“I had a strong premonition that the big rollover was going to be an omen. An omen of how the rest of my life would turn out; how I would face the larger events. I wanted to do something grand—be in a club or bar or rave and shout the countdown with drunken comrades, usher in the new millennium with hooliganish ecstasy.

Instead my friends dropped out on me to watch ABC’s coverage of the ball dropping. I ended up at a friend’s house watching movies and having assorted shots of alcohol. As they began counting down, however, I realized how I could not damn myself to a future of watching other people have fun on television. I couldn’t understand how watching a massive celebration on television is better than being in that same massive celebration. Real time.

I left, out the front door at the stroke of midnight and began walking home, from Anaheim to Whittier. That's really far if you don't know. Both Disneyland and Knott’s Berry Farm are in Anaheim so as I walked the fireworks from their celebrations lit up the night sky. I passed a church where they were singing religious songs with rambunctious fervor. I passed a goat farm, probably the only goat farm in Anaheim, CA. My brother picked me up in Fullerton and took me home. At least I wasn’t watching tv.”
- In response to Hope, January 1 2000

A decade ago, amidst the euphoria of a new millennium, with all my hopes in the air, hopes which could only be disappointed in part, I began a lonely walk from Anaheim to Whittier. I wanted a televised event and what I got was the sound of my footsteps and the cars zooming past me as I walked toward my undersized apartment. I got my brother, who picked me up just shy of Malvern, who knew I would have spent the whole night walking without him to rescue me.

Last night just after midnight I repeated the process which is now ritual: a trip outside, thoughts of who I have become and what another year, or decade, has done to me. My trip, with the temperature submerged below freezing along a snow canvassed path, was necessarily short but the discomfort was so synchronous to the feelings in my heart that it seemed somehow orchestrated in the long span of things.

The discomfort was synchronous and warranted. What other feeling can accompany a year of so severe a loss? What can be thought in such circumstance? That God is with me, that He loves me, I am well aware but is He not also with me outside in that cold and darkness, as my fingers experience the sharp prickles of the weather through my gloves, as my breath is drawn in short, quick pulls and my nostrils, seemingly bewildered by the harsh winter air lose faculty and begin to secrete their contents?

My intuition all that time ago proved correct: the pattern I established for a new year, indeed a new millennium, would be a cyclical journey for each year’s end and beginning. What I couldn’t know that night ten years ago as I walked away from my friends in search of a higher ideal that I had so carefully crafted over the years, was that walking alone with broken daydreams was a foreshadowing a night a decade later when I’d walk alone with reality, not daydreams, broken around me.

One year ago I shared part of the night with my daughter. There was not a part of my future I could separate from her; she was the object of the hopes which I’d allowed to recede for myself. It was a real and direct transfer; there was nothing I could imagine for her that I wouldn’t obtain as much satisfaction (even less!) in wanting for myself. I had begun to realize parts of her being that I hadn’t preconceived, discoveries that I understand now are what make parents so proud and mystified by their children. She was beautiful beyond the subjectivity of my emotion as a father. Her feet were dainty miniatures of my own. As she found her voice, she would make her sounds to the delight of her mother and I; conversations of love on the living room floor.

Now that she is gone, the hope I’d transferred is still with her. I encounter it when I visit the cemetery, when I find myself looking at its evidence in the portrait etched on her stone. I can’t be there without encountering that feeling of loss in an acute, almost tactile sense. Sometimes it is in the silence. Sometimes it’s in the noise of crows I can see in my peripheral gaze. Sometimes it is in the sound of the wind. Sometimes it is in looking at my wife who returns the look with an understanding that neither of us put out in the open: we will spend the rest of our lives bereft because all we had is with our little girl, wherever and however she now exists.

My decade started after midnight, listening to my footfalls in a cathedral of quiet, freezing cold. Now I find myself anonymous, unknown more than a hundred miles away. If ever an epoch could begin from a sunken place, this is it. Although my intuition about the omen of beginnings is still with me, it can be said that I’m starting things with a heart that, although damaged, has not given up completely. I start with the love of my wife as we exchange places picking one another up in our journey together, tightly bound by our loss. It begins with the paradox of God’s love, which is still true even when life feels like the air outside in a Dakotan January. I cannot tell you how I know that, but I do. So firmly do I believe that I’m willing to stake the life, and death, of my daughter upon it.

Omaha, NE
January 1, 2010

I was 13 at the time that this all started. My youth and its accompanying energy abounded as I bounced my rubber ball on an outdoor tarmac court, new to the game and new to the introspection that being there would give me in life. When school was out I felt compelled to practice, to dribble and imagine my opponents confounded expressions as I effortlessly evaded their attempts to contain me. I would jump and feel time slow down as the ball made its way from my fingertips towards its ultimate goal. God makes us for things and I had hope that my lanky frame had special reasons for being a smaller proportioned version of the college kids I would watch on TV.

Then I was 16 and the reason I was practicing alone was because I’d played past the point that everyone else wanted to – I’d regress into that old form of imagination I’d developed in my first teenage year. I’d have the ball and shoot it from 25 feet away thinking as it arced its way down “she loves me, she loves me not” and wait for the inevitable: my victory over odds, a perfect concoction of love and basketball. I skipped lunch on schooldays because my dreams were enough sustenance.

All that time, all those dreams.

By the time I am 28 I know my dreams were about something else. My Achilles tear is two years past and although I can still play other things go wrong. Competitive play seems to always lead to some form of injury so I relegate myself to simple practice; shooting around like I did when I first learned the game. When I get to a court and allow myself to drift into the past it’s amusing because I can’t connect what hope that teenager had with my current state except to bemoan feeling old. I can’t help but do it anyway – it’s my best time of Introverted Thinking.

I’m 34 now writing after an evening spent absent mindedly shooting around on an empty basketball court when I’ve put the pieces together in an act of deliberate distraction the way Archimedes did when he was soaking in the tub before shouting eureka. I’m not shouting but the clarity with which things make sense is like the warmth of a car in the sun after a cold day. The irony is this: 21 years of playing alone has given me the coping mechanism with which I can think the daughter I lost. It’s the one place I can let physicality offload my reasoned thinking and memory, shifting my mind into the sort of cruise control of repetitive motion and exercise. If God made us for things so trivial as a game like basketball, He wasn’t thinking as I was of the ability to make the kind of undeniable beauty the gifted evoke; He was evolving the companion He would give me for the grief I’d live with when I was no longer young

So I shoot the basketball and think about belief and about how we conceptualize the act of believing. In the dark corner of spacetime that I occupy, what do I believe about religion, afterlife, and my daughter Lael? Will I see her again?

