I run because I’m not famous, I don’t want to be famous, but I still haven’t outgrown self-comparison and a mild obsession with writers and musicians and movie stars. I run because aging hipsters aren’t myths, they’re people.

I run because I really like the word “and.” I like the rhythm of it in life. I know it annoys people to deal with it over and over and over and over. There’s a march to it. A cadence. It’s moving forward. It’s the first (only) rule of improvisation: we only have “ands” to play with, no “buts.” For example, a man and a woman, dressed only in black, take the stage:

“Gee Sally, why do you have a raccoon on your head?”

“Do you like it? I think the pink is fabulous. I had to buy it.”

I run for Sally, who went with the raccoon on her head and wherever it might lead them.

I run because life is a lot like improvisation. We can argue with each other and fight about who is in charge and who is telling the story, or we can build it together. I run because I think the world needs a little more and-and-and and a little less but-but-but. I get a lot less but-but-but from my mind and my arms and my body and my heart when I run.

I run because it’s important (and difficult) to be alone with myself. No people, no family, no TV, no music. Just me.

I run because I don’t like myself very much. When I’m alone in the mountains, I have conversations with myself. I argue. I laugh. I get annoyed. Sometimes I’m proud of me. I run because I’m still trying to figure things out. I run because I don’t think I get to stop trying to figure things out. I run because I need to get along with myself more. We should be friends: me and myself. Running is an ongoing accomplishment. I run so I can look pain and self-doubt and exhaustion in the face and smirk like an aging hipster.

I run to stay sane.

I run because I believe Jeff Tweedy: distance has a way of making love understandable. The further you go, the more you understand. Or, the further I go, the more my body pumps endorphins into my bloodstream and I’m so high I either think I understand or I don’t care that I don’t understand. I’m cool with either one.

Like most things that fight for attention, both sides of the dry creek bed, east and west, offered the same thing: dirt, sand, rocks, roots, patches of sun, and glimpses of giant red and white cliffs as the canyon began to squeeze into formation.

About five miles into the canyon, the trail didn’t have time to fight with itself anymore. It was disappearing. I could not make out the clear worn edges and smooth middle of the trail anymore. It came and went in patches. It would dip into the dry creek bed and seem to not come out again.

But I was able to follow the trail. Someone, some hippie/hunter/searcher/poser had been here before and left stacked piles of rocks behind to point the way. Within the weeds and bushes and boulders and trees, were small, silent stacks of rocks. Out there, they looked as man-made as a shopping cart. Despite being made of the ground around them, the piles were clearly different. They were clearly created. Clearly composed.

These piles were notes to the world, to any other people who come this way, “There’s a way through here. Follow along. This place is huge and beautiful and epic and scary and you belong here. Right this way.”

Kind of like a wink left behind for all of us to smile at.

I wonder what my piles of rocks look like? Am I leaving any? Am I following any? Do I stop when the trail gets dicey? Do you?

Still, I’ve been told that if you share your resolutions, you have a better chance of keeping them. Official self-reflection every year can’t be that bad, right? What did you accomplish last year? Are you better or worse? Happier or sadder? More fulfilled or more empty?

I guess I’m uncool enough that I think it’s worth it. Besides, it makes me feel good to keep any of them. You should try it. Self-satisfaction tastes a little like  an artichoke heart after nibbling away the leaves one by one by one.

To all the bearded, tight-pant, checkered-shirt, scarf-wearing  hipsters out there, here’s 5  resolutions from my 2010 laundry list:

1. Read 36 books. That’s 3 a month. I did 23 last year. I have 18 lined up already. Everyone should have a reading goal. Reading books will make you famous.
2. Picture a day. One photo from each day of the year. I got through February last year. You’ll look at the world differently if you do it. You can watch my flickr stream to see if I’m keeping up.
3. 2 marathons, 2 triathlons, 2 ultras. This, of course, means I’ve got to figure out what’s up with my knee and build my mileage up again. The hundred mile run will be in October. That’s plenty of time to get ready, right?
4. 50 blog posts. It’s all about building your brand, or in my case, continually figuring out what my brand is. 50 posts makes sure that I am writing everyday. Lucky for you, I don’t post everything I write. Otherwise, you might be reading about little, bearded men talking to me from my grandparent’s bushes.
5. 3 months as a vegetarian. I seem to try this one every year and forget about it during some stressful day in February when I attack a plate of buffalo wings.  This year, I’ll shoot for at least 90 days (for month long stretches). I’ll start in January and decide what happens after that.

