At least I had a good line as I returned to Pulaski County from my 84. I played with two 60-something Union Pacific retirees named Mike and Marvin, and en route to a 97, endured a joke told by Marvin, a Nebraska native whose son lives in Chicago and sells security systems to prisons across the U.S. and has season tickets to Nebraska Cornhuskers football games, and whose daughter is the manager of a Holiday Inn in Oklahoma City. It was a bad joke. I think my dad might have told it to him. It involved an old man approached by a sexy young woman. She said, "Your zipper is down." He said, "Oh yeah? Did you see my Mustang?" She said, "No. I saw your Mini Cooper with two flat tires." It was pretty easy for me to deadpan: "I don't think that's funny, Marvin. It's too close to home." They also laughed when I said, "Hey, I got a golf dvd coming out next week. It's called How to Fuck Up a Perfectly Good Drive."
I ran a new loop tonight, called the Maple Street Loop. It's two miles long, and includes sections of the 47th Street and Levy Loops. It avoids the Levy slums and thus the street-corner hoodlums. That was my idea. I ran by two of them anyway. They had wandered to the edge of the Better Homes section and were walking on a sidewalk, smoking. "Fuck," I thought. They looked about 16. As I passed them, their voices bubbled friendliness: "Hey, man." "Was goin' on, ol' school?" It occurred to me there's a chance I've been running by those kids since they were babies. I jogged for the first two minutes of each five to finish the loop in 26:35.
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