeys began with my getting their attention in their own language, which I considered needless clutter.
For a 10 point list, it would have been easy to break #2 to #3 into 2 points.
I visit here every day but am mostly under the radar ('lurking' sounds a little creepy). This post in particular, I really enjoyed; it's been rolling around in my head since I read it in the early morning hours today.
Thanks, Susan in Seattle. It’s my favorite kind of post to write.
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