Be still, my shark-filled heart

Heading out of the beach town, Stone Harbor, the Stone Harbor Boulevard cuts a thin strip of road through a salt marsh. It's a beautiful, mystical strip, dotted with marinas, crab shacks, farmer’s stalls, and stilted houses with docks jutting out into the high cordgrass. Bull sharks have been known to swim there and the place rivals the tropical rain forest for biological productivity—facts that seem to verify what I’ve been feeling for years: that the salt marsh holds a beautiful mystery; that certain pockets of Jersey rival the world’s most alluring spots.

This summer Karen snapped a picture of the back doorway of Tim Rush Farm’s Country Food Market. The salt marsh is framed in the doorway like a blue river with low green banks. I look at it when I feel wistful. Jersey, I sometimes think, kicks the world’s ass and this small strip of road rivals any place for pure, summery beauty.

Stone Harbor Boulevard

The summer's over, I know, but I'm still feeling the sharks in my heart. Today, a balmy October Sunday, I pulled a chair out in the sun and sat in my skimpy bathing suit reading F. Scott Fitzgerald's biography. My tan has not yet faded.

This was a momentous summer for me; a weird summer, in ways; but ultimately the best summer of life. I graduated from my writing program in Asheville. I read a selection from my novel in front of about 100 people--the people I most admire in the world, my peers, my friends, my wife, my brother, and my mother. Later, to celebrate, my wife cut a rug with James Franco.

Karen and I drove away from Asheville, circuitously, up the Blue Ridge Parkway, and then back, and then we hit the road home. It was mid-July. The sun on I-81 was dazzling and tremendous. I felt like I was not only driving home, but into the heart of my summer.

A few days later we ate a celebratory meal with Sue and Andrés, friends from Barcelona--great friends whom we see maybe once a year. We drank too much wine. On a dare, I sprinted around the length of Rittenhouse Square--in just over two minutes.

In late July, we went to Borgata. A group of us waited in line outside the Gypsy Bar. Karen, the center of the group, tethered us together with her irresistible buoyant mood: she assured us we had no place in the world to be because we were the world, we were the party. I looked around at the people looking at us and I believed her. Inside Gypsy Bar, we danced. The band sang “Don’t Stop Believing” and I crooned loudly from the center of the dance floor. Later, we drifted into Carina, where, after watching Karen try on a slew of extravagant dresses in the dressing room, we tousled on the carpeted floor, bedazzled dresses strewn around us like luxurious bedsheets. Looking at myself, naked and skinny in the dressing room mirror, I laughed outloud. Something broke within me: I felt unusual and damaged, but fine with it, and suddenly Atlantic City became a new scene.

Then there was a Saturday in August, Karen and I sunbathing on one of Stone Harbor's tight beach plots, the waves rolling in between the jetties. I went for a dip in the green water. I swam for about an hour, bodysurfing the little waves, wading over the red swaths of seaweed on the ocean floor. From time to time, I'd look up into the clear sky and catch on those single engine-planes trailing a banner.

Then there was an epic walk on the beach with my Dad. A weekend at the Cogan's beach house. And a brisk Saturday morning in Cape May. We walked out of breakfast and into a parade. Chris Cogan hadn't slept for days. He felt, he said, "Like hot garbage." I burst into laughter.

It was August. I remember missing the moment as it happened.

Goodbye, summer. Be still, my shark-filled heart.

Love, Large & Small

I fall in love daily. I develop huge, swelling crushes and infatuations. I imagine secret rendezvous without uttering a single word: with books, with interesting people, with fonts. Lately, I love Georgia font. I play around with fonts. I try to trick myself. I’ll be puttering along, writing my stupid novel in Times New Roman when suddenly, a simple change in font (Georgia!), and my novel is no longer stupid, but elegant, lean, beautiful.

I love women, too: elegant, lean, beautiful women.

My wife, Karen, is all three. She’s also multi-lingual, freckled, prone to yawns, and exceedingly in thrall of lotions. All types of lotions: hand lotion, foot lotion, face lotion, and, of course, massage lotion.

I love this picture of my wife. That's a wedding invitation in her lap.
And that's New York City zooming by in the window.

I am NOT in love with massages. I don’t love giving massages; I hardly love receiving them. This is one thing my wife hates about me. Just as it’s important to love, I think it’s important to hate. I must admit, I love much more than I hate, but Dick Cheney is just awful.

I love small things. I especially love wearing small bathing suits. Have you seen Before Night Falls with Javier Bardem? In one glorious scene he wears a small bathing suit on a cliff overlooking the sea. The movie is unbearably sad, of course; in some ways it seems to say that illness (AIDS) equals the loss of a small bathing suit; but in other, important ways, it seems to say that a small bathing suit is worthless without a tragic sense of life. Like I said, sad.

(I’m wearing a small bathing suit now.)

