daverea.com

Any time I get generally depressed, I usually ask myself when I last exercised. Or sometimes Kelly has to ask because I forget to. In my world, exercise and depression seem to be mutually exclusive – one can only exist in the other’s absence. In the case of last night, when I had a serious case of the down-for-no-reason blues, it had been at least two weeks since I’d done anything even resembling exercise.

After making this realization, Kelly and I headed over to Ellison park to do some walking and jogging. We gave lots of evil “you suck” looks to the people who were letting their dogs run around leashless, despite the prominent “leash all pets” signs every fourteen feet.

This morning, I headed over to the rowing club to meet up with my rowing buddy Don, and we put in a few miles on the Genesee River. It was flat as glass, and there was lots of eerie mist rising off the water and getting twisted around by the frosty 6:30am air. There were also ducks sleeping on the river, one of which I almost hit. I turned around to check for sticks in the water just as my bow brushed over its tail. It went squawking off to my right, and clobbered itself on the blade of my oar. It then swam off calmly, as if to say to all its friends (who were probably laughing hysterically on the far shore), “Nothing to see here, I’m just swimming normally! I did not just make a complete fool of myself!”

At our turnaround point, two miles into the row, I saw three deer, two of them fawns with lots of little white spots, drinking at the river’s edge. They spooked and disappeared into the woods before Don saw me pointing and making lots of little “I want Don’s attention but not the fawns’ attention!” noises.

We slid our shells up to the dock at about ten ’till eight, and noticed a woman wearing all black and doing what looked like yoga on the far shore of the river. I thought to myself, “hey, that’s kinda cool, very zen-like.” Then she started yodeling.

I looked at Don. He looked back. We stood on the dock, shells bobbing up and down beside us, as this woman belted out completely unintelligible tones across the river at us. It wasn’t like Western yodeling, like you’d hear in a cowboy movie. It was some kind of Asian (or maybe native American?) chant, largely monotonic. It was not at all pleasant to listen to. I kept waiting for the guy next to her to join in with some kind of screwey harmony that would make it sound good. But he just stood there and watched her.

We carried our shells up to the boathouse, and went back for the oars. She jumped up an octave. My ears started to bleed. We stowed our oars, signed out and headed for the cars. She jumped up another octave. The sleeve of my sweatshirt fell off, and a guy on a bike fell over.

I drove away and waited until I was out on Elmwood Ave. to open my car windows. I hope this doesn’t become a regular thing!