Country Roads

Run Time: 65:16 + 2:30 kick

A cool, clear night just after the time change. It was actually after sundown when I checked into the hotel across the street from the Bellingham International Airport, but it was going to be the only non-rainy day of the work trip. I had gotten up at 3:50 am Eastern to fly to Seattle, and now it was 5:00 pm Pacific, so I had been awake for 14 hours. Also, I had not run in 3+ weeks due to the Fast Pass Virus I caught at Disney World. How was the run? Invigorating.

On one of the flights, I deleted YouTube from my phone. Other than Snapchat, which is only used for a family chat, I’ve completed the purge. I deleted LinkedIn last year. I deleted Twitter before it was X. I deleted FaceBook in 2018. I’ve never had Instagram or TikTok. I have nothing to look at on my phone other than my Gmail account and Family Album. I use Pocket Casts to listen to podcasts. Everything else is functional, like AllTrails, Fender Tune, Firefox, Weather, Uber, Maps, Reminders, and Sky Tonight. We have other family chats on Signal. I have nothing left to scroll.

I feel compelled to resist the attraction to the video clip. Will I miss content of value? Probably. “Miss,” in this context, means it will elude me. It doesn’t mean I will long for it. I don’t want to yuck anyone’s yum, but what if the space between activity is spent daydreaming? Or thinking? Or remembering? Or planning? I have enough writing projects to keep me writing 50+ hours a week for the rest of my life, and then some. I have enough books in my library digital For Later shelf to keep me reading for another 10+ hours a week for the rest of my life. I do neither enough. I write about 5 hours a week, and I read about 1 hour a week. How can I justify watching any YouTube video with that imbalance?

No judgment on anyone else’s choices. I do not mind if you want to watch TikTok videos or check Instagram multiple times a day. I know what life is like without all of it. That was my life for most of my life. I remember watching only what was on network TV, even before you could pop a tape into the VCR to record it. I remember long summer mornings and afternoons when there was very little on TV worth watching, when I read Nancy Drew mysteries and comic books and made forts in the blackberry bushes.

I feel like I have been selective on social media, but there are limits to my abilities. I cannot completely filter out the meaningless, the mindless, and the ill-intentioned. I cannot filter out the marketing. When I was just out of high school and started university in 1982, I subscribed to a communist newspaper. It was a 16-page newsprint edition that came to my dorm room once a month, with in-depth articles that were way over my 18-year-old head. I recently subscribed to the DSA email list, to learn more about what they are doing, fishing around for a party I might want to join. Every email is a fundraising email. I want to know what they are about, not why they want my money.

I think I can leave it up to my family to curate the content and post what they think has value for me to check out. I enjoy reading content that is genuinely funny and/or thoughtful and/or well-written. I just feel compelled to give my attention to the long-form writing and video storytelling that requires me to make an attention investment.

How did we get to the world of YouTube and Instagram? Why is it so easy to get us to watch something or read something so short? My lovely wife reads books on her phone — a lot of them. I don’t know how many books a year she reads, but it’s a LOT. I want to commit to that practice and relearn to open a book and read a few pages when I’m waiting for someone in the cell phone lot, or when I’m eating my breakfast, or when I’m on the toilet. I’ve read the LOTR trilogy twice in the bathroom, so I know you can hit a high page count that way.

I’m not sure how I’m going to share my beer reviews and the songs I write without using YouTube, at least, and I’m going to have to figure out how to do that on my laptop. I’m sure a solution will present itself.

What will redeem us from the post and the click? I have no idea. Perhaps nothing.

The Pointe Nature Preserve

Run Time: 65:43 + 2-minute kick

I am behind in my blogging. This run took place more than two weeks ago. I almost forgot what I wanted to write about. The run was beautiful. It was hot. Most of it was a gravel path, which took me almost to the very point where South Dakota, Nebraska, and Iowa converge, at the confluence of the Big Sioux and Missouri Rivers.

How long does it take a drop of water in the Missouri River to travel from the headwaters in Montana all the way to the Mississippi River in St. Louis? Is it possible that, in my many crossings and followings of the Missouri River, that I’ve rejoined a drop of water that I met previously?

In our family Book Club, one of the books we read this year is Learning Love, by Thais Gibson, which is about helping you to improve your relationships through the understanding and use of Integrated Attachment Theory. It’s a good book — I recommend it. Integrated Attachment Theory seems to make sense. I’m not going to try to explain it here — you’ll have to read it for yourself if you want to know more.

