Of Laughter and Forgetting

REGULAR readers of this blog have probably wondered where I’ve been for the past few weeks. I did say, in an entry near to the beginning of the month, and the new year, that In Play Lose was going to be more active here in 2017 – but when I speak of In Play Lose, I am primarily speaking of myself, of course, since as I previously posted, even nonfiction is dependent upon a fundamentally strong central character, be they a historical figure or some other subject of the work, or even if it’s simply the author themselves.

I have always been a huge fan on gonzo journalism, be it of the original or the spaghetti sense of form, because inserting oneself into the center of a work of nonfiction does not take away the impact nor make it any less true; to the contrary, the effect can be heightened, since the author not only wants to tell the facts, but create an experience using those facts. If you read the work of Hunter S. Thompson and say, “wow, that story is fucked up and weird,” then he has done his job, because the people he was tailing and trailing and chronicling at the time were, in fact, as fucked up and weird as he said they were, and history has shown them to be that fucked up and weird, but history as also shown us, time and again, that we don’t learn a goddamn thing from it.

“This may be the year when we finally come face to face with ourselves; finally just lay back and say it – that we are really just a nation of 220 million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns, and no qualms at all about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable. The tragedy of all this is that George McGovern, for all his mistakes ... understands what a fantastic monument to all the best instincts of the human race this country might have been, if we could have kept it out of the hands of greedy little hustlers like Richard Nixon. McGovern made some stupid mistakes, but in context they seem almost frivolous compared to the things Richard Nixon does every day of his life, on purpose ... Jesus! Where will it end? How low do you have to stoop in this country to be President?”
– Hunter S. Thompson, 1972

And this blog, of course, is fundamentally about me, the weirdo author, the guy who has spent most of his 47 years on the planet pretty much failing miserably at most everything and as a result, over the course of time, has come to develop a heightened sense of the absurd, the appreciation for the high art of failure, and the ability to laugh off most of life’s most intense and immense disappointments. Most, but not all. There are still some doozies in the closet which I’m not going to break out any time soon. So don’t ask. It’s not happening. You might be able to get it out of me if I’m in a seriously good mood – “seriously good” as in both serious and good, and opposed to exceptionally good mood, which isn’t the correct usage of the word seriously but I don’t give a goddamn right now – and if you buy me a few extremely expensive whiskeys at the bar. But no promises.

And every now and then, I’ll tell some stories here at In Play Lose which are personal in nature – such as this wonderful jaunt through the past that I recalled last summer about the greatest booze cruise in history, a story which many people had told me, both in person and online, really resonated with them,  and about which my buddy Puneet recently said, “I felt like I was there on the boat with you. I wish I could have been there.” That sort of compliment resonates with me, it says more to me than any readership data or book sales numbers ever will. If I tell a story, and it resonates and creates the experience for another reader, then I have done my job.

And I’ve been pretty bad at doing my job for most of the past 25 years – my job fundamentally being that of someone who should be telling stories, be it of the fictional or the nonfictional nature. I do it well, but simply do not do it enough. Which is something that I’m trying to fix here in 2017. In fact, I think it’s something that I need to be doing in a big, big way. I feel a certain sense of moral obligation to do it at the moment, in fact, because if there is one thing that comes with developing a heightened sense of the absurd and learning to appreciate for the high art of failure, it is the ability to laugh.

And this blog is primarily centered on sports because the result in sports is always black and white. There are winners and there are losers. And yet within those absolutes, there is endless nuance, instances where that black and white dissolve and mix and create endless shades of grey. I took a break on Saturday night from what I’m working on, at present, to watch the basketball game, watch the Golden State Warriors completely obliterate the L.A. Clippers by a score of 144:98. And it was ridiculous. Steph was doing Steph things, sinking 50-footers and scoring 25 points in a quarter. The Warriors scored 86 points in the second and third quarters alone and played probably the most beautiful 24 minutes of basketball that will be seen on this earth in 2017. On the halftime show, Magic Johnson compared it to the Showtime Lakers of the 1980s – an apt comparison, although he qualified it by saying, “we were getting layups and dunks, while the Warriors are shooting threes.” I hated the Lakers because they were so damn good, but damn they were so damn good.

