John

I got up this morning to do a project helping John hang drywall. I would be driving and John didn't have a license, so I'd need to pick him up. I picked up some sandwiches and Gatorade at the IGA a couple blocks from my house, then drove across town and made it to John's at a couple minutes after 7.

John has a small house. A camper is parked in the back and there was a bike laying in the front lawn. The door was open but the screen door was closed, so I got out of the car, walked up the sidewalk, and knocked. I heard voices inside. John came to the door and told me to come in for a few minutes.

"Are you ready to go?" I asked. "Do you need to load up some tools?"
"Are we taking the van?"
"No. My car." John's eyes were glazed and I could tell he'd already been drinking or had started the night before.
"What tools do I need?"
"I don't know. Mark said you'd know what tools you'd need."
"Okay, give me five minutes. We'll pick up a 12-pack on the way."
I looked at him, registering his body movements, the unsteady shuffle and sway and thought about our drywall project ahead, standing on ladders, handing up 30+ pound sheets of drywall, and just shook my head.
"Don't tell me what to do," he said, then paused. "Well, I'm taking at least one anyway."

I then noticed John's friend who was sitting on a couch to my left. "John's an alcoholic," he said. "So am I. You okay with that?"
"Okay," I said. I turned back to John. "I'll go out to my car and give you some time to get things together,"
"My name's Rick," the other guy said, and shook my hand. "Can you feel that?" he asked.
"No," I said, not sure what he meant.
"Energy. A strong grip." I didn't feel either, but pulled my hand out of his.

I called Mark. "John's drunk. What do you think?"
"I'll be over in just a minute." In the meantime John had grabbed a pitcher of tea and toolbelt, and gotten in the passenger side of the car. "Let's do this," he said. Rick followed closely behind.
"Let's wait here for a minute till Mark comes I said."
"I'm not going to go to work today, Rick."
"What do you mean?" he said. "Sure you will."
"No. No, he's called the cops because of my heroin."

Mark arrived soon after, John was taken off the job, and went into the house and began playing his electric guitar, badly. He had once been one of the best drywallers in the business, and had been sober for a six month stretch recently, and some of the old skills had come back. I felt guilty and angry. I didn't want John working drunk, but hated to see him lose the job. I felt angry that John blamed me.

I haven't seen much of John's world, and have only experienced it around me, not directly lived in it. I lived above a couple bars in Lincoln when I was in college, heard the songs sung on the street at 2am after closing time. I lived next door to a prostitute in Springfield, and saw her men come and go or was awakened in the middle of the night when the windows were open. I was awakened one night to knocks on my door and two kids were standing outside, asking me to call the cops because their dad was upstairs with a cord around his neck on the balcony, and they were afraid he'd jump.

No conclusions, just thinking out loud for now.

Committees (grrr!)

School starts in a month, but I've already been having dreams about heading back. Last night I dreamed that I was stuck in a committee to decide our writing textbook for the next year, which isn't too much of a stretch. The dream was full of elements of real committee meetings. The main question up for debate was whether we should use the current text or whether it was too offensive because of the language. In real life, this question comes up all the time. I'm not one to usually get on the censorship bandwagon, in fact I was making the argument that we gain by hearing the perspectives of those we don't agree with (or who don't agree with us) as much, or more, than hearing from the perspectives we already buy into.

"Cliff, what's the definition of madness?" the retired prof asked whom I was now replacing.

"Um, doing the same things yet expecting different results." I thought this was the right answer, but she turned to someone else, who rattled off a definition that was verbatim something she had said and she nodded. I thought, Socratic questions are good teaching tools, but they also feel like a setup.

"Lunchtime!" someone said, while plates of sandwiches and desserts were wheeled in. The meeting fell into a state of chaos for a few minutes as everyone grabbed sandwiches, some eyeing them with piggy eyes, and I thought we'd have some reprieve from the endless debate over textbooks. Instead, it was going to be a "working lunch" where we would eat AND talk at the same time. Whoever thought that a working lunch was a good idea needs to be shot. Just when you think, "Good, a break. I don't have to listen to Donnegal drone on, at least for the next thirty minutes," think again.

