The Logic of Long Distance

If Dr. HST were an athlete, he'd have been a distance runner. This piece is based on some true events. However, it has been fictionalized. The “facts” in this piece have no bearing on any fact, living or dead. Read and draw conclusions at your own risk. Some assembly required. Batteries not included. [ Editor’s note :] I woke this morning and found a thick manila envelope jammed under my front door. Across it was scrawled:  “Still alive. Here’s the report as you ordered. Pay me in Vegas.”  --Dr. RVT.  I thought there must have been some confusion, but I opened the envelope to find some ragged and coffee-stained papers. I knew they had found their way to me for a reason. This is what they said. * * * I was ten kilometers from Eugene when the lactic acid began to take hold.  I was used to the stuff inside my body during track sessions, but this was something wholly other.  A nefarious doctor from the suspect and secretive ...

"Many is the mirage I chased. Always I was overreaching myself. The oftener I touched reality, the harder I bounced back to the world of illusion, which is the name for everyday life. 'Experience! More experience!' I clamored. "In a frantic effort to arrive at some kind of order, some tentative working program, I would sit down quietly now and then and spend long, long hours mapping out a plan of procedure. Plans, such as architects and engineers sweat over, were never my forte. But I could always visualize my dreams in a cosmogonic pattern. Though I could never formulate a plot I could balance and weigh opposing forces, characters, situations, events, distribute them in a sort of heavenly lay-out, always with plenty of space between, always with the certitude that there is no end, only worlds within worlds ad infinitum, and that wherever one left off one had created a world, a world finite, total, complete." --Henry Miller, The Rosy Crucifixion II Runners, i...