Some thoughts on running

I went running this morning, something I haven't done since August last year. That last run had been just before the trip up to Edinburgh, a sort of sickly sun poking through the clouds, but a cold wind definitely heralding the wintery apocalypse we only now seem to be escaping. 

I got quite good at running for a bit last year. I was doing maybe 25 minutes three times a week, and I was starting to enjoy it, kind of. The last half was never nice, as I turned round at Victoria Park and headed home, knowing a stitch and a stumble on Roman Road were likely, and that a little negative thought entering my mind could end it all prematurely.

One of the best, and perhaps only, incidents to happen to me whilst my running fad last year was the time that an old woman stopped me in the street. I tried to do a sprinty section right towards the end (although, it's weird, how after a longish run, when you sprint you can't really feel your legs sprinting like you would if you sprinted from the outset, though your mind tells you otherwise) and just as I was finishing it off, this old woman appeared from nowhere in front of me. She flagged me down. In her hand she held out a jar of Marmalade and asked me to open it. I did, the lid coming off with a pop. She was pleased and said something kindly and old-east-end- womany and went back in the house. I walked back to my home feeling like I'd done something useful, and kind, for once.

And that's the best thing about running, and concentrated exercise, really. It's the high afterwards, not really the looking in the mirror bit. It's the sweat on your back and in your hair that says a job well done. The work I do in my day to day life rarely has immediate satisfactory results, where one can stand back and be pleased that the effort was worth it, actually see it or feel it, like a builder or maybe a doctor. But with running the results are there pretty quickly. Your mental alacrity is heightened, limbs ache but pleasurably, breathing is somehow easier, more controlled, less shallow.

The run today with Kate was hard. I had to stop and fast-walk occasionally. I had to divert my mind from thinking too much about stopping. I don't have much confidence in my stamina. I recited Morrissey lyrics, watched ducks, considered the gravel, concentrated on occasional dogs. I'm not sure I totally enjoyed it, but the sun was beautiful and soon I was hot and panting. 

And then, the endorphin rush comes, the focus and clarity builds, the salty taste of sweat in the shower pleases. 

Last night I drank four bottles of beer, ate two massive fatijas, and 1/3 of a tub of Ben and Jerry's. The sluggishness has gone, and suddenly I could eat it all again.

Nine nine nine nein you're not coming in.

I made a 999 call last night, my first in a long time, my first since ever to be truthful. It was ace.

A squealing, high-pitched, caterwauling strangled bark echoed along Brokesley Street at 1am, dragging my synapses out of the drunken corpse I had morphed into over the past few hours in the pub. Kate was there beside me, as this I think male voice screeched in a really upsetting way. It was a kind of drunk voice, but it was disturbed, and disturbing. 

'Kieran!' or 'Karen!' he yelled. I don't know if it mattered, the sex. He was calling them a 'pervert' or 'perverted', he was screaming it all along the street, crying, whimpering. It was really high pitched and girlish. But maybe that's what happens to a man's voice when you're totally distressed. I can honestly say I've never really suffered, that's all to come, but I couldn't make out any nuances in the discordant shrill that helped me define it as either genuine misery or just cockeyed gurgling. 

I started envisioning what could have happened to the guy. Had he been raped or something? Would you describe that as perverse? Rape is more than just perverse. I mean everyone has their own sexual practice barometer. Perhaps Kieran just wanted to try out some kind of plastic bag-induced euphoria in a valiant bid to recycle, or a unique spin on tea-bagging that just left the guy feeling empty, or something to do with crystal meth, I don't know, crystal meth upside-down cakes.  Whatever it was this guy had took it badly. 

Anyway, he started banging on our door, really loudly, fists and feet. Was someone in pursuit of him and he needed to hide in the house? But why was he wailing about Kieran being perverse? He'd be saying something more concrete like 'let me in' or 'open up' or 'help', but he wasn't. He was just banging away as if Kieran was just behind the door. 

I wasn't going to let him in, obviously. He sounded mental, and he'd just start crying and thrashing around and maybe put a rock in my face. It reminds me of the time when I was 12 and a woman who was either drunk or on drugs came round the house and insisted she'd run a bath and had seen sharks in it. Actual sharks, and she was confused and crying. This is on a middle class housing estate in North Bucks, around 4pm. Me and my mum didn't know what to do. And we couldn't get rid of her. She wanted a light for her cigarette but mum thought she might burn down the house or something. I didn't want another one of those, even if Kieran had been perverse to this guy and he needed to talk to someone about it, loudly and probably with a hammer.

