It was cold and rainy in the Front Range today. A month from now, a system like this would bring snow rather than rain. Snow.
Game of Thrones doesn’t entirely make sense to ski and snowboard people. “Winter is coming,” characters keep intoning, their voices deep with foreboding.
Huh? we think. Don’t you mean “WINTER IS COMING!!”
A few weeks ago, my mentor Jerry said to me, “I don’t think you’re actually a writer. I think you’re meant to be a teacher. Writing is just your modality.”
Well. There’s a bigger story there, including just how disruptive I found that assertion, and how I put it out to the universe and got some pretty clear messages that, goddammit, he’s right. Look for more on this subject in the days ahead.
Anyway, if it’s the case that I’m meant to teach, then Free Refills should be supportive of that in as many ways as possible. I should write pieces that teach, either directly or via the example of my own walk along this path. (I’ve sometimes done a pretty good job with the latter, I think.) The format of Free Refills should also support that mission–an obvious way would be to make it easier for readers to find information that’s useful to them.
But I think to truly succeed at that mission, Free Refills also needs to support a community. I’ve stated before that the true goal of FR is to change the world. While one person working alone can generate good ideas, it takes more than just ideas to effect change. Without people committed to bringing change about, even the best ideas are little more than words.
Let us pretend for a minute that, after having had two separate epiphanies this summer regarding the formatting, and thus evolution, of Free Refills, I really had done something as stupid as leaving the specific details in my head rather than writing them down. Were that case–and this is purely hypothetical, I assure you–what would I do? How would I attempt to productively move forward if my recollections of the exact ideas were now vague and hard to see?
Well, I’d pretty much have to say to myself, “Tough fucking shit.” Sure, I’d do my very best to recall just what it was that I was thinking, based on the desultory notes that do exist, and I’d attempt to follow the breadcrumbs from other people’s work that inspired the ideas in the first place. After that, I’d just have to accept that I might have to substantially figure it out anew. I’ve observed that the best way to generate ideas is to work with whatever ideas I already have, no matter how thin and impoverished, and then make room for magic to happen.
Lucky for me, this is all hypothetical. My recall of those epiphanies is perfect, and it’s only out of silly self-consciousness that I’m not today telling you all about them. So don’t worry about me.
A couple of months ago, I published a piece in which I said that I’d figured out how to organize Free Refills so that it truly supports my assertion that I’m building something lasting here. A few weeks later I wrote that I had figured out how to reformat the site to properly communicate the work that I’m trying to do now. In each case, I said that it all came to me in a big download.
A big download? How intriguing! How sexy!
And then did I zero-draft an explanation to myself about how it all will work? Did I go to my notebook and draw up some mock-ups and tree diagrams explaining the site’s structure? Or did I instead leave it all sitting in my brain, in the expectation that I’d remember it all, despite having experienced again and again and again than any idea that I don’t write down may as well have been an idea in someone else’s head for all the good it does me? Am I now finding myself with only a let’s call it incomplete recollection, and so find myself stuck trying to replicate a pair of epiphanies? I wouldn’t have been stupid enough to have done that, would I? Surely not with something so important, right?
I feel a little bad every time I convince a new friend to check out Free Refills. This piece right here is the 670th I’ve published since I started the Free Refills project, and the vast majority of those pieces are uncategorized. I’ve also never created an index, and I don’t do tags. If you’re new here, you can wander through the few categories that do exist, but after that you pretty much have no choice but to start at the top and read backwards in time.
I’ve been talking about the organization of Free Refills since the autumn equinox of 2015. (Take a gander at the earliest entry in the Rules.) I’ve made promises, and I’ve 100% broken them. Free Refills is still an unorganized mess, I’m still using the default theme, and the only realistic way you can read the bulk of what’s here is via reverse chronology, which kind of gets in the way of my assertion that it’s not a blog, which it isn’t, I promise.
Well, the autumn equinox just rolled by, which makes it harvest time, and in the face of what I just said, the obvious things to take harvest from would be all the pieces I’ve published and all the drafting behind those pieces. I need to read all of it. Doing so should give me a much stronger sense of just what exactly I’ve accomplished, and also go a long way toward giving me a starting point for organizing.
But holy shit is that going to be a lot of work. Behind these 670 pieces there are something like 650,000 words of zero drafts, which is the equivalent of six reasonable-length novels. Thankfully, I like my own writing, so I can think of worse things, but at the same time, I can’t imagine reading six novels by even a favorite writer of mine in a short period of time without getting really really bored.
Well, there’s not much to be done about it. If I really was writing for publication all along, as I so claimed, and not just performing some kind of perverse calisthenics for my fingers, then the professional in me knows that I gotta buck up and do the work that needs to be done. There are bound to be some genuine positives–surely somewhere in all that writing there are some seeds for pieces that I’ve totally forgotten about–but it’s gonna be exhausting as well.
I’m choosing to see it this way: a bountiful harvest will always entail a lot of work. Don’t you agree?
