magic hat

This past weekend, we decided to go to a Hershey Bears hockey game (and you can read more about that at The Classical sometime next week). During the preceding days, I was on campus, working to get everything necessary for the semester settled. The process for preparing to teach four classes and direct four creative writing portfolio projects entailed three course redesigns and one curriculum revision, which was a lot, but all of it will be helpful in the long-term.

The week was also, in some ways, a trial of the everyday: timing and morning routine, lunch options, going out into some seriously frigid temperatures and not whining about it too much, getting my office in order. I spent more time than I want to admit to testing out various winter hats, too, because I didn't want my ears to freeze and fall off, and nor did I want my hair to be doing the thing it does when I've worn a hat, even for as short a time as it takes me to get from home to office. The thing that it does is what comedian Elvira Kurt does in the linked clip. (Short version: it's not good.)

The week ended, and Saturday came, and with Saturday, a meeting of the knitting group. Just before walking out the door with a just-started sweater project in my bag, I decided I was going to knit a hat. I was going to knit a hat I had my eye on for more than a year, and I was going to knit it in time to wear to the hockey game. I scrounged around for yarn that would suit the pattern, coming up with a partial skein of bulky, cream-colored wool and a ball of leftover blue laceweight. The blue, I was certain, was more than enough. For the other—the part that would actually become the hat—I could only guess. In my hand, it seemed like it would work.

I knit like a fiend at the meeting, and I knit through one and a half televised hockey games. Around the second period of the Bruins vs. Flyers, I started to get nervous about the amount of yarn I had left. While Pekka Rinne stonewalled nineteen of the first twenty—and eventually thirty-seven of thirty-eight—Minnesota shots, I got really nervous.

Fifteen minutes before we had to leave, I wove in my ends with this much yarn to spare.

Doesn't have to be a lot. Just has to be enough.

The hat itself has proven to be exactly what I wanted it to be, so much so that I am considering making one in another color. 

I don't usually make things that can be done in a day. I gravitate toward fussy things on small needles (socks, lace) or large things on whatever size (blankets, sweaters). For all that they're the first things most people think of, I've knit perilous few scarves and hats, and Saturday's project felt strangely like magic. In the morning, I wanted a hat. In the evening, I had one, and it was one I'd wanted for ages. 

I need to keep remembering how uncomplicated that process can be. All I needed to do was decide. All I needed to do was start.

"such is the bread of an everyday life, from morning till noon, to the shadowless night"

In having an actual commute again, I'm listening to more music than I've done in a long time. My general inability to read or write while listening to music is something I may have mentioned here before, so I tend not to listen to much of anything except while driving or working out and sometimes while cleaning or cooking. Now, I have at least an hour each day to listen, which means mostly that I put my entire collection of music (which is not very large, admittedly, only something like two thousand songs) on shuffle and let it go. Most days it means a pleasingly varied bump from Dvořák to The Dreadnoughts, Mediæval Bæbes to Melody Gardot. Sometimes, my iPod seems to want to make a point, slipping from the random algorithm to something that feels suspiciously like surreptitious DJing, playing two or three songs from a single artist in a row, settling in on a genre for most of the drive. Friday morning was one such morning, when the device settled in on Flogging Molly for a bit, and I kept coming back to this track, "Rebels of the Sacred Heart."

It's been a long time since I listened to Flogging Molly with any singular verve. I thank them for being my introduction to something kind of like Celt-punk, which I continue to love, for being the first live show I attended with a mosh pit, for being a band that traveled in my ears when I went to Edinburgh by myself more than a decade ago. I don't even have their newest album, though I might have to get it after this post, which has made me miss them. 

"Rebels" isn't even one of my favorite tracks, but on Friday morning, Dave King's blunt imprecision charmed me. Most of the words have a broad finial of -ah, perhaps best heard in the opening lines, no matter whether it seems to make sense, and there's not a clean th- to be heard, all of them rounded into d-. Even after the playlist carried on, my mind repeated, ah well—such iz da bread uff an evryday life, with the kind of obsessive return that I couldn't help but think of Anders in Tobias Wolff's "Bullet in the Brain." The sounds were wonderful and almost silly and from so far away in memory and experience, from a much younger and more naive self, albeit one who was a little more attuned to popular music, who bought albums on their release dates (not the me who missed the last two albums from this band entirely). And those sounds were from right then, that second, when I was also literally thinking of bread, thick, good, brown bread, full of a dozen kinds of seeds and grains, which I'd had for breakfast, which I would also have for lunch. And I was thinking of the expectations of whatever one's everyday life might be. 

For me, on Friday, my everyday life brought me my morning writing, some student conferences, some scholarly reading, and administering the reader review session for the student papers I'll spend this week grading. I assigned the work to my classes; my only expectation must be that I will also read and comment and return that work. I think also of expectation as it is tinged with hope: that my students will surprise me, again with their care and their insight; that my writing projects will find homes. It is, on the whole, incredibly evryday, incredibly predictable.

I was also thinking about hockey and the expectations therein because on Thursday night, when Pascal Dupuis was struck on the back of the neck by a Kris Letang shot, expectation and fear and all of that came crashing together. Mostly, I was worried. Dupuis was taken off the ice on a stretcher, and no matter his thumbs-up to the crowd on his way out, it was scary. I remember last season when he was taken off the ice with his destroyed knee, and this season how he started, somehow, with every bit of the expected hop in his skates. That made the possible outcomes sadder: how unfair to be injured again after most of a year spent rehabbing another major hurt. Early on Friday morning, though, my concern was mostly about general wellness—there'd been no update at all. Yes, Dupuis had moved his legs. Yes, he lifted his arm. Neither of those things constituted anything like real reassurance.

I don't think players and fans consider injury "expected"—not major injuries, anyway. The little ones, like bloodied mouths and missing teeth and puck bruises and soreness, fall under some other heading. They're inevitable, which is not the same as expected. In some ways, those little things are part of the "everyday bread." Soreness comes of working hard; puck bruises might mean a successfully blocked shot. And those kinds of small hurts are the ones fans celebrate. I'm as guilty of it as anyone, feeling somehow proud of the late October game last season when Dupuis popped two teeth out of his own mouth while sitting on the bench between shifts, and on Saturday night, when Evgeni Malkin laid out to get a stick on the puck carried by a breaking Travis Hamonic. 

