Walking Life

It's the end of June, a month that has been eventful in the greater, outside world, with the good (Cavs winning) balanced out by the bad (Orlando) and everything in between. Because all the local libraries have the nerve to be patriotic, and also because I don't have wi-fi at the casa, I will be offline at least until the Fourth, after the libs close tomorrow afternoon for the holiday weekend.

If only the Brits had won...wait, would "Brexit" have happened if we were still property of the Queen?

Anyway, I'm coming to the end of the period I like to call "no payments for student loans or medical bills due," I've already mailed off the first payment for next month for the student loans and my medical bills will be paid via an arrangement I like to call "bleeding me dry if I don't get a job soon." Speaking of which, I have applications out there, no responses as yet. But some of the jobs I've applied for in teaching, they probably are waiting for a while before calling people like myself, who are qualified to teach. I figure by this time next month, it might be time to hit the "panic" button on the lack-of-incoming-cash department. But for now, I walk.

I started up walking again over at Sertoma Field ("Sertoma" being Cherokee for "made-up word coined by white people," I suppose. Though if I Google it after posting this and it turns out to be a real word, who's the racist then?). It usually takes about forty-five minutes to do three laps (well, it takes me forty-five minutes to do three laps), and it's a good way to meet people who like to run by while also saying good morning if they can be bothered. I'm not a hat-wearer per se, but I like to go walk before I even think about taking a shower, and my bedhead is best hidden under my twenty-odd-years-old Red Sox cap (from Starter, so it's got a band in the back to accommodate my oversized head). Plus, you tend to get sweaty from all that walking. So why not save some water and walk while you already stink? Stink some more! It's fun!

I got an iPod Shuffle back in May, it was almost a full month before I got it up and running (of the two thousand songs I have, it could load maybe 250. But I can't complain about the variety too much, even when I don't want to hear Van Morrison songs one right after the other. I like to mix it up). I like to have a soundtrack while I avoid the duck shit that's all over certain parts of the walking track. At Sertoma, as in life, a lot of your time will be spent avoiding duck shit. Look it up, it's in the Bible and the Bill of Rights. Generally, I have been walking pretty regularly in the mornings, at around nine; any later and, with the way the weather is going here in SC, I'd melt before I made it completely all the way around. And I'd melt into the duck shit on the paths. Nobody wants that.

By and large, I've done a lot of reading this past month, right now I'm almost three hundred pages into Infinite Jest. I like to head down to the Cooper lib and get online, the parking pass doesn't run out until early August so why not? I do miss the daily tumult of either teaching a class or preparing to teach one the next day; even after the clusterfuck that was April, I have to say that I enjoyed every last stress-inducing minute of the final build-up to graduation. As I didn't get into any MFA programs yet, I'll have to put off my exit from the state for a year, I guess. There's a lot of uncertainty in the near future, safe to say, and I imagine a lot of my fellow grads feel something similar. I guess that's why I took up walking again, even with all the duck shit to navigate: it's something that I have some control over, even if there's duck shit involved. And did I mention how the mama and papa ducks hiss at you if you walk too close to their babies?

At any rate, I walk to lose weight (which I *think* is starting to work), I walk to get exercise, I walk to get out of the house for a little bit, and I walk because I like to listen to music. And then I walk some more...