Thursday, December 31, 2015

Losing televised sports as an interest

   When I was a kid, I loved sports. I enjoyed playing and watching them, and baseball was my favorite. I very much liked seeing the games in person at the stadium, but the television experience was still plenty exciting to me. In those years I was a big fan of very non-local teams like the Reds (from Cincinnati) and the A's (from Oakland), I imagine at least partly because they were so successful back then. I certainly didn't know where Cincinnati or Oakland were located, nor did I seem to care.
   A few years later, perhaps in my mid-teens, I recall going to Yankee stadium with my father and being amazed that he would get bored so early in the game and want to leave. At this point I was beginning to prefer other sports (I believe that hockey, being a sport that my friends at that time would play, was becoming a new favorite), and these preferences would continue to change the older I became. Still, I couldn't understand the boredom on my father's part.
   Now I can.
   I don't know exactly when it happened, when the actual break took place, but I realized perhaps a week ago that I generally cannot watch any sport on television for more than a little while without becoming extremely bored.
   This change did not occur suddenly, but over time I did notice that the different type of sports I watched had shrunken, as had the time I could bear to do so. Baseball was the first to go, then hockey, and now American football, which seemed for a time to take the reins and keep my sports interest from completely disappearing altogether. For a few weeks, European football (soccer in the U.S.), and even basketball had briefly appeared as a possible replacement sports interest, but these were short lived.
   At some point, I had developed the boredom and lack of interest of my father that had so perplexed me years earlier.
   For years, televised sports were something that I used to unwind after work, a passive activity that I could engage in without having to care much about the outcome. For a nervous person such as myself, being able to engage without invested attachment to something was alluring and relaxing, and it worked most of the time. My wife and I even coined a term, 'stupid t.v.' to signify watching television for this same effect, and we would often watch different programs together (She also allowed me to watch the sports I wanted, even though she absolutely hates them. and I am thankful to her for that).
   So it is that this lack of interest in sports has meant not only a change, but also the disappearance of an avenue for me that was useful for decompressing from a world that I often feel quite fearful in. I mourn this loss, truly, but hope that it signifies that I will be moving on to discover new methods that are more in fitting with the person I am currently and will become. This is not only a hope, but also a wish.


Tuesday, December 29, 2015

An altered view

   Below is a picture that I took as I walked around Stow Lake in Golden Gate Park. About a week ago, we had a good rainstorm accompanied by strong winds here in San Francisco, and one of the large trees fell into the lake. It had stood next to the bench seen below.
   For some days the car path located just outside of the picture was cordoned off for what the people that walk here said was a crane to remove the trunk, but after a few days the fallen tree and cones remained.
   It's interesting to me that somehow the area had appeared relatively unchanged from how I'd known it for some years (even with the tree laying horizontally in the water), but today I noticed that something was different; it had finally been removed.
   Although I have passed this spot more than a thousand times, and seen here much more than just this specific tree, the visual absence of it made the area appear completely new. It really fascinated me that my perception could be so radically altered by the removal of just one thing, no matter the size, from my field of vision.
   I realized at that moment in a very visceral way that my eyes did not in fact translate empirical information, but rather helped to form the subjective beliefs that I use to determine what is true and not in the world. It was a powerful reminder that what I often determine to be irrevocably correct can conceivably be so to the contrary.


Friday, December 25, 2015

The recent and distant past

   I'm confident that I'm not alone when I say that the idea of time is a very elusive thing, but to me, it just feels entirely too subjective sometimes. Actually, I guess that it feels as unreal to the physicists that deny it exists as a linear thing.
   Like most people, I follow the clocks, and am quite obedient when it comes to being early, on-time or late according to them, but in terms of my memory and my own experiences (as well as my experience of people that have had or have some importance in my life), I cannot say that this obedience seems to carry any weight; either the clock, or my allegiance to it fails me.
   When I have some reminder that nudges me to think about the past, it often feels like I was both there and not, or as if the event thought of might have occurred a week, a month, or even  many years in the past. Sometimes, more recent events seem stronger, while other times the strength of the memory or sensation associated with it seems of greater import. It reminds me of paintings before the renaissance, when the size of objects depended on their cultural importance, rather than their portrayed closeness to the viewer.
   As hazy as the past can sometimes be, so can the future, so I rarely think about it, other than worrying over short-term things like getting paperwork done at my job or planning on what clothing I might need on an upcoming vacation. If events that happened when I was younger are unreal, the future is unfathomable. It's not that I do such a good job of living in the present that there is no need for a planned future, but rather that the sense of one remains too imagined.
   So it is that when I recall memories or sensations that have occured in my life, I am often happy and delighted to try to employ them to learn more about how they have contributed to the person that I am now. More tellingly, to the man that thinks about who they are, because the sense of self needed to feel wholly like me, like Adam Cooperstein, is as hard to fathom as is my own past.
 
