People of Walmart

I was born and raised in Vista, California. It took me 23 years to get the hell out of that town, but only took seven more years for me to get back (Loretta). Six years ago my wife (who is also from Vista) and I, expecting our first child, left the wilds of urban San Diego and bought a house in our provincial, conservative, suburban, comfortable, troubled hometown, which we swore we'd never do. We're still there. We love the house. We love being close to our families. Sometimes we even think we've made our peace with Vista, and could just as easily stay here forever. But in our heart of hearts we both suspect that's probably not true.

I work in Los Angeles and have a four hour round-trip commute every day. If I'm going to keep doing this job, or another job in this industry, we know we'll have to move to LA sooner rather than later. We've been confronting that reality in our own ways a lot lately and I think it's safe to say that net-net we both see the idea as a positive one. We worry about uprooting the kids, we worry about not being as close to our parents, we don't like the idea of leaving a house we've put so much love and elbow grease into, but those are details rooted in the big Fear of Change that nags around the margins of any major life decision.

The truth is, we'd rather be in a real city, we'd rather our children grow up in a place where they're exposed to a wide variety of cultural stimuli, we'd rather be closer to the epicenter of the kinds of arts and ideas that our respective professional and creative lives are centered around. We could stay in Vista forever and be perfectly happy, of course--it's not a life and death decision. But we both think that's probably not the path for us, at least not right now.

It's more complicated than it should be, for me at least, because I still haven't quite worked out the way I feel about my hometown and what it represents. Some days it feels to me like a very sad place, a tree-lined pit of despair and pale compromise, a breeding ground for mediocrity and sameness from which no beauty or greatness could ever spring. That's how I saw it when I was 15, to be sure, and I cultivated that perception well beyond it's sell-by date, in large part to make me feel better about myself. But I'm not 15 anymore, I'm not holed up in my room on a Saturday night listening to Smiths records and reading Fahrenheit 451 and cursing the football team. I'm a grown-ass man.

And, yeah, OK, the town still doesn't have a bookstore. The closest thing we get to a foreign film at the local movie theatre is Inglorious Bastards. The biggest culinary news of the decade was the opening of the California Pizza Kitchen down the block. The sheriff's department seems to open fire on Hispanic males for the crime of walking out of 7-11. I could probably score crystal meth at the bus stop on the corner. There are 3 Walmarts within a 10 mile radius. I can't count the number of "Sportsmen for Bush" bumper stickers I *still* see on huge trucks tooling around town on any given day. That's all true.

But does any of that really matter? It's all in what you choose to see. Some days I can get over myself, I can put that 15 year-old kid's voice out of my head, and I can look around me and see real beauty and real depth and real love. I can see people who are just trying to get through the day and still taking the time to help each other. I can sit on my patio and listen to the birds and smell the neighbor's barbeque and in those moments there is nowhere I'd rather be.

And often I experience disgust and love for my town in almost the same moment. The other night I was coming home late, after a particularly stressful week that had kept me out of the house and away from my children far more than I would have liked. I promised my oldest son that I would bring home a very specific Star Wars toy that happens to be sold exclusively at Walmart. Please understand that my objections to Walmart are wide and deep, philosophical and visceral, political and sociological, deep-rooted and pervasive. In other words, I hate everything about Walmart and I have vowed repeatedly to never set foot in one ever again. But my kid wanted a toy, and my love for him trumps both my wavering principles and my weak stomach, so I sucked it up and made the stop.

I held my nose and looked at everyone in the store with my usual mix of disdain and condescension, secure somehow in the belief that I was out of my element, that I was not one of these people, that I was just a tourist with a mission. I found the toy, made my way past the throngs to the 10 Items or Less aisle and took my place in line. The man in front of me, who had a cart with what I'm sure were exactly 10 items, shot a glance back at me. What the fuck are you looking at, I thought. Mind your own business. And then he turned around again, and insisted in a gentle and kind tone that I go ahead of him. I protested but he wouldn't have it. Maybe he could tell by my body language that I was in some kind of pain and needed to get out as soon as possible. More likely, he was just being kind. He was just a gentle and dignified man committing a small and simple act of kindness. When I left I thanked him, and called him Sir, which is a word I never use, at least not in earnest. But I meant it. I was genuinely moved by the gesture, and I was filled with shame for my ugly thoughts about the people around me. You're a fucking snob, I thought to myself. Why do you need to dehumanize these people just to make yourself feel better about your own value? Why do you need to pretend that you're not one of them, that you don't come from where you come from? What fucking shame is there in going to Walmart, or living in Vista, or not wearing vertical stripes to try and hide your morbid obesity? What the fuck is your problem, chump?

