hold onto your tinseled butts

The turkeys have been slain. Their reign of terror ends for another year, and we feast upon their flesh to remind them never to return. And yet … they do. Like the Devil himself, the turkeys appear. No matter how many we kill. No matter how long we stay up, they are there, just beyond your periphery, waiting, watching …

gobbling.

News

I temporarily have moved my site to a blog.joshbelville.com/ site: https://joshwritesablog.wordpress.com/

There’s no drama about why this happened. I just didn’t want all the bells and whistles of having a full-blown website, but wanted to have a blog, and this felt like the best solution. At first I tried to find non-corporate owned blogging sites, but it’s impossible. Auttomatic, which owns WordPress and Tumblr, two of the best blogging sites out there, is just too much of a juggernaut to dismiss. Blah blah blah.

I do plan on buying a Plan so that I can have some bells and some whistles on the site. But right now I am broke because of teeth and car troubles. In your 40s, the Triangle of Troubles is Teeth, Car, and Bowel.

As you may have seen in my previous post, I am moving my newsletter stuff to my site rather than Substack. It’s really just for ease, but also because Substack lets Nazis talk about Nazi stuff on their platform, and I don’t like that either. So you’ll eventually see these posts from a wordpress site, rather than Substack. Don’t freak out.

Dreams

Merry Christmas: I have uploaded a new podcast episode as my present to you. This one is a few of the dreams I’ve recounted into my phone after waking up. Topics include Demi Adejuyigbe, peeing, beef jerky, and peeing again. That’s it. Does that appeal to you? If so, have a listen. It should appear in your email shortly after this one. If it doesn’t, just head on over to my Substack and listen to it there.

NaNoWriMo Debrief

Final stats: 95,186/50,000 words. I was on a real tear this November, writing the most I’ve ever written for a NaNoWriMo. I’ve technically written two books, although both need to be expanded upon greatly, and edited, and made a lot better overall. Let me give you a little elevator pitch of them.

Book 1 is called re:human. It has two plots. Plot A is about Six, the first human created by AI 10,000 years after humanity has gone extinct. They have a somewhat oppressive “mother,” a sub-sentient proto-AI called Zero, who keeps Six alive within a building called the Facility, which has everything Six needs, but little of what Six wants. The story is about Six leaving the Facility and taking a trip to the City, and what they find there.

Plot B is about Dr. Tamara Vandayar, a researcher in the 2070s who helped developed Zero. Her story is about how she inadvertently created the first fully-sentient AI, known as One.

Book 2 has no current title, and is about Tamara’s descendant, Adelphi Vandayar. The story splits between him in the 2300s, sneaking aboard a generation ship, Pioneer, which was hastily constructed to escape Earth and travel to Proxima Centauri (the nearest possibly habitable star system), as sentient AIs eradicate humanity, and then to Adelphi in Six’s time (many decades later than Book 1) as Pioneer returns from Proxima Centauri b for … reasons. Don’t want to give too much away. I don’t want to say it’s aliens, but…

Does that sound cool? Let me know because I have no idea. I just thought the philosophical concept of a robot creating and rearing a human was interesting and now it’s all spiraling out of control. In a good way.

Race Report: Holiday Half

Here’s the blog about it. In short: it kinda sucked! It was rainy and miserable and I am just not a very good runner, haha. Not for distance races at least. Oh well. Plus the paint peeled off the damn medals because of the rain. Wild stuff.

A Year of Running

26 races. Twenty 5ks, one 3 miler, one 4 miler, one quarter marathon, one 10k, and 2 half marathons. A total of 108.15 miles raced.

37 parkruns. 185 kilometers, or about 115 miles run.

4/5 Portland Parks & Rec ribbons. (Damn you stomach flu!)

Distance ran & walked total in 2022: 450.44 miles

Distance ran & walked total in 2023 (as of this newsletter): 1220.03.

I made up my mind this year and I’m glad I did. I’m glad I started this on my 40th year around the sun too. It feels a little “midlife crisis” but it’s also me acknowledging that the past three years were a bit of a downfall for me, mentally and physically, and now I feel better than I have in a long time.

No plans to run that many races in 2024 though. I honestly can’t afford it, plus they can take your toll on you, and I’d rather just run a lot of easy mileage with some speed and hill sessions thrown in the mix. A lot of this year was me trying to prove that I could do these things, but what I really proved is that I can do them my way, as in, I’m no elite athlete, I don’t think I’ll ever run a sub-20 5k race, or a sub-3 hour marathon, but I can get them done. And for the vast majority of people, that’s enough. It’s enough for me.

Resolutions Roundup

For 2023:

1. Run a half marathon (and/or a 5k every month). ✓ [WAY overachieved on this one]

2. Bench 225 for reps. [I don’t have a gym membership so this was impossible.]

3. For January, eat 100-150g carbs and no artificial or added sugars. [This was a bad concept to begin with and I’m glad I didn’t adhere to it at all.]

4. No social media except Instagram, BeReal, Strava, and D&D Reddit (for battle maps). [I added Mastodon, tried to get back into Facebook, and dabbled in the stupid ones (Threads, Bluesky).]

5. Meditate every day I am healthy. [Sometimes running is meditative!]

6. Complete a project. ✓ [This is NaNoWriMo.]

7. Start a new hobby. ✓ [This was my short-lived but fun jaunt into personal genealogy.]

8. Make a new friend. ✓ [Lots of new parkrun friends!]

9. Workout 30 min every day I am healthy except Sunday. [This was also kind of a ridiculous desire, because I love rest days.]

10. Take a trip out of state to somewhere I’ve never been before. ✓ [Long Beach, WA]

So, 50/50. But like I said, I’m glad I didn’t follow a couple of them.

2024! A tentative list:

1. Social media purge: no apps on phone, block all but Insta on desktop, only post on Instagram once at the end of the month.

2. Hidden NYR, very personal, hush hush.

3. Run a sub-25 minute 5k.

4. Run a marathon! [This is very tentative.]

5. Do something outside of my house once a week. See a movie, hang out with friends, go to a museum, see a band, etc.

6. Get laid in England. [Look. We all have our bucket lists, okay? I just want to have a bit of how’s your father with an English bird, awwright?]

7. Buy local in store whenever possible.

8. Finalize a first draft of my book.

9. Run 100 miles every month.

10. Take lots of photos with my goddamn camera that I bought!

The End (of the friggin year!)

The craziest thing about 2023 is that I have been fairly regular in posting newsletters. Honestly, my life is too boring for this level of competency. Thank you for reading. In honor of a year of writing and living, here is an AI image I generated that was going to be in the email I sent to my office about our White Elephant gift exchange next week:

I ended up not using it.

See you next year.

take my haaaand, we’re off to ending daylight saving time

Just me, sitting here, eating some discount candy corn, listening to my cat snore, thinking about how 2023 is almost over. This truly is what November is all about. Mostly the discount candy corn part.

Random Thoughts

• Family reality TV (that is, reality TV that centers around a family) peaked with The Osbournes and will never regain that level of greatness. The reason behind this is that Ozzy Osbourne was a direct antithetical concept to reality TV, and thus, watching Ozzy be “family man Ozzy”—this man who bit the head off a live bat in 1982—was an amazing juxtaposition, especially because he was still very “Ozzy” even in the context of the show (and by that I mean his brain was addled after decades of heavy drug and alcohol use). Compare this with Keeping Up with the Kardashians, a reality show that is fundamentally fake and full of fundamentally fake people doing dumb fake things. Kim Kardashian will never be as funny or fun to watch as Ozzy Osbourne.

• The amount of waste individuals generate pales in comparison to the amount of waste corporations generate, and yet I am still mad at myself for letting a bell pepper wither away in my fridge. It looks so sad! Just sitting there, deflating slowly, the green of its skin turning darker and darker. How do I tell it that I’ve already eaten the onion? That I ate the onion while it desiccated in the crisper drawer? O WOE TO THE GREEN BELL PEPPER

• Random thing I learned the other day: the word “handiwork” is not a play on “handy work” but is rather two words, “hand” and “iwork,” the latter of which is the Old English past participle of “work,” made by adding the i- prefix. So “handiwork” more literally means “hand worked,” aka “hand made.” This is more or less what the current meaning is too, but it’s still neat. (Also the i- prefix still exists in Germanic languages as ge-. This all makes sense as Old English is Germanic in origin.)