Some of the exercises in the book involve identifying Core Wounds — negative core beliefs “that prevent you from stepping into who you have always been destined to become” — and reprogramming them to accurate, positive core beliefs that help manifest becoming who you have always been destined to become. As you probably can imagine, Core Wounds mess with our relationships with others quite dramatically at times.

For me, identifying Core Wounds required a lot of introspection and retrospection. I had to think hard about what I believe about myself, and where those beliefs originated. It is easy, I think, to be fooled into thinking what we believe about our self is true. What other perspective do we really have besides our own? Yes, we will hear someone give us their opinion about us, and if it differs from our own, it might give us pause, but it seems reasonable to think that we would know better than anyone else who we really are and what we are really like. And we probably do. But it doesn’t mean we’re always right.

I recently listened to an interview with Patti Smith on the “Wiser Than Me” podcast with Julia Louis-Dreyfus. Julia always asks her guests if they feel comfortable telling the listener their true age, and then she asks how old they feel. Patti Smith said she has always felt like she is in the 9-11 year-old range. This resonates with me. I sometimes reflect that the voice in my head has not changed from about the age of 9, when I was in the third grade, and I started becoming confident about my independent identity.

I have my share of Core Wounds, and this book helped me to understand some of where I have been a little too hard on myself, or maybe a little too easy on myself. But it also made me wonder about the mystery of memory. Why do we remember some events so clearly, and so many others not at all? What happened to engrave something seemingly insignificant into our memory like a perfect video recording? How can we see that drop of water running through the river of our life so clearly apart from the others?

Here is a memory from when I was in the fourth grade: playing four-square on the playground at recess. In four-square, the kid serving the ball is in square 1. To their right is square 2, diagonally across from them is square 3, and to their left is square 4. There is a line of kids waiting to get into the game. When someone is eliminated by not making a proper play on the ball, the first kid in the line enters square 4, and the other three players advance accordingly.

I didn’t play a lot of four-square, but this day I did. The line was long, maybe 20 kids. As I advanced through the line, I noticed a pattern in the play. The server would make an easy bounce to the player in square 2, who would make an easy bounce to the player in square 3 that set him up to make an unplayable bounce to the player in square 4. It was a set-up to keep the 3 players in their boxes the entire recess. They were friends, of course, but it was all orchestrated by the bully in square 1. He got to keep his spot as server only through the compliance of the lackeys in square 2 and 3. Everybody in line was the victim. They basically did not even get to touch the ball.

This was unfair, obviously. I was angry watching what was happening. Kids were calling out the unfairness, but it wasn’t changing anything. I was not worried, though. In square 3 was my friend David Carr. We were not best friends, but we were good friends. He was a mellow, polite kid who was one of the “cool” kids but not a jerk. It really didn’t jibe with his personality to be the hit man who was putting all of these kids out of the four-square game unfairly. I stepped into square 4, and the same thing happened. He knocked me out with an unplayable ball. I was shocked.

I would not leave the box right away. I just stared at David. He would not look me in the eye. The dickheads in boxes 1 and 2 were yelling at me to leave, so I did. When recess was over, and we were all headed into the building, I went after David. I tackled him with the intent of pounding him. He was bigger and stronger than me, so I expected that I would be the one who got pounded. But something else happened. He saw me coming right before I got there, and he started yelling, “I’m sorry! I’m sorry!” I tackled him anyway, but he got ahold of me and just held me and kept saying he was sorry. He didn’t fight back. That was a big deal — to not fight back in front of all the other kids, for any reason, was a big deal.

A teacher came to break us apart, and David immediately began to defend me, saying it was all his fault. Everyone had seen me rush him, so everyone knew I had initiated the fight, but he wanted the teacher to know the whole story. I was still out-of-my-mind angry. I kept trying to get out of the teacher’s grip. David was the kid who got in trouble sometimes, and I was not, and I think he wanted it to stay that way. Plus, he clearly felt bad about what he had done.

Neither of us got sent to the principal’s office. I avoided four-square for awhile. I forgave David. We stayed friends all through grade school and middle school. He became a stoner, and I helped him with his schoolwork a lot. Maybe that memory stays with me because I am still unpacking it, 50 years later. Why didn’t I go after the square 1 bully? Why was I more angry at David? I saw, once I calmed down, how he had gotten himself stuck in square 3 doing someone’s dirty work, and how sad that was for him. In the course of one recess, he literally put 50+ kids out of a four-square game unfairly and felt like he had no choice. I’m sure he said that to me at one point, that he had no choice, and I tried to tell him that he did, because it was my job to tell him that, because he was my friend. I think, maybe, that I looked up to David up to that point in our friendship, and that I looked after David from that point on.

