What happens when you give me a microphone

A couple weeks ago, I got an email from La Salle College High School, my alma mater, asking me to be the guest speaker at their Honors convocation. They wanted a younger speaker than they usually get (I can’t remember who spoke to my classes when we were there, but I assume they were in their mid-50s and had made a bunch of money trading frozen concentrated orange juice futures or something), and maybe someone who could connect to the students. So I went, even though I don’t give many speeches, because it was a real honor to be invited, and because it was an opportunity to begin rewriting what has been a complicated history for me at La Salle.


There were about 600-700 people there. 240 students, their parents, faculty and administrators. Not too long ago, I would probably have actually vomited at the thought of speaking in front of a group like that. I would have been paralyzed at the podium, and I wouldn’t have been able to look away from any students who looked bored.


But I’ve been teaching and I’ve had to learn how to handle public speaking, at least a little bit, and I think it went actually kind of okay. At one point, early in the speech, a Christian Brother in the front row looked like he was dreading what I was about to say, but otherwise, I felt like, at the very least, I didn’t totally screw up.


Two reactions stand out. First, a member of the La Salle board of directors said, “That was unlike anything I’ve ever heard!” It’s best to just assume that’s a compliment, I think. (I’ve now used that joke on three different websites, and in about 5 different conversations. I’m sticking with it).


Then, about two hours later, a La Salle student emailed me to thank me for the speech, to say he really related to it. That was pretty cool.


Anyway, I’m working on getting a video of it, but in the meantime, the transcript of the speech is below.

Two notes, for some context:


1) I practiced it a lot, but planned on some ad-libbing; it’s how I’m comfortable speaking to groups. So what you see below is about 75-80% of what I actually said– there were some last-second cuts and additions, as well as a bit of reorganization.

2) For those readers who don’t know anything about La Salle–  it’s a really well-respected, expensive private school in the Philly suburbs. That’s relevant later.


[Greeting, congratulations]


I got two bad grades in my life, and I remember them both vividly. The disappointment, the frustration. The two worst grades I ever received, one here, and one at La Salle University as an undergrad.


The grade, both times? It was a B.


The class? Both times, same class—public speaking.


And yet, here I am, eleven years removed from high school, an unlikely speaker, for a number of reasons.


The last time I was at one of these Honors Convocations, I was seventeen and I was feeling very proud of myself. I had a near-perfect GPA and had convinced myself I was the smartest person in this room.


Actually, it didn’t matter much which room I was in, or what time of day it was, or who else was there—I always thought I was the smartest person in the room. And I made sure everybody knew it. See, I was arrogant, but I was also insecure. As much as I believed in my own superiority, I also needed other people to acknowledge it. So I became dismissive and rude and condescending. I spent the entire convocation, and about 80% of my life, making snide comments about other people. I became an expert at muttering sarcastic insults. Every word I said traveled sideways.


But still few people acknowledged the genius I was sure I possessed. Mostly, I was anonymous at La Salle. I didn’t know many people in this school because I acted like they didn’t deserve to know me. My few friends and I devoted free periods to discussing how much better we were than everyone else around us.


To an extent, I was right to be proud of my GPA, as you should all be. Like you, I worked hard to achieve it. I earned those grades, and the honors, and, later, the scholarships. But I took it too far.


I let good grades define me.


I let good grades skew my perception of self.


I let good grades rob me of my empathy.


At the beginning of my Senior year a few friends and I printed a newsletter that we smugly called an underground newspaper even though it was only four pages long. The administrators here who remember this would probably prefer if I limit the details on production and distribution. So, for the sake of avoiding another detention, let’s just say this: the feature article was a detailed attack on every group of people on campus, from hockey players to band guys to guys who owned their own cars. The goal was to condemn every aspect of the school; a little bit of teenage rebellion. It was, let’s say, not well received. By anyone.


Although we published anonymously, I was caught within a day because I’d bragged to about three dozen people that I’d written it. It wasn’t enough to put people down; I wanted them to know who I was. Once everyone found out, my alienation from them was complete. I spent the remainder of my final year with one foot out the door, eager to escape to a world filled with people I would like.


But I ran into the same problems in college. And graduate school. And at work. It wasn’t until my mid-twenties when I finally realized that I was the problem. Maybe it was me who was making things so difficult. It took me until then to realize that intelligence and good grades are meaningless if they’re not paired with humility.


You are all obviously intelligent, hard-working people. You’re going to achieve incredible things over the next decade and beyond. So you have every right to enjoy your success and anticipate bright futures. But do not allow it to corrupt you. Without humility, achievement can become toxic. Without humility, you risk reducing your life to a series of hollow certificates.


