While the rest of the world spins around their own issues and life, I try to revolve slowly enough around mine that I can saturate myself in the insanity and roll around in the daily issues I feel I alone face, until I become a spongy mass that can bounce easily off the walls without doing too much damage to myself.

That’s a new/old concept for me.  Years ago I meditated, walked for miles up in the neighborhood of the old digs after I got off work, headed for Red Rock Canyon and Calico Basin before the sun started to come over the horizon, absorbed as much wine as I could, and worked all the wrinkles out of my brain and worked as much animosity as I could out of my system that I felt for a lot of the high limit poker players so I could blissfully pass out in a coma and get up the next day to start again.

Somewhere along the way, I let all of that slip into the past, including the meditation and feel good miles I put on my feet trekking the trails of nature.  Those are the parts I missed the most over the last few years.

I hit stages of feeling so crappy that I often wondered if I’d just die in my sleep — that in the last seven years or so — and managed to look up my old friend depression a zillion times or so (yeah, I’m prone to it) and rolled the crappy and depression up into a raggedy-assed package tied together with kid stress, money stress, and grandkid stress. No matter what anyone says, or how they try to act like they’re immune, your kids are your kids for life and even though I’m not interested in living their lives and what they put themselves through, I still worry about them…I can build a massive volcano ready to break through the thin crust and explode molten all over the world out of that stress for my boys at times.

So…the last few years have found me having some horrible times with surgeries, non-feel goods, and feeling like my hands are tied and my feet are stuck in concrete galoshes.

Lately I’ve been crawling out of the pit I dug for myself and started to take the deep breath, relax, deep breath, relax, and get back into an exercise routine that has already made me feel much better about life in general.  I’m just getting started.

This is a poster of the Bloomsday Run held in Spokane WA every year — a friend of mine bought it for me and we ran it separately but together that year.  It was my 40th birthday.  Hard to believe that in less than a week it was 28 years ago. When I left the old digs and moved into the coach, I put a bunch of stuff in a tube, this was rolled up in it:

An interesting not on the Bloomsday, the year I ran/stumbled/wogged it, there were over 54,000 other runners in the mix.  It started on three separate streets and converged about 1/2 of a mile later.  There are three hills in the course, one is called the Doomsday.  If you hit the bottom of it about 4 miles into run and look up at it, and were in the shape I was in (newby, quit smoking about 6 months before, exhausted already), you’d know they aptly named it.  It’s about 3/4 of a mile long.

The fun side of it is that some people dressed up for it in costumes, some had hauled couches and chairs out along the route and wore costumes as they cheered us on, others squirted you with garden hoses when you ran by (thank God) and others ran with you for a minute offering you a cup of water.  It was one of most momentous occasions of my whole life.

I made it.

My time sucked, but if you crossed the finish line, you got a post card with your time, your standings in your age group, your standings over all, and whether you died at the end — just kidding.  About 6 people did die, that’s the downside of those events, people just don’t prepare for the stress they are going to put their body through. And the ones that went down, I believe were heart attack victims.

On the upside, it was the largest timed road race in America back then. The biggest race was the Bay to Breakers in San Francisco that year where over 76,000 runners registered for it but they figured a lot more than that ran it, they just didn’t register.  It wasn’t timed though, not like Bloomsday, with a report on your finish.

In thinking back on it, life should be like the Bloomsday, when you’re gasping for air and your brain is telling you can’t do it, someone on the sidelines needs to scream, “COME ON, YOU’RE DOING GREAT!” and hand you that cup of water or hose you down so reality sets in.

You can do it! Just start moving forward, that’s what I’m doing and it feels kinda good.