Thankfully, by lunchtime on Friday, the news was that Dupuis was skating already, well enough to be under consideration for Saturday night's lineup. On Saturday night, he logged nearly sixteen minutes of solid play against the Islanders. It wasn't a four-point performance like his work against the Ducks in the Penguins' opener, but it was really all right for a player who'd been stretchered off the ice forty-eight hours before. What I'd expected from that image wasn't what I'd received, and I find myself incredibly grateful. More and more, each time I watch a sporting event, I am grateful when nothing catastrophic happens. I willfully forget what I know can happen, so I can celebrate the good that I am seeing: Patric Hornqvist in front of the net, Malkin finding his shot, Pascal Dupuis standing beside Dan Potash between periods on Saturday night, upright, catching his breath, awkwardly accepting well-wishes from his favorite target for jokes. 

On Friday, I put bites of cheddar on small chunks of bread, and I read the updates from practice at Consol Energy Center. I played the song again at my desk, and for a little while, I chewed, and I listened, and I was grateful.

connecte(d)isconnected

I think I watched six minutes of Game Four of the Stanley Cup Final, and that was the balance of the end of hockey for me. And that hurts me, somewhere in my hockey heart (damaged goods at the moment, thanks to Pittsburgh's fizzled season and off-season travail).  It's unsettling, too, that I can't quite remember what I've seen. I know, at the end of May, I watched some of Kings-Blackhawks because I was in a small, dark, Dickensianly damp hotel room for a week, but I know also that I fell asleep before any of the games were over. It's all half-memory, scores and highlights and Twitter reactions and forgetting what is first-hand and what is second. It's the same with baseball, though it's a long season and what I'm missing isn't the last firework burst for months.

But I have been seeing a lot. With two weeks of my fellowship now complete, I can say I don't lack for what Annie Dillard calls eye-food. The days are all about diving deep, about filling both lungs with air and fixing a light on the brain, between the eyes, and plunging. Coming up for breath at the end of the day has actually been difficult; the first week, I couldn't. After the archive closed at five (eight p.m. on Wednesdays), I spent nights reading PDFs, something both charming and uncanny in electronic versions of documents three hundred years old. (And painstaking: I discovered that I would much rather turn physical pages than execute the several clicks it requires to advance to the next page and size it to readability, even if that means re-typing large passages of notes instead of digitally highlights or annotating them.)

There have been books, too:

This book, Seamanship, Both in Theory and Practice, has been immensely valuable (not to mention immensely beautiful).

The diagrams are consistently excellent, including this primer on knots (one of several), and it includes written explanations both of the physics of sailing (why sail A on mast X drives the ship in N direction when the wind strikes from Q direction at H force) and how to execute specific maneuvers on-board (like the very particular process of dropping the anchor on a ship of any particular size). If you are going to be time-traveling and expect you may end up in the Age of Sail, or if you are the sort of person who may be marooned on an island where an eighteenth century ship is moored, take David Steel's book with you.

I am very much adrift in the contemporary world right now. There are some lunchtime snippets of World Cup, and President Obama spoke here in Worcester last week and that precipitated some conversation about this city on that particular day, but there is otherwise little talk of here, of now. But everything in this project I am researching feels anchored well, encompassing, whole. It is hard to cope with that sometimes--there are many conversations happening in the places I usually spend my time (both online and in Wyoming and in Pennsylvania) that I know I'm missing and feel I shouldn't--but there are also many conversations here (with actual human beings and texts and the funny writerly place inside my skull) that I would not miss for the world.

***

And a little plug: my short essay, Final Mica and Final Mare, is the second piece in Narratively's Tales from the Pitch folio in The Beautiful Game feature, in which I wrote about an intercollegiate soccer tournament in Sibiu, Romania.

read and recommended: "The Old Ways of Defeat" by Chris Collision

Half of this post is months later than I intended it to be, but I'm not often a timely writer, and when I am, usually the coincidence works against me. But maybe it's timely in a different fashion because this week, word hit the hockey streets that the ECHL's San Francisco Bulls are in some dire financial straits. This makes me incredibly sad because I hate to see any team (anything, really) struggling, but I was really hoping the Bulls were going to thrive. I was rooting for them. I mean, the whole team released a You Can Play video, not just a few token players from a variety of teams put together, but a seemingly unified voice, which is still something of a rarity at the professional level. The team has been playing for two seasons, and they've held two LGBT nights (with these pretty excellent jerseys). A team like that makes me want to love them. Back in August, in Classical Magazine Issue Four, Chris Collision, writer of many fine things, wrote an essay I have to talk about, an essay I've been meaning to talk about since it came out, and two San Francisco Bulls playoff games create one of the essay's hinge points. So, here we are.

"The Old Ways of Defeat" is, for detail junkies like me, a joy. The ambient sounds of the minor league sporting event--perhaps in their most Platonic guise at a hockey game played in a place called the Cow Palace--are everywhere, and sharp, and right. The situation of the team, the league, and the circumstances of these particular games are clear and purposefully placed, rounding out a personal experience with knowledge that is effortlessly conversational--"the ECHL will, for example, teach you things like 'there is an Ontario in California'"--and self-aware in a traditionally (and I mean this as a compliment of the highest order) Montaigne-like fashion.

How easily this essay communicates is one of its strengths and ironies, as the piece starts in a moment of isolation, the alone-in-a-crowd feeling that is so difficult to handle--on the page and in person--as it's eroded here and there by the strange charms of the minor leagues, the fans, the trappings, the unlikely Bulls-versus-Alaska-Aces playoff matchup. In this essay, the erosion is only partial, so much in the way that the verve of these particular games are: highs, lows, no definitive Moment, a point best illustrated in an incredibly brief, mostly elided hockey fight that means essentially nothing in the course of a lopsided game and the Bulls' season's imminent close. The fight gets no glamor on the page, a writerly restraint I admire, and it's also an illustration, I think, of a final separation: "There is watching it, and there is doing it." We're just watching, most of us.

