Trying to Live

I WAS going to write something on Sunday, something intended to be long and hopefully be profound, but I didn’t. Instead, I went and played scrabble in Berkeley, and played quite badly at that. I played like an ass. I haven’t played that badly in ages. Were it not for some fortuitously good timing and the drawing of some extraordinarily good tiles, I wouldn’t have been able to muster the 3-3 record that I did. Finishing even-steven, much like in football, can be looked at with nuance. There are good 3-3’s and bad 3-3’s and this was one of the latter, because it should have been a whole lot better given what I was drawing. There are also boring 3-3’s, which is most of them, in fact. But I was OK with my 3-3 and I was happy for the distraction, the game itself actually feeling like a distraction and a diversion for the first time in a while.

I like it when that happens, to be honest. I’ll admit, however, that my ethos and approach to the game of scrabble is vastly different than many of the people I know. I’m different from a lot of scrabble players, in the sense that they try to shrug off the games where their opponents draw all the good tiles, and completely fixate upon the games in which their own mistakes cost them. I’m completely the opposite. I absolutely, positively hate it when someone draws the bag on me. I hate it. I can’t stand it. The reason for this is that it doesn’t feel like a game, at that point, because I’m not playing the game. I’m sitting there and watching the other person play – and, quite honestly, I have better things to do than watch someone play solitaire. And I sure as hell don’t want to pay for the privilege of watching this – which is precisely what you’re doing when you pay some entry fee for a tournament and then sit there and watch your opponent play. It’s a pointless activity, a waste of my time, and nothing pisses me off more than someone wasting my time.

But losing because I make mistakes? Sounds OK to me. There is cause and effect there, there is action and reaction and it all makes sense. I lost two games on Sunday as a direct consequence of making utterly stupid plays. Terrible plays. Migraine-inducingly terrible plays. Just awful. And that’s perfectly fine, because I got what I deserved. Mistakes are correctible the next time around. Getting the bag drawn on you is not correctible, because there aren’t any tiles left and the other guy drew all the good ones. It’s just a waste of an hour.

Or waste of a half-hour, anyway, since I tend to play a lot faster than other people and my games end really quickly, which I’m perfectly fine with as well. It has been suggested, with some merit, that I occasionally play too fast, and cost myself because of it. And that’s probably true, but what’s also true is that if it’s taking me a long time to play, it isn’t going very well, and having extra time doesn’t necessarily mean that I’m using it. If it takes me five minutes to make a move, I’m probably spending 4½ of those minutes thinking about what I’m going to make for dinner, or thinking about what I need to do for work, or wondering when and if the Giants will ever win another damn game. It’s not about time, but tempo. I know the pace I like to play, I know the rhythm and the pace of the logical progressions that I make, and I’m far better off keeping a quick tempo than I am laboring over every goddamn possible play. I keep the pace quick to keep my mind sharp, to keep myself focused and in the moment. And in that moment, it’s perfectly OK for me to feel like the world is ending because I have EIIIOOU on my rack. Having EIIIOOU on your rack is, on balance, a good life problem to have. You can’t exchange most life problems. You can’t, at worst, play most of your life problems through an R to make OURIE for 5-10 points. Real life can wait while I figure out what to do with all of these fucking vowels …

I started playing scrabble competitively because I thought it would be a useful outlet, since I’d always been absurdly competitive by nature, and I thought that it would help me concentrate and serve as a fun distraction. It stopped being a fun distraction when I started getting good at it, because with aptitude comes expectations. I’ve always hated losing. And I mean hated losing. I still do, but nowhere near as much as before – if I did hate losing as much as before, I wouldn’t be able to write a blog that’s all about losing, after all. Scrabble is all that matters in the 30-50 minutes that I game lasts, but I hated losing so much that the game wouldn’t end, and I’d often lose the next game – and possibly the one even still after that – because I was still fixating on losing the previous one. But that generally doesn’t happen any more. If you’re angry about losing, you can fail to see the humour in it. Success is actually quite ordinary and mundane. No one ever laughs about everything going according to plan.

