Free Refills

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?

Once you start to believe that there’s no such thing as magic, that the machinations of the mind can explain everything and eventually will, then you will stop seeing magic, no matter how incredible what you witness, no matter how unlikely. A coincidence is just a coincidence, utterly without meaning.

But if you choose to see it otherwise…

A pair of ravens flew overhead at that precise moment: a statement of fact. Beyond that, only this question remains: Which world would you rather live in?

But the very idea that the difference between our unconscious and dissatisfying lives and a connection to the vastness of what we’re capable of, both individually and together, is really as simple as just learning to breathe, connecting through the breath to all that’s around us, and meeting the moment–perhaps it terrifies us. Because all of the pain and all of the suffering–war, famine, hatred, killing–might then be seen to be more than just the sad reality of our lives, but instead might be a tragedy so towering that to really begin to comprehend it might send us scurrying back to the comfort of our couches and televisions and easy unconsciousness. Because to begin to believe, to truly believe, that it really doesn’t have to be this way, and that we truly have the power to change it, to change it right fucking now and we’ve always had that power, it must just disrupt us at our very core. Better to stay stuck where we are a member of the human race, in general accord with all those around us, rather than shake things up by truly embracing our true natures and the true nature of the world–that creation of the most beautiful sort is eternally available to us, we only have to choose it–and demonstrating and risking the opprobrium of all those who aren’t ready yet to begin to imagine that the pathway out of their suffering, be it a world of dull grays or the fiery pain of sharp knives across flesh, is right now and has always been immediately at hand.

Some days, the pain washes over you. You find yourself swimming in black seas. You know the feeling, yes? You go looking for any bright spot, anything, to light up the darkness.

Well, how about this: Tottenham Hotspur are playing in the Champions League (and beat Borussia Dortmund, 3-1, yesterday, hooray). Meanwhile, Arsenal are playing in the Europa League.

Go suck, Arsenal.

So how should we summarize the Slam season in general? And how do we expect the respective tours to progress from here?

Among the women, we had four different winners over the four Slams. Serena won in Australia and then left the tour to have a baby. Young Jelena Ostapenko won in France and has had okay results since (the quarters at Wimbledon, the third round in New York). After a lackluster early season and her meltdown in Paris, Muguruza beat Venus for the Wimbledon title. And now Sloane Stephens comes out of nowhere to win in New York. Do you see any kind of pattern there? Because I do not. It seems like this is a year of transition. Let’s hope that this year’s breakthrough players continue to play well through the end of season–and beyond. After all, last year, it looked like Angelique Kerber was going to truly embrace the role of becoming a long-term force on the tour, but this year, she was merely a shell.

The story atop the men’s game has been, in essence, the drop-off of last year’s top-two, Andy Murray and Novak Djokovic, and the return to splendor of Federer and Nadal. Federer and Nadal were both amazing in Australia, and their final there was a classic. Afterward, Federer stormed through the North American spring hardcourt season. When things returned to Europe and Nadal’s beloved clay, Nadal owned everybody. I maintain that Federer did not play a great Wimbledon, but still, he was better than everybody else. And then Federer was lackluster in New York, the injury he suffered in Montreal clearly taking a lot from him, and it was Nadal who was brilliant.

Back in April, I predicted a remarkable year for both Federer and Nadal, and that’s pretty much how it worked out. Yes, I hoped for a more remarkable ending to the Slam season, that Federer and Nadal would compete the way they did in Australia, and that unfortuantely isn’t what happened. Still, though: at the end of 2016, would you have guessed that Federer and Nadal would split the four Slams between them?

And where to from here? The Asian swing and the European fall tournaments can sometimes feel like something of an afterthought after the U.S. Open. This year, for the men, with so much of the top end of the field out for the season, it will seem especially so. Unless Federer regains his form and offers some stout competition for Nadal in the late-season Masters 1000s–which is possible, if he wants to compete for year-end number one–then the season will end not with a bang but a whimper. We’ll see.

Among the women, there’s been no clear number one. With many rankings points still to play for, let’s hope we some exciting play and perhaps some consolidation among the top players in the game.