My Time as a Human

As Mike, a cashier at Wheatsville, handed me a can of black beans I looked up past his grin to behold the end to a long search. It was crushed and mangled and the blue cotton had been crudely splatter painted by the sun, but it was none other than the perfect replacement hat.

My previous “normal guy” hat served me well for many years. It was just the right level of normal to get me through airports, police stations and other places requiring discretion with my culturally conflicting hair. It was also dear to my heart, as the logo on the front came from Enchanted Rock, a natural area near Austin revered by native americans and modern rock climbers alike. A wiry French speaking Tahitian man wears it now. After spending a night drinking on the beach with him, he gave me some amazing pearl pieces he’d pulled from the ocean and hand carved himself. I wanted to give him something of value to me.

Mike found his hat under a seat in the back of an Austin bus. He ran it through the washer and up onto his head where it had now been sitting long enough to have its own cowlicks. The patch on the front was circular and read, “City of Austin – Founded 1839″ in light blue letters around a yellow and red shield. It was crude. It was simple. It was about my favorite place on the earth.

Sadly, he didn’t have many leads on finding another one of these gems and so began a quest, one of many in the collection of ongoing quests and missions that carry me through life. It wasn’t until about a year later, working as a theater manager for the SxSW Film Festival, that I saw the hat again. I immediately abandoned my post to run across the convention center and grab the man lucky enough to be attached to it. He worked for the Austin Department of Public Works, maintainers of my city and the secret source of the hats that are blue. While he at first feared for his life, after hearing my impassioned plea he said, “hell, I’ve got another one in my locker. I’ll just give it to you.”

When he returned I told him that I wasn’t going to pay him, and at even the suggestion he held up his hands. Instead I wanted to give him something equally cool. My wallet had carried a treasure for six months, waiting for the right moment. I pulled out the crisp two dollar bill and gave it to him.

That exchange, the fact that he gave me the hat as a gift, is part of what makes it so valuable. It’s a thread woven into the cotton that hugs my head and rests gently above my ears in reminder of the simple kindness of the people of Austin, the city who’s name it bears, the city I love.

My dad’s father died when my dad was still a teenager. It was a fact that, as children, was so puzzling and mysterious and incomprehensible that we simply couldn’t grasp it. He was never overly willing to talk about it. He told us that it had made him sad and nothing more.

One day while poking around his closet I found an amazing old felt fedora and begged him to let me use it in the high school play. We were doing a production of The Sting and even with a couple of paint drops around the edges, it was perfect. That’s when I learned that it was the last thing he owned that had belonged to his father. When he at last acquiesced, I was extremely nervous that something might happen to it. Now I’m even happier that something did: it picked up another story, another thread, another piece of what makes things like old hats so magical. I’m glad that my new hat is well on its way.

[ed: It should be noted that the blue hat is, in fact, one of two normal guy hats I have. The other went with me to India and can be seen here. It has a Mad Penguin logo on the front, and is probably the coolest gift my sister has ever given me!]

In one of my favorite moments of irrational young angst, my (lesbian) friend Shannon, who was being inundated by suitors, reached such a peak of confusion that she cried out in genuine dismay, “why is this girl sending me flowers?!” At the time, I was the one laughing until it hurt. Now, years later, we laughed together as we talked about the process of aging.

As an artist and highly social being it’s not something I come in contact with all that often. My friends range in age from twenty to forty and I rarely know where they fall in that spectrum because their level of enthusiasm, creativity and experience are much more relevant to me than the number of years they’ve had the option to engage the world. All too often I’ve met people in the their mid twenties who are so much more comfortable with themselves and have explored so much more of the world than others who have never stopped in all of their fifty years on earth to look into a mirror.

Because of this, I was completely unprepared for my first confrontation with the concept of aging. My friend Monkey had a birthday a few years back. He’s about ten years younger than me and swore that nothing could wear him out. His birthday gift of total athletic exhaustion started with a morning of intense martial arts sparring and then he was handed off to me. I set up rounds of squash, wrestling, and swimming which have all done a pretty good job of exhausting me in the past if I do them long enough. I hadn’t actually wrestled since high school, but at the time even a feisty little guy like me could be brought to the point of complete immobility by the drills we did.

After a few games of squash I started going through a series of takedowns with Monkey when suddenly something happened. I stopped. Not because I wanted to. I had his head and shoulders locked up and I was about to flip him over for a Russian Roll when suddenly… I couldn’t go anywhere. I heaved and sputtered and finally had to stop for a second, apologize, and start again. It happened a second time. And a third. It was freaky. My legendary boundless energy had, for the first time in my recent memory, completely run out.

