A Melancholic Birthday

Another birthday came and went yesterday. In some ways, the year preceding it was a typical year for me. I won’t dwell on that. But some noteworthy things, at least to me, occurred.

My wife and I caught Covid on separate occasions after being fully vaccinated and boosted, and it was no worse than a standard cold for either of us, except that I had an unusual sore throat for a couple or so days.

I saw a local 15-year-old bowling prodigy named Saphyre compete in the U.S. Women’s Open in Rohnert Park last August and stun and thrill me by beating some of the best female bowlers on the planet, including my beloved New Hui Fen, on one of the oil patterns. Later, she took Jillian Martin, probably the most heralded female junior bowling phenom ever, to the wire in two Storm Youth Championship tournaments and convinced me that she’s a young sorceress with her amusingly nonchalant bowling style, deadly powerful release, and deceptively wizardlike lane play skills. Watching and rooting for her has been one of my biggest recent if not lifetime surprises and pleasures.

Speaking of bowling, I shot a 300 in league a few months ago, and a 290 and 278 more recently, but I’ve struggled to carry consistently and score well on the new lanes and oil, which is all the more frustrating when I see so many others in my league tearing them up. But I attribute some of this struggle to my unwillingness to put in the time and effort to get and do better. Isn’t that a central element in the story of my life? And can I change that? Will I change that? Not only in bowling but in every other important respect?

My mom seems to be doing well as she approaches 85, but I’m not sure how forthcoming she’s been about her health and well-being. One concern I have is that one of her step-daughters who lives nearby and has been so helpful to her may be moving away before long, and I will need to take up the slack that I may be ill-equipped to do.

My wife is still with me but I don’t know for how long as her parents back home get older and older and become more dependent on her overworked younger sister. When she finally does leave, my life may change drastically.

Finally, arguably the most important event of the year since my previous birthday and unquestionably one of the most important of my entire life occurred less than two weeks before my newest birthday. My best friend of over fifty years, Craig, was found dead in his car with a gunshot wound to the head miles away from his residence in Southern California. The police and medical examiner have ruled it a suicide, but I and everyone I know who knew him just can’t believe he killed himself. There were no signs whatsoever, even in retrospect, that pointed to suicidal ideation or tendencies, and there’s no apparent reason why he would have done such a thing and many reasons why he wouldn’t have done that to himself at this point in his life when he had so many things he enjoyed doing and so many achievable plans for his retirement. Yet, it looks like his family has accepted the ruling and that he will be cremated and buried soon.

I’ve been shy and reclusive all my life and have had no other friends for as long as I did Craig or shared as much with any other male friends over the decades as I did with Craig. I got drunk for the first time with him. I saw my first Bruce Lee movie and countless other movies thereafter with him. I went to my first Mahavishnu Orchestra concert and many concerts later on with him. We bowled together. Played basketball together. Spent countless hours in each other’s company or on the phone talking about this and that.

Even as our interests diverged over the past few years and we had far less contact than we used to, it was reassuring to know he was out there and was someone I could turn to if I ever needed him, and I hope and think he felt the same about me.

His sudden and mystifying departure has left a hole in my life. I will miss not only our phone conversations, occasional visits, Facebook messagings, and so much else, but I will miss the warm reassurance that the potential for sharing a reminiscence or other simple pleasures of our abiding friendship exists even when it resides in the background. For now it exists no longer.

Craig told me that after his parents died years ago, he became acquainted with a psychic who could communicate with his parents and enable him to communicate with them through her. I’m very skeptical of this but not completely convinced it wasn’t true; he told me some amazing things about what he learned from that communication that gave me pause. And so I wish that if my friend does consciously survive in a different or alternate realm in which he retains awareness of what’s going on here and an emotional connection with family and friends still inhabiting this plane of existence, he will find a way to reach out to that psychic so that she can reach out to me and tell me what really happened to him and why, and so that I’ll really know there’s life beyond death.

And now I look toward another year with plans and goals to fulfill, new friendships to forge and old ones to strengthen, new challenges to face, and all without the reassuring constant in my life that was Craig.

A Facebook Post About Covid Vaccination

 (I posted the following comment this morning to a friend’s Facebook page in a thread discussing vaccination.)

