The 4-1-Run

The Cosmos tastes like Old Bay

2012-02-07T06:23:00.000-05:00

I glow when I drive eastbound across the Chesapeake Bay Bridge. At least that's how it feels. Now, no one is staring or pointing at me as I go by, so I may not be actually glowing.

Hitting the Bay Bridge is like a trigger experience--it evokes a certain feeling. It's an aesthetic high. When your head, heart and soul are all elevated together, lifted up above whatever plane they were previously on. And in that experience are changed, for the better.

Wordsworth and the Romantics (not a band, that I am aware of) would use the word "sublime," to describe this experience, which I dig as well. For Wordsworth, the sublime could be approached by the mind, but the mind would come up short. The mind can walk up to it, but can't grasp it, so the spirit takes over and can bridge it, can touch the sublime, but only temporarily.

We step into the sublime at an intense sunrise. Maybe on the beach, listening to the surf, before anyone is around. Above treeline in the mountains. Surrounded by redwoods in California. Grand Canyon. This experience of the sublime happens in nature and through art, and I am going to say throughout our lives, though maybe we've never named it or thought about it that way.

I've been thinking about this, the eastbound across the Chesapeake Bay/sublime feeling and what it is, what triggers it and why. And then yesterday I was reading Albert Goldbarth, who said, "We're the few but beautiful / units of the first day of the cosmos / densed up over time;"

Maybe Goldbarth has unearthed something here (that is generally the case when I read him, he is an aesthetic archaeologist, uncovering something new daily). Maybe in the sublime, we are reaching back, touching or experiencing something akin to that first aesthetic experience: Creation (please note the capital "C").

If we mix some Carl Jung into our Goldbarth-and-the-sublime sandwich, maybe the sublime is our soul, tapped into the collective unconscious, re-experiencing, recognizing Creation, tapping our fleeting consciousness into the Cosmos.

Dude. No. Duuuuuude. So when I'm driving eastbound over the Chesapeake, when my heart races, when my eyes and soul light up, when my brain tickles, I'm getting a hearty helping of the Cosmos, served through the Chesapeake.

Mmmm.

Tastes like... Old Bay.

A decade of Anna

2012-01-31T06:40:00.001-05:00

"Anna" is another word for "life-changer." At least that's been my experience. I can still remember the shirt I was wearing to the hospital, ten years ago today, when Robin had her. I've written here before about her hearing my voice. If you'll indulge me to quote myself, it serves as an introduction, the first time I met Anna:

"When our daughter Anna was born, her left arm was a little slow to get moving. The doctors weren't overly concerned--this can happen to a C-Section born baby--but they noted it, and I went with them as they rolled her down the hospital hallway into a room to check her vitals and her arm. She didn't care for being prodded and was screaming (those who know her can attest to her lung capacity) over the doctors and nurses, until I talked to calm her. When I spoke she fell immediately quiet and moved her head and unfocusing eyes toward my voice. She stayed quiet while I spoke and the nurse commented that she knew and responded to my voice (read to your babies in bellies). Homegirl (Anna, not the nurse) had the keys to the car from there. I knew from that second, and holding her looking out our hospital room window that night as she slept that there was nothing cooler than being a dad. I've thought so countless times since."

All the moments and milestones since and my mind hangs on that moment the longest. A decade moment. A lifetime moment.

I have said before that I have enjoyed every year of our girls' lives more than the previous year, just watching them grow and learn and seeing who they become. That's true still. But your child hitting double digits gives you pause. Fuck "gives" you, it MAKES you pause.

My life over the last decade has been co-defined. Many of my greatest moments are moments Anna made--things she said or did or thought or spoke.

I have cried more, been more emotional over the last decade. Many of the tears are the good kind, but that depth of experience, of experience shared with a soul/person in your care, growing and changing and looking to me/us for opinion, answers, solace, laughter. Perhaps I neglected to read the "free tear duct fill-up with birth of baby" sign.

Over the last decade, I have watched more kids movies than I ever thought possible. I have learned the names of toys and books and TV characters because, well, that's how I roll.

Over the last decade, I have seen myself, outside myself. Anna is a morning person, like me (Ava prefers sleep, like Robin). Anna and I share some of the same hang-ups, same tendencies, same inclinations. I'm not sure what to say about recognizing yourself in another, but it is an experience without parallel.

Over the last decade, I have gained a respect, admiration and sense of wonder about my father, my parents, and how the hell they raised and dealt with us (me, really, my sister was much easier) and seemed to always be in control. We, as parents, certainly do not.

I think it's fair to call the last ten years, the decade of Anna in our house and our lives. Over that time, she has given me a new identity, a new responsibility, a new perspective and a new name: Dad. I think it is my favorite of my names.

Happy 10th birthday, Anna! Can't wait to see where you/we go next.

Put Columbus on the couch

2012-01-27T07:02:00.003-05:00

I am afloat, adrift maybe, but for family, house, job keeping anchor.

That's a good thing. I don't particularly dig constant floating, specter-like, unable to return to earth. Those with an airy spirit can suffer that specter syndrome.

Sometimes collapsing ass to couch is a homecoming, like a ship returning to port after a trying passage, one with serpents and storms and Columbus-sailing-off-the-flat-earth drama.

Chill the sea serpent. Put Columbus on the couch.

Docking ass to sofa sanctuary and watching the girls in the evening's safe harbor. It's an imperfect metaphor, but in real life it works fine.

* Illustration by Adam Scoppa.

The pint glass as reality

2012-01-24T07:30:00.001-05:00

I'm into pint glasses. Sure, the connotation of ale or stout contained therein is a part of the infatuation, but it's also how they re-shape and contain whatever pours into them. A pint glass is both a vessel and a lens.

Seeing a pint glass sitting on a tavern bar in front of taps (preferably of Evolution), creates a different expectation than seeing a bottle or can or plastic keg cup in whatever setting. Just like some people wear a suit or uniform to work, a pint glass is a well dressed beverage.

A pint glass is a form. It's like a poem, a song, a short story, an aphorism, a novel, a memoir. The form colors the perception and the experience of what is inside.

If experience is reality, as the Empiricists like to say, then a pint glass shapes reality. John Locke, a pint glass is reality.

We each have our own metaphorical pint glasses, in which we try to contain and order the world. Especially after a few pints.

So pour that in your pint glass and swill. Responsibly, of course...

Sipping "Volcanic Sunlight"

2012-01-18T03:43:00.003-05:00

Perhaps poetry is irrelevant today. Saul Williams, a poet, is not. When you perform at Def Jam events, when you make an album with Trent Reznor, when you project words, thoughts and feelings like a force of nature, relevance remains. It lifts you up.

I remember hearing Williams recite poetry at the end of one of the great hip hop albums, Blackalicious "Blazing Arrow." I remember being moved by it, but not knowing who he was. This past summer, TWM71 brought him back to my attention and I picked up his book "The Dead Emcee Scrolls."

If Williams just wrote poetry and read it at bookstores, he wouldn't stand out. That's the problem with poetry. It's too easy for people to dismiss. There's no cache. Why would I want to see/hear/read/write that?

Matthew Zapruder, also a poet, wrote a great piece in the L.A. Times called "Why I Rhyme." It looks at what drew him to poetry, but also at the evolution of poetry through rhyme to today's free verse. There are some gems there.

"Poetry at its most basic level is about the movement of the mind... the leap from one thought to another... that leap, that movement is what makes poetry." -MZ

Williams makes leaps from one form to another, moving beyond poetry proper. He is an actor, he is a musician. He has a singing voice that may be kin to Lenny Kravitz's. I think Williams' reaching out, expanding the boundaries of poetry to more culturally relevant forms of expression can invigorate poetry.

Williams' art is performance. That's what connects it. It isn't content to live quietly on a page. It wants ears. On Feb. 23, at the Black Cat in Washington, D.C., it will have mine.

A moment of clarity

2012-01-10T06:38:00.000-05:00

I was drinking a Newcastle Brown Ale in a Raleigh, N.C., movie theater watching "Pulp Fiction" for the first time. It was the first time I ever imbibed a beer in a movie theater (viva art theaters!). And the movie immediately became one of my all-time favorites, if not my singular favorite film. I don't think that was related to the beer.

HBO has been showing "Pulp Fiction" and last night I latched on early, even though we own the movie. It's a film I will watch anywhere, anytime. I am not a screenwriter; I don't dig on screenplays. But PF taught me about how I want to write--the language, the dialogue, the staccato conversation, which stays casual and funny but delves deep into philosophy, character, life. The narrative that leaps forward and back. And everything with plot twists, pacing and humor that keep you glued. I almost come out of my seat, still, when Vega gives the adrenaline shot to Mia Wallace.

I am sure I could expound on similarities between PF and my other top all-time movies ("Cool Hand Luke," "Raiders of the Lost Ark," "Snatch" are in that company). But other than being re-smitten with a late night screening of PF, I think I am on a thread where art forms and genres other than your own instruct/inform you. One of the books I have going at present is John Berger's "Bento's Sketchbook."

Berger launches off of the writing/thinking of Benedict "Bento" Spinoza, and the fact that Bento is said to have carried a sketchbook with him, which was never found (at least not that is known) after his death. Berger, an artist, writer, thinker, looks at the impulse to create/draw, combined with deep meditations, which go beneath the surface.

I can't draw. But in looking at the impulse to draw, to create, and how Berger approaches the outside world, I am inspired.

So those are my extra-genre inspirations this morning. An all-time favorite film and a new book. Add morning coffee to that, maybe a lunch-time run, and I am ready for take off.

The abstract pirate

2012-01-03T07:30:00.001-05:00

I went through a Buffett phase. Not a "Cheeseburger in Paradise" Buffett phase, but a "Gypsies in the Palace," "Volcano" phase. I bought the box set, listened to everything and read his novels. We've seen him in Maryland, New Jersey and Pennsylvania.

I still dig Buffett, but more in an island-vibe way, a waterman soul way; as someone who could happily live life in and on and around the simple, small water town. His music is a perfect arrow in the quiver of the various music that should be enjoyed thereon.

The song that reeled me in was "A Pirate Looks at 40." The simple articulation of being out of time, of standing outside what society deems financially/occupationally important. I wrote the line, "My occupational hazard is, my occupation's just not around," on my ceiling in college (part one).

That song is in my head again as we start 2012, looking ahead on the year, as this is the year I am scheduled to turn 40. It's never an age I've given a lot of thought to.

I can remember a New Year's Eve, when I was probably 17 or 18 and thinking about New Year's Eve leading into the year 2000. Thinking that I'd be 27. Wondering what that would look like. Remembering that my mom was 27 when she had me. Would I be married? Would I have kids at that point?

It was all abstract. When things/images/concepts are abstract they can never be specific. But when they move to specific, they never go back to abstract. They supersede it, take it over. With Robin, I no longer wondered what my wife would look like. When the girls were born, I ceased to wonder what kids would look like or what their names would be.

My looking forward or back at life has never really been age sensitive, but life event sensitive.

I am glad and thankful that the abstract future has revealed the life I now live. But I still feel like Buffett in "A Pirate Looks at 40." Maybe more so.

Twelve for 2012

2011-12-31T08:19:00.003-05:00

Hello 2012. I can see you. Walking up to the door with the insulated pizza box. Or is that a candygram?

2011 is on its way out. But I don't care to look back on a year that had me hobbled with a messed up ankle for almost half of it. I want to look forward.

What do I want from 2012? What do I hope to accomplish? This is all subject to change. But here are some thoughts. I put these out there with/as intent...

- Complete/compete in an event I've never done before. Maybe this is a new trail race, or distance I haven't run before. Or maybe it is a stand-up paddleboard or kayak race. Throwing something new into the physical challenges.

- Read James Joyce's "Ulysses" before I turn 40 (on April 8). This has been one of those reads that feels like it has been missing, as a college English major, where we read "Dubliners" and "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man." It has been sitting on my bookshelf, beckoning. I've thought about it. It is time to listen.

- Read books that are currently on my bookshelf vs. buying more. I have amassed a prized collection of books I'd like to read (and some I actually have). But too many of them fall to rainy day status as I get pulled in by something new. This is a year I want to cultivate what is here vs. acquire what is not.

- Get out on the water/go fishing more. I don't hunt. I don't play golf. I dig fishing, but don't do it nearly enough. I'm not talking about going offshore fishing. I mean to get out fishing on the Bay, in the rivers. Local.

- Go to more Nationals games, take the girls to their first Major League Baseball game. I've got my Memorial Park/Camden Yards memories with my dad. That's part of what pulled me to the Nationals when I started working next door. Now our household, my Pittsburgh wife included, are Nationals fans. This will be a fun year to indoctrinate the girls beyond evening Comcast TV.

- Finish 2012 in better shape than I start it, both physically and financially. This is a big one. This year was too sedentary for me in terms of physical activity. And it was another year of wanting to accomplish more, sock more away in terms of finances. Though these two things aren't related, I want to go at them both with abandon. Restrained abandon :)

- Spend less money on stuff, shit I don't need, either save it, or spend it on experiences. Forgo stuff for life.

- Take better care of my temper. It generally stays indoors, doesn't venture out. But the girls see it in the mornings, or around homework time. It doesn't seem like me. And I need to be mindful of it. Perhaps starting the majority of the days with meditation or yoga--Sun Salutations first thing most mornings...

- Plan and take more trips. Of the day variety, of the overnight variety, of the weekend variety. Let's go places we haven't been. Let's take the girls sometimes and just grown-ups and/or friends.

- Walk the dogs more. They dig it. I dig it. We don't do it enough. We should.

- Complete a project I haven't done before. Not sure if this is going to be an around the house or yard project, a creative writing/research project. It is a way of expanding horizons and comfort zones.

- Take care of my house (Protect this house!). In this case literally. The house, the yard, the garage. I'm not one that comes home and tinkers. I'm not going to be, not going to try to be. But I do derive some peace of mind from working in the yard, or when I friend and I re-floored the downstairs. There is some stuff that needs doing. Let's gitterdun.

Well, there is 12 to do's for 2012. That seems like a good number. The key is in the follow-through. That's how the doors get open. And this isn't so much a to do list as it is a mode or way of being for 2012. Direct the intent.

Boxes of Yule, or blank slatedness

2011-12-28T06:25:00.003-05:00

2011 has phoned it in. You can't expect much. Its last few days are torn between a Christmas hangover and new year build up. Pull the covers up and hit snoooze.

But wait. Maybe because of low/no expectations, we should expect more. We can do with these days what we want. A week given to us by teachers and school administrators since we were in kindergarten. This week is ours, Fu$% yeah!

Having said that, it still feels like recharging time. A few Fat Tire ales. Some Woodford Reserve. Listening to the Roots "undun." Listening to Ambrose Akinmusire's "When the Heart Emerges Glistening." Reading Walker Percy. Reading Kabir. Contemplating Lewis Carroll. Readying my mind for David Foster Wallace, "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again." Morning coffee. Deciding what way to try to direct my body/fitness in 2012.

I'm not sure 2011 has a discernible theme for me. For that matter, I'm not sure any year has, aside from the year I got married (1999) or the years the girls were born (2002 and 2005). The attempt, I suppose, is to wrap a neat little bow around 2011 with these last few days. Or maybe it is to set it out on the curb with the Christmas tree, and boxes of Yule.

I'm not sure I can pull that off. I think I'd rather enjoy each one, in its blank slatedness. Its carefree aura. Happy week between Christmas and New Year's. May it be the best of the season.

Christmas light-tinted glasses

2011-12-26T08:18:00.004-05:00

Let's say there are two types of consciousness: Christmas morning consciousness and the other 364 mornings a year consciousness. There is something about Christmas morning that is different. That takes you back to being a kid. It is full of hope, anticipation. You can't wait to get out of bed.

So what's up with the rest of the year? Why can't that Dec. 25 feeling be the norm? What the hell are you asking me for? Why don't you ask yourself?

It seems like that is maybe the one morning a year we give ourselves permission to not think about work, not to think about bills, or the everyday, mundane quality that days can quickly take on. We allow ourselves to dwell in a sort of awe. To see the world through Christmas-light-tinted glasses.

It's easy to blame the rest of the world for the fact that we don't feel or see the world this way everyday. But ultimately that's bullshit. How I look at the world is up to me, not just as an abstract responsibility, but every morning.

I'm not saying I've mastered it. Far from it. There are plenty of days I struggle to get the day going. I'm pissed at the girls for not getting ready for school. I'm having a mental/spiritual 38 degrees and rainy day going on in my head.

But I'm the one who has to fix that. I've got to work that through and get back to that Christmas morning consciousness. What William Blake identified as "twofold consciousness." What Colin Wilson tried to convey in his book "The Outsider."

What are the ways I can cultivate that feeling? For some people, it is solace/faith/hope through religion (Christmas is Jesus's birthday, after all). For some people meditation (I've got to do a lot more of this). For some people maybe a morning run (I need to get back to that). Maybe there is a mantra to chant to bring it all back.

Personally, I like the idea of leaving the Christmas tree up all year long. Maybe change the decorations to reflect the current season--flowers in the spring, Red Stripe and flip-flops and fishing rods in the summer, football in the fall. Oh to see the world everyday through Christmas light-tinted glasses.

Homegrown, home team

2011-12-23T05:22:00.000-05:00

I read everything I can lay eyes on when it comes to the Ravens and the Nationals. I frequently cruise by The Washington Post's Nationals Journal and The Baltimore Sun's Ravens pages. I spin the radio dial by 105.7 The Fan on the commute during football season. I have text alerts come to my phone from The Sun and MASN.

I don't frequently call in and don't think I've ever commented online--does anyone set out to be a wave in an ocean?--but can and do discuss with friends, family, fans in person. We have a 13-year-old nephew who reminds me of me in his encyclopedic fervor for sports statistics and theories. I've said and been told before that sports reporter is a road I should have taken with a full tank of gas. I read the Nats reports by Adam Kilgore at the Post and think, man, how cool would it be to write about that stuff all day...

I recently caught up with a former philosophy professor/mentor, who is a baseball fanatic. He had the following comment, "I have been a Branch Rickey man since my childhood. This means adopting failed teams that are engaged in rebuilding through their farm system... The Nationals are very exciting and I can't wait for Bryce Harper." He made another comment that he envied my work location (next to the Nationals stadium in DC) because, "You get to see the best fielding third baseman since Brooks Robinson." I, too, am a Ryan Zimmerman fan.

There is something to this home-grown thing he mentions. A born and raised Baltimore fan, localizes me. We watched Cal Ripken come through the ranks. But the Ravens have given us that since coming to Baltimore as well: Ray Lewis, Jonathan Ogden, Ed Reed, Todd Heap, Ray Rice, Joe Flacco, Haloti Ngata, Terrell Suggs, Torrey Smith. These are all players we've watch get drafted and step onto the playing field as "our" guys. And then you add the Anquan Boldins and Vonta Leachs, the right players to round out what you've got.

The Nationals are vibing the same way: Ryan Zimmerman, Stephen Strasburg, Jordan Zimmerman, Danny Espinosa, Ian Desmond, Bryce Harper, then you add a Jayson Werth and a Gio Gonzales and see where things go. You get in on the ground floor and hope to take the elevator on up. If you've been or listened to a game and seen Zimm hit a game-winning home run or make a phenomenal play at third, or seen Tyler Clippard or Drew Storen shut down an offense, you can feel something deeper going on.

