The Cost of Opportunity, The Terrible Risk of Stealing Your Own Hopes

Occasionally I dream of winning the lottery. When the jackpot gets big I plunk down one or two dollars on a ticket, and I think the main reason I do, the main thing I'm buying, is the opportunity to dream for a day or two, to muse and wonder on the life that might be. The dreams are both distracting and instructive, a mental vacation, a seminar on what you really want.

What I dream of is not fabulous riches and an oversized house and fancy cars, although those pass throught the picture. The chief appeal is time. A lottery winner, or at least the lottery winner I become in my head, is with one oversized check given back the precious store of 24 hours in every day for the rest of his life. Life suddenly is no longer dominated by drudgery and petty obligation.

I wouldn't have to put on the headset and get abused and bombarded by people's petty troubles, the litany of their enormous irritation at having to press two buttons instead of one, their outrage at missing Dancing With the Stars. I like a little TV as much as the next guy, but I can't help but thinking they'd be better off dancing with their wives, or gazing at the stars, or reaching for them, rather than being nasty and rude to me because I had the misfortune of being on the other end of the line when the dreaded beep sounded, the tone that haunts the dreamless space between closing my eyes and losing consciousness.

I get frantic, my fists clench for a second, if I think about that beep and the control it holds over my life. It is an audible lash of slavery. I wear a headset but I might as well be chained to the desk. For forty precious hours a week I'm in a misery of triviality and whiny indignation, over what? The right to stuff your minds with nothing and line the pockets of the stockholders of the Global Communications Giant with ill-gotten cash. There is no way the monthly cable phone and internet bill should be $300, for anyone, but for hundreds of thousands of people it is. There is no way Ray Ramano should make twenty million a year for telling jokes, but he does. We're that desperate to be distracted.

There's an opportunity cost to everything we choose to do. There are fishermen who are poets, but even they must realize the more time they spend tying flies, the less fish they'll catch and the more poems will pop into their heads, but the fewer hours they'll spend writing them down. The dream of winning the lottery isn't wallowing in the pile of money; it's wallowing in the priceless luxury of having enough time to take care of the body and mind, to sleep until you're ready to be awake and exercise until the body is rejuvenated and read until the mind is inspired, to be free of punching the clock, to live the Johnny Paycheck classic, "Take this job and shove it, I ain't workin' here no more."

I live in dread of being discovered for the malcontent I am. It takes an enormous energy to hold in check my growing discontent. My wanderlust is at war with my sense of responsibility. I need to earn a living. Everyone does. But why does it have to make us so miserable? Why do I have to average 10.85 calls per hour and achieve 2% new product sales and maintain a CQE rating of 94 while keeping the occurences below 5.0 a year? I'm supposed to care about the customers. Deep down I'm a fundamentally courteous person, so I do. But who cares about me? How do I escape the dread I feel climbing those stairs to the third floor? When I get to the top of them I've only climbed high enough to reach another round of emailed memos and motivational pep talks, of glitches and fixes and oppressive reminders and error codes and points to remember.

The biggest part of the problem of me is not the working hours, it's the time that's left to me. No matter how rich or poor we are, we have the same store of 24 hours, and we can spend it sleeping or dreaming or stuffing our faces. I can play poker or go to the gym or take a nap. I can read the Duck blog or research a new novel. Most of the time I don't do much of anything, and the years mount while I fall asleep. I have a lottery ticket in my wallet but I don't want to check the numbers yet. I'd like to keep the dream alive for another day.

There's a new movie out which I've heard about but haven't seen called Food, Inc., about the dangers of our highly processed and manufactured food supply, the ways it is literally making us sick. The movie has an agenda and a pronounced political viewpoint, and I'm not sure if it's still in theaters or available now for rental or on DVD. Draw your own conclusions about its content, but it illustrates an essential principle at the heart of our lives:

We become what we think about, we are what we take in, the inevitable product of our lives is the habits we practice and the choices we make, whether they are made consciously or not. No matter where we are, we didn't get there by accident, and nothing changes until we change our thinking.

