What I Like

Another New Year's, another bout with reflections and resolutions as I attempt to identify ways that I'd like to improve myself in this next year. I won't say it's totally hopeless, but I truly find the whole idea of New Year's resolutions a little glib. Think back to the resolutions you've made over the years and how many to which you've held up your end of the bargain. Probably not too many, if you're anything like me. Not that I don't in some way improve and grow every year, it's just never in the shape of the resolutions I made. Blah blah blah, I'm not writing this to go off on a cynical tangent or anything--I'm just trying to create a platform from which to launch into the thing I really like to talk about.

In my life, I have discovered there are a few things I can remember with great ease. As it were, they are not amazingly useful nor productive or intellectual in the traditional sense. I can't remember anything about politics, parts of a car, recipes, bank account balances, nor can I tell you anything informative about financial workings, U.S. international policy, or Hindu gods. As hard as I've tried with all of the above, the details contained in those topics do not stick in my cranial mud.

What does stick, though, are random things and opinions about music. I do not hold any mystical insights about the magic of music nor do I have a particularly deep record collection. I don't play a music instrument. What I can tell you is what year every Pink Floyd album ever made was released, why the Cure sounds so depressing, and how Jane's Addiction recorded their album Ritual de lo Habitual. I remember hearing things about how hip hop developed in South Central Los Angeles, and can tell you about the John Coltrane quartet from 1965-1969. I know who Prince's protege is. I don't know these things because I spent extensive time researching them. My knowledge comes from reading liner notes, remembering conversations between friends, reading Rolling Stone, and of course perusing the random smorgasborg of information and music websites on the internet. And somehow all this stuff just sticks.

So, it would be unoriginal and regurgitory to present these little facts I know and somehow pass them off as my own. In this light, my aim is to present very simply what I like or don't like musically and why. Maybe I'll throw in some facts. I might even use a link. I'll try and make it multi-genre oriented (my wife would pass the point of exasperation if I spent any more time talking about how freakin' cool Pavement is). And, I'll try not be a snob while doing all of the above but no promises.

Donde Esta La Biblioteca?

Drab and dismal days, which are common during Portland winters, have their way of painting most activities in black and white portraits. The sliver linings are grey at best, and the rain beats against windows and rooftops like an insidious question, asking for an answer much more frightening than the question itself.

On days like these, I enjoy going to the downtown library.

As a friend pointed out, the downtown Portland library is an establishment in the throes of an identity crisis. On the one hand, it must maintain the images and expectations associated with libraries: intellectualism, literacy, a vault containing the catalogue to the world’s greatest ideas, historical events, disciplines, literary and musical achievements. What is a library if not the celebration of the one artifact responsible for sculpting the ancient world into the modern one: the written word.

But, the downtown Portland library has another dimension to it, reinforcing one of life’s most recurring lessons: there are always two sides to a coin. The side I speak of is the one to which the police respond when they are told there is a fight ensuing on the front steps. It is the one that trains the librarians to negotiate with the constant influx of transients and their plastic garbage sacks of clothes. Most of all, this is the side juxtaposing the esteemed reputation of this library’s overbelly with a shady but equally shiny underbelly.

I am finding the downtown Portland library is an ideal place to get a true dose of culture in its organic form (opposed to the little siphoned increments of colorfulness often mistaken for true portraits of society and its denizens). Here, we main-line humanity: the bum reads the newspaper next to the geology professor; the graduate student exchanges greetings with the addict changing his clothes in the bathroom; expensive perfumes share the air with potent body odor; texture from a book’s ancient page mingles with matted hair that has not been washed in a long time.

And no one blinks an eye.

Waking up this morning to a moist, rainy and windy spring farce was not, in my opinion, fertile ground for inspiration, let alone motivation. But, hurrying in through the thick wood and brass doors to get out of this relentless inverted bog is the first sip of an awakening. The smells and faces of my comprades are ripe with difference (not indifference!), one of the many reasons I am falling deeply in love with the downtown Portland library.

