Dream Log: Lost on Sunday

I dreamed that I and some friends were in a car together, and we pulled into the parking lot of a Catholic church in an area somewhere on the border between suburban and rural. Mass was about to begin. The others went inside, and I decided to take a walk until Mass was over. 

There was a tall, steep hill near the church, and I climbed it. The hilltop was very broad and flat. Even though I was in church clothes, I felt like running. After I had been jogging along for a while, a man zoomed past me, wearing the Chariots of Fire running outfit: white T-shirt tucked into white shorts, white socks, black shoes. 

I took the difference between his speed and mine as a challenge, and sped up. He soon disappeared around a bend and I never saw him again, but I enjoyed running fast. For a while I was self-conscious because I was running in a dark red shirt under a dark red sweater, dark red corduroy pants, white socks and black shoes, but then I told myself to worry less about what people thought and enjoy myself.

I ran so far that when I stopped I didn't know where I was, and couldn't find my way back to the church where my friends were. The area had become much more urban. 

I walked through a plaza lined with Renaissance-style apartment buildings which, I felt sure, many connoisseurs would disparage as absurdly gaudy and over-the-top. But then I told myself that I didn't have to let some hypothetical snobs stop me from enjoying the view. 

And the dream went on like that for quite a while: I walked through many different architectural styles which I liked although, somehow, I was sure that there were many experts who would laugh at them, and over and over, I was able to overcome my self-consciousness and like what I like. None of it was Sylvester Stallone's sort of thing. I don't like architecture that's THAT gaudy. (And there's no reason that Sylvester Stallone should be upset about that.) One of the buildings was a mall which included a shop whose wares included some of those old books which are as tall and wide as a man, which often appear in my dreams, or, more likely, new replicas of those old books.

Dream Log: Pasta Competition

In a decaying commercial neighborhood in an American city, amid strip malls which were going under, a TV network had bought three glass-walled fast food restaurants and converted them into fancier restaurants for the purpose of a competition where a chef and their staff would move into each of the restaurants and make fancy pasta dishes. I was one of the chefs, Johnny Depp was one of the others, and I don't remember anything at all about the third one. COVID-19 didn't exist in this dream. So in that way, it was sort of like being a Republican.

In the dream I was a renowned chef of Italian cuisine, and I was annoyed that Depp had the nerve to enter this competition against me. In the first round, we had a short period of time in which to prepare several pasta-based entrees. I made several traditional Italian entrees. When I saw the menu which Depp presented to the judges after he was done, at first I wondered whether his kitchen had been out of protein and dairy, and whether he had just used a small amount of lightly-cooked vegetables and a whole bunch of spice in a desperate attempt to compensate for the missing ingredients. 

However, to my astonishment, Depp was awarded first place in this round, and I came in second. Oh well, I thought, those are the perks of being a world-beloved movie star. But then I tasted a couple of his entrees, and was astonished again, because they tasted very, very good. I wondered, Did he have a ringer? A world-class sous-chef, perhaps? I reached out for info to my many contacts in the culinary world, and found out that, in this dream, in addition to being a huge movie star, he was also, in fact, a well-respected chef specializing in varieties of East Asian cuisine which were not well-known in the West.

In the first round the only rule had been to prepare several pasta-based entrees. In the second round we were to prepare several pasta-based entrees in which pork was prominently featured. In the dream, I was known as an Italian chef. Fewer people knew that I also was well-versed in very eclectic global cuisine. Well, a lot more people were going to find out, because this competition was being recorded for a television network, and in the second round, I and my staff worked hard and pulled off several magnificent Chinese-French-Thai creations. And once again, Depp got first place and I came in second. This meant that it was very unlikely that I would be able to overtake Depp in the third and final round to win to the overall competition. 

