Sports Help Men Avoid Feelings

As featured on Click2Houston.com:

This time of year is difficult for a man; there's nothing good on television.

What I mean by that, of course, is that there isn't much to watch in the way of sports. For many men, sports is the only thing worth watching.

The football season is months away, baseball is at its tedious early-season stage, most people's knowledge of hockey begins and ends with the film "Miracle," and the only ones paying attention to soccer are us Anti-American Europhiles who are hell-bent on having the U.N. take over your town.

"What about basketball?" I hear you say. "It's playoffs, baby!"

Exactly. There's nothing good on television. I question the legitimacy of a sport when the players haven't figured out how to dress properly.

As a side note, due to my lack of interest, I had to check the official NBA Web site to ensure that it really is time for playoffs. I discovered there that the NBA has something called a "D-League."

Apparently the "D" stands for "development," but think of all the other words that start with "D:" deficient, dull, dumb and dunderheaded. Who's going to go watch a load of D-League players? Give me C-League, at least. Do D-Leaguers have to repeat the season?

Most amusingly, there is a team in the D-League known as the Fort Wayne Mad Ants. Really? Mad ants? That's the best they could come up with?

What do their fans say? "Go Mad Ants! Get angry, you ants! Play like someone's taken all your sugar!"

But the thing is, if there were a Mad Ants game on TV tonight, I would watch it. I am male and I have to watch sports. If I don't, the terrorists win.

Actually, I think a man's seemingly constant need to watch sports runs a bit deeper. Watching sport is a kind of emotional opiate.

The common perception by women is that men are emotionally D-League -- we don't quite get it. In truth, though, we do get it. We just don't like it. Feelings are hurty and troublesome. Feelings are the Bo and Luke Duke of our souls, upsetting our happy Enos Strate status quo.

I've never bought into the idea that men feel particularly differently than women. I think we just respond to feelings differently. Also, we generally don't seek out particularly emotional experiences. I know women who watch films that they know will make them cry. How does this make sense?

"Sometimes it's good to cry," my wife insists.

Sometimes it's good to get a colonoscopy; neither event, however, is really my idea of a good evening in. So, I watch sports.

I can sit there comfortable in the knowledge that at no point will I be introduced to some cute and quirky female character whom I will fall in love with, only to watch her make an idiot decision or die of a horrible disease. At no point will I be confronted with my own prejudices. At no point will I be forced to question my moral foundation.

There are moments of high emotion in sport. I will always remember the way the whole of Cardiff seemed to jump when Wales won the Grand Slam. A particularly important rugby achievement in this part of the world, it was met by rapturous celebration in Wales' capital city. My lasting memory is of all of us in the Maltster's Arms in midair as the final whistle blew.

But that kind of thing is rare. Generally all you get from watching sports is a handful of people you don't know running around for a few hours. If you are watching basketball or soccer, you get the added feature of watching people you don't know pretend they are injured.

Watching sports is easy on the soul. It settles all the frustrating things that might be dwelling there. In my case, watching sports helps me to take my mind off the paralyzing fear of exams I'm facing next month. I know I can trust Manchester United star Cristiano Ronaldo to do nothing more than run around like a sprite and pout.

Somehow that puts the world at right.

The Ghostly Ice Cream Van

I have fallen out of habit of directing to my columns, but I am still writing them. Here's my latest one, which I am sort of pleased with simply because of the imagery, e.g., "dairy-treat-bearing land shark."

To that end, I'm pretty sure that Bomb Pops to the Malevolent is a good name for a band.

In response to Annie's question

Is that a general Kerouac question are you referring specifically to On The Road, since it is mentioned in the list of things I've read this year? This was actually my third time to read the book and I have to say that with age (that is, as I age) it loses something.

Kerouac is a good gateway for people who haven't really thought about using words to convey complex and convoluted emotions, rather than, say, cohesive thought. But there are authors before and since who are better at it than he was. If you strip away the events, you get storytelling that isn't actually that strong. Kerouac holds you with the action and pace rather than plot, narrative, craft, etc.

But, perhaps those criticisms are too easy to make 50 years after the fact. Classic literature rarely holds its initial impact for a long period of time because it gets copied to the point that the original seems cliché. This is especially true of any of the Beat authors. People tend to get locked up in the mythology of the author and project their envy/admiration on the work rather than evaluate it honestly.

