THE ART OF LOSING, PART 1

There you are, you slippery bastard.

Elizabeth Bishop tells us —

The art of losing isn’t hard to master;

I’m having that day where I lose my coffee cup 37 times.

That’s a good place to start, though. It gives me at least 37 chances to rejoice. 37 chances to grow new dendrites. 37 chances to establish a network in my brain called Joyous Response to Simple Victories.

so many things seem filled with the intent

to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

File “coffee cups” under that heading.

I’ve written at least a couple dozen blog posts on The Art of Losing before this one. Threw out most of them. Kinda hard to write a blog about loss day after day, even if it is supposed to be about the upside of loss. Like, “let’s start with the time Doug died” or “that time your house burned down” is fine if in the long run it led to something good.

It all does. At least that’s my argument, my mantra: all of life is a miracle, even the shitty parts. (I thought I was really smart for having come up with that until I found out that Albert Einstein beat me to it.)

Still, to be able to trace the path that led to the good part, I have to go back to the morning when I read “Doug passed peacefully this last night”, or the night when I woke up to see a flicker reflected in Kenny Kott’s glasses and heard him say “something’s burning”.

Going back there takes me out of the present moment, obviously. And I really like being in the present moment. The past can be like a shitty movie. The final print is never going to change. There’s no director’s cut. The future is like at electric fence hidden by tall grass. The grass may look cool and inviting, but you never know what you’re going to walk into. Or pee on.

Once I found the present moment, it became like Vacation Spot USA for me. It’s a place of calmness, of clarity; of hope, engagement, curiosity, positive anticipation – even excitement. You know, like an awesome water park where they don’t allow kids. Like a killer ski run that I have all to myself. I want to go to there and stay to there.

And then I lose my goddamn coffee cup again. Glory.

OK well, at least I did the thing where I turned off the Automatic Backstory Generator, the thing that’s the awful YouTube pre-roll ad from the Most Insulting Part of My Subconscious. Jesus Christ, if you’d’a cleaned house maybe you could find something that’s the size of a brindle calf in this dump. Better rent a backhoe, or better yet, just drop a goddamn match and cut your losses.

Yeah. Really glad I turned that thing off.

Super duper cool thing that I learned about the brain: You can encourage the growth of new dendrites just by using your powers of concentration and a lot of practice.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster

of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.

The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

I’ll look up the research later and throw a link in here — or maybe in a future post, but for now here’s the layperson’s directions:

When something good happens, I hold on to the feeling it gives me for twenty seconds. I even count backwards in my mind while I’m clamped onto the goodness. It’s not easy. It’s like the patting your head while rubbing your tummy thing. It takes practice. But it can be done.

Do that enough and the brain will establish new neural pathways that respond to joy, even simple joys, like finding a coffee cup for the 37th time in a single morning.

Or finding a letter from Doug.

THE NO-PUTTERING RULE

Fig 1: What I'd rather be doing.

I'm ill. Therefore, my wife has enacted a very stern "no puttering" rule. She says I'm the worst patient. I won't stay in bed and get well. I prefer instead to putter, which includes (but is not limited to): futzing with the oscillator on the fershlugginer unit, purchase a portzebie brand kluge and never using it, and pecking at shiny things.  

However, I am allowed to do non-strenuous things, like catch up on my reading pile (which is now taller than Billy Barty) and write this blog (as long as I don't type hard enough to raise a sweat). Oh, and continue my memoir project. 

Billy Barty (R - shown actual size) and Jack Wild (L - shown tripping balls) on the set of HR Pufenstuf. 

Puttering is the most active form of sloth. My dad used to do it all the time. But then again, my dad had asthma and was hitting the bronchodilator pipe pretty hard most days. That inhaler stuff can give you the strength of ten men and the attention span of a sugar glider (or so I've heard), so it's no wonder he was out in the garage nailing things to other things most days and that his desk looked like a vertical landfill. 

I say "sloth" because essentially you're replacing something you should be doing with something that is utterly non-productive, say, replacing working on a memoir project with teaching the cat to speak Spanish. So if you think of a meth freak as a very-speeded-up tree sloth, or view catatonia as a tremor at extremely high frequency (see "Awakenings", Dr. Oliver Sacks), then you get my drift. 

So, odd as it may seem, Teresa's "no puttering" rule has made it so that I can only do things that are non-strenuous (reading, writing but not too hard), and will undoubtedly lead to me being super-productive on the memoir thing. However, the cat will just have to remain a monoglot. For now. Until I kick this thing. 

Much love, -G

THE WAY IT WAS

My sweetheart (pictured here with a stranger who bears an uncanny resemblance to Anna Kendrick) dancing her wee hiney off at The Last Supper Club in Pioneer Square after the Seahawks won Super Bowl XLVIII. 

'Twas only three years and one day ago that on the morning after the Super Bowl, my wife bolted out of the hotel bathroom and asked "Where are my contact lenses?! I left them in two water glasses on the side of the sink! I told you!" It took me a few startled seconds to realize that I had stumbled into the bathroom in a fit of alcoholic dry mouth and drank them both.

