excerpts of thought.

April 27^th. Morning of ny ing marathon lottery begins with six miles at 5h30am.  running in the early dark is an eerie thing, entirely different than running in late dark but still vulnerable and primitive and revitalizing.  raw. an interesting mantra cycle/ chorus of fragments: 
silver scythe cutting spring wheatsky.

Harvest a field of pthalo blue.

Kicks through an empty, echoless world.

May 3^rd. Ran nine at brunswick nature park in slow/fast clips hurdling horse-scat and roots and eventually (felt it coming) broke a quick bend to the right as a black snake raced beneath feet off trail and swiftly ascended a net of branch and vine, his climbing form like a heavy black rope pulled in strange jerks through the tangle of growth. Unlike anything i'd ever seen before.

lotus blooms in marshland of bnp

trail shot on bnp with new growth in may.

May 6^th. A dozen miles at carolina beach state park with the great punctuation- the pause, build and break of the momentum- being a large deer that surprised me on a bend in the sand-bermed turn. She jammed through the thick of trees as a quick-paced percussion of hoof, her form dissolving immediately behind pines and crag oaks. . . reminded me of running pennsylvania when a huge buck and two doe stood on a gravel farm road in early morning, within twenty feet, a shock of deer when a doe sprang sharply ahead and her hooves where eye-level in effortless power and ee cummings poem 'bout the lithe light deer the fleet flown deer but back to carolina beach on a hot friday morning when I kicked slow and meandering like a heavy thing falling down the trail to be mocked by nature's brutal if not ungentle wit.

roche. snake. ramble.

April 15 2011

La Roche.  Basque word implying the loss of senses, a sort of derangement of the senses rimbaud and later the surrealists strove towards.  Early coastal heat begins the assault of the senses, a mile-marked delirium, intervals of mindsmoke.

observations on a friday morning trail run at carolina beach:

1. a field of dragonflies blurred my vision and obscured my feet as I ran across a rooty passage of trail; must've been 50+ dragonflies.  Dali may have appreciated the image-morphosis of feet becoming dragonflies.  what freudian symbolism would be attributed to dragonflies? (ants = anxiety.  Melting clocks = mortality and flesh-decay.  Giraffes = ?)

2. a lethargic snake baked on the trail by a sandy bend.  Sand and pine needles and the leaves of dwarfed oaks had pushed up against the roots of a tall pine; and he folded into the bed of debris.  he was an optical curiosity, a pattern in a patternless array.  startled by his presence and my near-miss of his body, I assumed his dangerous nature and determined him to be a water moccasin.  But that wasn't the case; he was a garter snake: harmless, common, basking. An unfortunate ignorance on my part, a (fortunate) total immersion in the moment.  fear-defined moment.

The starkness of a thing. . . doppler effect of mileage.

Running carolina beach state park with sugarloaf dune draped in saint-white sand and the new silk of spiders, the flitter-rustle of finches and the muffled footfalls of pineneedled trails at an unpushed pace of about nine minutes, easy & pleasant movement in the Spring sun while vicious cross-currents of the cape fear push against coast in quickspill sapphires and salt-foam. . . glassy black brine and the carpet of jade moss gives rise to dwarfed crags with thick fans of woody moss, the wicked arms of live oaks, the vertical launches of pine and long-leaf. . . the sum of the experience moves beyond roots and rocks, dredging sand, moves beyond the seven miles to the 31 miles in four days on similar terrain, and I am reminded of the difficulty of the goal and anxiety builds like doppler effect as the ultramarathon approaches, getting louder and overwhelming and then a pulse becomes a constant roar abruptly diminishing and dropping to a faint bass-pulse somewhere far away. . . but the run is sound, my fitness remains okay through gum surgery four weeks ago followed by intestinal poisoning, and a nine minute pace feels perpetual and pleasant for the moment. spoon's “everything hits at once” cycles with current image-ideas and the landscape of carolina beach puts me head-on into pollock's blue poles and I pause into the painting, relayer it as it was painted, seeing pollock's angst pouring paint on and throwing those rough-planed boards across the flat-laid canvas with barely a touch of rabbit skin glue and just starting in, thrusting against the deep pthalo blue house paint like a jazz artist would a new melody suddenly clear, seeing the rhythm and starting to jam, calligraphy in air above the canvas duck, earth and hay and stirsticks and fingers and bottle caps all building into a cohesive surface. . . blue poles, a fine image to get entangled in thoughts of leg-labors kicking the final kilometer, enjoying new spring growth & glad to be part of the fantastic world, glad to be running, grateful.

the rhyme of contrasts. . . . an inchoate ramble, a run in sand.

