Who Decides Who's Crazy?

2 December 2006

Arsenal 3 – 0 Tottenham
Adebayor 20’
Gilberto 42’ (pk)
Gilberto 72’ (pk)

Penalty kicks never feel that great for me, and I couldn’t tell you why. Don’t get me wrong, I like getting the points, but I’d prefer a thrilling kick from 16 yards out by Rosicky or something. Penalty kicks are like, “All right, you’re a jerk, we get it, and because of that, we get a shot with about a 95% chance of scoring a goal.” Of course, if we were tied or something, and 80 minutes were gone, I think I’d be singing a different tune. My competitive urges are still rather honorable though, I have not yet fully turned into my dad, who doesn’t give two shits if Man-U goes up 4-nil on a penalty kick, he wants points, he wants you humiliated, welcome to the United! There’s probably a fair amount of swear words that would normally be inserted in there, but I’m feeling tame right now. So, my bracket for March Madness is in shambles. In fact, it’s not even in shambles, it doesn’t exist anymore, as if it had been hit by the Boxing Day Tsunami. Poof, vamoose, &c. Texas A&M lost in the sweet sixteen and Kansas lost in the elite eight; I have one final four team left standing, but of course I have them losing to A&M. We could summarize it thusly: I am fucked. Which is sad, because I traditionally do pretty well. It would appear I am back down with the rest of you people, my dynasty of top-5 finishes comes to a close. I actually wasn’t that sad when Kansas lost. Well, okay yeah I was sad, but somehow I knew that I would just love sports all the more. In fact, I may have found a major school to root for during the normal season. Sure, I can root for Mason, but they’re usually nowhere to be found on ESPN. I fell in love with the way Kansas was playing basketball in this tournament: completely sloppy, but completely athletic. They were a hoot to watch. They’d grab a rebound, chuck it down-court, and a whole three seconds after the rebound, toss it up for the alley-oop. I console myself for their loss by remembering that baseball season starts in a week. That can put anybody in a good mood. A couple of nights ago I had one of the worst panic attacks I’ve ever had, since I began getting them. I get a panic attack probably every few months due to my fear of death. Some background: I am not religious. The first time it happened was about six years ago. So, I was lying in bed, and my thoughts drifted towards death; as I envisioned the nothingness that I believe occurs upon death, the whole thing overwhelmed me: the sense of nothing, the lack of being, the end of consciousness, it hit me like a gunshot. I leapt out of bed (about as literally as that phrase can get) and ran into the living room, where I immediately collapsed. The feeling I experience at the height of these panic attacks can only be described as akin to staring death in the face, or at least what I figure death to be. Every few months, this terror seizes me. At first it only happened while I was trying to get to sleep; but in the last couple of years, it has started to come on in rather awkward settings. A memorable one was when I was taking the bus up to visit my dad, last summer I believe. We were in a tunnel, fairly close to New York City, and the fear grabbed me. I told myself over and over again to fucking stop thinking about it, stop thinking about it, think about your Dad, and the music you’re listening to, put it out of your mind. It worked: I calmed down. I’ve gotten better at controlling them, I can usually shut the anxiety down before I have to bolt and run somewhere, as happened the first time. In fact, about a week before this weekend’s 8.5 on the Richter scale, I was in the car with my roommate, and felt the panic coming, but quickly shunted it out by focusing on the automatic windows. I’ve grown fairly successful at keeping the crazy out. Sunday night, then, was like a relapse. For whatever reason, I couldn’t pre-empt the fear, and it smacked me in the face. I ended up huddled in front of my door, shivering, totally naked (awesome?). I had shouted my usual panic attack slogan, which is: “Oh my fucking God.” Somehow, my roommate hadn’t heard me, or decided to pretend he hadn’t heard me. Maybe he thought I was watching some really loud porn. I sat there for a few minutes, gathering myself and fighting embarrassment. Eventually, I managed to get up and put my boxers back on, and lay down in bed. Every time these happen to me, I feel broken and exhausted; it’s good they often happen during the night, because I can run to the respite of sleep. I’ve described my panic attacks to a few people over the years, and they sort of shrug it off: “Oh, everyone’s afraid of death.” I don’t think most people are afraid like I’m afraid. If you understood the gaping maw of non-existence that I see as death, maybe you’d begin to get a hint of the sheer terror that crashes onto me. The other side of this, though, is that I think this is because I enjoy life so much. If you ever watch me take a train or bus ride, I stare out the window the whole time, enjoying the entire experience of watching the world. I don’t care if the train goes through the seediest parts of Baltimore and Philadelphia, and I don’t care if I’ve seen them twenty times: I’ll look outside like it’s my very first time visiting Rome. Life is amazing, when you think about it: this whole world just clicking together, everything just being. Part of my continuous fascination with all of it is precisely because I’m not religious; my beliefs frame life as a natural creation, the Big Bang, &c. I treasure all of my experiences, even the most mundane. I love seeing things, and feeling them. I love hearing things too: my rich love of music is another example of my infatuation with the senses. That’s really what it is, isn’t it? I love seeing, I love hearing, feeling, tasting, smelling: my interaction with the world, on every level, is vibrant and full. Sometimes it makes me feel like I’m a little kid lost in this huge world. I just want to walk around and experience things; all of my other desires are centered around this one key feature. Maybe that’s a simple goal in life, but I think it’s a great goal. I get shivers, you know, when I listen to songs: not just a few songs, but a huge amount of them. Radiohead’s “The National Anthem” is a marked example of this: the bass line in it cuts a swath through my soul. Just thinking about it makes me twist my foot against my desk in pleasure. This song possesses me: whenever I listen to it I want to shake, to grab things and throw them around, to gyrate, to scream. It’s releasing, energizing, the opposite of the panic attacks: whereas those drain me, songs like this fill me up, they charge me. I’m listening to it right now and I want to take hold of my computer monitor and pull it out if its sockets, swing it like a lasso and catch me some bulls. My love of sensation has ingrained in me a huge delight with life, and because of that, death scares me more than anything I could possibly imagine. I want to keep eating food, I want someone to touch the upside of my arm delicately with their fingernails, I want listen to Radiohead, the Ramones, the Velvet Underground, Beirut, The Smashing Pumpkins, and Joy Division and just groove, I want to watch trees roll by, but more than anything I want to touch soft grains of sand, let them slip through my fingers, as I lie right there on the beach, my face inches away from the beach as the sand rains from my hand back to the earth. I want to smell fresh air after a night rain, and watch snow waft down from the clouds. I want to taste hot sauce, and watch sad movies. Oh, the perfect song just came on. No, not “The National Anthem.” Feist. “I Feel it All.” I really do. I feel it all, and it’s all amazing.

