Spring Break

Eugene, March 31, 2008

The past week has been spring break for the ITA Axemen. We held informal workouts Tuesday and Friday and begin a full-fledged spring season tomorrow.

The flowers are blooming, and like the birds and the bees, I too have caught a bit of the spring fever, even though the weather has been wet and miserable as usual--snow, at times--now, however, the sun suddenly shines through in all its glory--that's Eugene for you. What I mean by spring fever is that I met a beautiful girl a little over three weeks ago and we have been dating ever since. Her name is Pearl, we met at the opera and we live through the opera. Last week we explored the Oregon coast of Yachats to Newport, settling down in the Tennessee Williams room of the Silvia Beach Hotel. The highlight of the trip was reading "A Streetcar Named Desire" in a tiny but hot bathtub with a rich Sonoma Cabernet and dark chocolate: an Ecstasy one can only wonder. In recent months Silvia's Beach has taken me on a journey beyond the horizon of our recent centuries to the depths of the Mediterranean world. Silvia Beach's physical hotel is just the immediate gratification of months of research. With Proteus as my guide, I feel like I can do anything. Apollo may frustrate my enterprise, but Proteus will protect me. The problem now is that the Willamette Valley is so far from the sea, and my vanity is in constant danger of self-destruction without assistance from the gods to properly channel my energy. Such a dilemma Joyce identifies as a "Tall Man's Complex" of sorts, always thinking oneself the tallest man in the room, but I prefer Schopenhauer's title "World as Will and Idea," Emerson's "Over-Soul," Nietzsche's "Superman," or Campbell's "Hero." However one defines this teleological principal of processing the ideal, our literary history is enough entangled in Aristotelian cannibalism, for me to offer yet another list of hackneyed footnotes. Yet I am too smitten with the enigma to offer a solution. . . better to just BE THE HERO, in between your blogging of course, where the customs of society beg us to describe THE HERO.

My Achilles Heel has taken me away from running the past 10 days, and I anticipate another week heavy on race walking and pool workouts. Such a regime screams "Victim," so I have added a goodly amount of power, weight lifting to get my testosterone levels up, and vindicate myself from the recent calumny that I am a faggot; my antagonists cite the tendency of me to take two hour walks along the river while belting Flowtow's "M'appari" from the top of my lungs as a sure sign of homosexuality. I assure you that this is a false rumor, though I do quite enjoy the motion of race walking, the sexiness of the step, the efficiency of the stride. And although I remain contemptuous of race walking as a sport, I am an advocate and subscriber to race walking for its physiological benefits: form-running breakdown, freeing of the mind, focusing of the mind, and its low stress.

God Bless and Walk with the Hips!

Gabe