gratitudes and inclusions

Hold on, buckle in. This is messier than I intended. But I’m going for it. See you on the other side…

*

life inversions on Vie Hebdomadaires

Another guest post at Vie Hebdomadaires, this time covering the basics of life inversions, tol-style. If you've been around a while, this will be oldish news. Still, I'd love to see you there. I always love to see you.

we don't need no stinking plans...

Yesterday I posted the communiqué from the Occupy Wall Street non-group stating their one demand. Today I was thinking about what a ludicrous thing it is that the media was applying pressure for them to state what their demands were. I thought about it yesterday too, but there was no making sense of it, so I just had to let it lie.

But today I was thinking about it some more. I thought about it in the context of why that’s such a big deal, the idea of a list of demands. I thought about the meme of public consumption that encourages people to dismiss activism and dissent if it doesn’t have a set agenda – if there isn’t some stated premise or an alternate plan to “make things better”, an idea to change things to the way that the activists want things changed. I thought about how demands make activism seem like a hostage situation. How that also makes it easier to criminalize dissent the way we see that happening so much more in the “free” world.

zero sum

I was thinking about masks, how we wear them even when we’re trying hard not to. It’s an onion thing, I think, peeling them off one by one only to find another layer of them. When we peel the last one off, do we cease to exist?

The inversion was about getting rid of masks, or at least minimizing the number of them. I try not to have a work mask now, for the casino slavery, but I know there is one. Maybe, on the good days, it’s more translucent than any I’ve ever worn, but I still bite my tongue too much to think that I’m not wearing one.

Mom’s definitely receding. I saw her Community Care nurse and worker on Friday. They don’t make diagnoses or provide prognoses, of course. They concentrate on the now, on the care. An appointment with her psychiatrist will be next. He should be in a better position to provide insight into what to expect, what the timelines might be. I both want to know, and don’t. We’ll still be measuring in years, I think, but small numbers.

That led me to think about minimalism: What we need as opposed to what we want, or even what we think we need. My working theory suggests that the less we use, the more we have to give away. It’s the opposite of modern consumerism. For me, it’s still an ideal. I can trim more, perhaps actually develop enough self-discipline (a virtue I lack) to create more space for giving even when I am in a place where using much isn’t an issue.

One of the reasons that getting out of the casino is so crucial is just simply to not have to wear that work mask. I think maybe that I’ll be able to measure success, my version of it, by how few masks I have to own. None would be ideal, but that seems like a dream more than a goal. I’m not sure humans are meant to be mask-less. Or maybe capable is a better term for it, not capable of being mask-less. At least not in our culture. We can only strive to limit the number and make the ones we do wear as authentic to what we think our true selves are as possible.

When I die, I hope there’s no more onion left to peal. That’s a nice thought. For Mom, and for me, I need to remove myself from the equation of her care. She deserves something as selfless as possible, so I need to not be worrying about me. That will require some intense peeling which, in the end, will actually help me. And that’s how the universe works on the good days.

aftershocks

So, the story goes that Mirm went out to do a couple errands. While she was gone Mom became anxious because of the stranger that came into the condo. It was the stranger that Mom asked to leave last Wednesday, even though it was Mirm that asked, and Mirm that went for air, and Mirm that came back.

Today Mom called to ask if I’d come into the condo briefly this morning. She was sure that she saw me, but I was at home and Mirm confirmed that I didn’t, and Mom was disturbed by the dissonance. Hell yeah, it disturbs me too.

Depending on the online resource I tap into, these are symptoms of either late stage five or early six, but I’m no doctor, and it’s pretty obvious that the symptoms are a bit interchangeable depending on frequency, severity, etc. The bottom line is that it’s both as bad and not as bad as I’d thought. One of Mom’s medications was changed, or rather her schedule for taking it was changed, and there’s at least a reasonable probability that these symptoms are related to that change, to the affect the change had/is having on her stress levels. The rest of the time, most of the time, there’s little change and the treatments she’s on have mostly arrested the progression for the last year. It makes me more thankful than ever that the life inversion happened when it did.

Mom’s stress jumps now when Mirm has to go out; when she’s alone for any amount of time. It’s like she looses her tether to the now when she’s alone and, in the absence of the anchor that company provides, her anxiety rockets – the panic of sudden confusion, as if abandonment were perpetual and unavoidable.

I don’t know, maybe that’s part of it. Maybe I’m out to fucking lunch. Trying to imagine this stretches my somewhat considerable imagination, and I know that I’m simply not able to actually get it. Selfishly, I hope that I never do, not completely. I’m also in active denial regarding the stage descriptions that I read online, especially the timeline they provide for progression. I hate time today. Living in the now is the only strategy I can respect at the moment.

On the positive side, this all has nothing to do with Mirm. She remains a rock; a laconic, stoic one that I have to drag admissions of simple humanity from, but a rock nonetheless. So I‘ve scheduled an appointment with Mom’s outreach nurse for a week and a half from now. To talk about options, resources. They aren’t ready for me to move in to help, reluctant to give up the freedom they’ve carved out over the years, and I respect that. But Mirm, as tough as she is, is still 81. Hopefully there will be someone that can come in so that Mirm can do her errands, walk the dog, get some air, and still have someone there to provide that tether for Mom while Mirm is out.

I have to look out for Mirm seeing as she’s never been very good at choosing herself over Mom. If she’s not going to look out for herself, and she won’t, then someone has to look out for both of them. That only seems fair.