And Now, a Digression

I don’t really buy into the Thinking Blogger award thing; that is, I understand it was a genuine meme at one point (how many of you actually know what meme means?) but like most things on the internet, it has proliferated into meaninglessness. Of course, perhaps this is the standard conclusion of a meme. The purpose of a meme is to “propagate from one mind to another,” so perhaps its reproduction across the blogosphere is natural. It’s kind of like AIDS. I appreciate that Michelle nominated me, which is to say she likes my blog, but I don’t think that this award has any real value at this point. No; I take that back. It has value, but an inherently local one. There is a pyramid of how much my blog means on the internet. Michelle is probably at the top, as she’s the only one who consistently reads this, and below her are her readers who sometimes venture here. So the value is relative to that pyramid. Our hegemony on the internet is limited, thus the thrust of this award is limited. But still; she gave it to me, an interesting maneuver in this post-relationship era, and I appreciate the gesture. Despite my fear of perpetuating this meme, I will link to five blogs that I enjoy regularly. In what may come as dead-horse-beating, I would like to suggest that by embracing this meme, I am indeed following my belief in social constructionism. The award has its own local (e.g., social) value, regardless of what other, unknown bloggers might say, and by participating I am acknowledging that I endorse this local value, I approve, let me into your little club. Oh right; dem “rules.” 1. If, and ONLY IF, you get tagged, write a post with links to 5 blogs that make you think, 2. Link to this post so that people can easily find the exact origin of the meme, 3. Optional: Proudly display the 'Thinking Blogger Award' with a link to the post that you wrote (here is an alternative silver version if gold doesn't fit your blog). I like silver. So, without further ado, here’s my list (in no particular order): - A Cultured Left Foot (yes, it's a football blog, but it's good dammit) - Hitherby Dragons (a meta-fiction site, like Alcova) - Confessions of an Aca/Fan (this guy is way smart) - The Ken Pom Blog (okay it's another sports blog, but he's a fun read, although very technical) - Journey to Self-Improvement (Michelle already got nominated, but she really is the only other blog I read. So too bad, Shell, you're getting this anyhow.)

I’ve Been Learning to Drive My Whole Life

29 November 2006

Fulham 2 – 1 Arsenal
McBride 5’ (A)
Radzinski 19’ (A)
Van Persie 36’ (F)

The fact that an American scored the opening goal does not escape me. McBride couldn’t pull it through in the World Cup to get us out of the group stage, but when it’s Arsenal, oh well then, consider that can of whoop-ass officially opened, and not like a can of soda, no, he ground his car key into the side of it, because he was shotgunning it at a house party. Asshole. But what can you do? Such is the irony of professional soccer. Rather, it exposes the obvious loyalty issues that arise in the juxtaposition of club soccer versus international soccer. Let me break this down for you; I feel like a lot of Americans don’t bother to understand this distinction (and why should they, when they don’t bother to understand soccer in general?). Here’s what we got: most (good) players are on two teams. They have their club team, like Arsenal, or Fulham, or Manchester United. That’s comparable to, say, the Yankees, or the Baltimore Orioles, or the Texas Rangers. Then they have their national team. Like, say England or France, which is obviously comparable to America or Japan. The baseball analogy working so far? Good. The only thing is, baseball isn’t nearly as multi-national as soccer. So when you have Japan versus America, there might be like, one player it’s awkward for. But in international soccer, there are usually at least three or something players on opposing teams that you at least like, if not actively support because they’re on your club team. It’s such an awkward feeling. For example: I fell in love with Kaka during the 2006 World Cup. Then I found out he plays for AC Milan, and suddenly I felt kind of dirty. When it comes to Italian soccer, I am foolishly a Parma supporter; so I found myself torn. Here’s this vibrant, exciting player, who reminds me a lot of Cesc Fabregas, but he plays for a team who routinely beats Parma. I still haven’t resolved this issue. I kind of pushed it to the back of my head, I put my man-love for Kaka to the side. So, you ask, why do I root for Parma? Let’s check one thing; ah yes, Parma is still in the relegation zone. They’ve won four games this season, out of 28. They are rather pathetic. My dad consistently makes fun of their shabby record, and the fact that I root for some losers. His mockery seals my faith in them, however. Like a rebellious child, I shout, “I don’t care, they’re Parma, and they’re bad ass!” Which of course is a flagrant lie. They have 10 games to get 3 points higher than another team, which is a considerable task for them. But somewhere along the way, I fell in love with them, much like I did with Arsenal. I picked them, and I’ve really had no reason to look back. Why’d I pick them, you ask now. Well here’s the thing. I realized that I needed an Italian team to follow, and I had no loyalty to any of them (the Kaka-love had not yet taken hold). I quickly picked Parma for the simple reason that Stendhal had written a book titled The Charterhouse of Parma. I read this book around the same time I read Anna Karenina, and both affected my writing on a deep scale. I like a lot of books, and the styles in which they are written (Coup de Grace by Marguerite Yourcenar and The Stranger by Albert Camus spring readily to mind), but those two books showed me that things I had been doing were not wrong, and in fact could be very, very right. Tolstoy demonstrated that large casts in a novel were entirely plausible, and could still be emotionally affecting. I had been wrestling for some time with my desire to write about a lot of characters, but felt that maybe I was losing something in the process (for example, The Age of Lost Innocence, that novel I never work on, has somewhere in the neighborhood of 25 primary and secondary characters). Of course, by having excessive characters, the novel would be quite long, but it can still work. But Stendhal, they way he wrote, was like discovering Jesus or something. He eschewed the standard approach to detail, instead opting for dialogue, action, and emotional exploration. He also did it with a rather large cast, at least by Romantic standards (four main characters, with a number of supporting roles). You see, early in the nineteenth century, there was a large focus on the individual, on personal exploration, within nature and society. Tolstoy and Stendhal presented some of the first Realist views however. They removed solitary exploration and expanded the scope to study how internal emotions affected outward actions, and how those actions impacted others both within and without. There is an obvious chain of events that they review critically: they thus merged Romanticism with social realities to achieve early Realism. I write quite a bit like Stendhal: I always found physical details to be boring. I was instead interested in what people were doing and thinking, and the interplay between those two facets. Reading Stendhal was like reading what I wished I could write, and as a result, it was a watershed. I read an article in the New Yorker recently about how Picasso was thoroughly inspired by Rembrandt, how he riffed extensively on paintings by Rembrandt and updated them with his Modernist sensibility. I can see a similar thing happening in my relationship with Stendhal (and to a lesser extent, Tolstoy). I have taken Stendhal’s love of the real and laid a post-modernist map down on top. That is to say, I am positioning myself as the next branch in the tree of novel-writing: from Stendhal to Tolstoy to Mann to Kafka to Böll to Kundera to … me? I fucking hope so. Of course, if wishes were horses… I’d be eating steak. At some point, I need to stop writing here, and start writing The Age of Lost Innocence. That project has been treading water for about a year now. Maybe it’s no longer relevant to where I am in life? Something about it fails to grab a-hold of me. Alcova still appears mildly interesting, but since my sleeping pattern has gone to hell in a hand-basket I haven’t had the energy to really work on that, either. The only project I can muster any kind of energy towards is this, but I frequently worry about the quality I present here. This project is approaching 30,000 words, but what have I really said? What have I really done? I feel like I’m building sandcastles during a hurricane. I think part of it is due to the scattered nature of my desires, presently. I’ve grown confidence in my personal identity, so maybe the quarter-life crisis is actually coming to a close, but my wants, they are still in shambles. I am, of course, referring specifically to girls. I want a girlfriend, but none really attract me. I wish I was still with Michelle, but we all know where that stands. I can’t sleep for more than four hours at a time at night, and I’m drinking more coffee as a result. I was driving to work today, and suddenly the sensation that work was eroding my spirit leapt up. What a tacky thing to think, I immediately reacted, but that did not change how true the emotion was. My head felt stuffed, my body felt automatic; I was driving through lights to get to work, so I can drive through more lights to get home, so I can watch basketball and go to sleep. I feel wiped out, but I am also beginning to sense that I don’t care. That worries me to no end. The more wiped out I am, the less I can write. The only reason this project is as alive as it is, is because my ego drives me to throw some shit on the wall that three people will see. I need to talk about myself, I need to explore how utterly useless my life is but how utterly happy I should be with it, how ungrateful I am that I’m leading so immediately successful a life. It all comes down to this sleeplessness that I am experiencing, I think. The more tired I am, the more willing I am to throw open my arms and welcome in the depressing thoughts. I am letting myself beat myself, and my writing is the collateral damage. The one thing that makes me happier than music (and yes, both precede sex; I am well aware of how not sexualized I am) is slowly bleeding to death. One of three things will happen: I will find the energy somewhere to write, despite this fatigue; I will get better sleep and my writing will return to me like a lover lost ten years ago in Italy; or my writing will die, and so to with it will go my hopes, my dreams, the only reasons I don’t despair entirely. I can't let that happen. I can't let that happen. I won't let that happen.

