Sunday, February 22, 2015
Tuesday, February 17, 2015
I write every night, but not on this site. I enjoy this page though, so here is some limited information from my experience on how to feel good when working:
Almonds are good for you. I like to keep some kind of nuts in my bag, a habit I developed in Japan when I would have long train rides between jobs, and I would often get hungry. It's also good to have peanuts. I practically grew up on peanut butter sandwiches, and still have them from time to time when I need a quick snack to hold me over for a little while. I've also been eating nut mixes with walnuts and cashews for a few years. Anyway, click the links to learn more from this excellent web site, World's Healthiest Foods. Many of the foods I already ate before I discovered this site, but seeing their list and researching more on the internet has made my menu larger and healthier.
I had some Kiwi earlier today, as part of a larger fruit mix with papaya, blueberries and raspberries. Other times I'll get one that has pineapple and various melons or grapefruit. I also love to eat oranges a few times a week.
This morning it was very frigid outside, so I was happy to have the holiday indoors and enjoy the warmth of my room with some yogurt, the non-fat Greek kind, with granola. That reminds me, I need to eat my daily apple. I already ate kale before a dish of grass-fed beef, 90% lean, with onions, shiitake mushrooms, organic tomato sauce, and 100% whole wheat pasta. One of the best pieces of advice I ever got from a college government professor was to always choose whole wheat when available. I also eat organic whole wheat bread most days, and oatmeal with buckwheat honey every morning for breakfast. About half the time I get the kind with flaxseed. As for other carbs, I often eat brown rice with my stir fries, and also some quinoa here and there, some barley, some rye, and recently I've really gotten back into cooking potatoes. I also like to cook other mushrooms, bell peppers, broccoli, spinach, and carrots, with as much variety as possible. Often I'll cook with soy sauce and/or lemon/lime juice. In the past year I've gotten happily and healthily addicted to beans and lentils, eating either pinto, garbanzo, black, kidney, or great northern on a daily basis. They are welcome supplements to all the tofu I've eaten for about four years now, that is, since I moved to Japan and taught there for a year.
As I've written before, I also drink various teas and herbal tisanes every day. Most mornings I commence the day with black tea, and then I'll usually have a cup or more of green tea afterward. Often I will also have a cup of white tea. A couple times a week I'll have oolong tea, and about once a week I'll have pu-erh tea. As for the tisanes, I'll generally have between one and three in the afternoon or evening, depending on what I'm doing, if I'm home, and how the weather is. I tend to have each of these at least once a week, and recommend trying them if you have stress or need something to help you sleep or digest: peppermint, found in the pyramids at Egypt and generally grown in Washington and the rest of the Pacific Northwest; chamomile tea, a flower found in many parts of the world, and often harvested for tea in Croatia; rooibos tea, also known as "red bush" tea, from South Africa, and probably the herbal I drink the most often, nearly every afternoon before going back to work each evening. I've been working a full schedule (39 hours of teaching each week) since the new year began, which has been excellent for the finances, staying busy in the evenings, and meeting more and more people while practicing endurance and being on my feet instead of sitting in a chair, which I do a lot of when I'm home and researching how to keep going the best way. With this process I've also learned about: hibiscus tea, a flower which grows around the world; ginger tea for the throat and the stomach; chrysanthemum tea, which I just drank, and means "gold flower" in Chinese; licorice root for the throat and stomach; ginseng; damiana leaf; and sometimes I even have some lavender mixed with one of the aforementioned, or passionflower tea, although they're both very new to me.
Of course, you need more than just teas, fruits, veggies and whole grains. You need protein, and there's more to explore than just beans. I've been eating tuna several times a week since I was five years old, and I just read that it's one of the healthiest foods there is. About six months ago I began to eat sardines for lunch more days than not because I'd read in Michael Pollan's Food Rules that it's better to eat the smaller fish because of over fishing in the seas and principles of nutrient retention on the food chain, or something to that effect.
After initially reducing my meat consumption drastically while living in Japan and then upon return to the U.S., I've definitely resumed eating chicken several times a week (although not quite as healthy as the kind in the link) and beef once or twice per week. Whenever I'm home I'm served plenty of turkey sandwiches and soups, along with bean soups and chili.
The other staple I've had my whole life, besides tuna, peanut butter and chicken, is the egg, or eggs, that is. I eat scrambled eggs (I usually get the kind that aren't in cages and are only fed vegetarian feed and so forth) on whole wheat bread more days than not, and have been for most of my life, although I usually ate them with toast, English muffins or a bowl of Cheerios growing up. I ate Cheerios consistently until about two years ago, I'd say, when I switched to other cereals, and I've been eating oatmeal for most of a year now.
Of course, I also love my sweets, chocolate chip cookies, which are a perfect excuse to drink plenty of milk, which I'm lucky to buy at a grocery store on the shores of the Hudson River yet produced upstate in a town several miles from where I grew up. I used to play them in baseball, football and basketball, but now I drink skim milk sold in Manhattan but produced by their farmers in Washington County.
Then, of course, what would life be without juices? I love grape juice, orange juice, and any blend of various fruits and veggies singing together in harmony manifested as juice that I'm drinking.
Tomato juice is also acceptable.
On top of that, I try to move around. This weekend I took a few walks to the park and the river, and as some sort of mid-hibernation restlessness steam valve, I ran along the rails of the river overlook, on the snow and ice, which was _______ awesome and made me very happy to be alive
Of course, all of these healthy explorations and additions and substitutions have been making up for the years and years of indulgence in sweets and salts and fast food and simple selections. I still enjoy many of the same foods (I happily enjoyed pizza, a gift of a doughnut from a student, and cookies this weekend), but I have also broadened my horizons considerably. A testament to mixed progress is the fact that some friends and I have realized that a certain Ethiopian restaurant has become our regular favorite.
Keep eating what you love. I hope we find some more favorites to explore
Almonds are good for you. I like to keep some kind of nuts in my bag, a habit I developed in Japan when I would have long train rides between jobs, and I would often get hungry. It's also good to have peanuts. I practically grew up on peanut butter sandwiches, and still have them from time to time when I need a quick snack to hold me over for a little while. I've also been eating nut mixes with walnuts and cashews for a few years. Anyway, click the links to learn more from this excellent web site, World's Healthiest Foods. Many of the foods I already ate before I discovered this site, but seeing their list and researching more on the internet has made my menu larger and healthier.
I had some Kiwi earlier today, as part of a larger fruit mix with papaya, blueberries and raspberries. Other times I'll get one that has pineapple and various melons or grapefruit. I also love to eat oranges a few times a week.
This morning it was very frigid outside, so I was happy to have the holiday indoors and enjoy the warmth of my room with some yogurt, the non-fat Greek kind, with granola. That reminds me, I need to eat my daily apple. I already ate kale before a dish of grass-fed beef, 90% lean, with onions, shiitake mushrooms, organic tomato sauce, and 100% whole wheat pasta. One of the best pieces of advice I ever got from a college government professor was to always choose whole wheat when available. I also eat organic whole wheat bread most days, and oatmeal with buckwheat honey every morning for breakfast. About half the time I get the kind with flaxseed. As for other carbs, I often eat brown rice with my stir fries, and also some quinoa here and there, some barley, some rye, and recently I've really gotten back into cooking potatoes. I also like to cook other mushrooms, bell peppers, broccoli, spinach, and carrots, with as much variety as possible. Often I'll cook with soy sauce and/or lemon/lime juice. In the past year I've gotten happily and healthily addicted to beans and lentils, eating either pinto, garbanzo, black, kidney, or great northern on a daily basis. They are welcome supplements to all the tofu I've eaten for about four years now, that is, since I moved to Japan and taught there for a year.