Within the tradition of Protestantism I’ve grown up in there are the devotees of Swiss theologian John Calvin who propound a great theme of God’s sovereignty and choice: that He knows we can never choose holiness (turning from sin, redemption from the bad through the death of Christ) and as an act of His own grace selects those who will realize their sin and inability to desire Him. Do I believe I will see her again in a Christianized conceptualization of heaven, I wonder, because I can’t accept alternatives as an act of divine will?

A good Calvinist¹ would nod and find themselves opening their Bible back to passages that comfort them in the book of Romans, psychologically accosting themselves for the evil they harbor and feeling all the better for realizing their Total Depravity because doing so gives them more gratitude when they consider God’s act of grace in saving them, in making believers of them.

Swish. Clang.

I’m chasing the ball back and forth allowing a crescendo of play to coincide with the feeling stirred up in my heart. I think of how, like my old dreams, the intellectual arguments for belief used to be so real to me. They mean nothing to me now in my present state. It would be like my meeting the girl I had a crush on when I was 13 and playing basketball for the first time now that I’m in my middle thirties: we’d look at each other, bemused at how time, weight, and life have made of us creatures we couldn’t imagine as youngsters. The past is relevant only in that we knew each other and that’s why we recognize our present day selves.

I was reading earlier this week about Mother Teresa and what some call a crisis of belief. She wrote once to a confidant:

"Jesus has a very special love for you. [But] as for me, the silence and the emptiness is so great, that I look and do not see,—Listen and do not hear—the tongue moves [in prayer] but does not speak ... I want you to pray for me—that I let Him have [a] free hand."

To another:

“So many unanswered questions live within me afraid to uncover them — because of the blasphemy — If there be God — please forgive me — When I try to raise my thoughts to Heaven — there is such convicting emptiness that those very thoughts return like sharp knives & hurt my very soul. — I am told God loves me — and yet the reality of darkness & coldness & emptiness is so great that nothing touches my soul.”

Yet she continued her work. Yet she continued her public profession of faith. I understand what for her was little to do with feeling and everything to do with the grit of a personal choice because I now find myself doing the same thing: deciding my belief in the absence of emotion and reason. She wasn’t always like that; before starting her work in Indian slums she felt witness to direct encounters with Jesus, both vivid and concrete. But that was before forgotten people, poverty, and most importantly death took hold of her life as her ministry took her to these states of being which most “normal” people take care to avoid².

I wonder if it isn’t because death under some circumstances, although natural, defies our sensibility in a way that removes our old friends of emotion and reason a place in ordering our world. There’s the distant and vague death that we can accept and there’s the death that leaves us bereft of all that we can care for like the old Ukrainian man we see crying at his wife’s grave each day.

As the crescendo unravels and I feel my body getting tired – the shots I make are all short because I’m no longer using my legs to help with the energy to project the ball towards the hoop. I’ve got to do one more thing before I leave. From 35 feet away I take a few dribbles and then shoot saying in my heart “she loves me, she loves me not” – she no longer a vague woman of my destiny but instead my daughter Lael to whom any worthwhile effort of mine I now dedicate.

Swish.

I’m almost done but there’s a new part to the ritual of leaving. One more shot, same spot, this time my heart whispering “she hears me, she hears me not.”

The ball goes into the basket with a resonating thud from the back of the rim and I can go home.

¹Ironically neither was Calvin a “Calvinist” nor was Luther a “Lutheran.”  More here.
²Mother Teresa has many critics. I find telling the difference between how each responded to seeing trauma and suffering. Perhaps her most vocal critic, Christopher Hitchens, wrote the following after seeing chaos in northern Uganda:

“I… tried not to notice the hundreds of other eyes that were hungrily turned toward me in the darkness, wondered what the hell the actual politicians, here or there, were doing… , and managed to get out of the night encampment just before the equatorial rains hit and washed most of the tents and groundsheets away.”

Reading last year’s birthday post reveals to me what a different state of mind I occupied in this short span of a year. Here’s what I thought: life is in a steady grind, I work at BigCo, my wife is pregnant, and I’m going to sail kicking and screaming (for effect) into the sunset of the life of a salary man. I’m going to make a big show of both the sacrifice and joy it is to be a father; I’m going to figure it out and explain it to my friends who are afraid of the prospect of children. I’m going to give up the notion of grad school and be more practical (safe) since I’m not going to have time for frivolity. My child is going to be, despite all the odds, a rampant success, a fulfillment of his or her parent's deferred dreams, hopes, visions, wishes, etc and etc.

Now things are different. Derailed. Demolished. I’m turning 34 in a few minutes and what I have to show for it is a kind of emptiness that is created when life that is full is drained. The child I planned would take me so many places is gone. I wake up each day with that realization, a steadily sinking one that becomes more real with each passing minute: a fuzzy notion that everything is wrong, a dreadful nagging about rare misfortunes, a concrete realization when I see her little ballerina socks on my end table, and then a depressing wall when I’m up and trying to remember what it felt like to take on a day with the innocence of hope.

I don’t have much to show for turning 34 at all except that amazing experience of being a father being given and taken away.

This is the part where I’m supposed to write about the little sliver of hope, or about God, perhaps quoting a verse or two. “What a heartwarming struggle!” you might say to yourselves and then next year I’ll have a pleasant confirmation of that little sliver of hope I wrote about on my previous birthday. The road through shadows and death will have come out to a pristine oasis of a deeper self.

It might be so. Check back in a year and I might have all those wonderful things to share. I’m old enough and tired enough to accept that storyline.

