Quickie Kings Summit via Coronary

In an effort to be more regular about posting, I’ll be posting some of my runs on here. I have to get these postin’ reps in to build up my workflow, ya know?

I do want to clarify something. I previously said that hunters in Tillamook are not supposed to use the trails. This is not true. I was incorrect on that. I stopped by the Forest Grove Rangie Statie and talked to em. They can use trails but it is heavily discouraged. In Tillamook State Forest they close gates and give hunters access behind those closed gates. So hunters are SUPPOSED to use roads but they can use trails, as the entire forest is public land.

Anyway, onward with this post.

If anyone is curious and likes data, I self-host a bunch of my strava stats over at strava.crap.cam if you ever wanna dig into that. It’s a better way of representing strava data than anything strava offers. Check it out.

I ran Kings Mountain again today. I did a slightly different route and used Coronary Ridge. This is a super fun, little used, trail that is really quite steep.

Fun run! It was extremely wet but in a good way. The air temp was up around 50F so nothing to worry about. My river dip was also very pleasant. I’m surprised that 47F is starting to feel warm this early in the year but I’ll take it as a win. My car didn’t get broken into so that’s also a win! Gosh, the wins are really stacking up.

Book recommendation. Go checkout my friend Juhea Kim’s new book, A Love Story from The End of the World.

Spanning multiple locales and epochs, and rendered in fine detail and vivid color, this transportive collection shows what it means to live as human inhabitants on our one miraculous planet. Lyrical, at times hilarious, and always heartfelt, each of these ten stories is a reflection of individual choice in the face of man-made in a near-future Seoul, where air pollution has become so fatal that the city has been encased in a translucent biodome, a civil engineer charged with its upkeep contemplates an arranged marriage. A painter, disenchanted with New York City, travels to the South of France and falls into a dalliance with an entrepreneur who claims to have invented a new color. And on an island where the Indian and Pacific Oceans meet, upon which other countries have relegated their waste to form a mountain of landfill, a local boy facing daily privation gets internet famous for his K-pop-inspired dances.

Her previous books are also amazing. Go check em out. She’s an Oregon native. Her writing is wonderful. I lose myself in her books in a way that I don’t come across as often as I’d like. Her books are a bit of an escape for me, so I’m quite curious how this short story collection will impact me. Thanks Juhea!

I also recently finished up The Book of Eels. I don’t really have much to say about this book, much like I don’t have much to say about the eel. This book is definitely worth a read if you want to learn a bit of history about the eel and it’s relationship to humanity. There’s a weird amount of Sigmund Freud in this book. I’d put it at a 6/10, which means it is slightly better than the average book. My pal Joules gave me this book so thanks, J.

I’m also going to recommend a wonderful anthology of South Korean science fiction. I read this a while ago. I was recently discussing it with my LMT while he rubbed me down, so I figured I’d let others know too. The book is called Readymade Bodhisattva. I believe most of these short stories have never been translated into english before. There are several amazing ideas in this book. If you like the idea behind Highlander but think the movies kinda suck, there’s a great story in here for you. If the idea of a robot finding Nirvana interests you, there is a great story in there for you. I’d put this anthology at a 9/10 for sure.

Readymade Bodhisattva: The Kaya Anthology of South Korean Science Fiction presents the first book-length English-language translation of science and speculative fiction from South Korea, bringing together 13 classic and contemporary stories from the 1960s through the 2010s. From the reimagining of an Asimovian robot inside the walls of a Buddhist temple and a postapocalyptic showdown between South and North Korean refugees on a faraway planet to a fictional recollection of a disabled woman’s struggle to join an international space mission, these stories showcase the thematic and stylistic versatility of South Korean science-fiction writers in its wide array. At once conversant with the global science-fiction tradition and thick with local historical specificities, their works resonate with other popular cultural products of South Korea―from K-pop and K-drama to videogames, which owe part of their appeal to their pulsating technocultural edge and their ability to play off familiar tropes in unexpected ways.

Stay tuned! Thanks for reading.