Category Archives: Muddled Musings

To Phil, the Real Marathon Man

La Laguna  

Perhaps because I’ve felt as if I’ve finished a couple, but my eyes have been drawn to marathons of late.

Maybe it’s that irritating commercial from Marathon Oil, whose new jingle implores you to “put a tankful of freedom” in your guzzler. (Does that make the Prius the official vehicle of the Socialist Marxist Party?). Maybe it was catching the classic film again.

Or, most likely, it was yet another documentary I consumed, this one on the famed run of 26 miles from Marathon to Athens, which gave birth to the modern day sporting event. The documentary touched on all the rote facts, including the roots of its distance, how it became the symbol of national pride in Boston, and how more than 300 are held annually in the U.S. alone.

But I began to wonder about the guy who ran the first. Why wasn’t he celebrated? I mean, he did die trying.

Turns out, the guy is as heroic as any of the A-list Greek gods, from Apollo to Zeus. And the guy was real.

His name was Pheidippides (Phil to his bowling pals), and he was born about 530 BC.

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Phil didn’t exude celebrity.  Not hulking, not that powerful, not even that cunning. Not…Herculean.

But Phil could run. And run. Like, further than you’d have the patience to drive run. And Phil believed in doing his share. So when he joined the Greek Army, they unwittingly turned him into one of the world’s first professional couriers, sending him to dispatch news between armies separated by miles.

Around 500, Persia was planning its biggest New World invasion yet, with Marathon as ground zero. What that documentary (and historical memory, for some reason) failed to mention is that Phil ran more than 150 miles over two days to get to Sparta and plead for help.

Sparta did, and helped repel the Persian army. And it was on that run, to Athens, that Phil died, giving the news of victory. Historians say his final words to the Assembly were ‘Joy to you, we won. Joy to you.’

Where’s  Phil’s pomp and circumstance?? His fable? His book deal? His summer blockbuster biopic?

Maybe his name was too tough to spell, let alone pronounce. Maybe we don’t like heralding those who die trying.

But don’t we all feel his pain, even a little? I can’t help but see him as that Everyday Greco Joe, who played to his strengths to get through the day, tried to keep his head down at work and do what feckless bosses commanded.

Bad news, Pheidippides. Bosses are still trying to run Joes to but a nub.

But you’d be proud of how much of your stride we emulate. Joy to you, Phil. Joy to you.

 

 

 

I’d Like to Teach the World to Sting

 

Warning: spoilers and curves ahead

Mad Men was a profound show that flirted with a profound ending.

Instead, it chose a mildly ambiguous one. Which, by today’s standards, could qualify as profound.

But you couldn’t help but feel unfulfilled by the final chapter of the eight-year odyssey of Don Draper. The slick adman and reality escape artist was grinning like Buddha at show’s final scene, having come up with the ad pitch of all ad pitches: the I’d Like to Buy the World a Coke jingle.

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Much hay has been made over the finale (sorry, Don, there’s no escaping your farm roots), which has been heaped with praise for neatly wrapping characters’ story lines and giving viewers the Matt Weiner sendoff we never got in The Sopranos. And no finale ruins the legacy of a series (look at M*A*S*H*, or Seinfeld, or any series finale).

But just as Tony Soprano’s final scene remains under-appreciated (in a television first, the viewer got whacked), Mad Men‘s final episode has attracted fawning like a gleaming blue Cadillac; it’s over-praise, and fleeting.

The problem may have been in the show’s genius concept: How the appearance of happiness often trumps the appreciation of it.

And for eight years, Weiner and writers took an unflinching look at that inner-conflict, creating one of the most complex anti-heroes in television history in Draper (played with deft narcissism by Jon Hamm). His was a protagonist capable of great nobility — and unspeakable trespasses.

Which is why Mad Men shouldn’t have ended on a punchline, however brilliant.

And there’s no arguing the cleverness of the joke. The real ad was conceived by the minds at McCann-Erickson in 1971. Draper was working for McCann-Erickson on the show, which also had reached 1971. And Mad Men can perhaps boast a television first: the only series to end on a commercial. Normally they’re followed by one.

But the real ambiguity of Mad Men is not in the finale’s contents, but its intent. What are we to make of Don’s last smile? That it takes a human touch to be a good salesman? That work can’t equal happiness? Or can it? That, if you run fast enough from your past, you can start over?