Or maybe nothing seems fair, but it is what it is.

chrysalis... or gas

Ever notice how sometimes life seems to throw up these undeniable lines of demarcation? These chasms that are invisible as you approach, and then, one day, you look back and notice that you've crossed a great divide, one that can't be re-crossed – there's no going back – and that you couldn't have seen to avoid even if you'd wanted to? And they're only obvious in hindsight?

Well, I think I'm in the middle of one. And from here, being even digitally social feels really hard.

Not that there isn't a lot to talk about going on out there. Part of me is still in shock in the wake of the Canadian federal election. I feel like I don't know where I live anymore. My country feels bi-polar in the bad ways. And then people rioted in Vancouver, people that called themselves fans of a game played by adults but were really just idiots, or alcohol-induced idiots at very least, and watching that play out in the media has been worth talking about too. And there's Syria, and a new Gaza flotilla, and a new illegal war in Libya complete with assassination attempts that fly in the face of international law. Even if I was just taking a break from politics, I'm still loosing sleep thinking about the oil and vinegar symbiosis of art and capitalism; how the oil involved doesn't feel very edible to me, and how I think vinegar is a crappy metaphor for art. Seriously... losing sleep. So it's not like there isn't plenty to talk about...

I just don't have the will to talk. I feel like my hands are pretty full right here at home.

I went through one of these chrysalis periods a couple years ago when the life-inversion started. I guess, to be honest, I sort of felt that one coming too, but I wasn't aware of feeling it until I was past it and had one of those, “Oh, that's what that was” moments. In a sense, maybe, this is still the same process of change that I'm in the middle of. Or maybe, like glissading down a mountain side, there are times when you start something, it gathers its own momentum and takes on a life of its own, and we just have to ride the slope until we stop and hope an avalanche isn't on our heels.

I won't know, of course, until I'm through it, so I could be wrong. I might actually be in that weird space, mid-leap, with gravity pulling at me, fighting the momentum that should carry me over the gap, my arms and legs swinging as if I wish I had something to hold onto. I might have actually noticed this time, in situ as it were, instead of only realizing from the perspective of twenty-twenty hindsight.

Or I might just have eaten something weird and it has me all discombobulated.

I honestly don't know, but everything feels weird, as if I'm in a movie and the DVD is skipping on a frame with a CG scene-to-scene bleed effect. The cat keeps walking by, if you know what I mean...

And even if I'm right, I'm not exactly sure what the feeling signifies; what the chasm is; what the change will be or mean. Which makes being aware of it kind of frustrating. It's a hurry up and wait scenario. I feel like the dog named Stay.

I wonder if, in that last moment before they wake up to their new life, zombies feel like this.

Or maybe they think that it was just some bad brains they ate...

So, yeah, I'm holding my figurative breath. Call it an involuntary hiatus. Or maybe the calm before the storm. Or indigestion. I'm still around though. Miss you guys and all that.

P.S. The manuscript is still with my beta readers. Early returns are good and remarkably helpful. One day I'll have to take a long trip and buy a bunch of dinners.

...yeah, i'm not done yet

There seem to be all these lists of things that MUST BE DONE in order to BUILD PLATFORM and BECOME ATTRACTIVE TO AGENTS AND PUBLISHERS.

I choose to believe that the best thing is to write a good fucking story, and write it well. The good news is that, occasionally, a sane voice calls out from the publishing ether and says exactly the same fucking thing.

If I write the story I wanted to write, if it’s as good as I can make it, then that’s success. Any other definition has to be considered suspect. Selling books is mostly a crapshoot anyway. It’s bingo, at least if you’re talking about Rowling-like sales. We need to get over it and live in the real world.

Don't get me wrong - I’ll be happier than a pig in shit if I can pay bills off of royalties one day. That’s the dream, something I hope for but is largely beyond my control. In the mean time, I’ll be only`as happy as a pig in shit just to write the stories, even if the only people that read them are the ones that I talk to directly or e-mail regularly.

Seems to me that following a whole bunch of other people’s lists and ideas on how to succeed at being original is more than slightly oxymoronic. Seems to me that originality is found off the beaten path.

The life inversion was/is about not keeping score in the standard ways anyway. It was/is supposed to be the opposite of that. The inversion is about letting go of all of those social measurements, all that cultural bullshit, and just being, just loving the process, just living the adventure, just writing and telling the story as honestly as I can.

I was listening to CBC radio the other day and Jion Gomeshi asked Chris Murphy of the Sloans what he thought of the great reviews their latest disc was getting, perhaps the best in their twenty-year career. Murphy said, “We don’t pay attention. If we did, we’d have to believe the bad ones too.”

So I’ll keep score in other ways, like I said a couple weeks ago: by how many days I spend in flip flops instead of suits and ties; by how often I can write something that breaks through my own sense of cool; by how honest and vulnerable I can be in front of the keyboard; by how uncomfortable I can be hitting “publish”; by how “wrong” an action is according to the lists and rule books.

That’s what being an artist is supposed to be about, right? Rebellion? Counter-culture? Targeted subversive behavior? Punk rock and revolution? Isn’t it? Isn't it?

...to be clear...

Someone I adore, someone I respect and admire, thought that when I said I was thinking about balance and careers last week, I was actually saying that I’d decided writing wasn’t as important as I’d thought and that I was dropping the gig, at least as far as doing it for the rest of my life to the exclusion of most other things went.