This was by far the biggest calamity of 2014. Back then, we had no idea that there could even be a 2016. We started the year with the Seahawks winning the Super Bowl. Obama was president. My dad was still living and could still play the squeezebox. The worst thing that could happen is that I could drink my wife's contact lenses. The second worst is that I could still have a job that felt like I was sticking my guts in The Hope Grinder every day.

There was no talk of fascism except when referring to some ranting numbskull somewhere on the other side of the globe.      

I watched a recording of Super Bowl XLVIII last night that I've fondly hoarded on my DVR. Last time I watched it was before the 2016 season.

My how things have changed since then. 

I made it all the way through the first two quarters and two thirds of the way through halftime (it was Bruno Mars, patron saint of Hawaii, teaming up with the Red Hot Chili Peppers, holders of the Eternal Flame of Youth) before I got all teared up.  

I want to keep this blog apolitical. At the same time, there seems to be a big, orange elephant in every room I walk into. That now includes my living room, even if I'm not watching the news -- and I never watch the news. When I see the commercials that ran back in '14 -- the multi-hued family eating Cheerios, "America the Beautiful" being sung in multiple languages -- and remember the racist backlash on Twitter from that, it seems like the writing was on the wall. We thought we had tweet-shamed those people out of existence. Well, one of those racist Twitter monsters now holds the nuclear codes. The Hope Grinder seems like the memory of a paper cut. 

I have no moral here. No great lesson to impart. It was just surprising to discover that watching the Seahawks win the Super Bowl again could make me so goddamn sad. 

Thanks for listening. 

Much love, -G

WE'RE NOT DONE PUNCHING NAZIS

Fig. 1: A bear punches a Nazi. Clearly, this is what nature intended. 

While we're on the subject of punching Nazis... Yes, I know that the topic seems like it may be passe, what with the blaze of discussion on social media surging and then dying down over the expected lifespan of 48 hours. But trust me, the Nazis are still around, and at some point in the not-too-distant future one will poke its shaved head out of its Wünderbünker and someone will take a swing at it and it'll start again. How do I know this? Well, we've been doing it for about 80 years now. 

Which brings me to Konrad Lorenz, whose work and memory I will most likely misquote and defile right here and now. He was a Nazi, for starters. Well not a real Nazi. But he was an "examining psychologist" for the Nazis. He was to study the biological characteristics of "German-Polish half-breeds" to determine whether they were psychologically and physically fit to be allowed to reproduce. The degree to which Lorenz participated is unknown, although he did at one point speak out against the inhumanity of the Nazis. He got sent to the Russian front for his troubles and began a career as a prisoner of war. So -- and I'm totally projecting here -- but I'm gonna say that this is Exhibit A in my case of why Lorenz would probably be in the "Punch a Nazi" camp. 

Fig. 2: Geese found Konrad Lorenz delicious, and in fact said that he hardly tasted like Nazi at all.

Exhibit B is this: Lorenz wrote a book called "On Aggression" in 1966. The most fascinating part of it is his research on predators and prey. Check this out: a particular pride of lions will prey on a particular dazzle of zebras (yes dazzle is the correct collective noun for a group of zebras I shit you not). If a rogue lion from a different pride tries to get up in that piece and snatch a zebra, you know what happens? The zebras kick it to death. 

Didn't see the coming, did you? I bet you thought that lions got to eat whatever'n'thefuck they wanted when they wanted and zebras are milling around like Steak On A Stick until a lion decides it's time for charcuterie. That's totally wrong. It's more like the zebras have a sacred compact with their angels of death. So weird. So cool. And so very, very Goth of them.  

Also embedded in the calculus of the predator/prey relationship is how much the predator has to exert themselves in order to procure their daily meal. Part of the gig if you're a predator. Also part of the gig is that you might just fuckin' get decked while trying to bring home lunch. 

Which brings me to Nazis. Nazis exist to wreak havoc; to beat, maim, kill, and chafe their way to realizing their ideology. So it has to be embedded in their philosophical calculus that they're going to take some lumps in the process. They just have to. Otherwise, decades of American cinema -- upon which rests our entire idea of what is true and good -- are wrong. 

So in conclusion: be a Nazi, get punched. It's natural law.

Much love, -Gunn 

BECAUSE BEAR

Focus on the watermelon, bear. Just the watermelon. 

So I told you guys how I just fuckin' SCHOOLED the peeps at the health club -- well did not actually SCHOOL but more like just went back to doing what I was doing for the fitness contest and lost weight by my own method instead of the one they suggested but didn't really rub it in OTHER THAN doing a little dance at the Wednesday weigh-in because I had lost 10.2 pounds Jesus Christ this sentence is long. 

And yeah, I was going to tell you what my method was so here you go. It has to do with bears.

