Old Questions, Old Answers

Recently I’ve been possessed anew of an old question. In some ways it’s the question that all other human questions must reduce to, or at least should reduce to, because when the world snaps into focus it is ultimately the only thing that fills your field of vision. In classic American terms, what’s the good life and how do we live it? What do we have to do to get the most out of life? It’s such an often repeated phrase, ‘get the most out of life,’ recycled through the increasingly unreliable and various organs of cultural transmission so many times that it seems to have been infected or at least slimed over with a film of bullshit, but just because the question has been co-opted countless times to sell Oxy-Clean and nose jobs and Ab-Gliders doesn’t mean that the question itself has been corrupted..

What’s the good life and how do we live it? The reason it works as such an effective advertising strategy is because it's the question we're all looking for an answer to. It seems like QVC and Toys'R'Us don't have the right answers, but there are right one’s, there have to be, and if Hollister and Tommy Hilfiger have exploited the question for profit, a long line of thinkers leading back into the primordial mist affirm that it’s worth asking. I think a crucial component of the answers we’re actually looking for proceed from the simple question ‘why?’.

I’m proposing, of course, nothing complicated here. I’m rephrasing old questions in old terms, presenting nothing new and offering nothing revolutionary. How do we live a good life? Seek the foundations upon which life rests, and then when you understand why, maybe you can go from just life to something good. It's not terribly complicated, but I think in formulating my world view up to now I’ve neglected things that seemed simple because somehow I got the idea that they weren’t enough. No enough either in the sense that they weren’t sufficient or that they weren’t trendy enough, that the answers we’re all looking for are strung up in layers of neon tugged into hieroglyphs into postmodern oracular smoke, that a seemingly complicated world needs an equally complicated codex to read it. That a simple answer is a boring answer, a blasé answer. And yet, maybe there’s a little string we could pull somewhere that’ll bring the whole thing down, and maybe that’s pretty cool. Maybe there isn’t, and maybe it isn’t, but just maybe we can figure out what we’re supposed to be doing here.

The questions are old, the proposed answer is simple (or at least the algorithm for exploring it is), but there is nothing to reject in things that we have seen before or in things we can grasp. I am alive, sooner or later I’m going to die, I want to live in the best way I can. How do I do that? The most important, most pressing question we’ve got. And the most potent answer I can think of to that question is a simple injunction to think about why. About why things are the way they are. About why we do the things we do, why we want the things we want, why we react to things the way we do, why this is this way and why that is that. If you get that, then you can manipulate the matrix. If you don’t, then you’re drowning in it, casting around for the sort of life-preservers that keep you in the water with the same efficacy that they keep you afloat.

I try to live life to the fullest, I want to get the most out of life, I want to live every day like it’s my last, blah, blah, blah, blah. We’ve reached a strange impasse where the most important resolutions we can make have also become the most empty. It’s crucial to make the resolution, but the resolution itself, alone, without anything to back it up, is worthless. Why? Think about it I guess.

Sometimes You Need to Put it Somewhere

Some ass named John Barth once said that nothing ever lasts longer than a mood, and maybe I'm bipolar but I think that of any line of anything I've ever read this has resonated with me more than any. Nothing lasts longer than a mood and we flash from one to the next on the rise and fall of crashing and soaring and plummeting and flat lining chemical reactions in our heads, and for a while I couldn't handle that but who gives a fuck, we are what we are and what we are can't change that, doesn't change that, and if somewhere there are enzymes catalyzing the rush of whateveryouwantocallem's through our veins like so much water through so many canyons, if it's these little chemical process pulling the pulleys and booms behind the scenes of what we think of as our selves, what's to lament about that? I am a massive machine that's nothing more than molecular ups and downs but those molecular ups and downs are all that I am and why not fold them in rather than force them out?

Nothing lasts longer than a mood they say, which means that nothing lasts after the adrenaline fades away, resolution rides on receding streams of dopamine and we are (are we), as it were, at the whim of our brain chemistry, but sometimes, when a mood is real good, you need to put it somewhere. Somewhere you can get to.

