i ran

I visit my family. Drive into that town, the scene of many memories. There's where the apple orchard used to be, there's the old elementary school, with the automatic conjuring up of a mini version of myself alone, ambitiously mining the length of the playground for lost marbles (the clear ones were the best), and collecting dead bugs for my bug collection. There's the little yellow house where I once kissed a boy named Paul, Paul with freckles and a green jacket, there's the pond that a bunch of us stole away in the night to sleep by, to be roused by the police and delivered back to the homes of our displeased parents in the wee hours of dawn. There's the gas station where we used to skip school and smoke cigarettes. This was all before, before, before before. I was just a kid!

Get to the house, it is way back, by the reservoir, not many cars go back there. Jagged, winding hill, woods everywhere, stark and beautiful, rising gracefully out of the snow. I am wearing my sneakers because I want to run today. Despite having a generally egalitarian nature, I secretly never liked people who ran -- that tight, spandexy tribe of superhumans with lung power, stamina, and the audacity to appear happy and serene throughout their tortuous ritual; not only never complaining, but eager to describe their "runner's high" to anyone who cared to listen. Running seemed the antithesis of everything "musician-y," which tradition had somehow dictated (or at least I had somehow interpreted) PF Flyers as the only reasonable sneaker, an indifference to pretty much anything that would take away time that could be spent playing, practicing, writing, recording, or being in a vehicle on tour, and a general mistrust of all that seemed overly peppy, upbeat, brimming with cheery enthusiasm.

Now I'm running. ====== =---=== That's an arial view of running in a straight line, which I doubt I have done. It started from a walk, which came from a hike, but then walking somehow became not fast enough, and one day it just changed into a run and has been running ever since. To something, away from something, to something, away from something, to something. You are an observer outside your body, connected to the ground, on the earth, into a thought, out of one. If you are angry it takes the anger and turns it into sparks, if you are sad, it fools the sadness into noticing the rhythm of your breath. If you feel good it tells you that you have time to notice the sky and if you're happy it turns your happiness outwards and makes you run even longer. Today there were deer in the woods and I noticed how grey thier coats are at this time of year. In a certain light they seem to blend right into the trees. If you are not paying careful attention, they would be easy to miss. We ran to the waterfall, past the deer, my feet & I.