Sunday, June 22, 2008

A pretty mellow day today, mostly attending to various routines. I'm stiff and sore all over today from my extended, all-body workout yesterday, but that's a great feeling I haven't felt for a while. I like exercise in the context of doing something--say, biking to work--but can see that going to the gym will be good training for my body to handle more ambitious tasks in the future. I'm not sure just what those will be at this point, but I think back to mending fences in the setting sun with Ann Marie a few days ago, and I start to get some ideas.

But, stiff muscles or no, it was time to get out of bed and go for a bike & run first thing this morning. (And my legs were sore, after doing leg presses, squats, and hamstring curls at the ARC yesterday.) So I biked out to the MKT trail entrance at Flat Branch, ran my 3.5 or so miles (in which my tired legs fared well, and I was passed by the most outrageously cute little redhead, though my thoughts were more on how I'd like to be out there with Ann Marie), and biked home just in time to meet my folks for breakfast.

After me having taken them on a tour of local, downtown eateries for several consecutive weeks' worth of Sunday breakfasts, it was only fair that they finally turn the table on me and get me back into a generic corporate chain, in this case Bob Evans. Smaller and not as noisy as the factory-like atmosphere of Cracker Barrel, it had few distinctly vegetarian options, but I had a decent omelet with a few vegetables in it.

So, no real complaints, but I was thinking about it this morning, and realized that these corporate places all seem to want to recreate or evoke something from the past, or an idea of something from the past, and don't have any identity of their own. They're all replications of something that doesn't exist.

Nostalgia is really all these places are, and they're little more than collages of random images that have nothing at the center. They're built, decorated, and supplied based on standardized templates. They're the same everywhere you go. And for a lot of people, that's the comfort. Like McDonald's, it's a predictable experience, even if it's an entirely artificial one. Such places are industrial food-producing factories, and the differences between them are little more than veneers.

What feels more "right" about the local places is that they are nothing but themselves, and unique. Ernie's, Broadway Diner, Cafe Berlin, Lucy's--they're not imitating something else, they are what other places imitate. Ernie's & the Broadway Diner really are diners, which have been around for decades, and the history on their walls is their own, actually-lived history, not some framed copy of an old photo or some other antique bought out of a catalog. Sometimes they're rough around the edges, and they don't have the regimented predictability and uniformity of a chain restaurant.

But going there is a genuine experience. That's the difference. They're not fooling you into thinking you're somewhere you're not. Cafe Berlin has local art on the walls, somewhat motley-looking furnishings, very cheap-looking ceiling tiles, and slow service by very local-looking, quirky people. And nothing on the menu is prepared in the way it's prepared in a corporate place. And that weirds some people out, including my parents to an extent. But it's real. And unique. And that feels healthier to me. In those places, nobody and nothing is trying to fake me out.

Local places also represent the fruition of real individuals' ideas. The local places I list above are all the products of local individuals with their own ambitions and visions of what a diner should be. They are living ideas, born, raised, growing, and producing their own fruit. They're creating legacies for those who founded them, and stories for those who visit them. Does anyone really have unique Cracker Barrel or Bob Evans stories? Corporate places are just snap-together models whose workers and managers are drones carrying out the vision of some vague, distant corporate entity. Everything is done by one set of rules. It's all someone else's vision, and by this time a diluted one that belongs to no one but a nameless corporate ring-binder of standards.

So, that was breakfast.

Afterwards, I took my folks over to meet the two huge black dogs I'm watching, and they all liked one another. My dad had some good stories of dog-obedience to tell, as well as a somewhat harrowing (not dog-related) one I'd never heard about a time when he was a child and he and a friend found a dynamite detonating cap. His friend set it off, lost two fingers, and it was only through sheer luck that my dad's eyes were somehow shielded from a blast that send tiny bits of metal into most of the rest of his face. 36 years old, and there's still so much I don't know about my own family.

