First of all, lately I've been having problems with gravity ("eating shit"). In the last month I have fallen, twice. My plan, after the first fall, was to stop falling, but that didn't work out as I'd hoped - the best-laid plans of mice and men, as they say, you know. The wounds from my first collision with the ground were just starting to heal (although my ankle was still swollen) when I collided with it again and reinjured all the same injuries, with a few new ones thrown in for balance. Today my knees are all scraped up and my palms are bruised and my ankle is still swollen, although falling again didn't rehurt my ankle - instead I was running around the yard yesterday trying to make a kite fly and that's kind of what rehurt it. (Kites need wind, I found.) I'm getting good use out of my knees and palms because I'm sure they're there in order to catch us when we fall. Which hurts. Especially falling into pavement at high speeds (very high speeds - do you know how fast I'm running these days?). I'm glad I was wearing shorts both times I fell because if I'd been wearing my (expensive and fabulous) running pants they would have torn and that would have made me mad/sad. Being constantly injured with wounds takes a great deal of mental energy and I have been exhausted. I have used up all my bandaids.
Second, before I ever fell I got sick. I know! It surprised me too! I never get sick! And it wasn't like I got sick and then got better, nooooooo. I got sick and then stayed sick for weeks and weeks and weeks. And during that time I was signed up for not one or two or three etc. races, but six. Six! Races! Sick! It was terrible. And then on top of all that, as if running while sick weren't bad enough, in the first of the six races, I fell [see previous paragraph]. (I received medical attention from firefighters, it was very patriotic.) Oh it's been so miserable around here. Maybe you don't empathize enough, so let me tell you more about it: First my lungs turned to mush and I got coughy. Then I felt feverish (98.9 degrees fahrenheit!), and I rolled around and moaned for a while. My throat was engulfed in flames. Then I thought I was getting better, but then I kept on coughing, and then I started feeling feverish again. My eyes were weirdly glassy and people were scared of me. My voice became weak and feeble and then people felt sorry for me while maintaining their distance. My head, including my ears, filled up with a thick, frothy snot, and I couldn't hear for the next three and a half weeks. I went to lunch with someone and could not hear anything she said. (I smiled politely and said "Mmmhmm" at various intervals, trying to fake it.) I felt very disconnected from humanity. The snot in my throat was made of silica gel and I was awake all night every night unable to breathe or swallow or anything. My cough turned into the kind you can chew up and eat, the kind that rumbles through canyons and disturbs flocks of birds, the kind that can fertilize gardens. I couldn't taste and I couldn't smell, and I had no appetite for a few weeks (awesome). Then my cough turned into a thin, persistent, pointless, uncontrollable cough, and my ears remained plugged and my voice remained weak. Sometimes I'd cough so hard I'd nearly barf. I felt like I had straw in my throat, or a furball. Then finally I thought I was getting better when one day my throat started hurting bad, it felt like I was swallowing hot razorblades. But that turned into nothing.
I have had the good fortune to have done some interstate traveling the last couple weekends, giving me the opportunity to spread my illness far and wide. As everyone knows, the only way to get over an illness is to give it to someone else, so with any luck I've infected the populations of three states. I'm fine now, thanks.
I am not technically a fan of the early morning but I was out and about one morning at 4:30 and it was really very pleasant. I was at the 50,000 SILVER $$ bar very early on a Sunday morning and it was a strange mixture of people who were still having a Saturday night and other people who were having a Sunday morning. (For me it was Sunday morning.) It was exciting, in an Americana kind of way. I didn't buy anything.
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