The Vig

I need to go clothes shopping.

A friend of mine told me before Christmas that I was the only person he knew who had a good 2009.  Looking back, I think he’s right.  The funny thing about truly life-changing events is I don’t think you know they’re that momentous until you’ve gone through them and look back.  At least that’s how I feel.  The Summer of Bean has NOTHING on what actually happened.

I’ve known for years that I’m addicted to food.  I couldn’t stop eating.  Even after this happened, I stopped off at Muchas Gracias afterward for a burrito.  I was talking to a friend of mine about it a couple of weeks ago.  I mentioned it takes a serious time commitment to take in the calories required to get to 370 pounds and maintain it.  Forget about the money.  Forget about the food.  It takes time.  Daily.  I wondered for years why I never left the house.  Now I know.  It was because I was eating.

A friend emailed me out of the blue in July and told me about this program he’s been visiting which deals with food addiction.  I stopped in for the first time in July and haven’t stopped going since.  I’m down about 75 pounds.  A day at a time, as they say.  Now you know why you haven’t seen me at Whiffies or celebrating Tomato Pie Day for a while.

A month or so later I was chatting with my housemate’s girlfriend.  She’s in the mortgage business.  We were discussing the $8,000 first-time-homebuyer’s tax-credit.  I was starting to get the itch to leave Vancouver and get back south of the river.  That commute over the Interstate Bridge, even though it was only a half-hour or so, was becoming a real downer for me.  I felt isolated up there.  Friends and family were all a twenty-minute drive away at least.

I’d been looking into renting a place in Portland or maybe down in Lake Oswego.  The more I looked though, the more I thought it made no sense to keep renting.  Not at those prices.  So I asked my friend what it might take to buy a place.

To my surprise, she came back the next day with a pre-qualification letter.  The guy who, until recently, could never pay his bills on time was suddenly able to buy a freaking house!  Or, at the time, condo.

I immediately called another friend of mine who I’d known for years and asked him to help me out.

Sidebar: This is a story about friends, old and new.  The old ones, some of whom I hadn’t seen in months or even years, were happy to help however they could.  The new ones really don’t know me from Adam, but are equally willing to give.  It is, as the kids say, amazing.  End Sidebar.

After several weeks of looking we finally found my new home in Powellhurst-Gilbert.  It wasn’t my first choice, but now that I’m here, I don’t think I’d have it any other way.  My commute to work isn’t any shorter than the one was to Vancouver, but my life commute, to coin a phrase, is much shorter.  Friends who were a half-hour or more away, are now just up the street.  Family is a lot closer too and boy do they like that.  It’s growing on me.

So that’s my last six months or so.  Crazy, right?  If you would have told me at the beginning of July that I’d be closing out December down 70 pounds and in a house of my own, I would have called you crazy.  But here I am.  I really feel like I’ve won the lottery.  That’s what I tell my friends.  All of them.

No doubt you’ve seen those shows on TV or read stories of people who win some huge sum of money only to throw it all away.  Their stories are nearly all the same.  The issue is people never take time to figure out who they are with their newfound wealth.  Their lives have changed suddenly in ways that they can’t handle.  You see it with folks who’ve lost weight too.  Despite what the mirror or their friends might say, they still see themselves as that fat person.  They never take time to adjust.  And before they know it, they’re right back in their same old habits.

So that’s what I’m working on: figuring out who this new Bean is.  And thats what I hope to be writing about from here on.  Things that I’m doing to create this new life.  Posts may or may not be frequent.  I haven’t figured that out.  I do know they’re going to be focused on the positive.

Thanks, as always, for your patronage.  Let’s make 2010 one for the scrap book.

I got the news yesterday as I sat at Big Al’s watching Matt Leinart play his way out of the NFL; the Winterhawks had traded away the guy Mike Williamson once called the team’s biggest leader.  Were it not for the fact a goaltender cannot wear the captain’s C, Kurtis Mucha likely would have been a third year captain this season.  Of this I have no doubt.

Like Dylan B., I was initially shocked by how little the team got in return for him.  I was also shocked at what a crappy team he’d been sent to.  As soon as I read Steve Brandon’s article, the whole thing made a lot more sense to me.

Here are some facts Hawks fans need to take to heart:

1. The Portland Winterhawks aren’t going to win a championship this season.  They will consider the season a fortunate success if they get through the first-round of the playoffs.
2. The Western Hockey League is a developmental league.  That is to say, the primary purpose of each organization is to prepare players for the next level of hockey.  Players, especially players with skill, should seek every opportunity to maximize and showcase their skills.
3. Teams in the Wertern Hockey League who are building toward a championship in two or three seasons understand ice time is precious, especially for younger players who are developing.  Older players can only clog things up.

