Memories of the Clinton Administration

I was looking through my old running logs today.  I kept every run, race, weight workout on paper from 1978 through about 2014. Since then I've succumbed to the electronic. My heirs will wish I'd started sooner. 

The logs have proven far more interesting for the occasional side comment explaining why I didn't exercise (i.e. I was up late the night before on a date).  If I'd thought they'd be interesting in the future for the statistics instead of the relationships I would've been wrong. T

Some notices are cryptic. I mentioned going to lunch with “Curious” but finally remembered that is was a blonde named Georgi (i.e. "Curious George"). Facebook helpfully tells me she's living in northwest Ohio and has two teenage girls. Apparently divorced given the use of the maiden name and the different surname of the daughters. 

1993 was the “year of Chubby’s” (a bar in Newark) that I loved to frequent. The big midsummer event was Branson, MO which was a memorable vacation for that deep immersion in “the other”, the bluegrass, the rhinestone, the comic, the corny. A return to authenticity via country inauthenticity?  A lust for the clean living I ascribed to cowboys and country artists? It was somehow more authentic to see those theatre acts in Branson than the rock acts of Columbus. Maybe I thought they were humbling themselves by not being cool.  I was trying on new clothes, literally and figuratively, starting with cowboy boots.  God was surely preparing me during that year in which I'd meet my future wife. 

I was labeled “a dreamer” in school and wonder now if that goes with drink and old country music.  Chubby’s was my “thing” from the summer of ’91 through the summer of ’93.  I marvel now at the sense of time I had then, pre-marriage, pre-iPhone. It was nothing to drive a half-hour one way and spend 4-8 hours altering my consciousness.  That's one way to slow down I guess. Time stood still on those stools. I took in the Tiny Wellman band, watched “Commander Sue” (so called because she always sat alert in a front row stool) as well as the myriad of dancers who, along with the band, became a sort of movie set for me, like I was inside a movie.  Or maybe a dream...