Walking The Walk

When did we forget how to walk?

No, I mean how to walk farther than from the parking lot into the grocery store.

When was it that we forgot how to walk a moderate distance - like five miles? Many adults today can't remember the last time they walked five miles. I'll bet there are lots of high school kids who have never walked five miles in their entire lives.

For tens of thousands of years, if you wanted to go anywhere and didn't have a horse, you walked. Period. Five, ten, fifteen miles - if you had to get there, you walked. You didn't complain about it - it was something you just did, like breathing, or hauling water from the well.

Serious walkers - like armies on the march or folks making pilgrimages - walked hundreds or even thousands of miles. Well OK, some of them may have complained a bit. After all, suffering a little is what making a pilgrimage is all about.

But that all started changing a mere hundred years ago or so. And now look at the sorry state we're in.

Think about it. If you told someone you just walked two miles to the grocery to pick up a box of cornflakes, what's the first thing they would ask you?

"Why, what's wrong with your car?"

(In California, they would ask, "You mean all of your cars are in the shop at once?")

At some of our larger shopping malls, people walk out to their cars, drive to the other end of the parking lot, and re-enter the mall because it's "too far" to walk from one end of the mall to the other.

If you think about it in a detached, objective way, this is a little sick - literally. We should be asking why we're not leaving the damned car in the garage and walking a piddling little distance like two or three miles. Our bodies evolved over millions of years to carry us, under our own steam, distances much farther than that. What are we doing to those bodies by protecting them from even this small amount of exercise?

Statistics are starting to prove overwhelmingly just what we're doing to our bodies. A lot of those statistics have to do with our diet. But most discussions of the connection between diet and rampant obesity also mention the lack of even the simplest exercise in our lives. And even light exercise like walking is proving to have nearly as much benefit as more rigorous running, cycling, swimming, or trying to figure out how Windows 8 works.

But why am I ranting thus?

Well two reasons, actually.

The first is that I started walking - for fun as much as anything - about a year and a half ago when I discovered I couldn't go more than about three miles without getting tired. That scared the shitake mushrooms out of me, after being able to ride my bike all day without too much fatigue just a few years earlier.

The second is that fellow blogger, Frogma, started posting about her personal 'NONgoal' to paddle and walk a hundred miles in a month. Hmmm, I checked my logs and discovered I'd been doing about 65 miles a month for most of last year and wondered if I could do 100 in a month, too.

So, I set my own NONgoal at the beginning of this month and just passed 100 miles a few days ago - coincidentally about when Frogma also logged 100 miles.

Being a bit more anal than Frogma, I guess, I set up a spreadsheet to log my daily progress, which I can now share with you here via the wonder of Google Docs.

In theory, it wouldn't be too hard to set up one Google Doc that allowed a number of bloggers to log their progress in the same place and compare results. But that sounds a little too competitive for the water blogging community I know. Or is it?

At any rate, outing my progress like this gives me some incentive to stay on task. I'll be updating the log every time I walk throughout the year, so you can follow just how well or poorly I'm doing, if you are terminally bored.

I could go on about what I like about walking, but if you already do some regular exercise, you probably know about the peculiar addiction that develops to this sort of thing, and about how you actually feel worse if you start missing too many days.

If you don't exercise, you are probably already pissed off by these arrogant, elitist, holier-than-thou skinny little shits with the bumper stickers that say things like, "I'd rather be jogging," so I won't piss you off any more.

But, you may have noticed that I like duking it out in the comments page, so feel free to vent.

Warhol Retrospective At Tate Modern

Sorry to intrude on the territory of London blogger, Captain JP, but I had to post a few words about the upcoming Andy Warhol restrospective at London's Tate Modern museum.

The controversial 20th century American artist who launched the Pop Art movement in the 1960s is perhaps best remembered for his posterized multiple image prints of iconic figures from American culture like Marilyn Monroe, Elvis, Muhammad Ali, and Elizabeth Taylor.

But the highlight of the Tate exhibit will be the first public showing of a recently discovered print of American sailing icon Tillerman.

I imagine JP will have more details for us when the exhibit opens in April.

A Snowy Morning

Whose garage this is I think I know.

His mind is focused elsewhere though;  

He will not see me stopping here  

As he curses at the snow.  

My little horse must think it queer  

To stop without a tavern near  

Between the woods and frozen lake  

The coldest morning of the year.  

He gives his harness bells a shake  

To ask if there is some mistake.  

