…I carried that book with me until I emptied my foot locker a couple of years after I left the army. I never managed to finish it and it sat in the bottom corner of the foot locker collecting more dust. It never got better than that first sentence and even though I wasn’t a very acute reader back then…I knew it wouldn’t. The tiger only lasted a few pages…and it was down hill from there.
A life is filled with little mysteries and inexplicable inconsequential events. In any given day you can ask yourself a dozen times….”what?”…and get no answer. I love that. I love making up my own answers to those stupid little puzzles. This morning watching soccer on T.V. I saw a player being sent in to replace a guy who was injured. The replacement crossed himself three times, pulled up his socks twice, reached down and pulled several blades of grass from the field, tossed them into the air and kissed a tattoo inside his wrist…all before going onto the field. I don’t know how many times I’ve seen these little rituals performed by all kinds of athletes. There must be hundreds of little private gestures in locker rooms and dressing rooms all over the world. They’re supplications, prayers, wishes, incantations…”let me do good”…”let me not get hurt”…”let me win”.
I don’t know where they pick up these rituals…how they become habits…why they continue even when they don’t work. I imagine some older more experienced athlete taking the younger aside and saying;
“O.K. here’s what you need to do before you go on the field”
I wish somebody had said that to the guy who wrote that awful book all those years ago…might have worked.
Maybe he was fulfilling a dream…may even have gone on to write more and better books. I’m glad he tried. I’d like to say that I learned something from that book of his but I didn’t, really.
But here’s the thing. After writing that post the other day I was going through my portfolios and purging old prints and drawings that I’d done years ago and now hated. They were bad and I knew they were bad. Should I keep them or toss them? I thought about that stupid book and the guy who wrote it…and I wondered if he thought it was good when he did it…Probably, yeah. And what would he think years later? I tossed the drawings.
I probably didn’t cross myself in the right way the day I did them…or I didn’t remember to throw the grass in the air. Whatever…I thought that they were good at the time…and I’ve moved on from there. I think that the things I’m doing now are pretty good most of the time. Tell myself little stories while I’m doing them…talk to them…make up mini mysteries about them. I don’t know if I’d like them a few years down the road. It doesn’t matter. I’d like to think that I’ve kept the ones that are good enough to leave behind. That somebody will find them…or some of them and wonder what’s the story. And maybe somebody will see one and say…”Wow! that’s a really ghastly piece” But it’s the next sentence that counts.
“I wonder what he was thinking.”
Yep, I’d like that too.
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