But right now the thing that is inexorable is that the struggle and hurt I’m writing about here in vague terms has a name – her name is Lael. She was beautiful. She cried a lot but we could usually calm her down by bouncing on an exercise ball. I’d hold her sometimes when she slept and when she was awake she’d play with a toy that would play the same songs over and over – songs that many a nonparent would find annoying but which I would give anything to hear again now. She would fall asleep in the baby swing with her head always cocked to her left. She had long eyelashes. I fed her a bottle on most nights. She didn’t sleep through the night for a long time and when she finally did, Kristin and I were so happy. I was exhausted all the time but I was happy. I made two big realizations that I’ll always hang onto: that of all the creations I dream up in the totality of my imagination, she was the best thing I will ever attribute to myself, and that no man knows his capacity to love until he has children.

So here’s to 34, being broken, and to the daughter I lost on father’s day.

“Beauty is not the goal of competitive sports, but high-level sports are a prime venue for the expression of human beauty. The relation is roughly that of courage to war.

The human beauty we’re talking about here is beauty of a particular type; it might be called kinetic beauty. Its power and appeal are universal. It has nothing to do with sex or cultural norms. What it seems to have to do with, really, is human beings’ reconciliation with the fact of having a body.”
- David Foster Wallace, “Federer as Religious Experience”

“Greek philosophers considered sport a religious and civic – in a word, moral – undertaking. Sport, they said, is morally serious because mankind’s noblest aim is the loving contemplation of worthy things, such as beauty and courage. By witnessing physical grace, the soul comes to understand and love beauty. Seeing people compete courageously and fairly helps emancipate the individual by educating his passions.”
- George Will, “Men At Work”

The play is broken.

A referee has blown a whistle just before Derrick Fisher passes the passes the ball to Lamar Odom. Odom, who having anticipated the space and time to make his move unopposed, continues anyway, and with a single motion, palms the basketball.

Palming, or holding a basketball with a single hand, fingers stretched around the curves of the ball, requires large hands and finger dexterity. If you go to your local basketball court you should see someone working on palming the ball as though it’s a half conscious attempt to copy the move that Odom is about to make. A person with smaller hands must rely on having enough finger dexterity to palm the ball although it doesn’t take much to dislodge the ball: too much motion with the hand, a defending person tapping the ball while it’s in their fingers, or even simply time as the fingers lose their grip from sweat or fatigue.

When Odom catches the ball with his left hand, his body is facing the side of the court about 6 feet from the basket. A fraction of a second after the catch, making the motion seem simultaneous with the catching and palming of the basketball, he jumps toward the basket, turning his body the 90 degrees clockwise it needs to be facing the hoop directly. This is a natural turn for him since he’s left handed just as right handed players find it easier to rotate counter clockwise while jumping. Odom not only has great leaping ability, the quickness with which he can do it makes his play like that of a smaller player. This is remarkable and even in the NBA, a rarity for any player at 6’10”.

In college, we had a player for our team named “Big Mike.” Mike was 6’10”, like Odom, and since our school played in a lower level league than larger universities, it was rare that he played against players of equal size. It was not infrequent to see Big Mike play against players who only could stretch to 6’5” – a full 5 inches shorter. Although this paper advantage could have translated to his exploitation of opponents on the court, he had a cardinal weakness. He had a terrific problem with jumping. In layup drills, where a player dribbles the basketball, unopposed, towards the hoop and “lays it up” or makes an effort to put the ball in the hoop, he would often try to dunk (throw the ball downwards through the hoop by jumping high enough that his hands were over it), barely able to stretch his hands over the empty basket. Although it was comical at the time, it’s a truism that players of that size often have a hard time with the coordination it takes to plant their feet and jump.

Dale Brown, one time LSU coach, remembering his first meeting with Shaquille O’Neal, the self described “most dominant big man to play the game,” said that O’Neal showed up to a basketball camp when he was 13 years old, at 6’9” asking how he could improve his vertical jump. His problem at the time was similar to Big Mike. Even in his senior year of high school basketball, his vertical jump was a mere 16”. Unlike Big Mike, at whom we would find ourselves laughing in puzzlement as he tried to jump the few inches it would take to dunk, he was able to overcome this in college, improving it to 42”.

Odom’s jump now has him in mid-air, facing the basketball hoop. The basketball he has palmed is stretched up, at an angle as his back arches, a windup maneuver that belies his intent: it looks like he’s going to slam dunk the basketball with as much force as he can when his body snaps forward from its arched state into the angled form players usually assume for a slam dunk from that distance. This posture of the body was seen, in almost perfect form, in the 1988 dunk contest when Dominique Wilkins threw himself a lob to himself off the backboard – so perfect, in fact, that it contributed to his defeat of Michael Jordan and the title of the NBA dunk champion.

But Odom doesn’t dunk. His body snaps forward but he brings the ball, still palmed in his left hand, around in a wide arc, above the rim, almost dropping it to fall through the net from above except that he lets it roll off his fingers, a casual flip of the ball into the hoop.

It is Plato’s theory of ideals brought to life. In the way that Plato believed that our minds conceive a perfection that is only approximated in real life with varying shades of integrity, Odom is closer to the ideal that the observer can conceive, a form that defines the imperfection of what kids do on basketball courts everywhere: palming the ball, feigning dunks, practicing layups and the “finger roll.” It’s what makes us human: to share this ideal, a thing we can name and not define like love, justice, or beauty, and yet in common grasp for it in our lives even if the world can only offer us a tainted version.

The play is broken, so the casual observer and most players are not watching. After the ball goes through the hoop and the referee waves off the basket, Odom catches the ball and after he makes a quick bounce the referee, whistle in mouth, with his hands up and out making it seem like he is answering “ten” to some fictitious question, gestures that he needs the basketball to restart play with a pass from out of bounds. In the way that we walk by fall leaves, or that we look askance a perfect flower petal in landscaping, or ignore the night sky when it’s full of stars, the players forget and finding their positions for the next play, set up to continue.

I. Finding

I made it a point to visit a few bookstores in New York. My favorite given the limited time I had was Book Court, which I visited twice. The first visit was a glance in the window; reconnaissance during the lunch hour of the conference I was attending as I tried to map its location during daylight. I crossed Adams, the main thoroughfare in front of the hotel and turned onto Court Street, hoping that I was going in the right direction.

