In our family, we don’t sing “Happy Birthday.” We sing the Birferness Song. It goes like this:
Birferness on you,
Birferness on you,
Birferness dear Papa,
Birferness on you!
Two years ago today, I called him and sang that to him for the last time.
I love you, Papa. Happy birferness. I sure do miss you.
Imagine someone tells you he hates the town he lives in. “Why don’t you move?” you ask. Well, he says, it’s just that here I really know my way around.
Do you then warn him? Do you tell him, “Engage in certain other behaviors long enough (for example, writing and publishing every day your not-a-blog) and you might find yourself with a one-way bus ticket to the big city you’ve always dreamed of living in. What will you do then?”
At poker Monday night I played pretty well for a while, meaning I was careful with position and played the player before the cards. Then a couple of players left and another joined and the game changed and I did not adapt, or maybe I did but in the wrong direction, and I played poorly for some time and bluffed away a lot of money. When I took a moment to explore how I felt, I noticed I was in a cloud of unhappiness, all angry and red. There was a certain familiarity to the feeling. I’d been there before.
I awoke the next morning at 5 when the dog began whining for her breakfast, and immediately a thought came up, a reflection on, or more accurately, through, the previous night’s game. It fell into place with a click, like a puzzle piece finding its home.
The problem isn’t that I lack the tools. It’s that I actively but unconsciously engage in self-defeating behaviors. I don’t play badly because I don’t know better. I play badly because losing confirms something I want, on some level, to see confirmed.
…all together around the table on this temperate spring evening, one dog sprawled and deeply asleep on the couch between my sister and Debby, the little dog at my sister’s feet, keeping her toes warm, his nose in the basket that is the woven strap of her shoes.
“I’m not getting up,” my sister says. There’s just a thumbnail of Manhattan left in her cocktail glass. “You can go get me a brownie if you want.”
“Can I?” I ask.
“Actually, I need to pee,” she says. “Sorry, dogs.” The dogs look slightly aggrieved as she gets up, but neither makes any effort to find another place to sleep.
The day has been just long enough, the night just dark enough. Alex, our graduate and guest of honor, is a particular type of quiet tonight. He’s not much of a talker around let’s call us adults, but in this instance he’s present, checking his phone only intermittently for something better to do, rather than checking out completely via some game or SnapChat or whatever technology occupies the mindspace of a young adult these days.
I don’t feel old, and yesterday at his high school graduation (which was also my high school, many years ago), I could certainly see that I am no longer his age, that those faces are fresh and their world still new, but I can also still remember walking into a tent (maybe that exact tent?) on the same well-kept playing field near what was then simply called the middle school and is now West Campus. I remember from that day a feeling of momentousness, and a thrill but also a hollowness when it was over, of something emptied and not yet filled. How am I almost 41? What path did I take to get here? Would I be here on this day no matter the route I took? Are regrets just ghosts we refuse to allow to rest? (“Haunt me,” we tell them. “Who would I be without you?”)
Nuria insists that we all do a shot of tequila. “Arriba, abajo, al centro, pa’ dentro,” she intones.
A strange disorientation persists, as though some part of me has fallen back 23 years and is demanding a reckoning. “You had your whole life in front of you,” he–I–says to that long ago me, and is it I or he who responds, “Perhaps I had something to learn.”
And in that moment the situation becomes just right–a mixture of drunkenness and good cheer and a comfortable temperature and flattering lighting–and we attain a sudden mental resonance and a new understanding begins to dawn on us and we declare without reservation that what drives the observer into hungry desire is the shapely calf.
From that place of clarity, I demonstrate how the world will come to see: with my legs crossed ankle-on-knee, I slowly pull up the leg of my jeans, slowly push down my sock into my boot, and thereby frame my lower leg just so. I have become the quintessence of desire. My actions tell the world: I have truly fantastic calves.
But ours is an age in which we don’t fully exist until we are observed mediated. Until we are captured and pixelated by the cameras on the devices we carry with us everywhere, devices that demand our attention like needy children, and until we are displayed, glowing, on a screen, we remain incomplete. Without a photo, the moment exists as a moment only, shared amidst joy and laughter. How will we be remembered? Without a photo transmitted through the ether, who besides those currently present will get to admire my handsome calves?
