Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

He tosses and turns in the vain effort to get to sleep. There is throbbing in his head, the natural consequence of this sort of upheaval, this sort of discombobulation of schedule and energy and the flailing inability to stay at rest for more than two-hundred and forty minutes at a time. It is a vicious cycle, the pain creating the need to sleep creating the need to awaken creating the pain. There is ticking in the background, the gentle click of time in its passage, meting out empty hours between newly filled hours that march for a hazy horizon gaining clarity but still no certainty whatsoever.

One never knows the exact moment that one falls asleep. It is the magical nature of losing consciousness that one is never around to feel it. One can beckon it or hasten it or trick oneself toward it, but one never gets to feel that precise moment of final drift into oblivion. The closest that can be reconciled is to awaken shortly after and realize that one had just drifted, to start-stop-start-stop and try to simulate the sensation by being aware of its close proximity. But this approximation only highlights the nature of awakening and not asleepening. Namely, surprise. One is always surprised to wake up, not merely because life is a gift, but because it indicates the news that one had fallen asleep, which till then had not officially registered with the office of consciousness.

He awakens to the comforting but unstable sounds of rain on the roof, thunder in the distance, the roil and tumult of running water on tin, asphalt, concrete, glass, marshy grass. The contrasting symphony of collisions blending into a familiar din that might be soporific were he not dealing with the fresh consciousness that predictably comes after four thin hours. There is renewal of the tossing and flipping, but he knows how this scene ends and eventually the covers are cast aside in something just better than disgust as he rises to face 3:52 in the morning and all that it implies.

I have yet to adjust to this life. To any part of it. I am awash in reflection, anticipation, appreciation, exhaustion, and resignation. Five parts, equal measure. I grow weary of even categorizing how I feel or what I hope for, but it’s automatic to the point where I can no longer even imagine how to avoid it. It’s nice to be too busy to notice, sometimes, fleetingly, but the schedule increases the impacts of the inevitable moments when not noticing is impossible. The next step will be reducing the headaches, or sleeping through the night, or finding a situation that can help me with either.

Have barely a moment to update things, so this will have to be short and sweet. As regular readers will have noted from the string of Duck and Covers with no other content lately, it’s been an insanely busy week. Not only is it my first official stint on the job working officially for Rutgers University in a professional capacity, but we’re hosting the tournament this weekend, making everything that much more time-consuming and challenging. I love tournaments, I love running tournaments, and I most especially love running tab rooms, so there’s a lot of love for this weekend. But there’s also an incredible amount of preparation required and I’m just barely surfing the top crest of it.

As though notching the first week of my life as a pro Debate Coach weren’t surreal enough, today marked the announcement of the second round of the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award contest advancers, a demarcation that culls 80% of the 5,000 entrants in the General Fiction category. For the second year in a row, I’m pleased to announce that a novel of mine (last year it was American Dream On; this year The Best of All Possible Worlds) has advanced. I was less sure about my pitch this year than last, but am much more confident about future rounds since the opening portion of this book is much tighter and less depressing than the start of ADO. Last year, I felt nervous about the first round and confident about second, though ADO ran into a stonewall of readers who only want things light and fluffy, no matter how much character development is thrown at them. This year, I was even more nervous about first and even less about second, so hopefully I’ll be in this thing for a while to come. Quarterfinalists will be announced on March 22nd.

Like before, the least I’ll get out of the contest is written feedback from two writers about the first few chapters of the book. The most I’ll get is a lot of publicity or… well, there’s always a chance of winning the thing. And given what the book is about and the unending surreality of my life right now, how could I rule it out? I’ve been due for some upside after the worst year of my life, but plenty of people who deserve good things don’t get them. I may never feel lucky again, quite, but I have to recognize that my life has been filled with incredible peaks and valleys. And who would I be if I didn’t yodel from the peaks?

Today is a good day, without reservation.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

Last night, I had a dream about admitting a romantic interest to one of my oldest friends who I liked for some years back in the day. In the dream, it was acknowledged with the effortless casuality of ancient history and ancient knowledge, the artful and slightly playful dismissiveness that only comes from people with supreme confidence in themselves and their every decision. Such an attitude doesn’t quite comport with the real-life version of this person, and yet speaks volumes to my perception of relative confidence and attitudinal approach as I face the hills and waves of future forays. Increasingly, my major concerns are that everyone else likes themselves better than I do (empirically untrue, of course, because everyone feels this way) and that no one else feels living is truly serious business. This last, unfortunately, may empirically be true.