Landing

I highly prize that feeling of not waking up each morning to trudge to a job that I hate, one where I am constantly thinking, “There are so many better things I can be doing.” Granted, I’ve never been unfortunate enough to work a job I truly hate, but I have had some that are less-than-inspirational. Is this a generational thing? Seemingly, older generations—-particularly, those who endured the Great Depression—-have a quality of perseverance that folks from my generation (which one I am again? X? Y?) lack. I’ll never get used to the feeling of walking into an establishment with an application—-any store or service—-and feel small. That eventual revelation that I am not a customer, but that I need the warmth found under the wing of employment just like everyone else: this is humility. That, and perusing Craig’s List multiple times each day.

I am job-hunting right now. Today I went to an interview for a before-school pre-school position. The woman asked me how I would discipline a three-year-old in a classroom. Can three-year olds even talk?

We are partnering right now.

My girlfriend and I, having spent half of our three-year relationship 3000 miles apart, are living together in a very nice basement belonging to a couple of my college friends, one of them my next-door neighbor my freshman year. We are sharing a bed again, are cooking meals together, and sometimes we have important talks. Sometimes we argue, and say things like, “I don’t understand why you always…” We cuddle and make love, too, and have jokes that make sense to only us.

We are exploring.

Portland is a city of underground magazines and progress. Everywhere we go the entry room is decorated with floppy, thick newsprint detailing missions and urban adventures of which we would like to be part. Green initiatives, organic food, artistic venues, places to drink, public transportation, music, martial arts, book clubs: at times we are overwhelmed by the possibilities (and the cost).

We are yogaing.

Yes, we are going to yoga. We are contorting our bodies to positions that supposedly have some kind of mystic purpose, and though I can speak only for myself, I mostly feel pain and a kind of junior-high-gym-class level of embarrassment. Did someone just see my butt crack? I sweat and grimace and Mizuho thrives due to her flexibility and petite body type. Most of the positions have Indian names, ones that everyone in the class seems to understand except me. My favorite position is called “child's pose”—it’s prone, laying your stomach on your knees with your hands stretched way out in front of you. It requires neither flexibility nor existential wisdom.

We are getting lost.

Within the span of a day, we are guaranteed to get lost. Correction: I am guaranteed to get lost. Forget the fact that I read maps and guide novices in the wilderness for a living. Urban travel for me is a different dragon. I often suspiciously wonder if some travel demon changes the streets on me, always preventing me of getting back the same way I came and subsequently dumping me out in some industrial park. Mizuho is patient, and when I imply we are lost with my go-to expletive—-Ahhhh, shit!—-she never plays the most notorious of female aces in the sleeve: “We should stop and ask for directions.”

We are reminding.

Everyday, we are reminding ourselves that what we are doing is okay. It is okay to not have a job every second of the year, or even half the year. We remind: risks are okay, and irrationality can often be the only way to discover value. In other words, it is sometimes okay to wake up, read, and then go out for dinner. We remind ourselves that this period of time is but a small piece in our lives’ jigsaw puzzle, a scintilla of mineral in the canyon of world history. We remind ourselves that having all the answers mean you are absolutely wrong, and having none of them means you are living rightly and justly.

I remind myself to not take each and every day so seriously, and to shave after getting out of the shower.

We are in a library now. We have secured a quiet room in the back of the east end, and she is quietly studying and I am writing this. We are listening to jazz and it is raining. Perhaps somewhere someone who is very old right this very minute is wishing they had secured such a room in a library on a weekday and had taken the time to listen to Keith Jarrett. And perhaps they are in some place like Florida because—-let’s face it—-all old people eventually go to Florida, and they are sitting there wishing it was raining in Florida, because I hear it rarely does this time of year.

The Demolition Diaries: Week 1

I arrive now at Saturday after my first full week as a construction worker, and I’m fairly certain that I am developing some kind of tendonitis in my right hand from swinging a hammer 8 hours a day. I had a dream last night that I couldn’t find my gas mask in my tool bag, and I counted over 20 scratches from nails on the inside of my left arm.

I overheard a conversation last week about BB-guns and one of the workers informed everyone that he has “a nice CO2 one; I bet that shit’ll break your skin!” At the time, he was wearing a shirt that said “Wild Willy’s Heavy Petting Zoo,” which backed up his opinion quite effectively, I thought.

