Issue #012: Zen in the Art of Fighting
Thank you for tuning into the latest and greatest from the front lines of my ambitions as a martial artist and author. I'm glad you're here and am exceptionally grateful for your support, interest, and investment in this journey.
If you’re new, welcome. If you’re not, welcome back! However we know each other or however you found this newsletter, I hope sharing some stories and thoughts on a monthly-or-more cadence will inspire you to find and follow some courageous and crazy dreams of your own.
If you'd like to catch up on the previous editions, you can check out the full newsletter archive here.
Big thanks to new and ongoing Patreon supporters
Rachael, I meant to thank you last month. Thank you for the support and consider this callout a belated one on my part. 🤦♀️
Those who subscribed this month got to read:
Feeling like you're missing out? Feeling generous and want to toss a tip toward these literary endeavors? You can join the Patreon family for as little as a buck a month.
Before we dive in...
I am at an existential crossroads with this newsletter as the road trip that effectively inspired it has concluded. As of this month, Bug and I have officially decided to stick around in Georgia for the foreseeable future. While the journeying and fighting spirit of this newsletter will continue, net new travel-specific content is likely to be lighter in the future.
I'm not sure where the newsletter is going next, but I care about continuing the regular cadence of putting good, thoughtful writing out into the world. Whether the subject matter of that writing trends toward jiu-jitsu, toward writing "the book", or toward something else that has compelled me to put my fingers to the keyboard, I can't predict. But I can promise that it will be something that I felt was worth writing, worth sharing, and is worth your attention for a few moments.
If you have any feedback on what you've enjoyed in my work or what you'd like to see me cover here, please hit "reply" and let me know.
Without further ado...
Where I've Been in June
I took a short but sweet trip to Memphis (22 hours, end to end) for a BBQ-meets-book signing for one of my favorite living authors: ESPN sportswriter, True South producer, and broadly-brilliant essayist, Wright Thompson. While my experience “meeting” Cheryl Strayed was both disappointing and underwhelming, my experience meeting Wright Thompson was completely the opposite. He was a person, not a persona. The heart, vitality, and sincerity he puts on the page matched up to the man in person. When he thanked me for being there—and later sent me an Instagram DM to thank me for the “fan mail” letter I’d brought to the book signing—I felt his gratitude to be genuine and without affect. Despite his degree of success and celebrity within his realm, “the mask had not eaten the face.” For those who find themselves in Memphis, I highly recommend a visit to the interior of the Bass Pro Shop Pyramid, a walk along the Mississippi River, and the Peabody Hotel Duck March (best enjoyed with the chocolate mousse that is served in a white chocolate duck).
Me and WWT at Charles Vergos' Rendezvous. I left the venue with a stomach full of BBQ, signed books, two new friends from Mississippi with whom I'd shared a table. It was a wonderful time.
I visited my mom in Miami, FL for Fathers’ Day weekend as part of our annual tradition to be together and honor the better parts of a difficult man. Last year, my mom came my way to Austin, TX (the city where I was at this time, last year). This year, I met her in Miami, an especially poignant spot for the weekend: it's the city where my parents originally met and where they owned a small apartment together for over thirty years. I spent the weekend looking through the shelves and cabinets of said apartment, searching for hints of my dad in his better days and as his better self. I found a few items that gave me a better understanding of him, specifically a few books, a collection of cassette tapes, and, most of all, a very bedazzled denim jacket. I am not sure he ever wore this in public, but it is revelatory to me: he thought himself as larger-than-life and as impenetrable as the “Man of Steel.”
My most noteworthy training-related experience of the month was a visit to Aviv Jiu-Jitsu in Boynton Beach, a gym co-owned and operated by two of the most accomplished women in jiu-jitsu: Luanna Alzuguir and Ana Carolina Vieira. My mom drove us up north for an hour only for me to discover that the class I’d hoped to attend had been cancelled. True to my mother’s shamelessness in asking for what she wants (and not having wanted her hour in the car to have been wasted), she encouraged me to ask for an ad hoc private lesson. Luanna and ”Baby” tag-teamed the lesson, and couldn’t have been sweeter or more helpful. It's one thing to get a private lesson with someone at the top, but to get one from two champs at your weight class is golden. One day, I hope to go back there to train with that team for a week or more. I’ve got reason to believe that a gym like AVIV—helmed by two accomplished, competitive women—is likely to have a culture of women following in the founders’ footsteps.
I drove for an hour in the Florida thunderstorms and got more than just a picture out of it.
What I've Been Thinking About
How to use a job in tech to advance my vocation in writing…and whether a job can ever be “just a job” for me. On June 1, I took up a three-month contract for a job in product management. The job is annihilating me, but I am also allowing it to annihilate me. Despite my yearlong sabbatical, and all the lessons it imparted on the role of work in my life and the kind of life I’d like to live, it has been obscenely easy to fall back into the consumptive—but comfortable—bad habits of wanting to be stellar at my job. Out of habit of giving everything to my job, I am back to giving everything to my job...at the expense of almost everything else I care about.
I am struggling with how much of my time is spent in (mostly bad) meetings that sap my energy for writing. I am conflicted when I see my best creative work end up in slack messages and user stories rather than manuscript chapters and writing contests. The question I ask myself about work is the one that this satirical video (of a product manager) dives into: what is the true cost of "the value I have delivered" and of my choice to be excellent at the office? Can I break that tendency to offer up my soul to my job and redirect it toward the work that matters most to me?