These letters you just received [they all receive academic letters, an 'L,' like athletes traditionally receive], are functionally meaningless objects. [this is the point when the Brother started to look uncomfortable]. They look nice, but they do nothing. For functionality, you would be better off with a rock. The thing is, like a nation’s flag, their value isn’t in their physical utility, but rather in what they represent.


If you’d asked me back in 2000 what this school represented, I would have had a very different answer than I do now. I walked off campus on graduation day and vowed never to return, and certainly I never could have predicted that I would be invited back. I maintained that vow until last year, when Mr. Bloh invited me to speak to his creative writing class. I was still conflicted—it was hard to overcome four years of bitter memories. But I decided to go because Mr. Bloh has always been supportive of me and my work; when I was a senior, he conducted an independent study with me where I was allowed to work on a novel, the first time a teacher had ever encouraged my writing to that degree.


While driving here last year, I felt again like a seventeen year old, fearful and angry and lonely. But when I walked through that front door, I ran into Ms. Shustack. Even though she has taught thousands of students during her career, she recognized me immediately, talked to me for ten minutes, remembered the one class I took with her back in 1998. I saw Mrs. Mullen, who hugged me, and took me on a tour of the building, showed me the upgrades the school had made, and, above all, seemed genuinely happy to see me.


Throughout the tour, I ran into other former teachers, and the story repeated itself. A week later, I received a handwritten letter from Brother Ken Cook thanking me for visiting. They all welcomed me not because I’m remarkable—I am not, I’m just a smart kid who got into some trouble. Not because I’m remarkable, but because they are.


That, to me, sums up what this letter represents. It represents a spirit of generosity and fairness. A spirit of forgiveness and compassion. An understanding of the moral obligations we all have to make others’ lives better, rather than worse.


Make no mistake, it is a privilege to go to this school. Few students anywhere have the benefit of parents who are willing to sacrifice so much to send you to a school of this caliber. Few students have access to the advantages this school offers—the facilities, the space, the curriculum. Few high school students, in this city especially, go to school every day actually believing that they can do whatever they want to do with their lives.


I don’t say all of this to diminish your accomplishments. I say it to remind you that, for all your hard work, this is also a room full of very fortunate people. Look at the state of the country today—the unemployment, the unrest, people feeling betrayed and forgotten by the power structure—and think about how remarkable it is that you have to opportunity to overcome all of it.


But it all comes back to humility and empathy. Do not allow your success to harden you against giving back to your community. I should be clear: this is not a plea to people to drop your careers and sign up for Greenpeace, living your life on the high seas. I’m not asking that you give away your material possessions. This is a call for the most gifted, intelligent, and diligent among us to remember the good fortune we have had and to use our talents to help people. Maybe that means doing charity work. Maybe it means improving the world through scientific research. Maybe it means bringing you La Sallian values into a life of public service. Maybe it just means making a concerted effort to be kind to people you’ve never met. Saying hello to strangers. Giving people second chances. Trying to understand them, even if—especially if—they annoy you.


There’s an adage you’ve all heard before: “Be kind, for everyone is fighting a harder battle.” I really don’t like that one at all. I think it’s a little bit stupid and shortsighted, and obviously not true. It’s too often used as a blanket defense for people acting rudely or shamefully. It’s the kind of thinking I used to justify my own condescension toward everyone. Just because someone is going through a difficult time, it doesn’t entitle them to treat others poorly.

So, no, I don’t like the Be Kind adage, although I like the idea behind it. The idea, I believe, is better expressed by the novelist Elizabeth McCracken, who wrote: “one should never guess at the complicated histories of strangers.”


As a student here, I spent far too much of my time concocting simplistic histories for the classmates I didn’t like, and I judged them based on the little bit that I knew. Those judgments turned my gifts inward rather than outward. I always wanted to be a writer, but never learned how to truly write until I learned how to listen, to hear people’s stories rather than filling in the blanks on my own. Only then did I realize that I could use art to contribute to our culture, rather than just boosting my ego. Only then did I finally start publishing stories and essays, and then a memoir.


I took the gift of this education from my hard-working parents and I scorned them for it. I didn’t begin to share those gifts with others until I started teaching, developing friendships with students and trying to guide them through their own college struggles.


Without humility, without empathy, I was just an unpleasant guy with a high GPA. With it, I am working toward becoming a man who people can respect, and a man who can respect himself.


So, I’ll close by urging you not to make the same mistakes I did, to appreciate the privilege you have here. I urge you not to use that privilege as an excuse to put people down, but as an opportunity to lift them up.

