A Bit of Everything

This blog will be something of a literary Full Metal Jacket. That sentence doesn't quite make sense, I am aware, so I'll explain. Under normal circumstances, I would alter the opening sentence to make it more digestible or just axe it altogether, but it seems like a perfectly good sentence - whether it makes sense or not - and good sentences are becoming increasingly hard to come by these days. So it remains, though an explanation, especially by this point, is overdue. 

The blog will contain nothing about war and its dehumanized soldiers. If in fact the blog was centered around war and its dehumanized soldiers, the whole Full Metal Jacket thing would have been too obvious. The better way would have been to do as Hemingway did, and make subtle comparisons between dead soldiers and the wasted meat of the stock yards. 

Speaking of Hemingway, I must relate a quick story. I wanted to know where Hemingway is buried (which I have discovered is Ketchum, Idaho). I went to google and typed "Hemingway burail" and hit enter. A simple typo. Google, as it is so prone to do, asked me if I meant to type in something else. I normally take these suggestions well because they route me to what I actually was looking for, or if they don't, they're at least understandable and provide ideas for future searches. But this time, Google brazenly said "Did you mean Hemingway boring?" And so I quietly cursed at my computer, and more specifically at Google, which was asking me if I thought Hemingway was boring simply because I misspelled "burial". No, Google, I don't think Hemingway is boring. As surprising as this may be to you Google, even though I made a simple spelling error, I do have the mental capacity to enjoy books that aren't about horny vampires.  

Anyways. This blog isn't about war, though we've now spent a good paragraph talking about war and an author who wrote about it. I promise you it isn't. 

I deftly employ the Full Metal Jacket comparison because I plan on having a similar sense of structure. It's a bizarre thing to take away from something so visual as a film, let alone to try and mimic: the structure. [I can only think of one other film where I remember how it was told more than I could recall what was told. But I couldn't use that movie because the entire story was told in reverse and that wouldn't work here, or maybe it could work brilliantly but I'm just too busy being bored with Hemingway to figure out a way to do it]. 

In Full Metal Jacket, the first half hour [maybe a bit longer - I can't remember exactly] could almost be a comedy. The early scenes mainly consist of a tough-as-nails Drill Sergeant [fun fact: the actor who plays the Drill Sergeant in the movie served in the marines as an actual Drill Sergeant for years] - and this guy just berates the hell out of a crop of new marine recruits. He's vulgar in the most creative and enjoyable ways. 

Quick example: 

DS = Drill Sergeant

PJ = Private Joker

PS = Private Snowball

DS: Private Joker, do you believe in the Virgin Mary?

PJ: Sir, no sir!

DS: Well, well Private Joker, I don't believe I heard you correctly!

PJ: Sir, the private said "no, sir", sir!

DS: Why you little maggot, you make me want to vomit!

[slaps Private]

DS: You Goddamn communist heathen, you had best sound off that you love the Virgin Mary, or I'm gonna stomp your guts out! Now you DO love the Virgin Mary, don't ya?

PJ:  Sir, NEGATIVE, sir!

DS: Private, are you trying to offend me?

PJ: Sir, NEGATIVE, sir! Sir, the private believes any answer he gives will be wrong and the Senior Drill Instructor will only beat him harder if he reverses himself, SIR!

DS: Who's your squad leader, scumbag?

PJ: Sir, the sqad leader is Private Snowball, sir!

DS: Private Snowball!

PS: Sir, Private Snowball reporting as ordered, sir!

DS: Private Snowball, you're fired. Private Joker's promoted to squad leader. 

PS: Sir, aya-aye, sir!

DS: Disappear, scumbag!

Well, as the boot camp comes to an end, the movie takes an abrupt and dark turn. And then they're off to war and the dark turn becomes even darker, almost horrifying. These once soft recruits are now hardened marines, and war is still war, just with new faces and names that it has claimed or will claim. It almost feels like two separate movies -- the break is that sudden, that clear. And so it will be in this blog. One story that will feel like two, though hopefully much less dark, and as we've now spent far too much time emphasizing, not about war and its dehumanized soldiers. 

That was a hell of a preamble, if I may say so. It has set the table quite nicely for what is to follow. 

Now let us eat. [A hell of a dinner analogy]. 

Being a bartender, like any other form of employment, has things about it that you love and then other aspects that you don't. [That was a hell of a truism, if I may say so]. The long nights can be a bit of a drag, but you get to sleep in [unless you open the bar the next day, in which case you get to sleep for a few hours and then re-fill ice tubs you just emptied a few hours ago]. The money is great, but often you're working so much that you rarely spend any of it on anything besides rent and caffeine. The environment is enjoyably relaxed; it's one of the few jobs where you can tell the customer to "fuck off" while your manager listens and not be disciplined. At it's core what we do is fun, or it can be. 