Well, I know the answer(s) to that last one. I've got a lot of problems, clearly, and the vast majority of them, like this one, are entirely of my own making. And none of them are Vista's fault.

The Sporting Life

My father is, among many, many other things, a lifelong connoisseur of American sports. "Fan" is not the right word in his case, because that's not what he is. He doesn't participate passively and root feverishly, he immerses himself into the sports that he loves and studies their rhythms and properties, lets them seep into the fabric of his life, participates in them in any way he can. He was a great athlete in his youth, a Triple A pitcher for the Chattanooga Lookouts, the farm team for the Detroit Tigers, and a professional middleweight boxer for 12 fights. He coached baseball, football and basketball for years at the high school level, and when he retired from teaching and coaching he spent many years as a freelance sportswriter for local papers, attending every sporting event he could, whether it was professional baseball, college football, track and field or even junior college basketball.

He's 85 now and doesn't get around much anymore, but the first thing he does every morning is scour the sports page at the dining room table and plot out his television viewing for the rest of the day. I spend a portion of most Saturdays at my parent's house, visiting my mom and dad while the kids run around wreaking havoc, and now as ever the constant background noise of whatever college football game or baseball game happens to be on offers a kind of nostalgic and peaceful reassurance that I can't even describe. It is the sound of my father in his element, and I find it joyful.

I grew up immersed in this world and took to it with my own kind of enthusiasm. I was not an athlete, as anyone who's met me can attest, and though my natural interests from an early age tended more toward books and movies and fantasy worlds than baseball and football, I did inherit my father's ability to see the beauty and intricacy of sports. More than anything, though, sports offered a way for me to *experience* my father, I realize now, to participate in his life and his worldview in a way that is enormously important for children and their parents. He gave me the gift of the thing he loved, without ever forcing me to love it too. He just tried to show me why he loved it, I think, in so doing modeled for me how one can love something and take joy and comfort from it, how one can use the things they love to help them get through the day and better understand and participate in the universe around them. He did what all great fathers do, I think--he tried to teach me how to live not by dispensing wisdom or making rules, but by showing me what he believes the world has to offer.

I'm thinking about this stuff today for a lot of reasons, I guess. My father is getting older, my children are getting older, I find it harder to make room for abiding pleasures in my own hectic life. I don't really give much of my attention to sports anymore, not in a substantive way. I haven't been to a baseball game in a few years, I try to watch football here and there on a weekend but invariably find myself unable to really concentrate after a few minutes, I don't take the time to read the sports section of the newspaper very often. But it is always there for me, and I can return to the pleasure it offers at any time, for however long I like. And I do return to it, without even realizing it sometimes. I find myself stopping on the sports station while scanning the radio on my long drive every now and then, and I linger there, reassured and soothed by the banter. I am in those moments 11 years old again, drifting in and out of sleep in the passenger seat of my dad's old Chevy truck on the way home from another Padre game, my head on his shoulder as he drives, Jerry Coleman's voice on the post game show, a warm and tender feeling in my stomach, the lingering taste of salted peanuts still on my lips. I know I could leave the office tonight and drive to Dodger stadium (are the Dodger's in town tonight?) and buy a ticket and get a hot dog and have the time of my life, all by myself, if I chose to. That is a gift my father has given me, one of many. A way to be at home in the universe, wherever you are.

Anything at all

I haven't been writing about my progress in executing my food and exercise plan here lately because...well, what did my second grade teacher say when I told her how boring I thought the class was? If you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all.

That notion never really took with me, so I may as well buck up and face the music. I've been more or less flailing the past few weeks when it comes to wellness. Good days here and there but more bad days than not. No exercise whatsoever, save chasing my kids around the park or the beach on the weekend. Periods of thoughtful food choices interspersed with mindless gorging. Too much drinking.

