A Brief Packer Encounter

Now that football season has begun, and the Green Bay Packers have won their first game, it's time to share my low brush with fame and my close encounter with the celebrated team.

Late 9/11 Thoughts: Lower Manhattan's Fall Carnival

Nine years after 9-11, and on what, according to the New York Times is the most inharmonious commemoration in the near-decade since, I had to take a moment out of a very busy weekend to give space to my own thoughts on the anniversary.

I was a witness to the event, watching down Fifth Avenue as in a walking dream from the relative safety of midtown on a clear, crisp day as the towers burned and fell.   I spent the day with co-workers trying to make sense out the events, listening as the scrambled jets flew over my city, trying with some difficulty to contact my children in New Jersey and family members around the country.  I slept in my office floor that night when the subway back to Brooklyn was suspended.

Sherlock Holmes Alpha Omega

The other night my son and I attended the 20th anniversary meeting of the Epilogues of Sherlock Holmes, a Scion Society of the Baker Street Irregulars, based in Chatham, NJ.  We have not been members for 20 years--only about three--but there was a terrific turnout of members new and old and a fine evening was had by all.

Sydney Paget's famous imagining of Sherlock Holmes

The evening's subject was the beginning and the end of Sherlock Holmes.

7AM FILM FEST: Touch of Evil (1958)

I've been taking advantage of this lull in my "career" to catch up with movies I've backlogged in my own personal DVD queue (whether via Netflix or movies I own).  After walking the dog, returning from a run or boot camp, I've been using the remaining early morning hours to watch a movie while the rest of the house sleeps.   I call it my 7AM Film Fest.  My fellow filmgoers are Bob, the cat, and Rita, the dog.

Orson Welles, Victor Millan, Joseph Calleia, and Charlton Heston

Recently I watched Touch of Evil (1958).  Orson Welles' strange, stylized, accidental, uber-noir classic about a crooked American cop, Hank Quinlan (Welles himself at his most bloated) in a tug-of-war with an idealistic Mexican federal investigator, Miguel "Mike" Vargas (Charlton Heston, defining upright, and in a 20th-century wardrobe) over the supposed guilt or innocence of a suspect and a murder trail that crosses back and forth between the US and Mexican sides of the fictional border town of "Los Robles."

Unlucky 13

Yesterday I went out as planned to do my Sunday long run.  I was only scheduled to run 8 miles but I was trying to make up the mileage I missed the previous Sunday by running at least 13.  I got up early, hoping to take advantage of the morning's relative shelter against the predicted 90 degree intensity expected by mid- to late morning.  Alas, since it was Sunday, I had not set my alarm and slept through until 6:30, when the dog woke me for her morning walk.

My dog Rita wakes up with me during the week at 5.   She has completely cycled herself to my weekday schedule.  Unfortunately, she makes no allowance for weekends.  Trying to catch a few extra z's with her long face a few inches from my own, as she whines and makes periodic, increasingly higher-pitched yips, is a slow torture wake-up system.  On this occasion she did my a favor since I wanted to get up, or rather I'd though that would be a good plan the day before.  After cursing her ancestry I dutifully stumbled downstairs with her and put her out in the yard.

Running off at the mouth

This is a blog and by definition it's an exercise in hubris.  Who the Hell cares what I have to say, outside of friends and family? But it's my first attempt at a blog and I hope over time it finds a voice that reaches out to others who trawl the internet for nuggets of experience in which to refract their own lives.  I'm not always going to talk about running.  But I will talk about the marathon of being a single dad.  I will talk about the narratives spread over the running times of old movies that I love.  In between I'll fit in books and beer and anything else that strikes my fancy.  Hopefully, I'll find my voice in this very public sphere and some of you will want to hear it.  This is definitely a work in progress.  As am I.

What makes Tommy run?

I just began training for my second marathon.   The only thing more startling than the words "training" and "marathon" in that sentence is the sequential "second."  Two and a half years ago I barely ran, and I certainly didn't do so willingly.  Earlier this year on my 50th birthday I ran 26.2 miles in 90-degree weather and now I want to do it again sans the scorching conditions, which I think I'll be able to improve on by running in November, in Philadelphia.

There are lots of people who run marathons and ultramarathons and there are lots of people who can run faster than I can.  There are lots of people who can't, and there are those that I manage to pass on the course.   That's the beauty of it:  there is only one fastest person and one slowest person alive in the world at any given time.

The fastest person alive has been officially identified as Usain Bolt.  The slowest person alive is unlikely to be known by name.  But between the happily named Mr. Bolt and and the unknown slowest man/or woman in the world is a six billion plus number line on which the rest of the human race sits as a series of constantly shifting points.  I know I'm not near Usain Bolt's end of this axis but I know that somewhere in the world there are at least a million people I could probably beat in a long-distance race.