Bears, or "nature's little eating machines" as the scientists call them, are opportunistic eaters. In other words, they will eat whatever the eff is in front of them. In nature, that means that if there's a deer, they'll eat a deer. Not a deer and a salad and a roll because nature does not supply "balanced meals" last time I checked. You get one kind of food at a shot. Whole bunch of apples fall from a tree. Whole field of bear grass (yes it's a thing and yes bears graze - more later). Whole bush full of berries. You get the drift. 

Only time bear does *not* do this? When bear is eating out of the garbage. Human garbage. Garbage from humans who eat "balanced meals". Does bear get sick doing this? Yes. Yes bear does. Bear also gets shot, but don't even get me started on that. 

So I figured I'd take a cue from the bears and only eat one kind of thing at a time. Last night I had two lamb burgers all on their own, no sides, no bun, nothing. Earlier that day, I had a salad that was just salad, no cheese, no croûtons, no je ne sais quois. Although I didn't plan on it, it turns out that I eat things more than an hour apart, so that probably works in my favor too. 

The other psuedo-science I applied has to do with how I think stomach acids work. I remember back when I was in Mr. Eilers' biology class and we did that thing where we had to spit into a test tube for, like, half an hour so we could learn something about how digestion works. I'm probably recalling this incorrectly and I'm way too lazy to read the Internet, but I think it was that the composition of digestive "juices" (worst use of the word "juice" EVAR) changes depending on what's in your stomach. So I figure that if you throw three different kinds of stuff in there (protein, starch, roll, automobile tire, odd sock) it's going to get all wanged out trying to supply just the right kind of "juice" (ugh) to handle it. ("Wanged out" is the correct scientific term, by the way.)

There. So to review, in a nutshell:

Do not eat before 10AM or after 6PM. Eat only one type of food at a time (meat, veg, fruit, starch) with an hour in between. And yes, I know that I drank beer in order to lose weight just that one time, but don't do that. Your results may vary. Try this at your own risk. Member FDIC. 

And if you choose to try this method, shoot me an email and lemme know if it works for you. 

Much love, -Gunn

BEER DIET

'Bout to get skinny af. 

Weight loss story? Sure, okay.

So two things: I'm taking part in a fitness contest through Seattle Athletic Club Northgate and I said I wasn't going to drink for as long as Trump was in the White House. 

SPOILER: I lied. Not about the fitness contest, though. That's real.

So we have to weigh in every Wednesday morning at 6AM. First weigh in, I'm hella heavy. Like heavier than I've ever been in my life. I'll tell you how much. I'm not shy. Two hundred and seventy six pounds. Heavier than anyone on the Seahawks defensive backfield. Except, you know, not totally ripped like Kam Chancellor. Goddamn Christmas. Anyway. Second weigh in BLAM I'm down five and a quarter pounds. The trainer is all "OMG YOU CAN'T DO THAT". I'm all "YES I DID".  She goes "HOW DID YOU DO THAT?" I go "Don't eat before 10AM or after 6PM". She goes "OMG YOU CAN'T DO THAT. YOU GOTTA EAT SEVERAL SMALL MEALS A DAY." (She really does speak in all caps. For real.) I go (I'll save you the all caps although I was all-caps-ing) "I can't do that because when I do that I fall asleep at 10AM". She goes "YOU GOTTA" (she's still all-caps-ing.) OK. So I do.

Next weigh in I'm up by almost two pounds. I'm all MOtherFUcking SUMBITCH. Other trainer (dude) is all "Numbers don't lie." (He does not all-caps. He is chill af.) I'm all "I'm going back to doing what I do."

Couple days go by. He sends me an email about how I should meet with one of their nutritionists. I delete it. I go back to doing what I do.

But check this out: I add a twist. I play dirty pool. The night before weigh in, I go and drink three beers despite what I said about not drinking anything during the tenure of the Trump administration. Here's why:

Ever wonder why alcohol makes you pee? It's because it suppresses the hormone that makes you *not* pee. True story. The longer the alcohol is in your system, the more you pee. And because I know this, and because I really fucking want to win, and because I don't want to go back in there, stand on the scale in front of the trainer, and have them read to me from the Bible Of Several Small Meals again, I cheat on my no-drinking-while-Trump deal and I have three beers. 

And as of this morning at 6AM (drum roll) I AM DOWN TEN AND A QUARTER POUNDS BOO YAH THANK JESUS. 

Now before you say "YOU CAN'T DO THAT ALL  THE TIME" (because I know you're all caps af), no worries, I don't plan on doing that all the time. That would be insanity. And although I am clearly crazy as a bedbug, I'm not that kind of crazy. I still wanna go for as much of the Trump administration as I can without having a(ny more) drinks.

Oh -- I left out the other detail. I only eat one kind of thing at a time. So for instance, if I'm eating meat, I'm only eating meat. Not meat and a salad. And if I'm having salad, I'm just having salad; likewise, veggies with veggies. I make sure I eat things at least an hour apart. Now I have no idea if that's backed up by any kind of research, but I do know that it works for me. I'll explain how I came up with this method next time. 

Much love, -Gunn

DISDAFIRS

As in "it's the first post". C'mon. You know what this is about. 

It's about getting this motherfucker on the air, is what it is.