Free Refills

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.

Back to last Saturday: When the storm of self-hate finally blew itself out, and I was fully able to turn my attention back to the subject I’d intended the draft to be about (the energetic cost of things left undone), I hit on an understanding of something so important and unexpected that, in the draft itself, I interrupted myself mid-sentence with “…oh my.”

I had turned my attention to the wounds we carry (go back and read my caustic litany if you’re confused as to why) and suddenly the seeds of this appeared:

You suffer a wound. You are wounded and you need to heal. Healing takes as much energy as it takes. The worse the wound, the more energy it requires to heal. Simple enough.

You can, if you want, pick at the scabs. Then the wound doesn’t heal. And it also takes a little energy to pick a scab. Now you have just made things worse: the wound still needs the energy it needs to heal, and you have also spent energy unproductively.

(And it always seems like a good idea at the time, doesn’t it?)

You can do that again and again and again. There’s nothing quite like continuing to revel in the pain of an injury. You can point to your wounds and shriek with a martyr’s righteousness: “Look what’s been done to me!” More energy wasted, and the healing still delayed.

Sometimes, when you do that kind of thing, the wound begins to fester. Now you have the initial wound and an infection as well. An untreated infection will get worse, will spread, will do greater and greater damage.

Suddenly, rest and the passage of time are no longer enough. Now, you must take action in order to cure the infection your actions have caused, and healing must become your active priority.

How many times have I done exactly what I’ve just described? How many times have I suffered an injury and, through my actions, made it from bad to worse to an actual crisis?

Let me now step away from the language of wounds and healing and into an analogy that’s more generalizable and aphoristic:

When you find yourself stuck in a hole, first of all, STOP DIGGING.

For a variety of reasons, on Saturday I found myself needing to z.d. more than 2,500 words to reach my 5,000 for the week. I also found myself physically feeling really, really terrible. I recognized it as energetic in cause (I wasn’t getting sick), but it hurt no less for that realization. I was in a bad place.

When I’m really struggling while zero-drafting, I just let the negative self-talk flow out of my fingers onto the screen along with everything else I’m writing. What follows here are excerpts of that negativity from Saturday. Since I started this z.d. practice back in the winter, I always said that the express intent was to publish what came out. Well, I never thought I’d follow through to quite this extent, but it emerged as important when I later read over the draft. I’ll explain. But first:

---

I am basically typing here in order to punish myself for this week. Every single thing I write here is clearly getting thrown away. This is bullshit. I should just lie down.

And furthermore, by not doing just lying down, I am condemning my tomorrow to being even worse.

But how about this: if I don’t do it, I am going to condemn myself for the failure in that way. Either way I am going to lose.

I cannot even express how much I am trying to run from this process. I’m less than 1000 words so far and I need to get to 2900 for the day and this sucks, it sucks, it sucks. I just want to lie down and escape.

I feel totally and completely physically shitty, just tired and my forearms hurt, and of course the writing is nearly impossible, I’m just typing, basically, in the assumption that failing to get to 5000 for the week is worse than typing utter crap to get there.

Every typo is making me cringe. Or want to bash the fucking computer. I feel tension through my upper body. I keep turning away from the screen, this feels so fucking bad. I keep wanting to run. How much longer before I can take a break?

I don’t know, motherfucker. What are you trying to prove by all of this? That I’m a total fuckup? FUCK YOU.

Do you notice how, in this space right now, every annoyance is amplified beyond belief? I am fucking freaking out.

I am going to close this fucking buffer because this is so fucking awful and I am just typing to finish up words.

WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH ME? WHY CAN’T I BE A FUCKING ADULT?

---

Pulled from their places in the draft and written out one after another, those sentences are awfully hard for me to read. Within the space of the draft itself, I can see that despite those outbursts I both succeeded to a reasonable degree in exploring what I initially set out to write, and also led myself to an important insight into just what was happening to cause the discomfort in the first place.

As I read over the draft now, the anguish of the moment is gone (and thank God for that–it was really unpleasant) and what’s left, all things considered, is a piece of surprising quality.

In other words, all that negative talk was simply wrong.

Toward the end of the file, I wrote this:

It is better to do a very bad job than to break the promise to myself. That is much worse.

And that’s almost true. The correct sentence should read:

It is better to feel like I’m doing a very bad job than to break the promise to myself. That is much worse.

Startling but inescapable conclusion: how you feel about the work as you’re creating it has at most a weak correlation to the actual quality of the work.

So do the fucking work.

As my practice continues, I feel myself getting pulled toward different work.

(Not that I’m going to stop publishing here. I’m going to keep doing this project as it exists now for the rest of the spring. The rules might get amended come summertime. We’ll see.)

A bigger picture is beginning to emerge. Themes and connections between different pieces get clearer day by day. I keep insisting that This Is Not a Blog, and I’ve got a good sense now of exactly what I mean.

And my novels are calling to me, louder every day, crying out from the shelf where the printed drafts sit. “Finish us,” they’re saying. I hear that call and can say to myself in return, “I am now a person who finishes things.”

