Sometimes The Lose Wins

This worked out pretty well

ONE year ago, I was on the verge of losing something vital to my existence: my home. We had until the 10th of June to move out of our house. It had nothing to do with us. It had to do with a marital breakup among the owners and the fact that the house was worth about $4,000,000 on the open market, and we were being Ellis Acted into oblivion here in San Francisco.

The entirety of the Bay Area has suffered from a continual housing crisis since I first moved here in 2000, in that there is far too much demand, not nearly enough supply, and no real political or even societal will to do anything to resolve this issue. Having lived in the Mission District for 13 years, and had experiences that run the gamut from watching the tenement slum next door burn to the ground and kill people – there were probably 75 people living in that 11-unit building at a time, none of whom knew enough English to know to call 9-1-1 and alert the fire station two blocks away – to then seeing that building be rebuilt and its units rented out to techies and yuppies for $4,000. This actually simplifies most of my feelings about silly arguments related to gentrification and urban planning and most every other issue in San Francisco – in both the case of the deathtrap slum and the $4k a month reclamation project, it boiled down to the fact that the landlords are money grubbing scum, which is pretty much what most of the landlords are, and they are going to wind up benefitting either way, be the tenants rich and white or be they poor and Spanish speaking. Predators, either way. And clearly I made a mistake from renting a place from someone I thought was a friend for 13 years. That was naïve of me. Landlords are not your friends, not when the house that you live in can sell for $4,000,000. It’s always borrowed time. Amid this mess, which began in early April, my friend Amanda said to me, “I wish that I owned a place, so that I could rent it to you,” to which I responded, “but at that point, we couldn’t be friends any more.”

And let me tell you, having two months to move, with no idea where to go, in a market this tight, is a truly awful life experience that I don’t wish upon any of you. Every single minute of your day is stressful. You cannot enjoy anything. You feel guilty for taking the time to have fun and enjoy yourself for a few hours and do something like go to dinner, or go to a movie or a Giants game. “Shouldn’t I be looking for a house right now?” You chase leads, you look at terrible units and try to convince yourself that they would somehow be alright. You see random numbers in windows as you walk past and hurriedly call them, only to never hear back. Lots of that. Lots of unreturned messages. Lots of vague, evasive emails in response to your query. You set up appointments to look at places and the realtors never show. There were three of us on the search – we had decided to form a unified front, as all of us were needing a place by mid-June and we figured we’d have more luck looking for larger spaces than simply 1-bedroom units, which were and are so in demand – and between the three of us, we probably had 1/3 of our inquiries actually result in a response. Not being shown an apartment, mind you. That rate was even lower. I’m talking about just getting someone to pick up the damn phone and call me back. When it’s this sort of a market, and you’re looking for a place, and doing so from a place of urgency, to the majority of money grubbing scum landlords and their collection of mouthpieces and whores handling their business, you’re basically shit, and you’re reminded of it regularly. Seriously, kids, don’t try this at home.

And by the way, this is why I’m an active member of the Tenants Union here in San Francisco, and why I recommend that other people get similarly involved. Housing is not a privilege. It is a necessity. It is essential. But I’ve always likened the housing problem in a city such as this to the parking problem – there are way more cars than available places to put them here, but the city likes it that way, because of the many, many ways in which they can capitalize on it financially, be it through parking meters or the insufferable $500 worth of parking tickets you’re going to accrue in the course of the year no matter how much you try to avoid it. It’s that way with housing issues as well. Why would a zoning board composed of realtors want to drive down their future commissions from housing sales by making more of it available? So long as you’re making a shittonne on your investment (that $4,000,000 house that I was living in was originally purchased for $188,000) why would you give two shits about a goddamn renter? These people are trash, they’re money grubbing scum and need to be held in check.

Anyway, so a year ago today – May 25, 2017 – was probably the lowest point in the housing search. It was a foggy and cloudy and dismal morning and I was doing something that I’d always hoped I’d be spending my birthday doing: apartment hunting. Because god forbid that I enjoy anything, at this point. My boss was really helpful actually – “take the week off, get the hell out of the office and find a place to live” – and so The Official Spouse of In Play Lose and I were planning on spending my birthday doing more apartment hunting.

Oh joy. Seriously, this was the worst birthday ever.