Shame

Yesterday, NFL wide receiver Steve Smith left the New York Giants as a free agent and signed with the Eagles, a potentially major move, depending on his health and a few other variables.  But I’ll leave that discussion to the experts.  (I don’t use this blog for much, but one thing I can assure you I will never use it for is to offer my amateur analysis of NFL personnel moves).

I’ve been distancing myself from football for a few years now.  Not entirely, not a clean break or anything, but working hard to put it in the proper perspective, as opposed to the perspective evinced by my memoir.  And I’ve been doing a pretty good job of it, actually, to the point that I actively avoid most NFL pre-game and analysis programs, because after a while it’s so hard to look past the fact that these shows are devoted almost entirely to grown men wearing thousand dollar suits while they shout crazy, baseless guesses about upcoming football games at each other and work very hard to convince their viewers that this game is The Big Game and it Means Something and is Very Very Important.   For a long time, I believed them.

Obviously, a lot of people do enjoy the hype because those types of shows thrive, and are remarkably influential.  Same deal with talk radio.  And when you allow yourself to be immersed in the endless hype and you wholeheartedly invest in this idea that Your Team is the most important team in the world, this is what you get.

You get people like the immature, destructive protagonist of my book.  You get people who are willing to go on a player’s Facebook page and wish death upon him because he had the gall to go work for somebody else.  You get people saying incredibly racist, violent, and homophobic comments directly to a player because he made a personal decision about his career and that decision is inconvenient for some New Yorkers.  To be clear: I don’t think I would have actually written these specific kinds of things on a player’s Facebook page, although I am continually relieved that Facebook and Twitter were not around to reflect my worst impulses and to consume all of my time when I was a teenager.  But I had the same basic mindset as these people: I had built my life and my image and my self-esteem around the well-being of a football team, so when someone did something to hurt the team, I took it as a personal offense, a direct attack on me and those I loved.  I don’t want to blame the media too much for this, although their whole This Is War narrative certainly contributes; the blame falls squarely on the individuals for so structuring their lives and for so losing perspective that they think it’s okay to say something like, “Steve I hope you blow out your knee again.  By the time next year you’ll be selling rock in Compton.”

First, let’s note that it’s not a surprise that a lot of the most vitriolic comments are imbued with this kind of somewhat subtle racism, the implication that his only career options are to be a football player or to sell drugs in Compton, or the consistent implication from semi-literate Facebook users that he is dumb and somehow less capable than them.  Even the implied idea of ownership– their rage at his making the personal choice to work in another city– is pretty uncomfortable.

Second, a lot of Eagles fans online (specifically in the comments section I linked at BGN) are very pleased with themselves because Eagles fans aren’t the ones doing this. This time.  But let’s be honest here: this is not a New York or Philly thing.  It’s a lunatic sports fan thing.  There are insane, hateful, awful people rooting for every team.  There are good people who turn into awful, selfish, petulant people when their team is threatened.   Of course Philly fans would do the same thing.  Anyone who has ever attended an Eagles game– or watched a sporting event in a Philly dive bar– has heard them saying worse things.

Finally, the thing that’s most interesting to me is that usually the ignorance and hatefulness of the Internet is blamed on anonymity. In my book, that’s what I said was the primary cause.  And lately, websites have been forcing commenters to register using their real names and photos, presumably in an attempt to curb the kind of incivility that dominates Internet discussion.  But look– there are a bunch of people who are perfectly willing to attach their real names, face, and profiles to racist death threats.  There are people (using photos of their children as their avatars!) who are so callous and so caught up in their life as a fan that they have no qualms about letting the entire world know exactly how ugly their soul is.  Some of these people could probably be fired if someone clicks through to their profile and finds out where they work.  Many of them are probably considered reasonable, caring people by their peers.  But left alone, given the opportunity to say something terribly hateful, they embrace the opportunity, and you can’t help wondering– are we supposed to believe in the person they show us in public, or the person they reveal themselves to be in private?

Skimming through the comment thread on Smith’s Facebook page, I kept coming back to this thought: this is the reason I’m ashamed that I was an obsessive fan.  Because it turns you into the worst kind of person you can be: selfish, unaccountable, and heartless.

Three months summarized

I’ve always been bad at maintaining a bloggy presence.  Even during my summer break from teaching, I didn’t manage a single post, and although I’m not exactly sorry about that, I do wish I had more interesting things to say on a regular basis.  And, honestly, the thing I’ve been waiting on is the opportunity to write a triumphant post in which I broke the news about selling my first novel to a major publisher, which would then launch several weeks worth of novel-related postings.