Kate told me to ring 999, so I did, and I sort of forgot how I'd always been told the rigmarole goes: you choose your emergency service and then they put you through. I said police, for a moment slightly unsure that I'd made the right decision. A fire engine was useless, and it didn't strike me he needed an ambulance, although it's possible the perverse act in question might have involved his mouth/nose/anus/arm/balls/penis, and any one, if not all, of those body parts could have been harmed, given the severity of his howls. Another reason not to invite him in, I guess - a carpet with fugitive testes ground in to it is a sizeable chunk out of any deposit.

The woman I spoke to made sure that I wasn't actually going to let him in the house. I gave her my address, my postal code and I just told her plain what had happened.

I went downstairs to Kate again, and it had all gone quiet. No-one came round. I didn't have to sign anything or have to make a cup of tea for behatted officers.  We heard a few sirens but then I live just by the Mile End road, so it's not unusual to hear that. It's a day later and the police haven't called or anything. I guess this guy's alive and better now. I hope he stays away from Kieran, he's definitely bad for him, that's a relationship going nowhere. 

When I came back with eggs from Tesco this morning, I checked our bin to make sure there wasn't a bloodied head in it. Or some balls.

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The new Morrissey album is out tomorrow. I loved Morrissey as a teenager, and I studied pretty much everything he did: interviews, bon mots between songs, head tilts, mic cord whippage, self deprecating wit interlocked with a brazen arrogance. I got into him in 1995, the year of Vauxhall and I, his last great album. I went back to the Smiths and really got my hands dirty with the canon. Morrissey wove his way into my life utterly, threading his songs through my adolescent cultural revolution, dictating the books I read, the films I saw, my attitudes, my social behaviour, my intellectual aspirations. It was brilliant to be into Morrissey at 15 - I was a blank canvas and he held the brush. He helped form whatever I am now. I genuinely would not be the same person if I'd instead devoted hours of my teenage years to Color Me Badd.

In 1997 he released Maladjusted, a collection of witty titles more than actual songs, and on the front cover he had shorn the quiff. I too razored my hair off. Then, whilst he wandered into the wilderness without a record deal, I went to university, and discovered Beck, and Jim O'Rourke, and Outkast, and Nick Cave. Morrissey seemed pretty conservative in comparison. I still bought 2004's You Are The Quarry and 2006's Ringleaders of the Tormentors. They were OK, sapped of the sexual mystery of his earlier work, leaden musically, with occasionally comedic lyrical twists. But I never felt them like I felt the others. 

I'll buy the new one, Years of Refusal. I'm actually excited about it. The lead single is straight forward, post-good Morrissey, and he's said 'In the absence of your love, and in the absence of human touch, I have decided I'm throwing my arms around Paris because only stone and steel accept my love' many times before and in many more interesting ways. But he's a signifier for the teenage me, diluted, that I return to selfishly, idiotically, like a double duvet in summer.

I wish he'd get like a hot shit producer or something though.

Snow Worries

Snow is dangerous. 

Obviously skiing has it's perils for the averagely anxious, extreme-sports avoiding dullard like me. You stand on plastic planks with sticks to save you from colliding into rocks, bespattering whatever French mountainside you've chosen to overlook for a long weekend whilst sipping Veuve Clicquot with your honking Clapham friends.  Not for me, this adventure. Holidays are a means to reduce risk in my head - an opportunity to escape stress-induced heart attacks, mentalists thrusting me into trains at Mile End station and the choleric hand of God battering my kidneys as a guilt-trip reminder to stop treating my body as if it were a poorly organised distillery. So skiing, and bungee jumping in Thailand, and shoplifting in Dubai, and cheating on Millionaire in India... these are not holidays to me.

So, when snow turns up on your door step like a red carpet to an incredible Smeg freezer cabinet that seems to be preserving London for the global warming that will microwave it to oblivion, I'm surprised by how beautiful it is. How bright light captures it and makes Brokesley Street romantic. Cars topped with the stuff like icing on a particularly sugary cake, shoe holes in the ground you can't help but fit your own into, like a kid again. 

