Category: Uncategorized (So Far)

Today is one of those days. Today I expected to feel good but I don’t feel good, and so I feed that bad feeling back into myself. Not just the feeling as it happens but the constant re-comparison between how I feel and how I expected to feel. Not just wallowing but, in a sense, digging. Making it deeper.

Since I awakened at 3am I have been trying to be everywhere except exactly where I am.

Outside the window, a brisk snow is falling. It’s been warm and sunny recently and the snow isn’t sticking on the roads, the roads are dark and wet and the puddles glisten in the light.

For a while I fought with the spring, because the winter was so good and I didn’t want to let it go. But I look outside right now and I see it snowing and I see the road wet but not icing up. Springtime in the mountains: snow still falls when a storm moves in but the warmth continues to hold on.

Today is one of those days. One of those days when it is very hard to meet the day as it happens. Some days you ask, Can I relax into everything that is? And some days you ask, How do I best help the time pass?

Larry the Bartender stood in filtered autumn afternoon light and with his bar towel polished waterspots off the glasses. He wore a vest and a red, long-ended western bow tie, evocative of the Old West saloonkeeper he sometimes imagined himself the echo of. Though his family could draw their lineage in this land all the way back to the Spanish land grants, Older than Old West, this here was decidedly a New West, where the Indians and their Pueblo-influenced casinos were the richest people around, where the descendants of conquistadors and brave colonials now shot heroin or died in rollover crashes on the way home from the bar. Two of Larry’s customers had died that way, and Larry thanks God that they took only themselves and their battered pickups with them. The roadside crosses their families had erected felt more obligatory than sorrowful, as though the families had purchased the crosses long before, in anticipation. Drunk-driving deaths around here being so common, perhaps they had.

Larry measured himself against the values of his abuelita, who at 83 still strung her own ristras and made by hand, in the manner she was taught by her own grandmother, the tortillas she served with every meal. Though she had eventually come to a moral detente with the existence of the grand, fluorescent-lit Safeway, she still vocally derided the shelves of prepackaged tortillas as “Further proof that the gringos are trying to ruin us.” Larry bit his tongue–the owner of the dominant purveyor of tortillas in the state was every bit as Hispanic as Larry and his abuelita. But his heart swelled with pride when his seven-year-old little girl, Teresa, came home after spending a day learning the art of tortilla-making from her great-grandmother and expressed her great-grandmother’s own disdain for machine-made tortillas: “Like Wonder Bread, but in circles.” Three days later, Larry’s wife reported to him that Teresa had, while coloring in her book, asked what Wonder Bread actually was.

In response to the USWNT’s outrageous lawsuit against US Soccer, in which they assert wage discrimination because they only get paid a quarter of what the men make:

The women play on a pitch half the size of the men and their games last half as long. As there are no factual errors in my analysis, it’s clear they only do a fourth as much work and therefore should get one-fourth the pay.

It’s science.

Now that my ski-teaching season is over, I’ve been reflecting a lot on my teaching, what I learned, and how to teach more effectively.

I had to admit to myself that I went into this winter with the idea that learning centering would enable everyone to improve radically, almost as if by magic. When I put it that way, the idea looks pretty ridiculous. Certain students had major breakthroughs through centering and focusing on the breath, but in general, while a few minutes’ instruction followed by consistent admonitions of “remember to breathe” may have sped up learning (hard to know for sure), it was no panacea.

What I didn’t understand with sufficient clarity was this: People bring deeply held patterns of stress with them. The process of learning a new skill will dredge those patterns up from the sediments of the students’ lives.

Getting students to center and breathe freely on flat ground while not moving worked pretty well. But as soon as they did something that took them out of their comfort zone–which, for some first-timers, came as soon as we started to practice side-stepping (the second skill we practiced once we got both skis on, after sliding around on flat terrain), and hit almost all of them the first time they went up the magic carpet and saw that even on the minimal slope of the bunny hill, being unable to control one’s speed could have serious consequences–patterns of stress in the body generally came clearly to the fore.

Thus the question that’s dominating my reflections: How do we most efficiently replace those patterns of stress with patterns of flow?

