IS THIS FOR REAL OR IS IT JUST ANOTHER DREAM?

I love the idea of doing something physical and corporeal to reconcile mental and spiritual gaps, to seal cracks:
My preoccupation with swimming across rivers started in 2001. A close friend had died, my own half-century mark was approaching and my 12-year-old twin sons were in an adolescent landscape furnished with clothes, language and activities all incomprehensible to me. There was little I could do about any of these things. But for that reason, it occurred to me to find a divide that could be crossed. And more and more I came to imagine that swimming across a river might be a way to do this.

When I first started seriously jogging about three years ago, I was freelancing for magazines and writing the first chapter of a book, and the daily two-hour-long run through Prospect Park was a way to clear my head, organize my thoughts, let my ideas course through and breathe. (And a way to quit smoking, among other vices.) It was a silent time. I began in May. By July and August, when Brooklyn heat and humidity are at their most tropically asphyxiating, I was serious about it, committed to it, and the tactile motion of my sneakers rowing along the blacktop started to become very emotional - Prospect Park is 3.75 mi. around its circumference and every day at about the 3-mark, just beyind the gazebo where the same two old be-hatted men would peer at me over the stone wall with lazy curiosity, ya mami would shed a tear. I didn't know why at the time. For someone like me who trie(s)(d) so hard to front like I'm indestructable, like nothing you lobbed would land and crack, the whole motion of it was confusing, like, wtf, I am a gangsta boo with a hard attitude ... and now I sob when I jog? I don't even live in Manhattan for chrissakes! I was breaking my "only cry during Lindsay Lohan movies" clause and it fucked me up.

I remember one shining fierce hot day in particular when the weeping, the sweating, the men-peering, the vein-pulsing, the muscle-aching all converged at a moment when John Lennon's "Oh Yoko" came on the ipod mini (the old dead pod, Lil Pink RIP). I got feverish day-shakes fierce, the sweat inducing cold shivers, the emotional temperature and the physical one irreconcilable. But jah bless John Lennon, wherever your gentle heart may be: that was about the time when everything fell into place, love, purity, what it means to stay innocent and how to do it in the face of so much awfulness. In the middle of a dream. In the middle of a dream I call your name. I knew the jogging wasn't really about writing my book (the old dead Courtney Love, RIP), but it was about writing the things I have yet to finish, en proceso, the things that are so powerful they live both in my heart and in the tattoo I have an appointment to get, Guadalupe Gomez Escobedo, the things I can't reveal here because they are special and deserve paper and ink, old-fashioned, in some vain and human approximation of permanence. And after years and years and years of escaping miserable places and soul-squashing situations, it was a powerful thing to realize now I was consciously running towards something, and that I knew at least the shape of what it was.