Last night I, along with the rest of the Missoula running community, which means the entire rest of Missoula, was at a running talk at the Wilma Theater. We, the running community of Missoula, filled up the entire place. I imagine our coach and the other honchos who head the running community, as they looked out into the assembled masses, must have been thinking, "My god, we've created a monster" - and they have, the Missoula running community has become a monster. Everyone and his mother runs. You cannot look in any direction in this town without seeing people running. People run all over the place in every kind of weather at all times of the day and night, everywhere, always. I realized at the talk last night that I've become quite disconnected from running. I'm all about the boozing and the socializing but not about the vitality and the actual running anymore. The reason is that running hurts, and the reason for that is my stinking ribs. I hope it stops hurting soon because I'd like to be bouncing and bounding happily around with everybody else instead of trudging around with a grimmace, blarg. You know? If it doesn't start getting better soon I'll retire from running forever.
I cannot, though, retire from the big race of the year because I've done it every single year (4) and I am now one of only like 106 perennials. Every year, as more of us perennials give up running or die off, that number will get smaller and smaller. I plan to run the 50th Missoula Half Marathon in the year 2056 and win my age group. Or maybe I'll do the full that year. I hope they do something special for us perennials, like maybe let us ride on a float in a parade, or maybe give us special shirts, or maybe give us a ride in the race for a few miles and drop us off two blocks from the finish line, or maybe give us 10 free beers after the race, or maybe give us free massages, or maybe do a documentary on us.
It's a dang shame that I am not a documentary filmmaker. If I were I'd be filming all these documentaries right now, they'd be very interesting. I'd interview myself in every one of my documentaries - I'd sit in a large chair, maybe by a fireplace, and I'd call myself an expert. I don't know why when I went to college I had to go major in something boring. If I could give advice to high school students I'd tell them to go to college only if they want to sit on their butts in front of some stupid computer for the rest of their lives.
Anyway, my break from running is over and so my winter reading project is officially over. I didn't end up reading nearly as many books as I imagined I would. I ran out of steam pretty quickly, actually - probably because of all those Montana books I read at the beginning. Who wants to read that much about Montana? Not me, anymore.
I'm reading the worst book right now - I won't even tell you what the title is. It took the author 34 years to write and you can tell. In 34 years you have a lot of opportunities to sit there and say, "Hmm, what other ridiculous crap can I cram into this crapfest?" I can only imagine his thought process: "I know! I'll put in a paternity twist! And then I'll do it again! And then I'll have the grandson have an affair with his grandmother! And then I'll put in cameos by Mark Twain and Freud and Kaiserin Sissi for no reason and... who else? Oh, how about Hitler as a child! And let's give Sissi a wooden frisbee! Awesome, this book is so full of tidbits! Woowee! How about some baseball, and Buddy Holly, and psychology." The author's (or the narrator's) obsession with whipped cream is distracting and there is a whose/who's error in the book, which I'm normally willing to overlook (and perhaps it wasn't an error - perhaps the editor was making a subtle but effective argument in favor of updating orthographic standards to reflect the possessive use of the apostrophe) but in this case I am not.
The book is about time travel and unfortunately it seems that the whole thing is made up. The narrator tells us things she can't possibly know, which means she's making up a bunch of shit, which means the book can't possibly be true. I demand believability in the books I read, even if they're about time travel. You'd think that at some point over those 34 heinous years the author could have thought about using a third-person omniscient narrator instead of making the narrator a character in the story, right? Come on! This book is the reason I hate things.
Tomorrow will be two minutes and thirteen seconds longer than today. It has been foretold that the journey I started in 2003 will end in 2011, which is exciting, I hope.