We did have one solid lead, a place Doug had found in Alameda that we’d put an application in on sight unseen. We’d asked Doug what he thought of it and he said, “well, it’s a place,” which is something, I guess. Honestly, the three of us were growing pretty desperate. ANYTHING was looking like it was worth making the effort to land, including some places we'd seen which were godfuckingterrible. We had not even seen this place in Alameda, but we called over there on Friday morning to follow up on the application and also inquire about seeing the place, and the manager said she'd be happy to show it to us that day.

Getting from San Francisco to Alameda is something of a pain in the ass on public transportation. It took forever and we finally got there around 11:00 a.m. or so. It was at that point that the manager then said to us, “you didn’t get the apartment, but I'll be happy to show it to you if you like.”

What the actual fuck?

Honestly, she goddamn said that. That is one of the stupidest goddamn things that anyone has said to me in a long time. Seriously, you couldn't have just told us this ahead of time, and not wasted our time? How fucking callous do you have to be to not even show some courtesy? How fucking indifferent are you? Seriously, get bent, you fuck.

So at that point, I’m pissed. I’m really angry and I do well not to bite the property manager’s head off. At least it’s easy to sour grape in this situation and say “I didn’t want that place, anyway,” but quite honestly, I didn’t want that place, anyway, nor would I want someone as discourteous as that being an overlord for the place that I live.

I mean, seriously here, does real estate just turn you into a douchebag? My first apartment in San Francisco was in a building that was bought by a slumlord who was ultimately sued into bankruptcy and oblivion by the city, and they employed a whole bunch of lunkheads who doubled as security agents, wearing black fatigues and acting as if they were some paramilitary unit. One of them came up to me one night as I was smoking outside the building:

Andrew: Do you have any identification?
Lose: Aren’t you a little overdressed, Andrew?
Andrew: Have we met?
Lose: I was just in your office four days ago and you tried to pawn off a home loan on me, you dumb fuck.

Seriously, what the fuck is wrong with these people? But I digress.

Where was I? Oh, right, I was standing there with my spouse for about 20 minutes on a street corner in Alameda, waiting for a fucking AC Transit, positively stewing. It took forever but we finally found a coughing, wheezing AC Transit and lumbered our way back to Oakland in order to catch the BART.

And by that point the sun was breaking through and it was actually starting to turn into a warm and bright day. And it was at that point that I said to KC, “you know what? Fuck these bitches. Fuck all of them. This is my birthday, goddamn it. They don’t get to ruin my birthday for me. Only I get to ruin my birthday for me! They can go on ruining my days again beginning on the 26th of May. So fuck it, let’s go to Swan’s.”

Eat here

And KC liked the idea of going to Swan’s Oyster Depot for lunch, which is quite possibly my favorite place to eat in San Francisco, if not the world, and previously we'd gone to Swan's the day after I got laid off from my job at UC Berkeley in 2010, and doing so proved to be an act of both self-preservation and defiance, an act of "fuck it, life doesn't suck," which did wonders for my sanity, and we were there for like 2½ hours that day, during which time we ate approximately 1,000,000,000 oysters, and for 2½ hours, I didn't care that I no longer had a job.

This seemed like an act which was worth repeating, nearly 7 years later. We needed another reminder that life doesn’t suck.

I’ll take all the things, please. Yes, all of them.

And as we were departing from Oakland's 12th St. station on the BART, intent upon feeding our faces with another 1,000,000,000 oysters in the afternoon and flipping the bird to our landlords, to the attorney threatening to sue us on the 10th of June and to every goddamn phony we’d dealt with in the previous couple of months, KC was scrolling through craigslist and perusing some apartment listings on her phone.

“Here’s a place we might want to go and have a look at,” she said to me. “A new listing, brand new, just a few minutes ago. The apartment is located in the Outer Richmond, out by the beach. It says here that they are showing the apartment at 5:00 p.m. tonight …”

We were the first people to see the place. The tenant himself was showing it, owing to the hasty nature of it all: his wife had just landed a new job in L.A., beginning mid-June, and they had to get out of town as soon as possible. He told us that the building is owned by a family trust, whose primary requirement for tenants is that they don’t burn the building down. They had zero interest in all of the nonsense you get involved in when you’re looking for a place to live in this city – no ridiculous jumping through hoops, no outrageous demands. The place was a flat located way out in the old Russian neighborhood of the western part of the city, and it was just a 10-minute walk from the beach:

Not bad for a backyard, eh? I like my backyard

So, as I was saying before, May 25, 2017, was the high point of the housing search. Seriously, this was the best birthday ever.

