Tell Me Everything

And a post on Luke, our dear second son, born 3/2/12, forthcoming.

For now: The dream.

Science tells us that today is the day when baby will be born, and it’s amazing that science could be spot on or we could be waiting another two weeks. To have a thing that you can’t know in your life is such a gift, and there’s a lot of that with kids, and I really like it.

The reaction to having a “Leapling,” as I’ve learned they’re called, has been interesting. It’s weighted mostly on the “Ohhh, that would SUCK for the kid.” Worry over confusion, “missed” birthdays, taunting far outweighs the idea that there might be some magic in it, or failing that, at least some novelty.

I saw Jonathan Stockton recently, my dear STOB from the old Burnett days. Stockty Old Boy (Stock T Old Boy, STOB, get it) and I were fierce table tennis competitors and trusted allies in the glory days of proof-reading at that old work-horse agency, the same one my parents met at, the same one that devoured my old man. The system was weak when we were employed there, and we manipulated and contorted it until it could be ridden in any manner we pleased. Then Paul left, and a void was created, and into that void stepped Phyllis, a dowdy middle-aged deadweight into a world of jumpy, under-30s, and everything was soon ruined. I jumped ship shortly after.

STOB spent his days in the proofreading bullpen writing a book on dive bars, and not a page of it is to be missed. Stocky showed me the lesson in practice that a good reader makes a good writer. I miss his tone and style, and write him occasional letters hoping he’ll give me a fix in return. He’s turned his focus to photography, and he’ll no doubt find success there, as it encompasses his love of vintage gear, patience, and character.

All of this to say STOB is a leapling, who put his condition like this: “It’s okay. Everyone remembers you’re birthday. But that’s a problem, because I can’t remember anyone else’s.”

Come visit. We’d like that.

E & O, Angeles National Forest, February

Sad to measure time in UFC fight cycles, but here we are, Brock Lesnar has retired, Nick Diaz is DQ’d for having weed in his system and Mr T is still nowhere to be found.

I think about him, and I miss him, though I’m glad-ish to report that I’ve stopped looking for him at night, shining flashlights into the shadows when I’m out on last walk with Mabel. I’ve stopped listening for rustles and meows, and I no longer mistake the cats that live at the top of the hill for my old friend.

Otis has stopped asking when he’ll come back. He accepted that he went out for a long adventure, but it took a solid month for him to stop wondering when that adventure would end and Mr T would come home. I brought him up the other day, and you could see his thoughts drift like clouds into the dark yesterdays, grasping only to swirl the fog.

There’s so much happening here, so many good things, a baby due any day, any hour. But I finally found this old picture, and I wanted to light a candle for my lost cat.

Mr T, YFC, Chicago, winter 2002

So many things on the tip of my tongue this morning. So much to tell you.

Been coping with angst about unreciprocated playdate texts to the local moms. There’s a great group of kids in the neighborhood with interesting, enjoyable parents to go with them. All boys around the same age that get along famously and parents with artistic careers and appreciation for beer, coyotes, and canyon living. But somehow, the group formed without me, and my invitations for day-of playdates are often ignored. I worry that this has to do with my social skills, but really the saddest part is having Otis request to see one of his friends and then have to listen to me go, “Okay, I’ll send them a note!” And then an hour or two later, leaving for wherever we’re going, having him ask, “What did they say?” And then I have to make up lies because it’s too shameful to say that I didn’t hear back, most likely because my social skills aren’t quite what they used to be, a condition that he’s directly responsible for. I’ve aired this out around the house and with a couple friends and have been reassured that it’s the technology, the group text that’s so easy to ignore, the timing, the schedules, the starting of preschool. But the fact is that it only takes a few ignored texts to make you feel like a real heal.

Guys, you probably already do, but just a reminder: respond to your text messages. Do it for me.

On a brighter note, the devastating effectiveness of my new McColloch Steam Cleaner provides me great joy. I was researching carpet cleaners when I found this little debbie, and though it didn’t seem right for the carpet, it lingered in my imagination for weeks. Imagine how clean I could get my sink, my tub, my oven, my grill. Think of all the urine that Otis manages to expel onto our new bathroom floors and think about how satisfying it would be to clean it with a blast of steam. I was haunted by the image of sparkling fixtures until I caved in and bought the thing. Amazon makes this kind of nesting too easy. It’s loud, so wonderfully loud that I have to wear ear protection. It’s dangerous — that steam could take the skin right off your hands. And I love it.