I’ve got at least 6 more, but believe me, you’re better off not knowing what they are. These are the good ones. The others will give the tight-pant hipsters out there a little too much ammunition.

Now go, be uncool, and make some of your own.

Looking back at that sentence I find many things wrong with it. The most glaring problem though is that phrase resting leisurely in the middle: trying hard to believe. Is that even possible? To try and believe?

On the surface it’s supposed to be pretty straight forward isn’t it? Very Yoda. You believe or you don’t believe. I think that it’s like this with most people. Belief is as simple as choosing your pants for the day. Pick them out, put them on, and get on with your life.

I’m not trying to minimize beliefs or be critical about anyone’s thoughts on the subject. It’s only an observation. Despite stories of the prophets, I don’t see anyone wrestling with their beliefs these days. Maybe I don’t listen enough. Maybe I’m being dramatic. It’s really simple to self-fulfill your own prophecies or make your reality a part of your beliefs (and vice-versa). Beliefs are kind of made to try on and test out. That’s not a bad thing (maybe you’re supposed to experiment). I guess I just think that most people never change their outfit once they get the first one on.

Take my daughter, who watched me delete an email from her account that said specifically that if you don’t forward this email on to 15 people and you delete it, you’ll have three years bad luck. Her next two days at school and home were hell: a falling christmas tree, a broken blender, fights with her brothers, tripping on the stairs. All because of the email curse that was going to ruin her life for the next three years. It got the the point of tears a couple of times. The second time she began to cry I felt guilty for deleting the email, and then I wanted to punch the one who created it in the face.

I wanted to track them down for forcing me into a ridiculous moral moment and turning my daughter into a superstitious sentimental.

But that’s not what I want to believe. I’m not sticking to my point. I want to believe that I’m here, alive, on planet terra for a reason.

See, my grandpa should have died around age 40. The doctors couldn’t make sense of why he lived. They pronounced him dead at his home before they lazily loaded him into the old ambulance and took him to the ER where they performed CPR on him for hours and hours and burned him with new defibrillators. Growing up, I heard this over and over again, “Shawn, your grandpa is supposed to be dead.”

So, because he isn’t dead, there must be something he’s supposed to do. There must be some purpose he needs to accomplish before he calls it quits. My grandpa believed this too: “I’m here for a reason and it must be a good one. I better do good things until I figure out what it is.”

It might be a little selfish, but I like to think that I was the reason. Was there something he was supposed to do for me? Some example he was supposed to set? I try to think about what this might have been. What did he do in the year before he finally died? The days before? He told me the nurses were good looking at the hospital. Was this it? Some cryptic message about keeping a sense of humor and recognizing beauty? Who knows?

Regardless of the reasons, I do think this is a great philosophy to live by even if I’m not sure I believe it. Even if I only try to believe it:

“I’m here for a reason and it must be a good one. I better do good things until I figure out what it is.”

When starting a new habit or trying to accomplish a goal, you should change all of your passwords to something that helps you stay focused on your new decision.

For example, if I decide that I’m going to read three books every month (because, let’s face it, reading books can make you popular and impress your boss), I could change my password to:

Ryar3btm. (Remember you are reading three books this month.)

Or maybe I’m widening my circle? Networking more. Discovering new people and looking for additional opportunities to grow and expand my reach. I could try something like this:

Dyttsn2d? (Did you talk to someone new today?)

And for those more interested in the spiritual or metaphysical world, you might be looking for some kind of affirmation or reminder about your faith or righteous path. Try this:

Ysp2d. Yli. (You should pray today. You like it.)

Give it a shot. Let me know how it works. We all need reminders sometimes and chances are you type that sorry little password of yours at least three times a day. Who wants to constantly be reminded that they’re clever enough to come up with something like Pa55W0rd? We might as well use it to help us become who we want to become.

