Popcorn #1

POPCORNING – (as defined by me, meaning the rapid fire of my own ideas, just popping out of my head, random thoughts, and nonsequiturs.  Perhaps a popcorn will land in your lap and when you pick it up and eat, it will be tasty, or maybe not.)

Some of you who know me will be surprised to learn that I got rained on today during my 6-mile run. You know I am the Autzen Stadium of running. They say, with a sideways sort of grin, that it never rains on Autzen Stadium, just like it never rains on me when I run. People I run with know this about me. They have witnessed this phenomenon firsthand too. I can drive in the rain over to the river path to run, windshield wipers slamming full force, and as soon as we step out of the car, the rain will stop. We then will finish the run, and right as we get back into the car, the rain will start up again. And I do this all the time without prayer, although I can’t deny that I could be praying subconsciously or that I am hoping so bad for the rain to stop that it can be misinterpreted as a prayer and my prayer comes true. But that’s just an idea.

Today, I got wet. According to my calculations, it was a four-dog-shake run. Murphy while running forward, legs still trotting, wiggling, beginning at the head and ending in the rear, would shake off the rain about every mile and a half or so. It was at about a mile and a half, just after his first shake, that we encountered a gray squirrel. I got to thinking how beautiful they are, that massive, silver-gray tail outlined in brown, their tails being almost as big as their bodies. It’s impressive. It’s not exactly the tail of a peacock, but it is not completely dissimilar to that. Once someone told me squirrels are just rats with pretty tails. At the time I accepted that, but as I reflect on that now, I think he had it wrong. Squirrels don’t try to burrow their way into your house to live with you, steal your food, share your heat, look up your wife’s dress, and give you diseases, even though some people in recent times have contracted the bubonic plague from a squirrel bite.

We have a lot of squirrels around our house. Our squirrels are the ugly brown cousins to the gray ones. I wish we had the pretty ones, but even the brown ones are kind of cute in their own way. I’m constantly seeing them in my yard. And so does Murphy. He might be half border collie, but they’ve outsmarted him every time even though their teasing of him looks risky to me. He might catch one someday, but I doubt it.

One day I went out in my yard to pick some lettuce growing next to my fence. A squirrel was atop the fence about a foot higher than I was on the ground. He watched me cautiously as I approached. When he didn’t scamper away, I tried to shoo him. Instead, he reared up on his hind legs, baring his claws and teeth. I thought, “Oh yeah, big tough guy. Why don’t you just skedaddle!” I thought surely his bravado would fade as he looked at me--big bear of a man that I am. Now understand, I’m looking at myself through the beady eyes of a squirrel. By human standards, I’m a medium-sized, slightly built man, more accustomed to running than fighting, especially with small squirrels. I wasn’t afraid. As I bent down to pick the lettuce though, sensing he was gaining in height, I felt more vulnerable as a target for a full-on squirrel attack, as I noticed him, or possibly her, gender makes no difference, as she poised more and more for jumping on top of me. I backed off cautiously and spontaneously changed the menu. There would be no salad with dinner tonight.

I couldn’t believe I had backed down from and was actually frightened by a 1.5-pound squirrel. Typically, I’m not afraid of wild animals, although it does freak me out sometimes when I see those postings at trailheads warning of bears or cougars. I will say the bears don’t worry me so much, although my chances with a bear would be less favorable than with a mountain lion, probably. But bears seem reasonable. I think they pretty much want to be left alone, as do I. So, they go about with their bear business and I go on with mine in a human way, running upright and sweating. Sweating is handy for cooling off as is upright running. But sweating also may have some other protective qualities. We stink. No matter how successively we cover up this fact for other humans with soap, deodorant, and perfume, the animals know. They know. Under that soap and that perfume, they know who we really are. We are that definite P U animal. Not temporarily like that skunk when it raises its tail, but constantly. We are naturally an extremely malodorous animal, probably not very desirable as a meal for carnivores. We like to think animals avoid us because we are big, bad, clever, and we carry big guns that go bang bang. Really it is our scent. If we could smell it as much as other animal species can, we’d probably avoid each other as well. We might not even be the social animals we are now. We’d all live alone in our own stench, seldom venturing out to come into contact with other humans. Now I don’t think we would end as a species, gone extinct because of our stink. I think we would still sneak together for short trysts in the night, the sex drive being that strong. You’ve maybe heard that insulting idea of what a man would still do if he could just put a sack over her head. In this case, both a man and a woman would hold their noses just to experience the ecstasy, that ecstasy of sex, and as a byproduct, we would reproduce. And babies don’t smell that bad, except occasionally when they poop or burp up gross. They don’t even need to apply deodorant to their tiny armpits.