As I've written before, I also drink various teas and herbal tisanes every day. Most mornings I commence the day with black tea, and then I'll usually have a cup or more of green tea afterward. Often I will also have a cup of white tea. A couple times a week I'll have oolong tea, and about once a week I'll have pu-erh tea. As for the tisanes, I'll generally have between one and three in the afternoon or evening, depending on what I'm doing, if I'm home, and how the weather is. I tend to have each of these at least once a week, and recommend trying them if you have stress or need something to help you sleep or digest: peppermint, found in the pyramids at Egypt and generally grown in Washington and the rest of the Pacific Northwest; chamomile tea, a flower found in many parts of the world, and often harvested for tea in Croatia; rooibos tea, also known as "red bush" tea, from South Africa, and probably the herbal I drink the most often, nearly every afternoon before going back to work each evening. I've been working a full schedule (39 hours of teaching each week) since the new year began, which has been excellent for the finances, staying busy in the evenings, and meeting more and more people while practicing endurance and being on my feet instead of sitting in a chair, which I do a lot of when I'm home and researching how to keep going the best way. With this process I've also learned about: hibiscus tea, a flower which grows around the world; ginger tea for the throat and the stomach; chrysanthemum tea, which I just drank, and means "gold flower" in Chinese; licorice root for the throat and stomach; ginseng; damiana leaf; and sometimes I even have some lavender mixed with one of the aforementioned, or passionflower tea, although they're both very new to me.
Of course, you need more than just teas, fruits, veggies and whole grains. You need protein, and there's more to explore than just beans. I've been eating tuna several times a week since I was five years old, and I just read that it's one of the healthiest foods there is. About six months ago I began to eat sardines for lunch more days than not because I'd read in Michael Pollan's Food Rules that it's better to eat the smaller fish because of over fishing in the seas and principles of nutrient retention on the food chain, or something to that effect.
After initially reducing my meat consumption drastically while living in Japan and then upon return to the U.S., I've definitely resumed eating chicken several times a week (although not quite as healthy as the kind in the link) and beef once or twice per week. Whenever I'm home I'm served plenty of turkey sandwiches and soups, along with bean soups and chili.
The other staple I've had my whole life, besides tuna, peanut butter and chicken, is the egg, or eggs, that is. I eat scrambled eggs (I usually get the kind that aren't in cages and are only fed vegetarian feed and so forth) on whole wheat bread more days than not, and have been for most of my life, although I usually ate them with toast, English muffins or a bowl of Cheerios growing up. I ate Cheerios consistently until about two years ago, I'd say, when I switched to other cereals, and I've been eating oatmeal for most of a year now.
Of course, I also love my sweets, chocolate chip cookies, which are a perfect excuse to drink plenty of milk, which I'm lucky to buy at a grocery store on the shores of the Hudson River yet produced upstate in a town several miles from where I grew up. I used to play them in baseball, football and basketball, but now I drink skim milk sold in Manhattan but produced by their farmers in Washington County.
Then, of course, what would life be without juices? I love grape juice, orange juice, and any blend of various fruits and veggies singing together in harmony manifested as juice that I'm drinking.
Tomato juice is also acceptable.
On top of that, I try to move around. This weekend I took a few walks to the park and the river, and as some sort of mid-hibernation restlessness steam valve, I ran along the rails of the river overlook, on the snow and ice, which was _______ awesome and made me very happy to be alive
Of course, all of these healthy explorations and additions and substitutions have been making up for the years and years of indulgence in sweets and salts and fast food and simple selections. I still enjoy many of the same foods (I happily enjoyed pizza, a gift of a doughnut from a student, and cookies this weekend), but I have also broadened my horizons considerably. A testament to mixed progress is the fact that some friends and I have realized that a certain Ethiopian restaurant has become our regular favorite.
Keep eating what you love. I hope we find some more favorites to explore
Saturday, February 14, 2015
I am writing because I believe that I can energize you with something that flows and replenishes from all around but will voice from inside the harmonious human language of
mindful flesh. I have much I say every
day about what comes this way in our play. I hope we will meet one day as we greet each day along the way
Sunday, February 1, 2015
Super Bowl
Today is a holy day in the land known as the United States of America.
This evening more people in the world will sit down and watch the same thing than at any other time in human history. That is, if they top last year's results of 111.5 million viewers.
What could be so important, you ask?
An organization representing a game called "football" is televising their championship game. Two groups of 53 players and an army of other people called coaches will use sophisticated cutting edge technology, undetectable performance enhancing drugs, hundreds of millions of dollars and all of their God given intelligence in competition to move a ball back and forth. The one who does it the best will be the champion until tomorrow morning when the entire football universe, including all its fans, players and vast network of well-paid commentators, will begin to speculate about next year, perpetually absorbed in the future.
Some people are watching the game because they care about which team moves the ball the best, but the vast majority of people who are watching the game tonight really just feel like being social and want to do something traditional with friends or family. It's an excuse to watch the same thing as others, so you can talk about it the next day at work. Perhaps you've already been using it as a bridge to cross otherwise uncomfortable socially quiet moments. It's also a reason to eat plenty of food and watch commercials without feeling guilty about being mesmerized by product advertisements. And, of course, it's a really creative powerful game that is very fun to play and sometimes exciting to watch
This evening I'm taking it easy on the football party front. I'm enjoying the easy chair this evening for several reasons. 1st, I'm on my feet 40 hours a week with pleasant people from places that make me pause before using the term "patriot" to characterize myself. I love our peers... inside and beyond our borders. On top of that, I began the weekend by getting together with the same group of friends with whom I watched the game in 2014. We played board games and laughed. At first I was confused by the game's new rules and thought the theme to be a little old timey fantasy for my tastes, but I soon got into my roles as the King and the Magician (and a few times the Bishop). The goal of the game was to establish districts, and I did so by building a temple, a school of magic, a harbor, a university and a dragon gate. A perfect way to complete a very social week of hard work. That's why I'm fine with writing during the Super Bowl. Besides, as long as I call my dad at halftime or after the game, the social necessities will have been seen to.
Even though I'm not as into the spectacle this year, I still feel like reminiscing about the importance of the game in my life. Yes, it's only a game, but we've been over this. As Tom Robbins wrote in Still Life With Woodpecker, "everything's a part of it." Even he included the Super Bowl in one of his books, Skinny Legs and All, but only as a contextual device to show that a young woman dancing the dance of the seven veils is far more enlightening than any game played only by men. Then again, if I wanted to write deeply about every football moment that gave the game importance and influence in my story, I would take up too much of your time, which I appreciate you giving to read this in the first place. So here's a quick list of memories:
The first football I owned was blue and said NEW YORK GIANTS on it. My father gave it to me. The Giants are his favorite team, if he had to pick. He usually just goes by the uniforms, not because he doesn't know about football, but because he's an artist, and that's more important to him, as much as he loves sports, athletic activity and being outdoors. As for the Giants, even though they actually play in New Jersey, they somehow represent our home state. There are also the New York Jets, but they were newer and my dad didn't care about them. I liked their green uniforms though.
I don't have a memory of this, but he tells me that I watched my first Super Bowl in 1990. I rooted for the New York Giants, who were victorious over the Buffalo Bills when the latter missed a field goal that would have won the game. Although both teams were from New York State, the Giants represented us downstater's against western New York, a place I had never been. We had family far up north in eastern New York, but besides that we were on an island in the greater New York City area, so we supported our local teams. The world was small to my eyes back then.
Even though I supposedly saw part of that game, I didn't know anything about football until a year or two later, when I was seven years old. Until then I'd just seen football as something that was on the TV on Sunday's and that only fathers liked. We children cared about video games and imagination that involved running around fighting as soldiers or superheroes. Complicated adult games weren't interesting. That is, until my father sat my sister and I down at the island table in our kitchen and explained the rules using a salt shaker, a pepper shaker and an Excedrin bottle. It also helped me learn my seven's multiplication tables.
The following summer I had a lot of alone time while living in Baltimore. I threw that New York Giants football at my baseball net and caught it's return bounce quite a bit while my sister was having surgeries and going through physical therapy at a nearby hospital with a doctor who specialized in limb-lengthening for dwarves. As you can imagine, she wasn't as into sports, so that easily became a way for me to carve out my identity within the family. She was getting obsessed with early Beatles boy band tunes and the biographies of the band members, and I was starting to exert my faculties on studying fantasy football magazines, memorizing the starters and statistics for every team. I was nine years old and I could tell you all 22 starters for all 28 teams, and even their special teams players and coaches as well. I also role played every single game on the sixteen week schedule, playing it out with my hands, legs and imagination on the small strip of lawn next to our apartment building. Of course, the Bills scored more than 200 points in every game, and successfully destroyed the Cowboys in the Super Bowl of my Imagination. When we went back to Long Island and the season started, I would sit inside watching the game on the television, and then get inspired to run around on my own and turn fantasy into physical activity.