As with the images we have come to know and–well, come to know–there will be an art to it, a subtle language developed around the undiscussed distortions of technology. There’s that angle so often deployed in our self-portraits: the photo taken slightly from above, such that the tilted perspective, lens distortion, and wide depth of field provided by our attenuated little cameras make us look just so: forehead slightly distended, eyes cast winsomely upward, chin shortened and narrowed.
Call it the selfie angle.
And so it will be here as well. We’ll shoot from above and along the calf, so that the calf appears rounded and full and powerful, the ankle narrowed, the foot tiny. Thus I declare to the world: See me. Desire me. Love me.
Finally I display the calves that allow me to be seen.
This is the new thing. This is the moment it goes viral. You heard it here first: #calfselfie.
Yesterday’s piece was as depressed and depressing a piece as I’ve allowed myself to publish here. As I set it to be published, I wondered if I would feel differently and reach a different conclusion after a good night’s sleep. “Maybe I’m just down today,” I said to myself.
My friend Rafe sent me a link to this video about FIFA’s corruption from John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight. I watched it when I was done writing yesterday, wondering if John Oliver’s smiling outrage could help me rediscover just what I was so pissed off about.
But I tested my feelings on the matter when I woke up this morning and found them still consonant with yesterday’s piece. I find it all pretty disgusting, the kickbacks and bribes and financial shenanigans that have been FIFA’s bread and butter for so long. It’s all pretty awful, but it’s awful in a way that’s so typical, I’m no longer certain of the value of putting energy into even being angry about it.
And I have to be honest with myself. FIFA’s been essentially synonymous with corruption for years and years, and yes, it troubles me, but what have I done about it? They have one product to sell, the World Cup. Have I stopped buying? Have I said, “I’m sorry, I just can’t support an organization like that. Count me as one pair of eyeballs not watching. You’ve lost me, advertisers.”
Are you kidding? Of the 64 matches in the 2014 World Cup, I probably watched 50 of them. Take that, FIFA!
I can try to pardon myself by saying that one person’s lone protest isn’t going to make any difference, which is true enough, but I don’t think it absolves me of anything. Facing this kind of corruption and wagging my finger while lapping up the entertainment on offer may feel good–nothing in the world feels quite like righteous indignation–but it’s a waste of energy and hypocritical to boot. Better to just admit that the shenanigans of the world are too deeply ingrained to do anything about, allow our plutocratic overlords their fun, and accept the bonbons they allow us in return. Did I mention how great a World Cup it was? It was really great.
The kind of thing FIFA does is so typical of powerful organizations, and so minor league in comparison to others, that fretting about it is a waste of time.
Want some examples?
Watch the part at 7:50 in the John Oliver piece, when the Al Jazeera journalist questions Sepp Blatter about their non-profit status and then mentions their billion dollars in the bank. Gross, right? You know what else is a non-profit? The National Football League. The NFL, the most popular sport in America, brings in an estimated $9.2 billion in revenue every year, but gets to keep the tax benefits afforded to a non-profit.
More NFL: With the exception of the publicly held Green Bay Packers, the owners of the NFL franchises are all billionaires. Yet the owners manage, again and again and again, to demand public money to finance their stadiums. It’s welfare for the richest, and it’s astonishing and disgusting, and no one cares. (Oh, and by the way: I watch a lot of pro football too.)
Let’s get even bigger picture. The injustices of the financial industry are beyond myriad. I’ll pick one that makes me want to be like Rumpelstiltskin and stomp my foot furiously into the ground again and again and again until I dig a hole so deep that it fills up with water and I drown. The financial industry fought like hell to keep financial derivatives from being regulated in any way, arguing that the industry could police itself. But then in 2008, Lehman Brothers collapsed, and what happened with the credit default swaps Lehman had sold against their failure? Were they treated as the worthless pieces of paper they were? No, not at all. The government stepped in and paid the fucking things out at par. That’s right: a bunch of really, really rich people made a bunch of bad bets, and when their gambling bill came due, the government bailed them out. And by government, of course I mean, “the taxpayers of the United States.” We paid the bill for the financial industry’s hubris.
