Mountain run! Young punks put in their place! Poem.

That title says a lot so let me preface it all with my annoyingly typical frustrating day.

Twelve o’clock class planned. Ready to go. Full steam ahead. Ding goes the phone at around 10:30. Cancelled. OK whatever I’ll just go in early and prepare my 2 o’clock class. It’s three hours long. 2-5pm. Ya know. As the days are nice and long now I planned a mountain run from 5 something to 7. Cool. Clean clothes in the bag hop on the bike to pedal 7 km to the office. Get there with plenty of time to eat a banana and work on stuff. 

2 o’clock. 2:15. Um mm, any messages for me? No. Nothing. 2:25. 2:35. Ding goes the phone.  Sorry can’t make the class today. 

Forty minutes AFTER the dang blasted class was supposed to have started. 

Okay. Put running clothes on and run to the mountain. It’s all good but yeah I can sense I am pushing it a little too much. And my teeth are clenched. Probably my fists as well. Anyhoo, love my mountain & I mean how can I not be happy on my mountain!? 

Here’s my happy mountain booby graph. Gotta smile everytime I make this one. So as I was heading down the first loop a running club of ten or so guys (20 ish years old) were coming up. Everybody is friendly, smiles and bonjours all around. Very cool. So I get down to a spot where there is a drinking fountain to quench my thirst and figure yeah, I  got just enough left in me to make a second loop. Cool beans! So I head back up and almost at the top I pass the same runners coming back down and I can here them whispering oh my God that guy is going back up!! I’m like (in my head) damn straight I am going back up! You know it!!

Took a couple pictures at the top. Such a hot and sunny day with a pretty good view.

Not sure what you call the little horsey piece on the chessboard, but I definitely spotted it! Look up there in the clouds, pretty awesome. 

So I’m going back down and figured I am not doing a third loop as it’s too hot and I have already drained my energy but why not just let gravity and the pendulum effect take over and see how fast I can get down this section.

Just me. On my own. Minding my own business. 

Wouldn’t ya know that a couple young punks walking on the trail decided that they were not gonna let me pass them. 

So they started running. After me. In my already pissed off frame of mind. You go punks. YEAH, YOU DO THAT. MAKE MY DAY. Oh the giggles I had as I heard the heavy breathing and foot pounding behind me. Bring it on. I just went faster and faster. All the way down to the end of the loop. Stopped at the water fountain to see where they were and just turned around and SPRINTED back up and cut between them as they were coming down. Couldn’t look in me the eye. They knew they had been beaten. Beaten bad. 

I kept going uphill until I reached a point where I knew they could no longer see me and collapsed like a ton of bricks. Just in the shade of a nice tree. I sat there for a good ten minutes panting hoping not to die but oh so happy to have kicked some ass and buried them in the dirt. 

What a nut case I am. Certified grade A bat shit crazy. And I don’t care! At least I can laugh at it and I didn’t die in the process. 

Today’s light hearted poem to ease the mood a classic Billy Collins piece…

The Art of Drowning 

I wonder how it all got started, this business 
about seeing your life flash before your eyes 
while you drown, as if panic, or the act of submergence, 
could startle time into such compression, crushing
decades in the vice of your desperate, final seconds. 

After falling off a steamship or being swept away 
in a rush of floodwaters, wouldn’t you hope 
for a more leisurely review, an invisible hand 
turning the pages of an album of photographs- 
you up on a pony or blowing out candles in a conic hat. 

How about a short animated film, a slide presentation? 
Your life expressed in an essay, or in one model photograph? 
Wouldn’t any form be better than this sudden flash? 
Your whole existence going off in your face 
in an eyebrow-singeing explosion of biography- 
nothing like the three large volumes you envisioned. 

Survivors would have us believe in a brilliance 
here, some bolt of truth forking across the water, 
an ultimate Light before all the lights go out, 
dawning on you with all its megalithic tonnage. 
But if something does flash before your eyes 
as you go under, it will probably be a fish, 

a quick blur of curved silver darting away, 
having nothing to do with your life or your death. 
The tide will take you, or the lake will accept it all 
as you sink toward the weedy disarray of the bottom, 
leaving behind what you have already forgotten, 
the surface, now overrun with the high travel of clouds.

Love it!!!! Great everybody.