New Digs

New home for the old blog and it feels…spacious.

Welcome to my new space for writing after sunsets, a blog I’ve used off and on for about seven years now. I’ve been working to consolidate my online presence, so moving my content here seemed to be the right thing to do.

Feel free to browse my past posts and look to this space for new work to come. And while you’re here, feel free to bounce out to my main page and see what I’m all about. You can find links to works of mine online as well as some more information about who I am and what I do on the page, in front of a classroom, and in a variety of forms of consultation.

A star is mourned; His name was Kobe

Photo by Lerone Pieters on Unsplash

Kobe Bryant is gone. Just a little more than a day since it happened and the permanence of that statement is still stone heavy in my chest.

Kobe was the singular player of my era on the team I’ve loved since discovered basketball. I wouldn’t call him a hero, given our relative similarity in age. Magic Johnson filled that role for me growing up.

No, watching Kobe play the game was witnessing the seemingly simple and effortless layers of his artistic genius peeled back one at a time. Stripped to the skill, then the work, then the single-minded focus, then the insecurity, then the stubbornness, then the ego, then the mistakes, and finally to the love at the center of it all, a passion that made him maddeningly certain of himself.

But the thing about heroes is that they are human and fragile and beholden to the same dangers as the rest of us.

I think what made Kobe such an icon to his fans was that if you watched him long enough, you came to the same conclusion everyone else did: he was a true believer in himself, willing to use anyone and anything as motivation to prove that belief valid over and over again.

That certainty made him capable of amazing things in basketball and his pursuits off the court. It also made him struggle with his role and responsibilities when he’d caused others pain.

And I think it made the rest of us looking on wonder, at times, if he was fully human. He seemed like he was the product of his own will and some freak giftedness all at the same time, something that resembled our dreams of being special but only our dreams.

But the thing about heroes is that they are human and fragile and beholden to the same dangers as the rest of us. We build monuments of their mystiques, trade interest for infatuation with their abilities, invest our collective hopes in their singularity.

All of this makes it easy to forget the impermanence of it all, the way some people make us forget the transience of existence, if just for a while, because of their proximity to our aspirations.

I guess this is what I’m taking away from this tragic situation. I don’t want to make a metaphor of a man.

Photo by Marcel Schreiber on Unsplash

Yesterday, that proximity was lost. The news of Kobe’s death, for me, was seismic. It was also somewhat familiar.

All these years later, I can still summon the sensation of hearing that Magic had contracted HIV. I was a sophomore in high school, and my friend Elaine found me in class to ask if I’d heard the news. I had not.

When she finished telling me, I stood up and left. Walked off campus and spent a couple hours wandering around. In my head, this was a death sentence.

Later, someone wheeled a TV cart into the weight room on campus and I watched Magic’s press conference where he confirmed the rumors, tried to set people’s minds at ease about his prognosis, and retired at 32 years old.

When it was over, I was sick, physically. I tried to believe it when he said he planned to go on and live a long and healthy life. But I also knew that people going public about having HIV usually meant AIDS would claim them soon. That’s how it felt back then, that my hero was fragile and human and dying.

Except he didn’t. Instead, Magic went on to reach a zero-viral load with treatment, become likely the most humanizing face of efforts to change the public perception of HIV, and construct one of the most successful post-sports business careers of any athlete I can think of. In essence, he’s lived long enough to redeem much of what once felt lost.

Kobe, on the other hand, will not. In shocking fashion, he’s gone just as he was setting out to accomplish the goals he had for after sports. As a parent. A writer. An investor. And a man.

At the same time, as complicated as it is to ponder in this moment, he also still had work to do. Like any human does. And also unlike most of us. In Kobe fashion, nothing he needed to work through was small, including his flaws.

I guess this is what I’m taking away from this tragic situation. I don’t want to make a metaphor of a man. I don’t want to shield myself from the full expression of who Kobe was so that I can only quote his inspirational words or reference the way he played the game.

At the same time, I want to hold space for the side of him that gave passionately to a variety of causes and doted unreservedly on his kids—the fact that he was flying with his daughter GiGi to one of her basketball games is so emblematic it hurts—along with the side of him that was so self-assured he had yet to reckon with some of his weakest moments.

Maybe I want to maintain my hope that he would mature enough as a man to be capable of performing the labor that would lead to fuller levels of atonement.

Maybe I just remember that we so often build idols to eventually betray us, but the models we fashion them after are people and people are always more complicated than the portraits we paint of them.