But there's something arresting in that, too, and I have to give you the whole final paragraph because I can't bring myself to carve it into anything but itself:

And then there are these live events—moments shared and unrepeatable, in all these shabby but life-full places that pull a poorer and more diverse crowd. They are not glamorous or even particularly beautiful, and there are whole buried rivers of disappointment running under all of it. But these can all be a step towards a life that's less lonely, less canalized through phones and less inert in front of a screen. It's a fight. But Kris Belan fought B.J. Crum, held him accountable for a smallish transgression in an essentially meaningless AA game. He fought harder for less.

***

My interest in the San Francisco Bulls is bandwagon-y at best, due mostly to "The Old Ways of Defeat" and their work with You Can Play. I can't name a player on the team without going back to Collision's essay or Googling something, and I've never seen them play. I wanted to, and I almost had the chance: in October of 2012, my husband and I made a mad weekend scramble to San Francisco over my fall break so that he could see his beloved 49ers play in Candlestick before they moved on to what will be their new, shiny stadium in Santa Clara. It was not a good trip to San Francisco. The point of being there was only the football game, all of it already an extravagance, so we were staying cheaply, far away from any of the San Francisco I'd seen the year before (the piers, Golden Gate Bridge, great food) while road-tripping with a friend. It didn't feel at all like being any place anyone would want to go--just a chain hotel, chain restaurants, and a sense of rushed alienation: not quite thirty-six hours in the city, all told.

Twenty-four hours after we arrived, it would be clear that the trip was a disappointment in many ways. At the top of the list was the fact that the San Francisco 49ers got shellacked by the Giants. It should have been a good game, in terms of 2012 competitiveness, one the Niners had a good chance to win. The Niners did not win, and the experience itself wasn't pleasant. We got the only tickets we could get: in the endzone, in the very top row, at Candlestick Park, where the giant concrete bowl gathers only the coldest air from the bay and slings it back around the rim. The sheer size of an NFL stadium and the distance from the game--something I'd not experienced before--made me want a ridiculous jumbotron uglying up the place, if only so I could see what was really happening. My reading glasses weren't cutting it. The one-sided game drained all of the live-sports-experience out of it, too; the Bay was quiet. The Niners Noise drum line was basically the only life in the place, and they stood in our endzone far too little. But that would come later.

We arrived in San Francisco on Saturday evening, and the San Francisco Bulls were due to play the second game of their inaugural season against the Bakersfield Condors that night, too. But there was no permutation of flights that would get us from Wyoming to California in time to make the game. The BART train we took from the airport toward our hotel actually passed the Cow Palace, probably sometime early in the first period, and had we not also been toting our suitcases, I would have lobbied that we go, anyway. Then the train ride was long, and we walked a long ways afterward to actually get to where we were staying. Even if we'd simply dropped our bags, turned around, and headed back to Daly City, the game would be over before we arrived. Still, as we ate our burgers from In-N-Out, I ended up following the third period from my phone for no other reason than being more near to that game than anything else familiar, which was one version of being connected, in some small way, to everything happening there.

Here's hoping the San Francisco Bulls can hang on.

You can get Classical Magazine at iTunes and in PDF/epub/mobi format as a monthly subscription or by the individual issue.

now what?: on writing I don't know how to share

On Wednesday, October 30, at 10:15 a.m., I received the new issue of The Classical Magazine (issue six) in my inbox (as a PDF because the only iDevice I own is an iPod so old that it can sing along with most of the music on it). The premise of this issue is econo, short pieces of prose and poetry and the things between, and it is full of work by writers I enjoy and admire. But I haven't read any of it yet.

I have work in this issue, too, a short nonfiction piece called "First Star," my first published hockey-writing, a piece woven around Sidney Crosby's broken jaw, a Predators-Avalanche game I went to last season, and Lokomotiv Yaroslavl. A piece hinging, in many ways, on Semyon Varlamov and his play with both Colorado and Yaroslavl. I wrote the piece in the first third of October, about events from last season.

On Wednesday night, I was having a Twitter conversation about Varlamov, his kickass season so far, his apparently affable nature. Half an hour after that, the news broke that Varlamov had turned himself in to Denver police and was arrested on domestic violence and kidnapping charges. I turned my attention to the Penguins' game in-progress, I circled social media warily, I tried to focus on new writing tasks. Mostly, I felt sick to my stomach. Mostly, I didn't want to read anything, anywhere, at all.

***

It's been a few days since then. I don't want to think he's guilty, but I also refuse to assume he's not because already the crows are calling the alleged victim a liar. (Women are just like that, lying about terrifying and humiliating things for money and attention.) Already the heads are shaking and saying that it's just not possible that Varlamov could do such a thing. (Everyone knows nice guys don't do bad things.) Avalanche head coach Patrick Roy gave Varlamov the start last night in Dallas because he didn't see any reason not to. Varlamov has yet to be officially charged with any crime; he posted his bail; he is, legally, quite free to play. The slow unfurling of legal procedures proceeds apace, and it's unfair of me to assume guilt or innocence in any direction until that process is completed if I believe in this legal system.

I do. And I don't.

As someone who wants everyone, under all circumstances, to have the right to real due process, not just torches and pitchforks, I must believe in this legal system. As a general optimist and person who attaches affection easily to people, places, and things, I cling to that benefit of the doubt. I want this goalie whose play I appreciate and whose career took a path I found conveniently symbolic to be innocent. And I mean squeaky-clean, photographic-and-eye-witness-evidence-plus-retinal-scan-that-the-accused-was-instead-volunteering-at-a-trick-or-treating-event-for-at-risk-youth-at-the-time-of-the-events, evil-impostor-committing-crimes-in-my-stead innocent. Except not exactly that either because I also do not want, at any time, for anyone to be guilty of domestic violence. Of violent crime of any kind. Because I don't want people to commit acts of violence. Ever.

