MacKenzie's Laws

(subtitle:) "Stronger as you go along"
(Warning: Inspirational anecdote ahead, reader discretion advised)

I'm jogging up the bike trail at the end of a long workday, the weather is balmy, and it feels good just to be outside and moving. My usual slow pace is relatively pain-free, and after a warmup mile I actually feel something positive happening in my skinny old bow-legs. The muscles above the knee are more resilient than yesterday, and there's more spring in each stride than there was last week. Running three days in a row, even if it's snail-like ten-minute miles, seems to make a difference.

I pick up the pace, slow it down again in order to make it home, and let the subjective sensation, not the clock, determine my pace. They used to call that a fartlek workout (after some innovative German coach?) when you gradually speed up and slow down whenever the spirit moves you. So I make the turn at Maxtown Road and head south feeling noticeably stronger in mile 3 than mile 2, stronger today than Saturday, thus proving Coach Cercone right.

Leonard Cercone (pronounced Sir Coney) was the track coach at Birmingham Groves high school, an old-school athlete who believed in training hard all the time, winning all your intervals, never letting up. I'll save his opinions about spoiled Birmingham cake-eaters for another entry. I was a sophomore, a new kid at the school, hadn't learned how to train, and hadn't discovered my forte in track, so I was "coachable" (raw, clueless, undisciplined). Lacking the speed to run sprints, I ran a time-trial with the half-milers one day and started passing people on the second lap, prompting Coach Cercone to yell out, "Dunc, you're stronger as you go along." He was hard-core, but he knew the value of positive reinforcement.

I didn't become a great or even good half-miler, and I even skipped my junior year of track to distract myself with other things - girls, basketball, working at a movie theater, sportswriting, growing into my body. Being a late-bloomer by nature, though, I heeded Cercone's dictum and remembered it years later when learning to cross-country ski with the natives in the Upper Peninsula, trying out tai chi in Chicago, training for a marathon in Columbus.

Which brings me to my running partner on many a Sunday morning and his researched and tested rules of engagement - corollaries, in a way, to Cercone's dictum - that increase the probability of actually getting stronger as you go along. To wit:

MacKenzie's First Law - Run against the wind going out and with the wind coming back. Avoid the hubris of enjoying the ease of the first half of an out-and-back, only to be humiliated on the return trip.

MacKenzie's Second Law - Never run the same workout two days in a row. Increase or decrease your mileage, drop down or pick up the pace, change from a flat course to hills, switch from roads to the track. Just change something so you don't get stale, and you'll adapt daily to different conditions.

MacKenzie's Third Law - Make an attempt to look good. Wear shorts that fit and colors that don't clash. Leave the headphones at home. Consider a hat. When meeting a runner of the opposite sex, check your form: head up, shoulders down, arms relaxed, knees raised, breathing steady, look but don't ogle. Enjoy the scenery; be a part of it.

MacKenzie's Fourth Law - Identify a rabbit. When meeting a runner of the same sex (competitor) size up your rival and maintain your self-respect. If running in the same direction, this becomes a test. If they pass you, you have failed as a human being, and you can only redeem yourself by staying close enough to let their faster pace pull your sorry butt along, then pass the unwitting rival when they least expect it, but refrain from laughing maniacally as you do so. That would be bad form, and payback is hell (see First Law).

Donovan Lietch, dialectical materialist

I love my boots. I've had them for a few years now, so we have a kind of history together, a few small adventures my boots have made easier for me, like walks in deep snow or wet woods, winter workouts on a cold patio. So I try to keep them clean, let them rest and dry out, and do the occasional saddle soap and neat's foot oil treatment to keep the leather and stitching in good condition. They were once somebody's skin. They don't eat much and usually don't pee on the floor.

Does everyone feel this way about their shoes? You buy a pair of sneakers, you like the way they look, you get to know them, and the velveteen rabbit phenomenon happens, they get more real the more you wear them. Sometimes it's touch and go whether I break them in or they break me in, but usually I win because I'm too damn stingy to pay $100 for New Balance running shoes - the gray suede ones - and then admit it was a bad idea. If it takes a year and a thousand miles on the bike trail, it was worth it.

Then comes the long downhill slide from broken-in to broken-down. The creases lengthen, the scuffs deepen, the soles wear unevenly, and the stitching comes loose. Pretty soon my feet are sore after half a day, the beginning of the end of a relationship. That's were I am with my round-toed Rockports, the ones I bought on sale at Galyans with a gift certificate from my students at Westgate, how many years ago? They were a full size too big, but I like them so much I got them anyway and wore extra thick socks, no problem.

