It’s hard to read the posts I made in this space from last April without getting a little upset. There was a lot of looking forward then, especially a year and a day ago when I looked back on Nationals 2010 and tried to anticipate what the next year would bring, both at Rutgers and even tabbing Nats this year. And a year less a day ago, two days after, the giddy announcement that Em had finally secured a summer position in Liberia. It’s a little like the public-diary-rereading version of watching a really unsubtle horror film. No matter how much you yell “Look behind you!” at the screen, your April 2010 self won’t hear you.

I’ve been fond of telling people this week that “I’m not a person” right now, a nod to the obsessive focus I’ve brought to both preparing the Rutgers team for Nationals (you can read our latest Targum article from yesterday here) and to preparing to be Tab Director at the marquee title event for APDA. Splitting these duties is somewhat certifiable, and yet completely exhilarating as I have frequently observed that I like only coaching and tabbing nearly as much as I used to like debating. And a lot of the preparation, as the article attests, has involved me getting to debate the kids I usually just observe, if only in practice and drills.

Certainly spending three days at the US Military Academy in such a position of authority will be surreal enough. I’ve been making a lot of jokes with people in the last few months about how unpredictable recent developments in my life have been, how life itself seems pretty determined to demonstrate its flexibility and perhaps insanity to me. A year ago, my thoughts were focused on how tabbing nationals in my second year of coaching would be a likely farewell to the circuit, a last nod to perhaps my favorite institution of all-time before shuffling quietly into the shadows for a possibly somewhat permanent jaunt abroad with the wife I’d met through said organization. As it stands now, I am indefinitely involved, perhaps in an increasing manner, my third Nats tab room being just another notch in a life once again built on doubling down on debate and hoping the rest of the details sort themselves out.

I never make unmitigatedly positive statements any more, especially when looking at my own life and its meandering browbeaten path. But I can at least be thankful to debate as a whole and this league in specific as a heck of a safety net that’s been there to catch my terminal velocity this annum. That does bring me to the brink of an unknown on the verge of a summer without much clear form or shape other than letdown from the weekly adrenaline surge of competition. But it also provides reassurance at the constancy of having found a community I can always enjoy and feel a mutual benefit in relation to. In some ways, it may not seem like much; in others, it feels like the early fruits of most people’s lifelong quests.

The goal for the next 72 hours? One of the oldest in the book. Find a way to have some fun, to carve some joy from the sheer intensity. As long as they have music at the banquet, it shouldn’t be too hard.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

The tent poles hung perpendicular to the ground, looped around the air and staked into the wet earth still recovering from last night’s torrents. Green painted metal, spaced along the grass’ edge in distant sequence portending a certain exclusion. He came to sit, he came with book and phone and computer and notepad, all manner of distractions, to spend an afternoon of it, all but amazed that no one else in this collegiate sphere had come to do same. How many passing students, eager to show some skin to the warming sun, eager to free toes and dorm-whitened arms and knees to the world, looking disdainfully past the sprawling undergraduate lawn yet making surprising use of the benches, the stone tabled surfaces so unwelcoming to their class-honed rumps. He settles down ‘neath a tree, planing his jeans in the still soggy soil, feeling the slight infusion of moisture like a bonding of the Earth to its progeny, like a homecoming, like a return to the place that one should always be.

It is warm. For once, it is warm and sunny and there is no tropical storm or swirling snow or gusty wind onrushing to sweep the people of the world inside, away, undercover.

It is almost impossible to believe the singularity of this decision. A collegiate lawn, the very stuff of brochure and pamphlet and lyrical sonnet, bereft of human companionship save this one bewildered man, years out from his own youth and somehow feeling very much the youngest of them all. Surely not all are wearing designer brands unworthy of a little introduction to ants, beetles, soft green stains? Surely not all are in transit to another obligation, another deadline, another gathering under the high fluorescents of steady drone? And yet perhaps it only takes a precedent, a trendsetter, someone to make it okay or inspire the idea. Even on this coast, surely not all are sufficiently repressed to reject the casual suggestion of what should only be obvious on the breakout day of spring. To laze, to lounge, to read and even type under the shade of infant blossoms just starting to emerge and take up a position on the state of the reborn world.

