Tracks

. Smokey Robinson & The Miracles "The Tracks Of My Tears" People say I'm the life of the party Because I tell a joke or two Although I might be laughing loud and hearty Deep inside I'm blue So take a good look at my face You'll see my smile looks out of place If you look closer, it's easy to trace The tracks of my tears..I need you, need you Since you left me if you see me with another girl Seeming like I'm having fun Although she may be cute She's just a substitute Because you're the permanent one.. So take a good look at my face You'll see my smile looks out of place If you look closer, it's easy to trace The tracks of my tears.. I need you, need you Outside I'm masquerading Inside my hope is fading Just a clown oh yeah Since you put me down My smile is my make up I wear since my break up with you.. So take a good look at my face You'll see my smile looks out of place If you look closer, it's easy to trace The tracks of my tears

Feel or Panic or Let Peace Descend

It's been awhile since I put anything on this blog. I've been really busy. I've seen like five or six films in the last week, most of them for work. I've grade 45 student essays . . . I hate giving grades. My honors students got their essays back. They really seemed to like me, but honors students always hate you after they get their grades (some of them got B's).

I haven't surfed much, mostly because of the storm conditions: poo-poo in the water from the run-off, small swell, and very choppy, so I thought I'd write about surfing a little. The following is an "ideas-draft" I did yestereday morning: just think of it as a little of my own "poo-poo" being put in the water.

Feel Panic Or . . .

Surfing is a dangerous sport, but for most of us, it’s not all that dangerous. It sometimes feels like it’s dangerous, but it’s mostly not dangerous. Yes, there are sharks, riptides, rocky bottoms, and angry locals, but, in general, we have to remember that we are in a liquid medium and not prone to being injured in the way a skater or motorcycle rider is. Usually, we are okay. Sometimes we feel like we’re dying, or as Gerry Lopez put it in “Step Into Liquid,” “maybe you die a little,” but we don’t die, not really.

But what of this dying a little? What is that about? I have a strange love-hate relationship with the “wipe-out” experience. I find myself thinking of “getting worked” with mixed feelings. When I have made a mistake, fallen, and now am being tossed around, held under, dragged, flung, rag-dolled by a wave, I often find it can be an incredibly sublime experience. In those moments when I am held under the water, clearly powerless, totally abandoned to fate, I feel a kind of peace descending on me.

Of course, that is the only option at that moment: let the peace descend, or feel panic. Every decent-sized wave offers the potential for this sort of existential experience, but there is no predicting, exactly, when it will come. You paddle into a wave, you hold up, or drive down the line trying to make a section, or even pull into a tube, and you find suddenly, that something has gone wrong. Even then, you don’t know if you will face the panic-peace moment, because it could be that everything will be okay; you will dive through to the bottom of the wave, and emerge out the back untouched, free, none the worse for your mistake.

So, when every feel-panic-or-let-peace-descend moment comes, it comes in a sudden realization—a realization that you no longer have any control over what is about to happen to you—a moment when you will choose whether or not to panic, or let what’s going to happen just happen. If you panic, you make things worse: you expend energy, and, more importantly, you expend oxygen, and you torture yourself trying to break free from something that will not let you go. This is a beginner’s mistake, to fight and struggle rather than to let go, and it makes the experience anything but sublime.

But the other option is to let go, and let peace descend. I heard one surfer describe as “tipping yourself back inside your head.” That’s what it feels like, you deliberately choose to let go, to tuck yourself, your mind, in some deep, dark, safe place while you ride out the event. You sort of go numb. You feel like you’re dead. You’re conscious, in a way that makes you aware only of your existence, DesCartes’ thinking man in the oven; there is no up or down, no right or wrong, no choices to make, you are pure being. It is something like the petit mort, except that you are actually alone, and somewhere, deep inside, you are aware of the real violence you are experiencing, and, no matter what, you do die a little.

Yet there is something liberating about all this. In those moments, those moments when I’m being tossed, and dragged, and shoved under shelves in the reef, those moments when I’m “tomb-stoning,” my surfboard sticking straight up through the surface of the waves like a tombstone, me tethered to it, twelve feet below the surface, being dragged by the force for the current, unable to move my arms, let alone surface for air, that I feel incredibly liberated. For those few moments nothing matters—not what kind of father and husband I am, not how many articles I’ve published, or how many dead languages I can read, or how eloquently I can speak, nothing at all—nothing--except how long I can hold my breath, and whether or not I can resist the urge to panic, and just let peace descend.

It is horrifyingly sublime.