Livin’ in Division in a Shiftin’ Scene

25 November 2006

Bolton 3 – 1 Arsenal
Diagne-Faye 10' (A)
Anelka 45' (A)
Gilberto 45' (F)
Anelka 76' (A)

Classic 06/07 Arsenal form. You might even call it vintage Arsenal. Two weeks after crushing Liverpool and four days after crushing Hamburg, Arsenal returns to lose pathetically to Bolton. Bolton isn't bad, they're actually fairly decent this season, but you'd figure after Liverpool and Hamburg,…. You'd figure. I guess that's the problem: Arsenal figures too, but they can't figure, they have to perform. And when it doesn't matter, they don't perform. Only problem is, eventually that adds up to fourth place. Thanks guys. Maybe, if you keep underachieving, we'll stop demanding so much of you, and you can "shock" us in 07/08 by, I don't know, winning something. Mind you, that's a suggestion, not a demand: heavens forbid you do something your fans want. Maybe you should just keep passing the ball, right, that has to count for something? Sure, goals win games, but passing looks cute, and really it's quite beautiful, and this is the beautiful game, let's make it beautiful. Winning ugly is for losers, and well, we certainly aren't losers. We're just not winners, either. When you think about it, this is, for the most part, the life that I am sitting down to lead. My teams can’t win everything every year, they’ll be lucky to win once every ten years. So, nine out of ten years, I’ll be unsatisfied with the results that my team gives me. Why bother at all? I can hope, one year, the Yankees, Arsenal, the Redskins, the Wizards, George Mason, and Andy Murray, will all win in their respective sports. This has about a ten-year window, because Murray’s career is limited within his sport (which is tennis). So let’s say, instead of Murray, my given tennis player of choice. If all of those win in one year, I should probably just kill myself, because it’ll never happen again. But, it’ll never happen in the first place, and I wouldn’t kill myself if it did. I’m not sure what I hope to achieve, and in all honesty, I may not be hoping to achieve anything. Sports are, almost by definition, an exercise in the existential. Existentialism denies any meaning behind the universe; rather than viewing the universe as a place pulsating with the energy of life, existentialists see it more as a system, an objective network through which we, as mortal beings, establish various ideologies to project order onto something which inherently ignores order. Rather, it is not that there is no order, but there is no knowable order; much like there is no knowable reality. For example, God’s existence is not provable or deniable. The only acceptable route is to either accept or reject his existence on the basis of faith. I, rather than concern myself in the pursuit of something which I believe is unknowable, pursue that which I believe is knowable: human society, the reality that we create with each other. The greatest truth is that which we do. Thinking alone does not create, but agreeing with each other does. Our government is real because we choose it to be: should we so desire, as a people we could determine that our government should not exist, and it would be gone. The rules of sport have been agreed upon and thus sport exists: we make it so. Defining reality by dialogue, however, is a slippery slope, because dialogue is not static. Meaning amongst words shifts over time, like erosion on a beach. But, as Sartre pointed out, our essence is determined by our existence. The scope and entirety of our lives form in relation to our experience of the world. Similarly, words are shaped by our use of them. We grow up and learn the definitions of words, but as we learn them, we attach them to observation, and slowly use them to mean what we say, rather than say what we mean. The relationship within social dialogue is synergistic. Likewise, sports mutate as time passes. The focus within a sport transfers from one angle to another. A lot of changes happened to baseball in the 1920s, and home runs became more commonplace. Babe Ruth brought the home run to prominence, and ESPN created an appetite within the viewer for non-stop home run footage. One hundred years ago, home runs were crazy and rare; today they are cool, but more importantly they are a yardstick of a player’s ability and dominance. My love of sports comes from this demonstration of existentialism and social constructionism. We have built these sports, no one else. They do not come from some mysterious past, some unknowable secret. They were invented by people, and they represent our ability to come together and make something bigger than ourselves. Of course, to this end, they are also ours to destroy, as is being done by steroids. I’m one of the (many) people that absolutely detest steroids; they remove any element of humanism from the game. By increasing the standards for athletes, they belittle the ‘natural’ contributions that came before them, as if somehow, 61 home runs is not good enough. An interesting aside is that no one, at the end of 1961 season, when Roger Maris got his 61st home run, no one cared: he was shunned because he hadn’t done it in 154 games like Ruth had, he had done it in 162 games. Is this analogous to steroids? Certainly not. If Barry Bonds had hit 73 home runs unenhanced in 190 games, I’d be impressed. Baseball is a sport that wears you down; with the second longest season in sports (only overshadowed by soccer seasons, which go on generally for a crazy nine months), maintaining consistency is what is really impressive about the sport. Getting on the field, day in and day out, going two-for-five, stealing a base, making that mental effort to compete almost every day: that’s what makes baseball real. Us normal people, we who aren’t millionaire athletes, we don’t get to take six-month off seasons from work. Sure, they weight-lift and train in the off-season, but we know that’s wholly different from working 8 hours a day. It’s different mentally. Work wears me down. Conjuring up enough thoughts to keep writing here seems arduous at times. Eventually though, at the end of the day, it still feels important to me. Perhaps it’s comparable to the value of sports: this project that I am erecting, that seems to change direction every week, is another example of existentialism, of social constructionism, the two defining factors of my philosophy. This project has become my discussion with society: I am questioning it, conversing with it, exploring it, trying to understand where I fit in. This work provides an outlet for both my external thoughts on the world, and my internal thoughts on myself. My name is Sam, and I’m having a quarter-life crisis. I’ve been having one for some time now. I bring this to you, gentle reader, so that you may understand our generation, so that you will sympathize with our struggles. We were shorn of our innocence early in life, such that our sensibilities have become jaded, such that many of us stopped caring. I don’t want to make things right with the world because I can’t; but I can make things right with myself.

