It Was a Dark and Stormy Night

Actually, it was a mild and foggy morning. You went for your first run from the house since your near-mortal hip injury and became giddy as your feet carried you through the familiar blocks. In your giddiness you envisioned writing a blog post that was in its subtle (?) way more about writing than about running. You were thinking about New York Times best-selling author Steve Friedman, who wrote an article on Suzi Cope for the current issue of Runner's World. You admired his intent, which was to present a moving story in a dramatic way, but you found yourself questioning his chosen vehicle for achieving that.

It takes guts, you brooded, to write an entire narrative article in the second person. As someone who just yesterday wrote an entire blog post in the third person, you had a sharpened appreciation for the pitfalls of deviating from the literary norm. During the night after your rogue post you had tossed and turned, wrapping the sweat-soaked sheets around your tortured form. Had you overstepped the boundaries implicit in your poetic license? Should you get back online, call up yesterday, and press the tantalizing link labeled "edit posts" so you could push and shove the post back into the first person?

In the morning, when you stumbled blurrily into the mean streets of Berkeley, you were unsure what to do. As you jogged slowly along, the endorphins trickled into your brain and you felt a consciousness just heightened enough to carry you perhaps as far as breakfast arise within you. You decided to leave your third-person post as it was. You copped unflinchingly to your cowardice in even thinking of changing it, realizing that you were the one who hoisted that flawed banner so it was now your obligation to leave it flying.

And then? Uh...where were you? Oh yes, Steve Friedman. You concluded that he would have been better off employing a more traditional approach to his subject, either interviewing Suzi Cope and publishing the resulting Q & A or simply telling her story in as a non-involved third-person narrator. You decided that by writing in a voice that is often used to signal the imperative (think advertising: You Should Buy This), Friedman too often enveloped his story in an unnecessary cloud of melodrama. As you may know, Cope is a legendary trail runner. The article details her very personal experience of giving up a child for adoption when she was quite young and then late in her life meeting him and establishing a warm relationship with him and his family. The point of the story, other than its obvious happy ending, seems to be that Cope became a running animal in the process of fleeing her life's big secret. If this is indeed what she did, surely the facts are compelling enough to be related in a less heavy-handed way.

You finished your run. You ate; you showered. You decided, against the advice of your inner critic, to write this post. Your morning had been harrowing, searing, challenging--well, up until breakfast, anyway--so you knew writing a critical, puzzling, and disjointed post was not a task that you needed to shy away from. When you finished composing it, you shook your head to see if the endorphins would dissipate and your judgment return. You had vowed yesterday never to blog in the third person again. Today you amended your vow to include swearing off the second person. You decided not to be "her," not to be "you," but just to be as "I" as you could be.