Let’s be honest.  We all love Mucha.  He poured his heart and soul out for an organization that had no business asking anything from him.  But for whatever reason he stuck it out.  I have no idea why.  Yes, things are finally headed in the right direction here, and that’s a fantastic thing.  That said, as fantastic as he is, this year’s Winterhawks team isn’t going anywhere with him.  Understanding that, the team needs to free up his position in order to develop a younger net minder with the hope that in two years he can be the guy to bring home a championship.  Will that be Carruth?  Hamilton?  Someone else?  Who knows.  The point is the team needs to start down that path now.

Does it smart for Mucha?  Yes.  I think he wanted to finish what he started in Portland, and  I don’t blame him one bit.  The simple fact is he wasn’t going to play here as much as he needs to.  He needs to develop and he wasn’t going to be able to here.  Maybe he can in Kamloops.  Perhaps he’ll get traded to a contender beyond that.  There are opportunities out there.  There aren’t any in Portland.

Listening to Dwight Jaynes on The Game yesterday, I learned Daryl Hall has been doing a really cool Internet project for over two years now.  I was a HUGE Hall and Oates fan back in the 80s.  Somewhere around here I have a ticket signed by John Oates from the show I saw back in 1989 or so.  Needless to say, Im a downloading fool this morning.

A similar project I didn’t know existed until Friday is Beck’s Record Club.  Another cool concept.  Basically Beck gets together with some friends and records a tribute album in a day.  The most recent installment involves (I heart) Wilco and Skip Spence’s Oar.

I’m sure there’s lots of other stuff out there just like this, but there are only so many hours in the day.  Meantime, I have an appointment at the library to pick up the complete Moby Grape.  Drives to work should be a little more fun for the next few weeks.

Is Tumblr.  You may have noticed some slight changes to the layout here.  Things have been added, deleted, or moved.  The biggest change, for me at least, is the addition of my Tumblr feed.  It’s much easier to post links there from my iPhone than it is to use the WordPress iPhone app.  Plus I kind of want to make this space more about my own thing and less about commenting on others’ work.

Like everything else in my world right now, this is a work-in-progress.  Once the dust settles in a few months, I may try and find a template that integrates Tumblr into my WordPress blog a little better.  This particular solution isn’t very pretty, but it does the job.

It was a coin-toss on whether to attend last night’s game.  Those who were there may have noted my absence.  As Dylan B. pointed out on his Twitter feed a week ago, the Hawks didn’t necessarily need to announce their attendance for the Brandon game, they could have just had everyone introduce themselves over the PA.  Last night wasn’t much better.

A friend asked me last night why I wasn’t at the game.  I told her the same story I wrote here last year.  There was a time not so long ago when I would have come to a mid-week game like last night just to see what happened.  I think those days are over.  The Hawks might win, they might lose, but if no one’s there, what’s the point?

Dylan B. got in a gentle dig at this reporter earlier this evening.  It takes real effort for me to be sly sometimes.  Dylan makes it an art.  I’ll take the bait.

Who exactly have the Winterhawks alienated with their price increase?  The same dead-enders who were there every night of the Goldsmith-era were sitting in their same seats last night, and paying 30-percent more.  From Piper’s perspective, what wasn’t to like?  Especially on a Wednesday night in November when the entire town is discussing the pending Blazer implosion.  Piper’ll take what he can get mid-week.

Now, this will be the first Saturday home game in almost a month.  Hopefully the Hawks have been pounding the phones to get folks out there.  They’re in the Rose Garden on a Saturday night against Seattle.  It should be an easy sell, but who knows.  This thing isn’t going to get rebuilt in a day.

In other news, the team is beginning to make Goldsmithian noises about renovating the Coliseum.  A five or six-thousand seat arena inside the Glass Palace would definitely be a community asset.  I wonder how much further this idea would get if someone were to jump on the Green Line and spend an afternoon talking to the folks at PSU about joining in.  The Vikings are in serious needs of new digs; if they were to join together and wrap the whole thing in a big green bow, I bet they could get something done.  It would be a win-win.  Goldsmith never pursued this.  Perhaps Piper will.

