Pig Zen

Festa Italiana, San Mateo, CA, July 2008.

We went and saw our friend’s band play today.  They’re good players and performers, but the way things worked out, they’re weekend warriors rather than full-time musicians.  I wonder how often they wish things had worked out differently.

Music is the stuff of dreams.  I never wanted to be in a band when I was a kid.  Seriously, my goals involved growing up to be some sort of corporate success.  It was kind of horrible for my mom, I think — she was a flower child that begrudgingly drifted into office work because the extra money made things easier, and because in the end, that’s what grown-ups just did.  She drifted back out because the way it made things easier wasn’t really all that easy.

Selling out wasn’t a dream, though, it was a goal.  Being the CEO of a monolithic company seemed to be perfectly attainable; some days it still seems possible if I could learn to be more outgoing, more selfish, and more full of shit.  While I had detailed plans for a dream bedroom in a dream house in a dream life for right then, I don’t think I had any dreams for the future.  I don’t remember ever thinking that maybe someday I could be an astronaut or a movie star.  I was far too clumsy and asthmatic to have any professional sports aspirations.  The actual possibilities of my life seemed good enough.

I have flights of fancy now, of course.  Escapism becomes necessary when that universe of possibilities shrinks.  I have some pretty ordinary big dreams:  of traveling regularly and eating kind of like Anthony Bourdain did on A Cooks Tour.  I dream of being a better photographer and writer.  I dream of being coherent and eloquent enough to come up with a good book.  I dream of working on a screenplay and maybe directing it.

With maybe one foot on the top rung of the ladder of reality, things get more prosaic.  I have some sort of obsession about going to graduate school to prove to myself I’m as smart as my friends that went.  I regularly wish for the money fairy to show up so I can afford a house here and a cushion to provide for my mom as she gets older.  I dream of finding more motivation so I can use the skills I do have to change the world, even just a little.  I dream of getting over myself so that last thing is no longer a dream.

And every now and then, I dream of being able to play the piano and having people cheer for me.

February 2008.

We were out late last night with other people doing what people often do on Friday nights: we were at the bar.  Herself is not one for the sauce, and I practiced restraint.  The rest of our party, maybe not so much.

Elsewhere on the internet I’ve read that if it wasn’t for cigarettes and alcohol, the hospitals would be empty.  What drives people to chemical-induced debauchery and self-destruction?  My standard answer is, of course, “we drink until the pain goes away.”  As the modified version of the cliché goes, “we drink to remember, we drink to forget.”  I think the real answer is simpler.

Booze wasn’t really associated with good times during my formative years.  The only time that was different was one Thanksgiving night or post-X-mas dinner when my grandfather had a bunch of strays in (he was wont to do that around the holidays, try to find people that had nowhere else to go), and they were sitting around the folding table, playing poker.  I’d bring them beers, and they’d give me quarters.  No one was really fighting or getting their feelings hurt; it actually seemed like a good time was had by everyone except my mother and grandmother who were not used to so much traditional male obnoxiousness all at once.

That seemed like a fluke to me, though, until I started hanging around with other adults that drank.  I was pretty young, 14 or 15, when some of my then-BBS friends had a party.  I was invited and my mom didn’t even mind; she trusted some of the other adults that would be there.  It was at the house of a woman well known for her boisterous nature, and her convivial side only came out when her practicing Mormon husband was out of town.  I don’t think anyone offered me a drink and I didn’t ask.

They were drinking Southern Comfort and Blue Kool Aid.  It looked horrible and smelled almost as bad.  People were sneaking off to have secret conversations and stolen cigarettes.  They were calling up the radio station to make requests, and then not paying attention when the song came on.  I think a rather raunchy game of Pictionary was played.  There were drunk dials to those that could not be present.  Much junk food was consumed.  While there was some drama, it was the typical caused-by-miscommunication variety; nothing truly hateful was said nor anything dangerous done.

In short, they were acting like kids.  The booze was a lubricant and an excuse for letting the inner child out for a while.  This was when I first realized that adults are just children that have to be on their best behavior most of the time.  Quite a rude awakening for me; I was hoping something would magically change as I got older and I’d know what the right thing to do would be and that doing it would suddenly be easy.

SF Bay Area, July 2007.

I, too, am no morning person.  I have no idea what enables people to willingly wake up at o-dark-thirty, but people do it.  Some of them do even crazier things like go running or swimming at that ungodly hour.  I have the utmost respect for these dedicated souls, even if I do think they should consider a thorough psychiatric evaluation.