And, goodness, the new techniques I’ve been developing here. In my experience, writing fiction is much harder than writing non-fiction. Seeing a scene clearly enough to describe it vividly is difficult enough, and the work of setting a scene into the whole is more challenging still. But I’ve been wondering: what happens when I bring zero-drafting into fiction writing? What happens if I plunge ahead and allow and even invite mistakes into process? I recognize that I can’t start-to-finish zero-draft a whole novel and then expect it to work–an uncaught plot or characterization mistake early on could create a faulty foundation that ultimately brings the whole thing down. But perhaps there is a way to practice draft-and-iterate such that I can find a new freedom in the work by releasing control, which is what zero-drafting demands. Take a risk, plunge ahead, see if it works. If so, keep it. If not, throw it out.

I’m excited to try.

Something that’s coming up again and again in my zero drafts is the energy cost of things left undone. I’ve talked about it a little with respect to clutter, and I can see that I’m so far only scratching the surface.

Let’s get bigger picture: Not heeding the callings of our souls costs us more mightily than we even realize.

In that vein, I am doubly proud of what I’m building here. I am proud of the pieces themselves, but I am also proud of what they represent. The work here is bringing to fruition something that I’ve been called to do since well before I left New Haven, at least ten years ago and maybe more.

What killed my career as a freelancer before it even began was the whole querying process. I just fucking hated it. I spent so much time and energy working on the query letters, trying to sell pieces, that I didn’t have any energy left for anything else. My whole writing practice shrank to trying to write a perfect enough query that some editor somewhere would take a flyer on me despite my lack of experience. (I know I’m hardly the first person to decry this particular Catch-22.) I won’t deny that a huge part of the problem was my simple unwillingness to just suck it up and send out the zillion queries necessary until someone started to bite, to just hang in there until I had sufficient clips to prove to editors that, yes, I am actually a writer. But at the same time, something struck me as faulty about the whole process, even beyond the Catch-22 I just mentioned. I mean, there was this little thing called the Internet. Why was I asking someone’s permission to write something? Okay, granted, really I was asking them to publish it and pay me for it, but in many ways the request amounted to asking their permission. How many times did I meet a rejected query by trusting the quality of the idea and writing the piece anyway? Never. Not once.

But if you truly have a vision to create something, whom do you let get in the way? Ultimately, the answer is no one–except for yourself.

I kept being called. I heard the calling as though words were spoken into my mind: These are good ideas. Write them. Put them on the website. Create something. Create something that didn’t exist before. Create something that couldn’t exist before. This whole Internet thing is different. Publishing online is different.

And you don’t need a single person’s permission, except your own.

It was all clearly true, and yet. The thought arose again and again, knocking on my consciousness insistently, and I kept telling myself I would do it and I kept not doing it.

But now I am doing it.

For oh so many years, I let myself block myself. For whatever reason, I refused to allow my creative energy to flow as it was called to do. And the energy backed up and backed up and backed up.

How much force does something like that carry when it finally releases?

I was lying on the basement futon early yesterday morning, eyes closed and hoping for a little more sleep, when this thought hit me, and it seemed so suddenly obvious that I wondered why I hadn’t thought of it sooner:

What am I building? I am building myself.

I quickly realized I meant something different from “working on myself.” Working on myself is: I’ve got Stuff and it gets in the way so I’m trying to deal with my Stuff.

So while I’ve had (and continue to have) plenty of Stuff to work with and through, that’s not what I mean here.

It’s like this: How many times have I had that one conversation on the chairlift, the one where the friendly stranger asks, “What do you do?” and I say that I’m a writer, and then she inevitably asks, “So where can I read what you’ve written?”

I used to answer, “Sadly, nowhere yet,” and I’d tell stories about publications here and there, about hating freelancing, about unpublished novels. Now when I say I’m a writer, I can share a URL and say, “Check it out and see.”

I am building a person who writes and edits and publishes as a daily practice.

I am building a person who is building a body of work and, slowly, building something out of that body of work.

I am building on old techniques and building new ones. So I am building a person who builds on and builds with.

Work the process, trust the process, evolve the process: I am building a person who does these things.

I am no longer just calling myself a writer. I am building a writer.

This thing that I am building: It exists in vague blurs at the sides of my vision, and when I try to look directly at it it dissolves into mist. In its ghost-like nature, there is a message: this will not be something you can control. You can only do the work. It is constructing itself as you go, and you won’t see it clearly until it is complete.

Something comes into focus: This is the next piece, it tells me. I can hold it in my hands, turn it over and over, examine it as much as I want, but putting it into the whole offers me no further clarity except, This is the next piece. So it was with daily publishing and This Is Not a Blog and even the transcendent importance of Free Refills, which I haven’t yet told you about, but will.

All I know about helping this thing that I am building come into being is to continue doing the work, and to give honor to the work by allowing it to evolve and trusting the evolution. It is not something I can control and it will therefore never be comfortable, not until it is completed, at which point the next project will begin, and the process will continue.

Things which are solid: I see that I will have to dive into the design of the site itself. This is not a skillset I have, and the smart thing would be to hire someone, but how do you communicate what you want when when you don’t yourself know? This is not a blog, but it looks like one, and not a particularly loved one at that. Ultimately it must not and will not look like one. The discovery of how it should look is deeply entwined with what it is.

Control: All you can control is meeting the practice, but that isn’t where the edge is. Everything interesting happens in the space beyond your current understanding, where your mind has to relinquish its ability to figure things out, and let the flow carry things forward, as it always will.

Remember this? Build it and they will come. That sentence and the weight of meaning it carries now transcends the initial artistic expressions that brought it to us. It evokes a certain magic, a certain wonder. It demands the question, What is it?

What, indeed.