Interestingly, the prevailing narrative around the bailouts has become that they were a big win for the American people. Check out this article. Here’s a quote: “[T]axpayers ended up earning a $22.7 billion profit on their investment in AIG.” Um, no. That the government sold its stake in AIG for a paper profit doesn’t change that the collapse of the financial industry caused a fierce recession that cost millions of people their jobs, and has led to stagnant incomes for the vast majority of the American people ever since. It cost the American people trillions. That little part of the story gets left out.
One more example: a lot is being written right now about the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Supporters of the TPP fill the opinion pages with op-eds that argue for both the benefits and the inevitability of free trade in tones that sound like someone trying to explain something obvious to a not very intelligent child. Free trade will benefit all the American people, they say. Progress is unstoppable. Why are you in denial? To which I can only respond: if the TPP is going to be so good for the American people, why won’t they let us read it?
It will pass, of course.
What’s my point with all of this? Essentially, that a well-connected, powerful elite will always vanquish any opposition that requires the organization of large groups of people without an obvious financial or personal stake in the outcome. The NFL stadium deals are corporate welfare of the most egregious sort, but any opposition sounds distinctly fringe: What, don’t you like football? And the cost of it, spread around a city, never feels concrete. It’s not like they collect an obvious tax on the rest of us to support our billionaires. The Wall Street bailouts were complicated enough that almost no one really understood what was happening. It was easy for a self-justifying narrative to take root, when all most people understood was, “The economy was on fire, and we had to put it out.”
So coming back full circle: Until people like me would rather turn our back on the World Cup than give ugly people millions of dollars, nothing substantial will change.
Old men will enrich themselves on their backs and blood of slave labor in Qatar and 2022 will roll around and the World Cup will be a great spectacle, and nothing will change.
It’s time for me to come to grips with that fact, or else devoting some of my energy to changing it.
After the sweet glow of schadenfreude at yesterday’s news wore off, I found myself facing an uncomfortable question: for all my ire, what exactly am I asserting is the problem with FIFA’s corruption? FIFA has essentially one product to sell, a quadrennial soccer tournament that just happens to be the most popular sporting event in the world. So FIFA insiders are using their power to enrich themselves. So what?
It’s funny: when I think of it that way, I have a hard time answering. What’s the problem I see here? Well, it’s repulsive. Okay, and?
I should say that I’m not suggesting that FIFA’s corruption is getting in the way of the quality of their product. No one is claiming that FIFA’s corruption extends into the match-fixing that’s believed to be so rampant in high-level soccer. FIFA executives enrich themselves on the back of the quality of their product. Match-fixing can only lessen that quality. These men are brazen but they aren’t stupid.
The 2014 World Cup was a terrific spectacle. FIFA may be corrupt but they certainly deliver.
If I can’t assert a harm greater than, “Those idiots awarded the World Cup to Qatar, which is a stupid place for it to be,” then either I need to clarify my thinking or else shut the hell up.
FIFA Officials Arrested on Corruption Charges
As an ardent soccer fan, waking up to this headline on the New York Times website was like waking up to a gourmet breakfast in bed, lovingly prepared and served by a well-drilled team of supermodels.
When the vote came down back in December 2010 and FIFA presented us with Russia 2018 and Qatar 2022, I don’t think any fan of the game thought anything but that the vote had obviously been rigged. Russia 2018 we could understand–it’s a big country with an active domestic league, a growing presence in European club competition and a solid history in the international game. But Qatar? QATAR!? Qatar in the freakin’ summer!?
We’ve grown so accustomed to powerful people and organizations lying right to our faces that it seems we’ve lost much of our capacity for outrage. A well-connected person in a position of power acting corruptly? Yawn. I mean, what else is new?
