My Time as a Human

When I first signed up for this ride, I was looking for a launch into my next phase of life. But as I tear down all of my physical possessions a pattern emerges in the distribution of memorabilia. The framed photographs of the Chinese countryside. The paintings of Huan Xian. The Chinese sword. The Go set with flat bottomed stones. The Chinese coins. At last I pulled out the photo album sent me by my Chinese girlfriend of 12 years ago with the tiny handful of the only photographs I have from that time. There are six of our two and a half weeks in China. Six photographs. Two and a half weeks.

Even given my four year relationship with Weishi, that time seems so short compared to the lifelong sense of connection it established in me. The craving to return stayed with me ever since, and that journey has been delayed repeatedly over the years for one recurring reason.

The first big documentary film project I worked on was the story of an eccentric Austin songwriter that was shot and killed many years ago protecting an old man from his son. My friend Kevin Triplett started following the story and then built a small team including Mike Nicholson, Chris Ohlsen and myself. We interviewed hundreds of people over the years, traveling from Colorado to Georgia. Four dudes in a little van crossing the country picking up the pieces of a dead man’s story, looking through the tears and laughter and smiles of those who loved and hated him, many of whom were both, trying to get a glimpse of the man known as Blaze Foley.

Every time a relationship ended, it was time to move, and my ties were loose I would swear I was off to China. But this film, this epic project of so many years, kept creeping along. New discoveries. That one more great interview. Just plain getting it edited. At one point, after I had spent months doing early edits, all of the hard drives and computers were stolen and we had to start again from scratch.

Tonight, at 10:20pm at the Alamo Drafthouse in Austin Texas, I am going to see the finished film. Exactly two and a half weeks before my flight leaves for China.

Thanks Blaze. It turns out that, now, I can fly.

One of my favorite moronic jokes to tell is about sweet, sweet updog. I was out with Leigh Shaw in San Francisco last week playing in Delores park and a couple of guys had set up slack ropes between palm trees. We were taking turns trying to balance on the ropes, either planting a foot right on the line and standing straight up or trying to jump and land our bare feet directly on it. The thing about first learning slack rope is that just about anything you do sends you into this crazy oscillation, the rope and your leg whipping back and forth until you’re thrown to the ground. Just about anything can set this off, and there was a guy playing with us who smelled so much like updog that it hard to concentrate. I thought I’d seen someone carrying around a huge basket of updog earlier, and so I wasn’t that surprised, but it was driving me nuts. As soon as we got a second away I mentioned it to Leigh and she asked me, “what’s that?” “What’s what,” I said.

“Updog.”
“Updog?”
“Yeah what is that?”
“What’s what?”
“You were talking about something called updog.”
“Yeah that guy reeked of it. It was making me crazy how much he smelled like updog.”
“But I want to know what updog is.”

This went on for a while. At last I said something about how I’d seen the huge basket of updog go by earlier and she replied, “yeah but… what’s updog?” It was close enough. I grabbed her and spun her around yelling back, “Yeeeahh! Wassup Dawwwg?!”

So, uh, that’s the joke. And I admit, I love it. There’s a wonderful moment when the other person realizes they’ve laid out the punchline to the joke themselves, and since I’m usually grabbing them in a big hug or giving them the safer high five or handclasp hug as I’m shouting, there’s a minute where they’re momentarily stunned as they realize something has just happened, they caused it, and they’re not sure what it is.

But there’s something even more interesting about this joke. In order for the joke to work, I have to keep avoiding a direct response to their questions, and they have to keep asking until they ask in the right way. This also means that they have to repeatedly admit their ignorance, which reveals a lot about that person and our relationship. Sometimes I’ll go on and on about how I saw this beautiful updog in a church the other day and then this poodle stepped in updog and it got all over my friend’s car until it was bright purple… I’ve had people listen to all of this, nodding sympathetically and saying things like, “uh huh” as though they knew exactly what I meant until it became completely unbearable.