Like any job, the work comes at a cost. It's difficult to have a social life with non-bartenders, because people with normal jobs are at work when you're sleeping and then they're socializing when you're working. There's the unpredictable income [except the $2.13/hr], the unpredictable schedule [because of games, special events, public holidays], and the unpredictable people who come in to the bar who you make drinks for and whose generosity your income depends on. But at the end of the day, it's the hours that exact the steepest price. There is something taxing about sleeping away the days, unnatural at the very least. Especially when you've been awake at 5 am before, running along Town Lake as the city comes alive with the sun. When you've clipped in at 9 am on a lonely road on the outskirts of Austin and wonder how the hell you'll feel in six hours as you turn the pedals over for the first time. It's in moments like last night, where I look at the clock on my car radio as I'm driving home from work and see "5:12" -- and in that moment, as I look at the glowing numbers, as I get on the highway for the drive home, there's a feeling I can't explain. I should be running, I should be staring at a pool. I should be somewhere on that lunatic fringe. 

INSERT ABRUPT, BUT STILL SOMEWHAT CONNECTED TURN. 

I signed up for Ironman Wisconsin last year. It was going to be the breakout Ironman race for me. 2010 had been a breakthrough year in the short course distances. I'd finished top-5, competed with some guys who usually destroyed me. I was racing and competing with the best non-professionals in Austin and I loved it. But the promising year ended rather poorly with my second Ironman-distance race in Oklahoma City. I hadn't trained properly, and it showed for the first six or so hours of the race. I died in the swim and I faded in the bike. It was a four-loop bike course, and what had started as a five-minute gap between Joe and I on the first lap was well over 30 minutes by the final lap. As I started the run, I found something, and I ran like I've never run before. I was on pace for a 3:40 marathon. By mile 13, I had run my way into third place, still a ways off from Joe in second place. But I was running, smiling, finally. 

And then it fell apart. My left ankle went from a dull pain to a steady ache to a pulsating throb to an unbearable flash. The best I could muster was a limp-walk. It was after I started walking that I saw Dad, who was not doing well. His stomach had betrayed him again leaving his body drained of all the strength that it normally had. I saw him as he sat in the front seat of a golf cart, head wobbling with the bumps of the road, as he was being monitored by the medical staff. I stopped the cart and gave him a hug and asked how he was. Then the cart drove off and I nearly cried. It was one of those feelings you can't explain. I was walking while my Dad was being carted off.

Be an Ironman, I told myself. Do you think he would be walking?... Look at your arm. What do those words mean if you walk right now? Are you a quitter? Come on. Just keep on running. It's that fucking simple... And so I started running for a few hundred yards before I stopped again. I turned around to make sure Dad wasn't watching. 

That race came as close to breaking me as anything ever has. There were so many questions, so many holes that had been exposed. Anyone who knows me is aware that I can be prone to extremes. And so as I looked back on the race, tried to make sense of it all, I had internal dialogues.  

-"If someone had told you that if you walked during the race, they'd shoot Mom, would you have walked?"
No. I would have found a way to keep going.
-"Then why didn't you?"

I couldn't answer that, or at least I didn't want to. The answer lay entwined with words like quitting and compromise. Words that I battled daily to keep out of life. Why would you walk when you could run?

Would it have been tough to keep on running? You better fucking believe it. To this day -- and I've played football with a partially dislocated shoulder, I've broken my wrist, I've been knocked out cold -- that pain in my left ankle is close to the top. But the question still lingers. "Why didn't you?" The answer isn't that I physically couldn't run. We've established that if there was enough on the line, I would have kept on running. Death wasn't imminent. Then why didn't you?  (I found out later that the cause of the pain was severe ligament inflammation and damage, which took physical therapy before I could run pain-free again.)

Sometime after the tough race, after tossing around the questions I didn't want to answer, I signed up for Wisconsin. It was the race where I'd qualify for Hawaii, where I'd cross the line in under 10 hours as my family looked on. Where I wouldn't break. That was the plan. 

Well, Ironman Wisconsin is this Sunday, and I won't be racing, or even be there. My brother, my father, my friend and my brother-in-law (who all signed up the same time as me), they will be there.  They will be Ironmen again Sunday night. And I won't. And so I look at those electric-green numbers on my car clock as they tell me it's early in the morning and I think about what they're doing -- the soon-to-be Ironmen -- and about what I'm doing, what I've done. 

-"Quitter."

I could be out there. I'm just focusing on other things right now. 

-"They don't have other things to focus on?"
Of course they do.

-"You want to "enjoy life" -- that's what you're telling people, right?"

Something like that. 

-"I hope those beers and conversations were worth an Ironman finish."
I'll be back there again.
-"Will you?"
Yeah... I could have done the training, put in the miles.

-"Then why didn't you?"

We are of course prone to be hard on ourselves. And so the selfish part of me thinks of Ironman Wisconsin and I blush, almost ashamed that I was the one who didn't make it to the starting line. That I limped yet again on the big stage of the Ironman. 

But the other part is excited as hell for everyone who will be there, who are only a few hundred hours away from conquering those 140.6 miles. I wish I could be there, standing on a hill, cheering, offering a joke and a high-five. I so badly want to be there to hold bikes while they're having wheels and cassettes put on, to be around the dinner table for the hours and hours of conversations. I wish I could be there for the hug at the finish line. I wish I could hear Lilly as a spectator. 

Instead, I will be following neurotically from a computer and when I can, ducking out of the bar to call Amelia and get updates. I will be hounding everyone to take photos, to write race reports. 

And on Monday morning, as I drive home from a long and busy night of work, my thoughts will be off in Madison, Wisconsin, wondering what the water temperature was like, how the wind was, how smooth the roads were, and what the finish was like.