The only time woke up early without whining about it was X-mas morning when I was a little kid, and that was probably because all the anticipation adrenaline kept me from sleeping.  My grandmother used to get up early and have a bowl of Corn Flakes while she read the newspaper.  Corn Flakes and milk were perpetually on her shopping list, and eating that cereal and looking at that smudgy gray printing seemed to be the most grown up thing in the world.  While I always yearned to be a grown-up, I never quite managed to get out of bed in time to enjoy that breakfast ritual while watching the sun rise.

They now offer night school for high school kids.  If they had that when I was a kid, well, I wouldn’t have been tardy at least once a week to first period.  I hated high school and I hated getting up early.  Those two things together were like a perfect storm of loathing, and it was a lesser miracle that I made it all the way until the twelfth grade.

Towards the end at my old job, we were having status meetings every morning at 7:30.  It was the exact same meeting every day; we talked about all the projects that didn’t go anywhere because all of our effort was put into fighting fires.  The meetings would have been horrible no matter what time of day; any team that is forced to start each and every day with self-flagellation is doomed.  The early hour was like adding insult to injury; the meeting was set at that time half to spite me.  We eventually cut back to every other day and finally to once a week, and maybe they’re still having it and recycling the same meeting notes by scratching out the date.

I think a large part of if I’m going to have a good day or a bad one is determined in the first two hours.  Despite the fact that I’m a geek and thus afraid of the sun, I tend to be in a better mood if the sky I see out the window is blue rather than cloudy when I first wake up.  Maybe that’s why runners and swimmers get up early to work out: they have complete control over the first act of each day’s drama.  That has to beat the rushed and disjointed chaos I go through.

SF Bay Area, June 2008.

We’re in the middle of our challenge.  One thing I can say:  herself has been much more personal in her writing than I have.  Lately, she’s written some very personal things while I’ve been writing essays.  I think she’s writing for herself, while I’m generally writing for some vague notion of an audience.  That means she’s trying to expose something that her inner voice is trying to share, while I’m trying to write for a group of people that I can’t even identify.  I’m not comfortable writing directly about myself so I try to tell some kind of story, and I want that story to be funny or thought-provoking or informative.  She’s just been writing what’s on her mind, and I’m impressed by that, because it ends up being all three.

Acting is believable and compelling only when the actor connects with the emotions and motivations of the character.  Writing is only worth reading when the writer is connecting with the essence of the theme.  There’s a distinct possibility that my theme is to put up a blog entry every day for a month.  Since there’s not yet a market for the blog-post-a-day calendar, the value of that theme is drawn into question.

Here’s my moment of truth for today: I often wonder how many people really could connect with me.  I’m such a mash-up of neuroses and contradictions that even the best writing would still make me look like a cross between a Neal Stephenson and Woody Allen character, and lacking the good points of both at that.  I’m trying too hard to act like a coherent version of myself rather than just being me.

Out the car window, SF Bay Area, January 2008.

Lacking any interesting topics tonight, I went to one of those writing prompt databases, and after refreshing through a couple of ideas for parents and one that was a little to fanciful for me, I found this:

If you could change one thing about the town you live in, what would it be?

There are countless things I wish were different about this place.  I wish it were cheaper to live here.  I wish it was less crowded.  I wish earthquakes weren’t a constant threat.  I wish being run off the road by a jackass in a BMW wasn’t a constant threat.  I wish that the Governator’s constant hare-brained budget balancing schemes would just go away.  Realistically, though, I don’t think changing any of those things would have the desired effects.

The Bay Area is what it is because of its good points, and that brings about the bad ones.  If it were cheaper, it would be more crowded.  If it were less crowded, it would probably be more expensive and less diverse.  I think earthquakes are a deep-seeded part of the Californian identity; people aren’t afraid of taking chances here because just living on a fault line means you’re always taking a chance.  The jackasses in the BMWs are probably like the appendix of urbanized California — we could take them out, but the scar would linger.

I was looking at one of those lists of “great places to live.”  Only one Bay Area town was on the list, it was near the bottom, and while it’s a perfectly okay bit of suburbia, no one’s gong to write any songs about it.  While we have a remarkable “quality of life” here: good weather, sophisticated cultural institutions, good schools in certain areas; the list was focused on good places to raise a family.  The American nuclear family has fled most of California in droves because the air here is too rareified.  Anywhere else in the country, you can work and commute less, your children can probably go to better schools, and you’ll be able to live in a safer neighborhood, surrounded by families just like yours, and you can enjoy a house with a back yard and room for a dog.  Whether or not that nuclear family idea is sustainable any longer and that level of insulation is what children really need are two different problems all together.

I think the cost of living here is part of the formula that inspires greatness.  People have to work hard just to scrape by.  Part of the reason great things happen is because they have to happen in order to sustain this place, whether it’s in technology, food, or even entertainment.

So, dearest California, don’t you go changin’.