In Jim Murray’s classic 1998 column “A star is born; His name is Kobe,” the venerable L.A. writer poked fun at the hype of biblical proportions surrounding the then 19-year-old kid still just beginning his ascent of the mountain of fame that would eventually render so many people speechless at the news of his death. Deft as always and armed with various scriptural allusions, Murray poked fun at the unique reality that existed in the space between fans’ overblown expectations and Kobe’s dizzying level of potential.

But it’s not the jokes that came that came back to me in the aftermath of Kobe’s death. It was the now somewhat prophetic last paragraph

“Any way you look at it, you might want to get his autograph before he ascends into hoops heaven. He won't be hard to find. He'll be the one walking through doors without opening them.”

I wonder, though, given Kobe’s rejection of doing anything with the mere goal of being good enough, if we are more likely to find him there lamenting the things he never got to accomplish despite all that he did.

Coaching Small

Of all the things I was looking forward to doing during my sabbatical from teaching, coaching a basketball team of six, seven, and eight-year-olds was not high on my list.

More accurately, I didn’t really want to do it at all, because while I have coached basketball, I really don’t feel wired to work with that age. A year earlier, I coached my older son’s fifth and sixth grade team and even that was a stretch despite the fact that my boys had great attitudes and won more games than they lost.

But little kids with commensurate little attention spans? Games that don’t keep score? Refs that don’t call traveling? Courts with numbers on the floor so players will know where to stand while playing defense? Yeah, this was outside what I would call comfortable.

Why was I there, then? Because my younger son asked and I want him to have the kinds of memories I do of my father, who coached my middle school team when we couldn’t find anyone else to help and later taught my high school 4x100 relay team how to hand off the baton properly on his lunch break.

Mostly, I need my kids to know I show up; that I care. So I volunteered, tried to set aside my misgivings, and arrived for the first night of practice. When I gathered my ten players to introduce myself, I felt like a lumbering giant and made a mental note that some of my drills would have to be demonstrated from my knees.

Did I mention that coaching these kids made me feel a bit like the Jolly Green?

I mean, some of these kids, my son included, were tiny.

Fortunately, I was handed the best team I could have asked for. We weren’t the best team in the league (that honor belongs to a couple of squads that were *somehow* loaded with mostly eight year olds who played in other leagues). But blowing the doors off teams without a scoreboard doesn’t matter anyway.

No, my kids were there to learn. A few of them wouldn’t turn seven until well into the season or later, several had not played on a team before, and a couple had never touched a ball. One kid was so raw, he spent the first practice running every drill in the opposite direction as everyone else. Every. Drill.

But they didn’t care and they liked each other immediately. Plus, they were goofy and looking for opportunities to laugh with each other. And even better than that, they listened.

We had a total of three 45-minute practices before our first game and at each one I figured I’d just be trying to get the herd moving in the same direction. But they had other plans.

I really didn’t know how we’d play in a game. I had a few kids, three in particular, who knew what they were doing. One worked with a private coach. One had played with my son a year earlier and felt much more confident this year. And one, at seven, has a more developed step-back jump shot than I ever did.

But at this age, every kid plays and sits equal minutes, so balancing my kids with experience and their teammates without was a challenge. Not raising my voice like I would with my high school players was another. I don’t generally coach angry, just loud. But volume is anger, or so a mother of a player on another team implied when she told me I was praising my players too loudly and that it wasn’t nice.

I laughed and then hi-fived a player from her kid’s team when he hit a shot falling out of bounds.

But that first game was a mystery until it started. Then I saw what I was working with, which was 10 kids who played hard. They tried to played within the rules (I’ve really never seen a group in this league travel less than mine did). And they happily passed to each other, especially my best players. A couple of them could have taken every shot, but they were the first to make sure the others got the ball and some shots.

My team. Faces blurred to protect the innocent.

And there were high-fives for everyone. They went out of their way to congratulate each other when something good happened and didn’t get mad at each other when things weren’t going our way.

That’s the magic a coach is looking for at any level. Players who do what they’re asked and involve their teammates. And that magic worked for us all season long. They legitimately improved every week. By our last game, everybody on the team was getting at least one shot of their own and doing something significant enough that I could give them credit for it in our post-game talk.

Even better than that, my least skilled and most timid players had come out of their shells. And were embracing their roles. One girl I had would barely look at me the first week and often stood completely still on defense. In the last game, she had three steals and was intimidating kids on the other team when they dribbled near her!

