There is a café in Thailand where you can sit among alluring animals and drink something with foam on top while an ostrich watches you from across the room. I have never been to this café. I have never been to Thailand. But I know, with the deep cellular certainty of a man who has spent considerable time thinking about the failures of others, that this café’s business model contained a flaw.
Last week, one of the ostriches escaped.
It ran nearly ten miles down a busy highway before anyone caught it. Ten miles. On asphalt. In traffic. The ostrich, a bird that evolution specifically designed to be large, fast, and completely unable to fly, made a break for it and logged the kind of mileage that would impress a serious amateur runner. The café staff presumably stood in the parking lot for a moment, watching it go, and then someone said something in Thai that probably translates to “well.”
Nobody gets away. Not even from a café. I would like to state, for the record, that I understand this ostrich completely.
The Part Where I Tell You I Hate Running
I hate running so much that I bought a car.
This is not a joke. This is a philosophical position I arrived at after careful consideration of the alternatives, which included running. I own a vehicle specifically so that when my body needs to be somewhere other than where it currently is, I can accomplish this without my knees filing a formal complaint. I have run approximately ten miles total in my adult life, distributed across several decades and at least three moments of genuine emergency, none of which turned out to actually be emergencies once I caught my breath.
Experts will tell you that humans are born to run. These experts have clearly never met my left knee. The running industry generates tens of billions of dollars annually selling shoes, braces, gels, compression socks, and motivational podcasts to people trying to make running less horrible. This is not the profile of an activity that is going well. This is the profile of an activity in crisis management.
The ostrich had no car. The ostrich had only legs, an open highway, and whatever passes for determination in the mind of a large flightless bird. I do not blame the ostrich. I blame the café.
The Animal Café Escape Artist and the Woman Who Made It Personal
Around the same time the ostrich was burning through its second mile, a woman in Florida jumped into the water to save her dog.
The dog, by most accounts, was probably fine. The woman was not fine. The woman jumped in, realized that the situation now included her, and had to be rescued alongside the animal she’d gone in after. Two rescues for the price of one impulsive sprint toward the water’s edge.
I want to be clear that I am not mocking this woman. We have animals. There is Trouble McFussbucket, a pig whose very name suggests an ongoing series of incidents. We have Señor Hector Queso Suarez DDS, a chihuahua who has never once in his life assessed a situation accurately. We have a blind dog named Remmi and a cat named Vinny Van Meow and a small dog named Professor Archibald Pickles, who Karie calls Dipshidiot with the easy confidence of someone who has earned the right. I know exactly what it feels like to see one of these animals in apparent peril and abandon all rational thought in the service of a creature that will, nine times out of ten, sort itself out before you arrive.
The difference is that I would have gone for the car. Or at minimum, stood at the water’s edge for several seconds asking hard questions about my footwear.
Running bypasses the brain entirely. This is its core function and its central danger. You see something, your legs start moving, and your frontal lobe gets the memo roughly three miles later. The woman ran toward the water. The ostrich ran toward the highway. Both ended up requiring outside intervention. I submit that the car would have helped in both cases, if only as a reason to pause.
Bill Gates Attempts to Outrun a Story
Which brings us to Bill Gates, who has been running for years.
Not literally. Bill Gates does not strike me as a man who runs. Bill Gates strikes me as a man who has people for that. But he has been engaged in a different kind of cardio since roughly 2019, when his association with Jeffrey Epstein became a subject of public interest and his PR operation shifted into a gear that has not fully downshifted since. Vaccine sprints. Mosquito net marathons. TED talk intervals. A relentless philanthropic pace designed, at least in part, to put enough good-looking distance between himself and a story with his name somewhere in it.
Ten miles down the highway. Into the water after the dog. The legs were moving the whole time, and the net showed up anyway.
