my new favorite northwet hobby is surfing in the rain. matt, tim, and i took off for westport at a very civilized 10am.

it rained. the whole time. not just in rainy elma, wa.

rained the whole time in westport, wa (our usual surf spot), and the whole time on the ride back.

and while i didn’t notice contact at any point during the day, when i got home there was a very faint scratch right down the center of my nose.

while running eight miles in the rain this morning (yay seattle), my shoulder hit something that was way too fleshy and firm and forgiving. it felt like i had crushed an infant’s skull. again. upon looking back, it turned out to be one of those land-of-the-lost sized sunflowers on its last autumn legs.

i must have been really deep in thought to have missed a 12″ sunflower hanging over the middle of the sidewalk. i’ve been thinking about this class war stuff pretty hard since the other day. as of now, i have no idea where it comes from. i’m sure i’ll figure out the origins but i have a lot more thinking to do.

as a side note: land of the lost was some fucked up shit.

foregoing the falsely modest preamble:
today amazon started shipping a book of letters that i co-compiled and co-edited, aptly titled and oddly subtitled ‘dear future me — hopes, fears, secrets, resolutions’. the content of which was taken from the public (but anonymous) emails written to a website that i co-own called futureme.org.

i wish that i could read this book for the first time so that i could get some sort of sense of whether it’s actually good or not, but i can’t because it still feels like i’m editing. this is completely terrifying, as i’m a reader and not a writer. however, instead of stressing about the first customer review that’s going to pop up on amazon, i’m focusing on the fact that the publisher did a really beautiful job on the cover/interior design. i mean, what else can you do?

the book:
http://amazon.com/futureme
(i get a short url because i work at amazon.)

current amazon.com sales rank: #46,064 in books. and rising!

i think that living in madison park is making me realize that whenever the class war comes (and it is coming), i’m not going to have any idea which side to fight for. where is the class-war mason-dixon line? does it go by salary? attitude toward spending money? or is there a general rule of thumb, something like: if you can take a vacation and not have to think about how you’re going to pay for it, it’s obvious to everyone else which side you’re on despite whether you hate your asshole maserati-driving neighbors or not.

sux.

it’s tough to write a composition about the environment, but i’m going to take today to reflect on my impact on it.

i’m in the environment all the time, though not as much as i should be. i ride my bike to work (in the rain today), i compost, i’m vegan. there’s only so much that one man can do. i haven’t switched over to cf bulbs because my normal bulbs haven’t burned out yet. and when they burn out, i probably won’t replace them at all, or at least until mia gripes about being unable to see. i don’t really like light anyway. and i’m very sensitive to ugly light (a lot of cf bulbs give off ugly ugly light). i even unscrewed my fluorescents at work. when it gets dark, i go home to sit in the dark at my house. bye-bye work.

you know what’s greener than buying cf bulbs or organic hemp pants? buying nothing. you only think you need new bulbs and new pants. you actually don’t. you may ask me, ‘jay, how do you reconcile this attitude with your job at amazon? why don’t you get your head and your ass together?’ this is a good question and one i ask myself a lot. yes, i work retail at the earth’s largest selection store. i design things that get people to buy more things though i really don’t want them to buy anything, ever. i think that the earth may have enough things already and maybe we should just make do with what we have.

so to answer your question, i am not sure how i reconcile my retail job and my don’t-buy-anything-that-isn’t-absolutely-necessaryness in my head other than to tell myself that i spend my day solving very hard problems and not contributing to the larger disaster that is consumer culture. and i think that’s at least somewhat true. i also tell myself that i’m working to make amazon a little greener and that my personal contribution is helping people find books on composting human waste, and hemp pants, and cf bulbs, and dr bronners in bulk (we sell all of those things). it’s the same way that i convinced myself that my federal taxes are going toward schools and head-start programs and food stamps and not subsidies for corn farmers and nuclear weapons. but i digress…

to conclude, i’m going to keep doing what i’m doing: not buying much stuff and if i have to buy stuff, i’ll buy as green as possible and put my purchases in a backpack that i brought from home, so that i can sling it over my back and ride my bike ride home from the store. it’s a good start. every little bit helps!

happy blog action day.

i ran today for the first time since the portland marathon. knowing that this was going to be a run that didn’t mean anything but recovery, i brought along a camera. i was inspired by pc, who does really great photo essays of his runs in southern california. it’s like he’s the last man and/or only pedestrian in the los angeles.

while he and i think that we’re cut from the same running-is-simultaneous-punishment-and-reward cloth, we differ in our terrain choices: he prefers the concrete of the LA river, and i prefer parks and lakes and trees.