That's the exciting part. I could wake up tomorrow and find I won the lottery. Or I could wake up this afternoon and make a choice that unravels all the rest of them, that sets in motion the life and the hopes I really want to realize. I need to find the courage within myself to live my passion. I need to find the courage to be truly passionate. Somewhere in all of us is the power to discard our complacency and lazy assumption, to consider the cost of what we're doing and failing to do. We have to stop stealing our own hopes. We have to discover what we knew all along.

In Remember the Titans, Coach Boone is blowing his whistle while the neat rows of players in their practice whites are doing up-downs in the summer heat. "We're going to change the way we eat, We're going to change the way we block." He's a fierce taskmaster. Every detail will be right. Every choice will be for a purpose. The Titans will play with one heart and for one goal. The Titans went undefeated. They left everything on the field. They didn't let racism or ignorance stand in their way. Every one of them accomplished more than they thought they could. They changed the way they ate. They made a future greater than anyone forecast for them. They are remembered, and their story still inspires greatness.

A Change of Heart, A Change of Mind, A Change of Pants

I'm embarrassed with myself for sounding so mopey and helpless. Last night I put on my best suit and Marie put on a sexy red sweater and curve-flattering black slacks, and we took twenty bucks of her hard-earned first paycheck and went out for Chinese food. We went to China Jade, our favorite place. The service is quick and efficient and the food is fresh and beautfully prepared. On the way home we stopped at the Red Box and got another movie. We ate peppermint Easter candies in bed and watched Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium. It was a perfect evening and next day, the perfect antidote to the morose self-absorption I was feeling yesterday.

Occasionally it's good to watch something bright and colorful and happy, to remind yourself that there is magic and it is real, and that the most powerful and magical things are simple. Holding a squishy, bright, beautiful baby. Whispering to someone that you love them. Having them squeeze you in return. In the afternoon at lunchtime the last two days I caught pieces of Ella Enchanted and Remember the Titans on cable, and in my life and in my viewing I'm getting all these subtle and encouraging reminders that it's okay to believe, that there's no reason to give up merely because circumstances are discouraging or your sinuses are stuffed. Today is a brighter day and I'm grateful, even though it's Sunday afternoon and time to go back to work. At least I'll have leftover Chinese food for lunch.

Gran Torino and My Sister's Keeper

In movies there are big moments that define lives, but real life isn't that clear. We have a lot of messy little decisions instead of great crystallizing climaxes and defining moments. On the surface these were two movies that had little to do with each other, but both were about sacrifices and redemption and acceptance, facing death. The hope is by viewing such beautifully told stories we can step back from our own messy lives for a moment and find our own integrity and decisiveness, increase our own awareness of life and death and purpose.

I'm just spitballing here. The farther I get into this the more I realize I don't know anything. It's a risky thing to write, particularly about your own life. Sometimes it's like throwing a party and having nobody come. To love somebody, to believe in something, that's the important thing. But in the midst of all the small decisions and mounting discouragements sometimes that isn't an easy thing. You can lose your way.

A week ago Thursday I bounced the rent check. It came through a day earlier than I'd planned and it cost me an extra $134, a late fee from the property management company and a returned check fee, and a late fee from the bank. On Monday I had to go to court for a traffic ticket. My license had expired. I had to send away to the State Department for my birth certificate. It cost $35 for the research and the copy and $40 for a new license. I didn't have the money so I kept putting it off. I only drove back and forth to work, so I was hoping I could buy a little time till things got better. Then one night a Beaverton cop pulled me over. I got out of the car with my wallet in my hand, a stupid thing to do. As if driving expired weren't stupid enough. "What was I doing wrong, sir?" I asked, trying my best to suck up. I'm not good at sucking up. It's part of the reason I'm not good at my job. Another story interrupts the first. The cop told me my license plate light was out. It's just a pretense to write tickets. A license plate light doesn't make a damn bit of difference. But it justifies a lot of stops.

So Friday I hawked my laptop to offset the extra expenses, and Saturday I went over to DMV to renew the license, and Monday I went to court. The judge reduced the fine to $295. He used to be able to dismiss those but not anymore. The legislature passed a new set of minimum fines, with a maximum reduction of 25%. It's a way of raising taxes without raising taxes. Things have momentum when you're poor. And everything that happens sucks up more time.