I had my first experience pouring concrete this last week. It was hard (get it? HA!). I accidentally dumped a nice and chunky batch on the front lawn of the home at which we were working. Luckily, the owners weren’t home and the Concrete Dude looked like he had seen this before and calmly sprayed it all into the street with his heavy-duty-don’t-fuck-with-me hose.

Needless to say, I am quite enthralled with my new work environment, and relish my opportunities to learn as much as possible about carpentry, power tools, home-building, and the various creative and colorful uses of profanity. I’m developing muscles that haven't been developed in a while, as my runner/backpacker’s build is losing its tyrannosaurus-rex-upper-body-like appearance and rounding itself out a bit.

I even ate a cream-filled chocolate donut that had a thin layer of dust on top.

I come home tired everyday. I am the dirtiest I’ve ever been in my life, and my boogers are the deepest shade of black possible. I installed insulation one day last week, and am confident I still have roughly one million microscopic shards of fiberglass imbedded into my forearms. I used a sander and a metal-cutting saw. I learned that copper sells for five dollars per pound, and I was tricked into walking right into the fart-cloud of one of the stinkiest workers.

Everyday I am drinking coffee until it comes out of my ears and believe that next week I will try to take my first ever cigarette break.

I witnessed a rather lengthy conversation between two electricians about the life and career of Peter Frampton. I was even able to add a few facts to the dialogue, helping them recall that his keyboardist on the “Frampton Comes Alive” album was none other than Bob Mayo. I immediately wondered how I was able to drudge up that information. I think this job is giving me subconscious access to pieces of information and skills I was never aware I possessed. Perhaps I’ll even develop an extemporaneous opinion about sheet-rock or, even better, the pros and cons of using 3/4-inch plywood for floorboards!

I considered signing up for an “Install Your Own Toilet” workshop at Home Depot. Not that I need this skill or anything—I’d just do it for shits and giggles (HA?).

All week I was reading the seventh and final Harry Potter book, The Deathly Hallows. Anyone who has read Harry Potter knows the joy of being able to talk about the storyline, what this or that character is up to, and hypothesize about what will become of Harry and his buddies. I very nearly asked a co-worker’s opinion about whether or not he thought Dumbledore was really dead, and where he thinks the Horcruxes are hidden. You can imagine, though, my feelings of loneliness when I realized that this was, perhaps, not the guy to ask, as the shirt he was wearing that day read:

“Your girlfriend f***s like a CHAMP!”

Whoa! I just looked my watch and it’s getting close to Beer-Thirty. Until next week…

The Demolition Diaries

I smash things, and break them. I haul them and throw them. Sometimes I drag them, and other times I just huck them. Just freakin’ huck them. I cough and bleed. I say bad words and take water breaks.

I demolish shit.

Knowing that I would have a month break here in Spokane before disappearing back into the woods again for my primary job of teaching students how not to die or get seriously injured in the wild, I decided it might be a smart idea to try and save some money. I contacted my cousin Ryan who is remodeling his house to see if he could put me in touch with a contractor who could set me up with some kind of labor. He put me in touch with Jared, who ended up hiring me to break things, and then chuck them in a big dumpster. I was hired to do demolition. This means I was hired to demolish shit.

When I talked to Jared on the phone to get the details of where I ought to report to work the following morning, he told me to bring my demolition tools. Demolition tools? Like guns or bazookas, or bombs? I thought of all the things I would need to demolish something, and started brainstorming ways I could get my hands on some C4, or even a tank. But all I really ended up needing was a hammer. Oh, and I found a crowbar, too. I showed up bright and early at the site the next morning with my cute little pair of work gloves and tool bag (which is actually my Dad’s).

If I meet the folks who owned the house we are “remodeling,” I will tell them to never ever go back to their house. There is no good that can come of it. We have taken a quaint little abode that housed memories, feelings of comfort, the coziness of safety…and we have made it the exact opposite. There is more dust and trash than I’ve ever seen in my life. Nails protrude from the floor, the ceiling, the frames—everywhere—and it is like they are always jumping out at you and trying to scratch you, tear your shirt, kill your face. In my tool bag (which my Dad packed for me the night before just like a grade school lunch), I noticed he put in a purple respirator or, to use the vernacular, a gas mask. I laughed at the notion of wearing a gas mask on a remodel job, the chiding I would get from my coworkers, being called a “pussy” on the first day. No sir, not me—that’s going in the bottom of the bag.