I talk a lot about there being two types of art (music/books/performances/paintings): those things that make you excited in the moment (think Batman), and those that you chew on and have to digest (think The Darjeeling Limited)–those that stay with you for days, weeks, years. I think a lot of people I know went to Where the Wild Things Are thinking they’d be getting the first kind of experience. When they were confronted with the second, they felt a little bit like they were watching Adam Sandler going punch drunk during a song about Hanukah.

I was trying to put words to why I liked it so much on the drive home. The only thing for now–remember, I’m still digesting–is that Jonze and Eggers presented something real. You can’t really call it magic realism; there’s still an overlying mist of fantasy in Marquez’s stuff. But it does seem ironic that we get to see real relationships and sadness unfold with giant horns and beaks and claws. They manage to give us something that feels honest.

This is Eggers’ strength in A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. It’s too easy to turn relationships into either a complete mess or a complete success. We want relationships in our lives and in our stories to have clean boundaries and be easy to describe. Good or bad. Doomed or ordained.

Take Robin Hood for example. We never see his moments of doubt or indifference. You’ll never see him cry or wonder if Marian is worth it. When the lovers are together, we don’t see him confused about what to do with his sword, or trip and fall after he kisses her goodnight. It’s not real-life. Most of us don’t really want it to be, but this is where the poetry comes in. That’s what poetry is: beauty and meaning still existing in our honest, mundane, messy, sticky, confusing, angry, double-standard lives.

So, you should go see Where the Wild Things Are if you’re ready to digest something meaningful and you’re ready to be self-obsessed for a little bit  after watching huge wild creatures pelt each other with dirt clods. If you’re looking for something a little more cartoony, stick with Sponge Bob.

Point is, I’m part of an entire generation that can artfully jump from topic to topic. We’re capable of starting a conversation about Tiffany (I Think We’re Alone Now) at 1pm and end up high-fiving girls with dark hair and tattoos at Roller Derby by 6. The more lucid among us will wonder how we got there. The rest of us just think it’s a great night.

A lot of people blame the Internet and modern media for this grazing, this skipping from topic to topic, action to action like a baby playing with the buttons on a tape deck. Maybe it was MTV? Maybe we’re just evolving? The next great leap forward: now you can ride your bike, chew your food, speak French, and rub your belly at the same time. Congratulations. You deserve a medal.

Well, you’ll be glad to know I’ve figured it out. It’s not the Internet or MTV or the alien DNA the visitors snuck into our water supply (though I do think all of those things have added to our new sporadic tendencies).

It’s Sesame Street. Sesame Street is to blame, and here’s how I figured it out:

We we’re having one of our conversation slams late on a Thursday afternoon. These conversations do feel a little competitive, like we’re all one-upping each other in weirdness. With three people, the conversation topics went something like this: burritos -> running -> Hunter S. Thompson (Google) -> Whitesnake (Slacker) -> Peanuts -> dog hair -> US mail -> Simon and Garfunkle -> Google -> Sesame Street -> Oscar -> Mr. Hooper -> death -> produce. This leads me to a Muppet Wiki looking at the episode in question and I discovered something remarkable.

The average number of scenes in a 50 minute episode of Sesame Street was between 35-40. That’s a separate scene about every 80 seconds. And these aren’t scenes that are part of the same narrative. We’re not following Ernie around on the streets and each scene is a new house or doorstep. We go from Big Bird -> The Count ->  cat in a dollhouse -> weird pinball machine -> Guy Smiley -> numbers roll call -> the letter H -> the number 4 -> cake -> puppies -> Ernie -> kids on a playground.

Every 80 seconds we get something completely different.

No wonder we’re good at skipping around. Jim Henson did it to us. Snuffy and Maria did it to us. We were conditioned.

So, thank you Sesame Street for teaching me how to count and for ruining my ability to focus on one thing for more than 80 seconds. My life is peppered with oddities because of it.

