“... everything is complicated by the presence of the opposing team.” – Jean-Paul Sartre
Showing posts with label life. Show all posts
Showing posts with label life. Show all posts
Sunday, March 31, 2019
My Apologies for the Absence
TRULY I have reached a place in this lifetime where I do not know what to say. Perhaps it is a case where I have reached the end of language, going beyond the point where words can express what it is that I feel. Perhaps it is a case where I have reached the point of pointlessness, a place where there is nothing that I can say, nor is there anything that anyone can say to me, which will affect me in any sort of desired way. Perhaps it is a case where all you have left is silence, knowing that nothing you can say nor do will make a fucking bit of difference. I do not know. All of it is plausible, yet none of it seems to matter.
Tuesday, February 19, 2019
Sunday, January 6, 2019
Grief
WHAT is it about me that leads me to find and discover so many absurd situations, or what is it that leads them to find me? I guess that I go looking for it. I am uniquely attuned to it, I suppose. Being a keen observer of humans and their interpersonal relations, curious as to what does or does not make people tick, I always have an eye and an ear out for whats going on around me. My tendency of making metaphors out of everything leads me to make these sorts of connections of whatever behaviour goes on all about me and then trying to find some sort of meaning in it, or even making meaning. So when people do weird things – which people are inclined to do – I tend to notice it and extrapolate what it means. I doubt my life is necessarily any weirder than that of anybody else, but I think that, instead, I notice it more, whereas others simply turn their attention back to their phones and turn the volume up in their headsets, blocking out their surroundings.
But still, weird things seem to happy to me a lot of the time. Weird things, most of which I fail to find any metaphor in other than it being a testament to the absurd nature of our existence. Someone doing something that makes no sense likely seems to be a sensible act in their own mind. For example, why would some 81-year-old man decide that it’s a good idea to start talking to the guy next to him on the 1 California on a Sunday afternoon?
“The 49ers sure are bad. They used to be good. I went to that playoff game that time, 1971 at Kezar Stadium. They lost though. They played the Dallas Cowboys.”
You could look it up: the NFC Championship game on Jan. 3, 1971, at Kezar Stadium. Dallas Cowboys 17, San Francisco 49ers 10.
He had limped his way onto the bus on Polk St., he had a whole bus’ worth of places from which to choose to sit, and he sat down next to me, proceeding to start talking to me about a playoff football game from 1971. I don’t know why he was doing that. Perhaps, at that age, speaking with anyone in the world seems like a good idea. Age is isolating. You limit yourself, you turn inward, you feel as if you no longer belong and that the world has passed you by. Just the night before, during our evening-long whiskey bender, I had been telling Geoff how my disinterest in making metaphors of music – mostly due to me being inherently opposed to nostalgia – means that all of the music I listen to is contemporary, but that I never go to any of their gigs when those bands come to San Francisco, because I would feel weird about being the oldest guy in the room by 10 or 15 or 20 or even 25 years. At an age like 81, the world must become so small, so silent and compact. Simply talking to some stranger on the bus would, I imagine, be liberating. If he wants to tell me about a football game from 47 years ago, I suppose that is okay although, to be honest, I think I am listening to him only because my phone is nearly dead. Otherwise, I think I’d have the volume turned up to 11 and be drowning out the world around me for a little while longer.
Which is what I did on the flight, one of those extremely strange and welcome sorts of flights whereby you take off late from one city and arrive early in the other. Due to turbulence all over the western U.S. at the usual cruising altitude, the captain had explained, they had clearance to fly higher in the sky, which also meant they had clearance to fly faster. What’s supposed to be a 2½ hour flight lasted 1:58. I had my earbuds in the entire flight and didn’t notice the commotion, and didn’t really understand why a flight attendant was wearing blue jeans and a purple sweater – not exactly proper work attire, nor did the colour scheme match that of Southwest Airlines. It was only when we landed, but couldn’t get off the plane for 40 minutes, that I took out the earbuds and figured out the reason for the commotion: a flight attendant had fainted during the flight; the stand-in dressed in a purple sweater was an off-duty staffer headed home to the Bay Area who stepped up in a pinch; an entire crew of paramedics and EMTs and firefighters then boarded the aeroplane. Suddenly, the flight that departed late and arrived early was deplaning very, very late. It annoyed me, and then I was annoyed with myself for feeling so indignant about being delayed getting off an aeroplane because of this medical emergency. Jesus fuck, show some compassion.
Where was I going anyway, and what was the need for urgency? The Coliseum BART station, the Embarcadero, the shed alongside Embarcadero Two where you catch the 1 California, which would then amble for 35-40 minutes, having a leisurely Sunday drive westward, up Nob Hill and towards the beach. Wherever it is that I am wanting to go, I am not going to get there very fast. Mostly, the sense of urgency was due to being hungover, and wanting to find some sort of a remedy for the throbbing in my head. I asked Geoff how he was feeling this morning, as he was preparing to take me to ABQ, and he said he was feeling “appropriate.” I then made reference to how, in the era of the Chinese emperors, those applying to be civil servants were subject to rigorous examinations which included a study of their skills as a poet. They were expected to be able to write about, and speak to, all of the important states of life, including being able to write about what it feels to be drunk, and also being able to write about what it feels to be hungover. Drinking to excess, therefore, was necessary. Never before had drinking to excess felt so necessary as it had on Saturday night, so when I awoke this morning, I considered the hangover to be proper and just.
By late Sunday afternoon, however, after my too short-cum-too long flight from ABQ to OAK, I really would like my head to stop hurting. I really would like everything to stop hurting. Flying hurts. I dreaded such a short trip – flight out on Friday, return on Sunday – simply because that much time cooped up in an aeroplane with so little time in between was likely to twist my neck and back into even more of a pretzel than they already are. Being on a 1 California bus with so few other passengers meant having some space to stretch out.
But now I have got this guy, this 81-year-old Chinese American with a hearing aid and a shopping bag full of foodstuffs yammering to me about how bad the 49ers are, but they weren’t bad back in 1971.
“But they lost though,” he shrugged. “Everyone loses sometimes.”
I suppose he has my admiration for his nonchalant attitude towards defeat. I have declared myself to be an expert in defeat, I have made it a point of emphasis in my life to attempt to explicate the nature of failure. Failure is the default in life. Everyone loses sometimes.
But he’s just saying stuff. This happens all the time on public transportation in San Francisco. There is some transient, some crazy guy babbling away. But it’s different in this case – he speaks clearly, coherently, short bursts of descriptives. I just lack any context for what he is saying. Is it a memory? Did it happen 10 years ago? 10 minutes ago? I don’t know. On another day, I suppose it would annoy me. Amazingly, on a day when seemingly everything else is wont to annoy me, he does not.
