Free Refills

So is there more to #280Tuesday than just that I wanted to come up with something super simple so I could easily meet my publishing requirements? “Hey, you wrote a single Tweet, congratifuckinglations! Now you can call yourself a hero!”

Yeah, there’s more to #280Tuesday than that. I was trying to come up with a way to use constraints not unlike the rules of game, in which the rules bound and define the area of play. (For more on this idea: See here.)

Furthermore, I like the balance of boundary and expansiveness in the new 280-character limit on Twitter. I found 140 characters awfully restrictive and rarely delightful. #280Tuesday.

But also there’s this: I am trying to connect the greater world to my writing by beginning to have the courage to promote it. And I believe, based on literally zero success so far, that Twitter could be a useful medium. #280Tuesday

There is nothing that resembles the exact flavor of sad that is maintaining a presence on Twitter and having no one ever interact with your Tweets. So I thought, “Hey, let’s try creating a thing and see what happens.” So: #280Tuesday.

This is an experiment for a type of piece I see myself writing for benjaminlanin.com pretty regularly next season. It’s my hope that I’ll be working directly with people interested in using skiing to learn flow, so I want to practice writing that explores skiing from a flow perspective

Because it’s been so long since this piece was initially drafted–but I still see value in the exercise–I’m going to annotate the piece to bring it somewhat up to date. Look for bracketed bits in italics. Those parts were written today.

Perhaps surprisingly, this was my first serious day at Breckenridge all season. I’d skied there with some friends and their daughters (ages 5 and 8) just after the new year, but we just puttered around Peak 9 for a few hours and got very cold; and I was at Breck for three days at the end of January for my snowboard certification test, but that was mostly riding Peak 9 on modest terrain, and there was little play and no exploration, so I don’t count any of those as serious mountain days.

Conditions have improved pretty markedly since the end of January. We’re now about a week removed from the last storm, and traffic on the mountain remains heavy, so we’re getting pretty desperate for a refresh.

[It’s now almost two weeks since the day I’m writing about her, and we still haven’t had a storm to refresh conditions. It had stayed cold until yesterday (Sunday, March 11th) but temperatures have gotten quite warm the past two days, and so we’re getting full on into spring conditions. If we don’t get a serious storm soon, the season is going to come to a crashing halt very quickly.]

We did a single lap on Peak 8 to warm up, a simple cruiser on Springmeir, and it was fine. It was a Wednesday in the quiet interstice between President’s Day and spring break, so crowds were light. We debated what to do next, decided to check out Peak 10, and so dropped down Psychopath to E Chair.

From the chair, we could see that the double-diamond terrain below E Chair is basically unskiable. We watched a couple of foolhardy souls attempt it, but we couldn’t imagine that they found much joy on a pitch that was basically devoid of snow. Barring a very snowy March, this terrain is best forgotten for the rest of this season.

A run down Upper Lehman, in the valley between Peak 9 and Peak 10, took us to the Falcon Superchair and up Peak 10.

We had reasonable hope for the groomed terrain on Peak 10 (Crystal, Centennial, Cimarron) because sometimes the trail marking (black rather than blue) keeps some people away, but on this day we found it scraped and icy top to bottom.

Because of that, I decided to explore approaching the terrain a bit differently. I’ve been inculcated sufficiently into PSIA-approved skiing that I generally try to carve on all terrain that’s carveable, but with conditions this icy on slopes as steep as Peak 10’s groomers, I didn’t feel confident that I could trust my edges to hold at speed, so instead I started playing with trying to maintain a sense of balance, control, and above all fun as I explored intentionally skidding my turns. I took a less aggressive stance by allowing my weight to go back a tiny bit and by standing a little taller, and when turning I consciously pivoted my skis beneath me. This is sort of how you see the park kids ski, the kind of skidded turn that looks sharp when it’s done with proper steeze. While steezy skidded turns didn’t turn these hardpack conditions into great fun, I felt more in control and less fearful than I usually would on icy hardpack, so I guess I’d call the experiment a success.

We did a single run down the north-facing bump-run Spitfire. We found coverage thin, especially skier’s right side, while the bumps skier’s left, where the run double-fall-lines into the trees, were of a challenging shape and size, but we managed to find some reasonable flow. On a good snow year, this is one of my favorite bump runs on the mountain, but on this day it was only worth a single run.

After a water/snack break, we decided we’d try going up to Breck’s high-altitude terrain, so we took the SuperConnect and then dropped down to 6 Chair. Any idea that we might include Imperial Bowl in our plans was put to rest as soon as we got a good look at Imperial from 6 Chair. Of all that acreage, there are only a couple of lines holding snow. Most of the terrain on the face is rocked out and genuinely unskiable. Should the weather bring us a series of wet spring storms, there may still be life on this part of the hill yet, but if we get some days of warm temps and serious sun, Imperial will be done for the year. Those dark rocks really retain the heat–a few days in bright sun, and all the remaining snow around them will melt out.

