“Hang on to your wallet
hang on to your rings
I can’t look below me
something will throw me
I curse at the windstorms
that October brings
…
I wish I could fly
from this building
from this wall
and if I should try
would you catch me
if I fall
when I fall”

-Barenaked Ladies, “When I Fall”

A storm is blowing into Highland Park, New Jersey this evening. It’s a storm that’s ravaged much of the seaboard already, bringing warnings of flooding and overwhelm to parts north and east. All day, the barometer has been sliding down as the winds have picked up and the skies have conspiratorially bonded in varying realms of shadowy gray. There is a sense of proximity, of closeness, of the world drawing near. Closer, closer, now almost here.

The world truly has converged today across the Raritan River, in New Brunswick. A young man who’d just joined the campus where I coach famously plunged to his death from the George Washington Bridge, his wet broken body just identified this afternoon. His roommate’s filming of his romantic encounters with another man, streamed live on the internet, and his subsequent private jump, are probably the top story in America today. The media is here to discover everything they can and stream that live on the internet too.

Unsurprisingly, many of the Rutgers debaters and I have held an online debate in the wake of this last event about the nature of the media’s frenzy. While their sharklike gathering is certainly unsavory, this story at least exposes the peer conflicts and homophobia that are often rampant on college campuses and get under-reported. I can’t espouse the demands for the head of the roommate on a platter, but neither can I say this is a particularly bad use of media time, especially when compared to the disappearance of yet another rich blonde girl from such and such location. It remains to be seen how the spotlight ultimately treats Rutgers, how the university fares under its white-hot illumination. Our team was already scheduled to debate civility on campus in a public showcase next Thursday before this happened.

Tonight I walked into downtown Highland Park, such as it is, to do a little light shopping and look around the town. It’s cute and quaint and fall serves it well. While my ultimate destination was Stop and Shop for imminent practicalities like envelopes and soap and microwave burritos, I couldn’t help but tarry at the Nighthawk Bookstore, offering used books and music till midnight, five days a week. There seems to be a bit of community to this community, traversed by walkers of all kinds even in the billowing winds of an onrushing thunder. The distances are short and the buildings old, but there is life and vibrance and a kind of candle in the darkness. By the time I returned home, fleeing the first sprinkles and clutching the chafing plastic handle of the bag (my half of the canvas collection is still stuffed somewhere against cardboard), I was feeling almost okay about where I’ve landed. A ping-pong ball bouncing high in the air, fortunate to land, all but by chance, in a small town instead of the Hudson.

A hard rain’s a-gonna fall, make no mistake. I am debating between heading over to practice rounds in my car or toughing out my simulation of carlessness and walking against the slings and arrows of outrageous downpour, come what may. I think I’d like to feel the rain pelting against my jacket, soaking my hat, gathering in my eyes and hair as I trudge into an almost invisible future. There is a solace in storms, the promise of washing away all that has gathered and built in the corners and cracks and alleys of sunbaked neglect. Of renewal, reopening the ground to accept the life-sustaining promise of water, the emboldening prospect of wind. There is also power and fear, of course. The sudden randomness of a bolt of lightning, the crack of the bough as it snaps away from the tree in a particular gust. But even this breakage creates renewal. New buds, new life, new access to the sun that the formerly blocked were denied.

It is time for all of us to fall someday. And it is October tomorrow. The only question is how far we fall when the wind knocks us down.

There is a special kind of anticipation that comes with waking up knowing that something exciting or fun or worthwhile is going to happen that day. The feeling that things are not for naught, that one does not regret feeling conscious after not doing so for a time. But further, that there is a hurry, an urgency, a desire for wakefulness that overrides the last vestiges of sleep and makes one savor the sheer process of looking forward to something.

There are extremes of this feeling. The day one gets married, say, or the morning of the first baseball game one can play in or, perhaps better, see on a major-league diamond. Trips to Disneyland. A first date with that certain person. Christmas. It’s no surprise that most of these feelings are associated with either childhood or love, the states of being that unseat our more rational, plodding, conventional approach to life and replace it with the unbridled joy and small recklessnesses of a perspective of innocence. It is hard to be this excited about work day #526 at a mundane bill-paying job or a perfunctory holiday visit to one place or another. It is the excitement, to borrow, only a free person can feel.

Debate mornings have long made me feel this way. I don’t know when exactly debate tournaments started feeling like Christmas, but it was probably sometime after I begrudgingly signed up for parliamentary debate in college and suddenly turned around and won my very first tournament, the epically oversized Columbia Novice Tournament. A Tournament so large and unwieldy that not even every undefeated team broke. Maybe it was the very next tournament after that, after this charmed and magical experience, that I started feeling like the chance to merely attend and compete and talk was like manna, like a cool breeze or a drought-thwarting rain. In the middle of the worst spells of a bumpy collegiate career, it was what sustained me. I stayed at Brandeis more because it gave me a chance to debate than anything on its campus-based merits.