Over the course of twelve days, the USMNT played three matches and took nine points out of a possible nine. I wrote that despite a porous defense, the US looked to be good for seven points in the three games, and since they were lucky to get away with the win in Jamaica, I’ll say my assessment was pretty solid.

Problems still clearly remain. Klinsmann seems to have settled on a center-back pairing of Besler and Gonzalez, and while it’s true they anchored a defense that only gave up one goal in three games, it was hard to look at their performance on the pitch and think, “Awww yeah, we’ve got this nailed down.” The way Gonzalez didn’t close [a player whose name is now lost to time] last night toward the end of the first half seemed a little too indicative of where the defense is right now. Good enough to qualify out of CONCACAF? Sure. Good enough to face a Spain or Brazil or the real Germany? (Sorry, that friendly was a good win, but it doesn’t really count.) No way.

It’s a little premature to write our ticket to Brazil right now, but with 13 points, the lead in the group, and four games remaining, you’ve got to say the US have put themselves in a good position to qualify. If they take six points in their matches against Mexico (here) and Costa Rica (away) in September–a stretch, but not impossible–then their two matches in October could practically be friendlies. And then from there we’ll have however many friendlies prior to the World Cup, and that might give us the time we need to get our defense up to actually acceptable.

(Apparently I still had more to say, because I left myself notes in anticipation of coming back to the draft. They read:

• Jozy confidence
• Bradley in midfield
• Dempsey
• That one series of passes against Panama

Of course I no longer know what I planned to say. I suppose I was going to say that Jozy Altidore, like many strikers, feasts when his confidence is high and starves the rest of the time; when I looked it up just now, I saw that he scored in all three of the qualifiers I was writing about.

I imagine I was going to say that Bradley ran the midfield, and that Dempsey was extremely important in the second striker/No. 10 role. I bet that one series of passes against Panama was really pretty, and probably led to a goal. But who knows?

I’d been in Albuquerque for two days when I wrote this draft, and was very much trying to get my feet under me. Also, a little more than week before, my friend Nolus had died in the desert near Grand Junction; searchers had found his body on Monday the 11th. I’d be driving back up to Colorado for his memorial a few days after I wrote this draft. What do you think: can I maybe forgive myself for never finishing and publishing this piece?

And the USMNT? They qualified comfortably for the 2014 World Cup, finishing first out of CONCACAF. Their defense never did get any better, but they played with enough grit (and good luck) to get out of their group in Brazil before falling to Belgium in the Round of 16. From what I gather, Jürgen Klinsmann still hasn’t solved their defensive frailties, though you can’t seriously expect me to be watching early-round World Cup qualifiers in the middle of the most thrillingly weird Premier League season of all time, can you?)

I said it was the Bargaining stage, but my wife said it was pure Denial: if Andre Marriner awarded the obvious penalty to Gareth Bale in the 20th minute instead of making an ass of himself (Marriner) for booking him (Bale) for diving, then maybe just maybe Newcastle decide that having the opportunity to play the spoiler against Arsenal gets them fired up enough to at least hold the draw. I mean, Koscielny’s goal was pretty ragged, to say the least. A team with something to play for doesn’t give that up, do they?

Unfortunately, that’s the kind of not-very-rational counterfactual you have to console yourself with when your team has slumped enough through the final two months of the season to find themselves no longer in control of their own destiny. It’s painful, but is it surprising? I can’t be the only Spurs fan who was hoping against hope that they’d avoid another late-season collapse, while at the same time watching each match with an air of dread, kind of expecting it. Because what had changed to prevent it?

Everything looked so good after Spurs beat Arsenal 2-1 on March 3rd, and then followed it with a total shellacking of Inter Milan, 3-0, on Thursday, March 7th. With ten games to play in the Prem, Spurs sat 3rd, two points ahead of Chelsea and seven ahead of Arsenal. They would be heading back to the San Siro without having given up an away goal. Things were looking good.

Three days later against Liverpool at Anfield, Spurs held a 1-2 lead going into the final quarter of the match. Liverpool looked on the ropes–and then in the 66th minute Kyle Walker got too casual and badly misplayed a backpass(?) to Hugo Lloris, which allowed Stuart Downing to easily steal the ball and beat Vertonghen on the line. (Breathe deep to quell your revulsion, then watch it here.)