I had a lot of fun watching football that year. I looked forward to it every Sunday, and especially on Monday nights when he would allow me to stay up to watch the first quarter of Monday Night Football. I remember thinking I was old when I would be out on the town somewhere and would look over and see the highlights of the game on ESPN on some screen in whichever bar I was in with my friends, and realizing that the night was still young, but there had been a time where just staying up long enough to see thirty minutes of football was all I cared about in life.
Whatever happened with my new adopted favorite team, the most important lesson of the season was "resilience." Many of the most successful people in history have seen success just barely elude them, but learned how to bounce back and fight another day. Even Tom Brady was selected 199th in the draft despite his stellar performance and achievements in college. Speaking of which, that year I watched the Super Bowl and watched some of the playoffs for the first time? Well that same year, 1993, the New England Patriots and Seattle Seahawks shared a special place in the league with records of 2-14. You can watch the former play for their fourth championship and the latter for a repeat as I write. We all take time to grow.
Speaking of which, football took on new meaning for me when we moved to Cambridge, New York, ten minutes from the borders of Vermont and Massachusetts and, therefore, New England. Even though the whole town was New England style and it was closer to go to big stores in Bennington or Manchester, Vermont than it was to go to the state capital of Albany, and the former were much nicer than the latter, I still considered myself a New Yorker. As for my fellow citizens, I'm sure they considered themselves many things, but the vast majority of them definitely considered themselves football fans. When you enter our small town, you will know how important football is before you meet anyone, because you will see a sign reminding you of the 1991 State football championship. I think there is also one for 2000 now as well. The class of the league isn't what matters. They were champions for all football teams within the borders of our state, including those eight hours away in western New York... but not necessarily any of the schools 25 minutes away in Vermont or Massachusetts.
That being said, nobody can argue against the truth that the Cambridge Indians are good at moving the ball against opponents. I took part in the historic tradition for two years, 1996-1997, when I was aged 12 and 13. My first year was great, and I loved to be part of something bigger and more successful than I was. My special play was the 47 counter, when we pretended to run one way while I took the reverse hand off and secretly ran the opposite way of the action, usually good for 10-30 yards at a time. I was smaller than almost everyone, so I liked that I had a chance to get a head start based on a some cleverness and then it was up to me to run fast and dodge tacklers the rest of the way.
The next year I broke my arm on the first day of practice. We were wearing helmets but no shoulder pads, and a player ran right into my arm with his helmet and fractured it. We got X-rays at the hospital, where Mark Palinski took care of me. We didn't see the results for a couple more days though, so I went to practice for two more days, running laps while holding my broken arm in one hand. I returned later in the season, but they had obviously figured out their starting squad by then, so there wasn't really a place for me. I had a few memorable plays (for me, that is) in the remaining games, including one where I did my best Barry Sanders impression and juked three would-be tacklers and broke a fourth after catching a prayer pass from the quarterback for five yards and then running another forty to the goal line. I wasn't the next Barry Sanders, but he was my favorite player. His was the first football jersey I ever owned, because he was the most creative, agile, graceful, dynamic, exciting and improvisational player I've ever seen, including the present day. Any time he got the ball you knew something magical and explosive could happen. He was the only reason I liked the Lions. Maybe he would even get stuffed several times, or decide to cut back and change direction for fewer yards than he would have had if he had just kept going, because he was always imagining each run as being the best it could possibly be. And it was all worth it for those times he did break away. He did it every day he played, but some days he did it almost every play, and those were the times I loved the sport the most.
As for my personal experience of the game, my teammates would go on to win the state championship as underclassmen a few years later and then play in another championship while we were seniors in high school. I was happy for them, and wished I could have taken part, but also realized that they hadn't actually needed me anyway, despite what all the coaches had told me when I'd first entered. The show goes on. The team is bigger than any one. But that didn't mean I didn't still have games to play. By then I cared more about actually playing basketball and succeeding than simply being part of some ceremonial success that was somewhat arbitrary given the fact that I didn't choose my teammates and they hadn't chosen me, we'd just been thrown together based on our parents' choices of residence. On top of that, music and books were far more interesting than football at that point.
I remember I was working at a Christmas tree farm senior year when our school was playing in the football state championship. I'd like to say that I had completely replaced football with writing or reading, and to some extent that year that's true, but I was also playing a lot of video games, including football video games, which I still loved to play with friends and watch on TV. But when my old teammates were playing to sustain the pride and glory of their thousand person village, I was wrapping and carrying evergreen trees, standing in the cold all day, breathing the fresh air, making small talk with customers and co-workers, and cleaning pine pitch off my hands with turpentine in the evenings. Somehow I think that was important to my larger ambitions. It was definitely a better use of my time than football. Then again, on weekends, it was fun to finally come inside after a long day in the cold snow and watch some football with my dad, and then talk about the results with my friends, passionately complimenting, criticizing and defending millionaires I hadn't met.
2002 was our final year as students at Cambridge, with our own hometown football team that everyone (not really, but mostly) talked about and cared about. That year we watched the Patriots begin their dynasty of creative rule adherence by beating the Rams. Years later we would learn that they had reportedly been seen illegally filming the Rams' practices, which clearly gave them a strategic edge. Years later they were caught filming the Jets' practices, so, yeah, draw your own conclusions. Meanwhile, they had also only gotten that far because of a beyond questionable call in the second round against the Raiders, who had stripped the ball from Brady and secured victory, only to have the league come up with an incredibly imaginative interpretation of what actually constitutes throwing the ball, overturned the play, and the Patriots marched on to finally win something.
I also remember that a coyote showed up on our doorstep during the game. A girl who had been watching the game with us walked to the front porch to go to her car, but then came inside to get my girlfriend for another set of eyes to confirm she was seeing a coyote and not a big dog. My father, the wildlife biologist, confirmed that it had mange and was huddling near the house for warmth, so he had to put it down for its own good. The Red Hot Chili Peppers' first song is called "True Men Don't Kill Coyotes," but I don't think they were talking about that situation, and my father later spent that evening heating up people's cars for them before they had to drive home, so I trust his judgment as a man.
As for coyotes, we've always heard them howl in our yard. Funnily enough, the comedian Chris Rock once saved us from coyotes on our farm. Some friends and I were camping sometime in middle school, probably 11 or 12 years old, and up there together as a group for the first time. Sometime after midnight we heard them yowling, and if you've ever heard a coyote howl at the top of its lungs, you remember the experience. So we turned up Rock's Roll With the New with the assumption that his yelling would scare them off, and I think we were right.
As for poetry, both coyotes and ravens are symbolized as trickster gods in the Northwest. The coyote is in a book I love by Christopher Moore called "Coyote Blue":
"When everything is right with you but you are afraid that something might go wrong that it ruins your balance, then you are Coyote Blue. At these times I will bring you back into balance."
Also, there's that Joni Mitchell song.
As for the raven, this is from Joseph Campbell's Hero With a Thousand Faces:
In the Eskimo story of Raven in the belly of the whale, the motif of the fire sticks has suffered a dislocation and subsequent rationalization. The archetype of the hero in the belly of the whale is widely known. The principal deed of the adventurer is usually to make fire with his fire sticks in the interior of the monster, thus bringing about the whale’s death and his own release. Fire making in this manner is symbolic of the sex act. The two sticks—socket-stick and spindle—are known respectively as the female and the male; the flame is newly generated life. The hero making fire in the whale is a variant of the sacred marriage.
But in our Eskimo story this fire-making image underwent a modification. The female principle was personified in the beautiful girl whom Raven encountered in the great room within the animal; meanwhile the conjunction of male and female was symbolized separately in the flow of the oil from the pipe into the burning lamp. Raven’s tasting of this oil was his participation in the act. The resultant cataclysm represented the typical crisis of the nadir, the termination of the old eon and initiation of the new. Raven’s emergence then symbolized the miracle of rebirth. Thus, the original fire sticks have become superfluous, a clever and amusing epilogue was invented to give them a function in the plot. Having left the fire sticks in the belly of the whale, Raven was able to interpret their discovery as an ill-luck omen, frighten the people away, and enjoy the blubber feast alone. This epilogue is an excellent example of secondary elaboration. It plays on the trickster character of the hero but is not an element of the basic story (Campbell 211).