By 9 a.m. I was holding onto it for dear life and received numerous compliments about my purple respirator.


“My respi-what?”
“Your respirator.”
“Wha—oh, you mean my gas mask!”
“Uh, yeah.”

My coworkers are all men, and they all wear Carthart pants. One of them showed up with a shirt the first day that said, “Fuck you, you fucking fuck.” Mornings mean pulling into the site with coffee cups from 7-ll, and lunches mean returning with some form of fast food paraphernalia. I try to hide my pita bread and hummus everyday, and avoid asking if this or that is USDA organic or locally grown.

When it’s time to go home at the end of the day, without fail, one the men always exclaims, “It’s BEER THIRTY!”

These mean refer to everything—and I do mean everything— as “shit.” Trash, trucks, tools, people, days of the week, loved ones…they are all substituted with the word shit at some point in the day. I’m practicing myself and today had a pretty good zinger:

A guy said, “Shit, we sure are moving fast, aren’t we!?”

I replied by saying… “Shit!”

Luckily, I own a truck and Carthart pants, but I think they’re on to me. I nearly blew my cover when I almost asked if we could change the radio from the classic rock station to NPR. That was a close one.

In all honesty, I find this kind of work very romantic. I can tell a lot of these men have been doing this for a long time, long enough to form very well-informed and articulated opinions—they all have an enviable knowledge of practical geometry, physics, angles, weight-bearing structures, volumes, pressures, electricity, and WORK. I opine that 6 months of hard work in any of these men’s lives equals that of my whole life. This fact does not shame me (though maybe it should?), but rather it heightens my respect for people in this line of work. It’s unlike any job I’ve ever had—no customers, no students. It’s just me and the blood. Just me and the pain and dust. It’s just me and the nails, hammers, shovels, drills, crowbars, t-bars, dump trucks, porta-potties and trash cans.


It’s just me, the guys, demolishing shit.

Marathon Months

Last September, after returning to the U.S. from a few years spent living and working in Japan, I decided to hunker down in Spokane, WA, for the winter. I found a couple of great roommates, whom I later found were also the couple that raised me and often referred to themselves as my “parents.” I graced their home with my presence once again, and even offered not to pay any rent. I graciously donated my appetite to my Mother’s ridiculously awesome cooking, and agreed at my Father’s request to use his truck in the interest of assuring that it did not remain idle throughout Spokane’s fickle weather.

Regardless of the good deeds I was doing for my roommates by watching the house during the day (cup of coffee and book in hand), I soon discovered a sensation that was not unlike anxiety mixed with boredom. I began to feel strange effects, even shocks, which others attributed to my jump from living in one culture to another. I felt weird. I was no longer a high school student, nor was I a college guy home for vacation. It became clear that, in addition to a job, I needed something—an activity—that would ground me in what felt like a period of sheer groundlessness.

In those tumultuous fall days—the ones where joblessness, being in an a cross-continental relationship, and feeling like a fish out of water were the prevalent forces contributing toward my being, what my roommates called, a “grumpy dumpling”—I had one activity that never ceased to bring me out of my glum-ridden funk: running. Running has always done that for me. In situations where I can’t seem to generate an ounce of effort, I go on a run and come back feeling like I’ve actually done something worthwhile, like I’m on a path to somewhere, like I’m the personification of proactivity. So, I deduced, what better goal to set, what greater sight to zone in on during this transition period than training for a marathon.

The story goes that the marathon was born when a Greek soldier ran from the town of Marathon to Athens (without stopping) to announce they had defeated the Persians in battle. He collapsed from exhaustion, and died after delivering his message. How the marathon evolved over the many years into what it is today is beyond my knowledge, but having done one prior to this last one, I knew that training for and finishing a marathon is an undoubtedly transforming, rewarding, and painful experience. I saw the marathon as a way to rub out a little bit of emotional pain with A LOT of physical pain.

During my days without a job, it was easy to hit my goal miles. I would wake up, eat a good breakfast, go on my run and then spend the day recovering, i.e. reading or watching movies. But this relatively short period ended after I scored a couple jobs, and I began to have to fit my runs into weeks of sometimes 50 or 60 hours of work. The weather also turned for the worse, too, and my snow-less running days became trudges and fords through white drifts and slush ponds. Some days I just couldn’t do it, be it being tired from work or simply not having the time, or some other form of empty justification.

