Two topics on my mind today. Not sure if they connect.
One of my favorite little bits from the Knausgaard books - I think it’s My Struggle Book 3, but that could be based on the cover - comes when young Karl Ove is listing all his classmates and assesses all the boys based on what they can and can’t do physically. Who’s fastest, who’s tallest, who’s strongest. I remember it because it’s such an accurate thought process before adolescence.
I don’t know if other men outgrow it, but I’m 50 and I have not, not completely. I still wonder most days what it’s like to have a body that’s not awful. Body image was a topic in IOP (that’s “Intensive Outpatient Program” for you fuzzy ducks who haven’t gone to rehab), and I took the floor. I described how much I hated the sight of myself, how I defaulted to believing myself utterly loathsome, physically, and how I relied on attention to feel less so, if only for a moment. How I’d spent 24 years in long-term relationships in part to keep that ongoing drip of knowing someone out there wasn’t revolted by me. There was a long silence. I’d gone deep. One woman said, “It’s okay to cry.”
I’m not in that place anymore, but that monologue was only about 4 years ago, when I was 45. It’s not like I’ve outgrown that constant self-assessment; I’ve learned to understand it and accept it. I’ve also learned to avoid obsessing about it, which includes some simple steps like not looking at myself in any reflection from a downtown building to assess whether I’m OK, whether someone would look at me and think, that guy’s OK.
Most of the women in IOP got where I was coming from. All of the straight men were mystified. It never occurred to any of them to wish their proportions were different in some impossible to change way. One PED-using gay man who was jacked as hell shared a lot about his body dysmorphia. He and I crosstalked about how damaging it can be to see women drool over 56-year-old Brad Pitt shirtless in “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood”. We also talked about kids’ superhero Halloween costumes padded with muscles.
It’s exhausting, the self-assessment. Like - I just watched “Perfect Days”, which was very good - far more melancholy than the trailer suggests. Part of Hirayama’s routine includes a trip to shower in the public bath and as he washed himself I’m thinking, “Is that what I look like naked? That’s OK, I guess.” (Koji Yakusho is 66 years old.) Hell, I’m at a coffee place right now and a man just walked by post-run, built like me, but he’s got lats and I don’t have lats. I bet he can do a dead-hang pull-up.
I don’t have a conclusion here. It’s just a constant cognitive-behavioral struggle to avoid putting myself in line. Am I the 20th strongest boy out of 25? Or more like 25th? But I am proud of myself for buying running shorts with a 5” inseam. At my age, running shorts should make everyone a little uncomfortable.
The New Adventures of Ghost and Skeleton
I recently canceled my live-streaming service. I still have NBA League Pass, but I can no longer watch Illinois basketball, the only college basketball I typically watch before the tournaments. As I type, I’m regretting the decision only because I’d like to watch the Illinois women take on Caitlin Clark and the Hawkeyes. (I just checked the score and Iowa’s up 40-22, so maybe it’s OK.)
I’ve rooted for many pretty good Illinois teams, even as I continue to hate the use of the indigenous mascot name. Chief Illiniwek was retired in 2007, but the Chief logo is still all over the stadium, though not used in broadcasts at least. I rooted for the Lou Henson teams (Kiwane Garris! Demetri McCamey!), then the 2005 team that was two iffy foul calls on James Augustine from winning the national title game.
But I don’t know that I ever loved rooting for a player more than Ayo Dosunmu, who led Illinois to a #1 seed in the NCAA tournament before they were upset early by Loyola Chicago in 2021. My heart fell when Dosunmu slipped to 38th in the draft, rose as he made second-team all-rookie as a Bull and has stuck with the team. When Zach Lowe wrote earlier this month “This version of Dosunmu is a valuable bench player”, I may have fist pumped alone. It’s bizarre, this paternalism over a player born in 2000. He seems like such a nice young man. And he’s from Chicago, y’know.
Would I feel the same if I weren’t a father?
And would I feel the same disappointment about Terrance Shannon, Jr.? Also born in 2000, but in his 5th year of college, TSJ was leading the Illinois team in scoring when he was suspended following a rape allegation in Lawrence, Kansas. Katie Heindl is the best writer on this issue on the NBA - how the league does and doesn’t deal with criminal charges - and I was relieved when Illinois suspended him. I loved seeing Coleman Hawkins take a larger role. I enjoyed the Marcus Domask extreme confidence experience. Then Shannon’s lawyer got a stay and successfully got him back on the team, and I…just…can’t. Maybe he’s totally innocent, maybe it’s a dumb drunken over-charge. But if were at Northwestern now, I absolutely would have been part of the student section taunting “No means no”.
Shannon will probably get drafted around the same place Dosunmu did, but Ayo has that leadership vibe, that it factor that suggests he was going to be successful no matter what, while Shannon doesn’t.
Like I fucking know. It’s bizarre to have so many opinions about two young men born in 2000, the year I got laid off during the first Internet bust.
Here’s how these two topics connect. Maybe I’m too old for this.
Yesterday, a college student/barista who writes poetry, who knows I write poetry, told me about their post-modernism literature class and their new love of Joan Didion. I learned the college kids don’t read Donald Barthelme anymore, and I recommended Renata Adler’s “Speedboat”. I loved feeling for a moment like I was still in college, working a job without a future, free to care about art instead of better positioning the electric industry to recover infrastructure costs.
And now I’m back.
Here’s a college-themed poem:
Gary Soto, from “Junior College”