So there's that.
In 2003 I watched my first Super Bowl with college friends. Our college team was nothing to brag about and nobody cared about the games, whereas we had important studies and social adjusting to focus on, so football viewing had been a rarity most of that year. But, because it's the Super Bowl, we all ate copious amounts of pizza and were mildly amused by the Buccaneers beating the Raiders very easily. Either way, both teams were pirates. Later the QB for the Bucs admitted to bribing someone to deflate balls so it would be easier for him to throw. And we're all like, "meh."
In 2004 the Patriots beat the Panthers. We don't know if they taped their practice or deflated the balls, but we do know what Janet Jackson's nipple looks like, and that's much worse than anything else that could ever happen in anything.
In 2005 I was in New Zealand. I'd arrived a few days before, so I was still very jet lagged from the 28 hour journey. I woke up at 3 pm to see that there were only two minutes remaining in the Super Bowl. The Patriots were beating the Eagles by seven. It was on an international station, and the announcers didn't really seem to care, even though they were Americans. My Australian and Kiwi companions didn't understand why the game was so popular. I told them that it would seem more exciting if the announcers were more enthusiastic, as it was a very close game coming down to the final play. It showed me how much of quality is fomented by mere hype.
In 2006 the Steelers beat the Seahawks because the officials kept making all of these calls that were clearly detached from reality. My friend was really angry about it for days, and he wasn't even a fan of either team. Something about justice in the universe.
In 2007 the Colts beat the Bears. I was living in Brooklyn at the time, and didn't really care at all about football, but I was visiting home that weekend, and really enjoyed watching the game with my father and my friend, both of whom used to play it with me.
In 2008 I was living in Queens, unemployed and writing my first novel. One of the aspects of the novel was that my life was really all a dream in the mind of the coach who had headed our high school football team. He was telling the guys at the only bar in our small town about my strange living experience as a Brooklyn hipster in the city.
I'll always remember the 2008 game as my favorite Super Bowl, because the undefeated New England Patriots lost their only game of the season in the championship against the New York Giants, and in the final minute too. We had a living room full of people, we were excited by the game, and for once I spent the Super Bowl drinking beer all day. They were Magic Hat's, which are from Vermont, and therefore New England. Besides that, I was all about New York. Unfortunately, thanks to all of those Magic Hat's, I was in the bathroom when I heard everyone's awed screams in response to David Tyree's miracle helmet catch. All that being said, had New England won, I wouldn't have cared. I cared more about reading Tom Robbins books and writing one of my own.
In 2009 Pittsburgh beat Arizona. It was a great game, but just a game. I remember enjoying it with a couple friends, but not as a big party. I was rooting for Kurt Warner and Arizona, but one of my first ever shirts that I owned was a Pittsburgh Steelers shirt, so it was hard not to be happy for them.
In 2010 the New Orleans Saints beat the Indianapolis Colts. I was on a beach island in Thailand. I had to look up the results on the internet the next day, because none of the hotel owners were showing the game. They said that if it were "real" football and not "American" football they might have some interest. I was happy for New Orleans because it was their first championship. I liked the Bonnaroo and jazz metaphors aligning with my journey around the world. I would also take a coast to coast journey via New Orleans later that year.
In 2011 I was in New York State, waiting to go to Japan. It was a good game between the Packers and the Steelers. The Packers won. I'd just spent most of 2010 backpacking around the world and the United States, so the metaphor made me happy. I also remember missing most of the football game because I was often in the kitchen or on the porch talking with a musician about my recent adventures and future plans to go to Japan, specifically regarding the photo in New Zealand under the Tokyo sign. I remember he said that sounded "like a publisher's dream." Then we went inside and watched Green Bay seal the victory.
In 2012 I was living in Japan, and I forgot about the Super Bowl because I was living in a different time zone where they had their own interests, and I was focusing on teaching and writing. The New York Giants beat the New England Patriots again. Good for them.
In 2013 I was living in San Francisco. I watched the game with my roommate at a hotel downtown. We talked to strangers at our table, and I got to see a Jasper Johns exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art next door during halftime. The Baltimore Ravens beat the San Francisco 49ers for their second championship. The 49ers already had five of them though, and had always been respected as the greatest dynasty while I was growing up in the days of Joe Montana, the greatest clutch quarterback of all time. They had already won the championship the year after I started following the sport, so I didn't mind that they didn't win that specific game, which would have nicely coincided with my just having moved there. Also, the third Super Bowl I had watched was in 1995, when San Francisco had beaten the San Diego Chargers by... many points. My dad's favorite player, Jerry Rice, had broken some records during the game. Jerry Rice is the other player whose jersey I would wear when we played backyard football. A couple months after the 2013 Super Bowl I wrote a book about that picture of the Tokyo sign, and one chapter was about getting into football while living in Baltimore and watching the Super Bowl in San Francisco.
In 2014 I watched the Seattle Seahawks get their first Super Bowl Championship by beating the Denver Broncos, whom I had cheered on to win the 1998 and 1999 Super Bowls against the Packers and Falcons, respectively. Both cities had legalized green by then, so I was happy in any case.
This year we have a choice between Seattle and New England, Northwest and Northeast, birds of the seas or people who love their country. Crown thy good with brotherhood, from sea to shining sea... supposedly. Well, I've never liked the New England Patriots football team, and there's a lot I like about Seattle, but the outcome is just another statistic.
Seattle is worthy of praise from yours truly because it's the first place I ever traveled to as an adult on vacation, in 2007. I remember buying some excellent vinyl records, smoking a joint with friends on the University of Washington campus beneath a statue of Edvard Grieg, and seeing more green trees, bushes and flowers than anywhere I've ever been in my life. Jason Webley and Tom Robbins, two of my biggest inspirations and favorite poet magicians, hail from the general area. And of course, blue and green is the best color combination on Earth, that is, when forced to choose amidst the rainbow.
1st reason to love green and blue: they're the most prominent colors on Earth when viewed from space. As Tom Robbins said in Skinny Legs and All, "keep your eye on the ball." I do every day... on my computer background when I'm using Microsoft Windows, designed in Seattle. Blue and green are also the colors for the logo for the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, where my father earned his income for decades, and therefore was able to give me food to keep me alive, and therefore give you something to read, thus completing the circle of life, which thrives on green and blue. They're also the colors of the canoe and car I drove very far, from New England to Seattle in the summer of 2012. I officially drove from Cambridge, New York, but the evening before I technically commenced the western journey after talking on my friend's porch in Bennington, Vermont, at the same house where I'd discussed Japan during a 2011 Packers victory. I'd just returned from Japan, and I was moving to San Francisco, but I was going to drive through the north, to Seattle, Washington, and then along the coast. Finally, they're the colors from that excellent James Taylor song that kept me comfort on winter journeys ("deep greens and blues are the colors I choose"), although he also mentions the New England Berkshires of Massachusetts in the same song. And of course, "Blue in Green" courtesy of Miles Davis. Therefore, I'm rooting for the state of Washington and the city of Seattle to win the game, especially because peppermint tea leaves, while having been found at the pyramids dating as far back as 1000 BC, are typically harvested from the Pacific Northwest, and they can be very helpful in soothing digestive functions of the stomach and the mind, making one peaceful and harmonious with humankind.
Even though I'm not a fan of the football team, if New England wins 2014's NFL Super Bowl, I will be happy to celebrate the area. In fact, I already have been doing so, as my most recent adventure was a road voyage around New England in autumn of 2014. I drove through Connecticut and Massachusetts to Maine, where I visited a friend and hiked Mt. Pleasant. Then I was fortunate to drive around New Hampshire and camp amongst the White Mountains, where I had hiked Mt. Washington in between road adventures in the summer of 2010. After that I pushed on to Mt. Abraham near the town of Lincoln, Vermont, seeing the most stunning view of Lake Champlain I've ever seen, and I've been going to that lake my entire life.