I’m still sort of amazed how that came together, because we were truly growing desperate, and growing despondent, with mere days before we were going to find ourselves embroiled in what would likely be a long, ugly fight against being evicted, involving lawyers and courtrooms and judges saying to get the hell out of their courtroom and arbitrators and mediators, during which time we would still be living in the place, living in a situation where the owners wanted us gone and we would all hate each other so, really, who wants to be there at that point anyway?

But none of that came to pass because, out of nowhere, it just sort of worked out. I have no idea how. I’m not going to question it. Luck and timing is everything in this life. Sometimes, stuff actually works out.

I’m not sure yet how the birthday will go this year, but it will probably be less life-altering than the last one. And that’s a good thing. I would do well to avoid that level of stress again at any point in time in the next 10,000 years.

And I should probably also take this opportunity to wish my sister Kimberly a happy birthday as well. We’re not twins. I’m a year older but we share the same birthday – one of those oddities in life that ultimately comes to make you unique. Happy birthday, sis. I hope your birthday is, well, less dramatic.

Trying to Live

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My Hero of the Week and Many More Weeks to Come

The LOSE has been on extended summer vacation here, owing to me scribbling away at a novel and also owing to the fact that sport takes the summer off, for the most part, and I already covered the miseries of the misfortunes of the local nine this season, which have refused to improve. Now the EPL has resumed, football is but a few weeks away and there will soon be all sorts of failure to document.

But there is no failure at the moment. There is only winning. The Official Girlfriend of IN PLAY LOSE is no longer the official girlfriend, as a new marketing agreement has been forged and she has accepted a promotion:

She is my hero of the week, and my hero for many more weeks to come.

We win at life.

Hero(es) of the Week

Today the airport unit of the San Francisco Fire Department was pressed into service as first responders for one of the most unimaginably awful reasons – a Boeing 777 coming up short on its approach to the runway, smacking its tail first (which then separated from the rest of the body of the plane), spinning round and ultimately skidding to a stop as the fuselage became engulfed in fire. It's a terrible tragedy – 2 persons lost their lives in the crash and 49 were seriously injured – but it's also a damn miracle, as there were 307 people on the plane altogether.

I'm not that far off when I say this happened in my backyard – we live 15 minutes from SFO, and we're basically the emergency aeroport shuttle for all of our friends who miss connecting flights, get stranded in bad weather, oversleep, are too hungover to fly, etc. This was a soul-shaking sort of event today, since air travel in this country has become so safe that you almost take it for granted – there hadn't been a major commercial aeroline accident at SFO since 1968, and there hadn't been one which was fatal since something like 1953. This just doesn't happen. You simply cannot believe a jetliner has crashed. You cannot believe that it is real.

And I just wanted to take this time to thank those first responders, who are the true heroes of every week. I live 2 blocks from S.F.F.D. Engine Co. #7, and the engines have a tendency to go revving thru the neighbourhood with sirens blaring at all times of day, which can be annoying. But the men and women of Engine Co. #7 also nearly collectively killed themselves (and I mean that in all seriousness, as several were injured) working in the middle of the night back in Sep. 2005 while fighting an inferno next door – a slum tenement not up to code which was gutted by a fire that nearly took all of the surrounding homes down with it, including mine. They very likely saved our house that night, and all of us who live in this neighbourhood were left standing helpless in the middle of the street, watching the fire crews work and hoping it would turn out OK. I will always be grateful for that. It was a horrific night I have since had the odd nightmare about – there were multiple fatalities among the residents of that building – and yet it could have been so, so much worse.

So I love the S.F.F.D., and their efforts at keeping people safe in this city never go unnoticed by me. They truly are The Good Guys and they are my Heroes For the Week – and pretty much every week, for that matter. A lot of people didn't lose today at SFO, in part, because of their efforts. But my heart goes out to the families whose loved one were lost or wounded. There are no words.

The LOSE has been on hiatus here, mired in deadline pressures and such at the office. We'll be back talking about silly games and such here in the near future. In the meantime, I need to write these damn articles. Nertz.

