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captainsblogRandom things from the end of my fortnight of hellish commitments- which settled down, largely, at the end. Wednesday's court hearing got postponed; Thursday's never even got on the calendar; today's early one took all of five minutes once I got down there. It was pure joy sitting at my desk for an entire day Wednesday and just. Doing. WORK! without having artificial commitments to be in place X to do thing Y for Z (or more likely Z-squared) minutes.
Thursday, I got enough done, and had enough off my plate, to do something I can't remember ever doing in quite the same way:
I do a high-intensity interval workout a couple times a week. Most of its treadmill components are short- running between your "base" pace (mine's just under 5 mph) and "pushing" a mile above that for 1 to 3 minute intervals, with some "all out" sprints (2 mph above base) of 30 to 60 seconds mixed in.
Not this time. This was a straight one-mile run at push, followed by a row break, then a half-mile run at the push pace. I don't think I have ever before maintained a speed above 5 mph for an entire mile, inside or out, without slowing down at least briefly. But I did. It wound up taking just over 11 minutes. Then, the half-mile took just over 5, since I upped the speed a little since the distance was half. Do that five times outside and I'll do a Turkey Trot in under an hour, which I've never done.
The one odd thing? The heart rate zones. The monitor was working for once, and I only got into the 84-plus percent of maximum heart rate for 9 minutes of the 23 allocated for the mile, the half, and the stuff in between. It climbed slowly and steadily, but never got much below 80 percent or above about 86. Varying the speed must have more of an effect than I realized.
Oh, and I knew I was gonna be sore. But that didn't kick in until this morning, and a hot bath cleared most of it. We had other things to do last night.
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We are blessed here with a vibrant literary community, some coming out of the dozen or so university or college English departments, but also a non-profit called the Just Buffalo Literary Center. They've been sponsoring reading and writing opportunities for students and lovers of the craft, and for many years have had an ambitious series of lectures by renowned authors, held at (and filling) the Philharmonic's home at Kleinhans Music Hall. This was our first year as subscribers, and we got to three of the four presentations between fall and spring, the final one coming last night with a Man Booker Prize/MacArthur genius grant winner named George Saunders. He's been a New Yorker regular, an occasional late night TV guest, and has taught creative writing at Syracuse University for years, but his talk last night about his latest work- Lincoln in the Bardo, a ghost story about the dying-too-young son of Abraham Lincoln- resonated with his connections to Rochester in places and years where I was, or might have been, at or near the same time.
Saunders had an engineering background, and his journey took him to oil fields in Sumatra, and to at least one slaughterhouse ("knuckle-puller" is a job title), before finally landing him in SU graduate school for his writing and, not long after, in a Corporate Woods of Brighton office park (the same one I would toil in from 1995 to 2003) doing technical writing for the likes of Kodak. A longtime Rochester journalist told the tale a few years back, describing the influence Rochester's environs had on him:
“You go from Corporate Woods in (Brighton), past six-foot-high cattails, to the highway and Kodak Park, which is kind of Willy Wonka with methylene chloride. You can drive a straight line, six miles, and see all of these different levels of America. Different tastes and pop culture. You drive past malls and pioneer cemeteries next to a car wash,” he says. “It’s such a funny mix of the American topography. It supercharged my understanding of the American dilemma. Those things are still in my work.”
He found his groove as a writer while word-doodling during his transcription of a corporate conference call, and that eventually turned into his first collection of short storie- one of them loosely tied to Lincoln called CivilWarLand in Bad Decline. Then, probably around the time I was working in Corporate Woods myself, he got a call out of the blue from Ben Stiller. Yes, that Ben Stiller. He'd only just broken out as a director as well as a star-star-star (oddly, we watched his directorial debut Reality Bites the night before George's talk, not having any idea of his connection to the actor); he was calling to say he'd optioned the book and wanted to make a movie out of it.
Saunders told us how they had to ask their best friend, a dentist, if they could borrow his minivan for the visit. Jeff Spevak picks it up from there:
Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson are strolling through the quiet grounds of Genesee Country Village & Museum. Stiller has just bought the rights to CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, and he wants to see the inspiration for the short story about a failing theme park. The park is relatively tourist-free at the moment, and only one person recognizes Stiller. As this is 1997, Wilson is still an unknown actor, so no one recognizes him; he stops to get a fake vintage photo taken of himself in a fake Civil War uniform.
And certainly no one recognizes the fellow wandering alongside them, the author of CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, George Saunders.
Some 16 years later, Saunders still escapes widespread recognition. But his critically acclaimed short stories have created a second level of notoriety. There he was, this past January, yukking it up with Stephen Colbert on that hippest of absurdist-news platforms, The Colbert Report, after Saunders’ latest collection of stories, Tenth of December, had just been declared by The New York Times magazine “the best book you will read this year.”
Far as I know, the movie has never been made. But the story, like so many of those reduced to pages by this author, will always stick with me. We now have his more recent Lincoln piece to enjoy.
He also told a frightening-in-retrospect story of how we might never have heard this talk. Some years back, he'd tried cutting out alcohol for a bit, but wound up at a holiday party where the main grape was something called Boone's Farm. He indulged a bit. He then went home, went into the bathroom, blacked out and hit his head on the edge of the bathtub. His wife heard it and rescued him from further damage, but one millimeter to either side and maybe not so good an outcome. On our way home from the venue, I stopped at an Elmwood Avenue late-night liquor shop, and repeated the story to the cashier. He'd never heard of Boone's Farm.
The world will not suffer from this loss.
----
That late night led to a not-so-early morning here. My one and only court, it of the five minutes, wasn't until 10 this morning. After that, Rochester awaited for the third time in seven days, but as briefly as ever. I had an overdue appointment with my own dentist there (everything's fine, and no, he wasn't George's dentist back in the day), a quick meetup with a bankruptcy client, but then it was back on the road to get back to downtown Buffalo before 5. Today was the last day of Eleanor's show, and they needed pieces picked up by the end of the day, so I switched cars with her at Wegmans around 3, got to the gallery a bit past 4, and the piece was safely home by 5. She has two others which are now framed and waiting to be picked up, so more of this will lie ahead.
Tomorrow is Seinfeld Saturday- the part of Holy Week where nothing happens. I am looking forward to something similar;)