And I was not taking it well. After the second round, we had a session of on-camera interviews, being shot in a building which looked as if it might be a strip mall which was in the process of being demolished or converted into something else. The front of the building was mostly glass. And if it had once been a strip mall, the walls between the individual stores had been knocked out, so that a long and narrow space remained.

Depp was being very gracious and polite. I was not. He said very complimentary things on-camera about me and the food I made and about my whole life in general. He came over to me and held out his hand for a handshake. I didn't shake his hand. Instead, I told him that he looked as if it had been several years since he had taken a bath, and advised him to stay downwind of any judges sampling his cuisine.

Depp had been perfectly nice until then. Even now he kept smiling, but he retorted right away by saying that I looked as if it had been several years since I had been able to run a hundred yards without stopping to rest partway through. 

"Touchee," I said, and then I ripped off my microphone, stormed out of the building, wearing heavy winter clothes because it was winter and we were somewhere in the northern US, turned up a long, steep hill and began running very fast, into a stiff headwind. Even still I ran uphill for a long longer than a hundred yards, just in case any of the TV cameras were following me.

And, once AGAIN, just as in quite a few other dreams I've had in the past several years, the running felt so real that I thought to myself, "Okay, it's NOT just a dream, I really CAN run pretty darn well!"

But, once again, after yet another fairly glorious, long dream-run, I woke up, and was confused for a little while about the running until I figured out, Okay, that was just another one of those running dreams. Could I run a hundred yards right now? I don't know. 

I ought to try sometime.

13 Minutes and 31 Seconds

40 years ago -- yes, just about exactly 40 years. It was the spring of 1978 -- I ran a one-and-a-half-mile cross-country course in 13 minutes and 31 seconds. Well, I actually didn't run the whole way. About halfway through, for a short stretch, I and a couple of others walked. I think I may have spotted someone ahead of me slowing from an agonized jog to an unhappy walk. That may have been what it was which gave me the idea to do the same. I didn't do it for very long. I could vividly picture being spotted walking instead running, and being yelled at by an authority figure, the gym teacher or someone else. In retrospect, I don't know what the authority figure would have done to me, besides yelling, if he had spotted me walking. At the time, though, I was scared enough of it to limit the walking to only a short stretch, and on the part of the course where we were farther away from the school and disapproving adult eyes.

I did not do this running (and walking) by choice. I was forced to do so, in school, in gym class. We had gym 3 times a week in high school. 3 times a week, and the beginning of every period of gym, we were required to run five laps around the gym, which came out to a half-mile, and to make a round on some Nautilus weight-training apparatus. I don't remember whether we ran first and then did the weights, or the other way around.

In the 9th grade, once during the school year, we did the 5 laps, the half-mile, as a timed race. 5 of us ran at once, and everybody's time was recorded. And then in the 11th grade came the outdoor mile-and-a-half.

Before the start of the 9th-grade half-mile race, I had assumed I was going to do pretty well. I had thought that I had been more into the 3-times-weekly half mile run than many of my classmates, and that I was in good shape. I remember that there was one other student in our group of 5 whom I assumed I would beat easily. I don't remember his name or much of anything about him, but I remember that, when we were lined up for this half-mile race, he looked puny and pasty and no threat to me.

Then the starting whistle sounded, and it was as if all 4 of the others were at the first turn before I had taken a step. I had assumed that I would be going at considerably less than top speed for this half-mile, but I had to run as fast as I could the whole way, just to stay a considerable distance behind all of them. As I was finishing the final lap, surprisingly, many of my onlooking classmates began to yell, "Go, Steve!" and "C'mon, Steve!" and things like that. It was surprising to me that they knew my name, and even more surprising that they were expressing goodwill. I responded by finishing the half-mile to the absolute utmost of my ability, and crossed the line to a big round of applause. I don't remember my exact time. I remember that it was between 2:45 and 3 minutes, and, if not the slowest time in the class, it was 2nd or 3rd from the slowest at best.