She Started Dancin' to that Fine, Fine Music

21 November 2006

Arsenal 3 – 1 Hamburg SV (Champion’s League)
Van der Vaart 4’ (A)
Van Persie 52’ (F)
Eboue 83’ (F)
Baptista 88’ (F)

The line for this game tells you right away it was exciting. Arsenal goes down four minutes in—that’s some horseshit right there. But we’re tenacious, and early in the second half we get an equalizer. Then we come back to settle that goal differential into something that looks appealing, and we’re well on our way out of the group stage in the Champion’s League. Fantastic! If only we could, you know, have won this eventually. Writing retrospectively on matches like this is a bit like knowing we’re all mortal: sure, the victory seems awesome at the time, but we end up losing everything come February. This is one of the fundamental philosophical lessons that sports teach us, one of the mantras that, while cliché, feel so powerful as a sports season begins to wind down. The end of a season is incredibly depressing: when it’s late October, and baseball has just wrapped up the World Series, life suddenly seems a little bit empty: it is, in fact, like breaking up with someone. There’s a void in your life, left by the thing—or person—that you had grown so used to, so comfortable with. You thought it would be there every day, but one day, it’s gone, like mist on a cool morning. For a while, you simply miss it; God, I wish the Yankees were playing today. It gives every day some kind of verve, an extra spice. It might be a shitty day at work, but the Yanks are taking the field, and “Come onnnnnn Yankees! Spank them D-Rays!” You settle into the three-hour long chess match that is a baseball game. When there aren’t any games on television, well fuck. What do you do now? It’s the same with soccer: all week, I look forward to Arsenal’s match on the weekend. When the season is really bustling, they have a game every three or four days. When the game is over, you have to pick everything up and get back to real life. If you lose, well, there’s always the next game. That’s the cliché, the motto that reverberates through sports. It is spectacularly reassuring. It is one of the prime reasons I love sports to such a crazy degree, the kind of reinforcement that it engenders. Maybe that’s sad, maybe that’s pathetic: but I would argue that it is the same kind of feelings that religion evokes. Only sports, my religion, do it on live television. That is why it can’t be beat; that is why I attend church in the form of the stadium, read gospel in the form of sport history, and give thanks in the form of loyalty to my teams. Today has been a great day. My week started off rough, as I made a couple of embarrassing bungles at work. I won’t bore you with the details, but suffice it to say, I felt very stressed. Last night I got a lot a pretty solid sleep, for the first time in a number of days, probably in about a week, and that was a good omen: all wrongs have been righted, and work is once more flowing smoothly. I feel in control, no longer drowning. Suddenly, I’m confident in my ability to be an editor, a wonderful feeling considering earlier this week I had seriously started to question my ability at the job. Things are good, and they’re about to get better. Tomorrow marks the beginning of “the greatest sports tournament on Earth.” Yes, you guessed—March fucking Madness starts in a little under 20 hours. My bracket for the office pool is still not set: I’ve decided on my Final Four (I think), but beyond that, I’m still queasy. Specifically, I’m worried about Georgetown versus Texas A&M. Georgetown is technically, I know, the better offense. But there’s a stat that has begun to bug me: their tempo. They averaged 59.7 possessions this season, literally one of the lowest in all of Division 1 basketball. Texas A&M meanwhile was somewhere in the middle with 65.7 possessions on average. You’re probably going, “well, that’s just a difference of 6 possessions; big deal!” It is a big deal, when you consider that it means anywhere from 5-9 additional points. Furthermore, if Texas A&M controls the tempo, Georgetown might get sloppy, costing them more points. At 59.7 possessions, they have to be used to nice and slow games; speeding it up will cause confusion. Finally, I like Texas A&M because I think picking them to go to the championship is a bit of a unique call, but not an entirely bad one; uniqueness wins brackets, but stupidity can lose them. Texas A&M is a three-seed, and three-seeds have won the whole thing twice in the last four years. That said, I think Kansas can beat them. So, Kansas and Texas A&M? I’m loathe to write this, because in two weeks time I might look back at it and smash my head against a wall. I might also be hailed as a prophet. Tempo isn’t a huge dividing factor: if you look at a list of the 336 teams in Division 1, the 64 teams that made it in the tournament are scattered up and down it like pepper on a steak. But Georgetown is the third slowest team in the tournament. That bugs me. That rubs me all kinds of wrong. And today’s been a good day, hasn’t it? Is that a sign? Today’s been a good day, so my basketball picks will, by extension, also be good? It’s dicey though! I’m nervous. I’ve spent way too much time researching the bracket this year. I’m just about sick of it. All right, fuck it: let’s do it. Kansas and Texas A&M in the final, and Kansas grinds them into the ground (note, although this isn’t why I’m predicting a Kansas win: Kansas’ tempo is 69.5 possessions on average, one of three teams much more in line with what the winner’s tempo has been for the last few years). If I win my office pool, I make $75. This is important, people! Sure, I could blow $75 in a weekend—but the respect, well, that’ll last as long as this job does. This has been a very analysis intensive entry, and for that I apologize: although I do feel like it helps to get into the mindset of a sports fan. Now you know what I’ve been thinking about for four days straight. When I go to bed, I lie in bed, and I worry about my bracket. When I’m driving to work, I’m pondering: Can UNC really beat Texas? Can UNC last that long? Hansbrough’s got a busted nose! I described it like this, for my mom: filling out a bracket for the Big Dance is like a crossword puzzle. A sports crossword puzzle that’s incredibly fucking difficult. My friend surmised a few hours ago that, with all the brain-power we spend analyzing and thinking about the Tournament, we could get a man to Jupiter in two weeks. He’s probably not far off base, especially if we used all the money that was bet on the Tournament as well (roughly 2.5 billion a year—more than the Super Bowl). The point is, a good day at work and the eve of my favorite sports event have combined to make me a happy camper. I feel refreshed and reinvigorated. Eyes wide open, looking forward to the future. You know why? The very same day that the Tournament climaxes, baseball season officially starts. And there’s nothing better than seeing an old friend walk into the room, sit down, and start up a conversation.

