Every, each

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

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

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

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

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

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)

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.