the first few minutes of every pre-run start out the same way.

there’s always a little bit of settling in and taking in how psyched i am to be running instead of doing whatever else.

i’ve always wanted to bring everyone i know running with me.

there’s a lot to see, like this awesome grass-colored toxic sludge fertilizer(?).

and man-made passages from one lake to another that are prettier than they should be.

and all-nude october maples!

i will be a participant. the theme is ‘what i did on my summer vacation’ ‘the environment’. now i just have to think of an appropriate topic. i wish i hadn’t already used that crying indian post.

i haven’t seen time bandits since i was kinda young, i think. i know i saw it in the theaters in 1981 and it scared the piss out of me as a seven-year-old (i don’t remember that being literal, thankfully). and i may have seen it somewhere in my early teen years. what i didn’t remember was the awesome cast: sean connery (greek hero, scottish accent), john cleese as robin hood, michael palin as vincent, shelley duvall as pansy (heh), mona from who’s the boss as mrs. ogre, and ian holm (he was very magic in the sweet hereafter) as napoleon. wow.

dude, that movie is dark. terry gilliam for kids? the creatures in that movie are incredibly scary. and apocalypse on a small scale is still apocalypse. “mom, dad! it’s evil — don’t touch it!” and then they both die, leaving kevin an orphan. i mean, his parents were total suckass, but holy shit. his time-travel friends go back to work for the supreme being. kevin is alone. frightening!

if you haven’t peeped this thing in years, add it to your queue. you won’t be disappointed.

i ran the portland marathon this morning. it went pretty well. i ran a personal best of 3:17:07. i know that i’m capable of running faster, but i’m ok with today’s race considering that i was treating it as a training run since i didn’t really do any kind of real buildup or marathon-specific training. my longest pre-marathon run was maybe 17 miles, which is not long. today, i was pretty comfortable until maybe mile 22, when the hurt set in. legs, mostly. some lungs. though my lungs hurt yesterday before the race so maybe i’m battling some kind of respiratory thing? dunno. i went out slow. didn’t get much faster. but the course was nice. i mean, it was fine. a non-event, really. now i’m tired.

i was kind of freaking out the week before the race. i don’t wear deodorant and whenever i’m anxious, i can smell myself. so in the days leading up to the marathon, i was somewhat smelly. after the marathon today, i smelled fine. is there an evolutionary reason for this? or does my nervousness cause my body to release some kind of toxin that i have to sweat out? maybe the latter.

either way. i’m done smelling bad now. and i ran a personal best. whee.

there’s an engineer in our group at work who is deaf, so a few of us take turns transcribing what gets said at meetings for her. since i’m not that chatty in big meetings, because typing and giving conversation commentary are fun, and because she’s super-nice, i do this whenever i can. in a meeting today, there was much typing, so afterwards she smiled at me, put her hand on her chin, and brought her hand down. i don’t know if she noticed the puzzled look on my face, though there was definitely one there.

apparently the asl for ‘thank you‘ and the italian hand-gesture for ‘fuck you‘ are maybe too close for a non-discerning eye to interpret.

also, is this my first work post in a really long time? it might be.

yesterday was rainy in seattle. i know, i know. but it isn’t always. let me start over: yesterday was one of the rare rainy days we have in seattle, so i paid $12 and did 11 miles of treadmill running at the local young men’s christian association. 11 miles on a treadmill is incredibly boring. i lucked out in that there were no tvs. watching sunday-afternoon commercials for beer, deep fried corn chips dusted with flavored toppings, and viagra (yeah, i don’t see the connection either) are depressing but i think that’s a topic for another pulpit.

basically i’m saying that i had 1 hour and 15 minutes to people watch. it was maybe 1 hour and 10 minutes too long. mostly because i feel like i was in people’s homes, watching them in private moments that i really don’t know if i wanted to see. there was a girl who would do a curl or two and then turn around to see if her lumpy butt got any less lumpy (nope). and there was a dude who would do some pullups and then check to see if he got a txt msg (also nope). he looked like a castoff from the cast of entourage.

there were also a lot of lazy workouts going on. nowhere to be. just chilling on the exercise bike. i always thought about gyms the way i thought about bathrooms: go in when it’s time, get down to bidness, and then bail. actually, i think i used to make the same analogy about college. there were a bunch of weirdos there, too. though i guess that they’re not really weirdos. just regular people.

is that the common thread? other people around = no lingering? or that bailing early and not looking back is usually the right move for me? yeah. maybe that.

either way, i’m not going back. if it rains, i’ll get wet. gyms make me sad.