They came in their orange truck, a glorified golf cart, they came with lengths of rope and little plastic signage, they came with a sense of tired purpose that comes with contract labor at the end of an afternoon. They came to give meaning to the empty hook-looped green stakes, all but blending in with the verdant Renaissance they adorned, to draw long white lines in perpendicular contrast at waist-height and enclose the man in his peaceful reverie. They unraveled so much rope, so much string, they walked slowly and deliberately and looked away when the latter sought eye contact, afraid to even beg the question of denial of such justice to an exceptional April afternoon. And then the lift, the ties, the effortless knots the product of so many weeks or months in the Boy Scouts and one can see the man in particular, a lifetime ago, struggling in some attic room with a chiding older brother and his indifferent comic books as he tries once, twice, forty-six times to emulate the confusing monochrome sketch diagram of the particular tie he needs to master for the badge that appears the most pivotal rung on a ladder up to oblivion. How he never could have envisioned himself here astride a storied lawn on a bustling campus one April afternoon envying another of indeterminate age as he read and talked on a headset and seemed to reflect the grand randomness of it all, bucking the trend, as he remembered the gloried colors of that patch of cloth and the pat on his head he received from his father and how the world would never be this simple again.

Stringing, stringing, taking their time, getting each connection with each loop just so with a sufficient tautness to ward those who might duck or jump or doubt the seriousness of the effort herein engaged. And lastly the signs, just before twilight, plastic warnings in high-contrast English to ward those who would otherwise be inclined to feel a lawn is for enjoying, for contemplation, for an appreciation of the soft rolling Earth and its gentle carriage of all of us through the vast coldness of space.

Guitarists arrive as the orange truck is loaded and departs, they perform only for each other, one old, one young, perhaps two generations from the same branch but more likely and fittingly old buddies, a friend of the father perhaps, or men who met in a coffee shop once when they were both starving and refused to sell their strings. They all but whisper their tunes, but he is in just enough to range to appreciate it without discerning or detecting a single tune, though some must be familiar or known. And somewhere in this precise space, in this gap between the familiar and the unknown, there is a solace and a peace he can make with this music despite its being music, and it lulls him back to wistfulness on his now excluded lawn as the sun slips quietly behind a building and bathes the quad in shade that is not yet exactly cold. It winks, just briefly, through an alley’s gap, between two buildings, and then slips into the gently budding night.

Yesterday, at 3:00 PM Pacific time, Pando’s wonderful and heartfelt caretakers for the better part of a year drove her to the vet and said goodbye for the last time. She’d been sick and on painkillers for about a month, slowly fading away. She’d formed a real bond with Em’s cousin and her daughter, living in a house of cats in a certain isolation while she waited for me to be able to handle the emotional implications of bringing back an animal who was a living reflection of the marriage that was taken from me. Sadly, she didn’t make it to that day. I didn’t make it to that day. And I couldn’t be with her on the day she shuffled off the mortal coil, wriggling out of it like the blue harness I used to walk her in on sunny days in Berkeley and Princeton.

A search of “Pandora” on this website reveals 83 resultant pages, “Pando” adds 26 more. The cat was an essential feature of my life for eight years, non-coincidentally the eight years I lived with Emily before she left me. Those eight years make Pando the longest-running pet in my life’s history, surpassing Bags and Tappy, prior beloved felines, as well as Patty Duckworth (duck), Cadbury and Nepal (rabbits), and even Rilla (another rabbit). Eight years can seem like a short time, I guess, given that it’s only a quarter of the era I’ve logged on this planet so far, but it’s feeling remarkably like eternity right now, those eight years in particular. Pandora witnessed the happiest, most fulfilled time of my life and was no small part of that sense of fulfillment.