If I were an ’80s hair metal guitarist with a pointy guitar and spandex, I would slam that first chord and while it sustained I would throw my pick hand in the air and saunter to the front of the stage, because fuck yeah.
I spent all week zero-drafting about the energetic transition from summer’s Fruition to autumn’s Harvest and still haven’t quite found the hook for a serious piece. Simultaneously, I’m working with and within a challenging (yet, I believe, ultimately positive) shift in sense of identity. I propose a strong connection between the two. Seems logical, no?
Today I drove down to New Mexico, where the chile harvest is well under way. For dinner tonight I had my mum’s green chile stew, made with this year’s Limitar chile, and it was so hot and so delicious that right now, an hour or more after dinner, I still find myself dopey with endorphins.
Happy Autumnal Equinox.
When the solstice rolled around back in June, things were pretty tough in my life. I was deep in the process of getting everything I owned out of what used to be my home while dealing with several different flavors of heartbreak. It was not a fun time.
But as challenging as things were right then, I had the good sense to look ahead into the next few months, and I envisioned how my summer could unfold, and I realized there was literally nothing besides blocks I myself put up getting in the way of bringing that vision to reality. If I really wanted to, I could have the best summer ever.
Now let me admit: after all those years of living with depression, being happy isn’t something I naturally excel at. It’s pretty easy for me to be not-happy and not even realize it.
So with that in mind, I took the phrase, “Best Summer Ever,” and made it into a sort of mantra. I said it to myself every time I thought of it. I wrote it on the old tennis balls I threw into my ball hopper so that whenever I practiced serving, I’d see those words. If my stalker ever trained a parabolic microphone on me during a practice session, she’d have heard me utter, “Best summer ever, baby,” every time I pulled out a ball so inscribed.
And did it work?
Let’s be clear: I experienced new levels of heartbreak and grief. The only one I’ll give name to here was saying say goodbye to my beloved sweet Mango.
But.
I had joyful mountain bike rides in Summit County. I camped in beautiful places with friends. I saw the Milky Way from the balcony of the condo I was staying in; from the mountains near Twin Lakes, south of Leadville, CO; from a campground in the Bighorn National Forest in Wyoming. I rode a dude’s bad-ass fat bike around a park in Alamosa, CO. I had a meal in New York City that I will never forget. A massive flight of ravens wheeled overhead as I caught one of the most beautiful trout of my life. One day on the practice court, I hit the best serve I’ve ever hit. I drank a shot of Malort in Chicago, for fuck’s sake. I kicked ass in the ass-kicking vest in Wisconsin. Roger Federer won Wimbledon and Rafael Nadal won the U.S. Open. I wrote a bunch. I drank whiskey gingers and gin tonics with dear friends. I went to bed late and slept late. I reconnected with old friends and made new ones.
I cried that morning in Wyoming when the sun disappeared behind the moon and revealed the eye of God.
The last time I was this alive, I was a college kid living in Spain. That was twenty-three years ago.
Best summer ever, baby.
There’s something about the final days of summer that always strike me as the most melancholy days of the year.
It doesn’t matter where I am or what the weather is like. It’s been eleven summers since I lived on the East Coast, where I might have pegged the feeling to the impending grey miasma of winter, which loomed so gloomily that it might have overshadowed all the glories of the East Coast autumn–the beautiful temperatures, the breaking of the humidity, the incandescent fall colors. But I feel similarly here in Colorado. Our autumn may lack the east’s fireworks, but it’s certainly lovely, and, as an avid skier and snowboarder, winter is a season of joy as well. Yet I feel that melancholy every year.
Perhaps it’s something about summer’s vibrancy: the high, hot aliveness of the sun, the way the green of high-summer vegetation takes on an almost tactile quality, a firmness and a force. As all of that begins to fades, no matter how beautiful the weather, no matter how much I enjoy the break in the heat, there is something of a sense of loss. A goodbye.
The equinox is two days away. If goodbye need be said, then I will say goodbye.
Those of you have been here for a while might remember that I have myself a stalker. I’ve never seen her, but I’ve posited her existence based on the disappearance of certain items from my life. I have a near-OCD tendency to double- and triple-check that I haven’t forgotten anything when I leave a place, but somehow things keep disappearing. A surreptitious stalker is the most likely explanation, right?
One of the side-benefits (I guess) of my recent divorce is that, as I was moving myself and all my belongings out of what was formerly my home, I could become pretty sure that something that had disappeared had not simply gotten cast in with other things in my world. I mean, as I was packing, I went through everything.
So it is that I can safely declare that at some point this winter or spring, after a quiet time away, my stalker made her subtle re-appearance into my world. You see, I had a favorite pair of socks. They were colorful, and on the ankle of one of them, it said, “HEY YOU.” On the other, it said, “YEAH, YOU.” And sometime this winter or spring, HEY YOU went missing.
She sent me a pretty clear message this time, don’t you think?