FLOG

Un Fun Run

So at this moment I am sitting on the toilet wearing boxers over a pair of thermal longjohns, all Superman style, except with boxers, and I have been up for 23 hours.

Why?

This morning I was rudely awakened by the White Stripes and told I had to get my groggy ass down to school to stand in the wind and rain and duplicate the purpose of a ten foot long chalk arrow on the sidewalk.

Why?

I had duties. I was, as they say, "expected to volunteer." Which is fine -- I'm civic as a motherfucker -- but on a Saturday morning? Damn.

So alright. I helped a race get run. Like, people run this race around campus and it gets confusing, so they need a fellow to stand there and point runners in the right direction.

So I did. And a lot of people thanked me, mostly in earnest. But damn did it rain.

Ten minutes into the thing, you get a lot of these Serious Running People, and they all blast by, not really needing my help, each lost in their own vein-popping reverie.

But after that comes the long tail.

The very long tail.

(Notice how I'm making new paragraphs way too often?)

(This is modern sportswriting.)

(Soon, I will make a couple paragraphs that are only a word long.)

(This is proper sportswriting style.)

(Ready?)

Long.

Tail.

The long tail consisted of the non-running runners. The folks who are all, "Oh, it's a run, but I don't run, and I can't think of any better way to pay 20 bucks and walk three miles on a Saturday morning, so let's do this."

The long tail began with a duo of competitive dork-walkers. Have you seen this in the Olympics? The sport where they almost jog, but they get disqualified if both feet are off the ground at the same time? Them.

A couple of them went by, and then mostly nobody went by for a very long time.

Something like an hour.

I was bored, and cold, and it was raining a lot. So I set about using my shoe to make dams in the runoff at the edge of the street.

I was pretty into it when an old lady drove up and jumped out of her car and said, "I have a cell phone, would you like to call someone?"

As though I was stranded there.

I declined, which must have disappointed her, 'cause then she offered me a newspaper. Declined that too.

Finally the last of the walkers came by, a family of three fairly well-apportioned individuals, and in banter the father said of his pouting 10-year-old son, "He's very big for his age."

This was meant almost apologetically, as in "I'm sorry he's fat." Which isn't a very nice thing to say about your kid in public. But let that go.

I was too cold to really be listening, and thought he was saying something more complimentary about his son.

So I blurted out "Oh, yeah!"

Which I regretted instantly.

Now you know what I did this morning.

After that it's been: go home, get dry and warm, watch awesome football game, avoid crapping out afterwards, then drink a lot of beer and watch the best movie I've ever seen. About which, more to come -- let me just lay out the principal points for you: John Stamos, Gene Simmons, George Lazenby, Vanity, mutant anarchists with Cure hair.

UPDATE 11/8: I forgot to mention that the head of Career Services at my school, as he jogged past me, said, "You're working today!" And I am still afraid this was not just innocent banter, that it was instead a passive-aggressive dig related to his awareness that I have not as yet secured post-graduation employment, and that I really ought to go in and see him one of these days.

Damn.

Posted by FLOG at November 6, 2005 3:59 AM