I love small glasses. I drink wine out of very small glasses. Small glasses remind me of Sunday lunch in Barcelona, of small plates of tortilla, of small bathing suits dangling on the balcony, implying naked people somewhere. I remember one Sunday, stepping into the doorway of the Bar El Paso. A man was playing a slot machine, drinking a small glass of wine.

Bon vespre, I said to the man.

Em sembla bé, the man said

He was mean-looking; his face scratched, perhaps by a fierce animal. He looked at me, made a slight expression. I looked at him and smiled. I turned away, looked at the tapas on the bar, the retinue of six or eight small white plates, small bites of fried seafood, slices of baguette coated with smoked salmon, anchovies or cheese, all of it sodden under the harsh, yellow lights. I looked at the linoleum floor littered with cigarette butts and dirty napkins, the empty bar stools scattered about. Then I looked back at the man. He sneered.

We’re just like the small goldfish at carnivals, I thought, living in our separate fishbowls, at a close distance, staring at each other through the glass with unblinking eyes, asking, Who the hell are you?

Barcelona reminds me of the time in my life before I had even considered illness. I was twenty-three when I lived there. I was twenty-five when I first experienced illness. Illness, of course, is large and scary, but I think it can be defeated with daily smallnesses: drinking a cup of water with an entire lemon squeezed into it; smiling, two, three times an hour; probiotics.

Illness makes some people tiny. I feel lucky: illness makes me large. Sometimes I think illness is like pot, maybe it just amplifies what’s already there. (That’s why I only smoke pot when I’m feeling great.) I was large before illness, but in untenable ways: my anger was large, for example.

I remember the summer after I had been diagnosed with my first illness, ulcerative colitis. I had refused the drugs, but had yet to discover my remedies: Ayurvedic pills from India, stellar probiotics, and an obstinate refusal of wheat and cow’s milk dairy.

Anyway, I suffered that summer (and well into the fall and winter): all the awful symptoms you wouldn’t ever want to read about on-line. But I was also reading new books. James Hillman, Robert Bly. And I was seeing a mind-body therapist named Rosemary. So one morning, mid-July, a broiling morning, I woke up feeling hopeless and grrr, angry.

Why me? I wondered. Why the fuck me? Why the fuck did I get this fucking disease? Me. Me. Me.

At the time I was living with my father. I stepped out onto the deck, wearing nothing but my small bathing suit. I looked into the woods that surrounded the house. Fuck you, woods, I said. Then I grabbed a golf club and dashed into the woods, slashing at brambles and weeds. Slashing and cursing, I thought of my childhood, running through the cornfields of Lancaster, slapping the tall, green stalks. I thought of Clash of the Titans, Harry Hamlin, one of my first role models. I was crying, or maybe not crying, just trying to cry, which seemed to me infinitely pathetic. At some point, though, I suppose something happened, something stronger than anger, because I started laughing.

I stopped, looked around, asked myself: What the hell am I doing? And I laughed.

Now my anger is small. Now when I drop a small glass on the floor, I have to fake a conniption. That’s how small my anger is. (Thanks for that, ulcerative colitis.)

I love the New Yorker. I love opening its fresh pages and reading the movie reviews. Then I go to an article or two; then “Talk of the Town”; then, another article or two. Eventually, I read every single word. This takes about a week. If it works out just right, I’ll finish one issue on the exact day the next issue arrives.

I love arrival, but it’s often too large for me, too fraught with exclamation: We’re here! What I really love is the small steps on the way, the fits and starts.

Living Illness

This is a collection of a few blogs I have previously written about illness. I'm re-posting it now for a colorful friend...

April 6, 2007, I received a letter, a letter I had been waiting for, impatiently, for more than two months. The letter announced a great success for me, an impending Season of Triumph. I read and re-read the letter on a sunny Friday afternoon. I took a walk around my neighborhood, my fist raised high in the air, in triumph. Walking through the bright, sun drenched streets, I felt enlivened and validated.

A few nights later, after eating a bite at a café, and upon stepping outside to hail a taxi, I fell into a stupor, whereupon a few white lanterns festooned below a red awning across the street appeared to me as the sole constellation of stars in a universe from which I was slowly receding, as it were, into a hole, as black as pitch.

My wife helped me into the taxi. She helped me home to bed. That night, I woke up drenched in my own sweat. The next morning when I awoke I was unimaginably thirsty, as if a high powered vacuum were sucking the water out of my organs, indeed the very pulp from my bones.

Suddenly, surely, it seemed to me, I was suffering a re-lapse of an old illness, an illness I had assumed I had "cured" several years ago.

The fantasy of my impending Season of Triumph seemingly sidetracked, I looked at myself and I judged my life cruel and unfair.

So I called a doctor in India and ordered a two month supply of ayurvedic herbs—the wonderful herbs that had healed me before; the wonderful herbs that had left me symptom free for almost three years. And I waited, impatiently, for the herbs to come in the mail. Meanwhile I moseyed around my apartment with the dour expression of a mope.