So, obviously, I wasn’t very clear.

What I meant to say clearly then: What I am abjuring is the clutter that is so often conflated with writing these days, or being any kind of artist for that matter. I told a friend the other day, “I’m a writer. If I wanted to be a marketer,” I said, “I’d get into fucking marketing.”

I don’t want to be an ad-man. I want to tell stories. I want to live them too, but that’s me. Adventure is as much a reason for the life inversion as the writing and story telling is, so for me there has to be a balance of living and writing and imagining. For me, if there isn’t that trichotomy, I’m wasting oxygen.

To be clear then, I hope I die either writing a novel (preferably something really great and at the end) or climbing (preferably something really high and at the top). One or the other; I’d be happy with either.

love in mexico…

I was thinking about balance and careers yesterday. About how I could learn to hate something I love if I fell into treating it like a career.

I think my vacation metamorphosized into an open yet sub-conscious rebellion, one that is tempting me away from getting back into a blogging routine, from committed Twitter sessions, from freelance contracts, and absolutely, without equivocation, from dealing stupid cards at the stupid casino.

And then I remembered that I still hadn’t finished blogging about Mexico and the wedding. The wedding deserves a post of its own, as do the amazing people that made the trek to be there, but I’ve been lolly-gagging for a whole week now, laying back, enjoying the slow current, not worrying about where exactly it was taking me. Languishing. Happily…

Yesterday, driving into to Kelowna to meet an old friend for coffee, I realized this was happening – this sub-conscious resistance – and allowed myself to explore it, feel it, probe it  with my mind’s tongue, as if it were a cavity or a chipped tooth. I found a photo-album in a crevice and opened a mental folder full of those things I’d promised myself when the life inversion started: that this was about creativity, about creating; that success would be measured in days wearing flip-flops, not by counts of commas and zeroes; that victory would be measured in sighs and smiles; that I would not miss the ties or ever be sucked into thinking they were important, at all, ever again…

If you’ve seen the pictures on Facebook (and if not, why aren’t we friends yet? See below and to the right), you already know that the wedding was amazing. Beautiful. Awe-inspiring. Travis, my brother, and Kate, his bride (my new sister) have a unique love. They’re both thirty-ish, so they waited long enough to know. They’ve been together for six years, so they made sure. And they’ve already weathered storms, so they know how to find their way out/hold on/let go when those hurricanes inevitably hit.

I think that they have the real thing, found it and grabbed on and made it their own. They awe me, did I mention that? But I knew that going in. Their love is wonderful to watch, and it does awe me, but it doesn’t surprise me any more. 

Here’s what did: Their friends. Thirty-six of us made the trip to Mexico. Eleven of us were family. That  means that twenty-five friends – co-workers, buddies, amigos, bff’s, what have you – took the time off and forked out the money to travel and stay so that they could be there for a wedding. Consider that six of the people all work at the same salon in West Van, including the owner, and that she actually closed the salon down for the whole week, and an image begins to form of a very tight group.

I was never one to belong to large groups of friends, at least not with any aplomb. I was a fringe-er, a hanger-on at best. Mostly, I was just a loner. Loners, no matter how imagined, rationalized, or real their comfort with solitude, still have moments when they envy those idealized group dynamics. Mostly we tell ourselves that those perfect group moments only exist in ‘90’s sit-coms and movies.

Subsequently, I spent a week in Mexico in blissful envy, happily a fringe-er again, on the fringe of something unique.

I once wrote a post about a Japanese proverb regarding gauging the character of a person by the quality of their friends and I was reminded of it again and again. I wrote then that I have amazing friends, and I stand by it. But I have those friends in ones and twos, scattered across a wide geography.

To see that depth and quality of friendship concentrated among friends that live a work together daily was, well, weird in a beautiful way. That shit’s not supposed to happen in real life. My brother Troy, who acted as best man, noticed it and mentioned it in his speech. The parents all see it. I’m not hallucinating, not alone. It’s abnormal in the best ways.

So this is a toast, sort of, to Trav and Kate who are indescribably beautiful to me, and to their friends, whom I hope (and believe) appreciate how rare and precious is their love for one another…

And I thought, yesterday, maybe it was the quality of that time away that was making me reluctant to get back into the swing, to lean into the yoke, to bend to the plow. And, of course, it was, at least in part. But if I’m doing what I love then why would I resist at all? And I thought; maybe I’m just not quite doing it right. Maybe I’m off mission again, just a bit. Or worse: Maybe I’m trying to turn it into a mission.

I’ve been dancing around this concept for months now, rebelling against concepts of efficient utilization of social media, against the idea that writing is a career, or even a vocation (which is ostensibly better, like it involves a calling or something). But I think that I rebel against the idea that something I do could or would ever define me. That’s absolutely not what the inversion was about.

Writing was and is a facet of that, telling stories, reaching out – absolutely a part and, hopefully, one that funds the rest of it – but it doesn’t define me. I don’t ever want to work that hard at it, devote so much time to it that anything else has to suffer.

The inversion was about searching for an authentic life, a creative one, full of adventure and markedly lacking in the kind of focused self-discipline that results in dynamic careers. That kind of thing works fine for many people, and I’m not knocking it, but it’s not for me. At. All.

No more ties. No posting schedules. No worrying. Flip-flops always unless the activity requires something technical or the snow is deeper than a three centimeters. Zero pretense. Heavy on the adventure.

