Hard Times in Ann Arbor

My first experience with the Michigan-Michigan State rivalry was with my childhood best friend, Steve. We met when we were about three years old when we both moved into our brand new neighborhood, and we have been friends ever since. In a world where I know all too well that best friends come and go throughout the years, I feel very lucky to say that we've maintained that friendship through everything -- the awkward adolescent years, the clicky high school years, and the college years. And I know it will stay that way forever. Someday he'll be one of my best men at my wedding.

Steve was raised in a Michigan State household, and thus naturally gravitated towards Spartandom. I was raised in a pro-Wolverine household, and began loving Michigan football well before I even began loving my little brother Patrick (poor Pat was on the receiving end in many bouts of brotherly-fights during our youth; sorry Pat). Whether you hung a maize and blue block M flag or a green and white 'S' flag from your porch was sort of a dividing line in our neighborhood. Throughout our childhood's, our green and blue attire contrasted in the backdrop of whatever our playscape was. I'm not a big believer in destiny, but if there ever was a destined path for the both of us, it was that Steve would wind up in East Lansing and I in Ann Arbor, attending our beloved perspective institutions.

During those childhood years, consisting mostly of the 1990's, Michigan gridiron success overshadowed Sparty most of the time. I remember thinking that Steve must be really devout in wearing that Michigan State jersey when it seemed to be the unpopular school of choice in Michigan during the nineties. Being the Spartan fan in those days was the road less travelled, it seemed to me at least. And it took courage to remain resolute in Sparty-fandom during that stretch of history.

I have even more respect for Steve's resolution in those years, nowadays. After this year's Michigan-Michigan State game, in which my Wolverines were defeated for an unprecedented fourth time in a row, I remember (as I was walking back to Steve's house in East Lansing from the beer store, ironically) feeling for the first time in my life that being the resolute Michigan fan was the tough thing to do. I remember feeling like wearing a Michigan jersey around the state of Michigan required more fortitude than wearing an MSU jersey around. I felt a lot like how Steve must have felt after many of those 1990's or early 2000's games.

Last Saturday night, as me and a group of my Michigan friends gathered around a television set with drinks in our hands, begrudgingly rooting for Wisconsin to prevail over Michigan State, I felt happy for my friend when Michigan State won in the final moments of the game. Everyone deserves an experience like that every once in a while; those unforgettable moments are what makes sports meaningful, after all. But more so than happy I felt jealous. I thought about Steve and the unbelievable four years he's experienced during his time at Michigan State. And I thought about my own four years when I was at Michigan, and the utter sadness I had to deal with when it came to Michigan football. Why did Steve deserve that ultimate college experience with his beloved Spartans, but not me? It's a selfish thought, no doubt, but it's what I felt at the time (before descending into mind-numbing drunkenness shortly thereafter).

A breakdown of our college years (* note: Steve is still in his fifth year, and thus is likely to see a bunch more wins and possibly even a B1G championship this year):

Record:

Steve: 32-14 (likely to be about 38-15)

Me: 28-22 (misleading due to my freshman year 11-2 season)

Record against rivals (much more telling, in my opinion)

Steve (against the block M): 4-0

Me (against OSU and MSU): 1-7 (let me repeat, 1 and fucking 7.... 1 and fucking 7)

Times tried to kill self with alcohol

Steve: not as many as me

Me: More times than necessary

OK, jokes aside, I truly am happy for Steve. Steve's the type of fan that deserves the satisfaction. I know plenty of "Spartan" fans that loved Michigan football for 18 years until that MSU acceptance letter came in the mail and then magically it seemed convenient to become a Spartan fan. Steve isn't that guy. He's one of the fans who deserves what State is getting.

I just wonder how I'm in the group that deserves what Michigan is getting right now. I guess what you have to take from it all -- not only sports, but life in general -- is that the bad times make the good times (when they eventually come around) all that better.

Big Two-Hearted Sandlot

After returning from war, Ernest Hemingway went to the Upper Peninsula to camp and fish for several days in an attempt to heal his physical and emotional scars. It was a special place for him that brought him back to simpler days and made him forget the tragedies that can befall you on this treacherous journey that we call life. I wish I could call up Hemingway's ghost for a good trip up to the Big Two-Hearted River so I could ask him just how he healed those emotional wounds, if he ever did, or how he got over the heartbreaks that are rampant in his books. But since that scenario didn't seem likely (maybe If I had some absinthe), I figured I would settle for a trip to my own special place. For me, that special place is a tiny sandlot baseball field, secretly nestled in the woods of Hines Park and in between bends of the Rouge River.

In my mid-teens my life revolved around that sandlot. The neighborhood guys and I played literally whenever we could -- we sometimes would even wake up at 7 a.m. on a Saturday just to get a game in if someone had obligations that would prevent us from playing later in the day. And we worked tirelessly to upkeep that field, doing everything from mowing it to erecting foul poles to pouring kitty litter in the batter's box when it was soggy from rain. Quite simply, we were in love with the place.