We, the masses, have a bad habit of assuming that self-destructive behavior automatically means brilliant artistic output. Case in point, Lenny Bruce. Dude was not funny. Not even just a little bit. Don't argue with me on this because you will be wrong. But people hold him up as a genius because he destroyed himself. I have long felt that the only thing keeping Bill Cosby from being the greatest comic storyteller of all time is his failure to develop a heroin addiction. So, we look at Kerouac and think: "He smoked and drank himself to death; he must be a good author."

There are flashes of brilliance, but not on the level that the Great Kerouacian Hype Machine would have you believe.

A really interesting thing about On The Road is that it describes an America that is as foreign to the modern American as it would be to someone who's never even been to the country. Kerouac's pre-interstate, pre-fearing-the-world, pre-consumer-centric America cannot be found. Kerouac's America is so foreign that it is difficult for anyone of my generation (and I suspect anyone younger) to believe that such a place ever existed.

It's interesting also, to see how innocent/ignorant Kerouac was in a lot of things. His foray to Mexico is filled with failures of understanding, for example, the way he mentally ties mambo with Mexico (mambo being an American variant of Cuban music).

For all my modern criticisms, though, Kerouac has had massive impact on me. I still have a tendency to copy his style. I always claim to myself that Hemingway is my greatest influence, but my rambling manner betrays a far greater allegiance to Kerouac (and, it has to be said, Bill Bryson [and my grandfather]). I especially do this in the Welsh language, where there doesn't appear to have been any similar author. Literary rebels in Welsh write in unintelligible dialect, whereas Kerouac played with the words themselves (rather than the way the words are said/spelled) and used them to try to give form to the un-shapeable dimensions of what goes on inside our heads and hearts.

Beyond that, the Kerouac mythology has driven me quite a bit as well. Dr. Handy can probably expound on how she and I, under the influence of On The Road, pushed out into the world as best as could be expected of suburban Midwestern kids under the drinking age. And for each of us that served as the foundation for what we've become, what we're becoming. Although, it's quite possible that films like "Smokey and the Bandit" had just as much sway on my desire to travel.

In terms of Kerouac, though, I tend to think that Dharma Bums is a much better book. It probably had greater influence on me than did On The Road.

So, to sum up: Jack Kerouac is good, but so are Bill Cosby, quaint anglophile travel writers and 70s car films. Obviously, I'm not the best person to be talking to about any of this.

I Need Miss Texas' Help

My latest column is out. It contains an edit that makes no sense to me.

In talking about my university experience it says: "Consequently, I am struggling. Despite my ability to start a sentence with la-dee-da words like 'consequently,' I feel I'm just not good enough to be here."

But "consequently" is not the word I had there. Originally I had "hitherto."

"Hitherto" means "up to this point," whereas "consequently" means "as a result of;" so the meaning of the sentence is changed and it makes me seem like a person who thinks "consequently" is an obscure word.

Ah, well. I'm not arsed.

How The Super Bowl Looks Abroad

My latest column is out. If you read my blogging of the Super Bowl, the themes will be familiar but they are better fleshed out.

My favourite part is the observation that: "rugby... is what football used to be before being taken over by figure skaters. American football is so laden with rules and technicality that is at times more performance than sport. Yes, I realize you need to be fit to run really fast and catch a ball, but is it a real test of mental and physical capacity when you're allowed to stop every 15 seconds and do the Charleston?"

Who Sits and Watches Trains?

My latest column is out. Actually, it's been out since Tuesday, but I wanted to give more time on top to the story of my being attacked by a crazy woman.

That's life, innit? You start to think things are getting too dull, and then someone comes at you with an axe and Samurai sword.

I've only just noticed that the link I put in the column isn't working properly, so here's the link again. I'm not sure it's worth it for me to ask someone to fix in the story -- I get the feeling sometimes there aren't a whole lot of people reading that column. Not a whole lot beyond those of you who already read this blog, at least.

To that extent, I've been carrying on an internal debate about whether I want to put the fiddle on the roof in terms of my column. "Rhoi'r ffidl yn y to" is a Welsh metaphor that means you've decided to call it quits on something. The fact that it's "yn y to" instead of "ar y to" suggests the fiddle being placed in the attic, but I have always preferred to translate it as putting the fiddle on the roof:

"Right. We've had just about enough of that singin' an' dancin' now. This fiddle's goin' on the roof, it is. With the donkey" (a).

However it's said, I've been questioning whether I want to carry on writing a column for the fine folks at Internet Broadcasting. My dilemma is totally within myself. IB has been very kind in giving me a huge platform, and I have no real complaints apart from the occasional harrumph when I'm told to remove references to sex.

