Off He Went

The parking lot under the freeway was full. There were parents with baby strollers. There were dogs on leashes and dogs being carried. There were fast runners kicking up the gravel. There were bike riders weaving back and forth.

We got a drink and then started off across the pedestrian bridge under the freeway. We started out slowly. (This is how I have always been, preferring to warm up slowly, but lately it hasn't been so much a preference as a necessity.) So we ran slowly across the bridge.

On the other side, where the trail runs beside a field and along the top of a ridge looking down a wooded slope to the water, the fourteen year-old[*] broke our initial silence.

So how far are we going, three or four?

I thought for a moment and reflected on the fact that although we had been running for a while, I felt no more limber than when we had started.

Three, I said.

The sky was blue. The air was warm. Everyone was happy to be there. We ran past the soccer fields and turned up Barton Creek. There were canoeists and kayakers and a fisherman standing up in his boat showing off a large bass he had caught. There were dogs jumping into the water. There was a dad with his two boys feeding bread to the ducks.

We stopped to get water before the Pfluger Bridge, and then we crossed the river and headed back. We talked about his band practice and about his assignment to discuss who won the War of 1812. We talked about the meaning of winning a war and strategies for writing a convincing argument.

As we got near to the end, the conversation ran out (or perhaps just my contributions). It wasn't hot. We weren't running fast. But I felt like I was lumbering on about as fast as I could. We had about a half mile to go. I was looking forward to sitting down and stretching.

He turned his head and looked at me.

Shall we go faster? he said in an eager voice.

I smiled and said, You go ahead.

But he wouldn't.

Really, I said. I tapped him on the shoulder. Go ahead. I'll see you at the stretching area.

And off he went.

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[*] I must acknowlege my use of this term the fourteen year-old, for as generic as it might sound, I have lifted it directly from the stories periodically told by Brad Delong in his Semi-Daily Journal (for example, in this story about his fourteen year-old's tackling Roman history).

9:44:23 PM   permalink: []   feedback:   comments: []  

Gilliard on Hunter S. Thompson

Late last night the blogs started announcing the death of Hunter S. Thompson. This morning, Steve Gilliard had some thoughts on Thompson's passing, and at the end he pulled up Thompson's biting comments on the passing of Richard M. Nixon:

[on Nixon]: If the right people had been in charge of Nixon's funeral, his casket would have been launched into one of those open-sewage canals that empty into the ocean just south of Los Angeles. He was a swine of a man and a jabbering dupe of a president. Nixon was so crooked that he needed servants to help him screw his pants on every morning.

I didn't read Thompson when his Fear and Loathing was all the rage. But I can see from this snippet how his fury could light a fire. Fury like this is a rare thing.

Later today, Gilliard reflected at length about Hunter S. Thompson and on journalism, blogs and contemporary fiction. It's an excellent analysis on our culture and I suppose is a fair tribute to Thompson:

[on journalism and blogs]: Thompson had been a newspaperman, had worked for Time and hated it. He didn't fit into the neat box that people wanted to place journalists in. ... He was a refugee from American journalism, just like many bloggers are today. ...

Bloggers are not some new creation, but the newest set of the barbarians at the gates. They are the people who don't trust the system and it's artifacts. It is to writing, what rap is to music, the coming of democracy to a trade. What Thompson and his peers did in the 60's and 70's, we do today. But free of the constraints of editors and publishers and the need to hustle up work. ...

So you have journalists, Washington journalists, who report but do not question, getting squeamish when people do, like Helen Thomas, seeking to live off the handouts of their sources, and get the hand-fed scoop which will sell papers.

[on contemporary fiction]: And [you have] fiction writers more concerned with apartments and cheating mates than the world around them. ... Their self-absorption and lack of interest in the wider world. It is masturbation in print for the most part, and irrelevant. ... So when you need a brutal, honest fiction to deal with lives in Bush's America, and it's contradictions, you get bitter drivel.

[on blogs again]: The outlets to discuss American life are now closed off because [journalism] is afraid and [contemporary fiction] indifferent.

Which is why blogs are so popular. There is no other outlet to explain the contradictions in American life cleanly and clearly. The outcasts are more unwelcome now than ever in newsrooms battered by greedy owners and vindictive politics, fiction created to explain the anger at middle class suburbia. Honesty and truth have no place in either forum.

[and on Thompson's legacy]: It's odd to think of the outsider Thompson having won the day about what we call journalism, but blogging allows for a world of outlaw journalists, working cheap and fast ans supporting each other in ways he couldn't imagine. It's not a bad legacy.

3:10:50 PM   permalink: []   feedback:   comments: []