II. Walking

Walking in Brooklyn is unique to my urban experience in America. In Los Angeles I did a lot of walking from where I parked. In San Francisco my walks up and down the hilly city were accompanied by other tourists looking at their maps and pointing towards points of orientation. When it wasn’t tourists, it was workers since most of my walks were in the financial district. Even in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury I had a feeling most of the people I walked by were externals, like me. In places like Kansas City walks are designed, an imposition of walkability in an otherwise sprawled cityscape. Even in Manhattan the walk felt different for one principle reason: to walk in Brooklyn is to be surrounded by its inhabitants. That’s how I felt walking south on Court Street passing fruit stands, flower shops, and local restaurants.

III. Singing

It was later that evening when I started back. Evening had the same magic to it that had sparked my interest at midday. Although I might have been inclined to listen to music, I chose instead to just listen to the sounds of the city around me. It’s moments like that when I have the words of Walt Whitman’s poem I hear America singing come back to me and the clarity of my first experience with the words sits in firm contrast with being here. When I’d read it I always dreamed I’d be a part of the singing but I’m convinced that even American citizenship won’t bring me to a full immersion with the noises that reverberate from what fits into my conceptual imagination of this country: the people, the experience, the politics, the language, the place.

IV. Presence

The bookstore was everything I thought: new books, excellent range, well organized, and staff that subtly showed an awareness of your presence but left you alone to browse the shelves in peace. I overheard them talking about an in store reading – the “another one?” phrase revealing a sentiment that bordered between nonchalance and inconvenience. I wondered who it would be as I looked at the bookshelf on the far wall. There was a basement in the bookstore and finding my way upstairs after having a look I saw the author whose reading was shortly to ensue. She was tall both physically and as a presence, and as they waited for her publicist I took a step behind some different shelves to have a look.

V. Pedigree

Well educated, I guessed, pretty but not striking, part of the New York writing scene, and very young. She seemed to know I was studying her and performed the trick that confirmed her status as a well endowed member of The Scene, successful even if modestly so: she looked over me. She looked through me.

VI. Envy

I wondered about the book. I don’t often find envy but at that moment I thought of our differences. I thought about Biola, my alma mater, in its Real Housewives of Orange County context; wealthy suburban kids for whom college was either a fun detour into family life or spiritual seekers who chose it because it held the quaintness of spirituality with which they’d grown up. I thought about my house in South Dakota, the 1994 Buick Regal I drive, and the converted warehouse where I work. I thought about the doors at Yale, the walls around Harvard, and the way I’d felt like I could see but not be seen when I walked around either campus. I thought about driving down Highway 1 in New Jersey and turning right onto Washington Ave towards Princeton. As I crossed the bridge over Lake Carnegie, I could see crew teams practicing in the water. I loved the experience of putting a concrete experience to a fascination I’ve always had in good schools, the art of learning, and wondering at the people whose footsteps I would traverse at these institutions of merit. I hated how it made me dislike my past and question my own pedigree.

VII. Memoir

I wondered about the book and then found out it was a memoir. My curiosity vanished; I have a large tub in which I categorize memoirists, with a principle conclusion that neither am I that interested to write all about my life at book’s length nor am I interested in reading another person’s unless they are notable in some way. The Ivy League, I think, may qualify you to be envied, but it does not qualify you to be read. I didn’t wait for the reading to start though I did make a note of the name thinking I’d have to amuse myself by finding out what her shtick was in writing a memoir at such a young age.

I found out that evening while eating my box of takeout pizza that Sarah Manguso was named Editors’ Choice by TheNew York Times Sunday Book Review and won Best Nonfiction Book for the Year from The San Francisco Chronicle. Awards include The Joseph Brosdky Rome Prize in Literature from The American Academy of Arts and Letters.

A Memoir?

VIII. Terrible, Sparse, Beautiful

The book is called The Two Kinds of Decay and it’s about a debilitating disease Sarah gets in her junior year of college – a rarity that is related to but not the same as Guillan-Barre called Chronic Idiopathic Demyelinating Polyradiculoneuropathy or CIDP. The disease is as horrible as it sounds, and the book in its delicately crafted prose does not obscure the ordeal she went through before recovering.

It’s a memoir, to be sure, but the way the prose is that of a poet: words are not wasted, meter is evident, and you get as much out of the negative space of what’s unsaid as you do with each sentence. Pieces of it are better read aloud.

“… Think of spacetime , through which heavenly bodies fly forever. They fly until they change into new forms, simpler forms, with ever fewer qualities and increasingly beautiful names.

There are names for things in spacetime that are nothing, for things that are less than nothing. White dwarfs, red giants, black holes, singularities.

But even then, in their less-than-nothing state, they keep happening.”

I don’t read quickly but 20, then 30 pages turn as I read more into what happened. The writing is exquisite, the illness it describes so beautifully seems an equally exquisite torture.

The fresh frozen plasma was thawed before it was infused. The four half-liter glass bottles of albumin were left at room temperature.

For the first twenty or thirty apheresis sessions, I lay under several blankets, which didn’t help the cold but helped me think at least I was trying.

The temperature in blood vessels is warmer than room temperature, of course, by about thirty degrees Fahrenheit. I was very slowly infused with several liters of fluid that was thirty degrees colder than the rest of my body.

By the time I had the permanent line, the cold infusions went in very close to my heart. I need to describe that feeling, make a reader stop reading for a moment and think, Now I understand how cold it felt.

But I’m just going to say if felt like liquid, thirty degrees colder than my body, being infused slowly but directly into my heart, for four hours.

And then I realize the thing about writing, writers, and memoirs. Each time you put pen to paper you give a piece of yourself away. Just as our lives can shrink or expand with curiosity, what the writer gives grows in proportion to how much of themselves they put out for us to see. It comes neither with New York, nor with any institution of merit. It comes with a type of courage and sacrifice that is rare.

I should have stayed that day in Book Court and waited along with everybody else for the publicist. I should like to have known the cadence of the book as read aloud by its author whom I no longer envy but hold with a newfound respect.

When I rushed out into the street, a few blocks and a turn back to the confident framework of seeing a person that I’d made up in my head to represent the hobgoblins of my own foolish consistency, I missed the beauty of a person opening up for a rare conversation, the type that one pockets for a lifelong memory.

At least I have the book.

