Run & Paint

Wednesday, March 24, 2010

march 17th --> march 23 2010. prayer, running, painting.

march 17th
ran eight miles, across downtown from parking deck through library and homeless stragglers to Greenfield lake park and the perverts and junkies and alligators. . . . . . felt strong and enjoyed the hill-bursts. no real contemplations, just running through doubt and fear.

st. patricks day. 281 miles 81 miles 20 miles.

cake and ice cream with family (kyote kas mom who is visiting) following an excellent meal of corned beef, red potatoes, carrots and mustard. you got to love crock-pot cooking!

march 19th 2010.

envy. envy seems to be the lesson of the day. with others projecting against another’s life, them projecting on someone else’s, one is never really present for one’s own life.

the spiritual-emotional trespassing is a difficult tolerance, and tolerance is an struggle recently. hence a double opportunity for growth. . . . . rebuilding tolerance and an awareness of my tendancy towards envy.

prayer is first a thought, a confession or a vision, but ultimately it is an act or a sequence of actions.


gator trail will not happen as the cutoff for registration passed yesterday. I am a bit disappointed but know that this is something I can shoot for next year, with style and grace that would certainly be absent this year. I will continue building base miles and make another good run happen, likely including the three lakes trail marathon in Greensboro later in the year.

thoughts of hemingway, spain, trout fishing and the stream behind the house where I lived in banner elk, nc. no run but depression.


march 21 2010. a fun run y’day with my wife, on the first official day of spring, with kyote in the jogging stroller and a gorgeous day. two miles and a coupl’a yard sales as we circled the neighborhood. kas bought a cracked-glass vase.


today I hit the pavement at 8am and ran a solid sixteen miler across trails and Rogersville road over salt marsh bridges and misty fields where two horses stamped and chewed grass and then the ICW and finally the beach, where I was reminded of monet in Normandy and thought of van gogh cause of the painterly effect of the sun across the rippled ocean surface. . . . . back home through the cement-leg kicks of the marathoners (quintiles marathon at Wrightsville beach this weekend, though I missed out) on final or second-to-final loop and water and water and sun on my back. . . . need a hydration belt.

environMental was my mantra for a while. . . . something. . . . . a little kitschy and catchy at the same time.

fucking brahms; his string quartets. just massive.

march 23. is running my personal wabi-sabi perfect state? have I answered the metaphysical question haunting me since college: why paint? what ego-centric narcissist feels the need to act upon others’ senses with their own creations and visions? what desperate solitude & isolation pushes the individual into a violent act of creativity. . . . visionary pleads. . . . what is the point of art but ultimately an aesthetic fascination, thus a vanity? is art escapist or shamanic? (I am excluding fashion as art and the fashion of art. . . . the “canons” of art history are the monopolies of the individual’s mind and blinding. fashion is consumerism and capitalism and ridiculous.) and what is the highest form of art as an act of honest shamanic introspect?

running pushes the body mind and spirit. . . . environment meets invironment and painting approaches that threshold, stands at a nexus though falters in its capacity to move beyond. painting is always restricted to the internal vocabulary and image-repertoire and therefore its own solipsistic series of associations, UNLESS one believes that God (or a higher power) can and will directly act upon the creative self, and thus one serves merely as an empty vessel into which a diety-form pours the languaged creation. yet what is the ecstacy of art? perhaps no answer but the Act. . . . again. to Act is to reach for something higher, a work of contrition.

there is no hierarchy in things of the ephemera. back to more tangible facets of Act and Prayer. . . . . wish I had a farm to work—energy invested yields energy ie. work = food. . . . another blog in another mind.

tedd corbitt. . . . . man alive. 100 mile weeks?!!

six miles, an easy pace across d-town, PPD through d-town to Greenfield, scattered with zen pauses, then allergy pauses near and in the park itself. a pretty day although windy. blight filled much of the middle run, was rampant with nesbitt court and wright street and marstellar and even Greenfield itself was populated with creeps, thought of dybek’s Chicago chronicles. . . . back down fifth st. to third to boardwalk by front street and the many empty windows of the business district. bars, tattoo parlors and empty store fronts. a few good restaurants, including where I work. . . . . the cape fear swollen and powerful passing without judgement beside my heaving body. the river the river the river.



have commenced setting up a creative workspace in the home. canvases lean on walls and sketchbooks fan out by cds of mahler, Schoenberg, and the mad complete string quartets of hadyn. . . . . the pogues and ace of bass.

(half marathon at river towns, pa at beginning of may?)

311 miles in 2010. 111 miles in march. 22 miles this week.