An Open Letter to the Fastest Jogger at the Park
If you’ve ever run in one of our many, wonderful parks, you’ll appreciate this essay from McSweeney’s Internet Tendencies.
If you’ve never surfed over to McSweeney’s, you owe it to yourself to check it out. There is some fabulous writing there and some of it is really, and truly hilarious.
To begin, let me go on record as saying that you are, undoubtedly, the fastest jogger at the park. You burst out of the wooded thicket and into my sight like a firework of sweat and sleevelessness amidst Sunday’s leisurely banality.
I don’t know if the writer, Eric Torres, is a runner or not, but he puts his literary finger on the experience of watching that person weaving, perhaps obnoxiously, through the crowded foot traffic in the park.
There are many who do not understand the nature of your work, but you must not feel obligated to dignify their sniveling ignorance with your attention, least of all for those who cannot recognize the precise, deliberate manner in which you stampede between their infant children.
I must confess that I have played both major characters in this story, both the observer and, on occasion, the observed. Perhaps that is why I find it so resonant–and funny.
Check it out and tell me if you see yourself somewhere in there.