On a personal note, my wife and I were fully Modernized months ago. We had slightly unpleasant but not severe reactions to the second injection and have experienced no discernible ill effects since.

Nevertheless, we recently attended a major bowling tournament for a couple of days in a crowded bowling center, and even though masking was required and practiced by all spectators and competitors, it was a reckless risk we shouldn’t have taken in the middle of a Delta Covid surge.

Four days after we came home, my wife began experiencing subtle symptoms of possible infection and subsequently tested positive. But her symptoms remained mild and have now virtually disappeared.

Moreover, I never had any symptoms to speak of but got tested Tuesday and received my test result this morning. It was negative.

I don’t know how much of a role our being fully inoculated with a mRNA vaccine played in this very favorable outcome, but I think it’s pretty reasonable to surmise that getting vaccinated didn’t harm either of us and that, given my wife’s age and especially mine, it may well have spared us serious illness or worse and with no apparent downside.

And even before this recent brush with Covid, ever since we were fully vaccinated, we’ve experienced so much less anxiety about becoming infected and severely sickened with this deadly and pervasive disease than we did previously.

Vaccination removes or at least greatly lessens the terrible, nagging fear of catching Covid and makes life so much more enjoyable.

I guess some dispel this fear by underestimating or even outright denying the threat Covid poses to the unvaccinated. But that seems to me like a perilously risky strategy with potentially deleterious if not deadly consequences for them personally, for their loved ones, and, collectively, for society at large.

I say don’t be foolish. Get vaccinated. Do it for yourself. Do it for your loved ones and friends and coworkers and other people around you. Do it for your country. And do it for the world.

 

Bowling--You're Not Worthy!?

I got mad at a friend yesterday for saying bowling doesn’t get good media coverage because it isn’t “worthy” of it. What I found especially maddening about this was that he and I subscribe to FloBowling and regularly and enthusiastically follow professional male and female bowling and chat about it virtually every day. Watch some televised PWBA stepladders from early in the 2016 season, and you will see him sitting in the stands watching and texting me about what’s happening. And although you can’t see him in the audience of the televised PBA Masters stepladder recently that Jacob Buturff won, he was there.

I confess that I felt his remark like a slap in the face. And when he defended it against my protests and then said I needed to stop being so “emotional” and "honestly" face up to the truth, I didn’t exactly feel more favorably disposed to his point of view. Because what I understood him to mean, which he did not dispute, by his “not worthy” remark is not that bowling simply isn’t popular enough to garner more media coverage, but that it isn’t GOOD enough to deserve greater popularity and coverage. And while I realize that many people believe this, to the extent that they ever even give elite bowling a thought, it shocked me that HE would believe and say this to ME.

And because I felt my temperature rising as this discussion unfolded, I quickly made it very clear that I didn’t see any point in continuing along that line because it seemed that we had made our respective views plenty clear and that there was nothing to be gained (and, by implication) much to possibly be lost by chatting any more about it at the time.

Was I being too “emotional”? In hindsight, I’m willing to consider that possibility. In fact, I concede that a wiser or more mature response would have been to dispassionately take note of my friend’s opinion and then just let it go like I would a similar remark from a child or adult who knew nothing about bowling and was just talking out of his ass or trolling.

But my friend knew a lot more than nothing about bowling and he knew full well whom he was talking to, and he still said bowling wasn’t “worthy” of more popularity than it enjoyed or coverage than it received and that he had the right to hold this opinion and to express it. Well, I disagree with his opinion of bowling’s worthiness, but I agree with him that he has a right to that opinion and to express it. By the same token, I could say that I had a right to disagree with him and to express my emotional antipathy to his holding and expressing his opinion so long as I didn’t didn’t do it any more disagreeably than I did. But I’m not sure our asserting our respective rights in this regard gets us anywhere we want to go. I don’t know how he feels in the aftermath of our disagreement, although his uncharacteristic silence may well provide a clue, but I do know that I don’t feel particularly good about it.

And it’s not only because I don’t like having angry confrontations with people whose friendship I value and then having, with unpleasant awkwardness, to try to reconcile, but I also wonder if I don’t deep down agree with his opinion of bowling and am angry over the fact that he forced me to confront and examine it. Is elite bowling NOT worthy of the greater popularity and media coverage that other sports including football, basketball, baseball, boxing, soccer, tennis, and golf enjoy and receive? And am I foolish to be working, as I now am, to produce a podcast devoted to covering elite bowling?