One other thing my dad said really struck me. I was talking about people I know with student loans, and saying I was glad to not have any of that, and how I've been able to save money, get a pension at my job, etc., but sometimes wonder what my life would be like had I gone to school somewhere more exotic and costly, such as the Chicago Art Institute I was accepted to. And my dad said that if I wanted to go in a different direction and try something different in life now, they'd support me however they could. Here I am, 36, good job, great credit, no debt, and they're offering to help me if I want to change everything. That felt really good, and is already helping nourish the seed I feel in me of expanding the scope of my life. In a small way it's already making me feel that if there's something I wanted, it would be okay. A simple thing, but you wouldn't believe how hard it is for me to accept that idea sometimes.

The afternoon was mostly that maintenance I mentioned earlier. I took the dogs out to the park again, and had a great time with them as always. We run across a few other dogs every time, but they're perfectly well-behaved and never aggressive (even when one dog we met was). One treat I got to see yesterday and today was the dogs taking a dip in the creek. Usually, when we're nearing the end of our park walks, they go tearing off into the woods and emerge a little later soaking wet from the creek. So I decided to try and follow them and see it for myself, catching them in the act before they run back out and come find me. So I scampered up the winding forest path and down the steep slope to the creek, and was met with the sweetest sight of two massive dogs wading, paddling, and splashing around in the water like little kids. Blackie did most of the paddling, being shorter, and Walter loomed over the water, his belly clear of it when he stood at full height. It warmed my heart to see it. Those two make great adopted brothers.

Later in the afternoon, I read a little poetry (bits of Yeats, Frost, and Rilke), and sent a section of a Rilke poem to Ann Marie via text message. Then, after watching half of Italy v. Spain soccer, I headed back over to Access Arts to finish glazing my first five little pieces of pottery. I hope they turn out well; dry glaze is such an ugly, plain, powdery thing that it's hard to imagine them turning into shiny, glassy pieces with rich color. I hope they get fired soon, so I can learn from the experience before glazing my final three pieces. This stage was just experimental, combining a variety of the colors I liked best. While there today, I met a somewhat reserved middle-aged woman named Jacque who was working on some lovely-looking plates on the pottery wheel. She was kind and encouraging when I told her I was just getting started and learning the basics. From what I've seen over the last six weeks here, pottery is something that really captures the imaginations of a lot of people once they get exposed to it. In a world in which we're increasingly expected to just consume what's already been made for us, things like pottery open an immediate door to doing your own making. And the loving energy that people put into the work, in many different forms, is really beautiful to see. There's no pretense here. People of all shapes and sizes--mostly women, but not all--young, old, white-haired, high schoolers, tattooed & pierced, quiet and conservative--all come together with the same light in their eyes to make something real, small, their own.

It gives me hope. And sometimes hope is a painful thing for me to have, because it involves me contemplating the potential for loss, which can make me afraid. In our conversation last night, Ann Marie made a really insightful comment about how she and I respond in crisis moments. She said I tend to respond by trying to minimize change, and I think she's right. For whatever reason, I've had developed in me an instinctive resistance to certain types of change, and the counter-instinct to that has been an unconscious desire to just have everything figured out already. To weigh all my options, make a decision, and then be done with it. That subconscious approach to life is one of the factors that ended my marriage eight years ago; I didn't really know what to do and how to grow once everything was official, and I responded poorly.

Being with Ann Marie has been a real challenge to that suffocating tendency of mine, and frankly, at times it's been really difficult for me. But I keep re-engaging and loving her, because I know that to challenge this aspect of me is right. She's helping me to learn that decisions, commitments are living things, and like any living thing they require tending, feeding, care, nurturing. I've lived a lot of my life as though I have a checklist in hand, going through and figuring out one thing at a time--what job do I want? Check. What car do I want? Check. What bass guitar do I want? Check. What relationship do I want? Check. And so often, those made choices have withered on the vine afterward, as I treat them as finished when they're really only as alive as how they're fed energy in every subsequent moment.

And from pottery to unique diners to frolicking dogs to love to this very blog, the living moment is my goal. If I can ask anything of those I love and the universe, it's to help keep me in these moments.