And the thing is, I don't feel particularly motivated to turn it all around right now. I want to, I know I should, I go through the motions of planning it out, and then...I give in. I get stressed out at work, freaked out about something else, blah blah blah...and then I comfort myself with food. I feel some pleasure, in that moment, and then I feel like complete shit afterwards.

And so that's the update. I don't know. I have all the tools at my disposal, I know what I need to do, and I'm just not really doing it. I'm disappointed in myself, I feel like a slug, I feel powerless and lazy and silly.

So here's what I'm going to do: go home and play with my kids. Eat a healthy dinner with my wife. Watch the season premiere of The Biggest Loser. Then get up tomorrow and try again.

Where We Come From

A confluence of events related to my family has put me in a very specific state-of-mind, and I've been distracted all weekend with thoughts about identity, about how we become who we are, how we are shaped by where we come from and what we don't know and what we fear and what we love. What happens to us with age, emotionally and physically, how we do or don't get away from where we come from and what that means for the people we become and the people we create and the people we love.

"We are what we think. With our thoughts, we make the world," so sayeth The Buddha, and it's hard to argue with that. Train your thoughts to make your world, and the world will be yours. But for most of us, as I think the Buddha also points out, that's really really fucking difficult to do. Some people are closer to it than others, either by conditioning or natural temper, and they exude a kind of strength and steadiness that draws others to them and radiates security and confidence. My father is like that, he knows and I think has always known intuitively how to control his mind and keep his light shining through all manner of pain and trauma, and I am inspired and awed by his example, especially now as he struggles more than ever with physical limitations but refuses to lose his will and optimism.

So I try to follow his example of stillness and strength, as best I can, and even though I face nowhere near the adversity he's had to battle, I've had nowhere near his success in keeping the demons at bay. But that's my story, often told, and it's not my story that's been running through my head this weekend, it's somebody else's. The details aren't important or appropriate to share, but the thoughts have led me to a few different conclusions.

First, EVERYTHING MATTERS. Everything we do, every day, all day, is enormously important, ripples through the universe in ways we can't possibly understand when we're in the moment. I have to remind myself to trust that, even when it feels like the opposite is true, to take myself and my actions seriously, and to therefore let my principles guide my thoughts and behavior. And for me, that means, very simply, to always act from love. That's it. Let love guide and instruct my every action, all day long. And that's very hard to do, for me. My enemy in this pursuit is not so much anger or hatred, though I have those impulses and though those things are certainly the opponents of love, but for me it's much more fear, laziness and selfishness, which are also the opponents of love. When I think about my footprint in this universe, I realize that the harm I have done has rarely come from malice or greed or hatred, but rather from from *not* acting on something when I should have. And the reasons I didn't, always, are rooted in fear and then manifested in either or both selfishness or laziness. And that's just as bad, in many cases, as actively seeking to do harm. You're either part of the problem or you're part of the solution. Silence is consent.

The second realization I think I've come to (I don't know if you can call these things realizations, really--they're not new thoughts to me, but I'm feeling them in a way and with a clarity I haven't before) is that nobody ever really sees the whole board, nobody can ever really know what's in somebody else's heart, that it's completely impossible to see the world as it really is because the world is constantly shifting and moving under our feet, it's completely impossible to truly anticipate and understand and correct and console and guide outcomes and to really believe otherwise is a fool's errand, is monumentally arrogant and short-sighted, is probably something akin to unpardonable hubris and stupidity, and is something I've been guilty of pretty much my whole life. In the larger scheme of things, I know absolutely nothing. Not a fucking thing. Which makes the first point even more important, in my reckoning. If I can surrender the illusion of control, it might become possible to play my part in the universe conscientiously and with love and meaning. Everything matters because everything is part of everything else, and I can chart patterns and analyze results and learn from mistakes, but I'll never really know the way it all fits together, I'll never outsmart the universe. The best I can do, in the day that I'm in, is to act with kindness and love, to give off the kind of energy I want to get back.

And in that way I help create the place my children will come from, which is my greatest responsibility, my greatest weight, my greatest joy, my greatest challenge. Be who you are, my lovely boys. Be who you are.

sun, etc.

I'm bored with myself. I want a break from my head. I want to reset my thoughts. I'm tired of these cycles. I'm tired of glimpsing the man I want to be on the horizon and then scaring him away. I'm even tired of that thought, tired of the recognition that I'm my own worst enemy, tired of dragging myself into the crazy cave and then seeing the ray of light shining in and deciding it's all going to be ok. I'm tired of carrying this weight I've accumulated through sheer laziness and self-sabotage, it's making my back hurt. Literally and figuratively. I'm tired.