On the way I wandered west toward the mountain and happened upon Goddard College in Vermont. This was mysterious magnetism because that's where the members of Phish met and created their band, which would later become successful further north in Burlington, Vermont on Lake Champlain, and then become a legendary live band around the country, spawning enormous festivals that eventually inspired my favorite party on Earth, Bonnaroo in Tennessee (2006, 07 and 09, specifically). They call their music extended improvisation. I agree with their existential style. Meanwhile, New England is also cool to me because I teach English, and if you're reading this, you speak English, which is named after England, and experiencing the newness of the universe is always excellent. Well, I enjoy it. So did my ancestors, apparently, half of which made the journey amongst the waters of the sea from England to New England. Some of them started in Massachusetts, and some of them probably arrived in Connecticut before moving to Long Island all those centuries ago.
I've never lived in New England, but I've visited many times. Most importantly, the first road adventure of my life was with two friends in a car on the way to Boston to see They Might Be Giants give a free concert. I'd already seen them once the month before, in northwest Massachusetts, and that was my first real concert... wow, hats off to New England for introducing me to that scene...
I also experienced some of the early parts of my first coast to coast journey in New England by visiting Providence and Boston in 2010. I felt strange walking around Harvard's campus, because they had told me that I should go there, the interviewer said I was "Harvard material," and then they deferred their decision on me before rejecting me. That made me sore when I was 17, but that had happened nine years earlier. I'd graduated from a different school, found my path, and traveled the world. Besides, the only reason I'd wanted to go there in the first place was because all of the writers for The Simpsons had gone there and written for the Lampoon.
Anyway, the region has more personal significance for me because I happily embraced the challenge of climbing Mt. Greylock in western Massachusetts seven days before the first coast-to-coast America journey began. It's the highest mountain in their state, which isn't saying much, but it's a real hike with a great view, and it's even sort of part of the Berkshire range (depending on who you ask) mentioned in that James Taylor song.
When I returned from a seven month journey in Asia and parts nearby, I celebrated the return to the US by climbing Mount Mansfield, Vermont's highest mountain, not far from Burlington, Vermont. When I decided to have the next adventure a few months later, around America, I decided to celebrate and train by climbing Camel's Hump Mountain, also near Burlington, Vermont.
As for the Patriots, specifically, and where they enjoyed much of their football glory, I guess I can say that I saw my only Metallica concert at Foxboro Stadium, where the Patriots play, and that was a great experience. Metallica is a heavy rock band from San Francisco, California, whom I loved from ages 12-17, and have continued to enjoy, although not nearly as frequently, but on many new levels of quality. Then again, speaking of "experience," Jimi Hendrix was from Seattle, and the best mountain I ever hiked was Pyramid Peak in the state of Washington.
Whoever wins, I'm working to enjoy life. Until DC gets their act together, when I think of Washington, football, and Native Americans, I want to think of the Seahawks and of the state of Washington and the character Hawkeye from The Last of the Mohicans. My father uses his hawk eye to shoot in the wild, just like the character, and I use my hawk eye to shoot photographs in the wilds of forests and cities. LOOK! What do YOU see?
As for the name Patriots, I suppose patriotism's alright, because for all its mixture of action and behavior, the USA is often an amazing place to be. If you're not from there, patriotism can work. I think it's beautiful to find something to admire and respect about your home, whether it's your town, your county, your state, your region, your country, your planet or your universe, because it can help you learn more about your identity. Just remember to balance your love for something you know well with the love of the new the world has to offer you and me, both of whose identity commenced in the blue green sea, a mixture of mystery and unity.
I will conclude the football thoughts with ancient wisdom from America's greatest Harvard geniuses: the writers of The Simpsons. Of their many football episodes, the most relevant is about the Super Bowl where Homer and Lisa gamble on games together. When he turns down her offer to hike a mountain the weekend after the Super Bowl, she sees that he only cares about football. When he asks who will win the game, she says Washington, but isn't sure, because maybe she really doesn't want him to win deep down, so they'll just have to see. Thus, the outcome of the game becomes a determinant of her love for him. If the Redskins won, she loved him. Strange... if the episode were on today, given the name controversy, I think she'd take a different stance, being Lisa and all...
Anyway, that is a television show, which was always on at 8 pm on Sunday's after six hours of football. The outcome of each episode was as determined by our behavior as the results of the fictional game in the fictional show or tonight's Super Bowl. The game is beside the point. You either love someone or you don't, regardless of who wins the games. When it comes to love, you really care about how they play, and how they face every day with bravery, imagination and kindness on their way.
I love the part of the episode where they spend the following weekend climbing a mountain together, instead of watching other people get exercise. The view is stunning and completely worth all the time and effort. To be fair to relaxation while tuning into various universal stations, I saw that mountain scene on a TV screen long before I actually climbed any real mountains. And you can't climb mountains every day either. When I am pondering the balance of action and reception, I sometimes remember that it is often something you've seen on a screen that inspires you to take action with your energy in the first place. If you actually get up and take the action to balance your thankful passivity which inspires and informs creativity, then you will be exactly where you should be
This evening more people in the world will sit down and watch the same thing than at any other time in human history. That is, if they top last year's results of 111.5 million viewers.
What could be so important, you ask?
An organization representing a game called "football" is televising their championship game. Two groups of 53 players and an army of other people called coaches will use sophisticated cutting edge technology, undetectable performance enhancing drugs, hundreds of millions of dollars and all of their God given intelligence in competition to move a ball back and forth. The one who does it the best will be the champion until tomorrow morning when the entire football universe, including all its fans, players and vast network of well-paid commentators, will begin to speculate about next year, perpetually absorbed in the future.
Some people are watching the game because they care about which team moves the ball the best, but the vast majority of people who are watching the game tonight really just feel like being social and want to do something traditional with friends or family. It's an excuse to watch the same thing as others, so you can talk about it the next day at work. Perhaps you've already been using it as a bridge to cross otherwise uncomfortable socially quiet moments. It's also a reason to eat plenty of food and watch commercials without feeling guilty about being mesmerized by product advertisements. And, of course, it's a really creative powerful game that is very fun to play and sometimes exciting to watch
This evening I'm taking it easy on the football party front. I'm enjoying the easy chair this evening for several reasons. 1st, I'm on my feet 40 hours a week with pleasant people from places that make me pause before using the term "patriot" to characterize myself. I love our peers... inside and beyond our borders. On top of that, I began the weekend by getting together with the same group of friends with whom I watched the game in 2014. We played board games and laughed. At first I was confused by the game's new rules and thought the theme to be a little old timey fantasy for my tastes, but I soon got into my roles as the King and the Magician (and a few times the Bishop). The goal of the game was to establish districts, and I did so by building a temple, a school of magic, a harbor, a university and a dragon gate. A perfect way to complete a very social week of hard work. That's why I'm fine with writing during the Super Bowl. Besides, as long as I call my dad at halftime or after the game, the social necessities will have been seen to.
Even though I'm not as into the spectacle this year, I still feel like reminiscing about the importance of the game in my life. Yes, it's only a game, but we've been over this. As Tom Robbins wrote in Still Life With Woodpecker, "everything's a part of it." Even he included the Super Bowl in one of his books, Skinny Legs and All, but only as a contextual device to show that a young woman dancing the dance of the seven veils is far more enlightening than any game played only by men. Then again, if I wanted to write deeply about every football moment that gave the game importance and influence in my story, I would take up too much of your time, which I appreciate you giving to read this in the first place. So here's a quick list of memories:
The first football I owned was blue and said NEW YORK GIANTS on it. My father gave it to me. The Giants are his favorite team, if he had to pick. He usually just goes by the uniforms, not because he doesn't know about football, but because he's an artist, and that's more important to him, as much as he loves sports, athletic activity and being outdoors. As for the Giants, even though they actually play in New Jersey, they somehow represent our home state. There are also the New York Jets, but they were newer and my dad didn't care about them. I liked their green uniforms though.
