Chris DeLine

There’s an album by the band Fu Manchu called The Action is Go. I bought it in 1997 at a Best Buy-style store in Calgary called Future Shop. I had never heard of the band but the album cover had this rad skater on it and I figured that probably meant the music was cool. It was. Fast forward one decade later to Minneapolis where I almost (and rightly should have) got thrown out of a Fu Manchu/Valient Thorr show at the Triple Rock Social Club. Day drinking led to night drinking led to a drunken me unsuccessfully inciting a mosh pit at the show. I don’t remember which band it was, but I was in uber-punk mode that night and repeatedly banged on the bassist’s guitar as he leaned out into the crowd until he (rather politely, I might add) told me to cut it out. Shame is a strange thing, and now when I hear a song by the band, I’m reminded of that ugly version of myself. It’s funny, because “the action is go” has lingered as somewhat of a rallying cry in my mind when times require an emotional boost. There’s a strange dichotomy there.

I’ve read this (“The Creative World’s Bullshit Industrial Complex”) a couple times over the past year, but something clicked during last night’s refresher. I could quote any number of selections from the article (which would be ironic, given its focus), but really it comes down to figuring out where the value of having a blog is. Or at least figuring out if there’s any value here beyond using it to regurgitate selective thoughts other people have had and things other people have made in a way that represents myself in a positive light… “Maybe I just haven’t found the right type of naval-gazing,” he writes to himself…

That aside: Mind, body, and health are all clicking right now. I ran my first 12k this week, clocking in at 58:39.48 or a 7:52/mile pace. It’s the farthest I’ve ever run in my life, and the time might have been a little better had I not stopped to pee in the second mile. There, too, the action was go.