In the 11th-grade mile-and-a-half cross-country, the other boy I remember walking also seemed puny and pasty. And then, approaching the finish line, with most of the class having finished and recovered enough breath to yell, there was a puny and pasty boy a little way ahead of me. I don't know whether it was the same boy who had walked, but he or both of them were definitely not the small pasty boy who had trounced me in the 9th-grade half-mile. I ran faster, trying to catch the other boy, and, again to my amazement, I was cheered on by thunderous applause and shouts of "Go, Steve!" and "C'mon, Steve!" I dug deep, and although the other boy sped up greatly as soon as he figured out that someone was gaining on him, and seemed to be taking this contest with grim seriousness and to be very upset, angry, even, when I caught and passed him, I won the duel and crossed the line at 13:31. A few other boys came in later. (A 5k is a little bit more than twice as long as a mile and a half, and the 5k cross-country world record is well under 13:31.)

I remember them cheering for me in both races. I don't know whether at the time I noticed any cheering for anyone else, but if so, those memories are long faded and gone.

Maybe everybody was cheering everybody. Or maybe -- and this has occurred to me only very recently -- the other boys had noticed that I had been absent from school for long stretches, and had heard something about the psychiatric facilities I had spent time in, and had concluded that I was disabled -- "special" -- and therefore were giving me extra encouragement because they had concluded that I needed extra help, and these two races were the only times when I had noticed the help. In retrospect, it seems to me that I was so oblivious to what was going on in the other student's minds that either possibility is quite plausible.

Dream Log: Reporting on Long-Distance Mountain Running and Women's Gymnastics

Lately I've been dreaming a lot about running. Very vivid dreams. In the dreams, the difficulty and exertion have been very vivid too, but still, the running is exhilarating, and the dreams make me more and more determined to get in shape enough to run at an advanced level in real life.

Last night I dreamed that I was covering a long-distance, high-altitude running event in the European Alps. I went there to participate in the running as well as write about it. Right from the start, I was confused about the rules. The other runners knew I was covering the event as a writer. Most of them were distrustful of me and made no attempt to hide how they regarded me as an outsider and a threat. There were a few exceptions, runners who were friendly toward me -- but only a few.

I was really completely uninformed about what we were doing. For one thing, I wasn't sure how long the event was going to last -- all day? Several days? Dozens of miles? Hundreds of miles?

After I had run for a while, race officials stopped me and said that I had to wait here for ten minutes. We were in a little meadow between cliffs; other runners were resting there. It was unclear to me whether all of the runners were going to start again together, or whether each individual waited for exactly ten minutes. In any case, after I was running again, I saw some others well ahead of me, and gaining visibly, although we were making a steep climb and no-one was going very fast. One of my competitors who was friendly mentioned to me that this stage of the race involved a gain of altitude of two thousand feet, so that I might want to be careful and pace myself. There was a small flag of France below the collar of his jersey. I thanked him, but said that I wanted to run the very fastest race I possibly could, no matter how difficult it might be. He laughed, gave me a friendly smack on the back, and then darted well ahead of me.

The next stopping point was at a luxury hotel. Other runners were sitting in a room which was very bare and white, and stared at me with frank hostility. I could smell very good smells coming from a gourmet kitchen, and I wondered whether we runners were going to get some gourmet food.

Then everything got very hazy, and I lost consciousness. When I came to I was in a hospital bed in what seemed to be an emergency room. A doctor who spoke excellent English with a French accent asked me what I remembered, and told me that I had taken a great fall, and was very fortunate to have landed in a grassy area rather than a rocky area. He asked whether I had trained at high altitude before this race. I said no. He said that it was very important, if I ever competed in an event like this again, that I train extensively beforehand at very high altitudes. "Extensively," he repeated. I thanked him for his advice, but he turned away with the deeply annoyed manner of a man who is used to giving good advice and seeing it go unheeded.

