Addendum

I spent the summer of 1976 visiting my parents in Santa Margherita, Italy. I filled my head with Hellenic history reading two books on classical Greece, H.D. F. Kitto's The Greeks and another history of the times. I also read Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morals. The passage quoted above resonated with me, remaining in my mind while my life strayed very far from my intellectual and emotional roots. At 21, I understood the relationship between clarity of effort and human redemption. Camus' Sisyphus had blessed me with that insight three years previously. It required four reads of that essay, the last to Bela Bartok's Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta for the insight to dawn.

Nietzsche's view is more positive. Sisyphus is merely conscious. Nietzschean man creates. Nietzsche answers the question what make live worth living: “virtue, art, music, dance, reason, spirituality”. What is transfiguring is divine. Thirty-one years ago, I picked a tangential path and became a warrior.

Kitto remarks that Athens created great culture and Sparta created great men. Thirty-one years ago I left Athens to transfigure myself in Sparta. Heart and temperament have brought the warrior slowly back to Athens, now a mix of both. Plato was statesman, warrior, and philosopher. These roles are not mutually exclusive. This year I realize that my remaining life is about creating a new synthesis, one more closely aligned to Athens. This goal defines my 2009.

12/25/2009 - Year Ending....

Politics

I am astonished that the airport in Atlanta charges for internet access. In the 21st Century, wi-fi access is a basic convenience. Charging for it is on par with charging to sip from a water fountain. Come to think of it, I do not recall seeing any water fountains, just vendors. Georgia must be a laissez-faire free-market state. Laissez-faire in investment markets brought us the Great Bush Recession of 2007, which brought us the worst unemployment numbers and fiscal deficits since that other darling of the conservative Right - Reagan - was president. Good news. After four straight quarters of contraction, the economy grew in the third quarter of the Obama presidency. In November, personal saving rose from their negative values of recent years to 4.7%.

Personal

I sit in Heartsfield Airport on my way to Panama City Beach to help Dyana and her husband move to the DC area. Dyana's accepted a promotion and relocation to Washington. She and Phil will live with us while they sell their home in Florida and buy one in Maryland. This weekend I fly to Florida to drive her SLK 350 to her new home. After the unpleasant experience I had shipping my SL from Florida, she's reluctant to ship her car.

It been a tepid year. After lining up three pretty little A's at Johns Hopkins, I found it necessary to withdraw from my Computer Architectures course. It relied too heavily on the undergraduate hardware course, even using the same text book. The graduate course presumed intimate familiarity with topic and text and I could just barely keep up. Thus, I withdrew and will take the undergraduate course first. The decision to do so was understandable in light of circumstances, but left an unpleasant taste of setback.

Marathon

I ran a PR at the Marine Corps Marathon, but it was a disappointment. In 2009, I ran almost 1,500 miles in pursuit of a Boston qualifying time. I'm certainly in the best running shape of my life. At the MCM, however, the 4 hour pacer inexplicably ran the first hilly eight miles at roughly a 8:30 pace. The resulting toll the hills took on my legs came back to haunt me around mile 21. The first spasm of cramps in my right hamstring hit me suddenly clamping my leg in a vise grip. I caught the attention of some nearby EMTs with my gasp of pain. I was immediately slowed to a walk.What followed was an excruciating 5.2 miles in an attempt to walk as fast as possible to the finish line. Any running would set my right hamstring into agonizing spasms. I crossed the finish in 4:15 vice my goal sub-4:00. I am sure that I could have maintained a flat 9 minute pace through the race.

Family

So Denise and I have spent the past 4 weeks clearing out 30 years of flotsam from the basement in order to make room for our daughter and son in law. Our gym is in the only finished room in the basement. This room will become their bedroom. We will finish the basement, architected around a new, large room destined to be the new gym. In the long run, the new arrangement will be a boon. The current gym is just a little small for me to be hefting my weights while Denise stretches. We always knew we could do this, we just did not expect to do it under a 12/31/2009 deadline. Dyana and Phil arrive New Year's Eve. Their bedroom must be cleared by this date. Of course, my training program has been devastated.

