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Here are a few photos of the under stairs storage job slowly creeping towards completion. There’s a little bit of frame and panelling left to do on the face of the unit, then drawer fronts and the cupboard door. It’s starting to look cool, though.

I’ve added two gym trips to my weekly exercise routine, as I’ve mentioned before. I do a relatively short treadmill run and then use the machines and weights. I noticed additional weight loss and muscle gain almost immediately but now I’ve really started to feel the extra training when I play tennis.

It has been surprisingly easy to get back into running, even though I haven’t done it since I was 18 or so. I suppose that’s a sign that all the tennis had me in decent shape, though running is a really intense workout, more like hitting with the coach than playing a match.

I’ve always hated runners, even though I’ve done a lot of running in preparation for sports in the past. I hate their feeble-looking bony bodies, their horrible exhausted dragging steps, the pain on their faces. Running has always struck me as paradoxically unhealthy.

Being, as it were, older and wiser, I’ve realized a few things about why I think that. It’s how you run. For most people, a marathon is a near death experience. They shuffle through, totally drained of energy, and come out the other side on the verge of collapse. But those same people could efficiently run much shorter distances. I realize I’m about a five mile runner, for example.

I can run a good, strong five miles, but after that, I’m running weak. And my theory is, if you run, run strong. Running weak destroys the body. Running strong improves it. I can increase my distance capacity to a point through training, but I’m pretty sure that I will never be able to run strong for any distance longer than ten or twelve miles.

My last two runs I did 7.8 km in 48 min and 8.7 km in 52 min. I’m pleased with that and it’s about all I need at this point.

The girl was standing with a woman and two men on the street corner one block down from the bar. She had finished three more bottles of beer before they left the room. She was talking loudly and gesticulating with a cigarette. People passed them on the sidewalk in bright meandering groups. Music spilled out of the bars when the doors opened and, beneath the florid neon, cars cruised ceaselessly in the wide street. One of the men gazed stupidly at her as she spoke, the other glanced repeatedly down the length of her body, the woman wore her face and body set against the interaction. The glancing man talked for them and before she returned to the bar he handed her something and she embraced him briefly.

She sat down at the lofty little table beside the dance floor. He was leaned back against the wall, his boot heels hooked on the rungs of the tall chair, his bottle sweating on the table beside him.

“Anything?” he barked. Western swing thudded and swirled around them as a glittering band stomped out tunes in the hot lamps.

“This,” she said. She held out what the man on the street had given her. “You look disappointed,” she said.

“Not really.”

“Look if you don’t want to do this,” she said.

“I just had something different in mind is all.”

“Well what’s it gonna be?”

“I’m here,” he said. “What is that?”

She unfolded a torn segment of white paper. “A number,” she said, gazing at it. “And his number,” she said. “You guys are all the same.”

“You got two numbers?”

“The one we want and the guy’s who give it to me. That’s funny. No wonder his old lady was itching to go.”

“You gonna call him?”

“No,” she said. “Well how can I say? I doubt it though.”

“You gonna call the other one?”

“And I thought you were having second thoughts.”

“I’m hungry,” he said.

“Two minutes in the little girls and we’ll go eat.” She knocked back the remainder of her cocktail, shivered from her head to her toes and gathered her purse and the torn segment of paper. “Back in a minute,” she said.

“Longest minute of my life,” he said.

She returned to the table ten minutes later with a fresh cocktail, purple this time with a lurid green-skinned apple slice floating in it. She sat down sipping and put the drink down giggling. “I’m sorry,” she said. “He’s gonna meet us here in thirty minutes. And then this guy bought me a drink. He’s wearing a beige shirt with brown on the shoulders. He’s real big. Is he over there? Is he looking at us?”

“I’ll be damned,” he said.

“He is? Oh. I’m sorry. I know you’re hungry.” She reached across the table and took his hand, holding it in both her hands and stroking it gently. “He told me everything to do. It won’t take long and then we can go.”

“It’s not that,” he said.

“Well what is it?”

“I can’t believe you didn’t get me a beer,” he said. “I’ll be back.

I can’t say I give a damn about the Oscars but I found it sad that Avatar (which I haven’t seen) wasn’t even nominated for Best Animated Feature.

