Joggin' to Erewhon
Hate reading? Mentally Challenged? Blind? Listen to this post as part of the podcast mini-series, “Expanding Erewhonian Nightmare.”
In an effort to improve my health and not commit suicide, I’ve been exercising more the past few months. It feels good to get out early and hate the thing you’re doing to yourself more than yourself. Sometimes, jogging, you can even imagine you’re going places.
Such was the case in Studio City the other day when, having finally hit some kind of stride, and feeling a little hot headed, I beelined across Ventura Boulevard, faking out a speeding Ferrari before blasting off a red curb, sailing over a boxwood shrub, and—inhaling my first hit of runner’s high in a long time—I planted down firmly on an eight-pound mound of glistening wet canine excrement.
“Crap,” I thought as the flattened tread of my New Balance went juicing along its oozy lubrications. “This isn’t what I wanted.”
When my head hit the pavement, I was surprised, and I closed my eyes. Somehow it all seemed a bit less humiliating and terrible if, like a toddler, I could pretend I wasn’t there. I just needed someone to come scoop me up and scrub the shit off my backside.
When I finally stood, I felt determined not to throw a tantrum or throw up. I’d been on an epic health kick lately, jogging once or twice a week, eating lots of leaves, meditating some mornings for five, six minutes on an app. There was no need to let a minor slip up derail my momentum.
A little tree stood at the center of the boxwood planter. I grabbed a hold of its trunk, steadying my nerves, and hanging there, caught between the car wind blowing off Ventura Boulevard and a white stucco wall at the back of a strip mall, I tried to recall the Mindfulness Reminder the Calm app had delivered to my phone an hour earlier, a notification wedged between news of civilian slaughter and Amazon savings.
“Life—” “Life is—” “Life is about—”
Something?
“Life is about starting over, one breath at a time.”
Yes, that was it! I couldn’t undo all the damage I’d done to my health over the years with nicotine, a lack of leaves, loads of alcohol, anxiety, rage and poor hygiene. I could not erase the highly suspect mustard stains smeared across the ass of my pants. Nor could I, scanning the deserted sidewalk, hope to track down and hurt whatever heinous pet owner or homeless person had laid this cruel trap for my transcendence. There was only one way to surmount the setback, it seemed. The solution was simple.
Breathe. Begin again. Repeat.
I remember feeling the rough surface of the bark beneath my fingers, the responsive quiver of the trunk as the wind ruffled through the canopy. It was a little maple sapling. The leaves weren’t yet ready to fall—trees never can decide the season in Southern California. But I could feel my diaphragm falling, lungs filling in rhythm with the rocking, rustling leaves. Just then the sprinkler started. It would have been a good time to crawl into the planter, hide behind the box hedge and climb out of my clothes. I could probably rinse the shit off my shorts if I acted fast, scrub the t-shirt against the shrub’s dark leaves, maybe emerge just putrid enough to make it past security at Ross. I thought I’d seen one up the road. Maybe it was Marshalls. But instead of ducking down and disrobing, I stood there staring off into the wash of traffic, lost suddenly in the soft kaleidoscope of sound, the glinting glass and rattling leaves, the hiss of sprinklers and bus brakes, a sudden radiant calm shattering the insanity of my frantically grasping mind. Words rose like mist from the cool hollows airing within me.
Who am I? I thought. What am I? Where am I?
Overhead, the blue sky shone like a brilliant boundless dome, and I thought… Nowhere. Nowhere was the name of the place. Nowhere, a kind of divine detonation that sent a tickled chill flapping through the humming fabric of space. Nowhere was the key to the medium in which all was suspended in one long sentient embrace…
Still holding onto the tree, covered in shit, standing behind the blank khaki wall at the back of a strip mall, I found myself on the verge of some kind of epiphany, the kind of cosmic ego relief I hadn’t felt flood me since boyhood when, on afternoons of catastrophic boredom, for hours I used to watch my own eye floaters drift like water spiders on the surface of my vision, pondering the impossible mystery of that tiny, fragile pond as Jerry Springer reruns droned on in the background in my grandma’s bedroom.
Do we have to let it out? Or is it something we must let in? I found myself musing as the sunlight tumbled through the twitching leaves and my lungs lifted, swollen with sky.
But the sky was not the only thing filling my lungs that morning. There was something else. And after about ten or fifteen breaths I decided I had to let it out…
I’d had a good streak, I thought as I bent forward and barfed a modest chunk of Kind Bar on the boxwood, a couple weeks...
And standing there, staring down at the long yellow skid stretched across the sidewalk behind me, the way my foot had kicked up off the end of it earlier, sending me head over heels, and then down, down and around, I figured—finally—that my health kick was over.
But I was wrong.
A blank door opened in the khaki stucco wall at the back of the strip mall behind me. A kid slid out lighting a cig and started down the sidewalk. He had a t-shirt on that looked like the name of a college—something liberal arts, I figured, probably upstate New York, given the vaguely Algonquin-sounding name. It wasn’t until I’d managed to slip through the closing door and found myself alone in the gender-neutral employee restroom, washing my clothes with pink hand soap like a happy homeless man, that I realized the word printed on his chest actually spelled… NOWHERE.
I’d never been inside Erewhon, the world’s most expensive health food store, before.
Music in article voiceover is “Drown Me in the River” by This Cold Night.