Sometimes you're the dog, and sometimes you're the finger

I did a Frazz strip a while back involving the saying, "sometimes you eat the bear, and sometimes the bear eats you." Frazz, or maybe it was Caulfield, followed up with something about the wisdom of not teasing bears in the first place. I'd hunt that strip down for you, but I'm hurting for time. Lately I've been getting eaten by the bear.

So today I'm stealing one guy's story and another guy's photo, which combine into something much better than I could make up anyway, and then I'll tie it together just enough to try and fake some sort of intelligent involvement of my own.

Hey. The creative mind at work isn't always pretty.

Last night was the final night of the spring-semester swim training class with world-class swimmer and coach Iian. After class, Iian hosted a pizza party at his house, where Alonso, one of my fellow swimmers, snapped this picture in which I am happily eating some pizza, disturbed more by what the cheese is doing to my blood vessels than I am by the human finger that Rich is holding next to my ear. (Rich is Iian's father and my other world-class coach.)

Iian and Jim acquired the finger a while back when he and Jim were out walking their dog near their home in coastal California. The dog ran off and retrieved something, as dogs do. This time, it was a finger, which dogs don't tend to find as often. They usually find things like little, dry, hardened turds. Which are evidently more disgusting than human fingers, given that Iian found himself somewhat relieved it was a finger, and given that I'm not so sure I'd have kept on eating my pizza had Rich been holding a nugget next to my ear.

Anyway, these are the kind of people I'm so happy to hang out with and steal material from.

Life is good, even when it's overwhelming. Sometimes you're the finger, and sometimes you're the dog. And if you do it right, sometimes your friends are Santa Cruz, where you never know what you're going to retrieve but you know it's going to be a lot more interesting than, well, you know.

Time's up

C.S. Lewis famously noted that time passes at the rate of sixty minutes an hour, whoever you are, whatever you do. C.S. Lewis was right. But now he’s wrong. Now we have Facebook.

It’s not that Facebook and its electronic allies like e-mail, video games and blogs eat up time. It’s that they wreck the ratio. Watch someone burn up half an hour, an afternoon, a day on Facebook. Then ask them how long they’ve been on it. “Just a few minutes,” they’ll say. Watch them burn up a summer, a year, a relationship, a lifetime, staring at the screen and they’ll tell you they’re on it maybe ten minutes a day.

This is not a rant. It’s an observation, and one of the people I’m observing most closely is myself.

And I’m only making things worse. United Feature Syndicate and I just went live with the Official Frazz Facebook Page. And by “United Feature Syndicate and I,” what I mean is apparently “United Feature Syndicate.” I’ve already burned up an entire morning trying to figure out how to get onto it, let alone how to update it with each day’s new strip and some quick comments, which is the plan. Once I do, I’ll also link to it from this blog and back again, because if you’re going to thumb your nose at C.S. Lewis, you might as well do it reading Frazz and whatever insight I can pull from my sixty minutes per hour, 1,440 per day, 524,160 per year, around 7 per mile in a good run, 1.5 per kilometer on a good bike ride and someday, dammit, 1.5 per hundred yards for any length of time in the water.

But unless you can figure out how to get there yourself, you’ll have to wait another 2,800 minutes until my next blog post while I make sure I don’t get any further behind on strip and magazine deadlines, which approach WAY faster than 60 minutes per hour and fade away much slower. Not only did C.S. Lewis fail to anticipate Facebook, he didn’t know about the Deadline Doppler Effect. Some genius he was.

C.S. Lewis wasn’t the only genius who tried to explain time and came out the worse for it. None other than Albert Einstein (actually many other geniuses, and t-shirt printers galore, said the same thing in slightly different words) said time was a conspiracy to keep everything from happening at once, and we’ve all had days where it couldn’t have been more clear that that was a big crock.

Actually, time is such a vague, nebulous entity that hardly anyone can comment on it without coming up wrong.

Except Groucho Marx, who said, “Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana.”

And it goes by slowly while grown-ups like me whine about it. Wow. Where did my morning go?

Go Green, go White, go beige, go gray

I'm not sure how IQ is figured, but I ran across some numbers yesterday that show at least a little intelligence:
7:15   7:09   6:55
7:10   7:01          ... 8:36!
Those are my mile splits from yesterday at MSU. I didn't melt down, and the final mile wasn't up the side of a mountain. I just got smart for once; at the Heart of a Spartan 10K, it was nice to show the brains of a mollusk.

What happened was a popped Achilles tendon somewhere in mile 5. That sort of thing isn't unusual for runners, and may be even a little predictable for runners who go longish on the bike the day before in really stiff winds, which tends to encourage sloppy pedaling in too big a gear. What's also not unusual is for that kind of runner to ignore the tendon and try to finish off with one more sub-7 split and then spend many, many weeks in a position to make some really bad decisions regarding rest vs. temptation. Achilles tendons are like lady country singers that way: Do 'em wrong once and you might be forgiven; make a pattern of it and you'll regret it longer than a truck loan.

A lot of being smart is a matter of not being around bad influences, so it's a good thing Ron couldn't find me again at the starting line after he hit the loo. Ron finished in 42:30, which is about where I'd have been if that 8:36 looked a little more like the other splits. That's not to say I would have beaten Ron. I could have made it close, but making it close is not the way to beat Ron. He's got quite a finish, and whether or not I succumbed to his kick, I'd have spent several weeks kicking myself with my one good leg.

As it happens, we finished next to each other in the semigeezer age group anyway, Ron third and me fourth(!). I had no idea until Ron told Rich in an e-mail about something else. Had I known, I might have stuck around to see if the awards went three deep or perhaps more. They went five deep, so I could have brought home the, I'm not sure, beige, perhaps.

I'd be proud of a beige ribbon. But it's even better, for once, to be proud of my gray matter.