haiku

A couple of random Haiku.

mankind stands apart
from the lesser animals
in thinking he's more


thousands of years on
a photon from my flashlight
will reach a dead star

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A Shrine to Me

OK, bear with me. I'm a little embarrased about this, but not so embarrassed that I'm not publishing it to the World Wide Web.
I'm moving, so that means packing stuff up, taking stock of what I need and what I don't need, what's clutter, and what's important.
One of the things that hit me during this process is that I have a buttload of medals, trophies, t-shirts, and other assorted race junk. I know there are charities that will take your old medals and give them to someone else who deserves and will appreciate them. Well, that's fine if that's what you want to do, but it doesn't feel right for me.
Maybe I'm too much of a packrat. Anyway, the medals and trophies mean something to me. If someone else has earned a medal, I'd rather buy them one than give them one of mine.
I've given away only one medal, and that was one that had a special meaning to me. I gave it to someone for whom I think it will have a special meaning.
But that's just what makes sense to me, not something I'm trying to convince anyone else of.
What this means is that I have a bunch of race junk. Which gets us to the embarrassing part. In one of our spare bedrooms, I had built up what kind of seemed like a shrine to me when I started packing it up.
Here are 5 medals from the Silicon Valley Marathon.

Next to that I had decorated a steer skull with 5 medals from the Tucson Marathon and a bunch of leather-strapped ceramic medals from the Big Sur Marathon and Marathon Relay.

When you walk around race expos, you see companies selling various methods for displaying your medals. These are often something a little like a small set of coathooks, six to twelve hooks or pegs to hang your medals on. That works fine if you only run a few races.
I would need about a dozen of those.
I got this great idea to use a four-by-six-foot sheet of pegboard and a box of pegs like you might use in a workshop.

I'm not going to get into the other stuff here, trophies, cups, plaques, etc. The medals filled a small box, a about the size of a four-slice toaster, that I put into a large plastic tote, which I then filled with the other stuff, using race shirts to protect the fragile stuff.
Yeah, I'm going to have to think about what it says about me before I open that tote and rebuild the shrine.

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I'm back

Hello. I'm back, at least for one blog post.
I have moved from Chandler, AZ to Simi Valley, CA. Simi Valley is hills and trails, awesome running territory.
I'm totally out of shape, but I did this run last Saturday.
What else is new? There's a new No Sugar Added Poetry Book coming out from the Diabetes Hands Foundation, and it looks like I'll have a couple of poems in it, both about death and diabetes. Inspiring, I know.
Here are a couple of other things I wrote recently, after poetry was collected for the book.

Blue Candles

I thought about buying blue candles
In symbolic support for the dead
But I would hope never to light one
That they'd melt in a drawer instead.

my eyes

I hate what you see in my eyes
I know you only know because you love me
Please, when I come around
I mean me
not the me with barren, hungry blood
not the angry, resentful me

I hate that you see it in my eyes
before I know myself
I hate that you learned to notice
please when I come around
forgive me.

If someone can get grouchy
missing a meal
what happens when the brain is starving?

I know, because I've felt it
You know, because you've seen it
Please forgive me
I hate what you see in my eyes

That's all for today. I have at least a couple other blog posts half-written, but you know how it goes with this.

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