Next, I was in Madison Square Garden to write about a women's gymnastics event. The event organizers were nervous about investigative journalists covering the event, because of the recent scandal surrounding Larry Nassar. They seemed to relax when they saw me, because I'm an essayist, and they therefore seemed to assume that I was not going to cover the event negatively.

I felt that they were wrong to relax about me, because I had a lot of very pointed questions about whether the sport provided cover and protection for sexual predators, and also about whether and to what extent the competitors were harming their health and stunting their growth by malnutrition. But before I could get down to any investigation, I woke up.

Great Big Fat Guy, Day 484

I had another of those dreams last night in which I ran really fast for very long distances. Those dreams of running are so powerful and vivid. They're they only dreams I can recall which are so lifelike that later, I've become confused about whether I was remembering dreams or actual waking experiences. Last night's dream got me fired up and wanting to make those experiences real, to actually run long and fast.

If I'm going to do that, I've got a ways to go. Lately I've been having some problems, and it's been difficult just to keep up to my usual amount of exercise, let alone the great increase which any significant amount of running would represent. A while back I stopped doing push-ups, because they were giving me an intense pain in my lower abdomen. Instead of push-ups, what I've been doing is: I stand a little less then 2 feet away from a doorway, get up on the balls of my feet, fall toward the doorway, catch myself on the frame of the doorway with one hand, let myself keep falling until my arm is in the position it would be if I were doing a push-up and my chest were all the way down to the floor, then I push myself back to a standing position with one arm. Then I repeat with the other arm, and back and forth, one arm and then the other. Not as difficult as one-armed pushups, but it feels like I'm getting a good workout. It feels like maybe my arms have gotten bigger. I was doing pushups every day. I'm doing this exercise once every 48 hours, giving my muscles time to recover. Maybe I would've gotten bigger arms if I'd only done push-ups every second day, I don't know.

Whatever the pain in my lower abdomen was, it never interfered with my daily crunches.

I still have not done a bridge --

-- during the current Great Big Fat Guy era. I am still attempting a bridge every day, right after the crunches. My lifetime record for bridges in 1 set is around 12. It'd be nice to break that record. It'd be nice to win some 5k races. It'd be nice to lose a lot of weight.

There are injuries which are aggravated by exercise, and pains which are relieved by exercise. Recently I was having some severe pain in both knees, especially severe first thing in the morning, and I was worried that those pains might be a serious injury or some other incapacitation, but exercise has relieved the pain to a great degree.

Losing weight would result in reduced stress to my knees and some other joints. It would improve my sexual performance, as well as increasing the general amount of interest in my sexual performance on the part of potential sexual partners. It would improve my circulation (which would be part of the reason for improved sexual function) and my body's ability to fight off infection. There's really no downside, as far as I can see, to ceasing to be fat by means of proper exercise and healthy diet.

There are dangerous and unhealthy ways to lose weight. I'm not going there.

The movie Central Intelligence, in which Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson plays a formerly fat person, may have played a role in my recent increase in exercise, and in last night night's dream about running. It's not an overwhelming masterpiece of a movie, but it's not bad. It has a positive anti-bullying message. It's good enough that it's entertaining for me to think about how it could've been made into a masterpiece. Like for instance, how's this? Change the back story with Aaron Paul, Johnson's former partner, so that Johnson, but no-one else, knows from the beginning of the movie that Paul was the Black Badger, and knows that Paul also set him up to make everyone else think he was the Black Badger. Then Johnson could suppress the pain of knowing that the partner he thought was his best friend had betrayed him, along with suppressing other things, such as the trauma of having been bullied in high school. Make more of the movie about Johnson coming to grips with his issues, and give Kevin Hart more opportunity to help someone who he sees is in great pain. Yes, it would make the movie darker, but a comedy can be dark and a masterpiece, look at The Fisher King. Just spitballin' here. Like I said, it's not a bad movie as is.