But that hasn’t quite worked out as planned.  The book is still out there, my agent is still pushing it, but I got spoiled by how quickly my first book sold (less than a month on the market, I think), and this is going a bit more the way these things usually go, as I understand it– interminable waits, rejections that are comprised of about ninety-nine percent praise (i.e.- we really love your book, you’re a great writer, it’s very entertaining and engaging, but we’re not going to publish it), that kind of thing.  In theory, hopefully we’ll have news on that front sooner than later though.

In the meantime, I’ve been writing.  I have an essay forthcoming in the Eagles Annual 2011; it’s not the sort of thing you’d expect from one of those pre-season football magazines, as the editor allowed me to go in depth on my moral quandary as an Eagles fan forced to learn to root for Michael Vick.  I’m pretty proud of that essay, actually, because it took me a full year to figure out how to articulate my feelings on that complex issue.  As far as I know, it’s not quite on newsstands yet, but you can order online, and once it hits the streets, it ought to be very easy to find in the Philadelphia area.

Over at the Barrelhouse blog, I’ve been writing a series of reviews of inspirational pet books (those books that follow the formula of something like Marley & Me), a project that started as an excuse to make some  jokes about an easily mocked genre, but which has turned out to be really interesting, at least to me, not to mention that it’s been a good project in forcing me to articulate exactly what’s so objectionable about some of these books when most people would probably find them pretty harmless.

At Barrelhouse, we also just launched our latest online issue, and we’re in the finishing stages of producing our newest print issue too.  Once Issue 10 is released, then I think I become a full member of the team, rather than just some guy basking in the reflected glory of an indie lit magazine.

Okay, one more Barrelhouse note: in September, I’ll be teaching an online Fiction workshop along with my former Iowa classmate Sarah Strickley, who is dramatically smarter and better read than I am, which is intended as a compliment, but probably sets the bar a bit too low.

Finally, I’m working on another novel, on which I finished my first draft last week, but about which I’m probably better off not saying anything else until I’ve got a real finished product.  Don’t want to jinx anything by getting too presumptuous.

This is where I would say that I’m planning on updating more frequently over the coming months, because I would love to do that, but I don’t want to make promises I can’t keep.  But more frequently than once every three months also seems like an attainable goal.

Sex, Drugs, Rock & Roll

Late notice on this one, and I refuse to be one of those people who begins every blog post with a litany of excuses for failing to post regularly, so let’s just get to it:  tomorrow, Barrelhouse Magazine is hosting a reading at Tattooed Mom (530 South Street, Philadelphia), and I’ll be one of the featured readers, alongside Lee Klein, Stan Mir, Christian TeBordo, Katherine Hill, and Elise Juska, all of whom are more accomplished than I am, and all of whom figure to present some pretty great stuff.

In order to fit the theme, I’m breaking one of my rules, which is that I have long refused to read from my new novel until it’s actually under contract somewhere, because it seems seriously presumptuous to call it a novel when no one else in the world is validating it as such.  But still, I’m doing it because I don’t know what else to do, and I am, frankly, tired of reading the same passages from the memoir.

Logistical details: Event begins at 8 PM, the readings will be short, there is no cover charge, there are 50 cent pierogies, and we’ll be upstairs.

BarrelhouseTM0512

Busy week ahead

This week, I’ll be completing likely the final flurry of promotional events for “Bury Me in My Jersey.”  Saturday’s event will occur almost exactly 11 months after the book’s release, and more than a year after my pre-publication reading in Denver, and it seems like the well has dried up as far as promotional opportunities in the area.    So I’m hoping to have a successful, active week, and hoping to see a lot of people at the following events:

April 13, 6:30-8:30 PM– 4th Annual Meet the Authors Event at the Monroe Township Public Library in Gloucester County, NJ.

Library is located on Marsha Ave. in Williamstown, NJ.

April 14, 5:30 PM – A conversation with Tom McAllister & Ray Didinger. I’ll be reading from my book, then discussing sports and sportswriting with Philadelphia sportswriting legend Ray Didinger (!) at Samuel Paley LIbrary, Temple University

1210 Polett Walk

Philadelphia, PA

April 16, 10 Am – 5PM – Philadelphia Book Festival, sponsored by the Free Library of Philadelphia

19th St., between Wood St. & Vine St. in Philadelphia, PA

Of course, at all events, I’ll be signing and hopefully selling books; even if you already own a copy, now you’ve got another chance (or three) to get someone a signed copy as a gift.

Barrelhouse, blogging, and editing

The first thing I ever published– an obviously autobiographical short story about driving home from Iowa City-- appeared in an online issue of Barrelhouse in 2005 (in hindsight, I’m a bit embarrassed by the author’s note, and I wish the story were about twenty-five times better [no false modesty here, I assure you]).