And then there’s a webbed site Mr Helin hipped me to called The Daily Pepaw, authored by Cory Berg’s girlfriend Christine. She uses verbatim quotes and simple illustrations to perfectly capture the singularity that is Cory Berg. How he feels about this I hope will someday be the subject of a Daily Pepaw.

The baby is due any day, which feels like any minute.

I gassed out in yoga class yesterday totally and completely about 40 minutes into the 90 minute class. I felt like a heavy weight at altitude. Arms heavy, head spinning, vomit at the back of my throat. Absolutely nothing left. I’ve been doing the same class now for a little more than 6 months. Discouraging, indeed. But I’m going back today.

And that’s it, dear diary. I’m really looking forward to spring break. I hope there’ll be other kids my age at Club Med. Mom said there would be. Even if there’s not, at least I’ll come back with a bodacious tan. Oh, that reminds me. I have to see if Mom will take me to a tanning place so I can work on my base. Totally bogus that you have to be 18 to use a tanning bed. It’s not like it’s cigarettes. Anyway, I have to go to bed. Math test tomorrow. Karakes blows. Love and peace.

He came to join our class maybe sophomore or junior year, and we were immediately suspicious of him. He was German, or more probably, a child of American parents born and raised in Germany. He had long hair and was tall and thin and dressed like Axl Rose. We all thought he was a narc, an undercover, 21 Jump Street character. He was treated with suspicion for a long while.

He fell in with the Corner Kids, the trenchcoated crew of ill-motivated outcasts who smoked cigarettes just across the street from school. Outcasts might not be the right word. New Trier was big enough that there was no one too weird, too different not to have a small group of peers with which to curse the world, teachers, other kids deemed happier or more popular. People fell into these groups, and it’s almost strange how the school was set up to let that happen and not encourage migration. The popular kids had Boys Club and Girls Club, and they had little rooms on the 2nd floor in which to meet. The theater kids had the theater hall in which to exchange backrubs and gregariousness. The Corner Kids had the corner to smoke and compare trip reports.

I know only two other facts about Bruce, both of which are sticking in my mind this morning. One was that he allegedly took Lisa Lombardi on rides on his motorcycle, and apparently she did this in the nude. This image has tantalized and haunted me since I heard the story. Lisa was my number 1 crush since 7th grade, and after years of circling around each other, finally made out a few times senior year. Having had so much feeling for so long, and being so young and sex still so mysterious and powerful, these make-out sessions rank near the top as the best of all time. Knowing (or believing) that Bruce Johnson had ridden this very same girl around on a motorcycle at night with no clothes on made it all the more confusing and at the same time better.

And then there was this about Bruce, and I know this because we shared a dance class together junior year. Dance class was an interesting way to avoid the drudgery of PE, which involved the humiliation of having to wear disgusting, smelly gym clothes and seemed mostly an exercise in obedience. There was no joy of a game in PE. It was about showing up and not talking when the PE teacher was talking and doing what the PE teacher told you to do.

Dance, on the other hand, was populated mostly by girls. You didn’t have to wear gym clothes, just something comfortable. It was an introduction to a love of girls in yoga clothes. And there was a guy who played weird music on the piano and djembe and then strange modern choreography that taught me more about moving gracefully than I ever gave it credit.

One day Bruce showed up to dance class with a shaved head, and shaved arms, and shaved eye brows. He was completely hairless. I asked him about it, and he said he’d taken a bunch of LSD and shaved everything off. Why, I asked. Because it felt amazing. He’d then gone down to Lake Michigan and gone swimming, and he said it felt like being in a new body in some cold, clear heaven. He looked so peaceful about it, so pleased with the result. I was still scared of psychedelics, but there was clearly something to them.

I don’t have any of my old yearbooks, and I can’t confirm that this character’s name was actually Bruce Johnson or if I’m remembering that wrong. I’m not on Facebook, so there’s so searching through the old mugs to see what he’s up to now. Which is fine. I’ll just stick to the three things I knew about him: That I thought he was Jump Street, that he rode Lisa Lombardi naked through the night on the back of his motorcycle, that he did acid and shaved off all his hair and jumped into the lake.

It feels like those three things should add up to something, and I think that’s why I wrote them all down here.

The reality, of course, is that Bruce is now 35 or so and most likely looking to stabilize his life, to add to its depth, to find its meaning. He’s somewhere looking to walk the path, and failing and succeeding in different ways.

When you dig at these things, the ways in which we struggle to actualize, to become better people, to find our spot in the world, you come up with far more meaningful stories. But it’s hard to shake the old ghosts, all fire, lighting up a long-ago darkness to which a dawn never seems to come.