This is not an essay about whether Bill Gates is guilty of anything. That is a different essay, written by people with lawyers and sources and a higher tolerance for depositions. This is an essay about the run itself. About the years of careful rebranding. About the sweater-vest energy of a man who believed that enough good works could outpace a bad association. About the moment, which apparently arrives for everyone eventually, when you look up and see the committee room.
Nobody Gets Away
The ostrich was caught. The woman was rescued. Gates has a date on the calendar.
You can get ten miles down the highway on pure adrenaline and evolutionary leg design. You can launch yourself into Florida water with your whole heart. You can build the largest private charitable foundation in human history and hand out vaccines on four continents. None of it closes the gap permanently. The café owner still has your name on a tag. The rescuers are already in the boat. The subpoena already has your address.
I own a car. I go nowhere fast. I sit on my farm in Virginia and watch my animals make bad decisions from a safe and stationary distance, and I think about the ostrich on that highway, doing the only thing it knew how to do, which was run, and I think: buddy. I get it. I just never got out of the car.
The Nobody Gets Away Café is open seven days a week.
Brian Gerard (Lewandowski) writes books critics call "aggressively adequate"—better than "aggressively terrible" but somehow more concerning. He once traded a MetroCard for a pitchfork on a subway platform and now uses it exclusively for dramatic pointing. He lives on a farm outside Charlottesville, Virginia with three disappointed potted plants, a judgmental pig named Trouble McFussbucket, and a wife who smiles politely at his life choices.
His first manuscript was composed entirely of punctuation marks and confused sketches. He's since published "Not Bukowski" (poems that don't rhyme) and "Slop and Swell from a Festering Mind" (essays so concerning that bookstores check on his well-being). He once spent three hours photographing a rare bird that turned out to be a plastic bag, and he's the only person banned from church bake sales for "weaponized brownies." Inheriting absurdism from Vonnegut and Adams, sprawling narratives from Irving, and weaponized failure from Moore, he writes about conflicted everymen struggling through supernatural chaos.
He has two new, offbeat novels waiting for an agent or a publisher: "Truth Tastes Like Pennies" and "Elliot Nessie." He remains unconvinced that birds aren't surveillance drones.
The Nobody Gets Away Café
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Estimated reading time: 6 minutes
There is a café in Thailand where you can sit among alluring animals and drink something with foam on top while an ostrich watches you from across the room. I have never been to this café. I have never been to Thailand. But I know, with the deep cellular certainty of a man who has spent considerable time thinking about the failures of others, that this café’s business model contained a flaw.
Last week, one of the ostriches escaped.
It ran nearly ten miles down a busy highway before anyone caught it. Ten miles. On asphalt. In traffic. The ostrich, a bird that evolution specifically designed to be large, fast, and completely unable to fly, made a break for it and logged the kind of mileage that would impress a serious amateur runner. The café staff presumably stood in the parking lot for a moment, watching it go, and then someone said something in Thai that probably translates to “well.”
Nobody gets away. Not even from a café. I would like to state, for the record, that I understand this ostrich completely.
The Part Where I Tell You I Hate Running
I hate running so much that I bought a car.
This is not a joke. This is a philosophical position I arrived at after careful consideration of the alternatives, which included running. I own a vehicle specifically so that when my body needs to be somewhere other than where it currently is, I can accomplish this without my knees filing a formal complaint. I have run approximately ten miles total in my adult life, distributed across several decades and at least three moments of genuine emergency, none of which turned out to actually be emergencies once I caught my breath.
Experts will tell you that humans are born to run. These experts have clearly never met my left knee. The running industry generates tens of billions of dollars annually selling shoes, braces, gels, compression socks, and motivational podcasts to people trying to make running less horrible. This is not the profile of an activity that is going well. This is the profile of an activity in crisis management.
The ostrich had no car. The ostrich had only legs, an open highway, and whatever passes for determination in the mind of a large flightless bird. I do not blame the ostrich. I blame the café.
The Animal Café Escape Artist and the Woman Who Made It Personal
Around the same time the ostrich was burning through its second mile, a woman in Florida jumped into the water to save her dog.