I already knew one of the editors– he and I were pretty good friends in grad school.  Sometime after my story appeared on their site, he asked me to be a contributor to their fledgling blog, which marked my only successful foray in the world of blogging, at least in the sense that success is defined by quantity.  Anyone who has ever read any iteration of my websites knows that I cannot be described as prolific– it comes in bursts, five late night updates in one weekend, then 2 months of silence, that kind of thing.  Eventually, most of my ventures die quietly.  But, at least for a while, I blogged the hell out of Barrelhouse.

And then somewhere in there, I stopped for a while.  I still contribute occasionally, although I haven’t added anything since the archives were wiped out by a virus of some sort (the issue, as always, is what am I supposed to say? I have a lot of thoughts during the day, and always have opinions about things, but always struggled to make that leap from having a thought to assuming the entire world wants to share in that thought [which may seem odd to those who have seen my long-running twitter-like site {which admittedly is easy enough to find, but which I won't link, in the vain hope of somehow balancing a twitter-like site with some vague notion of privacy}} and that's why I always stop myself before blogging about most things, or posting those things on Facebook in hopes of receiving a thumbs-up from someone I used to know fifteen years ago).  Point is, I've always been on the fringes of the Barrelhouse team.

Two years ago, I attended my first AWP Conference, and upon remembering that

a) I barely knew anybody there, and

b) my small-talk muscles have totally atrophied over the past ten years, if they ever existed at all

I decided to spend most of my days sitting at the Barrelhouse table, ostensibly a hanger-on, but also selling when I could, encouraging people to spin the AWP-famous (which is to say-- not at all famous) Wheel of Destiny, and otherwise behaving like an intern.  An intern who was seriously ill and struggling with the elevation of Denver, CO.

This year, I made my second AWP trip (this time to DC)  and feeling significantly less sick and about a mile less elevated, I figured I’d spend more time mingling, roaming the conference (Networking, I guess, although if I were to start actually calling it networking, I’d have to start wearing a Bluetooth at all times and buy power cufflinks).  And anyway, what I ended up doing was sitting at the Barrelhouse table again, getting to know all of the editors, and being made to feel very welcome by a bunch of guys who had no particular reason to welcome me.

Today, they asked me to be their Nonfiction Editor, which makes me, six years later, an official part of the organization that gave me my first publication credit (however minor it may have been).  I assume the Editor’s sash will arrive in the mail shortly.

All that said, I would be completely derelict in my duties if I didn’t note that we’re currently accepting submissions for Issue 10: Crime Edition:

It doesn’t matter if you’re a two bit grifter who’s never worked the big store, or a butter and egg man wearing the fanciest glad rags north of Chinatown. That’s right. We just want the goods. The best piece of crime writing you’ve got. Could be fiction, nonfiction, or poetry. We take all comers.

It doesn’t have to be noir-ish, although that’s cool too.  It just has to be good.

Memoirs, The NFL, & D.H. Lawrence

Two weeks ago, I was listening to sports radio, a habit I often tell people I’ve broken, even though it is an obvious lie; the truth is, while I do listen to sports talk radio rarely, and dramatically less so than I did when I was in college, I still do tune in occasionally, for reasons I can never fully articulate, since the actual calls themselves are deeply uncomfortable and unentertaining, and most of the hosts think, talk, and act exactly like AM radio hosts.   Point is, I was listening.  And what I heard was one of the hosts saying something like, “It’s looking more and more like we could see the NFL canceling games in September.”

Let’s set aside the facts that a) much has changed in the NFL labor negotiations over the past week, and the league and union appear to at least be making progress toward a deal, and b) the host was basing this prediction on the usual talk radio criterion of crazy semi-informed guessing.   Let’s focus instead on my reaction.  When I’m alone, I generally have a steady dialogue running with myself, sometimes more audible than is socially acceptable, and this is particularly true when I’m driving, and so what I said in response to this radio host’s prediction was, “Good, I hope they cancel the whole season.”

I hadn’t thought about it in those terms before, and sometimes when talking to myself I tend to say things I don’t really believe, but upon reflection, I realized that, yes, in fact, I meant what I had said.  I didn’t care about the labor negotiations and, I thought, if the football season gets cancelled, then it saves me from all the stress of having to endure football season.

I kept this revelation a secret for a few days, because, let’s face it, I have kind of a reputation to uphold.  And, besides, the twenty-two year old version of me would be horrified to have heard such thoughts.  Twenty-two year old me would have called Present Me a fraud.  Then twenty-two year old me would have played video games for eight hours and eaten his weight in string cheese. And he would have cursed Present Me some more.