He then reaches into the pocket of his jacket and takes out some photographs, all of them old, most of them black & white, all of them with torn edges or crease marks or other signs of heavy usage. He starts looking through them, one after another, a smile on his face. There seems to be a smile on his face no matter what. There is a smile on his face as he is hustling to catch the bus on Polk St., having waves to flag the driver down. There is a smile on his face telling me about how the 49ers had lost to the Dallas Cowboys and missed out on a chance to go to the Super Bowl – which, as a lifelong fan, must have been extremely disappointing at the time. He is looking at his photographs, smiling slightly more than he had been before, as they obviously pique and tap into memories. Given the wear and tear on the prints, I suspect he might do this often. I turn my attention elsewhere, as he seems delightfully occupied.
“This is me,” he taps me on the knee to get my attention, showing me a photograph.
He didn’t really ask whether or not I wanted to see his photos. He just did it. I suppose that when you are 81, you just do what you want. You don’t give a shit anymore. Quite frankly, you shouldn’t give a shit anymore at that age, and maybe not at any age.
In the photo, he is dressed in his Army uniform, handsome and standing tall, proud. A sharp looking, strong young man. He must be 19, maybe 20 in the photo.
“1956,” he says. “Presidio.”
Presidio. San Francisco. My old co-worker during my Seattle banking days had served in the Army during World War II, and I remember him telling me about being assigned to the Presidio, and how getting stationed at the Presidio was the plum gig in the army at that time. If you were a scrub the Army brass thought little of, they would station your ass in some dumb place like Great Falls or Nebraska or some other wasteland. But the Presidio? Damn, that meant they thought you were good.
I nod in response. I am impressed.
The 1 California is just passing the JCC on California and Presidio, heading westward towards The Avenues. He sifts through the stack of maybe 6-7 photos, shows me a b&w pic ripped slightly down the middle, stained yellow around the edges, but the image itself remains crisp.
“This is my wife,” he says.
Oh my. She is quite the looker, dressed in a white dress. He sees me nodding with approval and he nods in response, his smile growing in both width and in glow.
He then shows me a second photograph of her, a colour photo, wearing a vivid red dress. It’s a traditional Chinese wedding dress. The fading to blue of the fringes of the photograph contrast that red dress, making it all the more radiant, ebullient.
“Beautiful,” I say.
“She died young.”
He somehow manages to smile when he says this.
“She died young. She was only 62. I am 81 now.”
He goes silent for a moment, nodding and, somehow, again he smiles. I have no idea how he does that.
I’m exhausted. I didn’t really sleep last night. Awakened by a ghost. New Mexico feels haunted. I awoke in a state of delirium this morning, not knowing where I was, hallucinating. For a moment I was 29 again, I was in the New Mexico that still felt like a dream and hadn’t yet become the nightmare it has now become. I am 29 and in control of my life, no longer suffering from any symptoms of mental illness, only to fully awaken to find I am 49 and grieving and feeling that mental illness enveloping me all over again, washing over me and threatening anew to drown me, just as I had started to drown the instant I first left this place back in November 2000.
There have been these moments, here and there, since the end of the ceremony on Saturday in Santa Fe where it has threatened to occur. A few tears have managed to slip from my eyes. It kept happening on the aeroplane, that being a place where I have always felt a certain sense of claustrophobic anxiety which seems to pull out and heighten whatever emotion is deeply affecting me in the subconscious at the time. I’ve been known to just spontaneously burst into tears on flight, crying for no apparent reason. But I held it together on the flight, at the aeroport, and even held it together during the necessary all night drinking session Geoff and I had engaged in after the service was over, having driven back to Albuquerque from Santa Fe and immediately commenced killing a bottle of bourbon in some quixotic but, ultimately, necessary attempt at also killing all of the pain.
Clearly, it had not been a success.
And I had held it together as I stood in the roomful of familiar strangers, people who I’d thought little to nothing about in the time since I’d last seen them, whose aging faces I had to compare and contrast to those making up my memories. None of them had aged well. Maybe none of us ever really do. The service was taking place in a hall near to my old house in Santa Fe, a mediocre neighborhood traversed by Cerrillos Road, the obligatory kingdom of ersatz sort of street you find in any city with furniture stores and rug dealers and strip malls and the like. An ugly, utilitarian part of town. A part of town which, to my 29-year-old eyes, seemed to be beautiful but, to the failing 49-year-old eyes mired behind thick glasses, no longer did so. It no longer felt like home. I’d left that home behind, I’d left New Mexico and moved to a city where I have never, ever truly felt like I am at home. Santa Fe is a place that Kate wanted to be from, but no longer wanted to be, and she wanted to leave so badly that she left me behind. It’s a place that she wound up returning to, and I knew when she made that choice that she would never, ever return to San Francisco.
But I held it together when I spoke, having figured out what I would say in my head the day before on the flight, having committed it to memory, tattooing it to my psyche, creating another scar and spot and stain that I can never scrub out. But goddamnit, I held it together. I’ve held it together all of this time. Go me. Aren’t I so fucking brilliant and so motherfucking proud?
I have my phone in my hand, which barely has any power, but there is just enough juice left for me to pull up a photo. I tap him on the knee to get his attention, and then show it to him:
“She is very beautiful,” he says.
“She died,” I whisper, rendered barely able to speak.
“Oh?”
“I had to say goodbye to her yesterday in New Mexico. I had to say goodbye.”
This is how I come to cry on the shoulder of an 81-year-old man while riding the 1 California on a Sunday afternoon, a man who somehow thought it was a good idea to talk to passersby and show old photographs that, likely, no one other than he would care about.
“You will come to smile again,” he tells me, his arm around me, clinging to a stranger as if he were a son. “You will come to smile.”
We get to 25th Avenue, my stop. I wasn’t sure where exactly that he was going – somewhere further up California St., I suppose, but there are only three more stops on the route, so it’s somewhere nearby. Perhaps he is a neighbor. Perhaps I should try to find him sometime. Or, perhaps, he was simply riding for the sake of riding, which is what many of the supposedly crazy people do in this city. They ride because going somewhere, anywhere, is better than the stasis, the solitude and the stillness.
I stand up and shake his hand.
“Bless you,” I whisper.
“Okay,” he replies with a smile and a nod. “Okay, it is okay.”
But still, weird things seem to happy to me a lot of the time. Weird things, most of which I fail to find any metaphor in other than it being a testament to the absurd nature of our existence. Someone doing something that makes no sense likely seems to be a sensible act in their own mind. For example, why would some 81-year-old man decide that it’s a good idea to start talking to the guy next to him on the 1 California on a Sunday afternoon?
“The 49ers sure are bad. They used to be good. I went to that playoff game that time, 1971 at Kezar Stadium. They lost though. They played the Dallas Cowboys.”
You could look it up: the NFC Championship game on Jan. 3, 1971, at Kezar Stadium. Dallas Cowboys 17, San Francisco 49ers 10.
