Stabby the Cat doesn’t put up with your excuses on back and shoulders day

He does, however, have a benevolent tolerance for your unruly hair.

Old-man shoulder hair: gross

Primer: dry
Paint: grey
Hair: high
Shirt: really bad planning because it has no sleeves and it’s cold out and I’m freezing but with me every day’s a GUN SHOW
Gender: guy

Last night the weather thingie on my phone promised me it would be a cool, comfortable 63° right now

But right now my phone tells me it’s actually a global-warmingy 66°.

I suppose next you’re going to tell me the Arbor Day Cow who frolicks through the cobbled suburban streets munching on squirrels and bringing all the attractive children immunity from smallpox isn’t real.

MY WHOLE LIFE IS A LIE.

I just ran three miles in sweaty-Freddy humidity

WHY CAN’T I FIT IN MY HIGH-SCHOOL PARACHUTE PANTS ALREADY?

Could it be the 12:20 pace? It’s nice and even and divisible by many numbers. For instance, if you divide it by 2, I ran at a 6:10 pace. That should count for SOMETHING.

To make myself look—and feel!—better, I followed the Blanche Devereaux playbook and took my post-run selfie from above. Behold my eternal youth!

I had to cancel yesterday’s run because I had a pretty epic headache relapse that kept me in bed until noon

And because my hair looked too nice for my ritual selfie. Thankfully the headache dissipated as quickly as it powered up and I was able to go to work and paint woodwork and swoon over Corey Booker.

But now my head feels great and my hair is a disaster (coincidence?) and it’s life-suckingly humid and I have three miles to run!

I’m tired of waiting

I have an 8K I want to run in three weeks and I need to train and my head pain is as low as it’s ever been over the last four weeks and I’m wide awake anyway and I’ve kept my running watch charged all this time just in case and I’m wearing my lifeguard shirt in case I drown so even though my ears are still screaming EEEEEEEEE in my head and my hair looks as lush as my hostas FUCK THIS HEADACHE PAIN—I’M GOING RUNNING!

I may be back in three minutes or three miles. Stay tuned ...

Rob (not pictured) and I (not pictured) officially transitioned this morning from spending the summer running our way to being lean and ripped to spending the winter lifting our way to being hunky and swole

And we promise that our massive gainz will not interfere with our ability to have good hair.

This Mickey shirt has been the Virgil to my Dante on three Disney half marathons and more long training runs than I can count

And today is our longest run before the NewBo half in two weeks. I have one Gu for each four miles, so that adds up to lordhelpustwelve miles on yet another morning of perfect running weather.

M-I-C ...

One of us needs some help in the coiffure department today

The other two aren't smart enough to spell coiffure. Or two. Or too and to for that matter.

Nope.

Nope nope nope.

After making it less than a quarter of a mile last time before the pain flared up and made me go lame, my hip DID last .96 miles—which I pushed through to make it an even 1.00 because I NEVER LEARN—this morning. Then I turned around and lamed an even 1.00 mile home.

Shit.

On the plus side, the rule of thumb for someone my size is to put only 100 miles on a pair of running shoes before replacing them, so these new shoes still have 98.75 miles on them. It’s like cashing in a bonus rebate coupon!

But in the mean time: Shit. Shit shit shit.

#HowToTurn50 #AndSayShitALotOnFacebook

Welp. Here we go.

Operation: See If Jake’s Damn Hip Injury Is Better is about to deploy. I’ll either make it to the end of the block or the end of the next block. Or I’ll slog out three miles. But as The Book Of Ivanka’s Totally Authentic Totally Profound Made In America Chinese Proverbs says: The first step of the journey begins with the first step of the journey. So off I go ...

#HowToTurn50 #AndNeverLoseHope

Come to Brie, Bend to Brie

Seeing an opera company perform Brigadoon at a gorgeous outdoor theater with a picnic of deviled eggs and hard-to-pronounce cheeses and residual glue in your hair from the matinee of your own show is an opportunity that presents itself only once every hundred years.

Wwww. Zzzz.

Wonder Woman shirt. 

Weapons-grade hair.
Wready for bed.

This, people—THIS!—is why you’re coming to see our last weekend of Fuddy Meers:

It's not because of our endlessly inventive fold-and-change set (though it IS pretty awesome). It's because of our almost-too-referential-to-be-in-good-taste house music (please register all complaints with someone else). It's not because of my Grammy-nominated, Canadian-trade-war-breaking, delicately nuanced portrayal of an honorable-but-faintly-flawed, unfairly stunning man who’s cruelly afflicted with alarmingly spiky hair and perhaps a mildly unsightly blemish or two (though thousands of ancestors of fallen Korean War soldiers are begging me from their graves to bring their children home based on the singularly stirring power of my comforting skin and my collective acting choices).

NO! None of that meaningless garbage is why you’re coming to see the last weekend of our show! Because THIS is why:

See these stairs? They go DOWN. To the BASEMENT. Of the THEATER. Where it’s NICE AND COOL. And these are just the actors’ stairs; yours have CARPET. And HAPPINESS. And OTHER CAPITALIZED THINGS.

And THEY’RE why you’re coming to see our show this unbearably hot Iowa weekend.

So get your hot, sweaty selves to our nice cool show NOW. You have only three more chances to see us before my Grammy nomination and my mildly unsightly blemishes are gone for good.

My hair is SO! ON! POINT! right now

Oops—I mean SO! POINTY! right now. Sorry. Typo.

And you have three more opportunities to see its relentless verticalness in person. So get your Fuddy Meers tickets NOW!

Why am I blowdrying the (artfully hidden) side of my face?

To dry up the wrinkles? No. (Well, maybe ... do you think it would work?) To make flapping doggy cheeks like I’m poking my head out the car window? No. (Actually, also maybe.) TO ENTICE YOU BY SHEER FORCE OF YOUR BURNING, BLOWDRYER-HOT CURIOSITY TO COME SEE OUR ALMOST-SOLD-OUT SHOW AND FIND OUT FOR YOURSELVES?

Let’s not kid ourselves. It’s always been Option 2.

I forgot to take a perfunctory selfie after Scott's first run with us last weekend

so I obsessively planned this one during all 3.33 miles of today’s run, where Scott and Rob ran a little too fast for my aging hips to keep up at the end but we all (well, probably just I) still clocked in at a respectable 10:43 pace. We tried to take our selfie in front of Rob’s midlife-crisis car—which I think is a Chevy Pinto, but I don’t know shit about cars so there’s a slight chance I may have that wrong—but the sun and shadows weren’t cooperating so we resorted to our default garage-door background where we all still look dashingly sporty and brutally handsome:

Fun fact: If you randomly, cruelly get the Village People’s “You Can’t Stop the Music” stuck in your head during a run because its tempo and beat perfectly fit your pace, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy because you literally CAN’T. STOP. THE. (DAMN.) MUSIC.

#HowToTurn50