It was such a weird thing for me to have thought.  Me– the guy who wrote the memoir about being an obsessed football fan, who used to begin the countdown to the NFL season in February, who on two separate occasions tried to liveblog the opening of the NFL Free Agency period.  But the truth is, I do not care about the NFL labor negotiations.  I don’t care who wins, because I already know who loses.

I tried explaining this to my brother-in-law a couple nights ago while we sat in the upper level at the Wells Fargo Center, watching the Sixers beat the Timberwolves.  He understood, mostly, where I was coming from, but I felt like I hadn’t really found the words.  My contempt for the labor story seems to have at least some obvious roots.  The breathless, totally hollow daily reporting that elevates an essentially trivial issue to one of great national importance, for example.  No matter how many spinning graphics and thudding sound effects ESPN plays, it really isn’t all that important, honestly; they’re going to play NFL games again, the players will get paid again, and the owners will continue to make obscene profits; any other kind of coverage reveals, once again, the dearth of perspective held by the sports media.  Or, another example: the completely disingenuous and arrogant stance of the NFL owners, trying to appeal to their working class fans by talking about recessions and belt-tightening and so on, all the while refusing to acknowledge that they’re making record profits.  Or perhaps it’s just the daily grind of trying to watch sports coverage; maybe I’ve burned myself out over the years, because I used to even subject myself to shows like “Around the Horn” every day, and I used to read 15-20 sports columns per day, and I used to engage in online debates about the most inconsequential crap.  Whatever the daily outrage in the sports world is, I was party to making it a BIG DEAL, treating it like it was VERY IMPORTANT that some idiot on one baseball team thought some idiot on another baseball team had disrespected him by rounding the bases in a non-traditional manner or that a twenty-three year old multi-millionaire posted something stupid on Twitter.  And so maybe part of the response to the NFL thing is embarrassment by my own complicity in the construction of this monolithic machine of 24 hour sports blather, I thought, but did not say because I hadn’t quite figured it out.

It wasn’t until last night, while re-reading Geoff Dyer’s brilliant and hilarious “Out of Sheer Rage: Wrestling with D.H. Lawrence,” that I finally was able to understand my reaction to the radio host’s prediction.  Near the end of the book, which purports to be, at least partly, “a sober academic study of D.H. Lawrence,” he writes:

But that, of course, is why I was interested in writing a book about Lawrence: to enable me to pass into the realm of complete disinterest.  Lawrence said that one sheds one’s sickness in books [emphasis mine]; I would say that one sheds one’s interest… one begins writing a book about something because one is interested in that subject; one finishes writing a book in order to lose interest in that subject: the book itself is a record of this transition

I wrote a book about how utterly obsessed I was with the Eagles, how dependent I was on football, and sports in general, to redeem and validate me in some way.  I’m proud of that book, and it doesn’t seem worthwhile to wonder whether I would change any of my past actions (recorded in the book or otherwise), because they’re things that happened and I have to live with their consequences. I’m proud of that book, and it seems, already, like the record of someone else’s life.  It feels like a documentation of a quarter century in the life of someone like me, but not quite, because even though we look the same, grew up in the same city, and have similar senses of humor, the thing he cares about most deeply in the world is not remotely the thing I care about most deeply in the world.  The book helped me to process all the toxic thoughts that accompany obsession, and then flush them out.

To bastardize Dyer: that Thing that used to consume me no longer consumes me, because I wrote the book, and I realize I probably wrote the book so that the Thing would no longer consume me.  If the NFL disappeared 10 years ago, I would have been lost.  If it disappeared now, I believe I would find something else to do.

Whenever the Eagles play again, I’ll surely be watching, because I can’t help it, and it’s a part of my weekly social routine.  I’ll surely be affected by the outcome of the game, but not even close to the way I used to be.  I’ll still be there, but  some days it really does feel like a chore, doesn’t it?

Swamistubbs is dead

According to psychologist Dr. Scott Bea, Facebook can be addictive, like gambling:

Dr. Bea agrees with the Scottish researchers who compare Facebook to a gambling addiction, where users are kept in a kind of “neurotic limbo”, unable to tear themselves away for fear they’ll miss out on something.

“If you walk away, you’re afraid that some jackpot might occur while you’re gone,” he explains.

The same goes for email.  And online discussion forums, as it turns out.