On the other hand, I often feel I’ve gotten younger with every passing year. As a child who grew up nine-going-on-forty, the approaching march to 40 feels like emotional regression. I think a fitting model of adulthood would be about figuring out what one has to take seriously and what one can take risks with. I think that a huge part of my rapport with my debate team, for example, comes from the fact that I can stay loose and jokey with them, that our practices, downtime at tournaments, and day-to-day interactions are far from all-business. My critique of most adults is that they cast aside their imagination and creativity in the belief that conforming to societally desired expectations will somehow improve their standing or others’ perception of them. Empirically, again, little could be further from the truth. No one likes a conformist. No one is impressed by how well someone falls in line, etches themselves into a cog, or fails to make waves. And yet aging implies a pressure to sit down, shut up, and start plodding along an inevitable treadmill toward a dubious retired future.

My own future is starting to take shape, at least in the narrow scope of the next year or so, and possibly longer. I have accepted an offer to join the staff of Rutgers University on a full-time basis, serving in an expanded version of my volunteer role that I’ve undertaken for the past year and a half. The school’s administration’s embracing of the debate team in the last few weeks has been overwhelmingly impressive and expansive and I am incredibly grateful to them and the institution writ large for the emerging depth of opportunity they are making available to me, but especially to the students of Rutgers. I think another facet of adjusting to adulthood is increasing acclimation to the idea that one will be under-acknowledged for one’s work and efforts – I am keenly aware of how distant my life suddenly is from such acclimation and what a call to action that contrast can be.

I spent the weekend on the Princeton campus, an emotional gauntlet of tremendous proportion. The recentering of the tournament in the traditional McCosh 50 heightened memories of all stripes, dating back to the spring of 1999, to say nothing of Edwards Hall and the various portents of the best year of my life. There were countless pockets of the campus I found myself in or near or passing by, having to shake my head in wonder at the circular cyclical nature of existence and what sort of bold metaphor one’s life tends to be. Of course, having the company of a team and a new generation to coach and assist both distracted from and periodically enhanced the nature of the trial. Suffice it to say it was emotional.

While the varsity squad struggled a bit again, the novices had yet another breakout performance, including a novice semis break for a team in their first and second APDA tournaments, respectively. Were I not sticking around, this would be about the time I would be desperately reconsidering that decision in the face of how much upside there is in the youth of the team, of wondering where we could be in a year or two. Which is of course nice instant confirmation of my decision to return, to see where we can get, to take pleasure in the incremental improvements as part of a long continuum I can now afford to see out instead of wistfully remember with wonder a couple years hence.

Today itself will be quiet, I’d imagine. A couple folks are coming up from Philly to help me invest in my decision to reside here for the foreseeable future – my apartment remains relatively sparse and unadorned, many artifacts still boxed or stowed, the whole place underlit and overly whitewalled. Hopefully by day’s end, the place will be less refugee camp and more safe haven, a place I have chosen instead of one I’ve fallen into, a reflection of a life I’m leading instead of following. It’s not the most celebratory of usages of time, but it’s befitting of my current status and location. Last year was celebratory and surprising and joyous. This year will be reflective but ultimately rejuvenating.

And, to top it off, my favorite of birthday perks, it’s supposed to snow tonight. While we got a whiff of spring a couple days back, yesterday about-faced into bitter windblown cold and this evening’s forecast calls for flaky precipitation, growing heavy right around the time of my actual birth anniversary (2:56 AM Eastern, four minutes till midnight Pacific). Not sure I’ll be up that late, given my new need to report to work on a schedule, but maybe I’ll set a brief alarm to blearily examine the echoes of 1992 as they fall and scatter on a place I’m starting to call home.