The inversion was and is supposed to be about no reserve, no retreat, and no regret. Good choices, no monopolies, all variation, always looking for the next adventure, perpetually learning. No rules. Living it, not achieving it.

I may need a new tattoo to remember this.

So here's to life and love. And let the cards fall where they may…

pause for gratitude

Revisions are going well, thanks for asking. There aren't enough hours in the day, or days left before April 21, but that's my own fault. Sleep is over-rated anyway. That said, the #amrevising is going very well. I may have to sleep on the plane and the first two days in Mexico, but I can live with that.

TED.com sent this today and I watched, happily. It's slightly inspiring in the way TED.com videos can be. I thought of life-inversions and starting over and how happy I am that I found myself in a place to make the choices I made a couple years ago. I thought about how everything in our society is being driven in a direction that makes everything a struggle, and things like life inversions as difficult as possible. I thought about elections and hoping that we change directions, even if the change we might make is to a direction that's not as bad that the current one, instead of actually to the right direction. I thought about how fortunate I am to be doing what I love most of the time instead of just when I can squeak it in. I thought about the people I love who inspire me every day.

So here I am, stopping in to say 'hi', full of gratitude. And sleep deprived, but loving it. Enjoy the video...

examination

I had the most interesting conversation on Twitter last night, one that grew (unexpectedly) out of yesterday’s post. I can’t get it out of my mind.

It was about authenticity (again), and control. Specifically, about whether taking ownership is, perhaps, an attempt to control too much. About whether self-examination can lead to a lack of authenticity – to what? Narcissism? A lack of mindfulness? A preoccupation with the past or future; things that we can’t control? Some, or all, or maybe none of those.

In a true moment of not letting go completely, I just kept thinking about it and thinking about it. Because that’s what I do, whether I should or not, whether it helps or not; I think about it until I can either understand, or feel satisfied that I never will. Or understand that it’s not time to understand yet. Sometimes we just have to let stuff sit in the dust, rest in its inscrutability, until we have the right hands to pick it up with, the right eyes to see.

And, yes, sometimes we just have to let it go and embrace the mystery.

I graded for my fifth kyu in Ki-Aikido a few weeks ago. I didn’t want to. The western system of colored belts bothers me on a subdural level. In Japan they don’t use colorful belts. You wear white until you wear black. I want to rebel against the artificial gradations. (And yellow is not my color.) But they still test on the way to the black belt, grading progress and providing unseen benchmarks, steps in the air that are invisible but strong enough to stand on so that the next level can be seen. I’d rather not wear the belt, but I accept and enjoy that the testing has to happen, and appreciate knowing that I can move forward.

I think that I approach the mirror the same way. I’m not looking for external validation as I do it (he says in his blog – oh, the irony), but testing myself helps me know where to go next, what to keep and improve, or what to leave behind. Sometimes the most surprising things happen, like when I discover that an old thing, trait, behavior that I never really liked no longer serves a purpose; that I can leave it on the side of the road and just keep walking instead of carrying the dead weight around.

Socrates said that an unexamined life was not worth living, and I buy that. Granted, I’m invested. Maybe I’m just a fan because I want to enable my own navel gazing. I have to admit the possibility, right? But can’t we wonder about the future and pick through the past without losing hold of the moment, of the present. Can’t we?

Earlier this week Stephen Elliot talked about how people don’t really change. Who we were is who we are is who we are. I buy that to a point too. To a point.

But we evolve too. There may be a core that can’t change, but how we dress it can. There may be an ‘us’ that can’t change, but how that ‘us’ interacts with the world, perceives it, embraces it or not; that can change. That can evolve. And that requires some level of examination, whether we burn the barn or go through it one item at a time, or maybe a bit of both. The examination is ongoing and painful and beautiful and grotesque and distracting and enlightening…

… and absolutely, authentically, worth it.

___

P.S. Sadly, my URL change yesterday had one unforeseen consequence that has no remedy at the present time: ID has no process in place to navigate all the ID comments made on the old URL into the new URL. All those comments and tiny conversations are lost to the outside now. Sorry, my fault.

If it helps, I can still see them all and visit the threads through the ID dashboard, but the truth is that I already miss them.

poetry #5 - ...does it make a sound?

© mdlockhart 2009

charcoal cold, she spreads herself above him
  noble, wanton, she hides, she hides behind
  the petty coats of the azure-breathing forest
tense and groaning, they sway beneath her,
  kaleidoscopic dancers, verdant in the planet's breath

i also sway, lost in the darkening
  in the spider-spinning cacophony of this aging warrior
  he is oblivious, lost in his own fuming worship
arms spread wide and full of shadow lines
  twisted, scar-knurled and full of fate

he is the former opulence
  brittle trailing of the ether's bridal gown
  now yellowed and ashed, he is alone

an anachronism
  hidden in among the lush present

besieged by a green youth, callous, callow
  not imbued with a proper

  respect, but in him there is a refusal
  arthritic and T-boned, his crooked palms raise
eternally to the stinging rain

