A week ago, I boarded a plane for the first time since July 2007. As I sat staring down at glaciers on my way north to Seattle, I realised that this may have been the longest time I've ever gone without a flight in my life. Flying felt familiar and comfortable...
For me, 30-mile weeks only normally happen in the first third or last third of a marathon training programme.But I'm not training for a marathon and yet I still managed to clock mileage in the 30s last week.The distance between the mental peaks and troughs is bigger than it ever has been at the...
After a year spent posting each day, a week feels like a decade. The break has de-cobwebbed my brain and done it a lot of good. I've noticed that, without the Modus whip lashing at my back, I process the world differently...
It all began a year ago. It was a premature present for my dead father whose birthday is tomorrow.An incredible amount has happened to me in that time...
I found the anniversary of my Dad's death, on St. Patrick's Day, more difficult to manage this year than ever before. And so too with the anniversary of his birth, today, St. George's Day...
Last time I found myself running around Echo Lake, I looped it five times and speculated on how many loops would light the fuse of dementia.Today, I looped the lake six times. Only the need to get home and get on with the day stopped me running more. The first few laps are tough...
I've been asked a few times why I insist on having a Modus Eundi post for every day of the year. It's all down to the pathology of the self-punisher; I will beat myself with any rod I can find. I started out last year with a flurry of posts and, before I knew it, I had a whole week behind me...
There's probably only 10% of Angelino Heights, the historic hilltop enclave where I live, that I haven't covered on foot. I bit a chunk out of that 10% today with a run along Bellevue and Boylston...
Amtrak trains are the opposite of polite children: they are heard but not seen. You can hear the rumbling when you walk under the platforms at Union Station. You can hear the distant honking and screeching at various places throughout the city...
Runyon Canyon is a small, busy but pleasant enough oasis of wilderness in Hollywood.Appropriately for a Hollywood attempt at being rural, it feels fake...
I took three days in a row off running last week and subjected myself to a slow crescendo of guilt. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. By Thursday, I couldn't handle the shrill scream of self-punishing conscience any more. I finally forced myself to run. This week began in the same way. Nothing on Monday...
A week to go. Then it will have been a year. Modus Eundi has been handrail, friend and taskmaster. I am two-thirds grateful and one-third burdened.I still don't know what Modus Eundi will become after its 366th day...
I think my accent has changed slightly in the nine months I've lived in LA. It started out as a London turd and it was then polished, not completely successfully, by years of private education...
Today was an Echo Lake day. A day where I feel I can only muster a mile or two. A day where I con myself into a quick jaunt around the lake in the knowledge that I might be able to add loops once I'm there and bump my distance up to something worthwhile. I ended up running round the lake five times...
Today was a spring sheep in a summer wolf's clothing. A day of relentless 90-degree blaze. I could have waited until dusk to run but I was in the mood for self-punishment. J had to make an impromptu trip to USC to pick up a book or two...
I've begun meditating. I've flirted with it before but I've never given it a proper chance, assuming that my inner turmoil is too much of a turmoil to be stilled by sitting and being mindful. Maybe the layman language and chatty tone of the book I picked up from the library helped...
After a three-day running lay-off, I find it nearly impossible to run a decent distance. It's all I can do to get changed and get out.But four miles is better than no miles. It's enough to remind me I'm a runner.And it sowed a seed of enthusiasm for the days ahead.
I spend a lot of time on public transport shuttling between Echo Park (home) and Pasadena (shrink). There is no easy route...
Upwards is the only direction in which you can escape the world...
The most disturbing kind of outdoor mattress is the battered outdoor mattress that once belonged to a child. The combination of frolicking storybook characters and taped-up rips suggests fear, loss of innocence, sadness and abduction.But maybe I'm projecting.
The good thing about today's run was the mileage. Nearly 13. One of my longest runs of 2008.The bad thing about today's run was the riverside infestation. Cloud after cloud of flies...
The one-year anniversary of Modus Eundi is approaching and I don't know whether I'll be celebrating it with a birthday party or a wake. At times like this I feel I've said all I want to say or can say...
"Then came the flinch: the two inverted chevrons in the middle of the brow, the pleading rictus. It couldn't not be there: fear of failure. Fear of failure, which was perhaps supposed to keep men honest, but turned out to make them mad."
Whenever I find myself in the caged walkway alongside the 110 freeway, I'm heading south and putting the finishing touches to a run home from Pasadena...
A few minutes after heading out for a ride on the Elysian Park rollercoaster this morning, I realised that I'd left my camera behind. I didn't want to break the stride I'd got into and go back, so I made do without. As the hills and the yards passed, I became conscious of something...
A battery of sledgehammers swung at my head in unison this morning and assaulted me out of sleep. They could have been a traumatic dream. They could have been the tipping point of the long haul of between-lives limbo...
Spinning. Disoriented. I want to switch it off.
Running by the railroad tracks to the east of the river is comfort running.The lines, rectangles and cuboids imply order and help soothe a chaotic mind.The suggestions of life (paint scrawls, paused trains, parked trucks) are enough to dilute the bleak concentrate of loneliness and make it...
I'm bogged down by the search for a meaning. There are meanings everywhere but there isn't a meaning anywhere. When I search, I lead myself up the garden path and into the garden maze. I disappear. Others can see me from above but I can't see myself.I'm not the man who wasn't there...
I've made several attempts at staying alongside the Arroyo Seco river between Pasadena and Chinatown and they have all failed. The river is shy and keeps itself to itself for large chunks of its southbound journey. Today, though, I had some success...
Five years ago, when I lived in Hackney, I woke up in a crime scene. The elderly couple next door who shared our steps had been burgled and beaten up in the middle of the night. I had heard smashes, screams and sirens but my sleep was deep enough to hide them all in a dream...
They've been draining the Silver Lake Reservoir of contaminated water for months now.It's finally starting to look empty.I ran to, around and from today and spent some of the time wondering where all the water and the bromates go. To the ocean?And how will they refill it...
I didn't notice the poor, doubled-up bundle of a woman covering her head and face when I boarded the bus to Pasadena today, even though she had a three-seater all to herself right by the front doors...
I've been straddling the Atlantic for nine months and my groin is aching.I live in Los Angeles now and I have no intention of living anywhere else for the forseeable future. But I have 34 years of London behind me...
CHARITYBUYING PILES OF OLD CLOTHESWASHING THEM IN ALL-NIGHT LAUNDROMATSGIVING THEM BACK TO USED-CLOTHES STORESKnocking around between university terms back in the early 1990s, I found myself scratching the surface of conceptual art. Yves Klein, Piero Manzoni, Bruce Nauman...
Watching twilight turn to night while running to the river and back is something I should do more often.Music, thoughts and sights change on the course of every run...
After 25 miles in 3 days last weekend, I took 3 days off.And the same thing happened as usually happens. The further into the past the last run recedes, the less I feel like running in the present...
Modus Eundi