There are Things That Drift Away

18 November 2006

Arsenal 1 – 1 Newcastle United
Dyer 30’ (A)
Henry 70’ (F)

It’s difficult when you realize that your struggle is not the important struggle that is occurring, that you are in fact the supporting character to something else. It’s especially difficult for egotistical writers: we believe that everything that happens around us, happens for us and because of us. Thus, it takes a big leap to understand that our story is not the one of significance in a given situation. When Michelle broke up with me, it hit me particularly hard because suddenly my life was different, it was about the pain I was going through. I wanted her back, and to be kind of honest, for a while I figured we would get back together pretty quickly. Not due to any kind of cockiness, but just because what we had was so good. I have attempted to start discussion with her a couple of times (although, impressively, not when drunk), and she has, with appropriate grace, responded for a short time. I’ve spent a lot of time frustrated because we used to talk at great lengths, the kind of depth that a real connection implies. I knew talking to her again was probably a bad idea, because getting over someone is not assisted by continuing contact. Point of fact, I should probably stop looking at her blog, but I really don’t want to. I watched my friend Zach stay in contact with his ex to an absurd degree (example: long conversations on the phone), and then he’d talk about missing her, and I’d roll my eyes: “Stop fucking talking to her so much, retard.” It also didn’t help that they pretended they were dating one fine weekend last fall. Easier said than done. I crave that contact. She had become such a huge part of my life so fast and I had grown quite used to it; now there is a strip mine in my life where she once was. I crave her contact because I know we had a great rapport, but to a certain extent I just need the intimacy. I’ve never needed it like this before; I’ve spent a large portion of my life lonely, and for large stretches, I’m sure it was for the best that I was lonely. But now, now I need that closeness, that affinity, I need it like a junkie needs heroin. What scares me however, is I don’t think I’m ready for that level of intimacy with someone else right now. That is to say, I’m stuck between a rock and a hard, emotional place. I want the deep relationship, but I probably shouldn’t have it now, and I’m certainly not ready to begin laying the necessary foundation with someone. A problem I’ve had all my life is a complete lack of understanding myself. My relationship with Michelle has both helped to crystallize my views, but also fog them. Some things have come into focus, others have become opaque. While I do believe that society defines who we are, at some point, I have to stop looking for others to figure me out. I have to figure myself out. I need to figure out what I want. It’s so difficult though to look at what one has in life, look at what where one wants to go, and determine what exactly the value is. It’s difficult to look beyond the labels of what I consider myself, to find some kind of real essence, especially because I don’t think I believe in essences like that. Believing in social constructionism has eroded whatever I think is beyond society: society creates everything, dialogue within it establishes all knowledge. I guess I want there to be something more, at the same exact time I don’t think there is anything more. So on a more simplistic level, I have to look for what I want out of a relationship at this point in time. I know I want to be in a relationship, and the question is, with whom. I have a pretty good idea of this, and my needs are broad, but also limited. The more I think about this, the less I feel unsure of everything, but certainly earlier today, I felt very unsure, worried, scared, so on and so forth. Maybe I do have a good idea of where I am, of where I’m going. There are some things up in the air: I’d like to move to New York, I think, in a couple of years. Get a cool editorship at a newspaper or something, or … somewhere. I’d like to have some fiction material completed by then, maybe a few of the sections of Alcova that I’m foreseeing. Shop that stuff around. The whole crisis today came about from what I was talking about earlier, about realizing that at varying points, my life isn’t the critical one. I read Michelle’s blog, and she described how our relationship was slowly derailing her sobriety. She very tactfully attributed it to not being in a place suitable to a healthy relationship, but I feel at least a little responsible, seeing as how I would still get drunk when she wasn’t around. It is probably for the better though, maybe we were drifting apart slowly. I lead my reckless post-college life, and she’s struggling to be craziness free. The point is, she needs the space, and my desires are less important, because I’m in a more secure space in my life (although my insomnia might lead me to believe otherwise). I’m learning to let her go at this point. For her sake. The more I try and talk to her, the harder I make it on both of us, and the more I—potentially—hinder her strides to sobriety. From this moment on, I cut the last chords linking me to her. She needs to be free of me, she needs to get to a place where she can focus on herself entirely. Lingering on what we had is only counter-productive. I can see where I want to go in life, and I can begin to accept that it no longer involves her. It’s time for me to stop seeing everything in my life as when she had been in it; our paths have split, I am one. Our journeys were always our own, but for a little while. Like cool autumn rivers that run together for a time, then part ways, a fork in the waters, at some big, warm oak tree that towers over both of us. The time we spent together was startlingly ephemeral, but magnificently worthwhile: for certain, the time could not have been spent better.