---
he shakes and cracks within her dispassionate embrace

  straining towards the deluge, skeletal

  it spills, her showers

like sand between bony fingers

  and rigid, impotent, he rattles and rails

the mistress, un-aged, dances

  rushing between her younger lovers’ groaning limbs

  her laughter and disdain rolling

deeply, booming in the shadow

  through cloud and over root

he strains, zealot rigid

  unbending, spine fused by age and frustration

  no possible supplication

is left to him

  proud, but diminished

he stands as mute witness to

  the absolute constant of mutability

  the virginal truth of change

  the glare of what may be

to a dodgy and skittish present

---

tall, he prophesies

  a blood-full, onyx sky swollen above

  gyres about him with her younger lovers

slashes him with tears, explodes in ecstasy

  amplified echoes of his angst

desperate, he barks splinters

  against the sky that cuckolds him

  summons his own thunder and,

one last time, without resignation

  bends back to stare into her weeping mien

i hear his cracking sigh, 

  see him kneel and fall

  warmly, the scent of her full and sweet

he crashes to the forest floor

  and returns, returns to the earth

the young dance, oblivious above him, but i see

  as i see her, shuddering as she nods

  a final thunder head bowing to earth

  as with a flourish, a final tear she

mourns into the spreading darkness

© mdlockhart 2007

(Up the mountain in the first months after the inversion started, I found one deciduous tree at over 7000 ft, 600 or 700 feet above any other deciduous. It was dead, but beautiful, held up by the pines around it. The poem isn't about that tree, one I saw fall in a wind storm in Alberta, but it could be. Will be. One day.)

locus of control

I remember in psych 101 talking about locus of control, how our lives could be diagramed as circles of influence and how, no matter how large the circle was, it was where the locus of control was situated – inside or outside that circle – that had the most impact on our sense of self-esteem and happiness.

The life inversion was about walking away from a large circle of influence. I no longer manage a staff of forty-odd people, or oversee million dollar budgets and revenue streams, or get to go on TV and do interviews, or do guest articles in Canadian poker magazines. But when I did, although the circle was large, the locus of control usually felt like it was firmly located just right around the edge of the circle, sometimes just inside, usually out.

And I was miserable.

We were standing outside at work the other night, smoking in the cold, and a woman was talking about her dentist. She said that he said (hearsay, I know, but I won’t be taking this to court) that he considered casino workers to be tough people. Apparently they don’t bitch as much about their pain as regular folk do and he’d decided that we must be made out of sterner stuff.

I wanted to suggest that he come spend a few minutes in our break room if he ever wanted to hear some serious whining, but thought better of it – I’m the new guy after all.

Somebody said, “Maybe it’s because we’re already numb.”

The storyteller laughed and said, “Yeah, we’re all dead inside already.”

Everyone laughed at that one. Gallows humor. Laughing at shadows to chase them away.

My circle is now pretty small. Inside of it with me are a triple handful or so of close friends and family, about a quarter of whom are in these digital environs, and whom I only know by the tone of their written words, and the honesty and fearlessness with which they write. I love my friends.

My locus of control now feels firmly within my circle. I choose my schedule, I set my agenda, I strive after things that I feel make me a better person and writer, I wrestle my demons, and I do it all on my own time, according to my priorities and integrity.

Even the casino feels like a choice now, not a sentence. I’ve finally answered the question, “So, are you planning on applying for management again?” with, “No way in hell”, enough times that people have stopped asking. I’m not a threat to their advancement aspirations, so I’m not a threat. I go, I deal cards, and then I leave.

I can see on their faces that they don’t get it. They’re working for a career, and making sure that their position is secure, and struggling to even approximate something akin to keeping up with the Joneses. They don’t really get the guy that’s just stopping in, as if I was just topping up the tank before I keep driving, because they feel stuck. It’s in their cynical voices, their scowls, their rolling eyes, and their disparaging commentary.

I feel bad for them, but only because I know what it feels like. Intimately. I remember.

It reminds me why I made my changes – why I’m making my changes. I’d rather be the only goldfish in a free pond than any shark in the ocean, fighting over scraps. I left that world, and love that I left it. I love that I don’t feel dead inside any more.

.........

P.S. After the SOTU tonight, I tweeted, “I feel like I just drank a can of Coke Zero”. “Decaf, no-fat, no-whip mocha” could be a substitute. Was it just me, or was there no fiber and lots of filler? Was that a “Why bother” SOTU?

the last twenty minutes

First of all, it’s 2011, so I’m changing the font. Fuck yeah.

_

Turns out I wasn’t nearly as “over” my cold as I thought on NYE. Turns out that working that night from eight until four the next morning didn’t help. Casino hours… what are ya gonna do?

So I stumbled through the weekend of dealing cards and then slept Monday and Tuesday, literally. It’s Thursday and I almost feel mostly human again.

All that down time did let me finish watching the World Junior Hockey Championships though, so it wasn’t all bad. I just set my phone alarm to get up for the games and, in between, slept in medicated bliss. I was back on my feet yesterday though, running around, catching up on stuff, and ended up watching the final (Canada vs Russia) in a pub.

Canada lost in a monumental third period meltdown, going from a 3-0 lead at the start of the period to a final, dismal 5-3 loss, allowing five unanswered goals in what will surely go down as one of the greatest chokes of all time. I’ve mentioned before that I watch hockey now for the joy of the game and not to cheer the home team. Mostly. I was a little disappointed.

It was disappointing to watch the Canadian team blow the lead, but not world-ending. More disappointing was that it was a boring game to watch. Canada dominated for forty minutes, and then Russia dominated for twenty. There was very little of that exciting battle between two equals when they go toe to toe in the kind of display of skill and speed that makes hockey the fastest, most exciting game in the world. (Yes, I’m biased. My blog, I’m allowed.)

