What would happen if a man born and bred in Wisconsin would one day leave his beautiful homeland in search of a new life in California?
He would blog about it. That's pretty much it.
I am delighted that events have called for this letter to be written on a Saturday. I assume that you three could discuss some of its finer points over Bloody Marys tomorrow during your weekly brunch.
In 1982, the Brewers clinched their last division title, and in the process they set a then-record for the most homeruns by a team in the history of baseball. I wet myself. I know this, and I'm not ashamed to admit it, because I was seven months old when they ultimately went to the World Series. At seven months old, I had seen what has so far been the precipice of my baseball life, which amounted to a loss in seven games against the Cards.
I'm not going to lie. It's been a tough road for the Brewers fan. It took almost one hundred years to figure out if our Milwaukee Brewers were Major League or Minor League; American or National. "Bushtown," they called us... Bushtown.
The darkest hours during my baseball life involved concerns about my team leaving town. They involved getting used to the idea that 13-0 starts doesn't mean we'll have a postseason. They involved a Twins fan getting the prestigious "fan of the game" title while my American League team got shellacked in an empty, dilapidated County Stadium by the Twins. And, as somebody who had always claimed the Cubs as his National League team, they involved several years of therapy since 1997. Bud, I'll bill you later.
Still, there were things to rejoice over. Bud got Bob Uecker (who I've always assumed was God's distant relative) to become our local ear candy. There were Bucket Brigades, Vaughn's Valley, a 1987 no-no, 3000 hits for The Kid, and there was, eventually, something brewing in our farm system-- the Baby Brewers.
These Baby Brewers-- they're all grown up now. Many have gone to other teams. But when they came, in the mid aughts, change was in the air. Our beloved Milwaukeeans in the Selig clan had given the reigns to Mark Attonasio, an outsider. Forty years after a team showed up in Milwaukee with outlines of stitching that spelled "Seattle" still visible on their jerseys, forty years of identity crises, ups and downs, and worrying that Major League Baseball would be leaving Bushtown-- forty years of hoping for some daylight... and the sun began to shine. Change was in the air, and, to our collective relief, for the better!
Last night, I got to be a Cubs fan one last time, when, powered by shear hatred cultivated over a century, they managed to not suck, albeit briefly, and destroyed the St. Louis Cardinals. Your Milwaukee Brewers; Division Champions.
Bud, Mark, God, to you three: hats off. Somehow you three got baseball in Milwaukee, gave it to me, kept it there, and made it something to be proud of.
But... the timing. As you know, I had taken off to Los Angeles this last year. If the deal is that the further away I get from Milwaukee the better the Brewers do, that's no problem. I can be in North Korea by the start of next season. But I'm going to need a place to watch the postseason here in LA.
The first chill in the air calls all stratified segments of the population to a brisk attention. For all the talk about unity in the work place, politically, within families, and toward any historic cause, really, no leader has been able to emulate the inspiration that Fall does. Leaves get raked, oil gets changed. Baseball and football converge into a Shangri-La for sports fans, allowing for them to reflect and come to terms with baseball's results while still providing dreams of what is to become of the nascent football season.
Ceremoniously, today, I donned my Fall Saturday uniform. As with most people's, mine is a combination that is designed to cover as much skin as possible as comfortably and in as aesthetically repulsive of a manner as possible. A tattered dark blue sweatshirt and "Guinness" pajama pants are my mainstays for these mornings, to wander my territory and to clean and to read. For flair, I wear a camouflaged Brewers hat that I bought for four dollars not too long ago. For all obvious reasons, I have not been dressed like this recently. Nonetheless, it is the most comfortable outfit I own. It keeps the chill out.
The chill serves as a reminder that there are a number of things that are not under our control. In a sense, I suppose, this could be negative. It's also the beginning of every true adventure. It's the mother of necessity which, in turn, is the mother of invention. Nobody can avoid the chill; nobody can avoid change. So we cope.
