Fringe

I've been super busy. I took the GRE subject test in English last week, finished up a UCB improv comedy class, dropped lil Winston off at the doggy hotel (that has to be a euphemism for something) and flew out to Utah for extended Thanksgiving/business.  I've still been writing for Jazzbots.com, though its been a bit hectic. There is no posting schedule for us bloggers, so usually after a game or something interesting happens there is a cuddle-puddle full of blogs and the administrators stretch them out over 3-4 days.  

In other news, how good is the TV show Fringe? very good, though I found the last episode kindof disturbing.  One of the characters is named Joseph Smith, and in the episode (spoiler alert) he is surrounded in his house by an "angry mob" of swat-team FBI agents, jumps out a window, and then is shot in the head when he hits the ground.  I'm Mormon, and anyone familiar with the history of the LDS church had to feel a little disturbed because that is pretty much exactly how Joseph Smith, LDS prophet, was murdered in 1844.  I'm sure its just exec. producer JJ Abrahms trying to work his magic again and build up a quasi-mythology about his fictional TV series backstory, but one has to wonder if such a thinly veiled allusion is actually a anti-Mormon message. I mean, in the show Joseph Smith comes off as a very bad guy.  

Now I said I was disturbed, not angry or self-righteous. I'm willing to see how it plays out, and maybe the martyrdom of the Prophet Joseph Smith has now reached the sort of cultural relevance that it is subject to parody. That can only be a good thing. When it comes to knowledge of his life's mission I firmly believe any publicity is good publicity. 

What do you think? Should I be angry? 

Second Jazz article up on Jazzbots, plus news.

Second article is up and it is awesome.  It's a little bit of TGIF, as I compare Balki and Cousin Larry from Perfect Strangers to two Jazz players.   Why not, huh?  check it out: www.Jazzbots.com

In other news, I just learned my cousin has a web hosting service. Yup, he's got servers and everthing. So I'll be moving over there soon with a blog name that doesn't contain .blogspot.com

The name is going to change, and I've got some good ideas for it. Stay tuned. Yaay WordPress. 

-aaron 

First Blog is up over on Jazzbots.com

I'm officially blogging for Jazzbots.com. Hit the link to the left and take a gander. I am excited to be blogging, though I admit  that it's a strange set up. All posts are reviewed, as it is an "official" Utah Jazz blog. Titles are changed and my intended formatting tends to end up skewed.  But, chances are high they have more experience than I do, so I'm just going to roll with it. 

My first article at Jazzbots is about how die hard fans (like myself) tend to focus on the speculative peripheries of our teams and therefore lose the immediate experience of basketball. Sounds cerebral, but I don't think the article comes across like that. Or maybe it does. Check it out and leave a comment.  

I dont like Ike. At all.

I cant sleep. It's like 330 saturday morning. I think the eye of Ike is passing over Galveston right about now, and I can't help but feel sick inside for the people who chose not to evacuate. I served my LDS mission in Houston, and spent a lot of time in Galveston itself, as it was part of my zone. I actually had knee surgery in Galveston while on my mission. I spent even more time (8 months) in smaller, lower-lying communities to the north and west of Galveston. Places like Port LaVaca and Palacios. Places right on the gulf, where people live in trailers. I truly fear for those places, especially because there are so many people still there who I love deeply. I feel so disconnected from them, and truly don't feel like there is anything I can do. I wish I was there to help them. In Clearlake, where NASA is, I hear the mayor is urging people even now to evacuate low lying areas. I know those areas. One apartment complex in clearlake called Harbor Tree used to flood with even the mildest of summer rainstorms. We would walk through it wet to our knees after a storm. Every stairway was rusted up to the third or fourth step. I feel sick for what they must be going through now.

