What makes Jeffrey run?

I wish my health could maintain itself without getting me involved

I have no idea how to exercise. As in, literally, I just don’t understand how to do it. I’ve never participated in any kind of sport or fitness regime - the closest I came was dance classes in college. For the first 30 or so years of my life, I relied on youthful metabolism and the hustle of a life in the theater to keep me fit. That worked until it didn’t. By the time I realized I needed to start doing something about it, I was at a loss. 

Every few years since then I’ve goaded myself into a bout of doomed effort. At one point it was a gym, but I hated the lights, the smell, the self-consciousness. I did yoga classes for a while, but then the pandemic happened, and I’m still not ready to hang out in a room full of sweating, heavy-breathing people. When faced with my latest personal health panic (nothing specific, just looming mortality), I’ve turned to what I’ve tried on numerous other occasions: running.

I’ve always hated running. When we had to do four turns around the field behind my middle school, my side would stitch up after the first lap and I’d have to walk the rest of the way while everyone sat on the sidelines and watched. When I’ve tried it again as an adult, I still got cramps, and now the pounding of my feet reverberates up through my ears and gives me a headache. Worst of all is the feeling that I’m responsible for keeping it up - I could stop at any step, and desperately want to, but no, I have to force myself to smother that desire and just push my future corpse forward Step. By. Endless. Agonizing. Step. 

So why do I keep trying? 

Because it’s that much less boring than my other options. 

It’s no secret that I love living in the city - my family is willing to pay astonishing amounts of money for the privilege. We’re fortunate enough to be able to afford a pretty nice house in most parts of the country, but instead we pony up the sort of monthly rent that would have made me choke if you told me 20 years ago. And one of the main reasons we do this is because there’s so much to LOOK at. 

Any stroll down a city block - even the one that you live on, which you look at every day - is filled with door-to-door surprises. You encounter different people, or the same people in different circumstances. Some have dogs. They put weird things out on the curb. Deliveries are being made all day. Sign and decorations go up. Plants bloom, or else they lose their leaves. The sun hits a window just so, illuminating everything on the block in a way that feels brand new. 

And then there’s the pleasure of hitting streets that you only see once every few months, or ever. Entire buildings appear and disappear. Businesses open and close. Street art emerges from the shadows. You catch a fortuitous glimpse into an open window or a gated yard. The stream of pedestrians begs the question of where they’re coming from, where they’re going. Cooking smells waft across the blocks. Gardens bloom out of nowhere. People leave books on their stoops. BOOKS, for god’s sake! 

I still find running exhausting and demoralizing. Sometimes it feels good when it’s done, but mostly I worry that with every step that I’m doing it all wrong - splintering my shins, taxing my lungs, overburdening my heart. I see the other runners pass me out, and they all seem thinner and faster and younger than I am, even when they’re not. I feel like a total fool. 

But when I open myself up to it, I get access to more of the city, at greater speed. It’s not as leisurely as a walk, and not every city block is a masterpiece, but look, I’m trying not to DIE here. I’ll enjoy whatever scenery I can. 

Here’s this week’s media report: 

BOOKS FINISHED

• Mr. Rinyo-Clacton’s Offer, by Russell Hoban: Most folks are familiar with Russell Hoban as the author of classic children’s books - especially Bedtime for Frances and its many badger-centered sequels. Well, in the ‘70s he decided to knock off the kidlit, move to the U.K., and start writing weird novels for adults - and it turns out they’re pretty great! This one, from 1998, is kind of a riff on the Faust story, in which the bizarrely-named title character (it’s the term for a kind of neolithic British pottery) offers to buy the narrator’s death. I wouldn’t say that anything that happens in the book is a surprise, yet it was a comforting if off-center pleasure to spend a couple of hundred pages seeing someone slowly emerge from a depression to decide life is worth living. Most of Hoban’s stuff is out of print in the U.S., but last year Penguin reissued a bunch of them in the U.K., and after ordering them online (they all sport great covers of work by the British pop artist Eduardo Paolozzi) I’ve been working my way through them - this was my third (after the brilliant Riddley Walker and the moving The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz). Very much an author worth exploring! 

• Kick the Latch, by Kathryn Scanlan: This is narrow but deep novella that blurs the lines between fiction and fact. The author interviewed a horse trainer named Sonia over several years and then wrote a lightly fictionalized version of her life story based on the transcripts. You never know exactly what’s true, but it all feels very real - from her childhood among rural Iowan eccentrics to a hard but satisfying life tending to horses across a range of midwestern race tracks, through to injury and tragedy and eventually the rich reward of a quiet life. But those broad outlines don’t capture the specificity of Sonia’s voice and experiences, which truly come to life on the page. Like Denis Johnson’s Train Dreams (which I discussed a few weeks back), it captures the sweep of an entire life - a uniquely American life, bound in space and time - in barely a hundred pages. 

• Tibet: Through the Red Box, by Peter Sís: I first read this book when it came out 25 years ago - I bought it as a gift for my sister when she was nine, and I was entranced by the nesting-box story and insanely detailed illustrations. Sís grew up in Czechoslovakia, where his father was a lauded documentary filmmaker. The Communist party decided to exploit his talents by sending him to China, where he was assigned to film the building of a highway into the hitherto isolated nation of Tibet. He was gone for much of Sís’s childhood, returning with stories that blended myth and memoir. This book stars with the adult Sís opening a red box full of his father’s memories, which tumble out across the pages in scratchy mandalas, palimpsest roomscapes, and miniature manuscript pages to create a singular document that makes turns the misconceptions of childhood into an urgent concern. My sister reminded me of this gift a couple of weeks ago, which prompted me to revisit it - I’m glad it stuck with her for so long. 

• The Emotional Lives of Teenagers, by Lisa Damour: Yes, Dash is almost a teen. I had read an excerpt from this book in an article somewhere, and Damour is right on the money. Take your kids’ emotions seriously, don’t panic when they have negative emotions (they’re supposed to!), and offer sympathy instead of advice, unless advice is asked for. God help us, we’ve been putting some of this stuff into practice, and it’s already defused many a situation. Good work, everyone! 

• Darkly She Goes, by Vincent Mallié and Hubert: I’m endlessly fascinated by the fact that, like Japan, French-speaking Europe has its own flourishing comics culture that is very distinct from anything we have in America. This is a fairly standard but quite enjoyable fantasy/horror story about a princess with the power to control animals and monsters. In its detailed but non-hyperbolic artwork and frank, unsentimental storytelling, it is, to me, much more enjoyable and accessible than whatever its mainstream U.S. equivalent might be. 

BOOKS STARTED

• God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, by Kurt Vonnegut: 

MOVIES

• After Hours (1985, dir. Martin Scorsese): What fun! A screwball caper with a knife’s edge, this is the epitome of the smug-yuppie-in-over-his-head genre. Even at 3am, I don’t think Soho was EVERY that empty in the ‘80s, but that’s fine, because the people who you do run into are some of the greatest character actors: Catherine O’Hara! Teri Garr! Cheech and Chong! Rosanna Arquette! John Heard (who never registered as interesting until this; though I did spill a plate of ribs on his lap during my short stint as a waiter in college)! Is it just a little tiny bit misogynistic? Possibly! But it’s hard to hate a movie that climaxes with an angry mob led by a sinister, slow-driving Mister Softee truck. It starts out as comedy and becomes surreal poetry by the end. Why didn’t Marty make more comedies???

Until next time…