We welcomed Pandora to our home, the tiny studio on Curtis Street in Berkeley, on 8 November 2002. She was about four years old at the time, born probably almost exactly when Emily and I met in a novice semifinal round at Brown University in November 1998. Emily and her partner ran one of those classic “there is a law cases” about something busted in Louisiana, made all the more aggravating by the fact that the case wasn’t at all clear from her partner’s opening constructive speech (and there were no points of clarification sessions in those days). Suddenly the case became clear in MG when Em got up to speak, leaving my partner to construct the real opp to the case as we now understood it. We dropped the round and I was annoyed (the next week’s Waltham Weekly included this scathing review: “We debated 5 rounds against both novices & non-novices, then proceeded to novice break rounds, losing semifinals on a 2-1 decision to a snotty Princeton (am I being redundant?) team.”), but the MG had nonetheless caught my eye as both attractive and intelligent, launching a nearly three-year interest that I wrestled with as she displayed poor judgment in her choice of relationships and yet did just enough to keep me interested.

Where was Pando during all that time? What was she up to on the mean streets of Berkeley? These things are not recorded, were unknown to us when we got her. About all we knew was this when we picked her up:

We have a cat! She’s a 4-year-old gray tabby/tortoise mix who ends up looking like a mottled mix of gray, brown, & black. We got her at the no-kill animal shelter about a mile away. It took her about 3 hours to really warm up to the house & us, but now she’s feeling pretty much at home. A name is pending.

The next day, 9 November 2002, I wrote this on Introspection: “Last night, I was falling asleep while reading a solid book, holding my future wife, & listening to our new cat purring in my lap. I think in that hour, I truly discovered inner peace.”

We named her three days later, both deciding to replace the shelter’s temporary appellation of “Charlotte” with a more interesting and apt descriptor. I’m not really sure what drew us both to “Pandora”, though we both quickly discovered the power of box jokes for the lifetime indoor feline. Somehow those failed to get old for pretty much the rest of her life, if the testimony of her last caretakers is any indication.

Pandora, of course, spent most of her life in conflict with said box, which became a major source of strife and tension for those dealing with her. She was fine and well acclimated for a couple months, but when we left her in the company of a local friend for a lengthy December trip to Albuquerque, we returned to find that she had soiled the bed utterly. She was never quite the same again, often confusing cloth and bedclothes and futons for her litterbox. She would go through periods of improved behavior and seem to be on the mend, but much of our lives were spent with plastic sheeting on cloth-covered furniture whenever we left the house.

It occurred to lots of people during these years that we were making a lot of sacrifices and bending over backwards to accommodate a cat who had a little bit of a screw loose. But she was honestly the sweetest and kindest animal I think I’ve ever encountered, though Patty Duckworth may be competitive. She actively desired human contact at almost all times, approaching with her trademark headbutts as she bid whoever her targeted human was to look away from the computer or book and pay attention to her. She enjoyed TV and movies at times, lively eyes darting to keep up with the rapid movements on the screen, but also taking advantage of the sedentary human attention that left laps open and hands free for scritching. The top of her head was her favorite place to be touched, but she also liked the chin. Her defensiveness about her hindquarters and the tufts of hair there seemed to indicate she may have had a litter in her days as a stray, but this never kept Emily from pushing the envelope at times to rub her belly. Only at these times would Pando actually bite and Em took such bites personally at times even though she admitted egging them on. She jestingly said that Pandora liked me more than she, but I don’t think she ever really meant this. At this point, though, who knows.