Unlikely Hero of the Week

Zion, Ilinois 1915. (foto found by cousin Pamela)

My hero of the week is me, because I've decided, on the occasion of my mumblety-mumbleth birthday, to lose something that I've had for a long time.

My nicotine habit.

Best confidante and best editor Laura said to me once, "sometimes I'm amazed that you're not addicted to everything." I actually have a really high tolerance level for most medications and drugs, which means a lot of stuff just doesn't do anything for me at all. The only two things that I can't seem to do without are caffeine and nicotine. One of those has got to go, and it ain't the coffee, I can tell you that.

I've stopped numerous times in the past two decades but I've never been able to quit. Big difference. And I've always resumed again. Usually, I just try to be nonchalant about it and try to act as if quitting is no big deal. This time I'm doing it differently: by announcing it here before a worldwide reading audience, I am setting myself up for PUBLIC SHAME AND RIDICULE here on the blog if I don't stick to it. Help me out here folks. Help me stay with this.

I think it'll be OK. Just as a warning, I'll probably be cranky, bitchy, agitated and annoyed. So, in other words, I'll just like I always am.

Seriously, I want this to be a positive, life-changing experience, so all shows of support are appreciated. Thanks everyone out there for reading. Keep reading and I'll keep writing, because someone out there will keep losing. But in this case, I'll win out in the end.

You May Already Be a Winner

The LOSE is back after a vacation, and after recovering from a vacation, because New Orleans was all that was advertised and then some. After that much food and that much alcohol and that much general abuse, my body seems to have responded by declaring a wildcat strike. I’ve been a little slow going here, and am only now just getting back up to speed.

This blog is an act of non-fiction, as such you should always remember that everything here is true, including the lies. Most especially the lies, in fact. But all stories, be they fictional or not, should have a compelling character at the center of it. Which we don’t in this case, since all we have is me, but we’ll pretend and see what comes. The main character of IN PLAY LOSE ventured to New Orleans not just to party like it’s 1999 but also to compete, and I found myself in a dangerous predicament that I’m decidedly unaccustomed to.

I was winning.

For those of you who don’t know me, let me explain my competitive pastime and passion: I play scrabble. I’m really good at it. I’m currently ranked about 56th in North America (although that number will drop slightly after my incompetent display at the Best of the Bay tournament this past weekend). So relatively speaking, I’m pretty good.

But what does that mean, actually? It means that, to be candid and somewhat boastful for the moment, I’m pretty much better at the game of scrabble than most people are good at anything. In the world, there are a very, very, VERY small number of people who are demonstratively better than I am. So, in that sense, I’m really good at this game.

But how good you are is relative not only to the general population but also to those who dare enter the same arena. The 12th man on the worst team in the NBA would mop the floor with the bushers playing pickup ball at the community center. Put him on the floor at the Staples Center or Madison Square Garden and he’ll most likely seem like he has no idea what he is doing. And for all of my relative aptitude at the game of scrabble, I’m also one of the least successful players of my level. I have won quite a few of the few shorter, 1-day tournaments we hold around the Bay Area, but I’ve never won a larger, multiple-day event in the more than 9 years that I’ve been playing.

Now, to be honest, this fact doesn’t really bother me that much. I’m not someone who wants to let a showing in one particular tournament define me. Regardless of whether you win a multiday (which has never happened for me), or you go 1-17 and finish last (which has ... sigh ...), you still have to play the next event. It’s a continous process, it’s open-ended and fluid by nature. Attaching too much weight or stock or value to one event doesn’t really make much sense. The game is still the same. (Shorter tournaments are much more susceptible to volatility and fluctuation, both in terms of the outcome of the game being affected by distribution of tiles and players getting a hot hand. A longer tournament mitigates some of those circumstances a bit, but not entirely.)

And I went to New Orleans mainly for the purposes of having a vacation and a party with some good friends of mine in a city I’ve always wanted to visit. The tournament seemed like little more than an excuse to do so, and my reward for spending 7½ hours cooped up in a cramped hotel meeting room playing a board game would be to have the opportunity to step outside the front door of the hotel, which was conveniently located on Bourbon St., and step into the veritable feast for the senses that is the French Quarter. Going into the tournament, I was far more intent on getting myself several platters of oystyrs on the half-shell, a Central Grocery muffuletta, and a Sazerac to swig than I was in winning the tourney. I had deëmphasized the tournament in my mind to the point where the actual results seemed somewhat irrelevant and caring about the result was a waste of energy. I was going to keep the tourney in perspective.

