The Sun Also Rises

Dear America,

Greetings from Lake Sircoe, Canada.  I wish you could see this place.  I just came down from the top of a lighthouse where I watched a pink and orange sunset over the water.  A couple white gulls lazed around in the air and there was a red sailboat rocking way off in the horizon.  It was the most perfect event I’ve ever witnessed, and it was the ideal way to end the day that I’d spent at the end of a wooden dock reading Hemingway and drinking gin and sodas.  I finished half of The Sun Also Rises today, and even more of a bottle of gin.  Then I sauntered down the island and up the stairs to the lighthouse tower.  Truly stunning.

I thought about you today.  We had a great time together last month didn’t we?   I kept wishing you could be here today.  I’m probably just being nostalgic for a you that never really existed though.  You were always too busy to just sit and watch the sun set.  Does idling an entire day away listening to water lap at a dock sound good to you?  How about sluggishly thumbing through a Hemingway book called The Sun Also Rises with a sweating glass of gin and soda?  I have a feeling it all sounds too boring.  Too lackluster.

You always liked things faster paced.  If anything it always felt like I was sprinting just to keep up with your walk.  Of course we argued this issue into the ground and I’m not telling you anything you don’t know; it’s just that I had almost forgotten that about you until we spent last month together and then it hit me like a brick, oh yeah, I remember this – you are always in a hurry.

You were always on to the next thing before you finished the first.   You wrapped the next bite of spaghetti around your fork before you had even swallowed the one you were on.  You marked up tomorrow’s square in the daily planner while the sun was still up and leaving you plenty of good today to work with.   You hadn’t figured out how to use the apps on your iPhone 4 and already talked tirelessly about the iPhone 5.  You were always on to the next thing.  You were looking for the next breakthrough band, the next film, the next everything.  You were never happy with what you had.  You needed novelty and newness and next, next, next.

There I go again.  We’ve gone round and round about this and we never come to a solution.  I don’t know why I feel compelled to bring it up.  It is just that we spent 27 years together and some of your qualities rubbed off on me.  They say couples tend to start looking and acting like each other, and sure enough.  Even now I often find myself scarfing down a meal when I have plenty of time to actually sit and taste it.  I’ll find myself carrying on about the next place I’m going to visit or the next device or album I plan to purchase when really I should be thinking about where I am and what I have right now.  You rubbed off on me during those years.

I’m not saying this to make you feel bad, though.  That is just who you are.  And this is what I’ve learned about relationships: The quality you hate most about someone is usually tightly knotted to the quality you love most.  If you do away with the thing that grates on you the most, you’ll also be killing the thing you love the most.

The thing about spending a week isolated on this cottage on an island, the thing I hate most about it, is that one cannot simply get supplies when they are needed.  We took a ferry ride out to the island, and we loaded down the ferry with what we hoped would be enough supplies for the week, but it wasn’t.   Leah ran out of her cigarettes already, and she’s been pretty cranky about it.  She can’t just run to the store and get more, so we just have to deal with the irritability.

I wonder if maybe someone shouldn’t build some kind of bridge out to the island so that vacationers wouldn’t have to wait on a ferry to the mainland every time they ran out of toilet paper or needed to get ice or smokes, but if a bridge were built the quiet solitude on the island would be sacrificed.  And that’s what I love most about the island.  The worst quality about the island is webbed together with the quality I love most.  If supplies were readily available, the serenity I am experiencing would not be. That lighthouse would have been filled with tourists, and the peaceful sunset I witnessed would have been a guided tour.

And the same thing goes for you, America.  That quality that I hate most about you is inextricably linked to your best quality.  You are always in a hurry.  You are always moving on to the next big thing.  You forget to enjoy the moment.  You always think about what could be instead of what is.  And that drives me crazy.  Maybe it’s what drove me away.  But it also is what makes you great.  I’ll tell you a story.

One time I was with a friend of mine, a Jordanian, on the way to see a movie.  He asked me why you seemed so unhappy, why you can’t seem to just enjoy life.  Why, he asked, does America not relax?  Why does America not take her vacation days?  Life, said my Jordanian friend, is to be enjoyed, not to be rushed though like America does.