It’s not that every tournament went well or was in any way comparable to the Columbia Novice Tournament. I only won 7 of the next 73 tourneys I attended. Every one that I didn’t brought disappointments or regrets, although I guess the ones where I lost in Finals (6 more) weren’t so bad, usually because I got to run a fun case that I really enjoyed and debated in as many rounds as were held. But part of the vital appeal of each new tournament and each new Friday morning launch was the possibility. Every time one steps into a round, one has a chance at winning. Every time one steps into a tournament, one imagines oneself at the head of that room, arguing one’s way through Finals.

I can’t participate in Final Rounds any longer, of course. Not for some time – almost a decade already. The best I can hope for of my own accord are demonstration rounds, which have become remarkably common of late and carry a ubiquitous invitation for the sage 30-year-old with the long hair and giddy demeanor. Seriously. Giddy. I am just a different person in the debate world and it’s a huge part of what attracts me to it, year after year and weekend after weekend. So I’m getting my fix in, but honestly what excites me are the possibilities for my wards. Coaching debate has given me a new lease on an activity I’d long been missing, and earnestly given me a new lease on excitement in a year that has had every shot at killing me. Getting to drive fresh-faced youth discovering their own love of debate and its potential on the way to the same time-worn campus lecture halls I once traversed brings me a satisfaction like little else. It is the comfort of not only doing something fun and exciting, but of being in the right place at the right time. Being centered in the universe.

When the universe has seemingly turned its back on me, when I am leaving a home with my debate-reared and -discovered wife for the last Friday ever, it is this feeling of place and belonging that I crave most. And to add to it that I will be in a tab room, the epicenter of the collision between my love of rational argument and my penchant for statistics – it almost makes life feel worth living. That just for a morning or so, I can remember what it was like to be joyful, to have butterflies in the stomach for good reasons, to feel like all the future one needs is a weekend, a car, the company of like-minded friends.

Somebody throw me the keys.

When I got on the train bound for New York City yesterday, I didn’t think I was boarding a time machine. I thought I was embarking on a conventional landbound vehicle for a city long hated, long tolerated, long rearing moments of significance in the annals of my life. But I was wrong and HG Wells was right. This train carried no gamblers, only ghosts.

I stepped off the Princeton Junction platform and the seats of brown leather affronted my eyes and I was whisked backward more than a decade, suddenly remembering the first time I’d been on a New Jersey Transit train of any variety. The year was 1999 and I was accompanied by my recent debate partner, Dalia, and a few top debaters from New York schools who were heading back to said city. Dalia was showing me the ropes of the train system between New York and Princeton after I’d spent two weekends trying to show her the ropes of debate. She was the sophomore, but I was the one with an upside on my career, to the pointed reality of a fifth round judgment that would forever poison me to the idea of our further partnership.

After breaking at Swarthmore with a 3-1 record, she and I had gone to Princeton and were sitting on a 3-1 record again, facing a Williams team while we were on Opp. We were hopeful going in and euphoric going out, for we’d clearly crushed their case. The other team had name recognition and debaters with lofty successes, but we’d pluckily been upsetting teams with more age and experience the whole time we’d partnered. Indeed, had she not insisted we flip Gov in octos at Swarthmore, a top-level senior team from UVa might have been added to our list of the upset. But we were confident Williams would be joining our list of notches and our 4-1 record would put us on the verge of the break.

Come break announcements, of course, Williams was in and we were out. Appalled, I sought out our judge, one D. Silverman. He spent many minutes outside the building which had hosted our round, on a quad I now know well from traversing it to get to the Chancellor Green library. I never can walk that path without thinking of that conversation with this cocky and later evidently contemptible man. We went around and around about the finer points of the round for a good long time before he finally leveled with me, recognizing my tenacity was not easily sated and I was not buying his flimsy excuses. He told me frankly that my partner was a liability, that there was no way a school like Princeton could risk having a person like her in or near the break. He raised his eyebrows and asked if I understood. It was crystal to me. I had learned what kind of people could populate this debate circuit, what kind of hubris the Ivies could produce, and what I had to do to ensure future success. I never debated with Dalia again.

What I didn’t know then was that Dalia had dated our judge that round for a while. I heard graphic details about their entanglement the next year. What I did find out later that tournament, however, was who said judge had moved on to. One E. Garin. The same Garin I’d developed a scorching crush on after hitting her in novice semifinals at the Brown tournament earlier that semester. Sitting in McCosh 50, the grand lecture hall hung high with ornate beams and raftered lighting, watching the time pass between quarterfinals, semifinals, and finals in which we were not invited to partake, I sat hunched over the curved wood seat in front of me and wondered how this could be. My teammates cracked brief jokes about their height differential and her being from California, but all I could wonder was how someone so Machiavellian could land someone so seemingly bright and charming.