Watching an Ozzie Newsome/John Harbaugh or Mike Rizzo/Davey Johnson combination is akin to a chess match on top of the actual games and seasons. It's a game within or on top of a game and when they both work together it's the complexity and simplicity of a symphony.

I'm not sure what sent me down the sports path this morning. The football season is gearing up for the playoffs. And the Nationals just made a big off-season splash, which we've been waiting for. Maybe that's it.

Maybe the soul looks like snow

2011-12-20T07:35:00.002-05:00

When someone old dies, the question gets asked: what does the soul/spirit look like? This is positing that you believe there is a soul/spirit, something more than the breath in the body.

If someone 92 dies, what does their soul look like apart from the body? 92? 70? 30? The time in their life when they were the happiest? Or is it that essence that connects all these ages? That look in the eyes that you can trace from baby pictures on through old age. Or is it a color or smell unique to a soul?

Hard to wrap your brain around a soul. The concept gets credence even in science, per the theory that energy isn't created or destroyed, it is just transferred and transformed. Certainly there is an energy in someone alive that is absent when they are dead.

If you connect that concept to Jung's collective unconscious--that we can tap back into history, that we are connected to it, the soul will swim through your head, buoyant and sticky like a magnetic is sticky, pulling the mind along.

These are heady conceits, appetizers for uncertainty.

I don't know what the soul looks like. Maybe it looks like snow, which is why I get light-hearted when it snows. And maybe Dylan Thomas is also describing the soul when he writes:

"Our snow was not only shaken from whitewash buckets down the sky, it came shawling out of the ground and swam and drifted out of the arms and hands and bodies of the trees; snow grew overnight on the roofs of the houses like a pure and grandfather moss, minutely white-ivied the walls and settled on the postman, opening the gate like a dumb, numb thunderstorm of white, torn Christmas cards."

Remembering Shirley Miller

2011-12-18T09:49:00.004-05:00

Remarks given at memorial service, 12/17/11.

Frank Sinatra had nothing on Shirley Miller. More than a mantra, “My Way,” was likely Shirley’s theme song. It practically played on loud speakers in any room she walked into.

Shirley was my grandmother. She decided when I was born that she didn’t want to be called “grandma” or “granny,” or anything of the sort. She decided to let me try to say her name and go with whatever that effort produced. “Shuey” was what came out and it is how she has been known by our family ever since.

Shuey was fiercely independent, yet never drove. In fact, never even got a driver’s license. But it never slowed her down. She could always get where she wanted to go. If her late husband Bob Miller’s autobiography had a sub-title, it might be “Driving Miss Shirley.” But he never minded. He always seemed to be having a good time and you could find him reading a newspaper with a cup of coffee at about any antique or gem show.

If you ever rode in a car with Shuey around Easton, or Towson, or Baltimore, you know that she could, and did, turn every building, or home, or store into a personal landmark. “Where Dr. Detrich’s office is, that’s the house we grew up in.” “That’s the house where Cousin Nellie lived.” That’s where mother moved.” “That’s where we got Berger’s cakes…” She was a walking oral history of a place, which was put to good use when she worked with curators, archivists and volunteers with historic photographs at the Historical Society of Talbot County.

Shuey was resourceful. She collected, as she liked to say, “anything there is more than two of.” Dolls, jewelry, Christmas tree pins, Cameos, books—we’d be here a while if I tried to list everything. When she found something at an antique show, she would figure out how to get it. She might trade for it. She might go down to the basement of their Towson house and make slipcovers or curtains to make extra money.

Shuey was not one for sitting around, there were too many things she wanted to do. At Londonderry, she planned trips and social events, helped with movie nights. She was big on movies. I love the story she would tell about her mother, who went to just about every movie they showed at the Avalon Theatre. She figured out which seat was the very center seat in the theater. And that’s where she sat. If someone was in her seat, she asked them to move. You can see where Shuey got parts of her personality.

Because of her tenacious collecting and shopping personality, around Christmas time, she was the secret weapon. She was given a list of whatever the must-have hot gift was for my sister or me. And she was there when Toys ‘R Us opened, throwing elbows and acquiring the gift, by all means necessary. I think she got them all.

Christmas time has always made me think of Bob and Shirley. They were really the best part of the holiday. On Christmas Eve, they drove to Oxford from Towson. We waited to see them turn the corner onto our street. We helped them unload the car of presents and suitcases. We had dinner and they were there the next morning when we woke up—Shuey with her tea and Pop with his coffee. This time of year will always make me think of them.

This past Sunday, I went over to her house. She wasn't doing well. Wanted company. We watched the Ravens game and they happened to be playing the Colts. Shirley and Bob were big Baltimore Colts fans and they attended almost every Colts home game together. She could tell you all about the old Colts and this past Sunday was talking about Art Donovan.

I asked her if she ever, after all those years of cheering for the Colts, ever thought she'd be pulling for Baltimore to beat the Colts. She said, "Yep. As soon as they left town."

That's a statement that encapsulates Shuey well. She didn’t dwell on things. She moved on to what was next. She let you know what she thought and didn’t add any words or soften a sentiment that she meant to be hard. I will always love, and learn from, her directness. She’d probably tell me I’ve already said too much.

On Monday night I watched a documentary about the writer/philosopher Walker Percy. He is the kind of writer she and I would have talked about—she would bring me book reviews cut out of the Baltimore Sun. Percy’s first novel was called “The Moviegoer,” which instantly made me think of Shuey and her mom. She stayed in my head and thoughts for the rest of the film, very clearly. It was later that night that she died.

I’ve since picked up the book and been reading it, thinking of her. There is this idea in “The Moviegoer,” which says we all have a search, that is the thing that “anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life.”

My sense of Shuey is that she was never sunk in the everydayness of life. She lived, daily, on her own terms. She did and said the things that she wanted to do and say. She spent time with the people she loved and enjoyed. And she truly lived the life that she set out to live.

Tomorrow is her husband’s birthday. While I am sad that we don’t get to spend Christmas with Shuey, I am happy to think that she gets to spend it with Pop. I will always picture them together. Probably reading the Sun, drinking coffee and tea, wearing festive sweaters. I like to picture them in their house in Towson, where they spent 62 years. It was the first house I knew with a green house. I’m pretty sure she’s got one now, too.

Wayfarer

2011-12-13T04:31:00.000-05:00

I got Walker Percy confused with Walker Evans. I recorded a documentary on PBS thinking I'd learn more about "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men," which is a touchstone for me. What I got instead was what I needed.

"It has to do with a view of man, a theory of man. Man as more than an organism, as more than a consumer. Man the wayfarer. Man the pilgrim. Man in transit, on a journey." -Walker Percy

If I am like Walker Percy, it is in that Wayfarers are maybe my favorite sunglasses of all time. Wait, different "wayfarer?" Okay. If I'm like Walker Percy, it is in that I am stuck posing the big, meaty existential questions. I am not comfortable, not content to not ask them. I love the word "wayfarer" (and the glasses, in large part for the name). Pilgrim is a word far richer than the Mayflower. Life as pilgrimage, as a journey for answers. A spiritual, a soul quest.

When they started talking about Percy's first, and maybe most influential novel, "The Moviegoer," it made me think of my grandmother. And of her mother, who watched movies at The Avalon Theatre in Easton. I knew her mother, my great-grandmother, as Muddy. Muddy figured out which seat in the Avalon was the very center seat, and sat in it for every movie. If someone was in her seat, she moved them. My grandmother, who our family calls Shuey, also watched movies in that theatre. So did my father, who I call Dad, and so did I, who I call me. I watched "Star Wars" and "Raiders of the Lost Ark" in the Avalon, and met my wife there (at a concert, not a movie).

But "moviegoer" made me think of my grandmother, Shuey, and of her mother, and movies. And I want to read it. Shuey and I talked about books and movies. I went over to her house on Sunday. She wasn't doing well. Wanted company. She had the Ravens game on, which we watched. They were playing the Colts, whose games, when the Colts were in Baltimore, she and my grandfather didn't miss many of. I asked her if she ever thought she'd be pulling for Baltimore to beat the Colts. She said, "Yep. As soon as they left town."

That's a statement that encapsulates Shuey well. She lets you know what she thinks and doesn't add any words or soften a sentiment that she means to be hard.

The Ravens won the game. We talked a bit more.

The phone rang this morning, at 1:45 a.m., or so. Shuey died around midnight. Her journey moved on. I'll have a lot more to say about that. I've been awake since and haven't had a chance to put those thoughts in order. For now it's man the wayfarer, The Moviegoer and thinking about Shuey.

Frost-breathed inspiration

2011-12-09T10:16:00.001-05:00

Frost-breathed inspiration. Ice on the windshields, the kind that begs the scraper. Walking out front to frost on the bones seems to wake my soul more quickly.

Vince Guaraldi and watching the Charlie Brown Christmas special. Dylan Thomas's treasure, "A Child's Christmas in Wales." Cutting down our tree in 60 degree rain then swilling hot chocolate from Styrofoam cups.

The storytelling of John Jeremiah Sullivan. The power of William Carlos Williams's words. The Roots's new album, "undun," which may rewrite expectations for all hip-hop albums to follow. The buoyant beats and lyrics of TV on the Radio. Listening to this Black Keys song in the truck with our girls dancing along...

The unconsciously quotable, tears in your eyes laughter at Chevy Chase and Randy Quaid in Christmas Vacation.

Any chance to savor Samuel Smith's Oatmeal Stout.

And the lights on the Christmas tree. Plugging in the tree lights first thing in the morning, still dark outside. Standing in the dark room in front of the kaleidoscope that resides amongst glass balls and fir branches, I have no definite age.

Is it really real?

2011-12-06T06:09:00.002-05:00

We rock around a real Christmas tree. It was a holiday tradition for my sister and I to go out with our parents and help pick out and cut down a tree. It has become the same thing for our girls. Full disclosure, my sister's husband's family owns a Christmas tree farm, and you don't want to be the ones caught with the fake tree.

There is no shortage of places to get a real tree, mind you. The Lions Club, the Optimist Club, community organizations with lots around town, Lowes, Wal Mart, etc. Sometimes I'm asked, why don't you get a tree that's already cut? I could go with the Tevye/Fiddler on the Roof answer...TRADITION! (tradition)! And that's part of it. But there is something more basic, that cuts to how I roll.

I'd rather put money in the hands/pockets of friends or family. This is an across the board philosophy. I've got nothing against Starbucks--they have perhaps improved the quality of coffee, nationwide. But I'd rather give my money to Tim Cureton and Rise Up Coffee (plus the coffee is better). Dogfish and Fat Tire are fine beers, which I enjoy drinking. But Geoff DeBisschop and Evolution Craft Brewing Co. are making the best stuff around and they are friends.

I applaud and try to go with the buy local approach as best I can. But supporting friends goes much deeper. Especially when you have talented friends who are doing cool things.

Plato offered up as one possible definition of justice, helping your friends and thwarting your enemies. It would be hard to argue that as a universal principle for mankind (unless you can do so without having any enemies), but in my limited, personal world, I like it. Particularly the first part.

When I can further a tradition and give a fun, meaningful experience to my family and help my friends at the same time... well, that's tinsel on the tree. A real tree.

Lunch break

2011-12-02T05:56:00.002-05:00

The window is too public for a voyeur. The seat in the coffee shop requires you to be a part of the scene, not apart from. Would never do. That's okay, I'm not into voyeurism.

Plain sight hiding places. Flannel shirt, jeans, boots or running shoes--coffee shop camouflage. In view, but unnoticed. An espresso-sipping notebook scribbler, like the rest. Easier to find than cream.

Used to be, I stopped in here before work or at lunch. Knew most of the people. Worked in town and was dailed in to what was going on. Now my work world is across the bridge, inside the beltway. When I look at downtown Easton, I can't see it as a place where I can work. Where I've grown up, where I live, where I will live, but not as a place where I can find a job doing what I do.

The rain outside isn't cold. But makes inside the better option, makes you have to want to go out. The coffee shop is comfortable, but feels almost sterile. Nothing of note. It's also not why I am downtown. Pull up hood, pick up coffee, jet. Rain letting up. Walk down Goldsborough.

I hear the soundtrack for Frogger, waiting for cars to go by, hop through the opening, up the sidewalk, around the corner.

I left Easton to make a living. We stay in Easton to live. The last time I hit the coffee shop was Waterfowl Festival weekend. Nine-year-old daughter Anna and I were downtown to hear Chester River Runoff. It was hands-in-pockets cold. No idea how you pluck a banjo with cold hands. Between sets, Anna and I grabbed hot chocolate and coffee. The band was there, too.

This time Anna is the band. 4th and 5th grade chorus. Christmas concert at the Festival of Trees at the Tidewater Inn. As I get to the Tidewater, her class is is stretched around the building like Christmas garland, filing their way in. I see her before she sees me; a friend points me out to her, and at nine years old it's still cool to acknowledge me.

As we all go in, Easton High School's chorus is performing. We had friends who were in Mr. Thomas's chorus. I flash-forward in my head and wonder if Anna will still be singing when she gets to high school. I knock that shit off, because picturing our girls growing up too quickly wrecks me and dudes don't ask for tissues at Christmas concerts.

The Easton Elementary chorus goes on. There is a full slew of kids, and Anna is in about the middle. We find each other and she smiles every time I hold up the camera. Flashes glances over while singing. They sing "Winter Wonderland," which is a favorite of mine.

They finish to applause and file off stage. I head out, back to the rain, but Anna catches me from behind, to say thanks for coming and see you after school. These life moments keep coming: concerts, field hockey games, field trips, award ceremonies. As kids, we had our first dances in the same room at the Tidewater. Easton reaches back across generations of my family, and reaches forward.

Intersecting Egg McMuffins

2011-11-29T07:09:00.002-05:00

I spent much of geometry class at McDonalds, full disclosure. The classroom was located next to the student parking lot and I had a friend that thought highly of Egg McMuffins.

Let's put that out there as we measure a theory in existential geometry: I am likely wrong. But here goes anyway. Two lines intersect at a point. I'm thinking that any given person/individual is a unique collection of points--the intersections of various lines. These lines not only meet at points, but these points actually create us.

Lines come from everywhere. Our parents are two lines. Where you grow up is at least one line. Family members, friends, teachers, what books you read, what sports you play, imbibing a memorable sunrise on the river or in the mountains--all the various experiences we have are all lines, intersecting at you/me.

Each person is a different collection of points, of intersecting lines. And the funny thing is, in as much as we are a collection of these lines, these points, we are interconnected and not individuals alone.

William Carlos Williams busts this line/thought out in Paterson, pulling the disparate together to clarify/ and compress.

To think of that pulling the disparate together as the role of the artist or poet is spot on. But I also think each of our existences is the same concept--the pulling together of the disparate lines, which meet in points, which points are us. Intersecting Egg McMuffins.

* Sculpture is "Tracks," by Gene Kangas, 1983.

"I got the trees on my mirror"

2011-11-22T07:05:00.001-05:00

The smell was from one of the earlier haunted houses. The one that was at the old Idlewild school. I must have been in elementary school. I don't like the abuse/bastardization of the word epic, but those haunted houses were. There were illusions, hydraulic floors, swinging bridges, chainsaws, then flame-throwers. All volunteer, put on by the Kiwanis Club, work done in the evenings. They were community events, and scarier than any haunted houses I've seen since.

The smell was from the room my father's crew haunted, set up like a swamp, with brush and cattail cuttings, or the one next door, which was a woods scene. It was something that had been cut. But the smell this time wasn't from elementary school, or Idlewild, but this past Sunday, during a run along Rails to Trails. It was instant recognition as the same smell, it conjured it up precisely, to the sea creature mask my dad wore.

My wife has mentioned a smell--something like honeysuckle maybe, but I can't recall--that she knows as her grandfather. Something that was in his house. When she smells it, she knows it is him saying hello.

I am sight-oriented. For learning, for memorizing, I have always been a visual person. Smell would probably rank among my least go-to senses. Which made the haunted house flashback, while out for a 5-mile rise up run Sunday morning, stand out more.

It's a season of smells. The smell of Thanksgiving in Butler, Pa., and the smell of a soon-to-be-cut Christmas tree in the living room. It's likely my nose getting ready. Nose in training. Amping up performance for the evergreen smell that smells like childhood.

Running with Axl

2011-11-18T07:00:00.001-05:00

I don't think Axl Rose is much of a runner. At least not back in his Appetite for Destruction and Lies days. But I've been hearing the song "Patience" in my head a good bit lately, particularly while running.

Patience is one of those songs that has forever stamped its tune on the word/concept of patience for me. I can't hear or think the word without seeing the video or hearing the melody. And patience is a virtue I've been lacking on runs since easing my way back into things post-ankle injury.

I used to be able to settle into whatever distance run and know I was going to be out there for a while, what my pace should be, and just drop into a groove. At this point of the comeback, my runs are three to five miles and I feel out of sorts. Not resigned to a distance and running without rhythm.

And that's generally when Axl chimes in. Ah yes, patience. Funny how no running at all for almost a half a year will set you back. Throw you off.

But I'm running without pain. Endurance is coming back. Speed is inching up. No distance or pace is taken for granted. It's a beginner's mind mentality. It's a gift. Like patience.

As the bush shakes; I'm shaking it, boss

2011-11-15T06:52:00.003-05:00

Early fall's rented orange has begun its move to brown. Brown holds the hue, but can't keep the space, lets go and, relieved of the weight, branches shake in the wind.

"I'm shaking it, boss!"

We track the leaves, our arcs are the same, dropping to the grass, leaves, bushes. It's not the real estate we picked out, but here we are. Now what?

"I'm shaking it, boss!"

Keep shaking. Don't know what else to do. We're not ready, don't want the barrel delivery at the end, that comes when we go still.

No, not still--we're shaking it, boss. Every day, when still prevails, we shake the bush, we show we're here, accounted for. We're here, boss...

all of a piece, alone
in a wind that does not move the others--
in that way: a way to spend
a Sunday afternoon while the green bush shakes.

* italics from "Cool Hand Luke" and William Carlos Williams's "Paterson"

Three Bridges

2011-11-10T06:20:00.000-05:00

The river was dry at that point. The foot bridge no longer necessary, but cool. It used to shush trains across, through town, now the girls like to bike to it. A new job, a new life, re-imagined.

Not like the bridge at lunch, which never stops vomiting cars across. Near that bridge, the waterfowl is primarily helicopters and commercial jets, which you can't shoot at. There are no duck blinds along the river. No one works the water, except to give tours.

Near both these bridges, a third, but not geographically. In Paterson, N.J., but in this case held in the mind, lit there by the pages of Williams' words. I've never seen it, but, sitting next to the lunch bridge, the sound of Paterson's falls drowns out the whup-whup-whup call of the bird about to touch down and the one taking off.

"Refined by the fire"

2011-11-08T06:30:00.001-05:00

Three lines have stuck with me. They are renting space in my mind, probably deeper. The first is from John Harbaugh during a Sunday night press conference.

"That's what being refined by the fire is all about," he said it about wide receiver Torrey Smith, who dropped a game-winning touchdown before catching the game-winner a couple plays later to beat the Steelers. Refined by the fire, learning and being changed by doing it, real-time, on the stage. The bigger the stage, the bigger the fire, the greater the refining.

The second line is from TV on the Radio and pumped through my headphones while on a four-mile run last week, the longest so far of my return to running.