I almost agreed with him, but then I had a thought.  Well, I told him, look at this thing you are driving.  If it were not for America's dissatisfaction with conventional travel and her relentless work ethic, the automobile never would have been invented, the assembly lines never assembled.  Then I looked around and saw that all of my friend’s CDs in his car were from American musicians.  How about this music, I asked him, if it were not for America’s relentless pursuit of creativity, you would not have any of this.  Hell, I told him, if it weren’t for America’s work ethic and dedication to craft, the movie theater we are heading towards would have nothing to offer.  And how about that iPhone, I told him as I pointed to the one sitting in his console.  Sure, Steve Jobs and Wozniak were workaholics who never took the time to relax much, but that’s why you can check the movie times on your phone and then pull up a map telling you how to get there.  I thought I was over you, America, and then suddenly I found myself offended that anyone would criticize you.  I found myself coming to your defense.

Have you ever tried to hold a picture right up to your nose and look at it?  It gets all blurry when it is too close to your eyes.  In order to see it clearly, you have to put some distance between you and the picture.  The same is true for relationships.  Sometimes you have to put some distance between you and the other person to see them more clearly. I used to criticize you for your inability to relax.  Your insistence on the next everything made me insane.  But that was when we were too close.  Now that you and I have some distance between us, I can see that the thing I hated most – the thing that drove me away - is also the thing that I love most about you. The fact that you can't relax, can't enjoy what you have, the fact that you need the next and better thing is what makes you awful.  It's also what makes you great.

I’m not saying this because I want us to get back together.  I am not ready for that and it’s not realistic, so don't worry that I'm going to come running back. The sun set on you and me.  Our day dipped down over the horizon over a year ago, and it’s gone.  I think we’re both at peace with that, and who doesn’t feel at peace after a good sunset, especially if you can watch it from the top of an old lighthouse.  Right now I’m really enjoying living at my own pace, as I’m sure you are.  I’ll take all the slowness I can get.  But I wonder if someday, maybe way down the road, we might try to make it work again.  Hemingway may have had a point; the sun has set on us for now, but the sun also rises.

Sincerely,

Adam Showalter

The Railey

The railey, or superman as onlookers have dubbed the wakeboard trick, is a stunt that requires an unusual heap of bravery and lunacy.  The speed and airtime necessary to deliver a railey are such that a wakeboarder must hurl his body skywards at speeds of near fifty miles per hour while he flattens out over the water, all the while extending his arms and legs and holding the rope handle out in front of him.  When the trick is done well, the rider looks like Superman flying proudly through the air and looking down from his midair perch, thus the railey’s supplemental moniker.  It is one of the sport’s most exhilarating tricks to watch, and it inevitably brings those watching to the edges of their vinyl seats where they are rendered breathless for a few captivating seconds while the rider glides magically over the water, weightless and careening through the sky with his board and head on an even plain ten feet above the water.    

But the railey is not without its hazards. While this high-flying feat is without a doubt an enchanting one to watch, it is, for the rider, a trick that requires that he put himself in a most vulnerable position.  If the wakeboarder fails to get his board back under him before he makes contact with the water below, he will do a fifty-mile per hour belly flop with a board attached to his feet.  The feeling is something like being jackknifed from a high dive by a WWF wrestler.  And that is not even the worst-case scenario; if the rider gets the board only partially back under him, the lip of the board can snag on the water and hurl the rider downward in positions even more compromising than a belly flop, and at far greater speeds. 

I spent entire summers trying to learn the railey and during the process bruised my ribcage twice, turned both ankles, knocked my wind out countess times, and very probably sterilized myself.  Once, after a hopelessly botched railey, I hit the water with such tremendous force that when I reemerged to the surface my yellow “Live Strong” bracelet had inexplicably been pushed all the way up my arm between my bicep and armpit.  The bracelet was jammed so tightly up there I could not get it back down.  I wriggled in discomfort watching my arm turn blue from lack of circulation as the boat looped back to pick me up, and to this day I do not understand how it happened.  My friends had to cut the band from my arm with scissors.  Seeing it in such an impossible position was like seeing a tiny black ponytail holder around a woman’s neck and wondering how she managed to slip it over her whole head.  It seemed physically impossible, and it was testament to the reckless speed I had acquired when I struck the water.