He had limped his way onto the bus on Polk St., he had a whole bus’ worth of places from which to choose to sit, and he sat down next to me, proceeding to start talking to me about a playoff football game from 1971. I don’t know why he was doing that. Perhaps, at that age, speaking with anyone in the world seems like a good idea. Age is isolating. You limit yourself, you turn inward, you feel as if you no longer belong and that the world has passed you by. Just the night before, during our evening-long whiskey bender, I had been telling Geoff how my disinterest in making metaphors of music – mostly due to me being inherently opposed to nostalgia – means that all of the music I listen to is contemporary, but that I never go to any of their gigs when those bands come to San Francisco, because I would feel weird about being the oldest guy in the room by 10 or 15 or 20 or even 25 years. At an age like 81, the world must become so small, so silent and compact. Simply talking to some stranger on the bus would, I imagine, be liberating. If he wants to tell me about a football game from 47 years ago, I suppose that is okay although, to be honest, I think I am listening to him only because my phone is nearly dead. Otherwise, I think I’d have the volume turned up to 11 and be drowning out the world around me for a little while longer.
Which is what I did on the flight, one of those extremely strange and welcome sorts of flights whereby you take off late from one city and arrive early in the other. Due to turbulence all over the western U.S. at the usual cruising altitude, the captain had explained, they had clearance to fly higher in the sky, which also meant they had clearance to fly faster. What’s supposed to be a 2½ hour flight lasted 1:58. I had my earbuds in the entire flight and didn’t notice the commotion, and didn’t really understand why a flight attendant was wearing blue jeans and a purple sweater – not exactly proper work attire, nor did the colour scheme match that of Southwest Airlines. It was only when we landed, but couldn’t get off the plane for 40 minutes, that I took out the earbuds and figured out the reason for the commotion: a flight attendant had fainted during the flight; the stand-in dressed in a purple sweater was an off-duty staffer headed home to the Bay Area who stepped up in a pinch; an entire crew of paramedics and EMTs and firefighters then boarded the aeroplane. Suddenly, the flight that departed late and arrived early was deplaning very, very late. It annoyed me, and then I was annoyed with myself for feeling so indignant about being delayed getting off an aeroplane because of this medical emergency. Jesus fuck, show some compassion.
Where was I going anyway, and what was the need for urgency? The Coliseum BART station, the Embarcadero, the shed alongside Embarcadero Two where you catch the 1 California, which would then amble for 35-40 minutes, having a leisurely Sunday drive westward, up Nob Hill and towards the beach. Wherever it is that I am wanting to go, I am not going to get there very fast. Mostly, the sense of urgency was due to being hungover, and wanting to find some sort of a remedy for the throbbing in my head. I asked Geoff how he was feeling this morning, as he was preparing to take me to ABQ, and he said he was feeling “appropriate.” I then made reference to how, in the era of the Chinese emperors, those applying to be civil servants were subject to rigorous examinations which included a study of their skills as a poet. They were expected to be able to write about, and speak to, all of the important states of life, including being able to write about what it feels to be drunk, and also being able to write about what it feels to be hungover. Drinking to excess, therefore, was necessary. Never before had drinking to excess felt so necessary as it had on Saturday night, so when I awoke this morning, I considered the hangover to be proper and just.
By late Sunday afternoon, however, after my too short-cum-too long flight from ABQ to OAK, I really would like my head to stop hurting. I really would like everything to stop hurting. Flying hurts. I dreaded such a short trip – flight out on Friday, return on Sunday – simply because that much time cooped up in an aeroplane with so little time in between was likely to twist my neck and back into even more of a pretzel than they already are. Being on a 1 California bus with so few other passengers meant having some space to stretch out.
But now I have got this guy, this 81-year-old Chinese American with a hearing aid and a shopping bag full of foodstuffs yammering to me about how bad the 49ers are, but they weren’t bad back in 1971.
“But they lost though,” he shrugged. “Everyone loses sometimes.”
I suppose he has my admiration for his nonchalant attitude towards defeat. I have declared myself to be an expert in defeat, I have made it a point of emphasis in my life to attempt to explicate the nature of failure. Failure is the default in life. Everyone loses sometimes.
But he’s just saying stuff. This happens all the time on public transportation in San Francisco. There is some transient, some crazy guy babbling away. But it’s different in this case – he speaks clearly, coherently, short bursts of descriptives. I just lack any context for what he is saying. Is it a memory? Did it happen 10 years ago? 10 minutes ago? I don’t know. On another day, I suppose it would annoy me. Amazingly, on a day when seemingly everything else is wont to annoy me, he does not.
He then reaches into the pocket of his jacket and takes out some photographs, all of them old, most of them black & white, all of them with torn edges or crease marks or other signs of heavy usage. He starts looking through them, one after another, a smile on his face. There seems to be a smile on his face no matter what. There is a smile on his face as he is hustling to catch the bus on Polk St., having waves to flag the driver down. There is a smile on his face telling me about how the 49ers had lost to the Dallas Cowboys and missed out on a chance to go to the Super Bowl – which, as a lifelong fan, must have been extremely disappointing at the time. He is looking at his photographs, smiling slightly more than he had been before, as they obviously pique and tap into memories. Given the wear and tear on the prints, I suspect he might do this often. I turn my attention elsewhere, as he seems delightfully occupied.
“This is me,” he taps me on the knee to get my attention, showing me a photograph.
He didn’t really ask whether or not I wanted to see his photos. He just did it. I suppose that when you are 81, you just do what you want. You don’t give a shit anymore. Quite frankly, you shouldn’t give a shit anymore at that age, and maybe not at any age.
In the photo, he is dressed in his Army uniform, handsome and standing tall, proud. A sharp looking, strong young man. He must be 19, maybe 20 in the photo.
“1956,” he says. “Presidio.”
Presidio. San Francisco. My old co-worker during my Seattle banking days had served in the Army during World War II, and I remember him telling me about being assigned to the Presidio, and how getting stationed at the Presidio was the plum gig in the army at that time. If you were a scrub the Army brass thought little of, they would station your ass in some dumb place like Great Falls or Nebraska or some other wasteland. But the Presidio? Damn, that meant they thought you were good.
I nod in response. I am impressed.
The 1 California is just passing the JCC on California and Presidio, heading westward towards The Avenues. He sifts through the stack of maybe 6-7 photos, shows me a b&w pic ripped slightly down the middle, stained yellow around the edges, but the image itself remains crisp.
“This is my wife,” he says.
Oh my. She is quite the looker, dressed in a white dress. He sees me nodding with approval and he nods in response, his smile growing in both width and in glow.
He then shows me a second photograph of her, a colour photo, wearing a vivid red dress. It’s a traditional Chinese wedding dress. The fading to blue of the fringes of the photograph contrast that red dress, making it all the more radiant, ebullient.
“Beautiful,” I say.
“She died young.”
He somehow manages to smile when he says this.
“She died young. She was only 62. I am 81 now.”
He goes silent for a moment, nodding and, somehow, again he smiles. I have no idea how he does that.
I’m exhausted. I didn’t really sleep last night. Awakened by a ghost. New Mexico feels haunted. I awoke in a state of delirium this morning, not knowing where I was, hallucinating. For a moment I was 29 again, I was in the New Mexico that still felt like a dream and hadn’t yet become the nightmare it has now become. I am 29 and in control of my life, no longer suffering from any symptoms of mental illness, only to fully awaken to find I am 49 and grieving and feeling that mental illness enveloping me all over again, washing over me and threatening anew to drown me, just as I had started to drown the instant I first left this place back in November 2000.