 

Wednesday, December 23, 2015

Marxism as a style

   I was recently working on an entry in this blog about outdoor clothing, and the writing and thinking on the subject led me to think about clothing made from coarse materials. As I thought on clothing made from these less-refined textiles (and who might have worn them years ago), images came to my mind of the early twentieth century worker proletariat. As it turned out, I chose not to include these ideas in that particular entry because the post seemed too rambling, but the idea has stayed in my head, so I'm writing about it here.
   I don't know why exactly I thought of these image-ideas, but I do know that this history has at times been very important to me, as I have in the past considered myself a radical Marxist, at least in theory. I still believe in many Marxist economic ideas, in particular, the exposition of capitalist ideologies as written about by people like Antonio Gramsci. I also suspect that old posters celebrating the worker proletariat, and the films of Sergei Eisenstein, had very much to do with it.
   So it is that as a person that very much likes particular styles of clothing (I wouldn't however consider myself fashion-conscious or fashionable), I have always associated clothing with particular times and social movements, and my current obsession with water repellent clothing has led me to discover the wonders of clothing that places these properties over comfort, and the connotations with workers and their struggles from one hundred or so years ago that it holds for me.
   So as I sit here writing in a pair of 65/35 polyester-cotton blend pants designed to be water resistant, I am thinking about how Marxist-proletariat idea(l)s have become for me more an interest in retro fashion and design than in active political movement.
   I think about the visual design style of Constructivism in what was then the Soviet Union, the buttoned-up-to-the-top suit jacket made popular by Mao (but originally called the Zhongshan Suit), and the early twentieth century newsboy hats often seen in posters from that era propagating popular struggle and worker strikes. I myself wore a kind of newsboy hat almost twenty years ago (also favoring buttoning the top button on my wool jackets at that time), and although I don't wear clothing in that way anymore, I still have a kind of leftist belief that there's probably nothing worse in personal style than trying to show that you've got money in the way that you dress.
   So as I finish up this short entry on the idea of certain clothing fabrics connoting a classic radical leftism, I realize that although it's true that I have very little interest in active political struggle, I still retain a place in my heart for a style associated with one of its' applications. Marxist? I doubt it. Materialist? Perhaps.
 

Thursday, December 3, 2015

Outdoor clothing

   I walk everyday around Stow Lake, which I enjoy very much, both for exercise and to help clear my head of the seemingly endless chatter that occurs there (though this aspect of my walks is not always so successful). I have set myself the strict routine of walking there no matter what the weather, and because I dislike using an umbrella, I sometimes find myself getting wetter than I prefer to, especially when I have to be at work for the rest of the day. Even if I do use an umbrella when it's raining hard, my lower legs often get pretty soaked (my waterproof jackets and water resistant/proof shoes take care of the rest of my body), and I absolutely refuse to use an umbrella large enough to cover this area (I find huge, dome-like umbrellas a bit obnoxious).
   But then, 'outdoor clothing' enters my life
   By perusing different websites for clothing in general, I came across a brand named Fjallraven from an English website called Oi Polloi, and through further exploration found that they make a 'jeans' style (i.e.-slimmer fitting) hiking pant that doesn't look so much like well, hiking pants. I bought two pairs online in different sizes from a discount website, and decided on the smaller pair, which were very tight around the waist, but slimmer fitting.
   Because they felt so restricting, I decided to try to lose a few pounds, which I did, and now they are pretty damn comfortable. This is in consideration of the fact that they are made of a cotton/polyester blend that the company calls "g-1000", and which is not, let us say, the most flowing of materials. I've gotten pretty into the idea of being somewhat waterproof in my clothing, and can't help thinking that there's a subconscious aspect to it for me as well; something like being bulletproof.
   It was a few years ago that I first bought some rather heavy canvas pants from a local company here in San Francisco called Taylor Stitch, who make a sort of slimmed-down version of classic Carhartt work pants, and when I first became interested in the idea of clothing that wasn't so comfortable. Like the bulletproof notion, I assume there's a similar association with stiff clothing, but there's also a quality to it that I think I also like in a very tactile way. It feels in some way that I am wearing clothing that was made a very long time ago, when production techniques were not so fully automated, and which produced rougher, more imperfect articles. I really like imperfect.
   When it is raining, and I am wearing my 'outdoor clothing', I feel like I can go where I want, unfettered by anything in the world at that moment, and for a man that can at times feel too vulnerable for my own comfort, that is a nice feeling, even if I'm receiving it vicariously from my clothing.