Apparently, two years ago, someone decided to make this the World Day of Social Justice. Hard to imagine a more desirable designation, especially since World Peace Day was already taken. We’re not there yet, folks, and the struggle is long, laborious, and continuous. But with any luck, there are still contributions to be made, reasons to persist in the effort. I remain alive and so long as I do, it will be as an idealist, perhaps even increasingly starry-eyed as the years cascade and I insist on remaining imaginative. There are doubtlessly worse ways to grow old than in the company of heated debate, the camaraderie of youthful enthusiasts, the glint of limitless potential, the shade of support and acknowledgment. It is a blessing to spend any day appreciative, maybe even on the cusp of something like hope.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

It’s been a manic day in Highland Park, one of my best days in recent or even long-term memory. There are lots of small little factors, but most of them are more about the absence of badness than the presence of goodness. For what that’s worth, that’s been enough to induce veritable euphoria compared to recent trends, so I’m not going to complain or look it in the mouth of take any of the other dismissive actions with which we usually regard upswings or energy bursts.

I’m also rapidly realizing that I might need to create a category of some kind to denote posts about life in Jersey specifically, a la my If You’re Going to San Francisco category from a couple years back. I’ll accept submissions for the title, though I’m personally partial to the line from “What Dreams May Come” (incidentally itself a category title herein) “If I could find you in Hell, I can find you in Jersey.” But that may be a little harsh to this state and the implications are a little overbearing, even for someone as ambivalent about this place as I am. Which brings me to the subject of today’s post in earnest.

So I’ve been on an epic quest the last few weeks for postcards. But not just any postcards, mind you, postcards from/of New Brunswick or at least Rutgers. I’ll obscure my reasons for this quest for the moment, but suffice it to say that a fairly serious project that is now in arrears was riding on successful conclusion of said quest. Today I stepped up my game after already being turned away from several places, and yet neither the discount store downtown, the pharmacy/grocery downtown, nor the Rutgers bookstore carry a single postcard of any kind. This despite the pharmacy (RiteAid) carrying no less than one and a half full aisles (that’s three aisle-sides if you’re scoring at home) of insipid greeting cards.

I was going to offer the benefit of the doubt that maybe no one sends postcards anymore, unless they’re mailing them to PostSecret. But why would there be such a gross disparity between frequency of Hallmark cards and postcards? Don’t people enjoy receiving both? And don’t most tourist destinations, or really places of any kind, still stock postcards en masse? Is New Brunswick specifically, or Jersey generally, so down on itself that they really don’t believe anyone will want to send postcards from here at all?

Almost everyone I asked referred me to the post office to continue my quest. Now admittedly they may have some at the post office, but that’s not really something the post office does, is it? Postcard stamps, sure, I got those there. But postcards? Really? I guess it’s possible they’re available there, but I feel like I’d get laughed out of the building if I asked, or at least have some old tired lady explain to me patiently that the post office is in the business of helping people mail things, not selling that which is going to be mailed.

It’s a bad sign of the state of this quest that I actually came home and looked up New Brunswick postcards on the Internet. Yes, I know that the Internet is replacing much of what we do in the real world and is probably responsible for the localized, if not general, demise of postcards as a practice. But really? I can’t find postcards of my town in the town, so I have to resort to trying to have them shipped in?! I’d ask what’s wrong with this picture, but it’s precisely a picture I’m failing to acquire.

I mean, yes, New Brunswick is not exactly the Grand Canyon. But it’s decently pretty and contains a great deal of historical longevity and significance. And the university is a real point of pride statewide. Who wouldn’t want to write home about their visit to the campus that dates back to 1766 or even the grease trucks and the new football stadium? How can the bookstore not sell any postcards?!

Put it this way, if the debate thing falls through, I may just have a new Jersey industry at my fingertips.

I will leave you with what, sadly, is the best I can find online as a cutting edge postcard of the highlights of modern New Brunswick:

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

Truly random musings, because it’s that kind of day and I’m in that kind of mood:

1. Life is a lot better when one isn’t in chronic tooth pain.
2. I’m really wildly excited about our tournament, now just nine days away. You should check out how much fun we’re having with our theme.
3. Yoga can be quite painful, especially for one’s head/neck. I am not trying to play with headstands any more.
4. In related news, I think there’s something wrong with my system when it’s held upside-down. I’ve always hated upside-down roller-coasters and last night my head felt much like it does after going on one. This may be related to migraines or just having a thin skull or something.
5. Baseball season is likely to increase quality of life soon. At least, until the M’s are 20 below .500, which will probably be about late May or mid-June.
6. I have/get to spend the weekend on the Princeton campus. This should be… interesting.
7. Computers seem to corrode my discipline. Showers enhance it. Food is a crapshoot.
8. I need to find a place to feed ducks regularly when spring comes. This is one of those random little aspects of life, like having an armchair or burning candles regularly or talking to people more, that is really easy to do and really ups my attitude about everything. I think at the end of life, it’s easy to ask why we didn’t fill our days with more tiny little enjoyable activities.
9. Most things seem worse in advance than they actually are. This should be the basis for fearlessness, especially in accumulation. Look back on all the things you dreaded and got through. Is life really worth dreading?
10. I think whenever I next get a pet, which could be years from now, it will be a rabbit. Preferably an English Spot:

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

I haven’t been posting much lately. There’s a few reasons for that. For one, there’s something stemming from my last post that’s still being resolved and I’m not commenting on that matter till it gets sorted out. So that tends to put a damper on my communication when there’s an elephant in the room that doesn’t bear description. But I’ve also been struggling a bit lately to find an equilibrium of time and expression that works for me. The complicating factors of being just shy of turning 31, dealing with multi-continental communication with a certain person, and trying to decide what I’m going to do with the coming year after this May have all weighed heavily. And, lacking conclusions, there is little to say.

So I’m not really going to talk about any of that today. What I do want to focus on is something arguably more important that has crept in through the margins, that has manifest on the sidelines of all these other things I’m trying to decide. A fitting frontispiece for this post might be John Lennon’s old standard “Life is what happens when you’re making other plans.” But it might also be my old standard “Why do you think we were born on a planet with six or seven billion people on it instead of just one person?” And herein lies the crux of the issue. People. Lots of ‘em.

Look, I’m an only child. People often frustrate me. I’ve been known to get into a state after weeks or months on end surrounded by others where I start to crave alone time, start to find ways to force it upon myself whether it’s really feasible or not. Staying up late has a lot to do with that – in times when I’ve been most surrounded, I’ve pushed the limits of late-awakeness mostly out of a need to carve out time that’s only mine, where I can be alone with my thoughts and stack them up, rearrange them, figure out what’s really going on. Losing that ability tends to correspond to what other people claim to experience when they lose sleep – fragmentation of thought, randomness of action. Not good things.

HOWever, the last thing I’ve really been needing of late is time alone. I’ve never had so much of it in all my born days. And this has put special focus on the rare exceptions, the time when I get to interact with others, especially outside of a merely utile context like debate. When I get to just talk and be and exchange ideas and thoughts and feelings with other folks.

People, these times are what life is all about. I have gotten to hang out, on the phone or in person, with a handful of close friends in the last couple of weeks, and I simply don’t understand how any human being could prioritize anything else in their lives above human interaction of this kind. Yes, I know we’re all technically sustained by food and it probably helps to have access to clothing and shelter, but the fundamental roots of our human dignity have to be about access to meaningful conversation steeped in mutual respect and interest. And admittedly debate is a lot like that, in several ways, or gives rise to similar interpersonal conversation once one pushes beyond “how was your round?” But conversations that are the fundamental centerpiece of most all of my friendships, the balanced buffet of bantery jokes and references, shared memories, enlightened understanding, and honest exploration, this is the atomic block of life as a rational agent. This is what keeps us, any of us (I would posit) going. And without it, life quickly becomes gray, drab, brutish, and potentially short.

This is somewhere between +1 and -1 on a 100-point revelatory scale, but the way it’s hit me this week has reframed internal debates about what is important and meaningful in my life. Namely because I’m so surprised that we don’t structure society more around the facilitation of these kinds of deep and profound interactions. There are a lot of market-based commercial reasons to minimize the role of these conversations and exchanges of ideas, of course, though I hardly think capitalism can singlehandedly shut them out. But obviously if we advertise based on the exploitation of insecurities, we hardly want to enable people to derive such satisfaction from individualized free experiences that at most require a meal or beverage over which to stage such an encounter. But that can’t be all that’s thwarting daily recognition and prioritization of these kinds of groupings. Part of it has to be about the difficulty and perhaps non-universality of finding close friends, especially those who persist across years and decades to enable meaningful reunions and catchings-up. Still, most everyone has such friends, even if only in ones and twos.