How could I have so easily let go of my impending Season of Triumph? To me, it seems obvious: I was immersed in my own unhappiness; depression had laid a thin veil over my senses. I had lost my sense of fantasy.

Is it possible to lose one's sense of fantasy? Yes, of course. But here I'll make a distinction between two types of fantasy: the fantasy of the soul and the fantasy of the body. Hit with illness, in the midst of my triumph, I had somehow lost my sense of soul fantasy and suddenly, powerfully, I was intoxicated by my body fantasy.

What is the difference? Soul fantasy imagines. Body fantasy identifies. Quite simply, my capacity to imagine a season of triumph had been replaced by my identification with material reality (my illness). Stuck in this identification, like a fly in glue, I envisioned no triumph, only illness and more illness stretching out towards the summer.

I was lying on the couch. feeling tired, ill, apathetic. I mulled my symptoms in my head—fatigue, sleeplessness, moving pain—and the more I thought about the symptoms, the more they seemed to change, or more precisely, evolve. I was immersed in fantasy, and yet, suffering confusion: I did not experience this fantasy as fantasy; in fact, I believed I had abandoned fantasy in favor of reality.

But I had not abandoned fantasy!

After all, I had already made up plenty of fantasies to satisfy the simple question, "What is wrong with me?" The organic sickness may seem obvious, but the fantasy of illness, the sense of wrongness, is what really plagued me.

We all suffer the weight of living within our bodies; our suffering is similar. Modern medicine assumes this very fact: while we all suffer in unique ways, the nature of our bodily suffering can be catalogued and explained with reference to the suffering of other bodies.

And so we tend to believe the fantasy of illness is eclipsed by the reality of illness. After all, the pain in the body is a stark reality, a truth that cannot be ignored. And so we deal with it, in a manner that seems fitting: perhaps we flop on the couch; perhaps we raise our fist in the air, in triumph, and decide to beat the illness to a pulp.

Still, whether we bear our illness like a hero, deserve it like a martyr, or run away from it like a coward, we are still fantasizing, attempting in any way we can to deal with the unknown. And we differ, immensely, in the manner we deal with the unknown. Yes, we all share the weight of living within our bodies, but we are astonishingly unique in the fantasies we devise in order to live, happily or unhappily, with this weight.

I am writing here in favor of fantasy. I do not buy the ridiculous notion that fantasy takes us away from "what is." To me, fantasy is deepening pursuit, where every experience, every moment, becomes an opportunity for soul-making. When I fantasize about my triumph I am fruitfully making; when I fantasize about doom I, too, am fruitfully making.

Yes, fantasy, or imagination if you prefer, takes us away from our material reality. But it leads us, step by step, to an altogether different reality, a reality of our own making. Through imagination, I see through the seemingly cruel fact of my illness; I give it meaning, when before, mired in reality, it had none.

"There is a joy in this," James Hillman writes, "For as the soul becomes a vivified reality of its own, an image-finder and image-maker, life becomes relieved of having to be a vast defensive engagement against…reality."

***

I will let you into a bit of my fantasizing, as I had wrote it in my journal around that time:

"I had intended on working on my novel the entire morning, but now I am paralyzed with a pervasive fear that seems to be gripping my shoulders and literally pushing me down into the floor. It's saying: 'Give up, fall asleep, be fearful, be very, very fearful…'

Fear: it is the hardest part of any illness—the illness itself, and the recovery, for recovery always leaves the possibility of relapse. What can I do? Endure? Live? I have no choice but to acquiesce to life. I have no choice but to continue to live.

What am I afraid of? My fear is not the fear of death. My fear is life! The mere idea that I am alive is enough to throw me into hysterics. I want to run out onto the street and scream at the top of my lungs: 'I'm alive!'

And yet, at the same time I want to flop down on the sofa, close my eyes, and keep them closed until my fear subsides.

Will it ever subside? I cannot say.

My illness has forced me to mature and now my recovery is doing the same thing. Recovery. Perhaps we are all recovering, everyday, and death is just the final reward for a lifetime of recovery. What are we recovering from? Birth. What a drastic trauma! What a ridiculous circumstance! I mean we come here naked, we spend our lives in clothes, and the whole time we have the vague feeling that what we have always thought is appropriate is not really appropriate at all. In fact, perhaps the most appropriate thing to do is strip naked, down to our bones, and walk the streets in utter triumph. I can just picture it: thousands of people crowding the avenues, everyone naked—enormously naked. We will pump our fists in the air as if it were a protest, a protest against fear.

We will not cower in the face of our troubles. We will triumph.

Yes, the cries will fill the afternoon air! We will overcome!

The choice is simple. Do you stand in place? Or, do you take one step forward? That first step—it must be like sitting down to write, each morning.

The first step—and then one must take another, and another, until one is walking. And then when we become bored of walking, we jog; we jog, until we become bored of jogging, but by then we have reached the coast and all we can see for miles around is the beautiful white sand. No longer jogging, we sprint. And then we fly over the sand—yes, fly. We are rising from the ground, floating into space. And that explosion we see in the night sky is our head bursting over the firmament. How beautiful it must feel, to spread ourselves out over the sky, to liquidate.