This is not to say that I seek out this experience. On the contrary, I try, at all costs, that is, at all costs short of not surfing, to avoid it. It is unpleasant. It is terrifying. At Scotchman’s, where I like to surf on south swells, you get out of your car on a cliff above the beach. On a big day you can hear the surf’s thunder from the moment you get out of your car. I hear it, and I feel sick. I’m no hero. I’m no thrill-seeker.

When I go to the Surfline web-site and see a big storm in the South Pacific, and when they start predicting surfing in the eight, ten, or . . . range, I can’t sleep. I have nightmares about the next day’s swell. I think most surfers have dreams of such swells, but I admit it, I have nightmares. For all the sublimity of the experience, I don’t want to face the horror.
Still I do, because when you do make one of those waves—when you drop in on it, set your rail, and shoot down the line to safety—you feel an exhilaration, a sense of life, a sense of involvement, i.e., of being fully involved with your own existence, that doesn’t seem to have a rival.

How often have a I seen a surfer at the end of one of the terrifying rides shoot his/her arm into the air in what looks like a victory salute? But this is not the kind of exhilaration one gets from winning the Tour de France, or climbing Pike’s Peak, or scaling Half Dome. Those “victories” have an aura of conquest about them, but most surfers would say their exhilaration feels more like the joy of “survival,” and there is something sublime about that, too.
But that moment of exhilaration would not be possible, or at least would not be as intense, if we had not experienced our fair share feel-panic-or-let-peace-descend moments. It is those moments beneath the waves, those moments spent getting beat up, dragged, spun, and held down that make the moments of gliding safely to a wave’s shoulder seem that much more sublime.

I have not experienced many moments in life that I would describe as feel-panic-or-let-peace-descend. events This is probably due to the fact that I usually feel like there is at least one more thing I can do before I have to accept what will come. This probably explains why I experience so little peace in my one-land, non-surfing life. I’m always in a semi-panic mode, looking for one more thing I can do to avoid some kind of disaster, and, admittedly, most of these disasters are relatively minor.

I do remember that feeling, about four years ago, when my wife, Barbara, called me to meet her at the hospital. She was pregnant, just about to enter her third trimester, and she called me at work. I could hear the emotion in her voice, a sense of sadness and panic stuck in her throat, telling me that she had not felt the baby move for several days, and the doctor couldn’t find the heartbeat, so she had been sent to the hospital where they had better equipment. It only occurred to me later that day that the superior equipment was only part of the reason she was being sent to the hospital.

As I drove to meet her there, I was trying to make a deal with God, something which counts for “prayer” with most people, a sign that I had not yet reached a full-on feel-panic-or-let-peace-descend moment, hoping still for a miracle of sorts. My deal-making, I mean “prayer,” was a full-on sign that I was fighting, still leaning towards panic rather than peace. But as I stood beside Barbara, who was lying prone on an examination table while a technician performed an ultrasound, and as I stared at the screen, at a vague, lifeless little shape on the ultra-sound monitor, I realized that there was nothing I could do, this little image of death expressing everything we can really know about life, that ultimately we are not in control , and that in those moments all our advanced academic degrees, publications, clever observations, and sophisticated arguments mean nothing, there is only our existence in all its brutishness, and, in the midst of all my pain, pain for that little lifeless, mostly-unknown male child, pain for my wife, pain for myself, and maybe pain for us all, I knew, in the midst of, in spite of, and maybe because of that pain, a kind of horrifying peace.

More

I’ve been too busy to write in this the last couple of days, but part of that busyness has been due to seeing movies:

“I [heart] Huckabees,’” didn’t really match my expectations. For one thing, the “existentialist” in the Existentialist Detective Agency seem more like New Age motivational speakers than the embodiment of the ideas of Sartre or Kierkegaard. This film was not so much an exposition of modern philosophy as an application of some of those ideas to modern problems. Still, I liked the film, mostly for the performances of the actors. Mark Wahlburg (spelling?) stole the film with his hilarious portrayal of a firefighter, suffering his own existential crisis which seems to have been caused by his concerns over our dependence on petroleum.

I also saw “Scary Movie 3” on DVD. Justin had rented it, and he Elly watched it a few nights ago. The film kept Elly from sleeping for two days, but Justin thought it was hilarious. He was right. I laughed out loud a bunch of times.

I’ve been reading short stories in the latest McSweeney’s, and Elaine Pagels’ The Origin of Satan. The Pagels book is mostly a retread of other things she's written. It's the same story she always tells: the "institutional" church villified and persecuted diverse voices. I think this may be the last book of hers I ever read. She just keeps saying the same things over and over again.