Pandora moved with us from Curtis Street to the Big Blue House on MacArthur, becoming a fixture in the long sunny hallways and befriending our roommate Fish with all the wrong moves (frequently mistaking his bed and his laundry pile for the box). They had a bit of a rivalry at times and she probably had more to do with his eventual decision to move out than any one single factor, but they also had plenty of good times, including and especially Fish’s discovery of her theme song, an obscure Tori Amos number:

Many was the afternoon Fish would serenade Pando with either a capella or pre-recorded renditions as she darted around the high notes and looked altogether uncertain what was being expressed to her. She did spook easily, a product of never going outside, prone to mewling plaintively whenever she was in transit to the vet or a place to board and often scrambling full-tilt across a hallway or room when she encountered unexpected movement. She would jump at insects, but rejected all possible toys she was showered with except bread twist-ties and the occasional hair-tie, and, discovered far too late, pipe cleaners. This latter was the only lasting thing she enjoyed competitively with drowsing in an attentive lap.

She never particularly photographed well.

But she followed us back to Berkeley when we moved into Grant Street, adjusting well to the reduced space and falling into a rhythm of slightly better behavior. I drove her down to LA contemporary to Jake’s wedding in 2009 as we prepared to move across the country in a long slow roadtrip and here she was first introduced to the household in Altadena where she would conclude her days. She stayed there for a good bit of the summer and Em’s mom flew her out to Tiny House in Princeton to spend a good year in cramped quarters. We’d taken to walking her in the yard in Berkeley on a blue harness and continued this tradition in Princeton, allowing her to chew on tall grasses that swarmed in the heat surrounding the decrepit building, though such encounters were often cut short by encounters with passing cars or dogs or people, sending her darting into the house and taking cover ‘neath a couch. Those lazy sunny days in the grass, few though they were, stand out like monuments to a happiness I am fairly certain I will never feel again.

The last day I spent with Pandora was one of the most frustrating, described in incredible detail in this post from June 2010. She spent the whole day before resisting insertion into her cat carrier like never before in her life, and I recall thinking that she was sending me some sort of message that in retrospect seems plain and compelling, nestled as it was roughly halfway between Emily flying to Africa and her undertaking the events that would unravel our marriage. I was flying to the wrong place as it turns out, taking too much time and attention to friends on the opposite part of the planet from that which might have kept my life together. I had no way of knowing at the time, of course, as constantly reassured and missed as I was by Em, but the lessons best learned are the ones that only become clear over time. So we spent a day in the Philadelphia Airport together, me desperately concerned about Pando’s hydration and ability to get through that much stress, waiting for a backup flight that would wing us to LA, back to Altadena, and to what would eventually remain her home.

I would never see her again.

Granted, of course, this was by my choice. Pandora, as is clear, was a symbol of Emily and I, a representation and living manifestation of our time together. We lived together for a handful of months in total without Pando, she was born when we met and died just now as we struggle with the effort to talk to each other every couple weeks without upsetting each other. I was in no position to take her back and take care of her in her final months as she struggled to hang on, as I myself struggled to hang on as I continue to do. I have spent enough time dodging ghosts and pictures and reminders and mementos to not have to hold the living, then dying manifestation of what I have lost.

And yet I feel guilt, of course. I was worried that even the mere trip back to the east coast would kill her, but I feel tremendous guilt for leaving her to die without me. Not that she was not loved or taken care of, and I am deeply indebted to those who did so, but I still feel a gnawing, chewing sadness that I was so distant from her in her closing year.

All I can come back to for solace is another post, a giddy night in October 2009 when the world seemed alive with presence and feeling and meaning, when I tried to bank the sense that the universe made even in the face of tragedy. The whole post is called (grandiosely but simply) “It All Makes Sense” and you can see the whole thing here. But if you yourself are rushing, are exhausted by the 2,000 words on display mixed with these images and overwrought emotions, I can leave you with this summary.

It opens like this:

This post is an antidote, a message in a bottle, a documentation of a sensation and a perception about the world that is here and irrevocable. It’s something that I may lose, but no one can take away from me. And this is me, planting my flag, staking my ground, putting forth my chronicle of feeling this way and knowing these things at this time.

It all makes sense. All of it. What happens, what doesn’t, when, why, how. We are all so blessed and so privileged to be able to participate, to take part in this experiment with free will and this existence that is at once driven by our own whims and yet interminably destined to make itself work. It is punctuated by tremendous pain, yes, and tremendous anxiety, but it is all so very worth it. And I can see the pain and see the past and I know that every bit of it is worth it for everything.