But really, perhaps I am only a thin man, dreaming of implosion. And the scene I see over the firmament is not my head bursting, but the wide expanse of a black hole sucking everything down and spitting it back out.

It's obvious: I want to go somewhere and come back changed. I want to take my herbs and suddenly become irrevocably new. And there's my impending Season of Triumph, always about to begin.

The illness I suffer from is not called dying, but living."

***

I can't read this without feeling somewhat embarrassed, even alarmed. The person who wrote that seems like a fanatic to me, a true madmen. Of course, I was a fanatic, a madman. This is what illness can do to you: throw you into a new, crazed realm. That is why the experience can be so disastrous; it's also why, it can be so enlightening.

Illness, I think, can help you grow into a new person. But you have to fight it. Illness and recovery are fundamental components of the human experience. We all experience illness and recovery. But can we use the occasion of illness to truly recover? Recovery is often more about what is not apparent then what is: the obvious physical illness may be shielding the less obvious psychological issues—issues that simply need to be dealt with, in order to heal, to be fully alive and healthy.

I believe illness can offer transformation, but only if the experience of being ill is fully lived. Too often we take drugs that suppress our symptoms and so we never actually live the symptoms, letting them teach us what we need to learn.

We tend to think that illness is an unnatural state from which we must escape. We are meant to be well, to be happy. I know I tend to think this way. I absolutely do not want to feel unwell. I absolutely want to be happy. But life is not entirely about being well and happy. Life is also about struggle. In my darkest moments it is not the idea of happiness that gives me strength, but this notion of struggle.

Yes, life can be excruciating, but I have the suspicion that life is supposed to be this way, that we are supposed to live under all kinds of moons; to suffer loneliness and relish it; to laugh because if we do not laugh we will cry; to clutch our stomachs in pain; to hurt ourselves as we hurt others (only worse); to eat the last bite and drink more then enough wine and still not be satisfied; to be hungry and hollow one moment and satiated and disgusted the next; to want to die, just a bit, every day; but to want to live a bit more, because life is not intended to dull us into submission, but to continually alert us, again and again, that life is living when it is felt deeply.

I always feel slightly ridiculous when I recover from an illness. I think about the time I wasted being ill, the time I wasted worrying, and the crushing symptoms that no longer seem real. Still, I notice: I am deeply impacted by the experience of illness—illness has changed me. And when I recover I notice: I am a bit more humble, a bit more in love.

Isn't this the value of illness? The experience of being ill scores our identity. And yet, as we try to walk away from it, a bit dazed, we take new steps towards new possibilities.

Naked you are blue as the night in Ambler

My fifth wedding anniversary is July 3rd. I’ll be in Asheville, North Carolina, attending my writing program. I’ve been there three consecutive years—three years, I‘ve missed my wedding anniversary. My wife, Karen, who has learned not to expect gifts—at least gifts you can buy—anticipates a letter. I’ve lived with her six years. I talk to her daily. I’ve been dating her fifteen years. And yet, I write her letters. I can’t buy a diamond (my wife’s engagement ring was sapphire; she lost it), but I can write a letter.

I can write, for example: Desnuda eres azul como la noche en Ambler.

Actually, I would never write that line. That’s Pablo Neruda, from his first collection of poetry, Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair.

He wrote: Naked you are blue as the night in Cuba.

Karen lived in Chile, Neruda’s home, when she was nineteen. At that time, I was at Bloomsburg University. We talked on the phone once a week, a difficult, static-filled affair. But we wrote glorious letters. I told her about my Saturday afternoons, drinking beer at the Cattawissa Inn, an ancient establishment located off a solitary road outside that sold draft beer for sixty cents a glass. She told me about her Santiago life, sharing a mango with a certain Brianna, drinking boxed wine in the squares, visiting the streets called Maruri and Argülles where Neruda, young, unbearably skinny and unbearably alive, wrote his early poems.

Young Neruda

Neruda was Karen’s age when he was living in Santiago, in the 1920’s, writing poems that would lend credence to the myth of the Latino lover:

Tonight I can write the saddest lines. Write for example, The night is shattered and the blue stars shiver in the distance.

I would never write something so ridiculous. I’m surprised we even accept this from Neruda. Maybe just him, and no one else. I must admit, though: I’ve written more than a few sentimental letters. I looked over some of my letters today (Karen’s kept them all, a hundred or more, bundled neatly in a shoebox). I’m almost completely embarrassed by everything I wrote from May, 1996 to September, 2004. I did discover a few good tidbits, such as early evidence of my health fanaticism. (I asked Karen's permission to quote the letters; after all, they are her letters. She said, Fine.)

