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Category: Humor
Description: Open the pages of But Seriously and you'll see that it is anything but serious. David Jenneson's tight, funny first person wit will keep you reading, smiling and nodding in agreement. His broad brush covers everything from beating up Spammers to destroying Andy Warhol sculptures in the name of art, from the Beatles to being chased by shotgun wielding millionaires. Even his more serious pieces like Freedom 54 (about the pitfalls of being fired at age 50) and My Little Cancer Doll (about providing home care to a companion with serious breast cancer) still raise a smile here and there. And yes, there is even a first person experience about finding faith on a frozen stretch of highway in 1967. It gives a broad look at a generation coming to age and remarkably, always finds humor even in the darkest of circumstances. A great gift for someone who truly loves the written word.
eBook Publisher: Hard Shell Word Factory, 2005
eBookwise Release Date: April 2005

4 Reader Ratings:

Great	Good	OK	Poor

Available eBook Formats: OEBFF Format (IMP) [219 KB]
Words: 49952
Reading time: 142-199 min.

"If I were asked which story I liked most, I would have to say all of them. I would be hard pressed to single out one story as they all were great. This is one book that everyone should read. You won't be disappointed."--Robert H. Goss, Round Table Reviews

"Dave Jenneson is a very funny writer and this book is loaded with laughs. Get it."--Brother Jake Edwards, Vancouver's most popular morning radio host, Rock Radio 101 - CFMI

"What does hitch-hiking across Canada in the dead of winter, borrowing Dad's car without permission and getting caught, getting paid in onions, and on-the-job training as a cancer caregiver all have in common? They're just a few of speed bumps along David Jenneson's roller-coaster ride down memory lane a trip filled with more laugh-out-loud moments than any book I've read for a very long time. But Seriously is more than just laughs, though. It's a thoughtful, and sometimes poignant, treatise on coping with the road blocks, hairpin turns, pot holes and rockslides along the road of life. 4 beacons"--Nora, Lighthouse Literary Reviews

I'VE INVENTED A NEW sport. And like all great inventions, necessity was truly its mother.

From time to time a man needs big resolutions in his life. I've been overdue for a good one. So I resolved to start jogging again.

I have a romantic attachment to jogging. In the seventh grade I was very fat but was still forced to run cross-country and came last in my class. I grew six inches that year and in doing so became tall and thin, so by the end of the year I came in first. What a fine, guiding metaphor for the rest of one's life.

Since then I've had a history of jogging. Off and on. And off. It ended six years ago when I blew out the mainspring of my left knee—the cartoid some-or-other—and was forced to retire.

Still, jogging is free, and six years is enough time for any body part to heal. So off I went. Down to the track. Did my stretching, got up speed and you couldn't see me for dust. I'm in my early fifties, about two-hundred and thirty pounds, but it feels good to be back in the Adidas again at any age.

It wasn't until a white-haired old man whipped by me at seventy—that was his age, not his miles-per-hour—that I began to suspect I was engaged in a new form of sport.

The next night, some willowy show-off shot past me twice during my first lap. That confirmed I wasn't jogging anymore.

I estimated my speed to be approximately .03 miles-per-hour. Yet I wasn't walking, either. It had to be something new.

Schlogging.

Schlogging has the forward-looking, streamlined stance of the long distance runner without the bother of speed. Instead of taking a sports car for a spin, it's rather more in the nature of taking a paving machine for a few turns around the track.

Schlogging is as slow as a human being can jog without actually achieving immobility—a rhythmic, friendly shamble.

When speed trials are done, as I'm sure they will be when schlogging catches on, it will turn out that some people can walk faster than other people can schlog. It doesn't matter. Everyone wrecked their knees jogging during the look-at-me 1980's and 90's. Now in the my-knees-hurt new millennium, we're told it's fashionable to walk.

Yet, secretly no one wants to walk unless they have a destination. Everybody knows that only crazy people walk aimlessly. And then there's that other kind of walking that looks like someone with a frozen fish up their yahooty being chased by a swarm of bees. Walking seems like you wish you could run but can't because you've succumbed to old age. Schlogging carries none of that stigma. It feels like you're running but can actually be slower than walking so it combines the best elements of both.

First, it can only be done around a flat track, because any incline could send a schlogger into reverse. So, no hills.

Second, I'm now regularly left in cinder dust by self-absorbed joggers who never look up, whip around the track and are gone in a trice. By contrast, as a schlogger, slowly orbiting the track like Jupiter, I get to see entire sporting events. Slo-pitch, soccer, track and field. It's quite absorbing.

Schlog and the world schlogs with you. Run and you run alone.

No one can criticize your schlogging style because no one knows what you're doing. Schlogging is the non-judgmental sport.

Joggers are always glancing in agony at stopwatches, but the dimension of time does not exist in schlogging. Time bears the same relationship to schlogging as it does to a glacier. If there are schlogging clubs set up in the future, as I'm sure there will be, the criteria for membership might well be one's inability to break the twenty-minute mile.

This leads to the third advantage. A sweet-smelling, grassy field, surrounded by trees, is a glorious sensory break from my troubles. No pressure to beat the clock. Just drift around and around, smell the daisies and amazingly, afterward you bask in the same beatific glow, just as if you'd been running. The schlogger's high. Truly moments in paradise.

Copyright © 2005 David Jenneson