A heatwave is settling over New York City, and the streets are filled with the silence that heavy heat brings. Voices seem to carry further. At sunset I went for a sludgy run. These days my running soundtrack is an odd mixture of glitch, gloom, and ‘70s rock: Autechre, Fleetwood Mac, The Knife, and Funkadelic. The early maximal albums of M83 are also fantastic widescreen scores for running.
I love watching other people run. Everyone has their own style, like a moving fingerprint. Some are knock-kneed and avian with prancing steps, while others take leaping strides like something from a savanna. My style sits somewhere between scraping and dragging. Sometimes there’s crying. They say you never see a cheetah stretch, but maybe I should. My legs always hurt. I hate running but I admire how it forces me to narrow my focus to a single step and all the life lessons this implies. And each night there’s the sensation of either running from or towards something.