I’m Going to England (in May)

I have booked my first ever international trip across Ye Olde Ponde to my ancestor’s stomping grounds: London, England. Yes, from what I understand King Charles himself will be at my airport gate waiting to tip a ladle of Heinz baked beans right down my goddamned gullet. (Queen Elizabeth didn’t perform this ceremony because it was thought “unbecoming of a woman.” That’s why you didn’t know about it before now.)

The trip is two weeks in London. The only thing I have planned is to run my 50th parkrun at the original spot, Bushy Park, on May 11th, which is the day before my birthday. Other than that I have NOTHING planned but I’m sure I’ll visit the museums and eat an English Breakfast and a Turkish Delight and a Jammy Dodger and then Greg Davies will see me walking down Trafalgar Square and shout, “You! Boy! You would be perfect for the next series of Taskmaster!” and then I’d do that and become famous and well-known as “The Best Taskmaster Contestant.”

Honestly though I think I’m just gonna bum around London for two weeks, maybe take a bus up to Scotland, maybe figure out how to get to Ireland and try to erase the “London” from the “Londonderry” signs. If anyone has any suggestions, let me know!

NaNoWriMo 2023

I am doing National Novel Writing Month once again. This is my 21st outing, which is impressive, but on the other hand, I’ve only “won” NaNoWriMo three times. So, whatever.

This year I’m expanding on an idea I’ve had for a few years now, about a human created by robots long after humanity has been extinct. The current title is re:human (see, cause it’s re(garding) humanity, and it’s also re(making) humans, you get it? eh? eh?). I thought it would be interesting to try and make the cover art using Dall-e 2:

The prompt is a person in a vat surrounded by machinery. I don’t know how people get such good AI art cause mine always looks like this shit.

If this ever becomes an actual book I won’t actually use AI for the cover, even though it would be kind of ironic because the book is about AI creating humans, and then I use AI to make the book cover … but AI is just thievery right now, so unless that gets better, forget about it, bub. I’d rather pay an artist.

I’m writing this newsletter on Nov 10th, and I’m already at 30,000 words, so … I must really like this idea. In fact, I’m at a point now where I know where the series goes, if it ever becomes a book series. Who knows right now, but it’s a fun thought.

If anyone’s interested, I may post a snippet of the novel in a future post. Just something to wet the ol’ whistle. If you’ve ever wondered how the sausage is made. Is that how the saying goes? Wetting whistles and sausages sounds like a pornographic combination.

Running

Ah, who cares. I’m doing it. Since last newsletter, I’ve run three races:

ORRC Dual Duel 10k – Running 25 laps on a track is hard.
Run Like Hell 5k – Got 3rd place in my age group! Weird but cool.
Mt. Tabor Tar n Trail 5k – Everyone missed a whole .30 of the 5k because of a poorly marked sign, and then the event organizers never followed up on that so I’m not gonna run that one again.

Oh, and we have a new parkrun in Oregon! It’s in West Linn; that Run Like Hell blog link above will talk about it too. It’s nice to have two options now, even if both are far away from where I live.

November’s only got two races, the Hood to Coast Turkey Trot 5k at Portland International Raceway, which is at night and lets you get to run around the raceway track and look at the Christmas lights before anyone else, and the very next morning is the ORRC Turkey Trot at the Zoo, which is a 4 miler. So that’ll be interesting.

After that is my LAST OFFICIAL race for 2023, the Foot Traffic Holiday Half. I am running the half marathon and it will be cold as balls, I’m sure.

I’ll have a more thorough analysis of my Year in Running next month, but suffice it to say: it was quite a year.

Reviews

Movie: Saw X

The Saw series is over …? X was honestly pretty good and had one of the only torture porn scenes that actually made me look away. Plus there was a lot of Tobin Bell and I love that guy. He’s genuinely talented and makes a great “gray area” villain (even if his philosophy isn’t very gray area). Here’s my slightly longer Letterboxd review.

TV: Shoresy Season 2

Very good. Somehow they’ve made a Letterkenny/sports movie hybrid and it’s quick and fun and quippy and all of the characters have their own quirks. Also, for Jared Keeso to make a joke character in Letterkenny and transition him into a full-fledged person that I care about in Shoresy is amazing.

Also, Keilani Rose (Miig in the show) was SHOT IN THE CHEST in LA prior to filming, and recovered and is in the show and I am glad she is okay! She only had a fractured rib and punctured lung. Not great, but could’ve been a LOT worse.

Book: Shift (#2 in Silo Series)

The first book, Wool, was uneven and kind of slow to start. It didn’t help that the first half of the book is the first season of Silo, the Apple TV show, and that the TV show is better than the book. Shift, thankfully, is a lot more interesting, acting as a prequel/sidequel? to Wool and delving into some of the machinations of the silo. Hugh Howey still refuses to write a scene between more than two people, but at least the scenes here are more interesting.

YouTube Share’ems

I don’t think “Now and Then” is the best of the Beatles “post-John” songs (that would be, IMO, “Real Love”), but the story of the two living Beatles making a song with the two dead Beatles using state of the art technology, creating a music video that is, if nothing else, a memorial for The Beatles, is pretty incredible. My only issue is that the song is clearly and painfully an unfinished demo, even from John’s standards. But he’s been dead for over 40 years so there’s not much you can do on that front.

Because this novel I’m working on is science fiction, I’ve found myself down a rabbit hole of science fictiony concepts. PBS Space Time is always interesting to me but I especially enjoyed them breaking down why building a foundation for thinking of time on an atomic level is important.

The End

Well that’s it, see you next month, when Santa Claus descends from the North Pole to terrorize us all with capitalism. Until then!

this is a byline, where one would put a witty comment if they could think of one

I feel like 2024 is going to have some big changes for me. “Josh you just ran a half marathon—” no but I mean, like, other changes. And I’m not a big change guy. Personal change, I mean; I love quarters and nickels and dimes. But getting my trajectory from ΔA to ΔB takes a lot of fuel.¹ It’s always been this way; ask me to get a new hairstyle and I will, maybe, two years from now. But there’s just something about my current situation which feels untenable, bristly, at odds with some innate desire.

I think what I’m trying to say is: I’m gonna buy a boat.

Just kidding. You think I can afford a boat?

Portland (Half) Marathon Report

First of all, if you wanted a race report on the Portland (Half) Marathon, click ye olde link to ye olde blogge and have a read with your eyeballs. If you want a TL;DR: it went good, I made it, huzzah. There is a more philosophical treatise on the impact running long distances can have on your brain and your body, but I ain’t the type to write all that shit down. If anything, I need to not think about it so I can do it. You know how sometimes you’ll be having sex and suddenly you’ll think of George Washington’s wooden teeth, which weren’t actually wooden but were all sorts of teeth—holy shit, imagine having walrus teeth in your mouth—and then suddenly you look down and your partner isn’t even in the room anymore, they somehow just crawled out from under your frozen body as you ponder our first president’s dentures and now they’re on the couch eating Wheat Thins and watching an episode of Maury from 1994? Yeah it’s like that. No think, just sex running.

I’m running a 10k track race on Sunday the 15th with the Oregon Road Runners Club. My first track race and I can’t wait to look completely like I don’t belong there.

I’ve told this story a million times but when I was a kid, my class went to the local roller rink to skate. I had never skated before so I was hugging the walls and falling on my ass. At some point they declared that there was going to be a race around the rink with all of the boys. Despite me never skating before, I was put in the race. When they shouted “Go!” the boys all roared down the skating rink … and then there was me, at the end, shuffling like an old man. I guess my point is, sometimes you just gotta be shit at something, even if it’s embarrassing. Usually people are like “Nobody’s paying attention to you” but I guarantee you people were looking at me. Ah well. I was a kid!