Eventually, after a couple summers of routine near-death experiences, I landed my first railey. It was the proudest moment of my life.  The wakeboard came down between my legs and the water just before we collided and instead of being blasted into the water, which has about as much give as cement at fifty miles per hour, I found myself gliding above the water atop my board and riding comfortably out in the flats.  I had stuck the trick that seemed impossible just two short years before.  Unfortunately, one good superman did not mean I had the trick whipped and I was only able to land it on about half my attempts. 

Recently I have become a more reliable executor of the superman.  The last few times I rode my wakeboard in Abu Dhabi I landed massive raileys to enthusiastic cheers from my friends aboard the boat.  Because of the long warm season in the UAE and my ability to board year round, the trick that had eluded me for so long back in America was finally becoming routine. 

Then I came back to the States for a visit, and since my return I’ve been unable to land my superman and stranger yet, unmotivated to really sell out and try.  Maybe it is because the boat I ride behind here in the states is not putting out the same huge wake as the boat I got accustomed to back in the UAE, but I am not convinced that the boat is the culprit.  I think the main reason I have been unable to stick a railey on my liquid hometurf is because I am scared to put my body in such a vulnerable position right now.  I cannot get myself to commit to the trick.

See, a wakeboarder cannot halfass a railey; either he sells out and puts his body in harm’s way (and by doing so puts himself in a position to land the trick) or he goes in timidly and really gets hurt.  To land the trick a rider must commit to putting his body in a compromising position.  To go in hesitantly is to increase the chances of damaging your ribs or getting a yellow bracelet shackled to the summit of your arm.  You need to be moving too fast.  You need to be catapulted into the sky.  To quote a good friend whose wakeboarding motto inspired my blog’s title, You gotta want it. If you don’t want it bad enough, it’s not going to happen.   And right now with only 30 days to spend with my friends and family in America, I simply do not want it bad enough that I am willing to risk a weeklong stint in Cox Hospital.

My inability to execute a railey is not the only bizarre detail I have noticed during my holiday in America, though.  I was closing in on 30 years old when I set out for new horizons, and upon my return I found that most of my friends have slipped into legitimate adulthood during my absence.  I returned home after a year abroad, still happily single and unattached, only to find that most of my friends had become fiancés, husbands, fathers, or some combination of the three.   The same guys, who when I left were finishing their tattoo sleeves and seeing how quickly they could suck a beer out of an oil funnel, have been converted into responsible family men.  

Now it’s not just my mom and aunts who carefully spin every conversation marriage-and-childrenward.  My old friends do the same thing.  Upon my return, I found that the topics of kitchen appliances or painting-the-baby room can be treated with the same passion that used to be reserved for road trips or the hot girl that just moved in to a neighboring apartment.  A conversation that, in its initial stages, pivots around a new favorite craft beer or an up-and-coming band will quickly spiral into one about diaper prices or how the wife wants to build a bigger deck in the back yard.  Scores of my buddies have stopped using the pronoun  “I” altogether; everything is “we really want to do some traveling after graduate school is finished” or “we really wanted to buy a Big Green Egg, but the mortgage payment is so expensive we settled for a new gas grill.”

Most of my friends have slipped into marriage and fatherhood like a kitten into a sock.  They are happier and more comfortable then they could have ever imagined.  Their lives are purring along wonderfully.  I’ve watched them scoop their toddlers off the floor and zoom them above their heads.  They show me baby pictures and kiss their smiling wives on the forehead. They talk about their babies like somehow the little pips have already found cures for cancer or medaled in the Olympics.  They sell me on marriage and fatherhood so hard that I can only assume they are on commission.  Dude, it’s so great to have a life-long teammate and a little human being to love.  You just can’t understand it until you’ve done it.  So what do I have to do to get you into one of these babies today?

But sometimes in the very same breath they’ll tell me about how cumbersome marriage and parenthood can be.  They’ll heave deep sighs about the never-ending responsibilities, the financial issues, the monotony.  They lament the masculine fires that used to burn in their bellies that have been doused in baby piss and put out by daily trips to the store for more Gerber.  They bewail long weekends with her incorrigible mother. 

