Saturday, September 16, 2017

I've been reading a lot: Books 43-49

I've been reading kind of a lot lately, because I had some days off and because my charmingly old fashioned hotel room for the half marathon:

Tally Ho Inn

didn't have the internet. I picked that hotel because its parking lot is also the finish line, and walking right from the end and into a shower was wonderful, but staying there with no internet for Friday night and the rest of the day on Saturday meant I plowed through the three books that I'd packed, and I had to drive over to Pigeon Forge to grab another one.

I needed to stretch my legs, anyway, even though my feet hurt, so it was kind of just as well.

Before all of that, though, I finished some books at home.

43) Somebody told me I would enjoy Riley Sager's Final Girls, and I did. It tells the story of Quincy, the lone survivor of the Pine Cottage massacre. Recovering from the loss of her college friends, Quincy is contacted by Lisa, the sole survivor of a murderous rampage through her sorority house, and Sam, who battled the Sack Man during her overnight shift at the Nightlight Inn. All three women are survivors of horror, and the media dubs them the Final Girls in a nod to the classic horror movie trope.

Years later, Sam has dropped off the grid, going into hiding. Quincy has built a life as a baking blogger with a handsome fiancée, moving on and looking forward until the night that Lisa contacts her, and then kills herself. Before Quincy can even respond to this news Sam appears on her doorstep, claiming to be worried, but something about her is a little off. She drinks heavily, shoplifts, and keeps asking questions about the night at Pine Cottage that Quincy has done her best to forget. She wants something, but what? And why didn't she tell Quincy that before coming to New York to see her, she'd been out west, visiting Lisa?

Sager moves back and forth between the past and the present throughout the book, contrasting the present day with the night at Pine Cottage as Quincy's memories come back. In the end, there are twists, as there are in all horror movies, but they fit the story. Overall, this was a good read.

44) I moved away from fiction to read Chuck Palahniuk's Stranger Than Fiction, a collection of true stories that sees the author of "Fight Club" travelling around the country to attend sex festivals, farming combine demolition derbies, wrestling tournaments, and other interesting but out of the way places. There are also personal essays here, dealing with the murder of his father or the time he tried steroids for a month at the gym, and overall this was a good, if sometimes unsettling, read.

45) The unsettling continued with Alissa Nutting's Tampa, which some article said was one of the most interesting books of 2013. (I'm a little behind, I guess.) It tells the story of Celeste Price, a smoking hot sociopath married to a policeman, who goes into teaching because she wants to seduce high school boys. She goes about seducing one, then another, and then spirals into a web of evasion and covering her tracks that includes drugging people, lying, seduction, and death.

While this is thematically similar to that book I read a few weeks ago, "The Manhood Ceremony", it was somehow less disturbing, possibly because Celeste knows all along that what she is doing is terrible, rather than the author trying to make her in any way a sympathetic character. You don't root for Celeste, and she doesn't want you to. It was an interesting read, but I feel like 2013 must have been a really bad year for the publishing industry if this was one of the best books.

46) Meddling Kids, by Edgar Cantero, was a really good book, and not just by comparison to the last one. The first of three books I brought with me to the half marathon, it tells the story of the Blyton Summer Detective Club, four plucky kids and their dog who, in the summer of 1997, unmasked the Sleepy Lake Monster, an old man in a costume trying to scare people away from the Deboen Mansion so that he could look for the fortune allegedly buried there.

13 years later, Andy, the tomboy, is wanted in two states and unable to sleep without nightmares of bodies, symbols, and terrible creatures crawling out of Sleepy Lake. Kerri, the beautiful redhead, tends bar in New York City, living alone behind locked doors with the grandson of the club's Weimaraner. Nate, the sarcastic horror movie fan, has committed himself to an asylum where he is constantly visited by Peter, the all-American jock. Peter killed himself a few years ago, but that doesn't stop him from dropping by. Determined to conquer her fears, Andy decides to get the team back together, to go back and solve the real mystery of the Deboen Mansion and the Sleepy Lake Monster, but she doesn't realize that Sleepy Lake has a lot of monsters, and they've been waiting for those meddling kids to return.

This book was nostalgic, hilarious at times, and also disturbing, and was a fast, entertaining read.