"There is hardly a method you know," which I thought about in terms of getting back to something. It's not about method, or technique, it's about the attempt. It's about getting out there and learning. And the going changes you. It refines you by action.

Sport isn't just about form, or study, or preparation, though all those things are a part. It's about being on the playing field. In that context, for me it's about getting out the door and running, or in the gym, or on the rock climbing wall.

I've also been diving back into William Carlos Williams, who supplies the third line for us.

"There are no ideas, but in things," from his epic and awesome Paterson, which is a constant source of inspiration and motivation for me. Tied into the first two lines, the first two ideas, you don't have "perseverance" as an abstract concept, you have Torrey Smith catching a game-winning touchdown after making a couple mistakes earlier in the game. You don't have "endurance" as an idea apart from the runner pushing him/herself beyond their limits into that reserve. You don't have "art" aside from the painting or poem or play.

Three lines, over the course of the week, each of which has stuck to me. A post-game press conference, a lyric heard during a run, a heady, memorable line from Williams. But even the lines don't exist in the abstract, they are tied to people and particular points in time. Maybe they point somewhere. Maybe it's back to the sources.

Writing, life

2011-10-26T23:32:00.000-04:00

Anna ditched her scooter and followed on foot. "Not riding your scooter?" "I'm the writer, dad," she flashed her notebook and pen.

She does this frequently. She writes articles, newspaper articles--extended questions, descriptions, observations--some she gives to me, some she keeps.

This is a big deal in daddy-daughter relations. I never pretended to be an accountant, per my father, growing up. There is something about writing, being a writer, that holds sway for her. For Christmas she wants a pocket notebook and a camera.

She knows I am a writer. That I do it for a job. But she also knows that I carry a notebook in my pocket wherever I go and get up early to read and write, and that that is something beyond a job.

If I won the lottery, I'd write more than I do now. I'd flush out that big project that is waiting, buried, that I haven't made the time or effort to unearth. The statement. Testament.

Watching Pearl Jam 20, reading Roberto Bolano and Franz Wright, and thinking about legacy, that's when I struggle that I haven't unearthed it. Haven't found it and committed. That I need to start digging deep and make the time.

But I look at our girls, Robin, our life. I look at Anna and her eyes as she makes her thoughts words. And I know commitment

Sleeping under ramps

2011-10-24T05:40:00.001-04:00

We slept under skateboard ramps. Two quarter-pipes, six- to eight-feet tall, pushed up against either side of Arcadia Street. It wasn't just the skateboarding or the hardcore music, it was also a chance to do something different, to milk all the day had.

Twenty-five years later and I'm still looking for skateboard ramps to sleep under. Not actual skateboard ramps, mind you--though I wouldn't rule out the right opportunity--but experiences like that. Doing something different and extending the day.

I watched Cameron Crowe's documentary "Pearl Jam 20" Saturday night/Sunday morning. It made me think of the ramps, trail running and the activities that hone the edge for me; that pull what's inside out and manifest it, use it to color a black and white life. Maybe our lives are given to us black and white and it is up to us to add the color.

I got thinking about creativity and art and being able to tap those sources that feel primal, first-hand, unfiltered. Pearl Jam has created albums for 20 years, no two of which sound the same. A bit like Zeppelin in that respect.

It made me think of how I want/try to weave creativity into my life.

First is family. Seeing what our life as a family becomes. To actively help shape or guide or keep it open to possibilities, not have it handed to us already prepared, pre-heated like cafeteria food. To watch and enjoy what our girls do, what Robin does, how we all live.

Second is my own life. Life as a work of art, something we create, where choices are like brushstrokes, painting on an existential canvas.

With family and life first as active, creative works unto themselves, writing as art then comes in as a way to record, document, translate, to give back to it all. This third aspect of creativity, writing in particular, that creating art, that is the part that got stirred up for me watching Pearl Jam 20. Stay tuned for an expanded riff on that subject.

* image above - Pearl Jam bassist Jeff Ament built a skatepark in his hometown.

Two photos

2011-10-20T07:25:00.002-04:00

It's probably a good thing I never met Laura Dern. At least not before meeting Robin. There are those famous or glimpsed people you've never met whose look, mannerisms and roles just captivate you.

Her legs in Jurassic Park held equal billing with the dinosaurs. Her character in Wild at Heart (she and David Lynch are practically unstoppable when teamed) swirls you.

Those untouchables--the actresses, rock stars, authors, whoever--that draw you in. Maybe they say something about who we are, what we want, what we are after. Or maybe we just like what we like.

It's the eyes in a photo. Maybe they are windows to the soul. Or maybe they are just crystals unto themselves that don't have to go deeper.

Elizabeth Smart knows something we don't. She knows what she's looking at, sure, but maybe what she is looking for. To go singly after the man she wanted to be with. To have kids (four), raise them and support them, on her own. To embrace art and family and support both. To hold on to and hold up the idea of true love, both in your mind and with your life. To write as she lived--

Is it all there, in the eyes?

Bob Wiley

2011-10-11T06:07:00.000-04:00

My body is a disguise. A shell I've put on for the last five months. It's me, but it's not. It hasn't moved like me, done the things I do, it's changed, grown.

This disguise has claimed a share of my mind/spirit. By the we-are-what-we-do-repeatedly standard, it has made me someone other than who I've been. I've felt it. It has tunneled away, a depression, an anger that has taken me over at times, though I've tried to own myself most of the time.

Yesterday, mind/spirit began the work to reclaim itself and the body. Maybe it started on Saturday, when Anna and I raced each other to the truck at Ava's soccer game. When I sped up and kept pace, she said, "Dad, I didn't think you could run?"

Yesterday, there was no runnerly pretenses or garb--an Element skateboard shirt, lacrosse shorts, Nationals hat on backwards and Brooks trail shoes. I doubt I struck anyone as a runner, except for the fact that I was running. Slowly. Not sure how my ankle would respond.

Two miles, my first run in months. I wouldn't say that I'm back, but the real work, the reclaiming has begun. It will be done with running. It will be done with push-ups and pull-ups (Herschel Walker-style). It will be done with planks and mountain climbers and dead lifts and squats. The reclaiming will take place on roads, grass, trails, track and at the gym. It will be early morning, lunch breaks and evening when it has to.

It's the Bob Wiley reclamation program. Baby steps. Baby steps to the door. Baby steps out the door.

The "barbarism of reflection," or "it takes a second to wreck it"

2011-10-06T06:18:00.000-04:00

"The barbarism of reflection" -Giambattista Vico, The New Science

If the past made one mistake, throw out the baby. What could they know of architecture if they thought the earth was flat AND the center of the universe. Idiots.

Why should we listen to them? What could they possibly teach?

Upon closer inspection, upon further reflection, it all falls down, London Bridge. The center never holds. What a bunch of dolts, we scoff, reading a morning paper we couldn't print, or a computer we couldn't build, drinking coffee we wouldn't know how to make without instruction from someone before us.

Imagine what flaws, what faults, they will find of us. Upon further reflection, we stop creating, and begin to tear down.

If you've got no time for the past, and Vico has nothing to say to you, dig the Beastie Boys, "It takes a second to wreck it, it takes time to build."

Beware the Buddy Pass

2011-10-04T05:57:00.001-04:00

The Buddy Pass: wherein one lacrosse teammate lobs the ball easily to another, seemingly giving him an easy pass to catch. Seemingly. Because simultaneously, a defender on the opposing team is drooling, smiling, teeing up, as the latter "buddy" eyes the lob pass into his stick, he gets de-cleated, concussed into 2.5 weeks from the present. To borrow from the bumper sticker, friends don't throw friends buddy passes.

Driving home yesterday, I got to thinking about the fact that buddy passes are not relegated to the lacrosse field. We get lobbed shit all the time. "Spoon-fed" is the kissing cousin of the buddy pass, if not its equivalent.

Think fast food. Think pop music. Think produce section of a grocery store. Think Walmart. Anytime we are given something--food, art, gas, music, information--too easily for our own good or appreciation, maybe what is happening seems awesome, "Sweet, how convenient," when in reality, it's the lob of the buddy pass, coming down into our stick, and when we look up in front of us, we are getting ready to be de-cleated, slammed to the ground into the reality of complacency of being spoon-fed everything, all the time.

Maybe we'd be better served catching the quick, line-drive pass, in full stride, heart-pounding, with field awareness, that we've got to work for, but that gives us an open shot at the goal.

There's your sports metaphor meets current culture for this Tuesday. Beware the buddy pass.

Mosaic vs. map

2011-09-30T07:27:00.001-04:00

It's like a map, the story. If I take out the narrative thread, I will probably lose myself. You will probably get lost at sea--how else would you find your way? The story is the GPS, it gives you directions for which way to go.

And yet, we don't work by story alone. We improvise, intuit, fly by impressions. We don't have to understand something to like it.

Impressionist paintings make shitty road maps. You aren't likely to arrive at your destination. You are getting the feeling, the take of the artist. There are writers or musicians who do likewise. They string together impressions, ending up with a mosaic, not a map. Fragments that don't equal a story, but reveal the intersection of reality and one particular soul. And if it works, our soul recognizes both the artist, the impression, and itself--our soul regarding another and itself.

Our daughter's impression of cool. Jeff Tweedy as musician. Joe Flacco or Hines Ward as football player. Ryan Zimmerman as baseball player. Living on a farm, with her friend and collecting eggs from their chickens to eat, as adulthood, self-sustaining. Working at a bank, because that's where money is. That's their plan for when they turn 18.

Childhood seems to oscillate between impressions, the mosaic, and coherent narrative, the map. Come to think of it, so does adulthood.

Source materials

2011-09-27T07:51:00.004-04:00

I'm always digging for source materials. The foundation that holds someone or something up, or the clothespins that hang them/it on a line.

If a writer, musician, artist or athlete I am a fan of sheds light on inspirational source materials, I'm taking that walk. If it resonates, I'm starting the dig. So when I read that Jeff Tweedy pulled some fire from William Gass's "In the Heart of the Heart of the Country," I reached onto my bookshelf to dip back into a book I hadn't picked up in a while (Gass's "On Being Blue" occupies one of the strangest, but most coveted places on my bookshelf)

And when poet Gabrielle Calvocoressi cited Robert Pogue Harrison's "Forests," and then followed up by warning me, "it's so good it will melt your brain," well, I've gotta take that chance. That's the tangential nature of my reading, writing, music, etc. I'm frequently following a thread.

For a few years now, Wilco has been one of those source materials, artistically speaking, for me. A band I can't get enough of. And as mentioned last week, our nine-year-old daughter and I went to see them this past Sunday.

A no-duh-cartoon-brick-to-the-side-of-the-head realization is that, for me, the building blocks of my source materials are first-hand experience, more than books or music. And our girls are some of the source of the source materials. So here is a concert from a main band, with oldest daughter for her first concert. When you cross the streams of that many sources, what you have is a life moment. And it was. And Wilco delivered. And Anna and I both ate it up and levitated at the same time.

So for the moment, I'm soaking in and re-sorting the source materials. Listening to Wilco, reading Forests and Gass, and laughing and remembering with Anna.

Wilco, Little Boy Blue & the Man in the Moon

2011-09-23T06:26:00.004-04:00

I've said recently and frequently that the two bands I'd most dig seeing live are Wilco and The Black Keys. I've been in a listening frenzy. And then I go and win tickets to Wilco this Sunday through a WRNR 103.1 Twitter contest. Color me stoked in vibrant, groovy colors.

It's a Sunday evening concert and Robin bows out, so I am roledexing my friends for big Wilco fans. Meanwhile the band played on Letterman on Wednesday night and I am watching the performance Thursday morning. Anna, our nine-year-old is next to me watching and I mention to her that I am going to see these guys on Sunday.

"Can I go, dad? Please, please, please???"

SOLD! Instantly I hear Cat Stevens singing, "The cat's in the cradle with the silver spoon, little boy blue and the man in the moon...," and think about five to seven years when she won't want anything to do with dad at a concert, unless it's transportation. I think about how she digs the music I listen to, always asking to hear Black Keys, going to Pre-K asking for The Raconteurs and Jack Johnson.

She wants to go to a concert, with dad, and it doesn't involve sitting through Britney Spears or Lady Gaga or Justin Bieber. Color me amped, in a cool daughter way, who will get to hear real music performed live, by an awesome, challenging band. I have said before, there is hope for her musical soul. And to boot, we get to go up a little early for a private performance by the band, for WRNR contest winners.

So Sunday will be a time to see a great concert; a time to spend daddy-daughter time; a time to build the kind of memory, that if you don't start early, will likely go the direction of little boy blue and the man in the moon.

Color me a heavy metal drummer.

Alma Mater

2011-09-20T07:18:00.001-04:00

My alma mater is a dirt road around a field on a Hagerstown farm, the first place I ran three miles.

My alma mater is a 13-foot Boston Whaler and a gray 1984 Honda Accord I learned to drive stick on.

My alma mater is the Holy Trinity church lot in Oxford where we met after school to play football and the marsh across the street from my house growing up.

My alma mater is a painted parking curb we commandeered for rail slides and 50-50 grinds and a loading dock behind Peebles.

My alma mater is Alternate Worlds comic book store and backyard wiffle ball.

There is a sign about Edgar Allan Poe at the University of Virginia, a school where he spent one semester. Always struck me as odd.

There are people and places, schools and books that taught me how to learn, or sparked something and whose sum total I count as my education. My alma mater is a series of imprints, scars, tattoos and impressions, which decorate and define my soul.

Confession

2011-09-16T06:19:00.000-04:00

Forgive me Father (Creator), it's been 16 weeks since my last confession (run). And with cooler temperatures, it hurts not to be out there.

For the past seven plus years, running 10 miles has felt like running around the block. And that has been a point of pride for me. I've run long trail runs, a handful of marathons, a few ultras, and more half-marathons and 10-milers than I can recall. It's been a kind of confession from my feet, legs, lungs and soul to the earth.

Now tis the season of jeans, sweatshirts, football and the Ravens, bonfires and Octoberfest beer. It's the season where morning coffee warms as well as wakens. It's the season of trips to the pumpkin patch and the girls thinking about Halloween costumes.

It's the return to Tuckahoe State Park trail runs and the cool morning runs that remind me why I run, when I am able. It's the heyday of the Rise Up Runner group runs, where sunrises are met with conversations about kids and the cosmos, elevated heart rates and the sprint at the end of the run.

Forgive me Father, it's been 16 weeks since my last confession. Likely I've taken those confessions for granted. And I miss them.

Benched, almost

2011-09-15T05:49:00.000-04:00

That lapping sound. The one that water makes as it swims under a dock and into rip-rap or a concrete wall.

I'd like to write that sound and have you be able to hear it. Transport you onto the bench next to the river to listen, when the helicopters and harbor tour boats are quiet enough to let you.

Maybe it isn't that sound I want you to hear, but to give you my flawed ears to hear it not quite right, the way I do. So you'll just miss it, but won't stop trying to get it right.

Butterfield's Lullaby

2011-09-13T06:34:00.000-04:00

I lose it when I hear Taps. It has to be performed by a single, live bugler, unaccompanied. It is the most poignant, somber, reflective song I have ever heard. If you can hear it and not be stopped in place, you may want to make sure you have a soul installed.

It's kind of like that for all the Honor Guard ceremonies for me. It is deeply resonant stuff. A good friend's father served in the Army in the Korean War and the Honor Guard came down to the Oxford Fire Company for the funeral and folded and presented his sons with an American flag. I had very little composure left. It rips me open. I think that is the point.

Author Jim Harrison, who has been compared to Hemingway, said about the literary Big Papa that his work was a "woodstove that didn't give off much heat." I have had that feeling about a number of works of art deemed classics; sometimes I just don't connect directly to them.

Taps was written in 1862, at Berkeley Plantation on the James River, after the Seven Days Battles. Union General Daniel Butterfield scribbled the notes on the back of an envelope and Oliver Wilcox Norton was the first to play it. The Confederates heard it and adopted it as well. The adage goes that it was one of the first things the two sides agreed on.

I'd go so far to call Taps a classic. It is one classic that strikes my soul vertically, connecting me to both the ground and the sky.

I don't have anything to add to the many voices and words written about September 11. But sitting down to watch the Ravens on Saturday, when the NFL tribute went out to Pennsylvania and the bugler played Taps, I remembered. Not just 9/11, but loss, sacrifice, Skeets Abell's life and funeral, mortality, and the fact that fucked up shit happens, over which we have little or no influence. And that there are times that we/I need to stop, reflect and remember. Taps is a universal doorway for that.

"Out for Delivery"

2011-09-10T06:42:00.002-04:00

I probably became enamored of the UPS truck waiting for some skateboard or another to arrive from Skates on Haight in San Francisco. I wasn't alone. We would have a crew sitting on Farmar's front porch or skating in the street, waiting for the brown truck to turn the corner from High Street to South. Christmas morning had nothing on the UPS truck, pregnant with a skateboard we would tag-team and help put together for whoever the luck recipient was.

Back then it was a best guess, when the truck would show up. That feeling really hasn't gone away. I've talked with some other "grown ups" (though I'd bet most of us still feel like kids most of the time), who are equally excited when they click on "track package" and see the phrase "Out for delivery." That's the day. Whatever it is will either be there when you get home or shortly after.

I'm not overly materialistic, but I do dig new toys (as a generic term). It was skateboards for a time, has been new running gear or shoes, and books. Ah yes, books. What got me thinking about the UPS truck this particular time was waiting for Franz Wright's new book, "Kindertotenwald," which was published earlier this week. Seeing that it was "out for delivery" yesterday stirred up the same feelings that my Powell Peralta Steve Caballero or Tony Hawk, the Dogtown Micke Alba, Zorlac John Gibson, or Alva Street Fire did in the teenage years (to be honest, I'd be just as tickled to have any of those show up now).

I've been waiting for Wright's book through the summer, when he mentioned that it would be coming out. A new book from him is cause for excitement and celebration. Reading this morning, he has made the morning more alive, my soul more expansive and the coffee more electric.

I'm not sure when or what I'll be waiting for next from the UPS truck. And whether it will be loaded with goodness from Skates on Haight or Amazon or where, but I know the brown truck and the phrase "out for delivery" will have me sitting on Farmar's porch with a couple socket wrenches, 3/8 and 1/2 if I recall correctly.

Ned Kelly's Head

2011-09-02T06:07:00.002-04:00

If I had a band I'd name it "Ned Kelly's Head." It would have to be a punk band. There is something cool and notable that the Australian Jesse James/Robin Hood's head eludes posterity, though they've pegged his body. Perhaps an M.I.A. skull adds to his immortality.

Speaking of immortality, a novel I hope to start digging into this weekend is Drew Magary's "The Postmortal." I missed a reading/signing by Drew at Politics and Prose, but my D.C. cubemate was kind enough to snag me a signed copy.

We've been Magary fans for a while, for his work with Deadspin, his blog Kissing Suzy Kolber, his irreverence, humor and joie de vivre. His cultural critique of the Charlie Brown Christmas special had a whirlwind of a cool discussion going around our office and as far as NYC. Please take the time to read it and weigh in...

Magary's writing got me to thinking about the writing I like and that humor has to be a part of it. Not just out loud laughing funny (but yes, please), but an existential laugh that lights up and connects your soul and mind to the rest of the universe in its head-scratching strangeness. That kind of humor. Tom Robbins, Tony Hoagland, Matthew Lippman funny. Funny with a magnifying glass on absurdity, including, but not limited to shopping at Wal-Mart.