Although I never outwardly expressed this sentiment at the time, I started playing scrabble because I thought it might be good for my mental health. At the time, I was about as down as I (thought) I ever was, and it seemed like an activity that would be good for me. And this has generally been the case, in fact, notwithstanding this tournament, where I’ll admit that I came unglued and, come to think of it, this tournament wasn’t very good for me either, but I was quickly able to laugh about it, and anyone who saw me throwing stray beer bottles or smashing my metallic clipboard into a U-shape in the vastly empty parking lot of a casino during one assorted summer/winter Reno vortex or another probably questioned my sanity as well, and probably wouldn’t be wrong in doing that. But in general, it’s been good for me. It grounds me and keeps me in the moment (a moment I’d probably enjoy more if scrabble weren’t full of pointlessly rigid decorum and, more to the point, ninnies obsessed with that pointlessly rigid decorum, all of whom seem to think you need pin drop silence in order to muster up enough concentration to find a bingo and none of whom have probably ever tried to sink a free throw at the end of a basketball game with a gym-full of people screaming at you, coming to discover in that moment that the noise makes no difference and that, in fact, you concentrate even more because you’re motivated to shut those motherfuckers up who are sitting in the stands). (Wow, that was a long parenthetical.)

Playing scrabble has fundamentally been good for my mental health. Losing at scrabble hasn’t, but at least now, it no longer seems to impact me in quite the same way. I guess it’s funnier now, since I’ve reached the point where I’m good enough at the game, and attuned enough to it, to better understand which lost games were actually winnable – which means realizing that I screw up a lot of the time, which maybe wasn’t so apparent in the past. Of course, this doesn’t make the times I get bagged the least bit more tolerable. Nothing will. It’s not the way that I’m wired, nor will I ever be. I consider the possibility of being bagged from time to time as an acceptable risk.

I didn’t lose any games on Sunday because I got bagged. I lost three games on Sunday because I played like a dolt. But I’m glad that I was focusing on playing scrabble, albeit badly, and enjoying going after the tournament was over for pizza and beer as God intended and the best gelato I’ve had outside of Italy with my friends and with The Official Spouse of In Play Lose. Necessary steps, as I’ve become a bit too introverted of late, a bit too immersed in my own world, and getting out did me good. I have a tendency to completely detach and to disengage when it isn’t going very well. This has a lot to do with why I haven’t been writing here at In Play Lose, by the way. It feels less like writers block and more like I had lost my voice. Call it mental laryngitis, if you well.

I felt, at first, a pressing need to write on Sunday, the 11th of September, about the fact that it’s the 10th anniversary of what I call The Day That I Tried to Live, which also happens to be the 15th anniversary of the day in our history that we’d all like to forget and wish never happened. These anniversaries seem to resonate more this year because of the numbers 10 and 15, but why is that? What is this fixation and fascination that we have with multiples of the number five? Me being 10 years on from that day isn’t necessarily any more relevant than the 9th or the 11th. The memory of 9/11 is no less terrible 15 years on than 14, and will still be as equally terrible 16 years on. (Oh yes, insert important note here: if you think I’m trivializing the memory of 9/11, then go and reread the paragraph about 9/11 in that blog post of mine from a year ago about my connection to the deaths and despair. I felt it too, just like many others did, and I think I have the right to remember it in my own way, and if you have a problem with that, well, get stuffed.) It’s not some milestone, this anniversary number that is a multiple of five. It’s not special. We should take back the zeros and the fives, just as we should take back the 11s.

But instead of writing about my mental health, which right now pretty much sucks, I decided instead to go and play scrabble, which also pretty much sucks but which is OK to get lost in every now and again, and whatever world of anxiety I sink into over the board will inevitably dissipate and disappear once the game is over – unless I get bagged, of course, which will still piss me off. But why is that exactly? From what does this thought and sentiment stem? This is where my mind goes when I’m thinking about all of these sorts of things, looking for the broader connections which may, or may not, exist. And I was pondering this today as I was out walking, which is something that I like to do on Mondays, when I will walk for as much as 7½ miles, usually accompanied by the sounds of one of my bass-heavy playlists thumping through the earbuds of my iPhone, and I will walk 7½ miles in spite of the fact that my right foot hurts.

And the fact that my right foot hurts, and pretty much all I hear is the bass in every song, explains a lot about my hatred of being bagged.