I don't have a memory of this, but he tells me that I watched my first Super Bowl in 1990. I rooted for the New York Giants, who were victorious over the Buffalo Bills when the latter missed a field goal that would have won the game. Although both teams were from New York State, the Giants represented us downstater's against western New York, a place I had never been. We had family far up north in eastern New York, but besides that we were on an island in the greater New York City area, so we supported our local teams. The world was small to my eyes back then.
Even though I supposedly saw part of that game, I didn't know anything about football until a year or two later, when I was seven years old. Until then I'd just seen football as something that was on the TV on Sunday's and that only fathers liked. We children cared about video games and imagination that involved running around fighting as soldiers or superheroes. Complicated adult games weren't interesting. That is, until my father sat my sister and I down at the island table in our kitchen and explained the rules using a salt shaker, a pepper shaker and an Excedrin bottle. It also helped me learn my seven's multiplication tables.
The following summer I had a lot of alone time while living in Baltimore. I threw that New York Giants football at my baseball net and caught it's return bounce quite a bit while my sister was having surgeries and going through physical therapy at a nearby hospital with a doctor who specialized in limb-lengthening for dwarves. As you can imagine, she wasn't as into sports, so that easily became a way for me to carve out my identity within the family. She was getting obsessed with early Beatles boy band tunes and the biographies of the band members, and I was starting to exert my faculties on studying fantasy football magazines, memorizing the starters and statistics for every team. I was nine years old and I could tell you all 22 starters for all 28 teams, and even their special teams players and coaches as well. I also role played every single game on the sixteen week schedule, playing it out with my hands, legs and imagination on the small strip of lawn next to our apartment building. Of course, the Bills scored more than 200 points in every game, and successfully destroyed the Cowboys in the Super Bowl of my Imagination. When we went back to Long Island and the season started, I would sit inside watching the game on the television, and then get inspired to run around on my own and turn fantasy into physical activity.
I had a lot of fun watching football that year. I looked forward to it every Sunday, and especially on Monday nights when he would allow me to stay up to watch the first quarter of Monday Night Football. I remember thinking I was old when I would be out on the town somewhere and would look over and see the highlights of the game on ESPN on some screen in whichever bar I was in with my friends, and realizing that the night was still young, but there had been a time where just staying up long enough to see thirty minutes of football was all I cared about in life.
Whatever happened with my new adopted favorite team, the most important lesson of the season was "resilience." Many of the most successful people in history have seen success just barely elude them, but learned how to bounce back and fight another day. Even Tom Brady was selected 199th in the draft despite his stellar performance and achievements in college. Speaking of which, that year I watched the Super Bowl and watched some of the playoffs for the first time? Well that same year, 1993, the New England Patriots and Seattle Seahawks shared a special place in the league with records of 2-14. You can watch the former play for their fourth championship and the latter for a repeat as I write. We all take time to grow.
Speaking of which, football took on new meaning for me when we moved to Cambridge, New York, ten minutes from the borders of Vermont and Massachusetts and, therefore, New England. Even though the whole town was New England style and it was closer to go to big stores in Bennington or Manchester, Vermont than it was to go to the state capital of Albany, and the former were much nicer than the latter, I still considered myself a New Yorker. As for my fellow citizens, I'm sure they considered themselves many things, but the vast majority of them definitely considered themselves football fans. When you enter our small town, you will know how important football is before you meet anyone, because you will see a sign reminding you of the 1991 State football championship. I think there is also one for 2000 now as well. The class of the league isn't what matters. They were champions for all football teams within the borders of our state, including those eight hours away in western New York... but not necessarily any of the schools 25 minutes away in Vermont or Massachusetts.
That being said, nobody can argue against the truth that the Cambridge Indians are good at moving the ball against opponents. I took part in the historic tradition for two years, 1996-1997, when I was aged 12 and 13. My first year was great, and I loved to be part of something bigger and more successful than I was. My special play was the 47 counter, when we pretended to run one way while I took the reverse hand off and secretly ran the opposite way of the action, usually good for 10-30 yards at a time. I was smaller than almost everyone, so I liked that I had a chance to get a head start based on a some cleverness and then it was up to me to run fast and dodge tacklers the rest of the way.
The next year I broke my arm on the first day of practice. We were wearing helmets but no shoulder pads, and a player ran right into my arm with his helmet and fractured it. We got X-rays at the hospital, where Mark Palinski took care of me. We didn't see the results for a couple more days though, so I went to practice for two more days, running laps while holding my broken arm in one hand. I returned later in the season, but they had obviously figured out their starting squad by then, so there wasn't really a place for me. I had a few memorable plays (for me, that is) in the remaining games, including one where I did my best Barry Sanders impression and juked three would-be tacklers and broke a fourth after catching a prayer pass from the quarterback for five yards and then running another forty to the goal line. I wasn't the next Barry Sanders, but he was my favorite player. His was the first football jersey I ever owned, because he was the most creative, agile, graceful, dynamic, exciting and improvisational player I've ever seen, including the present day. Any time he got the ball you knew something magical and explosive could happen. He was the only reason I liked the Lions. Maybe he would even get stuffed several times, or decide to cut back and change direction for fewer yards than he would have had if he had just kept going, because he was always imagining each run as being the best it could possibly be. And it was all worth it for those times he did break away. He did it every day he played, but some days he did it almost every play, and those were the times I loved the sport the most.
As for my personal experience of the game, my teammates would go on to win the state championship as underclassmen a few years later and then play in another championship while we were seniors in high school. I was happy for them, and wished I could have taken part, but also realized that they hadn't actually needed me anyway, despite what all the coaches had told me when I'd first entered. The show goes on. The team is bigger than any one. But that didn't mean I didn't still have games to play. By then I cared more about actually playing basketball and succeeding than simply being part of some ceremonial success that was somewhat arbitrary given the fact that I didn't choose my teammates and they hadn't chosen me, we'd just been thrown together based on our parents' choices of residence. On top of that, music and books were far more interesting than football at that point.
I remember I was working at a Christmas tree farm senior year when our school was playing in the football state championship. I'd like to say that I had completely replaced football with writing or reading, and to some extent that year that's true, but I was also playing a lot of video games, including football video games, which I still loved to play with friends and watch on TV. But when my old teammates were playing to sustain the pride and glory of their thousand person village, I was wrapping and carrying evergreen trees, standing in the cold all day, breathing the fresh air, making small talk with customers and co-workers, and cleaning pine pitch off my hands with turpentine in the evenings. Somehow I think that was important to my larger ambitions. It was definitely a better use of my time than football. Then again, on weekends, it was fun to finally come inside after a long day in the cold snow and watch some football with my dad, and then talk about the results with my friends, passionately complimenting, criticizing and defending millionaires I hadn't met.
Even though I don't care so much about the
outcomes now, so long as it's a good game I still remember all the Super
Bowls. In 2000 we saw the Rams beat the Titans. That was special
because the MVP of the game, the Rams' QB Kurt Warner, had spent the previous
season stocking shelves in a grocery store. One year he's a nobody, the
next he's achieved his wildest dreams. And on the other side, the Titans almost
won, with Steve McNair making some of the most heroic broken tackles and passes
under pressure that I've ever seen. They came up a yard short against one
of the best offenses ever. Neither team had won before, so I was happy to
see such a great game. I also remember my dad's friend Al coming to watch
with us. He loved basketball and sometimes shared that with me, but he
had never cared for football, and rarely watched the Super Bowl. He didn't
enjoy the football game, but he was all about playing James Bond's Goldeneye
first person POV video game for Nintendo 64 during halftime. My dad had
to lobby to have the game put back on and talk over his friend's repeated
protests that we actually play something where we participate in the outcome,
as vicarious as it may have also been. I also remember that we had a snow
day the next day, we went sledding on a hill, and my friend loaned me his copy
of the Red Hot Chili Peppers' newest album. As for Al, he was about to have a son, and years later, when I was teaching his son how to play a basketball video game, he told me that he would never forgive me if I got him hooked on the opiate of the masses. I asked if he meant video games, and he said professional sports. And he loves basketball. And apparently video games as well.
The following year the Ravens beat the Giants in the Super Bowl. I suppose I can't really claim any true allegiances to football teams. I was wearing a Ravens shirt, but I was from New York and had cheered for them in the first Super Bowl I'd watched. I guess I wanted the new team to win. Spread the wealth.