On Wednesday I took a bus over to JPM to straighten out the rent mess, and Thursday I did the taxes. We owe state but we're getting a refund from federal. I filed an injured spouse form to keep them from confiscating it all for interest on an old school loan one of us had. We're buried in debt. We'll never get out unless we get better jobs, win the lottery, or I master the poker thing or the writing thing, which is why I keep doing both of them. You have to keep ridiculous hope alive, because it is far better than no hope at all. Marie got a new job, which helps a lot. Her first check was $530 take home for one week of work, and those numbers looked awfully pretty printed out in a row after a week of self-induced defeats. Finally we had some breathing room and a cause for optimism. We bought groceries and paid the phone bill.

Last night we went out and had the same old fight. One of the bartenders was a young blonde woman with big boobs, and I got in trouble for ignoring her. It's complicated. I don't understand it. My thinking was, I love and adore my wife, and I'm going to show it by staying focused on her and ignoring this bimbo who wants everybody's attention. I just wanted to have a nice time, to dance and then go home and make love. We had hurt feelings and a misunderstanding instead, in a way that always seems to dredge old hurt feelings and feelings of not measuring up, for both of us. We're stuck in a loop with each other, and it's such an awful shame. She's such a vibrant and desirable woman. She deserves to be happy. I don't make her happy. I don't think I'm that appealing to her any more.

In My Sister's Keeper a family's life gets crazy over the oldest daughter's battle with leukemia. They conceived the youngest child in vitro to create a donor match, and after 11 years of cord blood and bone marrow and tests and transfusions the younger sister sues her parents for medical emancipation. It's a tear-jerker, but what humanizes and lifts the story are the honest portrayals. Each family member reacts to the crisis in their own way, and their responses seem very genuine, bouncing from anger to acting out to incredibly touching tenderness. I welled up. There's a time to die. The dying girl keeps a scrapbook of her memories and feelings of guilt.

In Gran Torino Clint Eastwood's Walt Kowalski is an angry man burying his wife, and everything he sees around him angers him more. He fought in Korea and worked forty years in the Ford plant, but his granddaughter shows up at the funeral with a belly ring and a navel-bearing shirt. His oldest son drives a Toyota. His neighborhood is being taken over by foreigners. A gang of gooks try to steal his car. The punks are lawless and purposeless and overrunning the streets. A frail neighbor lady drops her grocery bags and a passing scumbag pantomines raping her.

In a surprising and unlikely way he befriends his Asian neighbors and ends up teaching and protecting the Hmong girl who lives next door and her fatherless brother. The story is told with dignity and rough humor, and as the director, Eastwood displays his spare, lean stye and eye for detail. He's a careful craftsman. I read one time that his father owned a hardware store and his storytelling style shows his respect for the tools of his trade. A locked screen door echoes the priest's confessional without making a big deal about it. It just does. When Eastwood is riddled with bullets and stretched out on the lawn like Christ, there is a rightness about it. The moment is totally free of artfulness or pretension. It just makes sense, like willing the Gran Torino to his young friend instead of his ungrateful family.

I loved Walt Kowalski. I loved his uncompromising grumpiness and rough humor. I loved him giving lessons to his Hmong protege on how to talk like a man, complain about your girlfriend and the cheating mechanic, be confident and irritable and not weak. I saw him as the logical heir to Eastwood's cinematic history. No one can grit their teeth over a cocked weapon like Eastwood, and Walt Kowalski is Harry Callahan aged and humanized, dying gracefully, poignantly, handling things in the only way they can be handled, a savior in a stark place, a savior in a place too grim and lost for saving. Decaying neighborhoods and crumbling morals all over America are aching for a Walt Kowalski, but what they'll likely get is a fire next time that nothing will put out.

In truth I don't know much. I just keep writing because it's the only thing I know how to do. I want to love and be a better man, but the business of living in the real world is tricky. We keep running into the problems of time and money and the problem of living with our regrets and our fears. I watch these movies and I walk away from them inspired by the courage that pushes people on, facing hopelessness with such a spirit of hope, believing something is worthwhile despite all the evidence to the contrary.