The kind of funny where an infamous international outlaw's head goes missing. The kind of thing you would name an imaginary band after, if you were to have one.

Raison d'etre

2011-08-31T05:54:00.000-04:00

That thought or line that you wake up with in your head and fumble around in the dark for pen and paper so you don't lose it.

The phrase or string of thinking that you repeat over in your head while driving until you get somewhere when you can pull over and jot it down.

Sometimes it comes down to that: how badly does it need to exist?

It has to start that way, maybe. But it has to move beyond just the beginning, make the turn around the track from inspiration to perspiration and back to inspire.

There are those things made--in art, music, architecture, writing--that when you see, hear, walk into or read, you say, Yeah. That had to exist. The world would be less, not the same without it.

That's the kind of stuff I want to experience. To be bowled over by. To create, myself.

Diamond-shaped temple: Borges, Ripken, Flanagan

2011-08-26T06:13:00.000-04:00

Perhaps he was a god, breathing life into, animating, his various worlds and people.

"He sought a soul which would merit participation in the universe."

Wednesday was Jorge Luis Borges's birthday. He would have been 112 years old. He earned himself a Google Doodle with his worlds and people, his lifetime of creation. It was also Cal Ripken, Jr.'s birthday. He was 51. He's earned himself a household name that more people in America know than know Borges's. No Google Doodle, but Cal could run for and win any elected office in Maryland.

Reading Borges's story, "The Circular Ruins," all I can picture is a diamond shape. A baseball field. He says "the circle was a temple..., whose god no longer received the homage of men."

When I was seven, eight, ten, I breathed life into my baseball cards. Murray, Singleton, Bumbry, Dempsey, Palmer, Flanagan. I could recite statistics and characteristics and when I would watch them on TV, the Orioles and their diamond-shaped temple were more than images on a screen and somehow more than people--athletes--when we would go worship at Memorial Stadium.

I wasn't the only life-breather when it came to baseball and the Orioles. The diamond-shaped temple was full. And the breathing was dialectical: they, in turn, filled us with life, via home runs, strikeouts, a hometown pride and a cartoon bird.

Ripken earned himself a demigod status in Baltimore, perhaps in the wider baseball world. He was and still is baseball in Baltimore. The city's chosen son.

Flanagan was my favorite pitcher, and behind Murray, my favorite Oriole. 1979 was one of the first years I was quoting Orioles statistics and he went 23-9 and won the American League Cy Young Award, named the best pitcher for that year. Flanny and the O's went to the World Series, losing a heart-breaker to the Pirates. Perhaps we didn't pray hard enough at the temple until 1983.

Flanagan wore number 46. He was the only 46 I could think of my sophomore year of high school at Easton High, when I grabbed my jersey and became another number 46. The same black and orange colors, though I didn't have the cool mustache or long hair, and wasn't left-handed.

Wednesday, with Borges's Google Doodle and Ripken's birthday, the Orioles played baseball at a diamond-shaped temple. The Orioles have not been a good team for some time, and you might say their god, the cartoon bird no longer receives the homage of men, though the town wants to pray there. On Wednesday night, #46 was on the mound for the O's and pitched them to victory, not unlike Flanagan did so frequently in the 1970s and 80s. Maybe the temple was alive for a night.

But as Jim Palmer spoke after, the game faded into the background. We were no longer breathing life into Flanagan. At least not in a real sense.

But yesterday, driving to work and listening to people call into 105.7 The Fan, and tell Flanagan stories, there was no doubt: he was still breathing life into us.

"Something about the duality of man, sir"

2011-08-23T06:30:00.000-04:00

I'm a dog with my nose in the wind. And I sit with my back to the wind, watching water flow by, un-doglike. Seems I sometimes have a view that sees flip-sides of a coin.

I'm not much of a walker, but I am worse at sitting on my ass. With more than 13 weeks of no running now, walking at lunch offers at least some mobility. I can see why Frank O'Hara dug his lunch walks and writing. Stretch the legs and the mind, together.

Sitting on a bench along the Ft. McNair waterfront, the tide runs the way my legs want to. Jets land and take off from Reagan, a marvel of science every minute. This D.C. moves at a different pace. Clouds are the only traffic.

I walk back in front of the National War College, and it strikes me, having and watching kids, that they don't need to be taught to fight. Maybe taught how to win? Taught to resolve?

"I think I was trying to suggest something about the duality of man, sir."

Private Joker (Matthew Modine) in Full Metal Jacket is one of the movie characters I have most strongly identified with. It comes down to his ability, his willingness, to be neck-deep in a situation and stand outside it, observing, at the same time. His "Born to Kill" helmet with the peace sign pin speaks before and after his suggest something about the duality of man, sir, line.

"Basic Military Journalism. You gotta be shittin' me, Joker. You think you're Mickey Spillane? You think you're some kind of a fuckin' writer?"

"I wrote for my high school newspaper, sir."

As sensible an answer as you could give. A killer and a writer. A neck-deep participant and an observer. I'm not sure whether I first saw Jacket in 1987 or 1988, but beyond being one of the most quotable movies of all time, that has always stuck with me.

And Private Joker's suggest something about the duality of man, sir, line and character is what pops into my head walking by the National War College, on a pristine summer day, with the rivers flowing and the breeze both in my face and at my back.

Adrift, akimbo, a capella

2011-08-17T06:03:00.000-04:00

Don't expect musical accompaniment. That would denote rhythm. And this summer, for me, has had none.

Summer is a raft on the river, sans rudder or paddle. Everything is adrift. And I dig it. With the girls out of school, the sun staying up late, and most the house sleeping in, days are blank slates when I get home.

Go with the flow... but this flow is unaccompanied. It has no soundtrack. If it did, it would be the sound of cornhole bags smacking wood or flopping on pavement. It would be the sound of kids cannonballing in the deep end or laughing on rides at small town carnivals.

It's the summer of the cornhole.

[break]

Woken by the dogs, my watch says 2:20 a.m. "A few weeks ago we'd have just been going to bed."

[break]

I stand with my hands on my hips wondering what "arms akimbo" means. Sometimes you like the sound of a word before you catch its drift.

Drift and flow, silence, and summer, all spin in a tumble dry low dream cycle, and when I open the door...

It's morning. I'm making coffee. And fall is looking in the window, holding a paddle for me.

Great Visceral

2011-08-15T06:03:00.002-04:00

It was like being next to a burn barrel. All over town. Smoke from a Virginia swamp fire. That's what I've smelled the past couple days. And seen a haze from the dissipated smoke.

Reading someone from another country and generation, reading them describe the stars the same way I think about them.

Writing and reading and talking about Nationals closer Drew Storen's slider the other night against the Phillies, the one he fleeced by Ryan Howard and realizing we were all seeing the same thing.

Growing up in a small town, you realize how closely connected everyone is. There may be six degrees of separation from Kevin Bacon, but there is rarely more than one or two degrees on the Eastern Shore. Even with folks who aren't from here.

But being connected to people is different, almost expected in some ways. Being connected geographically, olfactory and visually connected, to a place you haven't seen or thought of like the Great Dismal Swamp is one of those visceral experiences where I just shake my head, breathe in wafting swamp fire smoke and think... "Man."

* AP Photo/Stephen M. Katz

Thoughts walking through Ft. McNair

2011-08-12T07:58:00.002-04:00

A walk around Ft. McNair. Not an exercise walk. A clear my head and stretch my legs walk.

The Black Keys are in my ears and wind in my face. The walk, for lunch on a beautiful D.C. afternoon, is a solid call. I needed this. The breeze and voices of the Keys breathe air and energy through my lungs.

Without running or any workout routine going, I've been a passenger in my body and through the weeks. A new school schedule for Robin and the girls will likely make lunch runs and workouts the norm. I'm ready for that change, though I'll try to keep some early morning runs, when I get back to running.

Seeing an American flag in the wind at Ft. McNair carries its own awesome meaning, especially this week with the SEAL helicopter going down in Afghanistan. I walk past soldiers and sailors and Marines and I wonder--how can I serve? What is my part? I frequently have that feeling that I am someone who should have been in the military.

Philip Levine was named U.S. Poet Laureate this week. He's been one of my favorite writers for some time. One of the things that moved him further into poetry was reading a book by Wilfred Owen, given to him by a high school English teacher. Owen was a lieutenant in World War I. He wrote about his experiences in the trenches, the literal and figurative casualties of war.

Levine graduated from high school in 1946. He had figured he'd be drafted out of school, but World War II had just ended. He knew his calling was to write poetry. To know your calling.

He worked in automobile plants, a Detroit factory worker, and wrote grease-stained poetry on the side. We need more grease-stained poets and writers, like Levine and Palahniuk. That's how you arrive at Levine's "The Simple Truth:"

Some things
you know all your life. They are so simple and true
they must be said without elegance, meter and rhyme,
they must be laid on the table beside the salt shaker,
the glass of water, the absence of light fathering
in the shadows of picture frames, they must be
naked and alone, they must stand for themselves.

Maybe that's it. Maybe that's my part, my calling, but more to the point, maybe that's any of our parts: for our lives, for our selves to be "simple and true," "laid on the table beside the salt shaker," and standing for ourselves.

"And her marvelous stars expand"

2011-08-09T06:36:00.000-04:00

I was floating on a raft with a half-full beer can in my hand. When I leaned my head back the tree branches and leaves mimicked the expanse of the stars. It was like they shared a set of opening wings. Of course, it could have been the beer...

"And her marvelous stars expand."

That's a line from Pablo Neruda. It opens itself up from within, "Residence on Earth," a book/extended meditation/extended poem that he wrote over the course of 20 years (1925-1945). He stopped writing it the year my mom was born.

But the night stars expanded this morning, when I read it, 65-plus years later. And they expanded back to last week, floating in the pool, thinking that same thing, but without giving it words, just awe, and a mental note.

Maybe Neruda is a time traveler, knowing that it might take him 20 years to let go of his poem, but that with it, its utterance, he might travel across decades or centuries.

Maybe it's just a service of the stars, flinging themselves out across the sky each night, like so much sand from a child's plastic shovel,

And by realizing that the stars are so much shovel-flung sand, and giving ourselves that scale in the scheme of things, we see that, smaller than sand, we can stand shoulder to shoulder with Neruda, separated by only a half-century, which is what, really?

Yeah, Neruda is a time traveler. He uses the stars, which he steps on, as they expand. But maybe it's the beer...

Every, each

2011-08-05T08:35:00.000-04:00

More pages every day. More miles, traveled. More breaths, breathed.

More coffee, more food, more information, processed: computer screen, Droid, radio, conversations, TV, books.

More hormones. More daydreams. More fantasies. More indulgence. More restraint.

The sameness. The routine. But there is beauty there. I like knowing that the sun is coming up. I like knowing where I live, where I'll sleep, which truck is mine in the parking lot.

Who wants a day of nothing but novelty? Nothing but surprises? Can you even have a surprise without an expectation of something, well, expected?

But in all these things there are differences. One breath from another. Which words to use. What to listen to, what's on the next page...

What questions will the girls ask? What will they discover in the sameness, that they never noticed before? And can I do the... same?

Skeeball and other snippets over 16 years

2011-08-03T06:13:00.000-04:00

Master of Puppets is playing while Lester Kasai takes his run on the half-pipe at Mt. Trashmore in Virginia Beach. It's the first skateboard contest I've been to and the first Metallica song I've heard. I am 13.

Two of us are stuck about 15 feet up, pitch black but for head lamps in John Brown's Cave in Harpers Ferry. We sure ourselves against shaft-shaped rock and ease down to the others. I am 15.

I am standing in an arcade on the boardwalk in Ocean City with friends, laughing beyond our sides hurting, watching a bonehead in a g-string ram his fist down the 50-hole in skeeball while tickets spew out onto the floor. I am 19.

We are sitting in a bar in Raleigh and the remnants of a shot of Jagermeister are burning my throat and shaking my head. After the walk home, I roll two port-a-johns down a hill. The night I turned 21.

I have just run 11 miles, from Oxford to Easton, just because I hadn't before and because I've gotten myself into shape. The miles are a sanctuary for big thoughts and no thoughts. I am 23.

I am standing with my father, for a picture, having just graduated magna cum-laude from Washington College. The picture has taken seven years to take. It matches the one of he and his father when he graduated from the University of Virginia. I am 26.

I am wearing a suit, writing a press release with a pen and paper, during a job interview at the Academy of the Arts. I've decided against graduate school in favor of a tie job. I am in the Academy's library at a desk, surrounded by books. Still 26.

We had our first sonogram and found out we are having a girl. I am out for a run on Rails to Trails and my head is running ahead of and above my body when the various names we've talked about and like stop swirling and two stop in place, like a slot machine: Anna Louise. I am 29.

Not to be confused with Colt Seavers

2011-08-01T05:37:00.001-04:00

My mind is stuck on fall and it's only August 1. Maybe it's because I live with a teacher and summer vacation is on its last legs. Maybe it's because football season is upon us with training camps and free agent signings, and if you are a Baltimore fan, fall and football season have been the only sport to look forward to for more than a decade.

Either way, I'm a fall guy. Not THE Fall Guy, aka Colt Seavers, mind you. And hopefully not a fall guy, as in set up to take the blame. I just dig autumn. Jeans and sweatshirt evenings. Cooler running temps. NFL Sundays. Despite the leaves falling, autumn has always felt like a time of rebirth and energy for me. Of beginnings.

We'll have a fourth-grader and a first-grader in the house. Robin will be at a new school, in a new county, teaching a new grade. Field hockey and soccer for the girls. Hopefully a return to running for me, after now nine weeks off due to injury.

As much as I dig fall though, I'm not about to let go of summer. It's still on-the-water season. We've still got Nationals games on the calendar. And our house is still in vacation mode.

So I'll try to dwell, breathing summer deeply in. And at the same time, smile toward fall.

Two concerts

2011-07-26T04:46:00.001-04:00

I was a born-again freshman sitting in the St. James dining hall when the hippie-chick librarian raised her hand. "I'm getting tickets to see Stevie Ray Vaughn in concert if anyone is interested in going." I knew who Stevie Ray was, but hadn't really listened to him. He didn't fit my lexicon of hardcore/punk-reggae-and-heavy metal that I had dialed in at the time.

It would be a few years later that I couldn't hear his songs enough. That "Pride and Joy" would be a shared song for Robin and I (by virtue of just digging it and dancing when Bad Influence or Tino Martinez would play it at Pope's Tavern in Oxford).

The librarian, who was also new at St. James that fall, went to see Stevie Ray. It's one of two concerts I wish I had a do-over, that something had spoken to me and said, fu%^ it, you aren't doing anything, do yourself a favor and go to that show. Now I'm not talking about a concert like saying you should have gone to see Bob Marley or Jimi Hendrix--your dream concert--rather a concert you had opportunity and offer to go see, but opted not to. Just because. And then you don't get another chance to.

Stevie Ray was dead before I really started rocking to him. It goes to the carpe the diem theory. Sometimes you've got to jump at the opportunity. Because you never know.

The second concert came probably seven years later. Sitting in a fraternity house at N.C. State. Kretzer and Murphy and a few friends were heading over to Chapel Hill to the Dean-Dome to see Blind Melon and Lenny Kravitz. Everybody knew Blind Melon's "No Rain" and Kravitz's "Are You Gonna Go My Way," but the show didn't seem that epic. There would be other chances.

And then there weren't. And it was only after the fact that I started burning up Blind Melon's first album and looking for more music from them. That I realized how cool it would have been to check them out that night. A night I did really nothing in particular.

I try to remind myself that I had opportunity and offer to see Stevie Ray and Blind Melon. And I didn't. I try to look at opportunities now and make sure I carpe the diem when opportunity and offer come together. Or I try to bring the two together.

What are your (two) concerts? Those things offered up that you wish you had jumped at. I'm not one to go back and rearrange shit--I think that your decisions and opportunities, etc. ultimately lead you to where you are and who you are? But man those would have been fun shows.

Dispatch from Ocean City

2011-07-22T07:31:00.003-04:00

Thunder and lightning. Dark-colored wifebeater t-shirts. William Carlos Williams. Abita Amber. Sipping rum. Donavon Frankenreiter. Bob Burnquist. Bucky Lasek. Green machines. Captain America. Washington Nationals. Ink jones. Plastic cupping the beach. Morning bike rides to the inlet.

Ocean City in the morning smells like deep-fried food and breakfast meat. I can smell powdered sugar clinging to funnel cake. My morning bike rides to the skatepark and the inlet are an olfactory pilgrimage through tightly-packed miniature golf courses, Sunsations and Candy Kitchens.

My family has been making our summer trip to Ocean City since my sister and I (now in our 30s) were the same ages as our kids (oldest is 9, youngest is 3). It is a rite of summer. And this summer, we've had bonus fun as Seth Pettersen and Donavon Frankenreiter played at Seacrets here and the Dew Tour, skateboard, BMX and surfing has just gotten underway at the beach. It makes me think of our frequent runs to Atlantic Skates and the Ocean Bowl and seeing Mike Vallely jump off the top of a construction trailer, landing on his board to start his run for an amateur street skating contest probably 24 years ago.

I read and write less at the beach than at home. Maybe that's part of the vacation mindset, a physical and mental break. I look around at everyone else reading and sometimes want to, but my mind is vibrating and/or crashing and receding on the sand with the waves. It won't sit still. And then when the kids get up ready to walk on the beach, or go swimming and jump in the waves, or play Jungle Golf or hit Jolly Rogers.

And that's mostly what the trip is about. Building shared memories with our girls, our larger family, their cousins/our nephews. They talk about the trip year-round--at first remembering the things they just did, then mixing those in with what we are going to do next year, or counting down to the coming trip. I like that the ocean is a part of their collective memory. I like that their feet are partly made up of burning beach sand and that their is wet sand beneath their fingernails from digging for sand crabs. And I celebrate the fact that we haven't brought home a hermit crab...

Can't not

2011-07-13T06:20:00.000-04:00

It's the sparsity that speaks. A man sits alone in his shirtsleeves, a desk and typewriter in front of him in a simple wooden shack or shanty on the water. It's the kind of view that will cause the mind to wander, coupled with a lack of distraction. There is no fluff. There are only thoughts leading to words. Not just any words: the right words.

He sits there and tries to work it out. Tries to say what he has to say because he has to. He can't not. It's primal and inherent in him. He might be the tide, the breeze or the sun. He is just carrying out his purpose.

I've always dug that photo. I first saw it as the cover to E.B. White's "One Man's Meat." It's the archetypal writer, in any age, all you need to do is change his tools to suit the era.

Maybe it's the influence of reading Palahniuk, but I sometimes picture this scene with there also being a gun on the desk. For specificity, we'll call it a 9mm--a shotgun would throw off the balance of the desk.

The writer then has two options for how to express himself. There are times, if the words aren't coming, if genuine communication seems compromised, that shooting a hole in the wall of the shanty probably says as much as any words could. Yeah, it's probably best if writers don't keep handguns on their desks.

But for me, this morning, it's the primacy of words, the right words. When distractions abound and I'm not sure what, if anything, I have to say. When words are strewn like litter, used and tread on and I'm picking them up and turning them over, I dig calling up this picture. The writer, stripped down. The words. The attempt. The purpose.

The can't not.

