How weak you must feel.

Good lord, tripped on a cat on my way upstairs in the dark last night and it feels like I sprained my toes.

Distance: 3.1 miles

Duration: 28:50
Pace: 9:18

As many runs as I completed in both 2019 and 2021. And in 2019 I was training for a marathon. Of course, that was also the year I was losing my mother and basically didn't run the last two months of the year.

Then again, after Chicago, I am surprised I ever ran again.

Route: Forest Hill Loop
Temperature: 58°
Climate: partly cloudy & cool
Mood: all right

Fall quarter, freshman year. I was eighteen. This was thirty-nine years ago. For context, thirty-nine years before that was 1947, when my parents were only twelve. Don't know how that is relevant, but it seems important to me to appreciate just how long thirty-nine years is. I digress. 

Fall quarter, freshman year. It was 1986. I did not know yet how to take care of myself. I remember I was ill that semester, and in the middle of the night I was hungry and had some milk (don't ask, it's gross, adults who drink milk are monsters) and was surprised to learn it had gone sour. I was grateful that one of the water fountains on the floor was right outside my dorm and was able to spit it up there.

The point is, I was eighteen and had never had bad milk before, because I had a mother who would never let anything go bad in her refrigerator. I had never thought to check the expiration date, of anything. It had been taken care of. I had been taken care of.

And yet, there I was. Living, in a way, on my own. Someone still made my meals for me, that is what a dining plan is for. And I was warm and safe, presumably so that I could concentrate on my studies which was why I was there. I was still like a high school student, but in many ways, on my own. Still a pampered child, only now I drank beer, smoked cigarettes, and screwed.

My girlfriend had a roommate who did not care for me, and I do not blame anyone who did not care for me when I was below the age of thirty-five. When I think of the room they shared I see the bed, the cinderblock walls, the naked, tile floor. It was a room like the other rooms. We did not sleep over at each others' rooms, that may have had as much to do with our own feelings of discomfort (sleeping in the same bed as someone else is a skill, especially a narrow dormitory bed) as it did with our roommate situations. Better not to make things weird.

Also, I think it wasn't allowed. That makes more sense, too. But people did it, of course. We did not.

"You have this, too? I have this."

Her roommate had a copy of Suzanne Vega's first album, and the girlfriend developed an affinity for it. So did I, though even at that time I felt that she, and by she I mean Vega, was criticizing me. Or maybe, more to the point, that she had my number. Or that she had ours.

I want to be clear, I was never physically abusive to her, my girlfriend. But that does not mean I was always kind, or smart. I was a fool. Several of the songs on this album (others of hers, too) allude to domestic violence, even as she serenely sings and elegantly plays her guitar. The song Marlene On the Wall, more than any other song on that album, reminds me of that time, of that place, and of that young woman. 

An old black and white poster, it may have been that one that every female college student had at that time, "Kiss by the Hôtel De Ville" by Robert Doisneau, the one Campbell Scott shows us in Singles (if you know, you know) but in the song it is Marlene Dietrich, witnessing the uneducated fumblings of a couple who are soon to come apart, a poster blu-tacked to the painted cement, a romantic image that attempts to add warmth and style to a utilitarian domicile with cold walls and a cool floor.

Other evidence has shown that

You and I are still alone

We skirt around the danger zone

And don't talk about it later

Suzanne Vega - Suzanne Vega (1985)

Cracking

Marlene On the Wall

Small Blue Thing

Straight Lines

Undertow

The Queen & The Soldier

Knight Moves

Neighborhood Girls 

But the only one here now is me

I'm fighting things I cannot see

I think it's called my destiny

That I am changing

Stretches: yes
Water: yes
Weight: 160 lbs.

Got my kit on this morning, stepped outside and it was raining. I'm not in training, there is no reason to deal with that. Not cold, not wet. Time to transition to the rec center.

Planks: yes
Push-ups: yes

Sit-Ups: yes