Bizarre doesn't begin to describe it

What a day, what a day.

I went running today at lunch. I finally acknowledged something to myself: my calf pain is not normal. They lock up really tightly within a few minutes of starting to run. It's a huge impediment; I can do the distance, but I can't handle the pain. When I stop, trying to stretch them out also hurts.

I have decided this is not normal.

Bless you, oh internet gods. In looking for calf stretches, I see that this is not particularly uncommon if you don't take good care of your calves. I have been stretching, and that helps some, but it really only delays the pain. I also know that if I'm well warmed up - say if I'm on a treadmill and I've already done a couple miles - I can jog and it won't hurt. But that takes a long time, more time than I want to give.

I got some new stretches - some I'd already figured out - and noted that one site said you need to warm up, then stretch. I've been stretching, fast walking down to the park, and then running. I'm thinking I will jog down to the park, stretch once there, then start running. See if it helps. And do the calf stretches morning and night, regardless of whether I'm running that day just to help it limber up. It's got to work better than what I'm doing. I want to make it through this. And then I'm also thinking of asking my doctor at my physical to recommend some PT to help me figure this out more professionally too. Including perhaps some deep muscle massage, because my calves have pretty much been tight since high school. Time to get over it!

Long about 2:30 then, the messages started rolling in on Facebook: Michael Jackson is dead. Okay peeps, here's the deal: I bet the press about Michael's life was nowhere near as freaky as the reality, and that's saying something. He was amazing, he changed music, he changed culture. But he was still very, very weird. Still, I see the tsunami of emotion coming - he is something as iconic as Diana or Kurt Cobain - a keystone in the arch, if you will, where his death sends reverberations down the line. What does fascinate me is that he is of a time where there was still relative cohesion to culture - we had, what, maybe 30 television channels? We saw a lot of the same things, shared the same experience. Who in this generation might be so transcendant? I think Obama is... I can't think of a musician or pop star or actor who I think of as transcending or revolutionizing what's happening. Perhaps because we have fragmented so much. Then again, there are probably few in any generation that are so transcendant.

Lastly, I went off to meet someone tonight... it went well. Lots of affinity. We talked politics and religion and all those verboten topics and we share a point of view. A good start!