Blow the Conch Shell

I don't often review my bank statement so a couple weeks ago I was sort of surprised to find I am suffering from what can be described as a small financial discontinuity.   The pile under the mattress is shrinking like the polar icecap. The nice lady at the bank called, I think she said her name was Druzilla, she called and said something about a possible legal action. Her call was a pretty big surprise since I still have a small box full of blank checks wedged in the big box with mattress money.

Now, you have to understand that I do have a plan to resolve it, but it isn't a great plan.  Druzilla told me I needed to spend less or make more so I thought about it and the only thing I can cut out of my monthly spend is my wine delivery bill or my “ice cream of the month” club fee and that just seems unreasonable, so I am thinking of augmenting my income stream.

I sort of glanced through the help wanteds and have winnowed the search down to a short list. I am thinking professional golfer or maybe I can land a slot at NASA.  I heard you can do OK in rocket surgery.  Basically, I will take anything that pays seven spots to the left of the decimal.  

I told my roommate about the call from Druzilla and my income augmentation plan but she had other ideas. My roommate says I am only good for one thing and if I play my cards right, I can work my debt off if I perform a "personal service".  I didn't understand what she was talking about so I asked her to explain and apparently, I can carry groceries in from the car like no other. I literally can't be replaced when it comes to packing groceries around. I am the franchise player when it comes to toting groceries from the car to the kitchen. As these things go, it isn't a great thing to be great at. The pay isn't union scale and the last time I checked, I was out of sick leave. You can only play that sick leave card so many times before the management gets wise and you end up toting a fifty pound bag of Purina up two flights of stairs to keep the eviction police at arms length.

I just got back from Hawaii, where I was conducting business.  I was wearing my journalist hat, gathering content for my blog, interviewing the Ironman World Championship race winners, posing for photographs, shopping for some Ironman swag and other business tasks. I wasn't there for recreation, I was there for business purposes. I just looked up publication 463-B, the authoritative IRS document on the subject and as long as I was there for business, I can write off the airfare.  So, I repeat, my trip to Hawaii was for business purposes.

Being a fully accredited member of the American Sports Bloggers Association of America(ASBAA), I feel qualified to offer the following race report.

It was a great event. There was some swimming, some bike riding and some running. It was pretty exciting.  I am pretty sure somebody won the race and if you want to know who, ask around.  I didn't stay for the end.  I got tangled up with a small contingent of Bloody Mary racers, drowning themselves in tomato juice and vodka without regard for personal well being. Those people are amazing athletes. I tried to pace them and found my skills to be amateurish at best. The quantity of juice and vodka was daunting, the salty rim of the glass was an unexpected challenge and the two olives? Forget about it.

As for the weather, I can tell you it was hot. Cyclists were melting. It was way hot. Runners were wilting. It was crazy, psycho hot. It was hot enough to absolve me of any responsibility for that small misunderstanding between myself and the authorities in a certain South East Asian country in 1997 that I can't name on pain of extradition.  Those guys have no sense of humor.

Sunrise at Ironman is different, depending on the venue. The landscape defines the moment.  Be it in the mountains, the desert or the islands, sunrise is unique to each.   I have seen all three and they are as different as such things can be.

Sunrise at Ironman must be felt.  You have to stand there and feel it for yourself. You have to let it wash over you.   You have to feel the rising sun brush against your skin, you have to experience the moment in your chest.  Sunrise is cathartic.  In that brief instant of sunrise, the primary colors reflected off of the mountain are different from the pastel hues that bleed together in the desert, the fresh floral smells of the island are different from the astringent scents of desert rock, the air of the snow capped peak tastes different from the air of cactus and sage.

The blade-sharp edge that is the dividing line between night and day in the desert advances at a military slow-march pace, flaring bright across the sanded flats and hills.  Conversely, the line of light that is sunrise in the mountains advances in fits and spurts.  The sun ever-so-slowly exposes a mountain cliff, then as it clears the peaks, the furthest valley is lit in an instant, erasing the night as quickly as a newborn fills it's lungs with first breath. Sunrise fills the valleys of the mountains like an echo quick. One minute, the heather covered meadows are dark, the next they are lit like a Rockwell Christmas tree.

Sunrise in the desert of Phoenix is like an invading army, advancing and unwilling to yield.   Sunrise in the mountains of Whistler is an eager embrace of lovers, joining light and shadow in ecstatic consent.

Island sunrise is a chanted prayer, a war cry uttered by a warrior from legend, a primal definition of the meaning of his life, and yours.  If you are lucky, and you look straight into the first ray of the rising ocean sun, you might see a canoe cutting through wavetops, charging out of centuries past, filled with men powering bladed oar.

If sunrise finds you standing on the sands of Kona, look into the rising furnace on the horizon and see those men coming for you, committing their bodies and their souls to each oar stroke, flying over blue bright wave.  Sunrise in the islands can be that, if you only look for it.

The thing that I realize now is how personal sunrise at an Ironman event can be. My expression of sunrise belongs only to me so it may fall short for you, but it is the world I know.

Sunrise in Kona is an affirmation of truth, it is an echo of the grace and elegance as it must have been on that first day, a promise of future days, of memories not yet born, of experiences I believe wait for those who choose them.