Ask me for my most vivid memory of my childhood, and the first thing that comes to mind is a night in either late 1976, or early 1977 – I don’t remember which, I just know that it’s the winter time – that I was so sick that I wound up in the Kaiser hospital in Walnut Creek. I remember I had a very nice and very young doctor who had a Japanese name, and it was probably about 3:30 a.m., and for some fuckknowswhy reason I remember that I had a 100° temperature – and I also distinctly remember the gross, slimy, disgusting feeling of having blood and pus and slime slithering down the right side of my face, because my ear drum had ruptured.

Trust me, that’s not a good feeling. I don’t recommend you experience it. It’s happened to me twice, in fact – the same damn thing erupted a few years ago when I was brutally ill on a day I had to take a 5½-hour flight from Baltimore to the Bay Area. I walked into the E.R. with blood running down the right side of my face:

Doctor: What seems to be the … (pauses and looks up from the chart) … umm, ick …
Lose: Umm, yeah …

And pretty much ever since that moment when I was 7 years old, my hearing has been fucked up and weird. I knew something was wrong then, and have known it ever since. I simply tell people that I’m deaf in my right ear to simplify things, but it’s not exactly that. Even so, I generally try to stand on the right of anyone that’s important so I can actually understand what they are saying. If I stand on your left and you speak, it’s gibberish. If I stand on your left and you speak without facing me, I likely won’t hear you at all. I’m also essentially tone deaf, as anything outside of a really low range just sounds like a muddled mess, which means that I could never really play music, because I could never really figure out how a tone was supposed to sound in the first place, and that always annoyed me when I was younger, because I’ve always loved music, came from a family of musically-talented siblings, and felt as if I could never truly contribute to that particular realm. Pretty much the only part of any song that I pay attention to is the bassline and the drum. Literally, all of that other stuff is just noise to me.

It’s not all bad, of course. Being the rock critic who could never play an instrument made for some interesting interviews with musicians over the years, since we would wind up mostly talking about the creative process required to write good songs. I had one particularly loud boss who sat directly behind me and used to yell at me, and so I would simply angle my chair to the right and their words would then dissolve into a dull yet manageable roar – at least until they figured out what I was doing, and would shout, “don’t you turn your deaf ear at me!” which would always make me smile, because I knew I had just won that small battle in a continual war. But really, it sucks most of the time hearing a bunch of gobbledygook.

And it was a fluke. Of course it was a fluke. It’s a random moment in time where life went off the rails. There was no way to expect something like that would ever happen. Nothing that I personally did, when I was 7 years old, contributed to the ensuing 40 years of hearing loss. I’ve adjusted, of course, almost to the point where I can say “it is what it is” and actually mean it (since most people who say “it is what it is” wish that it wasn’t what it is), but if I think real hard, and try to sift through the fog and the haze and the miasma that is my memory, I can almost – almost – remember what it was like to be able to hear out of both ears.

But one thing I can no longer remember – which pains me to say – is a time when my right foot didn’t hurt, which is really saying something, because back when it didn’t hurt, I could run like a gazelle and jump over buildings. It’s been almost 27 years now since I completely obliterated my right ankle, destroyed it and rendered it basically useless. And I walk almost 7½ miles on it out of spite, because every time I walk on it, my foot hurts. It hurts and it’s more or less hurt for 27 years, and the natural act of changing my gait over those 27 years to account for it has led to bad knees and a bad back and a bad neck … hell, that whole spinal column fucker is fucked up beyond, and again, you adjust to it over time, you come to terms with it.

It was a fluke, it was not the norm, one random moment in one basketball game out of who knows how many I played where it all went catastrophically wrong. That I had no access to the sort of medical care necessary to treat the injury was bad timing. I’ve never held the physicians who treated me in any sort of contempt for that, even though some have suggested that I probably should. I was forced to accept that “it is what it is,” and I can intellectualize that point and accept that point – up until that moment when, for yet another day now for nearly 27 years, my right foot starts to ache, at which point all of my logic and sense and understanding go right out the goddamn window.