But this is In Play Lose and what does this say of the Clippers? This is a good team, a really good team, one of probably the 5-6 best teams in the NBA when they are healthy – which they aren’t at the moment, as Chris Paul is out for two months and Blake Griffin has been in and out of the lineup and still doesn’t look like he’s 100%. (He was a matador out there when he tried to guard Durant, and Doc did him no favors by basically giving him no help.) And the Clippers were absolutely embarrassed by the Warriors. They were run into the ground once again by a Warriors team that likes doing nothing quite as much as it likes embarrassing the Clippers, and have done so repeatedly for the past three years. And the Clippers are fascinating to The Lose, of course, because they were so bad for so long, then got really good, but still haven’t won anything and pretty much never will since they’re stuck on the same side of the country as the Warriors, who own them and know it and love rubbing their faces in it. The Clippers have risen from being an abject failure to being a respectable one, a worthy adversary who still nonetheless succumbs. Theirs is a higher level of failure.

And it’s this which is interests me the most about Lose: the idea that a team like the Clippers does, in fact, create something verging on being great and yet they’re ultimately, in the bigger picture, no better off than some terrible team like the Phoenix Suns. Because let’s be honest here, if the Suns are 10,000,000 miles away from being an NBA champion, the Clippers are about 6,000,000 miles away as they are presently constructed, seeing as how the Warriors beat them by about 6,000,000 points tonight. Being close and not good enough is really not much different than being awful, and is, in many ways, worse than being awful. because being good but not good enough breeds false hope. I’ve been threatening for a while to write my definitive personal history of my devotion to the Vancouver Canucks, a 35-year escapade during which I’ve seen them achieve literally every single sort of failure imaginable, from just being flat terrible to being completely incompetent to seeing them stumble their way to Stanley Cup Final to seeing them be a hit crossbar away from winning a Stanley Cup and being arguably the best team that never won a Stanley Cup, because you don’t 187 division titles in a row unless you're badass, but all it takes is a hot goaltender or some key injuries at the wrong time and you’re sunk. And watching them fail at the highest level is worse than watching them be awful, in a lot of ways. It hurts a lot more. You get used to bad teams being bad, and you can laugh at the general displays of incompetence every couple of days. It’s harder to laugh when the stakes are higher.

But we need to figure out how to laugh when the stakes are higher. We need to laugh all of the time. Laughter is life’s greatest antidote. And in the strange times in which we find ourselves, we need to laugh. We need to laugh all of the time. We need to laugh, perhaps, more than we ever have before.

And these are strange times in which we live. Quite honestly, I have no fucking idea what the hell is going on any more. Reading the news, I feel as if I’ve bought a ticket for a night at the O’Farrell St. Theatre of the Absurd and come to discover that I’m actually a member of cast, except that no one has given me a script, because I have no earthly idea what I’m supposed to do. But I was buoyed by my recent trip to New Orleans, where I served as director of the annual Crescent City Open scrabble tournament, a fun but often thankless task that involves being an administrator, an organizer, a public relations person, a computer programmer, a computer troubleshooter, a psychotherapist and, probably worst of all, a referee, because we all know that referees are dumb and as blind as bats. But it was also during the long morning walk in the fog and in and around the top end of the French Quarter – a proud and elegant and proud and timeless area of the city a few blocks removed from the slop and the sludge of Bourbon St. – that I actually stopped acting like a tourist and felt, innately, as if I were actually living in New Orleans and, thus, experiencing it differently. It no longer felt like a filmset, the assortment of locals feeling no longer feeling like extras on that set, and it truly felt real to me – so much so that four wayward Alabamans approached me as I strode down rue des Ursulines and asked me for directions, prefacing it as they approached by saying, “let’s ask this guy. He lives here,” and I was able to give them directions, tell them the café was closed, and suggest the café where I got that really nice large chicory coffee that was in my left hand.

And feeling like you’re “living” in a city, even if you are only visiting, means that you come to feel the rhythms and the biorhythms and the tempos of the place. What I’ve always taken away from New Orleans is that it just might be the single-most creative city in which I have ever set foot. Even the throwaway street buskers are phenomenal musicians. There is music and there is art and there is a verse of poetry waiting to be written around every street corner. And this is not me speaking with blinders on, ignoring the troubles that the city of New Orleans endures seemingly far away from it’s quaint and charming and enticing central corridors. New Orleans is fundamentally a city of heartbreak – and when it comes to acts of creativity, a city of heartbreak is fertile ground for fine flowers. Only in New Orleans does the approach to the saddest moment of life – the end of life – call for the striking up the brass band and the throwing of a parade.