Brain Chemistry. It moves the pulleys and booms but, can I tell it where to move them? A silly question, or perhaps the central question. Someone else said I'm never the same person when I go to sleep as when I wake up, as when I wake up, but when I go to sleep a figure of flame do I have to wake up a thing of stone? Can you bottle fire? Can you keep it? Can you put it somewhere secret and safe for the night and open it up in the dim, sputtering critically flawed 9mm film of the early morning and have it come rushing out, the only spear you ever need to meet the day, the only shield you ever need against whatever tribulations the world might send your way? Can you make a mood last forever? There are times when I'm as the ebb and flow of a steely gray sea; slow, incessant, largely irredeemable, a sullen stagnation with too much momentum to gain any. But there is a flame inside me to scorch that world in streaks of whatever it is for which light seems to be the readiest and most overused metaphor. I'mma find turn that shit into ink and write it on my bones.

Roger Federer is the sweetest dude in the world

I love this man.

http://sports.espn.go.com/sports/tennis/aus10/news/story?id=4876370

Because Why Not

I just read that last post I wrote, and it's really good, I'm the shit. So, I find myself motivated to do it again. The question, however, is what does one write about when one's life is largely devoted to scrounging the internet for Mariners' news, thinking up new and creative ways of butchering Chone Figgins' name (just now I thought of CHUUUUUNE FLUGGINS!!!! and I wish I were a season ticket holder (who lived in Seattle) because I have at least 81 others that I would love to put on signs and try to get an interview with Mike Blowers or something. The impending absence of Beltre means that there will be a void opening up in the crazy fan section at Safeco once filled by The-Beltre-Guy, and I would love to be that replacement. The-Chone-Figgins-Guy. That could be me. Or should I say The-SHWAAAAAAYNE-SHWAGGINS-Guy?), watching infuriatingly melodramatic Japanese sitcoms on the internet, and occasionally scouting out Marshall's facebook page for pics of his girlfriend? Not much, that's for sure. Which is why I have just decided to write whatever it is I'm going to write in a language most of you probably can't read anyway. Because why not. It will also spare you the pain of reading it.

　　さあ、どうしようかなぁ。日本語ででも、書きたいことはあまりないじゃん。ええと、たぶん、なんだろう、あっそうだ！　あれか？あれにするか？はい、ということで、あれについて語らせていただきます。すごいな、あれ。まあ、やっぱり、やめた。実はこんな内容のまったくない話は続けられないな、実力足りないし。というか、エネレギたりないだろう。いや、つまらなすぎるから。　いずれにしても、さっさと本題に入るか？でも、本題って、まだ決まってない。わかった、わかった、スピッツについて話そう。スピッツは、どういうことというと、私の大好きなバンドです。そうそう、こんなにつまらないことをみんなに聞かせちゃいます。どうかお許しをいただけますよう、お願いいたします。本当に日本人がこれを読んだら、やばいかも、自分でも何を言っているかはさっぱりわからないから。まあ、そんなはずがないので、安心しましょうか。ごめん、話がちょっと飛んじゃったね。だけど、スピッツだ！すごい気に入ってる、最近。この前BEST　HITSみたいなアルバムを買って、まじで絶え間なく聞き続けている、ずっと。夢にも出っている。もう、ちょっと、やめたいなと思っているところだけど、絶対無理。現を抜かしている。やめようにも、すぐ体が震えだして、髪が抜け始めるとかかなぁと、心配しているから、まあ、しばらくでもこのペースで持続。どうせ結局、飽きちゃうからね。たぶん。　何でそんな気に入っているかいというと、　ぴったり九十年代の音楽の雰囲気にはまるから。たぶん初めてでも、日本語まったくわからなくても、聞いたら、すぐ”こいつ、九十年代のものだ！”とわかっちゃうと思うよ、間違いなく。なんでだろうな。何で聞いたらすぐTHIRD　EYE　BLINDのことが思い浮かぶのかな？不思議だな。だけど、幻でもない。確かな現象だ。音というか、雰囲気というか、どこかが、”これは九十年代に作られたものだ”と宣言しているように聞こえる、この馬鹿私に。えっ、やばいな、自分の言葉本が当にわからなくなちゃった。日本語的に文章があっているかどうかこいつを見てもらえる人はどっかにいるかな。ま、いいや。　ここらへんで、締めるか？もう、ずいぶん長くなってきたし、思わずに。はい、ありがとう、バイバイ。

Wow, that was ridiculous. Don't be impressed, though, it's very likely that none of that makes any sense. I mean, maybe it sort of does, but maybe I was just mashing keys together. I think it makes sense. Doesn't actually matter.　It was fun. Ok, well, it's nine forty and I haven't eaten yet. I've got some old lettuce in my fridge, maybe I'll go make a salad.

