This is human life in all its strangeness.

Costar recently sent me the notification: Pay attention to how you disregard your own needs. What an attack!!

As I talk more with other ultra-runners, we agree on some level that you have to turn your brain off and disregard what might be rational while participating in one of these events. You’re balancing meeting important physiological needs – the bottom of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs if you will – yet ignoring your body’s calls to completely stop and rest. Your own needs. Much less complex than the sentence that before the last.

I mull all this over as I wait for a friend and my partner to come to the mile 87(?) aid station at MMT 100. I’m thinking about the two Backyard ultras I participated in this spring, and two transformative book events I went to over the last twenty-four hours. All hold so much weight. My brain has decidedly not been turned off.

Melissa Broder on Friday night was more than I dreamed. Her humor in the darkness of all that is having a body, the watching of the watching of the watching. As a reader and a writer, I find a glow in the way she balances deep thought with obsessions like Diet Coke. I am part of consumer culture, ok?!

To the rabbits, I suppose there’s no such thing as sameness. For them, and their heightened olfactory consciousness, life probably a stream of new and exciting fragrances. But for me – senses dulled by a constant deluge of opinions and judgments – every moment is a house of oppressive thoughts to be escaped. This is human life in all its strangeness.

A majority of Friday evening’s conversation was asking why we have our obsessions, why we think the way we do. It was a room full of people that most definitely ask themselves what is the point every day. Broder explores this in every book in some way.

Then today, honoring Mandy May. Tonee Mae Moll closed her set with Mandy’s poem, “I want people to think,” and that was it for me (many of us, I think). The day, and the leadup, may have been the hardest in the grieving process, all while still being a beautiful way to bring many of us back to each other. We shared so many intimate details through our creativity in grad school. We’ve seen each other peel our soft petals and expose our thorns. Over the past year and a half, I have found running in the woods and listening to crows healing. But I still want to come back to these people.

It’s nearly 2a.m., time for me to go to the aid station to welcome the runners. At this moment, I need to be with them. They’ll be there for me another day, and I’ll be with writers again. I’ll write another time about each Backyard. For now, I want people to think that I said what I meant and I meant what I said because I did.

Books I’m thinking about / recently read:

• Death Valley by Melissa Broder
• Bone / Blood / Blossom by Mandy May

Stay sweaty and glittery. Black Lives Matter.