I don’t have any solid answers. Just unsettling questions. I guess I’ll mull on them a while.

Judging One's Own Judgment

Something happened yesterday while I was bowling in my league that has never happened before in my nearly fifty years of league bowling. I threw my strike ball, it hit the pins a little farther to the left (I bowl right-handed) than I wanted it to, and a pin remained standing. But not for long. Because another pin rolled across the pin deck from left to right and knocked it over just as the pinsetter raced down to grab it.

Bowling league rules say that after a ball is thrown, if the pinsetter knocks a pin over while it's standing or touches it while it's falling, that pin has to be reset on the deck. But it looked to me like the pin fell over without the pinsetter touching it, and one of my teammates, who was watching at the time, said it looked that way to him too. But members of the other team and some spectators in back of us said that the pinsetter touched the pin as it was falling, while a bowler on the next pair of lanes agreed with me and my teammate that the pin fell untouched by the pinsetter.

What to do? As I said, I've never dealt with this situation before. That is, I've seen pinsetters knock over pins while they were falling, but it was obvious that this is what happened. But yesterday's instance was not nearly so clear-cut. There was a difference of opinion between those of us who saw it happen.

I ended up taking a strike instead of having to reset the pin and shoot at it for a spare. But I think the haggling that occurred over it disrupted my concentration so much that on my next ball, I did something I haven't done in league for decades. I threw my strike ball in the gutter. I followed that up by leaving a pocket 10-pin on my spare ball and going nine-out for the frame, which was very costly to our team at a vital moment in our second-quarter position round match against the opposing team. The other team ended up narrowly winning the second quarter and making it into the league roll-offs at the end of the season, while my team finished second for the second consecutive quarter.

I'm writing about this because it touches upon something that has long been an issue with me. I've always lacked faith in my own opinions and powers of observation.

I've heard of psychology experiments where test subjects were placed in a room with confederates of the researchers, and they ended up concurring with the obviously false opinions of the confederates in response to questions about, say, which line in a series of lines was the longest. And it's not that the test-subjects necessarily lied just so that they wouldn't catch flack from the others. In some cases, they actually believed that their response was correct because, even if it didn't really look correct to them, it must be because it agreed with everybody else's.

I have little doubt that if I were a test-subject in such an experiment, I'd do the same thing. I'd figure that since everybody else said a certain line appeared to be the longest, it must be even if it didn't look that way to me. Well, actually, given the fact that I was a psychology major in college and know about these experiments, maybe I wouldn't do this. But otherwise, I think I very well might.

Yet, I'm glad that I stood up for my perspective of what actually happened to that falling pin yesterday instead of silently submitting to the protests of those who had a different perspective. I didn't insist that my perspective was correct, because I know that human perception and eyewitness accounts are notoriously unreliable and that my own perceptions may be more unreliable still.  But I continued to insist that it looked to me as though the pinsetter didn't touch the pin until the issue was finally resolved by the opposing team agreeing to credit me with a strike.

But this raises a broader issue of how much I can trust my own judgments about anything, especially when it's about myself. In my previous two blogposts, I questioned my longstanding judgment that I was a good enough writer to potentially earn money from writing. I wondered whether my dream and goal of writing professionally might be akin to a wretched or mediocre singer aspiring to become the next "American Idol." I wrote that in the unsettling wake of a linguistic analysis of some of even my simplest writing that rated it as too complex in its syntax to appeal to most readers, I was feeling very disheartened at the prospect of being able to turn even the one thing I thought I was pretty good at into a profitable activity.

Well, I discovered something today that gave me a little hope. I read a New York Times column by Ross Douthat that scored even higher on unreadibility than my writings did when I subjected it to the same online analysis. And I honestly believe that my writings are clearer and, arguably, better stylistically at least. So, if Ross Douthat can write a regular column for one of the world's most respected newspapers with a style possibly even more opaque than mine, maybe there's a smidgen of hope for me after all.

