20,000

January 18th, 2013

13.01.16-basketballLeBron James scored his 20,000th career point tonight against the Golden State Warriors, the youngest ever to reach that plateau. It’s an arbitrary number, really: The number of balls that have gone through a hoop during games. It doesn’t speak the sheer volume of balls that have gone through honing his shot, over and over again, learning, developing, expanding. Although I don’t believe LeBron’s focus on scoring points. He’s said so numerous times. His focus is on winning, doing whatever he can in order to make sure that his team is winning.

There’s a level of independence in LeBron’s accomplishment that I admire. He’s put himself in a position to win over and over again by going out on his own, not being afraid of being alone, being abandoned, being by himself. I’m not saying he did it alone, he’s certainly had the help and support of a group of people or he wouldn’t be where he is. But in contemplating the amount of effort, of time he’s spent sharpening not just his body, but his mind and their connection, listening to himself, learning himself…there’s something brilliantly independent in that. The amount of negativity, doubt, self-loathing, fear and nay saying that he’s had to endure and the staunch psychological confidence that he’s developed to excel at such a high level at such a young age is amazing.

As a codependence struggling with being emotionally present for myself, I admire that greatly. I get a little bit afraid when I think about taking steps as big as LeBron has. I worry a lot about letting people down, I worry too much about hurting people. I let my own concerns about the way that people might react to the decisions that I make. I let what I imagine people might say affect the decisions I make, and that is deeply bothersome to me. I understand that it is human to care what others think, but I need to give myself a chance to know what I think and want first, before I start to consider the people around me.

There is something to be said for excelling at a game. It is easier to quantify accomplishments. Although arbitrary, 20k is a milestone by which LeBron can measure himself. That quantifiability is, to some extent, accountability. For LeBron it is the accountability of his peers who, at this point, exist only in the pantheon. LeBron is playing against ghosts, which are even more intimidating that the imps that I battle with everyday; the looming legends that tower over him, growing larger by the day as rhetoric is poured over their altars. Those are big shoes to fill. Still, he has a ledger and he knows how to fill it.

It is harder, in everyday life, to find those milestones, those markers of accountability without them seeming futile or mundane. That is part of what the 365 is for me. To hold me accountable, to get me in the gym everyday. To work the muscles that I have. To establish this space that is my own, to nurture my independence and hone my focus and build my confidence. 365 is a long way from 20,000, but at the very least, it’s a start.

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Review: ‘Castle Waiting’

January 17th, 2013

13.01.15-Castle-Waiting-v2-_1I love comic books. I grew up on them, like so many middle class white adolescents did, given their striking visual power and their encapsulation as modern myth it was hard not to be drawn to them. I had a collection that was going to be worth something some day. I came of age at the time that the big publishers, Marvel and DC, began to exploit the implicit value of a “Number One”, the first comic in a series, by publishing variant covers and spreading the surface area out where it mattered most and then letting series dwindle and fade once the newness had worn off.

I’ve come and gone again from comic books. I’ve never had a hard monthly habit; most runs in pop comics aren’t worth sticking around for as far as I can tell, though I shouldn’t knock it, I suppose, since I haven’t tried it. But my beef with long running comic books is the same as it is with soap operas, unsurprisingly: A story’s no good if it doesn’t end. Modern superheroes have outlasted their value. DC’s recent attempt to restart their entire comics universe started strong but has since petered out, and really, seems to me, to be the absolute extreme of the “Number One” strategy, which is quite pathetic given the clout that DC’s got.

But these are machinations that I watch from afar. My indulgence in mainstream comics is limited to an occasional stack of Dark Horse books, usually of the Mike Mignola variety, and the occasional trade paperback that collects a story I’ve found interesting. My recent favorite has been Fantagrahpic’s repackaging of Stan Sakai’s Usagi Yojimbo. I’ve known about Usagi since I was a kid, but never picked up a copy until I stumbled across the Fantagraphics store in Georgetown. Now I try and go whenever I can to pick up a copy. The style is simple and uncomplicated, the stories are interesting and the characters likable. It’s a nice change of pace.

Last weekend, when I ran into the biker, I was in Georgetown to pick up new comics at the Fantagraphics store. My wife picked up a thick book with serious black and white drawings. I flipped through it and something about it caught my eye, and we took the first two collected editions home. It was a book I’d never heard of: Castle Waiting. Sitting down to read it this week, I’ve really fallen for it, it’s what they’d call a triple threat in show business: It can sing, dance AND act. The art is fantastic. Linda Medley’s line work is confident and flawless. She conjures a fantastical medieval world populated by humans, hybrids and fairies with an enviable ease. She packs her drawings with storytelling and doesn’t skimp on ambitious crowd or architecture scenes. The art alone is a mammoth undertaking.

