Category: Uncategorized (So Far)

The Men

Few first-round surprises. Nadal, Djokovic, Thiem, the Roadrunner and Wawrinka all handled their first-round matches in comfortable straight-set wins. Murray and Nishikori needed four sets, but prevailed. Dustin Brown’s stunt tennis failed to bamboozle Monfils.

The only major upset was Sasha Zverev losing in four sets to Fernando Verdasco. Sasha at his best can beat Verdasco, but Verdasco was always going to be a tough match-up on clay. Still, in my predictions, I claimed Sasha was a threat. It didn’t quite work out that way, did it?

Not a lot that stood out as remarkable, though Ferrer beating Donald Young 13-11 in the fifth certainly counts. It was a highly entertaining finish to the match. Playing what amounts to a six-set match probably also ends Ferrer’s chances of going particularly far in this tournament. The wear and tear adds up quickly.

The Women

Kerber. Out limply in the first round, and not really much of a surprise. Maybe players should be given the option to decline the one-seed. It might help them play better.

Petra Kvitova. She won her first match back in straight sets. Great to have her back.

The Bowling Ball of Inconsistency Rolled Down the Lane. But to my surprise, it was nearly a gutter ball. Besides Kerber, the only top-16 seed to lose was Konta, seeded seventh.

Who Are You Wearing?

After the brashness of some of last year’s clothes, especially the zebra stripes Adidas dressed its players in, this year seems positively sedate. Adidas has its players in classic-cut white with tasteful green accents. Did last year’s designers get fired or something?

From what I can tell, Nike did not put an X behind Rafa’s bull logo, which is clearly a mistake.

The French Open started yesterday. I wrote what follows before it started. These are the narratives I’m using to guide myself through the tournament this year.

The Men

Rafael Nadal: Though he was soundly outplayed in the quarters of Rome, thereby spanking my semi-prediction of a sweep of the European clay-court titles right on the bum, Rafa remains the overwhelming favorite here. That loss in Rome also meant that he played two fewer matches, suffered a little less wear and tear, and recovered for a couple of extra days, which all together actually increases his probability of winning the French.

A win this year would be his tenth French. With the convergence of speeds across the surfaces in the last ten or fifteen years, it’s hard to imagine anyone will come close to that kind of single-surface dominance ever again. You’ve got to be pulling for him.

Dominic Thiem: In the past few weeks, he and Nadal met in the finals of Barcelona (Nadal won comfortably), the finals of Madrid (Nadal won less comfortably) and the quarters of Rome, when Thiem showed that he has the tools to beat Rafa, at least sometimes. After that match against Nadal, I was quick to declare¹ that Thiem had just thrust himself into the conversation as the only serious rival to Nadal right now, and that we should hope to see them together in the final.

[I wrote this before the draw. Thiem and Nadal drew into the same half.]

Then the next day he got absolutely erased by Novak Djokovic, 6-1 6-0, a beating so humiliating I had to wonder if I was overestimating him. Except check out this quote from his post-match news conference: “I was empty. I was just not mentally on the level I should be against these opponents. It happens from time to time if you play a lot of matches. And if it happens against a guy like Novak, 6-0, 6-1 or a score like this, is the logical outcome.”

So what was the real culprit? The commentators simply raved about Novak’s performance that day, saying it was the best they’d seen him play since the French a year ago. They clearly really want to declare that he’s back. But I argue that Thiem genuinely was fatigued, mentally spent, and had arrived at the match with no clear game-plan–this after putting a great deal of energy into developing a winning game plan against Rafa the day before. Consider: even with Djokovic playing at his very best, Thiem’s groundstrokes and serve would on any normal day guarantee him a couple of service-game holds per set. And I say that notwithstanding that Djokovic presents a match-up he doesn’t like and hasn’t figured out. 6-2 6-2 would be a pretty serious beating too, but on any normal day Thiem would achieve at least that.

Assuming he comes back recharged from his week off, he needs to be considered among the favorites at the tournament.