Cleaning Up & Clearing Out, Digitally

I’ve been contemplating social media again. Wait, don’t go! I brought cookies. They’re just for me but you can smell one if you keep reading

My disgusting inky ichorous tendrils have been rooted within the World Wide Web practically my entire life. I made websites back in 1996, when I was 13. That was 27 years ago. And for a while, being present on the internet was great. Having a username and forums and AIM and early Facebook, it was all cool. Instagram filters that nobody uses anymore. If the internet of mid and late 90s was the wild west, then the internet of the early 2000s felt like the industrial age, and me and my online friends were the coal miners.

Now, the internet sucks ass. And by that I mean social media, which is a festering wound that could be cleaned out if capitalism wasn’t a drug-resistant flesh eating bacteria. Twitter, obviously, was demolished by the world’s dumbest richest man. Facebook has become a nightmare miasma of absolutely everything I don’t care about. Mastodon is good, but boring. Threads, stupid pandering. The only thing that continues to barely resemble its former self is Instagram, and that’s owned by the world’s fastest richest man! It’s all self imploding in the service of the All Ighty Ollar?

All this is to say, I’m pulling the tendrils out as much as I can. I’m trying to reduce my internet footprint. I want other Josh Belville’s to show up on google search results. I’m sick of posting a thing and then having to post that thing on multiple other things to ensure that the vast majority of people—my friends and family—can find it, even if they never read it or even think about it for one second. It’s absolutely absurd.

We have a device that fits in our pocket and can tell us where the nearest hot dog is in .0000005 milliseconds and yet in order for you to watch the YouTube video I made, I have to post it to Facebook and then also to Instagram oh and you better write a tweet about it too, have you thought about posting a thought-provoking post on LinkedIn about how nice it is to lick billionaire’s boots in order to buy groceries?—etc etc etc.

I hate it! It’s stupid and bad, and in the last few years it has even fractured relationships between family and friends because social media (or the Russians, or both) took our middling opinions and polarized them so much that I can’t look at my extended family online anymore without tagging them as Trump supporters in my head. In real life, this would never be a problem. I know they’re conservative and Republican, but if they asked me to their house for dinner, I would go and have a great time, because they are, at heart, good people. But online, everyone is a Something, and that Something is usually Bad.

In order to get the engagement they need to satisfy advertisers enough to pay them money, social media sites have to make you want to come back. I hate it. It’s basically addiction on a mass scale. It’s that fucking game from that Star Trek: The Next Generation episode. It’s stupid that this TV show accurately predicted our addiction to smartphones back in 1991.

So, what does this really mean? It just means that I’m going to try to either delete, or stop using, as many social media apps as possible, and to delete accounts to things that I don’t really need. I thought for a long time about just using this newsletter to post things, but honestly the engagement here isn’t very good either. Maybe I just suck! That’s totally possible.

For 2024 I want to use social media as minimally as I can, with a few exceptions. Like, I want to post only on Instagram, and only at the end of the month with a photo dump of what I’ve been up to. And then maybe go outside more and actually meet people and shit. Who knows.

Just thought I’d bring it up in case you’re wondering why you haven’t seen me around in a while. I’m out there, in the Real World, picking up Chicks.

Stuff

Great TDC with Caroline Polachek that really showcases her voice, which is beautiful. She does have that ethereal air of a woman whose parents are rich.

Somebody reminded me of Square One the other day. Amazing show on PBS about math and they had great music videos, like this one.

Conan’s interview with Arnie is very good. I forget that he’s a Republican and loves Ronald Reagan, which I will forgive, I suppose.

The End

I’ve always been bad at wrapping things up. In that vein: bye.

1. This is an astronaut joke, and I don’t even know exactly what it means. ↩︎

and yet, here i am

My life continues to be boring. As of this writing I am a little over two weeks away from the Portland (Half) Marathon, which is kind of exciting. Between it and now, however, pretty boring.

Been playing the Big Two video games of the past month or so: Starfield and Baldur’s Gate 3. Both are good for different reasons. If I had to pick one over the other though, it would be BG3. Very detailed, lots of great story and combat moments. Starfield is fun but it’s just Fallout in space. A lot of it feels unmotivated; the base building is Fallout 4, the upgrading is Fallout 4, character models look like they’re from Fallout 4. But you can build ships like Legos, which I enjoy, and the combat is sufficient and the planets are neat. I did board a pirate-raided ship whose power was malfunctioning, meaning that every few seconds it would turn off, causing me to float in the air from the lack of gravity. But that pales in comparison to the amount of havoc wreaked in Baldur’s Gate 3. A lot of choices you make in that game have consequences. Not consequences. Consequences. Which I enjoy a lot.

Running is going very well. I finally ran a sub-30 minute 5k at the Beaverton 5k. I’ll just post some blog links if you want to read more:

Garlic Festival 5k

Parks & Rec 5k: Westmoreland

Beaverton 5k/parkrun#24

The Portland (Half) Marathon is a little over two weeks away from this writing. I’m excited for that. Still don’t feel like a proper runner, and by that I mean I feel like my body is not a runner’s body, and by that I mean I think I’m too fat to be a runner. Typical body dysmorphia bullshit. If you run, you’re a runner. But it still nags at me in the back of my mind. Bought new proper running shorts; that little nagging part thought, numerous times, Why did you buy these? These are for runners, not you. Shut up, brain.

In the end, my body craves comfort because I was born with particular stars and planets in the night sky, or something like that, I don’t know how astrology works. So I bought the shorts because they are light and keep my cool when I run. Take that, self-confidence.

Been watching TV. Ahsoka is great. Star Trek: Strange New Worlds is good and fun and a proper middle finger to Picard’s depressing nonsense. The only streaming service I pay for is AppleTV so I’ve been watching a lot of shows there. Foundation is good, but feels like one of those cheap sci-fi shows you’d watch in the 90s, like Stargate. Shows that have mediocre acting and terrible setpieces but decent storylines and interesting characters. Foundation is a bit above that, but still.

Physical is a show that I didn’t think I’d enjoy but I actually really love it. It’s very raw and difficult to watch at times, which is surprising for a show about a woman trying to create an aerobics workout empire in the 1980s. It deals a lot with eating disorders, but since the creator and a lot of the staff on the show are women, it really comes at it in a way that’s rough to watch sometimes. I feel like if a man made this show it A) wouldn’t be as good, but B) would probably tone down the eating disorder stuff a bit.

There’s probably an essay somewhere in the idea of women-created art and how much more emotionally raw it feels, especially art about women. Reminds me of menstrual performance art. It seemed like the late 90s or early 2000s had a lot of women making art about or even with their period blood. (I doubt that was the only time it happened, it’s just when I was aware of it.) The shocking “gross” aspect of it being the point, in a way; period blood is a natural body process for most women and the fact that society finds it gross is kind of weird, really.

Anyway, the idea being that women are ultimately better at shocking people than men because there are more “taboo” concepts for women than for men. Think of when women were dressed head to toe and then a woman would show her ankle and it was scandalous. Physical is a show in part about a woman overcoming the taboo of having an eating disorder and, in turn, owning it and her own body and mind. It’s good. I like it.

The other Rose Byrne show on Apple, Platonic, is meh.

Hijack is surprisingly good. It’s about a plane hijack. Don’t know what else I need to say there.

The Afterparty season 2 is fun. I appreciate that the first episode is an homage to sequels. A little meta joke there. I also like the conceit that Aniq and Zoe will just somehow arrive at a murder at the beginning of every season. I was thinking about this re: Hijack as well—it would be great if every season started with Idris Elba getting on some form of transport that ended up getting hijacked in the first episode. Season 1, plane. Season 2, bus. Season 3, boat. Season 4, elevator. Etc.

Invasion is … alright, though I can’t stop thinking about Naian Gonzalez, who is just super attractive in that show. I’ve only gotten through the first episode though, maybe it picks up.

I think that’s it on micro television reviews.