On February 27, 1997, for example, I wrote:

“I just read a few chapters of a great little book: Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Energy But Were Too Weak to Ask. The book includes a recipe for a wonder shake that's supposed to make you feel better than you’ve ever felt. This spring I plan to purge my system of all its toxins with a five-day fruit and vegetable diet. Then, the milkshake.”

Most of the letters were monstrously sentimental. Spring, 1997, I lived in Italy. A letter from the time (March 25) begins:

“I cannot begin to tell you how lonely I feel. I have just bought a huge bottle of Chianti for 6,000 lira; now, writing you with frequent sips is my only pleasure of the day.”

Later, in the same letter, I wrote:

“I must strive to understand my misgivings about Rome. Now, I must understand myself; more than ever I’m alone: I am all I got…One thing’s for sure: I will never be happier to see you. I already can’t stand how much I miss you.”

The height of my schmaltz was January to May, 1999, when Karen was in Chile.

On February 18, 1999, I wrote:

“I’m listening to Billy Holiday: The way you hold your knife, the way we dance to three, the way you’ve changed my life, no, no they can’t take that away from me. Something rings so true in that simple, ridiculous line, like a stickybun with raisins. When I listen to that line I think of the way you changed my life. And I wonder: Who is they? I hope they never try to take that away from me.”

What? Who? Where?

In May, 2000, we graduated college. Winter, 2001, we moved to Barcelona. I was living with Karen, so I wrote only cards. Karen hides these cards amidst her clothes, in secret places I’m unwilling to explore.

By 2002, we were home and I was experience my first bouts with illness. I entered a silent period that lasted nearly two years.

*

In September, 2004, I started writing letters to Karen again. I’m not necessarily embarrassed by these letters. I’m not sure how I feel. At the time, we had just returned home from a three-week honeymoon in Spain. I had been hit by a car on the second day of the trip; a few days later, I entered the hospital close to death (at 118 pounds) and was diagnosed with a chronic, life-changing illness. In letter after letter I tried to explain to Karen (and myself) what had happened to me:

“If I was fighting for my life, I was not fighting for myself but our marriage. I was fighting for the oath I had given a little more then a month before, to have you as my wife, to live together in marriage, to love you, to comfort you, to honor you and keep you, in sickness and health, in sorrow and joy, and to be faithful to you, as long as we both shall live. A few weeks was certainly not enough to live this oath. I mean, with the wedding vows surely comes another unspoken vow, one that two young people feel probably feel obliged to ignore: to stay alive.”

By then, of course, I saw Karen every day. I talked to her for hours. And yet, the letters I wrote during that time seemed crucial. Somehow, I was trying to figure it out: what had happened to me? Why? I was absolutely poor so the letter, once again, became my de-facto birthday and anniversay gift.

*

Last year, a day after her birthday, a day late, I wrote my wife a letter. It began:

“I had a string of bad dreams last night. There were snakes, faceless people, classes I had missed and dark showers. All the familiar tropes. In one dream, you left me. I couldn’t believe it. I went into some room, looking for you, and I was distracted by the snake. There it was, huge and ugly, a python in a glass tank, smashing its head against the glass, trying to get out. Somebody fed it a bat. I woke up, terrified. But you were there. You hadn’t left. I asked, where’s the blue sheet? You mumbled something funny.”

Later, in the same letter, I wrote:

“Summer’s here, more or less. A new summer. The days are colored with imprints of what’s happened. The imprints will fade, though, as we stamp over them. I have faith. I have faith in our ability to keep trying. I no longer see snakes. I knew writing a letter would help. I’m selfish. I write to redeem myself. I write to crawl out of the wallow.”

In this way, my letters seem selfish. I write them for myself. I try to explain myself to myself. And then I give this as a gift?

*

Still, my wife wants letters. This year, I’ve written her one letter. To her, this seems like incredible negligence. After all, I currently have three or four active penpals; I write a novel; I write two, three blogs; I litter my friend’s facebook pages with comments; I twitter. So what’s one more letter to my wife?

I don’t have an answer to this question. In some ways, I know, it is incredible negligence. Maybe after I graduate from my program, this July, I’ll re-commence. I better, because I don’t anticipate becoming the type of man who buys gifts anytime in the near future. I’d love too, of course. I’d love to treat my wife to extravagant dinners, shocking jewelry. Right now, though, I’m poor.

Words are all I can afford.

Sex, Drugs, & I-Pods: My YMCA

About two years ago a tall, serious-looking Asian man walked into the gym at my local YMCA. He was wearing a full-length red sweatsuit, drinking a Starbucks coffee. He lingered for five minutes, staring, incredulously it seemed to me, at the people on the treadmills. I happened to be one of those people, so I stared back. He ignored me. But then, with sudden alarming purpose, he flung his leg, karate-style, into the open air. He repeated this high-flying gesture two or three times. Then he hopped, from foot to foot, like a boxer, for twenty minutes. Then he left.

