Cloud ‘09

There’s something I’d like to confess to you.  It’s something I’m ashamed to admit.  Something I’m embarrassed about.  I don’t like Lost.  You know, the TV show?  Yeah, I don’t like it.  I wish this weren’t true.  The reasons are unimportant (mostly having to do with the way the characters speak.  I can’t stand it.  It distracts me from the story).  What is important is that way that my distaste for the show keeps me from engaging with the people around me in a small way.  I would like nothing more than to gather with my friends on Tuesday or Wednesday or whenever the show is on and watch.  I would like nothing more than to participate in asinine conversation about what exactly is going on with that stupid island and why.  But I can’t.  I gave it a shot.  I made it through 2 1/2 seasons.  When I started to see ads for the new season that began a few weeks ago, I made one last push to barrel through the remaining episodes and be caught up with the rest of the world.  I just couldn’t justify the idea of spending 20-30 more hours on something that would become the bane of my existence.  This is not something I’m proud of.  I wish, I wish, I wish  it weren’t so.  But a wish and 50 million dollars will make you financially secure for the rest of your life.  So will just 50 million dollars.  You can’t wish or hope or believe something into reality.

I wish I liked Lost because it is important to me to engage with the world through pop culture.  Some people think this is silly or frivolous, but I don’t.  I have a hard time taking people who don’t know what’s going on very seriously.  Pop culture is the easiest way to be involved with people.  I know that you should strive for a deeper connection with people, but you can’t get deep with someone before you get shallow.  Find common ground.  And popular culture is really the lowest common denominator connecting us.  It doesn’t require much thought or effort; it only requires that you pay attention.  Find out what people like.  In some cases you will be confused by what people like.  I often am myself.  But at least you’ll know.  And in a small way, the people you interact with will feel known.  As far as I can tell this is a good thing.

If you didn’t know that a little over a week ago Barack Obama was sworn in as the new President of the United States of America, I would like to meet you.  I have never met anyone who lives on Mars before.  But I’m not sure we could be friends.  We wouldn’t really have anything to talk about.  Especially if they somehow beam Lost into outer space, which wouldn’t entirely surprise me.

I’m not into politics, even a little bit.  But just like everything else, I at least try to keep up with what’s going on.  I was happy to see Obama elected mostly because everyone else was so happy to see Obama elected.  I have no idea whether his economic stimulus package will actually stimulate the economy, or if any of his other policy ideas are good or bad or nothing new, but I am glad he is getting a chance to try.  The coolest thing about Obama from what I can tell is that he means so many things to so many people for reasons that you can pretty much make up.  And so the reason that Obama means something to me is that I hope that his election will stem the tide of cynicism in our culture.  I hope this because I hope that it will stem the tide of cynicism in me.  Obama was elected on a platform of hope and change, but there is a problem.  Hope and change are entirely unrelated.  And the former certainly does not beget the later.  Hope, faith, belief…none of these things are important or even relevant when it comes to changing your life (all of this assuming change IS what you want right now, and I kind of do).  It turns out that the best advice you ever got was from your high school football coach.  The most important thing in life is winning.

I am convinced, after having several months to evaluate the situation, that the most important thing that ever happened to me was the 2008 Philadelphia Phillies.  Their World Series win changed my life in tangible, measurable ways.  Ways that no amount of faith, hope, or belief ever could.  You could make the argument that since I am not actually employed in any way by the Phillies that their winning the World Series did not actually happen to me, but I would counter argue that you are a big fat jerk and I hate your face.  So there.

Here’s what you may not realize.  I, without exaggeration, spend more time watching baseball than I spend eating.  This may explain that I have a head full of baseball-as-life metaphors and a body full of, well, not a whole lot.  Certainly not enough muscle mass to push an ordinary bathroom scale past the 135 pound threshold.  Anyway, I watched at least 150 of the Phillies 162 regular season games (and every single playoff game) in their entirety.  And digesting that experience from beginning to end taught me a valuable lesson.  Nothing in life matters until you get one.  You have to win.  The beauty of baseball is that like life, it happens every day.  There are ups and downs, homers and strikeouts, days you feel great and days you have to gut it out with a hang over.  It’s hard work and it can beat you down.  But when it comes to results, the tangible is far more important than the intangible.  Winning is more important than hope.  The distance between knowing you can do something and believing you can do something is miles, not inches.

