Read Part 1 here

It didn’t.

He bought a treadmill, started running, and for a few weeks, his body held – like a beach home against a wretched wind and mounting floodwater.

He was running three miles every few days; then four, then five. I hung up the phone one day and thought to myself, “I should sign up for the half and run it with him. Or more appropriately, for him.”

A few days later, he called and broke the news:

“I’m done. For good.”

“With what?” I asked, knowing full well he was talking about running.

“With running. I’ve been in so much pain lately that I went to the doctor recently. He ordered me to stop running.”

“What?” I exclaimed. “Why?”

In true understated Minnesotan fashion, he replied, “Because I need a knee replacement.” If we would have been dining together, he may have added, “Pass the salt.”

I knew his knee would make or break his attempt to run the half. Twenty or so years earlier, he had major surgery on it and the cartilage was completely removed. Now, at 65, the bones in that knee were knocking into one another like bumper cars driven by teenagers who drank too much peppermint schnapps on prom night.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m sorry dad.”

“Me too,” he responded.

He didn’t sound sad. Or disappointed. But I knew he was and is both. He keeps a lot to himself. He would never, ever cry over not being able to run again one last time. But he would and will reflect on it.

He will reflect on the fact that we never got the chance to run a marathon together. Not that we never ran a race. As a child, he would enter me into fun runs here and there. I remember crossing the finish line of a one-miler in my bright orange Sunkist t-shirt and white tube socks, gasping for breath, and falling into his arms.

Still, I think at different points in our lives, my father and I pictured us crossing the finish line of a marathon hand in hand, and that never happened. This is something I regret, and I am comfortable saying that. I don’t trust people who don’t like dogs; I don’t trust people who don’t admit failure, and I don’t trust people who say that they have no regrets.

But regret is also largely useless and wasteful. It’s one of those things that may be important to experience, but dangerous to hold onto. Call it a beautiful cactus under the setting sun.

I choose instead to hold onto my father, a brilliant man who no longer runs but will always be a runner – a father who I misunderstood for too long, liked for years, and started to love at 28.

I picture him untying his running shoes for the last time, placing them in box, and casually storing them next to a box full of Christmas ornaments and a bin of VHS tapes. To do anything more would be far too celebratory for a man who deserves a statue but who, under the dark of the night, would melt it down and use the metal for bath fixtures within the addition he is putting in at so-and-so’s house.

When my own wheels fall off 30 years from now, I will do the same. And when the time is right, I will open up both boxes, and jog down memory lane.

Months ago, I wrote about why I run. With that thought in mind, I started training for the Flying Pig Marathon in Cincinnati, hoping to finish a marathon in less than 4 hours for the first time and knock Ohio off my list.

I finally crossed the finish line. I remember scrambling to find the bag pick-up location so I could pull my cell phone out of my back pack and call my father.

“I did it,” I said. “I made it. 3:51.”

“That’s great!” he exclaimed. “Wow!”

I thought of him, and what he would be doing at that exact moment we were talking, and I pictured him in his garage, cutting this part, or sawing this piece, or doing any one of 10 million things he is able to do with his hands. I pictured him building a toy train for my godson Aidan in that garage, or re-flooring his boat in the driveway, or moving dirt from here to there with his Bobcat in the yard.

People say the sky is the limit. My father would disagree, saying that a little scaffolding, a few power tools and some drill bits alone would allow him to build a hand-crafted wooden spiral staircase past them.

Raised in the brutally cold and unforgiving backwoods of Grand Rapids, MN, my father is the classic man’s man. Growing up, he hunted, fished, played every single sport imaginable and built big things out of little things or nothing at all with his hands. It’s not that he was always working; he was always doing. There’s a reason his number of surgeries is in the double digits.

People speak of the eye of the storm. For my father, that eye is his children. He is an old school worker bee modeled after a tornado that rarely rests.

But he rested when my sister Stephanie got married. He rested when my brother Lucas hugged him goodbye and moved to AZ, and when I called him from OH, moments after my run, I pictured him stopping, taking off his work gloves and picking up the phone.

“I love you so much,” he would say, ending the call after we had finished talking about the race.

“I love you too dad,” I responded. When I heard the click of him hanging up the phone, I said “I love you too dad,” a second time, knowing that I was sending that emotion off into nothingness, into space, into infinity.