You post something on a discussion forum because you think it’s funny or insightful or important in some way.  Maybe you’re trying to join an interesting dialogue (although, admittedly, probably not), or maybe you’re just trying to get a rise out of someone via outlandish or insulting statements (i.e.- trolling).  Maybe you’re frustrated with everyone else’s inadequacies and you desperately need to let them know how inadequate they truly are, particularly in comparison to you and your levels of expertise.  Maybe you’re a creep or a racist, and the forum allows you to get away with being a creep and a racist in a way that polite human interaction doesn’t allow.  Maybe you have deep reservoirs of anger to share with the world, but neither the opportunity nor the courage to risk real interpersonal relationships by venting that anger, and you prefer that it instead manifest itself in exclamation points and ALL CAPS and scowling emoticons that you inflict upon otherwise well-meaning Internet people, who, ultimately, aren’t even really people, not in the strictest sense; they’re just bundles of neuroses and obsessions represented by avatars and screen names.

And so you go online for any of those reasons and what you do is you post something, and then you wait for someone to respond to it, because response validates your insight, humor, and rage.  You refresh the page repeatedly, hoping for the jackpot of a response, that brief adrenaline rush that accompanies a connection with another person, that alleviates the loneliness you may find yourself trying to escape while stuck in a cubicle on the 75th floor, or sitting in your cold attic office, or passing time in a coffee shop, or, hell, checking your cell phone while waiting for the train to come.    It doesn’t exactly feel good but it feels like something, and it also obliges you to respond to the response, and then to track the conversation.  Meanwhile, you’re engaging in other conversations, and laying out a convoluted network of sometimes contradictory messages across the Internet, and before you know it you’ve developed something like relationships with these people who don’t really know you beyond what you’ve chosen to reveal (inadvertently or not) and whom you don’t really know.  All the while, you know it’s a little bit weird to invest so deeply in this nebulous virtual community, particularly when it begins to invade your real life and you find yourself beginning too many conversations with your wife by saying something like Guess what this guy on the message board said today? and you have frittered away whole days because you just couldn’t extract yourself from a debate over the insanity of giving Michael Vick an award for heroism, and you’ve found yourself lost in in-depth discussions of the merits of various episodes of The Office or arguments about the relative guitar-playing abilities of Stevie Ray Vaughan and Eddie Van Halen, as if you know anything about that anyway.  It’s a terrible way to spend one’s life, really, and you know it.  But you keep going back.

Eleven years after signing up, you’re still there, a senior member of the message board, posting less frequently but still scanning the boards, and feeling like you have some kind of reputation to uphold, and hating yourself for  wasting entire mornings caring about something so indisputably stupid.

I don’t mean to overdramatize it, at least not too much.  Honestly.  But it’s not so hard to get sucked into the morass of Internet debates, following link after link after link until you’re reading the comments on a blog post six times removed from the place where you started, and why do you care what an anonymous person from Australia thinks about True Grit anyway? On one level, there’s a kind of fascination just in being able to access so many opinions all at the same time and to overwhelm yourself with the id of the Internet; that bubbling cauldron of rage and insults and undistilled emotion, a being so reliant on gut reactions that there usually isn’t room for any other organs, particularly the heart and the brain.

It’s easy to get caught up in idiotic debates, even if you think you’re above it all, perhaps especially if you think you’re above it all, and it’s even easier to let the fleeting, pointless fame of being a well-known commenter go to your head. Seriously– how else to explain the preponderance of “star” posters on every discussion forum in the world?  How else to explain the people who post 1500 word treatises deconstructing a single line of sitcom dialogue, which, let’s be honest, was almost certainly written at two AM by a group of exhausted writers who had been told at the last minute that the network wanted more references to Charmin toilet paper in the episode, and which, ultimately, has no meaning at all, besides that it filled 10 seconds of airtime.  How else to explain the people whose posts in comment threads are written in a tone that suggests they’re doing you a favor by sharing their wit? How else to explain the way that prolific commenters seem to settle into a comfort zone, so that you know every story about Michael Vick on the Eagletarian blog will elicit the same people saying the same things, or that any story about government corruption on The Inquirer’s site will draw a different subset of people all saying the same things they’ve said on every other story like that?  How else to explain the weird, self-congratulatory tone of comment threads on sites like Deadspin and The AV Club, wherein 90% of the comments are people desperately, frantically scrambling to one-up each other with jokes that are sometimes actually pretty funny, but are often exactly as bad as you’d expect them to be?  How else to explain the bizarre interpersonal meltdowns that occur too frequently to be flukes?

Readers of my memoir know that I’ve spent countless hours on the Eagles Message Board (EMB), posting, cycling through rumors, bickering with strangers, and otherwise avoiding my responsibilities.  Members of the EMB know I’ve been there for roughly eleven years, carrying Member # 700 since the board’s latest reboot in 2003.  I’ve taken occasional breaks , often during the down cycles in the NFL season (that is, right now), but I have always returned to the  board, sometimes because the Eagles went and did something crazy, like hiring Juan Castillo to run their defense or signed a violent felon to be their backup quarterback.  Sometimes I go back because I’m bored, or because I’m afraid of throwing myself into the day’s work, because real, honest work on a book is exhausting and difficult.  Sometimes I go without thinking at all; it’s automatic.