That big platform is my primary reason for wanting to stay on. Well, that and the fact that I do enjoy writing the column.

I also enjoy writing my blog, though (b). Seemingly anything I wanted to say in a column can be said here and I can use as much mature language as I deem fit. But, a blog doesn't carry the same feeling of legitimacy. The column is part of what helped me to get noticed when I was trying to find an agent for my novel. And once I'm done with this little university adventure and again trying to write seriously, it could be an asset.

But the column doesn't pay and it diverges somewhat from what I'm focused on at the moment. The Welsh-language column I write each month for Barn delivers a bit of cash (only enough for a night in the pub, but some is more than none). I am hoping this summer to write a book in the Welsh language, and I also have a few ideas for Welsh-language novels. At the moment, my focus is on a path where an English-language internet column targeted to a U.S. audience doesn't really add much to my CV.

With the exception of this week's column (my favourite line: "If I were a trainspotter, I would put whisky in my tea and draw pictures of breasts in my notebook"), I haven't really been happy with the stuff I've been producing lately for IB. I don't want to turn in crap. I know that everyone in a media company sees him- or herself as a writer, so I don't want to be occupying a spot that someone else might be eager to fill if I don't feel I'm producing something entertaining.

But if I let go of the column, I will never get it back. Opportunities to write on 70-site networks aren't the sort of things that come along every day. IB hits some 16 million people a month. More than five times the population of Wales, every month. Fair enough, 15,999,920 of them aren't reading my column, but it's not the sort of thing you just throw away, is it?

I am plagued by indecision. If you've got any advice, I'd like to hear it.

(a) There is a Welsh children's song about a hat-wearing donkey with two wooden legs who sits on a roof.

(b) Sometimes. From about July to December I was considering deleting all my blogs.

Christmas Without Robots

If you haven't had enough Christmas spirit, my latest column is out.

My Post-Quarter-Life Crisis

My latest column is out. And contains a sentiment that I will save for when I'm famous and asked to speak at high school graduations: Older people are not superior, they've simply had more time to formulate arguments that they are.

Tossing My Brain Overboard

My latest column is out, complete with family-friendly edit. My editor (who loves the Longhorns, by the way) felt that I would be less likely to receive grumpy e-mails if he changed, "I was singularly focused on getting her to take off her shirt," to, "... singularly focused on getting her alone."

It defeats the point of the joke, which was to finish off a navel-gazing statement about my sub-conscious with a crass reference to sex, but almost certainly Adam is right. American news consumers are desperate to be offended and a reference to my fondness for certain parts of the female anatomy would give them too easy a target.

Amusingly, I had already self-censored an entire paragraph.

It is said that when Custer got his ass handed to him at Little Bighorn, some of his men went into such an idiotic panic that they simply fired straight into the air, unable to control their fear enough to aim at anything. I was going to point out that I respond to stress similarly, and likely would have run out of ammo before ever actually spotting a Lakota. But I scrapped the line because I could imagine someone getting so angry with my reference to a 131-year-old military blunder that they would write to me IN A FIT OF MISPELED CAPSLOCK HISTEREA.

The fear-the-reader nature of modern American news media means I can't really accumulate too many complaint letters. Managers in the fine company that hosts my column wouldn't have any problem dropping the thing if any of the complaints were to appear on their radar. So Adam is simply protecting my ass because I am too dumb to protect it on my own.

Although, obviously, he's not protecting my ass, because that, too, would be offensive -- both for its language and homosexual connotations. But it would be typical of the kind of thing we've come to expect from the liberal media: a Jew watching out for his sex-deviant European pal.

Wishing for Hard Labor

My latest column is out Actually, it's been out since Tuesday, but I haven't really had time to get at the computer until today.

I am busy reading Welsh-language novels. There appears to be an unwritten rule that in every single fucking Welsh-language novel the English must be nefarious, arrogant and ignorant/spiteful of the Welsh language.

I'm a bit disappointed in this week's column because I wasn't able to come up with a way to directly reference the Triple Lindy.

Half the Fun of Not Travelling

My latest column is out. My favourite part is when I refer to myself as a "wistful girl's blouse."

Also, I claim in this column that I am not being forced to sign statements of allegiance to Len Goodman. You'll note, however, that I conveniently left out the fact that I so totally would. Len Goodman should be king.