2002 was our final year as students at Cambridge, with our own hometown football team that everyone (not really, but mostly) talked about and cared about. That year we watched the Patriots begin their dynasty of creative rule adherence by beating the Rams. Years later we would learn that they had reportedly been seen illegally filming the Rams' practices, which clearly gave them a strategic edge. Years later they were caught filming the Jets' practices, so, yeah, draw your own conclusions. Meanwhile, they had also only gotten that far because of a beyond questionable call in the second round against the Raiders, who had stripped the ball from Brady and secured victory, only to have the league come up with an incredibly imaginative interpretation of what actually constitutes throwing the ball, overturned the play, and the Patriots marched on to finally win something.
I also remember that a coyote showed up on our doorstep during the game. A girl who had been watching the game with us walked to the front porch to go to her car, but then came inside to get my girlfriend for another set of eyes to confirm she was seeing a coyote and not a big dog. My father, the wildlife biologist, confirmed that it had mange and was huddling near the house for warmth, so he had to put it down for its own good. The Red Hot Chili Peppers' first song is called "True Men Don't Kill Coyotes," but I don't think they were talking about that situation, and my father later spent that evening heating up people's cars for them before they had to drive home, so I trust his judgment as a man.
As for coyotes, we've always heard them howl in our yard. Funnily enough, the comedian Chris Rock once saved us from coyotes on our farm. Some friends and I were camping sometime in middle school, probably 11 or 12 years old, and up there together as a group for the first time. Sometime after midnight we heard them yowling, and if you've ever heard a coyote howl at the top of its lungs, you remember the experience. So we turned up Rock's Roll With the New with the assumption that his yelling would scare them off, and I think we were right.
As for poetry, both coyotes and ravens are symbolized as trickster gods in the Northwest. The coyote is in a book I love by Christopher Moore called "Coyote Blue":
"When everything is right with you but you are afraid that something might go wrong that it ruins your balance, then you are Coyote Blue. At these times I will bring you back into balance."
Also, there's that Joni Mitchell song.
As for the raven, this is from Joseph Campbell's Hero With a Thousand Faces:
In the Eskimo story of Raven in the belly of the whale, the motif of the fire sticks has suffered a dislocation and subsequent rationalization. The archetype of the hero in the belly of the whale is widely known. The principal deed of the adventurer is usually to make fire with his fire sticks in the interior of the monster, thus bringing about the whale’s death and his own release. Fire making in this manner is symbolic of the sex act. The two sticks—socket-stick and spindle—are known respectively as the female and the male; the flame is newly generated life. The hero making fire in the whale is a variant of the sacred marriage.
But in our Eskimo story this fire-making image underwent a modification. The female principle was personified in the beautiful girl whom Raven encountered in the great room within the animal; meanwhile the conjunction of male and female was symbolized separately in the flow of the oil from the pipe into the burning lamp. Raven’s tasting of this oil was his participation in the act. The resultant cataclysm represented the typical crisis of the nadir, the termination of the old eon and initiation of the new. Raven’s emergence then symbolized the miracle of rebirth. Thus, the original fire sticks have become superfluous, a clever and amusing epilogue was invented to give them a function in the plot. Having left the fire sticks in the belly of the whale, Raven was able to interpret their discovery as an ill-luck omen, frighten the people away, and enjoy the blubber feast alone. This epilogue is an excellent example of secondary elaboration. It plays on the trickster character of the hero but is not an element of the basic story (Campbell 211).
So there's that.
In 2003 I watched my first Super Bowl with college friends. Our college team was nothing to brag about and nobody cared about the games, whereas we had important studies and social adjusting to focus on, so football viewing had been a rarity most of that year. But, because it's the Super Bowl, we all ate copious amounts of pizza and were mildly amused by the Buccaneers beating the Raiders very easily. Either way, both teams were pirates. Later the QB for the Bucs admitted to bribing someone to deflate balls so it would be easier for him to throw. And we're all like, "meh."
In 2004 the Patriots beat the Panthers. We don't know if they taped their practice or deflated the balls, but we do know what Janet Jackson's nipple looks like, and that's much worse than anything else that could ever happen in anything.
In 2005 I was in New Zealand. I'd arrived a few days before, so I was still very jet lagged from the 28 hour journey. I woke up at 3 pm to see that there were only two minutes remaining in the Super Bowl. The Patriots were beating the Eagles by seven. It was on an international station, and the announcers didn't really seem to care, even though they were Americans. My Australian and Kiwi companions didn't understand why the game was so popular. I told them that it would seem more exciting if the announcers were more enthusiastic, as it was a very close game coming down to the final play. It showed me how much of quality is fomented by mere hype.
In 2006 the Steelers beat the Seahawks because the officials kept making all of these calls that were clearly detached from reality. My friend was really angry about it for days, and he wasn't even a fan of either team. Something about justice in the universe.
In 2007 the Colts beat the Bears. I was living in Brooklyn at the time, and didn't really care at all about football, but I was visiting home that weekend, and really enjoyed watching the game with my father and my friend, both of whom used to play it with me.
In 2008 I was living in Queens, unemployed and writing my first novel. One of the aspects of the novel was that my life was really all a dream in the mind of the coach who had headed our high school football team. He was telling the guys at the only bar in our small town about my strange living experience as a Brooklyn hipster in the city.
I'll always remember the 2008 game as my favorite Super Bowl, because the undefeated New England Patriots lost their only game of the season in the championship against the New York Giants, and in the final minute too. We had a living room full of people, we were excited by the game, and for once I spent the Super Bowl drinking beer all day. They were Magic Hat's, which are from Vermont, and therefore New England. Besides that, I was all about New York. Unfortunately, thanks to all of those Magic Hat's, I was in the bathroom when I heard everyone's awed screams in response to David Tyree's miracle helmet catch. All that being said, had New England won, I wouldn't have cared. I cared more about reading Tom Robbins books and writing one of my own.
In 2009 Pittsburgh beat Arizona. It was a great game, but just a game. I remember enjoying it with a couple friends, but not as a big party. I was rooting for Kurt Warner and Arizona, but one of my first ever shirts that I owned was a Pittsburgh Steelers shirt, so it was hard not to be happy for them.
In 2010 the New Orleans Saints beat the Indianapolis Colts. I was on a beach island in Thailand. I had to look up the results on the internet the next day, because none of the hotel owners were showing the game. They said that if it were "real" football and not "American" football they might have some interest. I was happy for New Orleans because it was their first championship. I liked the Bonnaroo and jazz metaphors aligning with my journey around the world. I would also take a coast to coast journey via New Orleans later that year.
In 2011 I was in New York State, waiting to go to Japan. It was a good game between the Packers and the Steelers. The Packers won. I'd just spent most of 2010 backpacking around the world and the United States, so the metaphor made me happy. I also remember missing most of the football game because I was often in the kitchen or on the porch talking with a musician about my recent adventures and future plans to go to Japan, specifically regarding the photo in New Zealand under the Tokyo sign. I remember he said that sounded "like a publisher's dream." Then we went inside and watched Green Bay seal the victory.
In 2012 I was living in Japan, and I forgot about the Super Bowl because I was living in a different time zone where they had their own interests, and I was focusing on teaching and writing. The New York Giants beat the New England Patriots again. Good for them.
In 2013 I was living in San Francisco. I watched the game with my roommate at a hotel downtown. We talked to strangers at our table, and I got to see a Jasper Johns exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art next door during halftime. The Baltimore Ravens beat the San Francisco 49ers for their second championship. The 49ers already had five of them though, and had always been respected as the greatest dynasty while I was growing up in the days of Joe Montana, the greatest clutch quarterback of all time. They had already won the championship the year after I started following the sport, so I didn't mind that they didn't win that specific game, which would have nicely coincided with my just having moved there. Also, the third Super Bowl I had watched was in 1995, when San Francisco had beaten the San Diego Chargers by... many points. My dad's favorite player, Jerry Rice, had broken some records during the game. Jerry Rice is the other player whose jersey I would wear when we played backyard football. A couple months after the 2013 Super Bowl I wrote a book about that picture of the Tokyo sign, and one chapter was about getting into football while living in Baltimore and watching the Super Bowl in San Francisco.
