Dear Anon,
It's friday night and I wanted to ask you for some advice. You see, I still have a deep hankering for this girl I used to know, and it's powerful strong, too strong to shake, and I think she still nurtures a little speck of something for me too, but she doesn't trust me and every time I try to show her how I feel I fuck up terrible bad and now that she doesn't want me anymore my neurochemistry is all fucked up and I can't get my shit together. Do you have any idea how I could prove to her that I'm not a bad man, that I could be a good man and husband and father? I think she doesn't think I'm capable of being a committed father and husband. How can I prove to her otherwise? She told me I could wait for her, that someday she might call me, and she almost did, but I messed that up too. I say "too" because I mess up whenever something important is on the line. I just want to prove to her that I'm for real when I say I love her and miss her.
Until then,
The Wombury
Friday, April 11, 2008
Wednesday, April 9, 2008
Why do I love Failure so Much?
Hello Dear Readers,
You know what's funny? Right now, as the womby womb types this, Ed, the 30 year old live-in boyfriend, is in the living room watching old-school, classic rap videos on VH1, and I'm in here,in the Womby Cave, less than five feet away from him in real space (but worlds away when it comes to our taste in argyle socks), listening to Waylon Jennings singing, "Are You Sure Hank Done it This Way?" We're like a buddy-cop movie but more immobile. Pretty soon, he'll be teaching me cuss words native to the gutter language of his mother tongue, and how to cook PLATANOS and I'll be teaching him how to set up an ING account.
Question: why do I love failure so much?
No shitting you, dear readers, but the Womby believes it's a SIN to succeed in any capacity. Why? Is this Freudian? Is this Catholic Repression?
The Wombury is a competitive prick. He likes to win stuff. Name the stuff, and he likes to win it. Trivial Pursuit, philosophical arguments, one-on-one basketball, the affection of a pretty lass-I assure you the wombury wants to win. But when it comes to shit that matters, he's singing a different cantina.
He can't live among the stately brownstones of Brooklyn or the tree-line boulevards of Montclair-NO! he's got to live in the burnt-out quasi-"slums" of the bronx; he can't teach in a prestigious private school on the Upper East Side, NO! he's got to work with a "low-performing" population. He can't date brilliant beautiful women with whom he's got shit in common, NO! he's got to fall in love with "mean girls." And you know what? I want to live in nice neighborhoods, make lots of money, acquire status, and date well-adjusted, beautiful women. But I'm always getting in my own way. Sabotaging myself. Why? Fear? Guilt?
I blame this on Jesus. That's right.
"This is all prologue". That's what the Wombury tells himself to mitigate the pain of constant failure. "Someday it will all click into place. The writing, the teaching, the wife, the acceptance of God's mysteries."
But it won't, will it? Maybe the Wombury doesn't believe in the concept of failure.
Take his track team. Some people think coaching a team 8 members short of the required 12, would be a black mark against him. Some people might think it's "sad" to attend only 1/5 of the required meets. Like we did today. But not the wombury. To him, it's "cool". It's "cool" that the Wombury escorted the sole remaining girl on this team to her first meet this season. It's cool that there were at least a dozen schools at the meet, held in Van Cortland Park (the Central Park of the Bronx), which necessitated a subway, a bus transfer and gypsy cab to arrive for the 4:15 starting time, and each of the dozen schools carried a roster of about a dozen girls. Not Bronx Letters. Bronx Letters boasts a 1 to 1 coach to athlete ratio. They probably thought Diana was an Olympic hopeful.
And these were iconic NYC schools: Bronx Science, Stuyvesant, Clinton, Truman. And Bronx Letters. And you know the Wombury loved it. Just Diana and the Womby womb. Two peas in a pod. Most teams run warm-up laps around the track in clusters of 5 or 6, every runner sporting slick warm-up duds.
