Roughs

 

Roughs are raw pieces of free-writing that haven’t been through my full word-forge editing process. I’ve fixed some typos and deleted some extraneous meandering, but they aren’t ready to present as “essays” or as any kind of finished work. Most are old entries pulled straight from my journal, on the premise that there might be value to them despite their unrefined state (I do some of my best thinking in that journal).

Rough    
rough:
adj. - being in a natural state
adj. - not perfected, completed, or fully detailed
n. - rugged, overgrown terrain
n. - a disorderly, unrefined, or unfinished state
             -American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language.

For more about these pieces (and my need to label them), read my Rough #1: Permission to publish rough work.

 
Featured
My First Nighttime Trail Run

…It’s a place I’m not sure I want to go, but if I get into any of the longer ultras (which I am not at all saying I intend to do) I will have to deal with that. For now, I’ll just consider it an interesting sensation, and I’ll empathize with those who do go long…

Boston Marathon bombing

We take a breath, realize that we’re still alive, realize that we can stand back up. And then we stagger forward again, as that man did, towards the finish line. Not in anger, probably with defiance, but mainly because we know that we really have no choice. (Rough #5)

Quantifying the good and bad in people

...humans aren’t simple in that way. The balance between the good and bad a person does is irreconcilable — the one doesn’t count against the other, they don’t cancel each other out. No one is innocent and all do good and bad... (Rough #4)

My neighbor mutilates his trees

He sees no ugliness in what he does. He didn’t shudder at the thought of trimming the row of beautiful rhododendrons against the side of his house just as they were beginning to truly flourish... I wanted to cry; he proudly pointed to his work and said “they was getting a little high.” (Rough #3)

Time (gratitude and greed)

...we must find a balance between that gratitude for what we have and that greed for more of it. To somehow be both satisfied and searching, to reconcile our gifts against our hunger. (Rough #2)

Permission to publish rough work

Could I take what I just wrote, which is rough but not too bad, and put it up on my website? To get to Yes on that, I’d first have to give myself some permissions, a new set of rules that apply to... (Rough #1)