I bike to work here in Charlotte a few days a week. It's a seven mile commute, most of it a nice relaxing ride through Madison Park, over rolling hills and wide sweeping turns in a quiet neighborhood.
I get to Pressley Road, and things change.
Once, some guy was making a left and didn't see me until he came within a few feet of slamming me into next week. He missed, and in the rush to avoid his bumper, I gracefully hit a curb and exited my bike by leaping over the handlebars. Other people like to see how close they can get to me without actually hitting me; their rear view mirrors go whizzing by just inches away from my arm. A garbage truck hit a pothole on Pressley Road a few years back, and whatever liquid had been congealing in the back splashed on to my face. My mouth, thankfully, was closed.
Here at my Reagan-era condo complex, a perfectly lovely albeit ancient place by Charlotte standards, let's say I have three out of the four. Purposely hidden back in the woods are two pock-marked and lumpy tennis courts, remarkable for their ability to defy the laws of physics. It would be like playing on the surface of the moon, if the moon had more cracks in it. Balls that should be routine turn into unforced errors. They careen every which way, launched by giant weeds and hideous zig-zagging crevices and muddy divots. We call those ones do-overs.
Running at full speed is discouraged, because there is a good chance you will try to plant your foot in something slippery and foul-smelling. And then, as you are in mid-groin-pull, you will wonder whether going up 40-love was really worth it.
And that is just on the court with a net.
The other one is slowly receding into the earth below, the concrete contorting in a whirlpool of red chunks and topsoil. It's like a geologic toilet flushing. I wanted to get close to see exactly how far this sinkhole had sunk, but I decided not to approach it, lest I be swallowed whole. This, you see, is probably the final resting place of many a casual tennis player; let's pay a moment of respect for those who mysteriously disappeared while chasing an errant lob.
The homeowners association decided not to put a net up on this court. I'd say that was a good choice. They also have said it would cost too much money to repair and repave the courts. Instead, nature is slowly reclaiming them and making them into a sort of self-composting sporting venue. They don't seem very biodegradable, but hell, I probably won't be around in a hundred years to find out.
There are a dozen perfectly manicured, cleanly lined and geometrically correct tennis courts right up the road at Park Road Park, but they are always crowded. In fact, they're too nice. After complaining for about four years, I am learning to love and embrace my decrepit and misshapen home courts. I am starting to figure out how to play volleys that bounce in the wrong direction. I know when to pull up. I have learned to anticipate the unanticipated. I expect the unexpected. A smooth court is nice and all, but it throws me off.
And so that, Chris Sotardi, is why I keep losing to you.
Dan Lowe is 30 years old today. Or, he should have been.
Dan died five years ago. He was playing pick-up basketball on the floor of the Ohio University Convocation Center when he collapsed. Then he was gone. Just like that.
Dan and I were the same age. He was a very good friend of a very good friend. I met him a couple of times. Even before we were introduced, I already knew who Dan was. He was tall. 6'9". He was big; quite possibly the biggest fan the Ohio Bobcats have ever had. Those O-Zone t-shirts? Dan started that. He couldn't pry himself away even after he graduated. He stayed on to be the promotions guy for the athletic department. In Athens, D-Lo was legendary.
Dan was a good guy. I knew that. Everybody tells me that.
I saw his name come up on my Facebook page today. Dan's profile is still active. He has more than 200 friends, and the list is growing. Somebody is still approving them, five years after his death. Today was his birthday and those friends are all wishing him a good one. If you took away all the miss yous in the posts, you'd never know he had passed away.
Dan died when he was 24. I think of all of the things I've done since I was 24. All I've gotten to experience. How much I've changed. How lucky I am. How I wish I could have made an impact like Dan's in the little time I've had. I wish I could be as passionate about something as he was about the Ohio Bobcats. About life.
Dan Lowe is 30 years old today, and I wish I could have gotten to know him better. But I'm glad I met him. Thanks Dan. And happy birthday.
Gerald Wallace, Twitterer, whoever you are, you got me.
I’ll admit it. I’m a Charlotte Bobcats fan. I’m also a Gerald Wallace fan. The guy plays hard. I respect that.
I’m also a Twitter fan. I think it’s fast becoming the way news breaks. When the Panthers got rid of longtime fullback Brad Hoover, safety Chris Harris tweeted it first. When the Panthers got rid of Chris Harris, Chris Harris tweeted that first too.
The problem is, the more you want to believe in Twitter, the more likely you are to be duped by it.
One night I was sitting up in bed, and saw someone talking about Gerald Wallace joining Twitter. @CrashWallace3 was his name. I saw his Twitter background. It looked legit. I followed him. Then he followed me. I got excited. I put my skepticism aside for a second.