Core Wound? Maybe. Like I said, I’m still unpacking it. There are a lot of layers to an event like this, all from a simple fourth-grade four-square game at a grade school recess. Sometimes I think we all lived an entire lifetime in our childhood. I suppose it would not qualify as a Core Wound unless I had a negative self-belief as a result that was holding me back from being my authentic self. And maybe I do. And maybe I need to reframe it now and cut myself some slack for holding David to account for the actions of others. Or maybe I need to credit myself for holding David to account for his actions and continuing to be his genuine friends. Or maybe both.

Hampstead High School

Run Time: 65:42 + 2-minute kick

Better choices for running on the east side of Arterial drive. The Chavenelle “Trail” that I ran the last time I was here is actually the Chavenelle “Sidewalk without Shade.” This time I was able to cut through a residential neighborhood to the local high school track, where I could at least have some non-cement to run on.

It’s Youth Football Season in America, which means young middle-class athletes trying to run hard when the overweight coaches are watching, as well as parents in fold-out chairs on the sidelines and up on the path beside the tennis courts, looking at their phones. I counted 16 coaches on the field with what appeared to be 3 different teams, and 11 of the 16 were in what I would call “bad physical condition.”

What if you actually had to be in good physical shape to coach a sport? What if you had to qualify to coach a young athlete by being in good physical, mental, and emotional shape — good enough to be a role model? It might be hard to find enough candidates.

I’m not really one to talk. I was not in great physical shape when I coached youth baseball. I’m in better shape now. I probably was not in good mental or emotional shape, either, and I’m probably a little better in those two areas now as well. I think I did relatively little damage to the psyches of the young athletes I coached. Time will tell. I do get a few things thrown back at me by my youngest son, whom I coached the most, such as my coaching mantra, “Don’t be sorry. Just do it right.”

I actually think that the most qualified youth coaches are kids in college or just out of high school who played the sport in question. Most of them have not been crushed by Life and by being a parent, and they are blissfully unaware of how hard it is to teach proper athletic skills, which means it actually is not as hard for them. They tend to be relatively unbothered by the shenanigans of the parents, which basically triples their effectiveness. And they’re almost still kids themselves, so they have more fun doing it.

And, we should pay those kids to coach. Not a lot, but something, because coaching has value. In fact, whichever parent would be saved the agony of coaching themself should pony up and fund that project in gratitude. Not coaching that one season probably would add two seasons to their life span.

These kids on this afternoon were clearly not enjoying whatever they were doing. It was hot, and their hearts and minds did not appear to be into it, which made me smile as I jogged around the track. Character-building, they call it. Making your kid play a sport you wanted to be good at and fell short is a time-honored American tradition. The young athlete learns how to do not very well what someone else wants them to do.

And then, chances are, when their turn comes around to do the same thing to their kid, they probably will. If we want to break these generational cycles, we have to do something radical, such as taking men completely out of the equation. Maybe those coaches should only be women in college or just out of high school. Think of that. Think how much that would change youth sports.

Let’s make THAT happen.

Casper Rail Trail

Run Time: 65:29 + 2-minute kick

I wish I could say Casper is friendly, like the ghost, but it’s rather harsh and weatherbeaten, and many of the locals appear to have partaken of the methamphetamine in the recent past. This trail ran right along a main street, and it was a short walk from the hotel, but it was borderline sketchy. Plus the red ants with an anthill every ten feet or so just off the cement, who also look like they have partaken of the methamphetamine.

It was a comfortable evening to run. Still hot, but enough clouds to keep it shady, and a mild breeze to help the sweat keep you cool. I immediately felt the elevation, about a mile above sea level. It felt great. Reminded me of running in Utah when we lived there in 2021-22. That thin air just feels great to run in, especially compared to Michigan, where we live now about 300 feet below sea level.

I do like Wyoming in general, especially the rural areas, and double especially the mountains and hills. I have seen hundreds of antelope this week. The antelope and the ants will inherit this land when we kill ourselves off, which is appropriate, because their existence here antedates ours. I was surprised by the level of the water in the North Platte River in Douglas. The Platte in Nebraska always looks really shallow, and if you remember your elementary school films about the wagon trains, the Platte is supposed to be a mile wide and an inch deep. It seems a little late in the year for snow melt run-off. The North Platte is upstream from the Platte. You’d think it might need some momentum to get as deep as it looks in Douglas, but it runs deeper and stronger closer to its source in the Rockies.