I surfed 2-4’ Scotchmans at sunset yesterday. Very fun. There were only four of us out, and it was great.

Thursday night I played softball. I went 2/3, a great catch robbing me of a homerun and hitting 1000 for the game. We won. I think we almost got in a fight, too. People have a hard time realizing that co-ed softball in Newport Beach is not all that important.

Friday morning I surfed 2-3’ high-tide surf at 30th Street. I always feel like such a bully when I surf there. People just seem to get out of my way. I can't help it that they all seem to be shoulder-hoppers.

A few things I think I’m learning . . .

• I don’t need pressure to start working on a piece of writing; I need pressure (i.e., a deadline) to stop working.
• I am tortured in a way clergy people are not. They have settled the big issues. They have confidence about those questions; I do not.
• I don’t know what I want to do with my life. I suppose what I most want is to search for, and describe the truth, but I despair of finding the truth; but isn’t that despair a kind of truth?
• In seminary I sensed that my fellow seminarians had come to school for “ammunition,” not for education.
• Those guys that crashed those planes on 9/11 were supposed to be so fervently religious, but their God can’t do shit, that’s why they had to crash the planes for themselves; their God can't fight America for them. . . Oh, and Bush’s God can’t do shit either, that’s why he needs missiles, dirty political tricks, and Karl Rove. (See this month’s Vanity Fair article about how Bush, Rex Reed, and the Religious Right hypocrites trashed John McCain in South Carolina in 2000.) In other words, Bonhoeffer was right: the world has come of age, but some people don’t realize it yet. They continue to pretend God is doing things for them, but they end up just using God to justify all the nonsense (and evil) they want to do.
• If Barbara Walters interviewed me, I’m sure she couldn’t make me cry. This isn’t because I never cry. I cry at movies, while reading, and even sometimes when I’m watching television. But I can’t imagine a subject Barbara would bring up that would make me cry. Does this mean I’ve had a pretty easy life? Probably.
  
  Why do I like “Fight Club?”
  Because I do know what a duvet is.
  Because . . . “self-improvement is masturbation; now self-destruction . . . “
  Because I too dream of staring down on overgrown freeways from atop abandoned crumbling skyscrapers.
  “How’s that working for you . . . being clever I mean?”
  Think about “Marla” at the testicular cancer support group.
  “Soap, the hallmark of civilization.”
  Helena Bonham Carter.
  
  

Cathing Up, Not fish

9:42 p.m.
Okay. It’s been several days since I’ve written anything for my blog.

Last week I saw “Napolean Dynamite” with Justin. We both liked it, but not as much as my friend Susan. When I asked her why she liked it, here’s what she wrote:

I liked ND because it's pretty much the best movie, and ligers are pretty much my favorite mythological animals. And because Tina needs to eat the ham.

I don't know. It's one of those movies that is a nice little escape. And any guy who catches his girl a nice bass is gosh darn swell in my book.

Oh, and how can you NOT love the scene in which N lobs a grapefruti at his loser uncle? Or the one in which Kip runs over the Tupperware bowl and speeds off after fuming, "Dang it!" ?


Yes, Susan is, once again, so right, so perceptive, so brilliant. Napolean Dynomite, though painful at every step, is very funny.

Friday, after struggling most of the morning with a piece on religious fundamentalism, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and 9/11 (don’t ask), I realized that I haven’t done enough research yet. Plus, I spent a bunch of time doing random things for my church job, then I headed off to UCI to try to generate some discussion of Ann Van Sant’s arguments about King Lear. She essentially argues that King Lear dramatizes the difficulty both hierarchical structures and Christian virtues (viz. charity and forgiveness) have in keeping social groups together.

I then went home to get ready for a weekend camping and fishing trip at Lake Irvine. My dad had purchased the trip for Justin (my 12-year-old son) leaving me to accomplish the task. We only fished for about an hour Friday night . . . and caught nothing. We cooked spaghetti on the camp stove, built a fire, and then turned in around 11:00.

I woke about around 12:00 to a woman’s very loud moaning, sighing, and exclamations: “Oh my God, Oh my God, don’t stop, don’t stop.” They went three rounds like this, going and going until 1:30 a.m. The vatos locos on the other side of us kept yelling taunts at them, taunts that went unnoticed by the happy couple, a couple I suspect did not know each other that well, given the fact that they had sex three times in an hour and half, making love like people who may never do it again. I suppose they were happy, in that moment, that moment before she would begin to wonder if sleeping with that big goofball was a big mistake, that moment before the exciting, loud woman turned into the crazy psycho stalker, or, maybe I’m too cynical, just maybe, it was that moment before they realized that their passion was the beginning of something more lasting, more meaningful . . . though I doubt it.