Alternatively, I had an enlightening conversation a few weeks back with a longtime observer of the local sports scene.  The subject turned to the new Beaver baseball stadium.  I mentioned they were talking about building the thing at the Clark County fairgrounds in Ridgefield.  I told him I live in Vancouver and Ridgefield was too far to drive to watch a game.  When I mentioned that, his eyes lit up.

“If the Beavers moved there, they would own Vancouver,” he said.  They would no longer be competing with all the other noise in Portland, they could just concentrate on that one location.  He argued it’s too difficult to market minor league sports in Portland.  A move to the suburbs would solve that.

It’s an interesting point and one I hadn’t considered.  This all works for the Hawks as well.  The dead-enders will all gladly make the drive to Beaverton or Vancouver to watch the team.  So they’re really not going to lose anything.  If anything, the team will gain.

Beaverton has its own paper, which you don’t read unless you happen to live there.  We have one up here in The Couv as well.  Either paper would be more than happy to put “their” team on the front page.  And locals would love to go see “their” team.  This theory is working all over the Puget Sound right now with both baseball and hockey.  That one conversation turned my thinking completely around on minor league sports and the suburbs.

Another friend took it one step further suggesting sticking an NHL arena somewhere in Washington County and booking the heck out of it.  The Blazers, for whatever reason, don’t seem at all interested in maximizing the Rose Garden.  They’ve missed out on dozens of shows (AC/DC, Depeche Mode, and Fleetwood Mac…as well as the seemingly never-ending Springsteen tour, just to name a few) that Mike Scanlon would have booked in a heartbeat.  A properly run big-league venue somewhere out Highway 26 could definitely work.

Facebook has been an interesting experience for me.  I fiddled around with it for a year or so before jumping in with both feet at the end of last year.  At first I used it to get in touch with old friends from college.  Pretty quickly we’d assembled a good chunk of the “old gang” from the early-90s.  Even though it had been over a decade, for some of us we picked right back up where we left off.  It’s been terrific.

The high schoolers started showing up after that.  And, just like high school twenty years ago, that’s when it got complicated.  Pretty soon I was getting friend requests from people I had no memory of.  Others I remembered, but I never really ran with in school and never really cared to be friends with.  I accepted almost all their requests though.  I mean, why not?

It quickly became apparent why I left most of my high school acquaintances in the past.  I really had nothing in common with them.  Many wanted to rehash old events and reopen old wounds.  Some never grew up.  And others were trolling for relationships.  On so many levels, it just didn’t work for me.  So back in the spring, I had what I called “Friendpocalypse”.  I wiped my slate clean of all but my closets friends and those I found interesting.  Everyone else was dumped.  I also put my account into a super-secret status where those I’d whacked couldn’t find me.  I knew I’d hurt some feelings, but they’d get over all of it quickly enough.  Some of them did, others didn’t.

I’ve since relaxed my settings somewhat.  I allow people to find me, but they can’t see my profile nor can they see my friends.  It works pretty well.  The friends I’ve whacked have started coming back around, but this time I just ignore them.  I don’t need the aggravation.

This is the long way of telling you something pretty cool also happened on Facebook a few weeks ago.  Back when I was young and stupid, and fresh out of college, I moved to Boise to live with Pete in Parkrose and get eligible to attend Boise State University’s teacher education program.  My plans got derailed pretty quickly by the realities of trying to pay rent and eat.  I wasn’t very successful at much of anything over there.  This included girls.

I got hooked up with a waitress at the Shari’s restaurant in Meridian.  It got hot and heavy really quickly and before I knew it, I was in way over my head.  She was talking marriage and kids and such when all I wanted to do was have fun.  It wasn’t going to work.  Unfortunately I had as much experience breaking up with women at that point as I did dating them in the first place and rather than man up and break it off, I moved back to Portland and let the distance kill it.

I was, though, still great friends with her roommate.  In fact, the roommate and I remain great friends to this day!  So when I would call over there, the ex-girlfriend would answer and I would just coldly ask for her roommate.  Yes, I was a Grade A jerk.  I’ve felt bad about it for years.

I’ve tried to find the old girlfriend a few times.  I’ve found old phone numbers and addresses here and there, but never anything electronic that I could just pop a note to her.  I didn’t want to talk to her.  Certainly didn’t want to intrude on whatever she’s doing now.  I just wanted to say I was sorry.

Well I finally found her a couple of weeks ago.  I sent her a note through Facebook asking if it was her and telling her I was sorry for being a selfish jerk lo those many years ago.  She played coy the first go-around, telling me she’d known many selfish jerks in her time, and could I be more specific.  I got a chuckle out of that, gave her some more specifics, and apologized again.