I want desperately for the system to work, too. If he's guilty, I want every possible book thrown at him, preferably by Aroldis Chapman (metaphorically, of course: the weight of guilt should feel like that fastball in the unprotected ribs).

As a human being who's walking around this world with eyes open, too, I know that the system often doesn't work. I know that many cases like this (domestic violence cases, cases involving high-profile, wealthy persons) don't reach trial stage. They can be settled out of court, charges can be dropped (and not because they were invented but because of a host of larger, frightening reasons), and the very idea of the system can be collapsed before one even gets to the part I think of as that proper due process. I know that due process doesn't necessarily lead to justice, either, and that more people want to believe that the victim is lying than to deal with the wages of a culture that excuses and masks violence.

I want an impossibility: I want Semyon Varlamov to be innocent and I want Evgenia Vavinyuk to be telling the truth.

***

This post was never anything I ever wanted to write, but I also couldn't say nothing, even if no one even noticed the connection: "Hey, you wrote that thing praising that guy who might have assaulted his girlfriend." It's most of what I've been thinking about since Wednesday, and even as it strikes me as egotistical that I am in fact thinking what about my writing? in this context, we are inextricably tied to our work. Better to acknowledge that than not.

I loved writing "First Star." I loved that Predators/Avalanche game I went to. How I feel about that piece of writing now--I don't know. Rereading it doesn't make it more clear. What is clear is this: I don't know how the rest of this story plays out, and I know that it will absolutely matter to me when it does. I also don't know how to compartmentalize--hockey here, humanity there. There are enough talented and skillful people in this world that I don't think it's too much to ask that we be good at what we do and also simply good. Decent.

And if I'm feeling uncomfortable about my own work in the new issue, there's no reason that I should feel that way about the rest of Issue Six. So I'm going to go read that, and enjoy it, and wait.

confessional mode: fear

Today was the first day of the new semester, the first day of my new year. (I have no truck with January. Mid-winter isn't a good time for me to start anything.)

Maybe it's because of that newness, the ripple of uncertainty over and under everything--and today was so very much that--but today feels like a good--not good, but fitting--day to face front. So I'm turning this, which was, until five minutes ago, an e-mail to a very close friend, into a post, for better or worse.

What am I afraid of, right now? 

In ways that have nothing to do with my usual pile of writerly insecurities, I am afraid of when the media finally gets to Evgeni Malkin and asks him about what he thinks about the Russian anti-gay propaganda law that's turned the run-up to the Olympics into even more of a gut-twisting spectacle than before (before the inevitable human rights violations had a name and number and legal code). After Ilya Kovalchuk's response today, I tread the internet carefully, but today's news about Evgeni Malkin is this marvelously affable spectacle. Still, so far, 2/3 of the Russian stars asked what they thought have said they're in favor of the statute, to one degree or another. The third, Alexander Ovechkin, chose the only other option, which is to say "I'd rather talk about hockey" and evade the matter altogether. (Several good reads on the general subject are here, here, here, and here, and many, many more, of course, are out there.)

I understand that there's no particularly good option for the players on the Russian national team who might actually stand with GLBTQ rights or at least with the stance of the NHL/NHLPA/You Can Play partnership. Under the dictates of the law, actually saying anything other than the above two options could be found in violation of said law. I also know that Russian culture is what it is, and we're all products of our culture to some degree. The law is popular in Russia. I should have no expectations that my favorite hockey player should be any different than the significant majority of his country. 

But I do. Maybe I blame American exceptionalism--even my chosen-favorite-beloved-wearer-of-a-coordinated-shirt-and-shorts ensemble should be different, superlative, heroic against overwhelming odds. Maybe I blame escapism: if I dealt better with the actual world, sports and the people who play them wouldn't mean so much to me. Maybe I blame my own selfish worry: what if my favorite player says, "No, I don't think you are deserving of the same freedoms and rights of expression everyone else has"? It's personal. The personal is political is personal. I don't have to have met someone for that to be true because ideology and philosophy have very real, very tangible effects. (This is news to no one.)

Other fans have already had to deal with this--not just in this particular historical moment, but every time a public figure falls from grace and we have to make the decision: stay or go? That's not a choice I want to make, but I know what I'd choose, and there's that selfishness again: I'm broken up over what it would cost me. My fandom, my laundry, my favorite too-expensive, named-and-numbered sweater. But I'd always rather give up pleasure than self-respect, which includes voting with my esteem, my attention, and ultimately my money. Even if no one else notices or cares, I do. 

I'm a wreck over hypotheticals. That's not fair to some professional athlete whose real job is to be good at hockey. And I'm an optimistic person--I want to believe the best about people, particularly about those I admire, no matter the reason. I want to think, however Pollyannaish it may be, that human beings will default to being generous with each other. I think, also, though, of Sherlock Holmes: if I've painted over things with too rosy a brush, I've set up my own disappointment, and I have no right to expect otherwise. 

A ray of hope I have is a tweet from the You Can Play Project which says they've had support from some Russian NHLers who have not been able to support the initiative publicly for a variety of reasons (their own legal protection and consideration for their families likely included, which are good reasons). It saddens me to think that what I'm hoping for most (in an attempt to actually be realistic) is silence, no comment, let's talk about hockey, from a whole slew of Russian players and athletes. It troubles me to think what kind of meaning I'd imbue that with, too, but this is hope against hope. This is back to wishing, always, for what is kindest, and expecting that, even to the point of seeing it where it isn't. It's a disservice to everyone.

***

I'm not entirely sure what I hoped to achieve with this post. Usually I have some idea. Tonight, all I can think is that if I name the fear and whatever reasons I have for it, it will go away. I know, however, that's never actually true for me. Saying it out loud doesn't help. There aren't many cases where I feel better for having shared. But maybe someone else is having the same worry, and at least we can feel fearful and ridiculous together.

I don't know.

setting out

On Thursday morning, I leave for the longest trip I've ever taken, one that will land me in Sibiu, Romania (with a 5-hour layover in Munich) for seventeen days, in Pennsylvania for three days, and in various parts of New England, Nova Scotia, and the far reaches of Quebec for thirteen days. With the two full days that it will take me to get to and from my starting points, I will be away for thirty-five days.