Today I took a walk to the old ballfield. I felt like it was something I needed to do. I felt that if I could just see it again, some of the emptiness that has existed in my soul for the past three months might dissipate. If I could just stand in that old batter's box, maybe I'd be able to feel young and alive again, instead of the desolation that has hung like a cloud over my head for too long now. I knew the sandlot wouldn't disappoint.

It was a beautiful autumn day. The trees in the woods are just changing colors and the seasonal change in the air was palpable. As I walked down memory lane -- the trails we walked hundreds and hundreds of times on the way to the field -- I thought about the people we used to be: young, bright-eyed, naive and innocent kids with the world in front of them. It sounds strange, but it was as if I could almost see the ghosts of us dragging our baseball gloves and bats down the trail to the field, our laughter echoing off the trees. And I thought about the person I've become since I left home and that sandlot. I thought about the people we've all become. I thought about how easy it is to get lost in the world when you leave home, when you're world becomes more than just a sandlot baseball field.

But when I arrived at the field, I didn't think about being lost. I just felt hope again.

Sure, the field is overgrown with tall grass and weeds nowadays; the pitcher's mound is barely even visible through it all. But underneath all the brush, the magic is still there. The magic of a boyhood summer day, baking in the sunlight while rounding the bases. The magic of when a game-winning home run in a friendly match could be the highlight of your whole week. The magic of a grill-cooked hot dog and a soda in between a summer day's doubleheader. The magic of a couple of best friends just having fun.

It felt good to be home again. I just wish I didn't have to leave.

More Than a Game

After the worst summer of my 23 year life, I find myself longing for that first kickoff in Ann Arbor more than ever.

Over the past two and a half years my future started to take shape. I fell in love and found a best friend in the same person. We planned our wedding Up North together. We named my first son. We named our future dog - Bo. We signed a lease to an apartment that we would start the rest of our lives together in. And in a world where 50% of marriages end in divorce, we promised each other time and again that we would defy those numbers. I started to think that the world was a good place, after all.

In a moment, my future crumbled. And I still don't even know why. I just know that it's gone forever. Those 2 and a half years of my life will always just reside in my past as a gigantic lie. And the future that I had planned was just some fantasy land that apparently meant absolutely nothing. Essentially everything that I believed in for the past two and half years, and everything I believed in the future vanished in a moment.

People can't be trusted. The most important people in life have a funny tendency to let you down. That's just the way it is.

There's one thing that means anything to me that still remains, though: Michigan football. Sure, Michigan football has let me down more times than I can count. But upon summer's end, without fail, it's always there waiting for you on that first Saturday in Autumn. Michigan football will never pack up without warning and stop playing, leaving you wondering what the hell happened. Michigan football will be there, good or bad. And it always will. I can count on it to be there through deaths in the family, lost friendships, lost jobs, you name it. And this fall I will be very thankful for that.

People sometimes say sports is just a game. And sometimes that can be true. But this fall, Michigan football will be a hell of a lot more than a game to me. It's that long lost friend that will always be there. It's a crutch to lean on when life is shitty. It's something that I can believe in, when I don't believe in a damn thing in this world anymore.

Life is But a Joke

"Now the question on the table is: how drunk is drunk enough?

First the sadness cells go so you smile real big. And then the quiet cells go so you say everything real loud for no reason at all. That's OK, because the stupid cells go next, and everything you say is real smart.

And finally, come the memory cells.

Those are tough sons of bitches to kill."

-The Legend of Bagger Vance

When Summer Days Were Summer Days

"The happiest day I ever had was any day when I woke in the morning when I was a boy and I did not have to go to school or to work. In the morning I was always hungry when I woke and I could smell the dew in the grass and hear the wind in the high branches of the hemlock trees, if there was a wind, and if there was no wind I could hear the quietness of the forest and the calmness of the lake and I would listen for the noises of the morning. Sometimes the first noise would be a kingfisher flying over the water that was so calm it mirrored his reflection and he made a clattering cry as he flew. Sometimes it would be a squirrel chittering in one of the trees outside the house, his tail jerking each time he made a noise. Often it would be the plover on the hillside. But whenever I woke and heard the first morning noises and felt hungry and knew I would not have to go to school nor have to work, I was happier than I have ever been."

- Ernest Hemingway, Islands in the Stream

What I wouldn't give to be a schoolboy as the last bell of the school year resounds, ringing in the immortality of summertime, again.

A House on State

(The commencement of summer has found me not having to read boatloads of cases every night and thus with some actual free time. I've largely diverted my attention from this blog to a larger work that has been in progress since last summer and hopefully will one day be finished. I thought I'd post the prologue to it here (it was actually originally a post, but grew into much more). If you're interested in more, I'd be happy to get some feedback on the rest of it.)