During the lunch, other colleagues were pulling out papers and surveys, questionnaires and research statistics over why we should adopt one book over another. I slid down further in my seat, feeling unprepared other than the feeling that the meeting was pointless in the first place.
As someone read a paper I was actually interested in, people around the room began sliding their seats back, squeaking them across the floor to signal they were done eating, but the chorus that sounded like a cross between whining, out of tune violins and nose whistles drowned out what the presenter was trying to say, and he was sitting at my table. I held up my hands, "Wait, wait a minute," I said. "Can you stop and then reread that again? I had a hard time hearing you." Others in the room stared at me, aghast that I could be so rude and ask him to stop. No one was really listening to his paper anyway, were they? Thankfully, the dream ended.

At this point, I feel underprepared. I dislike committee meetings and retreats, especially when the retreats don't usually ever leave campus, and any "free time" or mealtime is filled with more talking, or pointless "teambuilding" exercises. I don't feel like I have a cause, while others seem ready to fight and die for their textbook or idea. Sometimes I wonder if I'm in the wrong area, and feel the death of a thousand cuts.

Trouble writing

I've had a hard time writing this summer, or wanting to spend time in the office. At the same time, I've been struggling with my faith and also an overall sense of purpose. The two, for me anyway, have always seemed to go hand in hand. When I'm in tune spiritually, I also tend to write a lot, there's an overflow of ideas and a sense of purpose and that what goes on in my life and in the world matters. In the last year there have been a number of transitions and a few relationship blows that have impacted me more than I knew. For some, they would right more in these situations. For me, it was just the opposite.

First, blogging. When I began blogging it was in the midst of a community of guys who mostly knew each other, but as we began writing we came to realize how little we had actually known each other, and it was eye opening, cleansing, and refreshing to see the things the others were thinking about, dreaming about, or struggling with. Sometimes narcissism crept in (and I'm not sure it's ever totally absent from public writing), but mostly it was a good thing. Others came to the site and we began to realize there's a whole blogging world out there, and we were reading others and being read, and the community was beyond us.

But there's something about writing your thoughts down and having friends and anonymous strangers commenting and dialogging with what you've written. My friend Enemy has talked through this as well: on the one hand there's the affirmation and the strokes of someone noticing what you've written (we want this), and at the same time there's pressure, the voice that says "Now you have to have someone's approval. What if they don't like where you're going with the story? What if they don't like what you've written? What if they STOP reading?" It's no longer personal, but public, and unlike books, the reviews come right away.

In the midst of it, I've wondered if I have anything to say. I've felt paralyzed, sick of the narcissism in my own writing and in the blogging world in general, though I've also experienced the healing and community of hearing from others and sharing with them (a positive aspect of blogging). You come to realize that in a world of 6 billion people (and thousands of bloggers) one voice is small in the crowd.

So I've wanted to begin to tell a story that's not just my story, but our story. The thing about Tolkien, Lewis, Rowling, Brooks, Herbert and others is that they create an entire world and invite readers into that world. In the midst they find the author's world, but find so much more. They find bits and pieces of themselves, how people are, how they should be, comments on politics and social structures and the epic questions of good and evil and ethics and the struggles of growing up, making good choices, or facing our fears. And they do this in ways that no lecture or sermon could: they show rather than tell. They comment on the world around us by having us look at a reflection, a mirror, doppelganger, or through the back door.

I've gone from living in a small town to big cities, to a small town once again, yet there are stories here if one knows how to look for them. There's a friend of mine who has a growing brain tumor. He had surgery a couple weeks ago, but the growth has come back, fast. I saw him yesterday, realizing it may be one of the last times I see him. He was a friend of my parents, and has since become a good friend to me, and it hurt talking with him, seeing his weakness, seeing that we both knew the time may be short.

There are the 14-year old guys I take taekwondo with. I went to one of the guy's birthday parties on Saturday, took him some pellets for his air soft gun, and was glad I went. There's going to church and seeing a girl I care about, yet not being able to talk with her since we broke up. There's going to the park to watch people and deer and birds in the woods, or, on a creepy note, to have been stalked/checked out by a guy (doubly creepy since I'm not gay and his interest made me feel uncomfortable). There's the guy who mows lawns and rides through town on his bike, the men and women who hang out at the Arcade (restaurant) on Saturday mornings to drink coffee and catch up on gossip, there's spreading mulch in a garden with friends, there's the demolition derby and Nascar racing on Saturday nights that the people in town go crazy over. There's the nursing home in town that has become a multi-state operation, the prison just outside of town, two private colleges, hundreds of bars and churches. There are good cops and corrupt cops in town, good politicians and corrupt ones.