My FAWM 50/90 music output has slowed to a snail’s pace. I’m at 23 songs and will definitely not get to 50, but that’s alright. Some decent stuff to tinker around with in a couple of months.

So there’s my past couple of months. Running, watching TV, playing video games and D&D with friends, and making some l’il songs. Here’s one of those songs with lyrics if you’d like to listen. See you next month.

the cool waitress of the sabbath

got the midshift this time
how's about a few hours to sleep in?
there's drool on your pillow;
a dream of a beach lined with palm trees

two missed calls from your mother
voicemails wondering if you forgot jesus?
you drop off your cigarette butt
in the half-empty can of budweiser
displayed on your bedside table

your car's in the shop again
the bus smells like pot again
you wish you had pot again

apply makeup in the restroom
just like the ancients before you
the cook is a new cook
the old cook got fired for stealing

angeline hands you your apron
tells you her boyfriend is leaving her
a brief hug while she wipes her eyes
you don't have the heart to describe
how much you despise her

here's where the fun begins
the regular crowd shuffles in
how they greet you with smiles
and a neverending empty gut

so this is your sunday whiled away
for a pittance and free dinner
late on your rent and your money's all spent
on some vices to quell your own wrath
the days keep on pulling you under the sway
while your mother's convinced you're a sinner
but someday they'll know what your CV can't show
the cool waitress of the sabbath

an overall cool-ish season so far

I know basically nothing about Belgium surrealist painter Rene Magritte, other than he’s the guy who made two of the most famous paintings of the 20th century:

This is not a post about Rene Magritte; I just wanted to title it “Summer Marches On” and when I typed that into Google¹, one of the first page results was Magritte’s painting, which is fascinating if you think about it in the context of its time. Late 30s Belgium, sitting neutral, watching Hitler’s rise to power. Two years later it would be occupied by Nazi forces, with King Leopold III surrendering without consulting his government at all, and would stay occupied until Allied forces liberated the country in October of 1944.

Magritte remained in Brussels during this occupation and his art style turned very different while the Nazis were around, adopting a more colorful, so-called “Renoir” style. For example, here is “The glass house” from 1939:

And here is “Forethought” from 1943:

Pretty different style, eh? The guy clearly didn’t want the Nazis asking him pointed questions about surrealism. I don’t blame him; they wouldn’t get it.

This isn’t a post about Rene Magritte, but god damn are his paintings amazing.

In case you think film reboots are a unique endeavor, might I suggest this:

Yes, Magritte painted a sequel. He actually painted several paintings over and over again in his lifetime. I won’t get into that though, because it’s kind of depressing.

Life

June was a good month. It started with two 5ks on the same day, which was new for me. Parkrun #15 in the morning and then the Starlight Run in the evening. I thought I was going to run slow for both of them but I didn’t, and it was fine. The Starlight Run was great because people were cheering us on even if they were mostly waiting for the parade later that night. Also there were a lot of children wanting high fives along the route. Like, too many. Sorry I didn’t high five all of you.

Then the next week I went on a date. A first date with someone I met on Hinge. I think it was Hinge. It wasn’t a great first date, we didn’t have a lot of compatibility and she seemed weirdly adversarial at times. And I drank too much, which these days is like two beers. Which meant I babbled on about nonsense. Eh. I learned from it; namely, that waiting for the Right One™ is the best idea, but also, you can’t find the Right One™ if you don’t go and look.

The week after that I ran the second of my Portland Parks & Rec 5ks, out in Lents Park. It was nice to actually run this one, when I had to walk the first one because of nagging injuries. And then that weekend I drove to Redmond, Oregon to run the Redmond Run. It was great! The drive to central Oregon was pretty and the cabin I stayed in was very cute and the run itself was a blast. Redmond is close to Bend, so it felt like a nice small race, like a little group of runners wanting to do something over the summer. I also got to walk around Smith Rock, which is beautiful.

Then! The final full week of June I drove to Grants Pass to have a little mini family reunion with my parents, my brother Russ, and his girlfriend Lori. Had a great time, despite what my friend Will thinks of his hometown. Drove to Crater Lake, saw a play at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, and drove around Grants Pass so my mom could take pictures of the bears there.

It was a lovely little vacation and it was great to see my family again.

In July, I ran my first ever quarter marathon with the Foot Traffic Flat, up on Sauvie Island, in the northwest of Portland. My first proper “distance” race, it went pretty well! I was pleased with my result, even if I got confused at the end because I thought it was a 10k, and not 10.55k, which meant when my watch beeped, alerting me that I had completed my 10k, there was no finish line in sight, causing me to wonder, “Did I make a wrong turn and now I’m following the half marathon crowd?” It was fine though, I just needed to run a bit more.

A week later I got the stomach flu! Yeehaw.

My race schedule has tapered quite a bit since the Flat. I don’t have another 5k until August, the Garlic Festival 5k in North Plains, OR. Since then I’ve been running more and more and getting a lot of PRs in my 5k runs at parkrun. I think I might get a sub 30 minute time by the end of the summer. Fingers crossed.

Now, I’m trying to get a new passport so I can go on a trip next year. I don’t think I’ll get it in time for cheap flights though. For some reason I lost or threw away my old passport, I have no idea, but I wish I hadn’t because it would’ve been a lot easier to get it renewed if I had kept it.

The objective is England. I want to run my 50th parkrun at Bushy Park in London, where parkrun started. I want to have one of those Big Vacations. I got a credit card and everything.

50/90

I skipped FAWM (February Album Writing Month) this year, having absolutely no desire to write music then. But with FAWM comes this little side quest called the 50/90 challenge; 50 songs in 90 days, from July 4 to October 1. (Or something like that, don’t math me.)

This year 50/90 is on the FAWM site and it looks great! They really did a great job of integrating it. So I’m writing little songs there. No real production value (not that I had that to begin with), just a geetar and me coming up with shit quick so I can grease up the ol’ creativity wheels.

I’m going to share one with you here. It’s the one I like the most, so far. It’s called “the horizon” and I kind of aped Phoebe Bridgers a bit but whatever.

I’m up to 15 songs as of this writing so we’ll see how many of those are salvageable. I’ve only done 50/90 once before, back in 2009, and there are several songs from that session that are garbage, and some that I wish I had released. Oh well.

A Thing for You

Here are some songs!

I know little about Richard Thompson but for some reason I had this album back in the day and I really enjoyed it. And of course since sumer has, in fact, cumed in², I thought it prudent to add this.

Art Brut was a band I enjoyed back in the 2000s. In one of my D&D games we joke about making a party of all bards (a “bardy”) and I suggested this be our theme song.

Jaboukie I only really know because he used to pretend to be other people on Twitter—most notably the FBI, which I believe got him banned for quite some time:

But anyway his song is very good if you like rap at least.

And finally, of course, it’s Carly Rae Jepsen. Her latest b-sides-esque album, The Loveliest Time, is out, and like with her previous b-side albums, some of the songs on here are better than the ones on her a-side album. Like this one!

The End

That’s it for now. Go look at some Rene Magritte paintings!

Also since you stuck around this long, here’s another song I wrote for the 50/90 challenge. It’s called “mod girl” and is about Gen Z girls who dress vintage. Enjoy. See you next time.

you dress like the 60s
but you're only 16
you were born in 2008
you might be a poser 
but you still look good 
in bell bottoms

the weed's 10x stronger 
so pack up your bong or
take a big hit from vape
swathed in ambers and greens 
holy hues of the autumn

high school still lingers 
a prison that brings only
terror like settling ash 
so spend all your nannying cash
on a bright yellow sweater

hippie or beatnik 
mod, chic--you can't pick
at least you can choose 
from them all
but not at the local mall
but the vintage store
tucked in the corner
their selection is better

one day when you're older 
these clothes all a-mouldering
piles in a landfill somewhere
you'll wonder what fashion
was there
when you were a teen

cause all you remember 
shift dresses and splendor
and go go boots stuck in your mind
a smile cause it felt so refined
so perfect and clean

the time feels like cycles
in 20 years, all this recycles
for the next protegees
but that feels like decades away
and now is important

so pull on your bold
colored tights, so old
and jauntily knock your beret
for this is your statement today
a decision made with a purpose
not just simply an accent

1. I had thought it was a lyric to a Decemberists song, “The Gymnast, High Above the Ground,” but the lyrics there is actually “April marches on.” Alas, it is not April at this very moment. ↩︎
2. hehehehehehhehehehehehehehehehhehe ↩︎

that stands for “have a great summer” if you didn’t know. i don’t think you’re all hags.