Prologue

"We went there for everything we needed. We went there when thirsty, of course, and when hungry, and when dead tired. We went there after weddings and funerals, for something to settle our nerves, and always for a shot of courage just before. We went there when we didn't know what we needed, hoping someone might tell us. We went there when looking for love, or sex, or trouble, or for someone who had gone missing, because sooner or later everyone turned up there. Most of all we went there when we needed to be found."

- JR Moehringer, The Tender Bar

In the late winter of those collegiate days we lived in a student house nestled in a traditional pine-soaked Midwestern college town that looked across State Street and towards the stadium in the distance. Tucked in amongst a row of other traditional college houses that sidelined that bustling street, about a mile south of the ivy-covered brick towers of academia, our home did not noticably stand out from the others. Like the other two-stories on that street it bore the scars of decades of wear and and looked like it ws slowly withering with age. Its white walls hid beneath sheets of dirt stains. Dead and overgrown weed branches forked through crevices in the porch steps. The crooked fracture in the upper right window never healed. And shards of broken liquor bottle glass speckled the clumps of dead grass and patches of snow that composed the front lawn.

Sometimes in the wee hours of the morning we heard groups of students, returning home after closing time, walking past under the window on the snow-covered sidewalks. While we sat sipping our drinks we heard their voices, accentuated by liquor consumed at the college pubs down the street, through that big living room window. Now and then the passersby would look up at the letters B-O-X that hung, and had hung, however feebly, from above the front porch of our house for decades. We faintly heard them mutter something about the rumors they had heard about those letters that had come to represent our house.

We embraced the outlandish and sometimes degenerate portrait that those rumors painted. To us they provided proof that we existed as more than just tiny fish in a big sea, as more than just faceless students in overcrowded lecture halls. Each time we heard someone wondering aloud about those letters as they passed by we quietly reveled in the prospect that we had stomped out some sort of footprint, no matter how small, to show for our four years spent on that campus. And though we dared not say as much, we each secretly knew that the reputation that preceeded the B-O-X letters provided a convenient excuse to justify our overindulgent lifestyles. The multitude of various rumors theorizing tall-tales about what the B-O-X signified compelled us to try and live up to the rumors. At least that's what we told ourselves.

In truth, though, those letters were no different than neon lights advertising the local watering hole: The Thirsty Elk or Mitch's Place or The Diamondback Saloon. Of course we would never admit as much, but there was nothing spectacular about the letter on our house; they merely represented what lie inside the house. And indeed it was a bar.

The rooms upstairs where the six of us slept were mere attachments of the bar, but an afterthought of the scene. We spent virtually all of our waking hours on the ground level, the heart of it all. The ground floor was not spacious nor was it pretty. It was really just one large room covered in cracked, dirt-stained white tiles, the kitchen countertop serving as the only divider between the kitchen and living room. The patrons of our bar, consisting of about a dozen of us, flocked to and fro from that countertop religiously, retrieving various assortments of alcohol without pause. Because our bar lacked bartenders and barmaids, the empty bottles never seemed to disappear and the whiskey spills never got wiped up. Yet it seemed some ghostly bartender, straight out of a prohibition era speakeasy, was always at work, as the stock of liquor available for all to drink never seemed to diminish.

On those bitter cold Michigan February nights we hibernated in the living room, the seating area of the bar, sitting on beer-stained couches worn to the bone from a couple generations worth of college students' use. The Northern winter permeated the paper thin walls and provided a constant reminder of the freezing temperatures outdoors. We shivered in our sweaters and sipped our rums and whiskeys and bourbons to warm us. Our arms lifted drinks to and from our lips mechanically. We drank and stared at hours upon hours of whatever happened to be that evening's sporting event glowing from the television set. Sitting and sipping and watching, we felt content. But sometimes if a sip of whiskey hit me the wrong way I looked around the room skeptically. Sometimes I would even get up and stand in front of the mirror and wonder if I myself was content. I wondered if it was truly content that we were feeling or rather if the room had been subsumed in a paralysis-inducing fog, in the way the Joycean drinkers of Dublin unconsciously suffered from. Some nights I concluded the former, some the latter. On the nights I came to the Joycean conclusion, I resolved it by walking to the countertop bar, fixing myself a particularly strong whiskey, taking a mean sip, and waiting for the whiskey to kill the images of Joyce's Dubliner's dancing drunkenly in my mind.