In 2014 I watched the Seattle Seahawks get their first Super Bowl Championship by beating the Denver Broncos, whom I had cheered on to win the 1998 and 1999 Super Bowls against the Packers and Falcons, respectively. Both cities had legalized green by then, so I was happy in any case.
This year we have a choice between Seattle and New England, Northwest and Northeast, birds of the seas or people who love their country. Crown thy good with brotherhood, from sea to shining sea... supposedly. Well, I've never liked the New England Patriots football team, and there's a lot I like about Seattle, but the outcome is just another statistic.
Seattle is worthy of praise from yours truly because it's the first place I ever traveled to as an adult on vacation, in 2007. I remember buying some excellent vinyl records, smoking a joint with friends on the University of Washington campus beneath a statue of Edvard Grieg, and seeing more green trees, bushes and flowers than anywhere I've ever been in my life. Jason Webley and Tom Robbins, two of my biggest inspirations and favorite poet magicians, hail from the general area. And of course, blue and green is the best color combination on Earth, that is, when forced to choose amidst the rainbow.
1st reason to love green and blue: they're the most prominent colors on Earth when viewed from space. As Tom Robbins said in Skinny Legs and All, "keep your eye on the ball." I do every day... on my computer background when I'm using Microsoft Windows, designed in Seattle. Blue and green are also the colors for the logo for the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, where my father earned his income for decades, and therefore was able to give me food to keep me alive, and therefore give you something to read, thus completing the circle of life, which thrives on green and blue. They're also the colors of the canoe and car I drove very far, from New England to Seattle in the summer of 2012. I officially drove from Cambridge, New York, but the evening before I technically commenced the western journey after talking on my friend's porch in Bennington, Vermont, at the same house where I'd discussed Japan during a 2011 Packers victory. I'd just returned from Japan, and I was moving to San Francisco, but I was going to drive through the north, to Seattle, Washington, and then along the coast. Finally, they're the colors from that excellent James Taylor song that kept me comfort on winter journeys ("deep greens and blues are the colors I choose"), although he also mentions the New England Berkshires of Massachusetts in the same song. And of course, "Blue in Green" courtesy of Miles Davis. Therefore, I'm rooting for the state of Washington and the city of Seattle to win the game, especially because peppermint tea leaves, while having been found at the pyramids dating as far back as 1000 BC, are typically harvested from the Pacific Northwest, and they can be very helpful in soothing digestive functions of the stomach and the mind, making one peaceful and harmonious with humankind.
Even though I'm not a fan of the football team, if New England wins 2014's NFL Super Bowl, I will be happy to celebrate the area. In fact, I already have been doing so, as my most recent adventure was a road voyage around New England in autumn of 2014. I drove through Connecticut and Massachusetts to Maine, where I visited a friend and hiked Mt. Pleasant. Then I was fortunate to drive around New Hampshire and camp amongst the White Mountains, where I had hiked Mt. Washington in between road adventures in the summer of 2010. After that I pushed on to Mt. Abraham near the town of Lincoln, Vermont, seeing the most stunning view of Lake Champlain I've ever seen, and I've been going to that lake my entire life.
On the way I wandered west toward the mountain and happened upon Goddard College in Vermont. This was mysterious magnetism because that's where the members of Phish met and created their band, which would later become successful further north in Burlington, Vermont on Lake Champlain, and then become a legendary live band around the country, spawning enormous festivals that eventually inspired my favorite party on Earth, Bonnaroo in Tennessee (2006, 07 and 09, specifically). They call their music extended improvisation. I agree with their existential style. Meanwhile, New England is also cool to me because I teach English, and if you're reading this, you speak English, which is named after England, and experiencing the newness of the universe is always excellent. Well, I enjoy it. So did my ancestors, apparently, half of which made the journey amongst the waters of the sea from England to New England. Some of them started in Massachusetts, and some of them probably arrived in Connecticut before moving to Long Island all those centuries ago.
I've never lived in New England, but I've visited many times. Most importantly, the first road adventure of my life was with two friends in a car on the way to Boston to see They Might Be Giants give a free concert. I'd already seen them once the month before, in northwest Massachusetts, and that was my first real concert... wow, hats off to New England for introducing me to that scene...
I also experienced some of the early parts of my first coast to coast journey in New England by visiting Providence and Boston in 2010. I felt strange walking around Harvard's campus, because they had told me that I should go there, the interviewer said I was "Harvard material," and then they deferred their decision on me before rejecting me. That made me sore when I was 17, but that had happened nine years earlier. I'd graduated from a different school, found my path, and traveled the world. Besides, the only reason I'd wanted to go there in the first place was because all of the writers for The Simpsons had gone there and written for the Lampoon.
Anyway, the region has more personal significance for me because I happily embraced the challenge of climbing Mt. Greylock in western Massachusetts seven days before the first coast-to-coast America journey began. It's the highest mountain in their state, which isn't saying much, but it's a real hike with a great view, and it's even sort of part of the Berkshire range (depending on who you ask) mentioned in that James Taylor song.
When I returned from a seven month journey in Asia and parts nearby, I celebrated the return to the US by climbing Mount Mansfield, Vermont's highest mountain, not far from Burlington, Vermont. When I decided to have the next adventure a few months later, around America, I decided to celebrate and train by climbing Camel's Hump Mountain, also near Burlington, Vermont.
As for the Patriots, specifically, and where they enjoyed much of their football glory, I guess I can say that I saw my only Metallica concert at Foxboro Stadium, where the Patriots play, and that was a great experience. Metallica is a heavy rock band from San Francisco, California, whom I loved from ages 12-17, and have continued to enjoy, although not nearly as frequently, but on many new levels of quality. Then again, speaking of "experience," Jimi Hendrix was from Seattle, and the best mountain I ever hiked was Pyramid Peak in the state of Washington.
Whoever wins, I'm working to enjoy life. Until DC gets their act together, when I think of Washington, football, and Native Americans, I want to think of the Seahawks and of the state of Washington and the character Hawkeye from The Last of the Mohicans. My father uses his hawk eye to shoot in the wild, just like the character, and I use my hawk eye to shoot photographs in the wilds of forests and cities. LOOK! What do YOU see?
As for the name Patriots, I suppose patriotism's alright, because for all its mixture of action and behavior, the USA is often an amazing place to be. If you're not from there, patriotism can work. I think it's beautiful to find something to admire and respect about your home, whether it's your town, your county, your state, your region, your country, your planet or your universe, because it can help you learn more about your identity. Just remember to balance your love for something you know well with the love of the new the world has to offer you and me, both of whose identity commenced in the blue green sea, a mixture of mystery and unity.
I will conclude the football thoughts with ancient wisdom from America's greatest Harvard geniuses: the writers of The Simpsons. Of their many football episodes, the most relevant is about the Super Bowl where Homer and Lisa gamble on games together. When he turns down her offer to hike a mountain the weekend after the Super Bowl, she sees that he only cares about football. When he asks who will win the game, she says Washington, but isn't sure, because maybe she really doesn't want him to win deep down, so they'll just have to see. Thus, the outcome of the game becomes a determinant of her love for him. If the Redskins won, she loved him. Strange... if the episode were on today, given the name controversy, I think she'd take a different stance, being Lisa and all...
Anyway, that is a television show, which was always on at 8 pm on Sunday's after six hours of football. The outcome of each episode was as determined by our behavior as the results of the fictional game in the fictional show or tonight's Super Bowl. The game is beside the point. You either love someone or you don't, regardless of who wins the games. When it comes to love, you really care about how they play, and how they face every day with bravery, imagination and kindness on their way.
I love the part of the episode where they spend the following weekend climbing a mountain together, instead of watching other people get exercise. The view is stunning and completely worth all the time and effort. To be fair to relaxation while tuning into various universal stations, I saw that mountain scene on a TV screen long before I actually climbed any real mountains. And you can't climb mountains every day either. When I am pondering the balance of action and reception, I sometimes remember that it is often something you've seen on a screen that inspires you to take action with your energy in the first place. If you actually get up and take the action to balance your thankful passivity which inspires and informs creativity, then you will be exactly where you should be
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