A Brief History of Time, or at least today

I'll try to be more brief.

Today I went shopping with my 14-year-old daughter Sarah.

Her old running shoes had worn out from her freshman high school varsity track season, so we went to the Boulder Running Company, which has been voted the top running store in America. (Boulder has what cyclists consider the best bike store [University Bikes], climbers consider the best climbing store [Neptune Mountaineering], Roger Ebert said is the best video store [the Video Station] in the U.S., and a Target.)

Sarah likes to hike, as you can see from her pictures of our Father's Day hike posted below, and we live right below Mt. Sanitas, which has a classic network of trails leading to the summit that she does with her friends and her yellow Labrador Retriever Nimoy.

On the Father's Day hike she found steep patches of icy snow nestled among the cliffs surrounding Ouzel Falls and she climbed up them and amazingly shoe-skied down on slick-soled, no-support Keds.

So I asked Mark Plattjes, who owns the Boulder Running Company, to tell Sarah that in addition to her road and track running shoes she should get trail running shoes but she didn't want them. She runs down steep mountain trails faster than anyone on the Boulder High varsity boys track or cross-country teams, so she needs them to be safe.

As always, she wouldn't budge. Mark was gently trying to convince her. He knows what he's talking about; he won the Marathon World Championship in 1993. After more impasse finally I said, "Sarah, don't listen to me. Don't listen to anyone else in this store, but could you please listen to a World Champion?"

Mark laughed and said his daughter Camille (who will join Sarah on the cross-country team as an incoming freshman this summer) doesn't listen to him either.

After years (I've lost count how many) of not buying any new shoes and turning my ankles hiking in my old running shoes, I bought trail running shoes (for me they're the lightest hiking shoes) also, and as I was trying them on I met an old friend from the store, Jason Hill, who's now the head of footwear design for the North Face, and I gave him the whole "Truth About Everything End of the World Tour" sponsorship spiel and he loved it and we set up an appointment for me to meet with him and the North Face director of marketing in Berkeley in early August.

Sarah and her friends came up with the idea that they don't want to shop at any chains if they can help it, but feel they can't help shopping at Target and so we got her 15 running socks that are a fraction of the price of running socks in any running store.

At lunch I asked her if she'd like to join me on my entire West Coast trip in a month and she said she didn't and that hurt me so I got angry and so did she and after going back out into the heat I told her that I get angry when I get hurt and we worked through it as we always do (not completely through it, but we're working on it).

During the heat of the argument she told me that all animals have to leave their parents because their parents drive them crazy and I pointed out that if any other animal parents suffered the abuse from teenagers that human parents suffer, they'd put all the teenagers on an ice floe and push it out to sea.

I guess this is how Marlin Perkins argued with his teenage daughter.

We crossed the street to REI, where two different families had given me generous gift certificates for coaching their children in ski racing. Last year Sarah raced Nordic rather than Alpine skiing and she'd skate-ski over after her Nordic practice to help me coach Alpine ski racing as a 13-year-old and all the six, seven and eight-year-old boys I coached idolized her like the goddess she is.

Even with that year off she qualified for her third Junior Olympics (out of three years she was eligible) this year and her coaches feel she has the best technique on the mountain, including among the 2006 NCAA Champion CU ski team (she doesn't have their size, power, strength, tactics or experience).

Because she was so dedicated to her own training this winter she only helped me coach once, while she helped me coach a dozen times the winter before, leading the boys on cliff-jumps (one landed on her) and through trees so tight adults couldn't come close to fitting on the lines she ripped through double-black diamond, dense forest.

(I'm starting a 12-step program for PSPs, or Psycho Sports Parents. As you can see, I am the worst. I'll be the first to say, "Hi, my name is Richard, and I'm a Psycho Sports Parent. I know of at least 30 parents I could get to join me in a circle and I'm certain that I could get each of them to agree that, "Yes, Richard, you are a Psycho Sports Parent.")

So the family that gave us the most generous gift certificate was in the REI and I showed them how we were using it and the father Lee Wood puts on conferences and I said at the end of The End of the World Tour we should put on a conference together and he agreed.

Then I recognized the customer at the next cash register and he's a CU Physics Professor who wants to join The Truth About Everything Advisory Board and have me speak to the CU Physics Department. Not that they're smart or anything.

We picked up the slides (in sleeves and on a CD) of Sarah's that you see below, shared a strawberry shortcake at an outdoor bistro (Okay, a fast food chain called Good Times), came home and Sarah posted the pictures on this blog, expertly positioning the lettering over the darkest part of the picture in a few minutes when it had taken Eric and I half an hour to do the same thing on an earlier picture.

Just as I was on edge with Sarah, I was on edge with Patti also. I think I'm so anxious about all these different media coming together and at the very least starting to make a living wage from all this that my anxiety boils over into inappropriate anger and I'm trying to learn to control and eliminate that, which isn't easy, because my family anger goes back so many generations it's survived the die-offs 65 and 248 million years ago, and the one we're creating now.