High Speed Train

I have no idea how fast I was going, officer, but I know exactly where I am.

I’m laying on a towel in Sheep’s Meadow beneath a crisp autumn sky. I have just run Greta’s Great Galop Half Marathon in 1:54:22, my second fastest half of the year. I ran with my iPod, accelerating when Outkast’s ‘Hey Ya’ and Jay-Z’s ’99 Problems’ boomed through my headphones. My joints ache: my knees, hips and ankles. But it is before noon, and I have already run 13.1 miles.

I am in my red chair eating scrambled eggs with soy sausage and mozerella, toast, o.j. and coffee. I am watching ‘The Last Party” on DVD. I am satiated, but sore.

I am asleep in my bed, the windows thrown wide for the breeze. I sleep soundly and deep, stirred only by the whine of the buzzer…

I am recording a duet with D, adding some reverb here, some EQ there.

I am stomping through the audience at Pete’s Candy Store in Brooklyn, the P.A. system long since having failed, singing ‘May The Circle Be Unbroken’ at the top of my voice.

But manishtana halaila haze mikol haleilot?

I am the circle, dancing to to Klezmer folk music with a bunch of black-clad and bearded Hassidic Jews at Art Land on Grand and Lorimer. They have taken my hands and spun me around and around. We are complete strangers laughing and clapping together on this night after Sukkot.

The joke: Professor Werner Heisenberg is driving on the Autobahn. He is speeding as quickly as his car will go. His odometer is pinned. The Black Forrest whizzes past his windows. A police office pulls him over. “Professor Heisneberg,” he says. “Do you have any idea how fast you were going?”

“I have no idea how fast I was going, officer,” he replies. “But I know exactly where I am.”