by Lindsay LaMorre

Two days of complete exhaustion and emotional depletion after the Boston Marathon … and I find both the desire and need to run.

I ask myself why??

Running makes me smile and has the power to change a day.
I run because no two runs are ever the same.
I run because it fills my heart with joy.
I run because success and happiness lies within.
I run to keep my mind and spirit clear and strong.
I run because I value and care for my health.
I run to be with amazing friends.
I run to be a part of an incredible community of runners that have welcomed, mentored, supported and encouraged.
I run because of the journey.
I run to embrace adversity.
I run because I can.

What was supposed to be a celebratory, joyous, and momentous event … turned into disappointment.

I ask myself why?

Was it the cowardly acts of terrorism that destroyed and deflated the whole event, manufacturing the run as completely meaningless? Was it my heavy heart for the victims who were fighting for lives and limbs? Was it the media that glorified the terror to enhance its spectacle? Or had it been something more personal, more selfish? Was it the thought of all those winter training hours suddenly deemed insignificant due to the bronchitis that had attacked my chest and lungs just days before I was to run? Was it that I couldn’t have my peak physical performance on the stage of the world’s oldest and most iconic marathon?

Maybe . . .

But the tragic events that occurred in Boston have impacted me personally and changed my perspective forever. My true disappointment laid within me … it rested in my inability to actually go back to the foundations of why I run in the first place. In the moment, I forgot to savour the opportunity and experience I was so blessed and privileged to have. Success isn't measured by a stopwatch; it's distinguished by the journey.

Explosions Sirens Chaos Panic Confusion

Why?

Within a blink, I may not have been so lucky — an opportunity lost and an experience taken for granted.

I finished the Boston Marathon.
I was with a loved one at the time of the explosion.
I was warm.
I had my belongings.
I was safe and healthy.
I was so very blessed.

I am fortunate enough to get a second chance in 2014 to revisit this question of "why?"

Running is my comfort … Boston is my inspiration.

_______________

(Lindsay LaMorre is a Health and Physical Education specialist who lives and works in Toronto. She wore bib number 10577 at Boston 2013.)

"It begins with the mass deportations. 25,000 runners packaged onto a fleet of school buses as neatly as you can say 'logistics'. They are being shipped to another town for processing — 26.2 miles away, to be exact — and yet the overwhelming sense in the air right now is one of optimism. An affirmative energy of nervous dialogue markedly contrasts the monologue of radical dividualization that steers the proceedings. Bright yellow sponsor bags, which hold those personal possessions one hopes will make the return journey, are clutched in every hand. An inversion has taken place: these overmen&women are the new figures of Agamben's camp logic, and yet they couldn't be happier. In some ways, they run for us all."

(Hunter Thompson Blanchot, I'm All In for the Disaster, p.22)

third eye wireless
kinodermed abrasion and butterwinged
avulsion, flappping
speaker lungs echo
aqualung therapeutic
fractal police stating
ID badger maximal
expressive ism, she said

she said (she said (she said ((( ))
she said (she said (she said (she said ((( ))
she said (she said (she said (she said (she said ((( ))

or else
a Party for everyone
don't we Like this
aren't we Like this
coffee bitter blackness
poison mouth silently sewn
elastin home box set-top
setup, videodrom'd gesture
but it pulls you back in, doesn't it

third hand clueless
synthetic onion fishnet tear
torn avulsive, rent untimely
it makes you wanna cry now, doesn't it

Endocolonization. What is appropriate and inappropriate in terms of ingested performance enhancers for the athletes of today and tomorrow? The paradox is born in the stars but finds greater resolution under the watch of the medical gaze. Modern sport is still the illusion of truth, after all.

_____

(speaking of medical gazes, thanks to MD for spotting this . . . get it? :{ )

With its lilting and stuttering, consider the (mecha) butterfly as part of an aesthetico-political topology of movement through gesture and language — passing through the free radical, to the busker, the jester, and finally to Paolo Virno's joke, which effectively "changes topics" in conversation and may be considered a form of innovative action in surveillant/spectacular societies dominated by language. In this topological sense, not only are the "logico-linguistic" resources of jokes important (as with Virno), but also the movements of the jester or joker, the gestures and delivery that allow for the topical change to occur (as with the butterfly).

~

The butterfly is relatively ambivalent to the local striations of anthropocentric territories (city streets, lot plans, the domestic home), save for an interest in those affordances offered by other objects within these striated spaces (flower beds, vegetable gardens, shaded areas). For the butterfly, in this sense, space is always "smooth", or at least its particular attractions and connections are not mapped in gridly fashion: it lilts and stutters from stopping point to stopping point, a nomadic line avant la lettre, but perhaps even more illustrative to us perceptually-conceptually as it moves in its delicate awkwardness volumetrically, lifting the nomadic line off the canvas or the cave wall or the desert route for understanding in other dimensional spaces.

~

The jester, on the other hand, figures prominently in the medieval court. Offering "witty" counsel to the king or queen through jokes (and other forms of performance), the jester is that one who attempts to provoke a minor shift in perspectival viewpoints — from on high to down low. As the feudal court apparatus is transduced to the even more striated and biunivocal relations of the chess board, serfs and pawns get their due while the jester is left behind. But in tegwar chess, or the societies of control, the rules are modulating with every move. We find the perfect opportunity for the (re)introduction of the jester and performative jokery into the game — a powerful piece on the board so long as it does not seek to enlarge its own image or invest in the credit.

xxx

kleinian kisses need stitching
breathing, and leaking
at the seams

seems like only yesterday
you tore free
from me, in me
and me to be

xxx

come, rated as such and dated as much
blue breath whispers
sizzzling
time written flee

xxx

seems extreme
this veering theme

xxx

explosive dreams need sequencing
mines stuttering cuts and pasting
and stitching
ocular gauze
visibly

xxx

three stitches or less
by exxxtension
impulsive tears by the tens
in another frame of mine

images of thought lying tattered
knead breath, defibrilly

_____

(for all the gadflies and barflies.)