So I was less disappointed in the final score than I was in the fact that neither team came out to play a full sixty minutes of hockey.

That sounds uncharitable, and it kind of is. These are kids after all, every one of them nineteen or under and subsequently susceptible to vagaries of emotional vacillation tempestuous enough to sink the Titanic.

Nobody will ever know what exactly happened. It looked to me, though, like Canada spent the intermission between the second and the third imagining what the gold medals were going to feel like hanging around their necks, and then came out worried about not losing them. The Russian team, on the other hand, spent the intermission realizing that they had absolutely nothing to lose, and twenty minutes left to them to reach for the brass ring.

And that, I think, made all the difference.

The team that won yesterday didn’t play the whole game as well as they could have, but they played the most important part – the end. Life is like that, yeah? Not too many people manage to figure out their personal legend, to use a Paulo Coelho-ism, early enough to say they were able to play the whole game. I know a lot of people, like me, that didn’t figure that part out until later on.

Most of the time, we give up. We say that we made our choice and now we have to stick with it. We get fixated on the destination and lose sight of the journey, hung up on holding onto what we've got instead of risking it for the sake of the path. We have a career, families, kids, mortgages*, obligations, responsibilities, and we convince ourselves that personal legends have to come second to those things, because we’re used to lists and priorities that have to be linear.

News flash: They don’t have to be. You can love your kids and spouse and still love yourself and pursue whatever it is that makes your blood sing. And if you can, and if I can, then we all can.

When it comes down to it, how we start is less important than how we end. Lots of us have great ideas, brilliant starts, and then, somewhere in the middle, lose the thread. It’s a marathon, a journey, after all, and there’s lots of time to get distracted, or sidetracked, or bogged down. Win or lose, it truly is how we play the game, the effort we put in to the end.

I lucked out. I truly feel that I found my little bit of destiny to chase after, and I was in a pretty flexible personal position to make drastic changes in order to chase after that fucker. I get that it isn’t always appropriate to flip everything upside down in a life-inversion like I did in order to make changes, but there are always ways. I’m surrounded by amazing people, online and in the 3-D world, that are doing it, chasing personal legends, making it up as they go along, carving out a path through the jungle towards a mountaintop and a cave full of bliss.

They’re reaching for it as if there was nothing to lose, and I find it inspiring to see. It inspires me every day to get in the chair and finish stronger than I started, the skate to the buzzer. Because I have nothing to lose except me, and the only way to do that is to stop trying. Let me say that again: We have nothing to lose but ourselves, and the only way to do that is to stop trying.

I don’t usually do the question asking thing here, but I will today, because I’m truly interested in hearing your truth. What is it in your life that’s worth playing hard for right to final buzzer?

* The word mortgage finds its roots in the French. It literally means “death pledge”. Not surprisingly, they don’t use that particular phrase in French-speaking lands to describe contracts to buy houses. Go figure…

hockey, dextromethorphan, and the bliss of doing nothing

I’ve been really sick all week. The fever broke last night, I think, and my brain sort of works today, but the week has been a joyful mist of woozy illness combined with good extra-strength cold and flu meds. Feverish, stoned, and blessed with holiday hockey to watch.

It could have been worse.

One of the un-joys of casinos is that there’s tons of money passing through our hands and, with it, a million germs. New employees to casinos, or old employees coming back, tend to not have a sufficiently robust immune system to handle the microbe overload. After my Boxing Day shift last week, functioning on four hours of sleep after a late shift on the 25^th, I came home and succumbed to some serious sneezing.

In between prolonged sleeps and supplemental napping I’ve enjoyed house sitting at a friend’s place and taking advantage of her television, something I usually avoid like the plague. But during the holiday week there’s some fabulous tournament hockey to watch – both the IIHF World Juniors and the Spengler Cup in Europe.

If I had to be sick, I picked a good week.

One might think that it would have been a good week to write some really psychedelic stuff, but I was having a hard enough time focusing on the TV and following the puck. I have a feeling that “Dick and Jane” prose would have been a challenge. So I took the week off, postponing a freelance contract until after the New Year and not even cracking the manuscript. I played utter and complete hooky.

And I barely even felt bad about it.

I read blogs his week (occasionally feeling brave enough to try to comment in English), many of which were following the standard New Years motif of goal setting and resolution making. Many were well-written and yet did not stir me. Two did though, mostly because they bucked the resolution trend: Judy Clement Wall posted a beauty at Zebra Sounds about creating a personal manifesto, and Giulietta Nardone notched a lovely piece at Giulietta the Muse about following your enthusiasm. Please, check them both out - you won't be sorry.

Both, to me, were about defining who we are and then being it or chasing that ideal as opposed to setting external goals and measuring worth according to whether we achieve the goal or not.

The inversion has been all about not setting goals in traditional ways; about setting out on a journey and seeing where the road leads me. Yes, there was a story to write. I suppose that was a goal in a sense, but it was still about the journey more than about finishing anything. It’s still about the journey, about letting something organic grow rather than trying to manufacture something artificial.

Organic is good; A journey is natural. I can let it form itself, stop when there’s a rose to smell, run when the way is clear, enjoy the woods when the brush is thick, and not sweat it. It’s not about where I get – it’s about getting. It’s about how I get. It’s about who it makes me.

