The Falling Apart

I landed in New York at about 2:00 in the afternoon this past Tuesday. I love New England in the autumn – the trees, the colors, the crisp smack of the air on your face that somehow reminds me of the sensation of biting into a York Peppermint Patty.

When I finally got to Connecticut (where I was staying), I turned on my computer only to discover that it doesn’t turn on. I hate when that happens. The rest of the week had me running around from meeting to meeting, meal to meal, broken up only by the moments in which I incessantly pressed the power button, hoping to dear God that the damn computer would actually start this time, but relegated to random bouts of swearing and idle threats towards this inanimate piece of electronic trash when it does nothing but crash.

My computer repair guru lives right next to LAX so, needless to say, the moment I landed back in Los Angeles I brought the computer to said guru to fix. I got the computer back from him last night. Apparently he got it to turn on because here I am typing.

In fact, here I am typing while sitting in my car, parked on the sidewalk in front of Catherine’s place. I’m crammed in the front seat like the 20th circus clown shoved in the Volkswagen Beetle sardine-like. I’ve got the computer on my lap, partially hidden behind the steering wheel, propped against the gear shifter and crammed into the middle arm rest. My back is twisted in a highly uncomfortable position that somewhat resembles the middle sector of a Triple Lindy, a feat only successfully executed by one person. Everytime I try to hit the space button I've got to push my shoulders back, suck in my stomach and squinch my elbow as close to my body as possible, reaching my little finger out in a dramatic attempt to tap on the button without mistakenly shoving the monitor into the steering column.

As luck would have it, the battery on my car is dead.

My car is not old - a mere 21,000 miles on the odometer. Apparently the electronic thingamajigger has gone kerflewie. Something caused it to go a little zap dang and now my car, in it's most retarded rendition of Herbie The Love Bug, randomly thinks it's trying to slow down. So even while the car is turned off, parked on the street in the middle of the night, the brake lights will mysteriously flash on and stay on. By the time I get to the car in the morning, the battery has been drained of all possible life.

So here I sit, jammed into the front seat of my car as I wait for the tow truck to come and give me a jump start. What better time to do a little writing.

As I'm sure many of us know, the New York Marathon is next weekend. Three weeks ago Catherine and I decided to defer our slots for the NY Marathon until next year because our legs hadn't yet fully recovered from Ironman. Basically, we were in serious pain even on three mile runs. As luck would have it, about a week after we deferred our slots for the marathon, we completely recovered. This weekend we went on a very challenging and tremendously beautiful 11+ mile trail run in the mountains. Our legs felt great. Our pace was back to pre-Ironman speed. Truth be told, we probably could've ran NY this year.

I refuse to watch the Marathon on TV. Don't even want to read about it. It'll be too depressing.

At this rate, though, my television is probably going to stop working anyway.