What Does Running So Far Prove?

My latest column is out. My dad's favourite line is: "I love me some Powerade."

Unfortunately that line is a lie. They gave us Lucozade, but I felt it would slow the pace of the column to reference Lucozade and then have to explain that is a sports drink that is apparently for people who like to eat candy while running. Cripes that stuff is sweet.

I also didn't mention my time in the column, which was around 1:54. That's a few seconds more than I ran in Fargo a few years ago, but I'm not particularly bothered because I had been suffering a pretty bad cold in the week before. At the starting line I was still coughing like someone's granddad.

The run itself was enjoyable, winding from City Centre down to the Bay and then up into Bute Park. In my column, I make a bit more of Butetown than was actually the case. The boy I referenced in the column followed up his taunt with: "All day, my old son! All day!"

My guess is that he was simply shouting things for the sake of shouting.

Going up through Pontcanna was the best part, because there were people cheering us on in Welsh. My favourite supporter was a curly-haired girl who looked to be about 4 years old. She was jumping up and down and shouting, "Da iawn! Da iawn!" at the top of her lungs.

Unfortunately, the race was "organised" by retarded people, so the moments before and after the race were filled with frustration. I'll bet cash money that any one of the regular readers of this blog could have done a better job on just a day's notice than the mental midgets who apparently have been putting on this run for several years in a row.

Here's a question for you: If you had an event that some 10,000 people were attending, how many portable toilets would you have at the start line? If your answer is "more than 10" you are better qualified than the Cardiff Half Marathon fuckwits. All of the men simply pissed in the street. I saw several blokes making no effort to stand near a wall or bush or behind any sort of barrier. They were pissing in disdain.

The race ended within the walls of Cardiff Castle. There's a certain romanticism to that, but take a look at this aerial view of the castle grounds and tell me how many gates you see. That's right, two. Two gates.

So, here's another question: If you were using one of those gates to allow the thousands of people to stream into the castle grounds, that would leave you with how many exits? If one exit for 10,000 people sounds a bit silly to you, you are WAY ahead of the incompetent ass-hats that charged me £21 ($42) to take part in their clusterfuck. They were trying to use the other gate -- a space that is only about 8 feet wide -- to allow people both in and out.

Oh, but that's not all. They didn't ask the police to block off the road that runs in front of the castle. That left only the pavement as the method of dispersal. The pavement is probably 4 feet wide and on any given weekend (like this one) is usually crowded with tourists and shoppers.

Things came to a standstill inside the castle walls. Those of us who had finished the race found ourselves trapped -- exhausted, dehydrated, cold and not at all prepared to stand in a crowd for 40 fucking minutes. The child bride was close to fainting.

The organisers insist they'll learn from their mistakes, but these mistakes are so basic that they shouldn't have occurred. It's the sort of thing that may very well drive me to write a sternly worded letter to the Western Mail.

Over The Falls In A Barrel

My latest column is out. Despite its headline, it is not about Britney Spears' career. However, it does contain a line that I'm sure Elisa can relate to: "Facebook is my chocolate pie."

Female Army Lays Siege

My latest column is out and it's a pretty easy guess that I was going to write about my sisters-in-law. My favourite line this week is: "Westerners are bulls in a china shop where all the china has a little picture of a matador on it."

It was better than Cats

It would appear that a major part of the writing process for me is spending several months telling people that I am going to write something, but not actually writing said thing.

Before I wrote The Way Forward (formerly known as Drinking Stories but still unpublished by any name), I spent about five months claiming that I was going to write it. In the case of my second book, that shit-talking interval has been reduced to four months and I am now in the process of very slowly crafting yet another story that no one will read.

I acknowledge the futility of such an act, but I still post myself in front of the computer every day, because that's my mental picture of what a writer should do. Much of the way I approach writing is wrapped in what I think I should do. That's a clear sign of a poseur, I know, but since that is indeed what I am I don't really know any other way to be. It's one of those logic puzzles: how does a poseur pretend to not be a poseur without looking like a poseur posing as a non-poseur?

So, I sit there in front of my laptop trying to look like a writer. If you were to set up a web camera in my study, perhaps I would indeed look like one. At almost any time of day you would see me sitting at the computer and you might think, "Gosh, there's a fellow who's dedicated to his craft," but on closer inspection you would see that I am more often than not checking Facebook.

"Do I have any new friends yet? No. How about now? Nope. OK, how about now?"