Yesterday, the business day before I was supposed to begin my new job, I received a phone call informing me that they did not have it in their budget to take on all the people that they had hired. I was one whom they had decided to let go. Bad news is bad news; bad timing is hell. I had informed the other company that I was interviewing for that I had decided to take this offer, not twenty-four hours before I received this phone call. Due to circumstance, and I'm sure nothing but circumstance, I found myself back on square one.
Them's the breaks.
I took a little while off. I took a few minutes to just sit down with my mouth open, staring at nothing in particular. But, I eventually realized, every minute that I'm staring at my hands is a minute that I'm not using them. Previous to receiving that phone call, I had been prioritizing; picking through what tasks I wanted to take action on, and deciding how I would take action on them. Two days before, I had given blood for the first time since my arrival. I had begun contacting charities to see if there was any way that I could volunteer for them. The night before, an online magazine said that I could write some posts for them.
A lot had changed, but what, exactly?
So today I felt this chill. I didn't think that it would be reaching California this early. After a minute of shuddering at the thought of cold (although it will not be like anything I have been privy to in the past), I put on my uniform. My sweatshirt and pajamas had never been so comfortable. I sent applications to a few jobs, and contemplated what I would write about for the online magazine.
Then, I went back to reading my book on Eisenhower by Stephen Ambrose in the ambient sunlight, filtered by my blinds. It's amazing that Ambrose, Eisenhower's hand-picked biographer, criticized Ike so openly about the results of many of Eisenhower's decisions. But nobody ever criticized Ike for his decisiveness.
As new and different as the Los Angeles area is to me, so I am to it. Evidently, there is a Wisconsin accent. I say that relatively facetiously, as I tend to wallow in mine when I can, like when I'm talking to other Midwesterners at Church: "Hey, I 'ope yer Vikings do real good tuh-day! Yah, I 'ope dey lose wid' dignity."
Yeah, I said it...
Yeah, I meant it...
The most ridiculous highlight of my journey, thus far, that involved the Wisconsin accent came at the first Packers preseason game that I watched after my arrival. I was at a table with my friends Chris and Jessie, both of whom come from the Dairy State and have been living in the Los Angeles area for some time. As we were sitting there, the accent issue arose in conversation. Evidently, the rest of the world has a way of saying the word "bag" that is entirely alien to the Wisconsin tongue.
"How do they say it?" I asked.
"Well," Chris said, "It's like... baahg." Unsatisfied with his attempt, the professional actor and student of regional dialects confided, "I don't know, I still can't say it."
Jessie tried: "Behg, I think-- No, that's not it either..."
"Baahg?" I asked.
And soon, all three of us were simultaneously droning the word "bag" over and over in this empty bar, with the only non-Wisconsinite at the table pounding her fist and demanding: "BAG! Just say 'BAG!'"
Around the natives, though, I try to tone the accent down. I thought that this would be a breeze before relocating, as the most difficult to pronounce place name in the surrounding area appeared to be Cudahy. Yes, as in Cudahy meat-packing. With the befitting smugness that comes with having mastered the new language of Californian, I moved into my new neighborhood. "Where are you from?" I was asked just yesterday. "Why, ma'am," I replied, "I'm from none other than the fine city of Alhambra." The woman with whom I was speaking paused and glared at me with a crooked smile.
"Ok, I meant where are you originally from? Because," she explained, "you are not from Alhambra." As in ham-- the food. My city, the one that I've lived in for over a month, I still can't say it right.
I also stick out a touch because of being a blonde-haired blue-eyed minority. In Wisconsin, for nine months out of the year, I was Caucasian. During Winter, for the other three months, I was fluorescent. Since I've been here, I've picked up a pretty ferocious tan and my hair has bleached, bringing me to look a little less determinable. These conditions are further complicated by the amount of melting that has occurred in this particular corner of the melting pot. There are people that I meet who are a little Japanese, a little Mexican, a little German, and so forth. The conversations that led me to finding out about these ethnic bouquets typically began when these people look at my blonde-lobster complexion, which had been further exasperated by dimmed lights in a restaurant or bar, and ask me: "So, what's your ethnicity?" I would cordially explain. Then comes my favorite part, when they respond, "Guess what I am! Go on, guess!"
