A few years back I bought a jug of whole milk at the grocery store. I wasn’t really thinking about the “whole” thing, just grabbed the jug and threw it in the cart.
Growing up, we drank whole milk quite regularly. No problems. Then as 2% came on the market, our family adapted to that because my mother bought it. Occasionally she’d buy skim milk and one of my brothers would cry out in protest: “Mom! You bought chalk water again!” Nothing tasted worse than skim milk on Rice Krispies.
That’s one of the ways we all learn to deal with compromises in life. Our tastes sometimes shift out of choice, but at other times they change out of necessity.
A sliver of reality
It’s a plain fact that as we age, seemingly harmless mistakes can turn into genuine problems. A few years back I got a sliver in my middle finger that quickly produced a nasty infection. Had I not gotten it treated, the finger could have been lost. Lesson learned. Take slivers seriously.
Other mistakes have less serious yet equally distracting consequences. And that brings us to the primary content of the iced chai tea latte I was purchasing at a local coffee shop, and how that turned me into a wholly gaseous planet of my own.
For starters: I don’t like any sort of coffee. None. But chai tea is an effective compromise. The latte milk content enriches the experience. Typically I remember to request 2% milk, or the barista person asks for specifics. All good there.
But sometimes we all forget our respective roles at the counter, or assumptions get made about the desired contents. Then they can become a routine. That’s how the whole “whole milk” formula got started at my local coffee shop.
Having a blast
There was one major problem with consuming those whole milk-based-iced-chai-tea-lattes. Lactose intolerance. The whole milk was gassing me out fearsomely. My gut was going hog wild and that mean quite a few “leans” in the office chair. I kept the essential oils fan running full bore in my office even though the whole milk gas wasn’t making me stink up the place. I felt like I’d swallowed drops of Jupiter.
But tell me did the wind sweep you off your feet
Did you finally get the chance to dance along the light of day
And head back to the milky way
And tell me, did Venus blow your mind
Was it everything you wanted to find
And did you miss me while you were looking for yourself out there
This happened twice in as many weeks. So I stopped to think: What’s causing all this? It didn’t take long to figure it out. The only time I got gassy was when I visited the local coffee shop.
So it’s 2% milk for me at all times now. I’m tired of sitting a half inch off my chair on a cushion of expelled air.
Farting is fun sometimes, and it’s funny at others. But not when you’re trying to get work done and live in peace within your own space.
Being wholly gaseous is only fun if you’re the actual planet Jupiter and that’s because it’s made mostly of hydrogen and helium with what looks like a little whole milk mixed in.
But Jupiter can afford to fart, because it sits out there in the blackness of space without anyone to really check whether it is stinking up its part of the solar system or not. And when Jupiter farts, it makes really beautiful little squiggles on the surface.
When I fart nothing really artistic happens on the surface of my body. The best I can do is wave my hand, swear on a Bible not to drink whole milk again, and get back to work.
Being wholly gaseous is simply not all that it’s cracked up to be.
That’s what happens when people in the back room at the news room get giggling about the thrust of a storm. Only to Sue and I, the image means we’ll not likely head to Wilmington, North Carolina for scheduled mid-October Half Ironman. She’s doing the whole race and I’m booked to run the half-marathon as part of a Triathlinlaws team with my sister-in-law Julie Dunn.
And I just read a Chicago Tribune and also a 
So we can’t be sure that North Carolina has done a damned thing about its hog and turkey industries. After all, the rest of the states in the deep Southeast United States are not exactly known for their progressive regulatory policies. Excuse the broad categorizations, but Southerners generally do not like to be told what to do either. Consider the lyrics from Lynyrd Skynyrd’s song “Sweet Home Alabama,”
So I’m thinking about the scenario down there near Wilmington, North Carolina. The hurricane is supposed to strike full force against the coast, then hang around for several days pumping thirty inches of rain into the landscape. I’m picturing hogs again floating down the river in the company of dead, sodden turkeys rolling like huge, bloated pillows of sodden feathers. The world of all that dead meat will travel up the seaboard and reach migrating turkey vultures all the way up in Vermont. The rush south on migration will be fantastic to watch as th
So I’m not sure I’ll be advising my wife and sister-in-law to go swimming in the ocean come mid-October. The levels of fecal pollution along the seaboard may be equal to those flowing down the Potomac from Washington several hundred miles to the north. Up there the problem isn’t hog shit, but daily torrents of 
I recall standing there at the start of the race with all the other sixty-plus dudes in their wetsuits. Several were stretching stubborn body joints. One turned to me and told me all about his back problems.
There’s a power struggle going on at CBS as a result of 
For example, consider the actions of conservative whip Newt Gingrich, the man who claims to know what’s best for America. Here’s how his personal life was described by a simple Google search factoid: “In 1984, Jackie Battley Gingrich told The Washington Post that the divorce was a “complete surprise” to her. According to Jackie, in September 1980, Gingrich and their children visited her while she was in the hospital, recovering from surgery for cancer, and Gingrich wanted to discuss the terms of their divorce.”