I'm Rooting for the Other Guy

As a sports fan I've always rooted for the underdogs, the teams and players no one expects to win. I love comeback stories and redemption stories, guys who overcome injury or failure to succeed. I choose a lot of my favorites based on likability. Of course we can never really know athletes, just the glimpses of their public persona, the carefully guarded interviews and appearances, the hints we get from the way they comport themselves after the wins and losses.

I've never liked Tiger Woods. Long before his indiscretions, I liked Phil Mickelson or Ernie Els. I hated the way announcers and interviewers fawned on Woods and excused or overlooked his bad on-course behavior. I conceded he was good, even great, but I always rooted against him, rooted for the crucial putt to lip out. I thought he was phony and scripted.

I even hated the way everyone called him "Tiger," as if they were chummy with him. Nicklaus was Nicklaus, Hogan was Hogan, but every breathless commentator would say, "Here's Tiger on the 16th tee." It was though he had home court advantage everywhere in the world. Even Muhammad Ali, maybe the greatest and most world-impacting athlete ever, was "Ali." But Tiger got first name status, like Elvis and Madonna. It rankled me, the favoritism and the small hyprocrisy of it. I used to work in a golf shop, and people who wouldn't have given a black person a bite of a sandwich would stroll into the shop with ridiculous grins on their faces and say, "Did you see what Tiger did today?" as if they were bosom buddies or brothers from another mother.

Our love of sports and sports figures is inherently ridiculous, and the cult of Tiger worship, particularly after his embarrassing and self-imposed downfall, was exposed as a sham and a monstrosity. And now talk of his comeback has dominated the sports shows and even mainstream media for a month. Will Tiger be ready? How will he cope with the attention and pressure? How will he perform after his layoff?

I'm cynical too about his rehabilitation. He's reforming his behavior chiefly because he got caught and exposed in a particularly embarrassing way. And now he is making a great show of saying the right things and expressing remorse. Missing from his declarations is any sort of apology to the series of women he used and discarded over the last several years, apparently without so much as buying them dinner or an occasional gift. The various inside editions and tell-all updates exposed him as cheap, ungenerous and socially retarded, kinky and twisted, insatiable and impressively endowed. The focused, fierce, disciplined competitive drive he displayed on course gave way to another person, someone that lacked morality, self control or human decency. I don't think he would have changed at all had he not crashed his car and wound up in the tabloids.

All that is parenthetical however, to the simple fact I never liked Tiger Woods as a athlete, the fact that he got the lion's share of attention even when someone else won. A great store is made over his race to overtake Jack Nicklaus' career majors record, but the Golden Bear set his mark in a golden age of golf. He had to earn his victories against Hogan and Palmer and Player and Trevino and Watson and Norman and Faldo. He beat Hall of Famers to earn his victories, finishing second nineteen times and in the top five 56 times. The competition was stronger and the equipment was far less advanced, persimmon drivers and aluminum shafts. Golf was a different and more difficult game. Stuff like this gets overlooked.

At the Masters this week there are plenty of storylines and inspirational beginnings. Tom Watson shot a 67, five under par at age 60. Fifty-year-old Fred Couples leads the tournament at minus six. Ricky Barnes, who finished second at last year's U.S. Open, is just off the lead at minus four. Barnes was a highly touted amateur player who has struggled as a pro, and a win at Augusta could turn his career around. Phil Mickelson made five under as well, and he is playing for his wife and mother, both of whom are recovering from breast cancer.

Inside the ropes there are plenty of athletes who have competed nobly and avoided indiscretion. A cascade of praise is heaped on Tiger Woods for doing what he should have done all along. The only thing he's coming back from is his own mess, and I'll be tickled to death if he falls short and fails.

Did You Hear About the Morgans?