The rhyme of contrasts, the balance of paradox. 

(random thoughts of Howard Finster, painter-preacher.)

nc museum of art, the grand glass doors framed by polished bars of steel, arriving with apprehensions against the funky-lego rigidity of the post-renovation building, now counteracted by a trail wrapping the rolling raleigh landscape, the massive sculpted coils on top of a hill, rodin's le penseur with clinched bronzed toes.  inside were the greco-roman statues, beat and aged, marble torsos of grandiosity. renaissance imagery, the usual ascending christs and compassionate marys and serene martyrs, interesting for a glance. . . the nineteenth century european painters, their street scenes and plein air peintures, still lives of meat markets and aristocratic patrons, their mythologies of body.  the american painters, o'keefe to wyeth with some damned fine american landscapes. . . the impressionists, the impressionists. . . into the modern now, what i consider the relate-able, giacometti, richter, a room full of mid-scale rodins (iris, burghers, balzac, ugolino, etc) and a garden with heroic-scale works (meditation, shades). . . . salle, scully, liu, motherwell, a perfect kline. . . a furious landscape by a nc painter gayle lowry. . . ultimately the nc museum of art hosts a damned fine art collection, is a good day trip, and after moving the mind you can move the body on the easy nature trail of the museum park.

****************************************************************
arrived stagnant, tired, but left with energy, momentum, craving a new image-repertoire, craving to push a new pictorial vocabulary into paint-heavy canvas.
looking, collecting image-scraps, extending my visual vocabulary beyond michelangelo, the ny painters, the post-war german painters (some of my personal favorites and thus aesthetic ruts). art realigns the paradigm, invigorates the psyche, inspires cross-referencing across time and geographic impossibility, denies cultural polarities, pursues a continuum in the annals of creative energy, scripts connections against disparateness, balances the paradox of things, conjoins the sacred and the vulgar.  this is my perpetual essay: the myth of synergy, of the ephemeral, of the holistic in creative work.  a nexus, a fusion of experience and expression, mind body spirit. art resides as an exacting and necessary presence in all layers of the collective unconsciousness, a core of the experience of the eternal mortality.
********************************************************
kline motherwell mitchell de kooning pollock twombly and the postwar german painters, beuys and polke, kippenberger, baselitz, grosz, hesse, auerbach, richter. . . . freud and rauschenberg and bacon, schnabel.  rembrandt rubens carravaggio michelangelo titian. . . . the power of rodin, a room of rodin casts. . . . eternal brutal humanity, cut in clay, hatched in paint, craving.
***********************************************************

millet in mind while running sand, the toil of foot-falls as digging slow miles across carolina beach state park, running steep sand mountains beyond sugarloaf on unmarked trails and into sunny point perimeter where pulling back into trails barely marked by deer, dogs, squirrels. . . . the push of isolated miles on a saturday morning, wife and baby three hours northwest and full sun in march wonderland of easy time.  
millet and the honesty of work, of harvest, of seed.  my body reels easy breath across vast stretches of sand and i feel a clarity of mind, a soundness of belief, a push of body which is mine and strong.

Rant & Pant, WRRC Survival Run 2011.