Well now it’s June. What the hell. It’s almost like time is unwavering and will wear you down like the endless river that creates the deepest canyon. You know what I mean? It’s exactly like that.

Summer Vacation

I’m taking a summer vacation from the ol’ newsletter. That just means I won’t be posting twice a month, but more like less than once a month. Whatever I feel like, really. I’m not leaving for good, it’s just nice outside and I’d like to go out there. Out there!

I hope summer treats you with respect and kindness, and that you get that raise you’ve been wanting. Ask for a raise! You deserve it!

I’m on Mastodon Again

Gonna try and make it stick this time. Follow me here. I’m basically writing about the same things in four different places. Isn’t the internet great? It’s certainly not an existential nightmare!

40 in Retrospect

I’ve been thinking a lot about what it means to be 40. Like, what was every decade for me? The first decade, 0-9 we’ll say for number’s sake, was learning on a macro scale: how to walk, how to speak, how to not piss and shit myself whenever I felt like it.¹ What numbers meant and how to add them together. How to read. (And, according to my kindergarten report card, how to correct the teacher on grammar mistakes when she would read to us.)

The second decade (10-19) was learning how to exist in the world: how to interact with other people, how to form rudimentary friendships. Learning about my place in the world both in the small scale—friends, family, classmates, and the various locations around my hometown—and on the large scale—U.S. history, geography, cultural differences, who says “soda” and who says “pop.” By the end of the second decade, I was deemed a man and sent off to fend for myself.

The third decade (20-29) was learning on a micro scale: really getting into the nitty gritty of everything. My brain could handle it now, all the nuanced aspects of life, politics, interpersonal relationships. Dating, sex, breakups, moving from home, drinking, drinking a lot. Discovering who my real friends were and who were just people I went to college with. Pursuing hobbies and jobs and theatre and music. Learning how to balance a budget by absolutely failing to balance a budget. This feels like the most important decade, doesn’t it? The one where you’re thrust into the real world, away from school and the safety net of your parents.

Decade number four (30-39) was learning how to survive: the world was harsh and unforgiving, and after ten years of living in it on my own, I was feeling the roughness, like sandpaper against my psyche, sanding my rough edges away. This is probably the family decade for many—marriage and/or children, some perhaps close to if not teenagers by now. This is where I and many others branched off from that group. I tried to survive via numerous avenues: going back to school (it’s what I was used to), weight lifting, meditation, therapy. You know how in cartoons when a character gets thrown a long distance, and at first they’re tumbling, tumbling, tumbling, before the skiddddddd to a stop. My 20s felt like tumbling, and my 30s felt like skidding.

And now I’m in decade number five (40-49), and after skidding for ten years, it’s time to stand up, brush myself off, and start to walk again. I don’t know what this decade holds (I know some of you readers do, in your own lives), but I’m eager to find out, on my own terms, and in my own pace. My rough edges are now rounded, polished a bit, even, but I’m still learning, still discovering things about myself. Like, I know how to balance my budget now. For real!

It’s interesting to be here, now, in my 5th decade, watching my brother in his 6th decade, my mother in her 8th decade, my father in his 9th. What do those decades mean for them? What does it mean to be in your 9th decade? I’m hoping I’ll find out one day, and I’m also hoping it means that my consciousness will be ready to be transplanted into an android or something cool like that.

Running

Hey guess what? I haven’t run a single 5k race since last issue. I’m taking it easy. I’m chill, dudes. My vibe is … relentless. Or something. It felt good to take a break, even if part of it was to rest my stupid calf muscle. So, you’re welcome! No run talk this week.

The Zelda Game

[Note: There are some light Tears of the Kingdom spoilers ahead.]

I’m playing the new Zelda game, Tears of the Kingdom. It’s fun, lots to run around and do, but it is part of a trend now in gaming which is basically that the new games are inserting so many new things that it stops being the game franchise, to me. TotK provides this huge open world sandbox that you can run around in, which the older Zelda games did too, but it also diverges wildly from most of the older games, and even the story is not really in line with the older games.

I think one of my nerdiest things is that I was obsessed with the Zelda timeline growing up. A lot of us nerdy Nintendo kids were, but my obsession was tracking the items from the different games and seeing how they could be timeline related. For example: in the original Legend of Zelda for the NES, Link has a “Magical Sword,” but in A Link to the Past, it’s called the Master Sword. Is it the same sword? In ALttP, Link has a Power Bracelet that lets him lift heavy boulders. In Ocarina of Time, he has Silver and Golden Gauntlets which do basically the same thing. Are they they same? Etc etc etc.

This is what you do when you’re a nerdy kid who likes to stay at home. But the Zelda timeline is now notoriously complex, with three timelines branching off of Ocarina of Time to explain the variety of games in the series, including a timeline where Link fails to defeat Ganon, which is, IMHO, bullshit.

The two new games, Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom, diverge from the timeline by placing the games around 10,000 years in the future, with all the prior games representing some sort of, you might say, “legend.” But this only fucks things up more if you think about it. For example: in ToTK, we meet King Rauru, the founder of Hyrule. Rauru is a Zonai, a species we’ve never seen before, who reportedly all descended from the gods and are all extinct by BotW. He’s married to Queen Sonia, who is likely a descendant of the line of Zeldas. (Haven’t finished the game yet so I don’t know if this 100% true or not, PLEASE DON’T TELL ME let me experience it on my own thanks.)

There is a sage in Ocarina of Time whose name is Rauru and who is human. So it has to be that King Rauru is named after this sage. Rauru and Sonia founded Hyrule. But we already know Hyrule existed before they did, because we literally saw in so many games. So what Hyrule did they found?

My theory is that the Zonai were sent to the world after the divergence to converge the timelines, by literally pulling the three separate worlds together into this new Hyrule, which Rauru and Sonia founded. My reasoning for this is, ironically, because you find items from all the previous Zelda games in these ones. For example, you can find the Wind Waker armor set as well as the Twilight Princess armor set—two games set in two different timelines. How’d they get in this game? Simple: when the Zonai merged the separate timelines, the items from those timelines came with, and then were lost to the 10,000 years of additional time.²

This also explains why landmarks are named from various games as well: because the inhabitants of these disparate timelines remembered different things and named landmarks after those things.

I will say this though: the Zonai must be pretty damn powerful if Rauru could seal Ganondorf under Hyrule Castle for 10,000 years. Nobody prior to him could do that!

So, maybe the new Zelda series doesn’t diverge from the old games after all. Maybe it converges them, into a single narrative.

Thanks for letting me talk nerdy to you.

A Thing for You

This is just a funny thing that I enjoyed a lot, both as a fan of these guys, a fan of Hans and Franz, and guy who studied dramatic writing in college. There are two episodes out as of this writing. Check them out!

The End

Life is pretty even-keel these days, which is great. Not much to chat about, not much going on. Hope the same is true for you. Until next time, friends! As my high school drama teacher would tell us every Friday afternoon: Be safe, be smart, make wise choices.

1. still working on that last one tbh. ↩︎
2. Why is Midna’s helmet even in BotW/TotK? Maybe the Zonai were powerful enough to merge the disparate realms as well. Perhaps the Depths are the Twilight Realm converged into Hyrule. Who knows? ↩︎

lordy, lordy, look who is one year older than he was before

Sorry this is a little late. I straight up forgot!

I’m 40

I’ve done it. Forty revolutions around the sun. Fun fact: the year I was born, 1983, was the year the military began the split from ARPANET (the proto-internet), making their own network and leaving ARPANET for educational and public use. 1983 was also the first year the TCP/IP protocol was standardized within ARPANET, creating what is essentially the internet. What I’m trying to say is: if I was never born there would be no internet. I know that doesn’t sound true, but just think about it for a bit. Just … take some time with it, okay?