We fished the next day from 7:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m., and never got a bite. We were chasing catfish with mackerel filets which we smeared with “stinky bait.” Justin managed to coat himself in the stinky bait, quite by accident, which made the ride home almost unbearable, but we never caught a thing. I felt disappointed for Justin. I remember what it was like to be twelve, to fish all day, and catch nothing. I could hear him praying under his breath, asking God to let him catch a fish, this boy’s prayer to catch a fish being one of life’s first hard theological lessons.

Sunday, church, Crop Walk (to raise money for hunger), then home to study John Locke.

Today, more Locke, teaching, reading, etc., and work on a short story that’s been rumbling around in my head. I’m setting it in Belgrade, dredging up memories of when I used to live there. I also got my copy of McSweeney’s, the entire issue of which is devoted to short fiction. I read Chris Adrian’s great story, “A Child’s Book of Sickness and Death,” about a young girl who has spent her whole life in and out of a children’s hospital. She’s back for another round of treatments at a moment when she is writing a children’s book about animals who suffer terribly. I know it sounds dreary, but it’s really not . . . well, maybe a bit dreary, but also very beautiful and funny.

Not going to take time to proofread . . . sorry.

"Speak what we feel . . ."

I just spent a couple of hours re-reading sections (okay, most of) “King Lear.” I hope my students will have read it at least once.

This is such a great play, but so depressing. It presents a picture of a “tough world” that offers no justice, a world where power is everything and divine help an illusion. When Lear can no longer force his daughters to care for him, they desert him. When Cordelia lies, dead, at the end of the play, Lear laments, “Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life,/And thou no breath at all? Thou’lt come no more,/Never, never, never, never, never!” (V.iii.304-06). This is so heartbreaking, yet universal for those who face the truth of death—the good do, sometimes, die young, much too young, and we wonder “why?” and we try to wrap our minds around that “never, never, never . . .” but we just can't.

Yet there is a kind of hopefulness in the play, too. Lear, exposed to the cruelty of the world, develops compassion. Cornwall’s cruelty is challenged by a brave servant, and an aged tenant overcomes his class antagonisms to help Gloucester find Edgar in the heath. And, of course, Cordelia remains the voice of love, forgiveness, and honesty. The play offers us the hope that we can bring love to life in our own acts of compassion.

It also presents us with a challenge, the challenge that closes the play when Edgar urges us to “Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say . . .” (V.iii.323). This is the challenge I’ve taken on myself. This is why I can’t be ordained as a minister in the church. This is at least one of the reasons why my whole career seems off track. I want to say what I feel, and not what I ought to say.

Of course, I don’t, not really. Instead of saying what I feel out loud, I write it down; I put words into the mouths of invented characters, I shroud what I feel in essays clothed with intellectual sophistication. Can we really live with other people if we say what we feel, and not what we ought to say? Yet, this is what I want to do: I want to say what I feel, and not what I ought . . .

What else did I do today?

Well, I got the big kids ready for school, then watched the little girls for a few minutes while my wife took a shower, then I went out to my garage and worked for a while on some memoir stuff (my only work space at home is in our garage). Then I went to church, after looking at Scotchman’s (flat). I tried to work at my office there for a couple of hours, answering email, contacting people at Y & R, trying to put out the fires that go along with my church job . . .

Then a couple of guys from the GAO called me about working for them. The job sounded pretty good. It includes travel, teamwork, chances to learn about new things, do research, write, and make a difference. It still probably ranks as a third or fourth career choice with me, but it beats being homeless.

I heard some demographer on “Marketplace” today. He described our demographic situation as a kind of hourglass: the baby-boomers represent a big group that is approaching retirement, and the twenty-somethings today represent another big bulge. Guess who’s fucked? That’s right: Gen X-ers. He was saying what we already know, the Baby Boomers will hold onto all the really good jobs until it’s too late for Gen X-ers to get them, but not so late that we won’t have to somehow think of a way to fund social security for them. Yes, I’m a whiney, bitter, Gen X cliché.

I said I would go surfing today, no matter how flat it was, and I did. I spent about 25 minutes carving up two-foot slop at 28th Street. Despite the horrible conditions, it was fun.

I watched/listened to several innings here and there of what amounted to a devastating defeat for the Angels, but tomorrow is another day, and Schilling won’t be pitching.

I watched the Vice-Presidential Debate. I can’t help it, but every time I see Dick Cheney I hear that Darth Vader theme music in my head.

I also had to watch the kids for a couple of hours while Barbara helped out with the schools’ book fair.