But then that stupid winning thing started happening, and I found myself starting to care. It’s really impossible not to care – you don’t get to be one of the best on the planet at something by not giving a shit. This is a competitive endeavour I’m talking about here, and one thing I’ve found to be true across the entire spectrum of competition is that those who are the best absolutely, positively hate losing. It’s pretty easy to detach and disengage from a tourney where you’re 8-8 after two days and have no hope of winning the thing. Success breeds pressure, it breeds expectations. The more that you win, the more important that it becomes that you win the next one.

So I got the hot hand on the first day of the Crescent City Open, took over first place after the 6th game and then found myself sitting at Table 1 for the 8th and final game of the day. (For non-scrabblers: the lower the table number, the better you’re doing in the event. I’ve been on the other end of that as well. At a tourney in Dallas, I was so bad on the first day that my table had an unlisted number and was located somewhere near Fort Worth.) I was so unaccustomed to being in this position that I couldn’t find my name in the standings or the table assignments posted on the wall. It didn’t even occur to me to look up at the top of the page, where the leaders’ names were printed.

And on the second day of the tournament, I lost a few games but so did everyone else, so I spent the majority of my day at Table 1 and finished the day with a 13-3 record, in first place overall and closing in on winning the biggest tournament of my career. It was a blast and I was having a great time, I was playing great and making good decisions and putting myself in position to win time and again. Playing the game in a style that I feel comfortable with, controlling the board and finding a good tempo to all that I was doing. But I wouldn’t go so far as to label it being in “the zone,” per sé. I’ve been in “the zone” on the basketball court before, where you get so focused and dialed in that pretty much every shot you chuck in the general vicinity of the backboard seems to somehow find the bottom of the net. “The zone” is surreal and somewhat otherworldly by nature, an altered state of higher consciousness. But this tournament didn’t feel like that all, actually. The New Orleans scrabble tournament, in fact, felt surprisingly normal as it was taking place. It felt – gasp! – like I actually knew what I was doing.

But it was a combination of factors – not the least of which being a food hangover from eating a steak the size of my head at Besh Steakhouse on Sunday night – which led to me waking at 4:15 a.m. on Monday morning, being hit with an enormous streak of angst, and struggling with physical discomfort for hours on end. The worst thing that excessive stress does to me is trigger migraine headaches. It also leads to enormous pains in my upper back which can sometimes last for days. I woke up on Monday and I was a complete, utter wreck. And the reason for this is obvious, of course – I wanted to win the tournament. Or, more appropriately, I didn’t want to lose the tournament. And there is a big, big difference between the two.

Like I said before, I’ve never one a multiday tournament before. The closest I’ve ever come before was at a tourney over Memorial Day weekend here in the Bay Area. It game down to the very last game, as myself and another woman were tied with 15-3 records. The game went very badly, as she got more than her share of the good tiles at the right times. This happens, of course, and scrabble is very much a game about managing chaos. You never have an idea of what you’re going to draw out of the bag, and all you can hope to do is prepare how to handle what does. And in this particular game, I was getting crushed and the game was growing short. I finally played a bingo and some other stuff to get within 70 points or so late in the game, to give myself at least a chance of winning, and out of the bag came KOOOSTU.

Blech. That rack is terrible.

And then my opponent put the word COLA on the board with the C on a TWS, in open space, and I had to do everything in my power to keep my eyebrows from arching straight off my forehead and launching into orbit, as I envisioned just how many cookouts I could have with the money I won after playing COOKOUTS for 95 points and I came back to win this game and win the tournament ...

And then she picked the tiles up and plays them somewhere else on the board and hits her clock. Sigh. That one stung a bit, to be close and fall short and very nearly have the miracle I needed to win fall from the sky.

The other time I was in position to win a multiday tournament was in San Luis Obispo and I was 10-1 with 5 games to go ... and promptly lost four out of the last five. There is a word for this sort of inept finishing, and that word would be “choke.” Because sometimes in scrabble you do, in fact, have games that you just can’t win, because you draw bad tiles and your opponent plays all the good ones, but not as many as games are truly unwinnable. Most of the time, it comes down to making mistakes, of which I made a boatload in that particularly disastrous series of games. It was a choke.