So, for the walking part of my “run,” I usually listen to a podcast, and then I switch to music for the running part. That’s the reward for the running. I used to listen to podcasts when I ran, and it was a slog. As soon as I switched to music, my body said yes. But, to make it say yes with an exclamation point, I listen to the podcast for walking part.

I have a complicated podcast rotation. I subscribe to 25 podcasts, and I alternate between listening to podcasts in order of episode release date, and in order of how many unlistened episodes I have in the queue. Plus, if there are 4 or more Best of Car Talks in the queue, I always start the day with the oldest of those, because they drop off the feed when I have 10 in the queue. I have a list of the next episode date for each podcast in my phone, and alongside that is how many unlistened episodes remained the last time I listened to one of those podcasts episodes, so that helps me keep track of what to listen to next.

So on this day, at the beginning of this run, I started an episode of Phoebe Reads a Mystery, which is a podcast of Phoebe Judge reading a chapter of a book (usually a mystery) every day. It’s one of the podcasts for which I have a lot in the queue — currently 592 episodes. This episode was Chapter 6 of Jane Eyre. I don’t know yet if Jane Eyre is actually a mystery, but this chapter almost made me keep it going when I switched from walking to running.

A fair portion of this chapter is a conversation between the title character and Helen Burns, a classmate at a Lowood, a school for orphan girls. Jane has recently been sent there, and she is having trouble adapting, and she has a conversation with Helen about how to conduct oneself in a difficult and dire situation. It is difficult to accept that two young schoolgirls would have such a command of the language, but of course it is Charlotte Bronte who has a command of the language, and these are fictional characters.

However, I cannot imagine that Bronte altered reality terrifically. Written dialogues usually are cleaner than real conversation. You don’t read the “ums” and “uhs” often in literature, and it’s hard to write dialogue of people talking over each other, which is usually what real conversation consists of. But I am going to choose to believe that Bronte wrote these characters accurately, and that two pre-teen orphan schoolgirls in the early nineteenth century could have a conversation more erudite, elegant, and poignant than any conversation I have ever had with any other person, even in philosophy classes I took in college. It was stunning to listen to.

The question that arose in my mind after I finished listening to Chapter 6 was, what the fuck has happened to us? Okay, so we have made great advances in terms of science and medicine and technology, but much as the headwaters of the North Platte drain to a trickle in the plains, the level of discourse for our species has shallowed immeasurably.

I have had this thought before, reading Charles Portis’ True Grit, and watching the movie 99 times. When Mattie asks LaBoeuf, “Why have you been ineffectually pursuing Chaney?”, or when LaBoeuf uses a Latin legal term, and Rooster says, “I’m struck that LaBoeuf has been shot, trampled, and nearly severed his tongue, and not only does he not cease to talk, but he spills the banks of English”, I am rendered speechless by the beauty of the language.

Human discourse now barely qualifies as communication. I not only long to talk like Jane and Helen, I long to hear someone, anyone, talk like that in the normal course of daily life. I cannot help but think we have slipped backward in this respect. I cannot help but think we would not be living in the Age of Idiocy if we had maintained this intelligent use of language.

Maybe it wouldn’t have mattered. Maybe we’d have ended up here either way. In Bronte’s time, there was terrible inhumane squalor in many parts of society, most assuredly as bad or worse than methamphetamine partaking. Squalor remains, and with respect to the use of language, an intellectual squalor predominates.

I will just have to be content listening to Bronte, reading Charles Portis, and rewatching “True Grit” for the hundredth time.

City Loop Trail

Run Time: 65:22 + 2-minute kick

Brandon is a pleasant small city. The night before I stayed in downtown Winnipeg, which was not pleasant. I was on the 10th floor of the Holiday Inn Express, which felt relatively safe, compared to the lobby, but when I got in the elevator to go get some McDonald’s, a woman asked me if I was traveling with my wife. I answered, “Yes!” I am pretty sure she was a prostitute. Sorry, not trying to profile anyone. It was just a hunch.

Doing business with our Canadian distributors is currently difficult, because they are paying a 25% tariff on much of what we sell, a reciprocal tariff to counter our tariff on Canadian imports. We are the best source for what they need to sell, but we also increased our prices in June to cover the added costs of all the tariffs we are now paying to import items and components, including a lot of stuff from China. That’s a double whammy for our Canadian distributors.

All of this tariff BS is a legitimate killer for business, especially anything that imports items for resale or components for manufacturing. If it is helping the economy in any way, it’s a mystery to me how that is happening. We are not going to bring manufacturing back to the U.S. I know I’m not the only one who knows this. We cannot afford to pay what it costs to make something in the U.S. from scratch, and we don’t have the infrastructure to do it.