I went back to the chess club last night. One fellow wearing a Ron Paul button had the delicate features and acne of a teenager, but his voice and comportment suggested him as an adult. I overheard him talking with someone about a failed bid for the South Dakota State Senate which convinced me that his look did belie his true age. The local county commissioner plays chess as well, and from what I saw his game is very strong; he was the state champion as a youngster. The Grandmaster stopped in but only for a few moments to discuss a tournament this Saturday. I wonder if I'll ever see him play anyone from the club; from what I observe chess protocol frowns upon the wasting of a Grandmaster's time.

But the Grandmaster's time and conversation were the irony: he was talking about his kids and wife, kvetching the way most normal people do: "I was busy... who's gonna watch the kids..." and so on. It's so strange to see a person in the mundane whose name only a week before you circled in the New York Times. It puts fame into a different light for those of us who pursue a modest amount: perhaps a name in a newspaper is even more sad than anonymity because it's a lie that you avoid the malaise of day-to-day living we all experience.

My best moment, however, was when the organizer of the chess club, Mr R, opened up and told me a little bit about his life. I'd played twice, losing the first game playing black¹ while being impatient, then having a complete collapse when my opponent, J, turned the board around and let me play white. J is a jolly fellow who managed to repeat the word "devastation" without sounding condescending. His matter of fact "I devastated you" description was as emotionally mute as a box score. After being left to ponder my "devastating move²" that lead to my "devastating loss," Mr R pulled up a chair. He gave me a chess puzzle which I failed miserably. It was a simple test of whether I could think more than one move ahead at a time.

Mr R revealed that he is a Chicago native and at the tender age of 5 was written up in The Tribune as a chess prodigy. He said "I didn't have the nickel it took to get from where I lived to the chess tournaments" and I took this on as a euphemism. Did his parents care? How rough were the times? I made my closer examination of his face seem casual and guessed he was in the waning years of his 70s. He continued, probably aware he'd got my attention, saying that after missing that opportunity for "a nickel" he fought in World War 2 which was more evidence that he was likely a youngster during the depression and the misfortune of that timing was what held him back from the game. During the war he said he played anyone he could and "never lost" a game of chess. He thought he was "pretty good" at the time and may have come back to the game, but he returned home to married life and children. Mr R's pivot point in life and chess was when he and his wife parted ways and it was in this aftermath that he started to play again, entering tournaments while he was in his 40s - the same type of tournaments he would have played when in as an adolescent if he'd had that nickel. I wonder what it's like to look at the precocious teenager on the other side of the board who is the younger form of you, the form that had the opportunity to play without the baggage of depression, war, and a failed marriage.

Whether he intended it or not, I think he was trying to tell me that he too had started late and with many obstacles. Earlier in the week he had called me to encourage me to come back to the chess club after I'd skipped a week. I offered the excuse of having an infant - my presumed carte blanche to invoke everyone's false sense that a family is an excuse not to play regularly, to put a pause button on the game so that life can go on. He didn't respond and we spent an uncomfortable moment listening to a white noise resembling the type of crackling you might hear on your television when there's snow.

Last night, after telling me about himself he gave me three magazines, recommending I start with Chess Life For Kids.

¹In chess, white always gets the first turn. This is a small advantage since you get a chance to control the tempo of the game in the first moves. What throws me off as much is that most of my books are from the white perspective so I'm just used to looking at things that way.

²Reading my chess book this morning I realized that there is a name for my bad play with black: "Damiano's Defense." Here is what Pandolfini says: "Other than resigning, or making a suicidal decision... this is practically the worst defense Black has."

I remember long ago, sitting across from M in a Whittier cafe when he showed me his schedule for the new year. Down to the quarter hour it revealed everything: work, eating time, study, exercise, sleep, and chess.

Today I made a plan and I'm feeling as fanciful.  Plans never seem to survive the friction of day to day living.  It's time to get some sleep so I can fail better tomorrow.

The irony of turning 30 was that so much was new: I'd gotten married the preceding March, I was a month into my new job, and was still learning the ins and outs of our apartment near the downtown portion of Sioux Falls. Three years later and much seems old hat: marriage life has founds its steady rhythm, Sioux Falls poses less of a mystery and work, despite another change in company, is much the same as its always been.  In that sense the day is more of a formality except for the fact that this will be my last birthday without children. 

I've read two books about old men in the last year or so and ended both despising the would be protagonists. Jonathan Raban's Foreign Land and Philip Roth's Everyman were books I would have wanted to like; books that might tell me a little about my future should I live a long life. Instead, ironically, they both wound up as good Christian books to me*: morality tales on how choices have consequences and human relationships are what persist in value when death looms close enough to eliminate all of life's normal pretensions. The two old men suffered from a narcissism I recognize in our high school selves - such self obsession that all conversation turns inward and we stop to really "see" the people around us because we're so busy making everything an aspect of that big old number one: ourselves. This thought really crystallized over the weekend when an old friend from my school days in Nairobi stopped by on a cross country trip with his family. Not only did we recollect different things, I felt a sense of us really seeing each other despite all that time we'd spent doing the equivalent of "shooting hoops" through those teen years. Jed the father, I hardly recognized you -

Well, here's to being 33, and here's to the hope that I keep seeing even when I'm old. Here's to human relationships, the preservation of marriage and the hope of longer life.

*I'm sure both authors would be quite unhappy with this opinion.

In short, the way students are treated in college trains them for the social position they will occupy once they get out. At schools like Cleveland State, they’re being trained for positions somewhere in the middle of the class system, in the depths of one bureaucracy or another. They’re being conditioned for lives with few second chances, no extensions, little support, narrow opportunity—lives of subordination, supervision, and control, lives of deadlines, not guidelines. At places like Yale, of course, it’s the reverse. The elite like to think of themselves as belonging to a meritocracy, but that’s true only up to a point. Getting through the gate is very difficult, but once you’re in, there’s almost nothing you can do to get kicked out. Not the most abject academic failure, not the most heinous act of plagiarism, not even threatening a fellow student with bodily harm—I’ve heard of all three—will get you expelled. The feeling is that, by gosh, it just wouldn’t be fair—in other words, the self-protectiveness of the old-boy network, even if it now includes girls. Elite schools nurture excellence, but they also nurture what a former Yale graduate student I know calls “entitled mediocrity.” A is the mark of excellence; A- is the mark of entitled mediocrity. It’s another one of those metaphors, not so much a grade as a promise. It means, don’t worry, we’ll take care of you. You may not be all that good, but you’re good enough.

