Swollen up in Bellevue

To get over the jet lag from flying coast to coast, I went for a quick run this evening with a work colleague. It was a short run (less than 3 miles) but pretty swift (5 minute kilometres). Then again, perhaps running that fast meant I couldn't run very far. That, or because I didn't drink three pints of beer seven hours earlier, I was lacking the vital energy required.

Flying has made me swell up. Or something has inflated me. I'm not making some sort of boast here: it's the inconvenience of finding my feet are slightly too big for my shoes, or my wedding ring is slightly too small for my finger, both of which are fairly painful things to suffer. At least as we ran in circles around the park near the hotel, a bunch of teens on a bench cheered (or jeered) as we went past. It's nice to have an audience.

Although today was a painful grind of delayed air travel, it did give me the chance to read a few things: in particular the quite ridiculously vivid (and quite ridiculous) The Hundred Brothers by Doug Antrim, whose first sentence is three pages long and consists of a long and literary shaggy dog story through a library jammed fill of obstreperous brothers.

Then I read a book I'd bought my wife for her birthday, as an antidote for the grim misery of all Booker winners, not realising it would be a heavy duty meditation on relationships, infidelity and writing. I'm not so keen on metafiction at the moment: I like a narrative that starts, and stops, and has a plot I can deal with. Perhaps not as heavily reliant on plot and dismissive of character as Fleming, but still, after flying several thousand miles and reading three hundred pages, I wasn't sure where I'd gone from and to. Oh well.

The hotel I'm staying at is predictably high class and much more spacious than our hotel in New York, but it does have a very depressing carpet. Nothing's ever perfect, I guess.