COOP-RISE KINGDOM

And I really think Cooper will thrive though. He’s seriously a champion. Seth Berdahl’s mother could literally coach him and he’d be fine. I of course believe in our shared coach’s training plan but there are probably a couple different ways to make somebody fast and maybe it’s more than a couple ways when you’re talking about Cooper. I’m not worried about him flopping under a new training regimen. You know what they say. All roads lead to Rome. I guess in this case the expression should be something like three roads lead to Rome but you get the message. 

Sometimes we all pile into the same living room and watch a bunch of ridiculous bullshit on YouTube. Ben usually decides what goes on the screen and that man has some serious range. We’ll go from a funny news clip of an LA gun buyback program in 2010 to a Trisha Paytas pickle eating ASMR. We were having an evening like that and the video queue switched to old legendary races and I was in the kitchen and overheard Cooper telling Carter that he doesn’t understand how somebody could have “a bad race.”

You can’t have a bad race, he said. You’re just a bad runner. Maybe that’s harsh but that’s true champion mindset. His attitude toward racing is cracked. I literally never have seen that man have a “bad race.” Except for two times when the circumstances were extraordinary. So I guess he’s right. Good runners race well. It’s the only metric that counts. 

We all went to New York last winter for Cooper and Cole’s pro debuts at the Millrose Games. At our group run before the meet we befriended a nice Danish man named Jeppe who is the father of the fastest kid I’ve ever seen (shoutout Melvin runs) and also owns the brewery that sponsored the afterparty. So of course we attended and all drank Jeppe’s funky beers on the infield of the track at the Armory and sometime after posing for photos with Billy the Toad and the giant Millrose trophy, Cooper’s dad Dave told us how we might not realize it now but we’ll probably all be friends for a very long time and what’s really beautiful about life is getting close to people who you love and he said some other romantic stuff like that and then put his arm around Cooper’s Uncle Brent who’s not actually his uncle and said they’ve known each other forever and that’ll probably be us too. Literally! I could see it. I hope he’s right. 

We split up for summer but came back together for its end. It was almost time for Cooper to tell everybody he’s joining Bowerman himself instead of them hearing it from Jonathan Gault so we had to get to work. I wanted to dress Cooper up as all of the major characters from Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations because it was a revolutionary nineteenth century novel and feels applicable to his life, but of course that choice would’ve been out of touch and we knew it’d land better if we do something more recognizable so we decided on Moonrise Kingdom as a theme. It’s a movie we all love, especially Cooper. He grew up watching Wes Anderson movies. He had cool parents who showed him cool movies. It’s even rumored that Cooper’s dad went on a date with Molly Ringwald. The OG hot girl from the classic 80s flicks. In The Breakfast Club she put on lipstick with her boobs. No hands, just boobs. In their garage they still have a VHS TV and they have Rushmore and The Life Aquatic (best Wes Anderson movie imo) and they’d just watch them over and over. Cooper saw Moonrise Kingdom in theaters in 2012 and he loved Sam’s independence. He thought Suzy was hot. He loves the colors. It feels like a dream he would have, something he wishes he could do himself. Real life Peter Pan. No adults involved. You can do whatever you want in the wilderness. Down by the water in a perfectly pitched tent, just Sam and the love of his life, record player on. Who doesn’t dream of that kind of reality? Cooper said. It’s a boyish fantasy world. The modern day Robinson Crusoe or Lord of the Flies. Cooper said, “I’d die in 5 seconds if I went out in the wilderness like that.” Wes Anderson is a romantic and deep down so is Cooper. So am I. So is Carter. Not Ben though, he’s a pragmatist.  

I googled where to get a boy scout uniform in Eugene and it turns out there’s an official Boy Scouts of America store in town. The people working there had some serious pent up rage and a true resentment for youth or art or something and although I’d love to dispense some profanity I’ll refrain and yes I hope those c-word employees are reading this. I went in there wearing my I Love My Boyfriend’s Holiday Brand Hoodie hoodie and I think the woman at the desk held it against me because she started asking all these questions like which troop I was with. Lady, you know I’m not with a troop! The virtuous thing would be to avoid asking questions you already know the answers to but I’m not one to moralize. I explained that we’re doing a photoshoot and then this gremlin man appeared from the back room and began to offer us a warning 17 decibels louder than normal speaking volume, proclaiming his concerns at us as though he was reading from a script, like he’d been waiting for some hooligans to come through and he could finally impose order, crack down on us with an intensity just like he’d rehearsed. Apparently the Boy Scouts of America are filing a lot of lawsuits lately because of trademark infractions and we should be careful with how we depict their name and image and be respectful unlike “the pop stars.” What pop stars! He talked about it with such certainty as though Lady Gaga was in a slutty boy scout uniform on the cover of Vogue last week. Like I would know. I wanted to say Dude it’s literally low hanging fruit to make fun of the Boy Scouts because they’re doing a good job of it themselves but instead I said Don’t worry sir we don’t have any bad intentions. Smiley face emoji. It literally gets worse. As though these freaks are addicted to conflict, a third employee emerged from the back to work the register as though she was some kind of military reinforcement being called to duty. We’d picked out a bunch of patches to later adhere to the uniform and she inspected them one by one to make sure they didn’t require some kind of certification or passage of a test to purchase. She wouldn’t let us buy this little red one that said “trained” because we’re not “trained.” Trained in what? we asked. She didn’t know. I wanted to stitch the word Bowerman above it so it’d say “Bowerman trained” in red but this woman killed my dreams probably because hers were killed when she was a child because she wasn’t allowed to join the boy scouts. No girls allowed. You’ll just have to work at our store in a few decades instead. She complied. We left the store and of course will never go back. Peace be with you all. See you in hell. 