We spent the next few days catching up.  She’s a married mother of one now, living in the Midwest.  She apologized to me almost as profusely as I had to her.  She was quite a handful and she knew it.  She told me if it were any consolation, she didn’t remember me as a jerk.  It really did console me.  She didn’t have to say that, but she did.

We’ve left it be for now.  Neither of us sent any friend requests.  I told her I didn’t want to intrude on her life and she assured me I hadn’t.  She was glad I got in touch.  So am I.

I still make the drive to Boise every year or so.  I enjoy being alone with my thoughts in I-84 through Pendleton, La Grande, and Baker City.  As you drive through that stretch of freeway, you get to listen to a lot of talk radio.  It’s really the only time I’ll listen to Dr. Laura.  Once on a drive either there or back, she said something that’s stuck with me.  She said “closure” is crap.  It’s something artificial people seek that doesn’t really exist.  People use it as a crutch as they seek to make some sort of pain go away.  I thought I agreed with her because “closure” was something I’d never experienced.  I think I have now.  Two adults shared a moment and managed to forgive each other for inflicting pain.  I don’t think I could have done that by myself.  It was more than just wishing she had a good life.  It was being able to tell her.  It’s a cool thing.

I had a conversation sometime last year with my dear friend Betty with Sunglasses.  I was telling her about this concept my sociology teacher brought up clear back in high school.  Basically he hypothesized people have to go through a certain order of maturity.  You need to do certain things in your teens, twenties, thirties, and so on.  And if you skip over a certain spot, then you have to go back and pick it up before you progress.  So if you miss out on your twenties and you wake-up and you find yourself 42, you have to go back and experience that period in order to mature into your forties.  This is, he said, is why you find guys in their forties and fifties driving around in fast cars with big gold chains and chasing twenty-year-old girls when they should be a little more grown up.

It was an interesting comment and obviously one that stuck.

Talking with Betty last year, I brought up a similar concept.  Sometimes people get stuck in a certain year and never get past it.  I asked Betty what year it was in her world.  She said it was 2008, she was living in the present.  But it hadn’t been that way until just recently.  She said before she met her now-husband, she would have said mid-nineties.

That’s where I’ve been stuck.  About 1997.  Oh the clock and the calendar have kept moving, but I’ve been stuck in that one year, living and reliving my own Groundhog Day.

This isn’t to say things haven’t happened.  They have.  A few jobs have come and gone.  I moved to Arizona and some stuff happened.  I moved to Seattle.  Other things happened there too.  But nothing has ever changed.  I go to the office, I come home, I grab Fourth Meal, and I go to bed.

Wash.  Rinse.  Repeat.

I think these thoughts every now and then, and a voice from deep inside seeks to calm me by saying “we’ll do this better next time”.  As though you get a do-over on your twenties or thirties.  Pretty quickly, the Big Voice comes in and says “you’re nuts”.  There’s no such thing.  There’s only the future.

So here’s to the future.

You, gentle reader, know I’ve supported Obama from the moment he announced for the presidency back in 2007.  And as big of an Obama fanboy as I am, even I think this Nobel thing is a little much.  At least it’s pre-mature.  He’s the third sitting US President to win the award.  At least the other two (Roosevelt in 1906 and Wilson in 1919) had something concrete to show for their efforts.  Obama, to this point, has bupkis.  That’s not to say he won’t have anything in five or six years.  But seriously, the guy hasn’t been in office for a year yet.  Heck the election was less than a year ago.  This is just dumb.

I think what the Nobel people are saying is for the first time in a long time we have a sitting United States President who makes the world want to be a better place.  One who inspires every corner of the world.  We haven’t had one, arguably, since Kennedy.  It’s a rare thing and the world certainly recognizes it.  Unfortunately the Nobel Peace Prize has never been awarded on potential.  It’s been awarded on results.  Obama, to this point, has none.

Sidebar: The Right in this country is going to have an absolute tizzy over this today, citing the fact Arafat won the prize in 1994.  They’ll howl their demand that Obama renounce the prize and renounce Arafat.  What they won’t mention is that he shared the prize with two lions of Israeli politics, neither of whom have been asked to renounce their own prizes.  If they’re going to start pounding Obama over the head today, they should pound Perez too.

I’m proud of my president.  I’m hopeful he can fulfill this extraordinary potential.  There’s plenty of time in the future for rewarding and recognizing accomplishment.  I just don’t think that time is now.

Am I the only person who has a Greatest American Hero flashback when I hear the word “scenario”?