Writing Archive

30 MINUTES OF NON-STOP JOGGING

This is my milestone: To measure life in moments rather than years, to live each and every single minute alive and awake, with wide-eyed relish, and to savor my heartbeats as delicious passages ticking off with percussive vigor from my very blood’s rhythm, tapping out a master-plan.

The first five minutes are pro-forma: Every single jog begins this way, with solitude and pain. I’m by myself and I hurt. And is this fundamentally different from any other moment, when I’m not jogging, that is?

The next five minutes: The Beckett refrain becomes a mantra — “I can’t go on… I’ll go on…”

The middle 10: Like that pre-pubescent and then adolescent sliver of life, time compresses and seems like this is all there is. I see no past and no future. I want to be impulsive and quit, but part of me thinks I can go on forever, while euphoria mixes with nihilism, as I waver from one moment to the next, poised to seize the day or just crawl back into my shell.

The next five or so: I keep looking at my watch. How much more time do I have? Spit takes on the consistency of glue. Out of the corner of my eye, I keep seeing dogs in the park taking a dump. The brain wanders in alliterative delirium: canines, condos, caffeine, coño… Every single Newport in the vicinity wafts my way, as I choke on my own esophagus.

The last five: I’m not really on the last five — I just keep looking at my watch again, hoping that time will pass and free me from the agony and shortness of breath, but such is my illusion, to escape the challenge at hand, but to flee into what, and why? Wasn’t this very moment all that there really is?

The last five, for real: A lamp-bulb flickers in pathetic protest against the dying of the light, as I round the park field-house yet again, and Michael Jordan is still in mid-360, still believing he can fly, in a framed BULLS poster that becomes my signpost of progress, someone to look up to, as I cycle through in eternal recurrence, past teenagers toking up, past people returning home from work with lone mom-and-pop items in sorrowfully ragged plastic bags to complete the workday and turn on the kitchen light and deal with what lies before, what comes next, and what comes after that, and I soak it all up just a bit too fast for my own good…

I wake up a few minutes later after having passed out in the park. A dog is licking my face. No, it’s actually a homeless guy trying to give me CPR. And trying to roll me.

As Rumi might say, this is my means of praise: To count each one of these 30 minutes every single time, but in more and more close detail, to account for them with the force of life and blood, and to live every last infinitely sub-dividable piece as if I have so many more to come and must buck up to savor what’s in store, for now and forever.