david brooks

dear david brooks,

your recent article "high-five nation" was just the worst. let me explain why.

you say that "[on v-j day] the allies had...completed one of the noblest military victories in the history of humanity. and yet there was no chest-beating." maybe there was no exuberance on v-j day because we exploded and incinerated hundreds of thousands of civilians in japan. maybe people recognized the frightening future implications of our use of nuclear weapons. maybe it wasn't because those were more modest times.

you call "individual expressionism" a capitalistic routine. you are wrong. sure, aspects of it are frequently co-opted by corporate interests, but there are vital movements (do-it-yourselfers, backyard farmers, much of the bicycle culture, to name a few that come immediately to mind) whose individually expressive members are driven not by money, but by intellectual curiosity and desire for self-sufficiency and sustainability. 

you use michael jordan's basketball hall of fame induction speech as an example of immodesty. can't m.j. allow himself a little self congratulation for the simple reason that he is the greatest basketball player to have ever lived? and because he was being inducted into the basketball hall of fame? there is nothing wrong with him reflecting publicly a little bit on his success in front of people who appreciate his accomplishments. he is frequently quoted as saying that his predecessors made his success possible. is the forced aw-shucksism prevalent among athletes today better than a little honest discussion? do you really think michael jordan is trying to bolster his resume at this stage in the game? shit.

later, you essentially compare the actions of contemporary professional athletes and entertainers, people who are paid to get attention, to those of soldiers and average americans at the end of a brutal two-front war; a war in which we unleashed the most fearsome human-made device ever devised on a civilian population. do you really think that our soldiers today would unabashedly celebrate the use of nuclear weapons on our enemies? do you even think that terrell owens would pretend to pull down his pants and moon afganistan or that dikembe mutombo would wag his finger at iraq if we obliterated their major metropolitan areas? 

you might remember babe ruth's called shot in 1932, which is possibly one of the cockiest gestures of all time. not just calling the shot, but the mocking and grandstanding the accompanied his trot around the bases. if there wasn't a precedent for public celebrations of personal accomplishments before, that certainly set it. 

an opinion column at the new york times? you can say anything you want to hundreds of thousands of intelligent people. don't fucking call me and my contemporaries immodest and self-indulgent and then back it up with illogical nonsense.

hood to coast

one time i asked my friend how you stop on a fixed gear bicycle without brakes in an emergency, right, because it seemed like the track skid took a second to initiate and he said "you just do". now that is an imperfect explanation and i ride with brakes because my gear ratio is, as rachel's friend pointed out, pretty stout. but i would like to borrow that explanation if i may to describe a recent experience i had that has nothing to do with bicycles.

so i ran in the hood to coast relay, which is a 197 mile road race on the back roads of oregon; teams have 12 people and each team member is responsible for running 3 legs, one every 8 hours or so. it is an intense experience for a number of reasons, 1) you don't have much of an opportunity to sleep, 2) you can't eat normally, because you're always about to run, and 3) unless you are a distance runner and 15+ miles don't bother you, running 5-7 miles every 8 hours is exhausting. 

now i was not out of shape, but it is true that i took a couple of weeks off from running before frantically trying to get some training in during the week leading up to the race. nevertheless, i ran my first leg, 6.4 miles, and felt pretty good. my second leg was 4.9 miles around 5am and i overexerted myself, running faster than i planned to (the result of some poor calculations of my proximity to the checkpoint.) 

by the last leg i was spent, my quads and calves were frozen solid and i had slept two hours in the rain and eaten only peanuts and raisins and bananas for the last 18 hours. my teammate flurry had given me some energy cubes, little caffeinated gelatinous bundles of carbohydrates (yeah, that's a natural product), of which i ate five to wash down my five ibuprofen. i was at the handoff point, waiting for my teammate to come in and i was thinking "my god, i don't know how i'm going to do this". 

and if this seems too self congratulatory or you think i am about to make myself out to be some sort of hero like robert redford in the natural (triumph in the face of adversity!), well then let me disabuse you of that idea. and if you don't want to read what amounts to a story about an overprivileged white kid going for a 5-mile jog, well then i don't blame you. i bet there is some show on mtv right now that will at least make a similar story entertaining with melodramatic dialogue, a lively soundtrack and fast cuts. 

well lindsey ran in to the checkpoint and sort of surprised me, i was so checked out. i went from daydreaming to running. the first few minutes i was so uncoordinated i felt like i had hooves (or maybe high-heels on, or maybe both like if the greek god pan were a cross dresser). whenever i passed anybody or someone passed me i thought "oh man, they feel like i feel; this is hard and they are doing this too." and eventually the physical exertion and discomfort were pressed backward in my mind, like they became more than i could focus on and i was just going. 

and so if someone asks me how you run a race like hood to coast, the only answer i would be comfortable giving them is "you just do". (and if you want to extrapolate my sentiment to mean "even when you think you can't, you can", then be my guest, just don't hold me responsible if things don't work out.)