My housemates made snow men outside. Chris' started out looking like a cock, but eventually became a man, like Jamie Oliver. Kate made a snow otter with soil for eyes, a cross between Bagpuss and Samuel Beckett's unwritten riverside masterpiece. Holly made a snow cat who was shorter than the rest but probably the sexiest of all three.

I walked Kate some of the way home and drifted through Victoria Park, watching the ducks on the lake slip about, confused but attempting to carry on regardless. A swan looked disinterested, like swans and genuinely beautiful people tend to, occasionally squawking contractually. People were smiling, and there were a lot of them about, skiving off work (although, lets be fair, this part of the East End isn't well know for its employed people - either they're fantastically poor and riddled with scurvy or they're funded by payrents whilst selling overpriced cupcakes for their friends on Broadway Market), building ironic snowmen with Starbucks cups in their twiggy hands. A girl took a picture of Kate and I if we took a picture of them. Some oiks threw snowballs quite hard, almost too hard, at complete strangers. If it rained guns, would they be firing? Almost certainly. 

But people seemed preternaturally happy. I think we'll take to global warming well once it gets its act together and really starts messing with things.

I came back home to work.  I ate soup, a bacon sandwich and five hob nobs. I had three cups of tea. The snow kept falling. My feet stayed cold. To change position, I put my laptop on my lap. It warmed my legs for a bit. But after awhile I began to suspect I was overheating my balls. As I said, snow is dangerous. You shouldn't put too much heat on your balls.

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I'm more than a quarter of the way through Infinite Jest now, page 350 or something. It remains awesome, tiring, clever and stupid at the same time. There's one chapter which has a twelve page footnote, itself footnoted, detailing the political upheavals of a fictional event between the US and Canada. I'm aware I could just skip it, but I have to read it, I'm going to read all of it, no cheating. Every sentence is densely constructed, and you need a dictionary by your side, but frequently there's obscenely brilliant moments - the shallow reasons why video phones gradually morphed back into their original ear-and-mouth incarnations,  the New York academic who thinks there are only a finite amount of erections available in the universe at one time and panics that he's denying a Ethiopian farmer his right to tumescence, the deformed details of poor Mario Incandenza, born with a small body and tiny head, his teeth like that of a dolphins. 

I think I'll have it finished by April. 

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I'm listening to Animal Collective's Merriweather Post Pavillion a lot. It's great and sounds like pop music from Atlantis.

#1. Infinite Jest

Hello. I thought it might be fun, or useful, or perhaps both, to start writing a blog.  Quite what I'll fill it with, I don't know, but I'll try and strangle any overtly pretentious turns of phrase at head-birth. 

I have sausages and mash (from Waitrose no less) to prepare so this isn't going to be an exhaustive first post, plus I'm hungover from a frantic, hyperactive drinking session with Gwynfor last night, ridiculous drinking, really. I took two days off booze and suddenly I had a license (and an unquenchable thirst) to knock back beers and whiskey sours and beers and whiskey. Our conversation slowed to a dribble. But I found myself quaffing with abandon.

So, to open this dialogue with no-one, here's a list of titles that could have been at the top of this blog. I stole it from a lengthy footnote from David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest, a gargantuan novel published in the mid '90's, which is ostensibly about addiction, but which in truth is probably about everything. It's awesome, in both senses, and I'm less than 200 pages in, with another 850 odd to go. 

In the novel, the hero (or the character who is currently looking like the hero, anyway) has a deceased father who made wildly pretentious, pondering films that achieved little or no acclaim in his lifetime. His work is listed in minute detail in a footnote at the back of the book. Infinite Jest was one of the titles of his movies, as was The Unfortunate Case of Me. Other titles I like and could have nicked for the blog name include:

Tennis, Everyone?

There Are No Losers Here

Fun With Teeth

Homo Duplex

Zero-Gravity Tea Ceremony

Pre-Nuptial Agreement of Heaven and Hell

Various Lachrymose US Corporate Middle-Management Figures

The Man Who Began To Suspect He Was Made of Glass*

The American Century As Seen Through A Brick

Good Looking Men In Small Rooms That Utilize Every Small Centimetre of Available Space With Mind Boggling Efficiency

Dial C For Concupiscence

If you've got the balls, you can buy Infinite Jest here: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Infinite-Jest-David-Foster-Wallace/dp/0349121087/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1231612408&sr=8-1

*this was my second choice. The URL was too long though.