Unencumbered (like a cucumber)

2011-07-08T06:23:00.000-04:00

Growing up, we spent more time in the marsh across the street than we did in our houses. Maybe our thoughts took on the shape of cattails or were muddy like brackish water. Maybe they wound through brush like the trails that were bushhogged for us to explore.

Our girls just went for 30 days without watching television, allowed just one movie a day. They were/are not vidiots (video idiots) to begin with--they prefer their bikes, the park, the pool, the beach--but it has been cool to see their minds work differently when they think about what to do next.

And maybe that's the thing: allowing your thoughts to take the shape they would take if they were unencumbered. Unencumbered like a cucumber, free from the pickle jar.

My grandfather was a recovered alcoholic, who didn't drink for the last 50+ years of his life. He worked to help others with their recovery and frequently spoke to groups and on the radio. I remember a statement he made about alcoholism and if you could ever be "better," no longer an alcoholic.

"A cucumber is a cucumber, but once you turn it into a pickle, you can't turn it back into a cucumber."

Granted this thread is held together by the fact that unencumbered and cucumber happen to rhyme, one leading me to think of the other and my grandfather's quote, but what else are you going to string your thoughts together with?

The point is influence, is the encumbered nature of our waking thoughts. Unencumbered (the cucumber state) is almost impossible and maybe not even desirable, but maybe we can be mindful of the influences that shape our thoughts.

Only very slowly does my thought swim across the river,
Weighed down as it is by the suit men forced it to wear.

That is a line I read this morning by Fernando Pessoa, which seemed to connect a bunch of disparate threads.

Fucking suits, the encumbered nature of our waking thoughts, which will be more concerned with straightening their ties and shining their shoes if we don't let them ramble, to see where they'll drift.

Back in the marsh across the street, the river got shallow, came together and was easier to cross through clumps of tall grasses. We took boards we found and made foot bridges so we could get across to the shore on the other side.

Something in the eyes

2011-07-05T06:35:00.002-04:00

There is something in the eyes. Those folks who have had to contend with their demons. The folks who have had to strip themselves bare and examine, change or reach an understanding about parts of themselves.

It's a look I've seen in the eyes of endurance athletes, particularly ultra runners and triathletes. When you've been running or underway for three, four, five or 20 hours and aren't finished, or maybe even close to finished, you can start to break down physically, mentally, psychologically. I know I can start to lose it.

The question becomes: how will you/I put it back together?

Will I allow myself to crumble and quit? Or will I figure out what I need to keep going, to rally, to finish?

For me, it isn't always pretty. But what comes with that decision and gumption to continue means everything.

It's a gift--the ability and opportunity to test myself in different ways. I don't think I've ever taken it for granted, but even less so now having passed five weeks without running (fu%*ing ankle).

This past Saturday, six of us met at the Miles River Yacht Club for an open water swim out to a mark in the Miles River. It was a 3/4 mile swim. I was the lone non-swimmer among a group of solid/strong aqua people. Coupled with the fact that my ankle won't flex to kick while swimming freestyle, I was the slow boat.

It's been a long time since I have swum any distance. But it felt like swimming in the river always has to me: see something a ways off and see if I can swim to it, and back. "Just keep swimming, just keep swimming..."

After my forward floating, a couple of us biked the 13 miles back to Easton, while the rest rode to Tilghman and back. My bike is a single-speed, which I have been digging for the flat land known as the Eastern Shore.

Where this post came from is both dealing with injury, redefining my activities, both for the moment and the long haul. And from the look in the eyes of the swimmers. Those who had put their time and training in; who looked effortless in their strokes, unlike my "survival" brand of swimming.

It's something in the eyes. It's a look you know when you see it. A contentment that comes from continuous effort, on the other side of struggle and through self-searching.

Contentment and wanderlust

2011-06-29T05:41:00.001-04:00

When my head is still, I can smile. The kind of smile where your whole body curls up at the edges. We've all been around that kind of smile, whether it's our own or not. It's addictive. I dig smiling like that and I dig being around people that rock the whole-soul/whole-body smile.

Contentment is inherent in that kind of smile. A contentment that comes with not wanting to be anywhere else in the world; with being cool, happy, and in tune with where you are, the people around you and the vibe and activity of the moment.

I like to cultivate that contentment, though I'm not always particularly good at it.

The flip-side of that feeling, let's call wanderlust. Restless leg syndrome for the soul. That feeling that you gotta move, gotta go, gotta see, gotta do. I sometimes chug down a fat cup of wanderlust as well.

I think a little wanderlust is probably a good thing. If it is harnessed toward your career and the George Jeffersonian moving on up. If it motivates you to travel and see the world. If it keeps you from complacency.

The problem with wanderlust is forgetting the contentment side of the coin. Forgetting how to bust out the whole-body smile. Forgetting to dig what's going on around you. If you're always looking toward the next thing, you don't even take in the cool shit from the here and now.

A handful of us at work where thinking on commuting. Our friend TWM shared stories of his DC Metro commute days, about how sometimes he would just take the Metro to random stops, listening to his tunes for whole albums and letting that be the soundtrack for whatever he was writing or his afternoon, and would find someplace new to grab a coffee and write. Man, I dig that.

It reminded me of a house painter in Oxford, Bruce Mills, who I've talked about on here before, who generally commutes from town to town by bike. He said how he hates to travel by car because he gets there too fast and can't take in the sights, sounds and smells and get his head together.

There's something to that, something in that for me. Whether it is reading E.B. White's "Charlotte's Web" aloud to the girls; whether it is our new neighborhood games of stadium-lit cornhole; whether it is a sunset cruise on the Choptank; whether it is the feeling of jumping in the pool on a hot afternoon and timing how long the girls can hold their breath for; whether it is being at a Nationals game and watching them win a pitcher's duel in the bottom of the 9th inning.

Contentment. That whole-body/whole-soul smile. I gotta get me some of that.

* Illustration at top of Huck Finn by E.W. Kemble

12 Years: Looking Forward

2011-06-26T07:09:00.001-04:00

I've walked down docks since I was able to walk--a force of habit growing up in a town surrounded by water on three sides. Walking, or sitting or chicken-necking, or dipping crabs, or drinking a beer or watching a sunset (or sunrise) on a dock with the river flowing, or standing still has always been one of the simple pleasures that fills my soul.

Twelve years ago today, my wife Robin and I walked down a dock next to Holy Trinity Church in Oxford and onto the waiting boats of friends Mike Siachos and Eric Abell. Mike's mom and family were waiting and cheering across mouth of Pier Street's marina. It was the first time Robin and I walked down a dock as a married couple. It added a new depth and memory and smile to my dock vibe.

Last year at this time is the first time I really wrote out loud about our anniversary. I was thinking back on the wedding and our lives together. Funny though, looking at the picture above, which I dig for its perspective of looking forward, is also how and where my thoughts are at the moment. Looking forward. Enjoying the right now and looking forward to those things we haven't done together yet.

It's unfortunate and a misnomer that marriage gets a rap of being no fun. A killjoy. I think that sucks if that is the case. I look back at the last 12 years and could not have had any more fun, starting with the wedding day itself. And I look around at some of the married couples we frequently run with, many of whom have kids, and the same seems to hold true. Having a blast.

Today, celebrating our 12-year anniversary, we're planning a boat ride to Oxford with great friends. One of those friends, who sang at our wedding, will be singing and playing with a band at Pier Street. There's a more than probable chance that Robin and I will walk up a dock together. And there is a more than definite chance that I'll be thinking about our first walk up the dock together, 12 years ago in Oxford. The way I think about it just about any time I'm on a dock, looking at, or swimming in the river.

God and numbers (sung like "God of Thunder")

2011-06-21T06:03:00.001-04:00

I don't generally ponder God and numbers at the same time. That's why I majored in English and Philosophy. But I've kicked around a notion for several years, an analogy really.

Let's say God is the number seven (Why seven? Why Otter? Why not?). And you go to church and kick it with your Christian friends, who are all saying, "four plus three." And then you scoot down to synagogue to hang with your Jewish friends, and what they're saying is "five plus two." You mosey on over to the Buddhist temple, "six plus one." Muslims are rapping, "seven plus zero."

They're all describing the same thing, the number seven, with their own words, in their own way. And that's how I've generally looked at various religions, who often seem to be dancing around the same number/revelations/teachings at their core.

On the one hand, why the hell would you go to the land of five plus two and try to jam four plus three down their throat, when from where they are sitting, it's five plus two all the way. And from a math teacher's perspective, you're a bonehead anyway, because five plus two is as correct as you are.

Maybe what we've needed for some time is an existential math teacher, to show us we're all saying the same thing and to chill the fu$% out. The Crusades and religious violence could have been avoided with a parent-teacher conference.

So there's a Tuesday morning serving of God and numbers. Which should be sung to the tune of KISS's "God of Thunder."

The road of excess

2011-06-16T06:06:00.001-04:00

If you've ever been hungover, you get William Blake. At least what he meant when he wrote, "The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom." The morning after, when your head is pounding, your stomach wants to hurl and life cannot progress as it should, you experientially understand "excess," or too much, and why you should avoid it.

That doesn't mean you won't do it again, but you've learned where that behavior leads, in a way that you wouldn't by someone telling you.

I know the road of excess. And I hope I've been able to glean a couple of its palaces. I think it's as solid a piece of advice as you'll find scribbled out there, in memorable, bumper-sticker form. The way I see it, there are two problems we have as a culture with following Blake's adage:

1) We master "excess" and never get around to the wisdom part. For example: debt. obesity. pollution. All those ad nauseum buzz words that plaster newspapers and politispeak and talk shows. All things whose excess should be able to lead us directly the wisdom of how to let go, ease off, scale back, etc. We just keep plowing down the road of excess, probably until we run out of gas and never reach the palace.

2) We try to claim the palace without having tread the road. This seems especially problematic to me. Here's why. The teenage and early 20s especially should almost be known as the road to excess years. If we don't make mistakes by way of excess, trying shit, falling down, and storing away the lessons learned (a.k.a. "wisdom), we'll also call this "living life," then it seems to me that come 40s, 50s, whatever, we are walking mid-life crises waiting to happen.

And by the time that phase of life comes around, there are frequently those pesky things like families, kids, mortgages, etc., that get royally bent over when we go out to learn the excess road.

The equally interesting thing, to me, as a parent, and as someone who certainly used those years for excess (for better and worse), is how we try so hard to plop our kids directly into the palace of wisdom, without ever having them find it on their own via the road. We don't want them to fuck up or fall down or hurt or embarrass themselves. We put them in bubbles that don't allow them to glean wisdom or life lessons that might help or shape them.

I'm sure I'll be no different. I'm sizing the girls up for protective bubbles even now. But there is something to be said for Blake's advice. On a far-too-preachy Thursday morning.

On the shelf

2011-06-13T05:52:00.001-04:00

I hope to wear real shoes this week. That's after being on the shelf for more than two weeks now with an ego-induced ankle injury. One of those things, like Charlie Brown trying to kick the football, that you knew wasn't going to have a favorable outcome.

I don't take well to being injured. And semi-hobbling on a fat ankle, almost doubling-over in pain to hot-foot it across the Giant parking lot or turning sharp while cutting the grass, well... sucks.

This past Saturday I got in about a half-mile open water swim, while we were beached, hanging out on Jamaica Point, out on the boat. That accounts for the only real physical activity I've logged since the snap-crackle-pop of the ankle.

The hope is that it's a learning experience. The hope is that this time on the shelf reminds me not to try to kick the football. Charlie Brown had trouble with that lesson. But no one really wants to be Charlie Brown. And no one really wants a gimpy ankle, particularly when their (my) motivation for running, for longboarding, for biking, was just starting to crank with possibilities this summer.

Note to self: learn, motherfuc#$r.

Timing is an wily bastage. While I bide my shelf time, I've been reading Chuck Palahniuk's "Rant." In my reading encounters Palahniuk and maybe Tom Robbins each have a way of making you think about how you experience your life and what some alternatives are to how the rest of society accepts a shared reality by assumption.

I'm pretty well with Palahniuk and Robbins. I tend to be someone who likes to experience things for myself, even prior to shelf time. But taking a seat on the sideline hammers that point home.

I gotta watch out for kicking footballs. Next time it's held out there, I'm kicking Lucy.

Riffs for a Tuesday morning

2011-06-07T07:10:00.001-04:00

Language is a monkey wrench. -Charles Simic

If I'm wondering what I think, what I have to say, I can always turn to Simic to ask me the right questions. To make pronouncements that remind me both that: 1) language is just a tool, not an end in itself, and 2) I don't like the Foo Fighters.

Being a man among words, it's sometimes easy to get so hung up on finding just the right word, that I am left sitting, silently, with something to say.

Employ the right tool. You could try to cut down a Christmas tree with a monkey wrench, but you better have a lot of time and a big tree skirt.

Sometimes, a smile is the right word.

Philosophers who seek those moments in which the senses, the mind, and the emotions are experienced together. -CS

There is no instruction manual for that kind of integration. Or if you find one, let me know. Maybe just sitting for long stretches in front of a bowl of gumbo at the dinner table, pausing between spoonfuls to look at my wife and daughters. Eating and being, mindfully in love.

Laughter undermines discipline and leads to anarchy. -CS

Some of my favorite memories are filled with fall-on-the-ground/spit-take laughter. Playing wiffleball in our back yard with my godfather, Doug Hanks, Jr., who could break up a game at any minute with a pronouncement at the plate. That's something he could do, and did, throughout his life.

If philosophy, cosmology, poetry, life--if the big, noble pursuits don't include, seek out, or make room for laughter, then I'm not playing. That's maybe why I'm drawn to those folks who think, who write, who live, or try to, with a smile.

Hey, beer man!

2011-06-01T06:19:00.002-04:00

I'm not prone to hallucinate about baseball beer guys. So I'm pretty sure I saw him. He wasn't carrying, or hawking beer. And he was in the wrong city. He might be a two-timer, like me.

Yesterday, walking down Half Street from work, there was Howard the beer guy from Camden Yards. In D.C.

Howard's probably the only beer guy I can identify by sight, anywhere in the world. He's got a timeless mullet, pulled into a ponytail. And for a while, he had a shtick that no one could touch.

Whenever he poured your beer, he would ask you a baseball trivia question. If you got it right, he gave you your beer, for free. He was a walking baseball encyclopedia. It was awesome.

Howard stopped asking my dad questions when he got his second answer right during one game. He shut dad down, smartly. My dad can hang on the baseball trivia.

My crowning beer-buying accomplishment was the time I knew "Walter Johnson" was the right answer to Howard's question about a fantastic pitcher who pitched for sub-par teams near Baltimore, but the Nationals hadn't moved to D.C. yet. He probably thought I was too young to remember that the Senators were a team in D.C. (I am too young, but my baseball knowledge runs historical at times). I got my free beer from Howard.

So yesterday, Howard was walking in D.C., in a red shirt, carrying a bag to the Nationals vs. Phillies game (the Nats won 10-2, by the way). I'm not sure whether he was going just to catch the game, or if he is two-timing Camden Yards with Nationals Stadium. I don't blame him if he is. I do that too.

But I hope he was just going to enjoy the game. Reading the Baltimore Style Magazine piece on the people at Camden Yards (link above, look for Howard Hart), you can tell he still digs baseball and taking in a live game. He's a guy I'd like to buy a beer.

I'd bet he's walked more steps at Camden Yards than anyone could count. He probably turns to "hey beer man!" anywhere, at any time, purely on reflex. But there are those of us that know his name is Howard. And he knows his baseball.

Maybe Tycho Brahe is all we can hope for

2011-05-27T07:15:00.003-04:00

I know I know who Tycho Brahe is....

Who is Tycho Brahe?

We were sitting at lunch and the small tug sitting at the dock had his name lettered on her bow. I knew the name, had come across it in college. Astronomer, explorer, something like that.

In our iPhone/Google age, Brahe is searched and found on the spot. Astronomer it is. He was the man. Observed a supernova, made precise calculations about the heavens before the invention of the telescope.

Brahe changed the game. He showed that the stars and heavens were changing, in flux, not perfect and immutable as folks were thinking prior. He laid the framework that changed the universe, or at least how we think about it.

But ultimately he didn't have it quite right. The Earth was still the center. Looking back, he had some fundamental flaws in the truths he was putting out there. But from where he stood and what he had to work with, he was right. And even now we know he was closer than anyone that came before him, and a gateway to help our cosmology get where it is.

The thing about it, is that we are likely in the same boat (not the tug at the DC waterfront, just talking figuratively here). History tells us time and again that what we know at any given time is generally shown to be HUGELY flawed with another century or so worth of technology, data and hindsight.

You could have gone to school and taken a science test where the right answers were the the Earth was flat and/or the center of the universe. Newton was king of physics until Einstein knocked him on his arse.

If you look with a broad historical perspective, you've got to conclude that we are equally fucking wrong about some of the basic building blocks of reality that we take for gospel. Which ones? Who knows? But we're using what we've got to plot the best map, paint the best picture we can. It's not our fault we can't see around the corner.

Maybe Tycho Brahe is all we can hope for. See and say it the best we can, without being able to get our heads around the whole picture. It's gotta be enough. And, hell, if we aren't ultimately right, it's at least good enough to get a small boat named after you 400 years later.

* Photo by Will White

May 24

2011-05-24T06:07:00.001-04:00

We took the back seat out of a mini-van and replaced it with a big living room sofa and six of us piled in to go to Annapolis. That was 16+ years ago. I talked with Robin in McCarveys for a while that night. And I haven't stopped thinking about her since.

Some people, when you meet them, you just have a feeling are going to change your life. The more we talked and saw each other that winter and spring (1995), the more it became clear to me that she was that kind of person. We moved in together at the end of the summer.

I barely remember getting engaged three years later, on her birthday, May 24. I remember everything about it--sitting on our deck next to Crockett Brothers Marina in Oxford--but it is blurry, the sequence, the words, what was said. Largely because we had talked about it, getting married, and knew we were going to.

I've talked about it here before, our wedding, our life together, the milestones and years we share. But thinking about Robin this morning, on her birthday, what strikes me are the variables, the almosts. I almost went to the Army, when we first met. We almost moved to Pittsburgh for graduate school. Later we almost moved to Pittsburgh again, for a job. The life decisions, the changes, like having kids and buying a house.

How my memory of her, looking at her now, includes that night flirting in Annapolis, includes moving into four different apartment/townhouse/houses, my college graduation, holding her hand(s) during the births of our girls.

How having a drink on our back deck in the evening can conjure up our drive to Colorado, or Maine, or Asheville, N.C.; a sunset happy hour on the Choptank 16 years ago or last year; time with friends in Cooperstown, N.Y., more than a decade ago or camping on the Pocomoke River, just a couple months ago.

How watching our daughters run on the soccer field, or learn to ride their bikes, or get an A on a test, or playing catch, can make me love Robin, all over, without her even having to be there (though I prefer when she is).

It hits me that the person who is the most constant in my life is also the person who makes life most interesting. How being together, spending/sharing time with someone also makes me more myself.

It fascinates me that how, getting engaged thirteen years ago today, that I look forward as much to this weekend, to tonight, as I did to time together back then.

It's funny what memory holds on to, how Robin can tell you what people were wearing at any given event or night out seemingly since we met, whereas mine works in odd details and sequences and between the two of us we can generally recreate/rekindle what went down.

Love is an odd bird, how it can lead you by various parts of your body, brain, soul to someone; how you can cross paths after not even knowing of the other's existence for 22+ years and then everything changes and the next 16+ years kick the shit out of the ones that preceded them.

