Notes from the Red Bird House

I thought I'd be impressed with Iceland. I mean otherwise why would I have come here? I suppose it'll happen one of these days, one of these travels. I'll pick a destination that disappoints. That'll have to wait for another time. Iceland (Well, Reykjavik specifically) rocks. Austere, yet friendly. Forbidding, yet warm. A long-term stay is surely not for the woosy among us. It takes a hardiness, of spirit, mind, and body, I should think, to survive here. Winter is just now coming - Saturday being its first official day in Iceland - in October. My guess, though I have nothing to back it up, is that it'll last until April, the end of April. Six full months of absolute cold, stormy cold, severe cold. Hell, if it's cold now, I can only imagine what February is like. Nonetheless, native Icelanders, the intrepid descendents of Vikings, a heritage they seem insanely proud of (and why shouldn't they be?), will roll with it. These are people who swim in the ocean o...

New places, by and large, aren't my favorite. Then why do I love travel? Patience. As they say, "Wait for it..." Whenever I arrive in a new city, I am instantly uncomfortable. In other words, my comfort zone is blown. I'm confused, anxious, unhappy. Everything is...well...foreign. I don't recognize anything - not one landmark or one street. Without Google Maps, I am lost. North and South blur, east and west, too (Who am I kidding? Even with Google Maps, it's all a blur. What in the Hell direction am I supposed to walk? I can't tell you how many times I walk ten steps in the wrong direction only to reverse course and realize I'm still not going the right way).  When I step off the bus, as I did in Reykjavik, or exit the train station, as I've done just about everywhere else, I tell myself that if I can find my hotel, I never have to  leave it. I can close the door and be safe. I have to play mind games in the beginning. I have to. Otherwise the f...

I wonder when I'll stop having these bouts of anxiety. So this time it hit me somewhere over Canada about the time "Deadpool 2" ended and I had to go in search of something else to watch. With my attention freed up for the first time in a few hours, I had nothing else to think about. What in the f*** was I doing going to Iceland? To run? For a brief moment I doubted my actual sanity. What had I been thinking? Of course the pre-flight graphic on the video screen that touted Iceland as the third windiest place in the world - something I hadn't realized nor researched (much like the seven mountains in Bergen) - made me pucker a little but the thought - the actual thought - that I'd somehow f***ed up didn't occur to me until much later. More than I can even recollect ran across my addled brain - in no particular order - You checked a bag?!? What in the f*** did you do that for? What if it doesn't show up? What if the collection of the bag slows you down? Di...

They say it kind of snarky, sarcastic. "Yep, just living the dream." Like they are doing anything but living a dream. A nightmare perhaps but not a dream. I always have to wonder, though. If life is so awful, so un-dreamlike, why don't they do something to change it? I suppose they are mired, stuck in a life they spent years dreaming of and pursuing, and have absolutely no idea how to escape. If they even know escape is possible. Most of them are living some incarnation of the American Dream - education, job, house, marriage, family - and it's nothing like they imagined it would be. "I guess this is all there is...," they think. "Unless I win the lottery, beat the house in Vegas." Of course they never play the lottery, never go to Vegas. They merely sit tangled up in a shitty status quo and snark about how they are "living the dream." I feel for them. It would be hard not to. They're miserable. They've made a choice, made a bed ...

"I love this powerful statement: 'Define yourself.' I rehearsed it a million times during the 2005 Chicago Marathon."  ~ D. Kastor I can tell you the last time I ran long because it's also the last time I wrote anything longer than a social media post. I didn't take time off on purpose. Life just got busy. Days and afternoons off (of which there are honestly precious few) got sucked away by tennis matches, bouldering, grocery shopping, weight training, laundry, and a library book I needed to finish before its due date. See? Life. I flew to Las Vegas a couple days ago for a long weekend to visit my father and planned a long run while there. The weather promised to be coolish and the humidity significantly lower than at home, plus (and probably most importantly) race day loomed and I hadn't put in any miles in far too long. And my last miles (the ones that inspired a blog about turning lemons into lemonade) positively sucked. At some point, I was ...