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 ...

Some days I have nothing to write about. I turn on my laptop, sip my coffee, and nothing. I can be in the mood, want to write, maybe even need to write, and nothing comes. Nothing. A fragment of an idea here, a notion that never takes off there. Today, though, is not one of those days. Luckily and unluckily - Yes, all at the same time - I have too much to write, too many topics; my brain is one giant run-on sentence. Back in the day, my creative writing professor told us that many writers use movement (a walk, in most cases) to stimulate ideas. I have found that to be absolutely true. Whether it's a walk, run, solo game of ping-pong, spin ride, or tennis match, the result is usually the same  - IDEAS, stuff to write, half written blogs or stories bouncing around my brain dying to see the light of day. Well, dying to see the outside of my brain. If you've been reading my blog posts this summer, you know what day it is. If I'm overflowing with ideas and have far too much to...

I quit watching TV in May or maybe June. It was an experiment. I blogged about it even. I spent a week on vacation not watching TV and ended up no worse for wear. In fact, I enjoyed the not watching so much that I decided to see if I could survive an entire month. I figured after the month was up - if I even made it a whole month - I'd run right back to TV. After all, a habit is a habit. Plus it's TV. You can't not watch TV, can you? I'm here to tell you that you can. You actually can not watch TV. Because by and large, TV is crap. When my month was up - simply out of boredom and old habit - I scrolled through the guide on a couple occasions. And by "scrolled through the guide" I mean I spent forty-five minutes of my life trying to find something decent to watch. Yes, one night I bumped into a Lifetime Movie Network movie that was pretty good, but that was an aberration. I have just shy of a zillion channels and there's still nothing worth watching, in m...