Now cougars, that’s altogether different. After all, they are cats. I mean who hasn’t noticed how crazy cats can be? If you are unaware of this because you’ve been living under a rock, then go watch some videos known as crazy cat videos. Besides who hasn’t experienced this. One minute you’re petting a cute, fluffy cat who’s enjoying the rub, rolling over, purring, and next thing you know you are contending with a whirling ball of fur, a vicious piece of flesh, mostly teeth and claws stabbing and lacerating you. But I’ve always figured if it came down to an all-out fight with a domesticated cat, I’d get the best of it. Big cats have that same characteristic as the little ones in that they are unpredictable and scary, but if it came down to hand-to-paw combat with a cougar, the end of me might be the opposite of what it would be with a little kitty, this time the cat might get the best of me, especially if it pounced unannounced from out of nowhere as cats will do.

The thing is a cougar might not bother you at all. It’ll just be doing cat things until suddenly the mood catches the cougar and it acts ferociously before it's even had time to think about it. Cougars, like humans, are bloodthirsty animals. They’ll kill you just for the sport of it. For no real reason at all. We humans even call our killing of other animals, hunting, a sport. I mean, we often eat the meat and then put the meat’s head on our wall, to admire we ate that thing, but it’s fun for us to kill in this way, not so necessary anymore for survival. A cougar is maybe even more bloodthirsty than we are. A cougar is probably not defending its turf necessarily and it’s probably not going to eat our disgusting flesh. It’s going to kill us just for the fun of it. 

Women, especially, can tell you what’s up with humans. Women’s biggest fear rightfully so on a trail run is not so much in encountering a bear or a cougar, as those may be the biggest fears for me. It’s encountering a man whose brain is twisting like a toad. While I might be cautious of wild animals, even a lowly rattlesnake. A woman is more afraid of me because I am a man. So, I must reassure her as I run by with a smile, perhaps a runner’s wave or a nod but not too big of a smile. I don’t want to scare her. She knows the male of the human species is especially rapacious and bloodthirsty. And “rapacious” should remind us of another word, of something else a woman must always fear when encountering an unknown and sometimes even a known man. It’s a shame. It's so wrong.

What I’m doing here is attempting to reproduce some of my thoughts during my wet 6-mile run today. Right after leaving the car at the Delta shopping area, I got on the path down to the Willamette River, the twelfth biggest river in the United States. I realized I had forgotten my earbuds. I decided not to circle back and cross the busy Delta highway to get them, even though I had planned to listen to and was so looking forward to an episode of the storytelling podcast, the Moth. Podcasts keep my mind focused on a topic and my mind off of the running., which who wants to think about running while running, although there is that too, and that can’t be helped.

Besides I thought it would be fun to run with just me and my brain. In an unfocused way, popcorning can be just as distracting from the running as the tighter focus of listening to a podcast. The problem is my mind can go all over the place. Like Murphy, I’m noticing squirrels, shiny objects, and bushes that would be fun to pee on. I like it though. My mind becomes a sort of playground,  going to the merry-go-round, the swings, the slides, and maybe even sipping from the drinking fountain. If you weren’t so understandably afraid, I’d invite you to join me in my lonely playground, to come inside and play with me in my mind. But the closest you’ll maybe get to that is reading this.

Another comparison I might make is about how fertile I think the mind can be when you take it on a run with you if you don’t leave it back in the car with the earbuds. In my case though, growing in the fertile soil, you might find a corn stalk growing next to a strawberry vine, next to a rose bush, next to poison oak. This is not a farm anyone would want to live on perhaps by choice, but somehow, I do and I survive. Corn one day. Poison oak the next, but with a rose thrown in too. And a strawberry on top. Variation is the spice.

OK. My run is over. It was far from a good run. It was definitely a wet run. Even though the rain slowed at mile three, by then I was soaking wet, so it didn’t make a hell of a difference that it slowed down. And it never stopped. Far from perfect, me and the run, I’ve started to wonder if I’m slowing down these days and will that be permanent? I keep wondering because in general, my pace is becoming slower and slower as you would expect for someone rushing on to 70 years of age. But then every once in a while, I go out to run and everything is right and I am fast again. That gives me hope. I can feel it like I’m gliding lightly, each foot barely landing before takeoff, and the world is whirring, blurring by. And Murphy beside me is galloping instead of trotting as usual. Unlike Donald Trump and his perfect phone call to Ukraine, my run is not only perfect but it is true. But that’s another day and another run. It was not this one.

I will leave you now. I left out a lot of things like seeing a single gold ornament hanging lonely from the spindly branch of a scrub oak. Hello, shiny bulb. Meet me, a lonely, dim bulb, too stupid to know to get out of the rain. Or how there was hardly anybody out on the trail except for the obligated dog walkers and one cyclist, crazier than the rest of us out there. At least we had our dogs to think about. With the rain, the dogs aren’t bothered. They just shake it off, the way we should shake off the inconveniences and stresses of life. Actually, that is one of the benefits to a solo run, to get away from it all, to strain the body so in the end it must relax and our mind will too. Today my mind got a workout, soggy but playful. It is a good way to end this now, the end of another run with a criticism of Donald Trump at the same time. It doesn’t get much better than that. . . . Can it?