I would be wondering that for a number of years.

We all know the history, the rest of the story, the way it relates to New York. And sadly, we all know this story doesn’t have a happy ending any more. It’s not a story of redemption and triumph and vindication. If anything, it’s a story of unheeded warnings, of making one’s bed and lying in it, of judging people on their judgment and sticking to it. Years later, before 9/11 but also in New York (Fordham, precisely), I would resolve myself to give up on this years’ worth of pining for this girl because her judgment must be simply too flawed if she could stay with someone who disrespected her so much. And yet. And yet. I’d joked that if I’d known at that diner conversation that she was still with him, we never would have ultimately gotten together. That joke was never funny, I now realize. It’s tragic and scary.

But I have gotten ahead of myself, jumped off the tracks. The ghosts were not in a diner or at Fordham or haunting the vaunted streets of the Big Apple. They were on brown leather seats, backpacks and luggage and sleeping bags strewn, debaters dog-tired but generally satisfied. Despite herself, Dalia was happy with our performance and unperturbed by our fifth round miscarriage of justice. Another debater, Jess from Columbia, was glowing with the success of her final-round appearance not more than an hour prior. They were chatty and punchy as the train rolled down the tracks. Confronted with twin affronts from a particular person, I was inconsolable. Trying to look forward to the rest of the week at NYU with Gris, but utterly despondent about the man who could end my hopes for success in debate and love at almost the same time.

My companions, to their credit, made every effort to engage me and cheer me up. Dalia, perhaps knowing that she had dated our fifth round judge, was more circumspect about putting our loss in perspective. She kept trying to buoy me with discussions about our future partnership, comments that only drove me further inward as I writhed with the knowledge that she was a declared liability who I would have to find a way to ditch. Jess told me to put my freshman year (now almost finished) in perspective, noting that I’d collected more success than almost all my classmates and that she was one of the few prior winners of the Columbia Novice Tournament who’d stuck around. She cited her success that weekend, showing it was worth it. She described the alleged curse of CNT winners quitting the event, encouraged me to stick with it.

The next weekend, she and her partner would unseat me in semifinals at the CCNY Pro-Am tournament, also in New York. Our fifth and quarterfinal rounds would both be wins, though. Against the Princeton team of Silverman/Garin.

In the meantime, Gris and I had a good time in New York during Brandeis’ second spring break. We joked and laughed and took my mind off my debate reputation and the latest girl I’d liked and lost. As I reported about that week in the Waltham Weekly on the verge of a third consecutive trip to the New York area, this time for Nationals at Fordham:

We also failed to do most of the touristy things in the appley metropolis, to which Greg (one of my hallmates & friends here), who grew up on Manhattan, said “good”. The World Trade Center looked like a really good idea till we saw a longer line than the towers are tall, with a $12.50 fee waiting at the end of it. But mostly we went to delis & coffee shops in SoHo & that area, & I rode the subway a lot, esp. to get to my debate tourney the second weekend, which was in the middle of Harlem & revealed a completely different side of the island than where I’d been staying. In the end, I’ve concurred with the analysis of millions who’ve gone before me…. NY is a great place to visit, but I really couldn’t imagine living there. But I’m sure glad Gris does so I can visit so easily!

This time around, fully ensconced in my memories of April 1999, my stay was only a few hours. I had time to print resumes at a print shop and get an egg sandwich at one of the trucks near the employment agency conducting my “interview”. I had time afterward to stroll the streets and dump quarters into payphones that all seem to conspire against the idea of enabling long-distance calls. I had time to contemplate what it would mean to spend the year of my attempted recovery from the decade since 9/11 and everything that followed riding brown leather seats into New York City two, three, four days a week.

You can’t make this stuff up. I write fiction so I have something believable in my life.

In debate, we talk a decent amount about the distinction between positive and negative rights. Most of you will be familiar, but the basic idea is the split between something that the state actively provides and something the state prevents you from losing or being infringed. For example, you have a positive right to vote. You have a negative right to not be killed.

Increasingly, I’ve found applications for this concept in things that have nothing to do with the rights that the state theoretically distributes to people. The active/passive or positive/negative distinction seems to play an even greater role in personal relationships than it might in political ones. Most everyone seems to bring preconceptions into living, relationships, and daily activities that prioritize the provision of positive privileges or negative ones. And this divide may be one of the most important and profound in impacting how the course of a relationship, friendship, or society evolves.