Accepting and revealing my ignorance has been the most essential part of my evolution. At one point I thought about tattooing “I Am Ignorant” on the inside of my right arm, so that everyone would already know and there’d be no point in holding back. Every time my ego gets the better of me and I twitch back a question about something around me, I lose a moment of opportunity to learn. Every time this happens and there is another person involved, every time I nod instead of asking, it’s like another huge bag of cement is added to a stack that I have to move to get back to the first place I didn’t understand. If I tell them I don’t understand now, I have to keep asking my way backwards, revealing with each question how far back I started lying to them, pretending I knew what they were saying.

On the other hand, revealing ignorance does some other wonderful things. I can’t count the number of times I’ve interrupted someone ranting away about some technical process or amazing film to point out that I didn’t know some obscure acronym or actress and had their eyes pop, not with amazement at how stupid I was, but excitement at the opportunity to share what they knew.

I’ve also had people pause, sometimes blush, and point out that they weren’t really sure how that worked either. If I’m feeling gracious, instead of busting them for trying to streamroll me with buzzwords I make the otherwise awkward moment an opportunity for both of us to learn. “Here,” I say, pulling up a laptop, “I’m sure the answer’s online. Let’s look for it on updog.”

Clicking on the dog’s tongue takes you to the photographer’s site

A friend was talking in wonder about a guy he knew who always seemed to stumble into adventure. My friend went on in amazement about how this person had wandered into a port in Chile and was suddenly on a boat sailing around the world. “I don’t know how these people do it,” he said. Then he stopped and turned to me. “What am I saying? You know what I’m talking about. You’re one of those people!”

Most people think there’s nothing magic about statistics, but I love to experience math that way. Your odds of meeting someone who wants to give you their car because they won’t need it for the next year are exactly zero if you sit at home. I spend, granted, too much time socializing but this means that my social network is large enough that when I need a toaster, the odds are pretty good that I’m connected to someone out there who just realized they have an extra toaster and would love to see it getting use. The odds, to an outsider, look like magic when I speak the words, “I need a toaster” and a new toaster appears on my counter. I call it Mathemagical.

Now it turns out that I’m actually a really shy person. (No, no one else believes that either.) But I learned a trick years ago that helped get me into the good kind of trouble by upping the odds that I’d be near it. I call it “jumping off cliffs”. After a couple of simple recent cliff jumps, small social risks, I suddenly found myself spending five days hugging dozens of women in slow motion as a nonverbal conversation about music.

First, the cliff. When I was in Jr. High School I learned a trick. If I tried to stand in front of a phone, imagine the call I was about to make to a cute girl, and then force my arm to pick up the phone and dial, nothing happened. Nothing happened for a long time and I felt miserable throughout every one of those terrifying minutes. I learned instead to walk away and take on a project or do something else until I’d completely forgotten about the girl and the phone. The moment that thought re-entered my head, the moment I realized I’d forgotten, I immediately threw myself off of a cliff. I grabbed the phone and before I was aware of what was happening, it was ringing and someone was about to answer. I was falling. No time to think about jumping, it had already happened and now I was going to have to respond! Sure, I blundered, said moronic things, pissed people off, and made them laugh. But if I had simply sat at the cliff’s edge absolutely nothing would have happened. And here’s the best part. This type of risk, and almost all social risks, are metaphorical cliffs. No one will die. What’s the worst that can happen compared to that?

A little more than a year ago I went out a cafe to meet an old friend, Margaret Heyn. I should probably have been working, but I don’t get to see her very often now that she lives in San Antonio so I skipped out. She had a friend along and after some chatter they tried to convince me to, again, skip out on even more work and go Tango dancing with them. As it turns out, tango dancing requires a fair bit of patience and has a steep learning curve, especially for leads. I had tried a few times years ago to learn this dance with Margaret and was frustrated. Worse, they weren’t asking me to come to a class. They were asking me to come to a full on dance space full of people moving smoothly and elegantly around a tiny room, step into this densely packed sea of movement with a woman in my arms, and somehow manage to stumble around without tripping her, running into anyone else, falling onto anyone, or generally being the single cause of a complete disaster. I can tell you from experience that, starting out, this is nearly impossible. In a notable night from my past I once lead a woman into having her foot stabbed by a high heel. I helped her limp off of the floor and swore never to dance again.