Summation

It has been a year of progress in singular directions. I did not achieve what I wanted, or even what I am capable of achieving. Yet, the obedience was maintained, strength and intellect grown. I am better prepared for 2010 because of 2009, but I have that unhappy feeling of having fell short this year.

Photo

After missing two MCMs due to injury, I returned this year. Kathrine Switzer and her husband, Roger Robinson, were signing books at the expo. I first had the pleasure to speak with the effervescent Kathrine at the 2008 Marine Corps Half Marathon Expo when buying her book, 26.2 Marathon Stories. It still retains a prominent place on my office credenza. On this occasion, the digital Nikon had proper settings and Denise was able to get some gratifying photographs of my conversation. On the left is the history-making Kathrine Switzer. On the right is Denise grinning happily as she awaits her free back massage. Behind her is a map of what awaited me the next morning.

5/11/2009 - Numbers from NPR:

This is a topic for March Madness. 75% of NFL players declare bankruptcy within 2 years of retirement. 60% of NFL players do so within 5 years of retirement. This came from an interview with a Sport Illustrated columnist who had just published an article in that magazine on the exploitation of young athletes. Parents and educational systems are raising children for gridiron glory while completely neglecting the knowledge and skills for leading lives as adults contributing to their society. This is naked exploitation. From baseball parents to rabid alumni, the goal is self-pride for the adult, not preparing the young person for life.

Nearly 20% of adults working 40 or more hours a week have no health care insurance. 50% of personal bankruptcies are due to medical costs. To his discredit, Mitt Romney dismissed the nation's first attempt to remedy the misery of millions by labeling “Hillary-care”. Forty years ago, the Right realized they could close intelligent discussion on an issue and swing the debate their way by crafting a clever, pejorative label for ideas and people they opposed. The most interesting example of this was the “bleed-heart” label applied to liberals. While the Right claims to be the party of Christianity, it used a symbol of Christian tenderness to lampoon opponents. Brutish right-wing machismo trumps Christian sentiment.

Last year, the four “killingest” nation-states were, in order, China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the United States. In this country, Texas led the way in capital punishments. Our religious Right makes us so like the nations we despise the most.

On this 150th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin, I am reminded of a sardonic comment in an article in The Economist about how only in Iran and the United States is evolution a matter of political debate. The dialog, occasionally shouting match, over the accuracy of Evolutionary theory between the Religious Right Wing and humanists is quite useless. The Religious Right Wing is no more likely to concede the scientific foundations of Evolution than Iranian mullahs will concede that America might not be the “Great Satan”. That they posit Creationism as science it proof that they have no understanding of the scientific method whatsoever. Richard Dawkins is correct in point of fact if tactless when he states: “In order not to believe in evolution you must either be ignorant, stupid or insane.”

2/16/2009 - Living Life

Yesterday, I ran the 48-th running of the Washington's Birthday Marathon. I had a suspicion that the roads behind our home in the agricultural research station were the site of a marathon for years. The spray painted markings, "M" with an integer between 2 and 24, were clear evidence to me. Denise would dismiss my speculations as one of my usual running projective fantasies. I found the race web site this winter by Googling various combinations of the words "marathon", "Beltsville" and others. My running fantasies were vindicated. A marathon through the woods and fields of the research station on February 15 could only be hilly, cold, and desolate at best, brutal at worst. I had no desire to run it.

Sunday, I woke to a cold, clear dawn. The sky was clear blue, temperature in windy 30's. Driven by a homing-like instinct I stuffed down a large breakfast and made my way to the Greenbelt Youth Center to register. Denise and I found an amazing group of people there, roughly 250 runners, almost all seasoned marathoners and ultra runners. Many were routine veterans of the JFK 50-Miler. Whereas a Boston Marathon jacket is a rare sighting at most large races, they were a commonplace in Greenbelt that morning. During the pre-race wait and the occasional conversation during the subsequent, challenging 26 miles, I met no one with fewer than 7 marathons' experience.