Novak Djokovic: He erased Thiem in the semis at Rome. The commentators were quick to declare that the old Novak was back. He’s the defending champion, and it just feels wrong to say he’s an underdog. For a period of a year, from Wimbledon 2015 through the French 2016, he was absolutely invincible. It looked like he was seriously going to challenge Federer’s record for most Grand Slams ever. But since he won the French, his intensity has fallen through the floor. He’s a mere shell of himself. Yeah, he beat the pants off of Thiem. Then the next day in the final against Sasha Zverev, he started the first game like this: double-fault, unforced, unforced. He got broken at 15 in that game. He got completely and soundly beaten over the course of the match. It wasn’t even really as close as the 6-4, 6-3 scoreline would suggest. In total points, Zverev won, 64-48. That’s a beating.

Sasha Zverev: While it’s kind of hard to imagine that at 20 years old he has the mental toughness to keep his shit fully together over seven rounds of best-of-five tennis, his title in Rome (his first Masters 1000 win) thrusts him into the conversation of players to watch this tournament.

Andy Murray: Andy will be the one-seed here this week, but he’s shown no evidence at any point this year that he’s the player he was at the end of last year. It’s impossible to imagine that he’ll repeat as a finalist here like he did last year. I expect he’ll exit limply in a middle round. Maybe he can get it together in time to defend his title at Wimbledon.

Stan Wawrinka: Never, ever count Wawrinka out of a Grand Slam. He’s like a freight train. If he gets out of the first week and gets up to momentum, from that point he’s capable of going all the way. His clay-court form has been underwhelming so far this year, so he’s certainly a long-shot, but until he loses, never, ever count him entirely out of a Slam.

The Women

Serena’s having a baby. Maria wasn’t granted a wild card. So that’s the two biggest stars in the women’s game, and winners of four of the last five French Opens. Defending champion Garbiñe Muguruza will be here; she made it to the semis of Rome, about the best performance she’s had in a tournament since she won last year. She’s been wildly inconsistent since her victory in the French, and her chances appear to have taken a real dive after her injury and subsequent retirement in the Rome semis. That means you almost should count her out. She’s shown no ability to handle the pressure since she won here last year, and she’s nursing an injury. Hard to imagine she’ll go real far.

So who does that leave? At one point I called most of the women’s game “a parade of also-rans,” and I haven’t really changed my assessment. While champions of the women’s game like to claim the wide-open field is a feature, not a bug, I disagree. Why? For me–and, I hazard, most sports fans–the interest isn’t in seeing two people who are both incredibly skillful at hitting fuzzy yellow balls across a net to each other. If it were, all professional matches would be essentially fungible, because each and every professional tennis player is simply incredible at what he or she does. What we want, instead, is answer to the question, “Which of these players is appealing enough, entertaining enough, that I’m willing to spend my limited time watching them play?” We’re seeking something almost ineffable, something that might be properly called spark, are we not?

Well, the wild inconsistency of the women’s game means there really isn’t any spark. I and others hoped that Angelique Kerber was going to be the person to finally show up as a consistent threat to Serena, but she’s been a shell of herself this year. The number-one mantle fits her uncomfortably. So who does that leave? Based on play, the only player who remains particularly compelling is Venus Williams. She’s been consistent but beatable on clay this year, which is fair because it’s probably her worst surface. It’s hard to imagine that she’s capable of winning the whole thing, no matter how cool that would be.

The other player of real interest is Petra Kvitova. No one expected her to return from her injuries so quickly. After what she went through, every successful shot she hits is a complete and beautiful story unto itself. It will be a pleasure to watch her play.

So here are my predictions for the French Open women’s side:

1. Seeded players will scatter like bowling pins in front of the rolling momentum of their own inconsistent play.

2. Someone is going to win, because the rules demand it. But otherwise … I think it’s possible that every single woman in the field would find a way to lose by the semis.

3. I predict a seeded player will win. There! How’s that for bold? I have narrowed my field down to one of the 32 players.

