Free Refills

I wrote this two years ago today to express what I was feeling while I and so many others stayed glued to our Facebook accounts, waiting for any news. I declined at the time to publish it, out of fear that it would make people angry, I guess. And then we got the news and it no longer seemed appropriate.

June 11th was two days after that year’s Apogaea, an Apo of fun and consequence for me. I was supposed to be packing that day. A few days later, I’d leave for NM for the summer, to spend time with my dying father.

A friend of mine is missing out in the desert near Grand Junction. He went out dirt biking over the weekend and wasn’t back Monday as expected. The police found his car (with phone inside) Monday night. As of right now (~12:30pm Tuesday), full search-and-rescue operations are underway.

I and many others are praying for his safe return. I’ve got a ton to do today, but I’ve found it hard to pull myself away from FB, waiting for any updates, hoping for good news. I bet I’m not the only one who is finding himself unable to do much else today.

Seeing so many people expressing their love and concern is heartening. It makes me feel better.

But I have to admit this as well: I am struggling with a lot of anger. I am writing this knowing that many people in our respective community will see it, and I’m certainly not trying to offend. Our community places great value on honesty, and so I’m hoping that people will meet what I say with the understanding that I’m trying to put to words what I feel so I can get it out and let it go and focus all my energy on his safe return.

The last I spent any real time with Nolus was in January of 2012. We went up to Jackson Hole together, and there I witnessed his thrill-seeking behavior at its most selfish and non-conscious. I watched him put other people, including myself, in very real danger, because of the pleasure adrenaline brought him.

Afterwards, I pretty much broke off my connection with him. I decided that someone who could so little pay attention to the safety of others in pursuing his own thrills was not someone I could trust. He spoke the language of consciousness but there was a big hole in his behavior, and so I cut him off.

Today, I have watched as anguish and trepidation and sadness have spread through our community and I have, like I said, been heartened by the love that people have expressed. But I have also been angry to see the anguish and sadness the situation has caused. Not to suggest that it was wholly preventable–I too enjoy sports like snowboarding and mountain biking, and I understand that accidents happen. But I remember going up the tram with him at Jackson Hole, and him heading directly to the out-of-bounds gate–without any avalanche training and without avalanche gear. I told him he’d have to go without me, and he did. So I know that things people do to prevent this kind of situation–leaving detailed itineraries, promising check-in phone calls, carrying extra water–would not have been actions he would have bothered with. Again, let me make it clear that I am not suggesting some kind of karmic retribution on him. I wish only his speedy and safe return. But I also witness this anguish–a friend of mine wrote, “I burst into tears. I couldn’t help it”–and I think of how little he did to spare us from these feelings, and it makes me mad.

So this is my prayer to Nolus: come back safe, my friend. And after I give you the hug that I’m praying you’ll be safe to receive, I’m going to express as clearly as I can what a total selfish fucker you have been and request that you start walking the walk of love for others instead of so often just talking the talk. Part of love is holding people accountable for their actions, is it not? I think it is. Through my feelings today it is clear that I never released you from my circle of love. When you return safely I will hold you to the responsibility of being within that circle. That is what I mean today by “I love you.”

Come home safe, my friend.

What I’ll be publishing over the next few days was written beginning June 11th, 2013, while I and so many people I knew waited for news from the search, and then over the next couple of weeks leading up to Nolus’s memorial. I wrote with the intention that I publish something before the memorial, to try to capture some of the contradictions that I found in Nolus, to try to speak honestly about someone who had been a complicated presence in my life.

I ended up not publishing at the time. The piece felt too complicated and conflicted, and I suppose I was afraid of angering people.

Nolus remains a complicated presence in my life. But the best of his example guides me forward still, and now two years have passed since his death, and I think it’s time I share this writing.

I tend not to be much of a planner. As I write this (Friday, June 5th), I have done this much about planning my route for a roadtrip that starts–started–Sunday: I asked Google Maps for directions from Boulder to Gig Harbor, WA, looked at the options it gave me, and said, “Southern route.”