Am I the only one who felt it, right then, that feeling of a switch being flipped? One minute, Liverpool are looking like a team beaten, Spurs are 24 minutes from an unbeaten run of 13 matches, including five wins in a row, and then the momentum shifts. As the match progressed, Spurs looked like they might be lucky enough to escape with a draw, but then in the 81st minute Jermaine Defoe made a dreadful backpass, Assou-Ekoto fouled Suarez in the box, and Spurs somehow managed to lose.

From there, the wheels came completely off: four days later at the San Siro, Spurs got totally outplayed and only advanced in extra time off a last minute Adebayor goal to win on away goals. Three days after that, they lost at home 0-1 to 11th-place Fulham. In their next tie in the Europa League, against Basel, they went out on penalties. Their draw against Everton on April 7th dropped them from third in the league to fifth, as both Arsenal and Chelsea passed them.

Going into the last weekend of the season, they’d gone unbeaten in seven, with four wins and three draws, but still trailed Arsenal by one point for the final Champions League spot.

So here they were on the last day needing help from Arsenal/Arsenal’s opponent Newcastle to get into the Champions League, save their season, and not lose their best player. Their best hope was to get an early goal to put pressure on Arsenal and perhaps enliven Newcastle. They should have had that chance in the 20th minute, but Marriner shafted them, and after that the team looked subdued for most of the rest of the match. Arsenal scored, and little hope remained. A limping 0-0 draw looked like a real possibility. Then in the 89th minute Gareth Bale uncorked one last amazing goal (doubtless raising his transfer fee by another £5 million in the process) and Spurs finished the season with a vapid half-triumph. One more collapse, one more fifth-place finish, one more impending loss of their best player.

(Video of Koscielny’s goal for Arsenal and Gareth Bale’s for Spurs here.)

Repeat a tragedy enough times and it becomes a farce.

But how I was hoping. Spurs played most of the season with a squad containing one-and-a-half strikers (and even that may be giving Adebayor too much credit), a didn’t-make-much-sense amalgam of players brought in to fill the hole left by Luka Modric’s departure for Real Madrid, and one player whose rise has been so meteoric, I’ve been continually terrified that one day I’d hear he’d failed a PED test.

If you’re an Arsenal fan, Spurs’ yearly farce is delicious (read this ESPNFC post to get a feel for the level of gloating we’re talking about), but for the rest of us, isn’t Spurs-to-the-Champions-League the better story? Getting third or fourth place with a limited, unbalanced squad, keeping the most exciting player in the Prem, finding out what AVB can achieve when he actually stays with a squad for more than one season (which he’s never done) and with the greater transfer flexibility afforded by Champions League money and the appeal to outside players looking to join a squad in the ascendancy? If you root for any team besides Arsenal, tell me the truth: would you rather see one-dimensional Theo Walcott against Europe’s best, or Gareth Bale? It can’t just be Spurs fans who are tired of watching Arsene Wenger scowl on the touchline as his overmatched team–always punching above their weight, but still–crashes out of the Champion’s League and finishes the Prem in 4th place.

Yes, I’m a diehard fan, and yes, I’m biased, but Spurs in the Champions League would have been the better story. We’ve already seen the movie (just last year!) where Spurs finish fifth and lose their best player. But here it is: Hello Europa League for Spurs, Hello Real Madrid for Spurs’ Best Player: The Sequel. So sure, I’m making my way through the five stages of grief. But how many stages of boredom are there?

(All of the soccer pieces I published that spring were from the time between my Easter visit, when my dad announced he was ready to begin the process of dying, and my arrival in Albuquerque in June.

I felt like I’d found a little momentum with the writing, so I had this idea going in to my time there that I would write all summer long, that I would write about what was occurring as it happened. Looking back, I respect the impulse while smiling sadly at the naivete. I had no idea, going in, just how hard that summer was going to be. In some ways, I didn’t even understand it as it was happening. The full intensity of the experience was so vast that it kind of obviated reflection. All I could do was hold on.

How hard was that summer? I described it, later, like this: “Like being hit by a bus, but in slow motion.”)

In the spring of 2013, I returned to writing my soccerblog after a several-year hiatus. I published semi-regularly during April, May and early June of that year, but I also drafted a handful of pieces that I never published. Those pieces have been tapping for my attention ever since.