It was off 6 Chair that we found the best runs of the day. We first headed pretty hard skier’s-right over to Too Much and found the snow delightful and the bumps nicely shaped and sized. Runs like Too Much, Solitude, etc., can be iffy. They’re pretty much south-facing, and while at this altitude, just below treeline, temperatures stay colder than lower down the mountain, it doesn’t take a whole lot of warm sun to bake them into unpleasant sheets of ice. But on this day, we found them in solid condition, with the snow kind of chalky, but able to cleanly hold an edge.

Which was really nice, because overall I’d been having a pretty ragged time in the bumps that day. Bumps have been a big focus of mine for the past two seasons, as I try to find my way toward deeper flow on terrain I have in the past tended to struggle on. This season, I’ve reached new levels of flow in the bumps, but I’ve mostly been practicing in the blue bumps, in part because when you’re working on skills, you don’t want to overterrain and make things complicated, and in part because the coverage through so much of the season has been iffy, and it’s harder to find your flow when you want to be focusing on the breath but are simultaneously watching super-intently for exposed rocks so you don’t kill yourself.

But on the snow at Too Much, where I found the coverage adequate and the quality trustworthy, I began to bring the skills I’ve been developing over on the blue bumps into the black. and it was great. My run on Too Much was solid, but it was on the next two–one on Solitude, and then one back under the chair on West Snowbird, inspired by a big group of shredding bump-skiers we watched as we rode the chair that time–that I really hit my flow. I won’t say things were perfect, but they were clearly the best, most in-flow turns I’d ever made on black bumped terrain. I was smooth, kept my skis on the snow and my body committed to the fall-line, and when I lost the flow by thinking, which I did every fourth or fifth turn, I accepted the drop out of flow with equanimity instead of recrimination, re-connected with the breath, and made the next turn. It was really fun.

We rode 6 Chair one more time, this time cutting skier’s-left over to the south side of Horseshoe Bowl, the sections called Stampede and Rustler and Mule on the trail-map, and I practiced that same flow, and the snow there was similar in quality to what we’d found around 6 Chair, and I made some solid, committed turns on the steep terrain of the bowl, was feeling like I was seeing more evidence of the progress I’ve made this year, and had a really good time.

When took a lunch break at Vista Haus, then took the T-Bar up and did another run in Horseshoe Bowl, doing the section called Outlaw, and found it good. We enjoyed the steepness of the terrain.

(By the way, no one I’ve ever met differentiates between different sections of the bowl by name. Horseshoe Bowl is just Horseshoe Bowl.)

From there, we went over to Peak 6, making our Grand Traverse of all five peaks complete. (And yes, this means that we treated Peak 7 as essentially just a transition to Peak 6. It’s often that way, Peak 7 below the bowls mostly being a series of undulating rolling blue cruisers.)

The snow quality on Peak 6 was pretty good, though not as good as what we found on 6 Chair, and it was definitely thin. We skied both Delirium and Euphoria, skier’s right from the chair and through the gates that separate that terrain from Bliss, and it was the fun, varied terrain it usually is, but it paid real dividends to be very careful, because exposed rocks abounded.

We did three total runs on Peak 6, then headed down Monte Cristo to pick up the gondy and call it a day. The snow on Monte Cristo, which has a couple of serious rollers as it makes its way to the bottom, was scraped and icy and it was hard to trust an edge, and so it feels pretty safe to say that if you’re at Breck and you’ve got the skills to ski the higher-mountain terrain, head up there for the good snow and the most fun.

[I’m guessing the high-alpine terrain has really suffered since this was written. Surely it has continued to see high skier traffic, and given the warmth of the past couple of days, it may have crossed over into the realm of icy and unfun.]

My goal for today was to finish a piece I started drafting a week ago about a ski day at Breckenridge I shared with my friend Andy on Wednesday, February 28th. The idea of the piece was to write about conditions as I found them, while also discussing the ways in which I was practicing and exploring flow on the mountain that day.

I aimed to have the piece up this past Monday, but I struggled with revisions. The piece is a bit of an experiment. I’m trying to establish a certain expertise, in hopes of ultimately creating interest in my coaching business. The piece ended up longer than I expected, and there’s a certain unwieldiness to its form. I got a little down on myself when it didn’t come together easily, and since those initial revisions I’ve ended up putting the piece off. Today was the first day I’ve picked up the z.d. since Monday.