The Asian man repeated this routine—same full-length sweatsuit, same Starbucks coffee, same karate chop— every day for nearly a week. Then, abruptly, he disappeared. A few members, I had heard, had complained. Some, I suppose, considered him a freaky nuisance. To me, he was a curiosity: I never once saw him sip his Starbucks coffee; nor did I ever see him put it down.

I’ve been a member of the Ambler YMCA for twelve years. I go three to nine times a week. I’m the tallish, skinny guy making an absolute scene on the treadmill: speed cranked to 10, sweat flying, lips pursed as if ready to shout, Fuck yeah! Recently, I’ve shattered all of my personal treadmill records. For some reason, 22:36 minutes is my benchmark. For weeks, my highest mileage at 22:36 was 3.56 miles. This last week alone, I ran 3.77 and 3.81 miles. I get off the machine pouring sweat, lost in my own world, blaring Weezer on my i-pod.

The Ambler Y, like most gyms, inspires bizarre behavior. I love it. I get stoned simply to heighten the oddity of the experience. My wife refuses to go to the Y with me; apparently, I embarrass her. I sing along to my I-pod. I wear women’s t-shirts. Sometimes, I wear my sunglasses on the treadmill. The lenses make everything look bright and hopeful. Why is this so embarrassing?

What embarrasses me is the behavior of others. Just today, for example, a young, very thin girl grabbed the pull up bar. She dangled. Then she lifted her legs and started peddling, as if on a bicycle. It was atrocious. I watched in wide-eyes anger and wondered: Who does she think she is? When she was done she hopped down, took a look at a very official-looking notebook; the cover announced, ostentatiously, Penn Athletics.

Younger kids, college athletes, I guess, carry these official notebooks around they gym in open defiance of the Y’s unspoken commandment: You Shall Not Try to Look Cool. But the exercises these kids perform look so uncool, so senseless, really, that I wonder if there’s a conspiracy among coaches, a sadistic plan to keep athletes obedient to the rigors of team and sport. The plan is simple: make athletes look repellent to potential boyfriends or girlfriends.

One kid, a Villanova stud (a stud, at least, according to his own swagger), grabs a 25 pound weight, plops down, and vigorously smashes the weight on the ground, to his right and left, for twenty, thirty repetitions. It’s obscene, a loud display of—what? Strength? A learning disability?

Last week, I accidentally got too stoned. I could hardly work out. I sort of moped around, stretching, until Villanova Swagger showed up. He commenced his smashing routine. I stared at him until I caught his eye. We stared at each other for a few seconds before he turned away. Victory! Or maybe not: I think he turned to his friend and made fun of my shorts.

Anyway. I suppose athletic programs offer better guidance than Men's Health. Here's a real article title from the magazine: "Silly Exercises, Serious Results: These 12 exercises may look ridiculous but we guarantee they’ll build strength, muscle and stamina."

I can spot the Men’s Health guy immediately: he’s the guy performing the strange abdominal exercises on the giant red ball.

Does Men’s Health only advocate exercises that replicate the motions of sex? If so, why is there no equivalent female magazine? And why must Men’s Health Guy combine the red ball exercise with the gym’s most ostentatious object: the 45 pound weight? Is it really necessary to perform sit-ups while holding a 45 pound weight, not to mention: You’re on a fucking giant red ball?

If this is the way to get a six-pack it's not worth it: A six-pack is not worth the humiliation.

I’ve accumulated many comfortable strangers at the Y. Last year, a blond girl I noticed from the Y approached me and my wife at a local bar. She was drunk, obviously, and she seemed to move in exactly the same way she did, sober, on the elliptical machine.

You sweat a lot, she said to me.

I know, I said. I’m a sweaty man.

It’s sexy.

Really?

Your wife sweats, too.

She was maybe one of the two or three most famous Y members; apparently, she also approached our friends Charlie and Trish and proposed an outright ménage a trois. She was pretty in a did that girl just propose a threesome? kind of way, but the night we met her she was wearing a pair of last season’s UGGS. When I saw her the very next day at the Y she ignored me. She fascinated us for a few weeks, and then, suddenly, she disappeared, a la Karate Chop Man.

I typically go to the Y before dinner. I determine my work-out based on the presence of this one guy—a guy I’ve met and talked too; somehow, though, I’ve forgotten his name. So, even as he continues to greet me amiably (Hi, Seth!) I’ve let the relationship devolve, on my part, to a nod. I determine my work-out based on how best to avoid this guy. If he’s lifting weights, I’ll run on the treadmill, and vice versa.

I like to get in and out.

Sometimes, there’s complications. I’ll see Trish, end up gabbing for twenty minutes. I’ll see Charlie and get into a recreation of our high-school athletics days, on the swim team: throw-downs, squat-thrusts.

Sometimes, the very nice gay guy with the mustache talks to me; sometimes, he follows me around from exercise to exercise. He flirts and I tell him: I’m not gay. He doesn’t believe me.

The only way to deal with all this is to get stoned. I just strap on my I-pod, blare Weezer, and run on the treadmill, mutely fascinated, maybe a little scared of all the sweat and muscles.