The world is the way we designed it. We are the consumers. We off-shored manufacturing so that we could buy more. The jobs that were lost to off-shore manufacturing were not sustainable. Tariffs are not the answer to anything other than how can we fuck everything up in the name of shock politics?

It was actually kind of nice to find a few kindred spirits to talk to about the horrendous joke we have played upon ourselves by electing this clown. I normally avoid discussing politics with customers, but some of my Canadian customers align with my views quite well, and I want them to know that not all U.S. citizens are toxically self-destructive.

Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday of last week were three of the eight lowest sales booking days of the year so far for my sales region. That is not an anomaly. That is scary. That is look-for-a-life-boat numbers. There is no reason to think it is going to get much better. The industry we serve already wasn’t doing well before all of this nonsense. End users will just move to something else rather than continue to spend money on what they need to keep their current business afloat.

Pardon me if my faith in humanity is lacking. As I’ve written before, I eschew belief in favor of evidence. It makes no sense to me to have faith in humanity. The evidence I have seen shows me that the powerful are seeking to increase their power, and worse yet, the systems are doing that all on their own, almost like machine learning systems figure out how to do something better. I think we’ve lost control. And that’s why, I think, we are seeing more civil disobedience and violent protest. It might be the appropriate response.

As of today, I have a job. I am confident of the value of what I do. However, the pattern of last week’s bookings is not sustainable. I am pretty clever at pivoting my sales tactics and focus, but I’m not sure I can produce miracles.

But it sure was beautiful in Brandon.

Sterling Heights High School

Run Time: 65:11 + 2-minute kick

I wasn’t sure I was going to get a run in. Thunderstorms were on the horizon, so to speak. I was glad I did. It was the only run of the week. Canada sent all of their wildfire smoke across the border in retaliation for tariffs. It was warm and muggy, but a nice breeze made for a good run. Most of the run was on the way to and back from the school. I will remember that track, though. It will be a good spot for future trips.

It was a nice, older neighborhood, with cracked and uneven sidewalks and well-manicured lawns. Probably an HOA community. You never know when you are in an unfamiliar city, and the Detroit area in particular. I ran by two schools on the way to the high school, and schools are always a safe option. Even the bad guys generally don’t mess with the schools. As long as the students aren’t hoodlums, you’re safe.

Not ten minutes from the hotel earlier that day, I had hesitated to stop for gas until the neighborhood looked more friendly, basically a few blocks before I got to the hotel. You wonder what some of these strange buildings contain, with trash and debris strewn all around, and some old guy sitting on an old dining room chair in an open doorway, smoking. Whatever is going on there, I don’t know the password.

The business climate seems a little rough here in the Mideast as well. I had a record sales month in April, mostly due to impending price changes due to tariffs, and then May was a high dive into hell. There may just be a disconnect somewhere between the powers that be and the power-free. We’re all just riding the same wave together, which is sloshing back into the backwater right now.

My Canadian customers are particularly miffed about paying tariffs on our products. They seem to be taking it personally, and I guess it’s okay for them to be generally angry that we elected a clown to hold our highest office. Immediately after our price hike, we sent one shipment to a customer in Alberta and mistakenly listed the U.S. as the country-of-origin for the items we imported from Taiwan on the customs forms, which led to a 25% tariff they had to pay that they shouldn’t have had to pay, because Canada has no tariffs on items from Taiwan. There was stern language and genuine vehemence in the emails I received, more than is warranted for simple incompetence.

The work travel has been wearing on me lately. For this trip, I abandoned podcasts while driving and listened only to music, which was helpful. Also, on this evening, after the run and dinner and a shower, I fell asleep at 9 pm, which is extremely rare. Kind of a kung pao coma. I had strange dreams that I could not remember.

Going through my photos for this post, I can tell I was a little off my game. No screenshots of the compass or the sky tonight apps. Rituals disrupted. No bueno. But the music and the run and the smokeless air was good. I’ll get back on track next trip.

Diagonal Trail

Run Time: 64:57 + 2-minute kick

Creative name for this trail. The elevation gain data seems a little exaggerated. Partly that is the width of the graphic, but also, I ran this trail from one end to the other and it felt pretty flat. The approaches from the street were the most pronounced elevation changes I encountered, and those kind of worked the other way, so I cannot account for these climbs at each end.