I never thought I’d be 40. I don’t mean I was planning on dying before 40, I just mean that my brain has yet to truly comprehend what it means to spend four decades with consciousness. Before 1983 there was no me. And now not only is there me, there’s four decades of me! Yikes! I have memories and shit! Memories of stuff—and things!

My 30s were definitely the hardest decade. Living in Portland, away from the majority of my family (and then, eventually, away from all of my family when my brother moved away), has been tough. There are countless videos from people in their 30s who will tell you that your 30s suck so I won’t belabor the point. What I will say is this: I am privileged to be in a position where I was able to have a lifejacket, so to speak, keeping me afloat for the past ten+ years. Therapy, meditation, and exercise helped in the early years, but it’s only within the past couple of years that I realized that a lot of my mental health is in my gut. This isn’t me telling you to go vegan or to do a detox,¹ this is me telling you to maybe take a multivitamin or an iron supplement or vitamin D,² or just get some healthier foods in your gut, if you can. I had a brain fog for years that would not let up and then one day I had a bunch of good quality meats at a Brazilian grill and I felt better almost instantly. I don’t think the meats were curing me, I think that I was getting some nutrient(s) that I wasn’t getting before. That’s all I’m saying.

Also, like, eat an orange. Oranges are so good!

Anyway, I’m 40 and I feel basically the same. The only thing that’s really weird about it is that sometimes I remember something from high school and it feels like it was two or three years ago but no, it was 22-26 years ago. Also I am like 50x more invested in my bowel movements than I was ten years ago.

Instagram is Just Sex Now

Is anyone else’s IG explore feed just 95% hot people? Look, I know I’m single and I enjoy a good attractive woman ogle every once in a while but it feels like IG is trying to mainline hot women into my veins lately.

It almost makes me miss TikTok. At least with TikTok I would get some educational and informational videos among the women. My explore feed is this:

• muscle girls being hot

• hot girls being hot

• POWER RANGERS (I don’t know why!)

• clips of the lead singer from Paramore even though I’ve never listened to Paramore or really even looked up this girl

• clips from podcasts with porn stars where the porn star is talking about sex work and/or a disgusting thing, which can be interesting but the hosts are usually these 20 year old dudes and it feels like they’re 30 seconds away from jerking off right then and there

• star wars shit, obviously

• legos, occasionally

• swimming girls being hot, apparently IG thinks I’m really into that

  ³

• like, people with star wars opinions, not about the series as a whole but you know, water cooler type shit about what type of Crocs Moff Gideon would wear

• memes of course

• medical infograph-esque posts that I very much did not ask for

• fan pages for stuff that i like but don’t like enough to want to look at a fan page for (coughcriticalrolecough)

• oh and also running stuff, remember, that thing I talk about incessantly?

Thankfully it is no longer suggesting dental videos, popping/surgical videos, or videos of guys from India getting shaves. I get it, it’s promoting stuff that I’m more likely to tap on, but knowing that I’m more likely to tap on these things is kind of depressing? I certainly don’t feel great tapping on the nth video of a scantily clad woman gyrating her hips to a sped up version of “Semi-Charmed Life” by Third Eye Blind.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not objecting to people being hot, but there’s just so much of it these days. Everyone’s hot! Everyone has an OnlyFans! It’s just a lot of hotness. I feel like 400 years ago you were lucky if you saw one hot person your entire life, and it was Helen of Troy, and a war was fought over her. Now I see 50 hot women in six seconds of scrolling. We’re not evolved enough for this!

Oh Christ I Ran a Bunch Again

Ha, bet you thought this would be a birthday extravaganza issue, but no, I did THREE 5ks since last we met. I don’t even care about my birthday anymore, all I care about is Run.

The theme of these 5ks is “Josh Needs to Stop Running for A Bit and Heal Up.”

Cinco de Mayo

Blog post. Ran on May 6th, which still aggravates me. Time was 36:20. Ran slower because my achilles tendon was hurting [note: this is foreshadowing], but this was a nice race at a lovely section of Milwaukie, OR, which I had never really been to before. It’s nice!

P&R: Fernhill Park

Blog post. Walked on May 7th. Portland Parks & Rec puts on a 5k every month from May to September. So I signed up for all of ‘em and got a dang ol’ t-shirt too. This was the day after the Cinco de Mayo run, so I ended up walking it instead of running to spare my achilles [note: this is also foreshadowing]. Fernhill Park is lovely.

Pacific Coast

Blog post. Ran/hobbled on May 14th. This one was kind of shit. Which sucks because it was my little birthday weekend getaway! Long Beach is a cute coastal town and the event was fine, and I got some salt water taffy and saw the ocean, but I was way more dehydrated than I realized on race day and I got a bit off track and then pulled my achilles in the final sprint to the finish, which boy oh boy hurt a lot. Stupid, stupid, stupid. Scared me that I might’ve torn something (maybe I did) but the pain subsided a lot after I stopped, and now it feels kind of like when a charley horse subsides and your muscle is just sore as hell. So it could just be a muscle strain instead, I dunno.

My next race isn’t for another three weeks. It’s the Starlight Run, which is a fun run so I will be taking it VERY easy. Then it’s the Redmond Run and then, trumpet fanfare, it’s my Foot Traffic Flat 10k. The thing I’ve been training for this entire time. So, I really ought to let my achilles heal up first.

A Thing for You

So, I think said last issue that I’m big into vlogs now, and I’ve been watching Caroline Winkler’s YouTube channel recently. I think I enjoy her channel because she used to be an actress and so I dig the vibe. She’s also one of those people who’s like “I’m not rich” but I’m looking at her family and she just feels rich, you know? It’s that east coast money thing. Anyway, I’m not one of those people who feels the need to dive into past videos for a channel, but my YT feed has been just awful lately and it kept bumping this video and so I watched it and I really enjoyed it! It’s just Caroline talking about life, really, and explaining what feels like a more nuanced take on “fake it til you make it.” Was an inspiring watch, to say the least.

The End

When next we meet, I won’t have any 5ks to talk about. Aren’t you excited? Instead I will probably talk too much about the new Zelda game. Until then!

1. Please do NOT do a detox, they do nothing for you. Your liver and kidneys do the detoxing folks! That is their job! ↩︎
2. vitamin diiiiiiiiiick ↩︎
3. i probably am ↩︎

or good porn star name?

Before We Begin: I Made a “Day in the Life” Video

Hi so I have been watching a lot of day in the life vlogs and just thought it would be fun to make one. Most of the vlogs I’ve seen are from women and the few men’s vlogs I’ve seen feel less like a daily life and more like they’re trying to prove to you that they practice Buddhism. I think my vlog is somewhere in between that. Why did I do this? I have no idea. Something to do? I think it turned out pretty well.

Sorry for all the technical issues, I basically never edit video and I filmed this in 4k for some stupid reason. Some of the video is jittery and I have no idea why, and the sound volume is all over the place. But it’s fun! I swear. If you like it please give it a thumbs up so I don’t feel like I’ve wasted my life. Okay back to the newsletter…

It’s my birth day month starting tomorrow. This year is the big 4 0. That’s right, I am turning 40 years old on May 12th. The funny thing about getting older for me is that I don’t feel like I’m 40, but I also totally feel like I’m 40. That’s the thing about aging—nobody knows personally what it feels like until they get there, you know? When I was 20 I didn’t know what 30 would feel like. I had ideas, because of memes and stories and pictures and videos of other people complaining about how terrible it is to be in your 30s, but I personally did not know what my body or mind would feel like at this point in my life. So now I’m about to enter my 40th year and I’m like … is this it?

Fun fact: I haven’t heard this song in years and yet the bass line is still embedded in my brain. I saw the Strokes play … Musicfest NW? I think? Years and years ago and I oh no wait I’m thinking of Interpol. Anyway I saw Interpol play years and years ago and the thing I remember about it the most is that the guitar player would stick his cigarette in between the strings of the headstock. At the time, I thought that was very cool.