Sartre chokes on his own smoky words while Vegh String Quartet saws and hacks Beethoven’s Grand Fugue, opus 133. Now considered a canon of string chamber music, the piece was initially rejected and ridiculed, forcing a re-composing of the fourth movement.  Wonderful irony of histories.
************************************************
Lately, while running, i've been aware of my degrees of spirituality as I attempt to judge whether ego is consuming my runs.  And during a 12 miler at greenfield park last Thursday, the source of my ire revealed itself: the materialism of running, the culturally dominated aspects of the runner, the classic external definitions of what a runner is, that is to say, the cultural ego pressing me into paces that steal the landscape, steal the joy, steal the deeper momentum of a run.  I have unearthed my mythologies, exposing them like earthworms to the sun: the body type, the clothing, the pacing, the jaw and thighs and attitude and all of the demands society makes on even the most beautifully solitary of Acts (not so unrelated to the Act of painting or drawing or writing).  anyway, running claims no ego, and no ego drives me other than the fact that i think running makes me a better person, mellows out my temper and stabilizes my mood as any meditation may.  Unfortunately my creative ego struggles against bloated senses of self, and that is why the image-repertoire is currently barren and rocky, like an aesthetic object devoid of use.  But below is the rant that ensued after the run.

Billboard Life:  From Beauty to Banal. . . and sometimes it is the materialism that gets you, that removes you from the Core, depletes the Passion, gets you into the Label and the newest new, the most progressive progressions, swipes the ideal of a moment, robs the momentum & loses the meaning.  the pure Act becomes mired beneath peripheral aspects, against marketing plots, the collective sheep-song of consumerism. or the beauty of a thing becomes an obsession, a demise of itself, a self-devouring Bosch-form. . . the dreadful neurotic race that everything becomes.  Decay of american passions.  Guerilla capitalism. Van gogh’s delirium.  How something beautiful becomes a commercial exploit, a bark for power, an angle into profit: magazines stuffed with advertisements, marketing-strategy essays on dead artists (profiting living dealers), commercialized & mass-market painting (the Global Image), the namebrand artist or the omniscient namebrand society.  airbrushed runners on glossed covers, uberman mythologies embedded in every article, the gear and more gear and more ads about the gear.  the ongoing cannibalism/ consumerism of Politics. Renting out God.  Communions of breast of vulture in sauce of rotten teeth and fouled essence of what-can-i-get-from-you. Fuck that. Give me a farm, a community, and a chance at something Higher.  Give me minimalism and alchemy.  Give me arte povera, a monk's wooden beads, a raspy psalm.  Whatever.  Give me the eternal, seeded Core.

1.16.10   Sunday morning,  a  nine mile run with the folks from the WRRC, the 2011 Survival Run.  Was a real jackrabbit deal, the nine mile trail twisting back from Carolina Beach State Park into unknown areas where white sand was frosted with morning dew, steep sand-cliffs overlook picture-perfect Cape Fear drifts where lazy sails caught a slow breeze, onward through massive sand dunes with black needles webbing against brown brush (a natural drawing, an environmental happening), running right through the center of a live oak circle, into Sunny Point and the fantastic stretches of woods with complete silence and more sand dunes into the underground brick tunnel of rebar-laced cement, a bunker of busted chards, with lithe, quick steps across graying concrete chunks where shrubs shove out between, then passing through sharp dry grasses, reeds sweep knees, thigh-high with dry-scratch sounds on each piston-push, Marley’s “Hammer” providing the rhythm for the knee lifts (kick on the downbeat) and then 1.4 miles of road to the community center of Kure Beach where everyone congregated for a delicious and voracious breakfast of scrambled eggs & pancakes with coffee.

Two running narratives. . . legs & language.

