Vonnegut saved fiction

I thought I'd held fiction's head underwater long enough to drown it. Then Kurt Vonnegut saved it. It's not the first time he's done it. And he doesn't work alone.

Vonnegut first saved fiction while I was in college. I was uncovering the secrets of the Universe in the poems and proverbs of William Blake, the dialogues of Plato, the scientific mysticism of Fritjof Capra, the interconnectedness of Buddhism and the aphorisms of Nietzsche. What did I need fiction for? The highfalutin make believe of blowhards.

But "Slaughterhouse-Five" is short and I'm on break... And "Cat's Cradle," and then I remembered why fiction mattered. How, in Vonnegut's hands and voice, it doesn't take itself all that seriously, but does; is irreverent, but genuine, is made up and autobiographical; imparts philosophy without preaching.

There have been co-conspirators: trying to navigate the mind and work of James Joyce in school; discovering and devouring Tom Robbins when graduate school for philosophy didn't happen; backing into David Mitchell while writing speeches and feature articles. When I think I need to back slowly out of fiction's room, someone taps me on the shoulder.

This past week in Ocean City, I was unmotivated by a novel I was reading. I'm searching for a job, wondering where life is going, if the girls had sunscreen on them, if the beer has enough ice on it, you know, equally important existential questions. Fiction, I got no time for you. And then I start looking at titles of books on the beach house's shelves. And there is "Bluebeard," a Vonnegut I haven't read.

I picked it up and half finished it in a day. We were leaving the beach, so I picked up my own copy at a book store on the way home. In the midst of job applications, getting rid of a tree in the yard, feeding kids, Vonnegut seeps into the day. "Bluebeard" is finished. Fiction matters. Its ideas. Its voice. Its humor.

Vonnegut has saved it. Again.

Go to weddings

I have no advice to give. I'm not a marriage counselor. And anything I've learned over the course of being married for 14 years is so quirky it probably wouldn't do you any good anyway. Each marriage is like a snowflake, unique and melts when it gets too hot... (kidding). But if I could recommend one thing to the married couples out there, it might be: go to weddings.

Not in a Wedding Crashers kind of way, for the sake of morals and no midnight bondage art shows, let's stick with weddings you actually get invited to. Take the opportunity to get dressed up and go on a date. Pay attention during the service. Watch for the moment when the bride and groom see each other for the first time. Look at the look on the bride's father as he walks her down the aisle (especially if you have two daughters--it's sacred and uplifting and crushing all at once).

Hold hands and listen to the vows the couple makes to one another. Watch how happy they are to be married and dancing and celebrating with the people around them. If you the wedding you are attending is along the shores of the Chesapeake Bay and you get to catch a sunset with the spans of the Bay Bridge in the background, so much the better.

Go to celebrate your friends, absolutely, but go also to remind yourself of your own wedding day. Re-live all those thoughts and feelings for yourself and with each other. Remember, spark, recharge.

It's funny how much your thoughts are the same and different over time. Watching a brother serving as best man, toasting his newly married younger brother and wife, it takes my thoughts to our daughters, who are 11 and eight and certainly won't be getting married for another 30 years or so...;), wondering if they'll be close enough to be the maids/matrons of honor at each other's weddings (should they find someone and choose to get married), what their lives will be like, what their shared memories will be, and what they might say to the other.

Other people's weddings are a time for celebration. But they can also be a time for reminding you of what got you there, however long ago.

Chasing Wallace Stevens, Adam Brown and Danny Way

Maybe I've been chasing Wallace Stevens all along. I don't know. I'm no expert. Didn't know that much about him, really. But he came to stand for something in my mind before I even read him.

Wallace Stevens is a path, a way to combine the philosophical and the creative; the absurd and the profound; the stars, the Earth, myth and books. From my first times reading him, I've know he was doing something with his writing that I want to do with mine. It's also his commitment to writing, since he didn't write for a living, but still made time, composing in his head on his walk to work. All the same, I don't want to get shoved to the ground by Hemingway or sell insurance like Stevens did.

I like Stevens as a model, albeit an imperfect one. Not a catwalk-turning model, but something to strive for.  I've been thinking about a couple other models lately: Adam Brown and Danny Way. I don't have designs on being a modernist poet, a Navy SEAL or a game-changing professional skateboarder. But at times I've wanted to be all three.

I'm not going to go into detail about Adam Brown's story. I'll let Eric Blehm do that for you in his book "Fearless: The Undaunted Courage and Ultimate Sacrifice of Navy SEAL Team SIX Operator Adam Brown," which I think all human beings should read. What I want to say about Brown is that he has become a model for me for overcoming obstacles. From drug addiction to injuries that should have ended his career, Brown relentlessly and compassionately ran down his dream. He would not be stopped. That's something I want to cultivate further in myself.

