Supafly.com

Introduction: Losing Sucks

I am discouraged by last night’s loss against the Spurs. It’s going to be difficult for the Suns to get out of the first round of the playoffs when we’re down two games to none.

But I will say this, in the past few years, there’ve been two teams that have climbed out of a hole this deep. The Miami Heat was down 2-0 in the 2006 NBA Championship series against the Dallas Mavericks, and the Heat went on to win the next four. The Phoenix Suns were down 3-1 against the LA Lakers a few years ago in the 1st round of the play offs. The Suns went on to win the next three and move onto the next round.

Why does this matter? Both of those come-from-behind teams were lead by two future Hall of Famers: Shaq (Heat) and Nash (Suns.) Now here we are in 2008, and the MVPs are both Phoenix Suns. If anyone can do it, it’s the Suns.

Having said that, lets talk about…

My Trouble with the Police

Last fall, Candyce and I were on our way to see The Darjeeling Limited in the theaters when I decided to swing by her brother’s house to pick up her jacket. (Lesson from first year of marriage: females get cold more quickly than males, especially in air conditioned movie theaters.) While she was inside digging for her jacket, I noticed two cop cars pulled in front of a house down the street. Candyce hopped back in the car and I opted to exit out of the neighborhood through the far gate just to see what the commotion was all about. I know this is messed up, to snoop in on neighbors like that, but curiosity is a powerful thing.

I rolled by the cop cars slow enough to see what was going on, but not so slow that I looked suspicious. Both cop cars gunned onto the street and followed me through the neighborhood. Great. As I sat at the exit to the neighborhood waiting for the gates to swing open, I told Candyce that I was going to get pulled over. “But first they’re going to follow me down the street and into the intersection so they can put on a big show with their flashing lights.” She started to panic, and I told her not to worry because we hadn’t broken any laws.

Twenty seconds later, they lit me up with the swinging blue lights. The whole intersection froze. The only cars that moved was my own, followed by two cops.

A young police officer walked up to the car and put his flashlight in my face. “Do you know why we pulled you over?” I was friendly but honest. “No officer, I don’t.” With the light still in my face, he told me that my license plates expired six months ago.

I did not know this.

He asked for some paperwork and we couldn’t find any of it in the glove compartment. As I handed him my driver’s license and an expired insurance card, I offered an explanation, “We got married earlier this year, and it’s been really hectic. I lost track of time.”

He came back to my car a few minutes later. He leaned into my door and held my driver’s license two feet in front of his face, skipping his eyes from my face to the photo on my license. As I am prepared to defend the authenticity of my ID, he tells me this: “You look really familiar.”

I have heard those four words assembled in that order more time than I can remember…those words have become a part of my life. Without hesitation, I casually told the officer that I was involved in local churches…that I live in the area…that I write for the Phoenix Suns…and that I was on The Real World… (This is my verbal resume for PHX Citizen of the Year, punctuated by a claim to fame.) His stern look of disapproval melted into a smile. “No way! I thought that was you!”

He turned away from the window and looked back to the second police officer sitting in his car. He waved his hand forward with enthusiasm. The second officer was too lazy to get out of his car, or maybe he thought I was a tool and didn’t want to waste his time. No problem.

The cop, Candyce, and I spent the next 20 minutes talking about reality television and the Phoenix Suns. He finished the conversation with a gentle reprimand for having an expired tag, but then told me what I needed to do to fix the problem. I told him I would send his wife an autographed photo. We shook hands and went on with our lives.

(Officer, if you are reading this, I apologize for not sending that photo. I lost your address and I feel really bad about it. If you email me, I’ll make things right.)

Welcome to the Department of Motor Vehicles

I’ve driven around town for the past four months understanding that I could get pulled over at anytime because of my expired plates. As illogical as it sounds, dodging cops all winter seemed like a better option going to the DMV.

You see, standing in line at the DMV is a humbling rite of passage into adulthood. It’s a memorable encounter with lifeless world of tax-funded bureaucracy. At risk of sounding melodramatic, it’s a two-hour experience that makes you feel like you’ve lost all momentum in life. Smart people will experience the DMV once, and then vow to avoid that place again.

Last week my friends made fun of me for my expired plates, and I defended myself be explaining the DMV is a leper colony. Jason told me to renew my plates online and avoid the DMV. It was a dream come true. I walked back inside and renewed my tags on the Internet in less than ten minutes. Just for fun, I played Chamillionaire’s anthem “Ridin’ Dirty” while I clicked through the site.