4. I won’t bother to watch much, if at all, unless Venus or Petra make a deep run.

---

¹ In my zero drafts, anyway. I haven’t published anything to that effect yet.

If you follow the news at all, this week’s inescapable story was the suicide bombing at an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester, England, in which 22 people were killed. After last week’s piece, in which I talked about the negative impact of taking in certain kinds of information, it feels salient to talk about the significance of this story.

As with the kind of story I wrote about last week, there’s nothing useful you can do with information about the bombing, but what’s different is that it almost can’t help but affect you. Coverage was ubiquitous. To filter out a story like this would require a deep commitment to actively avoiding pretty much every news source.

I felt deeply saddened by the news. Maybe it’s that it’s so easy to imagine myself in a similar situation. I know the feeling of leaving a big concert, carrying the glow of having shared a special experience with thousands of others, and so I feel a “There but for the Grace of God” empathy to all those affected by this horrific deed. It’s no mistake that terrorists target this kind of event, not just a place where a lot of people have gathered, but also a place of happiness, of celebration, of sharing the exuberance of life. Terrorism of this nature means to attack the social impulse in our society, to corrupt joy itself.

Terrorism seeks to create exactly the kind of emotional response that I’m experiencing. It is meant to engender sadness, to make the world seem more dangerous, to impose the spectre of itself every time we engage in the sort of aliveness we experience when we attend a concert, a sporting event, or similar. Terrorism means to attack our very sense of the world’s goodness, to corrupt our resiliency and our hope.

And the ugly truth is that terrorism achieves exactly that. Engaging in the act of imaginative empathy–that the people affected are exactly like me–creates exactly the result that the terrorist hopes it will. Furthermore notice that part of what is under attack here is our very ability and desire to empathize. Indeed, my taking the time to write about what happened and to grapple with how to respond is exactly the kind of response the bomber surely wanted. In some ways, my empathy and the response it calls for empowers the hideous people who did this in the first place. But to not feel this sadness feels monstrous. To disengage means dismissing some portion of my own humanity. Surely that is worse. Thus we are faced with the incredible corrupting power of political violence.

From the perspective of what we’ve been writing about here, the question arises, “How do we successfully use energetics to make a difference when this kind of thing happens?”

I wish I had some kind of answer, but I do not. I went into writing about this hoping I’d have something to offer, but I do not. Sometimes the world is a sad place in which people do awful things, and news about those awful things makes its way to us and affects our lives, and I don’t know what to propose to do about it, except feel the sadness because what happened is sad. I wish I could even hope that someday our embodied sense of shared humanity might develop to a sufficient level that political violence of every sort will be seen not as violence against the Other but as violence against ourselves. But even that hope feels empty, because the suicide bomber himself showed quite clearly that he had no qualms about violence against himself.

There’s no easy conclusion here, and that too is sad.

If by that you mean:

1. that the only way to read Free Refills forward, even if you wanted to, is pretty much to scroll all the way to the bottom and then read upwards and
2. that the vast, vast majority of the pieces are in the category, “Uncategorized, So Far,” so that categories aren’t much help

then yeah, I think you’re making a pretty good point there.

I have some pretty clear work to do to bring my declaration about the Not-a-Blogness of Free Refills in line with its formal reality, eh?

A blog’s form dictates that it’s meant to be read backwards, that is, reverse-chronologically.

Free Refills is not a blog, you see, because you’re supposed to read it forward.

The day will come when I bring the work back into the world of things. In that world, writing becomes an object that can be held, and there it makes sense to focus on having written instead of continuing to write. Perhaps not obviously, given my focus on my work at Free Refills, it is in the world of things that the most important aspects of my work exist. Why? Because that is where we live.

There is a way that I’ve never been able to fully express the insight driving what I’m doing. So I persevere. I follow the insight until such time as I am able to say, “Here. This. This is what I mean.” But until I get there, I need to make sure I show up, every single day.

