Dec 1
A friend recently told me that one of her goals in this middle stage of life is to learn how to live with an “undefended heart.” That struck me as an interesting and somehow essential way of putting it. It was term that I resolved to ponder more deeply. An undefended heart. What a thing to be able to say one has amid all the pain we endure and inflict upon each other. What a ballast for a world so riven by division and chaos, deceit and manipulation. Read more
It’s a shame we have to die, my dear. No one’s getting out of here alive.
— Foo Fighters, DOA
I spent part of yesterday watching the “Gentlemen’s Final” at Wimbledon. Like many things about this old tournament, the vocabulary speaks to a bygone age. Who uses words like “gentlemen” anymore? Although this year’s finalists refreshingly seem to actually fit the term. Jannik Sinner and Carlos Alcaraz seem to be something of a rarity in professional sports in that they are genuinely decent young men in addition to being spectacular tennis players. It was a good match, and it was nice to see Sinner prevail after a crushing loss to Alcaraz in a five-hour marathon a month or so in the French Open final. Read more
On my walks this week, I’ve been listening to a series on The Medici family on The Rest is History podcast. After I finished walking the Camino last month, my wife and I spent six days or so in Italy with some friends. We toured around places like Florence, Pisa, Livorno, and Siena—the heart of Tuscany, where the Medicis rose to power in the twelfth century. So, my curiosity was piqued if for no other reason than recent proximity to the region. Read more
I was in a social context the other day where a few of us were grumbling about 90/10 conversations. You know the kind, right? One person takes up 90% of the conversational space. It’s pretty much one-way traffic. You feel more like you’re being talked at than with. Your 10% contribution mostly involves nodding and emoting at the appropriate times. I was in gift shop in Montana last summer that hawked various knickknacks (coffee mugs, tea towels, greeting cards) containing funny, often irreverent little sayings on them. One of them said: “I’m sorry I slapped you, but it didn’t seem like you’d ever stop talking and I panicked!” I’ve never considered physical violence to end a conversation, but I have had my moments of desperation! Read more
I’ve referred to Nick Cave’s Red Hand Files often over the last few years. This is the forum where Cave responds, often quite movingly and insightfully, to the questions of his fans. He’s been doing it for six years and three hundred posts. I look forward to these arriving in my inbox every time. To mark his three hundredth post, Cave decided to flip the script. Instead of responding to the questions of his fans and readers, he decided to ask a question of his own. It was a very simple one: “Where or how do you find your joy?” Read more
At a Christmas party last week, I became the proud owner of an orange rotary telephone. This artifact came into my possession via a gift exchange where guests were instructed not to buy anything. Typically what happens at these kinds of gift exchanges is that people either set to work doing virtuous things like baking a loaf of banana bread or they rummage around in their house for something that either don’t need, don’t like, or think would make for a hilarious gag. I’m pretty sure some of the gifts at this particular party have been circulating for at least half a decade. It’s all great fun. Read more
My son is just over 6’10 and he hates basketball. How much fatherly despair can fit in one sentence, I wonder? Far more than is good or healthy or sane, to put it mildly. Right around the time he passed his dear old dad in height (I think he was eight or nine) and it became obvious that his height might just confer an athletic advantage or two, said dad began to invest considerable and wildly disproportionate emotional energy into his son’s sporting pursuits. Basketball, obviously. Volleyball. Hockey, for a short time. Football, as middle school gave way to high school. Without exception, my son’s interest in these sports failed to even come close to his father’s. His general approach to sports could be summed up in a word. Actually a lonely syllable would suffice. Meh.
A brief follow-up to Tuesday’s post about how we are living in “morally inarticulate” times. In today’s New York Times, Pamela Paul compellingly and persuasively argues that we should not abandon the term “prostitution” for the supposedly more dignified and dignifying term “sex worker.” Calling a whole toxic ecosystem that feeds on poverty, addiction, violence, lust, and predation “sex work,” Paul argues, does not change the reality. This is not a job like any other and we shouldn’t describe it as such. Read more
A few stray threads to pick at as another week winds down…
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I spent the August long weekend with a few long-time friends in Seattle. Guys always need a reason beyond just getting together to get together, and in this case, it was a concert. Greta Van Fleet was in town and this seemed like a pretty good excuse to make the trek. I’m likely a bigger fan than a few of the other guys, but I think everyone enjoyed the spectacle. Read more
My wife and I have different interests and philosophies when it comes to things like fitness and staying active. She likes hiking and running for excruciatingly long distances over hills and mountains. I like chasing balls and pucks with racquets and sticks. Thus it has been forever and ever. Every once in a while, one of us will venture over into the other’s world—I’ll go on a hike (and hardly complain); she’ll swing a tennis racquet for an afternoon—but for the most part we stay in our lanes. You need your own thing in a marriage, right? Read more
What hasty preparations we make for our future. Think of it: it seems almost tragic, the things we’re sure we ought to bring along. We pack too heavy with what we hope we’ll use, and too light of what we must. We thus go forth misladen, ill equipped for the dawn.