And then there are the risks, they tell me.  There’s always the chance you could end up hating her after a year or two.  Or she could end up hating you. She might cheat on you, stop cooking, or put on sixty pounds and refuse to change out of your extra large Pink Floyd tee.   Maybe her family will end up being a total wreck and then it will be your responsibility to comfort her through years of therapy and tears.  And that is just the spousal part of the equation. 

What if the perfect little kid you’ve envisioned comes out mentally handicapped, blind, or deformed? What if you lose your child to a car accident and suddenly the most important thing in your life is taken from you and to top it all off your wife catches a Prozac addiction to deal with the pain of losing a child?  The possibilities for tragedy and misfortune, for a family man, are endless.  And it is up to him to stick it out to the end. 

I reckon what these friends chose is essentially the life-path version of the railey.  When you get married and start a family, you put yourself in the most vulnerable position possible for a man.  You give up control of your life.  You put yourself in a compromising situation and, chances are, you are going to get hurt. 

But to achieve the most rewarding experiences in life, you have to put yourself in harm’s way.  As I’ve learned on my wakeboard, there is no way to halfass it and still get those sensations; a man has to approach his familial commitments with reckless devotion.  He has to make himself vulnerable and in doing so, open himself up to all manner of hurt and suffering – or then again he might touch down safely on the other side having felt the greatest sense of accomplishment available. There’s no chance of pulling it off without sustaining an injury or two, but if he manages to land feet-down he’s in for some exhilaration. 

The friends I left behind one year ago are now bracing themselves for both the greatest pains and the greatest rewards life has to offer.  They are vulnerable, moving way too fast, and they are nowhere near safety, but they are gripping that rope handle between their fingers and hoping they will be able to pull off one of the greatest stunts a man can try - the meaningful family life. 

I’m willing to put my body through hell in order to feel myself carve through the air above the water, arms and legs fully extended while I look down from my midair perch.   I spent entire summers dealing with debilitating injuries in order to stick the elusive railey.  I compromised my body and made myself vulnerable every time the boat pulled me out of the water. But that was just my body.

I have serious doubts that I will ever be able to put anything besides my body on the line to get that feeling.  Fearing for my own life is one thing, but taking responsibility for other lives - that is real risk.  It takes a braver man than me to pull it off.  It takes a stoic acceptance of vulnerability.  And to all my friends who have taken on the responsibility of being a husband and bringing children into this world, to all my friends who have made themselves vulnerable and opened themselves up to life’s greatest pains in order to pull off one of life’s greatest stunts - I don't know how you do it.  I think you are supermen. 

An American Slob

Four Years Ago

It was Sunday morning and my arms and legs were slumped about the sofa as I stared at the flat screen TV in my living room.  Under the belly-portion of my wifebeater tank, inches above the mesh shorts I wore to bed every night but never washed, I heard a grumbling from my belly - something about when was I going to learn to eat dinner before I went out for a Saturday night on the suds with my buddies.  It was a message from my slowly-expanding, 25 year old tummy to remind me that it (my stomach) was not solely responsible for my bellyache and that maybe, just maybe, those seven longnecks I guzzled last night on an empty stomach should share some of the responsibility for this fuzzy feeling. 

Football wouldn’t start for another hour and pizza or some fries would have been significant treatment for my particular brand of illness, but darned if I was going to de-starfish my limbs from this sofa to make or order any food myself because why should I have to do anything?! Sure I could have called delivery, but my iPhone was probably somewhere all the way over in my bedroom and it was Sunday and I felt pretty sure the Bible said something about not working today.

To distract myself from the shitstorm of misery life was heaping upon me just then, I reached for the Sunday paper and ink pen on my coffee table.  I reckoned I’d do the Sudoku and then draw a penis or two on otherwise harmless characters in the Sunday Funnies.  This would distract me, I hoped, from the mountain of hunger and discomfort I felt until the Kansas City Chiefs could take the field and divert my attention from my own suffering to theirs.  Feeling uninspired by the boxes inside boxes inside boxes, I skipped the Sudoku and decided I’d just get right down to business donning Doonesbury with a whopper when I realized that the ink pen in my hand, the only one in the house for that matter, was dry.  Oh man are you serious? This can’t be happening.  I lapped away at the ballpoint - futilely hoping that my saliva might restore the Bic back to life.  How could I have only one pen in the house and it didn’t work?    