At first I was in a panic about the weird illness I must have picked up. Now it was time for my older friends to laugh at me. Apparently, the ability to spike in energy, that impulse push, was the first thing they noticed fading. I immediately melted down and frantically began listing every activity I could start learning now and still do when I was eighty. Clearly, I was almost incapacitated and needed to study Go, Tango dancing, and bridge ASAP.

The word “age” suddenly meant the slow death of all things precious to me until, during my conversation with Shannon, she used it in a very different way. She talked about how happy she was to no longer be twenty, and sent into emotional overload by the irrelevant details of life. She talked about perspective and self confidence. Perspective is something I grew pretty quickly and is something I am proud of having been able to offer others for a long time. But then I realized what had changed for me in a positive way.

While I’ve always been comfortable and happy with who I am, only recently have I been able to see how much my experience has given me some pretty formidable skills. I woke up one day while on the project in India and realized that I was, in fact, a complete badass of versatility. Out there in the field, after having memorizing several technical manuals on the plane so that I could shoot confidently with new equipment, I was having partial German conversations at midnight with an engineer in Germany so that he would send me a firmware patch for our equipment. I was hacking code. I was setting up backup systems. I was working really well with people, often without the benefit of spoken language. By the end, I was already learning some of the language. I was shooting some great footage from extreme positions and often while running. I could have fixed our jeep if it had broken down. I could have built a house from scratch. In two weeks I’ll be performing Indian music at a wedding. All together it feels really, really good to finally realize the value I can provide. Now I just have to tag this realization with a word, its source, that thing that has caused me so much angst… aging.

Photos are from a photo booth set up by the excellent photographer Steve Noreyko.

All of my Christmas toys, clothes and games came from garage sales when I was growing up. I was prepping at the top of a snow hill, ready to prove my teenage skiing mastery, when an older guy almost fell over when he saw my skis. “Wow! Those are the first Cubco bindings ever made!”

I grew up in the middle of a relatively wealthy area and so some of the castaway gear I used had been, at one time, pretty top notch. I always felt like it gave me a sort of James Bond mystique, in that most of my sports equipment would have done well in the playboy club of thirty years earlier. I would even recognize the styles in the films. Things like wooden skis.

One Christmas I was overjoyed to open a pair of hockey skates still in the original shrink wrap. I’m guessing they were of about a 1920′s vintage. They looked something like Chuck Taylor All-Stars with metal blades attached to the bottom.

[ed. Holy Kataka! I found a picture, and they really were from the 1920's! Mine were just like this but shiny, new and black, and here they are in a museum!]

In college I started playing B-league hockey. The bizarre smoothness of the ice, completely lacking in the holes, rocks or protruding reeds of a pond, threw me off a at first and it took a while to adjust. I was doing reasonably well when, at some point, someone pointed at my beloved skates and said, “You know, I think those might be holding you back.”

When I first started playing in a band, I was using a secondhand guitar run through the one working channel of a homemade Heathkit amp that my dad had built in high school. I tried making my own distortion pedal by overloading a transistor, but I kept blowing them out. Literally. They would explode with a tiny pop and a whip of magic smoke. My friend Doug “Magic” Swanson was our drummer and he was fond of saying, “a great musician never blames his equipment”. I was equally fond of nodding in agreement.

But this time I decided to give the advice some due and dug up a used gear store where I found a pair of the cheapest, most destroyed pair of Baur skates that would still wrap a foot. They were barely alive, but they were also of some near-modern design. I strapped them on, stepped out onto the ice… and flew. Suddenly I was carving and leaping and effortlessly zipping backwards across the ice.

I’m at a time of transition. I’m looking through my safety nets and the things I cling to and wondering which of them are the beloved hockey skates I need to leave behind to move forward. Sometimes it’s hard to know when it’s time.

The rhythmic thumping of our running shoes hitting pavement kept time as barbs on the barbed wire fence clicked by beside us. My friend Zeim and I wound our way through miles of moonlit streets training for our high school cross country team. As we ran we talked about running and cars and then, suddenly, he laid it on me. It was a statement so profound and life changing for nerds like us that it should have been followed by a thunderclap. “This year we’re going to homecoming,” he said, “and we’re going… with girls.”

We laughed at first and broke stride for a second but the knot in my stomach was set. What girls? How would I find one? If I did, what was I supposed to do with her during this sacred ritual of American life? My complete lack of a television set had not prepared me for the rite of passage to come.

