Comin’ atcha, again, from beautiful Bates Hall here at the Boston Public Library. I have made my neighbor with the wireless a proposition (and actually wrote her a check) and am waiting on an answer, but until I get one I’ll be coming at you from the BPL. Which is really no hardship. The setting is perfect for a little studious reflection on the burning questions of the day.

I was going to take the T in this morning, but I got halfway to JFK from my place and realized, wow, my backpack is so light. I had forgotten my laptop and had to walk back, and thought, sod it, it’s quicker by bike. And it’s true. I made it to the library in about twenty minutes, whereas it would have taken me twice that to get here by train, because I would have had to go either Downtown Crossing to Back Bay station and walked, from Park to Copley, or just walked across the Common from Park. Plus because I lost about ten minutes on the way to JFK it would have been extra thick once I got there, and the misery of being packed into a stuffy train on a gorgeous day like this–there was just no reason to ride the T.

So there.

What am I going to call this blog until October now? Any suggestions?

I got to Copley Square about ten minutes before the library opened and waited out on the steps of the McKim Building with all the bums. I like to check the two statues out there to see which one, The Goddess of Art or The Goddess of Science, the pigeons are pooping on more. But the rain last night had washed away the harsh avian judgment of the previous day, so that Art and Science are starting out the day even. As they should.

I do want to say a word or two about blogging, since it may seem to some that I have been remiss over the last week. I thought about filling in my lost dates from the past week with faked spontaneity, just to make it look like I’d been a good little blogger, but in the end I decided against it. My more demanding critics, like Chex, for instance (hey, by the way, are you related to Coco Crisp?), would surely know, and then I would be in the doghouse again.

So, consider this a sort of Resurrection of The Rage!

Anyway, the remnants of the 110th Boston Marathon were all over Copley Square this morning. Like the day after an orgy. An orgy of masochistic ecstasy. How about those Kenyans, though? Gotta love ‘em. The dude beat the record by one second! You can’t help but think about the space of a second.

But I have to admit something. And here you will definitely be able to tell that though I live here, I am not a proper (and certainly not an improper) Bostonian, but: I don’t get it. I mean, it’s true, some of the runners were inspirational, but they were also crazy. And then there were many who probably weren’t inspirational, just crazy. There were none, I can assure you, who were not crazy.

There is certainly something fascinating about the very fundamentally human propensity to turn everything into competitive sport. I make no claims, pro or con, though I am definitely not against healthy competition. I don’t want to debate the merits of it, it’s the phenomenon that interests me. I mean, don’t you find it endlessly fascinating that every single thing we can do as humans has or will inevitably become a competitive sport?

Running is an ancient one, of course. And when running had a very vital purpose—like you see in that wonderful movie, Gallipoli, for instance—it made complete sense. But in these decadent times, an age of increasing abstraction, when everything is divorced from its purpose, I find it interesting how we still very much feel we have to come up with some purpose anyway. We can’t just have a day where crazy people run 26 miles from Hopkinton to Boston for no reason whatsoever, and if we did not have charities cashing in on it (and thank goodness we do), that’s exactly what it would be. In other words, if we didn’t make something up, we would see it for what it is—sheer, unadulterated MADNESS. And we would see runners for what they really and truly are: UTTERLY MAD.

And don’t even try to deny it.

I don’t know how many times I heard an anchor use the word “inspirational” to describe a runner’s story. And, as I said, there were inspirational stories. But as for running twenty-six-or-so miles, it is not, by any means, of necessity inspirational in and of itself. You can also raise money for cancer by holding a bake sale, but we don’t call that inspirational.

And anyway, all those runners get a high out of it. It’s like crack for them. I don’t know why we don’t lock them all up. It should be illegal.

I was “working” a little further down on Boylston yesterday—well past the finish line, on Berkeley Street—and decided to walk to my garden in the Fenway around noon, to plant a rhododendron. Ran into one of those Heathers in their royal blue jackets. They were all clumped together with no runners to service yet, and were barking at pedestrians. “You can’t walk here! Go around!” But in the most sententious tones. Really, give someone a uniform, and they turn into a Nazi. Every freakin time.

And then there’s the Sox. Sox Nation’s crazy, too. Forgive me for what I’m about to say. I have nothing against the Sox. But whatever you think of the actual Sox, the fans are another thing entirely. I have never fully understood the passion of spectating. There is nothing inspirational about Sox fans, that’s for sure, but I suppose they’ve made a true sport of spectating. When they leave the stadium (I have a prime spot in my garden to watch the watchers passing by before and after), they are either all puffed-up and full of hot air or utterly deflated and full of piss, which they very often relieve themselves of in the Fenway Victory Gardens.

It’s comical, really, the degree to which they invest themselves in what is as utterly vicarious and wholly passive an activity as activities get. The only analogy I can make is to religious services. Like, crazy Pentecostal religious services. I know it’s not original. And again, there is some primordial need to be part of an enormous crowd letting out a mass, hysterical primal scream in one giant roar. I mean, it’s obvious. But better baseball than bullfights, I guess. I don’t know.