In Jerry’s piece from Tuesday, he spoke of our propensity to meet information without feeling it. He said, “When we stop feeling, the area between right and wrong becomes fuzzy. We can be manipulated by the images we see and the things we hear. It’s truly hard to stay centered and feel the truth.” There’s a reason we don’t feel the information we experience: we are inundated with information that is directly harmful to us if we let it in.

While I was in New Mexico visiting family, I came across a story in the A-section of the Albuquerque Journal with a dateline from somewhere in Oregon headlined, “Man Holding Human Head Stabs Clerk.”

I’m not going to ask you to connect with your center and discover how you feel upon reading this headline. In this instance, I’d prefer that you respond intellectually. Notice that this story has no informational value to you at all. Unless you have some kind of direct connection to what happened–you are on the police force in that town in Oregon, or you know someone involved–there is nothing whatsoever that you can do with this information.

It would be wrong to say that this story’s value is zero. It’s actually worse than that. It’s value is negative, because if you allow a story like this access to your feeling self, it will harm you. The events the story tells of are essentially random. They happened far away from where you live. The horror we feel–or, more likely, recognize that we should feel, without actually feeling–comes from the essential rarity of events like this. However, we evolved in a world in which all information was immediate–someone telling us, “Watch out! There’s a lion over there!”–and our processing systems, both intellectual and energetic, are still rooted in that world. So stories like this, when allowed into the feeling body, are actually a form of poison. They take on an outsize importance and thereby poison our understanding of the world. We come to see events like this as much more common and significant than they really are.

Stories with this kind of negative value abound. You’ll hear about seven children dying in a school bus crash in Tennessee, or a man who kidnapped and imprisoned a woman in Ohio, and what they have in common is that the events in question have no impact on your life, but they tell you the world is a bad place. (These examples, by the way, are meant to be made up, but they probably bear some resemblance to things that actually happened, events that I couldn’t help but have some awareness of just through exposure to news sources.)

Most of us have therefore learned, unconsciously, to not let these sorts of stories have access to our feeling bodies. Unfortunately, because we do this unconsciously, we are training to numb ourselves to negative or problematic occurrences in our lives. (Conversely, when we make the choice consciously, we are doing something good for ourselves, taking control of our own emotional and energetic spaces. Indeed, when we start practicing that kind of approach, we often stop reading or watching the kinds of news sources that offer this kind of information, because we notice it’s easier and healthier to not engage with it at all.)

The impact of practiced numbness is nefarious. We become more and more disengaged from what’s going on around us. The world seems out of our control, beyond our power to do anything about. Numbness about our personal lives dooms us to living attenuated lives, unwilling and unable to change things for the better, either because we believe ourselves powerless to do so, or because we have no felt, emotional access to the value of a potential change. In our political lives, we end up up with a situation like we’re facing now, in which a benumbed populace is no longer able to engage intelligently with the problems it faces and instead chooses wishful-thinking pretend solutions.

While the path to re-engagement is learning to feel, a first step, especially in our political lives, is to stop feeding ourselves poison. If you want to get healthy, first stop doing the things that directly damage your health.

The world of infinite information is not ours, not exactly. In our world, there is enough for everyone to have free refills, too–this belief, that our cups runneth over, is the beating heart of Free Refills, you understand–but the way it works for machines and the way it works for us is different. That’s part of the reason that the age of networked machines has us so confused. It’s not our home. We don’t entirely belong here.

I’ve had important people in my life say to me, “If you don’t think that the daily publishing is working for you, if it’s demanding too much of you to do effectively, if it’s getting in the way of more important work, then stop.” And I’m like, I can’t. I have to find my way through it. Because the essential insights guiding Free Refills still apply. The advent of the machine (itself comprised of many millions of smaller, connected machines) that allows free refills of information–because the marginal cost of a copy is zero–changed everything. We still haven’t come to grips with the new world it brought. In this world it’s no longer enough that I have written; what matters most is that I keep writing.