Remember when you could smoke inside a building? As terrible as it was for everyone’s lungs, there was just something about it that you can’t replicate. Like, back when I lived in Idaho and we would drive over to Merritt’s Country Cafe on State St. in Boise. They made “scones” there but they were basically elephant ears, but they were tasty, and there was a non-smoking section and a smoking section, separated by … nothing, basically, I think a latticed wooden partition. And that’s nostalgic for me for god knows why.

God I miss Merritt’s. A hole in the wall diner still existing in 2023. God bless ‘em.

Anyway, lordy lordy, look who’s (turning) 40 (on May 12).

News & Updates

Lord help me, I signed up for the Portland (Half) Marathon this October.

I’ve probably already mentioned that I signed up for the Shamrock Run half marathon next March. At the time, I thought, “Well, this is a year from now so it’ll give me plenty of time to train.”

And then … look, I’m not sure what’s gotten into me. I’ve never run more than 5 miles at any one time, and that one time I did was the 2013 Shamrock Run. But thanks to Garmin Coach I ran nearly 7 miles on the 25th (which I talk about in the Day in the Life video) and the day this newsletter drops I’m scheduled to run a 7 mile long run. I’ve gone insane, is what’s happened. Running has suffused my brain with so many endorphins that I am now constantly chasing that high, man. Doesn’t it remember how much I loved sitting on the couch, eating an entire bag of Spicy Nacho Doritos in roughly 10 minutes? Where’s the nostalgia for marathon 12 hour video game sessions where I eat an entire frozen pizza AND an entire bag of Spicy Nacho Doritos?

(This is not to dissuade people’s eating habits, by the way. I still eat entire frozen pizzas from time to time. They’re good!)

Hell, I don’t even know why I like running. I have ideas, but whenever websites are like “Why do you do this?” and there’s a multiple choice answer I just pick “health” because I guess it’s health. I know exercise is good and makes you feel good but why running? I used to love weight lifting—why no more? There’s something about pushing yourself in running that’s different than weight lifting. I don’t know how to explain it, other than to say that physically getting from Point A to Point B in a certain amount of time feels more of an accomplishment to me than lifting a big heavy thing.

I decided on the half marathon because A) ain’t no way I’m running a full marathon this year, and B) it’s a logical extension of the 10k I’m running in July. (In fact, that 10k is technically a quarter marathon.) It’s twice that. A half, for those who don’t know, is 13.1 miles. So now when you see someone with an oval bumper sticker that reads “13.1” you know what that’s all about.

For reference, 13.1 miles is the distance from the east side of the Burnside Bridge here in Portland to Troutdale. Imagine me running from the bridge to Edgefield, more or less.

For my friends from Idaho, it’s the distance between the Danny Peterson Theatre in the Morrison Center at Boise State to Kuna.

Some people run TWICE this distance! In two hours! (Fun fact: 145 people at the latest Boston Marathon ran the 26.2 distance in under 2 hours and 30 minutes. That means they ran under an average of 5 minutes and 44 seconds per mile, for 26 miles. I don’t think I could run a 5:44 mile for one mile!)

I’m thinking about doing a video journal of my experience on YouTube. Not my experience on YouTube the platform, my experience of training for and running a half marathon. Would people be interested in that? Let me know in the comments and don’t forget to like this post and SMASH that subscribe button. (I’m practicing for YouTube.)

In other news, I got my lipid test results back finally from Quest Diagnostics, who took well over a week and an email from me to send them. They aren’t very good. Slightly better than when I checked almost two years ago (and I mean slightly), but still high and low when they should be low and high. Like, I’m not actively dying but I’m probably dying, you know what I mean?

I was a little bummed at the results because I thought all the running I’ve been doing lately would help more than it did. Our damn bodies are just very, very good at keeping stuff like fats. We looooove them fats. And the good news, I suppose, is that it isn’t worse.

Also, my dad had to go back in the hospital because his gallbladder keeps making gallstones, and gallstones can be made from high cholesterol, which means … I really gotta get my cholesterol in order so I don’t get gallstones when I’m 80. (He’s fine, they cut out his gallbladder and he feels a lot better!)

So, I’m trying to eat less meat and processed stuff. You know, the same thing everyone else is trying to do. I think my health trend is getting better though. Nothing apocalyptic for me, but high cholesterol is a cause for concern, and if my running etc doesn’t help drop it by, say, the end of summer, then I’m going to look into taking statins. I could just have the kind of high cholesterol that doesn’t go away with diet and exercise. We’ll see!

Five Fifty Fifty & Lilac Run

Two 5k races in the same WEEK? What is wrong with me?

Here’s the blog for Five Fifty Fifty. Here’s the blog for Lilac Run.

In short: the Five Fifty Fifty is a race for mental health that this guy in Wisconsin put together around six years ago. It’s a 5k in 50 states in 50 days. But there are only fifteen states on my shirt. I guess the rest are virtual? It’s probably fine, but it also felt very slightly like I gave my money to a scam artist. Probably not though! It was fine! To be fair, every race is just money spent on a t-shirt and medal, really, which if you think about it is kind of a scam. I get a shiny thing and clothes but I have to run for it? Anyway, it was a VERY small group, 50 runners total, and was rainy and cold as hell. Took place in Laurelhurst Park which is a nice park, but very hilly. My time was 36:39, surprisingly fast considering the rain and hills. The whole thing was alright, but probably not a race I will run in the future. Sorry, mental health.

The Lilac Run was a much more normal run in Gresham, out and back down the Springwater Corridor, which is just a long paved trail that stretches from southeast Portland to god-knows-where. I didn’t even know it went all the way to Gresham! My time was 35:41, a new personal best and the first time I’ve gotten my 5k time below 36 minutes. This means I have officially beaten 2013 me’s pace! It only took me ten years! Take that, 30-year-old me! Honestly, this run felt very good and I tried refueling as I was running, which had mixed results. Also there was a little Japanese garden island next to the venue! Neat!

This week was supposed to be a recovery week, but then I “unlocked” actual workouts on Garmin Coach, and have been running like a madman ever since. You can read more about that here, or watch the vlog I made!

parkrun #12

I did a parkrun again. It was a hot one! Like seven inches from the midday sun, almost!

Side note: Gen Z is never ever going to know how fucking big this song was in 1999. This album, really.¹

It was a gorgeous day out at Rock Creek Trail and we all did a parkrun. My time was 37:16, which is not bad considering I’ve been running like crazy this week, but it’s also pretty slow, comparatively. It’s cool, the sun was out and it was my first real time running on a sunny morning with temps around 65°F. Which is hot, for me, when I am running okay!

A Video for You

They’ve been releasing series 13 of Taskmaster on a weekly basis on YouTube, but I’ve finally gotten to the final episode. This was definitely one of the best casts this season. Taskmaster is great. Please watch it, it’s very fun and funny. But I guess start with episode one, even though this episode is very, very funny.

I knew nothing about this channel but it came up because of The Algorithm and I love Benny Schwaz. The host of this channel is also named Josh and honestly could maybe play my stunt double in a movie or something. He’s a little annoying to me, not a personality type I like to watch on YouTube, but thankfully he and Ben are a delight together. Ben is almost too good of an improviser. He’s so quick and funny in a way you just don’t see with a lot of people. I really wish we could’ve seen him in a movie or anything with Robin Williams.

The End

When next we meet, I will be … 40. I’ll also have another two 5ks in my belt, because I’m a madman. Until then.

1. Sometimes when it’s cold outside I will say, in a Rodney Dangerfield voice, “Boy, it’s a cold one! Like seven million miles from the midday sun!” This is still much too close for the sun to be, however. ↩︎

this newsletter has nothing to do with oysters, i just thought the image of a bunny that looks like an oyster was funny

Greetings, fellow Belvilleans. Belvillains? Look, I can call you one or those or I can call you Baguettes, which would be kind of funny. Greetings, fellow Baguettes. Welcome to another thrilling episode of The Newsletter. Boy do I have some updates for you. SHOCKING updates about, uh, TERRIFYING things. But I’m going to put them at the end of the newsletter to force you to read through this whole newsletter first. NO don’t scroll down to the end, I was lying, I don’t have any super cool updates, please just like me, okay? Grade me! GRADE ME!

