50. Weather, running

Some announcements:

First, don't send me any more text messages. A while back I said you should, but I’ve changed my mind. The text memory in my phone is almost full. Deleting the texts I've received is inadvisable; without a complete record of my life my biographer will probably make up a bunch of stupid shit.

(I need a new phone, partly because of this storage capacity issue, and partly because the glass cover on my phone has cracked. When I discovered the crack, my feelings were hurt really bad, kicking off a week of unprecedented bad mood and histrionics.)

Second, I'm too busy reading to respond to any text messages anyway.

(I found out that probably the glass on my phone had cracked from being left in a hot car and not because I had dropped it on the pavement in some drunken and idiotic moment I can barely remember, which made me feel a lot better about myself and the world.)

It’s wintertime in Missoula, dark, cold. It’s been mighty hard to get out of bed these last couple weeks. The sun is away on its yearly trip to Australia and we miserable suckers who aren’t down there with it should just stay in bed until next June or whenever it comes back to us.

I'm not running distance so that I can become repaired over the winter. Without all that running and preparing for running and recovering from running I'll have so much free time, man - just hours and hours of nothing to do - and so I have instituted a winter reading project. Over the next three months I'm going to read everything on this list that I'm going to read. (I know it's a summer reading list rather than a winter reading list - I'm slow, I know.)

If you want, you can join my reading club, but don't expect any meetings or any discussions because there won’t be any. We won't discuss anything because we'll be too busy reading. It's not forbidden to discuss the books - if you and I perchance meet one day on the street and you wish to exegise on whether Norman Maclean's referring to his brother as "my brother" rather than by his name is humanizing or dehumanizing, you may do so. I may choose not to respond, but certainly, please, feel free to broach the subject.

I am on my third book. Fortunately for you, and unfortunately for me, I am a slow reader, so you should have no problem catching up and ultimately surpassing me. So it goes. Here's what I've read so far:

1. Double Take by Kevin Connolly. Although this is not exactly a travel memoir, I am pleased to have read it without coming down with a terrible case of wanderlust.
2. A River Runs Through It by Norman Maclean. Too much fishing.
3. The Big Sky by A.B. Guthrie. So far, the kid who ripped the head off a chicken got the clap from a whore in St. Louis, and four cats have fallen off a boat into the Missouri River.

After this I will read two or three books not on my winter summer reading list, and then I will probably go back to the list, depending on the whims and flurries of time. We might want to read The Maltese Falcon along with the rest of Missoula and nation, or we might want to read Selected Works by Richard Hugo along with the rest of Montana. You might want to read Your Inner Fish by Neil Shubin along with all the freshmen on campus but I won’t be reading that as I’ve had enough of books about fishes.

My third and final announcement is that I might be switching over to a single space after a period. Typographical implications have been considered; now I evaluate the psychological effects.

p.s. Note to my biographer (who, if he’s worth his salt, will have already researched this year's weather records by the time he reads this, but you never know if he’ll instead decide to spend his huge book advance on hookers and blow and forego any actual research): In order to understand and appreciate things, you should know that it's not winter yet, nor is it not sunny. Sir, perhaps you should read The Big Sky by A.B. Guthrie. First, it would count as actual research (and I can’t do everything for you – you’ll have to put in a little bit of effort), and second, maybe the discussion of STDs will scare a little sense into you.