The Brakes

In the dream I can't stop Dad's old pickup. It's not careening down the highway at seventy-six miles per hour. Even in dreams my life is calmer than that. We're rolling in reverse through the night, Dad and I. My head is turned, looking behind. Dad stares ahead. The night is impossibly dark. The truck's feeble lights swallowed by dream darkness. There aren't even any shapes behind me, just a sense of something. Rocks, a stream, concrete walls, other cars, someone's cat or child. I push the brake pedal, first gently then to the floor. The truck still rolls. I hurt my leg pushing against the pedal. My head still turned backward, my eyes searching the nothingness, my heart screaming. Dad stares ahead, at peace with all he sees. I can't make that truck stop. I stand on the brakes, my mind spinning faster until I come awake, rolled onto my side, in dim morning light. The truck and Dad fade. I turn to look behind, out the bedroom window, and feel myself falling. There was never anything behind us, just an emptiness into which I've long been falling. Having made the trip, Dad could have told me that standing on the brakes against it means nothing, nothing at all.

New Morning

This morning I have nowhere to be, nothing to do, and no one expecting me. Instead of rushing to make the coffee, grumbling about the dishwasher, and worrying over the clock as I write Morning Pages, I feel light, content, unencumbered, almost healthy.

Stress has not been my best friend or at least I've not learned how to accept it as my guest. This morning I weigh just shy of two-twenty at the end of week I hoped I'd be two-seventeen. I ate my stress this week. I tried to resist it.

There has to be a better way.

Better sleep helps. Last night I went to bed without electronics and fell right into deep sleep. Simple measures. Ben Franklin was right about that early to bed, early to rise stuff.

Writing helps. I rewrote someone else's piece and felt great playing on the court of my skills. In my new job, thinking in solitude with pen on paper brings clarity, comfort, and understanding.

Fresh air helps. Walking to and from work each day, reading outside, shooting baskets, and running all cleanse me.

Timers help. I spend exactly half an hour reading a report, an hour writing a proposal, twenty minutes decoding a budget. I need tight limits on scrolling through YouTube and reading the news, things I do out of habit that don't feel good at all.

Stressed out, heavy, and under-rested, I'm unsure and feel out of balance. Today I have started anew, begun a return to balance, but this is a long game. I'll be at it all year. Hell, I'll be at it the rest of my days. That's okay because I'm curious what's out there and what's within me. I'm in the mood to explore.

I was stressed to distraction this week. I'd prefer to feel healthier, to accept rather than resist stress. Sleep, writing, fresh air, and timers help.

I said there's nothing I have to do today, no one I have to see, but that's not entirely true. Even on weekends I have obligations. It's just that I'm not resisting things so much. That feels like the first step. It feels like a way through. Mostly though, it just feels better.

Shit You Not

Sometimes life is shit. Everything sucks and there's nothing to do but go in the corner and pout. Stuff just keeps raining down and giving up is the only option.

This is not one of those times.

A couple weeks ago around ten o'clock on the eve of our twenty-fifth wedding anniversary, my wife tentatively woke me with news there was standing water in the basement. She couldn't plunge the floor drain open. I got up groaning and whining and went down. I stepped into the water in pajamas and bare feet, and went to town with the plunger. Nothing doing.

And why, I wondered, is an oatmeal cookie floating here?

That wasn't oatmeal. I stepped out of fetid, fecal water and hung my head.

Still, even then life wasn't shit. Sure, sewage was floating in our basement and I walked into it barefoot, but feet clean and plumbers come in the morning. I went up two floors and back to bed.

The next morning two guys cleaned the roots out of our pipe. Water and sewage ran freely. It cost a pretty penny, but so it goes.

See, it's not all shit.

This morning, as I walked toward the office, my wife called. Sewage had pooled between the sidewalk and the road. I walked back home. No water or sewage in the basement. Just a brown puddle around the vent stack. Okay, I thought. That's enough. That's about all I can take.

But it wasn't.

The same guys came over. My wife stayed home to wait while I drove to work. Hours later she let me know they had cleared the pipe from the sidewalk to the street. All was well again. No problem, no charge, no shit.

Two weeks from now the pipes may back up again. Maybe the whole sewage line will need replacing or worse. There's no telling, but here's what I know:

• The sewage in the basement wasn't so bad and is gone.
• Sewage on the lawn instead of in the house is small potatoes.
• Many problems can be solved with no more than a phone call and credit card.
• When no one gets hurt, sick, or lost, it's not a big problem.

There are times when life is shit, but right now the pipes are clear and everything bad is flowing away from me. This is a good life. I shit you not.

The Long Run

I went for a solo run for the first time in a while. I've run a few times in the past weeks with my daughters to keep us active, but this was the first time in at least a month I've gone out alone. I ran my favorite course through the cemetery in part because it's my favorite distance, five miles. I felt great.

I'm rereading Chris McDougall's Born To Run. My daughter asked, "how many times have you read that?" Six or eight, I said, though it's more like ten. She rolled her eyes and left the room. What can I say? I know what I like and sometimes prefer rereading to reading anything new. Plus, the book is all about long runs and pushing against what's accepted. I'm at the part where Scott Jurek gets up from the pavement in Death Valley and wins the 135-mile Badwater race in temperatures no one was ever intended to survive let alone run through. I love reading this sort of thing.

Our new bathroom scale arrived. The old one gave out. I wonder if it got tired of me. I'm pretty heavy and it's not the pandemic that has done it. I gained twenty-seven pounds last year in a job that was killing me. I left the job but kept the weight. I'm 221 pounds when I should max out at 200 and really should be down at 185. I am working to be healthier, but losing twenty-one pounds, let alone thirty-six, isn't something I can accomplish in an afternoon without lopping off a limb. It's a long run I've struggled to ever finish. I tend to walk off the course and grab a hot fudge sundae.

Monday I start a new job. Last year, I ran for my life from teaching and went to work for the Syracuse Community Center Collaborative. That job proved to be the best I've ever had. I got to work with and for great people who patiently trained me, believed in my talent, and trusted me — the exact opposite of my teaching life. So why am I leaving after just shy of eleven months? I applied for and was accepted as the new executive director of the Syracuse Northeast Community Center. In eleven months on the job I have moved to the highest position. Fourteen months ago I described my life as "I'm treading water as I bleed to death." Now, I'm embarking on a fantastic adventure.

The thing about the long run is that there are stops along the way and things to see. On my solo run through the cemetery I passed a stone labeled "Abbott Costello" and for the hundredth time smiled imagining a cemetery rewrite of "Who's On First." I ran without thinking of mileage or effort. I felt no fatigue, felt like I could just keep running and running. And though I'm unlikely to be significantly lighter from one run, my spirit is just a bit lighter and maybe that will show up on the scale.

Sometimes the long run turns out shorter than I expect. Last year I decided to quit a terrible job and just see what might happen. You know what happened? One good thing and another and another. I can't see any good reason not to keep expecting these good things. Sure, there's always another long run, a finish line so far away it's hidden by the curvature of the Earth, the turning of the calendars pages. And the road can be hard. There were hills in my solo run today that took my breath, but I shortened my stride and whispered, take what the hill offers and give what you can. The top wasn't so far away.

In Born To Run, Scott Jurek falls to the burning pavement in Death Valley about halfway through the 135-mile race. He's spent. He's lost. He can't go on. Lying there he thinks, there is no way he can finish, certainly no way he can win. Unless he got up as though he were starting completely fresh. Unless he ran like he never had before. Unless he got up and believed he could make the long run. He got up and won the race.

I kind of know how he felt. I'll keep running and see where I end up.