Will I use my exotic Sconnie powers for good or for evil? I still don't know. For the time-being, I'm just focusing on finding out all that I can about, well-- here. And to do so, I'm blending in better than I could have imagined. Quietly, almost accidentally, I've already been slowly woven into the outer-fringes of different social webs. It's something of an honor to me that in such a little while, during perhaps the most reclusive single month of my life (due to the big, nasty job-hunt), I've come across people that remember my first name and shake my hand. In a gracious act of selflessness, the hulking monstrosity that is Los Angeles seems to have offered itself to me, a stranger... from a strange, far-away land.
I would venture to say that the one thing that sets America's culture apart from most others-- "culture" in the sense of folklore, music, literature, and arts, that is-- is our obsession with the road. For other societies, the road only seems useful as a means to get somewhere. "All roads lead to" someplace; or the main character is taking "the rocky road to" somewhere. In the Cantibury Tales, a pivotal work in British literature, the road is treated almost despondently; it's our antagonist. The stories which are told by the characters in that particular piece are the cure to having to put up with the lousy, miserable road. The road is the waste and rubbish of global literature.
And like flies, we Americans swarm to it. All our folk heroes suffer the same fate ("Some say he went to... Other claim they last saw him in..."). We're the people of Johnny Appleseed, Easy Rider, Jack Kerouac, Bobby Mcgee, and hundreds of comedic situations involving chicken trucks that happen to pass by at just the right time.
We write songs about roads. Many, many songs about many, many roads.
I think that this adoration speaks volumes about our collective mindset. And, daily, I'm given just cause to reflect upon our love affair with travel and asphalt. I take I-10 to church. I'll be driving the Ventura Highway to my new job. And today I had the pleasure of being personally introduced to Route 1, more affectionately known as the Pacific Coast Highway. There is probably a song that's written about Route 1 as well, but a song couldn't do it justice. I know that there had to be blasting, and hammering, and drilling, and shoveling to construct that highway, but the way that her black ribbon lies gracefully and delicately as a buffer between the restless power of the ocean and the resolute stillness of the mountains; the way that it somehow seems to fit in, even while surrounded by a land so untameable, contributes to an unnerving sense that the road belongs and that the traveler does not.
Of course the traveler doesn't belong. And therein lies the beauty, bitter-sweet and unchangeable. Therein lies our obsession, and our commitment to the journey, regardless of where it may take us. And, readily, we accept that for all of our yearning to go somewhere else or achieve something more, we must pay a price.
Last week, I stood on the pier where The Mother-Road, Route 66, either starts or finishes depending on whether the person traveling would rather be in Chicago or Santa Monica. It was like a carnival. Street performers entertained passers-by, there was a ferris wheel, and trapeze artists. It was fitting that the artery that was the American Adventure for so long had that celebratory feel. "Here's the ocean! You've made it!" This week, referring to the other side of that circuit, for the first time since I've been here, I thought to myself "I wish I could have been there."
I had missed the first marriage among my cousins on my Mother's side, in Chicago.
The couple chose this particular weekend because it fell on the ten year mark of September 11, which is oddly fitting since they are a police officer and paramedic. I'm not the only one who missed it, from what I understand. My uncle* flew to New York to participate in ceremonies, in order to honor his fellow firefighters that had died during the attacks ten years ago.
I've had other things going on, besides these melancholy little tidbits. I just ran the longest run of my life today, at sixteen miles. I've submitted some writings just for fun to see if anything comes out of it. I've met people, had laughs, and whatnot. But, as light-hearted as I typically like to be when I write these correspondences, I think that it would be unfair to pretend that everything's fine all of the time. And this marks the ten year anniversary of what I can say without flinching was unequivocally the worst day of my life. Obviously, it was unspeakably worse for many, many other people than I'll ever begin to imagine.
