On Cutting and Backpacks

It’s too late to go incognito now, after announcing in Facebook that I would be embarking on this project of lunacy. Unless I discard this and create a new one under a different name, I will have to watch what I write. You see, I can’t help it: when I write, negative stuff comes out—it’s like opening a spigot of self-centeredness, longing, resignation, anger, self-aggrandizement—my writing reeks of elitism, a label that a professor long ago used in a critique of, and that my wife discerns in my work. Elitism, though, I think is not quite the accurate word; I am hardly elite in anything. What they mean I’m sure is this air of I’m-better-than-you or at least I-have-better-taste-than-you that permeates my pieces (isn’t that elitism?). Indeed, my general attitude towards everything is suffused with this bitter flavor. In face to face dealings I am more or less able to keep this in check, except in moments of drunkenness when my usual reserve breaks apart and dissolves, and all the crap spews forth. But in writing? To write is to be drunk. Tear down the fucking dam then.

Herein lies the problem: I have a certain measure of respectability to maintain at work (as if!) and a mask of domestication at home that I have to keep wearing—my writing will cut through both like a scalpel.

Again, the question: should I go incognito? The thinker in me says yes, protect at all cost the structure that I have built up over the humdrum years. The feeler says no (Thinker? Feeler? Can you guys believe that I’m using these terms? Told you I would cut.). Let everyone see you for what you are: still not done being absorbed in himself (I doubt that this will ever happen), seeking validation for what he feels he does well—to cut with words dipped in what passes for him as wit.

I will defer answering until the time that I find it necessary to make a truly deep incision, the type that severs veins, tendon, connecting tissue. That day fills me with dread and yearning.

Now, this is a blog on running, so let’s move on to that piece ubiquitous in running blogs, the gear review. After dawdling for over a year—hours and hours of tiring and lonesome department store and online hunts for a bargain—I finally was able to buy a backpack that I could use for running home from work (Read: it’s a pack that I could use for running, not one for running. Oh, the compromises that I have no choice but to make.). I didn’t have the cash for it, so I maxed out my credit card, got home, and showed the bag—my golden key to running a full marathon—to my wife. She looked it over and said, in Waray (Waray translated into English loses its corrosive bite), that it was an ugly piece of low-quality crap that will make me look like a construction worker (I’m not the only elitist in the family). I bristled at this but managed to summon enough sense to display outward calm.

Anyway, this Saturday morning after work, I ran home, the construction worker’s bag with my office clothes packed in on my back for the first time. It was almost midday, the sun high up stung my face and arms (I had found that I could tolerate running in the sun when I’m wearing sunglasses; it’s not so much the heat that hurts but the glare), and the bag strapped tight (via chest and waist straps) reduced ventilation to my back. In no time at all I was dripping with sweat. Although it is supposedly designed to not impede the flow of air around my back, I didn’t really expect much of it, and, after some strap adjustments, I attained a degree of comfort with it—my stuff didn’t bounce around, which was the important thing—but, it didn’t really “disappear” on my back as I imagine costlier and running-specialized packs would.

Now, now. After threats of cuts and incisions writing about a backpack seems pretty lame. Some cutting, it looks like, will have to be done though: the straps dangle and slap my arms as I run. When you’re sweating like an animal and on the verge of having a heat stroke, minor irritations are magnified tenfold, and you have to find a way to get rid of them.

Well. That’s it for my first ever gear review (of sorts). Next, I hope to find time to write about why I choose to run home in the sweltering heat, after enduring nine or ten migraine-inducing hours of graveyard shift work. Or perhaps the real question is why do I have to endure work?