so when i got home from surfing today, i used my hour of spare daylight to rake the yard. raking is fun, picking up the leaves is a bummer. and while that yard-work meditative state was settling in, i remembered that i don’t like grass and that by raking leaves, i was effectively giving comfort to the enemy.

and why am i doing this? because when you live somewhere that has the jay-approved coupling of politeness and judgment, neighbor and landlord approval means something. or at least not hearing about it means something. though i am resigned to rake and mow for as long as i’m renting, when i have my own house, i’m going to tear out all the grass and plant a small farm of dark leafy greens.

or ready for a 20k in western washington. i am not ready for a 20k in 90°-and-on-fire southern california. i’m just not. the average temperature when i run up here has probably been 45°, exactly half what i could potentially be running in down there. nuts, right? i mean, if it dips to the 60s by race day, i’m going to beat that fucking mountain to death. if it’s 90, or even 80, the reverse could be true.

theory on why this morning’s run was so incredibly good (i suspect i could have done an additional five miles without too much effort): not overtraining during the week (kept it to 30miles over three days and biked the other two), eating really well yesterday (12 bananas, two papayas, and one giant lettuce/fruit salad), and getting eight hours of sleep last night. eat right, get lots of rest. can it really be that simple?

upside of a pineapple express: it warms up the air to a balmy 60° and if i find a mango or a papaya to eat for lunch, i can pretend that i’m living somewhere tropical.

i hammered an 11mile run this morning. while hammering, i saw a guy wearing a members only jacket, smoking a cigarette, mowing his lawn, in a downpour. tough! also, he wasn’t just letting the grass spray everywhere, he was actually bagging it. i couldn’t figure him out, and the look he gave me didn’t say ‘come ask me follow-up questions to your weirdo thoughts about my retro clothing choices/smoking habits/lawn-mowing preferences’.

then i came home and made some crazy awesome raw dessert food, chopped up and devoured a giant salad, was interviewed for the german edition of the financial times (due out in the next month), and bought a used longboard (pictured below). the surfboard will also help me to pretend that i’m living somewhere tropical, at least until i get to the water next weekend and it’s only 54°.

matt, eliza, jay @ 3min. and that’s matt next to the play button.

where we were last night:

photo by jeff kirby (whoever he is)

also, i can now die with dignity. good job, washington. and fuck you, martin sheen. didn’t you have some more important shit to work on back in your own state?

i ran 70 miles this week, and i’m not sure if i’m undertraining for a marathon i have no plans to run or overtraining for a half-marathon that i’m doing in five weeks. so yeah, the quantity of miles is too many and the quality miles too few. it maybe seems like a stupid move, but i am so 100% addicted to long miles right now that i’m powerless against it until the mileage taper starts in a week. this week: fewer total miles, more faster miles. 7ish per day instead of 14ish.

and nbc, stop it with the lame music that is only tangentially related to running. the eagles? jesus, dude. that sucks.

when it was suggested by matt damon that this whole palin-as-vp thing was a bad disney movie, everyone laughed (if they weren’t too scared to laugh), a lot of people agreed, and a few made actual movie trailers. and that’s why i don’t get why everyone is so up in arms about the $150k spent by the rnc on a very special palin-family makeover, especially when everyone knows that a big shopping spree is part of any white-trash-to-better-dressed-white-trash movie — it’s the big transformation scene!

john mccain is now saying that the clothes will be donated to charity after sarah palin is done with them. aw. happy ending!

also, i got my absentee ballot in the mail today. shit is real.

and toed a rock within the first mile, resulting in this:

and this, right above my hip bone:

it’s always seems to be catholics (and ex-catholics in this case) who wind up with a wound of christ. shit like that never happens to presbyterians or lutherans.

as we got out of the car, the driver of the pickup noticed our surfboards and started talking to us about surfing. all the while, i was eyeing those banana boxes. the driver wasn’t going to leave the truck. also, he knew who we were now, so i decided to delay the beginning of my criminal career on the washington state ferry system. we went upstairs to hang out during the ride west.

when we came back down to the car, the pickup truck guy looked at us and asked, ‘do you like beef?’ looking nonplussed, i replied that i didn’t and matt shrugged his shoulders and said, ‘uh, sometimes.’ the guy then handed us his card and said that he had just slaughtered his grass-fed herd of cattle, if we were interested in picking up a 1/2 side of beef. he was making a delivery over to the peninsula, and he had about four cows boxed up in the back of his truck ready to go.

so psyched that i didn’t try to pilfer a boxful of cow that was masquerading as nature’s most perfect food. i wonder if the dude keeps the cows crated up in banana boxes to keep the beef thieves confused. good cover, fella.

nice job, handsome.

he flew down from strong island this past saturday to do a two-week stint handing out ~600 southern-baptist-cooked meals per day to people who don’t have food. with my pop being vegetarian, texas being texas, and southern baptists not believing that jesus was vegan, there’s a this-will-be-funny-later twist of irony in that he’s surrounded by food but doesn’t have a drop to eat.

he’s hanging in though, because dude is a scrapper. but if you’re in league city, tx. (close-ish to houston) and feel like bringing my pop a veggie burrito or something, lemme know and i’ll put you in touch. he’s easy to find — dark-olive skin, even thinner than he was a week ago, and he’ll driving a red cross truck like he’s on the race track that is the long island expressway. go get ‘em, pop.

i’ll post updates from him if/when he can send them.

running in the evening dark is kind of a bummer. morning dark is fine, because no one is awake and i have the entire earth to myself. evening dark sucks because people are driving home from work, which always puts them in a bad mood because they’re going somewhere they don’t want to be coming from somewhere they didn’t want to go to in the first place, sitting in something that they thought they wanted but not in the scenario they’re currently in, which is sitting in heavy traffic feeling like a total asshole. i see their faces. they do in fact feel like assholes. oh, and it makes them shitty drivers, which makes for a bad run in the dark.

where was i going with this before the judgment started? oh right. i was running home tonight and i saw all the uw freshmen starting to move into the dorms and holy cats how are they old enough to go to college? they look like babies with too-big backpacks. if my math and sexual timeline are right, i am officially old enough to have fathered a college freshman, which means that i am officially old.

it turned out pretty well and i’m glad that the kids finally agreed to the orange. it’s bright.