I’m through reading memoirs, and Christ on his throne in heaven above knows that I’ll never write one. I wish David Sedaris got back to fiction, which he presented so well in Barrel Fever before denouncing it. I don’t want to write accounts of “the glory days,” and all the “weird shit I did in order to have something to write about.” I want to skip off those things like a stone flung from the shore and on it’s way to the deeper waters.

But again, here we are, working it out. I have yet to summon the courage to open a blank word document. I have had several opportunities, and have an idea of something to write when I do. It’s not fully formulated, but it’s probably enough to make the opening of a blank word document worthwhile. I’m showing up here almost as penance. We’ll find out whether or not it was worth it when I summon the courage to open a blank word document and start writing.

I’m suddenly troubled by a strange recollection. I feel like I remember hearing that Bruce died in a motorcycle accident somewhere in the Pacific northwest when we were in our early 20s. I feel like I heard he was decapitated in this accident. Did I hear this at our 10 year reunion, or maybe sometime before? Was it Bruce or was it someone else?

I don’t really know who reads this blog anymore. According to the thing I check that counts for me, there’s some 200 of you. I’m hoping in your numbers there’s someone who has some information on Bruce Johnson, or the man I’ve been calling Bruce Johnson. If there is, it’d be a good time to speak up.

Every day, a little further from the dream I allowed myself to dream, and so closer to where I am and who I am as a writer.

I’m desperate to get back on track, to have the next thing, to be writing again (other than these disparate, staggering accounts of how I’m desperate to get back on track). My eyes scan the clear horizon, my mouse hovers above Microsoft Word, ready to open a new document. But to write what, exactly?

The first temptation is the most obvious. Maybe I can go back and fix something about the script. Colin said he had some ideas. Maybe I should implement them before it gets sent out anywhere else. Colin’s had success, Colin knows the business, Colin knows story.

But no. For now, the piece stands as I wrote it. I think at bare minimum it suggests the movie that it can be, and if there’s any interest in the subject and the voice, doubtless that it will come with notes and suggestions as to the story. And so it stands.

The second temptation is to ape other writers. I’m currently reading Stuart Dybeck’s short story collection “Childhood and Other Neighborhoods.” His stories are breathtaking in their simplicity, detail and clarity. Set in and around Polish neighborhoods in 1960s and 70s Chicago, his characters, immediately recognizable and honest, transcend into symbol without losing shape. It’s elegant, straight-forward writing.

The kind I could do? I’ve written short stories in my day, and God knows I’m done writing first-person, memoir stuff (aside from what you see here; this, obviously, doesn’t count). I love short stories. But what would I write about? The suburbs? New York? Los Angeles?

It’s so hard not to immediately start to copy the style of the writer you’re reading, at least, when you’re in a bit of a flail. If not in style, then in subject, or theme or form.

Then I think, maybe I should go take a class. Dybeck teaches creative writing — sure, he’s in Western Michigan, but maybe I could find a writer out here I admire and connect to and study with him or her. Then they could tell me how to write.

I would love that. Truly I would. It would require a great swallowing of pride that I think would be good for me, and it would require an investment of money, which I think would both humble and dedicate me to a craft in which I’ve already put so much time and effort.

The reality is that my life isn’t quite conducive to that at the moment. Maybe that’s an excuse, maybe it’s a reality. All I know is that with a two-year old and the second due imminently, I haven’t taken the first step to finding a mentor.

Except, maybe this is the first step. Recognizing that I want one. That I need one. Maybe the flailing is destined to continue until someone can show me how to make a dance out of it.

Patrick DeWitt? Are you interested? Gary Shteyngart? I would be happy to have a letter writing mentorship. I’m a good letter writer. Big Al, Uncle Steve and my mom can attest to that. Maybe you want to learn the ukulele and we could work out some sort of trade…

In the meantime, I suppose I’ll have to settle for dawn as my mentor. The way these lavender clouds are hovering above northeast Los Angeles like beatific divinity, it’s hard to want for more.

An old friend and ukulele student and his take on Mitt Romney’s weak dedication to his faith. Love God more, man!

Yesterday’s whispers, all beer breath and slap happy, persistent as the swinging tides, anchor me in darkness. I put in a week of chanting, shouting God’s name over the terrible, happy noise, but after a week, a month, it’s clear this will take a lifetime, and I’m tired, and the world is difficult.