But her storytelling skill seems just as honed. While the opening is a bit jumbled and it takes us awhile to get to the “real” story, the ride is worth it. The way in which Medley retells fairytales and recontextualizes our familiar tropes into a story of her own refreshes the myth. When we finally fall in with our heroine, Jain, the pacing slows to an enjoyable pace as we come to know the inhabitants of Castle Waiting, an isolated refuge for those who know how to find it. Medley’s cast of characters is lovely and believable, the kind of people I enjoy spending time with: smart, lovely people who like what they do, even if they don’t always like who they do it with. It’s clear that this is the tale of a family, a big sprawling family with cousins and uncles; generational, even, since Jain arrives at Castle Waiting midway through a pregnancy.

I’m 230 pages in and only about halfway through the first book. It’s quite a hefty tome, but I’m flying through it. The art is easy to read and beautiful to enjoy. Medley’s eye for detail is immaculate. This is certainly one of the best comics that I’ve read in a long time. In the tradition of Jeff Smith’s Bone and the better parts of Dave Sim’s Cerebus, Medley has conjured an amazing and beautiful world and filled it with flawed, interesting folks eking out their existence in a castle on the edge of the world. You’d do yourself well to join them there.

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Waking Up Sad – 15/365

January 16th, 2013

13.01.15-Bedroom_at_White-Pool_House,_Odessa,_TX_Picture_1847I woke up this morning sad. It was there waiting for me as I stir. I’m defenseless, my rational brain at its lowest point, unable to deny, rationalize, justify or explain any of the feeling. I lie there in the warm dark room just feeling the sadness. Its physical location is at the bottom of my sternum, where my ribs break into two sections and loop around to my back. I hold it there, cradle it, wondering what it is and where it comes from, asking it to speak, to dream, to give me a word or image that I can take with me and unravel throughout my day, to carry with me and feel, a talisman or artifact that would help give me some clue as to where this comes from and what I can do about it.

But it remains silent. The best I can do is promise that I will carry it with me throughout the day, a talisman in itself, a suspension of energy circling, dark blue-gray, drawing me down into myself, a damp gravity of its own. I feel myself wanting to cry, but not being able to, not pushed past the point of really feeling the energy expended in the crying would open things for me. I feel myself closing around the sadness, abs tightening until I am bent over, uncomfortably hunched, belly tight, shoulders closed. I breathe out and let go over and over again throughout my day, unable to truly let go of the pull of sadness for more than a few minutes; letting go, breathing in, moving forward. Checking in, letting go, breathing out, moving forward. It is a good way to deal with the symptoms, but I wish I knew how to let go of the disease.

This month I am safe: The bills are paid, there’s money in the bank and work on the table. My family is safe and supported, I am loved by family and friends both near and far; I am creative and productive, intelligent and employed. I have a new king size bed on the way and new toys in the mail. I am healthy, but for a sore knee, a knee that I make sore by playing volleyball, a game I love to play. And still I wake up with sadness in my breast.

I list all these things to try and convince my sadness that it is not sadness, or perhaps to trick it into revealing what it is that it is sad about. There is another list, too, I suppose. A list of imperfections that I am hesitatnt to repeat, hesitant to lend more power to. That does not feel fruitful to remember all the ways in which I tell myself I have failed myself, because I am not sure which of these is true and which of these I use to keep myself from really getting what I want, to really be happy.

And perhaps this is merely a residue, the accreted essence of all the illusion I have spent my life cultivating. Perhaps this is the hardening core of a life spent telling myself all the reasons I am not good enough, collecting all the excuses for why people don’t like me and why I’m not good enough to love. The pulsing heart of myself, a fat soft pearl of emotion that is just sad for having spent so much time feeling unloved and unlovable and now as I am letting myself off of the hook, lowering my standards from ultra-perfect to humanly fallible, as I am awkwardly, gracelessly learning to love myself and see the good that I do on a daily basis, maybe I am just sad for all the days I spent not doing that. All the days I spent wishing I was someone else, someone better, more beautiful and more intrinsically lovable.

As I write there is a loosening. The wet weight of sadness in my stern opens and spreads. I feel my spine open and stretch, the muscles next to the bones letting go, uncrimping. I feel myself rise to my full height and find balance there for the moment. This release is true, but perhaps not lasting. My unlovable posture has not disappeared; it will be triggered again by the work I do and the relationships that I am. I will encounter this posture again, and hunching over myself, discover the fat, cloudy marble of sadness that comes from choosing to put others before myself. But for the moment I am released of the sadness, able to see myself as strong, good, loving and lovable.

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Categories: 365

Georgetown Biker

January 15th, 2013

13.01.14-Harley-davidsonGeorgetown: Hipster bastion of south Seattle. South of SoDo it is a string of crumbling brewery buildings and sketchy businesses. Chalk full of Apple toting ragamuffins in various stages of ritual body modification or mismatched thift-ware swilling four dollar coffees and updating their Tumblrs. It is not all hipsters. There is also a biker bar, a club, a button making store, a music shop and the Fantagraphics store. I discovered the store accidentally, enjoying lunch at the biker bar with my neighbor before going to a discounted bartending class for his birthday. When we walked out, it was next door. Today, with some time to spare on our way home from Seattle, we pull of the freeway just outside the city, roll up through the dingy alleyway lined with cars and unhitched semi-cabs, rotten with potholes, and into the cramped street, buildings huddling together, leaning on each other for support. The cars the line the street tell a different story: we pull in behind a flawless silver Range Rover sport.