Camera Lucida

12 November 2006

Arsenal 3 - 0 Liverpool
Flamini 41'
Toure 56'
Gallas 80'

Ah, the good old days. When Arsenal would win huge games. Games like this were something, and look at that score-sheet, it's not even our goddamn goal-scorers. Gallas? Toure? They're defenders, for Christssake. Flamini, well, he's a midfielder; the good ones get a handful of goals a season. Wins like this, though, God, they get me going so much. They're empowering. They make you feel like you can do anything; even reading about the match and talking about it a little bit has a bit of that effect. I think my eyes just got wider, I felt a little surge of energy. Come on, let's take on the whole fucking world. Let's take them on and win. I'm hesitant to write a third entry this week: I haven't written this much here since last September. That's generally to keep the entries sparkling, so that they're fresh, interesting, thoughtful, evocative: all the things a good read should be. If you write too much though, I feel like that gets diluted, the emotion is lost somewhere, the bluster sounds hollow after hearing it for so long. If a bully came up to you everyday and said, "I'm gonna beat you up after school!" and then just ran by you laughing when school was over, after a couple weeks of that horseshit you'd wise up and stop being afraid of him. Maybe you'd get cocky enough to challenge him: just like if I keep writing this too often, you will get cocky enough to stop reading it. I feel like every entry is just spinning wheels anyhow, and someday you have to realize that, someday you'll laugh at me and walk away, because there's probably something worth just as much of your time out there. To follow up: our plan to escape the confines of our apartment landed us in a dive. We had a few beers and talked for a couple hours. We watched some sports on the big (and small) televisions. Basically, we did what we usually do. But the atmosphere was refreshing: older dudes, hanging out talking. Post-college kids, our age, hanging out talking. A few couples, talking quietly. Mid-90s rock music; terrible, hilarious, singable. The whole effect was calming. It was nice to be somewhere. We didn't care about being seen, in fact we'd rather not be, but being somewhere, hearing other people talk, it reminds you that this world is alive. Sitting in your apartment night after night is numbing. I hope we don't go to a bar every night, that would probably be a tad pathetic. But we could go to coffeehouses, book stores, and I don't know... what do 20somethings do? It's strange; my desire to write these last few days has exploded. Third entry here in five days. I'm working on Alcova again, for the first time in a week. I'm as tired as I was last week, but somehow I'm bursting with things to say. I want to talk, I want to explore. I have all these fantastic ideas in my head, these amazing stories, with absurd intricacies that only English majors would get, that I want to get down. Why couldn't I write last week? Part of it is my free time. Since Michelle and I broke up, we've sort of mutually ceased talking online. As such, I find myself finishing my work rather quickly, and then I'm stuck with a couple hours to kill every day. So I might as well write, right? But it's something beyond that, because I have that desire to write. It's a perverted desire to communicate. I want to talk to you, dear reader. That desire doesn't rear its head too often, usually I have to coax it out of its cave, dangling some kind of animal carcass (it feeds on flesh) in front of it. When I'm sad though, he comes out just fine, smiling in the bright sunshine, tromping on villages, smacking his lips, for he also feeds on my depression. I don't fault him though, for as he feeds on my depression, he removes it, excising it from my soul, until I am normal again, happy, able to move forward. My desire to communicate feeds on flesh and my sadness. Fortunately it has not eaten me yet, but I expect that day to arrive eventually. When I'm happy, comfortable, at peace, I feel much less like writing. I have less to say, because things seem right to me. My writing is driven by a wish to help the reader's understanding, of themselves and the world, evolve. Most good artist deign to hold up a mirror to the world, in order that the world may see itself truly for what it is (I worry that the world sometimes, narcissistically so, gets lost in its own reflection). I hold this mirror up for the reader, not society. Rather, I hold it up for the reader as a figment of society. I don't want to change the world, I want to change people. But people don’t think about issues when the stories are happy. If you read a book about a normal dude, happy with where he was in life &c &c, you’d be bored (I’d be bored), and it wouldn’t teach us anything about anything. When I’m sad though, when I feel depressed, I find the yucky things inside of me, the parts I’m ashamed of, and these are the things I need to bring out, to write about, to show other people. Because we’re all human, we all have similar weaknesses. I write about insecurity a lot, about doubt, fear, lack of connection, failure of communication, distance, neuroses. The novel that I was working on before Alcova, the novel I hope to return to soon, came about as picturing four siblings, four siblings who failed to talk with each other, to really connect. I write about this because it is a part of my life. I’ve discussed this before, but I worry about being distant from my family, my friends; and now, I fear, my girlfriends. But that's not what I'm hear to discuss. I write about these problems because I feel they are ubiquitous. I want people to see themselves in the characters of Kitty and Apollo, to realize that their relationship with their grandparents is similar. Kitty is one of the four siblings, and she is the granddaughter of Apollo. She takes care of him, kind of, and they share similar traits: they both smoke, but neither they nor the rest of the family know that the other smokes. It comes as a revelation. It's a metaphor, and it also isn't, for the small things we hide from each other. Even now, I fear mentioning that I smoke cigarettes, on the off chance that my mom or dad would read this. The things we hide maybe because we're ashamed of them, or because they're awkward to talk about. Somewhere along the line, discussing personal faults or awkward personal details got to be too much. I read this interesting article about a new Calvin Klein perfume the other day, and it described our generation as being physically bold but emotionally guarded. As hilarious an analysis as that is to come from a fashion company, I fear it's very close to the truth. Close to the end of our relationship, Michelle told me that she didn't trust me fully. We had been together for two months, and I felt that I trusted her. But she didn't trust me. It takes her a long time to trust people, she said. And why is that? A lot of people are like that. It takes them a long time to trust someone else. That's because of our society. Someone, in the past, has abused their trust, and therefore people like Michelle are hesitant to give it out again. Understandable, but unfortunate. Our society has developed into what CK described, but the two features are symbiotically related. We are emotionally guarded because we are physically bold. Guarding our emotions is the only way to be physically bold, otherwise you will be ruined. And because we don't reveal our emotions, all we have left is physicality. How do you show someone you like them? You kiss them, you hold them, you have sex with them. That is the language our society speaks now. I can't say whether this is bad: it is simply an evolution in dialogue. No longer is it fashionable to compose poetry for your beloved, or to court them for lengthy periods of time. You touch them, you lick their ear lobe. We stopped sharing our selves, and started sharing our bodies. Intimacy has changed. Should I change too?