And then there you saw Diana and me running as a twosome, and they erased from their minds any suspicion she was a future Olympian. Picture Diana, wheezy after 35 feet, Diana wearing the Bronx letters cotton jogging suit and her "coach", the Wombury! wearing Levis, a Ravens t-shirt, and his hideous gray chuck taylors that his mom bought for him. Big, ugly, paunchy, 30 year-old hipster fuck-up in Malcolm X glasses and a Mr. Clean chrome dome, jogging with Diana, thinking all sorts of things like, "How did this happen? Do people think I'm a loser? Why do the other teams' warm-up drills seem so much more sophisticated than ours? How long can I look at these teenage girls in their track shorts before I'm arrested?" And finally, "I wonder if any other coach is going to write about this?"
And then Diana finished last in her heat. But I cheered for her. And we rode the Bronx 9 bus and talked about the need for harder practices and exchanged disapproving faces when the old drunk white guy sat next to me, and I thought "what must people think when they see this 15 year old honduran girl and the 30 year-old white guy in the sportcoat talking to her? Would they disapprove?" And then I wondered to myself if I'll ever be an old, white guy drunk in 30 years. Why is failure so cool? Or is being cool a failure?
Until then,
The Wombury
You know what's funny? Right now, as the womby womb types this, Ed, the 30 year old live-in boyfriend, is in the living room watching old-school, classic rap videos on VH1, and I'm in here,in the Womby Cave, less than five feet away from him in real space (but worlds away when it comes to our taste in argyle socks), listening to Waylon Jennings singing, "Are You Sure Hank Done it This Way?" We're like a buddy-cop movie but more immobile. Pretty soon, he'll be teaching me cuss words native to the gutter language of his mother tongue, and how to cook PLATANOS and I'll be teaching him how to set up an ING account.
Question: why do I love failure so much?
No shitting you, dear readers, but the Womby believes it's a SIN to succeed in any capacity. Why? Is this Freudian? Is this Catholic Repression?
The Wombury is a competitive prick. He likes to win stuff. Name the stuff, and he likes to win it. Trivial Pursuit, philosophical arguments, one-on-one basketball, the affection of a pretty lass-I assure you the wombury wants to win. But when it comes to shit that matters, he's singing a different cantina.
He can't live among the stately brownstones of Brooklyn or the tree-line boulevards of Montclair-NO! he's got to live in the burnt-out quasi-"slums" of the bronx; he can't teach in a prestigious private school on the Upper East Side, NO! he's got to work with a "low-performing" population. He can't date brilliant beautiful women with whom he's got shit in common, NO! he's got to fall in love with "mean girls." And you know what? I want to live in nice neighborhoods, make lots of money, acquire status, and date well-adjusted, beautiful women. But I'm always getting in my own way. Sabotaging myself. Why? Fear? Guilt?
I blame this on Jesus. That's right.
"This is all prologue". That's what the Wombury tells himself to mitigate the pain of constant failure. "Someday it will all click into place. The writing, the teaching, the wife, the acceptance of God's mysteries."
But it won't, will it? Maybe the Wombury doesn't believe in the concept of failure.
Take his track team. Some people think coaching a team 8 members short of the required 12, would be a black mark against him. Some people might think it's "sad" to attend only 1/5 of the required meets. Like we did today. But not the wombury. To him, it's "cool". It's "cool" that the Wombury escorted the sole remaining girl on this team to her first meet this season. It's cool that there were at least a dozen schools at the meet, held in Van Cortland Park (the Central Park of the Bronx), which necessitated a subway, a bus transfer and gypsy cab to arrive for the 4:15 starting time, and each of the dozen schools carried a roster of about a dozen girls. Not Bronx Letters. Bronx Letters boasts a 1 to 1 coach to athlete ratio. They probably thought Diana was an Olympic hopeful.
And these were iconic NYC schools: Bronx Science, Stuyvesant, Clinton, Truman. And Bronx Letters. And you know the Wombury loved it. Just Diana and the Womby womb. Two peas in a pod. Most teams run warm-up laps around the track in clusters of 5 or 6, every runner sporting slick warm-up duds.