So you couldn’t count me among the gleeful when the NFL handed down a four-game suspension to Tom Brady and a million-dollar fine and loss of two draft picks to the Patriots for Deflategate. First of all, the punishments for both man and organization amount basically to slaps on the wrist. But secondly, the circle-the-wagons mentality, the constant denial of wrong-doing by an organization with a history of it, shows that nothing is going to change. When the Patriots’ lawyers posted a 20,000-word rebuttal to the Wells report, challenging it on pretty much any point they could think of, was anyone surprised? Was anyone surprised that the organization would throw up a smokescreen to protect themselves and their superstar quarterback?
But think for a minute about what they’re actually asking us to believe. They’re arguing that a man who throws footballs for a living, who is one of the five best people alive at throwing footballs, who has presumably thrown more footballs than pretty much anyone else in the world, who is well known for being very particular about his footballs, can’t tell that the footballs in question were underinflated? And that furthermore, if the footballs were intentionally underinflated (the Patriots dispute even that), that someone in the locker room took it upon himself to do so, without consultation with the team’s cleft-chinned angel-haloed golden boy quarterback?
Are you fucking kidding me?
But they aren’t. They clearly figure we’re utterly inured to this kind of bullshit by now. I mean, hey, Qatar 2022 was a legitimate choice, right?
There are couple of words that come to mind when, despite their power and connections, powerful, connected, corrupt people get what’s coming to them. One of those words is schadenfreude. The other word is justice.
Postscript: Weeding out corruption in sports is lovely, but should it ever come to pass that the obvious criminality at the highest levels of American business–I’m looking at you, mega-banks–ever leads to actual prosecutions, I might find myself with a restored faith in humanity and our future as a species.
Honestly, I have no idea. I’ve never managed to figure it out.
I went for a mountain bike ride this morning, which on the one hand could suggest a certain resistance to getting my work done, but on the other could be seen as an action of #expansion. I prefer the latter but worry about how much it’s the former. How can I be sure?
Up one climb my mind turned to my life and the way I have tended to describe it to myself, a long sad tale in which I’ve allowed my adulthood to get lost, in which I have little to nothing to show for all those years. And then, through some impulsive spontaneous protest against my self-negation, I began to tally up the victories of my adult life, and I found them myriad. One of them: even having the choice to go mountain biking on a temperate, just-sunny-enough Tuesday morning in late May, the first day on my bike in a couple of months, endless rains having closed most of trails in the area. Just having the choice is a victory and choosing to ride is a victory and those few spots on the descent on the Benjamin Loop (yes, that’s it’s actual name, and yes, it was nice of them to name the trail after me) when my hands ignored the brakes as I swooped through the esses where the trees get sparse and the view of the valley expansive–do I even need to declare victory? Isn’t it obvious?
In many ways my life is little different than it was nine, ten months ago. I write, beholden only to myself. I go to the gym or ski or play soccer or mountain bike. I have filled many days of my life with exactly these things.
But. The same and yet not the same. I am building something here. As I bring this project to fruition I am building a future that excites me. As I daily live and feel my challenge to myself as I never have before, I am building a present that thrills me. And this morning, as I pedaled up the hill, panting my breaths, mildly irritated and distracted at my inability to get the derailleur adjusted properly, the bike sometimes unbidden jumping up a gear, as I listed my triumphs, finding something in every year, it seems I am finally building my past.
Does that mean I get to take the day off from publishing?
Alas for me, I never wrote that into my rules. Therefore it’s a Monday, I gotta publish something.
So am I just gonna phone it in?
Not entirely. For today’s piece, I was going to introduce the world to #__________, which is almost certainly going to be the next big viral sensation, trust me, you’re gonna love it. I tried to write the piece earlier today as we drove through northern N.M., but one of the things about zero drafts is that sometimes they have a different idea about what they want to be about than you do. So a cheerful and slightly silly and totally awesome piece about #__________ (I bet you’re starting to get excited) became instead a rather introspective thousand words reflecting on my adult life, and I’m not publishing something like that on a freakin’ holiday, I don’t care if it is cloudy and rainy for like the 10,000th day in a row here in Boulder.
So instead I’m writing this really awesome teaser piece about #__________ and now you and your ______ and your _____ ______ have something to be excited about, so please go grill something and have another beer.