Philosophy ala Nick Hornby

In all this ample time I’ve had lately, I’ve been reading through anything I can get my hands on.  I even went to the library to get a library card so that I could really delve into books that I’ve never read before, but the whole scene was too overwhelming.  I came home and started to go through the back-rows of the book case in the house, brimming with books I’ve read a dozen times each.  Wedged between all those well-worn book bindings were a few books that I had never read.  Nick Hornby’s SLAM was one of them.  I had tried to read it after I first got it, but it didn’t call to me.  Perhaps I counted myself as too busy, perhaps too high on my life’s horse to lower myself to reading a book written from the perspective of a 15-year old kid who loves his skateboard.  I wasn’t sure why I didn’t get into it the first time.  Now, after having read the whole book, I can see that perhaps the reason I didn’t get all the way through it the first time was simply because I wasn’t ready.  I couldn’t realate yet. 

Here’s what Nick Hornby, (er, Sam?) has to say about staying out of trouble:

“What’s incredible to me is that you can keep out of trouble pretty much every minute of your life apart from maybe five seconds, and that five seconds can get you into the worst trouble of all, just about.  It’s amazing, when you think about it.  I don’t smoke weed, don’t cuss out teachers, I don’t get into fights, I try to do my homework.  But I took a risk, for a few seconds, and that turns out to be worse than any of the rest put together.   I once read an interview with a skater, I forget who, and he said that the thing he couldn’t ever believe about sport was how much concentration it took.  You could be doing the best skating of your life, and the moment you started to realize that you were doing the best skating of your life, you were eating concrete.  Skating well for nine minutes and fifty-five seconds wasn’t good enough, because five seconds was plenty of time to make a complete jerk of yourself.  Yeah, well, life’s like that too. It doesn’t seem right to me, but there you go.  And how bad is it, what I did?  Not so bad, right?  It’s a mistake, that’s all.  You hear about boys who refuse to wear condoms, and you hear about girls who think it’s cool to have a baby at fifteen. . . . Well, those aren’t mistakes.  That’s just stupidity.  I don’t want to spend the whole time moaning about life being unfair, but how comes their punishment is the same as mine?  That can’t be right, can it?  It seems to me that if you never wear a condom, then you should get triplets, or quintuplets.  But it doesn’t work like that, does it?” — Nick Hornby, Slam, Chapter 3

That’s me.  I’m Sam, and I paid attention, CLOSE ATTENTION, every goddamn second of every minute of my life except for one.  For almost two years, every single move that I made was towards a solitary, obtainable goal.  But I stopped paying attention for 1 minute.  For one fucking minute, I stood in my house and said, “Look at how awesome I’m doing.  I am, in a manner of speaking, doing the best skating of my life.”  And while I was there, gloating over the progress made, the goals obtained, the greatness that I had at last achieved, I got slammed.  And when you get slammed, when you quit paying attention, all those other minutes–the minutes where you were working your ass off, doing everything right–those minutes don’t count for anything anymore.  The punishment for not paying attention for one minute, if it’s the wrong minute, can be just as bad as the dues for not paying attention for ALL the minutes.  And like Sam, I’m sitting around, scratching my head, wondering, “that can’t be right, can it?”

*note: I’m not pregnant.  Sam’s trouble had to do with babies and condoms, my trouble doesn’t. But the same principles still apply.

Fucking Sad

I am incredibly sad.  As my niece walks in through the front door to find me laying, face down on the couch, I force myself to admit this truth.  I am incredibly sad.

I was laying face down on the couch in my Sunday best.  I tried to go through the motions today, but I had to leave in the middle of the church service.  I saw someone who had been in my class with me before I fumbled my life’s dream.  That someone didn’t see me back, thank God.  As soon as I saw her there, standing in blissful ignorance, having no idea what kind of heart wrenching pain her presence was causing me, I started to cry.  I thought I was going to be able to get my shit together while the lights were still low.  That’s when the pastor called for a meet-and-greet and I had to split.  Regardless of the fact that church was designed to be a community where people go to share their lives, I left. I left so I could shoulder this alone.  I had planned to find the nearest tobacco hut and bottle of wine so I could drink and smoke this misery away.

My mother-in-law caught me on my way out the door, rode home with me, and that’s how I wound up on the couch instead.

Still, I didn’t admit to myself that I was SAD.  Not the kind of sad that people reference on commercials, or the kind of sad that can’t be cured by watching a terrible movie.  Not the kind of sad that might maybe, sort of, sometimes, a little bit eek over into the side of sad that is defined by a 10-letter D-word.

No.  Leaving church, not being able to make it through a day without crying, having to force yourself to see friends and family, and even then, wishing that you weren’t–those things weren’t enough for me to admit to myself that I am sad. Sad like a quality, instead of a feeling.  Ser instead of Estar, if you catch my drift.

It was the niece, running through the front door, shrieking my name at the top of her hyper-excited 2-and-a-half year old lungs, who finally alerted me to the fact that have crossed over from the kind of sad that takes a minute to the kind of sad that requires a fucking effort to overcome.  Unfortunately, I don’t know that GI Joe’s rule about knowing being half of the battle applies in this situation.  I have no idea how to start getting un-sad.

Today, I guess, I started by peeling myself off the couch.  I guess I’ll go with the flow from there.

-S

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