And then there you saw Diana and me running as a twosome, and they erased from their minds any suspicion she was a future Olympian. Picture Diana, wheezy after 35 feet, Diana wearing the Bronx letters cotton jogging suit and her "coach", the Wombury! wearing Levis, a Ravens t-shirt, and his hideous gray chuck taylors that his mom bought for him. Big, ugly, paunchy, 30 year-old hipster fuck-up in Malcolm X glasses and a Mr. Clean chrome dome, jogging with Diana, thinking all sorts of things like, "How did this happen? Do people think I'm a loser? Why do the other teams' warm-up drills seem so much more sophisticated than ours? How long can I look at these teenage girls in their track shorts before I'm arrested?" And finally, "I wonder if any other coach is going to write about this?"
And then Diana finished last in her heat. But I cheered for her. And we rode the Bronx 9 bus and talked about the need for harder practices and exchanged disapproving faces when the old drunk white guy sat next to me, and I thought "what must people think when they see this 15 year old honduran girl and the 30 year-old white guy in the sportcoat talking to her? Would they disapprove?" And then I wondered to myself if I'll ever be an old, white guy drunk in 30 years. Why is failure so cool? Or is being cool a failure?
Until then,
The Wombury
Monday, April 7, 2008
Sacred Trust
Hello Dear Readers,
Just a quick, fairly non-comical observation.
While watching the 1968 classic, "The Lion in Winter," about the struggle for the succession of Henry II of England, the wombury grew curious. One of the beautiful things about watching films on a laptop is the ability to multi-task effortlessly. So the Wombury is "researching" Henry II, Eleanor of Aquitaine, and medieval English kings. It dawns on the wombury that he knows a fair amount about English history, that nation of shopkeepers, but next to nothing about the history of continental Europe. What, the wombury wondered out loud, in earshot of Sasha, the tonkinese cat purring on his shoulder, and the closest thing to his lover, was going on in the land we now call "Poland" in the year 1172 AD? What was going on in "Germany" or "Spain"? This significant gap in knowledge irked the womby womb. A online researching session was in order. books must be skimmed. websites perused.
In the process of perusing the LEO online catalogue search engine of the New York Public I noticed a book called "Sacred Trust". This book analyzes the medieval Roman Catholic church as if it were an economic firm. Brilliant concept. And as a fan historiography, even better.
But my thought for today, my central thought is this. Why don't we analyze economic firms and corporations as if their religious institutions?
Just a thought. And it's an interesting way to view history.
Why don't we look at magazines as pre-digital blogs? Why don't we view libraries as pre-digital information highways, or highways as pre-digital highways? Will we look at shopping centers as pre-digital websites, or girlfriends as pre-digital porn?
Will woman look at men as pre-posthuman sperm donors?
Until then,
The Wombury
Just a quick, fairly non-comical observation.
While watching the 1968 classic, "The Lion in Winter," about the struggle for the succession of Henry II of England, the wombury grew curious. One of the beautiful things about watching films on a laptop is the ability to multi-task effortlessly. So the Wombury is "researching" Henry II, Eleanor of Aquitaine, and medieval English kings. It dawns on the wombury that he knows a fair amount about English history, that nation of shopkeepers, but next to nothing about the history of continental Europe. What, the wombury wondered out loud, in earshot of Sasha, the tonkinese cat purring on his shoulder, and the closest thing to his lover, was going on in the land we now call "Poland" in the year 1172 AD? What was going on in "Germany" or "Spain"? This significant gap in knowledge irked the womby womb. A online researching session was in order. books must be skimmed. websites perused.
In the process of perusing the LEO online catalogue search engine of the New York Public I noticed a book called "Sacred Trust". This book analyzes the medieval Roman Catholic church as if it were an economic firm. Brilliant concept. And as a fan historiography, even better.
But my thought for today, my central thought is this. Why don't we analyze economic firms and corporations as if their religious institutions?
Just a thought. And it's an interesting way to view history.
Why don't we look at magazines as pre-digital blogs? Why don't we view libraries as pre-digital information highways, or highways as pre-digital highways? Will we look at shopping centers as pre-digital websites, or girlfriends as pre-digital porn?
Will woman look at men as pre-posthuman sperm donors?
Until then,
The Wombury
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