Like a Father to Impress

8 November 2006

Everton 0-1 Arsenal
Adebayor 85'

Somedays it just seems like the whole world is against you, physically and emotionally. It's snowing, which normally I love, but it will make my drive home annoying, and cold, and dangerous. Arsenal has lost three (all three, yes, it is impossible to lose anymore) cup competitions in the last 2 weeks. Oh, I know I'm writing about 8 November, when they beat Everton in the Carling Cup - don't worry, skip ahead a number of chapters and you'll see they lose the Cup. Then they dropped the FA Cup, and today, 7 March 2007, not 8 November 2006, they lose to PSV in the Champions League. We have lost domestically and abroad. Our failure looms large in front of us, like a tidal wave. Part of me wants to stick my arms out like Christ and welcome the depression. Wash over me, take me away, beat my head against rocks and drown me. Feed me to the sharks, scatter my bones across the sand, and let hermit crabs make homes out of me. It is so easy to think like that. It requires very little effort. Fighting it takes so much energy, and to be honest, I have very little energy left. My insomnia has gotten worse the last couple of nights, and every day I contemplate staying home from work and sleeping. But some insanity drives me, some lunacy drags me kicking and screaming to work, plops me down in my chair, and makes me stare at the internet until I have had enough coffee to do work. I have some kind of absurd work ethic that, for all intents and purposes, forbids me to call out of work unless I really am sick, and then like, we're talking fever and so on. I'm crazy. If this keeps up, however, I will have to take a day off. Arsenal has forsaken me, my college basketball team of choice (my alma mater, the goddamn George Mason Patriots!) have decided to be sub-par this year, and the Yankees, well, they haven't had a chance yet to disappoint me yet, but I guarantee you, they will. The only saving grace this year has been the Washington Wizards, who, somehow, have managed to be good. Oh right. That's because they're in one of the worst conferences to ever exist in sports. In sum: sports, my religion, my safety net, my pillar of strength, is failing me. Where religious people look to faith to help get them through tough times, I look to sports. Sports are the definition of social achievements, they are the model of humanity. They represent institutions, agreements, struggle, success—and loss. It is by reminding myself of the whole picture, of how complete an analogy sports are to humanity, that I can stomach such widespread and consistent losses. Like a man whose faith in religion has been shaken, my faith in sports has been shaken; shaken like a towel in a tornado. But like that religious man, I find faith again, slowly, surely. Right: sports represent both sides of life, the good and the bad. No complete analogy, no perfect metaphor, can symbolize life without victory and defeat. Thus I can embrace the magnificent losses that only Arsenal have endured in the last two weeks. So I can look at them, my beautiful Gunners, my honorable warriors, and finally begin to gather a small dose of security. The breakup with Michelle has hurt me surprisingly deep; it’s impossible to lie in my bed without thinking about her. As I sit, blandly watching television with my roommate, all the days seem to blur into the same day. I wake up, I go to work, I come home, I make salad, we watch television and I struggle to sleep. When I was with Michelle, my life seemed exciting and vibrant, flush with rich colors and hopeful attitudes. Beyond our relationship, it all seems gray, cardboard, superfluous. Maybe this is normal, maybe this is the standard route of a breakup. I want to try and get over her, but I look at other girls and feel immense dissatisfaction. But wait, this isn’t fair: I was dissatisfied with most of them even before Michelle. Now that I know, though, that there is at least one girl who actually meets my tall list of requirements, it seems doubly daunting to find a second. But what other choice do I have? Times like this, I look to my dad, and I wonder how he can be satisfied with his life. He got married, but divorced five years later. I was an accident in the middle. After his divorce from my mom, he had a string of girlfriends, but his dating years seem to be way behind him, by at least six years. Now he divides his time between being at work and watching soccer. I swear to whatever God you believe in, those two things (and sleeping) consume about 95% of his time. And he seems happy. I don’t get it. I want more. I don’t want to be reduced to coming home from work, watching DVRed soccer games, having a couple glasses of red wine and going to sleep. If that was my life, I would be immensely depressed. And maybe he is, I mean, when you’re 52 where do you go to find new love? I feel like he might have given up. I don’t want to be put in that situation. Will having a wife solve that? Having kids? Giving back to the community? Donating to a charity? At some point, my simple life has to be enough for me. I have to be able to sit down, accept that I’m an editor who wishes he had become a writer, a boyish man who worships sports, and generally a lazy bastard who enjoys a pint. The breakup with Michelle re-exposes old nerves, old anxieties of not being good enough, of being too neurotic, of being too plain. It’s one thing to think positive thoughts; it’s another to believe them. Telling myself I’m funny and charming is nice; knowing I’m attractive and a worthwhile date is a whole ‘nother ballgame. The alienating part is, I’m not questioning myself because Michelle broke up with me: I trust her, and what she said. I’m questioning myself because suddenly I’m lonely again, and I think my dad has been lonely for many years, and I don’t want to end up like him. I look in the mirror and slowly I see him (our physical resemblance doesn’t help). Good God, it scares me so much. I’m not ashamed of my father, but I do feel sorry for him. As I was fixing my dinner tonight, my roommate and I discussed how bored we have become with our cyclical lifestyle. Perhaps it has finally reached a tipping point: we talked about doing things on the weeknights. It’s difficult for us, because we’re usually exhausted, and waking up at 7am breeds early bedtimes, but sitting around this house is slowly driving us mad. Tomorrow we will break the circle, we will free ourselves from our shackles. Who knows what the night will hold for us: maybe only a cup of tea in a rundown coffeehouse. Surely it will be better than this, though, wallowing in existential crises, drinking water, tears held back but only for lack of sleep. Sure everyone dies alone, but I don’t want to live alone.