An uninteresting run for the most part, but a good find, because it was only a few minutes from the hotel that I usually stay in when I fly into MSP for a trip through Minnesota/North Dakota, or Minnesota/Wisconsin. Other than when there are three feet of dirty snow on the sidewalks, now I know a run route that requires no driving, which I prefer.

On one side of the trail was a golf course. On the other, a graveyard. Not sure what the metaphor is in that description. The beginning of a tiring week of watching Stanley Cup playoff games till midnight or later. Turned out to be my only run of the week. Coincidence.

In past years, when I would watch games after the fact, I would try to watch all of the playoff games. This led to asking extended family members at mid-summer events to not tell me who won the Cup, because I was still watching old games a month after the Cup was raised. I am less completist about it now, but if I’m in a hotel doing late work after a day on the road, I will have a game on if a game is being played, and if there’s another game after that one, I will stay up and try to catch a nap the next day at a rest area. That’s why it’s called a rest area.

What is a completist? A completist is someone who listens to entire catalogs of a musical artist to see if there are any songs they have recorded that should be added to their playlist. A completist is someone who finds on YouTube a classically-trained harpist who does rock song reactions and analyses, and after watching a few recent ones, goes back to their original posts from 3 years ago to watch them all in chronological order.

I am subscribed to 25 podcasts, and I listen to them from oldest-to-newest. 5 of the feeds cycle out episodes when they get old, so I start each day with one of each of those (so I don’t lose any). If I listen to one each of those in any particular day, then I move onto the next in a rotation of all feeds, followed by one of the episodes of the podcast feed that has the most episodes in the queue (first place currently held by This American Life, with 717 episodes, the oldest unlistened episode from 9/4/98 (no need for 4 digits in the year, because that was pre-Y2K); “unlistened” means unlistened to as a podcast episode, because I probably listened to it live on NPR when it aired). There are more rules to tell me where to go from there, if I have a long day of driving that exceeds 7 podcast episodes.

I think it’s almost as fun for me to design these systems of completion as it is to do the actual activity requiring the system. I have given up on the goal of reading an author’s entire bibliography, because I don’t read fast enough. I know I’m not alone — what, after all, is binge-watching all about? I might finish those This American Lifes, though, before my American Life is over.

The important quality in the pursuit of completism is endurance. Endurance, as Chinaski says, is more important than truth. One reason why I have confidence in my sales work is that I know I have endurance. I will outlast my competition. It’s inevitable. That is a comforting thought. I recently had a prospect email me in a response to a visit request that I was welcome to stop in, that he appreciated my follow-up, and that he had a feeling that my perseverance would be rewarded eventually. I love that.

This is another example of what I call “do what you like to do.” This does not mean the conventional message of magically find a lucrative career that matches your interests. It means find a way to do what you like to do in the things you choose to do. Make it fit you. I like to complete things. I like to write. In my work, in my life, even in my yardwork, I find a way to complete things (or work toward it). I find reasons to write (the yardwork example doesn’t apply here). I managed a towing company for 7 years. I wrote a newsletter each pay period, because I like to write. Nobody asked me to write a newsletter. I just did it.

How can you apply your obsessions constructively to your life? All of them, not just a few.

City Streets and Sidewalks

Run Time: 64:55 + 2-minute kick

A one-day diversion north of the border. Found this resort town in the Okanagan Valley, amidst a large collection of rather northern vineyards. Very picturesque, with mountains to the east and west, which created a south-wind tunnel in the afternoon for my run, but a warm sun mitigated.

I stayed close to the lake for most of the run. Everything was paved, and most of the run was on sidewalks, not trails, so not ideal but workable. They really could use a lakefront trail here. The lake extended down into the States — the border was actually not far away, which makes one wonder what restriction boaters have. I do not remember seeing any boats, now that I think of it, so maybe it is a boatless lake.

After reading tips for returning safely without detention into the U.S. the week before, it felt like a small act of bravery to wander out of the compound. No issues, though. I am, after all, an old white guy with a valid passport, so no one asked to look at my devices. I have devices, so that was a relief. Apparently I am not flagged in the system as a Lib.

I visited five potential new distributors in South Central BC, and it was refreshingly positive. Not one comment about tariffs or trade wars. Let’s give it up for the friendliness of our Canadian neighbors. I did see some F&#*k Trudeau signs, evidence that the conservative messaging is universal, but we knew that. This vineyard/winery region needs tourists, and many Pacific NW wine drinkers are old liberals with money, so probably there is a little less brazen apocalyptism is this consumer region.