The only other sound’s the sweep  

Of snow shovel and downy flake.  

The drive is lovely, long and steep.  

The dude has promises to keep,  

And drifts to shovel before he sleeps,  

And drifts to shovel before he sleeps.

Fish On Mondays

Say what you will about the internet.

It's turning our kids' minds to mush. It's replaced intellectual curiosity with The Google. It will be the end of books and libraries and literacy.

Well OK, maybe so, but let's set those trifling realities aside for a moment and look at the good side.

This looks pretty good, doesn't it?

Now, those who read my scribblings here and in the comments pages of the blogs I frequent will probably have noticed that I shy away from most discussions about cooking. It's not that I don't like the fruits of cooking, or the meats of cooking, or the seafood and desserts of cooking. It's just that I've never been much of a cook myself.

Discussions of things like beer basil butter generally leave me bewitched, bothered, and bewildered.

I am usually left in charge of charcoal grilling and have developed some survival skills there, but that occurs safely al fresco. In our kitchen proper, I'm strictly the sous chef. I do what I'm told and try to stay out from underfoot.

But, with the advent of the internet, that may be starting to change.

Over the weekend, our head chef and menu planner was looking for something different to do with salmon. A few months ago, she discovered a YouTube video on how to make homemade pizza and that has worked out well for us. So, this time, instead of scouring her collection of cookbooks, she headed straight for the interwebs.

The cool thing is that you don't need to be a culinary genius with decades of experience. On YouTube, helpful practiced chefs, both amateur and pro, walk you through all the perilous steps of preparation, just like Julia Child. But here, you can pause, rewind, and replay as many times as necessary so you can get the crucial details right without setting fire to the kitchen. And with the iPad, the video is right there next to your cooktop. Voila! Voici! Or voiever you want.

The video we found for pan-seared salmon over sauteed spinach, mushrooms, garlic, and tomatoes was done by an enterprising Jersey girl named Laura Vitale, who seems to have mastered the art of marketing herself on the interwebs rather well. I don't know what professional chefs would make of her, but her recipe - and more importantly her video - worked out superbly for us.

As usual, my wife did most of the heavy cooking, but, when I wasn't staring at where Laura was wearing her microphone, I learned a lot, too. I think I'm starting to gain the confidence to take on stuff like this, myself.

I even added a secret ingredient to Ms. Vitale's recipe.

Ten blogging points to the first one who spots it in the photo at the top of this post.

City Folk And Shore Folk

My fellow blogger and champion of most things New Jersey, Baydog, has been in mourning of late.

He might manage a smile or two and put up the cheery post to keep up appearances, but underneath, there's the telltale melancholy that we often wear when we've lost a loved one.

In late October, Baydog's beloved New Jersey shore was brutally ravaged and left for dead in the wild Atlantic surf. Worse, appalling images of the violence were splashed all over the tabloids and the evening news. There was no opportunity to cope with the loss quietly or to mourn in private.

Baydog is mending as best he can, as his folk always have. For Baydog is shore folk.

He was raised down the shore, got most of his schooling there, and grew up with sand between his toes. He was babtized in the warm water of Barnegat Bay, took communion in a hard-chined dinghy, and sang in the boatyard choir. He lettered in clamming and wrote his senior essay on the sound of the surf.

I spent my summers just two hours down Route 528 from Baydog, but I may as well have been ten thousand miles away. I was born of city folk.

My city was paved over. Almost all of it. What wasn't concrete was asphalt. And the few odd lots that remained between the concrete and the asphalt were given a peculiar name - vacant - as if whatever had once lived there had moved away. Trees and grass had been herded together and put in places called 'parks' where they wouldn't get in the way of more important things. If you wanted, you could visit a park, but you could never live in one.

In my city, there were no waterways to speak of, outside of the parks. The big river was mainly hidden behind security fences. Our parents would warn us about the dangers and tell us never to go there. In fourth grade once, we all got on the bus and took a class trip to the sewage treatment plant, but that was pretty much the most water I got to see all in one place. And it smelled funny.

Occasionally, we city folk would try to escape the summer heat and drive down the shore (you never drove down to the shore). As we'd approach the ocean, I could sense my parents getting uneasy. We were leaving the safety of the city behind. Not only were there no sidewalks here, but there was sand everywhere, and sand got into your shoes and socks. "Make sure you don't get any sand in the car," we were warned. "It gets into everything."

My parents never really understood these shore people who liked to walk barefoot in the sand. Why would anyone build a house down here? You'd be tracking sand into the house all of the time. How would you keep the carpets clean?

