Beauty and Glory

Since I was very young a core part of my identity has been based on testing myself in competition against other people in sports and games.

For most of my life I didn’t really understand this obsession. It was almost primal, like hunger, or lust, not something to be understood but to be experienced. But when my first child turned five, he saw an NCAA basketball game, and it was like a light had shined from heaven; from there on he played sports all the time, pored over trading cards, read scores, watched all the games he could.

I saw through him that the things that happen in sports are like the spells of sorcerers, like epic poems told one play at a time. I realized now that it was true for me too. I wanted to be in those stories, cast those spells.

I have better words for it now: beauty is seeing the fundamental, underlying truths of a thing and then using that truth to do something magnificent. Glory is being seen doing it. Maybe in the face of opposition or pain or fear, or just being the unlikeliest of people you could imagine, there on the field before all the world.

Let’s Talk About Fascists

This is one of those words that gets thrown around, so let’s lay down some boundaries around it.

First of all, fascists are a category of asshole; that is, a person who “systematically allows himself special advantages in cooperative life out of an entrenched sense of entitlement that immunizes him against the complaints of other people.”

Fascism, the exalting of a nation or race above the individual, is literally assholes who justify themselves by reason of kin or culture metastasized into a state. This is why it fascism is most succinctly described as an ethos of “blood and soil”.

OUR blood. OUR soil. Not yours. 

Made Ya a Mix Tape

I have been making an average of three mixes a year since 1993. This may be a uniquely gen x act, but one that I have continued regularly in the digital world, and I think now more than ever it’s one of the coolest and easiest creative acts you can do.

The sneering joke about mix tapes is that they are low rhetoric, an appropriation of other people’s art to signal intent of your own. But I think properly done the mix is an aural sketchbook, a way of freezing a feeling of a moment in time that might be broadly resonant or very personal. I’ve made elegies for football teams, angry breakup (with my boss) mixes, meditations on popular characters, lullaby and wakeup mixes for my kids, political mixes, and, of course, just times when I shared the sounds or songs I’d gathered from the world.

Sketchbooks, from Helen Wells

Write or Be Lost

I’m writing this because last month another man I’ve known almost my entire life committed suicide and I don’t want to die.

He lost his way. Some might argue he lost his way a long time ago and it took awhile for him to wrap it up. I don’t know; ultimately it doesn’t matter. I’ve seen people end things on a straight chute or after a drunken jaunt on a winding road. It’s happened a lot in the last few years.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned in the first half of my life is that the world, not lived in, will weaken us, will drive us down. Even among the happiest of us every day watches for weakness or distraction. Even if we are just running out the clock, we still have to bear the waves of time, boredom, fear, all around us.

I tell you this to explain why I am writing this at all. It must be so, if nothing else because when I say things they become clearer in my mind, and I am required to take them seriously, and by shouting them I feel less unmoored and alone.

I learned this trick long ago, and entirely by accident. I’d forgotten my creative writing assignment and needed to make something in twenty minutes or fail the course, so I wrote four poems and recited them in class. I can still remember those poems. I can almost recite them from memory. From there, on days when I’d find myself drifting, panicking, losing my way, I’d fall into the paper and the voices would calm me and I’d come back.

Journaling wasn’t enough. They wanted to be shared. It seems that if I don’t do that, it’s not the same. So I have to shout it out.

I’m not saying any of this is any good. But I hope that the facets or fractals of thought I throw to you might reflect some light in the world, give purchase to someone else and make things for them a little bit better. Just the fact that it COULD be read seems to matter to some deep part of me, for whatever reason. I don’t question it too much.

I ain’t gonna run out the clock. The world is bearing down on me and I want to stay here and live in it. Join me or not but whatever you do keep your eyes on the road.