In the context of a relationship, some folks are Gesture People. They expect little flourishes and actions that constantly remind them that the other person is thinking of them in ways that lead to something active. They want flowers, cards, surprises, sweeping moves. Sure, we all want this to a certain extent – no one is either entirely one side or the other. It’s a continuum. But increasingly it seems there are people for whom this type of manifestation of feeling is paramount – they don’t know how to feel loved without it.

Contrastingly, others are what I might call Hippocratic People. Not hypocritical – stay with me now. Those for whom the manifestation of love is the absence of harm. That no matter what’s done or said or happens over the course of the relationship, a baseline of understanding and empathy is never breached. There is a floor of feeling that evidences a level of care that one could only take and effectuate for someone they love. For these folks, any violation of the presumed floor is potentially cataclysmic evidence of the lack of love.

There are probably broader levels and layers to this whole thing that I’m not thinking of, and even if it’s binary, it’s a continuum and not a dichotomy. But spending some time thinking about where you fall on this line will probably improve whatever relationships you’re invested in, present or future. And it’s not to say that Gesture People can’t be quite happy with Hippocratic People. But it takes a lot of work – it takes an awareness of how different the other person’s presumptions about the evidence of feeling can be. If these things aren’t understood and communicated, you’ll have a situation where someone keeps making little gestures in the hopes of reciprocity while casually trampling through the floor of understanding, unable to comprehend why they are always treated with a certain care but almost never those same little gestures in kind.

Even identifying these differences isn’t enough by any means. In some cases, you can spend years trying to communicate across this seemingly minor divide and still not make it work. But it’s worth trying, worth thinking about for a little bit. No one is afforded a positive right to a relationship in our state, but we all would prefer to enjoy a negative right to prevent us from losing love.

I don’t like food.

I love M. Night Shyamalan and almost all of his movies.

I’m not a fan of comedy in almost any form.

I believe in God.

Okay, this last one is kind of cheating, because I guess it doesn’t set me apart from everyone. But the way people have been talking about it lately, I’m almost surprised that it doesn’t. I almost am coming to expect that whatever I think or believe is on the fringe of humanity, the outside looking in, huddled in the snow as the window frosts from my fading breath as I cup my hands against the glass. Breathe in, cold solace. Breathe out, the visage before me vanishes in a pale cloud of obfuscation.

I saw a movie tonight, Saturday night, the result primarily of my new landlord’s inability to get an inspection in time for the scheduled weekend move. My Dad flew out to help me move and wound up helping me pack, to much relief of mine, before heading back today. I skipped the William & Mary tournament, a relief only to potential endless driving, but it turns out Dave & Kyle made semifinals in the best showing for a full Rutgers team since the spring of 2006. So another Saturday night and I ain’t got nobody but M. Night and his new movie that they kept him from writing since anything he touches turns to critical disaster these days. His idea, his mood, his setting, but a few extra names to offset the presumed poison.

It wasn’t the best thing he’s worked on, but it was good. It’s been a while since I’ve seen an M. Night movie in theaters (I admittedly skipped “Airbender”) and I was struck by how the Philadelphia setting affected me in my new context as someone who spends a lot of time in Philly. Of course, I was further struck by the core themes of the film. Not just faith, which is in there, but the personal responsibility of the people who willfully or wantonly do damage to others. The question looms as to whether “the devil made them do it,” but ultimately the answer comes that only they themselves can UNdo it, whatever it may be. Or not undo it, I should say, but undo the destiny of their own demise in light of their mistakes and the lies they choose to believe from themselves. Suffice it to say that I found this message compelling tonight.

The rest of the time, of course, it was a movie at Market Fair on a Saturday night in Princeton. I’ve been feeling old for a while, but nothing quite feels so old as this context, especially an 8:00 show. All around me were the young, the hip, the trendy. Pockets full of money and minds empty of cares. Shrieks and giggles and hands aflutter. Even the pimpled loners sprung with a kind of exuberance I can barely remember feeling myself. The dingy carpet of the lobby felt like my lawn; the disgruntled upwellings in the back of my mind the plaintive yells for the youth to vacate. It would not have been so bad, of course, had not so many of these vibrant teens been all over each other. Not in any inappropriate or unexpected way, mind, but merely in the playful, shy, and devastatingly cute ways of couples old and new.

Here a patient but underconfident young woman, standing by her man even after a crippling leg injury forced them into the penalty box front and center generally reserved for those accompanying the elderly wheelchaired infirm. They crawled out toward the parking lot after, her unconcerned for time or space as he pitched himself slowly on a bound leg and two metal frames. There a blushing new couple, perhaps a third or fourth date, stealing glances from each other in an effort to break the awkwardness of staring straight ahead, yet hoping all too much not to get caught.