I don't claim or even pretend to know jack squat about life or love, other than to be living them day by day and trying to enjoy and appreciate and recognize them as such.

I think I've recognized Robin since that night in Annapolis, when we first really talked. What I recognize in her is both constant and changing, the same and different, caught up in cliche for not having the right words and a place where words can't walk directly up to.

What I've seen her be to and for me is a perfect complement, that soul that picks up where mine leaves off and that makes mine better and more than it was before I knew her.

Happy birthday, Robin, on what has become one of my favorite days of the year. I always dig finding out how we'll celebrate it, how we'll celebrate you.

Plato didn't have a coke habit

2011-05-23T06:14:00.000-04:00

Why a modern world if such poisons are invented! -Rimbaud

I blame Descartes. The case against him goes back to Bob Anderson's modern philosophy class at Washington College. Dr. Anderson laid into Descartes' mechanistic worldview, wherein you can do things like land on the moon or blow up nuclear bombs. Anderson didn't subscribe to this way of looking at the world.

Yeah, but those things have been done, landing on the moon and blowing up bombs. They are real, subscribe or not. Anderson was/is a Plato guy. As in spend 30+ years writing a book about Plato, all philosophy as footnotes to Plato, kind of guy.

Me: So Plato wouldn't have believed in the moon or bomb -isms?

Anderson: No, he wouldn't.

M: But those things happened, how could he not subscribe?

A: Plato could have had a cocaine habit, too, but he didn't, that we know of.

And that's when the light went on. Worldview is about choice, like making the choice to do cocaine. Which isn't a bad analogy for the modern/mechanistic worldview. For Descartes, worldview was separated from an overarching purpose. We just plod around in a mechanistic universe, so if something works, build it, so be it. If it doesn't, fu$% it, try again. Science and results are their own justification.

Never mind whether something is a good idea or what path it may ultimately take us down. And where does thinking like that lead you? Take a look around.

Philosophy classes and discussions have, for me, always opened doors to the world. Even back in my N.C. State days, I can remember walking to philosophy class (when I went to classes) and kicking existential tires in my head, then those same tires would end up on the professor's desk, being examined and wrestled with. It was uncanny.

At Washington College, Drs. Anderson and Brien shined the searchlight in all kinds of dark corners, which motivated me to get my own flashlight of inquiry, something like an earned (vs. "cash-bought," per Palahniuk) merit badge for refusing to just be a surface skimmer.

What brings me here this morning has been the idea of "progress," the thought that modern technology and science and society are driving us/the world to a better or more advanced place than where we were. That we're so wrapped up in what we can do that we don't think for a moment, whether or not we should do something in the first place. Then, when the consequences hand us the check at the end of the meal, we're saying ddddaaammmnnn! and stuck doing dishes.

Bob Anderson compared looking at the world through mechanistic glasses to having a cocaine habit. Yeah, I remember Len Bias. I think I'll pass on that, thanks. I think I'll keep looking.

Honeysuckle suckers

2011-05-18T05:40:00.001-04:00

Ava doesn't miss a chicken house. She can spot and call them out mid-McDonald's french fry. I'm not sure that this is a marketable skill for a six-year-old, but I dig it. It gets back to the idea of the Eastern Shore/rural living as part of the dream.

This past weekend was a case study for the rural/neighborhood dream. Cooking out on one side of the street where the girls gathered foliage as study specimens, barefoot in yards and gardens, followed by a weekend of digging holes, making mudpies and cakes and sucking the honeysuckle growing along the back fence.

"Dad, you've gotta try this honeysuckle! Let me show you how..."

We were honeysuckle suckers 30 years ago. We also knew our chicken houses--there were at least two sets of working chicken houses visible along Oxford Road. We learned quickly to hold your breath driving by them when the wind was blowing the funk towards the road.

Those houses and their funk have long since been replaced by something more suitable for Oxford Road, but that hasn't dulled Ava's keen coop-spotting skills. She pegs and describes them along Chapel Road as we head to the Hutchison's in Cordova for our nephew Samuel's third birthday party.

Samuel's whole celebration, the vibe, the people, the spring breeze drives home another key point to our girls: chicken houses aren't nearly as cool as horses.

Ego Drums

2011-05-15T10:27:00.000-04:00

I've got a set. I keep them in the corner, preferably gathering dust. But sometimes I've gotta bust 'em out. Ego drums.

Some people wail on their ego drums all day long. Those people aren't much fun to be around. Or work with. Or sit next to.

From time to time, though, it feels good to play the ego drums. Reset the self-confidence. Rock a little self-pep talk, complete with skill display and pyrotechnics.

When I dust them off and sit down behind them, I like to fire up the double bass ego drums and have them spin around me Neil Peart-style.

If you catch me playing them, so be it. I'm cool with that. But before I walk out the front door, I push them back into the corner and cover them up.

Ego drums are best thumped behind closed doors.

What's running inside you

2011-05-11T06:11:00.000-04:00

For better or worse, I've always been more concerned with the care and maintenance of my body, mind, soul, curiosity, family, sense of fun and adventure than the care and maintenance of my car, lawn or checkbook.

My truck generally gets washed when it rains, lawn and garden get the basic cutting and upkeep necessary for respectability and my free time is not spent scheming how to make our bank account fatter. The list of project to-dos around the house is a bit stagnant. It is accomplished in spurts.

It's not that I don't want to care more about some of these things--God knows it would make life easier at times, given that a fair amount of definitions of success are wrapped fairly tightly around some aspect of those facets of adult life that I tend to neglect.

But those things aren't what gets me out of bed in the morning.

You can out-distance that which is running after you, but not what is running inside you. -Rwandan proverb

It's something like that. What's running inside you. It's not a do-what-makes-you-happy directive, it's a do-what-makes-you-alive imperative.

We all work enough at jobs that to neglect those things that affirm our existence in favor of anything else feels like not just time misspent, but time wasted. Time that there is no guarantee you will get back, hoping for some retirement that may or may not ever arrive.

This isn't to shirk responsibility, rather to describe a pecking order of sorts. What's important. To me. To you. But that's not really it either.

It's more like there is a spark, or a low burning fire in your gut that is your soul. And what you do with your time and energy can douse that fire, can kindle it, can stoke it. And that fire is your Life and what you do with it.

I choose to be stoked.

Rumble Fish Memories

2011-05-08T23:25:00.003-04:00

I don't know when childhood memories turn black and white. Or if all memory loses its color or just most of it.

Some color remains though, like the movie "Rumble Fish," where the fish are the only color--vibrant, moving, mesmerizing against the drab.

A red, plastic fire helmet is one of my Rumble Fish technicolor memories.

The Dobsons were building a house next door to us and digging the foundation left a sizable dirt pile next to the shoreline. It was perfectly located for throwing rocks or clumps of dirt into the river--from atop the pile you could wing dirt grenades into the drink and wait for the brackish recall.

"Emergency!" (I remember it being called "Emergency One") was my show when I was little. I didn't miss it. I had the rescue truck and John and Roy action figures that drove it and the bright red plastic fire helmet that showed I was down.

I was rocking my helmet and throwing dirt bombs into the water when the pile slid under my feet, avalanche style, and tumbled me down into the river. I didn't know how to swim.

My Rumble Fish memory is being underwater and looking up to the surface and seeing my red, plastic "Emergency One" helmet floating above me. It danced in slow motion, out of reach. I don't remember if I even tried to grab it or just watched it.

Next to the bobbing red helmet, feet crashed through the surface as my mom had seen me tumble and run down to the shoreline, jumping in and pulling me and my helmet out onto dry land.

A thankful son? Nope. I actually yelled at her for not calling the fire department, thus robbing me of a chance to ride in the ambulance. I really dug that show.

When I pull the childhood memories to the forefront to examine them, there is still some color left. They haven't all washed to black and white, though maybe they are getting less sharp. The floating "Emergency One" helmet, dancing above me on the surface of the water--that shiny red--that's not one likely to fade. I can see it, swimming, like the rumble fish.

"Make Some Noise If You're Livin'"

2011-05-06T08:55:00.002-04:00

What if you've already done your best work? If you came out of the gate at a sprinter's pace and changed the game 20 years ago? What if, as a band, your first three albums were almost a holy trinity to a generation who measures your, and other albums against them? Would you just stop making music?

You can carry this same argument through writing, visual arts, sports, business, whatever... In the case of the Beastie Boys, I'm glad they are still putting music out.

I didn't want to dig "Licensed to Ill" when it came out. I was a punk-soul-hardcore-skater. No room for rap, much less rap the entire school was into. But they sampled Zeppelin and it was playing everywhere and hard not to get into. It became a soundtrack.

When "Paul's Boutique" came out, a friend and I bought it the day it was released on cassette tape and it became probably the most played album during high school and I would venture a guess that it may be among the most played albums I own today. It was truly a game changer. I catch new samples and allusions when I listen to it now. And when you have a name like Michael Valliant vs. Michael Diamond, your name gets inserted into "Shake Your Rump," almost instantly.

Funny how with an album I dig as much as "Paul's Boutique," that "Check Your Head," their third album may actually be my favorite. The return to their own instruments, the insertion of the funk, the 70s vibe; it is a desert island album for sure. I was listening to the college radio station at N.C. State when I heard "Pass the Mic," not knowing they had an album out. A trip to Schoolkids Records fixed that, then a group of us went to the Raleigh Civic Center that spring and saw The Henry Rollins Band open for the Beasties. Simply stellar.

Therein, the problem. "Paul's Boutique" and "Check Your Head" were unlike almost anything that came before them. And unlike anything the band had put out. Revolutionary is a term thrown around like sprinkles on ice cream, but damn near apt in the case of each album, when given the context of what came before it.

Likely not a day goes by that (friends or) I don't quote one of the first three albums or that I don't hear a line, a hook, a beat in my head from them. That's pretty pervasive. So how do you live up to that, creatively? You can't tear everything down completely every time you create and start brand new.

So you don't. They are not churning new work out at a Grisham-like pace. There is blank space, breathing room between efforts. My sense is that Mike, Adam and Adam go into the studio, when moved, and have a blast and riff and groove with what moves them. And then send it out into the world. Seems to me that that's what artists do. Or should do.

There are albums that have followed "Check Your Head" that I don't listen to much (Hello Nasty, To the Five Boroughs). But I'm glad they are out there. I'm glad the Beasties are still creating. And so I downloaded "Hot Sauce Committee Part Two." And played it for the commute to D.C., and the drive home. I'll put it on the iPod for a run. And I'm digging it.

It does my soul good to know that a band that helped shape my sense of music, my sense of culture, my sense of fun; a band that has given voice and lyrics and a shared soundtrack to a group of us growing up and still carving our niche, creatively, in business, family, life--is still dropping science like Galileo dropped an orange.

For me, it's a head nod to what they've kicked into the mix. To borrow a line, which I frequently do, "it's called gratitude...and that's right."

And at the very least, "it's a trip. It's got a funky beat, and I can BUG OUT to it."

Damn metaphorical ants

2011-05-04T05:45:00.000-04:00

The ants were fat this morning. Or maybe they were just blurry since I was making coffee and uncaffeinated.

Or maybe ants are a metaphor for those things that crawl in through the cracks of your foundation and manifest themselves in your kitchen. Which would be fine if they weren't on the counter.

Can a metaphor double as a real thing? I fu$%ing hate the ants, metaphoric and real.

My metaphoric ants are the projects that sneak up--the front porch, the garage, the garden--while I'm doing the stuff I dig--adventures with the girls, get-togethers and outings with peeps, time on the water, morning runs and trail runs, reading and writing.

On the one hand, life is short and you better be doing the stuff you dig. No other way to say it. On the other hand, no one likes (metaphoric) ants on the counter. It may be time to invest in some metaphorical Raid.

I run because

2011-05-02T05:06:00.000-04:00

I run because it changes me. Those times when I want to stop and sit down, but my mind and body go on auto-pilot and push on and find what's on the other side of quit.

I run because life throws so much shit at you that you have no control over, whereas I choose to run, I choose that test, that challenge and what it asks of me and how I respond.

I run because when I am hopping tree roots and slipping down singletrack, single-file between people I've never met, all at the same cadence, breathing in the trail and each others' collective energy, I know there is something more and larger than me.

I run because I see places and meet people and learn and experience things that I could not any other way.

I run because sometimes I wonder if I can and there is only one way to find out.

I run because it connects my feet to the earth and the air and water. It is elemental and so am I, and together we remember.

I run because of the experience of traveling to a race with a group of friends and the finish line re-living, re-telling; a post-race meal or beer together; and traveling home together, changed a little.

I run because there are times, sometimes, where there is only motion and breath and the world and I are...

Small town rites of passage

2011-04-27T06:07:00.000-04:00

There were two skills that guaranteed childhood (semi) independence and your ability to participate in just about anything worth doing. Two small-town skills: being able to ride your bike and being able to swim.

Once you developed the skill and trust to set out on your 20-inch dirt bike, you owned Oxford. Ride to Doc's Quick Shop in the morning, or evening, and it was all there. From the "Bajas" tracks and jumps on the hardened clay dredged from Town Creek to town-wide bike tag; from Little League practice to swimming at the Ferry Dock.

And that's where marketable skill number two comes in. Oxford is surrounded by water on three sides. From the park, to the yacht club, Ferry Dock or Strand--there is always a beach, dock, or some other means of getting to the water. I don't remember anyone growing up in or around the town that didn't learn how to swim. If there was such a kid, they must have been hermitted up in an attic.

Almost any rite of passage involved bike riding or swimming. Two of the more ill-advised bike treks I can recall involved, having just turned 12, following the gastronomic impulse of a friend who had a Big Mac Attack and the two of us rode the 12-or-so miles from Oxford to the Easton McDonalds. And the second was a habit we had of racing (behind) the bug spraying truck through town.

This is the kind of stuff that frequently bubbles to surface consciousness for me as both our girls first choice of outdoor activities are bike riding and swimming. That's what they want to do, almost anytime asked. It's a different area and era, yet the tendencies are the same.

There is something about the smile, the eyes, the joy that emanates from them, not just the first time they keep themselves afloat or ride without falling, but every time they hit the water or pedal fast down the street.

I look at them and I get it. It's not just that I remember the feeling, I still get it, particularly doing either or both with Anna and Ava. Maybe riding your bike or swimming is the key to childhood. Maybe they are the key to keeping your inner-child alive. Either way, look for our bikes in front of Doc's (now known as the Oxford Market) or at the park on weekends and this summer. Now if I could just find what they did with the Bajas...

Ivan DeJesus

2011-04-25T07:06:00.000-04:00

Ivan DeJesus. He was always a perplexing baseball card for me. I pronounced his name De-JEE-sus for about a year. Thinking it was pretty ballsy for someone to put Jesus's name in their own name.

I'm not sure why, but I frequently think about Ivan DeJesus around this time of year. Could be the preponderance of "Jesus" sprinkled through conversation via Easter; the fact that baseball season is in full swing (sorry); or some other connection I haven't pinned down yet.

It's an interesting thing, talking about/explaining Easter to kids. The rising from the dead thing, the killing Jesus in the first place, and then the whole why-the-fu*%-is-there-a-rabbit-hiding-eggs-in-our-house conundrum.

I dig Easter--for its timing, riding high on spring breezes and warming temps; for its colors and the girls rocking Easter dresses; for eyes lighting up on egg hunts and finding the strangely hidden eggs, the ones that are up high or supremely camouflaged; for the Easter egg that gets found a day or two after Easter.

I dig Easter for its focus on renewal. Our church has a tradition of covering an entire six- or seven-foot cross with flowers, to symbolize new life, where everyone brings in cut flowers and puts them on the cross. I can sit and stare at it for the whole service.

I dig Easter for the focus on faith. For contemplating life, death, sacrifice, rebirth, perspective, thanks.

Funny, I've always taken Easter and the resurrection as a metaphor for spiritual awakening or rebirth, not as an actual zombie-come-back-from-the-dead situation (I have seen folks tweeting about zombie Jesus). I guess it seems that if you dig what Jesus taught, how he lived his life, what he stands for, you don't need the resurrection as proof positive that he was right. You just take it at face value.

The rebirth/eternal life vibe is one that comes up in Christianity, Buddhism, etc. and I think each faith has something worthwhile to ponder on it.

Then again, what do I know. I spent a year thinking a guy's name was Ivan De-Jee-sus.

Take it from Ben Wade

2011-04-22T06:51:00.001-04:00

Follow the interesting. Implied advice from Ben Wade (aka Russell Crowe) in "3:10 to Yuma." Maybe cultivate or invite the interesting, to boot.

Watched 3:10 last night on one of the largest privately-owned screens this side of the Bay. Wade/Crowe's willingness/infatuation with following any flow that seemed interesting (as long as it didn't piss him off) sticks with me.

Most of our lives are structured to become routine. I think we could do well to welcome the novel when it says hello. Or maybe even say hello first.

I've changed course on the last couple of runs I've gone on. Decided to do something different. Not a major deal, but it instantly changes the mindset, the scenery, the feeling. Or when we've woken up and grabbed the girls and gone somewhere we weren't thinking about until drinking coffee that morning.

That's the stuff that sticks with me. That I want the girls to remember.

A quick Friday riff. Grabbing the tails of thoughts as they go by. Catching the 3:10 to...

Fringes

2011-04-20T05:55:00.000-04:00

William Carlos Williams was a doctor. Wallace Stevens sold insurance. Frank O'Hara worked at a museum. If that's all they did, we wouldn't know them--wouldn't remember.

We know them for their fringes. For what they did with the edges of their days--their mornings, commutes, lunch breaks, nights.

Ultimately, they weren't defined by their jobs.

I take cues from people like this in my life. From the naval architect who plays the mandolin. From the teacher and graphic designer who spend nights in their art studios. From the carpenter who still checks the Ocean City surf report and migrates to Costa Rica when he can. From the pediatrician who got me skateboarding again.

It's the fringes that are ours to claim. Those times outside the lines of our jobs.

What do you do when no one is telling you what to do?

Is that what we make of our lives? Is that how we'll be remembered?

If it is, I hope I paint my fringes aquamarine and wear them on my sleeve, or feet or hat. I hope I stretch them from night to morning and hang them on my office wall.

I hope I wrap our girls in fringes so that they will cultivate and decorate and color their own.

3-for-3 towards infinity

2011-04-18T05:59:00.000-04:00

As a child, I saw faces on walls, ceilings, doorknobs and spoons. Then, one day, they were all gone. - Charles Simic

We replace the animate world of the child with test scores. In third grade, if we're not careful, we can usher in the end of innocence via the end of imagination.

The world alive for test scores. Hardly a fair trade. If we facilitate this deal, we deserve what we get.

I'm the child of the rainy Sunday afternoons of my youth. - Simic

Improvisation. What you do when there is nothing to do. That defines you.

When the game is rained out, you can't hit the beach and you are left to fill in the blank spaces around scheduled activities. What do you do?

My rainy Sundays were filled with Tinker Toys, Legos, Star Wars figures, baseball cards and comic books as a kid. Seldom do I come up with something better today as an adult.

On rainy days in our house, if it gets too quiet, I go check on the girls and find them queens and creators of entire worlds that somehow (just barely) fit inside their rooms. On those occasions I smile.

The imagination has moments when it knows what the word "infinity" means. - Simic

Those moments. How to cultivate. How to extend. How to get back to...