And to place an exclamation point on that hope, I submitted an aforementioned Op Ed piece to a newspaper this morning. I spent a couple of weeks writing and polishing it meticulously until I could see no additions, subtractions, or corrections to make with it, and then I pulled the trigger and sent it.

All I can say is that getting that piece published in such a prestigious medium would be the crowning achievement of my writing hobby thus far, and perhaps the doorway to writing as more than just a hobby. I won't hold my breath waiting to receive word that my piece is being considered or has been approved for publication. I'm realistic enough to know that the odds are very much against it. But I still have a shred of hope in me. We shall see what happens.

Look, Ma, I'm On YouTube!

As regular readers (if there are such crazy people) of this blog know, I love to bowl. I bowl in a league that challenges us with roughly the same oil patterns that the professional bowlers face in their televised tournaments. Those patterns are considerably more difficult than the patterns that most of us bowl on in practice and league because they require one to be more accurate and consistent than one would ordinarily have to be to get strikes and spares.

For instance, on the typical bowling center shot, if you throw a hook, you can miss your optimal target several inches left or right or be off with your speed and often still get to the pocket for a strike or convert your spare. On the PBA Experience patterns, if you miss even slightly to the right of your target or throw the ball a little too fast, your ball is likely not to hook to the pocket, and it will often miss in such a way that you are left with a difficult spare conversion. If you miss your target a little to the left or throw the ball a little too slow, your ball will usually hook past the pocket and often leave a difficult or impossible split to convert.

Even though it can awfully frustrating at times, I enjoy pitting myself against these patterns because it encourages me to improve both the mental and physical aspects of my game, and it makes me appreciate more just how good the professionals on TV really are.

The woman who runs our league is one of the outstanding bowling coaches in the country and has developed a tremendous junior bowling program in our bowling center. In my league, both adults and juniors participate. She recently decided to make a video of our league and put it on YouTube. She compiled the finished product from footage gleaned from two consecutive weeks of bowling. I appear in four parts of the video, wearing one shirt and long pants in two of those parts, and shorts and a different shirt in the other two parts. One of the parts shows me throwing a warm-up ball at a full rack of pins. I will not say any more than that. Enjoy. :-)

My Thrill, Their Indifference

Last night I had the honor and pleasure of bowling with one of the finest female bowlers ever. Leanne Barrette is a bowling legend who won 26 women's professional national bowling titles, was women's professional bowler of the year twice, and was still doing very well on the women's tour when it shut down a few years ago. She is my favorite female bowler of all-time, and my grandfather and I used to love to watch her on TV, where she has appeared over 100 times. She now lives and works in the Sacramento area and bowls in one of the finest leagues in the nation in the bowling center in which I bowl.

Last night she substituted for a bowler in a junior-adult league in which I participate, and she bowled on my pair of lanes. Now I have seen in person nearly every great male and female bowler of the past forty years as well as numerous other famous people in many endeavors, so I am not the sort of person who is starstruck by anyone. I have even seen Leanne many times in the aforementioned league in which she participates weekly, and I bowl with her fiance, a professional bowler, in another league. But there was still something a little special in actually being down on the lanes with her, talking with her a little, and giving her low-fives when she struck and in hearing her say, "Nice shot" when I converted a difficult spare. It is not every day when as big a bowling fan as I am gets to bowl with a bowling superstar and one of his favorite bowlers of all-time.

But one thing that really struck me while bowling last night was how little the junior bowlers seemed to pay any attention to her. At the risk of sounding like the proverbial old fuddy-duddy who says, "When I was your age I tramped ten miles through the snow to get to school and another ten miles to get back home,"I have to say that when I was the age of those junior bowlers in my league last night, I would have been thrilled to death to bowl with one of the finest bowlers in history, and my eyes would have been riveted on every shot she made, just as they were last night, and I think most of my peers would have felt and acted the same way. But these kids, who are not casual bowlers but fairly serious, scratch-level bowlers, seemed to pay her no mind. When Leanne bowled, they were busy chatting with each other or on their cellphones and horsing around in some way or other. There was no sense of reverence or even respect for this bona-fide superstar of the bowling world, and I have to wonder if this is symptomatic of young people these days.