Yes, you can get e-mail alerts for such things, but what if there's a glitch? It's better to keep checking. Because, you know, the number of people I have listed on my Facebook is a direct indicator of my character. Your number of Facebook friends is directly related to how much Jesus loves you. Presently Jesus loves Al Franken a whole lot more than me, which is kind of unfair since Franken is Jewish. But Jews stick together, I guess.

Yesterday, though, I was actually writing my actual book and feeling quite pleased with myself, when I heard a little "tink-tink" noise just behind me. I turned around and saw a small orange and black cat just sitting there on the floor, staring at me.

"Hello, cat," I said. "What are you doing here?"

In typical cat fashion, it refused to answer. But I was able to guess that it had come in from the back garden. In these summer days I like to keep the door open to let the air in.

"I don't think Rachel would want you in the house," I told the cat, pointing to the stairs.

The cat acknowledged this and headed downstairs with me, where -- in true 1940s housewife style -- I put some cream in a bowl and set it outside in the garden. I'm sure proper cat owners will tell me that cats do not actually like cream, or that it is, in fact, bad for them. But this cat humoured me by licking it up and allowing me to pet it for a while.

"You're one of those damn cat diplomats," I realised.

Delegates from the cat community will occasionally try to persuade me to change my anti-cat stance. This tabby was very clearly trying to strike right to my core by showing up in my study.

Over the years, I have noticed that almost every author I like, and several that I at least respect, are cat people. Ernest Hemingway, Kurt Vonnegut, Jack Kerouac, James Joyce, Dylan Thomas, Kate Roberts -- all of them had cats and their appreciation of the fiendish creatures was often worked into their art. In Islands in the Stream, Hemingway spends a good five pages yammering on about his cat.

Since I am more a person who wishes to be seen as a writer than an actual writer, I have long worried that I would need to adopt a cat to fit the caricature of who I am trying to be. I have also long lamented that I am doing very little, if anything, toward developing lung cancer or cirrhosis of the liver.

Indeed, if that cat shows up again with a pack of Camels and a bottle of Bombay Sapphire, I will see right through its feline trickery.

But that's the thing, see. I haven't seen that cat since. After no more than two minutes of hanging out with me, the cat scampered off. That's the thing about cats -- they leave you. Which is at the heart of why I don't like them.

The purpose of having a pet, in my mind, is to have something around that will make you feel less lonely but doesn't have the ability to commandeer the TV remote. The purpose of a pet is right there in the name; it should sit there and be warm and pay attention to me and allow me to pet it. To that extent, I have never understood the point of keeping fish or birds. Pets should be mammals -- dogs, cats, bison, etc.

But a cat is a heart-breaker. It shows up and gives you a token amount of attention and then disappears to rub its fur all over your black shirts and make your house smell of its wee. Cats are bastards, dealing a kind of emotional crack to the weakest souls.

Here I am, wannabe writer, feeling a bit lonely in this faraway country where I still haven't mastered the language, and this cat shows up and makes me feel better. And then it pisses off, never to be seen again, making me feel even worse. Fucker. Little four-legged heart-wrenching demon.

Man, I hate cats.

*How many people get that headline?

You Want Dessert, Don't You?

My latest column is out. My favourite line is: "Personally, I haven't trusted those nefarious soft-servistas since they renamed 'Mr. Misty' as 'Misty Slush.'"

Missing Idiocy of Storms

I have slightly mixed feelings about my latest column, which is out today. I'm happy with it -- especially lines like, "...they throw themselves at it like Britney Spears to a bucket full of crazy," -- but what I'm saying isn't true, you see. I don't really miss TV news at all.

hell.

Remember when I used to do Flickr Fiction? Of course you don't, because that was a coon's age ago. But anyway, I used to do be part of this group of people who would make up short stories based on pictures that Donal found on Flickr.

We would post these stories to our blogs and then everyone who wasn't also part of the Flickr Fiction crew would ignore the post and wait until we got back to talking about naked teenagers or dog grooming or whatever the hell it is that we normally talked about.

Then, at some point, I don't remember when, all the Flickr Fiction crew decided it would be a good idea to create a site solely dedicated to our Flickr Fictionry and I promptly stopped writing because I am lazy and more inclined to call myself a writer than actually be one.

But today, for the first time in Forever Land, I actually wrote something. The piece itself can be found here, and it is based on a photo that can be found here. I'll warn you that it is unusually dark for me.