They know how the game is played and what the stakes are. I don’t anymore. I am unmoored. My whole life, since I was maybe four or five and first had crushes on girls, all I’ve wanted out of life is to be married to the love of my life. Now that experience is behind me and I don’t know what to want anymore. For the first time in a quarter-century, marriage is not the pinnacle. It’s not something I’m even sure I ever want again. I don’t know how to date or even think about dating without wanting that. I don’t know how to be, how to act, how to treat other people. Sure, I have my friends, I have the debate team, I have contexts I still understand. But outside of that, it’s a long lonely world of foreign feelings. What is the larger purpose of life? How does one find something that’s not sustainable love to be sustaining?

I get the feeling this might be another one of those differences. That most other people are muddling through weird feelings for people without knowing what they want or how or why, hoping to figure out by the time they’re my age or even older what it is they were really trying to do. If I didn’t know better and she hadn’t testified otherwise so strenuously for so long, I’d even say I married such a person. Maybe I did anyway. So it’s weird to go in this direction, to look at high school kids and see people who have it all figured out as I come unglued at the seams and disintegrate at the advent of my fourth decade. This is not the direction life is supposed to go. This is not how things are supposed to evolve. Or perhaps it’s inevitable for the people who think most seriously. I was so much older then; I’m younger than that now.

What do you want when you’ve lost everything you ever wanted and can’t have it back? And why?

Pulling into the movie theater, before M. Night and the teens had their way with my emotions, Garrison Keillor got his shot to prime the pump in the parking lot. He was talking about people flipping out and changing, people turning their life on a dime so suddenly at what should have been the height of their maturity. But even his story had a logic, an explanation, a predictability – the inevitable mid-life mayhem of, as he put it, getting an AARP card in the mail. Retirement, obsolescence, a meaningful loss of youth. It’s classic and obvious and sensible. No one is prepared for the torments and regrets of realizing one is too old for the life they imagined.

I’m not ready to be put out to pasture. But I am going in the wrong direction. Somewhere between here and my AARP card, I’ve gotta find the faith or hope or the Philadelphia elevator or even Minnesota small town that puts me back on a course toward something that makes sense. And all I can think about are the memories.

Maybe I just need to move out of Tiny House already.

Some days, you wake up and realize that ten days have gone by without you really sharing what’s going on in your life with people. Maybe you don’t, I should observe. I do. Maybe you wake up and realize that you’ve never really shared what’s going on in your life with people. Or that you’ve shared every day. I used to do that. That last one.

Things have been eventful and emotional. Trying to sum up the whole week and a half is both impossible and largely irrelevant, since so much of it has been about trials and tribulations that have largely corrected or improved or at least gotten to the point where I can’t worry or care so much as I did about that one specific thing. It’s complicated and trying and ultimately probably doesn’t make very good reading. I’m going to be working a lot over the next year on making things that are very good reading. And maybe even throw in a few more photos. There’s going to be a lot to see here, methinks, so don’t get used to these ten-day droughts. Just a few more to come, then content city. Maybe.

One of the things I want to post content on will be my new apartment in Highland Park, New Jersey, a suburb of New Brunswick, home of the Rutgers team that cleaned up this past weekend. But my landlord is dragging his feet a bit and the move-in date keeps getting pushed. I’m still holding out for this weekend – if it’s not then, I’m going to feel very silly for ditching the William & Mary tournament to move, let alone having my Dad fly out here in part to help me move. Still holding out hope for not feeling silly, but we won’t know till tomorrow for sure.

The tournament was fantastic and helped convince me that I’ve made a good call in sticking around Rutgers, APDA, and even New Jersey this year. There was every reason to believe that it would still be a struggle, tinged with unhappiness and strife and newly sad memories. Instead, the tournament was roughly the exact opposite, punctuated with great camaraderie among both new and old on the team, great reconnecting with APDA comrades, a marvelously fun demo round with Joel, and moments of real happiness for the first time in possibly two months. ‘Twas amazing. The fact that I could muster all that in the first tournament of the year under present circumstances was a huge ratification and endorsement of recent decisions. I may never believe in any of my long-term decisions again, let alone trust myself, but I’m going to run with what I learned last weekend.

Then we had the “Bachelorette Party” for Ariel, whose wedding is almost upon us, and then my Dad came into town. We’ve been working through the apartment, the burgeoning reality of my situation, and years’ worth of accumulation. I’ve been trying to eat and sleep when possible. Yesterday was really tough. Today was much better. Tomorrow, I’m hoping, will be at least as good as today.

I like this space better when I can be poetic, when I can illustrate the whole world in a poignant vignette or reflection. But I’ll take this too, especially when I haven’t been heard from in a while. I’m here, I’m hanging in, some days are even not terrible. I’m not willing to say that time is running its course or anything that overly positive, but at least things are looking the least bit up. Sideways? Maybe microscopically up.