William Deresiewicz on the "disadvantages" of an elite education. If it's the endgame that we look at I'd prefer "entitled mediocrity" to "the depths of one bureaucracy or another." But so too would Mr. Deresiewicz I suspect which is why his piece rings with irony. He knew people like me would read it and that we would feel like the Prep's Lee Fiora in an encounter with Cross.

I hadn’t gotten beaten by my mom that day, and we hadn’t had any significant arguments over anything. I thought that if I died, I wanted to die without being mad at my mom. So I thought, I might as well take the opportunity to do so before I got back to the house—at which point who knows whether there would be another fight or a beating.

I put a bullet in the chamber and raised the rifle up. The closer it got to my head, the faster my heart beat. I was taught that whoever committed suicide would go to hell. But I was so miserable in the Amish culture that I believed God would understand that my motives were good.

In the end, I didn’t have the guts to point the barrel straight at my head. Okay, I thought, I’ll just put the gun next to my cheek to see what it feels like.

The instant I felt that cold hard steel, I suddenly realized that I wanted to live.

I had never had that thought before in my life. I had always thought I wanted to die. I don’t know where the idea came from that I wanted to live, but it completely changed my outlook on life.

Here is the whole thing.

A few months ago I was at our local equivalent of Jiffy Lube getting an oil change. The guy working on my car not only had rehearsed and delivered their customer service script impeccably, as he worked on cars he'd yell out all the "check point" items that he'd finished. It went something like:

Brake fluid. CHECK!
Wiper fluid. CHECK!
Tire pressure. CHECK!

You get the picture.  The zeal with which he shouted his checklist was commendable - I'd wager a drill sergeant in a bootcamp somewhere either smiling, because of all the effort, or frowning, because effort like that seems out context when it's a matter of the wiper fluid or windshield wipers on a car - by extension a mockery of that much ceremonial bombast as applied to anything.

Before I could think to snicker I realized I actually liked it. If this kid took the trouble to shout and scream over an oil change, he'd take it seriously enough not to make a mess - the silly kinds of messes that I've paid for in the past - a broken wire that opens the car's hood, or a tire that's been ignored an nearly flat as I left.

These days I'm liking the people who take themselves seriously even if it seems like pomp or pretension.  Risking ridicule in the hopes of achieving something - that's something I can admire and even aspire to...

Today I had this thought: only you can make yourself happy. I wonder if it's my age but I hang around sites like The Happiness Project gleaning tidbits, finding little infusions of wisdom that make me retrench and work for it.

I read fantasy books. You know: swords, magic, etc... I should say I used to - of late they don't work for me quite like they used to.  But a recent quick read is reminding me of all the myths I used to envelope myself with in those books: duty, honor, true love, and, of course, a quest. Maybe it's reading about all those quests that gave me wanderlust in the first place, and that's not such a bad thing, is it?

The "serious" book I am enjoying at the moment is The Craftsman, I'll do my best to muster a review when I finish.

I listen to the Merriam Webster "Word of the Day" podcast in batches. I wrote a program to download 2 months worth and then work through them when mowing or commuting. Anyway, the word of the day on April 7 was luftmensch, a particular favorite of mine. Not to be all "meta" about it but I actually just like Yiddish words in general.  

Friday was the anniversary of "D-day" - it's hard not to know that on that day Americans stormed the beaches of Normandy in what was to be an Allied push towards Berlin.

Despite the patriotism and memories of "the war" most people here would be hard pressed to remember having (if ever they did) to learn of the Battle of Stalingrad.  I'm not going to argue about the importance of various World War II battles having already done so* with "Brat Paul" - my Korean Russian friend from college. I'd like simply to point out that war, death, and the memories of it are universal.

So why is it that different countries celebrate their own Memorial Day and make it on different dates?  I wish it were not so - I wish there could be a global day of memory for people who die in war. It should not be restricted to those in combat; there should be remembrance of the people who die for being in the way, at the wrong time in the wrong place.

I've been wanting to write short fiction about Ugandans involved in the Iraq war.  Perhaps the story would be based on my cousin who is not from a "poor" family, but neither is he rich.  He goes to Iraq to "fight for freedom" with the hopes of making some money and has a relationship with someone very American - how about a girl from South Dakota who enlisted after graduating from high school?  Their turbulent relationship ends when she comes back but she thinks about him every Sunday that the church asks those who "fought for their country" to stand up.  About a decade later he finds her "mommy blog" and writes to ask for help immigrating to the United States.  He comes on a tourist visa but it expires and somehow he is deported. 

Just some complicated thoughts from the memory of war around here.

*Conversation as follows:
Paul: Russia was win!
Me: What... ?
Paul: World War II, Russia was win!
Me: O.K.

Paul Graham wrote about cities this week. It was probably coincidence but I was one of the first to see and respond to it.  It's quite difficult to read things like that from the vantage point of Sioux Falls because it takes no stretch of the imagination to figure out what Paul might say about this place.  I think I'm like Paul in some ways, so I'm sure I have a good idea.

But there are a lot of people who choose to live in small places, off the beaten path and they find a way to thrive off of it.  I'm going to have to write to John Udell or Marian Bantjes not to seek a person to validate my existence here, but to see how there can be a path for people like me who don't live in a metropolis.

Here's some big news: the company I work for is not continuing existence and my fellow coworkers and I will become employees of Daktronics. 

This is exactly the kind of prattle I'd start writing and delete but I'm trying to get this blog going again.

I posted a link to someone's little rant about Anaheim that's come back to haunt me; what thoughts were my own got drowned by a complaint of misunderstanding, some of which I know.

How do you do Anaheim? Drive down Beach Blvd. It's the chief thing I lament about southern California: you absolutely need a car.

It's not that Beach takes you through Anaheim directly.  But it's a way to really see the place on the ground, to see real people and real places. 