And as for my son; he blossomed. He scored. He asked to play defense on the biggest players the other teams had because, as he put it, “I want the challenge of showing them a small kid can play bigger than they do.” He spent every game making sure his teammates were into the game, even when they were on the bench.

I love the way my kid shoots like a full-body shudder, tongue out, and zero doubt he should be taking the shot. Would that we all had his confidence with the ball in our hands.

In the final analysis, the season was fun for all the right reasons. After each game, I was able, easily, to call out the contributions every player and challenge them with specific ways each could get better over the next week. And at our party after our last game, I could genuinely congratulate every single kid on the ways they had made the season as good as it had been.

It was one of those rare seasons where it all stayed simple, the way basketball is best and should be played. Just kids on a court, looking to me to help them get better and to each other to make it all worthwhile. And that’s just what they did, carrying me along with them.

With how complicated all of the rest of my work has been, I’m really glad I signed on for the ride.

Top Shots: May 29

Yeah, yeah, it's been awhile. Life is busy and even on sabbatical, work I wasn't planning on just seems to find me. But I have been taking pictures along the way and here are some of my favorites from the last couple months.

The work continues on my novel, with storylines branching and merging and complicating my conscious hours. But progress is being made.

Speaking of work, I spent a very productive three days in San Diego writing and researching for the book. I also crammed in several burritos and some shots of the best city on the planet. Here's Sunset Cliffs at, well, sunset.

Another view of said sunset and, maybe, a metaphor for the writing process at the moment...

Looking down at Mission bay a couple days later, I've gotten to know this area much better than I ever did as a North County kid. One of the things I appreciate about the Claremont area is the sheer number of hills that provide different perspectives on the same sunsets. DEFINITELY a metaphor for the writing process.

Found this in a mural in Hillcrest at a moment I needed it.

It hasn't all been work. Here's the view from DTLA waiting outside the Wiltern Theater for my favorite band to play.

And here they are. Best show I've been to.

I've also been hiking with my boys for moments just like this when they find something that pulls them off the trail and makes them stop to take it all in.

My older son is about to finish sixth grade and it's crazy to watch him grow up in the small moments. That day, he insisted on leading the way up the trail and narrate what he saw along the way. Pretty soon, I won't be able to keep up, with any of it.

And, because beauty is everywhere, here's an art installation at the university where I teach reminding me that shadows prove the sunshine and branches lead back to the trees they're connected too. Here's hoping the same is true for my stories.

New Story: “The Best Thing”

After six years of sending it out, my short story "The Best Thing" has a home at Bull & Cross and was released this morning. Below is opening paragraph and a link to where you can access the whole story, free and ready for your reading pleasure. Let me know what you think!

"Butter turns his head toward me from his bed in the bike trailer and I can tell from the look in his eyes he knows I’m late. I can’t really do anything about the fact my chain fell off and it took an hour longer than it should have to get it back on. But it doesn’t matter. Since I found him behind the Jo-Ann’s Fabrics eating from a bolt of trashed blue and white cotton sear-sucker, Butter has proven to be exactly two things: angry and judgmental. But he’s my dog and sleeping bag partner, so I let him be who he is...."

The Best Thing in Bull & Cross, Issue 26

Top Thoughts: Feb. 3

I didn't end up taking many pictures this week, a combination of rainy days spent inside writing and a weekend at an indoor water park. Side note: I did indeed destroy my kids in side-by-side slide races. It's my duty as their father. So, instead of my best photos, here are thoughts that spent the week circling in my head:

1. Weird confluences are not so much strange as they are just a part of life. Doing some research for an essay, I found that one of the longest and most severe droughts in California history began the same year I stopped sleeping and started accruing a sleep deficit that's still with me. This seems...poetic.

2. I am still firmly committed to the idea that any structure or system that seeks to consolidate power for the few at the expense of the many should be torn down and replaced, including the ones within ourselves.

3. We do forgiveness wrong here because we make it transactional and predicated on the person who needs to be forgiven doing something to earn it based on our personal scale of their worthiness (h/t to Marcus Halley on Twitter for this thoughtful thread). I keep thinking about how this plays out in parenting and education where we so often teach grace as needing to be earned when that makes it anything but grace.

