Eight minute mile

This essay was previously for paid subscribers only. Consider signing up!

It was gross and humid already when I woke up and stepped outside onto the porch and walked directly into yet another spider web that they had set up at eyeball level for me. With remarkable precision. Like a carpenter with a level. 

I thought for the first time in thirty years of the chalk line tool my father used to make me hold for him while cutting wood. 

The third time in a row this week with the web business by the way. Me flailing around. Goddamnit etc. You can envision how it looks when a person has walked into a spider web. I don’t need to paint a picture for you. I don’t need to hold your hand here. 

I had to admire their moxie for continuing to try to reel my big ass in like this again and again though. The ambition of it. Maybe I had driven this particular spider mad. Maybe we were dealing with an Ahab type situation. 

No that’s stupid. Spiders don’t dream of revenge. Or do they? We’re fucked if they do. I always say I’m sorry buddy every time I send one to Hell when they’re inside of the house but I leave them alone on the other side of the DMZ. I let them do as they please. Benevolently you might say. 

What would it count for if they could understand me anyway? What does I’m sorry mean to something you've crushed?

Then I thought about Gwen Stefani for a minute or two for obvious reasons. I also do not need to spell this out for you. Zipping around on stage like she used to do. Still does. In that crop top we all know about. 

I don’t want to be thinking about that kind of shit this early in the morning if I’m honest. I’m just trying to go about my life. 

What if they weren’t trying to ensnare me though? Spiders work alone I am fairly sure but perhaps there are accomplices at play here. I had this dumb thought of animated Disney insects trying to drape me in robes of silk. A little old Italian caricature of a tailor type spider in charge. Ordering the other guys around waving his tiny cartoon scissors. Like with Cinderella or one of those gals with the birds if I recall that correctly. 

Every day trying over again to get me to look handsome enough for the big ball. 

Perhaps Gwen Stefani would be there? 

Does the spider ever admire its own handiwork once the entombing is done do you think? Right before digging in? How you arrange your plate at the restaurant just so before taking a picture of it that sucks that you throw up on a story anyway? Not grid but story. 

Our niece came to stay over this weekend. She and my wife love each other so much and they also both like me as far as I can tell. A kind of buffoonish lout character that dinks around in their periphery and lobs in japes from a distance like grenades. She is the niece-like character from the story of mine about horror movies and Pete Buttigieg eating a shredded up Cinnabon like a buffalo wing that you have maybe read. She will be 16 soon I think. As I mentioned I am the uncle so when nieces and nephews tell you their age every time you ask them it dissipates in your brain instantly. 

Wow you're getting tall!

We all had a lovely time nevertheless. We went out to dinner and then ice cream. I got a mini scoop of peanut butter Oreo then hated myself for it later. Throughout the night I found myself slotting into this dad joke role that kind of broke my heart a little bit because it’s a muscle I rarely get to flex. Not being an actual dad. She is very smart I know that and she wants to go to a very good college if they still exist in a couple years as she said. I told her that whatever she does she should go to a college that is in a city as opposed to a college campus kind of place and she said she wanted to do that. Probably not Columbia anymore though she said and I said yeah probably not these days.  

Last week I went down to the south shore to visit my sister who is dealing with a post-cancer operation situation reasonably well I think and hope and we sat out in her beautiful backyard on the bay and her son and husband peer pressured me into getting into their cold plunge contraption and I eventually said fine. It was like this ice cream fridge kind of looking thing you’d see at the corner store and eventually I got in and it froze my balls and hole off. 

Well they don’t call it a hot plunge. Not sure what else I was expecting.

I was hyperventilating but I couldn’t let my nephew who is jacked think I was a pussy so I sat there toughing it out looking like Baron Harkonnen with my giant bald head sticking up out of the thing and then I ran out and jumped in the hot tub that they also have then jumped into the pool they also have where my old dad was doing his daily laps and he told me about the Billy Joel documentary he had recently watched. His alcoholism and many wives or whatever it was.

Honesty is one of the songs my dad has regularly played over the years when he sits down at the piano. I always really liked that one. 

I won't ask for nothing while I'm gone. 

When I got out of the pool to leave I said bye dad love you and he said he loved me too which he doesn’t always say so that was a little suspicious. I went to see my mom up the street after and she was quilting in her quilting shed and we took a picture in front of the hydrangea she planted when I got married. It is so big now. There must be so many spiders in that baby. I wonder who they're trying to catch.

She said she had a theory about its growth which is that it was planted right behind what used to be the outhouse attached to our 250 year old home and she said all the Pilgrims and all of their many decades of shit must have taught the ground how to be fertile. I don’t know if that holds up anthropology- or botany-wise but I like the thought of it. Some guy from 1766 with diarrhea and now it‘s blooming into beauty in the background of a selfie I took with my mom. 

Maybe I'll go take a shit out in my own backyard right now. As a favor to the future residents.

Every time I see my mother I have this thought that I am catching up to her. She is now and has only ever been 19 years older than me sure but I am closing the gap on these final few laps. In a race that my nieces and nephews don't even know they're about to run.