And closes with this simple line:

I went inside to find Pandora staring at me as though she’d been waiting this whole time.

I’ll miss you, Pando. You and everything you saw.

Mariners’ record this year: 2-2
Mariners’ record this year with me watching: 0-2
Mariners’ record this year without me watching: 2-0

I might want to keep track of this over the course of a season, but it might be too depressing. There’s something very 2010-feeling about the above statistics, making the whole thing seem retrograde and unfortunate. I’m still getting mail from the Law Office of Trudi G. Manfredo, slowly training me to not let my heart leap when I see a large envelope or package waiting for me by the mailbox. No wonder so many adults used to hate getting mail. No wonder people have so robustly embraced e-mail and the postal service is having to run pyramid schemes to stay afloat.

Dissolution. There’s an apt word for you. The solution is getting dissed. Amen.

Got my copy of The Pale King today, the first new book I’ve let myself purchase since I started getting mail from Trudi. I am palpably excited about it, despite the fact that I know it won’t finish, perhaps especially because, since David Foster Wallace’s books never really finish and often almost die mid-sentence. They are about the journey and the exploration and in this case, about the descent into madness that accompanies a final chapter, a final submission, the narrative into suicide. Which is not to say, of course, that this book killed him, but it probably didn’t help. Electro-convulsive therapy is what killed him, of course, which I’ve discussed before. I’m now faced with a dilemma about abandoning or suspending my progress through Underworld to pick up the new tome, which feels somewhat compelling because my interest in DeLillo only came from running out of Wallace to read. However, there’s something to be said for savoring and delaying things, especially when they are the last of things. Once I get through The Pale King, there will be no more Wallace fiction in this lifetime.

What of apprehension, then, of surprise, of anticipation, of expectation? I have been on a new mantra lately, a big kick, something that stems from my interactions with Trudi and friends, yes, but also a longer scope of life writ large. It’s that what we can see coming is never that scary. Dental visits, deadlines, interviews, departures. We build them up in our minds to be cataclysmic moments of potential doom, but rarely does the actual moment even push the meter of our stress levels. They may not always be pleasant, may not always turn out, but not a one of them ranks as the top fifty worst days of any of our lives. It’s the surprises that count against us, the things we don’t see coming, the car accidents and sudden deaths and blindsidings and phone calls in the dead of night. There’s some relaxation and sobriety to be gained from all this, and I’m not even certain the sum of the information is reassuring. On the one hand, we’d be well served by just calming down about everything we dread. On the other, we must constantly look skyward in a more overarching dread for the calamities which may fall therefrom.

Of course the nature of surprise is that it can’t be anticipated, so the idea of this creating an overall aura of creeping dread seems silly in some ways. One could ruin every day one has remaining caught up in negative anticipation of death and I know many who do it (or would, or start whenever they come close). Some people even mistake my own hyper-awareness of mortality for this, though it’s actually the opposite – it’s a comfort with the concept designed to fuel energy into the living days, not a draining dread instead. (Incidentally, I know I keep overusing the word “dread” instead of synonyms, but it’s to hammer it home… and isn’t there an onomatopoetic beauty to the word? Does anything sound like “dread” so much as that solemn dead syllable itself?) No wonder we love surprise parties and surprise gifts and surprise whirlwind trips to the Bahamas. It corrects our vision of where the badness comes from, reminds us that positives can come from traditionally negative sources. That the clear blue sky is not just waiting to kill us, but perhaps also to elate us, that the random cacophony of wills involved in shaping our world can be on our side as well. No wonder I chose to delay telling the Rutgers team some particularly excellent news I have for them tonight so they could savor the nature of positive anticipation as well, so they could suspend their lack of faith in the notion of surprise.