My belly hurt, there was no football on, and I was hungry.  In spite of it being Sunday there was no sign of manna from heaven and to top it all off my pen was now rebelling.  I knew somewhere in the world someone must be having problems almost as demoralizing as mine but it was hard to imagine who.  In a last ditch effort to salvage a day that seems to be getting away from me already; I pitched the worthless pen at the wall.  Dammit! I told the wall when it rejected my offering.  How can life be so awful even on the weekends?  Somehow I managed to slump even deeper into the sofa. I’d gone through 6 of the 7 steps in the grieving process now, and it was time for step number 7. Acceptance.  I needed to accept the inevitable fact that if I were going to arouse a picture of Doonesbury or get a pizza and avoid starvation, I would have to get off my couch today.

I could have summoned my inner workingman and journeyed to my bedroom in search of clothing alternatives to my current Eminem-inspired ensemble, maybe some jeans and tennis shoes, but that was serious work and I was determined to keep this Sabbath holy, God help me. Bumbling towards my room, I agonized over the mountainous obstacles the modern man must hurdle just to survive in the 21^st century.  Cavemen didn’t have to put on jeans and a tee shirt every time they left the house.  They didn’t have to drive all the way across town every time they wanted a Papa John’s pizza. 

Then I decided Screw It.  I wasn’t going to go change clothes.  I was going-out in exactly the same clothes I had on plus flip flops. The end.  White tanktop, mesh shorts, and floppy sandals.  Why should I have to dress myself up when I was only planning on visiting Walgreens to buy a pen and then Papa Johns to snag a pizza?  It wasn’t a job interview and the only people I’d see were the worthless college dropouts manning the registers. I grabbed my keys. 

I flip-flopped and key-jingled out my front door; angry that I had to leave my house and looking remarkably like the Real Slim Shady in my white tank, musky mesh shorts, and sandals.  None of this struck me as odd at the time because who puts on real clothes just to go out to Walgreens or Papa Johns? 

Well, it turns out everyone else in the world except Americans, really.  But my younger, less traveled self didn’t know that and probably didn’t care.  What I didn’t know at the time was that Americans are the most informally dressed people in the world and that I was one of the sloppiest.  I didn’t know that on every other corner of the globe people refused to leave their homes without doing themselves up a bit first.  And back then it didn’t strike me as odd that me and my countrymates often woke up in our bedtime clothes and went out without changing.  However, that was before my mind had done a little changing of its own. 

Four Years Later

Oh, you’ll see America in a completely different light after being abroad for a year.  Things that used to seem normal will now shock you.  Get ready for Reverse Culture Shock.  Everyone and their gay cousin was going Nostradamus on me predicting how I was going to experience “Reverse Culture Shock” when I got back to America.  When I told people I was heading back stateside for a visit, they started in with their unsolicited prophecies about my trip and how weird everything would be to me. This Reverse Culture Shock concept smacked of a steaming heap of cockamamie, but just the same I told folks "thanks" for their dire warnings and assured them I’d brace myself.  Seriously, though, how much could America possibly change in one year?  Surely not much.  And could I really change so drastically in one year that my old home country would shock me?  No. Way. 

Then I touched down in Dulles airport, Washington DC after a year of traveling abroad and holy fashion-catastrophe, Batman! What had changed, apparently, was my perspective on dressing.  What a disheveled mess the American folks had turned into in my absence.  Either I was experiencing Reverse Culture Shock indeed or a nearby Goodwill store had detonated and left everyone in DC wounded with wildly tasteless and ill-fitting clothing.  I hadn’t even exchanged a fist bump with an American yet and already I felt shocked.  Were Americans always so sloppily dressed or did that all happen while I was away?