47) May Day, a short novella by F. Scott Fitzgerald, is one of those books that I can't remember if I've read before. It was published in "Tales of the Jazz Age" with other stories, and I know I've read that, but I had no impression of reading this before when I read it. A short tale of acquaintances from college meeting up a few years later in New York City, it deals with Fitzgerald's usual themes of youth, wealth, success, and mortality. It was an OK read, but I plowed through it in under an hour.

48) I was going to say that Wives, Fiancees, and Side-Chicks of Hotlanta, by Real Housewife of Atlanta Sheree Whitfield, was at the opposite end of the spectrum from Fitzgerald, but it's really not. The Fitzgeralds lived a tabloid life, and if reality TV existed in their time, they would have been on it. While Fitzgerald considered himself an artist, he also admitted that he wrote for the commercial market to sell stories, to support his more artistic work, and given his penchant to mine his own life and the lives of those around him for material, maybe Sheree's efforts in the same direction aren't really that far from his after all. (Except in the area of skill. Sheree may be a good talker, but she has an average vocabulary and writing level.)

This book tells the story of Sasha, who graduates college and heads to Atlanta with a year's worth of savings to become a fashion mogul. She has a plan, and is determined to let nothing stand in her way, even after a handsome basketball player tries to sweep her off her feet. Is he too good to be true? Is he worth taking her eyes off the prize, and following love instead of her goal? And what kind of person is his life of wealth and parties going to turn her into?

This was a quick read, but it's designed to be. Somewhat hilariously, Sheree only makes it 74 pages in before trashing another Real Housewife with the line, "at least Casey wasn't going out like one of those drunken reality TV housewives with a tampon string hanging out", and manages to get all the way to page 168 before Sasha utters Sheree's signature line, "Who gon' check me, boo?"

I got everything out of reading this that I expected to. I also got done with it too quickly, and had to go select another book from the Pigeon Forge Kroger, the first store I saw that seemed like it would have books inside. Had I wanted airbrushed t-shirts I could have stopped multiple times before then. Anyway, I ended up with this:

49) Into the Water by Paula Hawkins, the author of "The Girl on the Train".

Nel, a single mother, is found drowned in the local river, only months after her daughter's friend, Katie, was found in the same spot. Nel was known, and resented, throughout the village for writing an unpublished book about the women who have drowned in the river over the years, and now her sister, daughter, and the local police are wondering if her death was a suicide or murder. There are plenty of suspects, motives, and opportunities, and at one point I wondered if maybe the whole town got together in the middle of the night to kill her. That turned out not to be the case, but I found this somewhat unsatisfying, and some of my questions were still unresolved at the end.

Sunday, September 10, 2017

"Walk it off!"

For the first few years of high school, I had a gym teacher who had one answer for anything that happened to you in gym class.

Hit in the face with a volleyball? "Walk it off!"

Body-checked into the bleachers during floor hockey? "Walk it off!"

Ruptured your spleen during football? "Walk it off!"

OK, that last one didn't happen, but it could have. "Walk it off" was his stock answer for everything, to the point that it was jarring when we got another gym teacher later in high school who was all, "Do you want to switch teams so that you're not skins? Are you not feeling well, and just want to walk the track today? Do you want to help me referee? Maybe we need three or four refs for this," it was mentally jarring to have a teacher in gym who actually seemed to acknowledge that high school is a terrible time that couldn't always be walked off.

During our few years together, I imagined a number of things happening to that first teacher. I imagined him on fire. I imagined him crushed beneath the wheels of a school bus. I imagined him having a heart attack while screaming at someone in the middle of the gym, and all of the students running for help while I stood over him and whispered, "Walk it off", but I never imagined that, later in life, I would hear his voice in my head, and somehow find it inspirational.

Friday night, as part of the Great Smoky Mountains Half Marathon weekend, I took part in the 5K. When I did the half marathon last year and the year before I didn't do the 5K the night before, but I was unhappy with my performance last year and decided that if I was going to do this again this year, then I was going to challenge myself, and do more than just complete a half marathon. If you do the 5K on Friday and the half marathon on Saturday, they call it the Black Bear Double, and I signed up for it.

(Let's take a moment to recognize that over the course of a few years I've changed from a person who couldn't complete a half marathon to a person who feels that completing one isn't quite enough of a challenge. Holy shit. Who am I?)