We all make mistakes, and the people who make the fewest mistakes are generally the ones who win. As the competition level is raised and the margin for error grows smaller, the mistakes aren’t always as obvious. Either that, or they’re exacerbated because they look so stupid. Think of the dropped pass in football, or the missed layup in basketball, or the routine grounder that goes between the shortstop’s legs. You’re thought when you see that sort of thing is “what the hell is wrong with that guy?” Mistakes do come in all sizes.

But all competitions are about who makes the fewest mistakes, in the end. And I’ve come over the course of playing 9 years to accept the fact that rarely do I lose because of bad luck. Most of the time I lose because of my flurry of incompetence. And the last thing I wanted to have happen in New Orleans was to succumb to my own propensity for self-destruction. I wasn’t afraid of losing. I was afraid of choking.

So I tried some visualization techniques to try and relax, somewhere during my 2nd or 3rd shower on this morning. At first I just repeated to myself, over and over, “I’m going to win today.” I would sometimes even say it aloud, and I mumbled it a few times while wandering alone about the French Quarter in the early hours. “I’m going to win today ... I’m going to win today ... but what if I don’t ... NO! STOP THINKING LIKE THAT! I’m going to win today.” I tried to imagine what it would be like to actually win, what the moment would be like and how I would react. Tried to picture it in my mind. But it all felt like an artificial construct. And “I’m going to win today,” was soon replaced with, “don’t blow it.”

And since my mind has an innate aptitude and ability for conjuring up worst-case scenarios, I’m then thinking about what will happen when I go 0-4 on Monday in New Orleans and blow the tournament and finish completely out of the money entirely. It could happen, you know? I’m playing some of the best players in the world, after all. They know what the fuck they’re doing and me? Me? I’m just a hack. I’m the guy who throws all the parties and jokes and clowns around, who is popular with the other players and isn’t afraid to laugh at himself. But no one takes me that seriously as a competitive player, and why should they? I’m really not that good!

Welcome to the vortex that is my mind.

The games start at 9:30 a.m., and by 9:15 I am a complete mess. I’m so stressed out that I can feel a migraine headache coming on. At any moment, I expect to feel a twinge over my right eye which will then explode into a seering sort of pain which can sometimes render me near blind. My neck and my back are killing me, this dull and constant ache which never abates. So much for being free and easy in The Big Easy.

I’m going to win today ... I’m going to win ... Oh, fuck, but what if I lose? It’s going to be so disappointing, and I’m always coming up short and it will be just another one of those times where I wasn’t quite good enough. At least I’ll have a good story, because all tales of woe and failure ultimately seem funny over time ... just don’t choke, don’t blow it. Lose because Jesse draws the fucking bag on you, which he only does on days that end in the letter Y. But what if I go 0-4 and gag on it? Especially because of all of the people that are rooting for me ... wait ...

I’d been posting status updates on my facebook page, and the response from friends elsewhere to news that I was leading the tournament in New Orleans was somewhat overwhelming. I had over 100 different people liking my statuses, or commenting, or sending me private messages or emails or texts, all of which told me that they were cheering for me, that they were following along with the standings online, and that they were all hoping I would win. And I really took that to heart. So many different people had wished me well, had been excited to see me succeeding. And I realized then that the reason I was so worried about losing was that I didn’t want to let them down.

Which is silly, of course. None of these people were going to see me any differently whether I went 4-0 or 0-4 on the last day of a scrabble tournament. It wasn’t going to change their opinion of me. Regardless of the result, you have to wake up the next morning and go on with your life.

And some people claim that they don’t care what people think, that all that matters to them is fulfillment of their individual goals. They want to win and be on top above all else. Well, OK, but guess what. That isn’t me! I don’t want to be that cold, calculating, win-at-all costs persona. I don’t want to be that narrow. I throw great parties. I make people laugh. I space out and do stupidly maddening things while playing scrabble, the sorts of things Top 50 players in North America shouldn’t do, but then miraculously scramble and still manage to win a lot of games in spite of myself. That’s just me. It’s who I am. I’m a spaz and a flake and a goof.

And people like that about me. In the moment, winning the tournament would feel great and losing would be an enormous downer, but it wouldn’t fundamentally change the way that I am. Nope. I’m one of the Good Guys who wears the white hats, and not one result was going to change that. In the end, being one of the Good Guys is more important to me, and I took the 100+ well-wishes from a wide cross-section of people – from scrabble experts to people who’ve never actually played a game of scrabble in their lives – as a life affirmation.