There’s an element of discipline to the going forward that I understand in terms of music. When I wanted to get good at ukulele, I practiced diligently. I carried the thing with me everywhere and played scales and worked on long, tabbed out arrangements of jazz pieces. I watched old time players like Roy Smeck and Ukulele Ike and tried to copy their moves. It was fun and exciting to be progressing on a thing that was novel to me.

Then I started to busk at the Hollywood Farmer’s Market, and I put all those things I learned out into the world, every week, for five hours at a time. And at that point, my playing was as good as it would ever be. I knew literally hundreds of songs by heart. They would come through me. It was amazing.

And exhausting. To stand on pavement, often in the sun, with most of the weight on one foot (as I had rhythm instruments on the other) and sing and play above the push carts, the conversations, the vendor’s stereos would just obliterate me. I eventually got a little amplifier, but it was finicky and heavy and awkward. After two years of being at the market every Sunday at 7:45 am (barring travel), I called it quits.

Most of the other people who busked in my day aren’t there any more, either. There are a few, however, who were there when I started and are there to this day. The jazz band has amps, the bluegrass band has numbers, and both take lots of breaks. But the English black guy who’s repertoire includes everything from “Grandma’s Hands” to “Waters of March” continues to play unamplified, alone and on his feet. And he’s almost always playing when I walk by. Ditto the guy they call the Japanese Bob Dylan up near Hollywood Blvd, though he uses music, and I’ll never understand why because most of what he plays sounds like a loud, one-sided Japanese argument after a long night of karaoke. But it’s important for him to get the words right, and who am I to say…?

My ukulele playing suffered tremendously. All those songs I knew? Gone from my heart. I can play them if I have the words and the chords in front of me, but that has all the thrill and appeal of ordering linguini and clams in a restaurant when once you’d make it from scratch with no recipe.

So I moved on to piano, and wrote a bunch of songs and played a lot, and liked it. Here’s one. But after Otis was born that was a little too loud, and besides, I’d hit a plateau. Piano’s hard, and to get where I wanted to get required outside instruction and drilling. So it was on to baritone ukulele and then tenor guitar, where I’m currently enjoying the long rise and explosion of novel skill.

Is this the path to musicianship? Absolutely not. Will I chart a similar, meandering course instead of diligently walking the path towards enlightenment? Probably. The world is difficult, and it’s damn hard to go all in on anything. So much time, so much fear.

Will I continue to get up at 5 to watch the sky go from black to turquoise to salmon to blue and talk about these things? As often as I can. That part is surprisingly easy. There’s a huge disparity in the end result, of course.

But still, the light’s so pretty. And what bird is that singing?

Disclaimer - I’m really getting loose with what I’m posting here. There used to be intention and standards. Per the previous post, those have currently been suspended. While it’s not pure, unedited, stream of consciousness writing, these posts are getting pretty raw. This one, in particular, made me want to come back and write this disclaimer. It’s long, it’s complain-y, it’s unnecessary. But this has become my work-out space. Occasionally I’ll lift a big, huge bar that sways in the middle as it goes up and thunders when it drops, but these days, you’ll do well to expect lots of reps with unimpressive weight.

I imagine it’s extremely common to the modern experience to be bombarded with information you don’t care about. Billboards, radio advertisements, circulars, bumper stickers, phone solicitors all press on your head and require some effort to tune out. But it’s not too difficult. And besides, it’s something everyone has to do and agrees is annoying. Nobody likes those things. Those things are just part of the noise of living in a world with billions of other people.

But then there’s the noise of the things that people like and want to talk about that you have no interest in. This is harder to tune out, because even if you have no interest in it, the attention it gets, the intensity with which it surrounds you, presses against you like a pervert in the subway. You’re practically forced to wonder, “What is going on with that, anyway?”

The list of things that I put into this noise category keeps growing, and I know that when I list it here, each item will inspire one of two reactions. Either you’ll agree with me, maybe passively but still agree, or you will question my determination to be a well-adjusted, well-informed member of society. I don’t say this to challenge you. I just think this is going to be a tough list. Probably for all of us. But still, here it is.

Things that a Great Many People Care About That Require My Effort to Tune Out

Celebrities

While I’ll admit that I’m not immune to flipping through an US Weekly during air travel (if E buys it), it’s hard for me to fathom the fun of charting a celebrity’s life. Gossip about people I know is way more interesting, and it makes me feel terrible to do it. Gossip about people I don’t know feels a little bit like masturbating to underwear ads in the newspaper.

