I either forgot to “stop” it or I had neglected to charge it for a few days. Or both. Or neither. Whatever the “how” it came to pass, the reality was my Garmin had no juice. The GPS watch had no get up and go… and the whole morning neither did I. But at that particular moment I had the oomph to get out the door… and I didn’t want to wait the hour or so for the thing to power up as I could tell my enthusiasm and motivation was waning even as I stood at the dead screen before me.
So I went out sans watch. I know there are a lot of bloggers and commentators and people both smart and dumb who will say one should go out sometimes without a timing device and just run. It’s a reminder of the spirit of freedom or some such. But me? I just kept glancing down at my bare wrist and thinking, “Man, I feel slow… am I slow? Or am I fast?”
I have a poor judge of time and space and distance. Even as a child when confronted with weights and measures in elementary school, I could never decide what weighed only a couple of grams and what weighed 10 grams. I could stick the item on the balancing scale thing and tell you, but my internal guess-timator was broke… or never worked in the first place.
Ditto with space — is that pole 10 yards away or 50? If I’m on a football field I could tell you by glancing at the sideline markers. And roadsides with mile markers help sometimes… but even then I can be as poor a judge of distance as I am at times of people.
And so it was that I pondered the nature of my shortcomings, the thought that in the coming electro-pocalypse that will wipe out all technology, I’m really, really, ridiculously screwed. I have a black thumb that kills the healthiest of plants. I have zero practical skills (were I on CBS’s SURVIVOR I don’t know what I’d have to do to get fire but I assume it would involve an eagle ripping out my liver every day). And I have no idea how much anything weighs, how far away things are, and how long it takes to do something.
On the plus side, I checked the clock in my house when I got back. It was 11:39 AM. But since I don’t know when I started that information is practically worthless…..
My Garmin has now finished charging.
Thus, thoughts of the electro-pocalypse fade into the background, lurking, ready to re-emerge when the sun sets, though gazing at the sky I have no idea when that will be. Later for sure. Close enough, right?