I was feeling pretty lonely today, but Shakespeare is a pretty good friend, and Neptune hardly ever lets me down when I give him a chance.

Antigone, Fathers & Sons, 50 First Dates

Sorry it’s been so long since I’ve posted anything. I’ve been super busy and ultra-depressed: please keep sharp objects away from me (not kidding).

Part of the problem is how flat the surf has been lately. I’ve got to paddle out tomorrow, even if it's flat, or I’ll go completely crazy.

So . . . I won’t bother trying to catch you up . . . let’s start fresh with today.

I was busy working all day, but I feel like I got so little done. After getting the kids to school I spent about an hour and half checking my email, then brainstorming/researching what I should be working on this week. I’ve got to make contact with Young & Rubicam about getting a job there . . . advertising is not exactly my dream job, but I have to find a way to make living that doesn’t involve my working 90 hours/week. I figure if I could get a full-time ad job I’d at least be working with people I like, and I’d be doing something creative, and I’d be (hopefully) making real money, and I could still work on writing short stories, screenplays, and that elusive novel in my spare time. I’d planned to shoot off some calls to some contacts I have at Y&R during my office hours, but surprise, surprise, some students actually came to my office hours, so I spent the entire time discussing their essays with them.

They’re supposed to be writing on “the father-son relationship in Antigone.” Teaching writing is hard. I find myself wanting to take over their projects and just write them myself, but that wouldn’t be teaching, would it? I think I talked way too much, giving way too much advice, but I can’t help myself. I'm supposed to be more "Socratic," make them struggle more, but I keep jumping in with my ideas/suggestions. I had planned on spending about 25 minutes going over student theses in class today, and then dive into “King Lear,” but in both my sections I ended up spending the entire time working on their theses and then two more hours in my office tossing ideas around.

So, in a nutshell, I spent from 1-5 p.m. today discussing the relationship between Creon and Haemon. I couldn’t help but reflect on my own relationship with my father. He still goes to “Basic Youth Conflicts” seminars. BSY is an ultra-conservative fundamentalist Christian group that emphasizes patriarchy as God’s solution for every problem in the world. They teach that a man is the head of his household until he dies. In other words, I should still be checking in with my father about every decision I make. Conveniently his father his dead, so he doesn’t have to check in with him. All my failures seem to just underscore for my dad that my life is so fucked up because I have “removed myself from God’s protection” over my life, namely my father’s rule. Like Creon, any disagreement with my father has always been seen by him as a sign of pure disloyalty, ingratitude, and impiety. I'm sure he’s not surprised that I’m such a loser.

However, if I were writing on the “father-son” relationship in Antigone I wouldn’t write on this kind of conflict; I would focus on Eros. The chorus has a really long speech in which they suggest that it is Eros that has ruined the relationship between Haemon and Creon. I think that’s right. Haemon loves (erow) Antigone, and even though Creon says his son can “find another field to plow,” Haemon’s passion for Antigone leads him to confront his father, and ultimately to kill himself. Eros is so dangerous, but without it would life be worth living? I think Plato was right: our only converse with God is through Eros.

What else did I do today? Well, I babysat the girls and we, at least Elly and I, watched “Fifty First Dates”—a film I rented by mistake; I meant to get “Coffee and Cigarettes,”—which turned out to be pretty good. Some of the individual scenes were really lame, but the overall idea—high concept all the way—worked really well, showing the power of love (agape & Eros) to change our world, to make it better by forcing to see, and be with, each other.

Oh, and I also went to a Humanities Core Lecture on “King Lear” (given by A. Van Sant). She had a pretty interesting thesis that fit really well with Antigone. She argued that the play “dramatizes” the way old, hierarchical modes of social organization—modes based on deference (and duty?)—can’t hold social organizations together.

Oh, and I spent some time reading Roorbach and thinking about characterization in memoir.

Oh, and I read a really challenging article by Jeff Gordon (on Project Greenlight Website). He pointed out that most screenplays fail because the Big Idea is no good. The writer needs to really know what is entertaining about their script and how this script “contributes in a fresh way to the movie-going experience.” I’m going to try to take this as a much needed kick-in-the-ass as I go through another rewrite of “Used Books,” but maybe I need to work more on another concept. I feel like the way I tell the story is “high concept,” but I rely too much on humorous dialogue to amp up the entertainment value, and you can’t show that entertainment in a logline.

Oh, and I bought “(Rock) Superstar” by Cypress Hill off I-Tunes today. Is it shallow that I love that song? I’ve listened to it like eight times today.

Finally, had Humanities Core Staff meeting today: nothing memorable.