Some days were euphoric, others hopeless. Some days would be an early 14-mile run followed by an 8-hour workday, others would be the icing on the cake of a day-off. Some days, I would start my runs so fucking angry at some narcissistic bullshit, and then come back an hour later feeling like I was at the balancing point of mind, in total equilibrium. A situation or dilemma would often resolve itself during a run. Sometimes I couldn’t find a rhythm for the life of me, and others I swear I could have run a distance no shorter than Forever, I felt so good.

The race itself was a combination of all those feelings, but they were wrapped up so tightly and economically that they became a source of energy, not objects for reflection. I'm sure there were times when I felt anger, pain, happiness, and euphoria during my first marathon, but this second one seemed so much more emotionally cathartic but, by comparison to my first, strikingly unsentimental. I felt like I was running out 5 months of psychic lactic acid, liquid frustration that would have paralyzed me had I not had this goal of running 26.2 miles at a pace that ended up clocking me in at the finish line at 3 hours and 17 minutes. I didn’t really care too much about the time, although I knew before that I would do well when I left the starting line.

During these first few weeks in the wake of my marathon, I am feeling that day-after-Christmas cloud, that post-main-event funk that can be dangerous if its not seen for what it is: transitional, temporary, and normal. So, what I did today was I threw on my running shoes, figured I’d given my body enough time to allow for just a little run, c’mon just a little run, so that I can taste that feeling of accomplishment and no-self that comes with a good run at dusk.

Cute

There are moments in certain situations where we find ourselves so mentally removed to the point that we are able to observe all happenings with a sense of—many people will not like this next word—irony that renders the situation surreal and results in humorous and even ridiculous culminations. Being a waiter is difficult because I find it so hard to keep a straight face, let alone not be unequivocally and sincerely cheesy and serious in my interactions with my guests.

The moments of my being totally conscious of what I am doing yet oddly detached (because how attached can you really be at a restaurant?) make the following observations possible:

I am not a good waiter because I fail to grasp a seemingly simple yet important equation: guest plus receiving what he/she wants on time equals satisfaction.

I make what I think are authentically funny one-liners and lame jokes that would make me puke if I were not a server, i.e. a guest.

I enthusiastically use the word “absolutely” like it's the one word that will save humankind from its possible demise. If I were not me, I would wonder if I was simply being sarcastic, or just overly excited to get someone that little ramekin of ketchup I so rudely asked for.

On that last note, I must make clear that for some odd reason I cannot be ironic or sarcastic with my guests at my restaurant, and it’s not because I’m afraid that I’ll get canned. I simply cannot be either because the situation is, in itself, ironic—I must offer my personality to the guest even though, in most cases, he/she could give approximately two craps about who I am and what my personal history is and vice versa. It boggles my mind to great ends, so I end up being genuinely accommodating and friendly, and wanting to be.

I want very much to have some insightful, ironic, cynical, and clever comment about what happens when customers argue over who will pay the bill (regardless of that well-known but unspoken rule that whoever grabs the check first will undoubtedly pay) and the societal implications in the act itself. But, I have no such comments because I find—to my chagrin—the situation oddly sentimental. I find it…(grimace)…cute.

Blazing A Trail

I find the whole idea of New Year’s resolutions sadly glib. It implies that we need an important event to set goals, to turn over new leaves, to find the inner muses in our lives. In reality, the day changed into another like it has done since the beginning of Time (or at least since the recognition of the calendar), yet we ascribe a cathartic significance to this passing of the annual torch. Every place we fell short, every pound we gained, every indulgence we failed to fight off can be casually blamed on the Previous Year and assuaged by the beginning of the New Year and its Resolutions.

That said, after hearing friends formulate their own plans—some which will come to fruition, others already broken and forgotten—I couldn’t help but think about what I might do to address some of my shortcomings in the hopes that 2007 will prove to be the year that my “reservoir of maxims” get emptied into a very real, genuine, and measurable resolution. William James, who could very well be the anti-New Year resolutionist, said, “No matter how good one’s sentiments may be, if one has not taken advantage of every concrete opportunity to act, one’s character may remain unaffected for the better.” In other words, choosing the correct side on that eternal battle between What Is Said and What Is Done decides whether one is successful in their resolve, whatever it may be.