But, as with the rest of the nation, I know that the worst things that anybody can throw at me will someday be part of the journey. We are, after all, the nation in love with the road. I am, after all, fortunate enough to be a traveler. And to live dedicated to the ideals of travel is to take up a covenant to endure also the hunger pangs and heartaches that come with it. The solace of this being that, as long as we remain committed to our roads, someday the worst of these things will be left behind on the journey, regardless in how long and in what way we choose to carry them.
During the darkest of these periods (of which we've had many, lately), there will still be the sunsets and wildflowers all around us, if we bother to look. The roads will still lead us through innumerable placid places, and provide us with ample opportunity to drop our bags and be privy to all that these offer, be it ever so briefly. The lessons that we learn will be the ones that we choose to; the emotions we feel will be the ones we decide upon. We have an indelible freedom to do this as we see fit. That's why I, personally, have always loved, and will always love the road. That includes even the unsavory parts.
Kim, Josh, I really wish that I could have been there. I love you, and I'll see you both soon enough.
Take care of her.
*Cousin once-removed, or second cousin, or whatever.
To me, one of the most useful recurring Biblical themes is the concept of forty days. Forty days, on more than one occasion, is the amount of time that Biblical characters were tested, or faced hardship. During Noah's flood, for instance, it rained for forty days. Christ was tempted in the desert for forty days. Elijah took a forty-day journey while he fled Ahab for fear of his life. On the entirely secular level, the idea of "forty days" highlights the temporal nature of suffering. Regardless of the facets and nature of one's hardships, suffering must come to an end. It may not be an end that one would find particularly pleasant (as in "... at least they're not in pain anymore."), but an eventual end to hardship is nonetheless guaranteed. When the concept of "forty days" is commingled with the concept of an eternal God, eternity itself, or a great big world out there with a whole bunch of people whose real problems put your piddly little issues to shame, a measly forty days of suffering is actually something of a bargain.
"Forty days" has become a sort of a mantra for me. It's an acknowledgement of inalienable truths, if I may be so bold. It's an acknowledgement that we need to suffer. There are times when we need to prepare to suffer. And we need to realize that sought-after experience, after all, is merely hardship that has spent its time in the cask. I, at least, find this philosophy useful.
Good Midwesterner that I am, I had been preparing myself for a type of suffering that I was not used to upon my move to Cali. Unemployment is something fairly novel to me. Becoming accustomed to unemployment is something that scares me to no end. An unfortunate facet of moving to California, as became evident from the fruitless applications which I had submitted in the months prior, was that I would be, for the first time in six years, unemployed.
I would be unemployed with bills-- Character building, set in stone... bills.
Pleasantly, I have always been predisposed to the appreciation of beauty over glamour. (For reference, Beauty: Graciously working twelve hours a day to feed your family. Glamour: Sammy Sosa complaining about the Chicago Cubs not paying him enough to feed his family.) I feel like this stance had both provided me with a practical advantage upon my arrival to LA, a city only rivaled by Wausau when it comes to glamour, as well as unfortunately dulling some of the excitement and novelty of Tinsel Town.
For instance, when I went to Hollywood for the first time to meet some of Chris's friends, one of them asked me excitedly, "What have you always want to do in LA? What's the first thing?"
"Get a job," I replied.
And I meant it. Like so many other transplants to the cultural and artistic hub of the West, I had visions of Paparazzi bulbs flashing like lightning as tabloid reporters would bombard me with inane questions: "Nate! Nate! How did you find a company so well-recognized that still provides for upward professional growth during a recession?" "Can you comment on your benefits? Is it true that your 401k is matched 100% up to 8% of your pay?"
But, as the natural course of change and hardship would allow, I found myself with an internal battle between resolve and practicality. Every day that the phone didn't ring only amplified the ups and downs of life. I had begun the "forty days" that I knew I would have to endure from the onset. Regardless of principle, regardless of plan, experience, and work ethic, my idea of "a good job" became more subjective day by day. I'm excellent with calculus... And a forklift... I guess I could learn how to wash dishes... Imagine how chaotic this world would be without doormen... Begging is technically a job; it's kind of like sales.