And after nearly 27 years of this, I truly cannot remember what it was like to have two functioning feet. Memories of running free and easy all seem like abstractions to me. They no longer seem real. It’s as if it never happened and I just made it all up.

Now, in hindsight, of course, I can be hyperrational about it and say that the simplest way to have prevented this sort of injury was to never play a sport in the first place. Because guess what? Sports are bad for you. They are. If you play any sport competitively, and do it competently at some sort of decent level, you’re going to wind up getting hurt. This is why I find most discussions about the relative violence of football to be somewhat curious: the alternatives, while maybe not scrambling your brain, don’t exactly leave you feeling all spiffy. Watching any Olympic broadcast from Rio this past summer was like making rounds in a surgical unit, as the commentators rattled off every athlete’s endless string of injuries, a good number of them completely gnarly. But of course there is a disconnect. You don’t get hurt every time you pick up a ball. Hell, most of the time, the workout feels great. It’s that one goddamn time that does you in, that one moment out of the ordinary where maybe you plant wrong or step on a guy’s foot or some dumbshit thing like that. It’s the strange irony of sport, really, in that we know that eventually we’ll get beat up doing it, yet we keep doing it anyway until the injuries inevitably settle in.

And bad stuff happens to all of us, of course. We all have our shit. Mine isn’t necessarily any worse than anyone else. That’s not the point. The point is that I don’t like situations which I cannot have at least a minor amount of control – an innate feeling, one that’s ingrained in me, and has probably been innate and ingrained since birth, because one of the other pesky life details of mine, which has been out of my control for most of that time, and which I’ve been trying to cope with and manage and manipulate and run away from and ultimately had to figure out how to accept, is the fact that almost certainly since birth, I have been mentally ill.

Coming to be 47 years old and alive, when by all rights I probably should have been dead long ago, has led me to be fairly straight forward about it, almost to the point of being blasé. “Oh yeah, so, I’m nuts, and certifiably nuts at that. Meh, whatever. Pass me the Tabasco.” But as someone who believes, first and foremost, that knowledge is power, I’ve been attempting quite a bit, over the past year or so, to piece a great deal of my memory back together, as a fair amount of it has seemed to vanish deep in the fog. And that leads to asking myself a lot of strange questions, most of which center on being mentally ill: When was I first aware of it? When did I first resist it? First reject it? Make the first attempts to cope? How was it that I coped? How could I have possibly done so much coping and not croaked in the process? What stupid things did I do this time? What stupid things were done to me? Whom did I trust and what was I thinking when I did that? It goes on and on, it’s a seemingly never-ending process and it wears me out sometimes. I’ve spent the past year slogging through my own personal morass, and I think I’ve spent the past couple months feeling stuck in the mud. And there is really no good time to do that, of course, unless you want to take a month off from your life and spend $14,000 and check yourself into a mental hospital, which I don’t particularly feel the need to do again.

But the overarching theme in all of that introspection is a sense of powerlessness, one which ran rampant through the entirety of the first 37 years of my life, and one which I always lacked the right vocabulary to express. You know something is wrong but don’t know what, nor do you why, but you see the way other people act, see how they interact, and feel like it’s not possible for you do that and be that way. You don’t have any idea why that is and it drives you (even more) nuts. And then a few other really awful things happen along the way, just as awful things are wont to happen to some people, but it feels like piling on because you’re already all screwed up to begin with. Sometimes college is a disaster. Sometimes marriage is a disaster. Sometimes you lose a job. This can happen to people for all sorts of reasons but those all sorts of reasons don’t matter when you know, deep down, that there is something that’s just not right about the way you’re wired – in that context, you lose the job and have the bad marriage and the like because you’re shit. Duh. That was hard. This is how it’s meant to be. You’ve been shit since you the day you were born, so why would those situations be any different?

This is where my mind has gone for years, of course. There was always a sense of fated failure to all that I undertook. I felt as if I was star-crossed, luckless, hard done by. Pfft. Whatever. I don’t believe in any of that shit any more. And in making the efforts to understand my own mental illness, get a grasp on it, learn to control and manage it, and then start giving it big noogies, perhaps the best part of it has been to actually feel like I’m gaining some control, because not having any sense of control – indeed, never feeling like control was even possible – is part of what nearly led me to turn up dead. And again, this in no way excuses any of the dumb and stupid things I’ve actively partaken in over the years. Sure, I screwed a lot of stuff up when it comes to relationships, careers and other life choices. But I can learn from those mistakes. I can come to terms with those mistakes. It’s the mistakes seemingly made for me which I’ve never, ever been able to handle.

