Peanut butter and jelly sandwiches are great. I eat an unreasonable amount of them, for several reasons.

  1. I run a lot, so I need to eat a lot.
  2. PBJ sandwiches are nutritious and delicious.
  3. Athletes love PBJ sandwiches, including transcendent athletes (not just amateurs like myself).
  4. PBJ sandwiches are a cinch to make.
  5. PBJ sandwiches scale well: if I’m running more, just make more sandwiches; if I’m running less, save the surplus sandwich for the next day.
  6. Figuring out what to eat is easy if the answer is just PBJ sandwiches.

I’m pretty sure I’ve averaged 1+ per day for the past year, and it may be closer to 2 per day than 1 per day. Sometimes I worry about my dietary variety. Keeping the ability to run 60–70 miles per week and maintaining a steady weight, though, seems like a good proxy for “yeah, my diet’s aight”.

Keeping the ability to run 60–70 miles per week and maintaining a steady weight, though, seems like a good proxy for “yeah, my diet’s aight”.

But PBJ quality is markedly impacted by the bread. I insist (to myself) on 100-percent whole wheat, but sometimes I get some unpleasant variation within that constraint. Last week, I got the dumbest bread. It was whole wheat, but the slices were like slices for babies, and the bread was so soft. Soft bread is a little bit nice, but it lacks the punch of more solid bread. I don’t eat for enjoyment; I eat for nutrition. At this point, I think how much I eat is almost completely decoupled from how hungry I am. That’s not entirely true, because during my recent off week my consumption was noticeably down, but I always make myself have some yogurt after dinner no matter what, and I always eat until my plate is clean (and sometimes until it’s clean twice). It’s not easy to maintain weight on weeks of 60+ miles, but I manage. It requires some appetite-agnostic eating procedures, though.

Enough about the PBJ – let’s talk about gonzo journalism. I was recently asked why I read the news. I should’ve answered that I don’t “keep up with the news” in the passive, TV-watcher style. Sure, I visit news sites and get a superficial sense for the “important” events of the day, but my reading-oriented news consumption does a better job (I think) of exposing me to ideas and perspectives rather than soundbites and outrage. I’ve never been one for watching the news – as a matter of fact, I’ve never been one for watching anything, save pieces of sports games – and I think it’s because of the very cursory overviews it gives of anything and everything (and often, frankly, nothing).

I follow the news to be aware of what people care about and what’s going wrong and what’s going right and what’s going. Also, at risk of sounding arrogant, I think I do a nice job of figuring out the filter of articles I’m reading. I try to think of the motivation behind the content, so I think I can get useful information out of a biased piece.

Gonzo journalism is so cool because it does a phenomenal job of telling what’s going – and that’s the main thing, I think, that I’m trying to figure out from the news. It of course has the possibility of being horribly influenced by the content creator, but a well-viewed or well-read piece of gonzo journalism at least shows that, even if people were not thinking that, they thought people were thinking that, which I suppose counts for something. I don’t know. It’s also usually quite well written. I love a well-written piece (I’m sure I’ve mentioned this before), and I even love well-written pieces that are written about nothing.

But, in summary, I should’ve explained that I follow the news to learn about people and, by extension, to learn what people care about. The news has a lot of repetition, but I filter that out by choosing reliable (whatever that means) outlets and by avoiding the obvious hype and by clicking on things that, at least to me, seems like they have the potential to tell me about what’s going on in the current moment and, more abstractly, the human condition in the current moment.

I don’t entirely know where this post is going – it seems to be going nowhere, but it’s hopefully shaping up to be interesting. I took an experimental approach to this piece, in that I re-read rarely and paused nearly never. It proceeded almost linearly from start to finish, with only the occasional backstep, and not even too many backspaces. I think this “what’s going” approach to recording my own thoughts is perhaps more honest, certainly more interesting, and hopefully fun to read.