How to tell my own story—especially to people who do not know me and have no reason to care. In early May, I pitched myself into an interview with Voyage, a media outlet that has digital “magazines” for a few cities, including Atlanta. The interview was just released, and I'm pleased with how it came out. Being forced to answer the questions for the interview was a funny moment of having the mic turned back on me: though I’ve spent a lot of the road trip interviewing other people, I haven’t been interviewed recently for anything other than a job. I have no idea if anyone will read this interview and if it will drive any media interest in my writing, but if nothing else, it is a nice piece to look back on alongside some of the podcasts I recorded last year. How I told the story of the trip last fall differs significantly from how I tell the story of the trip now. What I realize now is that the trip was not about becoming a jiu-jitsu world champion. It was about learning to define success on my own terms.
Photo credits to @histandards.photo
In the wake of the latest news cycle and ahead of the upcoming 4th of July weekend, what it means to be an American and how to have pride in your country. My social media feed—and I’m sure yours, too—is full of vitriol and pain, no matter what beliefs you hold on the political spectrum. Especially after a year of traveling across the country, I know better than to stereotype people of a certain locale or of a certain religious, economic, or cultural background. In most cases, I am willing to bet that the similarities between two people with dissenting points of view in America significantly outweigh their differences. People want to be healthy. People want to take care of their friends, families, and loved ones. They want to be safe. They want to work and laugh and eat and enjoy what life has to offer.
This is true across the red-to-blue spectrum. This is also easy to forget.
My belief is that there are far more normal, reasonable, middle-of-the-road people than the conventional media cycle is willing to showcase, but to do so would be “too boring” and not sensational enough to keep people clicking through with eyeballs glued to the “news” (which increasingly reads like an op-ed column). The echo chambers that social media, in particular, reinforces do not optimize for balance or truth, let alone basic respect. I do not see much nuanced conversation about the issues facing the United States. I see a lot of virtue signaling. I see a lot of self-indulgent outrage and misplaced blame. I see fewer people seeking understanding than I do people seeking someone to crucify and cancel. Most dangerously of all, there is no shortage of factual misrepresentation and overt deception for those unwilling (or worse, unable) to think more critically.
Especially in the last month, I have wondered: How am I supposed to take pride in my country when it seems to be in everyone's interest to make me believe that the country is going to hell?
I got a piece of an answer to that question on a thirty-minute break from the grind of my new job, when I flew up for an onsite client meeting in New York City.
My company's office is at one of the new World Trade Center buildings. When one of my new colleagues and I went out for coffee, we walked around the crowd-packed edges of the 9/11 Memorial. Despite growing up within twenty miles of New York City for most of my life, I had never visited the memorial. I looked down into the black stone pit and listened to the echo of the waterfall, drowning out the din of the tourists. It was impossible to forget, even in my workday haze and even on the most beautiful summer day in Manhattan, that I was treading hallowed ground, the healed-over site of one of the most horrific and unforgettable events in contemporary American history.
Alongside this memorial, deeply evoking solemnity and loss, was a scene of vitality and renewal. There were university graduates posing for pictures with their families alongside the tree-lined perimeter of the memorial. There were food stands from a Smorgasburg pop-up lining the outside of the Oculus, replete with vendors and happy lunchers sharing some of the best of what New York City's culinary scene has to offer. There was me, finding peace in the sunshine with a new friend, counting my blessings while confronted with the perspective and the memory of over four thousand people who would never see another sunny day themselves.
Most of all, there were people from all over the country and world who running about and were so happy to be there: to be visiting New York and visiting America. Whatever bad news or seeming "fallen" status of America on the global stage had not stopped these people from wanting to come here and wanting to love and believe in America, for all its complicated mythology, past and present.
It gave me hope.
I thought of how much better things might be if I and other fellow citizens were able to see America through these visitors' and tourists' eyes: acknowledging but not focusing on purely the country's flaws (of which there are many) and, instead, respecting its capacity to better itself and live up to its reputation as a land of freedom and opportunity.
America is not perfect. No one is—and certainly no country is. But that does not mean it is not good, or that it cannot be good. Though the media has not made it popular or trendy to love America (and, if anything, has made it easier to find some loathsome fault in your fellow American), being American should not something to be ashamed of.
For fellow American readers struggling with their sense of patriotism: as you scroll through the next iteration of politically-charged media meltdown and take a hard swallow of your Fourth of July hot dog (or your favorite gluten-free, or plant-based alternative), I encourage you to remember this. There are many around the world who still want to visit here, become citizens here, and have both confidence in its founding promises and belief in its strength. We would all be better served by seeing our country as a remarkable thing of resilience and beauty instead of something hopelessly and irrevocably broken.
The WTC Memorial in Downtown Manhattan
Closing Out
Thank you for reading and I hope you enjoyed Issue #12 of this newsletter. I know this one got heavy at the end, but standing at that Memorial was a serious moment for me on Friday. It demanded acknowledgement with the requisite seriousness.
With all best wishes for a strong start to your summer,
EZ
Me, when I realize that now that I have shipped this newsletter, I need to go back to creating JIRA tickets.
PS: If you've never read anything of Wright Thompson's, you are missing out. Two top picks of mine are "Michael Jordan Has Not Left the Building" and "Holy Ground." My favorite lines from the latter piece, about WWT's visit to The Masters in the wake of his father's death, is below:
"I try to find messages, things [my father] might have left behind to lead me down the right path. I know he thought like that. For months after his death, my mother found flashlights in every room of the house. Big ones, small ones, medium-sized ones, all with fresh batteries. Then she realized: He'd put them there for when he was gone, in case she got scared in the dark, all alone."
Wright Thompson, "Holy Ground"
This is how I felt, going through my dad's books and belongings in the Miami apartment. The findings weren't all as wholesome as Thompson's father's flashlights, but were just as illuminating.
PPS: If you have any tips toward product/program management jobs that may be more sustainable for my writing life than my current contract gig, please send any hot tips my way.