There have been these moments, here and there, since the end of the ceremony on Saturday in Santa Fe where it has threatened to occur. A few tears have managed to slip from my eyes. It kept happening on the aeroplane, that being a place where I have always felt a certain sense of claustrophobic anxiety which seems to pull out and heighten whatever emotion is deeply affecting me in the subconscious at the time. I’ve been known to just spontaneously burst into tears on flight, crying for no apparent reason. But I held it together on the flight, at the aeroport, and even held it together during the necessary all night drinking session Geoff and I had engaged in after the service was over, having driven back to Albuquerque from Santa Fe and immediately commenced killing a bottle of bourbon in some quixotic but, ultimately, necessary attempt at also killing all of the pain.
Clearly, it had not been a success.
And I had held it together as I stood in the roomful of familiar strangers, people who I’d thought little to nothing about in the time since I’d last seen them, whose aging faces I had to compare and contrast to those making up my memories. None of them had aged well. Maybe none of us ever really do. The service was taking place in a hall near to my old house in Santa Fe, a mediocre neighborhood traversed by Cerrillos Road, the obligatory kingdom of ersatz sort of street you find in any city with furniture stores and rug dealers and strip malls and the like. An ugly, utilitarian part of town. A part of town which, to my 29-year-old eyes, seemed to be beautiful but, to the failing 49-year-old eyes mired behind thick glasses, no longer did so. It no longer felt like home. I’d left that home behind, I’d left New Mexico and moved to a city where I have never, ever truly felt like I am at home. Santa Fe is a place that Kate wanted to be from, but no longer wanted to be, and she wanted to leave so badly that she left me behind. It’s a place that she wound up returning to, and I knew when she made that choice that she would never, ever return to San Francisco.
But I held it together when I spoke, having figured out what I would say in my head the day before on the flight, having committed it to memory, tattooing it to my psyche, creating another scar and spot and stain that I can never scrub out. But goddamnit, I held it together. I’ve held it together all of this time. Go me. Aren’t I so fucking brilliant and so motherfucking proud?
I have my phone in my hand, which barely has any power, but there is just enough juice left for me to pull up a photo. I tap him on the knee to get his attention, and then show it to him:
“She is very beautiful,” he says.
“She died,” I whisper, rendered barely able to speak.
“Oh?”
“I had to say goodbye to her yesterday in New Mexico. I had to say goodbye.”
This is how I come to cry on the shoulder of an 81-year-old man while riding the 1 California on a Sunday afternoon, a man who somehow thought it was a good idea to talk to passersby and show old photographs that, likely, no one other than he would care about.
“You will come to smile again,” he tells me, his arm around me, clinging to a stranger as if he were a son. “You will come to smile.”
We get to 25th Avenue, my stop. I wasn’t sure where exactly that he was going – somewhere further up California St., I suppose, but there are only three more stops on the route, so it’s somewhere nearby. Perhaps he is a neighbor. Perhaps I should try to find him sometime. Or, perhaps, he was simply riding for the sake of riding, which is what many of the supposedly crazy people do in this city. They ride because going somewhere, anywhere, is better than the stasis, the solitude and the stillness.
I stand up and shake his hand.
“Bless you,” I whisper.
“Okay,” he replies with a smile and a nod. “Okay, it is okay.”
Tuesday, November 20, 2018
Kate
 |
| Kate performing in Dhaka, Bangladesh, in 2004. |
THIS is a poem that I wrote in 1998, which has been published several times, about Kate's struggles to make it as a musician while living in Santa Fe, New Mexico, which is where we met:
- - -
Kate’s Band Plays the Worst Bar in New Mexico
It’s the kind of gig that drives musicians
to become lawyers. A Gemini convention
at the meeting of the moons: half the patrons
are all about hugs, the other half ready
to rumble. Sixteen people crowd
the four-foot square dance floor, tripping
over darkness and their own bad tempers,
and all of them claim they just want to have
some fun. Tall man throws a chair at a fat
tourist in a rainbow sweater, whose only crimes
were dancing and being in love. As they separate
the combatants and the doorman sweeps up
the glass, the owner takes a bigger percentage
of the gross and threatens the drummer in Greek
or Turkish or Serbo-Croatian, or some other
language where P’s are R’s and the human
tongue moves odd ways. The two bartenders
shrug and chagrin, knowing their boss is
an asshole. Amid the melee, the quartet plays on.
Guitarist solos while the bassist puts his years
of epée training to use, parrying another flying
bottle. Kate thinks to herself why am I here,
remembering all of the days as a girl
when she’d lock herself in a room, eschew
malls and movies and climbing trees to practice
her unsociable saxophone, never thinking
in a million years it would ever come to this.
She could make more money on the Plaza
downtown, or selling velvet renditions of Elvis
in the meeting rooms at the Holiday Inn.
The highway to the Blue Note and Carnegie
Hall is dotted with thousands of sinkholes
and swan dives. They play the dark roadhouse,
the roller skating rink, 2-for-1 night at the tavern
with sawdust on the floor, and parties for which
they’re paid in seafood and cinema seats.
But she’s going to get better, damn it,
she’s going to get out of this place alive,
so she grips her baritone sax a little tighter,
places the mouthpiece to her lips and swings.
- - -
She came a long, long way from those days. She was a wonderful musician who played all over the world, and played at some of the finest venues:
Kate died Sunday, at the age of 49, after a 13-year battle with cancer. She was my hero, and I will miss her very much. My hope is that she would be as proud of me as I was of her.
Kate regularly played in the Bay Area at The Sound Room, which is a nonprofit center for Jazz performance and education that is trying to raise funds to acquire and renovate a new performance space in order to provide opportunities for local musicians. Please, if you have a few dollars to spare, contribute in her honor.
Monday, October 22, 2018
I Wish I Never Wrote This
PERHAPS the best way to sum up my experience inside a psychiatric institute is that it taught me how to take control of my own life. The whole point of practicing “mindfulness” and discover its power was to regulate and moderate one’s response to stress. I’ve been doing this for 12 years now. I modulate my emotions. I have this weird sort of multitasking brain, one which revs and redlines and thousands of RPMs and permits me to be able to do some wonderful and remarkable things when I’m in control, and leads me to spiral hopelessly into abysses when I’m not. I am the ultimate multitasker, able to juggle and triage and slot a dozen different things at once. I can focus on a task at work while my brain is juggling a math problem or a scrabble anagram. It’s a gift and a curse, one which, through mindfulness and through the act of making a point of experiencing what it is that I am feeling – be it physical, mental, spiritual, what have you – and then rendering it simply a data point. If my shoulder hurts, I relax my shoulder. If I feel deep pangs of regret or anxiety, I start to breathe. The mind revs and redlines 24/7, but I control my emotions and maintain focus, keeping in the present, all the while being fully aware of how perilous this life can be.
