Changing Human Destiny On A Wednesday

Blisters. Woohoo.

Oddly enough, different blisters from the running to the kind I get when walking.

(Shrug)

You wanted to know that, right?

Anyhow, broke out the Compeed blister plasters and gave the walking a break this morning.

This is not a blister-blog though. This is an idea I had last night, while running to the tunes of Thin Lizzy in my head.
I kind of figured out why swimming, by comparison, was boring to me during the month or so I did it in the early morning. It's because I'm boring...

What I mean is this: in the modern world, we plug ourselves in and soundtrack almost everything - train journeys, plane journeys, car journeys, walks, runs, pretty-much-just-sitting-on-our-arses-scratching-ourselves....everything. Silence is so unusual these days, I swear, if we weren't actively unconscious, we'd drive ourselves mad just trying to sleep through the night. Indeed - when I'm not laying next to d, I'm a prime case of this: I cannot sleep in silence, because the cavernous, quiet emptiness of my own brain is so damn boooooring.

I'll happily walk for miles and hours, pushed on by voices that crush the silence of my self underfoot. I'll cycle till I can barely move if MeatLoaf's yelling in my lugholes. When you swim - there's nothing.

Nothing but your own thoughts. And in terms of exercise, if you're not distracted, the main thought going through your brain is: Mmm...tedium and pain...let's keep going with this, shall we?

And yes, I do realise that this is a whiny, self-serving, very 21st century rant, and that people have been keeping fit and active since the dawn of time without isolating themselves from the rest of the world an dpouring music directly into their aural canals, but a) sod it, the 21st century is where I live, and I was a teenager in the age of the Walkman. I'm gonna be that shallow, and b) Ppppphbbbhbhbhbhbhbbhbhbhbbhbhbhhhhhaaaahhhh!!! - which is as close as I can get this evening to writing a raspberry.

What I'd need to make swimming an endlessly attractive option would, by extension, be a waterproof iPod.

If someone were to make such a thing (and I have no idea of course that they haven't), I confidently (and with no regard for tiresome factuality) predict that the training shoe market would collapse overnight, and running tracks would be abandoned or converted to swimming pools.

There's even an evolutionary opportunity here. After all, since we crawled out of the oceans, what has the dry land ever done for us? I mean, obviously, apart from the opposable thumb, tool use, an imaginatinon, language, science, art, philosophy, literature, the steam engine and the trouser press...what has the dry land ever done for us?

But imagine if we could go back to the oceans, and yet carry our music with us...I mean, yeah, sure, the whole breathing thing would be a drag at first, but surely that's the kind of challenge that really pushes evolution's buttons - if it wasn't, we never would have climbed out of the oceans in the first place...

Sigh...Never mind the poncy, fancy, did-we-really-need-it new iPad, Apple-fucks - give us the waterproof iPod and change human destiny...