Sean Lovelace: Why I Write (14)
2. My fifth grade basketball coach loomed about me (his head an overripe horned melon) and screamed, “That’s not how you shoot a fucking free throw, you little fuck! (He was five feet, two inches tall, and overused the term fuck to compensate.) This is how you shoot a free throw! Bend your knees, concentrate on the target, follow through! Got it? You fucking got it?”
I assured my coach I fucking got it.
“Good!” he bellowed then swiveled to walk away. But turned: “Let me tell you something else,” he spat. “If you don’t shoot one hundred free throws every day, forget every fucking thing I just said.”
3. Obviously, as a married man, I am often lonely and in constant need of drink, drugs, sex. I find gatherings of writers especially helpful.
4. Why do I play disc golf? The act is enjoyable. To play well, is enjoyable. Why? Because it’s hard. It is very hard to play disc golf, so therefore the joy. Any fool can go out and throw a Frisbee (though we never call them Frisbees; they are discs, not Frisbees). But I am discussing another thing entirely: to select the correct disc (out of hundreds), the correct shot (hyzer, anhyzer, tomahawk, forearm, sidearm, roller, etc.), to read the wind and distance and terrain, to put the disc in the target, and do it properly. This is a difficult thing! The human mind—if decent at all—accepts the struggle. Relishes the act. Engages the challenge. Ask the chessman. The dog groomer. The surgeon or the sailor.
5. Words do not express thoughts very well. They always become a little different immediately after they are expressed, a little distorted, a little foolish.
6. As a dog groomer I learned to manually squeeze the feces from a dog’s ass before washing the mutt in a giant cauldron of steaming detergent. As a lifeguard I learned how to avoid the sun. As a registered nurse I learned that dead people can actually make croaking sounds as fluids settle in their esophagus and lungs. As a produce store clerk I learned mustard greens from collard greens. As a DuPont employee I learned to wear long sleeves when working near cyanide. As an air conditioner repairman I learned how, when bidding on a contract, to outlandishly lie to Wendy’s restaurant corporate types. As an English professor I learned that the desire to tell stories is pretty much universal. As a Mercedes factory employee I learned to clean the metal spatter off the robots that construct the SUVs. As a Pizza Hut delivery driver I learned how to prank call Dominoes. As a QO Chemical worker I learned how to accept insider tips on upcoming “surprise’ OSHA inspections. As a Chili’s dish washer I learned that fry cooks smoke gargantuan amounts of grass. As a landscaper I learned how to dig a beautiful, deep, wide hole.
7. I forgot to tell you about the day I just jumped off my roof. A very self-destructive act, especially for a highly competitive runner. That moment remains in my heel (a fracture of the calcaneus) as I type these words, a low simmering fire, a warm brick.
8. One time my ex-wife (the 2nd one) gathered every shoe I owned and threw them all onto the apartment roof, to show me something (I forget). I found the act impressive in its creativity and told her so. I wasn’t angry. I actually enjoy getting onto the roof (I had no ladder at the time so backed my truck cab beneath an overhang and leapt across), the walking around of the roof (surveying my humble asphalt kingdom), the juxtapositions of the various shoes (also a dead crow and a child’s bicycle [wtf?]), the clouds that day like speckled eggs, yellowish yolk edges bleeding out in public politeness, nagging thoughts, something, I don’t know…I’m saying at least it wasn’t raining.
9. You have to want to fish a river much more than you actually want the fish.
10. Another time I somehow (God knows—a computing error?) won the Crazyhorse Fiction Prize. The payment was one thousand dollars. I stared at the check, as a woodpecker beat a thrumming rhythm on the stovepipe outlet above my kitchen. Metal. Beating. Heart. In response I threw a massive beer keg/cocaine party in the barn behind my rented Alabama house. Everyone was there, all the graduate students and their hanger-ons and some of the looser faculty and even a few neighborhood dogs. I have never in my life played that much bocce and horseshoe. We threw bocce balls and horseshoes until our hands fell off. This party went Thursday, Friday, Saturday, half-day Sunday (I was arrested Sunday around noon), then no-more-party. A thousand bucks gone! Wow, I thought, slouching against the cold, brick wall of a holding tank in the Tuscaloosa County Jail, sucking the fingerprint dye (it tastes oddly like pennies) off the pads of my thumbs, you can turn words into a party.
11. —How do you know he leaped and wasn't pushed?
—You said jumped so I thought you meant leaped but I don't know if he leaped, jumped, or was pushed. If he actually even accidentally fell.
—He didn't. Did he say anything, this man?
—No.
—On the ground, in the air, from his apartment before he came out?
—Nothing that I heard.
—What was his expression when he was in the air?
—He looked like a bird.
—What expression's that?
—His eyes were open and arms were out and he seemed to have the expression of a flying bird.
12. Only one man ever understood me. And he really didn’t understand me.
13. I was once a very fast runner. After winning or placing high in road races, people seek your advice. They think you have some golden key. Is it diet? A supplement? A secret Swedish training regimen? I have no golden key. I would always tell other runners, “The trick to running fast is running fast.”
){kind=link}