Perhaps the greatest expression of this sensation that I’ve seen in a film is in the phenomenal 1992 film The Waterdance, which is about paraplegics in a rehab institute. In a key scene in the film, during which a black man and racist biker get drunk and bond over being reduced to cripples in wheelchairs, Wesley Snipes tells a story of how he dreams that not only can he walk again, but that he is dancing on the water, he is dancing on the surface of the lake and if he stops dancing, he drowns, so he just keeps dancing. He dances on and on upon the surface of the water. It’s a beautiful image and also a terrifying one – the idea that life is so fragile and perilous, so short, and that you must struggle to summon the strength to survive when it seems impossible. This is my life, every single day. I’m constantly cycling through images, through metaphors. I’m constantly picking up my feet and doing that slide step against the waves lapping up against my ankles. It’s exhausting as fuck, but goddamn it, were I to step on dry land again, I would cut one helluva a rug.
But recently, I find the waves washing over me, threatening to drown me. The steps I’ve learned can no longer stem the tide. I feel as if I’m sinking, as if I’m drowning. It’s not because of any particular thing happening to me – I’m relatively healthy, save for the numbness in my left arm and stiffness in my right leg and deafness in my right ear. All of that has become normal to me and I play through it. I’m used to it by now. I’m relatively secure, if those bastards who pay me bother to pay me on time. I have a reasonable life in San Francisco, a city where achieving a reasonable life is becoming harder and harder by the day. It’s not that bad, really. I get by.
But I have no control over what afflicts those who are close to me. My father will be 78 years old and now suffers from dementia. My dad taught me the jump hook, which was my most devastating weapon on the basketball court. My dad played ball well into his 60s and was so healthy that he had 7,000 hours of sick leave at Washington State when he cashed it in on his Fulbright to Belgium. My dad had such an impeccable memory that he walked into my office one day in Seattle in 1992, shook my boss’ hand, and said to her, “yes I remember you from my Poli Sci 222 class in 1967. You got an A.” He remembered her maiden name, for fucksake. He remembered her fucking maiden name from 25 years earlier! And now that memory is eroding, that mind which made him a go-to expert on international affairs, sought after by everyone from the Pentagon to film producers in L.A. My dad taught me inclusiveness, tolerance, and open-mindedness, since he was a professor of International Studies and introduced me to so many people with different experiences and points of view. He is languishing, and I can’t fucking do anything about it. I cannot make it better for him. I talk to him on the phone, I am encouraging and positive, but I cannot make it stop. I cannot stop it. He is sinking into an abyss, one which also has a terrible effect upon my mother, who is dealing with this day by day, and there is nothing I can say or do or act upon which makes a shit’s worth of difference.
And I cannot stop the cancer ravaging my ex-girlfriend’s body. Kate has fought it for 13 years now. She is the strongest person I’ve ever known. She is my hero. I wish that I were a tenth as strong as she. And there is nothing that I can do about it. It’s cruel, it’s unfair: she’s spent all of her late 30s and her 40s fighting this most goddamnest of diseases, and winning a lot of the time, and yet she suffers. It’s an inevitable sort of suffering which, a decade ago, you would have accepted – “a decade from now, you will have all kinds of trouble, but until then, you might be okay.” Eventually, the bill comes due. I wish that I could make it better for Kate. I wish that I could take it all away. I feel an incredible guilt and shame – it was right after we broke up, an awful point in both of our lives, that she found out she had cancer, and because I was so mad at her at the time, I didn’t help her even though I could have and should have, like any fucking decent human being should have done. I wish that there was something – anything – that I could do to make it better for her. She’s one of the most remarkable persons I’ve ever known. She doesn’t deserve to be dying at 48 when there are so many goddamn fucking awful human beings running unabated across this globe at much older ages. Seriously, fuck this world.
I can’t do anything about this. All of my mindfulness routines which I’ve carefully curated after my mental institute experiences are about handling what it is that you can possibly control. But what about what you cannot control? There are simply some things that you will never accept, that you will never get over, the deaths and demises of loved ones being at the top of the list. I’ve reached what Laura, my therapist and my friend, calls “the end of language.” I’ve lost the ability to express and explicate the helplessness and the grief. The grief. Jesus bastard christ, the fucking grief.
What do you say about this kind of thing? What the actual fuck do you say? I understand that this is the nature of our short and fragile lives – we will have to come to terms with the mortality of everyone around us and then, more importantly, ourselves. But for fucksake, I’ve been making my reputation, if not my living, on my ability to explicate most everything, and I’ve got now fucking idea what to say or what to do about loved ones who are dying and who are disintegrating before my eyes. I don’t know what to say or do. I feel helpless.
And I’m drowning. I’ve been dancing on the surface of the water for a dozen years now. Because see, in attempting to learn how to modulate and regulate my own behavior so as to deal with the wildly undulating nature of my mind, I never learned the language of grief. I don’t know what to do or what to say. I’ve reached the end of language.
And I cope with this by drinking myself into a stupor, but that doesn’t fucking work, because I just wake up hungover and headachy and achy and I have to make a fucking 2+ hour commute to Palo Alto and GODDAMNIT I HATE EVERYTHING on a daily basis. Sure, this is the human condition. We have to come to terms with the inevitability of time, come of accept that which we cannot control. But fucking goddamnit, I don’t know what to do. None of us do. If we did, we’d all be fucking ascetics capable of escaping suffering through achieving enlightenment or whatever the goddamn hell you want to call it. Ultimately, I feel powerless to impact the lives of loved ones around me, and in that state of complete existential dread, all that I do to respond is drink myself into a stupor.
If any of you have any suggestions, I’m all ears.
We are fragile and frail. I write often about the greatest of warriors, those seemingly impervious to pain. Bullshit. It’s all bullshit. We all must come to accept our frailties and our failings, our own shortcomings. As strong as we may be, we cannot defeat those. Nor can we ultimately change the fate of others, as much as we would like to think so. There is nothing that I can say or do to take away some goddamn gene or chromosome which renders people in my family prone to dementia, What do you do? You be there, I guess. You consider it all “time well spent,” and be grateful for that time, even as you watch persons become a shell of the persons that you knew. You live in the past, remember them for who they were even though you know that they cannot ever be that person again.
I hate that way of thinking. I hate it. I hate all of it.
And I’m saying this now because I keep saying to myself, “THIS is the weekend that you’re going to make change and stop being a drunk and drinking yourself into a stupor,” but it’s not the weekend that someone who I know and love and care about stops dying, nor is it the weekend that I stop grieving the inevitable loss. And yeah, fuck, I understand that you should make the most of the time in the here and now and love to your greatest ability, but jesus fucking goddamn christ what is the fucking point? And like I say, I’ve reached the end of language here. This is all me just ranting and raving like a goddamn lunatic, pissing and howling into the wind. It’s as if saying nothing was just as valuable as saying everything, since whatever you say will be the wrong thing.
And what’s the bloody point? What value is there in an empty gesture of spending two years of your life working on the next novel when the people who inspired and motivated you will either be dead or incapable or remembering what it is that you did? What’s the fucking goddamn point of any of it? I feel no motivation to finish anything, even though I’ve got about 1,000,000 words’ worth of text stored up on my hard drive, great stories with great characters in need of being explicated. What’s the goddamn point in any of it? It’s all a tree falling in the forest. Who the fuck is there to hear it?
