Epps/Lowry 4m1I’m not a total Luddite. I’m more of a technological skeptic…the kind that loves gadgets. While I enjoy solving the problems of design and manufacture in a variety of different materials, computers with their hidden architectures and perpetual incompatibility issues can send me into fits of blind rage. While I may be in the mood to pimp my house or my furniture, I want my computer to behave like a Honda Civic right off of the assembly line. I want to turn it on and have it take me from point A to point B. I’ve been switching things over to a new system for the last couple of weeks, and I’m starting to think that changing residences would be easier. If I had a wooden shoe I would throw it deep into the gears of this machine.
Not being the type who enjoys tinkering with buggy software and devices of questionable usefulness, I generally wait until it is impossible to hold out any longer, whereupon I become immersed in the technology and immediately start extolling its virtues to the true technophobes that I know. This has cemented my position amongst the truly tech savvy as a hopeless neophyte, however people who haven't yet figured out how to open their department mandated email accounts have decided that I'm some sort of systems administrator.
Recently, thanks to Dan D, I acquired a powerful suite of GIS software that I will be using to produce maps for this project. Dan showed me a few things about the software, and we were able to quickly produce a dangerous dog map of Tampa by accessing the county’s GIS server. It turns out that the frequency of my encounters with presumably dangerous dogs has a lot to do with the fact that I run through all of the worst areas in town. I will be posting some of these maps as soon as I work out a few of the kinks.
I also ordered myself an MP3 player and a Garmin Forerunner 201. The Forerunner GPS unit should, among other things, allow me to upload my routes directly to Mapcard instead of having to input them manually as I have been doing. The MP3 player doesn’t figure into my Running Through Tampa plan very much because I refuse wear headphones while running on the street, however there is a tangential benefit in that I will be listening to instructional podcasts while I’m on the elliptical trainer in an effort to improve my Spanish.
For the time being though, my running is still technology free. I’m following Monday’s route in reverse for a slight change of scenery. As I pass the first mile marker on Ola just north of Broad, I hear what sounds like a swarm of bees coming from up ahead. Rounding the bend I see five or six full grown men standing in the road, radio controllers in hand, as a swarm of gas-powered toy trucks buzzes up and down the street, through lawns, and over makeshift plywood ramps where they tumble through the air and land on everything but their wheels. There is a woman doing a sort of Wimbledon-ball-boy routine, running back and forth turning the trucks back onto their still spinning wheels while another man in a wheelchair sits watching gleefully from the sidelines. Everyone is laughing at me as I try to pick my way through the melee, the trucks playfully strafing me from all sides, and I think about stopping to take some pictures but I’m running an 8:30 pace and I think I can push it through to the end.
This area has a long-standing appreciation for juvenile behavior, from these guys and their trucks to the Hampton Terrace go-kart racers as well as my own ill-fated moped gang and the Seminole Heights Marching Band.
In the early nineties, Andrew and I were the only people amongst our friends who drove SUVs. I had an old Isuzu Trooper full of garbage and Andrew had a Dodge Ram Charger with a nine-millimeter in the console. One of our favorite weekend pastimes was to load up our trucks with revelers from the constant party at the Baldwin house on Hiawatha, taking them on high-speed night tours of the alleys of Seminole Heights. Years later, when we both lived in the neighborhood, he and I would retrace these routes on our Sunday afternoon moped tours of the area.
Riding a moped is a lot like being a fireman. The children are really impressed. Almost everyone else thinks you’re an idiot. Almost.
One Sunday afternoon, as Andrew and I pull the bikes onto Broad Street from the Alpine Liquor parking lot an aging, bemulleted rocker stops his muscle car to lean out the window, throw us a goat, and yell “those things are TITS!”