I’m still going to publish the fucking thing. The discussion of conditions may no longer be the least bit topical, but the greater experiment remains worth following through on.

But I’m not going to publish it tonight. It was already after 6pm when I pulled out the zero-draft print-out to get to work, and after a few minutes I found myself saying (perhaps in response to the rather anguished sentiments that drove yesterday’s piece), “What exactly am I hoping to achieve by holding myself to the hard goal of finishing the piece tonight? Could I actually be better served by giving myself a little space on my Friday night? Tonight, could I not practice being a little gentler with myself?”

Apparently part of me is speaking wisdom tonight, and I’m going to listen to that part. A major guiding idea of Free Refills is to be supportive of my broadest and most ambitious career goals. To what end does practicing hardship and struggle serve?

Sometimes things can just be easy. Happy Friday. Look for the piece on Monday.

(Visual alliteration is kind of cheating, isn’t it?)

(On the other hand: When I sat down to write, that’s the first thing that came to mind, and damn is it descriptively apt.)

The third anniversary of the start of the Free Refills project is a couple of weeks away, and I feel proud that over the entire course of that time, I have never failed to reach my quota, and have been close to perfect with my daily deadlines. (Furthermore, I forgive myself my few misses–the reasons were mostly pretty solid.) To pull off this level of consistency, I’ve had to do away with any real attachment to ideas like, “I work best in the morning, and I don’t work well in the evening.” While I do still prefer mornings, I’ve certainly learned that I have the capacity to do quality work whenever there’s work to be done. I will complete the tasks I’ve assigned myself, and if that means I need to write at 10:30pm on a Saturday, I’ll do so.

On the other hand, I do think back kind of fondly to when my practice was more regimented. I remember stretches of time when I’d work from 8am until noon every weekday. (It’s my experience, and something I’ve heard many writers echo, that four hours of active writing is kind of the limit.) That kind of structure does tend to smooth out some of the ups and downs that my current process–“Get the work done every week, no matter what, but otherwise stay flexible”–kind of invites.

On top of that, there are days like today, when out of necessity I’ll schedule various tasks and errands in the early part of the day, trusting that I’ll have plenty of time to work later. But when I sit down to write at the end of the day, I find that I’m just beat.

Like I said above, I remain proud that I don’t let that fatigue keep me from doing my work. But given what I’ve been saying in the past few weeks about trying to cultivate a sense of play in my work and throughout my life in general, it does strike me that if I’m creating a situation in which my body is asking me to rest, to put a cap on the day and start relaxing, and I am instead doing the very opposite, I’m letting my current patterns undermine my best intentions for positive change.

How often does self-defeating behavior come so clearly into focus? I’m not beating myself up about it (believe it or not). But it seems pretty clear that I need to make a change.

It’s #OneSentenceWednesday, and here in this linguistic gamespace which I created in order to explore fun and freedom within a tight constraint, I am today exploring finding fun and freedom within the far-less-constrained world of realspace, in which I find myself all too often wrapped up somewhere between angst and despair with respect to my writing, my work, and just in general the cultivation of flow in my life, which is a little ridiculous when you think about it, because, after all, life’s final outcome has been known for a long, long time, and from that perspective, why shouldn’t I come to think of everything I do, no matter how apparently high the stakes, as a game, an opportunity to get some XP, maybe even gain a level, and though the monsters you face get more fearsome with every level you gain, your skills rise commensurately, and you are again offered that choice: will you approach life from a place of fear, or of play?

Though let’s face it, on the aesthetics of possible pronunciations of #280Tuesday, there is something to be said for “Two-eight-zero Tuesday.” I guess it’s all those trochees.

But “two-eighty Tuesday” really is best, right? The strong alliteration, the sense of a triplet rhythm, with the “Tues” of “Tuesday” held for a pair of beats. It has such a nice music to it. As hashtags go, #280Tuesday really should take off.

Thursday’s piece basically just fell out of my fingers. It was not at all my plan for the piece when I sat down to write, but what can you do but trust the zero drafts, amiright?

Is it a coincidence that such silliness on the subject of barbers and beards showed up in my life and writing at exactly the time that I reintroduced Figaro’s aria “Largo al Factotum” (from Rossini’s “The Barber of Seville”) back into my life after many, many years? It’s now back in heavy rotation, perhaps in part because Figaro’s exuberant exulations about his good fortune in life feels totally infectious, thus serving as an affirmation/incantation of feelings and attitudes that I seek to foment in my own life.

“Ah, che bel vivere, che bel piacere per un barbiere … di qualità!”

(“What a beautiful life, what a pleasure for a barber of quality.”)

