The Good Life

“Everyone likes to think they have their own little corner; it can be anything: needlepoint, lawn bowling, whatever. Some guy may gratify himself by thinking hes the best goddamn fruit and vegetable manager the A & P ever had. Which is fine. It gives people a sense of worth in a crowded world where everyone feels like part of the scenery. But then mostly they are spared any harrowing glimpses into their own mediocrity… The thing is that in track we are painfully and constantly aware of how we stack up, not just with out contemporaries but with our historical counterparts as well. In that regard it’s differenct even from other sports. A basketball player can go out and have a great day and tell himself he’s the greatest rebounding forward to ever hit the hardwood, but he’ll never really be troubled by the actual truth, will he? Maybe he’s just in a weak league. Maybe Jumping Joe Faulks would have eaten him alive thirty years ago. But he’ll never know. He’ll just have to leave such judgments in the sorry hands of the sportswriters, many of whom it has been pointed out can be bought with a steak. In track it’s all there in black and white. Lot of people can’t take that kind of pressure; the ego withers in the face of the evidence. We all carry our little credentials around with us; that’s why the numbers are so important to us, why we’re always talking about them…. We can all be good boys and wear our letter sweaters around and get our little degrees and find some nice girl to settle, you know, down with… take up what a friend of ours calls the hearty challenges of lawn care…Or we can blaze! Become legends in our time, strike fear in the heart of mediocre talent everywhere! We can scald dogs, put records out of reach! Make the stands gasp as we blow into an unearthly kick from three hundred yards out!”

Hazel Scott was a musical sorcerer and a civil rights hero.   She:

One of the funniest failures of US school system is the fact they are legally obligated to teach us all the states but they never actually show how big Alaska is like I have actually had teachers tell me that Texas is the biggest state. We have all just convinced ourselves that Alaska is that small shrunken down thing on most US maps and the people that know it's the largest state can almost never accurately describe how large it is.

It has a national park that’s bigger than maine. Or Switzerland. A park. 

I NEED A HIMBO