Sloppy, unkempt, and without anything even resembling a nod to fashion, grown men gallivanted up and down the airport in gaudy t-shirts that hung limply to their knees or even worse, wrinkled and oversized khakis half hidden by fat bellies that hung loosely over woven leather belts.  I looked down the long terminal and witnessed a live catwalk of anti-models: women slouched into flannel pajama pants and pink baseball caps, men who were either unaware or unashamed of their gangly beards and saggy sweats slunched on top of whatever seating they could find.  Everywhere I turned I saw people who had evidently just now rolled out of bed at, I looked at my watch, 11:00 a.m?!

Apparently nobody had bothered to change clothes during that window of time between their alarms beeping and their rides leaving for the airport.  Were my countrymen and women always so reluctant to change into something more attractive and I just didn’t notice it before, or did the clothes stay the same and my mind changed?  In every other place I’ve visited during the last year, I’ve witnessed people who have accepted the awful but inevitable truth that people will make judgments based on appearances.  United Arab Emirates, Japan, Oman, Qatar, Switzerland, and Holland – everywhere I went people were spruced up, tidy, and dressed well.  In other countries, fashion is something that people have in the same way that Americans have facebook accounts; which is to say you’d be in the minority if you didn’t.

For the rest of the world formality is the norm and for Americans it’s a chore.  Americans skip formality in much the same way that we don’t skip dessert. Foreign men wouldn’t think of leaving home without a collared shirt and if they did wear jeans or a tee out they certainly wouldn’t pair it with flip flops the way I tend to do.  What they would do is press and tailor their jeans and tee with the same precision that I do with my dress clothes and then they'd wax their hair just so, shine up some dress shoes, and stroll out in style.  No mesh shorts.  No wifebeater tanks.  Maybe people wear those things when they’re on their own couches at home, but they’d never leave the house without slicking up first. 

And the fairer sex abroad do up their looks just as vigilantly.  A Japanese, European, or Arab woman, if she were being abducted from her home in the middle of the night, would grab a change of clothes as her abductor yanked her out of her bedroom.  Even if a foreign lady is ugly, she typically gives off the impression that she's hot with her clothes and the way she carries herself.  I hadn’t seen a single pair of scrubs or PJs on a lady for over a year.  In Dulles airport, my initial step off the plane revealed at least three American women wearing pajama bottoms and pony tails tucked into ball caps.  One lady who had evidently just swallowed a Boeing 747 rumbled slowly towards a Starbucks in pink cutoff sweatpants and mustard stained shirt.  I wondered if perhaps a jumbo jet wasn’t such a bad snack when doused in French’s, and then I wondered how I hadn’t noticed this or cared about all this physical appearance business before.

What I saw in that terminal in DC shocked me.  It was the Reverse Culture Shock I’d been warned of;   my fellow Americans looked terrible.  While I hadn’t noticed the change taking place in me, apparently my standards for how-someone-should-look-like-in-public had changed.  I’d come to expect people to look fashionable and well kept, even if they were poor or ugly.  Women were meant to look snappy and beautiful; men were meant to look fashionable and respectable.  At Dulles airport in DC, people looked so ugly that I wondered if even the tide would bother to take them out.

I kept walking the direction of the baggage claim thinking about how disgusting and sloppy Americans looked while marveling at the parade of people who reinforced this observation when I stopped to order a coffee.  When the barista put the coffee on the counter I reached towards my back pocket for my wallet and was surprised to find that my pants did not have a back pocket and that my wallet was actually in my carry-on bag.  Surprisingly, I found that my pants did not have a pocket on them because they were not pants at all but instead mesh shorts, slightly dirty and grossly oversized.  Astonished and suddenly aware of my own appearance, I looked below my hairy knees and there, on American soil for the first time in over a year, were my feet – slipped comfortably into a pair of worn out flip flops. 

I snatched up my coffee and quickly slipped into the bathroom, suddenly humiliated.  Gazing at the reflection on the airport mirror, I saw a guy in dirty mesh shorts and flip flops.  A guy whose shaggy blonde hair had not been cut in three months and whose beard had not been trimmed in weeks.  A guy who looked sloppy and unfashionable.  A guy who looked pretty much the same as he did waiting on his couch for the Kansas City Chiefs game to start four years ago.  What I saw was a guy who had come to expect others to look snazzy and fashionable but who had neglected to turn those standards on himself.  A guy whose mind had changed, but whose clothes had not.  An American slob.