So anyway, the Donovan song (which album, Barabajagel?): "I love my shirt, I love my shirt, my shirt is so comfortably lovely...I love my jeans, I love my jeans, my jeans are so comfortably lovely...In fact I love my whole wardrobe." I guess that makes Donovan (and me) a materialist.

Dementia editoria somata

I dreamed I could record the sensations in my legs as I ran, so I wouldn't have to stop moving to write. Words would appear along the side of the road, I would read them, click 'Save', and a line or two of written language would be left behind while I continued down a side street. It was pretty cool for a while, although I couldn't remember what I had written during that dream-run, which was the whole point, right? Still it was reassuring that I could go back and read it, whatever it was, if I had to. Then the dream turned back upon itself like a repeating loop, and each line of leg language I saved was itself another dream in which I read a line, clicked 'Save', and turned down another side street. Pretty soon the repeating lines came faster, became less intelligible, and the whole process became less believable. I couldn't read the words anymore so I stopped turning off the main road, but I didn't stop clicking 'Save'.

prose poem for mixed media

Combine the following in no particular order (realizing that it will make a difference in the final result which ingredients come first and which next):

Put on comfortable shoes.
Put on a Tom Waits CD; I recommend "Mule Variations" or "Real Gone."
Pour a drink, something with fruit juice; a little tequila wouldn't hurt.
Boil water for little red potatoes. While the potatoes are boiling, snap the ends off a mess of fresh green beans, and throw them in the pot to steam on top of the potatoes.

Nurse the drink.
Read a short story by Heinrich Boll, maybe "The Green Silk Shirt," a sad and heart-wrenching four pages of sensual memory, material deprivation, dreams of satisfaction, and crushing disappointment in the midst of overriding fear. With any luck, each Tom Waits song will conjoin with a visual or tactile or other sensory image to which it provides an articulate, blue soundtrack.

Put the steaming potatoes and beans in a ceramic bowl. Eat them with salt and a spoonful of sour cream, while Waits wails and bass and drums and sax murmur in a room with old, uneven plaster walls painted eggshell white.

Mr. Gutman, part 2

Rev. Susan's sermon Sunday was about making choices. She told a story about a cool sunday school teacher she had in California, an older guy who happened to be a physicist. What she remembered was getting to freeze things with liquid nitrogen, being treated as an intelligent human being capable of making choices, rather than somebody who is born wrong and needs to be made right, and not getting indoctrinated.

It reminded me of Mr. Gutman. I probably learned something about English and social studies in eighth grade, but what I most remember is Mr. Gutman's mischievous grin and dapper herringbone twead jacket around his ample middle. ('Gut' = "good" and "belly" and "courage"; he had all three. Picture an animated, slightly rotund super-hero: Gut-man!) More than anything else, he reminded us that we were talented, bright, capable of doing more than we knew, and responsible for what we said and did, because it made a difference what we said and did.

It would be too humiliating to dredge up all the times I did something foolish and Mr. Gutman called me on it. But just as an example, how about the time the class was talking about Mussolini coming to power in Italy, and Mr. Gutman saw me say 'Wop' under my breath. He didn't miss much. He stopped and asked me how I thought Mike Torni, on the other side of the room, felt about that. We had our desks encircling the room instead of lined up in rows, so everybody could see everybody else, even though I sat with my jock friends and Mike Torni sat with his greaser friends. Thus confronted, I had to think about my unexamined racist world-view.

Have another hit - of fresh air

That's right, Quicksilver Messenger Service, circa 1970, during the height of the psychadelic era, so called, in rock and roll and the larger culture. I heard the song again a couple of years ago, this time a solo acoustic version by Richie Havens out on the commons in Kent, and it was just as arresting and valid in his baritone growl 33 years later.

So I'm driving home from church last Sunday after two cups of coffee and a better-than-usual sermon by our exceptionally bright, insightful minister, Rev. Susan, and needless to say, I have a few things to think about. Rather than turning south on Africa Road and going home on this chilly, damp first day of spring, I turned north and parked Hank, my new/old pickup truck, at the trailhead by Plumb Road. You can see straight down the trail to Alum Creek Reservoir, but I hung a left at the first branch in the hiking trail and just walked to air out my brain.

This is your brain. This is your brain on oxygen. Any questions?

The scenery in March is unspectacular. Of course there are lots of things to look at in rural Delaware County in any season, if you're paying attention, but that wasn't really the point. It had rained most of Saturday, and the trail was muddy, so most of the time I was occupied with finding high ground to walk on, not observing birds and trees and fields on the cusp of spring. It was cold, so it took at least half an hour of traipsing up and down folds in the watershed to get the blood flowing through my freezing fingers. And I wasn't really working out a solution to a specific problem, wrestling with a decision, or meditating on a theme from Emerson, so it wasn't like I was walking purposefully. I just needed to be outside for a while, and I needed to move. So I went for a walk in the woods and felt better.