It was a light little movie, as frothy as a meringue with lots of sugar and egg. I always enjoy Sam Elliot and Mary Steenburgen in any role, even though she is nearly always typecast as the brassy and independent woman, and he as the laconic cowboy in a uniform or a big hat. I am drawn to character actors. Brian Dennehy and Harry Dean Stanton are two of my all time favorites. I used to like Wilford Brimley before he started doing too many commercials. It's hard to take an actor seriously after he has done the late night supplemental medical insurance commercials. Robert Duvall and Michael Caine are too other actors I love in any movie, and Second Hand Lions , which features both of them, along with a young Haley Joel Osment and Kyra Sedgewick, is on my top five stranded-on-a-desert island movies, assuming the island had a battery-operated dvd player.

To me Did You Hear About the Morgans?, underneath the comic pratfalls and the bear spray in the eye, was about the limits of forgiveness and the nature of redemption. It's a subject that's in the news a lot lately. A host of men have gotten exposed in terrible indiscretions, Bruce Springsteen, Jesse James, Tiger Woods among them, and now they have to begin the difficult process of redeeming themselves and rebuilding their lives. For some of them they will have to do it alone. Some wounds can't be healed, and some heels have to suffer wounds for the way they bruised others.

Sara Jessica's Parker's character asks, why? Why her? Why did you cheat on me? He says I'm sorry a half dozen times and sends gifts, but that's the gnawing center of the victimized person's hurt. Why didn't you choose me? Why did you have to ruin what we had and destroy my trust?

Questions like these don't have easy answers. In the movie they dodge a bullet and outrun a bear and everything is all better, and in the end they wind up with an adopted baby in their arms and one of their own on the way. (I haven't spoiled the ending--it's a comedy. The ending was never in doubt.) But real life is a drama with tragic and pathetic undertones. The happy ending is never quite as easily gained.

Triple Feature: Revolutionary Road, Open Road, Paper Heart

On the scroll down of the blog there is a picture of Marie and I from when we were first dating. The light and joy in our faces shines out of the picture. The endorphins and serotonins were flowing. I felt confident and strong and desired. We were on the boardwalk of Fisherman's Wharf and the sun was setting over Golden Gate Bridge. We were in love, hopeful, energized, charged with optimism, crazy for each other.

The beginning of love is like that, for a variety of reasons. Some are biochemical and some are magic, and the feelings of falling in love and discovering one another and the enormous life-changing exhilaration of being chosen and discovered are like nothing else in the world. Early in the movie Revolutionary Road April Wheeler has a flashback to the night she met Frank, their courtship, and she telling him, "You're the most interesting person I've ever met." The beginnings of love are like that, fascination and desire and belonging. Most textbooks say it's unsustainable, a illusion nature fosters to make us procreate and survive the species.

Nothing prepares you for the loss of love, or the tipping point where love turns crazy and hopeless and disappointing. The promise turning sour and the longing to loathing is the emptiest, most frustrating, rage-inducing experience in human life. We turn away from each other. We betray and wound and destroy each other. We make awful decisions and grasp at straws. April convinces herself that Paris will rejuvenate their hopes. Life intervenes and destroys them altogether. It's brilliantly staged and masterfully set, as tense and tight and grim as life itself. Marie said, "When they were fighting I knew exactly what she was feeling. It was like you and I were fighting again." I felt it too. It's instructive that Kate Winslet and the director of the movie, Sam Mendes, announced in March that their marriage was ending after five years. They'd been living separate lives, the articles said. The tension and heartache they were experiencing clearly served their movie well.

I don't have the answers as to why love fails. I know how awful it feels, and how mournful and uncertain it makes you in your deepest heart. I haven't given up. Paper Heart was a kooky and uneven movie told in an offhand and off-putting style by an unsympathetic narrator, but what appealed to me in the story were the interviews with couples who'd been married forty and fifty years. They all seemed to say that with endurance and devotion the giddy exhilarations of first love became something quite different. With time they learned to accept morning breath and bad jokes. They learned to appreciate and accept and depend on each other. The shared hardships and history had a power and a grace all their own. It made me hopeful after the shock of seeing our worst moments played out on the screen by two strangers from the 1950's.