4. Two of my kids had birthdays within seven days of each other, one turning 16 and the other 8. Both had special celebrations: a trip to see Wicked for my daughter and a day of water slides and overstimulation at the Great Wolf Lodge for the other. The best part of both was watching the two of them (and their brother with the June birthday) share the excitement of each celebration with their siblings and extended family. Reminded me that the brief season with them in my house must be built on shared time and spending the big moments with each other.

5. Nothing triggers my impatience more than trying to write my stories. Pushing that rock daily up the hill is radical meditation and I need to cultivate the ability to sit with the moments where I am left at a loss for how to proceed.

6. I still dislike the New England Patriots.

That's it. Not so much profound as where I find myself, though those two need not be mutually exclusive. Until next week, then...

Top Shots: Jan. 27

This week's pictures center mostly on research related to my major project this season. I'm pushing into it directly and spent the last week finding spaces in the physical settings of the story, planning some tricky elements of the plot, and getting a feel for characters in their world. Here are some of the results.

A storefront across from the central location of my story, which you can see reflected in the window. Also, an emblematic representation of some gentrification at work.

A bridge over University Ave. that pops up in a couple scenes. From the top, you can look west toward the heart of downtown San Diego and east to the mountains beyond the city.

Art on a shop that's speaks to the neighborhood and the city itself.

A calm moment on the 163 Freeway. A couple hours later, it was knotted up like a clogged pipe.

Maybe someday...

I shot this picture on a college tour this summer at CalArts that I took with my oldest child and it keeps surfacing in connection with my main character. Can't wait to figure out how that's working, as it's not always clear why my connections get made in the first place.

Some paper planning I did. I'm no visual artist, but sometimes I draw spaces to understand them outside my head.

And speaking of my oldest, my daughter turned 16 at the end of the week. She's special, this one, and it was fun to shut down work and spend a couple days celebrating the occasion. (Also, a sneak cameo from my wife in the background.)

Top Shots - Jan. 19

This week's images are linked by a solitary thread braiding rain and fatigue and depression.

Looking up through my windshield seemed to be the best representation of my entire week. Cold, gray, and smeared to unclear.

I spent a couple days staring at this view, the typically dry streets of a neighborhood near mine awash is more rain than they could handle.

A couple of shots here of a washed out skate park in San Pedro just on the edge of drying out. While I was there, five local kids shredded rings around the deepest parts of the pool, trying to get in a session while avoiding the water still collected at the bottom.

Sometimes, it's the weirdest things that bring comfort. This week: a delivery truck from my childhood pizza shop popping up where I live now.

These last two were reminders that all storms pass, the sun sets on them in the same way it does on the best days, and tomorrow is another chance for all of it, good and bad.

Top Shots - Jan. 12

This week's pics are mostly focused on the work spaces of my first week on sabbatical because I've waited a long time to have the chance to focus solely on my writing. So I'm taking advantage of it.

The dinner table as desk usually doesn't work for me, but it's been good so far.

I spent an entire morning just thinking about the big questions each character in the novel I'm writing are wrestling with in their lives. Just those questions. No assignments to grade. No class sessions to plan. No letters of recommendation to write. Just my stories. It was phenomenal.

I did have some fun taking pictures with the basketball team I'm coaching. That's my son, taking it all very seriously.

And here's my tally for the week. Got a good amount done but didn't feel--like I normally do--that all I was able to accomplish was not enough. It's been a long time since I could say that.

Weekly Top Shots - Jan. 6

As a purely personal side project for fun this spring, I'm going to post my three or four favorite pictures from the week. It should be noted that I'm not, nor do I claim to be, a photographer of any skill. Like I said, this is just for fun and, possibly, a way to look more closely at my world.

And having the accountability of a weekly deadline, even if it's just for me, can't hurt. This week's pics are mostly place-based, though it's a stretch to call my beard a place...

This shot from New Years Eve comes from the Metro station near my university. I always love when the sun spills through the clouds like this.

Golden hour at Seal Beach just south of Long Beach. Seal is the closest spiritual cousin to the beaches I grew up on in North County San Diego and I go as often as I can.

Speaking of my beard...there it is on the same beach. It's really the only project I can guarantee will get completed during the spring sabbatical I just started...(that was a joke if you're reading, Dean Walsh)...

And finally, clouds over the foothills in the San Gabriel Valley. This shot is actually looking back toward the place I took the first one in this set almost one week later. Some of the best skies where I live come when the winds plow the clouds up and over the first ridge, allowing them to catch the light of the sunset like a painting.

And that's Week 1. Check in each week if you want.