Stay Positive Sunday - A Day Late And A Buck Short

Hi.  My name is Dan.  And I'm a hipster.  Just wanted to make that clear before we go any further.

Stay Angry Sunday

To say that this was a bad week would be an incredible understatement.  So I'm gonna try to stay positive, but right now I'm pretty god damn pissed.

Why I Lift

I love the gym.  I've been going for over four years now, having picked up the habit in my junior year of college.  At the time, it was a matter of convenience; I've got this membership through my school, and one way or another I'm paying for it - why not use it?  Since graduating, it's become more of a chore, but I'm lucky enough to live right down the street from a fantastic facility, and while my schedule can be demanding, I try to get there at least once a week.

When I first started, I was lost.  I'd gotten rudimentary training from gym class in high school and one (extremely bad) year on the wrestling team, so I at least new basic exercises.  But walking in, seeing all these people that were so comfortable, so at home - it intimidated me.  Being seen as a beginner, or struggling with some simple exercise or ludicrously light weight was simply too much for my fragile self-confidence.   I stuck to the simple stuff: elliptical machines, spin bikes, maybe a mile or two on the treadmill.  I stayed in my comfort zone.

I honestly couldn't tell you what snapped me out of it.  Maybe, after a year of experience, I just wasn't intimidated anymore.  Maybe, as I started working full time, some part of me realized I simply needed to be stronger - in more ways than one.  Maybe I just got sick of the TV they showed in the cardio room.  But a year in, I started lifting.  And I haven't ever looked back.

Weightlifters, in my experience, seem to come from two schools.  There's the bodybuilders, the meatheads, the guys that look pro wrestlers and grunt out sets with more weight than I could ever imagine lifting.  And there's the scientists, with their notebooks, their whey protein, and their copies of Starting Strength.  Obviously, these are stereotypes - everyone has more depth than that, and everyone combines the various attributes in their own unique way.  But these, in my experience are the two fundamental schools of weightlifting.  I belong to neither.  I don't lift to look good, and I don't lift to get strong.  These are happy side effects, but they are not my goal.  I lift for the mindset.  I lift for the mental place the iron takes me to.  For me, lifting is the closest I've ever gotten to meditation.

When I lift, it's simply me, the music, and the weight.  I leave my phone in my locker, I ignore the clocks, and I shut myself off from the world.  I don't have a partner at the gym - intentionally so.  For me, weightlifting could only ever be a solitary experience.  It's the absolute distillation of a struggle, with all the bullshit removed.  You, your goal, and the object preventing you from reaching it.  Everything else is noise, and weightlifting is my mute button.

Part for this, of course, is born from my work.  Without bogging the story down in details - my job is stressful.  Extremely so.  I work 13 hours, and face problems that are often simply unsolvable.  Triage, more than anything else, has become my primary occupation.  This stress wears on you, it eats away at you on the inside.  It becomes a constant pain in your gut that simply never relents, and unless you find a way to combat it, it will consume you.

I fight it with the iron.  I fight it with struggles that I can control, and that I can win.  And I fight it by leaving it behind, if only for an hour, to exist in a world where the only thing that matters is overcoming something that seems impossible.

Staying Positive - 4th of July Edition

“From whence shall we expect the approach of danger? Shall some trans-Atlantic military giant step the earth and crush us at a blow? Never. All the armies of Europe and Asia...could not by force take a drink from the Ohio River or make a track on the Blue Ridge in the trial of a thousand years. No, if destruction be our lot we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of free men we will live forever or die by suicide.”

Ars Longa, Vita Brevis

Art is long, life is short.   Odds are, if you're involved in any job that could be considered 'creative', you've met someone with this, or the original Latin, tattooed on their body¹.  It's the quintessential motto of the modern artist; my life is brief, a momentary flash in a greater universe, but the things I create will have life eternal.  They will stand the test of time, and be my immortality.  And make no mistake, artists seek immortality.  We may prattle on and on about the joy of creation, and the splendor of birthing something that brings joy to others, but at the end of the day we, like every other human being on the planet, are concerned with our legacy.  Simply put - we want to be remembered.  But back to the titular phrase.   You can attack 'Art is long, life is short', and the sentiment behind it, from any number of angles.  But the simplest way?  Well that's just to translate it.

Stay Positive Sunday

Keeping it with the positive jams.

A sommelier can, from a single sip of wine, tell you where the grapes were grown.  Not just a general idea, but often a specific vineyard, and, with some potentially dubious cases, the exact location within that vineyard.  The wine is truly a product of its birthplace, and it carries within itself the qualities of that place, a marker of the place of time from which it sprung.  

In the same way, I think, certain musicians carry markers of where they're from - not necessarily their place of birth, but where the grew up, and where they truly found their home.

Not Saying I've Got A Finished Fantastic Four Script, But....

So there's a new Fantastic Four movie coming our way.  The casting news released a few months ago caused a typhoon of nerd outrage on the internet, with the African American Michael B. Jordan cast as the not-traditionally African American Johnny Storm, a.k.a The Human Torch.  Teeth were gnashed, garments torn, and the online comics community proved, once more, why no one takes it seriously¹ .  All that said, I too was generally disappointed in the casting for the Fantastic Four, though my problem is not that Michael B. Jordan is black.  The problem is he's too damn young.

We're Gonna Start It With A Positive Jam

I'm finding, more and more, that adult life gets rough: it's important to keep in mind the things that make it worthwhile.  The things that bring you joy, peace, or satisfaction.  To do anything else is to descend into cynicism and pessimism, to fall victim to the default setting of work-eat-sleep-repeat.   As the Hold Steady said, it's important to start things with a positive jam.

Off the bat, this isn't a new song by any means.  In fact, it's a decade old at this point, released back when I was a mere Freshman in High School.  And it's a song that would have spoken volumes to insecure little Freshman-me, alive with the glory of punk and teenage rebellion.  But 10 years and several doses of reality later, I can't get this song out of my head.  For starters, it's just plain good: catchy as hell, with a slow build to a final verse that feels triumphant and cathartic.  I've never been a massive Say Anything fan, but "...is a Real Boy" is an absolute classic, one of the hidden gems of the early 2000s, lost among the mess of Fall Out Boy, Good Charlotte, and My Chemical Romance.

But good songs don't necessarily stick with you.  I like to think that things get stuck in your head for a reason greater than chord progressions (though, who knows, maybe I'm looking for meaning in all the wrong places).  But I think what gets me about this song is the simple, emotional honesty of it all.  It's in the first line - "Here I am, laid bare, at the end of my rope".  That kind of honesty is hard to come by in all the posturing of modern music - it's certainly not something that comes naturally to me.  But maybe it's something that should.

It's a punk rock anthem about how he knows that the simple act of writing this song will ruin his chances with Molly, but he goes ahead and does it anyway.  Because what else would he do?  How could he be anything other than himself?