And having the bag drawn on me in scrabble is a mistake made for me. It’s not what I’m there to do. It’s not the reason why I’m playing the game of scrabble. And now it would be a good time to also point out that I don’t particularly enjoy drawing the bag on my opponents. Winning is certainly better than losing, of course, but I’m someone who has always hated losing more than I’ve enjoyed winning. I’ve always tried to be gracious in victory, since if my opponent is like me, they probably hate losing – and let’s be honest here, at the peak of any competitive endeavor, every competitor hates losing to some extent. They may not all show it in the same way, of course, but if you tolerated losing so easily, you wouldn’t have taken so many steps to try and minimize its occurrence.

The biggest problem with having bad ears and a bad right foot and a bad back and a bad neck and all that jazz is the fact that, after about 10 years of attempting to follow a course of mindfulness and contemplation, I feel as if my mind is, on the whole, in better shape than it’s ever been – but my body is a wreck, and so I cannot really enjoy this sound mind and healthy spirit to its fullest. And this makes me sad, of course, because so much of the first 37 years of my life feels like a life wasted, and now I’ve got a head that actually works relatively well, and the body seems to not want to comply.

And it’s strange to generally be so calm. I’ve still not quite gotten used to that. I used to be all over the place, and it could be fun sometimes, especially when I was feeling extremely creative and the stars would align and give me some acute sense of clarity and vision. I don’t really get that burst of creative energy any more. Instead, I have to go about somehow inventing that energy for myself and managing it, allowing it to burn slowly instead of wildly blazing and going about scalding the hillsides. In the past, I’d sort of be hanging around and waiting for that ZING! of inspiration to arise, and then when it came, I’d just go nuts and roll with it come hell or high water. That doesn’t work for me anymore.

As a result of this general state of calm which has descended upon me, my previously interminably slow creative process – made slow by the fact that I could never finish anything, given that I have the attention span of a gnat – has now gotten even slower. I’ve got probably 2,000 pages worth of drafts of unfinished novels on this laptop, and 100 pages of In Play Lose ideas which never got past the first paragraph. For fucksake, Lose, FINISH SOME STUFF!

So bear with me here. I’ve been feeling something of a mess for the past couple of months, and trying to figure out where to go from here. I feel like I’ve had some mental setbacks, but this is going to happen from time to time. There is no cure for mental illness – nor for most other diseases, for that matter. You have to learn about them, learn to manage them and control them. It’s an ongoing process you must commit to, but one which is also prone to occasional burst of suckage.

And I appreciate, and am humbled by, the fact that a good number of people have sought me out over the past 10 years, across a wide spectrum of life, who are trying to learn to cope with depression or anxiety or other aspects of mental illness and have asked me for advice and guidance. It pleases me, knowing that I am a useful resource for others. I’ve become a passionate and tireless advocate on the mental health front, and I’ll always try to be helpful when I can.

But I definitely need to play more scrabble, given that deciding to make a go of playing it was probably one of the smartest things I’ve ever done. I met my wife and most of my best friends playing scrabble, I’ve taken on roles of leadership and responsibility I would have shied away from in the past, and I managed to follow a process all the way through – starting off knowing nothing at all, making the efforts to learn and improve, and then continuing to make those efforts and actually getting really, really good at it over time. Or at least I thought I was good at it before yesterday but nah, I’m still terrible. But that means I can still get better at it, right? Learning is cool and improving is cool.

But I don’t want to get too good at scrabble, because it would ruin my well-crafted life persona. After all, I’m the guy who can be a pretty good player on his day but who ultimately never wins anything at that stupid game, which sucks in the moment but is probably a good thing on balance, since none of you would want to read a blog called In Play Win. That would just be boring. One thing I learned long ago in the criticism business is that there are three basic reviews: it rocks, it sucks, and it’s boring, and the third one is the worst of them all.