We said we’d leave for the coast at 10 but we left at 11. It’s one road the whole way there from Eugene. Got there, took some photos, got some video, did our thing until 2:30 p.m., which is when we’d scheduled a lighthouse tour. There are eight lighthouses on the Oregon coast and you’re only allowed to actually go inside one of them. I called ahead of time and asked the woman Linda Can we go up in it? and she said Sure thing Matt so we were on our way. Probably the most iconic shot from Moonrise Kingdom is Suzy up on the catwalk at the top of a lighthouse looking through her binoculars directly at the camera. Of course we wanted to recreate that. We got there and listened to tour guide Linda talk about the oyster farms and the whale tooth that washed up on shore and the types of boats the coast guard uses there. Snooze! Yawn. Zzzzzz. I was being polite, waiting for the part of the tour when we’d go up in the lighthouse. Ben had a good time because he loves that sort of thing. When the time finally came and Linda told us we couldn’t go out on the catwalk I was like 👁👄👁. Linda said Nope that’s not allowed boys, sorry. We explained to Linda what we were doing again and tried to get a backup shot of Cooper leaning out a window on the side of the lighthouse but that was a safety hazard according to her husband who was also a tour guide. A match made in heaven. Some kind of lighthouse fanatic was on our tour and he told us he’d actually been to the lighthouse from Moonrise Kingdom and that it’s in Rhode Island. He’d been to over 800 lighthouses all over the world which is certainly freakish but to everybody else Cooper was the freak because he was in a silly little boy scout uniform on the tour. We left the lighthouse, Cooper skipped a stone so perfectly for the camera, then we bodied some grilled halibut and milkshakes at the Oregon Coast Restaurant. That’s what the restaurant is actually called. We got some great shots on the beach at Heceta Head, I assembled a fire even though everybody told me I wouldn’t be able to, and then just after dark we headed home. I could write about the oranges becoming pinks and the pinks becoming darkness but I'm not that kind of writer. The sunset was baller of course but i'm much more interested in how the moment we got into the car Ben auxed say something i'm giving up on you and kinda hit some of those runs during the Christina Aguilera part. "Give the boy some service," he said and then auxed Radioactive by Imagine Dragons the moment he got it.

We got home late and dropped Cooper off and were chilling in the living room before heading to bed and the doorbell rang. Our doorbell makes a bone-chilling sound too. Our house is pretty old and the bell is like one of those old-fashioned school bells that rings obnoxiously to signify the end of a class. But somehow it’s worse and sounds more sinister. Our other roommate Angus had just told me the day before that I should be more careful with opening the door without peeping through the peep hole, so I peeped and there was nobody there. Strange. I disregarded it and went back to the living room. Plopped myself down on the couch and it rang again. I walked all the way to the door and there was nobody there again. It was starting to feel like the start of a shitty Netflix horror movie. Of course I wouldn’t be the first one to die but you’ve gotta be careful anyway. I hid in the shadows and positioned myself so I could look out the window at the stoop in front of the door. I waited and waited and the doorbell didn’t ring again for a few minutes so I left my hiding spot and went back to the living room and I swear the second I sat back down on the couch the bell rang again. Now I’m freaking out. Carter thought we should hide upstairs in my bedroom. Ben was off the zaza and had grabbed a knife from our silverware drawer without saying anything. I was bugging out too but still concerned with finding out more information by looking out all the different windows. Meanwhile Angus went outside! Where the murderer was! I thought I was about to watch him die through the window of our home and the doorbell rang again. Angus saw Cooper and Reed scurry down our driveway and it was all over. Since we’d left decently early in the morning for the coast, Cooper hadn’t run yet and decided to go late at night and somehow talked Reed into going with him. They had us all tweaking out. If it were up to me they’d be sentenced to death via the electric chair, but it’s not up to me, so they finished their run and went to bed and we went to bed and that’s where this piece ends.