Gaze Not Too Deeply Into My Pants, Lest You Feel Them Gazing Back Into You

My goddamn ankle hurts.

It began with grand visions of spritual healing and ends with me here, ice on my bare ankle on a Friday night. Life do take the occasional ironic turn, ain't she.

I'll not bore you with more whining. I feel I've done more than enough of that here. So suffice it to say that this has been a rough week both at work and at home, replete with large bills and increased uncertainty of the future. Things came to a head after I got home from work this afternoon and a coworker IMed me to let me know that my immediate VP, the man pulling for my promotion and the one person I hung my hopes on more than anyone at the company, resigned. What's more, he was likely forced to do so by the geniuses at Übercorp for the unforgivable crime of being honest with them about what's happening in the department and how he feels about it.

This is not crushing news. Not yet, anyway. It certainly doesn't bode well for the department or our Infernal Masters, as this man was both the glue that held what remained of the programming staff together and the architect of the entire software system. He alone was worth five programmers and a senior manager. Without him, if even just a few more go, then Übercorp and my employer are, as they say, fucked. You may understand my concern.

Things have gotten ugly among management. They've done their best to shield us, but we didn't exactly fall off the boat yesterday. We can tell when Mommy and Daddy fight. So it's a bit stressful, but we manage to meet it with humor and an admittedly strained sense of camaraderie. Time will tell how much more strained things will get.

So I had this great idea. This weekend's run, a grand fourteen-miler, to be embarked upon after wakey-wakey, egg and bakey. But I got to thinking how cleansing a run can be, how the droning rhythm of your feet and the weariness in your legs takes you into the core of yourself and hypnotizes you. I thought of how running to the brink of exhaustion has brought me small drops of salvation. I thought of the vast silent void that I confront within myself on some of my long runs, the bottomless chasm that Nietzsche argued comprised the whole of reality and Kierkegaard believed we must find a way to cross if we are to discover God.

Grandiose sentiment, maybe, but it is very real to me. I both love and fear gazing into it. Without fail, I walk away from it feeling some small measure of healing. Not to mention what it's doing to my beer gut.

Hence my bright idea: Midnight Run.

I'd kiss my wife goodnight at about ten-thirty or eleven, suit up, then go for two five-mile laps and a four through the neighborhood. Across JFK, back around to Ridge Road, zig-zag up to H Street, down the hill past the newer McMansions to the lake, along the lake to North Hills, then back up the hill to home. Rinse, repeat, then one more time without crossing JFK.

I was excited. I would confront my anxieties out there, burn them off on the asphalt, sweat them out of my thighs, cough them up into people's yards. I would run fourteen damn miles, be home by two, have a stretch and a shower and then climb into bed, renewed and revitalized. Tomorrow morning, I would awake to inform my wife of what I had done, and she would commission a nude sculpture of me wrestling a centaur to the ground.

It was about mile three when I realized my left ankle wasn't going to make it. Flat feet, overpronation. Motion-control shoes to correct the problem were only going to do so much, and I was going to have to slack off. Thanks, gene pool.

I could only allow myself to finish the first lap, that's all. Just five measly miles. Supposed to be nine more. But if I try to run through it, the pain gets worse and there goes the half marathon in two weeks. It's not looking good to finish the full in Nashville this year, unless I start to see marked improvement soon. I may have to lay up and wait until the next season. So even this, the one vent I have for everything else that's gone wrong, even this becomes threatened by trouble. My 2:00 a.m. rebirth? Done.

Of course it was done. It was a manufactured moment the very second I conceived of the idea in my head. I might as well have been running down a beach barefoot, wearing white linen that flowed out behind me like wings or some goddamn thing. The true moments come when you don't expect them. They come after mile eight, when you've spent miles five through seven trying not to ask yourself why the hell you started this hobby, and suddenly you realize that I've made it, I somehow found the Valhalla of athleticism: I am in The Zone. My legs are running because they want to, my lungs pouring air in and out because it suits their fancy. My body wants only to go faster. All is in harmony.

Or perhaps it's in the middle of a horrible movie or bullshitting about nothing or staring at a menu in a Mexican restaurant and contemplating the fish tacos, I don't know. Life has a funny sense of timing. The only thing you can count on is that it won't let you manufacture truth. It reveals that on its own time, so you might as well just do what you can and leave the rest behind you. Put an ice pack on your ankle, grab something to drink, and fight off the sleepiness for one more hour before you succumb. Tomorrow is another day, and all, and tomorrow will bring what it chooses to bring.

So here I sit, not gazing into that void so much as shouting into it, not out of anger but simple curiosity of what it might bring. Perhaps nothing. Perhaps I will get up, go to bed, and dream of Pringles potato chips and burlesque. Perhaps next Saturday I'll kick ass on that fourteen. Who knows. All I know now is that I'm out of steam and must toddle off, and perhaps that's all that I needed in the first place.