I do have to blame money, I guess. And as the upcoming quiz (half the images are done and then I have to write all the answers – it could be anywhere from three days to three months away at this point) illustrates, money is a big impediment to most meaningful things. But surely even people dedicated to work or to setting time aside for a passionately pursued pursuit must be able to take a step back and realize that only when exchanging important ideas with those they most care for are they maximizing their potential as a human being. That what they can most remember about one, three, seven, twelve, twenty years past are moments spent in mutual revelation or wonder or admiration with another soul and that everything else in the meantime, save perhaps for a few treasured accomplishments or accolades, is fine print. Seriously, seek out your lasting memories. How many of them are alone? How many of them are all about you only?

Stop reading this blog entry. Call up an old friend. Or go visit them. And you’ll see what I mean.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

The future, apparently, is now. Or at least will start to take some shape remarkably soon.

Tomorrow morning, I meet with one of Rutgers’ Vice Presidents to determine what I’m worth to the University on a possible bid to return for a third year as coach of their Debate Union. I had had no intention of staying, but it’s becoming clear that there would be some possible benefits to doing so, most of which are likely to be outlined (or at least discussed) tomorrow. I could not possibly feel more conflicted about this issue. There are lots of reasons to leave New Jersey and probably very few to stay. But I do love this team and debate is about the only thing going consistently well in my life right now, so if they make me an offer I can’t refuse, I won’t. If I had to guess, the final offer will be somewhere that squarely makes the decision a quandary. But it will be interesting to find out.

Today, I found out that my cat, or at least former cat, Emily’s and my former cat, Pandora, is dying. Her kidneys are failing. She is very old (twelve and a half) and has lived a good, long life, most of it by far in the company of a couple that loved her very much. She spent the last two summers in California with Em’s cousin, and I couldn’t bear to take her back at the conclusion of this one amidst all the upheaval and torment in my life. I have half a mind to spontaneously up and fly out to SoCal and say goodbye, but it would be just as unsatisfying and disappointing as other last-ditch flights have proven. The Pandora I loved is probably already gone, her mood and will to live dampened by the giving out of her organs. I wish I could see her again, but it would probably just hurt. And cost. Still, the news has hit me hard.

I have been at a loss for words and thoughts and feelings of late. Maybe not feelings. Words and thoughts, certainly. I have predictable contexts where I can make sense, but most of me feels as though I’m grappling with oblong objects and insufficient tools for their manipulation. Like the whole world came wrapped in an unwieldy box and I’m just trying to figure out how to pick up any part of it without dropping it all on the floor, having it spill out in pieces of broken. It keeps seeming like a great idea to move stuff around, to pick it up and try it over there, no, how about here. But the reality is that just kicking at it in a certain direction is starting to seem untenable. And the whole thing leaves me grasping at words and concepts, flailing in my inability to plant a flag anywhere.

And, signal of my most volatile days for time immemorial, I’ve got a dental appointment tomorrow too. It was originally looking like a root canal, but we’re trying to get away with a filling, a redo of a misplaced filling from years prior, one that’s been giving me a lot of pain of late. My own kidneys seem to be behaving, their stone production compromised by the intake of sugarless pure cranberry juice, but it’s still been a year that’s been hard on my health. Just going to get dental work seems like a huge investment, a commitment of upfront time and angst on the whispered promise of a long-term that I have to find some value in. That perhaps will have quantifiable value, at least in some form, as early as by the time I get to said appointment.

How silly it all seems, the filter of money, of mortality. How much these color and change our perceptions of the world around us. We can be forgiven, I suppose, for money is freedom and the absence of mortality probably feels like freedom for the most part. But it is strange to wrestle on the cusp of inevitability when one is still mired in uncertainty. I tend to relish and savor uncertainty, and the idea that so many possibilities will foreclose quickly, even to possibly great ends, is a bit unsettling. Continually, as with this whole year, I feel utterly desanctioned from agency in my own life, its outcomes, the paths that unfold. This is where the inevitability comes in, perhaps, makes its mark, paints its red arrows. Or perhaps it’s as cyclical as the lifetime of an living beast, entering and exiting the world unable to control its own bladder, let alone its thoughts and feelings.

I will leave this in a sad, simple way, before heading off to another meeting, a lighter one, one to plan a tournament that is perhaps the only certain thing I have circled to look forward to on a calendar of days fading into each other. It’s the last known picture of Emily and Pandora together, and I don’t care who knows it – I miss my girls:

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.