He popped up in mid-June. Shortly after, he used Jesse’s official-looking background. He started amassing followers. Word spread. Some people were ecstatic. Others were skeptical. People wanted to know if it was really him. Someone asked former Bobcat Sean May. On Twitter. May’s account, like those of many NBA players, is personally verified by Twitter. Crash’s was not. May’s response: not him. And just like that, poof. @CrashWallace3’s cover was blown. Word spread quickly. The Bobcats warned their own Twitter followers that Crash was a fake. The next day, the account was gone.
While several Bobcats like Nazr Mohammed and Gerald Henderson DO tweet (last season, Tyson Chandler was fined after tweet came out during a game), a Bobcats spokesman says, simply, “Gerald is not a social media type of guy.” Bobcats guard D.J. Augustin apparently doesn't use Twitter either. There's an account with his name and picture. It's not verified. Whoever it is has never tweeted. The account has more than 200 followers. Just waiting for something. Anything.
We’re human. We make mistakes. But we also want to believe. We want to believe that an NBA All-Star really is talking to us. We want to know what they're doing. Who they are. Maybe they'll even have a conversation with us. It may not really be him. But maybe it is.
In the meantime, another member of the Bobcats just signed up for Twitter. As of today, Tyrus Thomas has more than 500 followers. But is he real? That's up to you to decide.
--- Read the Charlotte Magazine article: Faking It.
One thing, one thing, that I love more than anything, anything, in this world? Old people dancing. In fact, if the next wedding reception was somehow turned into a double-blind experiment, scientists would discover this disturbing fact: the amount that I gyrate on the dance floor is inversely proportional to the amount of geezers taking the opportunity to gently delve into the depths of the Macarena.
I am always practicing. I regularly work on the Apache. I throw the dice. A lot. Last year at a Halloween-themed wedding reception I went for broke by dressing as zombie Billy Mays and re-enacting Thriller.
Considering there were nearly no old people dancing at the reception on Saturday night, I had to step up to fill the void. I fired off something I call "big box, little box, big ball, little ball." It's an arm and hand move. Pretty self-explanatory. Then I moved on to other parts of my repertoire like the ladder-climb, the cranial swivel and the always popular pick-yourself-up-by-the-collar. That's a crowd pleaser.
At least one person requested that I do the T-Rex. I passed. The T-Rex is my own sacred creation. I lean forward in a terrible tyrannosaur pose and plop headlong into the evening with all of the sanctity of a giant lizard. I gnash my teeth wildly at invisible brontosaurs and pterodactyls, all the while slashing the air with my tiny T-Rex arms. I apparently did this move on the fifth date with Girlfriend. She is still around, but always humbly requests with wide eyes and bludgeoning seriousness that I never do it again.
I usually become embarrassingly sweaty after a long reception devoid of old people. On Saturday, I could have easily lost five pounds, had I not stuffed myself with wedding beer and wedding cake and wedding rolls covered in wedding butter. At the end of the evening, when some of the wedding beer had taken hold and I had slackened my dancing creativity, I found myself jumping wildly into the air to House of Pain. Later, during AC/DC, I was working. Double-time. On the seduction line.
I know it does not look that way, but I have taken dance lessons. The instructor, bless his heart, told me I had potential. He said I was better than most of the men who usually walk in the door at Fred Astaire. I'm not sure he was paying all that much attention.
No, I prefer to leave scorched earth when I trip the light fantastic. I am a destroyer of worlds, a murderer of merengue. I'll come at you with rabid wild eyes and sweaty hair and feet and elbows shooting forth from my body like lightning bolts raining down from Olympus. And if they play Journey, I will sing it at the top of my lungs. And if they play Ke$ha, I will mumble the words in a convincing way. I will big-box little-box my way into your little dance circle and blow it up. I will level your cha-cha slide with the carnage of my T-Rex. And if you don't like it, you had best bring your grandparents to the next reception. If you know what is good for you.
Prelude
I sit in my desk chair like a model posing for a portrait, my head cocked to the side, one elbow on the armrest, my spine curved like a slinky. My shoulders and lower back round forward. I know my horrid posture needs fixing. I, like Dante Aligheri, realize something in my life needs to change. Dante goes looking for salvation. I embark on a slightly less arduous journey to discover the joys of sitting up straight.
Virgil cannot take me across this Acheron. My co-workers suggest The Office's Dwight Schrute. Apparently, he's got some experience in this area.
Circle/Hour One - Limbo
I roll the exercise ball out off the back room at work and kick it up in front of my desk. I take a second to roll it forward and find my perch. This doesn't seem so bad. In fact, this doesn't even seem like hell, but in fact like a so-so Hooters. You know how there are good Hooters and bad Hooters? You can tell. Either the waitresses are all models, or the waitresses have never flossed. But once in a while, you find one that's firmly in the middle. That's a rare find.
