Sapiens: In the Midst by Rick Ewing

PLUG-IN: “RAS-CLOT likkle feds threatened to go after my family.” She began to cry when I got her on the phone. “Oh, Billy, it was horrid. I never heard what agency they were from, but they couldn’t tolerate that a monkey accomplished what you did.” She said my work hadn’t been destroyed, that it had been cached in some kind of inaccessible vault, like a NORAD missile silo.
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Part and parcel of the loyalty I feel towards “the business” is an inherent desire to explain to anyone who'll listen why I think it is of cultural significance and / or, value; there’s always a level of evangelism arising from subculture membership. I have favorite wrestlers, I've fantasy booked the territory. I have a theoretical model for how the business should be transacted.

Ladies and gentlemen, I am delighted to welcome you to the one and only performance of Mitchell Miracle and his Cakes of Instruction!

[Enthusiastic applause and whistling]

Many of you are still settling into your seats, and I will use this opportunity to remind you that all photography, as well as video and audio recording, are prohibited during the performance. You should, in fact, have remitted all electronic devices, in addition to personal effects like purses, wallets, car keys, eye liner, old receipts, bank statements, lip balm, candy, and rape whistles to the gentlemen at the door. Those two guys were hard to miss, am I right?

Grief is too often a tight rope of stoicism
and unbecoming.

For the guests she wore a black gown,
thumbed the chain around her neck like a rosary.

Mouthed the words to a song she once knew
by heart. Perched at the front of a room,
urn knocking against her ribs like a lover.

I decided to run again.

So simple. What’s to it but to start running? To not stop?

After I’d paid my registration fee for the race, after I’d plotted an early-to-bed, early-to-rise sleep schedule and a diet that revolved around kale and Gatorade, and after that initial hamstrings-calves-shins-knees-back-abdominal stretch, I set sneakers to pavement.

My knees ached first, a half-mile in. I’d known this pain before and kicked through it.

At the first mile marker, I sucked wind, a familiar burning in my lungs. Big deal! It’s called conditioning!