But what do you do when the stickers don’t come in the mail? You call them and ask what’s up. And what did the person on the phone tell me to do? Go to the DMV.

Sucker Free DMV

Since my last trip to the building, they’ve added a Time-Square like news ticker. In theory, this is a clever addition. The news lights up the screen brightens our spirits by connecting us to the hyper reality outside the walls of the DMV. But since all the news was bad that day, I just got more sad. I took a deep breath, closed my eyes, and tried to get some spiritual perspective when I was jolted back to reality when they called my number.

I sat in a chair and spoke to the 20-something girl across the counter from me. I explained that I needed to renew my license plate… She nodded her head, and then spent two minutes in silence clicking around her computer. There wasn’t much for me to do in those awkward moments except to size up the gravity of the moment.

I pity the young people who work at the DMV. If you are in your 30s or 40s and you work at the DMV, somehow it doesn’t seem that bad. But if you’re in your 20s and therefore young enough to still want to be a rock star, then working at the DMV is a public admission of defeat. I know this because our entire generation was raised on The Simpsons. Marge Simpson’s repulsive twin sisters, Patty and Selma, work at the DMV by day, and chainsmoke and the lust over McGyver by night. They are the epitome of uncool.

The Springfield DMV Employees of the Year

She got angry at her computer, sighed, and then I got two more minutes of silence. I was searching for something to make the moment more exciting for both of us. So I just blurted it out: “Have you ever seen The Real World?” She nodded her head slowly, only mildly interested in my question. I bounced back, “Well, I was on that show a long time ago.” She instantly came to life.

She explained that she watched the entire season of RW New Orleans, and that she liked me then. She stopped with that statement–I liked you then. She looked at me, I suppose to figure out whether she liked me now.

I still don’t know if she likes me now, because she switched lanes. “You know, famous people come in here all the time…Mike Tyson is in here every other day. I saw Ice-T when I first started.”

Left: Mike Tyson, the boxing ear-biting psychopath.
Right: Ice-T, the aging gangster rapper/ misogynist and now tenured Law & Order star.

Here I was prepared to fill her up with stories from my own life, and she cut me off with stuff far more interesting. Why was Mike Tyson in the DMV all the time? She said it in the same way a waitress would claim to serve up drinks to Eddie Van Halen and his buddies every Tuesday night–trying to play it cool, but barely disguising the fact that she’s excited to host a celebrity.

She continued typing and I sat in silence trying to imagine these two pop culture characters from my teen years sitting in that same chair waiting for a renewed license plate. I was in scene of the Surreal Life at the DMV in Mesa, Arizona.

She slid my precious stickers across the counter with a smile. “It looks like you’re all done here. It’s been fun. You should come back and see us!”

I walked to my car utterly confused. Was she suggesting I renew my license plate more than often than required? Or was that an open invitation to swing by on my lunch break with a Subway sandwich so I could pull up next to her on the employee side of the counter? We could gossip about Mike Tyson’s dumb tattoo and his propensity for traffic violations.

Then I drove to Home Depot and returned a door threshold I purchased 18 months ago, a random object that has resided in the back of my car for just as many months. (Think about how uncool that is.) But married life has made my life hectic and things like this just don’t seem important. I’ve driven my Home Depot many times in the past 18 months, but never with enough time to wait in line. But today was that day. Who knows, I might run into Ice-T.

I was watching This Old House last year when they were rebuilding a stunning home in Carlisle, Massachusetts. I was surprised to see that they did not lay tile on the walls of the bathtub/shower. Instead, Tom Silva installed large panels of synthetic board that were etched to look like tile. It seemed like a lazy shortcut that you don’t ever see on This Old House. The host asked why he chose that material, and Tom explained, “People get tired of cleaning grout in the shower.”

A year ago, I disagreed with Tom’s decision because I am a purist. Why use fake tile when you can use real tile? But I am a different today, not because I prefer fake tile, but because I recognize that you can’t keep  stacking chores on your home maintenance to-do list because you eventually become an employee of your house. After working all day at your real job, you’ll come every evening and do more work. It’s no way to live the decades of your life.