While I'm gone, my goal is to blog a little bit about it, as I can, though I have no idea what my internet access options will be like for most of the trip (particularly the Romanian & Canadian legs). And we all know how blogging promises go.

Still, there are concerns on this end of the journey: what to take, how to pack, how much is not enough, how much is too much, how I feel my lack of French will be much more a problem than my lack of Romanian and German, and so on.

One of the concerns of international travel is this: what do I want to wear for twenty-six straight hours? What do I want to wear to encounter seat-mates, customs agents, and my international hosts? The answer is the same as it is every time I fly: a Penguins shirt.

It's not a jersey (though one of those will come with me)--it's just a black, long-sleeved, hooded t-shirt, one that layers well and is very comfortable. The first time I wore it as the "what I'm wearing when I fly" item, it was shortly after I caused pile of consternation by wearing a sweater that apparently had metallic fibers in it, which precipitated another layer of shedding at security. The Penguins shirt has no such bling to inconvenience everyone. It was made to look half worn-out from the start, a calculated insouciance, and, if nothing else, the shirt will match my worn-out face around hour eighteen.

The Penguins shirt has also made me some unexpected friends: in January, in the drowsy Charlottesville, VA airport, the young woman operating the TSA bag-scanning belt was also a Penguins fan. She saw my shirt and asked about it. This was two days before the lockout ended. It was a small, marvelous moment, at the end of a trip full of a lot of great time with family and friends, but also after a stressful semester's end that crushed up against the winter holidays (a lot of flights, a lot of changing locations, a lot of bad weather) and ran right into the start of spring semester.

This little moment was in isolation from all of the me--it was simply about something external, something, of course, that I'd been looking forward to for months, hoping and then having hope fail. On January 4, standing in front of the machine that was ensuring the safety of my toothpaste and the non-weapon-nature of my fountain pens, we hoped we were close to something finally come through. On the 4th, we were only a week shy of that apparent January 11 drop-dead date, and this perfect stranger and I were hoping for the exact same thing: for there to be some hockey.


It likely seems silly to some to spend this much energy thinking about (writing about, really--the thinking takes a split-second, the writing...slightly longer) a piece of clothing, which is not often a thing I do. But travel is so often about split-second first impressions, and once I'm past practical considerations (I just refuse to spend that much time in a suit and no one expects me to do so, anyway), there are a lot of things I don't want my clothes to say to people. There are also a lot of things I like my clothes to say to people, and ties to sports fandom is one of those. One reason is that I will be traveling during the Stanley Cup Playoffs--it feels wrong not to put on a little black and gold. But the more significant one is that this shirt is both barrier and invitation.

Sports conversations are easy and, for the most part, universally a safe topic of conversation (and I mean conversation of the kind one has in airports and airplanes, not wearing a Crosby jersey in a Philadelphia bar and shouting). It can fill the space for empty, obligatory small-talk with something that has meaning and interest--if one cares enough to use a logo as a springboard into conversation, there's already content, and it's content that doesn't have to be personally revealing to be significant. It can be revealing--people often ask if I'm from Pittsburgh (because many people love their home team), and any chance I have to talk about the middle of Pennsylvania, the just-off-center location of where I'm from, I take. In the event, too, though, that the seatmate is creepy and revelation seems like a bad choice, there's always the excellent answer of, "No, but Mario Lemieux," because #66 is an excellent reason to have fallen in love with the Penguins in the nineties.

In early April, I was flying to Savannah for a conference--and there was some bonus baseball--and I spent the whole D.C. to Savannah flight (my third of the day and the point at which I am always thoroughly over the experience) talking about the NHL trade deadline with my seatmate and his companions, who were on their way to golf. One of them caught the Filip Forsberg/Martin Erat trade just before the cabin door was closed, and finally knowing the outcome of that strange bated period preceding the "Capitals' Announcement" was just so satisfying--in no small part because I was in company that also understood that. The time passed quickly and happily, and there was no trace of the desperate competition that happened in the last seat-bank I was in, in which there was a strange oneupmanship going on between the two guys beside me that started with watches and progressed to vacation homes and their children's college majors and I don't know where it ended because I had headphones and a book and I hid in both.

***
Before leaving, I did get to see game one of the Penguins vs. Senators series, and it was a satisfying way to leave my hockey team: gathering steam. The first period was a little shaky, but everything got stronger as the game went on. I'm hoping for more of that for the Penguins, and I'm hoping for some of the same for myself, for the just-before-leaving jitters to level out into excitement and appreciation and the bravery I know I can talk myself into.

The hockey community, particularly in certain parts of the country (like mine) and the world, is a little rare. I know it gives me some comfort and lift when I can see those people (my people) in places that are new to me, and I like to think that someone else is similarly buoyed by an exchange even so small as "Did you see ___?" or "Oh, that was heartbreaking" or "Good luck in the next round" or a little thumbs-up. It's worth those moments to risk the potential heckling that might come, too (I say, as I will spend three hours in the Newark airport).

Not everyone goes around with their hearts on their sleeves (and chests and heads and socks and boxer shorts and even on their very skin) in so immediately recognizable a way as sports folk, and for many, that's certainly not the only thing for which they bleed (metaphorically or otherwise), but it's probably unique in that it's so immediately and visibly shared. There's a pride (and a bravery and a safety) in displaying one's chosen team's colors. So tomorrow morning, I will start this trip, and even before I get to the TSA stations, I will do a little of my own x-ray magic as I set out: I will put on a shirt that makes visible on the outside so much of what is gathered in my heart and my brain so much of the time.

what comes after the draft?

On December 20, I finished the first draft of the novel I've been working on since June. The euphoria of it lasted for about as long as it took to print a copy, stack the pages evenly, and bind it with yarn because it was too large to fit in any manuscript box that I had. I put it in the mail to Laura, e-mailed it to a few more readerfriends, and that was it.

We should bind more piles of paper with string. It's a theory.