My seat is bouncy, fun and new. As I type, I dream of what this must be doing for that mild case of scoliosis I had in middle school.
Circle/Hour Two - Lust
I am a bit taken by myself, actually. Oh, what people must think of me, sitting on my exercise ball but still able to perform my job at the highest level. I look at a picture taken of myself, sitting on the ball. Oh man. I look good.
I do wish I could slump though. Perfect posture requires a little more concentration than I realize. In this level of Hell, lustful souls are blown mercilessly by a violent storm, unable to find shelter. I am being thrown to and fro by violent exercise ball kicks from co-workers. But they are just jealous.
Circle/Hour Three - Gluttony
I feel my core tightening as my mind starts to slip. Cerberus, the three headed monster, guards the circle of hell meant for gluttons: those who have committed that sin must remain in the slush of a pounding icy rain. I qualify for this punishment by wasting my burned calories on a Two Cheeseburgers Value Meal from McDonald's, which I inhale in three minutes without bothering to use a napkin. The ball kicking continues.
Circle/Hour Four - Avarice
My playful bobbing turns into nervous bouncing as the deadline approaches. My upper back starts to become tender. Every time I get up, I feel tension in my quads. A production tech winds up like Ronaldo and gives my exercise ball a free kick.
The Greek god of wealth guards the level of Hell I have now entered. Oh, how I wish I had not squandered my comfortable albeit posture-killing office chair for this. For years, I have tried to hoard the best seats in the newsroom. Now, I feel like I am carrying a great weight on my body as punishment from Plutus, although that's probably just my abs cramping up.
Circle/Hour Five - Wrath
I cross the river Styx with weakening legs, fusing vertebrae and congealing spinal fluid from this damn ball. I don't know why I thought it would be easy. If I were really sullen about my experience, perhaps I would find myself horribly immersed under the black water of the Styx for all eternity. I guess I am not all that sullen. Instead, my wrathful side takes out my anger on my rundown. I'll teach you to mess with me, soundbite about Google Maps. You'll pay for my pain.
A total of ten people have now kicked the ball.
Hour Six - Escape
I roll the ball into the control room and I try to ignore my stiff back by bouncing harder. I am so near escape that I can barely concentrate on the weather forecast. As the show ends, I emerge from the control room, triumphant and beaming. My co-workers are happy too. The lowest levels of Hell are reserved for heresy, violence, fraud and betrayal. I'm sure they don't want any part of that.
I vanquish the fitness orb to the back room from whence it came. I strut into the newsroom, under the twinkling fluorescent lights, with a new appreciation for ergonomics and a properly adjusted office chair. The ball was my ferry through the underworld of mild exercise at work. It could have been worse. I mean, I could have to sit next to the police scanners all day. Now that would be hell.
Two of my co-workers and friends are leaving their jobs this week. It's ok. I'm still here. If I'm the last one out, I'll remember to turn out the lights.
The first to go was Brandon. He's off to law school. At the TV station, he went from a guy who hadn't even written a television script to a guy who was producing a newscast in a top 25 market. In two-and-a-half years. That's a Jeff Zucker-like rise. At least, Jeff Zucker before he left the Today Show.
Back in the day, when going through a stack of resumes, I apparently picked his out. My executive producer at the time used to let me tear into them with a red pen, looking for errors. I spilled a lot of ink. Brandon used spell-check. He got the job.
I got my job here in Charlotte thanks to Rachel, whose last day is today. In 2005, friend from college called me as I sat in a newsroom in West Virginia, thinking of a way out. She said she had another friend named Rachel, who was waiting to become a special projects producer, just as soon as someone came in to replace her on the morning show. That someone ended up being me.
Just about everything I've done with my career over the last five years can be traced back to that point. When I've hit a rough patch, Rachel has been there to help get me through it, and not just at work. She's always been gracious, whip-smart and fair. Rachel is going back to school to get her master's degree. She got a full ride. I'm not surprised.
"Going back to school" used to be the newsroom euphemism for what happened to someone who was working one day and abruptly gone the next. Now, two of my best friends are going back to school. For real. Even after today, the lights will still be on. They'll just be a little dimmer than they were before.
Saturday morning, my girlfriend at I stopped in at Starbucks for a coffee, and I walked out with a new CD. I haven't bought one in at least a year, but the pull of an old school rap CD was more than my will power could bear.
I listened to my De La Soul as I woofed down a ham and egg sandwich, and then I remembered; I did just about the the exact same thing at a Starbucks four years ago, and the whole thing troubled me. I wrote about it.
