giovedì, febbraio 28, 2013

Storms and steroids and supermen, oh my

Possibly you've been hearing about all the flooding in Australia. Especially if you're English. We've noticed that the English media tends to go apeshit with Australian weather catastrophes, which I think is partly down to the English obsession with the weather and Australia being a cultural limb of England, if a withered and odd limb, which means Australian weather is fair game. I think a much bigger part of it is a conspiracy aimed at trying to persuade the English not to just move here en masse. Which, even knowing Australia as I now do, I would probably do if I was an English masse.

Anyways, we're living one of the places it's been flooding. Luckily this town is built to flood since it will flood at least once in a normal year, and we live up a hill, so it's had very little impact on life. Besides making running really, really muddy. Luckily I'm weird enough to get some sort of sensual - hmm - enjoyment isn't the word - interest out of getting muddy, soaking feet. You know, that transition to warm dry feet to cold wet feet to warm wet feet to the intense relief of stripping off the soaking sneakers and socks once you've finished up. I don't like it, but I don't mind. Especially since I'm a fatass and getting wet is better than getting overheated.

In any case it's not stopping me. I'm back up to five half-hour runs a week, which is where I'll stay until Godzilla starts eating solids instead of just boob, when I can let my fat burn off with hour-long runs, which will hopefully coincide nicely with him being old enough to sit in the jogging stroller my sister in law is giving me, and to come with me. Which will also coincide with being able to run barefoot on the sandy beaches around here again, which is a much, much more pleasant sensual experience than running in a muddy field in a pair of sneakers that badly need replacing.

Less likely than the shitty weather is that you'll have heard about all the doping scandals in Australian sport. It's the sort of thing that gets drowned out by the Lance Armstrong thing I guess, although it's coming from the same place - that sports doping has permanently outstripped any testing regimes for it and now legal and regulatory bodies have to become investigative instead of just - ah - whatever you call something that relies on testing. I guess they can try. But I wonder if the world has already reached the psychological point where we accept that's just what professional athletes do.

Fine. Fuck professional athletes. I really don't give a fuck. My concern is more for my son and anyone else who's presently young who might be into sports. If we could all just decide that we're going to be content to watch a bunch of doped-up professional future cancer patients do freaky things on television and everybody else is just going to enjoy themselves if they do sporty or exercisey things, I'm all for that. Or replace the professionals with a bunch of Blade Runner type things. That'd be great. I don't suppose that's how it works though, is it?

It's really amazing, all the things parenthood makes you give a shit about that you'd never given a shit about before.