She Will Always Carry On

5 November 2006

West Ham 1-0 Arsenal
Harewood 89'

This match seems to be indicative of what I need to write about. A 1-nil loss to West Ham (who are currently in a relegation fight) is exactly how Arsenal has played all season. They can beat the big guns, like Man U, Liverpool, Chelsea: but when it’s West Ham, or Fulham, or Sheffield U, it’s like they’re hungover, they totally forget to show up for the goddamn game. I really don’t get it, and I don’t think anyone does. If we had been able to win the small games and the big games, we would be challenging Man U for the title right now. But because we fold like a cheap card table when it comes time to face 16th-placed teams, we’re dwindling into fourth place, essentially praying we don’t fuck up anymore and keep our goddamn Champions League berth. Praying like we believe in all Gods from all times, all of them, every single one. That’s how much we are praying these days. Relationships are miraculous things. They are roller-coasters, sure, you’ve heard that analogy before, but it is so wildly true. Talking like this, of course, gives away the impetus for this entry: my girlfriend and I have broken up. This is the real roller-coaster rather, the post-relationship time. It’s strange; nothing seems different, really, but I feel different. Which is to say, I finally understand how different I felt when I was with Michelle. She didn’t complete me, I wouldn’t say that, but we certainly complemented each other in a lot of the necessary ways. She showed me things about myself I would never had known without our time together: not things that she grafted onto me, but things that were within me all this time, things I had simply never seen before. Like my ability to actually be a reasonably good boyfriend. I was terrified for a long time that I would be a totally lame boyfriend. But strangely, I found myself going through all the normal motions, like flowers on Valentine’s Day and calling her baby, all these motions, and they felt right, they didn’t feel cheesy, they felt like things I wanted to do, to express how much I cared for her. To a certain extent, it would feel like they were things I was supposed to do, especially the flowers: after I bought them, however, it felt good, it felt right, I wanted to give her flowers. This was a surprising feeling for me; most of the time, the standard motions have felt forced and tacky. Here, though, in this relationship, my first real relationship, they felt wonderful, because expressing my feelings in institutionalized tropes means something. What does it mean, Sam? It means… well, it means a lot. It normalizes us as a couple, because here we are, acting like couples all over the United States. That’s probably the most important thing it does, and one reason why I was excited. “Look, we’re a real couple, I bought her flowers, just like you did, see, I can be a stereotypically good boyfriend: Ta-da!” Thus, in turn, it normalized us and it normalized me, it reassured me that I am who I thought I was. Furthermore, it gratified my neuroses by convincing me I am someone worthwhile to be with, that maybe, just maybe, it is all just in my head. These are exceptional gifts that my short time with Michelle gave me, because in the end they all boil down to one ingredient: confidence. She gave me so much confidence, in myself, in my appearance, in my writing, in my life: she helped heal so many broken years, so much time spent in self-wallowing depression, anti-social Saturday nights on my computer, avoiding people who really wanted to be my friends for fear of opening myself up. That’s really what this whole thing was about, for me: learning to open up, learning how to be vulnerable, how to show myself to someone and hope they smile at what they see. Everyone’s weak, at the end of the day, everyone wants to be justified and legitimized for what they are. Michelle gave me that, by smiling at me so earnestly when I would prattle on, saying whatever came into my head. She gave me that by telling me I am attractive, even though I have terribly dorky traits. She gave me that by accepting who I was and kissing me softly, holding my arm, breathing onto my shoulder. I can’t thank her enough for everything she gave me from this experience. It’s hard to think about it though, and I wish, perhaps selfishly, that it had gone on for just a little bit longer. I gained a lot, and I could have gained more. This is the third part of the cycle, however; the third part of this whole experience which is demanding I grow. First, I had to gain the confidence to talk with this girl, and decide that I was really ready for a relationship; second, I had to find that good boyfriend who was living somewhere in body, and now I know where. Here we are, part three: I have to find the strength to move on, the maturity to not look back at what-could-have-beens, and develop my personal depth to think about other girls. In due time, of course. I don’t really feel like thinking about other girls right now, in fact, thinking about girls at all kind of makes me feel sick. It’s a process, a process that I am really only experiencing for the first time (although it does kind of mirror the process of when I crush on a girl and find out she’s not any kind of interested). At times I feel okay, you know, I feel secure in the future, and curious about what will next come my way. But at other times, weaker or more sentimental times, I get overwhelmed with sadness. I think about her smile, and her quiet grace, her absurd maturity, that made it sometimes feel like I was with a 45-year-old. Which is reasonable, seeing as how I often strike people as a bit of an old soul. Michelle is an incredible girl; she carries a large weight with her, a weight I was always fascinated by. She lived a lot of her younger years (as if we really are 45, I suppose) a bit wildly, and is now coming to terms with adulthood, as we all are. There was always this feeling, to me, of her being caught in her own wake, as if her life was a big cruise ship but she, the captain, had fallen off, and was trailing behind on a life-raft. But she’s catching up, you know. She’s made the raft a makeshift home. She’s got a nice sail on it, and she’s watching the coming horizon, her left hand over her eyes, blocking out that beautiful sun. She’s smiling too, you know, she’s smiling because she knows no matter what, no matter where this raft (and cruise ship) takes her, she’ll be good. Whatever shore she washes up on, whomever’s house she walks up to, they’ll be happy, and they’ll have this circular window on the third floor of their house, it’ll overlook the sea. She’ll be able to see the cruise ship and the life raft lying there in the sand, and she’ll smile more, because maybe she’ll think of me, and hopefully those memories will be happy. Godspeed, Michelle, I wish you the best of luck. I’ll miss you.