The Ghost of the Ice Cream Van

My latest column is out. Actually, it's been out since Tuesday, but I wasn't near a computer to post it. Random line from the column: "In Britain it is more acceptable to kick an old lady in the shins than design straight roads that are easy to navigate."

'Writer'

I don't remember which Christmas it was. We were still living in Texas at the time, but I was old enough to have been questioning the veracity of Santa Claus for a few years. We had come over to Papa and Joie's house on Christmas afternoon to open presents and run about and pester Papa to take us on rides in his golf cart.

The Christmases of childhood seem to have such established patterns: we did this and this and this for 700 years. For my family, the 700 years was spent going down to Lake Jackson. We stayed at my mother's parents' house and had a big Christmas in the morning, then went over to Papa and Joie's for another Christmas and lunch.

I can't remember if my father imposed this rule or if I imposed it upon myself, having developed his sense of propriety from an early age, but the Christmas spoils of the morning were never taken to the second Christmas at Papa and Joie's for fear of sparking a diplomatic incident with the other grandkids. The policy had positives and negatives. I never got in a fight with Shawn Jr. over whose Christmas presents were better (thank goodness -- he would have kicked my ass), but I spent the time at Papa and Joie's wishing I could get back to my new toys.

That sense of propriety stems from Joie, my father's mother, who gave each of the grandkids the exact same gift. This was the Christmas that she gave us all little AM radios that looked like Sunkist oranges. These were items collected at the local Texaco, where they had been offered for 99 cents with the purchase of a full tank of gas. At the end of the day, my brother and I were piling into the minivan when Papa came out with a secreted additional Christmas gift just for me.

A pen set.

Who gives a kid a pen set? What the hell kind of gift is that? A pen set would be no match against my friends' invasion-force-sized G.I. Joe haul. I muttered a thank you and got in the car. On the way home, my dad told me that I shouldn't mention getting an extra gift to the other grandkids. Yeah, Dad. As if I would.

We moved to Minnesota and Christmas tradition became me barbecuing a rack of ribs in sub-zero temperatures. I started writing. My journal; insufferable poetry aimed at getting girls to make out with me or feel really bad about not doing so; short stories. I wore a pen around my neck. I went to college.

In my first attempt at college -- in Moorhead, Minn., some 12 years ago -- I was particularly fond of writing letters and so managed to stay in contact with Papa better than I ever had or have since. In one of his letters back to me, he told me that he thought I was a pretty good writer and that he hoped I'd do something with it some day.

And I thought back to that pen set.

For the past several months, Papa has been in hospital -- unresponsive and in an existence that arguably goes against the wishes of his living will. On Wednesday, the family were all gathered in his hospital room, discussing with doctors the possibility of taking him off life support, of finally letting him go.

Then, click. Papa was there. He was slow. He was groggy. But he was there, suddenly talking for the first time in four months. The doctor started asking him questions to check alertness: name, date of birth, etc. Then he asked: what do you do for a living?

"Writer."

He's been retired for years, and hasn't been a sports writer for even longer, but the answer resonates with me. If he had been at his most lucid, I like to think that he wouldn't have answered differently. It's what he is.

These days I go around calling myself a writer (it's catchier than "Z-list foreign celebrity"). And much of what I am, and how I approach writing is inspired by him:
- Most notably, my policy on using profanity comes from him: "Sometimes it just fits."
- From him I get an admiration of (if not necessarily adherence to) athleticism in writing: removing cliché, unnecessary adjectives, etc.
- And from him I get the life lesson that the dumb option isn't always the wrong one.

The only person with a copy of my novel is my Papa. And the greatest compliment I've ever received about my writing came from that:

"I had to put it down," he told me. "It was so real, man. Really real."

The family gathered in Papa's hospital room sat and chatted with him for two hours, exhausting him with any questions they could think to ask, almost fighting with him to not go gentle. Everyone but my brother and I was there -- Jon and I tied to our worlds hundreds or thousands of miles away -- and they all got to tell him that they love him. It tears me up that I wasn't there, too. To shout: "I love you, Papa. I steal all your ideas!"

If you call yourself a writer, it's one of those things you feel is imprinted on your soul. You hope that if there is a heaven, you will spend eternity wearing a little name badge with just that word on it: "writer." And if you give someone the tools of your trade, what you are trying to give them is the ironically indescribable something that means so much to you.

I don't know where that pen set is now. I think it may be in a box, inside a box, somewhere in my parents' storage area. It doesn't matter. I've got what my Papa was trying to give me.