For better or worse, I am extremely analytical and tend to over-think many situations in which I find myself. My current jobs in retail and restaurant illustrate such a tendency. I find that I have an incorrigible enthusiasm for both of my jobs, an intellectual desire to learn that I am able to afford simply due to fact that I have not been tainted with the monotony of the day-in-day-outness that comes from doing these jobs for years. No, I’m fresh, eager to learn, and, above all, still noticeably incompetent.

Example: as I nervously and not-so-gracefully fiddled with the aluminum sleeve dressing the top of a rather expensive bottle of wine in the fine dining establishment (which is the same fine dining establishment that employs me to open said bottle of wine and others like it in both an eloquently and sophisticatedly fashion), a quote by F. Scott Fitzgerald rattled my psyche:

“Let me make a general observation—the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.”

I seldom have trouble concentrating on something, especially if it has to do directly with me. However, the rules change when someone or something else (i.e. a bottle of expensive wine) is introduced into the picture. Balancing the opening of the bottle with the preoccupation of how well I am opening the bottle plays havoc with my own “ability to function.” I find those two opposing ideas—me and opening the bottle—are not getting worked out very well in my mind, and the possibility of being a fancy-pants bottle opener goes to All Hell.

While I am confident of my skills in many endeavors, it has been made painfully clear to me where my blind spots are in the restaurant biz. Was it Aristotle who said that a man’s wisdom is measured by what he realizes he doesn't know? If it was in fact Aristotle who said that then I have a message to relate to him: Where the hell were you when I broke that cork off in that $50 bottle of Pinot Noir or when I completely blanked table 2’s order and left them sitting there for a half hour until I finally remembered to send it in?

My resolve to be a better waiter might sound strange to someone who has never worked in a restaurant, but I can honestly testify that being competent in this line of work is truly an achievement, if not an illustration of unbending intelligence. The demand for active listening skills, multi-tasking abilities, confidence through repetition, and attention to detail are not only areas where it would behoove me to strengthen at work, but are among my personal blind-spots of which I hope to catch more than just a glimpse in hopes of becoming a better person.

However, I arrive now at the The Ironic Part: I have to get Myself out of the way so that I might be able to actively address these blind-spots. I recognize that becoming a good waiter involves making “automatic, as early as possible, as many useful actions as [I] can.” My over-intellectualization and abstract ponderings will do little for me in a busy restaurant where I have eight or nine tables to which I must attend at once, or when I am opening an expensive bottle of wine for a group of sophisticants.

Pablo Picasso, God bless him, backs me up: “ I do not care who it is that has or does influence me as long as it is not myself.”

In this light, I often observe there is a lack of thinking or deliberation among the more experienced waiting staff which is the result of having done this over and over again over a long period of time. There is an absence of ego (at least in the philosophical sense of the word), a void where self-consciousness was replaced with automatism. They need not ruminate or rack their brains for the how-to’s and the what-nexts because this information has already been hardwired into their psyches, handed over to the Unconscious. William James (again) should have spent more hours in restaurants:

“ For, of course, a simple habit, like every other nervous event—the habit of snuffling, for example, or of putting one’s hands in one’s pockets, or of biting one’s nails—is, mechanically, nothing but a reflex discharge; and its anatomical substratum must be a path in a system.”

I like this--being brilliant at anything (even snuffling, whatever that is) involves “ a path in a system.” Blazing a mental trail, a psychic track—these are concepts that give me hope in becoming a better waiter. While I am not afforded this level of unconsciousness because of my greenness as a waiter, there remains a possibility that I will achieve a stylistic flow in my work at the restaurant, that all it takes is more heavy digging, carving, and diligent shaping of neurological paths.

And—finally, I apologize—I arrive at my point in regard the making of New Year’s resolutions: The act itself of deciding to do something better, to resolve to make 2007 the year that we such-and-such or give-up-whatever, is much more simple (and complicated) than we make it out to be. It starts with a space (or lack thereof) in the brain, and the possibility of creating a healthy footpath that leads to the head of another trail: habitual, uncanny, and unconscious competence.