I’m having a night of darkness. No biggie, right? The night is SUPPOSED to be dark. The sun has set, the supermoon is a thing of history for another few decades and in the case of Laughlin, NV, the clouds have blown in as the winds whip through the desert. The partially burned out neon signs of the casinos on the Colorado River can’t overcome the dark.
But this isn’t just about the physical, environmental darkness. I personally, to bastardize a Philip Marlow phrasing, found a pool of darkness open up beneath me and so I dove right in. Emotionally and psychologically and, yes, calorically dark. I had what can only be described as one of the worst dinners I’ve ever had – cold food, bland, and improperly prepared. I should have said something but instead ate the mush of gruel while I filled out an email to the restaurant management, passive-aggressively suggesting the food was the worst I’d had in ages. I have since found myself spiraling into a later night, additional junk food binge eat, further compounding the afternoon’s fool hardy snack attacks.
A series of bad calls tonight included actual phone calls that led to blind alley dead ends. A stab at social media cleverness scorched the cyberEarth of commentary, an awkward exchange about literally nothing of import but somehow magnified by internet protocols into SOMETHING OF GREAT IMPORT.
I can’t sleep despite miles and hours logged, a hamster on the wheel of life spinning and sweating but making no actual forward progress.
I told myself once long ago not to shirk the truth even if it painted me in a wallowingly poor light. It’s been a bad night of travel and life, through no one’s fault but my own. Yet despite seeing that, despite knowing that, I wrestle with thoughts and dreamless fits of unconsciousness that only deepen a sense of loss… both in a directional and moral compass orientation.
So having “slept” little more than an hour or two, I am once more awake and waiting to go at the starting line. What the race in nearby Arizona will bring I cannot say; I hope I can rally and at the very least control poor eating impulses. But it’s a slippery slope in balancing the needs of running with the needs of the body and soul.
What a pretentious bunch of hooey. No wonder I’m struggling at the moment, deluded with faux thoughts of meaning and self-import.
Perhaps 26.2 miles will help clear my head.
***
All week I’ve been trying to reset my iPod. It was a gift from a now ex-girlfriend from Christmases long past. The volume buttons are seemingly jammed and the iOS software is stuck in a perpetual reset loop. That may be the greatest metaphor for my own life I’m likely to encounter…
I’ve tried letting the battery completely drain, recharging it, plugging it into my laptop and attempting factory resets. No amount of fiddling has resurrected it and I suspect after years of service it has finally given up the ghost.
The short of it (too late as this tale has already prattled on for far too long), is that I’ve been running my loops with Mainly Marathons this week sans music. It’s been nice to cheer folks on and to hear the course sounds … but as the lengthy wallow above can attest, I’ve gotten my head all screwed up at the moment and could use some iTunes to disconnect mind and body for a bit at the race venue.
I suppose I could load music onto my phone but I like to use it as my running camera; headphones in phone’s jack adds a logistical tangle that I’m unprepared to unravel time and again to snap shots.
I’ve tried bidding on replacement iPods on eBay but keep getting outbid in the closing moments. Come to think of it, perhaps THAT is a fitting metaphor for my life…
***
But I digress. The wind has picked up since Mesquite. And the temperatures here in Bullhead City, Arizona, are not surprisingly cooler given MM warned us of this fact. Looking ahead to this adventure’s end in Nashville on Sunday, the lows there are in the 30s… and the low, low 30s at that.
I’m feeling the changes in weather.
Fair is foul and foul is fair…
I await the dawn, perhaps with no more sleep than what I’ve garnered already.
What a night. What a dark, dark night.