1.6.11

Thursday morning at Carolina Beach State Park, a gray coolness, a faint sun, hidden & dull behind clouds; a winter run on a winter day.
Ky and Kas left and I finished my coffee and a muffin.  Pulling into shorts and a warm top, I plugged in some Antibalas and faded into a strange sadness while driving to the park, a heavy gravity that I can only correlate to a family member’s surgery (achilles tendonitis). . . . maybe the winter funk that ebbs and flows like a collective melancholy is to blame.
The park was quiet in a flat lusterless light as clouds rolled in on cooler temperatures.  Rare sun moments layered the winterscape on mostly empty trails as my legs pumped across the blue blaze that connects the main office with Sugarloaf Trail. The sand was thick with strong, wet grips yanking at my shoes, shins splashed in cold mud as I stomped through puddles collected from the earlier rain.   The mood and conditions were challenging the very idea of the run.  The trees seemed dwarfed, brittle, elderly, hanging in the air like black smoke burning off of the ashen coals of the exposed sand. An inevitable eventuality, the state of the trees.  Eventually, slowly, my legs loosened and my eyes relaxed into the landscape.  An interesting pale, spongy moss sprouted along the side of the path, and looked for evidence of pitcher plants or venus fly traps (which I believe are warm-weather perennials). My ears zoned into the morning stillness and the cool air sizzled in my lungs and face.  A few dead ends forced abrupt turnarounds, but I allowed myself to run in new directions and follow sand roads and unmarked trails, trying to experience something organic, unmeasured, wild.   Something fresh and open, like a moving satori.  But mostly I found myself running, just running, the hoof-digs pulsing against strained breath, thoughts dispersed and fractured.  Sugarloaf was a nice reprieve though something nostalgic filtered the landscape, remembering states passed in which I viewed that landscape.  The sand mountain.  The poetic dynamics in the act of Erosion.  I looped the trail a couple more times to add up to seven miles, hitting no brilliant times nor any exceptional insights.  Ultimately, just a run, the work of the run, and sometimes that’s enough, and sometimes it is not.

1.7.11

A run at the beach. . . . today was a good run at the coast, returning to one of my favorite seven mile out-and-backs, from Landfall to the Loop including Summer Rest Trail on both legs.  I ran with my lungs open and my mind reeling, avoiding pace concerns, avoiding expectations, and trying to be engaged in my run.  Few people were out on the sidewalks and roads, though Starbucks was packed with folks. WB park was vacant. Two ducks were busy searching for fish, diving beneath the bridges, and they were amusing and serious.  Pelicans pushed heavy beaks into the wind above a choppy ocean chewing the shore.  A moment of sadness descended as I passed the shell of the retirement home, recently closed, along Summer Rest road.  The sun brightened as I sprinted my way to end the 52 minute run at a 7.2 minute pace before a two mile walk with my very grateful dog and some GlobeTrekker on public television.

What was I doing one year ago?  I was starting this blog.

take the time to enjoy the thing; halloween to battleship half marathon-

November 1 2010 11h18am.   total for October was pushed out by a good long run y’day, halloween sunday, a twelve mile run of about 1h40mins. . . . ran from home through ogden park (and the hispanic soccer playoffs) to construction roads and trails and huge sand berms and lakes and large geese migrating just overhead, their strange languages of flight-form and squawking and laughing, I alone and enormous paw prints in wet sand keep me alert and somewhat wary and the run pushes up high-voltage trails, long straight swatches of ankle-twisting brashness and quick-touch toe-runs and eventually back into ogden park and home. the numbers are: 150 miles for October, 1081 miles for the year.
November 5, 1h29pm. Our other laptop, on which all of our documents/ photos/ music & general cross-referencing library of personal data is collapsing due to some hardware failure (error hex 50), so I am on a loaner. . . . updates are few and far between and the original documents are binary pulses, static, on a harddrive currently unusable. . . . so lets start from scratch.
this weekend is the battleship half marathon in downtown ilm. still uncertain of my participation, i know i can do better than last year, and that fact continues to intrigue me, to pull me in against the monetary resistance, almost as much as crossing the bridges in their strange, grate-teeth-on-soles splendor.
recent reading includes, still, dfw’s collection of short stories entitled “oblivion” as well as the short stories of chekhov, babel, and a bit of dostoevsky. The short story format revisited– the powerbars of literary feasts. . . . wonder why mccarthy doesnt put shorts out? should re-read some d. eggers. . .