And Danny Way represents a couple things. Forging a new path, a new way of doing things is part of it. As I've mentioned here, I've been hooked on skateboarding since I was 13. At that time it was Tony Hawk, Mike McGill, Lance Mountain and the Bones Brigade. It was Christian Hosoi and the Alva skaters. It was Mark Gonzales and Mike Vallely. And then at a time when I had drifted a way from skating, Danny Way started building mega ramps and doing things that make my jaw and stomach drop.

If you want to be inspired by the story of a guy who goes after what he loves doing, watch "Waiting for Lightning" about Way jumping over the Great Wall of China. But it's as much Way's life story as it is the jump itself. And that's where it's most powerful. Way represents for me, figuring out how to make a living doing what you love, even when you weren't sure there was a living to be made doing it. Way didn't become a pro skater in a cookie-cutter manner, he redefined what people thought could be done on a skateboard, and revolutionized the sport. Whereas most people think that work is somewhere you go, put in effort, get paid--doctor, lawyer, teacher--Way invented another way to go, doing what he loves.

So there are three models I'm perpetually chasing. Chasing Wallace Stevens is a commitment to write and a striving for depth and form, marrying philosophy and creativity. Chasing Adam Brown is living up to Brown's example of overcoming any obstacle in my path, while not losing sight of what's important in my life. And Chasing Danny Way is creating a new way to think about, to pursue making a living and doing what I love.

That's a lot of chasing. Time to lace up the running shoes.

Save your freedom for a rainy day

"Save your freedom for a rainy day," someone had written on the bathroom wall... It remained there at eye level above the washbasin all summer. No retorts or cross-outs. Just this blank command as you angled and turned your hands under the faucet. - Rachel Kushner, THE FLAMETHROWERS.

Freedom is a tricky one. It's generally owned by your routine and your obligations. Freedom sits doing shots with your commitments and your bills, seeing who blacks out first. It may be that we are the most free at those nondescript times, like washing our hands in the bathroom of a bar, where our next decision doesn't carry the weight of the big ones.

For the past three and a half years, I've worked on a contract as a writer for the Coast Guard. The job in and of itself meant a commute to Washington, D.C., from Maryland's Eastern Shore, a trek I never thought I would make. It was a better job, a better opportunity than the previous eight-ish years working at a museum. The past three-plus years writing for the Coast Guard have been eye-opening, learning, defining. I've been up at 5 a.m. each morning researching and compiling an early morning report that went out before most people are at work.

This morning that contract is over. I still woke up at 4:30 a.m. (I'm a morning person), and wasn't sure what to do. So I started reading Rachel Kushner's "The Flamethrowers," which came as a Father's Day reading recommendation. It's already drawing tightening circles around art and freedom and the things I like to put my head around.

I'm not sure what contract or other opportunity is coming next. There's a freedom there, a reflection point that maybe asks what I want it to be, but also feels like we generally limit our choices before we really consider them.

We've been meandering about Maine this week, a geographic change from Maryland, and our girls first visit here, as a backdrop to mull things over, in odd moments, sipping a Long Trail Ale, looking at what happens when God employs a different palette, Bob Ross-style, painting mountains and rocky coasts and lobster boats, where we are used to seeing corn fields, cattails, and workboats chasing blue crabs.

It's not lost on me that our girls sat atop Cadillac Mountain yesterday in Acadia National Park, a decided and welcome experience and shift in perspective, as I wonder what will fill my work life next.

Contemplating spring and destiny, which has no beeper

Apr. 13--I'm cheating on David Foster Wallace. It's not that  I don't love him. I do. Sometimes I'm cheating on DFW with himself. But "Infinite Jest" is a 1,000-plus page tome that is gumbo-dense, very few page breaks and minimal places to come up for air.

So I'll put it down and turn to Thomas Merton, whose faith I don't have, but I envy. Merton often carries me from winter to spring, through the last, darkest cold days before short sleeves and beer on the back deck. Merton gives way to Walt Whitman. I try to re-read "Leaves of Grass" every spring.

This is how my reading and mental life goes. Like House of Pain, I jump around. I chase down tangents, at times feeling like a certain writer was put in front of me at a certain time because he or she has something to tell me. That often seems the case.

When I pick "Infinite Jest" back up, I'll forage my way through and come across something like this:

...both destiny's kisses and its dope-slaps illustrate an individual person's basic personal powerlessness over the really meaningful events in his life: i.e. almost nothing important that ever happens to you happens because you engineer it. Destiny has no beeper; destiny always leans trenchcoated out of an alley with some sort of Psst that you usually can't even hear because you're in such a rush to or from something important you've tried to engineer.

And then I sit thinking, "daaaammn," existentially speaking, and I know that I'm with DFW for the long haul, even though it may take some time. But hopefully not a Time [that] came to him in the falcon-black of the library night in an orange mohawk and Merry Widow w/ tacky Amalfo pumps and nothing else. -DFW, because that shit would be crazy.

