a catch up of things, 6.19 to 6.23.

6.19 sunday was a nine mile kick across summer rest and the loop and the shorter run left a long morning ahead to chill with the family. restful hours, re-creativity and leisure, they rejuvenate and rebuild things, burn out the debris to a clean working space, push the mind out of the miles. 

lazy afternoon flipped across a scratchy color documentary on de kooning. . . interviews, clips of his studio, the man working against canvas and pigment, de kooning in old age sweeping a liner brush into final melodic ribbons of color as his own mind-knots unraveled. Paintspattered overalls. Alternating color and b&w shots. Stills & moving images. Sag harbor and the door paintings. The charcoal and pastel drawings. The transfer sheets. De kooning's thin toothed smile, smoking into bent fingers.

Eventually all minds fade to music or paint or quiet.

The mileage is struggling against the heat and I am torn down by a 40 mile week that should be more manageable. Aside from the physical work, mental preparations begin to buffer against the travail of the grandfather mountain marathon. The angst that cancers into efforts comes earlier and harder and the endurance escapes the legs via negative self-talk.  Exertion is lost to unwillingness. To continue the legwork is a process of transcendence, and it is a process of being present, a fugue of self. 
meanwhile a six miler at blue clay today with my native american blood going and I felt playful, felt dialed in, hopscotching roots with bursts of speed (smooth but short passages), a fun run, slow and easy, shade and the stillness of the woods, breath, the metronome of things. Was refreshing to just run, turn the garmin outta sight, feel my body doing the work again, to be the center of a moment, the center of a movement. To run with the freedom that started the passion.  

unaware of the numbers.

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A fantasy.

One day I will live in rome and I will bicycle from modern districts to ancient ruins and I will have a notebook in my pants where thoughts and images collect.

Rimbaud never did this and as commemoration of my 37^th year I am running umstead for 37 kilometers which translates to 22.9 miles and it will be slow and easy and gnarly and miserable.

Ash, smoke, charcoal & the aesthetic of franz kline.

37y, 37k (rimbaud never did this.) a writeup regarding a long trail run in umstead park. . . .

well it was an alarm at 4h44am then abrupt silence but for the sound of percolating coffee and then two hours through dark and dawn to umstead park, and it was 7h34am on sal's branch trail and it was a running narrative of promise and voltage and impact and smooth running, fueled and wholly into the act, and then I searched out the head of the preplanned loop beginning with sycamore loop trail and wrapping the guts of umstead with company mill trail and sycamore trail was a beautiful thing of roots rocks river banks where granite piled like broken plates and little trickles of water entangled with the thrusts of squirrels, clouds of dragonflies, and then the run evolved towards a narrative of solitude, of blues, of bees, and the trail jutted quartz and exalted a young buck chewing air and wrapped hills and the terrain sort of reminded me of the runs in georgia and certainly one of the most engaging trails i've run and the loop knotted back into itself at an intersection of graylyn trail and north turkey creek trail and while reading the trail map I realized I was swarmed by bees. . . true annoyance became anger as those fuckers kept up for at least two miles, new troops added occasionally as one beelines my neck or shoulder or just levitates in my face, eye contact with a thousand eyes, and I was trying to read my now-soggy map and my run became a narrative of lost miles and disorientation and anxiety, of ongoing lost miles and then it was the mad-dash of another trail runner bringing my sluggish quads to a crushing awareness of fatigue, despair, thirst as i'd intended on refilling my bottle at the nowlostcar and the next two miles were plodding along, speed-hiking at its worst, unnerving and hollowing. But back to the blues and man I was thinking of the blues of my life as this was a birthday celebration run and thus retrospect was due and the blues came to mind starting with picasso's blue period, my tubes of pthalo or french ultramarine (red or green) or cobalt or cerulean blue and the minimalist palette of poverty and frequent uprootings, and then m. davis blues, kerouacs smokey blue word-notes, mingus and his blues and roots, monet's false blues as water lilies spin beneath light-flecks of sky, a chapbook I wrote fifteen years ago called “bluesin it in deep winter gray,” the blue of yves klein, the pasty blue extremities of freud's figures, the blue eyes of previous lovers, the blue eyes of a wife, the blueblack cheeks of sleepless years, blue horror of struggle and insomnia and terror and the blue book. Back to the bee swarmed intersection, the bee swarmed intersection now bee-free as they were spread all across my route like the bread crumbs of fables and I now know where the world's bee population has concentrated itself, but turning into the trail with my bearings intact, i kicked 'til i reached the car, grabbed a yogurt and gulpedgulped water and caught back up to my body's needs, eased back into the woods for one more three mile loop on sal's branch and that was that as driving home through raleigh traffic and dead kennedy's and marley and the pleasant fatigue of 17 miles behind me with who knows what ahead other than a shower and the evening's shift and I can honestly say that my efforts on the run held poetic parallel to those of my life, that the run served as a physical metaphor for the endurance of my 37 years, and in just being there, in the woods, running alone against mind and body and soul and time and running with Nature and God and Shewolves and Life and Mooncycles and noise and running just felt right and natural, a place where work is grateful.  And getting to a point where my life feels natural, aligned, synergized, has always been the goal.   