When the Past Bubbles Up

Because sometimes out of the dross of the present it does. Mysteriously. Who knows what it is that dislodges a long forgotten face, landscape, or abstract but verifiably temporal emotion out from the massive, sedimentary shelves of our memories, but sometimes a word, a glance, a shaft of light summons memory from the deepest mausoleums of our minds and reanimates them before us, alive, full of blood, and none the worse for time and distance. Sometimes it's hard to remember who you used to be, sometimes you feel like you've changed so much that you shouldn't even recognize your memories as your own, but then a breeze will strike your face from a particularly resonant direction and you'll find yourself standing on the sidewalk of a twenty-three year old life as a momentary eleven year old, not bothering to wonder how you can reconcile the briefcase in your hand (sike, I don't use a briefcase) with the long forgotten porch of a treehouse you feel yourself standing on. It's a bizarre experience, but it's also enough to remind you that who you always were is who you always will be, even if only in sporadic and unpredictable spurts and splashes.

When it happens to me it's usually pretty random, but there are a few things, a few magical items, that exist as the gatekeepers to these strange mental corridors between the past and the present. Musically generally serves to link me, and I would expect many others, to the earlier versions of myself, but not every song unlocks pockets of images of the same intensity. Many of the artists who hold the keys to my past I would strongly resist calling artists at all if it weren't for the fact that somehow the crude lines and jagged, reckless shapes they've scribbled in hasty power chords and melodramatic screams resolves into an image of myself; the Beetles may be incalculably better musicians, but their music is a white shapeless sheet that falls from my shoulders, whereas the frazzled short-circuiting of The Used, Creed, and Dragonforce fit my body like my own skin.

That said, the song that is for me the most retrospectively potent is actually really good. I don't own it, though, strangely. I don't really know why I don't own it considering that I have an album by the Jonas Brothers, but that's all beside the point. The point is that this song hits me harder than real-life every time I hear it. I don't know what crashing of chemicals in our brains bestows upon memory the power to be more real than the present, but I would swear on the light and my hope of salvation and rebirth that this song recycles my memories and throws them before my mind's eye more vivid and more powerful than I ever lived them. I don't do it nearly as well as the originals do, but as I'm singing it I'm all over Whitman campus living all sorts of different lives. At the center of it all, however, is a bathroom on the second floor of Anderson, a CD player, and a CD that a guy named Vince Booth left behind when he moved out. I can't hear this song without remembering that bathroom, and longing for it.

A Career in Review: Roger Federer

Strangely I find myself very by intrigued by my new-found appreciation for Andy Roddick, a thought that I by all rights never should have had, but the world is a crazy place and so, doffing my cap to said craziness, I will leave Andy for the time being and look instead at what yesterdays Wimbledon match did for my opinion of Roger Federer.

My opinion of Roger Federer... Have I ever had a higher opinion of any other public figure? Of all the human shaped stars in the sky, none shine brighter for me than Roger's. For years now he has stood Herculean and indomitable amongst the planets and nebulae and seven foot power forwards of our devotional sports galaxy, a figure too large for the relative obscurity of his sphere and too bright to be missed by even those who wouldn't normally see the world of tennis through a telescope. Where the majority of tennis players wink out before stargazers have a chance to wonder if they're even a trick of the light, Roger Federer blazes in the empyrean field of professional sports like a distant sun, and his presence commands the same sort of attention as a Lebron James or Tiger Woods.

Or so I like to tell myself. I'm not so delusional as to think that Roger draws as much attention, renown, or worship from all corners as somebody like Lebron or Tiger or Tom Brady, but I do know that of all the athletes I've watched I've only had one idol, and he comes from Switzerland. No other athlete inspires the sort of undying, unconditional, boundless love from me that Roger does, to no other athlete do I assign the same sort of unshakable loyalty, and given the choice of watching any single athlete in the world play up close, I would hands down in the blink of an eye without hesitation say Roger Federer, Centre Court, Wimbledon and wipe my hands of this world. Roger is a god to me.