The race was sunny, windy, cool, and hilly. I had planned to run it as a training run, but my excitement and the fitness of the field goaded me into racing it. It was a beautiful, brutal run. The first three quarter's mile was mostly up hill out of Greenbelt. Cresting a hill at the neighborhood boarder, the agricultural research facilities to the north opened up roughly 130 feet below us. A half mile descent followed as I realized this would be the beginning of mile 25 on the return. Upon reaching Beaver Dam Road, we began a seven-mile counterclockwise loop that we would run three times. We ran eastwards following the southern side of the tree line that protected us from the wind. On most of the route, the trees did not shade us and the sun warmed us to the point of perspiration. Beaver Dam is mostly a succession of small steep hills. We turned north along Springfield road, the hills lengthening with decreasing slope. Crossing fields, we got our first shots of the wind from the north-west again, drying our perspiration. The road entered copses that protected us from the wind only to re-expose us minutes later. At Powder Mill Road, we turned west, for two miles of running into the wind. Powder Mill is mostly long, smooth, ascents and descents. At the visitor center, we turned south briefly to re-join Beaver Dam. The loop had the interesting effect of giving the runner a inkling of what was coming up. He has a direct experience of waning strength as miles and laps go by. Future challenges melted into past obstacles. At my last pass by the visitor center, I knew it would be mostly downhill, to mile 25. I can easily admit I walked the last, steeper half of the ascent back into Greenbelt. I think I was walking faster than I could have run. After that, it was mostly a 0.2-mile downhill run to the finish line.

I do not remember actually seeing the finish line, just hearing Denise calling out my time. The voice I have known for over thirty years sounded particularly sweet as I numbly sprinted across the finish.

I do not think the Washington's Birthday Marathon is a particularly good place to come to try for a PR. However, an older oriental man minutes ahead of me qualified for Boston that day. I ran it 4 minutes off my marathon PR, without training specifically for this race. My thesis in running is that achieving a level of fitness that allows the individual to run 26.2 miles on any weekend and remain consistent with the responsibilities of a professional and personal life, and graduate school is possible, even desirable.

The hardship of racing a marathon being what it is, I am not training this morning. As I share this, I am sitting cross-legged on the floor in our home gym. Denise is on the treadmill in front of me doing her run while I keep her company. We have the Nova documentary on marathon training playing on the LCD TV.

12/31/2008 - Dark Play for Dark Times

At the end of the December, 31, 2008 matinée of Peter Shaffer's Equus, Thea Sharrock, the director, came out on stage for some New Year's comments and to offer congratulations for a highly successful revival of this play from 1973. He observes that Equus is a dark play for dark times, then goes on to congratulate the young cast for their success bringing this production back to life. In retrospect, I find it ironic that I picked a quote by Nietzsche to define 2009. This play's critique of society, Christianity, politics, sexuality, and the role of the individual in society are very Nietzschean.

I have some history with the text of the play. When I left the world in 1976, the University of Florida campus was steeped in Hermann Hesse, Freud's Civilization and its Discontents, and the Lord of the Ring. Freshmen English courses were reading Equus. Six years later, when I came back to the world, the student population had been lobotomized by six years of the Reagan Administration. You could actually meet female students who acknowledged they were on campus for an “Mrs” degree. Students buzzed about The Cars instead of The Glass Bead Game.

I cannot do this play justice by casual retrospective comments. It levels a scatter gun across bourgeois society that is so broad that it would take hours to synopsize. Nietzsche and plays like Equus represent a destination I turned away from in 1976. Thirty-three years later, I feel my life's path turning to this direction again.

I do not know what it means.