I should interject here to say that I had no right-- absolutely NO RIGHT-- to complain. This, of course, had always been a leap of faith. I probably could have done a few things to lessen the blow. I, however, had merely rowed my ducks fairly decently and made my move.
So be it.
But, getting back to my pity party, I strove to maintain my schedule and regiment while pursuing my dream-job. Or something that would pay the bills. Or begging, which, as I understand, is as respectable as entrepreneurship in many cultures.
The best piece of advice that I had received concerning this transitional period came from my friend, T. Heinle, who had warned me: "Don't rediscover youtube. It will be all downhill from there."
Youtube wasn't even in my vocabulary at this point, though. No, I was one of an elite group of Americans that would use their time off to hone his or her professional skills, catch up on reading, and attain outstanding physical fitness while applying for various positions. It would be like a vacation; a well-deserved vacation during which I wouldn't leave the house, and after which I may end up homeless. It was just like a vacation.
Of course, 100 slowly-read pages into my self-betterment I began to panic. Over twenty days, I filled out something to the tune of forty applications. I started getting superstitious ("I'll get the call the day after I finish this book, that's the way it always works out"), sometimes for the worse ("I'll get the call the day after I starve to death, that's the way it always works out"). I channeled the healthy dose of Midwestern guilt and sensibility handed down from generation to generation of German, Scandinavian, Polish, and French families, and I applied it to even the most modest of purchases: "OK, Mr. Hughes, go ahead and buy the pre-made salad. But that's a buck ninety-nine that you'll never see again."
But through the murk, still there were golden moments. And I always tried to remember that it was only a period of "forty days". I applied for jobs that, simply put, were out of my league. Gladly. I submitted for freelancing positions. I applied for the X-prize foundation, and knew, even as I pressed the "submit" button, that despite the New York Fashion Week slimness of my chance with them, that I had been able to apply-- to even just apply-- to a foundation that spurred common man into Outer Space. I applied to charities that I wanted to volunteer with, even if they couldn't put me on the payroll.
For brief moments, I felt like I was five years old again. Back then, I wanted to be a race car driving astronaut that played for the Green Bay Packers in his downtime from Indiana Jones-style archaeology. To be completely honest, I kind of still do.
But with the click of the "submit" button, it was back to my less glamorous, but still beautiful reality: discovering the ins and outs of an exotic place far from home; flirtations with possible employment during impromptu phone interviews. Brick walls, and brick walls, and brick walls.
But then I got the call. And then I got another. And then I got another.
"Forty days" is an abstract concept that helps me get through my periods of hardship. It's something that reminds me that all hardship, no matter how deeply etched into us, is destined to be temporary. It's a reminder that healing is always offered through God; through those that He puts into our lives. In no way is the "forty days" ever-- ever-- to be taken literally. However, I left Wisconsin, effectively becoming unemployed, on the twenty-fourth of July. I got my first firm offer on the second of September.
This will just be a quick post, I'm hoping to make a more in-depth (read: drawn-out) post later this weekend, though we shall see. I do have to thank everyone for checking this, though. I've had over 100 page views in my first month, and I'm having a blast doing this, too.
Just a couple of pictures (literally, a couple) of my first venture into Angeles National Forest for today.
That's what a day of trail running in the desert will do. I'm hoping to start a foundation to vacuum the place so I don't have this problem again.
That's my top half after the run. I was attempting to get the sea of mountain peaks in the background, which was absolutely stunning. Unfortunately, I guess you had to be there.
The trail I ran on was about 2,500 feet higher in elevation than where I live, so I assumed that it wouldn't be too big of a difference. Yeah, it was just like being in the city of Los Angeles, even down to the ski hills. I also knew that it would be in my best interest to carry a spare 20 pounds of water and emergency supplies on this short five-mile run in the mountains.
I had a blast, and I can't wait to wake up tomorrow morning to a brand-new kind of sore.