In Defense of Self Portraiture

My wife and my friends will tell you: I’m a narcissist. I’ve been taking self-portraits for a few years now. I’m addicted to my own face. I love taking pictures of my self and posting the pictures on social networking sites. To me, the profile picture is an essential part of the social networking experience; it's a means of introducing myself to the community; it says, “This is a bit of who I am right now, for better or worse.”

My wife rarely enjoys my “self-portraits.” She thinks I present myself as too serious. She thinks it's embarrassing: I actually mug for the camera, snap my own photo. On a recent trip to Brigantine, she “caught” me, leaning against a stone wall, gazing longingly into the camera, snapping photos of myself. Later, on the beach, I implored her to take a few pictures of me:

"Having never met you before but already hating your guts. It must be your picture."
~A recent anonymous blog comment on this blog.

How are my self portraits different than, say, Rembrandt's self-portraits? Of course, there's the medium, and the level of talent, but is my impulse essentially different?

In an 2006 article for Smithsonian magazine, celebrating Rembrandt's 400th birthday, Stephanie Dickey wrote: "Rembrandt painted, etched, and drew some 70 self-portraits, more than any other well-known artist of his time. By making his face the centerpiece of his art, he engaged in a uniquely personal means of self-marketing."

Narcissist?

Rembrandt was certainly not unique in this way. Self portraiture has been a viable means of "self-marketing" at least since the Renaissance. Giotto included himself in a cycle of "eminent men" in the Castle of Naples. Botticelli made himself the hero of the Adoration of the Magi. Van Gogh painted more than twenty self-portraits. Frida Kahlo is famous for her self-portraits.

Was "self-marketing" the impulse behind these various painters use of self-portraiture? Perhaps so (Giotto, for example, or Botticelli) but for many painters, "self marketing" was only part of the impulse. Frida Kahlo, for example, painted herself as a genuine means of self-fulfillment. She started painting after a terrible accident, in 1927, left her bed-ridden and severely wounded.

"From that time," she later explained, "my obsession was to begin again, painting things just as I saw them with my own eyes and nothing more…Thus, as the accident changed my path, many things prevented me from fulfilling the desires which everyone considers normal, and to me nothing seemed more normal that to paint what had not been fulfilled."

For Kahlo self-portraiture was a means of self-birth. The fact that her self-portraits so easily helped to advance or "market" her art was, for her, incidental.

The Broken Column, painted in 1944 after Kahlo had undergone surgery and when she was confined as she had been after her accident.

I’ve taken many pictures of myself. I've photo shopped many more, always in search of an expressive image. My impulses are varied and contradictory. Certainly, I'd like to present myself in a certain way--as handsome, dashing, mysterious--but I'm also keenly aware that I often appear ridiculous, goofy, and, yes, completely narcissistic.

Lately, I’ve noticed I’m getting uglier. I snap pictures of myself and I’m surprised: I look weathered; my prominent nose looks uneven, somehow more flattened and large; and there’s this line, this new line that runs down my left cheek. What’s that line doing there? Perhaps it’s too much wine, not enough sleep. My true feelings might best be expressed in a line by uncle Dean: “How goofy and horrible is life.” This is often how I feel: goofy, a bit horrible. I have not always felt this way. My earliest self portraits, taken when I was 25, just before I experienced my battles with illness, portrayed a different attitude, a sort of brash confidence that might be best expressed in a line from Vladimir Mayakovsky:

Without a grey hair in my soul
Or a snip of senility's gentleness
Raiding the world with
Sheer force of voice I'm strutting
handsome
22 years old.

My bouts with illness destroyed my sense of my good looks. In a short period of time I lost twenty, thirty pounds; my skin yellowed, my eyes sunk. Recently, an employee at the YMCA told me he remembered me vividly from this time; he had assumed, based on my appearance, that I had AIDS.

“You were so skinny, so yellow, and yet so flamboyant,” he said. “I just assumed you were gay, and that you had AIDS.”

Of course, this comment struck me, but it did not sting because he said it in the midst of my recovery. Had he said it back then, I would have crumpled. Tellingly, I have no pictures from this time. Had myspace or facebook existed, I would have stayed away.

I still feel a bit wounded. And yet, I feel confident, which is something I try to express in my pictures. To me this sense of confidence is not about strutting, but acceptance--of who I am, what I've become. However, I don’t want this sense to drive my expressiveness (in my writing; in my pictures) into dour seriousness.

Self portraiture gives me range to be slightly goofy. And to me, that’s the ticket—goofiness: the antidote to horribleness. I love the sense I get, while snapping my own photo, that I am participating in a goofy celebration. Surely, as Botticelli painted himself as the hero in the Adoration of the Magi, even as he actively engaged in “self-marketing”, he was also laughing inside. After all, how goofy to paint oneself a hero?