Some people were pushing themselves on the double, which followed a lollipop-shaped course: there was a straight mile, a circular loop for a mile, and then you retraced the straight mile back to the starting and finishing line. I was between the first and second mile marker when the first runner heading toward the finish came back heading the other direction, but most of us were not pushing ourselves hard. Much of the back of the 5K was people who were doing the Black Bear Double, and we were all talking to each other about how we wanted to get an OK 5K time but not use up too much energy before the half marathon tomorrow. Everything was going according to plan, and then we got to the loop.

The loop was in a field.

The 5K was not advertised as a partial trail run, and the field didn't even have a trail. It had a path where a lane had been cut into the grass, and we had to follow it for a mile. At first I thought maybe I had just missed that part of the course description, but then everyone around me started complaining about it, too, especially the guy pushing someone in a wheelchair. I've never trail run before, but I've hiked, and I know that there's always a hole or a root or a rock waiting to trip you the minute you let your guard down. Sure enough, the second I realized that I was twenty feet from finishing the loop and getting back on the paved walkway, I looked ahead instead of at the ground and gave my ankle a good, hard roll.

It hurt.

It hurt a lot.

I staggered for a moment, and the two women walking with me both asked if I was ok, since they'd both seen me almost go down. Before I could answer, I heard a voice in my head.

"Walk it off."

I still had a mile of 5K to go, and then 13.1 miles in the morning. I could decide I was too injured to do either of those things, but I knew in my heart that was a lie. I've twisted my ankle before, and I knew it wasn't sprained. It would be sore, but I was not unable to finish. There was a guy behind me pushing someone in a wheelchair through grass, for Christ's sake, and I was going to crybaby about my sore ankle? I walked it off.

Great Smoky Mountains Half Marathon 2017

Then, the next morning, I walked again. Since my ankle actually was still sore in the morning, I changed my goal a little. While my original thought was that I wanted to beat last year's time, I decided that due to the injury I would just set a goal of finishing while favoring my ankle, and let my speed be my speed. Fortunately, the race rules have changed a little, and the sweeper at the end is a four hour pacer, rather than 3:30, like my first year, and I figured the extra half hour was enough of a cushion that I could walk at a normal pace, not jog on the downhills, and could baby the ankle a little while still finishing. Resigned to my slightly new goal, I shifted myself back from the 2:30-3:00 hour starting wave into the 3 hour plus starting wave, and that's where I met Gwen and Dennis:

Great Smoky Mountains Half Marathon 2017

They're a married couple from California who started doing half marathons for fun, and we walked together and talked for the entire race. We discussed our jobs (Gwen's retired), Tennessee (it was their first trip to our state, and they were pleasantly surprised by most of it; the exception being the Confederate flags they saw in a few places), food (they like the ribs here), classic horror movies (Dennis feels that Adrienne Barbeau was cast in so many because she was good at screaming, while Gwen and I agree that she was cast for something on her chest that wasn't quite her lungs), and pretty much anything else that popped into our heads while we made the slow trek from the high school to the finish line. At Mile 12, Gwen decided she wanted to jog the last part, so she went ahead and Dennis and I walked the rest of the way in together.

I got my finisher medal, and an extra medal for doing the Black Bear Double:

Great Smoky Mountains Half Marathon 2017

Great Smoky Mountains Half Marathon 2017

Overall, it was a very pleasant experience, except for my foot. Right around Mile 9 I thought, "Jesus, I think I have a blister." The same thing happened to me during the same part of the course last year, and sure enough, right around Mile 10 I felt intense pain in my foot, and then it slowly diminished through the rest of the race, meaning that the blister had probably exploded. When I finally got back to my hotel room, it turned out that I was right, but rather than show you a picture of my foot I'll just show you one of my sock:

Great Smoky Mountains Half Marathon 2017

It hurt a lot. Yesterday, after the race, I could barely walk on it. Overnight, the swelling has gone down quite a bit, and it's stopped leaking blood and fluid (whatever that is inside of blisters), but while I was thinking about it I realized that the problem is not, as I suspected last year, my shoes or how tightly I lace them. It's this specific course. I do eleven and twelve mile training walks without this happening. I've done another half marathon twice without this happening, but two out of three times that I've done this one on its terribly canted course surface and come away with a terrible weeping foot blister.

I haven't made a final decision yet, but I think I'm not going to do this race again.

Or I might just accept the blisters, and walk them off.