November 6th. Eight miles of ramblin’ runnin’ at carolina beach state park, sand and pineneedled trails, wet and puddled leaf-mosaics bordered by black swamp swirling with pine oils; nasty currents of carbon and burnt steel cutting against yachts in icw, sugarloaf like the finest, white flour crunching beneath my salomons on sharp/quick ascents. A perfect midmorning run. Quiet and solitary, with only three other folks on the trails, and topping sugarloaf three times as i followed the trail which wraps the park while inter-weaving the run with various spontaneous trails. A good meditation, coastal brack and brine and cypress and luscious smells of autumn, good god-time in birdland and shed wet cold shirt for drywarm sweater and drove towards home, stopping for a blueberry bran muffin and hot columbian coffee. Work and work.
Saturday November 9th– i have registered for the half marathon, becoming the 1293rd person to do so with a cutoff of 1300. Destiny is mine.
November 8th.  the day after the 2010 Battleship Half Marathon.
Monday morning and my legs are tender with ropey tendons screaming the slightest movement, shoulders push against abdomen muscles like tired rowers in rough churn, mind reels the race-tape through as kyote chases a soccer ball and mahler’s third symphony belts out horns and string, heralding autumn’s first coastal frost. Now, recovery from the 2010 battleship half-marathon begins in earnest. the 13.1 miles y’day opened cold and collected, passing with a few strange (and by strange, I mean psychotic?) Moments, a homemade lunch of seered tuna and black bean tacos, then i worked my Sunday night shift to exhale, crashing into eight hours of royalty-worthy sleep. chasing kyote around the house will be my recovery run today. . . . but y’day’s half marathon was smooth and overall very good, with a coldcold morning tightening the veins in bare legs until the effort of the first incline heated and loosened and the legs began milling out the miles. . . . it all started behind the hilton of downtown wilmington, boarding the river taxi. My goal was around 1h40m, but the trip across the cape fear pushed a new goal. Some asshole harassed the first mate on the river ferry across from downtown to the battleship park (and yes, it was a rough ride and it did take four efforts to dock, but we were safe and ontime and the guy was just a dick. . . his brandnew minimalist nikes, his compression shorts and fuel belts and two garbage bags wrapped around more compression/ tech gear, garmin watches and heart monitors and this guy could've been a navy seal on a mission but besides that: my wife and twenty month old were cold and patient on the bench with a cape fear wind whipping the deck, so this guy was just an overtestosteroned chump who was marring my morning) and so my Mark was quickly exiting the river taxi with a haughty look to the first mate (who was holding the gate wide-eyed and embarrassed), and ky and kas and I got off and squared away and I was jogging to the start where the countdown was already underway. Hopping the dayglo orange tape, I found folks with attentive expressions and we began walk-trotting as an airhorn blew, pulling the runners out like a ribbon dance as the field expanded and a trot became a jog became a slalom became a run up the first bridge.

Ill skip the meat of the run but for a few choice cuts: at around mile 8 things got weird. The mind-voice began something like this:
“Ahh shit, a heavy, bonkey feeling in legs and chest. . . 13 miles. . . i'm done running, just done with it, i’ll never run again, this is ridiculous, 13 miles. . . every week I run this. . . runners drugs. . . need some music, a song in my head, fast and fast. . . easy skanking, easy skanking- skanking it slow. . . last year: gogol bordello; I felt good, lifting my head, felt strong and ran harder, arms in air, pumping. . . a burst. . . no ipod now, simplify and run. . . . enjoy the thing, the act of now. . . don’t bonk, could use some music. . . am i hitting a wall? Slow down, stomach breath. . . gatorade at next station, calories and electrolytes. . . what the hell are salt tabs?  compression man in sight, a belt full of hammer gels, drafting offa some cat. . . simplify to the run, no gum, no gels, breath. . . where did my pacifier go? (I chew my tongue for a second before realizing this is not a rational consideration.) Well that was abstract. maybe I’ll go to the comic store tomorrow.”  during this fugue i also projected several false recognitions on random faces.  i saw a friend mailyn walking on the path, and i saw a good running buddy jimmy coming the opposite direction, and, well, in short, these were false moments.   things chilled at an aide station and someone yelled “looking strong 1992" (my race number) and I felt better, felt human, and proceeded to pour a gatorade down my jaw and shirt and chased that with a water, shot a snot rocket, and pushed the final five miles. . . . (eventually compression man finished twenty meters before me.  for the record, i did pass him before my left shoe came untied.)

picked up some fresh tuna filet and seered it with black beans and fresh salsa and had lunch with kas and ky before a few restful minutes of football and then dressed for work.  good food and be-here-now runs are the Art recently.   that and a few sketches of punkass foot slogger. . . .
numbers=> 13m for the week/ 32m for the month/ 1113m for the year.