On the other hand, even as Frida Kahlo suffered immensely and charted this suffering in her paintings, she kept a still place in her heart for vibrancy. Kahlo’s last painting, in fact, (not a self-portrait) is emblematic of this idea. Painted merely months before her death, after the amputation of her leg, in the midst of a tremendous period of struggle, it is a testament to living. It is a still life of watermelons, chopped into halves, quartered, or left whole. The watermelons rest upon a plain brown table and are flanked on all sides by a clouded blue sky.

Eight days before her death, Kahlo put the finishing touches upon the painting. She inscribed her name and date upon the red pulp of the foremost watermelon. Then, in capital letters, she printed a final statement on the red pulp: VIVA LA VIDA: LIVE THE LIFE.


And this is really what I want to express in my pictures: the sense I have that despite my woundedness, or perhaps because of my woundedness, that I'm alive. I suppose this is a serious sentiment, but it is also a celebration.

Addiction? Diligence?

Early February, I signed my father up for a blog. I suggested he write occasionally, as an exercise. Since then, he’s written 90 blogs, more than me, Steve, and Suzanne have managed to write in three years at FoodVibe. The topics are wide-ranging, the achievement impressive: my father has never practiced writing before; now, suddenly, he has a 700-800 word-a-day habit. I suspect his diligence is part compulsion: my father, like me, assumes plenty of addictions. But I also suspect his diligence is just that, too: diligence.

The Addiction-Diligence Paradigm motivates most aspects of my father’s life. Take his business career. My wife, Karen, and I worked for him in 2000. (An insight into my father’s ethics: I was his lowest-paid employee; Karen made a 35% higher salary.) Our most cherished image from that time was my father in his office, his feet up on his desk, playing on-line chess. He was clearly addicted. (As he had been addicted to Dr. Mario years before.) He played sometimes for six or eight consecutive hours, as his thirty or so employees moved in and out of his office, fielding calls and questions.

My father has always been an advocate of results: it's not the time you spend actually working, he likes to say, but the effect your work produces. During his business career, my father seemed to be able to create profitable results in minimal time. Often, he performed a week's worth of work in ten minutes; he spent the remaining thirty-nine hours and fifty minutes playing chess. Still, his early diligence had made his last business successful, a business he had started only seven years before, with two partners, in the front porch of our house in Gwynedd, PA. Karen and I left the business in early 2001 to live in Barcelona. My father sold his share a few months later. Now, eight years later, he lives in Brigantine, NJ, with his wife (my stepmother) Phylis. He spends sometimes ten or more hours a day watching tv, blogging, and playing internet poker.

I think about my father's current lifestyle whenever I find myself feeling lackluster. What does it mean to have a productive day. When I’m not working, I try to write all day. It’s hard, though. Some days I feel titanic. Some days I feel utterly defeated. I look at my novel, think: It’s terrible; what’s the point?

When I was younger, in my late twenties, writing another novel, feeling like I might quit writing altogether, I wrote my uncle, a poet, a letter offering the same complaint: My novel is terrible, I wrote. What’s the point?

"Your struggles with writing your novel," he replied, "are worthy of your suffering, but don’t get so that you love your suffering. I don’t really know what it takes to write a novel, though judging from N, it takes a lot of time, perseverance, obsession, and slavish dedication, only one of that last three am I attracted to."

In another letter, he wrote: "Allow yourself to be uncertain but don't let your uncertainty turn to despair because it can be wonderful to write when you're sad and full of the dark bouquet of doubt, but misery lends itself to silence and one must get out of bed every morning and prepare for the great celebration of one's own imagination, even if it doesn't happen that day."

His point, as always: Keep going.

I don’t know why it’s so hard for me. I am obviously diligent in other ways: I run 4-5 miles every day; I cook dinner every night; I have type-1 diabetes for Christ’s sake, which requires total diligence. But these things are easy for me; writing is hard. Perhaps I’m merely addicted to running; merely addicted to cooking dinner and injecting insulin (self-care). Then again, I might be addicted to writing, too. Just now, for example, when I found myself unable to work on my novel, I felt compelled to write about it. My fucking novel. What will it take for me to complete this thing? What sort of reserves must I call forth? What drugs must I take? (Adderall?)

Success, like addiction, runs in my blood. I know this, but it doesn’t make writing any easier. In fact, as I enter my 33rd year, the looming success of my family members (not just my father and my uncle, but every family member who has gone before me) hovers over me, sometimes inspiring me, often overwhelming me. I want to triumph, like them; but if I fail, I feel, I fail Big Time. It’s a heavy thought. I feel constantly expectant, jammed with the promise I’m not sure I have the courage, or the talent, to keep.

I try to make myself feel good: What if I’m not supposed to feel burdened by promise, but lightened? What if I’m meant to fly up to my challenge? Not like a bird, or a plane, but clumsily, like a person?

The only thing I can control, really, is my effort: I can only sit down, write. Like my dad, the blogger. Like my uncle, the poet. With diligence and/or addiction. I'm not sure it matters how I qualify it: whatever it is, I need to do it.