“Really?” I asked. His slew of operations, injuries and accidents over a very physical lifetime came to mind. Then there was his slight limp, and the slower pace with which he was now getting out of a chair, or off the couch.

“Yeah,” he replied. “I want to do one more race. Just one.”

I didn’t doubt that he wanted to, or could. I just didn’t know if his body would hold up.

Three months after losing its job due to the lockout, the National Hockey League is still unemployed and spending most of its time drinking beer and watching TV, says the National Women’s Hockey League. “Every day it’s the same old thing,” said the WNHL. “When I leave in the morning, the league is on the couch. When I come home at night after work, it’s still there, usually watching Jerry Springer or Judge Judy. The only time it gets up is to go to the bathroom or get a Miller High Life out of the fridge. I know being out of work isn’t easy but you have to get out once in awhile, you know? Go to the gym. Or take the dog for a walk. But don’t just sit here eating TV dinners in your pajamas.”

The NWHL tried to help the NHL get back on its feet, but said the league hasn’t put any effort into getting a new job. “I updated the league’s resume, circled some jobs in the newspaper and took it to some networking events. I’ve even set up some interviews but the NHL usually doesn’t show up. I don’t know what else I can do. I tried getting the league to search for jobs at CareerBuilder.com, but it ends up looking at porn.” The NWHL says it knows the manager at TGI Friday’s down the street, so if it wants to, the league can get a job bartending for a few weeks until it finds something permanent.

ORIGINALY PUBLISHED ON JUNE 9, 2005 IN VOLUME 3 ISSUE 18

Residents of Daytona Beach, Florida were left shocked and outraged after a huge asshole of a bull shark had the audacity to show up in its own habitat and bite 14-year-old surfer Danny Hicks yesterday. The surprise attack was especially alarming considering that it occurred in a buoyed-off area where the shark was obviously encouraged not to enter. “It’s just so senseless,” said Laura Hicks,” Dan’s mother. “You drop your child off to go enjoy a fun recreational sport in the middle of a precarious breading ground for some of the world’s most dangerous fish and he ends up in the hospital. I’m mortified, I really am. Danny was clearly in the buoyed off area, so what the shark did was totally illegal. That thing should be captured and killed, or soon enough, some other person who innocently frolics in that predator’s ecosystem is going to get hurt.”

“I don’t know what to tell you,” said the bull shark. “I feel bad for what happened. But he looked exactly like a seal, especially on the surfboard. Plus, I have a small brain and bad vision, traits common to every Heterodontus galateus. I’m sorry. I am. Tell Danny the next time I’m at home instinctively looking to eat something high in fat and energy content so I can sustain myself and avoid the extinction of my species I’ll be more careful.”

ORIGINALY PUBLISHED ON JULY 29, 2005 IN VOLUME 3 ISSUE 23

First, a qualifier. I like, no love, California. I mention this because taken at face value, it appears as though the singer has grown weary of CA, and by posting the song, I am attaching my sentiment to it. 

But the song has nothing to do with California. Or San Francisco, Or Oakland. Or anywhere specific. Really, it has to do with everywhere.

Most of us have lived in a place, grew tiresome of it, and remarked to a friend or to our pillow “Fuck [insert city here]” or “Fuck this place.” I have. A few times. I don’t know what that makes me. To my stay-near-home friends, I may be described as “antsy” or “unsettled.” To my mobile friends, I may be described as, well, “mobile.”

So this song isn’t about a specific location so much as it is about a feeling. A feeling when you want to leave a city, a company, a person, a …

First, a little background: Fun is fronted by Nate Reuss, former lead singer of the now defunct band The Format. If you lived in Phoenix in the mid 2000’s and were dialed into local music, you had them on repeat and often muttered “These guys are ridiculously amazing. Seriously.” They were the one of the hottest things to come out of AZ, besides, you know, the fucking sun.

The Format’s history makes for a decent Behind the Music episode. The band garnered critical acclaim, Reuss started dealing with a slew of relationship disasters and boozing more heavily, and the band got a shit load of dogs together, which Reuss was stuck with when The Format broke up.

Reuss is the only former Format member in Fun, but his voice is so impressionable that it’s impossible not to dub Fun the “The New Format.” Whatever. Fun’s debut EP won’t drop until this summer. Until then, enjoy “At Least I’m Not as Sad (As I Used to Be)” – which is your typical saloon-inspired, orchestra-fused indie ballad.