Like any American corner bar, once dusk had fell and the February skies turned black as soot -- which was early on those reluctant winter evenings -- our house emanated a lively mood. As the warm spirits loosened our nerves and as our faces grew rosy from libation, joyful voices began to overcome the droning voices of the broadcasters on the television set. Spring in the step emerged as someone got up from a seat to refill a mug. As the hours grew older the room began to resemble that mythical pub in Ireland: a tiny brick tavern surrounded by green clover fields, packed full of wide-eyed men and women brimming with whiskey and good cheer, the songs of Celtic lore echoing from the tavern through the cobblestone streets.

The mood of the corner bar peaks as dusk falls, but no one seeks the mood of a bar just opened in the morning hours. For better or for worse, though, the mood of our house resonated with bar's at all hours of the day. Staggering down the staircase, dry-mouthed and hungover in the morning, entering the living room felt a lot like walking in on the depressing scene of a lone drunk sitting at the bar at sunrise, desperately slurping down his vodka with a shaky hand. Dozens of empty beer bottles, some marinating with tobacco spit and some with cigarette butts, emitted the gag-inducing stench of used tobacco and stale beer. Beer spills and broken glass shards peppered the tiled flooring, creating a sticky and perilous walking path to the kitchen. Yet the scene impeded us not. We sat out the hangover sitting in our own beer-spills from the previous night, watching sportscenter highlights of the games we had forgotten from the previous night. On the occasional days when the scene was simply too much too grapple with soberly, we embraced the image of the lonesome drunk at the bar at sunrise, refilled our mugs with whatever straggling liquors and sodas remained from the previous evening, and resumed our buzz and our position on the beer-stained couches as if nothing had changed, waiting for the sunlight to disappear once again.

On a campus overflowing with more than 30,000 students, everyone has their niche. Everyone has somewhere to turn to to feel closer to God, truth, peace, or whatever it is that helps them feel relevant. The athletes -- the football player's who are worshipped as gods, to the women's softball team, even to the swimming team -- had the multi-million dollar athletic facilities, the gyms, and the escape offered by the playing field. The asians reserved the mathematics floor of the graduate library and maintained a monopoly on the bubble tea shop on the corner of Main Street. The Silverstein's and Greenberg's occupying the spotless sorority mansions flocked to the Jewish section of fraternity row to drink wine and martinis. The stoner's hid in small corners of the university arboretum, puffing smoke amidst the tree branches and wandering aimlessly down the trails. For better of for worse, our place was the countertop bar at the house where the letters B-O-X hung hung crookedly from above the porch.

Cabin Fever

When I was in high school my greatest fear was growing complacent and settling down without having ever pursued my dreams of taking an adventure on the open American highway. I longed to see everything Jack Kerouac described in On the Road half a century ago: the fresh apple pie at the highway diner at every town in the Heartland, the secluded farm life of the Dakotan and Nebraskan corn fields and plains, the reds and oranges of the Southwestern desert, and foggy California nights looking out at the vast Pacific.

An inevitable part of growing up in American society, though, involves giving up "fantasies" -- as most would certainly describe them -- and embracing the 9 to 5 reality wholeheartedly. Indeed, these dreams or fantasies, whichever they may be, have dwindled in my mind as I've grown older and experienced the real world more and more. Lately, however, the lure of the open road and the prospect of a good old camping trip or road trip has re-emerged with vigor.

Perhaps the allure of adventure has grown in part due to this past year, which has largely been a realization that a career is more something you try not to truly hate than something you try to enjoy. Graduate school stands in stark contrast to college; it functions as much as anything else as a blunt reminder that the easy-going nature of college was but a four-year illusion and that the complacency of the working class world looms a lot closer than you think.

Perhaps its the lingering bitterness I feel towards the decision I made to move to Chicago a year ago, a decision that is becoming apparent to me that can only be described as a mistake as much as I don't want to call it a mistake. And maybe because I feel guilty for making that decision, I feel the need to wash myself of it by hitting the open road or secluding myself in nature for a couple days. A good old fashioned adventure would be a sort of cleansing, if you will. It worked for my Hemingway after all; after serving in World War I Hemingway ventured up north and secluded himself in the Northern Michigan woods to heal both his physical and pyschological scars, (though you can imagine those pyschological wounds never heal) as the short story "Big Two-Hearted River" goes.

Or perhaps the city landscape is just wearing on my country-oritented psyche. Last summer I had a forest at my back doorstep, a labyrinth of trails within a few short steps, and a country road leading to a lake a mere mile or two away. In other words, my own personal heaven. Over the past few months the closest I've been to nature is the artificially planted trees on the city streets and the pages that adorn my Hemingway bookshelf, with the latter being far more comforting.

No matter the reason, though, the dreams of boyhood are alive and well. This time, though, the materialization of an adventure seems more likely, as this time I'm mature enough to know that the Arizona desert and the California vineyards are realistically out of grasp. A camping trip or a week-long winter road trip doing a combination Ontario Hockey League venue tour and tour of the finest dive bars Ontario has to offer, which I've been contemplating as of late, will do just fine.