I recently set what seemed a semi-quixotic intention to finally publish them, despite them being about soccer-related happenings from almost three years ago. (Saying they’re no longer topical is putting it mildly.) I saw it as an act of clearing out clutter. I figured it might be kind of weird from a reader’s point of view, but worthwhile nonetheless.

Earlier today, for probably the first time since I stopped working on the pieces, I looked at the directory on my hard disk that they live in. The last of them is dated June 19th, 2013. June 19th, 2013, was three days after I arrived in Albuquerque to spend my dad’s final dying weeks with him.

For three years, I’ve believed it was perfectionism that kept me from finishing those pieces, and the tapping for attention was just a nagging sort of self-blame. Today, when I saw that date, it struck me that perhaps I’d misunderstood why they never got finished, and that perhaps there’s a bigger reason why there’d be value in finishing them.

We’re a few days past the spring equinox. Jerry and I launched this project on the autumn equinox last September, six months ago, making this a good time for a little reflection. We said in our initial pieces that our goal was to develop a training program that would help people reach their highest potential. How are our results so far?

In many ways, we’re still just starting this process. Our initial hypothesis was that we could use Jerry’s energy techniques to radically accelerate our improvement in sports, using golf as our playground. Unfortunately, because of my shoulder injury back in the fall, we haven’t been able to test that hypothesis much. The injury really limited what we could do for a while, and by the time I was healed enough to take full swings again, winter was shortly to arrive. Winter is just now releasing its grip; we’re finally on the cusp of being able to focus on the experimentation and practice that will be necessary to bring this project to fruition.

On the other hand, even under those constraints, we have seen some evidence of real progress. To name just the most recent example: a few weeks back when Jerry and I went to the pitching green and practiced what I called “allowing,” we hit some of the best chips and pitches of our lives.

What I have learned by teaching skiing this winter will doubtless inform my approach to the project as we accelerate back into it in the weeks and months ahead. Between all the energy I put into improving my own skiing and teaching scores of students these past few months, a few principles about learning have come much more clearly into focus for me:

1. There’s no substitute for practice.
2. Quality instruction is, at minimum, helpful, and is often indispensable.
3. Centering is a skill, not a panacea.
4. Patterns of negative verbal/linguistic self-description substantially hamper our ability to learn or improve a skill.

In weeks ahead, I’ll be writing more about these principles, and, now that winter and the ski season are winding down, intend to bring a great deal of focused energy to the project Jerry and I set for ourselves six months ago. My goal remains to break 100 over an 18-hole round. My dream is to do it by the anniversary of starting this project. I look forward to getting to work.

Happy spring. Thanks for reading.

On that first chairlift ride they ask me what I do the rest of the time and I tell them I’m a writer and they ask me what I write and I tell about them my various projects including that I publish every day on my website and they say, “So it’s a blog?” and I tell them that though I publish online every day it’s not a blog.

By this time I have already demonstrated some expertise as an instructor, so I have garnered some trust and established some authority and so they tend to accept that answer, or at least not object to it. Perhaps they figure that the person they’re trusting to keep them safe while teaching them skiing might take offense and then “accidentally” take them down some black diamond ice sheet and laugh diabolically while they desperately try to pizza their way to a stop before they careen off into the trees to their deaths. But telling them Free Refills is not a blog, while true, lacks any real explanatory power. It’s just kind of lame. I mean, Free Refills is also not an elephant nor a plate of spaghetti and while it might be amusing to list all the things Free Refills is not (a five-liter glass bottle of isopropyl alcohol; a coverless mid-90s issue of Newsweek; Donald Trump’s pocket square), it doesn’t really get us any closer to understanding what Free Refills is.

I guess I could start to explain about how it all started with a great idea, but that’s a lengthy explanation and the lift ride is only so long.

And were they to check out Free Refills, I’m not sure they’d be persuaded. As I’ve had to admit many times, it certainly looks like a blog.

I need a noun. I need some concrete way of describing what this is. (And, while accurate, “The Greatest Website in the History of the Internet” might not be immediately believable.)

And as much as I think a noun might help them understand, at least as important is that it might help me. A solid, concrete noun would make it easier for me to understand what I’m doing, and why, and how the writing and the website itself should communicate it.