Of course this last is a dual-sided sword, for in having time to anticipate so-called surprises, there is the inevitable churn of disappointment that correlates quite cleanly to the relief of surviving dreaded events. How many Christmases, birthdays, long-planned dates lived up to the expectation, the savory sweetness of mental pre-hyperbole? If someone tells you to go into a room and imagine the best thing you can, what are the odds of that getting exceeded? We are an imaginative species and capitalism trains us to be disappointed with whatever we actually have available to us in the face of what we could have. This is why we are so unhappy as a society. This is why we have drug and alcohol problems. This is why, yes, marriages so often dissolve into mailed paperwork as a replacement for one-time dreams. Reality is almost always short of our expectations, our best hopes. And it is all too easy to trade in reality for a lottery ticket, literal or figurative, suspending the idea that one’s chronic disappointment is a product of the very nature of expectation itself rather than merely unlucky circumstances that could hypothetically be changed. All too often, the unhappiest people learn far too late that it is their mindset, not their means, that have led them to disappointment.

My creative pursuits have found massive suspension against the backdrop of unexpected employment and intensified responsibility. The May 15th deadline for the fourth novel is entirely laughable at this juncture, long ago mentally erased if not literally so on my year-long plastic wall calendar. The summer arises as a possible boon to the creative and imaginative pursuits, a resurrection of quizzes and novels and the things I spend my life promising myself to do while usually getting caught up in more directly personable and interactive pursuits. Is it against my nature to sequester and write, to scribble and shun in order to communicate in a wider, broader, more explicable way? Should I be more comfortable with the 1-on-1, the 1-on-10, the small-scale but somehow attainable pursuits of change? Is this my true calling, in spite of what my ten-year-old self concluded? My ten-year-old self was sick of people, felt rejected and isolated. Every year since, with only romantic exceptions, I’ve felt more welcomed and included and inspired by the people in my life. Perhaps it is there, in iteration and not stagnant text, that I have the most to offer. Or perhaps it is a balance, as feedback rolls in from the prior two tomes of my own, perhaps there is something quality in scaling these pursuits against each other, in alternation, in the much vaunted middle ground.

I can’t even update Duck and Cover on a regular basis these days, it seems… today all but destined to be another gap in the already reduced weekday schedule. Part of this is a logistical paper problem – I’ve worn out the month of Oscar themes, but need some supplies to rejoin the regular tread of the other eleven months. Of course I feel an additional disconnect when facing the political world, however, namely an inability to relate to the events of the world around me. The US has become a hyper-militaristic state, never flinching from a conflict where anonymous bombing can destroy buildings, lives, and morality. And all the people I warned about Obama starting a war, I wrangled with about his Afghanistan comments and said he would find countries to invade in his tenure, that it’s become almost required action from each Presidential term, they can’t wait to sign up as being “in” on the Obama campaign on Facebook, can’t wait to commit to four more years of death by sky. There are no Democratic or Republican ideals, there is only a commitment to big business, big war, big money, big death. This is America’s role and influence on the world and the only hope is that someone eventually gets sick of it. But it won’t come from within, that’s increasingly clear. The next generation has been co-opted, far too susceptible to the idea that whoever America replaces bad leaders with will be better even in the face of plethoric counter-evidence everywhere in the world. The simple notion that killing can lead to progress has done more harm than any other single concept, and yet it remains close to its most pervasive at this very moment in history. Six-thousand years, no real progress. Just flashy machines and technological advancements to bring us our books from far away, our mail from law offices, our bodies to one continent or another, while our minds and emotions fail to keep up.

It’s no coincidence that the most satisfying aspects of our lives are the most ancient. Yoga, oral discussion, the warm feeling of connection to another human soul. It is at our most rooted that we are the most secure, happy, able to trust and hope. Put away the phone, unless it is really helping you communicate directly and robustly. Put away the screens, the bells, the whistles. Sit. Think. Read, maybe, or maybe just talk, even to yourself. The core of our experiences are no different than they were 6,000 years ago, or maybe longer. The best hope for progress may, in fact, be regress.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.