Issues of moral equivalency are hard for some to sort out. But those of us that have been faced with temptations and have chosen the right path actually do know the difference. When a casual friend long ago confessed that he was having an affair outside of marriage, he asked what I thought about the situation. I replied, “Well, when you’re in a marriage, it’s like a road map: you know which way to go. But when you have an affair then all the roads are open.” He broke off the affair not long after that.
Perhaps some men would have wandered off and found sex somewhere else. I know more than a few who did under much less stressful circumstances. Their marriages are no more.
. Residents in the homes along the fairways were treated to the sight of naked young women giving lap dances to men on golf carts. It took a few phone calls and protests, but those events were eventually banned at most courses.
That is not an American virtue in action. That is the death of a republic in process. The same thing has happened with the twisted ways our gun laws have been turned into vigilante justice. Now our public education is being torqued the same way, and our environmental protection policies too. Even the Department of Energy is closing down valuable opportunities to encourage use of renewable and low-fuel energy solutions.
Much has also been made of the comparison between well-compensated NFL players such as Colin Kaepernick and the poorly compensated people serving in the military––and veterans to boot. But America is conflicted on that issue from many fronts. Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders once stated, “If you can’t take care of your veterans, you should not go to war.”
Recently a young runner friend who is just a year out of college made a confession on Facebook. He related his experience with depression and urged others to seek help and counseling.
That winter was cold and snowy. We trained on country roads in the dark, racing along as we always did at 6:00 per mile pace no matter what the conditions. Between my generally dark mood and the relative stupidity of what we were doing, I began to complain. Perhaps I should have approached that a bit differently, engaging in some sort of “off session” discussion to moderate our approach.
When the spring track season ended, I had fully begin to emerge from the grips of depression. At home for the summer, I took a look in the mirror and did not like what I saw. My thick hair framed an extremely narrow face. My thick glasses made me look like Napoleon Dynamite. The Lasse Viren beard I’d grown for inspiration that winter suddenly looked desperate and dumb.
This morning as I ran my typical 8:30-9:00 pace for four miles in the early September humidity, I thought back to the training I was doing 40 years ago, in 1978. That was the year our college team took second place in the NCAA Division III national cross country meet. I ran 25:12 for 8K as our fifth man. It was quite an experience.
So this morning I had one of those weird synapses in which you wonder what it would be like to time travel. What would it be like to go back and have that kind of speed again? That endurance. There’s a part of me that wishes that was possible.
About ten years ago I attended the funeral for the sister of a friend. She’d gotten caught up in alcohol consumption and never wrestled free of it. My friend’s wife had also been an alcoholic for years, and over the stretch of several high school reunions she made no secret of the fact that she’d had a high school crush on me. She’d get drunk and start telling me (in front of many others) that she wanted to go somewhere and fuck.
How I wish, how I wish you were here
Yet I recall feeling very much alive and yet wanting to be in a different place one day while listening to those exact same Pink Floyd lyrics floating down to a running track on a hot spring day in April, 1979. The song was blasting out the window of a dorm room on the college campus where our track meet was being held. The hipsters of the day were hanging out their windows smoking pot and drinking beer while watching the track and field spectacle playing out below them.
The farmer dropped me off where the road to his property crossed the main highway. I was officially standing in the middle of nowhere. The only thing I carried with me was a silver Frank Shorter running bag with that logo of the famous runner printed on its side.
There is nothing like a spell of near silence to create tension in the mind of a lonesome journeyman. The roads definitely got quieter as the evening traffic ebbed. Crickets were joined in their songs of seeming solidarity when in fact it is the dirge of competitive fury and the right to breed. Large crickets will catch and kill smaller specimens, biting off their heads territorial defense. I’d seen it in firsthand in field biology and learned that nature in many other ways is the most unkind host in all the universe.
Then a small red sedan pulled over to the side of the road and before it reached me, flashed its lights to garner my attention. I grabbed my bag and trotted back to meet the vehicle by the road. To my surprise the driver was a woman in her late 20s. She reached over to roll down the window and said. “Where are you going?”
So I’m sure that some small synapse in his brain at least considered the possible response when he clicked on my name and sent a pic with the face of former football player Colin Kaepernick photoshopped into a Dallas Cowboys cheerleader outfit with a caption that read something like, “He’s found a new team.”
Well, I’ve sorted through a midden close to my own home. The forest preserve where our high school cross country meets were held was once the site of a farmstead. There was a small home that stood near the railroad tracks. It was perched on the edge of a steep embankment. All down the hill there were half-buried remnants of antique bottles, old metal cans and whatever else the long lost occupants of that home did not want.