What struck me too about Revolutionary Road was the movie magic in action. The set designers and costume designer and casting people did a fabulous job of creating the look and feel of another time in marvelous detail, even down to the distracting and awkward way men wore their high-waisted pants, the pasty white bodies lounging on wooden beach chairs, and the window on the kitchen door with slats and frosted glass. Every detail was perfect and perfectly captured, to bitterly reveal that the core of human sorrow has not changed from then to now.

Then in the last awful moment of the film we saw Mrs. Givings' husband turning down his hearing aid until he could no longer hear her, with a sneering and satisfied smile overtaking his lips. It seemed to say, in the end we negate each other with indifference. Love gives way to not caring much either way. We choke the life out of our hopes. It was the most grim, awful story I'd ever watched. I still don't think our lives have to end that way. I refuse to believe we can't make choices that will make all the difference.

The middle movie I watched in the afternoon while Marie took a nap. I wanted something light and hopeful, and Open Road, which the capsule said starred Jeff Bridges, one of my favorite actors, seemed to fit the bill. A father and son, the son a minor league ballplayer and his father a Hall of Famer, set off on a cross-country road trip and try to rediscover each other. Rediscovery is a hopeful note. They succeeded without being too heavy-handed about it. The son got the girl.

Romantic comedies are my favorite movies, but a steady diet of them rots the teeth of your imagination. It's good to take an occasional dose of something frank and strong. We have to test the muscles of our convictions. We have to see if our hopes have any sinew and fire. The goal is to become one of those people who withstand the hardships and learn how to love somebody for life.

A Parade Nobody Wants to Watch

Stop coming out. Everybody go back in. No one wants to know.

Recently Rickie Martin and Anna Paquin, two people who were famous a dozen years ago, joined the endless parade of semi-famous semi-celebrities who held a press conference to declare their sexual orientation. Every few weeks someome straggles forward, including another singer who finished second in American Idol and the mom from "Family Ties," a TV show that was cancelled when my daughter was still in high school.

It's tiresome. No one wants to know. No one needs to know. When you close your bedroom door, what happens there is your own business. We don't need to know every fart and belch of your personal life, especially when that life is some warped Hollywood cliche of what's trendy and cutting edge. You're gay? You're "bi"? You have an inappropriately warm relationship with small animals? No one cares. Take your dwindling Q-rating and dangerous preoccupation with yourself and go back to your home and have a nice life. Whether you spend it alone or with some other troll with the same singular fascination is nobody's business. The positions and manueverings of your sexual gratifications are meaningless to anyone else, and inappropriate for public conversation. Just go home, and be sure to close the bedroom door behind you.

What is it about people who make large sums of money being semi-entertaining that makes them think we need to know who they sleep with or how they grope each other? Why is a whole industry devoted to these revelations? People, Extra and OMG! breathlessly revealing these startling confessions in 50-point type, yet it's rarely a surprise and hardly significant. Does it change my life in any way to know Rickie Martin is gay? Women once swooned over him and his smoldering Latin sensuality. I suppose the most essential lesson is how easily we are all fooled and how pathetically our attentions can be swayed.

We're force fed tidbits of the lives of celebrities for no apparent reason. Brad and Angelina are on the rocks. No wait, they've adopted another child. The vampire boy is sleeping with his emaciated costar. John Mayer is inexplicably linked to another attention-starved fool. Who choreographs this mad dance? And why do we set it to music and call it a symphony? I think ultimately the purpose is to distract us, and for some reason it works every time.

The merry-go-round of the low standard of public information and entertainment is poisoning our brains. We are made dizzy with claptrap, sick with the empty cotton candy artificial flavor of a thousand scoops, fat and bloated and rotted in our souls. The web has accelerated our foolish fascinations and feeds them like an iv drip to our squishy shrinking dinosaur brains.

There was a children's movie Wall-E, with a subtle message for the adults watching. The earth had become uninhabitable and its people were marooned in space. They had lost the ability to move much. They had misplaced the ability to think for themselves or act independently. They lounged on massaging lounge chairs and feasted endlessly on super big gulps, their every need met by the giant faceless corporation that owned everything. But it was a children's movie. Nothing like that could really happen, right? Who's coming out today?