Obviously, I don’t know what the answer is to any of this. If I had some sort of insight, I wouldn’t be screaming into the wind at 1:00 a.m. after I’ve had too many whiskeys if I did. Being gript by joint senses of helplessness and hopelessness doesn’t really suit me, as I’m an optimist by nature who wants to believe in the goodness of people and the ability of people to make the lives of others around them better. But all that I’ve done to make others’ lives better hasn’t amounted to shit. It made no difference. I’m just a tourist and a traveller, I’m simply passing through.
Jesus fuck, I am such a pathetic fucking sop.
Seriously, people, love those around you. Love them so much that they resent how much you love them, and then love them even more than that. I cannot tell you how grateful I am that I have this incredible spouse who loves and adores me. I’m the luckiest goddamn motherfucker in the world. I’m absolutely blessed for that. Love those people and tell them that you love them all the time, even if you think they’re getting sick of hearing how much you love them. If nothing else, just opening your goddamn mouth and saying “I love you,” will come to be cherished. It’s the most precious goddamn thing on this earth, to be honest. It transcends everything. It is everything that matters in this lifetime. I don’t give a shit about your stats. I don’t care how much you’ve made or what you’ve achieved. Have you cared about other people? Have you given love in this life? Have you made it known to someone going to their grave that you will always cherish their memory? That’s all that matters.
I grieve for Kate. I grieve for my dad. I feel crushed. I feel heartbroken. I wish that I knew what to do. I wish that I knew what to say. And I wish that I never wrote this. I wish that this feeling never came to be.
Perhaps the greatest expression of this sensation that I’ve seen in a film is in the phenomenal 1992 film The Waterdance, which is about paraplegics in a rehab institute. In a key scene in the film, during which a black man and racist biker get drunk and bond over being reduced to cripples in wheelchairs, Wesley Snipes tells a story of how he dreams that not only can he walk again, but that he is dancing on the water, he is dancing on the surface of the lake and if he stops dancing, he drowns, so he just keeps dancing. He dances on and on upon the surface of the water. It’s a beautiful image and also a terrifying one – the idea that life is so fragile and perilous, so short, and that you must struggle to summon the strength to survive when it seems impossible. This is my life, every single day. I’m constantly cycling through images, through metaphors. I’m constantly picking up my feet and doing that slide step against the waves lapping up against my ankles. It’s exhausting as fuck, but goddamn it, were I to step on dry land again, I would cut one helluva a rug.
But recently, I find the waves washing over me, threatening to drown me. The steps I’ve learned can no longer stem the tide. I feel as if I’m sinking, as if I’m drowning. It’s not because of any particular thing happening to me – I’m relatively healthy, save for the numbness in my left arm and stiffness in my right leg and deafness in my right ear. All of that has become normal to me and I play through it. I’m used to it by now. I’m relatively secure, if those bastards who pay me bother to pay me on time. I have a reasonable life in San Francisco, a city where achieving a reasonable life is becoming harder and harder by the day. It’s not that bad, really. I get by.
But I have no control over what afflicts those who are close to me. My father will be 78 years old and now suffers from dementia. My dad taught me the jump hook, which was my most devastating weapon on the basketball court. My dad played ball well into his 60s and was so healthy that he had 7,000 hours of sick leave at Washington State when he cashed it in on his Fulbright to Belgium. My dad had such an impeccable memory that he walked into my office one day in Seattle in 1992, shook my boss’ hand, and said to her, “yes I remember you from my Poli Sci 222 class in 1967. You got an A.” He remembered her maiden name, for fucksake. He remembered her fucking maiden name from 25 years earlier! And now that memory is eroding, that mind which made him a go-to expert on international affairs, sought after by everyone from the Pentagon to film producers in L.A. My dad taught me inclusiveness, tolerance, and open-mindedness, since he was a professor of International Studies and introduced me to so many people with different experiences and points of view. He is languishing, and I can’t fucking do anything about it. I cannot make it better for him. I talk to him on the phone, I am encouraging and positive, but I cannot make it stop. I cannot stop it. He is sinking into an abyss, one which also has a terrible effect upon my mother, who is dealing with this day by day, and there is nothing I can say or do or act upon which makes a shit’s worth of difference.
And I cannot stop the cancer ravaging my ex-girlfriend’s body. Kate has fought it for 13 years now. She is the strongest person I’ve ever known. She is my hero. I wish that I were a tenth as strong as she. And there is nothing that I can do about it. It’s cruel, it’s unfair: she’s spent all of her late 30s and her 40s fighting this most goddamnest of diseases, and winning a lot of the time, and yet she suffers. It’s an inevitable sort of suffering which, a decade ago, you would have accepted – “a decade from now, you will have all kinds of trouble, but until then, you might be okay.” Eventually, the bill comes due. I wish that I could make it better for Kate. I wish that I could take it all away. I feel an incredible guilt and shame – it was right after we broke up, an awful point in both of our lives, that she found out she had cancer, and because I was so mad at her at the time, I didn’t help her even though I could have and should have, like any fucking decent human being should have done. I wish that there was something – anything – that I could do to make it better for her. She’s one of the most remarkable persons I’ve ever known. She doesn’t deserve to be dying at 48 when there are so many goddamn fucking awful human beings running unabated across this globe at much older ages. Seriously, fuck this world.
I can’t do anything about this. All of my mindfulness routines which I’ve carefully curated after my mental institute experiences are about handling what it is that you can possibly control. But what about what you cannot control? There are simply some things that you will never accept, that you will never get over, the deaths and demises of loved ones being at the top of the list. I’ve reached what Laura, my therapist and my friend, calls “the end of language.” I’ve lost the ability to express and explicate the helplessness and the grief. The grief. Jesus bastard christ, the fucking grief.
What do you say about this kind of thing? What the actual fuck do you say? I understand that this is the nature of our short and fragile lives – we will have to come to terms with the mortality of everyone around us and then, more importantly, ourselves. But for fucksake, I’ve been making my reputation, if not my living, on my ability to explicate most everything, and I’ve got now fucking idea what to say or what to do about loved ones who are dying and who are disintegrating before my eyes. I don’t know what to say or do. I feel helpless.
And I’m drowning. I’ve been dancing on the surface of the water for a dozen years now. Because see, in attempting to learn how to modulate and regulate my own behavior so as to deal with the wildly undulating nature of my mind, I never learned the language of grief. I don’t know what to do or what to say. I’ve reached the end of language.
And I cope with this by drinking myself into a stupor, but that doesn’t fucking work, because I just wake up hungover and headachy and achy and I have to make a fucking 2+ hour commute to Palo Alto and GODDAMNIT I HATE EVERYTHING on a daily basis. Sure, this is the human condition. We have to come to terms with the inevitability of time, come of accept that which we cannot control. But fucking goddamnit, I don’t know what to do. None of us do. If we did, we’d all be fucking ascetics capable of escaping suffering through achieving enlightenment or whatever the goddamn hell you want to call it. Ultimately, I feel powerless to impact the lives of loved ones around me, and in that state of complete existential dread, all that I do to respond is drink myself into a stupor.
