17 miles. 92 degrees. 82% humidity. 45 degree hills. 6 foot high stinging nettle. Lots and lots of deer flies. Nasty red welts all over my arms, legs, and back. In other words: fun, fun, fun (if you are a sick masochistic bastard who’d rather spend Sunday morning praying for death than sleeping in). Or me.
The first bit of September’s TNF 50 is along a portion of the Potomac Heritage “Trail” (the very portion that I ran this Sunday as reconnaissance). And, to clear up any confusion, at the moment this “trail” fully deserves to be in quotes. Because, at this moment, trail means a meandering, barely discernible ribbon of slightly depressed vegetation in a jungle of rain-fed overgrowth.
Did I mention that most of that overgrowth consists almost exclusively of plants that inject a nasty (and here I quote from wikipedia): “cocktail of irritants: acetylcholine, histamine, 5-HT and possibly formic acid?” Yeah, if I didn’t mention that, I should have, because my most endearing memory of those four hours is not the oftentimes pleasant view of one of the nation’s most scenic and historic rivers, not the occasional but stunning houses built high on the bluffs looking out over some of the least developed near-urban wilderness in America, not even the panoply of wildlife that one would imagine populating some pre-colonial utopian novel. No, what remains is the burning: the feeling of all that acetylcholine, histamine, 5-HT, and almost certainly gallons of formic acid burning nice stripes into my legs and arms.
I look like an overly penitent flagellant.
Comparably, those mountainous hills, high temps and humidity, and the god-foresaken swarms of man-eating deer flies were relaxing.
(My deepest apologies to Susan, whom I called at 7 am her time, and then regaled with screams as I hit patch after patch of nettle. Her fortitude in not hanging up on me is gratefully acknowledged).
For many years now I've left a trail of flecks across the Internet. Just begun novels; explorations of culture, music, writing, food, the future, mountains, long distances, shallow oceans, deep canyons; oddly-composed music; even more oddly-constructed poetry; impassioned editorial; strident analysis, and a slew of images, sounds, and scribbles. Most of this has passed into the aether, waiting only for some semi-sentient algorithm to pull it from obscurity twenty years hence. In the meantime, there is this lodestone, gathering what it can.
reb
on Jun 30th, 2008
@ 9:18 pm:
“I look like an overly penitent flagellant.”
I KNEW that reading the DaVinci Code would come in handy some day. I actually knew what the eff you were saying even though you used unecessary extra syllables to say it…
Peter
on Jul 1st, 2008
@ 7:20 pm:
So, for Reb, I’ll try in wee one beat string of ‘a’s or ‘e’s to say the like: i look like a guy too dear in love with god, that a whip is the way i say i love.
I’m not sure I used a single unnecessary syllable in the first version.