And then there were those awful storms. Didn't these people know the ocean could come up and wipe their houses away? How could they be so foolish?

It wasn't until many years later that I moved to California, far away from my city, where I got a sailboat that started teaching me about the ocean. At first, this city boy was afraid to venture very far from the safety of the harbor. But the boat and the ocean soon began their usual conspiracy.

It wasn't long before the ocean stopped smelling 'fishy' and started smelling like home to me. And it wasn't too much after that that I began thinking about those foolish shore folk back in New Jersey. I was beginning to understand their foolishness. And I was getting a little foolish myself.

Some of us live lives that are entirely too safe. Boats can spring leaks. Boats can leave you stranded out in the middle of nowhere. Boats can sink. But sailors keep sailing. Sailors need to sail. It's what we do.

I'm beginning to think those foolish New Jersey shore folk knew very well what the storms might bring. But they also knew things city folk would never learn.

In time, the shore's battered barrier islands will recover. The shore folk will recover. And Baydog, I hope, will recover. They all will have been changed a little by their ordeal.

Meanwhile, back in my old home town, the city folk are safe, untouched by the ocean, untouched by the storm.

Cheers!

For a few days now, I've been trying to summon the strength to write a cheery Christmas post, but this just doesn't seem like a good year for cheery.

My wife did whip up one of her clever alternative Christmas trees, which I've blogged about before and before.

I think this Christmas Guy looks kind of cheery and jaunty in an alternative kind of way.

And we took our usual stroll through one of Sacramento's established neighborhoods, where the affluent owners dress their fine old homes in a style that reminds me of how Christmas used to look before it was digitally enhanced and brought to life by Disney animatronics. There was hardly an inflatable, dancing Santa or computer-controlled flashing light display anywhere.

I took some photos and set them to some cheery music as you can see in the video at the end of this post.

But I'm still not really cheery.

I think the 700-pound grinch in most of our living rooms this Christmas is the grim memory of some school kids who won't be celebrating Christmas ever again.

The talking heads on our televisions drone on about what must be fixed to prevent future tragedies. They hardly mention that the ultimate tragedy was a human mind that broke in a way no laws or politicians will ever be able to fix.

At Christmas, I'm reminded that, as humans, we need other people in our lives to survive. Not to feed us or buy us iPads, but just to care that we are alive.

Christmas is mostly about getting off our usual treadmills and stopping to connect with the people in our lives whom we may have neglected all the rest of the year.

Remember to tell the people you love that you love them. Even if they piss you off some of the time. It could turn out to be the most important thing you ever do.

Now, let's go out there and make the best of what has been a pretty scary Christmas.


Cheers, from O Dock.





(And please, to keep all of the extra high definition pixels in this video from escaping, click the little gear thingy once the video starts, switch to HD, and then click the 'full-screen' doodad.)

One Blogging Day Before Oblivion

Well bloggers, it's December 20th, 2012, and you know what that means.

Yup, just one more day before oblivion to tidy up affairs and post those last minute posts.

Of course, those of us with boats that can go out on the big, badass ocean with accommodation onboard for pooping aren't sweating it too much. We can just sail off into the sunset like we've always planned to do anyway.

And now's a good time to do that for another reason. You wouldn't want to leave on a Friday, would you?

But what about those of us with boats too small for an extended ocean passage? What are those poor unfortunates to do? I think I'd look for solace in some distilled products and maybe, at last, dust off that old bible that you've never opened.

You know what they say. There are no atheists in Fox News foxholes.

But what's that?

You can't find your bible? I was afraid of that. Well, as always here at O Dock, we step up at crucial moments of peril and provide the vital resources our readers need to make it through the day, and possibly through all eternity.

So, if you have only a small boat and can't find your bible anywhere, here is a small snippet of it that should work in a pinch, or even if you're footing off:

The Laser's Prayer


The Laser is my shepherd, I shall not want.

It maketh me to lie down in strange postures,
It saileth me through the still waters, it restoreth my soul,
It leadeth me in the paths of starboard tackers for the wind's sake.

Yea, though I roll downwind in the shadow of death,
I shall fear no evil, for thou art with me.
Thy vang and thy sheet they comfort me.

Thou preparest a regatta before me in the presence of mine enemies,
thou annointest my head with a trophy,
my cup runneth over.

Surely, soreness and mildew shall follow me all the days of my life,
and I shall dwell in the fleet of the Laser forever.