If any of you have any suggestions, I’m all ears.
We are fragile and frail. I write often about the greatest of warriors, those seemingly impervious to pain. Bullshit. It’s all bullshit. We all must come to accept our frailties and our failings, our own shortcomings. As strong as we may be, we cannot defeat those. Nor can we ultimately change the fate of others, as much as we would like to think so. There is nothing that I can say or do to take away some goddamn gene or chromosome which renders people in my family prone to dementia, What do you do? You be there, I guess. You consider it all “time well spent,” and be grateful for that time, even as you watch persons become a shell of the persons that you knew. You live in the past, remember them for who they were even though you know that they cannot ever be that person again.
I hate that way of thinking. I hate it. I hate all of it.
And I’m saying this now because I keep saying to myself, “THIS is the weekend that you’re going to make change and stop being a drunk and drinking yourself into a stupor,” but it’s not the weekend that someone who I know and love and care about stops dying, nor is it the weekend that I stop grieving the inevitable loss. And yeah, fuck, I understand that you should make the most of the time in the here and now and love to your greatest ability, but jesus fucking goddamn christ what is the fucking point? And like I say, I’ve reached the end of language here. This is all me just ranting and raving like a goddamn lunatic, pissing and howling into the wind. It’s as if saying nothing was just as valuable as saying everything, since whatever you say will be the wrong thing.
And what’s the bloody point? What value is there in an empty gesture of spending two years of your life working on the next novel when the people who inspired and motivated you will either be dead or incapable or remembering what it is that you did? What’s the fucking goddamn point of any of it? I feel no motivation to finish anything, even though I’ve got about 1,000,000 words’ worth of text stored up on my hard drive, great stories with great characters in need of being explicated. What’s the goddamn point in any of it? It’s all a tree falling in the forest. Who the fuck is there to hear it?
Obviously, I don’t know what the answer is to any of this. If I had some sort of insight, I wouldn’t be screaming into the wind at 1:00 a.m. after I’ve had too many whiskeys if I did. Being gript by joint senses of helplessness and hopelessness doesn’t really suit me, as I’m an optimist by nature who wants to believe in the goodness of people and the ability of people to make the lives of others around them better. But all that I’ve done to make others’ lives better hasn’t amounted to shit. It made no difference. I’m just a tourist and a traveller, I’m simply passing through.
Jesus fuck, I am such a pathetic fucking sop.
Seriously, people, love those around you. Love them so much that they resent how much you love them, and then love them even more than that. I cannot tell you how grateful I am that I have this incredible spouse who loves and adores me. I’m the luckiest goddamn motherfucker in the world. I’m absolutely blessed for that. Love those people and tell them that you love them all the time, even if you think they’re getting sick of hearing how much you love them. If nothing else, just opening your goddamn mouth and saying “I love you,” will come to be cherished. It’s the most precious goddamn thing on this earth, to be honest. It transcends everything. It is everything that matters in this lifetime. I don’t give a shit about your stats. I don’t care how much you’ve made or what you’ve achieved. Have you cared about other people? Have you given love in this life? Have you made it known to someone going to their grave that you will always cherish their memory? That’s all that matters.
I grieve for Kate. I grieve for my dad. I feel crushed. I feel heartbroken. I wish that I knew what to do. I wish that I knew what to say. And I wish that I never wrote this. I wish that this feeling never came to be.
Wednesday, January 17, 2018
Get Help
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| photo by James Snook/USA Today |
IT’S ALL fun and games here at In Play Lose – at least, we want it to be that way. We laugh at losing. We laugh at loss. You can come back from a loss. You can recover and regroup. But sometimes, we are reminded of the sorts of losses that cannot be overcome.
Myself and everyone in the extended W.S.U. family were shocked to hear the news from Pullman that 21-year-old Tyler Hilinski, the heir apparent to the starting QB position with the Cougars next season, had taken his own life on Wednesday night. Hilinski was a terrific talent who, in his limited opportunities this past season, had shown incredible promise – leading a rally to a 3OT win over Boise State in one game, throwing for over 500 yards vs. Arizona in another. By all accounts, he was also extremely popular with his teammates and with the media members who cover the W.S.U. program. No one – literally no one – saw this coming. There were no warning signs, there were no red flags about depression or mental illness. Seemingly out of the blue, out of nowhere, a young man with a bright future before him is gone.
This doesn’t have to happen. Ever.
And sure, it may only be when someone elevated in status to something of a celebrity – and being a backup QB on a college football counts as such – that we feel compelled to make this sort of proclamation, but it’s when the afflictions of mental illness and depression come to drastically affect those who seemingly have it all – and thus seemingly have the most to lose – that we actually stop and think about the true extent of the problem. Just last year, two of the talismen of modern music – Chris Cornell and Chester Bennington – committed suicide as well: two people with storied careers, with families, with literally millions of people, all over the planet, who loved them for what they did. If people who seemingly have so much can succumb to the peril of mental illness, then no one is truly immune.
I am a tireless advocate for mental health services, although one of the things I’ve come to realize in the past decade is that I’m not doing enough. I can do more, and I should do more, even if it’s simple as saying, again and again, to anyone who is listening and anyone who can hear, that what happened to Tyler Hilinski doesn’t have to happen to you, or to anyone else. Get help. Don’t be afraid. Get help.
My story is here and I don’t need to recap it, other than to point out that the stigma of mental illness, the shame of mental illness, is far, far greater than most people realize. It takes incredible courage, grace, and humility to come to accept that you have a problem with depression, or some other form of mental illness, and you need to get help. It is seriously the hardest thing you’ll probably ever do. In that moment, all of your past mistakes and failings seemingly magnify, exponentially expanding in importance. You feel like a piece of shit. And all of the sudden, in that moment, the future is completely muddled and confusing, it’s daunting and overwhelming. You don’t know what to do. You don’t know where to go from here.
But life will get better if you get help. I promise you, it will get better. It may take a while, it may take years and you may have to be patient, trusting in a process of living that feels foreign to you, that feels impossible at times. But at the same time, you also take control. You learn about how your mind works and learn how to reshape it. Knowledge is power! And at the time, admitting that you have a problem with depression, with mental illness, with some sort of substance abuse or other addiction, feels like the lowest point in your life and the worst moment in your life, but in fact, you come to realize that the worst moment was the moment right before that, when you weren’t doing anything about it, and that coming to accept that you needed help was, in fact, the best thing you’ve ever done.