“There is no substitute for madness,” is the last line of a story called Winning by Ron Jones, which can be found in Take it to the Hoop, a collection of short stories, essays and poems about the game of basketball which is long since out of print and which I lost long ago – lost along with my remarkable and diverse collection of books that I’d gathered through college, stolen from a storage shed where they were stored since my stupid ex-wife, may she rot in the hell of her own making, made me keep them there because there was “no room for your books,” and there is no way using bold or italic or all caps to express the level of disdain she espoused in her stressing of the word “your.” I have now righted this one small error, one among many, after scouring the internets and acquiring a used copy of Take it to the Hoop from a group in a Kansas community raising money to build a new library, simply because I want to be able to read Winning again, and also read one of my favorite and also favoritely titled poems of all time: The NCAA Mideast Regionals and Other Existential Setbacks. Those of you who read this blog may remember that I offered up a piece of Christmas fiction a few years ago entitled Winning. I admit it, I stole the name. Bad artists copy, good artists steal, and wannabes like me should opt to go with the good.

And Winning, this story by Ron Jones I want to reread, is not about winning, in the traditional sense. Indeed, the last line of the story speaks to a placard places over the locker room door that reads “there is no substitute for winning,” where the word ‘winning’ has been crossed out and replaced with ‘madness.’ The story is about a guy trying to coach high school basketball at the poor and grubby high school on the other side of the tracks in a well-to-do town during a racially divisive era and it’s a hilarious and wondrous and resourceful and ultimately heartbreaking endeavor in which some semblance of salvation ultimately comes through coming to redefine what it means to win and to lose – which is basically what I need to be doing or, more importantly, remembering that I should be doing, because the greatest single moment of my lifetime, the single most-important moment which changed which realtered the entire course of mine, came when I was sitting on the carpeted floor of a meeting room at a psychiatric institute, laughing so hard that the tears were streaming down my face, and we all were doing that, and someone actually said they felt bad because being insane wasn’t supposed to be so much fun. And I felt bad for all of those suckers out there who were going to their stupid jobs and going through the day-to-day machinations of their lives, enduring the drudgery because they were the sane ones. We’re the crazy people, we’re the chosen ones and the lucky ones. There is no substitute for madness.

Nor is there substitute for laughter, and I’m going to laugh like hell for the next four years. I’m going to laugh my ass off. I’m going to laugh in the face of the people who do things that disgust me, because you’re not going to take away my ability to laugh. I was just chatting recently, in fact, with a person who was there rolling on the floor with me in uncontrollable laughter at the psychiatric institute and, thus, shares the single most-important moment in my life, and she spoke of how her 2016 was a personal dumpster file, to which we concurred than the world can pretty much go fuck itself after what it did to itself in 2016, and that laughter and madness are going to win the day in 2017.

And that means I need to write, and need to write a lot. And one of the reasons why I spoke so much of how I was impacted in New Orleans is that, in a place which feels real to me all of a sudden, a place in which I suddenly feel fueled and infused with the creativity and imagination of the city, it suddenly occurred to me that this other novel I am working on, which I have started and stopped and started and stopped off and on since the fall of 2003, was going nowhere because I had completely gotten the ending wrong. You can’t get to the end if you don’t know where you’re going. I’ve had an ending in mind ever since I started crafting this novel – a novel for which I’m going to put aside my usual propensity for downplaying my abilities by stating that it will be the greatest novel I ever write in my lifetime in I can ever write the fucking thing, but I’ve not done so because I’ve feared that doing so might actually kill me. I’m dead serious when I say that. But there in New Orleans, I realized that the ending I’d had in mind for over a decade was completely, utterly the wrong one, which means the whole goddamn thing – towards which I’d written about 23,000 words here in the first few weeks of 2016 – needs to be redone.

Crap. Now what?

Well now what is we do what we usually do when dilemmas about writing spring up, which is to put whatever it is that’s not working aside and do something else and do something completely different. And I mean completely different. As in, bearing absolutely no resemblance whatsoever to that monstrous magnum opus of mine which continues to do nothing but grow moss. And while I’m at it, make it funny, and make it absurd.

And so I’ve spent most every free moment I’ve had since returning from New Orleans working on a new novel, one which is pure slapstick and farce, and I’m 50,000 words into it and still seem to like it, which is generally an encouraging sign. And in choosing to do this, I also chose to set it during a rather remarkable point in time, which is Europe in late 1989 and early 1990, a time where I happened to be in Europe and got the experience the whole of the world changing in a few fell swoops. There I was in a Paris café sipping a 1664 and not watching football on the television overhead, but watching live coverage of the Romanian Revolution, as the intrepid reporters were ducking and taking cover amid the sniper fire, and return fire, in the streets of Bucharest. I remember sitting in the room across from mine at the university smoking hand rolled drums with a German grad student who had permitted himself the luxury of a fine bottle of cognac or brandy or whatever it was – I don’t recall, since I was most likely already drunk, since I was drunk all the time back then – and it was the day before the Berlin Wall fell and he spoke of the enormous senses of both uncertainty and optimism he felt for his homeland, with the latter ultimately trumping the former. It was a remarkable period of time where we every single thing we thought that we knew about how the world was organized completely collapsed.