The draft was done, and it was time to start the mellowing process before revision. Most writers will say they need a cooling off period before doing a thorough revision, some emotional and intellectual distance, and I generally agree with that. It's probably wise (to try) to fall a little out of love so I can look dispassionately at the narrative and characters before I make the hard decisions.

It was good to get the draft done. I got on a plane to visit family for the holidays less than thirty-six hours after I finished. The trip was part of the imperative to complete the book: if it wasn't out of my hands, it would have been in my hands through that whole trip, to the exclusion of the people I flew two thousand miles to see. I tried to leave it all behind, actually, but couldn't. I put a complete printed copy in my carry-on. I read my own draft on the plane, in airports, and even in the rare stray moments between visiting mania. I called it line-editing, and that wasn't a complete lie. At my parents' house, I was an insufferable prat who dropped the whole brick of it in front of my brother, onto the floor, so he could hear it. The physical shape and heft are things that everyone gets, even if talking about the weight of a novel means something quite different on the inside of this writer.

I have (mostly) stopped carrying it around. I have feedback from each of my readers, and as of the end of January, I've begun the actual process of revising. I even rearranged my desk to accommodate that.

Drafts to the left of G, drafts to the right, but he's stuck in the middle with Blues (versus Kings, which totally didn't fit into the lyric I was going for).

But between late December and late January, without the anchor of working on the novel, I nearly flew to pieces. I don't know what actual mania feels like, but maybe it was like this. I picked up knitting again for the first time in nearly a year. I didn't just pick it up--I tore back fifteen hours of knitting and started over, eclipsing my previous ending point in half the time. I spun several hundred yards of laceweight yarn. I completely disassembled my spinning wheel, re-treated all of the wooden pieces, and put it back together again. I've had it for almost six years and have never done that. I spun some more afterward. I made a lot of bread. I tried new recipes. I went to the gym. I reorganized my spice cupboard, cleaned the oven, listened to minor league hockey games, and tried to teach myself Russian. I agonized over whether to join a fantasy hockey league and decided I was too emotionally compromised by hockey to add an additional dimension to that. I applied to more residencies, I wrote some pieces of essays, I started working on the next novel in the queue. I cleaned all of my fountain pens and turned to writing everything long-hand for a while. I bought a brush pen and tried to learn to use it. I found an opportunity to teach in Romania for two weeks this summer. I prepped a brand new class I'd never taught before. I planned a road-trip and a vacation.

And I went back to the manuscript, over and over. I couldn't help myself. No matter what else I tried to put in those hours, there was no staying away. I looked at the first set of comments I'd gotten and made notes, questions to ask my other readers. I cheated and started fixing details and continuity blips; I rewrote the first chapter entirely because I'd decided to do that anyway. I spent the week after New Year's with a friend (who was in the process of reading the draft) and explaining to her what the characters thought of the music we listened to, the food we ate, the scenery.

There was, in sum, no clean break, and I couldn't figure out how to actually take time off. The only way I can conceive of getting that real distance, the editorial coolness and indifference that other people talk about, is infidelity. I will need to fall faster and harder in love with the next thing, and it isn't happening now. I don't want it to, either: the revising is getting done. In the past, I've gotten that distance because familiarity bred enough contempt that I didn't want to look at the piece anymore. Then I came back to it, weeks or months or even years later, when it had ceased being mine in any significant way. The contempt for this project hasn't come, and the revision is getting done because the trail is still fresh, still compels me to follow. The metaphor has gone from romance to the hunt. They are, of course, the same thing: both about blood, which is the vehicle for desire.

Annie Dillard writes, in the first chapter of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek,

Certain Indians used to carve long grooves along the wooden shafts of their arrows. They called the grooves “lightning marks,” because they resembled the curved fissure lightning slices down the trunks of trees. The function of lightning marks is this: if the arrow fails to kill the game, blood from a deep wound will channel along the lightning mark, streak down the arrow shaft, and spatter to the ground, laying a trail dripped on broad-leaves, on stones, that the barefoot and trembling archer can follow into whatever deep or rare wilderness it leads. I am the arrow shaft, carved along my length by unexpected lights and gashes from the very sky, and this book is the straying trail of blood. (13)

I'm following the blood on this book because the trail is still fresh, and it feels like an open wound in that I'm always conscious of it, like something's carved open and dripping red if I'm not working on it. That's new for me.

Gregory Orr, a lyric poet, and John Gardner, of Grendel and The Art of Fiction fame, talk about writing as coming from a wound, as trying to stitch together what will never heal. Both of these writers have some concrete experience with an extreme version of this--Orr shot and killed his brother in a hunting accident, and Gardner's brother was killed in a farming accident while Gardner was driving the tractor. I understand that every word may pull toward those kinds of moments because how can they not? But I don't think the wound is always tragic. I don't think the wound is always even real, insofar as to mean an event or a happening, but I cannot help but think of writing--any writing--as something in the blood or of it, even the raw flesh sting of a hangnail. Maybe that's the crux of it, really: it doesn't have to bare anything to the bone in order to exist.

I have a triangle of broken skin at the edge of my left thumbnail. It's not even a proper hangnail. It scabs flat and thin and my idle worrying at it makes it bleed without even hurting. The blood follows the line of the nail, pools under the short white rim of keratin before I can get a Band-aid. It's been this way for long enough that I can't picture this hand without it. Certainly there was a time, and not so long ago, but I don't remember it. The feeling, the vague itch, presents itself as forever. So it is with this book and revision. I can show you on a calendar when it became a part of my life--June 4, 2012--but it feels like always because imagining before, where there must have been some empty space that has become so filled, is too dire to contemplate. And for the three or so weeks that I tried, really tried, to make it not be present, there was a small, raw place on my thumb, my brain, my heart, my left ankle, just above the hard jointed knobs.

I'm still working on that knitting, but I haven't cooked much of anything since the Superbowl.

The pattern is Catkin by Carina Spencer. It's a cracking brilliant design.

My phone has two Romanian flashcard apps on it, but I haven't looked at them in a while. My Russian dictionary is beside my desk, but it's only there for the book. It's even been a little over a week that I've been to the gym, but I'll tip the halfway point on revising tonight. There's still a red seam on my left thumb, but both hands have been too busy to worry it.
 