For those of you who have never lived or seen that area of Texas, it is truly beautiful. Palacios is a tiny shrimping village, flat land, baptist churches, mostly gravel roads. The kind of place that hasn't changed in fifty years. Some of the happiest moments of my life were spent there teaching and serving people. We would drive our car out to the most remote of places, tiny colonies of trailers twenty miles away from anywhere, huddled around a small water tower. I remember one time we were on a drive like that, looking for a country road address and we came across a historical site/marker. It said that there had once been a city on that spot, settled before houston, that rivaled it in size and commerce, but that hurricanes had leveled it twice and the settlers had just given up. I stood at that marker and realized without nostalgia just how extreme Texas can be. I only pray now that destruction escapes most, but especially the ones I love and have left behind.

We beat all the families reunions (and their laptops)

So I got the position as an official blogger for the Utah Jazz.  Thanks for all of you who went and voted. You guys are off the hook.  

I don't post about sports on this blog, but a few sports are a really interesting part of my life. Tivo makes watching sports easier on the schedule, and there are always fascinating/hilarious parallels to be drawn between athletic competition and life in general.  Hopefully I can start sharing some of those parallels when the Basketball season starts up. Again, the website is Jazzbots.com. It is in its second year as the official community site affiliated with  the Jazz. Lets see how this works. 

Seminal Geography

The major periods of my life have all been begun by a move eastward. Growth in High School was interrupted by a move east to Provo for College and eventually graduate school, then that period closed by a move east to New York City. In terms of personal development, I can trace myself maturing eastward across the continent. As I write this I am in San Diego, and I realized last night as I drove home from the wedding of a close high school friend, that my vacation this year has retraced the steps of my eastward migration, and in doing so helped me revisit lost versions of myself.

The funny thing about old friends is that they have a way of treating you as the person you once were, and this makes it easier to fall into the attitudes, even the mannerisms, that defined you in those times. When I went back to Provo this summer, I did so without a real purpose. It’s not the first time I’ve revisited Provo and it won’t be the last, but the days without a clear goal gave me time to reflect on the place. One day I was up on BYU campus doing some random errand and in Ten minutes I ran into four people who were relatively close friends around 2004 but who I haven’t kept in close contact with. I chatted with all of them and by the tenor of their questions I was able to see some of the ways I have changed from the person I was in 2004. That day put me in a reflective mood, and I spent the rest of my time in Provo noticing emotionally important places as I drove or walked past them. Apartments where I had lived, street corners where I had had meaningful discussions, places I had taken girls on dates, Streets I had run down in happiness, and others I had walked down in insecurity and pain. It seemed everything in that small town was a landmark and it especially struck me how certain landmarks from my earliest memories of Provo were right next to landmarks from my last few months there. There was an aspect to their closeness that reinforced the length and roundness of human experience, and the pattern that God forms out of every discordance. Above all I was filled with deep gratitude for the experiences and the people that helped shape me in Provo.
Then I drove west to San Diego, to attend the wedding of the friend who was most responsible for the first steps of my adult maturity. At the wedding I ran into another large group of old friends. It was amazing where their lives have taken them in 8 years. Some that I worried about are doing just fine, like stylist for a Conde Nast magazine fine, while others were still floating around the same bar scene and still others were absent, lost to drugs. The way they interacted with me, how they treated me with consistent goodwill, helped me remember the person I was in high school, and just how much I have changed. I’ll keep those personal observations to myself, which perhaps is the greatest indicator of how New York has changed me, but I again felt the deep gratitude of having a place to go back to, and having people in that place that treat you like not a day has passed.

Ron is "off the hook"

His name was Ron. He was the assistant sales manager of a Utah Big and Tall men’s store. He was not big or tall. He wore oversized black pants with suspenders and a hunter green polo shirt. His face and neck seemed shrunken, tight , with a scraggly beard that clung to his bone structure so he looked like the pale animated corpse of some shallow-buried, perma-frosted 19th century polar explorer. He had thick black glasses and bad teeth and must have been in his early forties. The Big and Tall store was going out of business. I was picking over the remains of their liquidation sale.