How do you embrace the infinite--arms and mind and soul stretched wide...

My recent moments make me sound like a skipping record: breathless on a mud-ridden, water-logged trail run, ground flowers in bloom, hurting, pushed past my limit but still moving forward, hanging on; watching Ava draw at the dining room table; cutting the grass while Anna loops the neighborhood on her bike; reading Wallace Stevens.

Our imaginations are their most fertile, most infinite when we are children. Though we may not know what "fertile" or "infinite" mean, still we know them by being a child, by coloring the grass purple, by never knowing or caring what time it is, by surveying our rooms, our yards, our line of sight, and seeing them as boundless.

Caution: Looks Off Bridges

2011-04-15T05:14:00.002-04:00

I can't say if he was in the Army. It was just a jacket. Could have picked it up anywhere. The Army jacket is the second thing I noticed.

First is that he was stopped, standing on the Frederick Douglass Bridge. People don't stop on bridges and just look off at the river. But he did. Stopped time and watched planes land at Reagan. Or the tide. I don't know what he was looking at, but he was stopped and looking.

About 15 years ago we drank beer standing on the Bay Bridge. We were on our way to a Grateful Dead show at RFK (what turned out to be their second to last there) and an accident on the bridge stopped traffic. I had never gotten out of a car and looked off the Bay Bridge. It called for a Bud 10oz.

I've been reading notebooks lately. Charles Simic's, Campbell McGrath's, Sam Shepard's and Gary Snyder's. Writing in a notebook is like stopping on a bridge. Trying to take that pause and get your soul around it. A moment where you keep yourself from just moving forward without looking. Without stopping. Without thinking.

Like the dude in the Army jacket, I stop and look off bridges. I should get a bumper sticker to warn folks.

"Alive to what is about"

2011-04-12T05:54:00.001-04:00

One does not need universities and libraries,
One need be alive to what is about
- Gary Snyder

I don't normally run in the evening, but the weather was too nice not to.

Not much time, half an hour, four miles worth of time and distance, so start in on it

I still speak to everyone I pass. I can't not. I enjoy the responses and smiles, they are part of the run.

After winter runs, I appreciate an earned sweat, warm with a breeze back

I pass two slow bikers who seem put off that feet might be faster than wheels.

Back to our neighborhood, Anna sees me from our house and is sprinting in t-shirt, jeans and socks to meet me. She turns and pulls up alongside and tests me.

We sprint side-by-side, her eyes big, her hair behind her and she laughs loud and wild. I think about racing my dad down our street as a child

Robin and Ava are in the front yard. Spring breeze, last of the sunlight.

I get the girls' bikes and they ride around the neighborhood, Ava mimicking Anna, follow the leader

Circling back and out again, circling back

One does not need universities and libraries,
One need be alive to what is about

Anna at Milburn Landing, April 2011

Geography and dreams

2011-04-08T05:23:00.001-04:00

I didn't even take geography in high school. And still it has been a guiding force in my life. Not just any geography, mind you. More like a place.

I had a choice out of college. Two job offers: public relations (PR) at an art museum or reporter at the local paper. My cousin had gone the reporter route. It took him from Easton to Salisbury, to Wilmington, DE, to Chestertown, to Washington, DC, to Miami, where he's been for several years now. That's the newspaper route--you follow the trail to bigger papers and go where the offer is.

Geography is irrelevant.

Robin and I talked about it. It would be a life of moving. No deep roots.

PR offered up more possibilities where we were (and still are). It gave us a chance in one place. Where we met. Where I'm from. And where we love.

It might give us a geography of our choosing.

We chose geography. But it wasn't that easy. I think I've had the idea that I wanted to be a writer for some time. When I started the art museum job, telling people I did public relations left a foul taste in my mouth. I felt like I sold out before I ever bought in. No one dreams of a career in PR, not when they're little and dreams are still pliable.

My grandfather thought I'd be a sports writer for The Baltimore Sun. With my writing interest and love of sports and Baltimore (he and I always talked Orioles and Colts, then Ravens, and Baltimore sports icons, and he would always give me The Sun sports page when we stayed with my grandparents in Towson), it just made sense. Sitting around the campfire this past weekend, talking dream jobs, I said I want Mitch Albom's job, but based out of Baltimore and not Detroit. To write about the teams and sports I dig, but also use it as a launching pad for non-sports writing. You've heard of Tuesdays with Morrie, right? Oprah has. I don't think that's what I'd write, but you get the idea.

Around the same campfire, I explained the geography choice; how it's not an either/or vs. the dream, it's actually part of the dream.

If you've grown up on the Eastern Shore and been whirled into the Tred Avon River by the Oxford Ferry's wake; if you've beached your Whaler or skiff at night for a bonfire under the stars or camping on Chloras Point; if you've put down a few beers at sunset on a creek standing with friends on a newly constructed wooden bridge; if you've walked around a colonial town and been inside the houses where your father and grandfather were born and raised; if you've skateboarded and run on these same streets, giving them your own take; you're on your way to understanding this kind of geography.

But not yet.

When you walk along unsteady brick sidewalks, unsteady for the tree roots growing up underneath them, and you've got one daughter riding on your shoulders and the other holding your hand, walking next to your wife who you met here, laughing remembering these same roots under your childhood Keds shoes; and you're walking to the water to see the fireworks at the same place you watched them and learned to sail, at a place your great uncle helped put on the map...

you're getting closer. But it's not just having a history with a place. It's a connection. It's feeling the rivers and roads and marshes and woods--I could swear my blood kisses with the Bay's brackish water, separated only by skin when I jump or wade in.

I've known I've wanted to raise kids here since I was a carefree kid here, I think.

I'm not sacrificing a dream for a place. The place is contained in the dream and the dream is contained in the place.

Since picking PR over journalism, I've still been able to forge a writing niche. I've written about artists and art who/that inspire me. I've ferreted out, transcribed, edited and helped publish parts of James Michener's diary he kept while writing Chesapeake. I've learned and written about the Bay for various jobs.

In the latest chapter of my writing life I've been learning and writing about the Coast Guard--a service my grandfather and great uncle both served in during World War II. I'm occasionally writing about a new cutter named after a former Coast Guard Commandant who put my grandparents up in his house when they didn't have a place to stay. It has opened my eyes and connected me to a part of my family history that is now also a part of my family's present.

Writing is a part of my daily life, at work and in the mornings, on my own time.

Geography and dreams. For some people, it's a choice between them. Or maybe one is irrelevant. For me, I'm not sure where one ends and the other begins. Maybe they are the same.

Dante, Cobain, dark woods and mid-life crises

2011-04-05T20:43:00.002-04:00

Midway through our life's journey, I found myself
in dark woods, the right road lost.
- Dante's "Inferno," Canto I, translated by Robert Pinsky

Dante may be one of the best and most elegantly transcribed mid-life crises on record. His dark wood moment came when he was 35. He was rolling creatively into uncharted territory. Anyone who has flung themselves into the creative process can maybe relate. I see Dante, solo, venturing into the dark wood. Daunting shit, the dark wood.

As timing would have it, April 5 is the day another artist found himself in a dark wood, an inferno of his own. This is the day, 17 years ago, that Kurt Cobain killed himself. I remember being a freshman at N.C. State when I first heard "Nevermind." We burned that album up--both in Raleigh and in Easton, home for Thanksgiving and for Christmas break that fall and winter. I think for anyone our age (let's paint a broad brush stroke over 30 to 50?), that album claims watershed status.

We've talked about Rimbaud and Cobain and flaming out early as creative folks. But my mind is in a different place at the moment. The image of Dante I like better than the one of him soloing into the dark wood is the image of Dante meeting Virgil while he is there.

That image hangs in a frame on a wall in our house. I remember talking at length about Dante and Virgil and the idea of Virgil as a guide, as a model, as a kindred soul, in Professor Cousineau's class at Washington College. Dante's "Inferno," like Nirvana's "Nevermind," both carry watershed status for me.

Dante and Virgil weren't homies. They were separated by more than 1,000 years. They didn't kick it together at the bar or library. Dante's connection and debt to Virgil was intellectual, aesthetic and philosophical. Virgil leads Dante through the dark wood, through hell, Purgatory and into Paradise. Some metaphorical shit going on there, no?

I'm not sure this kind of guide would have been any help to Cobain. Depression, drugs, rock-star-status, you're talking clinical, chemical, psychological baggage that was maybe just too damn heavy to carry around anymore.

But I dig the role of Virgil as guide. As a way of thinking, when you are trying to cover new ground, when you are trying to break free creatively, when you're not sure how it all fits together existentially, that hey, man, there have been other folks before you who have blazed this path; their own path, leading somewhere different, but no less tenuous for them than for you. Than for me.

So I think about Dante and Cobain today. About the mid-life crisis as another birthday is a few days away. And I'm thankful for the Virgils. Both the creative guides--Whitman, Williams, Merwin, Hass, Snyder, Simic--who have put it out there and who stoke my soul to find its own way through the dark wood. And for the real pillars or guides who have been there--my grandfathers, father, family, friends and other touchstones who clear the way in their own way, or help me back up, or are just there.

Milburn Landing fragments

2011-04-04T05:47:00.000-04:00

Bunk beds, a double bed, heater, fan, table and chairs inside a one-room wooden cabin. It's more than ample for four of us. In our Joneses-keeping-paced-with world, I sometimes forget that that's all shelter really needs to afford.

I notice the mist on the river before the sun and the Deep Purple guitar riff cues in my head. The girls are up with the sunrise; a doughnut down and they are out on the playground.

Hot meal - eggs, pancakes, sausage, bacon - remarkable how much better food tastes and is appreciated while camping.

John boat ride to Shad's Landing and back finds a black duck with its purple wings overhead and a bald eagle who flies in slow motion.

Lunch is when you're hungry and riding bikes and playing on the river bank obliviate TV and video games for the kids.

Camping with families/friends creates a village, everyone watches and plays with the kids, cooks together, eats together, gathers in common areas.

The afternoon is a series of squalls and sunshine, rain and sun without a visible rainbow, but we don't need one to see the day's color.

Mandolin, guitar, harmonica and vocals draws a crowd and Lucky 7 Porter grooves smiles.

Later, cooking around the fire, lantern-lit playground games and bedtime based on tiredness.

Once the kids are down, campfire stories swirl with dreams, positions, fears and wishes, reminiscing and provoking until eyes and fire begin to fade

I walk outside at 2 a.m. and look up at an expanse of stars through the fingers of the trees, all reflected off the river.

Fragments, notebook jottings don't do the weekend justice. On the drive home and unpacking the car, everything smells of campfire smoke. A smell I hope remains in my nose, or at least memory, for some time... until next time.

Opening Day

2011-03-31T05:44:00.001-04:00

Opening day is a clean slate. It's green trying to push the droll winter the hell out of the way. It's grass-cutting season. It's little league practice until dinner time.

Opening day is a looking forward and in-the-moment day. Twenty-five years ago it would have been a day closer to swimming off the Oxford Ferry Dock time (generally late April, early May).

Though I'm more of a football fan than baseball, opening day of baseball season is one of my favorite sports days. Period. And though I'm more of an Orioles fan than a Nationals fan, I'm jazzed to be heading to the Nats' season opener this afternoon.

I can't recall how many Orioles' opening days I've been to. With a father who is a CPA, it hasn't been many. Which is why, in part, I'll feel like a kid when we take a crew from work and head across the street to Nationals Stadium. The other part of giddy will be the $8 beer in my hand and subsequent $8 smile on my face...

Baseball moments--both playing and spectating--are woven through my almost 39 years. Learning to play catch in the backyard with my dad; hitting a bottom of the last inning game-winning double over Jeff Wilson's head in right field so the Oxford Little League beat Cordova; being at Mike Mussina's first Oriole start at Memorial Stadium; being at the game when Eddie Murray, again an Oriole, hit his 500th home run; ...opening day for the Nationals 2011 season.

Opening day is renewal. It's change of seasons. It's backyard cookouts. It's Chuck Thompson and Brooks Robinson doing play-by-play. It's leaving work early with friends and co-workers and taking in America's game.

Letter to Campbell McGrath

2011-03-28T05:36:00.002-04:00

Consequently, you will know how to piece them together into a vision of your own design. -James Wright, "A Letter to Franz Wright"

I am not in Italy. Nor have I ever been. I take you and James Wright at your descriptions of it, which I couldn't touch if I were standing there.

Like both of you, I am a father. But again, a difference: I have girls.

I, too, have smashed my crude hammer against a wall of jewels and tried to gather up the pieces. I have wanted to collect both wall and splintered hammer and set them at my daughters' feet when they are ready (if they should have any use for a shattered hammer).

I like that your sons are with you, creating and sharing your Italy. I love that their words are your words, a distinct difference from James Wright's letter to his son, then distant from him.

"The hopes and dreams of fathers for their sons" (or daughters) and the desire to pass along something worthwhile, maybe even beautiful, of my own hopes and dreams and life.

I read your letter to James Wright and then re-read his letter to his son Franz and the words and sentiments swirl into deep blue water and I can't decide whether to watch or jump in

Beautiful Afro

2011-03-24T04:47:00.002-04:00

She had a beautiful Afro. Transcendentally beautiful.

She was walking across the overpass over 201/295. She had on a gray jacket and headphones, which only added unspoken cool to sublime beauty. She made me think of Lauryn Hill, if she had been in the Digable Planets.

If I could have stopped and stared I would have, but you can't pull that shit on 295.

It was a moment. A glimpse of beauty when you don't expect it--randomly on a freeway in a rundown neighborhood, where all you're thinking about is getting to work.

The Rolling Stones "I Just Want to See His Face" was playing, off of Exile on Main Street. Her headphones may have been playing the same tune--she walked perfectly in time to it. I wonder if she was the song incarnate, conjured up just to show the way you move to a groove. Maybe it was her theme music.

If Mick Jagger had been riding shotgun, he'd have sung about this girl, or her Afro. Or he would have cat-called. I don't know Mick, so it's hard to say.

For me it wasn't a cat-call situation. I'm married. I've found cat-call sublime beauty that way.

For me it was a moment. A reminder that there is this capital "B" Beauty out there, at unexpected times, in unexpected places.

Pay attention.

Suits

2011-03-22T06:09:00.000-04:00

I've never wanted to be a suit. You know the kind: a swath of sameness, dark gray, maybe pin-striped, cardboard cut-outs of dudes projected outwards from a suit.

They travel in packs, with similar haircuts and shoes and grooming habits. They have similar idioms and laughs. They may pull for different sports teams, but don't push much beyond that.

We've encountered them waiting for an elevator, all piling on at once.

"Suits," we both said, and nodded, and everything was implied and understood.

We waited for the next elevator.

Beer, Ice, Bait, Subs

2011-03-20T17:49:00.002-04:00

Beer, ice, bait subs. That's what the sandwich board sign says in front of the McDaniel Store. Nothing more.

Beer is the first thing if you're going fishing. A back-up plan if nothing's biting. All that time, you've gotta have a back-up plan. Not a bite all day, nothing's working, at least you can catch a buzz. That's what they say.

Ice serves two purposes: beer and any prospective fish. Cold beer and cold fish. Two absolutes of angling. Plus it's hot. Ice on the neck or forehead or ice down the shorts at the right time can extend the trip.

Bait is a prerequisite. You better know what they're biting on. In fishing or dating. You won't catch shit without the right bait.

Subs. Sustenance. Solidity. Endurance. If you've got everything else working, but can't deliver on the meal, well, you're hungry.

Beer, ice, bait subs. That's what the sandwich board sign says in front of the McDaniel Store. Nothing more. Your four food groups. Your four absolute truths. Your keys to happines on the water.

Say them aloud. Commit them to memory. And if you forget, stop in McDaniel.

McDaniel isn't the only town, or store, that knows the gospel of the one-stop fishing shop. Photo by Brian Brown, from the website Vanishing South Georgia. Some awesome photos and a stellar idea.

Richard Cory x2

2011-03-17T05:28:00.004-04:00

The chick in the photo may have just read Richard Cory. The mustached gent on the right would be Edwin Arlington Robinson, the cat that wrote the poem. You know Richard Cory, right? We read it in Mr. Thurber's 9th grade English class at Easton High School. Have a look:

Whenever Richard Cory went down town,

We people on the pavement looked at him:

He was a gentleman from sole to crown,

Clean favored, and imperially slim.

And he was always quietly arrayed,

And he was always human when he talked;

But still he fluttered pulses when he said,

"Good-morning," and he glittered when he walked.

And he was rich—yes, richer than a king—

And admirably schooled in every grace:

In fine, we thought that he was everything

To make us wish that we were in his place.

So on we worked, and waited for the light,

And went without the meat, and cursed the bread;

And Richard Cory, one calm summer night,

Went home and put a bullet through his head.

Richard Cory was the first poem I can recall completely pulling the rug out from under me. Everything is going along well and good until the last line. And then you sit there. And then you look at the author the way the lady in the photo is. "Dude! What?"

Then Richard Cory, the poem in a book, went quiet for a while. Backburner. Until a few years later, driving by 7-11 on Route 50 in Easton, sitting shotgun in my friend Colin's silver Honda Accord hatchback, when this song came on the stereo:

I remember listening, having the song ring the "hey, I know that" button in my brain, and then thinking, "holy sh#%! That's from Thurber's class! We read that poem!"

A couple years ago I brought Richard Cory up at the Museum where I worked and had an ensuing Facebook debate over who remembered it, who had read it in school. And post-debate, neither Colin or I could find the Boot Boys song version anywhere--of course we couldn't remember who it was that sang it anyway. I was convinced it was The Vandals.

In any event, Colin's diligence paid off by finding it on YouTube. It brings me back to the poem in 9th grade and the ensuing discussion on both what took place and the way the poet set us up only to pull the rug out from under us. And it takes me back to hearing that song in the car and realizing that something I learned in 9th grade actually informed me, gave me a context to understand what was going on in the song.

Edwin Arlington Robinson won a couple of Pulitzer Prizes. He never met The Boot Boys. But I bet he would have dug their tune.

Fair weather

2011-03-14T06:07:00.001-04:00

Sometimes weekends roll by like a Saturday afternoon walk along woods and fields. Especially fair weather weekends. Seems like I can start smiling Friday evening and have to washcloth scrub off my perma-grin on Sunday night.

Living on the Eastern Shore, the right way, is inextricably linked to its geography--being dialed into or connected to it. Spending time on the water, at parks, in the woods.

We've been fortunate to have and find family and friends who feel the same and find ample opportunities, reasons, excuses to carpe the outdoor diem.

Sometimes spontaneity makes the moment. Sometimes planning and looking forward to a shindig of a spring camping trip on the Pocomoke River.

Doug DeCinces had an indestructible mustache

2011-03-11T05:45:00.003-05:00

It was probably my most prized possession from childhood. The 1980 Topps Eddie Murray card (from the 1979 season). It was the first year I really dialed in on collecting baseball cards. Being my favorite player, he wound up being the most elusive.

Billy, the kid that lived two doors down from my grandparents in Towson, was the first person I knew that had the card. No matter how I reasoned with him, he wouldn't take a two-for-one trade for Mark Belanger and Rich Dauer, the Orioles shortstop and second baseman. He really didn't understand how much more I wanted the Murray card than he did.