I was institutionalized in 2006, and it was the best thing that ever happened to me. I’ve been blessed the past 11 years. Has it all been great? Of course not. A lot of it’s been truly terrible, in fact, but all of it was time that wouldn’t have existed otherwise. Time is precious in this life. It’s everything, really. Life is always about the process, which continues onward and changes. The great landmarks in your life – good or bad – are not ends in themselves. You still go on. I still talk with someone who I met while attending the psychiatric institute 11 years ago. We’ve both had challenges, traumas, and disappointments along the way. But in the end, we are blessed to still be here, to have families and friends and loved ones, to still be able to aspire and dream, to still be able to experience everything life offers. It reminds me, whenever I talk to her, that I should talk more about mental illness – both the terrible ways in which it can effect you and the ways in which you can overcome it. After all, you can’t tell people not to be afraid and talk about it if you’re afraid to talk about it yourself, now can you?
But I’m not afraid to talk about it. I was for my first 37 years on the planet, but not any more. It’s not a shame or a disgrace to be suffering from a mental illness. I’m proud of the fact that so many people in my extended communities have reached out to me in their times of need. People have confided in me, asked me for help, trusted me to be an advocate and a source of both knowledge and wisdom. I take this stuff very seriously. This isn’t fun and games.
Get help. If you’re struggling with depression, get help. Call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline: (800) 273-8255. Call a mental health professional in your area. They are problem solvers, they will work with you and try to find a solution. It can be difficult and trying at times, because solving mental illness issues is not a catch-all, one-size-fits-all kind of thing, and I know that it’s hard to be patient when you feel like you need help right away. But no one needs to die alone in their apartment with a gunshot wound to the head. This doesn’t have to happen. Ever.
And if someone does reach out to you, saying they need help, listen to them. Practice empathy. Listen and learn from them, love them in any way that you can. Fuck knows, there isn’t enough love and empathy in this world. Give it out, and give it freely. It can truly make a difference in another person’s life.
Thursday, February 2, 2017
I’m Going to Say This Once
I’M GOING to say this once, and once only, and then we will get back to the fun and the games. I posted this last night on my Facebook wall, but I feel as if it needs to be said here, in this personal space and corner of cyberspace of mine and I am going to modify it to fit this forum. And if you do not like that, then tough shit.
“What America does best is create Americans.”
– Bernard-Henri Lévy
I post pictures of these tacos all the time across social media, which are made by David. David makes his own sauces, his owns mixes and marinades. These are the best tacos in the world.
David is an immigrant. He has a wife and 2-year-old daughter. He does all of this, by hand, every day, and he makes $3.50 a taco, which isn’t a helluva lot. He works his ass off, like pretty much all of the immigrants who live in my neighborhood. They work construction, they work in restaurants, they take shit jobs that are beneath cushy white people like me.
David was originally working selling tacos outside of his building down the street, which is where a really popular local Salvadoreño restaurant was located, but it closed in order for the building to be seismically upgraded. It will come back, but for the mean time, some people are out of work. People just like David who work their asses off.
David now sets up his taco stand in a new location, having been welcome to do so outside the corner store – a store which is owned by a Yemeni national. He and his partner work really hard, work from 7 am to 2 am, just the two of them. They’ve managed to get some help recently, as the owner has finally managed to bring his family over to the U.S. after about a decade of trying and his two teenage sons also work in the store. And they had to get out, because Yemen is in chaos. With as much vile venom being spewed forth about “those kind of people” in this country, being in this country is still, without a doubt, better than being over there.
And the Yemenis who run the corner store are our friends. They are friends to everyone in this neighborhood – the whites and the blacks and the Latinos, the rich and the poor, even the police, some of whom I’ve noticed have taken to eating at David’s taco stand out front. They want a better life for themselves and their families, which is exactly what your ancestors and mine wanted when they came to this country.
These people are not my enemies, nor will they ever be. Where they may have come from does not make them my enemy. We make far too many enemies out of the people who are not, worrying about people from far away lands when it has been shown, time and again, that the real enemies often lie within.
But when you decide to cast people as enemies, based upon from where they come, it’s amazing just how many enemies you ultimately wind up creating. If you do that, they then come to see you as the enemy, and they are quite right to do that.
And if anyone who is reading this cannot comprehend this fact, then they should probably just unfriend me now, because as much as I appreciate speaking to a wide range of people with a wide range of views about a wide range of topics, and value that, and as much as I appreciate strenuous debate, someone who cannot understand this is clearly a fucking idiot, and is not worth one more goddamn ounce of my time.
And do not argue with me on this point. If you cannot see just how counterproductive, pointless, and fundamentally un-American this behavior has been which has come out of Washington, D.C. these past few weeks, then just leave this corner of cyberspace and carry on someplace else. Sorry to see you go – and I mean that will all sincerity – but I have nothing more to say to you. We have nothing left to say.
“What America does best is create Americans.”
– Bernard-Henri Lévy
I post pictures of these tacos all the time across social media, which are made by David. David makes his own sauces, his owns mixes and marinades. These are the best tacos in the world.
David is an immigrant. He has a wife and 2-year-old daughter. He does all of this, by hand, every day, and he makes $3.50 a taco, which isn’t a helluva lot. He works his ass off, like pretty much all of the immigrants who live in my neighborhood. They work construction, they work in restaurants, they take shit jobs that are beneath cushy white people like me.
David was originally working selling tacos outside of his building down the street, which is where a really popular local Salvadoreño restaurant was located, but it closed in order for the building to be seismically upgraded. It will come back, but for the mean time, some people are out of work. People just like David who work their asses off.
David now sets up his taco stand in a new location, having been welcome to do so outside the corner store – a store which is owned by a Yemeni national. He and his partner work really hard, work from 7 am to 2 am, just the two of them. They’ve managed to get some help recently, as the owner has finally managed to bring his family over to the U.S. after about a decade of trying and his two teenage sons also work in the store. And they had to get out, because Yemen is in chaos. With as much vile venom being spewed forth about “those kind of people” in this country, being in this country is still, without a doubt, better than being over there.
And the Yemenis who run the corner store are our friends. They are friends to everyone in this neighborhood – the whites and the blacks and the Latinos, the rich and the poor, even the police, some of whom I’ve noticed have taken to eating at David’s taco stand out front. They want a better life for themselves and their families, which is exactly what your ancestors and mine wanted when they came to this country.
These people are not my enemies, nor will they ever be. Where they may have come from does not make them my enemy. We make far too many enemies out of the people who are not, worrying about people from far away lands when it has been shown, time and again, that the real enemies often lie within.
But when you decide to cast people as enemies, based upon from where they come, it’s amazing just how many enemies you ultimately wind up creating. If you do that, they then come to see you as the enemy, and they are quite right to do that.
And if anyone who is reading this cannot comprehend this fact, then they should probably just unfriend me now, because as much as I appreciate speaking to a wide range of people with a wide range of views about a wide range of topics, and value that, and as much as I appreciate strenuous debate, someone who cannot understand this is clearly a fucking idiot, and is not worth one more goddamn ounce of my time.
And do not argue with me on this point. If you cannot see just how counterproductive, pointless, and fundamentally un-American this behavior has been which has come out of Washington, D.C. these past few weeks, then just leave this corner of cyberspace and carry on someplace else. Sorry to see you go – and I mean that will all sincerity – but I have nothing more to say to you. We have nothing left to say.
Tuesday, January 31, 2017
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.
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.
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