---

If you want to give Figaro’s aria a listen, which you do, give this a try. It isn’t the Robert Merrill recording that’s become my go-to, but it’s pretty good.

---

And while you’re at it, you might as well watch the greatest cartoon short of all time. It’s set to the music of the overture to “Barber of Seville,” as reworked by the brilliant Carl Stalling.

https://www.dailymotion.com/embed/video/x2o5y7d

Earlier today, after I’m guessing between 500 and 1,000 hours of gameplay (I’m neither joking nor exaggerating), I finally won my first game of Game.

I have mentioned Game here a few times, but never really spoken in any detail about it. But one of the first zero drafts I wrote in the days immediately following the winter solstice of 2014, when I came back to writing after my grief- and hardship-induced hiatus, was about my impressions of Game back then. I’d been playing for a few months at that point and was genuinely obsessed. It’s now a bit more than three years later, and that obsession has barely abated. I think it’s time to resurrect that zero draft and turn it into a piece.

And how did this win feel, after all these years of effort? Honestly, I felt a genuine and deep-seated sense of accomplishment, the feeling of having set a goal and then investing the time to see it through. This is, admittedly, a ridiculous feeling to attach to a computer game, but there it is.

Victory, baby! Sweet, sweet victory!

Regarding what I said on Monday, that the connection between barba and barber hit me with body-shaking force:

I was totally not joking. Earlier that day, I’d been saying to myself that I would gladly pay a qualified professional for some help with beard care. I haven’t yet figured out how to do it to my own satisfaction, and every day or two I find myself with clippers or scissors in my hand, staring at shape or a number of stray hairs, feeling a bit perplexed about the best course of action. That it’s so constant annoys me a little, and I don’t feel like I’m good at it, and my beard and mustache never quite look as neat as I’d like them to, and whatever combinations of words I’ve used as search terms has turned up endless pages–in modern America, information regarding facial hair care being nothing if not abundant–but not the hard, practical, specific information I’m looking for. Yes, I say, impatiently, but what if your mustache is bristly? I’ve learned about beard brushes (legitimately useful) and beard oil (necessary) and beard balm (jury’s still out) and mustache wax (see bit above about bristly mustaches), but the particulars of wielding the trimming blades with a warrior’s grace are either few and far between, or else so abstruse that they don’t show up on the front page of Google’s rankings, in which case (as we all know) they essentially don’t exist.

Perhaps there are whole sections of the Dark Web devoted to these dark arts, I considered. Perhaps covens of scissor-wielding wizards travel amongst the shadows. They speak in shiver-inducing whispers, the hoods of their cloaks raised, and show up unannounced at our doors. Their knock is a secret knock, but one which everyone knows. A knock that contains within it a mystery, waiting to be solved. Shave and a haircut? it queries, and waits knowingly. When the proper reply comes–Two bits!–nothing further need be spoken. They just know.

So anyway. When it hit me that I was wishing into existence a thing that’s existed literally since the Middle Ages, I was flabbergasted and amused that I’d never made the connection before. I mean, I’ve known the Spanish word for beard for the majority of my life. Did it really never occur to me before right now that there is a connection between these words, that they share the same root?

Nope. Never occurred to me.

I think the last time I went to an actual barber was 1996. How many of them even exist anymore? Have they not all been done away with by stylists and salons?

I have so many questions. Do true barbers see cutting hair as merely an adjunct to what they consider their true callings? Have they just been waiting, patiently, while the spinning helices of their barber poles explain to all eyes capable of seeing that time both passes but is also an endless flow? Do the endless spirals encode an invitation to a cleaner and better world?

Will I walk in, stumble over my words as I try to describe the convoluted path to linguistic realization that brought me to their shop? Will I struggle as I try to express the layers of confusion and stress that have built up as I’ve tried to navigate this chaotic, unknown, bristly world, this perplexing and stressful topography that grew up concomitant with the whiskers on my face?

Will I be met with a strong and empathic gaze and a comforting arm around my shoulder? Will a calming voice reassure: “I know, son. We understand. We’ve been waiting for you.”

I’ve long enjoyed structures like this, of some kind of enforced minimalism, in part because it’s the opposite of my natural tendencies toward let’s call it expansiveness (I count among my favorite writers Neal Stephenson and David Foster Wallace, neither of whom you’d exactly call terse), but also because there are flavors of expression that open up when you do so, ways in which the rhythm of a sentence might meander and flow along pathways that differ from what would be regarded as normal or typically desirable, and when you seek the maximum expansion within the constraint–that is to say, when you really embrace the constraint–then you discover within and through those erstwhile limitations some really delightful potential for fun, which might for example express itself as a sentence which is grammatically correct, clear in its meaning, and also goes on for a ridiculously long time.