I could probably stand to learn to be more of a planner. Instead of having hardly any idea what I’m doing, I could have like ten, fifteen percent of an idea. I’d probably throw that fraction of an idea away in the moment, but at least I’d have a starting place.

Either that, or I should just own that I’m not a planner and really fly by the seat of my pants. My default pattern actually seems to lead to a lot of stasis.

Anyway, as you read this, I am somewhere between Colorado and Washington. It’s beautiful here. I’m having a great time.

My birthdays have not tended to be the greatest.

As a kid, having my birthday right after the school year ended meant that I never had the big blowout birthday parties so many of my classmates did. I couldn’t exactly hand out invitations at school, and many families went away during those first few weeks of summer vacation.

My adult birthdays have generally been little better. In a low place the other night, I started giving names to some of my recent birthdays. In order that this not be a diatribe of held-over disappointment aimed at my friends and family, it’s possible that not all of these, um, actually happened:

The Year I Was Alone Because My Wife Went on Vacation. The Year the Locusts Came. Eight Years in a Row with George W. Bush as Our Nation’s President. The Year I Went Out to Celebrate with My Friends and Ended Up Buying My Own Dinner, Which Really Shouldn’t Have Been a Big Deal, but It Awakened Within Me Some Demons I Didn’t Realize Were There, and Man Oh Man Did They Feed. The Year the D.A. Declined To Press Charges. The Year My Friend the Professional Baker Made Me a Cake but Was Denied Entrance Into the Party. The Year That While I Was DJing at One Bar, My Girlfriend and Dear Friend Who Is Also a DJ Left to Get a Drink at a Totally Different Bar. The Year I Was Bitten by Not One but Two Snakes. The Year Humanity Vanquished the Great Evil that Has Plagued Us Since Time Immemorial.

(Wait. That last one shouldn’t be on the list. That one hasn’t happened yet. That one will actually be a pretty good birthday.)

---

My most fun birthday, hands down, was my 39th, two years ago. I was at Apogaea, the Colorado regional Burning Man festival. When I got to the Apotuckey Derby, which if you weren’t there you’ll just have to use your imagination, I realized I didn’t have to drink the crappy mint juleps they were offering, so I went back to my dome and made a delicious Manhattan. Then I realized that it was my birthday and I didn’t have to decide between Manhattans and gin tonics. Why not both?

Later, I invited every friend I could find into my dome and plied them with cocktails. Jan poked her head in at one point and offered me an edible. “They’re really mild,” she said. When you’ve been two-fisting Manhattans and gin tonics for hours the correct answer to that offer is, “No.”

Obviously I said yes.

Later, there was a burlesque show at Center Camp and I watched my new friend CJ totally rock it and it was awesome.

And not long after that, I tried several times to tie a bow tie and, for reasons you can probably deduce, failed. In frustration, I lay down on my bed and let’s call it took a nap as darkness was falling. Robin woke me up gently and sweetly some hours later.

Here is the place where the tone of this part of the piece changes. It had been an awesome birthday, but I awakened to a different energy than I’d fallen asleep to. I felt a pervasive feeling of melancholy, and after some reflection, realized it wasn’t just the result of having partied all day. It wasn’t just me that was feeling it. The whole festival had a subdued air that night. It was unlike anything I’d ever experienced at a festival before. I wouldn’t understand it until a few days later (and even then I would question if what I was thinking was possible), on Tuesday the 11th, when in the desert outside Grand Junction the search team found Nolus’s body.

Like I said, my birthdays have kinda been a mixed bag.

---

So today’s my birthday. Right now, I am somewhere between Boulder and Gig Harbor, WA. I’m scheduling this post well ahead of time so that I can give myself over to whatever adventures come my way.

I miss and love you all, and though I’m writing this days in advance, I’m going to say anyway: It’s beautiful here. I’m having a great time.

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.