Smoked Meat

In these modern times, the food we put in our bodies is inspected, certified, economized and evaluated, then pre-chewed by experts under the bright spotlight of governmental scrutiny, evaluated for residual levels of pesticides, herbicides, insecticides, fungicides, insides and outsides. It seems odd to me how it doesn't seem to matter if the food is good for you or bad for you. The actual nutritional value is just a side show compared to the predominant societal belief that if the food wasn't grown in a hermetically sealed biosphere, safely isolated from the influence of the Monsanto company, it must be bad and will cause your immediate demise. The literature proves it. Eat more fermented, processed soy and kale. Lots of kale.

We all benefit from the collective knowledge of the vegetarian zealots and the various vegan evangelists of all denominations. In the end, the common message is that we eat too much meat and not enough veg. Got it. I agree, I need to eat more brussel sprouts. Sprouts will save me and my offspring from all manner of sin and debauchery. Google says so. But maybe, if the stars align just right, I will find that there is some some anti-salad food club I can join, maybe there is a non-cabbage-centric path I can follow. A culinary revolution must occur.

I offer for your consideration an alternate theory. I offer gastronomic salvation, via the butcher counter. My theory is thus; What we don't have enough of is smoked meats. I don't discriminate, I like all kinds of smoked meats; smoked pork ribs, smoked beef brisket, smoked rattlesnake, its all good. The benefits of smoked meats are indisputable. Read your history. Humans have been cooking meat on a fire for three million years, give or take, and we are doing pretty well so far.

About two and a half million years ago, and this is a true story, two and a half million years ago, there were two families living on the edge of a vast, sun-beaten prairie. Both families lived off of the land, eating mostly sagebrush and coconuts or whatever grew in the neighborhood. Sometimes they ate grubs and grasshoppers and maybe a rabbit or a squirrel when they could catch one. It was a hard life.

One family lived in a nice snug waterproof cave while the other family lived in a rundown leaky cave with a bad draft and no cable. The nice cave family had Bob for a leader. Bob was tall and good looking with a cleft chin. When Good Looking Bob spoke, everybody listened. Women stared at him and hung on his every word. He was the image of human perfection. Good Looking Bob was a vegetarian and he loved his family very much.

The leaky cave family had Larry for a leader. Larry was short and not good looking and had no chin. Nobody listened to Larry. Women ignored him. Larry was the antithesis of human perfection. Larry ate meat and he loved his family very much.

Both families consisted of about twenty members. Like most families in their time, there was a nucleus of hard working adults in each family who provided the food. These adult folks brought the food home and fought off the wild animals, keeping the rest of the family alive. They spent most of their time hunting and gathering, gathering and hunting. The adults were a hard working group.

Then there were a few folks that were too old to hunt, so they made the clothes, gathered wood for the fire and took the garbage out. These older adults were semi-retired and invented golf.

Last, there was the kids. The kids served no purpose at all and were a drain on society. To make matters worse, these families had lots and lots of kids. Maybe the adults didn't practice good birth control.

Truckloads of food was required to feed the family, but times were really hard. The summer had been too hot and the plants died and the animals abandoned the savanna. The hunter/gatherers were striking out in the food acquisition department lately and everybody was hungry. In fact, both Good Looking Bob's family and Larry's family were on the edge of starvation.  The sagebrush dried up, the squirrels disappeared and the grubs must have migrated north for the summer. This was before food banks were invented I guess.

As a last resort, Good Looking Bob and Larry set out to find food for their families. Nobody actually put into words the impact of this act because they didn't have to. Everybody knew the score.  Good Looking Bob and Larry weren't coming back without food. They would keep hunting until they caught something, or they died trying. Times were desperate.  Good Looking Bob and Larry just wandered into the savanna, sniffing around for something to eat, digging for potatoes or lizards or whatever they could find.

On the first day, these desperate men didn't find anything. On the second day, same result. But on the third day, Good Looking Bob, tall and handsome and well educated, found a handful of dandylions and six brussel sprouts and some kale. He took those home and fed his wife and twelve emaciated children. They ate the entire harvest raw, because that is healthier and that is how you are suppose to eat vegetables. Good Looking Bob knew then, as we know now, that if you let your veg get too close to your camp fire all the health benefits are leached out. The science bears this out. Eat your veg raw if you want to maximize your B complex absorption rates.

Larry scored some food and took it home too. He had a wife and twelve skinny kids to feed, just like Good Looking Bob. Larry found a buffalo with a broken leg and killed it and took that home to his family and threw it on the fire, ignoring the commonly accepted idea that meat is bad for you. To make matters worse, he ignored the literature that clearly stated that smoked meat is especially bad for you.

That's the end of the story, but it begs the question: Which family survived and which died off? My first thought, when I heard that story, was that Larry's family and his smoked meat eating family would die off because we know too much meat in your diet is bad for you. High cholesterol levels and all that, right? Get some nice fresh anise and maybe a small portion of zucchini in your diet and live for an extra twenty years.

But, that isn't what happened. Good Looking Bob and his veg eating pack starved and died while Larry the smoked buffalo eater and his family prospered, going on to accomplish great things. I heard one of the grandkids invented the Webber grill, which sort of makes sense if you think about it.

If that doesn't convince you about the health benefits of smoked meats, I don't know what to say. As far as I know, that proves that we need to eat more smoked meats.

Since Whistler, I have swam three times, been to spin class once, ridden my bike three times and run two to three times a week. Whistler was exactly two months ago and I am working out three hours a week. As our good friend Samuel said, “How the mighty have fallen! The weapons of war have perished!” I don't know what to make of the second sentence, but the first one is spot on. I have fallen pretty far and I don't feel very good about it.

Maybe I will feel better if I eat some smoked buffalo.