As she did last year, the lovely Mrs. Jack sent text-message updates on my buddy’s Lotoja progress throughout the day. If anyone reading this is interested, he crossed the finish line in Jackson Hole at 7:31 PM, with a final time of 13 hours, 43 minutes, 22 seconds, landing him in 279th place. (I have no idea of how many riders there were this year, so his position doesn’t mean much, I guess.)

Jack’s time was just ever so slightly longer than last year’s, which was 13:39:58. I haven’t spoken to him yet, so I don’t know if he had issues with wind or what happened. Still, I remain impressed with his accomplishment; I doubt if I could pedal a bike much farther than a couple of miles, let alone the distance he covered in a single day. Well done, my friend!

Update (Sunday morning, 10:11 AM): I just heard from Jack, who informs me that the time I had on record for last year was incorrect. His time in 2008 was actually 14:00:55.138, so his performance this year was a significant improvement! Kudos, once again, and sorry for the mix-up!

My friend Jack is going to ride in the Lotoja Classic bicycle race tomorrow, his second time participating in this 206-mile endurance event. (You can find last year’s coverage here.) I’d like to wish him luck, if he happens to be sitting up too late for someone who has to pedal a bike up and down mountains in the morning, and may the wind be at his back. Or whatever bicyclists say to each other. I’ll be away from my computer all day tomorrow, but I’ll be getting text-message updates on Jack’s progress, and I’ll report the results when I get the chance…

In my office just a few minutes ago, I overheard someone say, “Oh, to be a lexicographer.”

You’ve got to admire that level of individuality in one’s career dreams…

I got a bit of a start this morning when the local news reported that a woman who more-or-less matches the description of my friend Cheno’s wife had been hit by a car while jogging only a couple blocks from the Cheno home. I know Mrs. Cheno is a runner, and even though the age of the still-unidentified victim was said to be 10 years too old, I wondered if the police and TV reporters might have made a mistake and it was really her being loaded into a LifeFlight helicopter. Being the paranoid, er, concerned friend that I am, I felt compelled to make a quick phone call, just to be sure. Whoever the unfortunate jogger was, it wasn’t Mrs. Cheno.

Which is great news for me and my friends, but I feel bad for the anonymous woman who’s in the hospital while her own friends and family go blithely about their day with no idea that someone they care about is fighting for her life right now…

UPDATE: The Tribune is reporting that the jogger has died from “massive head trauma.” The police believe they’ve identified her and are awaiting the arrival of a husband for confirmation. Jesus… I can’t begin to imagine getting a phone call asking you to come verify the identity of a mate you’d shared breakfast with and kissed goodbye only a few hours earlier.

As weird and potentially disrespectful as this next thought may sound, I find myself wondering what she was listening to on the iPod she was wearing at the time of the accident. Years ago, I wrote a short story in which someone dies in a traffic accident while the most ridiculous and overblown pop tune I could think of at the time — Meat Loaf’s “Paradise by the Dashboard Light” — played on a jukebox in a nearby bar. It must happen all the time, when you think about it, people dying to the sound of inappropriate, silly, or offensive music… especially nowadays when music is so ubiquitous in our all-entertainment-all-the-time culture. It’s a haunting image for me… you’re running or walking or shopping, whatever, preoccupied by the mundane thoughts and daily business that eats up most of our lives, listening to the stupid pap that we all have on for background noise while we dream of the cool things we’ll do one of these days, if only we can get through one more day of the usual rut, and then spang!, it’s all over. No glamour, no meaning, no big resolution, no swelling soundtrack theme and slow dissolve to the next scene, only the Archies crooning on about sugar and honey. It reminds me of an old episode of M*A*S*H, oddly enough, the one where one of Hawkeye’s paramours goes for a walk after their tryst and steps on a mine, and the last words in her diary are that her head is filled with thoughts of him. And another episode of the same show, in which Margaret sums it all up: “It never fails to amaze me. One minute you’re alive, the next you’re dead.”

Things to consider on a beautiful Wednesday afternoon in early fall…

I ought to be in bed, catching up on sleep. I can’t remember the last time I got a full eight hours’ worth. But instead, I sit here in the wee hours of the last day of the last weekend of summer, clicking my way across the Internet, in search of… what? Enlightenment? Absolution? Distraction from the existential horror of it all? Maybe I’m just trying to stave off the inevitable advance of the calendar for just a few more minutes.

Here’s a song that’s been running through my head for a good part of the day. The lyrics are typically Zeppelin-esque mumbo-jumbo, but the tone captures my mood pretty well…

So, I’m driving to the train station this morning, and at some point I glance off to my left and see… a black and white cow wearing light blue pajamas. Walking on its hind legs, no less.

For just an instant, I had the thought that the Monday-morning hangover really isn’t worth it anymore.

Then I realized I was simply passing Chick-fil-A, and there was some poor teenager sweating away his shift inside that cow’s plush innards. I really hope the whole week isn’t going to be like this…

Stephen King’s monumental fantasy epic, The Dark Tower, takes place in a world very much like our own, a parallel Earth that shares many attributes with ours, except that this other world is dying at some fundamental, metaphysical level. Entropy is accelerating; time no longer flows at a steady rate; most machines have ceased to function. Societies are failing and human behavior is changing for the worse, becoming barbaric and even monstrous. Even geography has been altered, with distances between places increasing, or their locations actually shifting around. Some of the inhabitants of this alternate Earth — the ones who are still rational, anyway — speak wistfully of what things were like “before the world moved on.”

I think that’s a wonderful phrase, evocative of so many things: loss, alienation, resignation, the sense of big changes occurring in spite of an individual’s actions or feelings. Perhaps most of all, it speaks of the melancholy recognition that something important has slipped away from you while you weren’t paying attention. My friend Jack uses the phrase all the time; it was very much on my mind yesterday.

Continue Reading…

Via Boing Boing, a delightful and unlikely vacation photo:

To see the full-size image and read the tale of how this couple ended up as impromptu nature photographers, go here.
Silly as it is, this story really made my afternoon…

[Update: Well, I suppose this will surprise no one, but the “Crasher Squirrel” has already become an Internet meme. As usual, I’m 20 minutes behind the curve…]