Happy Place

I been running, yeah.  I'm in a happy place currently with it, having logged over 100 miles last month.  (The Washington Monument is ever-present on the Mall, as seen from the veranda of the Lincoln Memorial.)

I run with friends usually.  Sometimes I run alone, but that's work and not as much fun.  (Interesting cloud cover over the Lincoln Memorial.)

I started off on my comeback to running four and a half years ago weighing in at a hair's breadth under 250 pounds.  Now I'm at a hair's breadth under 180 pounds.  (The National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) is nearing completion on the Mall within the shadow of the Washington Monument.)

DC has a great running community.  It boasts lots of races, myriad resources, great running venues and decent weather.  (Last week a noontime running group cooled off after three and a half miles in the 90 degree heat with ice cream from the Jubilee Ice Cream Shoppe down by the waterfront near Nats Stadium.)

Friend without the Are

Fifteen questions, spoken with a pause between each one and nary an answer in return, can be rattled off non-hurriedly in under a minute.  That was the case last fall when I had a chance public encounter with the mother of my three estranged sons, from whom I and the rest of my clan haven't heard a single word in over eight years.

I asked her five questions about each son.

Is he alive?
Is he well?
Is he married?
Does he have children?
Where does he live?

She met each question with stony silence, to match her heart.  I added a comment at the end, "That's information any parent would give the other," and then said as I walked away, "I'm sorry for you."

There were several other persons present, including her current husband.  Happy birthday, Jim.

I'll bet anything that he knows the answers to those fifteen questions.  Somehow I don't think he's an independent actor though.

He was walking alongside of the mother of my children as the two of them, and five or six other people, were walking a German Shepherd when I asked her these basic questions about our children, so he obviously heard the questions too.  And his silence to an anguished father was as stony as hers.

Life Altering Event!

I received an I-Phone today at work, so as of 4 pm on April 2, 2015 my life was transformed!  I went around to all my friends at work staring at the implement assigned to me, an I-Phone 6 so no big deal apparently, telling them that my life had been transformed by receipt of this device and that I was practicing worshipping my palm (with this miraculous God-device cradled within my palm).

They stated to me that I was expressing annoyance at this fantastic occurrence in my life (an I-Phone!).  Perhaps I was exhibiting frustration already because i) I couldn't see at my age the screen without taking off my glasses and ii) my finger was apparently too fat to tap correctly on the virtual keyboard,

When I went home at the end of the workday I left it on  my work shelf, along with its box of parts and instructions.  I have no doubt it'll still be there the day I retire.

I hope they don't come before then, like the bully manager did a couple of years ago inquiring about this miracle device's predecessor, a work Blackberry, that an IT audit had disclosed had never been turned on.  I couldn't give that unasked for implement back to them then (no I didn't sell it on ebay, nor did I ever ask to receive it); this 'game changer' is an equally unwanted, strangling, work horse collar that I don't want to be a part of.

Palm Sunday

Yesterday was a full day.  I attended church and we conducted the early part of the service in the frigid cold outside before retiring inside after receiving a palm shoot, where we listened to readers reading a biblical passion passage in lieu of listening to a sermon.

Then I went home and disposed of a pile of Susan G. Komen Race For The Cure t-shirts I found on a shelf in my closet.  This outfit is merely a political anti-woman's choice campaign and not an actual charitable cause (I used to do a lot of these races before I discovered the organization's true purpose) so I slit the logo on each shirt, rendering it unwearable, and dropped the pile into the charity clothing bin nearby so the material can be sold by weight as mere rags.

After that I ran a virtual 5K race on the W&OD Trail behind my house, in simulation of a real race on the trail later that day that I was going to be absent for but which I had been running every year since my return to running in 2011, when I had sixty extra pounds to lose.  I ran the 3.1 miles hard and finished in 25:57, huffing and puffing in the biting morning air.

To cool down after the run I walked around the 'hood and saw to my chagrin that a neighbor's house is for sale, owned by a man in his late sixties who has lived in the house since the early seventies but can no longer afford the property tax in Falls Church of over $7,000 annually on his snug but small workman's home, in addition to storm water fees, an impervious surface fee, inspection fees and decal fees that amount to many hundreds more each year.  The Little City's war on seniors; I'll be following him out of town after I retire when I won't be able to afford on my diminished income the avaricious, always-growing local taxation.

New Times

DC has wonderful running venues that often present wonderful sights.

There are open vistas, water, monuments and great cloud cover sometimes.

It's a runner-friendly place, where the cars mostly look out for you and some of the bicyclists actually call out when they're passing you.

The weather hardly ever prevents you from running, although this past winter was a challenge.

Happy happy Sharon as you crawl through your sixties

Hard truisms adhere to the institution of divorce that while sounding like cliches are absolutely true and immutable like No Good Deed Goes Unpunished and A Lie Repeated A Thousand Times Becomes The Truth.  You have to consider the characters involved in divorce, which is inexplicably an adversarial legal process set within an intimate family setting, absolutely inappropriate because the law is driven by the lowest common denominator, hence the saying that The Law Is The Minimum Of Morality.

I wouldn't wish divorce upon anyone, it is a society-sanctioned unbridled assault upon family, character and decency, driven by bottom-dwelling pariahs of the legal profession who provide the most hysterical and unbalanced personality in the mix with a vehicle to vent that person's spleen, while the law firm eviscerates the family's corpus for the lawyers' own gain and they utterly destroy the family members' lifetime associations which provides, I guess, an added rush of heady adrenaline to these bottom-feeding intellectual bullies' pathetic, warped existences.  Divorce is so bad that it exposes western marriage as the failed institution it is, although nobody's listening.

My divorce was final a decade ago yet it still impacts me everyday.  My three children had their wills overborne as impressionable minors by their Mother and her coterie of "professionals" and not a one of my children has spoken to a single family member of mine in over a decade, or me in over seven years.

They are adults now so their actions are upon themselves, but as children they were subjected to the irresistible machinations of the supposedly loving family member who obscenely capitalized upon the position casually given to that self-absorbed parent by mere societal custom, by the court acting upon mere gender perception that the primary caregiver would act "in the best interests of the children," a destructive phrase that has been the cause of untold damage to impressionable young minds.  Acting in conjunction with that narcissistic person were other reprehensible adults, avaricious money-driven or spiteful agenda-driven "professionals" who created the children's current barren tableaux.

Monstrous adults.  We have met the enemy and they are us.

Associations

I've spoken about my friend Trevor before. He works the corner at I-66 & Rte. 29 in my home town.

I caught up with him recently.  I discovered he regularly gets visited by the mother of my children, who lives nearby, on her walks with her current husband meekly in tow. 

Apparently this first-grade public schoolteacher spouts religious platitudes to him, all the while she eschews in my opinion the basic tenets of Christian faith of forgiveness, truth, love thy neighbor and honor thy parents. But it gets weirder still.

As I was speaking with my man, his sharp eyes noticed her driving by in her distinctive Mustang, headed back towards her house, shortly after she had passed by him while walking away from her house, just a few minutes before I happened by and stopped to chat with Trevor while jogging on the W&OD Trail.  I wonder if my ex saw me, doubled back quickly to her house, got in her car and drove around in a bigger circle, coming back in the "anonymity" of her vehicle to check up on my associations?