Mysteriously, I found myself at a dance later that year with an adorable redhead who had an unfortunate last name that rhymed with “yard”. She was willing to look past the David Byrne sized sports jacket I’d borrowed from my dad and wrap up the night with me as the sole pair of slow dancers still on the floor in a particularly well-publicized moment. It was the same jacket I later wore to MC the homecoming rally and a friend of hers couldn’t help but raz me with, “I’ll bet you’re wearing that same thing to homecoming, aren’t you?” I blushed, but could say nothing, because it was true.

[ed. What the... how did I get convinced to MC homecoming?! I remember cue cards, terror, and badly improvised jokes but not how a shy geek like me ended up on that stage in the first place!]

My ride at the time was a luxurious 1974 Chevy Chevette. I had pried off all of the exterior trim, added fuzzy seats and a cheap cassette stereo, and hung a toy fish from the rearview mirror. In conversation I called it a “‘Vet” and in the town where I grew up, people quickly made the wrong assumption and shrugged. I spent all afternoon shining it until the baby blue paint gleamed and then collapsed exhausted into bed.

There is a unique form of pain, a powerful crushing force to which I’ve become accustomed when waking. It hits like a sledgehammer to the gut and arrives with the instantaneous realization that something extremely important has been forgotten. At that time in my life it was usually homework, but this sledgehammer was in the form of a flower: the corsage.

The store where I’d reserved this crucial piece of the homecoming puzzle had long since closed and only the diligent love of a mother was powerful enough to repair this: my first blunder. She found an open grocery store while I showered like a panicked rabbit and I picked them up on my way to arrive late for the first inspection.

Maybe the extra time was just what they needed, or maybe they’d been waiting for hours, but her entire extended family was crushed into her tiny living room waiting to meet me. I did the rounds of handshaking and photographing as quickly and politely as possible and passed well enough to get us out and bolting for the restaurant… which was full. I only knew of one restaurant, as my family didn’t do much eating out, and in the few times we’d gone I’d never had to learn about “reservations”. My first experience was a tough one, as we had a flower-wilting 45 minute wait ahead of us.

She was a good sport about it, giggling about the whole thing and perfectly willing to partake in another very American suburban ritual: driving around and talking. The thing about suburban areas is that, in order to make every home feel like an isolated pod in the wilderness, streets are intentionally designed to meander and end and in no way form a coherent grid. The thing about suburban houses is that they are built virtually identically, be they tiny ranch houses or McMansions pressing up against their lot boundaries like overweight gentlemen in tight suits. The thing about me is that, when talking, my taxed brain switches to the “survival only” driving plan. Within twenty minutes we were hopelessly lost.

This fact didn’t occur to me until another twenty minutes later when we both realized we were already late for the restaurant a second time. Fortunately, two hours later when we arrived, the place was nearly empty and so there was no trouble seating us for an extremely tasty Chinese food meal.

The official policy stated that after a certain time in the evening, no one was allowed to come back into the high school gym. The vice principle was sitting out front to enforce this very rule and he made me to run through the whole story. Fortunately, he also knew me and was willing to let us in with a grin and a shake of his head. This impressed my date and I got a few points there, but in reality I owed yet another round to my ever-present blessing and curse: to be known as the lovable, blundering kid with promise. We hurried in to see what was left.

Right before a cell divides the DNA duplicates split and move to either side of the cell, forming two separate nuclei. This is what it looked like in the gymnasium when we arrived. Broken streamers dangled like DNA strands from the ceiling while boys clustered on one side and girls on the other. Apparently the guys had become “boring” and “clingy” and so the girls were done with them. This meant that, as the untainted newcomer, I got to dance with all of my friend’s dates as they gushed about much better I was than them; so much less clingy and annoying. They went on and on as I held each one tight, swaying to the music and nodding.

Afterwards we went to a diner where the girl squad, in one quick move made possible only by complete teenaged girl mind meld, saturated a booth. The boys were stunned for a moment, then shrugged and grabbed another booth where we immediately began shooting straw wrappers at each other. Despite sticking to her crew, the girl with the unfortunate name made a point of swapping glances and grins with me between the tables and I knew that everything was going to work out fine. To my delight her braces were no trouble at all. The kiss at the end of the night was breathtaking and leaves me, to this day, transported by the smell of new leather jackets and dry fall leaves to a cute redheaded girl and a time when I was a blundering kid with promise.

Photos link to photographer’s sites on Flickr.

[ed. Wow. How sad that during my search there were so many more pictures of soldiers returning from Iraq than of people dressed for homecoming dances.]