Can anyone really explain how they can love running? You love sunrises and dirt and being alone among the boulders and trees in the middle of a metropolis before you sit at a meeting and people give you the crazy look when you tell them that you ran nine miles in the hills before you took a cold shower, ate a banana and some oatmeal, and thought about the salt on your skin before you hopped in your car and drove to the office to sit down for a weekly state of the union. It gives you perspective and takes it away.

Anyway, too much too soon gave me a bum knee. If you’re also in this situation, here’s the best advice I’ve found. Follow it, and you could be good to go in a week or two:

1. Take a break from running. This part of it stinks, but there’s no way around it. You’ve got to stop long enough for it to heal.
2. Ice your knee. If it’s like mine, I have to ice right below the knee cap. Elevate your knee when you do it. Read a book.
3. Work your core. Most runners I know get so in love with running, they don’t do any of those other fancy-shmancy workout things. Use the opportunity to strengthen your core. Your body will thank you when you’re back on your feet.
4. Swim. No biking, no walking, no elliptical machines. Avoid activities where you bend your knees a lot. Thing is: to swim properly you shouldn’t bend your knees all that much. Swimming will feed your endurance/cardio craving.
5. Write haikus. It’ll help give you perspective.
6. Stretch. Now is the time to take up some yoga. When you’re not icing, stretch. Before you go to bed, stretch. After your swim, stretch. Make sure you do the funky cross-your-legs-touch-your-toes ITB stretch.

I’m giving it a week. I have a race next weekend and we’ll see how it goes. I think I caught it early. Which, I think, is the most important lesson:

Be big enough and wise enough to take a break when you’re supposed to. You’re still a runner. It’ll be there then you finish your haikus and get out of the water.

I’ve been obsessing about this for weeks.

I walked for 15 miles in the middle of the night–in the middle of the desert–with a guy who set out to run 100 miles. I joined him at mile 45. We had a full moon, headlamps, and plenty of pretzels every five mile to keep us company. And he was breaking down, his body had stopped tapping into any of its reserves. His only energy came from whatever food we got into him. We walked and walked and walked and shuffled and walked.

We got to know each other pretty well. We quoted Weird Science a little too much and talked a lot about a girl who was dressed up like Rainbow Brite. We created our own religion–it gets goofy out there. He can quote Pulp Fiction from beginning to end. 6+ hours later he finished the race at 100 kilometers. He didn’t finish the 100 miles, but he went further than he ever had before. Up until this race, the furthest he had gone was 38 miles. He did 62.

This is what amazed me. There was nothing in him that said, you can’t do this–you need to prepare more. Keep planning, keep thinking about it. Somewhere he decided that 38 miles was good enough to try for 100 miles. He had been running, he had been training, and then he just did it. I admire the way he believed in himself (and still believes in himself).

Me? I debated doing the 15 miles with him. I wasn’t sure if I could deliver a noteworthy performance. I knew I could finish, but I didn’t know if I could finish without being laughed at? I knew I could finish, but would he regret taking me on as a pacer as he struggled to keep me at his pace?

I plan too much. I think about what’s next too much. I worry about how I’ll look or what people will think too much. It’s left me questioning my goals. It’s left me, at times, wondering who I am. What is it I really want? Because, I reason, if I really wanted it, I would have already acted on it. Right? So I guess I don’t really want a whole lot.

6 hours in the desert with this crazy guy gave me some perspective. My “it-must-not-be-what-I-really-want-attitude” is crap. I wouldn’t plan and obsess and think about it if it wasn’t what I really want.

I have a favorite word in Polish. It’s już. In Polish, it sounds like “youshzz.” It doesn’t quite translate into English, but the closest word is “already.” It can mean I’m coming, I’m there, I’m here, too late, or it’s happening. I need to say this word to myself more in relation to what I want and what I want to do. Sometimes, I just need to stop preparing to do something and remember that I’m ready to do it.

Run 50K. Już.
Get an audience. Już.
Write a book. Już.
Write a novel. Już.
Be a father. Be a friend. Już. Już.

If I ever get a tattoo, this will be it. Don’t worry mom, I’ll put it somewhere professional. Unless you know me, you’ll have no idea I have it.