Take a Shot in the Mouth

I've always played team sports. Hockey, baseball, soccer (as a goalie, for one game, until I picked the ball up at half court. You can't use your hands outside of the goalkeeper area). Team sports are still a performative act for the individual player, but you have a group of fellow comrades that provide you with fist bumps and warm cheers to help you out of these moments of choking. Here’s a moment: I once slashed a player during a 5 on 3 power play, and the coach just ripped into me during the intermission. He threw a bowling pin across the room. I didn't even take off my helmet. I felt such intense shame and disappointment, not only for myself, but for my teammates. I let the guys down. When we were ready to get back on the ice, the guys gave me these small words of encouragement, "Come on, bud. Don't worry about it." I was benched for the rest of the game. But knowing the fellas were there to fully share the experience, no matter how devastating or ecstatic, no matter if we won or lost, I learned the importance of connections. I am not alone. I learned this.

We have the furious work done alone, in the gym, in the kitchen to maximize the effects of the gym (Seth, the exactitude of my diet would make you proud, although the taste of the food would horrify you. Tuna and iceberg lettuce blended into a muddy pap.) You can feel your skating stride lengthening (stretching regiment) and your foot work exploding (plyometrics and weight training), and you can see this on the ice, but there's also a higher level development of mind and manners. During one of my first college games, while I was walking back to the locker room, a fan threw a hot dog wrapper at me, and I swung my stick at the bleachers, trying to disembowel him. I looked like an idiot and embarrassed my team. Having to rely on others, you understand that they also rely on you, and so you can't do things like swing your stick at fans. These correctives, as silly as they seem, helped me become a better teammate.

In that sense, I feel like writing exists somewhere in this continuum of public and private acts. I mean, like Josh said in his class, we write for someone, even if that someone is an amalgam figure. Like, right now, I'm writing to a three headed dragon who is informing the content of this very post. If you write to yourself, who the hell is listening? Well, that's tautological sloppiness, but I guess I'm trying to say that I've learned how the lessons in team sports has transferred into my writing. How much of writing is really done alone? How much of sport is performed alone? This can get messy, depending on the sport (golf vs basketball: solitary, collaborative), and the type of writing, but I'll just end it by saying that this blog, as well as the talks, walks, dances, car rides, drunken meanderings near the hog pens, have changed the way I perceive my life, which translates into richer writing. By listening, and participating in these bad-ass talks, I move closer to what Auden called "the authenticity of being," a noble, life long goal of becoming, a process that is deathly essential in my writing. So keep feeding me, suckas.