I’ll be pitching cards tonight night when the clock strikes midnight. No big deal. Ultimately New Years is just another day, a Friday to a Saturday. If I can have another year much like this last one has been I’ll be a happy puppy. I lack for almost nothing, have everything I actually need. The manuscript is getting better and better, and might actually be close to ready for beta readers. I’m close to friends and Mom, and that’s at least as important as anything else right now.

And I’m on the right journey. I like the road. The path is pleasing - creatively, aesthetically and relationally. There are no goals to reach, just a dusty lane to walk, sometimes just a deer path, occasionally no path at all. But there’s always a direction and the journey.

I find that’s enough. I wish the same for you: Enough.

Happy New Year, folks. Have a good one, take a cab, and be excellent to one another.

finding wild and the things we do for love

A friend on Twitter, Jennifer Garam (who goes by the Twitter Tag @writieouschick – that’s so cool), posted this quote by Isadora Duncan last week: “You were once wild here. Don’t let them tame you.”

It had an impact. Several of us appreciated it, Jennifer posted on it on her blog, One Writeous Chick, and then another friend, Judy Clement Wall, riffed on it too on her blog Zebra Sounds. We came up with a little hashtag magic - #youwerewildhere – and now we’re enjoying our little not-so-secret movement in the Twitterverse. It's growing, very slowly and very organically, and I love that it's staying humble. Every day someone new jumps in, and there's another blog post, and the whole thing feels pretty real.

This is my contribution, such as it is.

I started a new job on Monday. Actually, it’s an old job. After nine years of casino work leading into the life inversion that got me out of there, I started back with the casino that I first worked at earlier this week. Dealing cards. Back to the beginning.

When they say that writers need to cultivate multiple sources of revenue, I never imagine this as part of my fantasy. I really didn’t want to go back. I would have been happy as a clam to never actually set foot in a casino again. I really would have.

The life inversion was and is, in large part, about rejecting the consumerist world. I wanted to find the best me out beyond the bright lights and bells and whistles of the casino world, away from accumulating stuff and living up to popular social standards. The whole thing is an illusion, a fantasy of winning, a mirage of possibility, wealth and vanity inside a reality of desperation and narcissism.

It’s yucky.

But, dealing is also a chance to make twice as much as I could anywhere else at entry level. There are bills to pay, jobs are scarce, and I still know people in that world. It’s still about who ya know, not what ya know. And, frankly, I know how to deal cards. I can work two days a week and cover my minimal nut. This will allow more time to write. It’s kind of a no-brainer. And yet…

I keep asking myself if this is a compromise that I’m making, if somehow I’m losing the compass heading and drifting back into an orbit that I worked so hard to get out of. It’s not pride or vanity; It’s not wearing a uniform again after so many years in a suit. It’s the fact that it’s a casino. I hate that world. Love the people (some of them), hate the environment.

And when I realize that - how much I hate being there – I stop worrying. Other than the bare minimum of revenue to support me while I write, there’s nothing I want there. It’s not me anymore, in any way shape or form. It’s just a thing I do to help me chase my dreams; chase my better self. Living a life without compromise was always a dream, never a goal. The world doesn’t work that way. The goal was to make as few compromises as was possible, and to make the ones that were unavoidable count.

There was a time that casinos offered the possibility of a career, a chance to learn new things, and some sense of helping others by being a good manager, a good leader. It was fun to feel important and capable for a while in that milieu. I thought I was wild there once, briefly, but I let that environment, its pretty lights and the promise of career, meaning, importance and security tame me. I bought in. That won’t happen again.

I don’t claim to have found the wild me - the better me - again when I left the casinos twenty months ago, but I found the path to that me. I found the journey, and the journey is what it's all about.

The writing is wild. Hell, it’s the wildest thing ever. The better me I aspire to exists, not at the end of this road, but every step along the way, every page I type out, every bit of craft I learn, and even more when I ignore the craft and reach for magic. Every day I can spend rummaging around in my imagination, or soaring on the creative thermals that blow when things are just perfect, is a day spent being wild. And like most things, the more you do it, the better you get at it.

This casino gig isn’t a compromise, it’s a sacrifice; a distasteful thing I have to do that harms nobody else but me, and even then only if I let it. It allows me to pursue the dream, to rummage and soar. It is the sacrifices we're prepared to make that define how much we love the thing we're chasing. I find that I am prepared to make some fairly large ones. This sacrifice, this little thing? 

It’s just a small part of finding wild.

november

When I was eleven, the academic curriculum I was involved in at school was provided the opportunity to do a remarkable thing. Remarkable to us, in any case. We were allowed to make the big, dangerous walk across the street, through the sports fields, and into the giant halls of the Senior Secondary School to the confines of the band class so that we could participate in a unique grade seven music program. Through a quirk of fate and germs, I managed to miss the first visit. When I arrived in the second week, all of the really cool boy instruments – the trombones and trumpets, saxophones and tympanis, the lone guitar and drum kit – were taken.

I was left with the choice of clarinet or flute. The teacher said I had a good embouchure for flute (if @migroddy wanders through, maybe he can explain that concept in the comments), so that’s what I got. In time, I came to appreciate that placement – there are some really cute girls in the flute section – but at the time, just stumbling out of the blocks into pubescence with all of its sharp corners and early-adolescent contrasts, I did not feel lucky. I felt ripped off, like a cruel joke was being played on me. Like a giant “kick me” sign (to replace the one, only slightly smaller, that I already thought I possessed) had just been hung around my neck. I was not an enthusiastic student.