Shall we construct a chart? Movement is good; being outside is good; movement while outside is sublime. Excuse the expression, but it's like the best drug ever. Mix with your favorite work- or play-related activity, with or without balls, bats, rackets, clubs, pedals, paddles, skis, skates, tools, or other implements of construction, and you've got the cosmic cocktail. As your doctor, I prescribe 20 minutes or more per day, and I guarantee it will change your point of view.

But there is a downside. It doesn't cost a thing, so you won't see ads on TV promising how it will change your life and minimizing the nausea, dry-mouth, and sexual side-effects. Therefore, there's no market incentive to promote going outside and breathing air, and there are billions of dollars to be made persuading you to do something else - take a pill, you'll feel better! And when you take that pill for your allergies, arthritis, anger, anxiety, acid reflux, boredom, bad breath, constipation, diarrhea, depression, erectile dysfunction, flatulence, headache, hair-loss, wrinkles, or whatever, you'll be contributing to the biggest growth industry of the Boomer Era, you guessed it, drugs.

Ooooooooh, have another hit - of fresh air.

Dr. Karl Haas

"Helllllo everyone."

Every night on some NPR station somewhere in America, you could count on hearing the distinguished voice of Dr. Karl Haas introducing his classical music show, "Adventures in Good Music." He died a couple of weeks ago at age 85. I will miss him.

Karl Haas was kind of a throwback among radio personalities - scholarly, German-American, steeped in high culture, kind of a romantic, serious yet fun-loving. There it is: he obviously loved what he was doing and enjoyed sharing it with strangers on the radio.

I don't remember when I first heard his show. It must have been Detroit in the early 70s. WDET was an amazing station back then, with a variety of jazz programs shaped to different periods and styles and tastes. The Metropolitan Opera on Saturday afternoon, with lots of classical programming across the spectrum. And this friendly teaching voice in the early evening talking about his musical topic of the day with intense interest and zest. For the musically illiterate among us, it was an easy way to learn just enough about the history and theory of music to better understand what I already liked and get turned on to stuff I hadn't yet heard. Which is what any good DJ does, yes?

He titled his program about the violin music of Isaac Stern "Leaving No Tone Un-Sterned." My kind of guy. He must have done hundreds of shows over the years, but one of my favorites was his deconstruction of the rondo. Haas could unpack composition so that casual listeners could understand what we were hearing and enjoy it on another level. Turns out the rondo is a club sandwich. Start with bread (major theme), add a slice of turkey (variation), tomato (second variation), and another slice of bread (back to major theme). It's not that complicated, but the form gives Mozart - or any imaginative chef - something to work his particular magic with.

In the winter of 1984, when I was planting trees in South Carolina with a crew of guys from Michigan, sleeping in a little camp trailer parked in the national forest, our boss was a big public radio listener. He owned the trailer and the radio, so we listened to what he listned to. We woke to the Morning Edition theme music every day at 6:00, and we were winding down by the time Karl Haas opened with a Beethoven piano sonata and "Hellllo Everyone" every night at 8:00. Bob Edwards woke us up; Karl Haas tucked us in.

Church of the Saviour Drug Store

Welcome to the architectural tour of beautiful uptown Northeasterville, aka the Dry Capital of the World. It's a small central Swingstate town with a rich history of churchgoing, education, enterprise, and opposition to demon alcohol. Right next to the public library on State Street, you'll see the Anti-Saloon League Museum, once the hub of a publishing empire that protected millions of people from unwholesome habits. Keep going north and you'll see the largest of several Methodist churches in town, a dramatic modern structure thrusting upward between spacious parking lots. Farther up State Street is the even larger campus of St. Paul Catholic Church, with its acres of parking where one of the town's original brick houses once stood in the way of progress.

Looking south on State Street, next to the post office and across from the majestic Episcopal Church, we find the Swingstate National Guard Armory, home of Regiment XXX and the local armed forces recruiting office, always looking to promise a free college education to the town's able-bodied cannon fodder. Up the street a block, I see the wrecking ball has spared the old fascade of the Church of the Saviour, which will soon become the home of the fastest-growing religious organization in Amerika, CVS Drugs. I can't wait to see how tastefully the rest of the CVS drug store is integrated with the pointed steeple and neo-classical porch of the old red brick church at State and Walnut. I'm sure it will be faithful to the nineteenth-century heartland tradition of making money in any way possible in the name of our heritage.

