Is This The Real Life?

Sunday, April 15, 2018, in Annapolis, Maryland, was, as my father used to say, “a royally shitty day.” In stark contrast to Saturday’s sunshine and high-80s temps, Sunday featured chilly, wind-driven rain all day long. Just a soaking, miserable day (that peaked with some thunderstorms around 4 a.m. Sunday night/Monday morning) that precluded any outdoor fun and games. The day also taught me a lesson I apparently have to keep learning over and over again.

I sat inside and, like many in this 21st century, that meant I was online. That I was cooped up on my sailboat, Further, was scant consolation for the fact that I was little more than a bump on a log.

Sure, I got to see my beloved Newcastle United upset visiting Arsenal to pretty much secure their Premier League survival. I also got to enjoy Manchester United losing at home to last-place West Bromwich Albion, thereby handing their crosstown rivals Manchester City the season title (that, and as with the New York Yankees, it’s nice just to watch Man U lose). And I even did a few (somewhat) productive things like work my way through the New York Times. What the hell?! I like to be informed.

But a lot of the time I sat there completely goofing off online. It was the kind of time-suck that back in February drove me to make my Facebook account inactive—and yet here I was perusing the same old inane shit on that cursed site. No, not updates from friends, I enjoy seeing those (although there isn’t as much of that as one would think) but rather all that “what XYZ shows you’re from whatever era” crap that a lot of people (including, apparently, a lot of friends) feel compelled to do, thereby flooding my news feed and likely adding to the data breaches for which Facebook has become famous. And yet I couldn’t help myself. Scroll, scroll, scroll…on and on through the news feed and also through countless boatwork videos, most of which turned out to be less helpful than if I had just dug into the issue itself on Further, until my head was about to explode and I forced myself to get the hell off the computer and off the boat.

What I did was no less indoors and no less sedentary, but it was a lot less mindless.

I took my book—I’m currently reading a collection of stories by Tom McGuane—and went to my favorite coffee shop. A comfy armchair, a cookie and a chai and I settled in to enjoy some quality wordsmithing. And in the process, my soul lifted, just that little bit.

And after I returned to Further for a bit of dinner I was off again, this time to the rink for a bit of beer-league hockey. And you know what? That peace and centeredness that playing puck always gives me returned again—in spite of the fact that I am not playing in a league featuring good hockey and it was also a playoff game so all the hacks were amped up and frothing at the mouth. But just being active—just…living—made all the difference.

I think I felt my heart settle down a bit despite revving up from skating. I know my mind calmed. And walking out of the empty rink after the game (we won, by the way, a game we had no business winning based on the regular season; semifinals are tonight) it occurred to me that I had lived more in that hour on the ice and that hour reading than I had in all the other hours of the day combined.

It’s an insidious device, this contraption I’m typing on right now. Capable of so much empowerment and yet also capable of incredible enfeeblement. It’s up to each of us how we make use of this tool. I am fully aware of the apparent hypocrisy of me bemoaning the internet as I write a blog post, but there are ways to be engaged online and there are ways to be enslaved online. And going forward I’m going to be more active in evaluating how I spend my own time and how I use computers and the interet: am I going to live? Or am I going to watch others live?

Hard To Do

Warning: A whole lot of navel-gazing follows. This is, to paraphrase my friend Jon, your front-row seat to my psychotherapy. If you don’t want to be witness to that, c’mon back another time.

I was seeing someone for a couple of months and we broke up a couple of weeks ago.

This likely comes as a surprise to some of you. Not that I broke up with someone — that’s happened in every single relationship thus far in my 51 years; it’s such a common occurrence now that my buddy Dave just sing-songs every time it happens, “Another one bites the dust” — but rather that I was seeing someone. That might have been surprising. We were only about two months in so we hadn’t done enough to where my relationship status was visible, on Facebook or, you know, in real life. But yeah, I was dating someone and it was good.

But going through another (apparently inevitable) break-up leads me to the question: What the hell is wrong with me?!

She and I met this summer when we were both participants in our local bicycle shop’s weekly group ride. In this era of online dating, it was especially awesome to meet someone organically and to hit it off right away. I’ve been online dating for so long now — going back to the days when my company, Citysearch, was under the same IAC umbrella with Match.com — that I can’t remember the last time I dated someone I’d met in everyday life.

So this was particularly exciting. And maybe that was part of the problem: I set my expectations too high. But part of the problem was definitely timing: I was so of the mind that I was in some fashion taking off to travel after the summer ended that when my dream of a sailboat began to take concrete shape, I went so all-in on making that dream happen that I didn’t invest enough in the potential relationship that was taking shape at the same time. For that lack of investment I’m sorry. But I’m not sorry that I invested in the pursuit of my dream.

And that’s why this failure of mine has prompted in me the questioning of why, when I dream, is it never of a happy, successful relationship but rather of another “thing” on my to-do list?

In 2004, I opted for my dream of a life in Alaska over a truly great love. It wasn’t a simple relationship-or-Alaska quandary; there were other factors, of course. But at its simplest level, do I regret that choice? I don’t know. I always say that while I might have done some things differently in my life, I don’t do regrets because my life as it has been constituted thus far has shaped what I feel has become a pretty good, pretty fun life. But as good and fun as it is, there’s still a huge hole in it. And while to this day I am deeply saddened at the ending of that relationship, I am deeply pleased I went to Alaska. I got so much out of my time in the Great Land that achieving that lifelong dream — even though I was in the city in Anchorage and not out in a cabin in the Bush — is one of the greatest satisfactions of my life, something I’ll take to my grave. But I sure would have liked to have taken that relationship with me as well.

And there have been others. In 2011, I chose to sail the extreme North Atlantic over what was shaping up to be a great relationship in Alaska. I could (the therapist would say “should”) have relocated with the woman I lived with in 2005 as her career went gangbusters. And way back in 1996 I chose to stay in Montana rather than return to Utah and make an effort to save what might have been the great relationship of my life. Again, do I regret those choices? No. And yes.

So now another relationship has come to an end. And it’s not a case of forgetting the past and having to relive it. I’m in full grasp of my abysmal track record when it comes to relationships. That track record has me wondering if I’m just incapable of being in love, of being involved with someone. If so, boy oh boy, that’s a shitty way to go through life. And if not, why do I keep failing at so important a part of life?

In the eulogy I did when my mother passed I described myself as “an emotional cripple.” I repeated that assertion in the therapy I finally got into several months later. After a few sessions, the therapist refuted my assertion and said instead that I’d never had relationships properly modeled for me. I won’t go into the details of his theory and while I appreciate the pass he gave me, I’m not buying the excuse. I’ve had too many opportunities to make a relationship work and I’m still 0-for. And that, to put it bluntly, sucks.

So what am I going to do about all this? I don’t know. I really don’t know. I’ll keep self-analyzing, I know that. And hopefully I’ll find some kernel inside of me that leads me to find a feeling of love for another human being, a feeling that inspires me to open myself and my heart so that loving that other person becomes the top dream on my list and we live happily ever after.

Yes, the fairy-tale ending. Hopefully it’s not too late for me. Through it all, I remain a romantic at heart. Ever hopeful.