I remember sitting down in McCrory's Five and Dime on Washington Street in Easton, in the baseball card section, pouring over the clear three-packs of cards, looking to see which packs had the most visible Orioles. Mike Flanagan, Lee May, Doug DeCinces. It felt like by having their baseball cards and going to games or watching on TV, you somehow knew the players. DeCinces had an indestructible mustache in his earlier Orioles days. It was Magnum P.I. cool. I remember when he shaved it off.

Josh Wilker gets all this and then some. His book Cardboard Gods: An All-American Tale Told Through Baseball Cards took me instantly back to McCrorys; back to organizing baseball cards; to going to games at Memorial Stadium; to watching on TV as Rickey Henderson break Lou Brock's single season stolen base record of 118 stolen bases in 1982, and then looking for his card that proved that fact the next year. I wasn't an Oakland A's fan, but for some reason watching that game on TV stands out in my head.

Wilker's book is as much about life-existence-childhood and throwing himself headlong into baseball cards as a normalizing force. I give Cardboard Gods and its reconnecting me to that place and time, part of the credit for getting me so amped for the upcoming baseball season. Wilker, along with Buck Showalter and the Orioles front office, and 105.7FM "The Fan" and driving by Nationals Stadium every day, as we've mentioned before.

That and it seems as if the O's are bringing back facial hair to some degree. And this bearded guy says, "Play ball!" And wipe your chin off, for crissakes...

Response to Sunday

2011-03-06T22:35:00.004-05:00

It's the same shelf at Newscenter, full of random books at the end of the aisle. The first time it was Merwin's The Shadow of Sirius. It didn't belong there and I've never seen another copy in the store since.

This time the shelf coughed up Jules Renard's Nature Stories.

It's Sunday evening. Rain swirls outside, but it is quiet in here, which amplifies the dervish out the windows. Three girls are sleeping. I've got my second evening coffee and am dwelling somewhere between the couch and Renard's animated countryside.

The evening caps a day that started with a 10-mile mudfest of a trail run, where Shaun and I scared up a half-dozen deer darting ahead of us across Little Florida Trail at Tuckahoe State Park.

As I ran until and through my legs hurting from climbing; as I ran short of breath and ski-sliding down muddy hills, I was at times part of the trail, at times my lungs, heart and breath, at times thinking about Renard and what he would see in the woods, on the trail, through the rain. Both what he would see and how he would say it.

It's something of a three-part process: observation, interpretation, expression. Being mindful and receptive to what is there, having it resonate and work through, and reordering it into a personal/universal form of expression.

For people, the possibilities of self-expression are staggering. For a bullfrog, less so. This morning they drank in the rain, the creek, the footsteps of runners passing by and sang it out in one bellowing, continuous note. To our ears, the bullfrog has one note, one word, one song in response to the world.

Tonight, the house is still quiet. In the kitchen, the oven is pre-heated and I've got a mind for baking flounder. This morning's run started with talk of the backwards notes of the mandolin, and with a looking forward to spring and summer fishing. My response tonight, it seems is preparing flounder and cueing up Blues for Allah.

Rimbaud vs. Ripken

2011-03-04T06:30:00.002-05:00

We were five miles into a trail run, zagging along the Creekside Cliff Trail, when AK threw Rimbaud out as his favorite poet.

The context was my Mike Tomlin letter and achieving success or acclaim (too?) early in life. Is it too soon? Do people extinguish themselves without toil as kindling? Without pacing themselves?

Hendrix. James Dean. Kurt Cobain. It's frequently creatives--artists, musicians. Rimbaud stopped writing at age 19. And yet is thought of as one of the most revolutionary writers, and major influence on subsequent writers over the last couple hundred years.

Security once gained, heart and beauty are set aside...

Rimbaud may have been on to something there. The poet Franz Wright has railed against the notion that poets and writers must today be teachers, academics to earn a living and earn respect. Wright argues that what this creates is sameness. He pictures William Blake and Rimbaud--two outright game-changers--in their tenured professorships and what a sham, a nightmare that would have been. Their struggle, what they went through, their place in life, informed their work, which was different than anything that had come before them. Teaching freshman English was not for them.

In our trail running seminar on creativity and success, AK and I agreed that being a slow starter, a late bloomer was perhaps the way to be. To have perspective and pacing alongside whatever success you encounter. Merwin is my example; my model for someone who is at the top of their game later in life. Don't burnout and do nothing.

Call it the Ripken example. If you live near Baltimore, you know Cal's sustainment phenomenon. Just keep going.

This week I rode to Philadelphia with two Coast Guard admirals, tagging along to write a couple stories. They never stopped working--pouring over notes, discussing strategy, what's next. It was inspiring.

They are of the age where you talk about retiring from the military, yet they are moving and doing more now than early in their careers, prior to earning the stars on their shoulders.

For some, once you've made it, attained the security that you set out to get, you stop. Welcome complacency and laurel resting.

I like the Merwins, the admirals, the Ripkens, the distance runners, who keep going. Who want to see what is around the next corner. Who realize the slog, when turned on its side, is a dance. That you can't achieve a moment like this, without playing 2,129 games in a row ahead of it...

"Long distance runner, what you standing there for?"

2011-03-01T07:42:00.000-05:00

Heavy metal is not the soundtrack to long distance running. It might power you around a track or get you amped and angry before a game, but for a long, grueling run, my mind/soul needs something more expansive. Something that can charge or carry me through the valleys.

Not to knock heavy metal music. Black Sabbath, Judas Priest, Iron Maiden, Ozzy, were formative musical influences for me, ultimately dropping me on the door step of the hardcore and punk, from Bad Brains, the Clash, 7Seconds, Sick of it All, that would be the soundtrack of my skateboarding teens. And I still dig and listen to all of them.

It started in sixth grade, trading cassette tapes back and forth with my friend Nate. Priest and Maiden and Motley Crue, Quiet Riot and even Deep Purple. Nate put a Grateful Dead tape in my hand, the artwork looking a bit like the Maiden covers, and proceeded to sing Casey Jones like it was an Alice Cooper song. I took it home to give a listen. It didn't fit with the screaming and power chords I was after, but wasn't bad.

I don't think you can dig old jazz and blues and not be pulled in with what the Dead, Phish and the jam bands have done with the improvisational, free-form vibe. Saying that, the unencumbered "space" of some of the live jam bands has always been a turn-off for me. The best of all of it keys a balance between structure and improv.

When I want to go out and plug in to the iPod for a long run, the Dead, moe., Strangefolk, Umphrey's McGee have given me that mojo of making my mind and body want to dance, want to float, making the soul smile and heavy legs lighter. That can be more valuable on some days. It can be what laces your shoes up.

Long distance runner, what you standing there for? Get up, get off, get out of the door.

Fire on the Mountain has a prominent spot on a number of running playlists. Towards that expansive state of mind where the runner, and the run, and the road or trail are all the same. And it carries over into the rest of the day, where Robin and I are driving with the girls and dogs to Tuckahoe State Park and both singing along together to New Speedway Boogie, with the road winding under the wheels...

Making strides

2011-02-25T06:45:00.002-05:00

I remember the walking more than what we saw or talked about. Winter of 95-96 in Oxford, the town was snowed in and Colin was snowed in with us at our apartment.

It was dark, maybe 10pm or later when we set out on a walk to explore the town and the snow. We talked and walked through a good bit of the night, undeterred, actually excited by the weather. I don't remember what time we got back.

One of those walks, those experiences, that sticks with you. I've had a few of them.

Sometimes I think I'm a runner because I'm an impatient walker. A group of us will cover our 10-mile Tuckahoe trail run or a run around town of the same distance in under 90 minutes--covering ground, heart pumping, endorphins cranking, body feeling good. But you aren't really seeing things the same as when you set out on a meander.

Walking itself is the intentional act closest to the unwilled rhythms of the body, to breathing and the beating of the heart. It strikes a delicate balance between working and idling, being and doing. It is a bodily labor that produces nothing but thoughts, experiences, arrivals. -Rebecca Solnit

Last week I sent some running quotes to a group of co-workers training for their first half-marathon. I stumbled across this gem from Thoreau, "Methinks that the moment my legs begin to move, my thoughts begin to flow." I've thought and lived and written about this same thing (though less eloquently) for some time. My mind works better in motion.

I'm reading Rebecca Solnit's Wanderlust: A History of Walking and it's hard to sit still. It reframes my mind and body and place/relation in the world and makes me want to walk.

My favorite runs have the same quality as a walk--unscripted, unmapped, done for the sheer act of being in motion, of being outside, of talking it all in. Not in a hurry.

Exploring the world is one of the best ways to explore the mind, and walking travels both terrains. -Rebecca Solnit

Some folks espouse walking meditation. I'm with them on that. I find it more difficult and less helpful to sit cross-legged than to be in motion. My mind wants to ramble.

I'm glad I wandered across Solnit and her book. Thinking about what I want out of running, out of life, where I'm going, sometimes I need to be reminded not to be in a hurry. Not to be indoors. Not to miss what's going on around me. Some of the lessons inherent in walking somewhere. Anywhere.

...a certain kind of wanderlust can only be assuaged by the acts of the body in motion, not the motion of the car, boat, or plane. -RS

Boulder rolling

2011-02-22T06:07:00.001-05:00

If Sisyphus had worked with Fred Flintstone, he might have been happy. To work at a quarry, to have a chance to smash that f%#@ing boulder, or at least to hear the quitting bell (or bird) and know he could put his toil down, if only for an evening.

But maybe that's what Sisyphus knows... that every morning, when the alarm goes off, that the boulder sits next to our bed, anew, waiting for us. That our evenings, our weekends, our vacations are really only our time walking down the hill to fetch our rock and start rolling again.

I like to think of Sisyphus sweating, with his back behind the boulder, his shoulders splitting, thinking, "Dude, I gotta work on my resume..."

Funny though, if Fred and the boulder-roller worked together and had a brontosaurus smash the rock, reduce it to pebbles, free Sisyphus from his torment--would he miss it?

Would he stand there, relieved but perplexed, wondering, "Now what?"

Paying attention

2011-02-18T06:12:00.001-05:00

Noticing the unnoticed. Or maybe it's making you notice those things you see all the time but don't pay attention to.

Maybe it's the way they yolk things together that had no business hanging out, but by seeing them grabbing drinks in a booth you wonder how you never put them together.

Illuminating the universal through the particular--those shared details that light the cartoon lightbulb over your head.

Seamus Heaney says, "Gleaning the unsaid off the palpable." I love that line. But I'm not sure it says what I mean.

My mind inhabits the city more frequently (or vice-versa). The daily commute, the NPR interview with the author who says the city is the answer--the spark for creativity, for innovation, it is people and community at their best.

It isn't. I don't buy it, nor would anyone who has watched a sunrise with a fishing pole in the river, or climbed trees for no reason, or smiled walking the woods on hearing a woodpecker go to town.

There are things the city lacks. But Gay Talese's New York intrigues.

Plus it's baseball season. Which has always brought with it trips to the city. And time in the stands. But not passively. More than a spectator.

Being a part. Paying attention.

A letter to Mike Tomlin

2011-02-15T06:09:00.000-05:00

Dear Coach Tomlin,

Up yours. Let me explain. I say this not as a Ravens fan (though I do bleed purple), but as a 38 year old. The same age as you.

At 38 most of us are still paying our dues. Maybe we are on the path to our dream job, maybe not yet, but career nirvana is supposed to be attained at 50, or late 40s at best. We're still under the thumb in our 30s.

Perhaps you didn't get this memo? At 38 you've become a dominant, iconic head coach of one of America's most storied and celebrated football teams. You've won a Superbowl and come a last-minute touchdown from a second.

And your success has come from your mind, determination, leadership. It's easy for us (me) to dismiss the athletic success of younger men or women as unattainable. At 5'10" 175ish pounds, I'm not playing linebacker in the NFL or power forward in the NBA. I'm okay with that.

But you've risen to the top of an older man's profession. We're supposed to be looking for incremental progress. Setting our sights on the mountaintop and then settling into the long marathon pace it takes to get there. You've Michael Johnson'ed the career track in 200 meters. You've fu%^ed all this up.

Now I can't say, well I'm 38, I'm about where I'm supposed to be. Now I've gotta think, yeah, but what about Mike Tomlin??

You've set the bar so high that we all may just wind up at the bar.

So way to go, Coach Tomlin. Congratulations on your success. Now I've gotta get the drawing board back out and try to game plan for reaching my dreams... a lot faster.

Thanks, Coach Tomlin. Thanks a lot.

To wonder

2011-02-08T06:16:00.001-05:00

The sky is the color of the snow on the roof next door,
so that it looks like all sky, no house.

Trees frame the lack of house,
branches arched in a question
as to its whereabouts.

Either the trees don't know
or they're playing along, part of the ruse,
or it is just their nature

to wonder.

*photo from Purdue University, ash tree.

Field Work, your own

2011-02-04T05:54:00.003-05:00

...the far saner 18th century attitude, which viewed nature as a mirror for philosophers, as an evoker of emotion, as a pleasure, a poem, was forgotten. --John Fowles

Probably the coolest thing about kids movies is the personification of everything that isn't us. Animals, toys, trees--nature itself--isn't just alive, it talks (and speaks English, to boot).

While scientists and my veterinarian brother-in-law will correctly poo-poo this worldview, the upside is that kids have a correct perception of the world, nature, reality as a living place.

Not only does it not hurt that kids want to hug trees when they are two or three years old, it's probably the only way out of the ecological Armageddon that a lot of folks are stirred up about.

Trail running, I frequently feel like a kid in the woods, though I do stop far less frequently to build forts or look for cool walking sticks.

I've had a big three of books going this week: John Fowles's The Tree, Seamus Heaney's Field Work and Thomas Merton's New Seeds of Contemplation.

The marsh, the woods, the river, the beach, besides being a playground and/or an escape have always been for me places of contemplation. I dig being at any of these places now with our girls and just watching them, or playing alongside or spearheading some adventure or another.

Heaney's Field Work is his record in poetry of four years where he went to live in a country cottage with his family. There is a music to his writing that wouldn't seem like he could have heard living in the city.

I think we all have/need our own field work. I've got a long-time friend who finds his in the Outer Banks. I'm not sure my own field work is a particular place so much as a return, or a turning to, again, those wild places with our girls, making their horizon eyes, scooping hands, climbing feet, and mine... new.

*photo from Seamus Heaney.org

The Tree, tending to

2011-02-01T07:09:00.001-05:00

I suck at sitting still. I can sit, but the still part, I've gotta work on. My mind is flighty, unmoored.

In this respect, being sick this past week, and not running, has given me something I had fallen out of touch with. I dusted off the mat and got back to yoga. Note to self: you get stiff quick if you don't put in some time.

And hitting a bit of the mental immersion back into practice, I read a bit of Patanjali's Yoga Sutra. I've always gleaned a lot from that honed style of writing, from The Bhagavad Gita, The Dhammapada, where you are reading fragments, distilled to the fewest words and simple cadence. In the introduction to the Yoga Sutra, Mark Whitwell talks about the "Sutra" style like this:

The style known as Sutra, that which has few words, yet is free from ambiguity, full of essence, universal in context and affirmative.

And with further study and practice, "the message takes on a deeper resonance and becomes more relevant, more revealing."

And that's sort of it. The cats who write like that, whether poetry, aphorism, sutra--few words, full of essence, universal in context, more relevant and revealing upon further reading--those are the folks I come back to.

Balance and patience don't come easy for me. But I also recognize how much trying to incorporate or practice each gives back to me. This time of year, cold but not enough snow to have fun in, too cold to dig being outside, I see photos of trails, of mountains, of singletrack through the woods, and I want to be there.

But, still being a new year, I also think about all the shit that I've left untended. That I've been meaning to get to, work on, read, what-have-you. One of those things for me is a book I'd forgotten about, John Fowles's The Tree, which kept getting bumped for something else, but is all those things I dig about reading and I settled into this morning. It could be one of those ass pocket of wonder books. We'll see.

Another one of those things is yoga. And as Patanjali says, "Yoga is the resolution of the agitations of the mind." I could use a little of that.

The other stuff? Well, I'm working on a list. I'll get back to you on that.

Are you gonna eat that melancholy? Part 1, Nox

2011-01-28T06:24:00.000-05:00

I f#%ing hate the word melancholy. It's like a fruit that can't admit it's a vegetable. And either way, you don't want it on your plate.

But here I sit, last at the table, in a staredown with melancholy and I can't stomach it. I want it to extract itself, move off the plate of its own accord so I don't have to eat that shit.

And there it sits. I've been sick. It's been cold. Couped up, cabin-fevered, little sunlight. And generally I'm an upbeat cat, but, man.

I've been sitting with three brilliant writers, muses really, who I am smitten with and shaken by, who are hip to some rough revelations about humanity.

Anne Carson (above). Joan Didion. C.D. Wright.

I've got some Buddhist in me. I fathom our transitory being, impermanence, non-attachment. But I have a rough time with death and our whole corporeal rodeo here.

Carson. Her book Nox. It's big. As a book and as a physical work of art and collage, yeah, but it is large in scope as well. The book is an elegy for her brother, who died and with whom she wasn't close in their adult lives.

She is thinking elegy, which leads her to history. She is a classics scholar, so history leads to Herodotus. Here is Carson's take on the Big Poppa of history:

Herodotus is a historian who trains you to think as you read. It is a process of asking, searching, collecting, doubting, striving, testing, blaming and above all standing amazed at the strange things humans do. Now by far the strangest thing that humans do--he is firm on this--is history. This asking.

This process, this asking, this is the kind of stuff that makes me tick. It gets me fired up. It's how I am wired, digging into the big questions. And Carson rightly connects elegy to history, and vice-versa, as they both run square into death. Yikes. Let me grab a beer here.

Carson being Carson, she digs into word origins, includes scraps of letters from her brother, mother, and juxtaposes some poignant, personal history with the broad historical sweep.

She looks the melancholy on her plate square in the snout (of course, it's not likely that a fruitgetable would have a snout, but it's a working metaphor, so play along), swallows it down and moves on to her potatoes. Meat and potatoes seem like something you should eat to balance your melancholy.

So there is this beautiful elegy/history construct in the form of Nox and Carson to deal with. That's part one of the mental malaise that's swirling at the moment, which is necessarily catching me different based on the winter, kicking the whole body cold, the getting older, the asking the big questions.

I need to go for a run, do some yoga, too snowy to hit the longboard. Get out of the house. Like maybe to Hawaii. That'll work.

At Chick Fil-A

2011-01-27T06:43:00.001-05:00

We've got Chick Fil-A all to ourselves, Anna and Ava barefoot in the play place, Latin jazz strumming over the speakers and the girls are choreographing their dance moves in step, one then the other copies.

I just got off the phone with my dad, called to wish him a happy birthday, which is today, and we talk about the Ravens, because it's fresh and that's what we do.

A steady rain outside, with a hint of ice or snow to come. It's nasty, but the coffee is solid and I'm kicked back with Terrance Hayes's Lighthead, but mostly watching the girls.

Thinking about birthdays and fathers and kids--Anna's birthday is Monday and Ava's is less than two weeks away.

Generations of consciousness and smiles. The creativity the girls are turning loose in the play place matches the flamenco finger picking of the guitar.

Ava comes out and asks to sit on my lap to finish her yogurt. Anna walks out reciting, "six salamanders, eight chocolate chip cookies, 11 trees..."

I think about the girls and my dad and being a dad and my heart knows, in this moment, I could not love any more than I do.