My life has changed because I now know that my years of dreaming and hoping were a waste.  And maybe you’re right if you say that the Phillies World Series win didn’t happen to me.  But I was along for the ride and I know what winning looks like.  In my life now, I don’t care about anything else.  I saw the hard work that needs to be put in and I saw what the results should be.  I won’t accept anything else.  Hope is just a distraction.  Allow me to demonstrate further.

I coach a junior high basketball team full of wonderful kids at school for losers.  Seriously, the environment there is defeatist to the point that it is toxic.  The negativity and excuse-making coming from the administration does a terrible disservice to the kids.  They are constantly let off the hook, rarely forced to work hard at anything, and are basically told that they will never achieve anything in athletics so let’s not even try.  Now I understand that not every kid is going to take to every (or any) sport and junior high is a great time to try new activities and such.  I am by no means a coaching Nazi.  We set a goal at the beginning of the season to make the playoffs, which would be the first time it had ever been done at the school.  And we didn’t just believe or hope we could, we worked our asses off for it.  I am certain that these kids have never worked for anything this hard in their entire lives.  And you know what?  We started winning.  Slowly at first, but then more consistently.  As a coach, I knew we could do it because I saw the Phillies do it.  I didn’t believe, I knew.  When we finally clinched the first playoff spot in school history and I saw the looks in the eyes of nine kids who for the first time in their lives knew they could do anything they wanted to, I got a little jealous.  They don’t have to waste 12 more years hoping for something like I did.  They have it.  They have a season full of results, and their numbers are higher.  They don’t have to prove anything to anyone anymore.  It’s been done.  Of course they can do it again.

But there’s something else about winning that transcends sports or my career or whatever I want to win.  I’ll never forget Marcus, Jake, Wolf, Peter, Jasper, Mo, Kareem, Lucas, and Liam as long as I live and they’ll never forget each other.  Just like I’ll never forget Cole, Jimmy, Pat, Chase, Uncle Charlie and 21 other guys that I swear I could name off the top of my head but won’t to spare your retinas detaching.  But most of all, I’ll never forget the 2 million fellow fans that packed Philadelphia for the championship parade on that perfect Halloween afternoon.  Every single one your red-wearing best friend.  The camaraderie was like nothing I’ve ever experienced. No mere episode of Lost could ever bring people together like that, and like Obama it meant something different to each person there.  And it’s funny because that parade was what, back when all I knew was belief, I always thought church should be.  But all the faith in the world can’t top the tangible.  Phillies 4, Rays 1.  Yes we can.

King with a (Temporary) Crown

The first snow of the season is a truly beautiful thing until you actually have to venture out into it.  It should come as no surprise that I much prefer to sit in my ivory tower on the 5th floor and be mesmerized by the large heavy chunks of white as they descend to the earth below.   Today I will have no such luck.  Today my teeth have no regard for my preferences.

As today is the first snow, I decide that it is occasion enough to dig through my boxes and break out my winter attire.  I normally try to get by on sweatshirts and windbreakers for as long as possible and I suppose this is to prove to the world how badassI am.   Instead, I just end up shivering everywhere I go and getting sick twice by mid-November.  I guess someday I’ll learn my lesson.  In truth, the real reason for this is that I lived in Florida for five years and down there everyone walks around in parkas and mittens the second the temperature drops below 55 and for reasons that have nothing to do withthe weather I never, ever wanted to be associated with Floridians as long as I live.  So I deprive myself of warmth for two months every year.  I guess everyone does something.

I find my knit hat, my gloves, and my scarf.  The first two I am fine with; I have never figured out the last one.  I’m pretty sure you’re not supposed to wear a scarf the way the hipsters in my neighborhood wear them, just flung casually around the neck.  I’m not sure how that’s supposed to keep you warm.  I sort of just wrap the whole thing around my head like a mummy, though I’m pretty sure you’re not supposed to do that either.  At least it keeps me warm, but it makes me feel like an idiot.  What I don’t need right now is to go out into the world feeling like an idiot.  But then I’ve never needed a scarf to do that.  Any scarf wearing advice is welcome in the comments section.