I will admit, however, that the noise level of celebrity gossip is fairly minimal, although I am aware that Whitney Houston just died, and why I have to know that — or make a concerted effort not to know that — seems strange.

Awards Shows

E likes to see what people are wearing, and I guess because I do like mixed martial arts fighting that’s not something I feel like I can judge, but neither one of us have any stomach for the actual show. We tried to watch the Golden Globes to catch a glimpse of Jake, but the whole thing is so foreign to me that watching the Indian or the Vietnamese or the Russian version of these things would be just as entertaining (if not more so).

This noise is mercifully seasonal but intensely unbearable. I find when people I respect and find genuinely funny tweet about an awards show, I get sad. I hate to think of them sitting there watching. I guess the comedians might argue, “It’s for work, I have to stay current,” and then I get sad for comedy.

Sports

Okay, so I like the Cubs, that’s true, and I like MMA, and that’s true, too. If you took either one of these away from me, the blip in my life would be nearly unnoticeable. Sure, I’ve blogged quite a bit about the Cubs and quite a bit about fighting, and thus contribute to the noise, especially the niche noise which the vast majority finds uninteresting. But it’s a drop in a very large bucket against professional and college football, professional and college basketball and major league baseball minus the Cubs (which usually happens around June).

When it comes time for champions to be determined in a bowl or series, the noise becomes deafening, even if you’re not in the town the contenders are representing. To me, that’s when sports are at their most absurd. When you step back, it’s hard not to argue that we’ve chosen to assign real value at an incredible proportion to a completely arbitrary set of skills and then become desperately invested in the outcome.

To be fair, I know quite a few people who follow sports in a thoughtful way, and appreciate varied aspects of domination that go into a competitive enterprise, and can learn from that, apply it to their lives and be pleased with the outcome. To me, it’s too much time and effort to understand all the various players and their strategies for winning to be interesting.

I follow the Cubs because I chose to invest at a young age, to identify with the underdog, the good-time Charley’s, the loveable losers, the cursed. And while I’ve wanted the Cubs to win and defy each of these labels, I don’t mind projecting those aspects of my own existence onto an external entity and watching the results.

I follow MMA because it’s easy. There’s no leagues or season to keep track of, no trades or dynasties. There’s just two fighters with different strengths and weaknesses and no one knows exactly how it’s going to play out.

Politics and the News

This is where I think I lose you. Even among the most mindful there can be a feeling of “How can you be effective if you don’t know what’s going on in the world?” Or in your own country? Or with the money you give to your government?

This one’s the hardest, as well. Information about current events is nearly unavoidable, and I admit to knowing a fair amount about the Republican primary, the crisis in the Euro zone, the Arab spring, the Prop 8 rulings, the cracks in No Child Left Behind and on and on. I do still feel a need to know these things, but it’s something I want to transcend, because this knowledge doesn’t do anything. If I picked one issue to follow and work on, that might be different, but I don’t. I just put on NPR and listen to things that are happening because it’s hard to make the universe materialize in front of your eyes every second of every day.

I could make more of an effort to isolate myself from this noise. I could cancel my twitter account, stop visiting the news sites, and listen to music instead of NPR. But I don’t. Or at least, I haven’t. And it’s not because I like to have something to complain about. It’s because it’s hard. I don’t want to lose you. I don’t want to be that weird-o who has trouble in social settings. It’s already hard enough. In a group of guys? With as little attention as I pay to sports? It’s humiliating. Take out pop culture and the news and you put yourself in a position to have to cut to the quick.

It reminds me of a story Kramer just told me, of a woman who approached her in the Bodhi Tree Bookstore. Kramer was browsing books, and this woman tapped her on the shoulder and asked, “Do you lie?” And Kramer said what we all would say in this situation: “Uh…what?”
“Do you lie?” the woman asked again.
“Like, tell lies?”
“Yes.”
Put on the spot and not really knowing what to say or where this was going, Kramer decided to be honest. “I guess so…sometimes…”
The woman took this in, then asked, “Why?”
“I don’t know…?”
The woman nodded. “Just asking around.”

I don’t want to be that woman, putting people on the spot and making them uncomfortable with immediate intimacy that’s deemed impermissible in our culture. But I wonder if it’s not more interesting…

Post-claimer - I want to say again that this might seem like the grumpiest, old man-y-est, pseudo-hippiest blog I’ve ever written, and it may well be, but please see the previous post as to what’s happening and please follow my advise not to read these things unless you like to watch a guy running 9-minute miles with a heart-monitor on.