Shoes and Cookies

Lately, I’ve had trouble finding a good pair of running shoes. A pair I tried on not too long ago seemed to fit fine at the store but when I went running in them they proved to be too tight. I removed the insoles and cut off the tips, providing a little extra wiggle room for my toes. This little trick has worked in the past. It didn’t this time. The shoes were too tight. And they felt funny: the heels felt much higher than the heels on the shoes I’ve worn in the past. This was a different brand, New Balance, and I usually get Saucony, which are often on sale at Big 5. The balance was indeed new: I felt like I was being tilted forward. I gave the new shoes to Goodwill and returned to the store to try on another pair. This time the shoes fit fine (I’ve learned over time to buy shoes two inches larger than my normal ten; either my feet have grown two inches larger, or measurements are not as standard as they once were), but the insole in the right foot has a tendency to creep up when I’m running. By the end of a short, three-mile run, half of the insole has moved to the rear of the shoe. I have to maneuver it back in.

Also, the fabric covering the toes began wearing out almost immediately. This has never happened before. A few more runs and my big toe will be nicely ventilated.

It may be time to go to a high-end running shoe boutique. But $200 bucks for running shoes? That’s something I’ll have to think about.

Meanwhile, I’ll continue to make do with my creeping insole.

This afternoon I went on a longer run than usual. I’ve gained four pounds in the past several weeks. I don’t know how this works metabolically, but somehow a two-ounce cookie translates immediately into sixteen ounces in my body. It’s as if my metabolism exponentiated anything with sugar or carbohydrates in it.

When I got to the bottom of Queen Anne Hill on the far west side, there was a man smoking a cigarette in the alcove by the one of the back entrances to Magnolia Bridge Self-Storage. This seems to happen almost every time I go running down there now. That little alcove seems to have become an ad hoc smoker’s lounge for the employees of the Seattle Park Department across the street. Unfortunately, that’s the one side where the sidewalk happens to be. I kept to the other side to avoid cigarette smoke and negotiated the leviathan vehicles that pass for cars these days, hitting the side-view mirror of somebody’s parked car with my shoulder. I hope I didn’t knock the mirror out of position too much, or that the driver notices its altered position before driving too far.

There has been a definite uptick in cigarette smoking lately, which I find perplexing, considering the sorry state of the U.S. hellcare system. If pressed to provide a theory, I’d say it’s due to despair, a bottomless pit of social malaise and opioid abuse.

I saw a seal in the water at Smith Cove, where the Foss Maritime Company keeps their tugs. I waved and shouted hello and the seal dove back under water. I didn’t like seeing a seal there, as there is a sign warning people not to swim there due to the toxicity of the water. But what I was I going to do? Dive in, swim to the bottom, and whisper “get out of here” to the seal? He (or she) might take that the wrong way. And how do you whisper when you’re underwater?

The tide was the highest I’ve ever seen it, almost flush with the piers, which normally have a clearance of twenty to thirty feet from the water.  

The wind was up and there was a lot of wave action and water splashing up against the riprap on the shoreline.

I saw a flock of geese fly in V formation and several Pacific loons sitting on the water near the Pier 86 grain terminal.

I spent the rest of the day at home with R eating dinner and watching The Messenger, a disturbing 2015 documentary about the sharp decline of songbirds world-wide due to multiple factors, including pesticides, light pollution, noise pollution, habitat loss and cats.

Afterward, I answered some letters and read Leo Frobenius On African History, Art and Culture an Anthology, with a foreword by Léopold Sédar Senghor. I was greatly amused by the story of a disobedient son who – against the orders of his father -  sets a trap for catching animals on the road to the village. He ends up catching various family members and then the road itself. He rolls the road up and puts it in a bag. He and his father get lost. Finally, admitting defeat, he puts the sack down. The road leaps out and father and son are able to return to the village. But the son catches the road again and decides to keep it. No one can use the road. It grows so sad that it dies.

Later that night, and shortly after going to bed, I listened to a conversation on YouTube between host Jeffrey Goldberg with author Kurt Andersen and his new book Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire at the Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies about American tendencies to believe in almost anything, however divorced from reality it may be, its distrust of experts and cavalier disparagement of facts, and how this gullibility and subjectively inflated wishful thinking led to the election of Donald Trump. Andersen surmises that these tendencies find their root cause in the extreme religiosity of the early American puritans, but then later conflates this with the relativizing philosophies of French intellectuals such as Michel Foucault and Jean Baudrillard, and the spiritual cravings and explorations of the hippies in the 60s, and their stance against rationalism and anti-intuitive deductive reasoning as tools of social control, which I found grossly oversimplifying and crude. I completely agree with his theory about Calvinism and the maniacally despotic views of the Puritans, but find his conflation with hippies and French intellectuals to be completely bizarre and unfounded. He himself appears ready to invent the most ridiculous theories. He also seemed to squirm and express awkwardness over his simultaneous patriotism and pessimism over the future of the so-called “great American experiment.” It was altogether a deeply disappointing, dishonest, and myopic talk.

The next day is rain, rain, rain. I love the sound of rain. Especially when it pelts the remaining leaves, those tender plates of chlorophyll stuck to the muddy wet ground.

The fact that it’s raining rather than snowing is something to feel grateful for. I don’t like ending sentences with prepositions but that’s what the word for is for.