Three months later and heading towards the holiday break, I was facing my first test; about sixteen bars of simple melody that I could not complete on my best day. Not even close. My inadequacy was earned; I didn’t practice. The space between that band class and my closet space at school where I could hide the offending instrument, or home where I could hide it even better, was a bit of grade school social hell for me. Subsequently, I was on the road to failing said test, a probability that was, to me, as or more horrifying than the sentence of having to walk around in public with a flute case.

Not doing really well in school was not something I was comfortable with, in any subject. I was a nerd and proud of it. So with a few nights left before the test I suddenly came face to face with my desperation to excel and please my teachers, dug the flute out at home, and tried to practice.

It was dismal. When Mom now complains about tinnitus, I wonder whether that evening had something to do with it. I know that it didn’t, but still, I now know that nothing says “I love you” like a parent suffering through the early stages of music tutelage. After a whole fifteen minutes of trying and failing I was frustrated and ready to give up. I’d just quit the music program. I hated flute anyway, hated the snickers and the jokes and the insults. Mostly, to be honest, I hated not being better than the others. I hated standing out for the wrong reasons.

And then, for what was to be the first and last time, Mom made me keep trying. Like the one spanking I received, it had a profound effect. And like that one spanking, I’ve later wished she’d done it more. A lot more. I never really learned about how good discipline could be for you as a kid, but I wish sometimes that I’d had the opportunity to learn that lesson better, and younger.

But on that night, she was stern and strong and unwilling to equivocate on the subject of my practicing. As I got up to quit, she got in my face and made me sit back down. On that night, my fear of failure was confronted by that fierce motherly aspect, and my fear backed down.

I took my seat and tried again, her at my shoulder. And then I tried again because that time sounded as much like bird torture as the time before it. And again, and again, and again. It took another thirty minutes of really trying, of having no safe place to retreat to, of being stuck between a flute and a hardass, before the crux passage finally worked. Magically, my spasmodic fingers managed to function together and I made it through the bar of eighth notes and through to the finish. The only smile in the room bigger than mine was Mom’s.

Band and jazz band and orchestra ended up being extremely dependable and relatively easy A’s for me for the rest of my public school career. I was never exceptional, just a bit better than most, good enough for first flute but not enough to ever worry about a scholarship, and I was (sadly) okay with that. I learned to enjoy playing and being surrounded by girls even more. (A good embouchure is also useful for kissing.) All thanks to Mom and half an hour of not quitting.

But, as I said, it was a one-time lesson. I could have, should have, received that lesson many, many more times. But Mom got pretty busy with the boarders, and I was always too proud to ask or admit I needed it. So I coasted, and then floundered, and finally learned how to avoid challenges so as to avoid failure with an alacrity that bordered on evil genius.

It didn’t affect every part of my life, that aversion to risk, just the creative ones. Just the important ones. I did well in my chosen jobs, was successful when I went pack to school at 26 to re-educate following a motorcycle accident, and managed to get through most things looking like I sort of knew what I was doing. But I also didn’t really “complete” a lot of things. When the going got tough, I got going… the other way.

Through my thirties I was provided opportunities to learn lessons that I wish I’d learned in my teens. Somehow I managed to stumble into management positions, and where I was comfortable failing myself, I found I wasn’t comfortable at all failing the teams that depended on me. That sense of obligation or responsibility was the leverage my mind and heart needed to get over the hump and push through to completion, even when my legs wanted to go the other way.

Those lessons took a long time to learn though. I wrote the first draft of the prologue of the story I’m writing nearly fourteen years ago, got forty or so pages in, drew maps, and then abandoned it. I told myself it was just fantasy and not literary enough. I told myself that it was unrealistic to want to be a writer. I told myself that I was almost thirty and should start being a responsible adult. And they were all excuses.

At forty-three, I finally had enough confidence, frustration, angst, disillusionment, hope… whatever… to try again.

You know this part of the story if you’ve been reading along for a bit. (If not, search “life inversion” and catch up.) I quit again, but this time only the parts that were really bad for me – the corporate job, the consumerism, the stuff-accumulation, the pretending and pretension. I decided to put all my eggs in one basket, say “fuck it”, and write that goddamned novel I’d always said I was going to write.

I finished the bastard last Friday.

Well, not “finished” it in the sense that I’m ready to try to sell it just yet, but I finished a second draft. It’s close. There’s a bit of polishing, then the sharing with trusted and valued readers, then a final polish. But then, soon, only a couple months away now, I’ll be trying to find an agent.

When I typed the last word of the last chapter on Friday, it felt a bit like vindication. Not over anyone else. But over me. To me it felt like giving a big middle finger to the part of me that thought I’d never do it; to the voice that whispered in the dark that I was deluding myself; to the piece that was still convinced I was a fuck up. I felt like I was standing over that remnant, that vestigial quitter, on the field of battle, my foot on its corpse, sword in hand, screaming something primordial into the cold gloaming air. My own Barbaric Yawp.

It was how I’d felt, just that once as an eleven-year old, when Mom made me keep trying until I fucking got it, only better.

Some lessons, I suppose, take longer to learn than others. Mostly the important ones.

Epilogue: The mss is essentially done. Like I said, there’s a bit of polishing to do, but it’s pretty much complete at 180k words. I edited over 50k of them in the last month (my own sort-of NaNoWriMo), so thanks for hanging around while I took that break. Regular posts will now commence again. I’ll keep you updated.

P.S. I missed you all.