Perhaps Weiner telegraphed the ending in the opening graphics of the series eight years ago. Every week, the show began on a familiar graphic: A suited man, plummeting from a skyscraper hued by womens’ silhouettes, only to land neatly on a couch, still coiffed, cigarette perfectly in place. Maybe that was the setup to the punchline.

We may never know, which may be the point. Or perhaps the show ended on a punchline that Weiner had in mind years before the show’s final bow (he said often that he knew how he wanted the series to end).

Either way, there was no shaking the sense that we’d just seen a great sales pitch. And like most ads, the promise is far more grand than the payoff.

 

Birthdays, Cursed Days and the Galapagos Islands

 

I got sick in June, 1979, on a Friday the 13th.

As a 14-year-old, I knew the day was supposed to be unlucky. But I didn’t really feel cursed. Not when the docs diagnosed me with juvenile diabetes. Not when they said I’d have to give myself two shots a day. Not even when I saw mom cry for the first time, as we sat in the parking lot outside the doctor’s office.

I understood it a few days later, watching a TV documentary about the Galapagos Islands. The narrator explained how Charles Darwin came up with his survival-of-the-fittest theorem on a visit to the islands and its thousands of indigenous residents. Iguanas, parrots, penguins.

But the animal that caught my eye was the great sea turtle, the icon of the islands (which are named after a specific breed of tortoise). With a little luck, the narrator said, a tortoise could live to 50, 60, even 100 years. More.

For some reason, 50 stuck in my head. It just seemed so old. That’s a half century. Grown-ups are that age. Parents are that age. Why, I’d even bet some people in their 50s are…grandparents.

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But I must have somehow, finally realized the Friday the 13th curse. I remember asking myself, for the first of many times: “I wonder if I could live as long as a sea turtle.”

It’s not an easy age to reach, the narrator said. Not even for the sea turtle. It had to survive the beach scamper from sandy egg to surf. If they avoided the birds, hatchlings had to survive the sharks and seals who love baby turtle soup. But if it could reach adulthood with its shell intact, the narrator said, a sea turtle can enjoy a long, fruitful life. Like, a half century fruitful.

So I began a countdown to a goal that seemed as unreachable as dunking a basketball. Fifty. Thirty-six years away. Five lifetimes, it seemed. As a boy, dad would say I was so impatient that I’d ask “what’s next?” five minutes after arriving somewhere.

And for so long, 50 did seem unobtainable. I was a shitty diabetic who could not accept that, overnight, I wasn’t allowed Bazooka, Starburst, Hershey bars. So I ate them with my friends, afraid of standing out.

I quickly succumbed. By the time I was 30, I’d had 17 eye surgeries. My kidneys were failing. I went on the transplant wait list for a new kidney and pancreas. Then, 50 didn’t sound so far off. Forty did.

But, at 35, I got the call that Samuel Flegel, a 17-year-old who was brain dead from a motorcycle accident, had come to save me. My perfect genetic match, he joined me in January 2000. sam

Suddenly, 50 wasn’t such a fantasy. And the years initially flew by as my new body broke into a sprint that took me to Australia, Japan, Mexico. 15, 14, 13, 12, the years peeled.

Five years in, the nausea came. Perhaps to remind me that Father Time and Mother Nature are still here. Not vindictive, but merciless. A divorce, a move, a resettlement accounted for the years, though they seemed to move slower. Nine, eight, seven…

Ten years in, and the engine truly felt sputtered. I watched hatchlings who should have long outlived me die in the beach scamper. Samuel. Libby, the first friend to offer to be tested as a viable donor, died in a motorcycle crash. Michael, who was tested and ready to donate a kidney, died of a brain tumor. Dad’s sudden death in his sleep made me wonder if I were meant to see the marathon tape. mikeybillybowles

The years were slowing to molasses. Four..three…two…

But something inside me awakened. Perhaps it was Michael. Or dad. Or a confluence of losses that made me realize how many people wanted me to get there. Who offered their bodies to see it so. That there were so many hatchlings, including the one I carry, who would never have a chance to outlive the great sea turtle. But they wanted me to.

One.

Hey, fifty.

I’m here.

What’s next?

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