A new april run followed by a memorial, a requiem.

Sunday at 6h40am I chugged a final dark coffee and crunched the gravel driveway towards the beach for a sixteen miler. a beautiful start to april while predawn-dark and cool and quiet, homes unlit and dogwood blooms pale but open and white in minimum light. Sunless flat trees began to fill out in form and I passed two folks walking dogs and smiling and the second mile ticks off as I run slowly and casually across market street, an impossibility any other time of the week, with barely a car north or south of my chuk-chuk-chuk of pace.
Gator trail has drained from my body, the recovery swift and impressive, but my footfalls remain flattened, unenergized, and I dread roadruns after such a carpeted trail run.  But my saddle gait is passed and my jaw muscles do not ache and I contemplate eagerly the next long run.  the umstead 100 passes this weekend (people are still finishing as I turn on Cardinal), with all the legs milling it out across eight loops of 12.5 miles and the bareballed guts of that distance, with the men and women driving forward from fourteen to thirty hours straight with headlamps and mudcaked legs and I am interested perhaps for next year, but I also know I don't want to ruin a longer running-life with one run of 100 miles; some never fully recover from such a thing. My skateboard and soccer knees may reject that distance, protesting quickly and finally, but the idea of a 100 miler is enticing and burns the mind a bit like a longshot high-yield bet.
A slight breeze cools me as I run the cross-city trail down Eastwood to veer out Rogersville past barking dogs and early porch lights.  Time-caught churchgoers push me deeper down the road's shoulder.  Up Wrightsville I watch a congregation gather outside the Presbyterian church, I admire the red jackets and decorated hats on the gregarious ladies, study the starched dark suits hanging from the thin, coat-hanger shoulders of an elderly man smiling to a man of thick build and big voice.
Debate mulls and fades to back of mind.  I mentally mask a canvas for the next layer of image-application and I make a mental note to do so. I remember a poem I wrote about a tree in California.  Quiet overcomes the Umsteads, the paintings and their secret images, the lifegoals, folds up the language-rambles and the clips of aesthetic-concerned essays.  Airlie horses watch me pass from perfect rolling landscapes of viridian greens, king oaks, grey spanish moss, red barns of white framing beneath the fresh sun.  Monet-moments pause by the Intracoastal Waterway with the crystalline reflections across mist-muted colors, the dry hiss of sea grasses. The ocean spills like tiny cups from a green-glass stillness, and the gratitude rises like prayer as I turn left at Mercer's pier, looking forward to being home with my wife and child.

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This is a moment to remember the father and son who were killed Sunday morning.  Trey Doolittle and his father Ronald David Doolittle II were triathletes pedaling out a training ride as they cycled River Road at 9h30am.  Behind them a fast car swerved wildly, running across grass and shoulder and 17 year old Trey and next his father.  The father was pronounced dead at the scene and Trey sustained injuries that he would not recover from, succumbing about 24 hours later.
The man had cocaine, an open container, and was intoxicated.  Personally the accident unleashes an anger, a rage so bleak and stark, so confusing.  A man of 63 years of age, on a binge, crushed to death two healthy, beautiful people. The brutal irony is overwhelming.
My wife's best friend was killed when she was struck by a vehicle, riding her bike home from Manhattan to Brooklyn, and this terrible thing thrusts the associated pain right back to her being.  Today I will run with thoughts of them, sending a white-light love to those who are also victims of this driver as they lose a friend, a partner, a brother, a father, an inspiration.