What’s that you say? It wasn’t “animated”? Har har har!

You make me chuckle so…

I have written and recorded a new song called My Melita using only one take, one track and the built in microphone on my iMac Pro. The recording isn’t great and I could polish the lyrics a little more, but there are some hooks in there and I love the tunes.

You can get it here or from the music page linked above.

I hope you will bee pleased with it!

A few pictures of how the under stairs storage I posted the other day is progressing.

These show the doorway to the closet section framed out; the interior of the closet section paneled including a window to a shelf over the tallest group of drawers; detail of the interior framing and paneling; a closer view of the shelf and some of my tools using it.

I always know I’ve made a useful thing when I feel compelled to start using it right away.

The play I’m doing with the Lords of Misrule is ending up taking more of my time than I would have liked, despite it being a minimal commitment engagement. That sounds like new speak for something awful. Anyway what with work and babies and other commitments, it’s going to be difficult to write blog posts this week but I’m going to try.

I want to observe an interesting difference in American and British cultural behavior. In America, when you smoke a joint, if you smoke one, you take a puff and you pass it. You keep the joint moving. In Britain, if you smoke a joint, you hold the joint for a long time, taking multiple puffs and holding the joint between tokes, which can last minutes with some smokers.

Well, at the gym, a similar difference of mentality is revealed by use of the exercise machines. In America, you do your reps and you get off the machine. Someone else might jump on, do their reps, then get off and give it back to you. It is not unusual to have two people trading reps on the same machine. In Britain, you sit on the machine between sets of reps. You do your reps and then… you just sit there. You monopolize the machine and you don’t move on until you’re good and ready, even though you aren’t actually using it between sets.

You can tell from my tone which approach I prefer, though at the gym here I’m forced to dominate a machine while I doing sets of reps. If somebody else gets on there, they aren’t going anywhere, so I can’t afford to let it go. I often have to drop certain exercises from my routine because some jackass is propped on the machine for longer than I can afford to wait.

It’s a strange and unadaptive approach in the case of the gym and of a joint. It seems peculiar to me and I’m curious as to why such a profound difference exists.

She watched him watching TV and smiled at secret thoughts. Finally he looked at her. “Am I really that interesting?” he asked.

“You gotta do something sometime,” she said.

“I’ll take that bet,” he said.

She kept watching him and he kept still. Finally he sat up on one elbow. “Here it comes!” she said. He took a pull from the cold black bottle and slowly settled back. “Aw! What a let down.”

“I never fail to disappoint,” he said.

“What do you make of swine flu?” she asked.

“I don’t. What do you make of it?”

“My friend had it. She’s okay but she said it was kind of weird. You know how when you’re sick you get that weird feeling all over? Not the fever exactly, but something else. Well she said it was like that but way more. Like she could tell her body hadn’t ever seen that bug before. She said it was a little like tripping, and she felt like it changed her. She said she saw the world different after. Can you believe that? I don’t know, though, the bugs are in your cells, putting their DNA in your DNA. It might change you.”

“It’s RNA.”

“Oh, right.” She crinkled her face. “How come you know stuff like that?”

“College.”

“I wish I’d gone,” she said.

“Why didn’t you? You’re bright enough.”

“Thanks. But there’s a lot more to it than being bright.”

“Yeah, I reckon there is.”

“What was it like?”

“A lot of drinking.”

“I mean the studies.”

“It was all right. I didn’t do too well. Just sort of partied my time away. But I got the degree. What that’s worth now I can’t say.”

“It’s worth something. They hardly look at you if you don’t have one. I only got this job cause of the way I look in these shorts.”

“That is something else.”

“I’m no fool. I know why they give me this job.”

“Look at it this way,” he said. “I’m here, too.”

“I guess that’s right,” she said.

They were silent and he drank from the cold bottle. Her brows were folded in concentration and she drank repeatedly and put the empty bottle on the bedside table. She stretched her arms above her head and the unblemished skin of her belly flourished in the dingy room. She stood up and got another bottle. “Too bad we don’t have any coke,” she said.

He groaned. “No, it’s good,” he said.

“I want some,” she said.

“Okay.”