Welcome to this month's edition of Tom Battles His Demons and Tries to Shape His Ass Up, version 562. Welcome to the world's worst self-improvement blog, a neverending chronicle of false starts and trite epiphanies followed by flourishes of despair and melancholy. Rinse and repeat.

So this week, again, I press the reset button. I feel the sunshine on my face. I decide to grow up. Yadda yadda yadda. Try not to skip ahead. Maybe the ending will surprise you this time.

Anyway, what the fuck else am I going to do? Sit on the couch and watch Everybody Loves Raymond re-runs and play video games and entertain myself with snarky comments and get fatter and fatter until I'm one of those people on the discovery channel who have to be lifted out their house with a crane? I don't even like to play video games, and Everybody Loves Raymond sucks.

So this week I hereby resolve to ask the following questions of myself:

--Really? Are you even hungry? ARE YOU EVEN HUNGRY?

--What possible causative value can arise from thinking about this thing obsessively instead of doing this other thing ?

--Are you acting out of love?

--What are you children seeing when they look at you?

--Are you being useful?

--Are you having fun?

--Is this thing you're yelling about really as important as you think it is? Should you maybe just shut the fuck up and go take a walk instead of being this guy? Do I need to ask you that again? Because you're still yelling, so I think maybe I do. Let me rephrase that: Do you really want to be an asshole? Really?

Let the sunshine in!!!!!!!!

Make it New

"The human body is not a thing or a substance, given, but a continuous creation. The human body is an energy system which is never a complete structure; never static; it is in perpetual inner self-construction and self-destruction; we destroy in order to make it new."
--Norman O. Brown

In his famous Nobel prize acceptance speech, the American novelist William Faulkner said that all great writing is concerned with "...the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself."

I haven't written anything here in almost two weeks because I take this blog seriously, I feel I would be doing myself dis-service to write anything inauthentic and every time I consider the notion of an honest accounting of my own heart's conflicts lately I can't quite face up to the challenge, I can't quite bring myself to take a breath and try and shape something into coherency, I can't stand apart from the thick of the battle and gain perspective. I am, in other words, going a little crazy, and I don't want to scare anybody by putting that on display. As Bob Dylan once sang: "If my mind's thoughts could be seen, they'd probably put me on the guillotine."

Which is not to say I'm having a breakdown or wandering around sobbing and cryptically quoting Bob Dylan and Faulkner to strangers at the supermarket, despite my occasional urges to do so. I'm going to work and laughing and watching Top Chef and playing with my kids and being normal old Tom for all the world to see. I'm keeping it together, and the only one who really knows how crazy I am right now is my poor wife, who is occasionally forced to bear the brunt of an outburst.

My battles are all interior and deep-seated and arising unexpectedly to take me by surprise. This is not the existential panic that is so often the background of my head, the who am I? latenight musings on mortality...it's both smaller and more pervasive than that, somehow. I feel discombobulated and vulnerable, unable to control any situation. I have what is to all appearances a minor staph infection on my leg that is responding well to medication, and I freak the hell out, sure that I'm going to die from antibiotic-resistant superbug, refuse to touch my children so as not to infect them, sleep in an air mattress in the computer room so I don't infect my wife, wake up in a cold sweat in the middle of the night, call my wife five times a day to make sure the kids are okay. I've written about this before so I won't go into it too much again, but basically I'm in a state of intermittent panic and anxiety--what if this happens, what if that happens, assuming the worst, focusing on the direst possible outcomes, my mind racing with potential calamity around every corner. Like a scared little kid.

And as usual I am comforting myself with food. I am also laughing harder than usual, making more jokes, shaking more hands, in inverse proportion to my internal discombobulation, like the Wilco song: "How to fight loneliness...you laugh at every joke, drag your blanket blindly, and fill your heart with smoke" Ok, enough with the quotes.

Writing that down it sounds far worse than it is. I'm having beautiful moments of pure joy and happiness, too. I'm bored, too. I'm taking care of business, too. It's just that I'm also going a little crazy, too, and I'm not sure what to do about it. Stay tuned.