This revelation about unending maintenance has changed the way I judge the landscape that wraps my home. A beautiful yard is unlike a beautiful mural: you can paint a mural and it will look good without any more work. But a yard needs continuous attention to be beautiful, especially if the landscape was poorly planned to begin with. Let me explain:

1. Plants need harmony with one another. Oleander bushes do not belong beneath pine trees. I imagine the dozen Oleanders looked cute when he planted them, but as the years passed by, they’ve each grown into a dozen one-trunk jungles. The spindly branches caught every dead pine needle that falls from the tree branches above. So when I looked out my window in the living room, all I see is a tangled mess.
2. Plants need room to grow. It takes a lot of discipline to design your landscape with room for each plant and tree to grow. This is a big problem around the perimeter of your yard where it is really tempting to load in the shrubs so it looks perfect right after you take off your gloves. Your satisfaction will be short lived because plants GROW GROW GROW. Within months, your plants will be choking one another. To break up the fight, you’ll be out there every Saturday with pruning sheers. After two years of this nonsense, you’ll tear out half of the plants…realizing that the guy at the nursery warned you and you ignored him. Lesson learned.

After two years of keep up with my landscape, I decided it would be wise to thin out my yard to make it beautiful and manageable. So for the past eight weeks, I’ve been busy:

1. Climbed trees with my chainsaw to cut out dead branches.
2. Cut down 10 trees that were once bushes.
3. Pulled five big fat bushes out of the ground, root and all.
4. Raked enough pine needles to fill a dump truck.

Although I am physically exhausted from all the labor, I feel a tremendous relief because now I have a yard that is both beautiful and low maintenance. Victory!

(Sometime I’d like to talk about my distaste for high maintenance relationships. Most high maintenance people aren’t that way by birth, but it’s a lifestyle/personality they’ve chosen because it makes them the center of the universe. They take advantage of generous and sensitive people around them, usually family. Think about it: who would put up with a high maintenance person but family? That discussion is for another day.)

It’s been a crazy week since I got back from San Diego on Saturday. It’s a great feeling to get my Phoenix life back together.

Last night the Oertle boys helped me move some furniture from my old house to my new house. I kept it there over the summer because it helped “stage” the home for a potential buyer. That’s the kind of thing I learned from watching too many shows on HGTV. It was kind of cool to see how much stuff I could load into my Honda Element. I fit a table on the roof, five wooden chairs along with a big leather loveseat inside. How awesome is that? I felt pretty cool because I used some Boy Scout knots to tie it all down securely. I couldn’t have done those knots had I not practiced a few weeks ago out in California.

I finished the night by watching an episode of the “A-Team”, my favorite TV show from my childhood. Well, I don’t know if it was my favorite show, but that and “MacGyver” were my favorite shoes to watch with Dad. We’d make popcorn, settle in the couch, and watch an hour of mindless adventure. This episode was hysterical because it was set in Miami Beach back when it was filmed in the 80s. All the guys had on short shorts, many of which were plaid. (Just like my dad’s back when we went on family vacations.) And the girl’s waist lines on their jeans came up almost to their bra. It was hysterical. (And there are no mountains in Miami Beach, so I’m guessing it was filmed in LA.)

Seeing stylish clothes from past decades is not new to me. I’ve worn vintage clothes for most of my life. But watching an old TV show and experiencing that era again was so much fun. This isn’t someone else’s memories, they are mine!

All of this is happening as I am finally importing all of my old CDs into iTunes, a very 2000s thing to do. Most of my friends did this years ago, but I’ve been so busy traveling, all I’ve done is pack and unpack the CD stacks as I’ve moved around the country. But I know I’ll be in this house for at least a few years, so it’s time to make ‘em all MP3s. Most of these CDs I imported into iTunes were given to me by bands that I’ve met on the road, or sent to me by record labels. So these are all CDs produced in the MP3 era. It’s just bizarre to look at a stack of CDs and know that they are worthless to most people. My case of 300 CDs in high school let everyone know so much about me. I love music! I like cool bands! I know about cool things! Now I will try to sell them to a CD store for $50.

:::::

Tomorrow is the engagement party for me and Candyce. For most of this week, her family has been fretting about the food and drinks while I’ve been straightening up the house. Although I’ve only spent a few evenings cleaning up the house, it already feels like twice as much like home than it did five days ago when I got back.

At work some exciting things are happening. We got a huge response from people who want to write reviews for the website. Most of them seem like pretty solid writers. It’s been pretty cool because a couple of them are already writing, sending me their copy. This means I have less work to do. I just make minor edits, format the images, and then post the review. But the more rewarding aspect of the project has been getting to know cool people through the website. These are people who believe in what we are doing, and they want to help. It feels great.