And the timing couldn't be more appropriate. While our elected representatives dismantle Social Security, cut Medicare and Medicaid, and make the world safe for the pharmaceutical industry, the rising tide that's supposed to lift all boats is a profitable flow of medicine to cure everything that's wrong with everybody. This is the new religion. Am I the last to notice? The drug company is watching out for our health, just like the military is defending us from foreign threats. It combines the modern belief in progress through technology with the patriotic trust that the leaders who make the laws and the captains of industry who lead them by the nose know better than you and I what's best for you and me. How fitting that instead of just tearing down the entire Church of the Saviour United Methodist, they decided to save the front so the brand new CVS blends in nicely with the streetscape of our safe, secure, home town.

Oh yeah, and kids, don't do drugs.

a lunatic dialogue for one player

Gven Golly and I went to a play the other night. One of Gven's fellow-students at the Yoga Factory in Northeasterville is Christina Kirk, a theater professor at Fundamethodist College who created a one-woman show called "Conversations with Judith Malina." Maybe you know of Malina and The Living Theater, which she founded with Julian Beck in 1947. It was new to me. Excerpts follow:

"Why these conversations, now? because all theatre is political, because I am afraid...guilty...ashamed...grieving...lying, because I need to cross a precarious bridge, because we're all caught in the illusion, we're all tired of waiting, we're losing the space between, we all need a lollipop every four seconds; because it's all so boring...there isn't a lot of time left...there is screaming...there is lack of screaming...there are bags of flesh; because the oblique angle needs a voice, the obtuse and acute angles are right, and the shimmering paradox may not be enough."

That gives you a taste of what it was like. Small theater, intimate space, cognoscenti present. Challenging to understand with the critical, editorial left-brain. The conversation comes across as a monologue by Kirk in which she acts as the voice, "often fragmented, occasionally altered, sometimes whole," of Suiye Ayla, William Saroyan, Anodea Judith, Allen Ginsberg, Anne Sexton, William Shakespeare, Garcia Lorca, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Emily Dickinson, the Chordettes, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Lao Tsu, and Rumi. Pretty wild crowd. I thought I heard William Blake's ghost, but I was wrong.

We ran into some friends and high-tailed it to the Old Mohawk for beer and appetizers to deconstruct Kirk's "Conversations" but didn't get far in that attempt. Professor Gorm knew the literary references but not the chakra theory, I knew the chakra theory but not the literary references, so we talked about basketball, more my speed.

Mr. Gutman

Everyone should have a teacher like Mr. Gutman some time in their school life.

Prompted by a friend's question about mentors, I called Detroit directory assistance last night, found his number, and called Mr. Gutman. It was the right thing to do. He answered the phone, I stammered my name and why I was calling. "Are you the Mark Gutman who used to teach in Garden City? You won't remember me, but..."

He did remember me, and we talked for half an hour about other kids from his eighth-grade social studies class, other teachers he worked with at the junior high school, and Mr. Singer the principal (I learned the difference between a principal and a principle because Mr. Gutman called Mr. Singer his "princie pal"!). He was as gracious as could be, and his phone voice sounded exactly like the cool twenty-something teacher in the blue-collar suburb whose charisma and respect won over all of us - the smart kids, the shy kids, the jocks, the good girls, the bad girls, the greasers, the lonely kids.

Mr. Gutman was especially interested in whether I had kept in touch with my friends from Garden City after moving to Southfield (no), and he encouraged me to search for them on classmates.com. Did I marry a girl from Garden City? (no) Turns out he moved to Southfield around the time I did, and he lived near 12-Mile and Evergreen, less than a mile from me. Turns out I moved to Ohio for graduate school and eventually got into publishing, and now I'm a textbook editor in social studies. He called it a coincidence.

He's retired now - it's been 40 years - after serving as high school principal, and he plays golf with Mr. Estelle, who was assistant principal and Good Cop under Bad Cop Mr. Singer. I remarked that to my 13-year-old mind, he and Mr. Singer seemed like rivals. Gutman acknowledged that Singer was "tough as nails" but helped him get into administration, which is what he wanted to do. Mentoring goes both ways and happens in the unlikeliest packages.