Dream Log: Energetic Priest

I dreamed I was a Roman Catholic priest. A very liberal one, to put it mildly. I was openly flirting with a woman in front of a young priest, who was also very liberal about such things and not bothered by my behavior, and a superior of mine on the Church hierarchy, who was very much bothered by my behavior, and threatened to have me thrown out of the priesthood. I wasn't rattled: I didn't think he could have me thrown out, and I didn't much care if he did. I didn't believe in God in the dream any more than I do in waking life.

Then for a little while the young priest and I were cops as well as priests. The two of us very energetically chased some suspects through a wintry city neighborhood, running very fast, going up and down many exterior staircases on old wooden houses, climbing over tall fences. Then we were no longer cops, but we kept up with the running and climbing, for reasons which were unclear. If nothing else, it was fun and a really intense workout. I was 54 years old in the dream, just like in waking life, but in the dream I was in much better physical condition.

Then I and the young priest and a third man who was young and athletic went inside my modest apartment. The two of them were both very hungry, so I got two dishes I'd made out of my refrigerator: they were mostly potatoes, plus some odds and ends I'd had on hand. I was embarrassed, because I thought that both of the dishes, both improvised on my part, were rather disgusting. But the two of them ate with great gusto and seemed to enjoy the food very much.

It occurred to me how some people seem not to realize that one and the same sort of food can be healthy or unhealthy, depending on how much a person exercises. These potato dishes could be quite fattening for sedentary people, but people like us, who'd been running and climbing very strenuously for long distances, could eat the very same thing, and the carbs would burn off very quickly, and the food wouldn't be fattening. I was reminded of a program I'd seen on the Food Network, hosted by Bobby Flay, in which two women were featured who ran a bakery for a living, and also ran marathons. On the program they prepared one of their favorite items, a huge chocolate-chip cookie with an enormous amount of calories. When the cookies were done they had a lot of their regular customers over to try them, including many other marathon runners. The women who ran the bakery, and the other marathoners, were all very lean and attractive-looking people. And they were all talking about what a great pre-race food this enormous cookie would be. And Bobby Flay seemed a bit confused, as if he didn't understand how this huge cookie full of fat and carbs and sugar and chocolate, which he would regard as a decadent indulgence, could actually be healthy food.

That was a real Food Network show which I saw in waking life, and then in the dream I remembered seeing it, as I watched my two young athletic friends chowing down on potatoes.

Then I woke up. Recently, in the past year or two, I'd been confused about whether I had occasionally done some fast running, or just dreamed about it so intensely that it seemed like real memories of running. When I woke up this morning all doubt was gone: all of that recent running has been in dreams. I mean, I've done SOME running in real life, recently, but it's been very different than in the dreams: in waking life, now and then in the past couple of years I've run for up to 50 or 100 yards at a time, and without necessarily turning blue every time, either. But in the dreams I've been going for miles, really fast. In these dreams I've been a better runner than I've ever been in real life.

But I'd like to run that well in real life. I used to be a very lean person who could chow down on big amounts of carbs without it fattening me. It'd be fun to be that lean and strong again. It felt good, decades ago.

Great Big Fat Guy, Day 3

The story so far: day before yesterday I walked 5-10 miles, farther than I'd walked in -- I don't know, a while. Yesterday I felt really tired and sore, but went for a 3-mile walk anyway, and got a second wind mid-way through the walk, and finished it feeling great.

I included the video to Katy Perry's "Firework" on my previous Great Big Fat Guy blog post, because I like the song, and because I want to spread that sort of positivity. Also because I had happened to surf onto the end of the documentary How to Dance in Ohio, about a group of autistic teenagers in Columbus, Ohio, having a dance, and Katy sang an acoustic version of "Firework" over the closing credits. And it was super-awesome.

Here's Katy crushing it live:



And today I read in the Hollywood Reporter's review of the documentary that "Firework" is

"the unofficial anthem of the disability rights movement."

