If I Had a Pineapple for Every Mile: Installment Uno

Runners play funny games sometimes. And, as someone who likes to attach as much metaphorical baggage to any and all anecdotal nuggets of daily life, I’ve found that every one of these games, tricks, and mental frittatas have braided themselves into the way I think, see, and carry myself (shit—that’s frightening). As such, I warmly welcome you to the first installment of an original CF series, titled, splendidly:
If I had a pineapple for every mile…


Yesss! I’m psyched! If I had a pineapple upside-down cake right now, I would bury my face in it and then spin around really fast (arms outstretched and flailing, of course) so I paintsplatter fleckity drips of pink and yellow frosting all over my walls. But I don’t. So…yesss! My landlord is psyched, too!

One of my favorite running games is called See How Far You Can Spit. To play this game, you spit; immediately thereafter, you…umm… see how far it went. Seems simple, right? All you bitches are like, “damn, Gina, I could win that game. I can spit like a teenage llama in heat.” Hold up, muchacha—this ain’t so easy. There is this thing that I like to call velocity. Some people call it wind, but that is because they never took physics. It makes this game very difficult, even for the gifted. You will be running, remember? And if you don’t suck and you are running at a decent clip, you hazard spitting in your very own eye.

[note: extended metaphor begins here]

And it is hard to measure, because your starting point is never fixed. But, because I am most often playing against myself, I usually consider myself the winner; that is not to say that I wouldn’t be able to win against absolutely anyone else (except, possibly, my dad, as he taught me nearly everything I know about spitting technique).

So, let’s quickly foxtrot back to this morning. [shoobity, doopity, doop] I’m running, and because I'm getting a bit distraught after listening to Ani, Kurt, Fiona, and Eddie V. (in that order) on my Shuffle, I need to search out a little funky-lite playtime in my head. (And, for the record, this Shuffle thing is luck-o-the-draw for songs that bizz-buzz to my earbuds from my library, so don’t ask why I loaded Depressive Mix 18 as a playlist). Anyway, I decide to play See How Far You Can Spit against myself. Fun so far, right?

Right. Until I realize that I had (had) been chewing gum when I made this valiant phlegm-toss attempt. When did I realize? Funny you should, ask, really. I realized when I stepped in a fricking hugeass load of gum about 30 yards later. Sticky-ugg-shizz, all over the bottom of the shoe, made worse because it had caked up dirt and little twiggleberries in it. If I was in The Crow, I would say “Shit on me... Shit on me… Shit on me.” But I wasn’t— so, instead, I just said “shit,” and left it at that.

For bringing to light that if I am going to spit into the wind, I should remove my chewing gum first, because I seem to step in my own gum wads often… and mostly because I refuse to look in the direction that I spit after I spit….
9 pineapples.

Okay, so that isn’t the most concise universal truth ever, but it’s merely the first installment. I’m just gettin’ heated up.

Spit on, good people—but watch yo' footing in the aftermath.