It’s enough for today. Maybe I lost the person who made me a grateful person, but I can still try to find grace in a little corner of each rotation of the Earth.

Fish’s house is a long narrow rowhouse nestled on one of the narrowest streets that allows parking in the United States of America. It’s a one-way street barely two car-widths wide, part of a series of such confusing glorified alleys that make up his rather cute neighborhood for struggling families in Philadelphia. People push in their parked cars’ side mirrors to make sure they don’t rankle against the opposite-side mirrors of the cars trying to squeak by them as their tires hug the curb, leaving a soft sheen of black rubber on the off-white cement.

Up the street a few blocks and across a street with plenty of lanes and parking stands the Melrose Diner, a Philadelphia institution that’s been through about twenty-five ownership changes in the last decade or so by most accounts. No one wants to let the place die, but everyone seems to come in with their own attitude of neglect or refurbishment. Many locals will tell you the place used to be amazing but has since fallen on hard times. It seems most online reviewers agree. The place still has the look and feel of the glory days of chrome, and the food and prices don’t disappoint. The waitstaff is wildly inconsistent, ranging from grizzled and gruff but thoroughly competent to young and diffident and apt to forget one’s table altogether. There seem to be more staff than patrons, no matter how full the place is.

Today I awoke with a hangover I couldn’t have had. Granted, I’ve been prone to dehydration lately and my late-night meal included two Coca-Cola Classics, the most I’ve had in one sitting in many years. Fish and Madeleine and Skipper and I went out to a Mexican restaurant and bar down the road to play my new copy of Settlers and drink and eat spicy food and entertain our hip waiter to no end. Skipper coached me in the ways of being divorced and I settled into a social setting where Emily’s absence was more permanent than temporary. It was fun in many ways, almost something like real fun instead of the pale shadow of former fun that so many normally good activities have felt like lately. But I also had to resist the urge to order alcohol for the first time, to chase two Cokes with something that might impair my memory enough to staunch my hemophiliac wounds. As a reward, this morning greeted me early with the sound of shrieking children out the window and a feeling like my head against a board. Just to remind me, I suppose, why I don’t cross that threshold.

It’s Labor Day, a day to celebrate, and Fish’s quaint little block that recently reversed its one-way direction to favor the flow of children’s bicycles over crosstown vehicular traffic had decided to host a Block Party. It was too early to feel I could move, let alone move my car, but the ballplaying children of Philadelphia awoke early to a last Monday without school and were all too ready to whoop their farewell to summer while careening down the narrow strip of asphalt. I felt the tug of guilt at the Prius standing in their way, felt a tug of concern for the dent of a football against the metal, plastic, glass, felt the pang of realizing how much of my last year of life had been spent preparing myself to have a child in the next couple years. The laughter, the fragility, the innocent hubris of youth, wafting up the brick face of the building and through the screen window, gently settling on my overly sensitive ear unfettered by the pillow that covered its twin. Memories of my own childhood, its joys and traumas. Am I glad to be born anymore? Maybe it’s for the best that I will likely never reproduce.

I held out for hours, navigating the minefield of memory and contemplation that has become my quiet time alone, will define said time for probably years to come. Occasionally sleep would snatch me away for blissful tens of minutes, sometimes only to relinquish me more profoundly in the throes of melancholy recall than ever before as penance. I tossed. I turned. I heard the doppling sound of whizzing children underneath the window. Finally, as I heard another car being moved, I could wait no more and groggily donned pants and shoes for the slide of a quiet blue car for less demanded pastures. It was only 9:30 in the morning.

Upon my shuffled return, I saw no reason to be awake, so I returned to the alternation of nightmare, relief, and waking memory that had adorned the few hours just behind me. It was not until the first hour of the afternoon that I decided pillows and air mattresses were no match for my headache and coffee would be necessary. Nothing and no one in the house stirred, so I scrawled a hasty note and descended the creaky stripped stairs for the throng of Block Partiers and the chrome monument just beyond. The place was abuzz, a hubbub of 80% capacity denoting a leisurely lunchtime crowd. I found a corner of the counter, spread my palms wide on the cool formica, and waited to express an interest in equal measures of coffee and water.

I was unlucky with the waitstaff this time around, drawing one of those disinterested and distracted waitresses who seem querulously unsure why people keep asking them for things as they try to enjoy their afternoon. This turned a somewhat officious trip for necessary fuel into an unending odyssey of reading Huxley and observing my own cast of conversational characters as they traversed the booths and seats in my vicinity. Most everyone was with someone else, and all in a famously good mood. Monday holidays in America are a reprieve, a get-out-of-jail-free card, an unexpected stay of execution. They transform Sunday-night-dread into delirious revelry, Monday afternoon drudgery into the false hope of real freedom. People slapped backs and pounded tables and laughed themselves silly, stuffing forkfuls of nourishment into already pudgy faces as they warded off the feeling that tomorrow they die.

