all & sundry

I practiced running at the gym; I plodded on treadmills, craning my sweating head to try and watch CNN with no sound, trying to distract myself from the blinking numbers that told me I had fifteen goddamn minutes to go. I was always embarrassed at first by the slapping sound my shoes made, I thought I was too loud, I thought I made the treadmill shake, but after the first minute or so I didn't care, I was too busy breathing and watching the numbers and the TV.

I ran along the Portland waterfront. I rode the elevator down 11 floors, blinked into grey morning light, and ran four blocks to the Columbia river, then I headed north, not that far, just until I reached the apartments that extended out onto docks and I turned around and ran back.

I ran in small races. One wound through the Portland city streets; I wore a baseball hat and I had a number pinned to my shirt, it was cool and maybe raining, at the end JB took a picture of me. Another was long, it was flat and boring and every minute, right from the start, I thought I couldn't possibly do one more step, and then I would do one more step. It started and ended at a brewery and my friend and I drank beers afterwards. When I came near the finish line I tried to go faster, I remember that.

I stopped running as often, and the less I did it, the harder it got.

:::

For a while I thought I wanted to be a graphic designer, so I took graphic design classes at a community college. I bought a drafting board, spray glue, pens, Exacto blades, T-squares, charcoal, pica rulers, pencils, ink, special brushes for sweeping away eraser crumbs. I carried my supplies in a plastic fishing tackle box. I carried my giant pads of paper in a tan paper portfolio case. I drew pictures and spent hours cutting and pasting things. I laid out fake newspapers, aligning the columns just so, adhering them to posterboard with wax that clung to my fingers.

The easiest class I took was life drawing: the teacher propped us in front of easels, nubs of charcoal gripped in our eager paws. He played Dire Straits and wandered around the room, humming. The hardest class I took was accounting. I had a bulky, hateful ledger I was constantly making corrections in, my numbers never added up correctly, I was always going back through each entry to figure out where I went wrong. At the end, though, I liked the accounting class better - it was so clean-cut, so obvious when something was correct or not. The art classes only confused me, I hated the subjective nature, I never knew if I was headed in the right direction.

Once, I drew an orange with a pencil and carefully shaded in its pores and bumps, smearing graphite on my palm the way lefties do. When I was done I thought it looked okay, but I had forgotten some critical step - adding type, or some other media, maybe - so my orange, it did not receive an A. That one seemed pretty obvious.

I abandoned graphic design, although I kept my T-square and tackle box for a long time afterwards.

:::

When I was in high school, I used to lie on my back in the hallway in front of my bedroom and talk on the phone - the headset cradled by my ear, the body of the phone balanced on my foot, which I extended, for some reason, up and over my head, winding the cord between my toes. I can't tell you how many times that phone would slip free and smash down on my face, the ringer making a stuttered, surprised sound, something like bing!.

These days, of course, none of my phones are connected to bulky base units, so I doubt that will ever happen again.

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