---
So I got a little mad at myself this week after I walked into Starbucks and left with a CD.
See, it's not so much that I wanted to buy a CD at Starbucks. It was just that I wanted the music, which is perfectly fine. I'd watched The Late Show with David Letterman the night before and saw Pearl Jam perform and thought, "Holy shit, I didn't know those guys were still around!" Then, I realized I did. I'd seen their CD on sale next to the cash register at Starbucks for at least two weeks.
Wednesday night, I was speaking Starbucksian, ordering a Venti Yukon, which translated into the largest cup of dark roast they had. The "barista" apologized, saying she'd have to brew a new batch, which would take a few minutes, which meant the $2 pitcher of coffee was on her. I glanced over at the Pearl Jam album that I'd been eyeing, picked it up, looked at the front (which told me about the most popular tracks), flipped it over (to verify that those songs were, in fact, on the CD), and told the "barista" I'd take it. I figured I'd take the money I saved on coffee and invest it into Eddie Vedder futures.
I spilled half of my free coffee on myself in the car (Starbucksian: "Drained a gratis Venti in my lap") before unwrapping my new CD and popping it in. I liked it, but something felt wrong.
I retraced my steps:
1. Watched Pearl Jam on Letterman.
2. Saw Pearl Jam CD at Starbucks. Repeatedly.
3. Bought Pearl Jam CD.
I had just fallen prey to the four P's of great marketing: product, placement, promotion and pricing. I thought I'd become a little more conniving than that. Some years before, I saw myself as an unpredictable consumer, the kind that still goes to places like hardware stores, thrift shops and garage sales only when I absolutely needed something. I strolled through the aisles as a non-consumerist hard-liner: a Fidel Castro in a world of capitalist pigs who, in order to be cool, ate Boca Burgers, drove Volkswagens and shopped at the Gap as they listened to Three Doors Down on their iPods. Me, I hadn't bought a pair of jeans in at least two years. I told my comrades I was fine with the ones I had.
My fear of slick marketing came from working at a clothing store. For at least three weeks during a winter break from college, I was employed by Structure. It was a store in the mall where my assigned job as an "associate" consisted of taking perfectly folded clothes off of a table, mussing them up, and then re-folding them, all in an effort to have something to do in close proximity to customers. "Hey," I might tell them. "Do you need some help there?"
Most of the time they'd say they were just looking, but, every once in a while, somebody would say they needed some help picking out a t-shirt to go with a button-down. "Well then," I'd say in my most fabulous helping-voice, "I think this red number would go really well with this green undershirt. What? No, you wouldn't look like a Christmas stocking at all! Yes. Your grandson would love it. Absolutely love it. Also, you should really pick up a pair of those parachute nylon pants."
Obviously, they couldn't figure out that I was the fashion equivalent of a Chevette wrapped around a telephone pole. I picked out my own Structure wardrobe myself: a pair of parachute nylon pants and an oversized long-sleeve t-shirt that I'd snagged from the clearance rack. I had no business advising others on what they should wear. But after two days of seriously putting some thought into helping people accessorize, I decided to see how ludicrously people would let me dress them. Seriously, I thought, how can I make this guy think he'll get more chicks sporting a pair of cargo pants with fifteen compartments? How can I make this woman think that her self-respecting son would ever wear a pink skin-tight shirt?
I was a horrible salesman. But I sold a lot of pink skin-tight shirts and cargo pants in three weeks.
It wasn't me. It was the trendy music and the trendy brand name and the trendy posters of trendy models wearing trendy clothes. They made our customers think everything in the store, the shirts and the pants and the belts and the workers making minimum wage, were trendy too. I vowed then that I'd never get sucked into the same marketing trap.
I guess fighting it took too much of my time. I used to be that guy who refused to shop at Wal-Mart, and instead found satisfaction in taking trips to five different specialty shops to get what I needed. Nowadays, I've found that I look for the big green Starbucks sign and figure I'll get my music there too.
Friday, I decided to donate my pair of parachute nylon pants to Goodwill and go try on a new pair of jeans. After all, I wasn't sure if I was a Grande or a Venti.
--- From June 3, 2006
I got a keg of beer at Olde Mecklenburg Brewery yesterday for a party tonight, and as I'm leaving, they tell me "Hey, you really oughta keep that cold."
I didn't have many options. Except for this.
Other than an orange, some pop and some condiments, there is nothing but beer in my fridge right now. I've been back from vacation from a week but I've eaten somewhere other than home every night.
20-year-old Jeremy would have been so impressed with me right now. But 30-year-old me is just shaking his head. Fat, drunk and stupid is no way to go through life, son.