But halfway through the meal, a kindred. Hopelessly awkward but with his own ugly sort of charm, a man in his forties or early fifties, unkempt without being unclean. Glasses and a moppy wave of brown hair holding off the last vestiges of beginning baldness. He had reading material like I did, sat six seats away around the counter’s long swoop. A regular, clearly, addressing at least three waitresses by name and lingering over the discussion with my inattentive friend as he dorkily voiced a profound need for coffee. “I don’t just need coffee, I need it bad!” he explained, taking a reflexive self-giggle at his ability to poke fun at his tired chemical demands. I realized he’d been up about as long as I had, and I could guess in a roughly comparably tormented state. I don’t need to tell you he lacked a wedding ring.

It was as I had already set my plate aside and was vainly hoping for another coffee refill that the next man joined the counter culture, squarely ensconcing himself between the older man and I. He, of course, even older, maybe mid-seventies at the most, unafraid to wear his large hearing aid with pride or take his time in the shuffling walk and little grunty struggle up to the counter seat. Not only a regular, this one, but a regular for perhaps longer than I’d walked this planet, warmly greeting waitresses not only in his immediate vision but behind him and around him as they paused with laden plates to return the entreaty even more warmly. A favorite, a kindly old soul offering the last of his Social Security and social interaction to the disenchanted diner denizens who take his tips home to too many children they see too little. He was past the point of reading, perhaps exemplifying a desire to merely see and be seen, to exchange softspoken words in his only hour-long exception to an otherwise silent world.

It hit me about then, double-checking his own lack of wedding ring and the corresponding absence of a tired gray-haired companion back home, that I was dining with my future selves. Oh sure, I wasn’t quite as overtly geeky as the ten-years-on manifestation, nor as hopeless as my nearer model. But I would be. I will be. I can see it all before me now, and shortly before leaving took time to make quiet appreciative eye-contact with these portentous brethren. I am he as you are me and we are all together. The jilted, the never-loved, the lonely men who find solace in the busy clatter of frying eggs and hastily scrubbed dishes and excited conversation of those who are not solo. This is how we do it. One day after another, one meal at a time, fueling ourselves on a long slow drive into an oblivion whose final exit no one will care to see.

I raise my cup to you, good sirs. To me. May we adorn the counters of a million restaurants to come, indirectly finding a way to feed children who will never be our own.

I think I’ve spent most of my life chasing memories. I do something, I enjoy it, and then I spend years trying to recreate that thing and get back to a place where I can relive that moment or reinvent it in some meaningful way. Maybe it’s what everyone does when they seek out future experiences and maybe it’s something only I do to this extent. I don’t know. This idea is new enough and uncertain enough that I can’t tell whether it’s a revelation or tripe.

It certainly explains the decision to come back to debate and start coaching after spending so many years missing debate after college graduation. It explains my taste in restaurants, in activities, in people. It explains most everything I do and every decision I make. The choice of where to live in the next year largely hinged on choosing between something I remembered liking (debate coaching) vs. some place I remembered liking to live (Albuquerque) vs. some trails I remembered liking to hike (Grand Canyon/Flagstaff). I’ve chosen, by the way. I’m moving to Highland Park, NJ, a suburb of New Brunswick, through June 2011. Moving west in the summer unless something radically unforeseeable happens. You know, because radically unforeseeable would be such a change at this point.

I think what I’m saying is pretty mundane and trivial. It felt revelatory, but it’s coming off sounding silly. Of course we chase memories, right? I mean, how does one know what one likes to do or who one likes to be if one can’t remember aspects of that reality? All we have to go on is our experience and perhaps the testimony and feedback of others. What else is there? Visionary thinking, I guess – the ability to imagine oneself in a new place and situation and see if one likes it. But how well does that work? And how would one judge what one can envision oneself liking without basing that on the aforementioned memories? Otherwise it would be pure speculation or invention. Or just randomness.

I guess part of this is about me being more past-oriented than the average person. I’m probably about two-thirds past-oriented and one-third present. The future doesn’t hold a lot for me. And if you thought that was true before all this happened… wow. So yeah. The past seems like the basis for whatever future there could be. I was a History major. I am fascinated by the collected actions of people in the past, what led us to this very point. I am certain that there are codes and patterns in the past that would be able to tell you precisely what will take place in the future, or at least the decisions that the future actions will be based upon. And who doesn’t want to predict the future? Maybe there’s a little room in me for future-orientation as well.