You'll see Koreans, Filipinos, Indians, Mexicans, Middle Easterners, Vietnamese, Africans, African Americans, and yes, some white people but the Real Wives of Orange County will be limited. 

You'll see skater boi trying to do an ollie onto a curb while you're at an intersection.  A dream and a trick - that's what I had when I lived there.

You might see a gang banger. Or a kid trying to look like a gang banger. In either case, don't look to hard; it's a sure way of getting beat down.

From Beach you can branch off - if you took La Palma east in my day you'd hit Book Baron. It's closed, but you needn't branch far to find something similar. 

You can still take Katella over to Angel Stadium, home of my favorite baseball team.  When Justin and I were there for a game we were asked if we were "down for the cause." 

Further south you hit places like Stanton.  If you want some Indian food made by Indians for Indians, this would be a good place. For each nationality mentioned previously, ditto.

Along the way there are other things to find: basketball courts where kids live like LeBron, enormous cemeteries, record stores, cruiser bikes, coffee shops -

The thing about it is you have to look.  Anaheim is not the downtown that is so obvious the tourist bus drops you off and you go looking for the faux local hangout.  There aren't tour buses with retirees and honeymooners...

... well there are, but they are at Disneyland, if that's your thing.

But if you're like me you want to see real people, eat real food, mellow out and find things.

Next time I'm around I'll fight the urge to head up to Pasadena or Hollywood and kick it in the OC.

This post feels a little vague though so here's a call out to the people I know there or nearby right now: how does one "do" Anaheim?

pi:

This week I've done updating around a few of my websites. It began with a few reports from friends that my pi page was down. I'd known as much but because I made it a long time ago and lost the original code. For geeks: I used Reflector to disassemble the original assembly and then cobbled it back together. It works now for all of you who are just dying to know what the 69,000th digit of pi is.

phoDak (oPhoto):

I also got around to some long overdue updates to phoDak (software which I'd originally called oPhoto). It started with some comment spam that was advertising porn.  I'd seen comment spam before but never on a new photo. I'd periodically clean things up, but didn't feel a dire need to write any code (laziness!).  But I couldn't take a chance with that kind of spam since it's the site related to me that people visit most often and also because someone may confuse the link with something I put up there. 

After disabling comments for a few days I used the following strategy:
1. I leveraged an Akismet library.
2. I added a picture/word because it seems to work well for Jeff Atwood.

If things are still getting through I may do a few more things like enabling some sort of "mark spam" link for people to get rid of bad comments. The worst case scenario for me would be to disable comment visibility until it was approved. 

In the process of doing that update I thought I'd roll in a feature people have asked me for quite a bit: the camera settings I use on the photos.  I'd been a little apprehensive about it because the first thing it will do is show how much of an amateur I am since my settings are more often than not quite bad.  But I've been needing to get more purposeful about really learning my camera rather than trying to compensate with photoshop. I'm doing my Canon 20D no justice by maintaining willful ignorance.

I updated my photo upload page which, get this, has never had a password.  Of course the URL is unknown except to me but it still was an irksome little thing that I finally got around to doing.  It's still got a secret location but I can rest easy that my heroes wouldn't think less of me.

Hobbitwerk:

My final software update (is anyone awake at this point?) is that Hobbitwerk now aggregates from this blog rather than the error message it's been displaying since I pulled the plug on my old blog on Userland.  I'll also be updating the blog link from it to seruyange.com/david along with the picture preview.

That's it for updates, stay in touch.

From an entertaining letter my friend writes:

Sawadi ka!
Bangsai Village was pretty darn cool!  It is everything one would dream a village to be.  It was quaint, green, guardedly friendly with visitors, and serene.  When I arrived, Urai-my host and I rode bikes to the local Buddhist temple.  As I was concentrating on keeping as close to the edge of the narrow road as possible without trying so hard I fall into the surrounding greenery, I was marveling at the lotuses doing their best to pretty up a mucky pond, the expanses of rice paddies swaying in the wind, and the canopy of trees giving a brief but welcome respite from the sun.  I kept thinking to myself, "I love this!  I should be wearing one of those bamboo triangle hats!"  As much as Urai is a typically diminuitive Thai female, she is just as generous in her hospitality, kindness, curiosity, and industriousness.  Man, could that girl work!  In fact, that's pretty much what she would do from 5-6 in the morning until about 6-7 at night.  And she's a young-un ( or at least what I would like to think as young at 30 years old)!  Her mother could probably kick my ass at 78!  She pretty much has the same schedule as Urai but wakes up a little earlier to make food for the monks who come rowing down the river at about 6:30 every morning.  Thai food is made completely from scratch-none of that pre-made preservative crap that we/I eat.  I made green curry and tom yam/yum soup and I had to scrape and squeeqe fresh coconut until my fingers were raw and sweat was nearly dripping into the fruits of my labor.  I also helped to feed a monk one morning-but don't worry I didn't give the venerable elder my food-it was Urai's mother's cooking.  Buddhism is closely tied to the culture and is an integral part of one's socialization and socializing in Thailand, especially in small close-knit villages that are somewhat the equivalent to the American version of Cheers.  The only unpleasant, unidyllic part of my stay in Bangsai was the Thai massage.  I didn't know that an 86 year old women with a gummy smile could have such powerful hands and feet! Yes, feet!  For those of you who picture a relaxing massage given by a young petite Thai beauty with a tropical flower tucked neatly behind her ear, well, think again!  This great grandmother stepped all over my body, including along my more intimate seams.  I was worried I would be made infertile, but Urai informed me that she's been giving massages along with delivering babies for 60 years, so I guess she knew what she was doing, and I was the fragile foreigner who kept repeating "bow-wow!" which means gentle in Thai ( but I wish it meant could you please just stop because this is really painful and I'd rather be at the gyno than lying here with your footprints all over me).  Ok, I know by now you're dying to hear about porn, prostitutes, and Pattaya, but that'll have to wait till my next update because I'm sure I've lost your attention after green curry-if you're anything like the students I'm teaching anyway!  More about that later, too!
La-konn, Sawadi,

Y/L

This post really began last week when I was at church. A video was shown for missionary work around the world and it struck me, over and over, that the only African's I see within this context are poverty stricken, malnourished children whose long gazes into the camera are designed to inspire pity.