Do they have no heroes or idols except, perhaps, "American Idols" or other entertainment celebrities? Are they more or less indifferent to great achievers in other areas such as science, literature, art, and even sports? And does this blase attitude carry over into other aspects of their lives? If so, why? And is this a good or bad thing?

Bowling Lessons

Debbie Haggerty is my doubles partner in my bowling league. She's also one of the best bowling coaches in the world. My friend Tim is a fine bowler with a simple style that enables him to be accurate and consistent. He loves the game and is always looking to learn more about it and improve his skills. One skill he wants to improve is his ability to roll a more powerful ball so that he can get more strikes. So, when I told him about Debbie, he resolved to take a lesson with her. Yesterday, he was finally able to drive here from the Bay Area and make good on that resolution, and I accompanied him to the bowling center.

He and I practiced for 90 minutes before Debbie arrived. Then she watched him carefully and videotaped him from several different angles. After that, she replayed the videos for him in regular, slow, and very slow motion showing him what he's doing right and what he's doing wrong and gave him suggestions on what he can do to improve, especially in the way of generating a more powerful roll on his ball. She then watched him try out those suggestions. Tim's a quick learner, and he was soon knocking down pins with more forcefulness than I was accustomed to seeing from him. I have no doubt that what he learned will make him a better bowler, because it will enable him to throw a more powerful ball without sacrificing the effective simplicity of his game.

Even though I didn't ask for it and didn't pay her for a lesson, she also videotaped me from the back and side and replayed it for me. It was a revelation. I've seen myself on videotape before, but never as clearly in regular and slow motion as I did yesterday. I was actually somewhat pleasantly surprised at how graceful I looked in some respects. Nevertheless, my game bears the somewhat archaic signature of someone who began bowling in the late 1960's with its long slide and extended follow through. And I was doing something blatantly wrong that was affecting my ability to be consistent. I was holding and pushing the ball slightly to the right of my trunk when I began walking to the foul line, and this caused me to swing the ball slightly left behind my back in my backswing, forcing me to try to get the ball back on line in my forward swing. She told me to hold the ball a little further left and make sure I push it straight out rather than to the right and that this should enable me to achieve a straighter, more consistent backswing which, in turn, should help me to be more accurate and consistent. She also made a suggestion about how to hold the ball before I begin my approach so that I can effortlessly generate a more consistent and powerful release and ball reaction leading to more strikes.

I was very pleased with what I learned and look forward to trying it out. I've always had difficulty understanding biomechanical principles and following instructions. This is why I've never sought out coaching and haven't asked Debbie for advice when we bowl together in league. But I understood the simple suggestions she gave me yesterday and think they will help me a lot. I think I'll now be less reluctant to ask her for advice when we're bowling together, and I may even hire her for some formal lessons.

Perhaps it's not too late to teach an old dog or, in this case, old bowler new tricks.

Moving Meditation on the Lanes

I bowled better last night than I have in a long time. I scored better too. I attribute it to being true to my new bowling ideal. My ideal is not to be concerned with how I score or with whether I win. My ideal is to focus strictly on mindful execution of my approach and delivery. My ideal is for bowling to be meditation in motion.

Last night it was just that much of the time. I began my first game with eight strikes in a row. Interestingly, I lost my focus a little in the ninth frame, as thoughts of a perfect 300 game began dancing in my head, and I threw a bad shot and ended up with an open frame. After that, I regained my focus and struck twice in the tenth for a 260 game. I began the next game well and had a chance at another high score. And, once again, I threw some bad balls when I became more concerned with my score than I did with my execution and ended up with a 221 game after opening in the tenth frame with a split. I was able to stay focused on execution the third game and bowled a 277 game. That gave me a 758 series for the night. By not trying to score well, I scored my best league series of the year. By not trying to win, our team won all three games. Alan Watts had two names for this intriguing phenomenon: "the law of reversed effort," and, more simply, "the backwards law."

I accomplished this by focusing on execution instead of score, and also by giving up trying to throw the ball hard with a lot of revolutions the way I did when I was younger. Instead, I tried to be smooth and steady with my approach and release. And what I lost in power and in the exciting explosiveness of my ball at the pins, I more than made up for in the consistency of my ball reaction and by outstanding carry on a variety of different ball entrances to the pocket.

I think last night's experience helped to make me a wiser, better bowler.