He approached me, “Today our prices are off the hook”
“I can see that” I replied, smiling. The phrase seemed so common to him, and it was so incongruous with his nature that I laughed out loud. “Why are you going out of business?” I asked, trying to contain myself.
“Oh we got bought out by Casual Male. They’re going to close this store to consolidate”
“That’s too bad, where are all we big and tall people going to go to get our clothes?”
“Huh, huh. That’s off the Chain!” he evidently thought I had made a hilarious joke. I smiled again and asked if I could use the dressing room. He nodded and pointed it out, still laughing to himself, stuck in the internal reverie of the joke. He shuffled back to the counter, chuckling. I took my selection of 2XB polo shirts with me into the dressing room.

I made the command decision in the dressing room that I had never before heard someone utter a phrase so opposite their external appearance. I could not feel sorry for Ron, he seemed innocent and totally oblivious, but I felt a great deal of pity for the phrases “off the hook” and “off the chain”. Born in the rap nineties as succinct expressions of urban excitement and astonishment they had made, like twin salmons, the long journey up the stream of cultural consciousness only to die in the air outside a discount rack in a Utah big and tall store that was going out of business. The death of their last authenticity was the great tragedy out of which joy and comedy must inevitably spring. I mourned them while a smile.

When I came out of the dressing room Ron was on the phone:
“I tell you hon, it can get real frustrating. Our prices are already off the hook but people still ask me if I can take a bit more off. Don’t they realize its marked down 70 percent. I tell you hon, it makes we want to just fly off the chain. Huh, huh, how are the kids? Good. Good. Gotta go, talk to you later.” Apparently Ron had a wife and this is how he talked to her. He approached me again. “If you like those, you’re going to need some pants with them.”
“I imagine I am”, I replied, more intent now on observing Ron than shopping.
“Well, these flat fronts here are off the hook.” This time, for emphasis he made a circle with the thumb and middle finger of his right hand and brought the hand up then down past his face as he said the phrase. I looked at him in the face for a good two seconds, then picked out a pair in black and shuffled back to the dressing room.

In the dressing room I decided that the strangest thing about it was that “off the hook” and “off the chain” were the only two phrases Ron felt the need to martyr. The rest of his dialogue was culturally befitting a forty-something, perma-frosted, big and tall store assistant sales manager. No “homie” or “tight” or “Oh! Snap!” or other 90's phrases he could have killed if they haven’t been already (they have). No, Ron’s choice, the outlier on his cultural vocabulary curve, was confined wholly to “off the hook” and “off the chain”. I deduced, because of the lack of other phrases, that Ron was no secret BET watcher, but had instead picked his pet phrases seemingly from the ether. Did his press “Scan” on his car radio in 1999 and, in that tuner space between easy listening and classic rock, hear “off the hook” from a DJ? Did his twelve-year-old son return home one day from 6th grade spouting the tired urban phrase in the way that so many white twelve-year-olds are prone to do? Did he pick it up from a previously idolized assistant sales manager? Was it his attempt to win friends and influence people? Did he consider it cool and current? Did his wife find it edgy and sexual? Did it put her in the mood? I decided in the dressing room that I was fascinated by Ron, that he was an oblivious marvel, and I suddenly wanted to shake his hand. And, if I shook his hand, would he betray more outdated cultural influences by trying to give me a dap? I hoped not. Ron was perfect the way he was.

“I like the pants a lot, but they are a bit big” I said when I left the dressing room.
“No problem, the most off the hook thing about these pants is that they aren’t pre-shrunk, so they will tighten up just a bit” It was as if Ron structured all his sentences just to fit the phrases in.
“Great” I said, “looks like I’m good to go.” Ron rang me up and began to bag the polo shirt and black pants. I watched him closely the whole time. “Man, when you guys shut down where are all we big and tall people going to go to get our clothes?” I repeated the joke only because I knew it would make him smile.
“Huh. Huh. Off. The. Chain. Huh. Huh. Don’t worry, you’ll find another store.” He said as he handed me my receipt. I put the receipt in my pocket and reached out to shake his hand.
“Incidentally”, I said as I shook his hand, (no dap) “what’s going to happen to you? Are they transferring you to a different store? Maybe one in the area?