I stumbled into this locale because it was between sales visits to Castlegar and Penticton, and I didn’t want to drive till 6:30 to get to the motel. I had not heard of Osoyoos or the lake, so when our travel app pulled up 20+ hotels in one town, it was a pleasant surprise. The view from the hotel room was beautiful, with a small balcony. Seems like a nice place to visit, but I did see clouds of gnats near vegetation when I went for my run, so that is disturbing.

Bugs are one reason why wind is not always bad, although these gnats seemed to be holding their position. They were clearly working in unison, finding pockets where their collective proximity reduced the effects. There is a metaphor in their somewhere, but I just don’t like to think of myself as a gnat, so I will stay out on my own in the wind.

Visiting new regions in my sales territory is rare at this point, so I enjoyed seeing some different country, especially the Canadian mountains. I crossed over a few high passes, with a fair amount of snow still roadside, and the grasses and plants hadn’t really greened up yet, but the rocky crags were majestic. Especially as I got closer to the Pacific, where the steep inclines reminded me of Oregon’s Coast Range.

The long drive back through Seattle Friday afternoon was kind of a downer, and the red-eye flight home through Minneapolis was unfun. I could not have made that loop up to Kelowna without the extra time, however. I have targets in Kamloops as well, which is even farther north, but that will have to wait till the next trip.

I actually would like to drive all the way up to Prince George, and cross over from BC to AB or vice versa, but it would just be too time-consuming for a work trip, with too little potential return. Heck, I’d like to drive as far north as the road goes. I think it’s fun to get on a map app and find the most remote settlement at the very tip top of a continent and wonder just what the hell the residents are doing there.

I’d like to think they are living lives of quiet isolation, but my guess is they are gaming and watching Severance like everybody else.

Mill Creek Trail

Run Time: 64:54

A drizzly, windy day in Eastern Washington, but warm enough to run in shorts and a long sleeve t. A great week in the Western mountains, with a fair amount of sunshine and even some early spring greenery.

Found a trail along old Mill Creek, actually just flat tops of dikes constructed on both sides of the creek. A couple of miles long on each side, so some back-tracking and lapping required to get the full run in, but plenty of squalor variety. This squalor was at least interesting, with classic cars and old cement mixers and barrels of waste.

On Apple Maps, the photos showed weird lines in the creek that I thought might be some glitch of satellite imagery, like repeated water sections taking the place of actual location-specific imaging. But it was real, some kind of artificial water break every fifty feet or so, all the way through town. No idea what purpose they served. The creek itself seemed man-made, or at least curated from its original path and shape, no doubt to suit the Mill.

Visiting distributors and prospects this week, talking about the chaos of tariffs, wondering about job security. More artificial constructs, like those creek breaks and dikes, taking us all away from our original path, tricking and trapping us with the illusion of importance.

It would be important if I lost my job. It would be important if tariffs caused some business to fail. It would be important if I jumped up into BC for a couple of prospecting visits and then border patrol wanted to take a look at my devices upon return. It would be important if our retirement savings expire before we do.

But we have built our own traps of importance, and tariffs are actually a very appropriate symbol of the mechanism of entrapment. Tariffs are taxes on the import of goods (an ironic term). Stuff. The commodity of consumerism.

Initially, I suppose, paid labor was a relatively innocent social and economic development, much better than forced or coerced labor. It sure feels coerced now. Yes, I get it, there are a billion paths to economic freedom, and you can always live in a hut with a firepit and a straw bed, but we can say we were born into this, right? Reversing or radically altering the current system is a multi-generational project at this point, and keeping the planet livable probably has to take priority.

At least we should be able to all agree that it is a farce, a tragically unfunny shitshow designed and crafted by the worst of the rich, white men, not unlike politics, and we’re all just forced to deal with it and navigate through it and hey, let’s just work through any problems that come up without getting all emotional about it and treat each other with a little grace, and tell me again about what your grandkid said the other day.

I have a feeling that, if my job ever were in serious jeopardy, that I would be given no heads-up whatsoever. Up to the moment that the axe fell, it would all be “sales is the most important thing we are spending money on right now.” It would suddenly become the most important thing to stop spending money on right now. There is a reason for this deception: they need me to produce, and if I feel secure, I should produce more. It all makes business sense. Business sense.

Isn’t it romantic, this cut-throat world of competition and pretend testosterone warfare? We’re all Knights, riding to uphold the honor of King and Kingdom. Before the first proto-worker accepted payment for labor, there certainly was competition – to survive, to live as long and as well as possible. Somehow I don’t think we traded that for economic competition, but we sure muddied the waters.