I was thinking of The African Child as I knew him or her, my friends growing up all gifted and rich in so many different ways: Arthur, a skinny 10 year old who made the school's varsity soccer team and dazzled us with on-pitch heroics, or Paul, the rowdy ball of obstinacy who wasn't afraid to challenge authority. I kept thinking about these children and how far they were from that picture and lamenting, as many Africans do, the imagery of Africa as seen in the west.  Arthur is a pediatrician these days and Paul is a social activist and their stories are not unique among the lot of us that grew up in Nairobi.

But back to that voice thing I couldn't find words that were short and punctuated to describe my reaction. I'm too given to long stories and invisible connections. 

So this morning I ran into a talk at TED by Andrew Mwenda, a fellow Ugandan. His words put together everything that I was thinking but with a lot more directness and challenge in their tone.

For some time Justin has been releasingamix of what he’s had in rotation, riffs from a collection of music that encompasses more than just sound. It’s a novel voice, one which I’ve looked forward to after each week of work. Experiences created: recently it was on a trip to Kansas City that I heard Ryan Adams softly singing Wonderwall, and tonight it was an evening on the deck with bratwurst on the grill while my iPod sounded out Devil Town for the end of my journey through the week.

I was that kid who – upon the rabid crush with girl X – would produce from the very corners of his music collection, a mix tape as a gift. It was no small task of meaning and I can remember the labor, even now, though I did it many times. What I didn’t understand then that I do now was that it wasn’t a gift; it was an attempt of mine to weave a narrative into music to be read by its listener. It wasn’t the lyric, the tricky beat, or guitar chord. It was a language of its own, the language of music, often unheard by the listener.

But I was that kid who heard things: up late at night, listening to Jazz Hour on Voice Of Kenya, that kid who listened to the twice dubbed Bach concerto, the one who would replay songs from memory to pass time on the long bus rides home. There was always something in the music itself, abstracted away from the physical aspects: the tape, the album art, and the logical explanation. Something living in between the sound atoms that were smashing together to form the vibrations on my eardrum that made it more. It was more and it was indescribable.

Perhaps it’s not just hearing. It might be that synesthesia – that you hear a track and it causes synapses in your brain fire off simultaneously: where you were when you heard something, what you were doing, what you are doing, whether you’re up, or down, alone or in a crowd –an all encompassing thing that I have to resign myself to calling the language of music.

I’ve never had real words for music, but I remember going to Hollywood to shop at Aarons and overhearing people talk – a well known DJ I recognized talking about electronic music with the words “pop” and “crunch” and “glitch”, the guy in front of me by the information booth asking about artists in terms of artists “… a soul sound, but more bluesy like a Memphis Minnie sound” – and being amazed at their ability to match human language to music. And that I understood what they were saying the way an amnesiac would gaze at something and recognize it without a context for how they knew.

Things can’t be cemented in spoken language the way they can in music. Perhaps that’s why it’s so special, why crushes get mixtapes, why radio stations and disc jockeys have “followings”, why those who hear the language of music fiendishly collect and listen, recreating and creating moments for the future, present, and why those who somehow bridge what is written and what is heard are to be treasured. It's why, when my friend A's father died in the Ukraine, she packed her things with tears falling, listening to his music. I know she'd never heard it quite like she did that day.

It’s that moment in Boston, with all your friends around you, when an unexpected slide guitar grips you while your head is spinning. A kind of permanence that can becomes an ambience you can reach into at any point along the future.

It’s the first time you hear something and you realize that you’ll never forget that this was when you heard it for the first time, and that the song will follow you through your life like an old companion.

What’s following me to bed tonight is the avant sound textures of Valgeir Sigurðsson. I’ll remember.

My first run after hitting the thirty-two mark was pleasant. It was one of those runs where you wonder why you're not getting tired and have to throttle the urge to over exert yourself.  I thought to myself it was a good omen.

Flash forward to Wednesday this week and I ambled my two miles like a wounded animal.  It seemed as though every joint and limb protested against any movement beyond a lackadaisical walk. And walk I did - as much as I hate stopping, time and experience have taught me that it's better to keep a marathon runner's mentality than that of a sprinter. Alexander the Great chose his horses first for endurance, not speed.

And even though it's the triumph I'm more inclined to celebrate myself in a blog post entitled "Thirty-two and sprinting" or something shameless like it, it's the second run that was more important.  Bad Running is good: it's those moments when you develop the perseverance for the running that is easy.

I was talking to a friend about The Happiness Project, a blog I ran across and how the author's aim is to be "happy" all the time. I'd gone through some sadness about whether or not I'd ever get to see Berlin and told her of a suggested exercise of writing down a few things one should be happy about to pick up one's mood. It was an idea to which M was a little cold: is it healthy to be "happy" all the time?

The notion stopped me dead in my tracks. Is it healthy to be happy, or to try to be happy, all the time?

Down time makes me appreciate what's good. It's the contrast that lets one understand the pleasure of being happy.  But unlike that feeling of embracing a bad run, my usual reaction to it is to try to bounce back in some way: focusing on work, a phone call, my aggregator, an old essay, or the tube.  Or running.

And even though it seems to me that unhealthy distraction is a bad tactic, it's a bit daunting to think about just letting an "unhappy" or otherwise disconcerting emotion wash over while you directly confront it.

The question still stands as something to be pondered: is it healthy to try to be "happy" all the time?

My father is on the phone with me a day after I've turned 32 which is, incidentally, last Sunday.  He asks if I've got "a plan."  He elaborates: "a five year plan, or a ten year plan."  Of course, I don't.  There are things I know I could be doing but they are vaguaries, with all the certainty of the percussion in ambient music. I'm in Overland Park, Kansas and the heat is stiffling as I stand outside the arboretum we've visited. I can't give an answer but he chuckles because he knows I'll be thinking about it on the long drive north to Omaha.

Although I still don't have the next decade planned, one thing kept coming back on the drive back towards the Dakotas: that my ideas are sound and that I need to express them.  I need to blog. My path is not through a graduate school. My path is not with fanfare.  It's this moment as I sit in the basement quietly typing at my keyboard, writing to you.

So here is the beginning of a new blog and with it, a new voice.