That would be suspiciously like joy in Mudville

What would be suspiciously like joy in Mudville, you ask? Professional ice hockey coming to Casper. Right now, it is frustratingly all uncertain, but there's a conversation happening. A conversation that could bring CHL hockey to Casper. 

The biggest challenges seem to be financial, of course, and I'm surprised that the theoretical plan would be to modify the Casper Events Center (installing ice and a Jumbotron, etc.), but it has held the Wyoming Cavalry indoor football, the CNFR, many state sports tournaments--it would certainly hold a fairly impressive crowd. It's also got locker room facilities, where glamorous things happen, like Casper College faculty members holding their annual "can anyone actually arrange their academic hood the correct way?" contest for commencement. (Pro tip: I don't think there is a correct way. I think the academic hood is just a cruel joke played on folks in academe in perpetuity. It's slightly below "good luck ever simply reading a book again" in sinisterness.)

I'm not just grasping at straws here in the absence of the NHL with my incredibly premature enthusiasm. I'm not not in panicked desperation for my Penguins, but I am applying copious amounts of AHL and KHL hockey to my chafed soul. It's something. I have emergency hockey treatments already scheduled over winter break (WBS Penguins vs. Hershey Bears, home and away, back to back days, oh yes). 

But now that I've had a good taste of real minor league sports, living here in Casper and getting kind of attached to the awkward growing period of things like Rookie ball and then the Mountain Collegiate Baseball League (not technically professional minor leagues, but still a developmental league), I'm more than a little in love. I've never been to a CHL game, nor even an ECHL game (because I've spent most of my life in the East) because I've always lived closer to AHL clubs. In this world of hypothetical wishing, I don't know what to expect. I have to admit I filter these things by baseball terminology--it seems the equivalent of AA baseball. I don't know what that looks like in hockey. I can't imagine what it will look like in Casper, with a team that, according to the article, will likely be a transplant from Texas. (I say good. I say, Let us rescue you. There is winter here. This is a place friendly to ice.) One of the teams in that league currently in Texas is unaffiliated, and my completely uneducated gut instinct says that would be the team that moves. The Allen Americans are a Dallas Stars affiliate, but the Fort Worth Brahmas are unattached (unattached officially, it seems, but there are a number of current roster players that have come up through the Sabres system, including Riley Boychuk and Shawn Szydlowski).

Wyoming is all about cattle. Come to us, Brahmas. (Or, if I am wrong, I'm cool with the Allen Americans. People wave flags here really well.)

(Also, Mario, maybe the Penguins would like a CHL affiliate, since we're sharing Wheeling with the Canadiens?)

Hockey-related talk this fall has been an exercise in not getting my hopes up. As the linked article above explains, it's far from a done deal, too. Details are incredibly sketchy, vague, fraught. What that should mean is that it's easy to push off to the side for a while. I'll learn the decision when everyone else does (and if it's going to happen, the decision will come soon, it seems, unlike in the actual NHL where nothing is happening soon). 

But all this has done is give me framework in which my imagination is already hiring a Zamboni driver. I'm already watching next year's draft, watching to see who might end up here. I don't need much on which to build wild flights of fancy, particularly not with hockey (particularly not with anything--don't let me fool you into thinking I have only a few categories of imaginative excess). 

I'm hanging my hat and my heart on this. 

Forth Worth and Allen, two of the possible hypothetical future Casper teams, are in a shootout right now, actually. 3-3 as of 9:20, MST, on 10/26. Allen wins, 4-3, on a goal by D-man Brett Skinner, a 2002 draft pick by the Canucks. He's got a bit of a journeyman's career, having started as a pro in 2005 and, after a bit of shuttling about that did include some games with the Islanders, having played for Amur Khabarovsk in 2010-2011. 

Now that I'm waist-deep in trying to wade the KHL waters (complicated most by time zones, actually, because it's hard to follow games when my students are shuffling yawning into their first class of the day), and I now think I get the enormity (and isolation and what must be a constant feeling of jetlag) of playing in Khabarovsk, I want that guy in my city, playing hockey. 

That's not even likely. Skinner's on a one-year deal with Allen, and if this season goes well for him, his goal is not going to be staying in the CHL. That isn't how the system works. The system works by moving up, moving on, and any (remember: hypothetical still, Holly) hockey that would take place in Casper wouldn't happen until 2013. 

So the right thing to do is to say, no, Brett Skinner, I don't want to see you here next year. Based on exactly six minutes of watching a text box update with the successes and failures of the shootout, I want you to have a good season. Brett Skinner, defenseman with a solid shot, I want you somewhere better next season. And then I want to watch the player who takes your place, and hope I don't see him the year after that, either.

Reset

Tara Mae Mulroy, a former editor for The Pinch, blogged the creation of a poem one recent morning, and also invoked the issue of scheduling writing, the problem of finding a suitable block of enough quiet to compose. There's little I love more than the process conversation, and the idea of process, specifically the cultivation of writing habits (and others), has been at the forefront of my mind all summer.

For the first time, I feel like I actually got there, wherein "there" is some basic state of satisfaction with what I'm doing with my brain and my body. I've written about my writing process before, at least in part, and that isn't really the heart of this entry. This is mostly about un-fargling my fargle-bargling tendency to do things that I know don't work for me and that result in deep wells of startlingly boring malaise [1].

This past winter was all about becoming really, really attuned to what doesn't work, moreso than usual. At the end of last summer, I burned out on yet another novel, one I'd been working on (ish) for three years. That brings the count to two 300-page unfinished manuscripts and a completed novel draft that could use a good beating revision that are in a drawer and are staying there for the foreseeable future. (I hope these all count toward the requisite failed novel count that every novelist I know racked up before The One That Worked.) There was the semester, too, and grading and the same sad violin I keep playing for myself. That song remains the same.

