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Published: September 6th 2010
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It's interesting to begin a blog by going through the series of steps to locate yourself in Space and Time. The website which hosts this "travel" blog, requires that I do this.
So, to reiterate:
The date is September 6th. Labor Day in 2010. The place is North America. United States. New York is the state. New York, the city. Manhattan to be more specific.
My hands are slightly trembling due to two identifiable factors:
1) Coffee. I have been making a habit of sitting at Whole Foods in their oh so lovely cafe each morning, with a coffee and some kind of muffin, usually Walnut Raisin. I have heard that persons of naturally high metabolism should avoid coffee, as it only reiterates (to "reiterate" a word I used just above) one's already pepped up, invigorated, innervated biological/chemical experience. But I have also heard from certain persons close to me (my mother and father) that one should absolutely, without a second thought, befriend coffee, bring it into your life and dance with it for the rest of your days.
2) Pressure to write my blog entry. What is pressure? There are so many kinds, and all of them,
Water romance
Not me, but just the same... like with any phenomenon, accumulate the labels of good and bad. There is the pressure to be good. There is the pressure to have sex with a hot woman who passes you by anonymously in some public place. There is the pressure of air which keeps the balloon inflated. There is the pressure of air in a man's head which keeps his sense of identity and stability intact. There is the pressure of your feet when they pound against the city sidewalk which ricochets upward and creates tension in the head, neck and face. There is the pressure that Wyston Marsalis feels (or felt...do the dead still cycle through their living patterns?) when he has a creative deadline to produce music. There is the pressure of the whip cracking on our own backs, the whip we ourselves are wielding. There is the pressure to be funny and/or interesting. The pressure to succeed. The pressure to win. The pressure to lose, even, and to lose badly, so badly that you are finally free of the pressure to win. Haha!
I am reminded of the song by Queen: "Under Pressure."
It was a certain kind of pressure that propelled me
to develop as a top notch competitive swimmer. I remember, standing in the hallways of my high school, a lowly 10th grader, new, vulnerable, small and crackly voiced (my friends were like 7 feet tall suddenly with booming deep voices), wearing clothes that never seemed to fit right (I think my mom still indirectly dressed me), wearing skin that didn't fit right either (please insert sad, turbulent 80's music here, something like The Cure, maybe?). I remember standing there in the midst of it all and deciding once and for all: "Enough of this half-assed shit! You are going to start going to swim practice everyday and you are going to be GOOD. You are going to SHOW THEM!" And so I did, and so it went. Cause and effect. Pressure and release. I swam my face off. My face fell off in the pool. Muscles grew. Limbs lengthened. I became captain. I rode the waves of pressure each day, putting my passion into the fury and fire and hell of long grueling practices. Swimming was pure passion for me. I conflated it with the female. I would hear a love song, something cheesy like "Total Eclipse of the Heart"
by Bonnie Tyler, or "Love Takes Time" by Mariah Carey, and I would hear these songs and something lovely and watery and sad and wonderful would be stirred in my heart and the object of this love would be Swimming. The Sport. The Way. The pain and glory of it. Swimming was my woman. Things sometimes got mixed up. I met a girl, fell in deep wild love with her (she barely knew of my existence), her name shone like amber gleaming on tree bark, and I got hit with such a whirlwind wave of melancholy that I vowed to NOT work hard at swimming FOR HER. For her, I would bag practice and fuck off. There was something valorous about it. Like I was a young knight and she my redemption into the life everlasting. Or something like that. But nothing, not even the lovely Amber could interrupt for long my desire to win, to excel, to triumph. I was in love with my sport. I continued to grow as a swimmer, reaching the national level, gaining acceptance into a top notch university, swimming there and winning the Outstanding Freshman award.
But.
Then.
Something was not right in the kingdom.
(Insert Smashing Pumpkins version of "Landslide")
"I've been afraid of changing, cause I built my life around you...."
My friend Charley Margosian and I would sing this aloud, longingly, achingly, and the YOU in the song was swimming. We were getting weary of it. It was feeling like chains holding us down. While the rest of the college world went by in beautiful colors, drinking, laughing, hooking up, LIVING, we were chained down and DYING. It seemed impossible to leave! How could we! How dared we! What a disappointment we'd be to the team, to the coach! They needed us! And who WERE we if we weren't swimmers? Walkers? Talkers? Eaters? Fishers?
Eventually we did it. Three of us, actually. The jewish trilogy of swimming dropouts: Charley, Ben, and Andrew. Alright, Charley wasn't Jewish but it really seemed like he was. He was Armenian. Close enough. I remember telling the coach, Coach Kathy. There was an awful silence. Just her and I in the office. The echoes of voices and pool water down below as practice was getting started.
"I want you to reconsider"
"....Well coach, I've thought about it alot."
"We really need you on the team"
(Oh god, my worst fears were confirmed, they did NEED me!)
"Coach, no."
"Frankly, I'm shocked and disappointed."
(Oooooh, one of the worst words in the book: Disappointed)
"I'm sorry to let you down coach."
And with that, boom. Out the door to the rest of my life, and new sets of pressures and releases, new sets of chains and freedoms from chains.
Hey, my hands aren't trembling anymore!
DREW
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romance writing
are you on a kind of book writing journey, drew? this virtual personal diary might become a collection of memories perfectly matching a mosaic of synapses as memories move in the gaps of the mind... entering black holes and scaping freely and transmuting. nice move! beijoS