Yesterday afternoon my friend Adam H. sent me the code and database for Version3 of supafly.com. I’ve written about it a few times over the past year, but it’s basically a three column layout. This website has been up for over six years in a couple different versions. But it’s gotten to a point where I have create a site around a content, rather than letting the site decide what will go where. The biggest part of my site is my journals, and the new layout is that it gives easy access to all of my old journals.

So last night I spell-checked my old journals and added them to the database one at a time. It was pretty tedious, but it was nostalgic reading journals from 1999. I thought it was funny because shortly after I launched my website, I tried out for “The Real World.” I never wrote about any of the many interviews along the way. It was hard because I was so excited as I got closer with every step, but if I wrote about it, I know there would’ve been too much drama around campus.

The part that is so amusing to me is I remember talking about my website while I was trying out for the show, as if I had a corner of the Internet empire. In reality, I had only had the thing online for a couple months, and half of the sections hadn’t actually been updated. Another thing that cracked me up was how in one period I wrote almost one journal a day. If I remember correctly, I; was getting close to making it on the show, and I wanted to write as much to remind MTV how dynamic and interesting I could be.

I was feeling especially nostalgic, so I listened to a playlist on Rhapsody of the best Monster Ballads from the late 1980s and early 1980s. Although that music was from elementary through middle school for me, that music reminds me of a time where I felt like nothing exciting would ever happen in my life. I was just a kid stuck in a rural town in the South. So listening to Skid Row while uploading journals of my adventures in college gave me a sense of relief. I made it out of the small town!

Half way through adding my 1999 journals, people started to come over my house for our weekly 24 parties. These parties started a few years ago after XLT when a couple people would come over to watch an episode of 24 that we had recorded with Tivo. Now it’s different because one of our friends was cast as the assistant to; President Palmer. With 20 or more people in the room, people get pretty snappy when other talk during the show. But as soon as our friend shows up on screen, everyone roars claps, like we’d just won the big homecoming game. Then we’ll replay that three-second clip a few times just for kicks.

These parties have been good for the Catholic community in Phoenix. The success of a lot of parishes in the city are because the people there made a conscious effort to build community and spend time with one another. Sometimes “church social groups” can seem forced and dorky. But the 24 party is an organic thing. It just kind of happened, and it just keeps happening. When old friends are back in town, they come to the party. If new friends are in town, someone always brings them to the party. Strangers are in my house all the time.;

Matt Maher is in Nashville meeting with a lot of Christian music people this week. He’s a talented songwriter, and it seems as though several labels are interested in his stuff. We’ll see what happens. I think tonight or tomorrow night he’s going to Chris Tomlin’s party for the gold party for his latest album. That means he’s sold 500,000 copies. And one of Matt’s songs has been a popular song on the album. So I’m excited for Matt. A few years ago Matt had a song on a Grammy nominated album. I’m just excited to see people recognize my friend’s talent.

Once everyone left the party last night, I sat down in front of my computer and entered the rest of my 1999 journals. The site is still a little buggy, but I’m really excited about the new look. It will take some time to pull the portfolio section together, but that will be a lot of fun to do.

I used to take off his boots at the end of the day. I didn’t look forward to it, but Dad had a lot of fun with it and we’d smile at each other. They’d thud even on the carpet, and I’d pull their leash into the closet. I didn’t know where he’d been, mostly adventures on our little farm in the mountains of North Carolina, repairing fences to keep in the goats, or pouring concrete slap for the pig pin. Or dusted with green from mowing the lawn.

I just plopped my boots in my own closet, in my own house, thousands of miles away from my father.

I got this pair of Doc Martin boots free while I was on The Real World. They aren’t the punk kickers I had when I was in high school, but wallet-brown leather work boots. The trademark yellow stitching lets me know they aren’t just any work boots. These boots have been through it all. I stepped on elephant crap in Africa, waded through Mardi Gras muck, painted a vandalized church in Mexico, and now they are keep cactus from piercing my feet as I trudge through the desert.

Dad’s house was a farm house in the mountains. He’d never have crazy paintings on his walls, and my living room has more chrome than his garage. He had shaggy hair and a beard, and I have stiff spikes. But at the end of the day, he rests his crucifix on his nightstand, just like I do.