Supafly.com

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.

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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.

You can always remember what you did last year at Valentine’s Day. I clicked back on my journal to read what I wrote here in my journal last year, just to see what I was thinking. That’s one thing I cherish about this journal, I can go back and see where I’ve been, and get an insight on where I’m going.

I spent an hour reading things I wrote…things I don’t even recall writing. I must’ve written it, I know I went through that. But memories evolve as time passes. We have a choice how we remember our past. I had forgotten some of the junk I’ve gone through.

The last few years of my life have been everything but ordinary. I went on The Real World and every part of my life flipped upside down. Being “me” meant something new, even if it is still the same me. I’ve been infatuated and heart-broken. I worked my tail off to finish college, then left a city that I loved. I’ve been devastated. I survived then thrived in New York City. I lived in Harlem and made great friends. I’ve banged through every nightclub, met so many women. I’ve lapped this country hundreds of times and spoken to countless audiences. I’ve been to more beaches, seen such hurt, slept in the strangest places…

Now I am pushing a mega-website from the middle of the desert, pouring all I have into what I have absolute faith will make the world a better place. I still lap the country like there’s no tomorrow. My friends are stable, responsible people. I am around families again. I bought a new car and then a house. A few months later, this house is still mostly empty because I am never here. I am lying in bed, and it’s the only thing in this room. My sleeping bag from Boy Scouts is keeping me warm.

I didn’t know a stable life would feel like this. It’s wonderful…the stress, heartache, and jitters are gone. Maintaining stability isn’t a full-time job, and I can put my energy elsewhere. But, those experiences, through hell and back, were good for me. Those lonely loud subway rides that traced my prayers beneath the city…

Who knows where my life will go, what people I’ll meet, or what adventures wait for me. There are thousands of canvases waiting for paint, thousands of people needing to be hugged. I’ll have to tie my shoes each morning, take out the trash, and iron my clothes. That’s part of the adventure too. Through it all, I just have to let God love me.

(I don’t know you and I’ll probably never meet you. I write this on a cold night in the desert, alone in my room. It’s not important why you came to this website. I don’t know where you’ve been, how you’ve suffered or how you’ve laughed. Know this: God loves you. His love is waiting for you every moment of your life. We are in this life together. We were never meant to make it on our own. Let God love you.)