Well, I guess I have one update: I have the Substack Notes thing now. Notes is Twitter but for Substack. I don’t know how it works for you. I don’t even know how to link it. I think it’s substack.com/notes? Does that work? Click that and find out. Maybe you just go there and see the things I’ve written and then you can comment on them? Who fucking knows anymore, people. These apps are tossing undercooked spaghetti at the wall at this point.

I also have the Chat thing but see my small rant above. Feel free to use it to ask me about broccoli or something, I don’t know. How many avenues do you need to access my content? Why would a newsletter app also have a separate space where I can do mini-newsletters? What even is the internet anymore?

News Re: Substack Itself

Well, it happened—another social media app, another buffoonish CEO being an absolute fucking idiot.

I’ll link the article here: Is Substack Notes a ‘Twitter clone’? We asked CEO Chris Best

And then I will show you these two parts of the interview:

So, this is really infuriating. It’s infuriating in the fact that Best is basically inviting people to be racist on his platform, and it’s infuriating that these rich white CEOs keep doing this shit. I don’t want another Elon Musk running a fucking social media company anymore, and I’m sick of the popular companies being run by these weird libertarian buffoons.

Now, if I was a big popular Substack guy, I would probably weigh the pros and cons of staying on this platform. But I’m not. I’ve got like 15 subscribers (hi mom). So, to me, leaving Substack is an easy choice. Especially now that I’ve got my blog up and running. I know people like the condensed version of my life on here, but man am I sick of these dudes running these social media sites and then having a shit response to “Should you moderate the content on your site?”. (I’m also sick of “content as business” right now but that’s a whole other thing.)

I’m going to stick it out on here for a bit but if Chris Best doesn’t reel back what he said in that interview, I’m out of here. I’ll take all your emails somewhere else, or hell I’ll just email you directly from my friggen Gmail, I don’t care.

Random Movie!

Sometimes I want to watch a movie but I don’t know what, and also I have like 50,000 pairs of polyhedral dice, so recently I married these two concepts and started watching movies randomly, by rolling dice. These are the results I’ve gotten so far:

• The Duellists (1977). Not bad! Ridley Scott’s directorial debut.

• The Land of Short Sentences (aka Meter i sekundet, 2023). Couldn’t find it online!

• About Last Night… (1986). Film version of the play “Sexual Perversity in Chicago” by David Mamet. It was alright. Lots of Demi Moore’s boobs and Rob Lowe’s butt if you’re into that.

• Temple of Venus (1923). Couldn’t find!

• Safety Last! (1923). Watched this instead. Pretty good, some neat moments and cool cinematography for the 20s.

• Thank You for Smoking (2005). Somewhat interesting but mostly bland movie. What happened to Aaron Eckhart? What is he doing these days? I hope he’s well.

• The Rocker (2008). Kind of a terrible movie for the first hour, kind of a decent movie for the second because it stops being about Rainn Wilson’s stupid character.

It’s cool because never in my life would I have ever watched any of these movies on my own. How do I do it? Basically I roll for decade, then year of decade, then whether I watch a top 100, worst 100, or cult classic film. If you want more detail, I wrote a Google Doc for it. I recommend it, but please get your movies from the holy bastion of streaming sites. Please do NOT pirate movies, especially movies from 1923 that are making basically no money so who cares but DON’T do it okay? Or else the Pirate Police will come to get you.

If you have any ideas for further dice rolls, fuckin’ … put it in the Chat thing! Or comment or god damn it I don’t know, just send me a postcard.

Race Season

Race season has begun for me. And by that I mean, I signed up for too many 5ks. Between April 8th and July 4th I have eight races. The 4th being my first ever 10k. (That’s a little over 6 miles for you gun totin’ Americans.)

Why did I sign up for so many races? Well, you know how when you’re using a table saw and you accidentally start to saw your thumb off, and for a split second you think, Well, I could pull back and have a dangly thumb that might not ever heal right, or I could just rip right through that sucker and put the thumb in resin and set it on the desk in my den as a little reminder of that time I severed my thumb with a table saw… what was I talking about? Oh, right. It’s like that. I’m the pushing my thumb through the table saw part. Hmm.

Okay, here’s a better analogy: it’s like Katamari Damacy and I’m the ball that keeps rolling over races. That … sounds bad in a different context. Running races. I’m collecting them until I turn into a star from the gravity of all the races—analogies are hard, people!

The 8th was the Lacamas Hop Hop 5k, which is detailed more on my blog. Basically, if you want the more nuanced and technical running stuff, go to my blog. Here, I’ll just say: there was a petting zoo.

I will relate a funny thing that I forgot to mention on my blog though: when I was walking up to the venue, the petting zoo trailer was pulling up. At the exact same time, the DJ at the venue was playing Taylor Swift’s “Trouble” and, I shit you not, I swear on my mother’s grave (after she dies of course), a goat inside the trailer bleated A FEW SECONDS before the popular goat screaming “Trouble” video remix.

Thankfully it was just a bleat and not a scream that would have terrified all of us, but it was still funny to me.

Re: the race, I did pretty good! I still walk a bunch, but not for long each time. My time was 36:57, a 5k PR and a good indication that my time should continue to get faster over the course of the year. I will get a 30 minute 5k. Maybe not in 2023, but eventually. There were mimosas and goats and it felt kind of bougie, but the medal is cute and kind of trippy, like maybe the designer took LSD before they designed the artwork for this year.

Also, my injuries that were a hindrance before are basically gone now, which I entirely attribute to my new shoes. Thank god.

The day after this publishes I am running the Five Fifty Fifty, which I signed up for like two weeks ago on a lark. I think it’s an untimed race but it benefits the AB Korkor Foundation for Mental Health, which, I’ll be honest, I did not do scrupulous research on prior to signing up. I just saw a 5k in Laurelhurst Park (close to where I live) and went for it. AB Korkor is the founder (A stands for Adel, not to be confused with Adele, who is a popular British singer), and the vice-president appears to be his son, which feels kind of nepotic. Let’s not think too much about this, okay? It’s a run/walk so I’m not planning on going all out.

After that is the Lilac Run in Gresham, so two races before my next newsletter. Are you sick of me yet?!

A Videos for You

Here’s the music video for Caroline Polachek’s “Smoke.”

I’m having weird feelings about this video, namely that it was clearly inspired by music videos from the 90s and—are we at a point where 4:3 aspect ratio is nostalgic now? It was only a decade ago! (Not the 90s, 4:3 ratio.) I have screenshots from my monitor from 2008 that are in 4:3. Anyway Caroline if you’re reading this I’d love to take you out for a lovely steak dinner, just shoot me a comment or whatever, I dunno. We have a lot in common: you were born to wealthy parents in Manhattan and lived in Tokyo during your early childhood, and I one time ran down a hill too fast when I was a kid and ran facefirst into a tree. We’re meant for each other.

I’m also going to link this because it was cool to learn Lindsay Buckingham’s picking style but also because hot damn is Never Going Back Again a great song. I tried listening to Fleetwood Mac’s discography from the start but the early blues stuff wasn’t my cup of tea, and really the band didn’t take off until Lindsay and Stevie Nicks joined. Which we all know, because this band has been studied relentlessly.

But seriously, I was listening through the early stuff and felt very meh about it, but once you hear Stevie start to sing “Rhiannon” on their 1975 album, you realize the band has just leveled up big time. Really wouldn’t be too off to say that Fleetwood Mac was really Buckingham Nicks¹ all along.

The End

When next you hear from me I will regale you with stories of not one, but two! 5k races, because I have gone insane. Until then.

1. Yes I am aware that Lindsay and Stevie’s first album was called Buckingham Nicks, I do have google, you know. ↩︎