Now, THAT'S a Reason.

There are reasons, and then there are reasons. Some are good, and some are not so good. Some are, when you come right down to it... well, stupid.

Take, for example, my reason for running. I go running in an absolutely fabulous location. The picture at the beginning of this post was taken from the path I run on.

That path, the location, the beauty of that spot is not the reason why I run. It would be a great reason to visit that area, but if you're going to go visit a pretty nature preserve you want to do it in a leisurely manner, with a water bottle and a sunhat and time to stroll. You do not, if you visit that park, want to do it while feeling your kneecaps creak and grind, with sweat pouring down your forehead in such profusion that you wonder, over and over, whether you would really look as lame as your kids say you would if you just wore a sweatband, and whether you should even care if you look that lame when sweat keeps getting into your stupid eyes, and getting in there so much that you almost decide that you will just get a sweatband the next time you're at Wal-mart but then in a moment of lucidity as oxygen finally makes it into your bloodstream, you realize that the only grown adult man you've ever seen wear a sweatband is Richard Simmons.


Richard Simmons. Sans Sweatband.

And then you think, as you're running, that that's not true, that other grown men who are famous wore sweatbands, and one of them was Charles Barkley, and he's pretty tough, right? Nobody would make fun of him. Only then you're not sure that Charles Barkley wore a sweatband at all, maybe you were thinking of someone else, like Dennis Rodman, and then you can't decide if Dennis Rodman was tough or kind of effeminate, and the look you're going for is not effeminate, and it's not like you'd be the one to tell Dennis Rodman that he was effeminate, and then you're not even sure if the person you were picturing as Charles Barkley, because you're back to that, was in fact Charles Barkley, he might have been one of these younger basketball players who you're not really sure you know or not, someone like Shaq, say, but Shaq's not really a younger player.

So you resolve, as you run - as I run, since I'm the one doing this... it would be really weird if you were doing this, too. (Thinking these things, that is, not running. Lots of people run.) But as you're running, you resolve to ask The Boy as soon as you get home whether you are thinking of Charles Barkley, and whether Charles Barkley wore a sweatband.

Charles Barkley. Also without band.

Asking The Boy sounds like it might be a good idea. The Boy loves basketball, after all. Loves it so much that he thinks it might be an adequate excuse to not immediately get upstairs and take out the garbage when you call him. Even though we have a digital video recorder that can "pause live television," and so when you call him he could actually pause the game, come empty the trash, and get back to his game, never missing a thing and not getting in trouble and having to risk deductions to his allowance or whatever the latest punishment I'm big on is. The Boy loves basketball so much that he doesn't even want to pause the game and take that short of a break from it. (Or he hates taking the garbage out that much.)(It's probably the latter, I guess, as I think about it.)

So asking The Boy whether I'm thinking of Charles Barkley would be a good idea except its not because you cannot be sure what type of answer you're going to get from The Boy.

The first most likely answer is going to be "What?" because The Boy knows that 99.9% of what I say to him is either a lecture of some sort or a description of something I like, both of which fall into his classification of "Immensely Boring," so that the sound of my voice by now operates as a sort of snooze alarm for his mental faculties. The reflexive "What?" in that sense is something of a modification of his defensive "What [insert thing here]" defense that I've previously discussed. The Boy's ability to shut out my vocalizations is proof that Darwin was right and that evolution can occur faster than he knows.

The next most likely answer is "Who's Charles Barkley?" because The Boy is, after all, fifteen and nothing that happened before his memory begins - 2004 - actually occurred, in his opinion, or if he was forced to learn that it did occur (the Revolutionary War, JFK's assassination) it was boring and needed to be immediately forgotten. The only pre-2004 items stored in The Boy's memory are the four Superbowl losses for the Buffalo Bills, which he has to keep handy to put me in my place when I get one up on him in sports betting.

But either of those answers would be preferable to a wild card, an answer where The Boy goes off onto some weird tangent and you end up wondering most of the night what Stalin has to do with generic frosted mini-wheats, which is a position I found myself in recently when I was eating some generic frosted mini-wheats that I'd bought on the last grocery shopping trip.

The Boy asked me why I'd bought vanilla flavored generic frosted mini-wheats, and I told him that was the only flavor they'd had, and he asked then why I'd bought them at all, and I responded, truthfully:

"Because they cost fifty cents."