But why, you ask? The answer is simple but gets more complicated: he plays a game I love, a game I hate, a game I didn't quite grow up with but grew into, a game that defined me and defines my starkest sports memories, with an unearthly beauty that is shoddy misdirection for sheer ruthless destruction. I admit that I love dominance, I love power, I crave the strength contained in competitive annihilation, and for years Roger stood on one side of tennis courts and banished opponents from his presence with a game that was simply undeniable and entirely beyond reproach. He was an archetype more than a human, an avatar, an earthly manifestation of a Platonic ideal rather than a fellow creature of blood and bones and dirt. He was so much better than EVERYONE that I looked forward to his matches not to cheer him in overcoming challenges but to bear witness to him incinerating his opponents (who were themselves unimaginably good tennis players) like dry bundles of straw before a wind of flame. He was a magician, a sage, a hero, and tennis was his Art. Maybe I've made my point already, but allow me the indulgence of saying that Roger played tennis in a way that seemed to stretch it out to the furthest limits of possibility, as if the game were designed with the prophecy of him in mind, and I couldn't get enough of the fulfillment that was pretty much every summer.

But then, into the golden light of his glory came a fleet-footed youth with a massive left arm and an inhuman will, flying into the sky of Roger's supremacy on black wings that churned sun-streaked blue into thick masses of lightning-shot black and gray, hanging in the air like the guillotine of the future that I never thought would call for Roger's neck. Fucking Rafa. If I love Roger with all of my heart than I hate Rafael Nadal with all of my soul. In my head Roger is white and gold and Rafa is the color of blood. Rafa came into Roger's perfect world and, somehow, tore it all down. All of a sudden, Roger was beatable, Roger wasn't going to live forever. Roger was our supreme champion, and... he couldn't beat Rafa. It started slow, with the French. Roger had never won the French even before Rafa, so even after he first lost to Nadal there it wasn't the end of the world. Nadal could quarter the market on clay because grass, hardcourt, and whatever shit they play on in Australia were part of Roger's kingdom and no army could storm that keep. They all said that Rafa didn't have the game to win on any of the faster surfaces. Yet. Yet is an insidious word, however, and faster than it seemed possible Rafa got better. As if some infernal engine fueled his ceaseless motor, Rafa got better and better and better up to the the point where patrick mcenroe and dick enberg were lowering the hard court odds to 50:50. Rafa never felt pressure, Rafa never stumbled, Rafa never gave up, and in situations where other men would crack, crumble, choke, and lose, Rafa never showed even a shred of fear, never once revealed to anyone his humanity, hit forehands and backhands and serves in a way that nobody else could, or arguably ever has, and won.

Even during Rafa's rapid ascension I still had confidence that Roger would overcome him in the end, but as trophies and plates continued to be doled out it became more and more clear that Rafa was Roger's kryptonite. I'd never imagined that Roger had weaknesses, but Rafa emitted deadly gamma rays that blasted through all of Roger's defenses at the speed of a falling giant, and turned him into a shivering, shaking, crystal thin shell of his former dominance. When Roger lost in the Finals of the French to Rafa in like ten minutes, losing all but four games in three sets, I was shaken. When he lost, a mere four weeks later, in five of the best sets many argue tennis has ever seen at Wimbledon, on GRASS, I was shattered. Number one was long gone, and the impetus produced by Nadal's already horrible victory at the inner sanctum of Roger's power seemed to me too extreme for Roger to ever reverse. He was number two in the world, and still incredible, but Nadal had thrust him from his pedestal of immortality, and when the new year brought the Australian Open Final I thought I could feel my idol of old hit the ground and break into a million pieces on the blue neo-styrofoam surface as Roger lost to him again, never, I thought, to be put back together again.

For all that, however, deep deep deep way deep down, I know that Rafa is no demon. He's not a bad guy, he's not a villain, he's not driven by the souls of a thousand demons. He's just.. really fucking good. Really amazingly good, and Roger couldn't beat him. Up until Rafa, Roger never really had a rival. He pretty much mopped the floor with everybody else out there. Rafa gave Roger his foil, his enemy to vanquish, but, unfortunately for Roger, he never really seemed to rise to that challenge. Roger could beat anybody else, but Rafa warped Roger's mind and stole his confidence like it seemed nobody ever would, and in the end was just too tough.