— Chang Rae Lee, My Year Abroad
There’s a weird and ill-defined stage of the parenting journey where your influence wanes and you become less of anything resembling an “authority” and more of a cheerleader or casual consultant (or vague irritant!). There’s no precise moment where this happens in your kids’ lives—they could probably be anywhere between 15-30!—but one day you wake up and sense that something has changed. They don’t need you in the same way, don’t want your input in the same way, don’t necessarily choose the things that you would have chosen, do not necessarily turn out to be carbon copies of their parents (go figure!)!. It’s the most natural thing in the world and yet it still somehow manages to come as something of a surprise. Read more
Apparently, this little blog is celebrating a birthday today. It was fifteen years ago today that I first pressed “publish” and sent a few thoughts out into the ether. WordPress was kind enough to give me a heartfelt birthday notification along with some stats today (I was touched, obviously). Over the last decade and a half, I have evidently written 1412 posts which have generated 13 995 comments. Which seems like rather a lot of words. Needless to say, a lot more than I expected way back on January 20, 2007. Read more
I found myself in a very long line up at the post office the other day. Without my phone. So, you know, pretty much the worst thing imaginable. Instead of pretending to attend to very important business or burying my nose in the (mostly trivial) minutiae of other people’s lives in worlds far away, I was forced to lift my gaze and pay attention to the actual world right in front of me. It was unsettling and disorienting. I barely made it out alive. Read more
What have I become? The thought occurred to me as I was pulling out of the McDonald’s drive-thru clutching my $1 medium black coffee on the way to work this morning. This was the fourth time in the last week that I have found myself in this shameful position. My daughter recently began a new job, and she and my wife have been emptying the coffee pot on the way out the door. I could have made a fresh pot but, well, you know that takes time, and I was running late, and McDonald’s has $1 coffee, so…. Read more
One of the podcasts I’ve been periodically dropping in on lately is Bari Weiss’s Honestly. Weiss’s story is an interesting one to me. She had the job I imagine many writers covet. She was an editor and writer at The New York Times, the journalistic equivalent of reaching the summit of the mountaintop. It’s not the sort of job you leave. But last year she did. In her resignation letter, Weiss cited the Times’ drift from being a publication that at least attempted an objective pursuit of the truth toward being a tool for disseminating an implicit (or explicit) orthodoxy that is “already known to an enlightened few whose job is to inform everyone else.” This was not what Weiss signed up for as a journalist. Read more
A podcast I was listening to this morning asked the question: “What was the last normal life experience you had before the pandemic lockdown hit?” What stands out in the memory of the days before normal life experiences became few and far between? For the host, it was attending a sporting event—a college basketball game between Virginia and Duke. And indeed, these collective experiences—sports (with fans), concerts, conferences, etc.—are what many feel no small amount of nostalgia for as this difficult year staggers toward its conclusion. Read more
A few people have asked me over the last few weeks how it’s been since I deleted my Facebook account. The short answer is that I haven’t really missed it. There have been a few times when I have felt a little in the dark, not knowing something what others in a conversation did because I hadn’t seen what this or that person posted. I’m sure I’ve missed out on the odd article that I really should have read or an important update in someone’s life. These are among the expected trade offs that are part of the deal. Read more
I’m bald. Have been for roughly two decades. Perversely, I spent the previous two or three years before losing my hair shaving my head and bleaching the stubble that remained platinum blonde. I’m not at all filled with self-loathing for my poor choices on this score or bitter about going bald early or filled with jealousy for men my age who have full heads of hair. The fact that I pleaded with my son for most of his teenage years to grow his hair long so I could live vicariously through him has nothing to do with unresolved early-onset balding trauma. My proclivity to wear a hat anytime I’m not sleeping or preaching has nothing to do with vain contempt for my bald head. I like being bald and am fully at peace with it. Really. Read more
Rumblings 