Here's some insight into me and my mind: I will buy almost anything that is less than a dollar. Less than a dollar is almost free. If you want to sell me something, tell me it's 75 cents. I won't, in all likelihood, even care what it is. Chicken nuggets, an armchair, a cassette tape of the Communards' album from the 1980's featuring "Don't Leave Me This Way," it doesn't matter. So when I round the aisle in the grocery store and see a stack of Vanilla-Flavored Generic Frosted Mini-Wheats (Having made myself hungry for them while typing that, I went to get one and learned that they're called "Mini Spooners," and I could probably write a whole column on how great store-brand generic cereal names are, how they come oh-so-close to the real names to let you know that, hey, they're almost as good and they're two bucks cheaper, so why not go for some Cap'n Crisps?) But that's not what I was talking about. I was talking about my reaction when I see that display of Mini Spooners and they're two boxes for one dollar. Two! For One! And the "one" is a dollar!

This ^^^ equals

This. ^^^

That's why we have two boxes of them, and we still have two boxes of them because I'm the only one that eats them and, really, I've got to be in the mood for them. Plus there's a lot in there and a couple of Mini Spooners goes a long way.

But The Boy wasn't ready to let it go at that. He was unimpressed with my skills at finding a value and wanted to make his point. So he asked me why I didn't buy something better for a snack, and I pointed out again that these were fifty cents (two for a dollar!) and he tried to teach me the error of my ways as follows:

The Boy: Who was worse, Hitler or Stalin?

Me: Hitler.

The Boy: (Surprised.) Really? You think so?

Me: Yes, of course. Hitler had more people killed. (Which, I've learned, was probably true, based on what I read at this website I picked at random after googling the phrase who was worse Hitler or Stalin.)

The Boy: (Reconsidering, then forging on.) Well, Stalin was pretty bad, right?

Me: Yes, of course.

The Boy: Well, those mini wheats are the Stalins of snacks.

And, apparently, this^^^ equals...

 

This.

So you can see, you do not want to ask The Boy a question unless you absolutely have to, because while most of the time your answer will be unhelpful, sometime it will wander from UnhelpfulTown and end up traveling down the Bizarre Highway to take up residence in Crazyville. And some of those answers end up loving Crazyville so much, being such a perfect fit for that area, that they end up getting elected Mayor. That's where that Stalin argument is headed.

Which is what my original point was: That there are reasons, and then there are reasons. The Boy's reason for not liking Vanilla Mini Spooners is, we can all agree, stupid. Or, if not stupid, the kind of reason that makes me... well, I don't know what it makes me do because the reason makes so little sense that it actually stops other perfectly valid thoughts in their tracks. The Boy's Stalin-as-snack argument has the exact same effect as if you saw someone get into a car accident, called up 911, and when they answered, before you could say anything about the accident and its location, the 911 operator said "Lemons." That's how much sense his reason had.

Unlike my own reasons, which are impeccable and which are sorted out during those runs during the time (the first 100 steps) before I begin to sweat uncontrollably and fixate on Charles Barkley. And it really is just the first 100 steps. That's how long it takes for me to decide that I really shouldn't be running but by then I've committed to it. And so during that first 100 steps, I remind myself why it is that I run, and it only tangentially has to do with the health benefits. Here is why I run:

I run in case I'm ever in the ending of a romantic movie.

It's that simple. If I'm ever in a situation where my relationship with Sweetie depends on my getting to the Empire State Building, or a New Year's Eve Party, or the tetherball court, or whatever location Sweetie's at that I've got to get to and the cabs are all taken up, or there's a traffic jam, or the phone's dead, or I've just got to run because darn it, I'm so much in love that only actual physical movement will express my devotion, then I'd better be able to do it. I don't want to let Sweetie down by suddenly sitting up on the couch one day, realizing that she's the best thing that ever happened to me AND that she's getting on a plane to Uruguay in just ten minutes AND my car doesn't work AND my friend is too hungover to drive me, so I take off running and poop out fifty yards later and figure "Oh, well, she'll be back in 10 years, we'll give our marriage another shot then." No, I've got to be able to run and keep running, and stay ahead of chubby security guards and untrustworthy ex-boyfriends and that one judge, and get to Sweetie in time to renew our vows.

See, now that's a reason.