Apr. 9--My feet prayed today. It was a three and a half mile prayer of thanks. They prayed on asphalt, dirt, gravel, wood and concrete. Their prayer went something like this:

Thank you for another year. Thank you for spring and sun on skin, for daffodils in bloom. Thank you for friends and family and their creativity in helping us live our lives in community. Thank you for breath and sweat, thank you muscles that work and ache, thank you for fields and roads and for a means to connect them all.

I'm not sure whether the people I passed could hear what my feet were praying, but I think they could. After a couple years that included a five-month layoff for an ankle injury, the better part of a year with undiagnosed Lyme Disease, and a recent layoff for being sick, my feet and I will always be thankful for an easy run in warm spring weather, the day after my birthday.

Apr. 13--So prayer seems to be on my mind lately. Not the ask for things kind of prayer, but the Merton-style contemplative prayer. Something like this:

There is in us an instinct for newness, for renewal, for a liberation of creative power. We seek to awaken in ourselves a force which really changes our lives from within. And yet the same instinct tells us that this change is a recovery of that which is deepest, most original, most personal in ourselves. To be born again is not to become somebody else, but to become ourselves. (Merton, "Love and Living")

That's how it comes together: spring, newness, renewal. Contemplation, whether it is inspired by DFW, or a spring run, or Merton.

Much like a Charlie in the Box, no one wants a haphazard mojo

My mornings have been usurped. Willingly, nobody stole them. But the up-while-it's-still-dark time that used to be for running, writing, meditating, is for work. Has been for a while, but I haven't figured out how to adjust my mojo. My mojo is fragmnted and haphazard. Much like a Charlie-in-the-Box, no one wants a haphazard mojo.

Rhythm is everything. Rhythm is nothing. If you are Eric B. and Rakim, you can let the rhythm hit 'em.  Maybe I mean momentum vs. rhythm, but probably both. They both invoke flow. So do rivers and diners, but the latter is another kind of Flo.

Eric B. and Rakim also advised not to sweat the technique. Solid advice. Get it working. Let it go. Look for content. And content is everywhere.

If my thinking is fragmented, blame David Foster Wallace. Part of my reading time is spread out within "Infinite Jest" at the moment. Other parts are contemplating alongside Thomas Merton, who seems to be who I pick up when I question faith, question life, want to find something to direct the questions.

In third grade, I went to the Salisbury Civic Center to my first WWF/professional wrestling match. There were four of us, as part of a friend's birthday party. Andre the Giant beat Blackjack Mulligan. Jimmy "Superfly" Snuka wrestled Ivan "The Polish Hammer" Putski. Bob Backlund retained his title against Playboy Buddy Rhodes. This past Sunday, we were in the same arena with our girls watching John Cena, Chris Jericho, Ryback and The Shield. Wrestling, the theater of the absurd, as a generational connection.

Baseball is another connection. March has been a dress rehearsal, building steam to opening day. About baseball, Walt Whitman said, "Baseball is our game, the American game. I connect it with our national character... America's game: has the snap, go, fling, of the American atmosphere." I'm a Whitman fan and a baseball fan. For our family, baseball season means Washington Nationals games in D.C., and Nats games on MASN on in the evenings.

The girls tear through packs of Topps baseball cards looking for Nationals' players the way I looked for Eddie Murray, Gary Roenicke and Jim Palmer Orioles cards when I was their age.

So this post is largely nostalgia. And looking forward. It's a cycle, circling back on itself and forward. It's renewal. It's spring.

 

A lone astronomer

In a room which blazed with light the young bride who was one day to be Queen of Italy was introduced. It was the event of the year... And while the world of fashion amused itself thus, at the same hour and in the same city a lone astronomer was discovering a new planet... --James Salter, "The Cinema," from DUSK AND OTHER STORIES.

I might hate James Salter. He was born in 1925, grew up in New York City, graduated from West Point and flew planes for the U.S. Army, flying more than 100 missions as a fighter pilot including during the Korean War. He resigned from the military to focus on writing. And his short stories and prose blur the line between prose and poetry. There isn't a word out of place. I hang on every sentence. He simultaneously inspires and makes me want to hang it up. But mostly inspires.

Salter went from fighter pilot to writer. He didn't waste time. I envy his economy of words and time. We all have a finite number of days on this earth, or at least in the bodies we're rocking presently. I wrote out the passage above about the queen-to-be and the lone astronomer. With your days, you can attend posh parties or you can set out to discover a new planet. Maybe, in the best lives, you can do both.

I picture Salter as the lone astronomer. About writing, he tells the Paris Review, "I hate the first inexact, inadequate expression of things. The whole joy of writing comes from the opportunity to go over it and make it good, one way or another." Salter misses parties.

I'm lazy. I don't always use my time to look for planets. To make the attempt. But as we're getting set to begin our Infinite Quest trekking through David Foster Wallace's masterpiece, Salter gives me the image of the lone astronomer. Salter and Wallace have made their discoveries. They've missed parties, put in their time.

Will we do the same?