Use Their Words: "We keep our eyes fixed on the horizon to avoid having to look back over our shoulder in embarrassment."

"What accounts for the popularity of watching folks walk for long days? . . . The truth is that many waves sweep mass society that have no more explanation than the oceanic kind: a random blast of wind drives a swell, it snags on a rock, and then the wave crashes. By the late eighteen-seventies, walking had started getting ferocious hate mail, or sermons, chiefly from New York City preachers, who thundered against it as a "gladitorial" sport. Soon there was legislation, still on the books, prohibiting six-day walking marathons.

The contests, one comes to see, were no longer really walking competitions. Mostly, they were, or became, something crueller. They were competitions in not sleeping. The ability to walk well--to have [Edward Payson] Weston's odd big stride or [Daniel] O'Leary's right light step--had surrendered to the more brutal ability just to stay awake for six days. (Weston eventually admitted to having chewed coca leaves while racing, although, Barry Bonds-like, he strenuously denied that the drug really helped.) The crowds were not coming to watch the walkers walk. They were coming to watch them drop.

Competitive walking, in its maturity, turns out to be less a charming game from an age of innocence than one more episode in the modern fascination with rituals of human endurance, made exotic by technological advance, and fuelled by the same morbid curiosity that gives us the demolition derby, books about survival on Everest, and the ice-bound stunts of David Blaine, along with "Survivor" and "Deadliest Catch." Our appetite for watching people stumble from exhaustion soon moves from one kind of spectacle to the next, perhaps partly because we're ashamed of having enjoyed the previous one. This may also explain why each one, when it goes, can leave so little track behind. We keep our eyes fixed on the horizon to avoid having to look back over our shoulder in embarrassment."

- Heaven's Gaits: What we do when we walk by Adam Gopnik, from the September 1, 2014 issue of the New Yorker

It's not quite the same situation, but as a Serial completist I wonder how that show will fare in the annals of history. Any number of its"characters" could be considered exemplars of "human endurance" - the subjects (Adnan, Jay, and the rest) as well as Sarah Koenig and her colleagues. Morbid curiosity? I think we can all agree the show has that in spades.

Looking uneasily over my shoulder.



Thanks to S&J for the most edifying, and most voluminous, of all of our wonderful wedding presents.

Sun comes up and we start again

Well, it took me two years but I finally completed my 2012 New Years resolution. Behold:

Onward.

Obviously it's been a while since I blogged, and it'll probably be a while before I do it again on any sort of regular basis. Partially that's because I got kinda busy this year becoming a new parent.

But the truth is that I have dozens of drafts here in Blogger that never made it to post - so that's a bit of a bogus excuse. The real issue is follow-through, which has always been a challenge for me. It's all about anxiety: I get an idea for something I want to do, but before I get to the execution I decide that I would probably just fuck it up or the person(s) involved wouldn't like it or would think I'm weird or would be disappointed. So I put it off until I forget about it or it's no longer relevant and then I drag myself through the mud a second time for not acting in the first place.

A surprising (or perhaps not very surprising) amount of my life is lived this way. And, honestly, that is not likely to change a great deal. I'm about to turn 33 (helloooo Jesus year) and while I dig the Eat-Pray-Love-How-Stella-Got-Her-Groove-Back late-in-life epiphany narrative on an aesthetic level, I don't see myself achieving enlightenment on a tropical island any time soon.

Which is not to say that I'm ditching out on that whole self-value thing altogether. But in keeping with the fake-it-'til-you-make-it philosophy that has dominated my life as a parent, I'm more interested in how I can work around the anxiety rather than trying to banish it. It just seems more practical.

So. This year I resolve to do more things when I think of them. Even if I think they might not turn out how I expect or people might think I'm weird. Newsflash: I AM weird. Also kind of awesome.

I also resolve to hang the words "BE HERE NOW" in an obnoxiously large frame in our kitchen. Maybe I can actually accomplish that by 2017.

http://youtu.be/0z2GLCmKqLQ