But the end for whom? I'm really running out of steam here and don't want to continue this post, sadly, but Rafa seems to have pounded his body to a pulp, only the uncertain future will tell whether or not he will ever recover, and in his absence, at the French, at Wimbledon, Roger has reclaimed the seat of preeminence that I thought he had abdicated forever. The future will tell how the narrative of Roger's career is ultimately received, how we will read the destructive meteor that was (is) Rafael Nadal. Will Nadal recover and resume the process (seemingly already well in hand a few months ago) of changing the guard? Will he fade away like a star shooting through the blackness of night, though leaving behind a much more tangible memory of his passing than a contrail in the sky? Will he come back and never be the same? Who knows, but just as his arrival altered the path of Roger's career and legacy, so to has this momentary passing; it is clear, however, that though Rafa has been out of sight for the past two majors, he won't be out of mind for the rest of tennis history.

Pausing for Greatness

In a world where professional sports have taken repeated hits from scandal after scandal and appear before us as the bruised, battered, dented recepticles of competitive spirit that they once were, it becomes more and more difficult to appreciate the products various leagues put on various fields and courts without first having to forgive the product in question some sort of ethical or competitive shortcomings. In almost all of the major professional sports leagues there are serious flaws we as fans have to endeavor to ignore in order to affirm the legitimacy of the objects of our support; in baseball you have to overcome the anxiety that your favorite team might be powered by a guy (or guys) that is a mutant product of test-tubes and needles; in basketball you have to ignore the specter of a corrupt front office looming over the court like a vast, shadowy puppet-master, using a legion of referees to block and construct games not quite as if they were Broadway productions but certainly as if somebody not on the court has designs on what the scoreboard says when the buzzer sounds; in football similar concerns about the humanity of it's superhuman participants arise if we forget to suspend our disbelief at the 300 pound man chasing like a sprinter after a quarterback and stopping just short of ripping his arms off and bludgeoning him over the head with them in taking him down. In cycling, it's hard for anyone to win a race without the guy he lost to (and everybody watching) crying for his pee in a cup. In all of these sports (except, perhaps, for cycling) the demon of commercialization time and again steps out from behind the curtain and further disrupts the illusion that the pageant of professional athletics is motivated solely, or occasionally even largely, by the sheer will for success and pride in team and place that it is in amateur sports. Athletes frequently invoke the old axiom that "it's a business, too," and unfortunately we can't help but suffer the intrusion of the business side of the game(s) upon the other side we care about; sports unite and inspire us, but you have to be willing to sift through the taint of bloated salaries, greedy, soulless owners (and sometimes players), and the invasive barrage of commercial sponsorships in order to get to that inspiration.

All of this isn't to say that I don't follow sports, that I don't root for my teams, that I'm not uplifted by their successes and downcast at their failures; the Mariners lost their way through 100 games last year and I vomited through September; The Mariners won 116 games in 2001 and I distinctly remember being violently depressed when they lost a game to the Cleveland Indians in which they were up by like 9 runs with three innings to play. I think I snapped and punched my baby sister in a fit of rage, that's how much that team meant to me. I love sports, I think sports are an intrinsic part not only of our culture but also our humanity, which is why it strikes me as so unfortunate that they seem to be debased a little more each day by scandal and mishandling to the point where a fair percentage of people seem to see professional sports as little more than grimy idols to greed and dishonesty.

Which brings me to the shining beam of light that lanced into that semi-dark sky this morning from a stadium at the center of a complex of chalk lined strips of grass in the middle of London and stayed there, pulsing, for something like four hours and 19 minutes. Today's Wimbledon final was a transcendent moment nearly ten years in the making that struck a decades worth of waving, wandering, and unraveling narratives of wild success, simultaneously unfulfilled and thwarted potential, glory, the loss thereof, and its redemption like a godly hammer out of the realm of the possible and into the realm of substance, giving it form as surely as a blacksmith turning raw iron into metal with meaning. Today a red-hot history in limbo was thrust into a four plus hour pool of cool, refining water, and what emerged was a redefined narrative of struggle and triumph that, in my eyes, redeems sport, and reminds us all of why, exactly, we are fans.