Recently, I decided to take another break, scale back my posting, reclaim my life, etc.  This decision was partly motivated by self-preservation, in that I suddenly had a lot of responsibilities piling up around the house (i.e.- my house is up for sale, and I needed to help make it sellable), and I couldn’t afford to waste so much time online.  But it was also motivated by a growing fatigue re:  the NFL in general (a topic too convoluted for me to cover here).  After a couple weeks of absence, I checked back, to see if anyone was talking about losing assistant coach James Urban to the Bengals.  Instead, I found two things:

1) A number of well-known posters had disappeared, either through self-exile or bannings, all rooted, apparently, in an indecipherable web of interpersonal drama and weird late-night fights and rampant rumors of extramarital affairs, ruining people’s lives, etc.  I have no idea what’s true or not, and I also truly do not care; what matters in this situation is the fact that the EMB suddenly seemed more trivial than ever, more high-schoolish than ever, more petty than ever.  It made me embarrassed to think that a) I was an active part of a community that would care so much about this stuff and b) I read enough of the threads to know even as much as I do about it.

2) The board is changing, redesigning and relaunching.  Everyone will have to register again, rebuild post counts and histories, re-establish themselves, etc.  If I were to follow the EMB this time, it would be the fourth iteration of the EMB on which I have been a member.  There’s nothing significant about the number 4, aside from the fact that it seems like too high a number of EMB versions to have visited.  It seems like sometime between 1 & 3, I should have moved on, and I haven’t. My contributions have declined over the past several years, especially since completing work on the memoir, partly because the memoir revealed to me just how damaging my addiction (to the Eagles, to the EMB, to procrastinating) had been, and that little bit of self-awareness made it impossible for me to ever return to the person I was in 2005.  But still, I was there, and making a variety of excuses for still being there.  Even the fact that I felt I had to explain myself or generate excuses for being there– rather than, for example, reading or writing or freelancing more or getting a second job or fixing things around the house or walking the dog– suggested there was a problem.  This move to the new board struck me as the perfect opportunity to bury my EMB alter ego, Swamistubbs, forever.

It shouldn’t be a difficult decision to reclaim one’s own life, and it shouldn’t seem momentous to forsake one’s message board persona.  It shouldn’t have made my wife audibly gasp when I broke the news of Swamistubbs’ death to her.  It shouldn’t be the kind of thing that drives me to write a 1600+ word post on my blog.  But here we are.  Swamistubbs is dead and I’m still alive, and there’s work to be done.

My quivering machismo

It’s in the paper today.

That is, “Bury Me in My Jersey” was excerpted in the op-ed page of The Inquirer today, under a headline with much more flair than you usually expect in that paper.  Those  who have read the book will, of course, recognize the excerpt– it’s Confession Number Six, from Chapter 2, slightly edited for space. It begins like this:

As the Eagles embark on another playoff run, fans are fantasizing about a Super Bowl parade and trying to find the words to explain how much it would mean to us.

I once told a friend, while drinking, that although I didn’t cry when my dad died, I would cry if the Eagles won the Super Bowl. This was partly a lie: Of course I cried when my dad died. But it’s also partly true: Not only would I cry if the Eagles won the Super Bowl, but I’m pretty sure I would cry more about the win than I did about the death.

Also, I’ve scheduled two more readings for February:

Tuesday, February 8, I’ll be at La Terrasse (3423 Sansom St. in Philly) at 7:30 to do a reading along with Brad Windhauser and a poet whose name I do not know.  The event is sponsored by the lit journal Painted Bride Quarterly.

On Saturday, February 26 at 2 PM,I’ll be making a homecoming of sorts, reading & signing at The Spiral Bookcase in Manayunk (112 Cotton St.).  I’ve made big, bold promises of a great crowd, so hopefully I don’t let the store owner down.  And hopefully no one from the book shows up to beat me up.  Although, if I am pummeled at my own promotional event, I could probably get back in The Inquirer

EaglesFanCast

I finally joined the podcasting world yesterday, when I was welcomed as a guest on the EaglesFanCast, a fun podcast that has been running for three years and covers pretty much exactly the topics you would expect it to cover.  I had a good time, talked some about the book, and we all spent a lot of time reveling in the fact that the Eagles just pulled off one of the greatest comebacks in NFL history.

Head to their website to listen and/or download the podcast (warning: some mild profanity).