And I suppose that if there's a disability rights movement, I ought to be supporting it. Especially if we've got such a cool unofficial anthem.

This morning, as most mornings, I did a bit of exercise and stretching as soon as I got out of bed. My shins and calves hurt. In 2008, I was having a very difficult time exercising, and I got shin-splints from walking not very much at all, and I eventually found out that I had a malfunctioning parathyroid gland which resulted in, among other things, too little calcium getting to my bones. The malfunctioning gland had to be surgically removed. (There are several parathyroid glands in the human body. They are not related to the thyroid except for being located near it.) I felt much better as soon as the malfunctioning gland was removed. I'm hoping that the minor pain I'm feeling today is not indicative of some other chemical imbalance of deficiency, and that it'll get better as I get thinner. I'll continue with the exercise as planned (gradually increasing walking distance, then maybe eventually adding running or cycling or basketball or something like that) unless the pain in my lower legs becomes severe.

I've never been much of a runner, I don't know why. 2 examples: in the 9th grade we had gym 3 times a week, and in every gym class we had to run 1/2 mile. That is, we had to run 5 laps around the gym and we were told that 5 laps was 1/2 mile. (It probably was.) Once during the year we raced the 1/2 in groups of a half-dozen or so and were timed. I thought I was going to to pretty well in the race. I remember looking at a little pudgy kid in my group as I waiting for the starting whistle, feeling a little sorry for him, assuming that he couldn't keep up with me. Then the whistle sounded, and it honestly seemed to me that the little pudgy kid and the rest of our group were somehow 5 to 10 yards ahead of me before I'd finished my first stride. I was amazed by the pace they were setting, and they didn't let up for the entire 1/2 mile. I literally ran as fast as I could in an unsuccessful attempt to catch most of them. If I recall correctly, I and one other boy (not the short pudgy one) were in a very close race not to finish dead last. I don't remember whether I finished last or next to last. I remember that my time was 2:52.

In 11th grade gym class will still were doing the 1/2 mile 3 times a week, and we went outside once during the year for a 1 1/2 cross country race. This time the whole class raced together at once. I remember that I and a few other walked part of the way. I remember that at the end, once again I and another boy were running for all we were worth in our own private duel. I don't remember whether or not the 2 of us were dead-last in the whole class. If not, we were definitely toward the back. Many other boys, who'd finished, were crowded around the finish line, and I knew they were no longer winded, because they were loudly shouting encouragement to both of us. I don't remember which of the 2 of us won our private race. I remember that my time was either 13:13 or 13:31.

In 8th-grade football, I was timed at 7.4 seconds over 40 yards. In full pads and helmet, but still.

So I don't know whether there's something physically wrong with me which hampers my running. The thing is, I don't think I was really unathletic altogether. Among other strenuous activities I did a lot of bicycle riding, and played basketball rather well, played baseball rather well after blossoming as a hatter in the 10th grade.

And I played ping-pong so well that I did not lose a single game for a period of years. My unbeaten streak would have been even longer except that between 2 unbeaten streaks, I happened to play the only player I've ever faced who played ping-pong better than I: my high-school guidance counselor, a grim-faced wiry 6-foot-5-inch monster of a man, a former Indiana state champion. Whether he'd been a high school champion, or won some sort of professional Indiana open, or what exactly, I don't know. The two of us played one day when I was 15, he won every game, and those were the only games of ping-pong I lost from the age of 13 to the age of 20.

They called me King Pong. Yes, they really did.

My point is, my remarkably poor performance in running doesn't seem to match up with my athletic performance in general. I have a right bundle-branch block, an abnormality in the construction of my heart's valves. The doctors say it's nothing to worry about, it's just unusual. I wonder if it has something to do with my having been good at basketball and awesome at ping-pong but terrible at high-speed running. (As a kid, I was even a way-above-average base stealer in Little League: my ability to get a good jump more than compensated for my slow running.)