One thing from autumn that did work pretty well, though, and that was that I joined a CrossFit gym. Yeah, I know. I barely believe it, either. It was actually a lot of fun, in that way that it was fun to go to practice for high school sports: friendly competition and shared misery. Apparently, I sincerely enjoy those things. The bigger deal is that, for about five months, I was in the best shape I've been in since high school. And despite experiencing Jell-O leg syndrome every other day and learning a vicious hatred of overhead squats that I am still not over, I felt completely jazzed. It was also one thing, at the end of three days a week, I could say I had done. For once, I paid attention to that feeling: that was a good thing.

Then the gym moved and things got wonky and that was that. Cue February and March: Nemeses. There's nothing dramatic to relay, just high-functioning flatlining. The work associated with my job got done, I didn't hoard cats or half-empty pizza boxes, I only resorted to wearing sports jerseys instead of "teaching clothes" once a week or so. Still no writing, and I started sleeping up until the point that I had to leave for work, and there was nothing after that. I taught at eight a.m., but sleeping until almost seven is not something that works for me. That has been true since I was twenty-one. After having been in the habit of working out and then abruptly not being in the habit, the dearth of energy--coupled with the internal litany of failure: silence, sedation--became the paralytic that so many of us know so well. The longer I went without doing any of the things I knew worked well for me (writing, eating/sleeping properly, doing something useful with my body),  the harder, of course, it was to start back up with any of them. The task becomes monumental.

What I did have, though, and this isn't to be underestimated, was the NHL season. It sounds frivolous, I know, but it made some serious differences. On one hand, it was something to look forward to, something to get excited about (which is important in that long dead space where baseball had been). It was another community for me, too, centered mostly on Twitter--not that I interact with it a great deal, but it lead to discovering a lot of great hockey blogs and their authors, the You Can Play Project, and a lot of fantastic information about teams and players. For a collector of trivia like myself, for someone who loves and lives for the internal narratives (real or imagined), the whole social media aspect of sports fandom is a dragon's hoard.

Where there is engagement, there is communication, too. As winter trudged on, I wasn't writing, but I was trying to convey some sense of what I felt, that energy, to people who didn't get it at all. When that didn't work (and apologies to the colleagues and family members who are completely sick of me talking about the Penguins), the words turned inwards. That wasn't new. I'd been monologuing to myself, in all of the wrong ways, since January. But this time, the narrative was different. It wasn't my narrative. It was the story of everything else, at least the hockey-centric version. By the time it all built up around the end of March--the playoff race heating up--it all slipped sideways, into fiction. That's where I live. It was good to be back, though it was, at first, hard to recognize the place.

This project has done a lot of things it wasn't supposed to do. It started in short stories. That's extraordinarily rare for me. This project actually became the glue for the first batch of short stories I can think of as a real collection, one I actually sent out into the world as a collection[2]. Then it became the kind of project I dream about: the kind that won't let me alone. It has changed its trajectory in some unexpected ways, too, and has gone on longer than anticipated (no one is surprised), but it also muscled everything else into place.

At roughly the same time the writing came back--No, stop, I am lying. It didn't go anywhere. It never goes anywhere. I just fail to pick it up, I put my head in the sand, I close the door tighter, all out of sense, all out of reason. I have learned that much: I don't suffer from writer's block. I am never at a loss for things to write. When I don't write, I am choosing not to. To know that I have chosen that--that I have also then elected to feel like hell for weeks and months--is a hard thing to know. But this series of posts is about loss and ending and I acknowledge the time that I lost and now I say I am ending that.

Reset.

At roughly the same time I chose to write again, my desire to do things again picked up. My beloved garage gym remains a thing that probably won't work for me again (timing, now, most particularly), but I've joined another. I work out by myself, or at least it seems so from the outside. But I have a head full of company, all of these characters living and working and yes, also working out, and everything is connected and the (completely invented) people I am writing about critique my music as I get back to the good place on the pull-up bar. I've found out that I can--if necessary--write notes while running at a fair clip on the treadmill. I've also found out that losing my balance and somehow managing to drag my shin across the spinning treadmill belt results in a really spectacular brushburn. These last two things, of course, are totally unrelated.

In the months of April and May, I baked my own bread. Throughout the summer, I took an active interest in making sure the food I was eating was actually food. I've never been a fast-food aficionado, but I would happily eat breakfast cereal and delivery pizza for the rest of my life. That leads to a lot of two p.m. face-plants for me. Throughout the summer, I never quite made it back to my five a.m. wake-up, but I managed six or six-thirty consistently. I had two thousand words by nine, most days. Many days, I kept going. In the afternoon, gym. I kept that. For most of three months, excepting the Montreal trip and a weekend with friends, I managed to do the things that keep me whole (and the two trips had, of course, other ways of doing that, including reminding me of the real, actual human beings I know and that I like them and enjoy leaving my house sometimes).

It is a really short list of things:

• wake up early, no matter what
• write, goddammit
• eat food with food in it
• make the body do something

It shouldn't be a hard list to manage. The last two of those points seem to be universally recommended and endorsed. Still, I have my share of anxiety about it--because they're so simple, they're easy to push away. They don't feel important because they are basic, and they certainly don't sound important to many other people. And I have a job. I am blessed with a full-time teaching job, and I am grateful to have it. I love what I do. I also know, though, that my brain is wired to put the needs of the many (my five classes of students) before the needs of the few (me). I have classes every day of the week, office hours every day, too. When the system breaks down, it breaks down here.

What I managed this week--in the three days my college has held classes and last week when the days were full of administrative and committee duties in preparation for the semester--was to keep those four points. Since classes started, I've managed the five o'clock wake-up. I've unraveled big problems with the book. I'm not making the big two- and three-thousand-word leaps anymore, but the progress is steady. The progress has to tread more carefully because now we have to know where we are going. We tread more carefully, this progress and I. 

Three days is, of course, absolutely nothing. These are three days when I have nothing to grade, three days when my students are still in their late-summer bloom, deciding, too, that this semester will be different. 

But these three days have been the reminder of what each day could be like. That seems a foolish thing to lose.

[1] The fargle-bargling comes from Zoo With Roy, my favorite Phillies blog.

[2] Congratulations to Lee Upton, winner of the BOA Editions' 2nd annual short fiction prize!