Thanks, Given

At the risk of writing a hallmark card, here are a few things I'd like to remind myself I'm thankful for as we commemorate the rape of Native American land this holiday season:

I am thankful that I still have the ability to remain surprised by life.

I am thankful for that everything is a story, and that stories get me through the day.

I am thankful that I can still find kindred spirits whenever I look hard enough.

I am thankful that I can still believe that we are more alike than we are different.

I am thankful for the lulling distraction of television sports and the way it can fill the silences in difficult rooms.

I am thankful that I can almost always see a path through, whether I have the strength to take it or not.

I am thankful to have a job, today, and food for my family, and a roof over our heads, a structure to contain the love and chaos and joy.

I am thankful for all I've learned and some of what I've forgotten in this long, crazy year that ain't over yet.

I am thankful for the sound of the coffee grinder, every blessed morning.

I am thankful for the smell of my two-year old's hair when I hold him close and he nestles into my chest, the smell of the unbridled, overflowing love that he has for every second of every day.

I am thankful for the brilliant, sensitive, defiant, inquisitive, emotional, loving, playful face of my six year old son, whether it's grimacing in anger or bursting with happiness.

I am thankful beyond words for my partner in life, love and occasional misery, the wife I will spend the rest of my life trying to deserve.

I am thankful for my father, tough as nails, heart of gold, constantly fighting his way back and attuned to the simple joys of life at every moment.

I am thankful for my mother, the matriarch, the heart, the soul.

I am thankful for the friends who put up with my craziness, who give me comfort and strength and laughter and joy and then always piss me off one way or the other.

I am thankful for health of my family, and the wonders of medication that more or less keep my insanity in check.

I am thankful for Jim Beam Kentucky Bourbon.

Most of all, I am thankful for the home I have to return to at the end of every day, good or bad, to find the warm, safe, glowing embers of love burning bright. God am I thankful.

Emerging, Briefly

I haven't written anything in awhile, mainly because I've been too preoccupied living the circumstances of my life, which has meant: accepting and then adjusting and then panicking and then accepting again and then having a wonderful time being unemployed and taking my kids to the park and then suddenly going back to work. Also, I've watched a fair amount of TV.

So I'm back at work after a two week interlude, back at the company where I spent 8 years before I left for my little Hollywood adventure, and I'm extremely grateful for it. I fully recognize how fortunate I (and my family) are to be employed again so quickly in this economy. My challenge now is to do my job well and maintain a healthy balance, continue to pursue a creative life on my own time, prioritize my mental and physical health and be fully present as a husband and father. Sounds easy, right?

Stay tuned for the continuing adventures...

Idiot Wind

"Oh the wind is lashing lustily
And the trees are thrashing thrustily
And the leaves are rustling gustily
So it's rather safe to say
That it seems that it may turn out to be
It feels that it will undoubtedly
It looks like a rather blustery day, today
It sounds that it may turn out to be
Feels that it will undoubtedly
Looks like a rather blustery day today."
--Winnie the Pooh

Today is not one of those days where I remind myself to see the good in everything and look up at the sky and smile. Today is another kind of day. A curl up on the couch and lick your wounds kind of day. Except I'm not doing that either. I'm not sure what I'm doing, really. Walking around as if everything makes sense, I guess. Showing up. Sometimes that's the best you can do.

The rare Southern California wind is blowing mightily, and I don't expect it to offer any answers. T minus two days until I am officially unemployed, and still uncertain about what comes next in a practical sense. I have never been able to stand the in-between days of my life, the not knowing, the neither here nor there. It's both a strength and a weakness, this aversion to being unmoored, and I recognize it as such. It's also, far too often, an excuse to give in to my own worst instincts and throw myself a pity party, which I'm not going to do this time.

I've been doing really well facing this transition so far, if I do say so myself. Focusing on the positive, plotting my moves in a level-headed fashion, seeing recent events as an opportunity to take control of things and structure my life and my thoughts in the right way. And I still have that attitude, all those things are still true. But today...ah, I don't know. Today I feel small, and weak, and a little bit useless. Expendable, I guess. Fuck that.

I think I need to get a little mad, actually. I need to rage a little bit, get it out of my system, feel some kind of stake in some kind of battle. Apologies in advance to whoever crosses my path today, and apologies in arrears to those who already have. Sometimes a brother's just got to work some shit out.

Couldn't Call It Unexpected

About a week and a half ago I had a really bad day.

Not a horrible day. Not even a day that ranks in my top ten worst days of all time. Nobody I love died or was diagnosed with anything or went insane or decided they didn't love each other. Nothing happened to my children, or my wife. My foundation was not shaken in any real way.

But this is what did happen: I lost my job, more or less, through no fault of my own. In a couple of weeks I, like 9.5% of the American workforce, will be unemployed. And that's not great news.

I'm not going to go into the details, for a lot of reasons, but suffice it to say that while I was of course extremely saddened by the situation, it also wasn't entirely unexpected nor, I honestly believe, is it entirely a bad thing. I've spent 4 hours a day in my car for the last eight months, arriving home to sleeping children and an exhausted wife far, far too many nights, and not entirely clear where the career path I had chosen was leading. I think, now, that I know exactly what I want and how I want to get there, which is something I definitely didn't know eight months ago. I'm grateful for that realization and believe I can put it to use, one way or the other.

So I haven't been blogging much lately. Instead, I've been "processing" this development, and preparing for whatever may come next. I've been updating my resume and writing cover letters and having lots of conversations with lots of people about lots of things. I've been trying not to panic, and, for now at least, pretty much succeeding. I haven't been second-guessing my choices, or wondering what would have happened if I hadn't made certain decisions at certain points in time. I've been telling myself the truth, which is that I'm extremely grateful for this professional experience, that I knew when it started it was an experiment. Sooner of later it would have been time for me to take the lessons I've learned and move on to the next thing, and it turns out that time is now.

Of course that realization is always easier when it's not being forced on you by circumstance, but that's the way life works sometimes. Most of the time, actually, in my experience. And I would like to have the strength, grace and confidence to recognize that reality and take it for what it is.

I read somewhere recently that when you boil it down, every decision we make is essentially a choice between hope and fear. Surely that's an oversimplification, but I find the notion appealing. I know, for certain, that I have chosen fear far too many times in my life, and I would like not to do that anymore. I would like have the strength to choose hope.

I don't intend to write about this much from now on, but it's an elephant in my particular room and I couldn't keep this blog going if I didn't at least express and process the news here to some degree. So there it is. Onward and upward.

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.