Now fully bundled, I leave the house to do one of my least favorite things…leave the house.  My journey will take me ten blocks uptown to Union Square and then over to the West Village, where the streets ignore my preference to be numbered and intersect at right angles, and end with an emergency trip to my absolute least favorite place, the dentist.

I don’t have any kids that I know of, but I understand the feeling of doing your damnedest to take care of something its entire existence only to be be resented and let down later in life.  I have been a stickler for proper dental care since I was young and all I have to show for it is the inability to chew on one side of my mouth and a currently cracked, throbbing, and swollen molar on the other.  I often wonder why my body never filled out in my mid-20’s and I constantly overlook the fact that eating food hurts me in ways most people take for granted.  And it is right about the time I am feeling sorry for myself about all of  this that I step in literally the first puddle I come across, a block from my apartment.  It looked solid to me.  What was I going to do, watch where I was going?  Be more careful in inclement weather?  Please, I was wallowing in self pity.  I don’t have time for all that vigilance.  My right foot is now soaked and freezing, which is a problem as it was one of the two feet I needed to get where I’m going today.

And now is the part of the story where I complain about how I don’t get life and continue to feel sorry for myself.  But given that 2008 is ending in a matter of days, I remember a promise that I made to myself at the beginning of this year that things would be different.  I was lucky to make it out of 2007 alive and I promised myself I would never have another year like that again.  The thing is, if you don’t stand up for yourself and your mental posterity it can get away from you quickly.  Your comfort zone gets violated, the things that you rely on disappear, your tooth throbs, your feet are wet, and the next thing you know you don’t feel that much better about your life than you did at this time last year. 

I’ve always resented the cliche that life is a struggle and nothing is handed to you.  That you have to crawl before you can walk.  Before you can run.  I’ve always resented that I couldn’t just be happy.  That I wasn’t sure that anything would ever make me happy.  But completed my errands in Union Square and making my way to the dentist, my life flashed before my eyes and not just because I ignored the orange hand on the other side of the crosswalk warning me not to plod slowly to the other side of the street.  As an SUV blared its horn at me I realized that I had completely lost my fight.  In my younger years I was an idealist, full of piss and vinegar.  Not happy, but not giving up on the idea that I could be.  Years of right crosses and black eyes, years of blows to the chin with nobody in your corner to stitch your gashes can cause you to throw in the towel.  Take some time off.  Early retirement.  Eight long blocks from knowing whether or not I can eat Christmas dinner, my step begins to ever so slightly spring.  If you want something in life you have to fight for it.  That includes happiness.  Pardon me while I become a cliche. 

I think everyone has a higher opinion of themselves than they should.  Everyone thinks they are a good person and deserve good things.  And maybe I give myself too much credit when I say deep down I’m not a miserable person.  It’s just that I’m generally unimpressed with what life has to offer.  I’ve been waiting to be amazed by something my entire life.  It hasn’t happened and maybe it never will.  But in the meantime I’m building my happiness on small things.  Like the fact that I am a more agile human being than the vast majority of the population.  Seriously, you should see me move in this snow.  I navigate the ice and slush with a grace and agility that parents should be telling thier kids about before putting them to bed.  Even though a quarter inch of wet gross has accumulated on the bottom of my right shoe, I still move past flustered pedestrians at an absurd rate of speed given the conditions.  I am a force of nature, every step drawing me closer to inner peace. 

As it turns out, teeth like years, can be salvaged.  And relatively pain free if you find a good dentist.  I throw another haymaker in the general direction of my brooding dark with the knowledge that I will indeed be able to enjoy Christmas dinner with a set of nearly fully functioning teeth.  I have a temporary crown in my mouth that feels more like a tooth than anything I’ve had in years, with the promise of a permanent one to come after the new year.  It cost me more than I really had, but sometimes you have to dig deep for things like that.  Wallet, soul, teeth, happiness, I don’t know anymore.  As I make my way home, bounding over puddles mere mortals can only hope to find a way around, I have no idea if I can do this.  But I know 2008 was better than 2007 because it had to be.  Next year will be better than this year because I won’t let it not be.