Where to begin. Perhaps with a brief admission that tennis isn't immune to some of the negative pitfalls that beset other major sports. There's a lot of money involved. If you win you will get very rich. There's the sort of scandal that Tim Donaghey would be proud of. Nikolay Davydenko has been accused of pulling punches (or should we say shanking forehands) in order to influence betting. Drugs aren't entirely out of the picture; recently Richard Gasquet was suspended a year for testing positive in a drug test. For cocaine. Yes, tennis isn't without it's flaws here and there, but the thing that sets tennis apart from its counterparts is its intrinsic individual nature. The problems that arise in other sports are largely institutionalized (greedy owners, greedy unions, greedy commissioner's offices), whereas tennis tournaments are composed of individuals coming to a single place to go one on one until there's only one. There are no contracts so there are no agents to hate, there is no free agency so there's nobody to betray, and no one's expectations to fall short of except your own, ultimately. There also seem to be no drugs to speak of, discounting the recreational ones Marat Safin snorts off the ass-cracks of Russian prostitutes. In the end, tennis is an every man for himself sort of game that is more reverent of its winners and merciless to its losers than any other game, and in this removal of all the extraneous shit that bogs down other major sports tennis shines.

Furthermore, the intrinsically individual nature of the sport allows for more compelling personal narratives than pretty much any team sport can offer. Or perhaps it's more appropriate to say that they are compelling in a different way. Certainly we love to follow teams, and a franchise like the Yankees or the Patriots or the Lakers accumulates stories over time until it's history becomes vast and complex in a way that no single man or woman's life ever could. When Jeter puts on a Yankess uniform he stands beside the Babe and Dimaggio and Gehrig, whereas when Andre Agassi picked up a racket and stepped onto the court he was pretty much just Andre Agassi. Of course, that is a bit of reductionist statement, as I will get to, but it is undeniable that a franchise with a hundred year history can come to mean more than any single person ever could.

And yet, the history of a franchise is composite, whereas a tennis player stands alone, not only as a competitor, but also as a figure that receives history. Sort of. He takes his meaning, of course, from the people he beats and the people who beat him, but compared to being member of the San Fransisco 49ers, Carlos Moya definitely stands alone.

That said, there are a lot of individual narratives that flame out without ever meaning anything. Ashley Harkleroad, Daniela Hantuchova, Janko Tipsarevic, Guillermo Coria. Ever heard of them? Not if you don't follow tennis rabidly you haven't. But then there are others. James Blake; his story starts in promise, nearly ends in tragedy, but comes back like Lance before fading into the obscurity that awaits most every professional tennis player eventually. Top ten in the world, Blake bashed his head on a net-post challenging a ball, broke his neck, got shingles, and lost his father to cancer in the same year. That's a real shit storm of bad luck (particularly the shingles) that you might not expect your neighbor the pencil-pusher to ever fully recover from, but miraculously Blake was back roughly a year later and reached as high as number 4 in the world. Gustavo Kuerten, or if you prefer(which I do), Guga, owner of the sort of curly fro Matteo Legget could only dream of and potentially the most retarded grunt in the history of sports. Patrick Rafter, last of the serve-and-volleyers (I loved this guy so much I chose my racket just because he used it, even though serve and volley was the furthest thing from the game I played), the Aussie you could identify by the streaks of white sunblock type stuff he spread across his face like warpaint, if not by his endangered species of a style of play. Others. Tennis has an incredibly colorful cast of characters.

Which brings me to the two names I've been keeping back for all of this time, the two names who this morning, at least in my eyes, played the sort of career, maybe even life, -defining match that happens only very very rarely in sports, and should be recognized when it does. First, and most obviously, there's Roger Federer, the sort of mythological figure who comes once in a lifetime at most, and for my money challenges, and in fact overtops, even Michael Jordan as an awe-inspiring superhero of the sports world. And then, perhaps even more interestingly, there's Andy Roddick, a figure who was supposed to be the savior of American tennis, the next Pete Sampras, who had the bad luck to be born into a world where the next Pete Sampras already lived and breathed and dominated. I've been pretty violently anti-Andy Roddick my whole life, calling him nothing but a big serve and an ugly, brutal forehand, a three year-old child at the net and a ninety-year old grandmother on the backhand side. Today, though, he proved something to me; he played the most spectacular match of his career in the biggest moment of his career, and agreeing entirely with an article I read that described his effort in defeat today as heroic, looking back at his whole career with today as the lens... I think I love Andy Roddick. I'll be back later with why.