This post assumes the reader has at least a fundamental understanding of the videogame Tetris.Thanks for all the kind words yesterday. Y'all made me cry. Pops is improving. He is in rehab right now and he looks a million times better. If he gets out I resolve to spend more time with him, and I suggest you all do the same with the people you care about.
During the summer of 1991, I fucked up my knee playing basketball. It was pretty bad -- we were playing on a glorious 9 foot dunk hoop and there was a stray puddle. In an an uncharacteristic display of hustle, I went sprinting after a loose ball, slid in the puddle, and my knee got hyperextended. I don't recall the specific part of the knee that got fucked up, but I was on crutches and I had to go to physical therapy.
Because I was immobilized, my already lukewarm sense of ambition was dulled down to exactly zero. I decided that I could do without a summer job that year. Best decision I ever made. I hung out, I read, I listened to music, and more than anything I played Nintendo. I am dating myself here, but this was the original NES and Tetris was my favorite game. (Later, my roommate Scott got SuperNintendo and SuperMario World became the 9th planet in my galaxy).
Anyway, the thing about Tetris was, as much as I loved to play -- I sucked. I had no strategy. I just shoved the blocks wherever I could find a stray hole. The result was some of the ugliest, most unstable looking digital architecture you can imagine. You know when you are waiting on a Tetris, and you've built up four good size walls, and you just need that long straight piece to fall, but instead you keep getting regular pieces, and you try to sort them out appropriately, but eventually you drop a piece into the wrong place and your structure is fucked? That was me, every time.
And the structure would just get higher and higher, to the point where it was clear I was about to lose, and the temptation was just to hit the reset button because the game was screwed. But faced with that situation, I never hit the reset button. I continued battling, dropping stray blocks anywhere I could, even though the amount of time I had between moves was next to nil. Occasionally, I would pull off like three brilliant moves in a row and the structure would drop a couple of levels, not enough to actually give me hope that I could win, just enough to give me a little breathing room for a second before my inevitable demise.
Sometimes when I would execute these lightning-quick, ultimately pointless maneuvers, my friend Max from Brooklyn would be watching me play. And he'd get fired up. Maybe it was the sensation of watching a beaten animal reach inside and fight off death for a few moments, like when a rabbit breaks free from a wolf's mouth, kicks him in the teeth and stuns him for a moment before sprinting off on bloody limbs through the snow, leaving a trail. The will to survive, to not simply accept a bum hand, is inspiring.
At times like this, Max would yell out to the room, kinda sarcastically but also with a sense of real wonder, "Look guys! Hans is fighting back!" His excitement seemed to be based mostly on the fact that I was even trying when the game was all but over. And occasionally another roommate would saunter over, take a look at the screen and see me manically shifting blocks around, staving off death for a few seconds more. And they would at least pretend to share the excitement.
"Look at Hans. He's fighting back!" Max would say again.
And I'd fight on, and I'd lose. Like 45 seconds later. But those 45 seconds meant something. And they still do.
And I guess I got this spirit from my dad...it's not quite a fighting spirit, it's not an aggressive spirit. It's about the ability to make the best of crappy situations, but somehow it's also about allowing yourself to get into those situations in the first place. About taking on way too much bullshit and not questioning it until it's all around you. Like life isn't entertaining enough until you fuck it up a little and see what happens. I can't express it well. It's a combination of things.
Seeing my dad respond to this latest brush with death reminds me once again how tough he is. You know you can't win, death is holding a royal flush, but you keep throwing chips into the pot anyway.
And he never ever complains. There was a massive hospital fuckup the other day -- the long and short of it is that he drank a gallon of stuff that makes you shit like crazy, and he shit like crazy all night long and suffered tremendously, in preparation for a test. Then the next day it turns out he wasn't ever scheduled to have that test. Somebody goofed. And he was pissed, really pissed -- but he didn't go crazy on anyone or pout. The dude just has a winning attitude.
It also makes me think about my current situation at work, the hours, the way I never say no to an assignment, even as it drives me to the brink of collapse. How I'm always feeling just shy of overwhelmed.
Maybe I can learn from it. Almost overwhelmed is no way to go through life.
This post makes no sense, but it gives me an opportunity to relate another story from pops (possibly an oldie).
About 40 years ago, or 30, or something, my dad was stumbling home from The Bar. (In his version of the story, he just says he was "coming home late at night," I've inferred the rest.) A dude came up to him and demanded his wallet. A mugger, you might say. So my dad pulled out his wallet and said, "Here you go," or some such cleverness, and chucked the wallet into the street. The mugger was distracted and took his eye off my pop for a minute. At this moment, pops sprung into action, taking a wild swing at the guy and connecting with a solid blow to the jaw.
The mugger, barely fazed, strolled into the street, grabbed the wallet and walked away. My dad went to the hospital where it was determined he had broken his wrist. That wrist continues to bother him to this day.
There's a lesson here. Twenty GP's to whoever can help me out by crystallizing it best.
cW gets the points for "Debris" and if ever there was a song to add to your iTunes, that's the one. If you've ever lost anything or parted ways with anyone or any of that shit, you crank that one up on your walk over to Starbucks with your hands in your pockets and you just might shed a tear. I would post an empeetrey but I think all I have is my iTunes version, which is non-shareable.
Also, points have been awarded for the new slogan contest. Nice work all.