And so, when I sat down at 9:20 a.m. to prep for my first game of the day, I wrote across the top of my scoresheet, “you’ve already won!”

And I didn’t win, in the end, as if it really mattered. I went 2-2 on the last day to finish 15-5 and I wound up in 3rd place. The games that I lost didn’t go my way. Of course, in the moment, I was pissed when it became clear I wasn’t going to win. Who wouldn’t be pissed? We’re competitors, damn it. The game is fun, but winning is even more fun. The hardest part of it was playing three of my four games vs. three of my better friends on the planet, all of us knowing what knocking each other off would mean. It’s better sometimes to have an unknown enemy to whom you can assign all sorts of negative qualities and attributes, make them into some sort of evil beast who must destroyed for the good of all humanity. We love to beat our friends, just not as much when there is something on the line.

I didn’t win and it bothered me and then my head exploded into a full-on migraine which made it extremely difficult to do anything other than crawl under the blankets in my hotel bed. But after a good 2½ hour nap, two huge platters of oystyrs and a couple Jack Daniels on the rocks, I was fine. It was all good. Win or lose, I was still in New Orleans with my girlfriend and a bunch of great friends of mine, playing a game we’re all really good at and having a great time. What’s not to like about that?

I’ll win one eventually. Or maybe I won’t. I don’t know. It really doesn’t bother me that much. And, of course, having had such a great tournament in New Orleans, I promptly played another tournament this past weekend as was godfuckingterrible, reverting to my wildly inconsistent form which has plagued me in scrabble and pretty much everything else for that matter. The tournament this past weekend was the Best of the Bay championship tournament, which is also an excuse to have a day-long dinner party. I’m all about the parties. We all won, because we all got to eat and eat a lot.

And I would rather see a friend of mine win, which is what happened in New Orleans. The Good Guys win! And as a footnote to that San Luis Obispo debacle I spoke of earlier, I may have choked in the individual event but it wasn’t all bad. It was a California team tournament, North v. South, and we clobbered those clownshoes from the South. And we made a point of celebrating afterwards at a seafood joint in nearby Pismo Beach:

Yeah, that tourney turned out pretty well, didn’t it? In play EAT!

Hero for the Week

The LOSE has needed a few days to recover from the vortex that was New Orleans, where there wasn't a whole lot of losing going on ... well, maybe apart from my dignity ... but there was just enough losing to make it noteworthy in this blog, and I will get to that here at some point this weekend.

But it's time for the Hero for the Week, and this week it is Anouk, who lives in Montréal and whose birthday is today. She is ... uh ... a number of years old. I don't remember.

Anouk is my hero of the week because she is my soul sister and fellow loon, and when I first met her we were both acting as if we were the biggest losers on earth, but we've both been winning ever since in one way or another, and she reminds me from time to time (and hopefully I remind her) that not only does being crazy not have to suck, but it's really the purest way you could ever hope to be. And who cares if other people think you're nutters? The joke will always be on them.

So here's to my Hero for the Week. Happy Birthday, Anouk, and were you here, I would have made you go to the grocery store with me just for old times' sake.

My Hero for the Week

"Jesus was not a celebrity. Jesus was a hero."

That phrase was uttered by a priest during a midnight Christmas mass I attended in New Mexico. I am not religious, but had been invited by a friend to the service, and while some might find such statements to be trite, I took this particular one to heart. There are too many celebrities and not enough heroes in this world. Don't aspire to be the former. Strive to be the latter.

And thus I present my Hero for the Week, which probably won't be given out every week because I'll forget, but I like the sound of it. My Hero of the Week is a person who is losing at losing – that is to say, they aren't losing at all.

And my Hero for the Week is Kate, who is a musician here in San Francisco and whom I've known for 15 years. She has been fighting now for 7 of those years, fighting and fighting and sometimes I was afraid that she was going to lose. But Kate is also the toughest, most determined person I know.

This past week, Kate got the best news she's ever received from her doctors. She says she will never truly be in remission – but I know that just means she will have more chances to win. Kate doesn't like to lose and she isn't going to. She is going to keep winning and winning and winning some more.

And for that, Kate is my Hero for the Week. I strive to someday possess a similar strength.