The future is starting to take a little shape, for better or for worse. I’m sticking with the Rutgers team, which I’m excited about, even though I’d ideally relocate them (and all of my East Coast friends) to the desert Southwest. I’ve got plans to volunteer at a soup kitchen, maybe even to swing that into some sort of employment at some point. Short of the latter, I’d like to get some part-time work doing something else, probably something rote and officey and relatively mindless just to get me out and about and put a little extra money in my pocket. I think three or four demands on my time would be about right to keep me sufficiently distracted to somehow survive whatever combination of separation and divorce lies ahead.

But what are all these things? Mere shadows of past memories. I remember enjoying the Rutgers team last year, and debate for nine years before that. I remember enjoying volunteering at a soup kitchen. I remember finding solace and structure in office work. I remember how I tried to distract myself the last time the loss of love drove me to the brink of destruction.

How does one make a new memory? How does one dive off the cliff and into the cold cold water of the unprecedented? Should one even strive to? Or is everything in our future built on a pyramid of the few good memories we’re left with that somehow survive unscathed and unfettered into the future? How much of the promise of a memory depends on its sanctity, on its untainted state in the future? “The price of a memory is the memory of the sorrow it brings.” Yes? Yes, but? Is all experience destined to yellow with age, to curl and crinkle till the bright sincere smiles get mangled into ghoulish grins? Is every good thing an implicit portend of its own doom?

The chase is on.

What’s interesting about my perspective in contrast with others’ perspectives is that perception is often a long long way from reality. And the more I’ve thought about it, the more I’ve really realized that my sadness comes from my idealism. That ultimately most people are innately pessimistic/realistic and accordingly don’t have a very high bar of hope. And since they work on a given scale of magnitude where the potential highs are flattened, they don’t get sad or upset or angry that often when things fall short. Because it’s not that much to fall short from. Whereas I, with my ideals and hopes and high standards, my real understanding of what humanity could be capable of if they cared, get pissed when things go awry.

It’s an important observation, and one that I’ve made in various ways, but I want to sort of bookmark the clarity of my understanding of it now. I slept a good deal last night for the first time in possibly weeks and I awoke in the sort of haze-state of first consciousness with a new depth to my understanding that other people are mostly just slogging through a relatively high concentration of mud and pragmatism and low expectations and accordingly find it easy to be happy with little things. Someone doesn’t look at them funny or says something nice and that exceeds expectations by such a degree that it puts them in a good mood. They can be happy and satisfied with less. They aren’t sitting around chalking up every subpar interaction and comparing it against what could be done. And, most importantly and contrastingly from me, they aren’t trying to mine every decision they make or experience they have for ways to improve in the future.

It’s this last bit that becomes the really damning thing. For by taking the perspective that living is serious business and that we’re on the planet to learn and grow instead of just muddle through and muck about, I end up disgruntled a lot more often than people who don’t expect much of themselves. And people can expect a lot from themselves in a given arena without trying to really thoroughly pump every experience and detail for information and potential progress. I understand more and more how deadly serious and debilitating and strangling my perspective must seem to people who don’t share it. When do I have room for fun?

But the flipside of all this, of course, seems to be the manic side, wherein I end up enjoying things in a purer, even more childlike way than most anyone I know. Most others seem afraid of expressing excitement or enthusiasm. And I think that’s related to the idealism too. If one doesn’t let oneself hope or dare to dream, then the potential ceiling on any experience is pretty low. It’s not that wildly captivating to get to have a good time, because that time is capped by the mucky muddly realities of the species and the planet. It reminds me of Russian and the fact that the word for happiness doesn’t have a permanent state – most folks are wandering around only hoping for fleeting satisfactions and thus can’t throw themselves into really enjoying them full-throttle in the way of a childlike idealist.

It’s easy to look at all this and say that I just haven’t grown up. That part of growing up is about moderating one’s emotional highs and lows or even the conviction or belief that emotions matter at all. But the ability to maintain childlike wonder, appreciation, hope, and idealism is what separates everyone I respect and admire on the public scene from everyone else in the world. Gandhi, King, and all the writers are people who objectively never grew up. They were visionaries, luminaries, people who could see beyond and above and had greater faith and higher hopes than anyone else thought practical. You can look at the lesson of their lives and say look, they just got a bullet for their troubles, proving that this is all mucky and muddly and useless. But I disagree. I think it’s clear that these are the only people who make our species worth discussing at all. Would that we could be judged by these examples rather than their assassins, rather than the practical doers who only aspire to sell out a little less this time.

I refuse to settle. Even if it kills me. If I die because of it, then I die once. But if I settle and compromise my ideals, I die every time I wake up and face a new hopeless day.