“We’ll give you a quick lesson in the parking lot”, Marg promised. The cliff loomed. Here was my chance to look like a complete idiot in front of someone I’d just met and potentially injure countless innocent dancers. Social death. I thought about it, made myself stop, and threw myself off. Sarah Stayer, Margaret’s friend that I met that night, won a free month of tango lessons that evening and handed them to me on the spot. We dated for the next year.

A year later I found myself in Chicago and wanting some kind of release. I leapt off of a few more cliffs. I sent messages to a series of people online who mentioned tango and Chicago in their facebook profiles. I drove an hour and a half into the city, to a place I’d never been, to try to dance with total strangers. I was still, essentially, a beginning tango dancer. There I had a fifteen minute conversation with Carolin Colon and Galina Obushinskaya after dancing with them. Each invitation to dance was another little cliff, the dance and conversation happening in free fall.

Months later I decided, against sound financial judgement, to splurge on a tango festival that happened to be in Chicago. I contacted Carolin out of the blue. I hadn’t spoken to her since our fifteen minute interaction months before. She, in turn, took a social risk and immediately offered to have me sleep on her couch.

It turned out that Carolin and her housemate had a cat, so propelled by my sneezes we split for a hotel room at the event, which lead to meeting more people who wanted a place to crash (when the dances ended at 5:00am) and suddenly I found myself in a nice hotel room in Chicago with Carolin, Galina, Viktoriya Pantaleeva and Margaret (who coincidentally happened to come to the same event!) laughing, drinking wine, swapping stories and having the time of our lives. New friends. New experiences.

So start your cliff jumping now. No one will die. And by upping the odds, you just may find yourself in a hot tub full of world renown tango dancers. (Er, that happened later.)

As always, click photos to visit photographer’s site

The beautiful Taiwanese stranger across the room turned to find my gaze, nodded ever so slightly, and rose from her chair to slowly walk towards me. As my feet touched the wooden floor, I let them take time to connect with it, feel it. We stood together now; the floor beneath me, the woman before me, and the music surrounding us. I let the rhythm begin to move me, ever so slightly. I stepped closer, until I could feel her, and raised my arm to offer the embrace. She placed her soft hand gently into mine. I encircling her body. We breathed together deeply, slowly, several times as we both embraced the floor, the music, and each other. At last, with one powerful step, we moved forward as one. This is the Tango.

A woman approached me during one of the daily workshops at this last week’s Chicago Tango Week. “I just have to tell you… I was so moved last night… it was just so beautiful… watching you and your wife dance…” I looked at her puzzled. “Your girlfriend..?” My head tilted to the side. “Your..? Wow… it was so beautiful.”

I still have no idea who she might have meant, because that is how incredible a tango connection can be. There are so many wonderful people and moving dances every night at a Tango festival. The daily stream of workshops were followed by dances stretching until 5:00 AM and as we immersed together in this world we grew ever more attuned to the music, the dance, and each other.

The peak experiences have many flavors. During one very quick style of Tango, called the Milonga, Galina Obushinskaya and I risked the breakneck pace and found a sudden exhilarating connection that took us shooting across the room. Later I had a slow, very simple, very connected dance that melted through each movement. At one point I somehow managed to dance with someone far more talented than I deserved and we hit a Nuevo Tango Tanda, a series of dances to modern interpretations of the music, and I had the chance to fly with creative improvisation. She was so incredibly responsive and equally playful that it was like suddenly finding myself doing tricks in an fighter jet. When it came to a close I could barely thank her I was so high and shaking and I swooned off the floor blushing, stumbling and giggling like a little girl for the next half hour, hugging my friends and grinning like an idiot. It was beautiful.

As with the Tango experiences, the dancers, too, came in many flavors. China. Bulgaria. France. Taiwan. Japan. Germany. Canada. Russia. So few people spoke English as their first language, and as Tango comes from Argentina, Spanish was the secret handshake of our underground society.

Ours was just one event taking place at the huge hotel, and as I passed one older man in the hallway, he asked me, “Como esta?” I grinned and replied, “bien, gracias”, knowing that we had just confirmed each other as part of the same tribe, the same enthusiastic group of people carrying bags of expensive shoes as we walked around the hotel in our socks. The same people who hadn’t slept for days and couldn’t wait to feel the floor again. The same people willing to fumble through awkward new movements until they became smooth. Lovers of the dance called Tango.