An uninvited guest.

I'm blogging on The Mountain Goats' new album All Eternals Deck until I feel like stopping.

I will say right away that I can't quite figure out "Birth of Serpents." I'm not enough of a superfan to scour the internet for interpretations, and since no inspiration has struck, I've got no narrative to put together the bits about photography with the apparent reference to the story of Jacob and Esau ("clutch your birthright in your fist"), nor am I sure how the snakes fit in.

But: ". . . see that young man who dwells inside his body like an uninvited guest."

In Walker Percy's Love in the Ruins, which is ultimately a little too weird and didactic for me to recommend, there is a part where a young man comes to the protagonist, who is a psychologist, for an evaluation. The young man's problem is that he can't, you know, perform his marital duties. The main character advises him to make his way home by going straight through the Louisiana swamp that lies between the office and the house. Later, we find that after the man has nearly died and has thereby put himself in a situation where he was acting more than thinking, he has no trouble doing, you know, what he needs to do. Percy maintains that the young man was too abstracted: he was living out some kind of unhealthy dualism.

I've started running again recently. And I've been pushing myself enough that I have gotten those wonderful endorphin rushes from time to time. In those moments, it's a wonder to be alive and in motion. Perhaps it's all of this happy jogging that has made me so receptive to the symposium on sports in the latest issue of The Point. (Part of one of the best essays is online.)

Several of the writers in this symposium hint at the old but good argument that the pursuit of excellence in sports makes us more at home as ourselves. It needs to be emphasized that athletics are good for us in this way when treated as active play rather than as an obligation of hygeine. In playful physicality, we're overjoyed to be bodies, not just pleased to have -- or dwell inside -- them.