I don't know what this next year will be like, but I'd like to start writing again.

Physical summer

When I was three and living with my aunt and uncle, my cousin and I got to stay up to watch the Incredible Hulk. My aunt and uncle banned Star Trek and Scooby Doo, but the Incredible Hulk was okay. I'd watch the transformation from Bill Bixby's David Banner to Lou Ferrigno's Hulk, cheesy green wig and body paint included, and I was hooked. I wanted to be like Lou Ferrigno when I grew up, not Bill Bixby. The power in David Banner was this bigger, darker, more mysterious side of him: "Mr. Mcgee, don't make me angry. You wouldn't like me when I'm angry." A mysterious threat. Anyone would take one look at Bill and say, "What's there to be afraid of?" but then the eyes would turn green and pain and anger would trigger the transformation.

During the school year I spend a lot of time in the office, with books, teaching classes, going to meetings, and after a while there's this dry, dustiness that blows through my insides. I begin to feel old. One of the things that made me nervous about an academic profession was all the professors who looked cynical, tired, and incredibly bored, living more in their heads than anywhere else.

So when I feel like this I dream about working in the North Pacific on a fishing vessel, or out on an oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico, or building a cabin in the remote areas of Canada, complete with ropes and obstacle training course. There are two sides, like Indiana Jones, the intellectual, academic side (that sometimes is fascinated, sometimes bored), and the physical side that wants to go on an adventure, be it traveling or testing my physical limits (have bullwhip, will travel).

The summer started with a two week trip to Greece and Italy, then, when I came back, taekwondo, construction work, and hitting the gym, bike or tennis court.

When taekwondo first started I'd find myself hunched over the trash can, wondering if I'd throw up. This last Monday I actually did. I signed on with a house construction company to get some experience, fill some time, and hopefully have the skills to fix projects in my own house someday. I learned how to clean insulation out of attics, hang siding, caulk seams in the basement, and the other day held a saw over my head for hours as I cut holes in boards for heating vents to pass through. My hands are torn up and blistered, my triceps cramped to the point that I had to hold an arm cradled to my chest until the cramps passed, and by the end of the day I'm plastered in sawdust and shredded newspaper.

I started taking supplements (not steroids) and have been going to the gym. My body feels like it's transforming, like I'm waking up inside the body of someone else. My birth mom was a bodybuilder for a while, and I inherited her genes, so I've given up the dreams of ever looking like an elf and realize I'll probably look more like a dwarf (though the beard has been shaved off).

It's been hardcore, complete with egg whites (cartons of liquid egg rather than all those yolks to throw away), turkey, fish, chicken, sweet potatoes, potatoes, greens, gallons of water, fruit and nuts, meals six times a day. Chuck Palahniuk, in his book Stranger Than Fiction, talks about his brief stint using anabolic steroids. It's addicting, psychologically more than physically. A transformation is taking place, you can see tangible results for your efforts, and your body feels more like that of a titan or superhuman, rather than human. It's power, and power feels good. No wonder hardcore athletes continue to use even though they know the internal damage they're doing to their heart, their testicles, and other parts of them. It's hard to walk away from.

In high school I worked out because I wanted to be noticed, to date women, because I had a lot of anger and needed somewhere to channel it. Now, there's something else going on. I wanted to not have to think for a while. At the same time the semester ended, so did my relationship with a girl I'd been seeing. We weren't together long, but it impacted me a lot. Working to exhaustion, feeling pain in my back, legs, and arms felt cleansing, a way to put school and the voices in my head behind me for a while. It's worked, for the most part.

Palahniuk's steroid prescription ran out, and he stopped using. School's going to start again (at least office hours) in a few weeks, and my desire for a full-time career in construction has been satisfied (I'm more grateful for my education and job teaching), but I learned that I love both working with my body and my mind. In another life, or in Morrowind or Oblivion, I might have chosen the warrior poet, or the warrior monk. For now, the adventures are coming to an end, perhaps, at least until my restless spirit stirs up again.