And here we are, 27 or so years later, wondering how in the hell the world ever got so screwed up. No one who felt the rush and surge of optimism and hope in Europe at that time would have ever believe that the world would one day wind up like this. But go back 27 years from then, and you have 1962 and the Cuban Missile Crisis. No one in 1962 would ever have foreseen what came to pass in 1989. Go back 27 years before that and you’re in 1935 amid the Great Depression and run-up to the Second World War. Who would foresee the world nearly ending in 1962? Would you have among the Dust Bowl and the urban blight of the mid-30s that 27 years later, the U.S. would be the most powerful nation on the earth and the richest nation the earth has ever known? Most likely not. The point is that things change, and do so far more frequently, and more rapidly, than we may realize. There is always the potential for the world to radically shift and for civilization to chart a new course, and if you find yourself in a world in which you feel hopeless, you should remember that there are times in the not-to-distant past when optimism seemed to flourish in abundance.

And in order to best figure out how to cope with a world which I find has gone off the deep end, I find myself reading, and re-reading, a great number of my favorite authors from the 20th century, great numbers of whom hail from countries like Czechoslovakia and the military junta dominated eras in Latin America. Authors who figured out how to cope with the worst sorts of oppressions through their own creative expression – expressions which are rife with madness and, yes, with humor. Laughter. The oppressor doesn’t want you to laugh, after all. They don’t want you to find the humor because, of course, the funniest thing is the oppressor himself. The wonderful Czech poet Miroslav Holub did a reading in England when I was there in 1990, fully basking in the glow of the Communists having been swept aside, and he prefaced a poem by saying that in the “old” days, old being several months ago, if you wanted to write about the buffoons running the country, you simply spoke in allegories and set your pieces in mythical German principalities or duchies or kingdoms, because you could get around the censors that way, since mocking the Germans was acceptable and even encouraged after WWII, but everyone in the know would know exactly whom you were referring to. He then read a poem that started with some long and self-important title of a German prince or duke or king and the whole room burst into laughter. So I’ll go back and reread Holub, and reread Milan Kundera, who is still Czech in my mind even though he wants to think of himself as French, and I’ll reread Josef Škvorecký’s wonderful books in which his jazz loving and jazz playing hero cares far more about jazz and girls than he does about politics, but politics always seem to get in the way of his pursuits of both hot sex and hot sax. And I’m going to read and learn from these people once again, because while living in strange times under strange circumstances, they sure did find a way to be both witty and brilliant and found a way to make both themselves and their readers laugh.

Laugh, god damn it. Laugh.

And this is all a roundabout way of explaining that the reason why I’ve not been venturing lately into this absurd corner of cyberspace which I have created is because I’ve been venturing lately into an even more absurd space, which is my own mind, and I apologize for that, because there is always time for Lose, and I am chortling at the train wreck that is the Cleveland Cavaliers at the moment, and loving me some Sixers as they win as many games in January as they did all of last season, and give me the Falcons and the points this coming Sunday. And is there a bigger douchebag in all of sports right now than Grayson Allen? Every Duke loss is still one loss too few. And I should give a shout out to tennis player Mischa Zverev, who really espoused the essence of Lose in his run-up to his Australian Open against Roger Federer when asked about a previous meeting in Halle, Germany, in which Zverev lost 6-0, 6-0.

“I'd rather lose 6-0, 6-0 to Roger in a quarterfinal than to a qualifier in the second round. At least there is something to talk about later.”
– Mischa Zverev

Fuck yeah. If you’re gonna lose, make it memorable.

So anyway, I apologize for being away from The Lose here for a little while, but rest assured that the spirit of Lose runs pretty much through everything that I do.

And I’m not really losing much all that moment, and I’m not going to be losing all that much here in this society, as it’s presently being constructed, since the people presently doing the construction seem to want to bend it back in such a way to benefit aging, lower middle-class white guys such as myself. But the ways in which this is coming about leave me aghast and absolutely appalled. I want nothing to do with any of this. But what can I do? I’m just one person among many. I can do what I do best, which is to make people laugh, which is to tell stories and tell jokes and point out the ridiculousness of everything around me here in my own personal Belgium. Some of those will be short form, some will be blogs, and some will be ludicrous novels that I throw myself into full bore at the expense of everyone else. We need laughter, we need comedy, we need to remember what makes us human. So let’s laugh a lot, here and elsewhere. Comedy = tragedy + time, so let’s laugh as time passes and strictly adhere to that principle.