Nik gets a coffee and the kids and I roll into Fantagraphics. I am not a huge fan of their work, but they are my source for Usagi Yojimbo books. Dan Clowes and the Hernandez brothers dominate the shelves, and I was never a fan of Clowes, and have long since passed through my Love and Rockets phase (it’s just so hard to keep up!). We browse, taking home books four and five of the collected Usagi and a new title: Castle Waiting. We’re back in the car in under an hour, and I realize I need to pee before I get back on the road for nearly an hour. I head back to the cafe, hit the head and grab a couple of bottles of Fiji (no San Pellegrino, surprisingly).

As I head out the door back toward the car, there’s a biker ahead of me. Leather jacket and chaps over black Carhartts, he jingles, just a little, as he walks. His jacket is black with a mascot in the dead center of his back, a tiny latino with a giant sombrero. The name escapes me now, but it’s latino sounding as well. The letters are stitched in red. In his right hand is a plastic bottle that narrows at the top: lighter fluid. I can’t help but think of Rosie from Point Break, the knife fighting pyromaniac, and I’m suddenly tense: The middle of the day in a grungy part of Seattle, following a biker with a bottle full of lighter fluid. What the fuck is he going to light on fire?

He walks to the end of the block, where an alley opens to our left. On the far side of the alley is a row of dumpsters and behind that a chain link fence guarding a small patch of bare ground. Overhead the sound of cars launching themselves onto the 5 south, thundering down dirt and grime onto the cars parked beneath the overpass. The biker turns into the alleyway, walks slowly over to the dumpster…and throws the plastic bottle away, then turns around and begins walking back. I cross the street toward the car where my wife and kids are waiting for me to return so we can go home, and I realize: it wasn’t lighter fluid, it was motor oil. He’s a biker. He filled up his bike with oil, then politely and responsibly threw his trash away. I get in the car, turn the key and we all head out, sun shining brightly on a chilly day, the regal bulk of Mt. Rainier calling us homeward.

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To Build a Fire, Part 1 – 12/365

January 14th, 2013

13.01.12-FireplacePhotoMy senior year of high school, as I was struggling with what it meant to be a writer, my English teacher recommended Jack London’s story “To Build a Fire”. It’s a good story, but I didn’t like it. Far too depressing for me. I like characters who linger on, wallowing in their misery and generally making a nuisance of themselves to all the people in their lives who’ve already given up hope or embraced the absurd combination of cruelty and joy that seems to be the engine of life.

Looking back now, from my vantage point here in the chilly but not cold Pacific Northwest, I also realize that reading London’s story in Southern California was to miss the point entirely: we were never truly cold, and that makes a difference, not only because to appreciate the depth of desperation in the story it helps to have been very cold and known the bleakness of being lost, or at least feared being lost, in the snow. It wouldn’t be until much later, sliding through the snow down the side of a Chilean volcano under the threat of oncoming storm that I would begin to truly appreciate how cruel and swift moving the weather can be. But that’s a story for another time. Suffice it to say that growing up in San Diego we almost never lit fires, thus at 18, struggling with hormones, social status and the acute suburban malaise of an aspiring intellectual, the finer points of the difficulty of making a fire were lost on me entirely.

Arriving here in Olympia just over a year ago, the climate is not that much different from Wales. The major difference is that it’s gray here a LOT more than it was in Wales. In Lampeter the sky was ALWAYS changing. Situated just off the west coast of the UK the wind was constantly moving the clouds across the sky. It was wet, and it rained often, snowed occasionally, but the sky was never the same hour to hour. I miss that aerial tempestuousness greatly. The second major difference is the way in which we heat our houses. In the UK radiators are ubiquitous. I don’t know from heating houses, but radiators make WAY more sense to me from an economical standpoint: heat only the rooms you want, don’t waste money heating rooms that nobody’s in. Ideally turning off the vents in the rooms that I’m not using would work, but A: it never does, and B: this house is old and nothing works the way it should. We also had a lovely gas fire in the UK that warmed the room quickly and beautifully. The only drawback was the roaring sound it made, even at the lowest setting.

Here in Oly we’ve got shitty central heating streaming out of noisy vents. The house we’re renting us lovely, but uninsulated; the walls are cold to the touch. The windows are single paned, and before we got our dehumidifer they were coated in condensation every morning. Last year I arrived in Oly on January 9th, and two weeks later it dumped 2 feet of snow. I was shocked and went into a strange kind of survival mode that resulted in my car getting lodged in the snow on our street because it hadn’t been plowed but my family needed food. My focus was on surviving, not the cost of heating.

This time around, though, I’m more prepared and less concerned about the snow, and thankfully both snows this year have been light and melted away before dusk. What I am focused on is bringing our heating bill down by finding new and cheaper ways to heat the house. One of the first things I decided to try was using our fireplace. I thought it would be a simple, straightforward way to keep the house warm and simultaneously generate a cozy winter nest for the family. I’m not sure I could have been more wrong.

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Categories: 365, daily lit, Olympia, Pacific North West, Wales