Seven or so years of this, possibly, then who knows what? Somehow, though, we’ve designed a system where our retirement incomes are tied to the stock market, so there are multiple levels of fuckery at play. I am waiting for the app that shows me who all has been enriched by my efforts, and to what extent.

Red Cedar State Trail

Run Time: 64:46 + 2-minute kick

Only one decent running day in a week-long work driving trip through Wisconsin. Weather not cooperating. One afternoon of snow flurries, but mostly it is wind that discourages leaving the warm hotel room. Wind is the dominant meteorological feature of my sales region.

The opportunity comes between Roberts (near the Minnesota border) and Eau Claire. All Trails gives me the Red Cedar State Trial, which turns out to be nearly ideal. The surface is dirt/fine gravel, my favorite. The trail follows the Chippewa River, which actually has some rapids. Not much elevation change. The trailhead is only a few miles off I-94, so access is easy.

The only issue is that the Central Northern glaciers have not yet fully receded, so my progress is halted a couple of miles in. The packed snow crosses the trail, right to the cliff’s edge, and footing is treacherous. The top of the snowpack has a level of slipperiness difficult to express in words. Frightening comes to mind. I judge that it cannot be crossed safely, and I turn around.

The trail extended beyond the trailhead to the north via an asphalt path. I used that section to complete my run, taking me to an old railroad trestle no longer in use, and blocked to keep wanderers safe, just before the river met Lake Menomin. An old factory unnamed on Apple Maps sat across the river, possibly still in use, probably near the river for chemical disposal. A pleasant, if cold, run.

I tried writing a novel a few years back that included a sub-theme of elites gaming systems for personal benefit — power, mostly. I shelved the novel, but thinking about systems gaming made me wonder what disincentives there are to attempting to game a system. Why shouldn’t we try to orchestrate advantage and control? Are there buried disadvantages?

It seems like systems gaming might have given humans an evolutionary advantage, if expanding our size, scope, and influence as a species is advantageous. Isn’t controlling animals and plants to cultivate food some form of gaming the system? I often wonder if we would not have been better off staying in the nomadic hunter/gatherer phase, so I am not going to concede that agriculture and livestocking were meritorious developments, but systems gaming seems ethically dubious, so that fits.

One question that arises is: is it unfair to game a system? If you have the intelligence, the courage, and the means, why should it be unfair? Is fairness even a justification for not doing it? I think you might be able to break down most components of economic systems into gaming ventures. For instance, slavery was one way to game the system, and we can all agree that slavery is unfair, because it takes advantage of another. But bribing an employee to do the work is not? Sure, it is less unfair, but does it not take advantage in some way?

And if gaming the system is unfair, are fairness and honor even valid independent ethical measures that should guide behavior? They seem to be, but why? I am not sure we have shared consensus on that.

One thing that allows systems gaming to happen is that those who engage are not held to account. Why do we not hold the gamers to account? For one thing, we might not even know who all are pulling the strings, or what exactly is happening that is impacting ourselves or others unfairly. If we do know, and we try to hold the gamers to account, there might be personal risk to us. We might want to reserve the moral justification to do a little gaming of our own. We might think it’s not our place or our responsibility.

I personally would like to see a little more of enticing the evil genius to come over from the dark side to help the greater good. Like using hackers to create secure systems. How do we make it worth their while? But wait, isn’t that a form of systems gaming, to incentivize gamers to contribute to the greater good? If it helps most people, is it bad? It doesn’t seem like it. So it’s not really the act of gaming the system that is bad in itself, is it?

Opportunity to game a complex system for substantial personal profit does not seem to be available to all. But it also does not seem to be randomly gained or stolen. It tends to require skill, intelligence, and knowledge. We want to think that we all have agreed to not do it, or to do it only for the greater good, but there is ample evidence to the contrary.

If you want to encourage a behavior, put it in one’s interest. As complicated and innovative as it might be to do that, there must be a way to encourage systems gaming exclusively for the greater good. The overlapping and intersecting of systems would seem to require a fluid and malleable strategy. Promoting a desired behavior often receives less emphasis than punishing or deterring undesired behavior. This seems like a rather tragic flaw.

I enjoy running. I enjoy the physical, mental, and emotional benefits I gain from running. If I could somehow simulate those effects with less effort, or if weather prevented me from running, would I do that? It would be tempting. For now, I will resist any attempt to game a system out of respect to my personal integrity, in part because I will feel better about myself. That form of personal happiness has more value to me than ill-gotten gains. I put it in my own interest. The long road is more scenic.