How Very Wilsonian

The hilarity coming from Bratislava last week must have had the Slovaks rolling in the aisles. Imagine their excitement over the chance to host the statesmen who, as leaders of the Free World, are working (and praying) daily to advance the noble cause of democracy worldwide. The high-mindedness of it all was so moving, and then the Bush European Road Show hit its dramatic peak when the earnest clown in the ten-gallon hat met with his soul-brother Vlad Putin for a little heart-to-heart, as reported in Slate:

"The public comments, at least, were mostly make-nice talk, but Bush also shared what he called 'concerns about Russia's commitment' to democracy. Putin in turn described democracy as 'our final choice.' He added, 'Some of the ideas that I heard from my partner I respect a lot. Some other ideas, I will not comment on. Thank you.' At that, says the NYT, 'Mr. Bush started to chuckle, and Mr. Putin winked back.'"

Thank you, Chuckles and Winkie, bring on the dancing girls, folks, don't worry about a thing and have a good time. Everything's in good hands, they've got big deals to make, big companies to merge, and empires to build, so the little issues can wait till after business is done. It really brings out the patriot in me, witnessing these historic occasions - think Congress of Vienna, think Versailles, think Yalta - when Great Men make Great Decisions on behalf of all us appreciative little people, and lap-dog columnists compare them to the revered figures of our proud past.

It made me want to barf when journalists of some integrity, like David Broder, cranked out the party line in his column just before inauguration day. The buzz word du jour from Karl Rove and Co. was 'Wilsonian', and I distinctly heard Woodrow Wilson turning over in his grave in Princeton. I can understand the ideological cheerleaders Krauthammer and Kristol repeating the mantra. But if Broder at the Post and Thomas Friedman at the Times want any access in the future, they'd better play along on this one. And of course they do, as responsible professionals, swallow their principles just this once in order to go along and get along.

Just like chanting any affirmation - okay, think Stewart Smalley, the Al Franken character: I'm good enough, I'm smart enough, and gosh darn it people like me! - if you repeat it over and over, people will believe it, which is as good as if it were true. [http://www.interluderetreat.com/meditate/affirm.htm] So repeat after me: the U.S. military and its corporate partners are taking over Iraq in order to spread the Good News of democracy. Again...

To blog or not to blog, that is the blogation

This thought has been rattling around long enough, and recent events make it timely. Which earth-shaking ideas - generated while in the shower, or stacking firewood, or sweeping the kitchen floor, or meditating - are suitable for blogging? [Answer: the ones generated while stacking wood, sweeping the floor, and meditating in the shower, of course.] I heard that someone, somewhere, got fired for writing something in their blog, the kind of rumor that could self-censor a million people instantly. So the reasoning goes: BE CAREFUL! Don't let it all hang out; edit yourself scrupulously - or as the far more subtle saying goes: Don't shit where you eat. Limits are not bad. As John Hartford said (in a song), "Style is based on limita-a-ation." No limits, no style.

In the middle of another, pre-election, conversation last year some time, Jack Spatula asked me which John Barth novel I was reading, and for some reason I wasn't ready to get into it just then (even though it was I who brought it up). The thing that was rattling around then was how Barth is always telling a story in which a character is telling a story, and sometimes the semi-autobiographical fictional characters are reflecting on the space between their present experience and their creative output - or lack thereof - and the tension it adds to both. Tension as in energy to put to use, but also tension as in angst, pain, doubt.

Barth makes it clear that he believes there is a difference between the life of the writer and the story, so let's not conflate the two by saying, postmodernly or post-structurally, that a life IS a narrative text, the present experience IS a creative act, and vice versa. While I'm not ready to go down that slippery slope, it does present some fun phenomenological and fictional possibilities - say THAT three times real fast! For now, I'm with Barth, pushing the literary envelope enough to poke some life into the fictional characters AND their doppelganger sitting at the keyboard, but keeping a permeable membrane between them.

Which brings me to what I really want to talk about, Hunter Thompson. How he lasted as long as he did is a wonder, but this week the world lost a singular character and a voice that won't be replaced any time soon. Hunter - can I call you Hunter? - knew no limits, or at least made it his business to transgress as many as possible, in public if possible, calling attention to the transgression as much as possible. Drug laws, normative ethics, common sense, journalistic conventions, race and class and party and genre lines. In short, he took pushing the writing envelope to new heights precisely by blurring or obliterating the distinction between the writer's life and the story.

It has become commonplace to say that he and others (somehow Tom Wolfe doesn't even belong in the same paragraph) stepped into the arena while reporting on it, rode on the Magic Bus, etc. etc. It took a really weird guy at a very weird time in Amerika to see that the bigger, richer, more vibrantly true story could only be told outside the lines, not by writing to please the editor, the publisher, the reader, the power broker, the patron, or to keep a job. Without being coy about it, Thompson played that angle for all it was worth, and he did it convincingly, sometimes despairingly, in the only way that could tap into the not-very-pretty stash in the trunk of Amerikan culture. Kids, do not try this at home.