The dog, by most accounts, was probably fine. The woman was not fine. The woman jumped in, realized that the situation now included her, and had to be rescued alongside the animal she’d gone in after. Two rescues for the price of one impulsive sprint toward the water’s edge.
I want to be clear that I am not mocking this woman. We have animals. There is Trouble McFussbucket, a pig whose very name suggests an ongoing series of incidents. We have Señor Hector Queso Suarez DDS, a chihuahua who has never once in his life assessed a situation accurately. We have a blind dog named Remmi and a cat named Vinny Van Meow and a small dog named Professor Archibald Pickles, who Karie calls Dipshidiot with the easy confidence of someone who has earned the right. I know exactly what it feels like to see one of these animals in apparent peril and abandon all rational thought in the service of a creature that will, nine times out of ten, sort itself out before you arrive.
The difference is that I would have gone for the car. Or at minimum, stood at the water’s edge for several seconds asking hard questions about my footwear.
Running bypasses the brain entirely. This is its core function and its central danger. You see something, your legs start moving, and your frontal lobe gets the memo roughly three miles later. The woman ran toward the water. The ostrich ran toward the highway. Both ended up requiring outside intervention. I submit that the car would have helped in both cases, if only as a reason to pause.
Bill Gates Attempts to Outrun a Story
Which brings us to Bill Gates, who has been running for years.
Not literally. Bill Gates does not strike me as a man who runs. Bill Gates strikes me as a man who has people for that. But he has been engaged in a different kind of cardio since roughly 2019, when his association with Jeffrey Epstein became a subject of public interest and his PR operation shifted into a gear that has not fully downshifted since. Vaccine sprints. Mosquito net marathons. TED talk intervals. A relentless philanthropic pace designed, at least in part, to put enough good-looking distance between himself and a story with his name somewhere in it.
In June, he will sit before the House Oversight Committee and answer questions.
Ten miles down the highway. Into the water after the dog. The legs were moving the whole time, and the net showed up anyway.
This is not an essay about whether Bill Gates is guilty of anything. That is a different essay, written by people with lawyers and sources and a higher tolerance for depositions. This is an essay about the run itself. About the years of careful rebranding. About the sweater-vest energy of a man who believed that enough good works could outpace a bad association. About the moment, which apparently arrives for everyone eventually, when you look up and see the committee room.
Nobody Gets Away
The ostrich was caught. The woman was rescued. Gates has a date on the calendar.
You can get ten miles down the highway on pure adrenaline and evolutionary leg design. You can launch yourself into Florida water with your whole heart. You can build the largest private charitable foundation in human history and hand out vaccines on four continents. None of it closes the gap permanently. The café owner still has your name on a tag. The rescuers are already in the boat. The subpoena already has your address.
I own a car. I go nowhere fast. I sit on my farm in Virginia and watch my animals make bad decisions from a safe and stationary distance, and I think about the ostrich on that highway, doing the only thing it knew how to do, which was run, and I think: buddy. I get it. I just never got out of the car.
The Nobody Gets Away Café is open seven days a week.
Nobody leaves.
See my Amazon author page and buy my books.
His first manuscript was composed entirely of punctuation marks and confused sketches. He's since published "Not Bukowski" (poems that don't rhyme) and "Slop and Swell from a Festering Mind" (essays so concerning that bookstores check on his well-being). He once spent three hours photographing a rare bird that turned out to be a plastic bag, and he's the only person banned from church bake sales for "weaponized brownies." Inheriting absurdism from Vonnegut and Adams, sprawling narratives from Irving, and weaponized failure from Moore, he writes about conflicted everymen struggling through supernatural chaos.
He has two new, offbeat novels waiting for an agent or a publisher: "Truth Tastes Like Pennies" and "Elliot Nessie."
He remains unconvinced that birds aren't surveillance drones.
More biographic lies...err...info.
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