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Ski Season Approaches!

August 31, 2010 – 7:39 pm

I know it’s only August, but this afternoon I found myself thinking that skiing is… sorta… right around the corner.  Metaphorically speaking.

The guy at the right is my role model.  Klaus Obermeyer, founder and scion of the family business that makes and sells good-quality, fairly-priced ski duds.  Klaus skis every day of the season (sans helmet) with a big smile on his face, and I can only hope that I’m in as good a shape as he is when I’m 80-whatever.

I was playing golf with a guy today who plays golf almost every day, because his back and his knees aren’t good enough to allow him to ski anymore.  So he said that he “basically suffers through 7 months of winter” each year.

I can’t imagine living where I do, and not being able to ski.  So for today, and hopefully for a very long time, all I can say is:

THANK GOD I’VE STILL GOT TWO GOOD KNEES!

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By John | Posted in Main Page | Tagged , , | Comments (0)

Who’s the Guy with the Shades?

May 23, 2010 – 8:05 am

So…  Yesterday I was out on the patio having lunch, and reading some new book on Arthur Koestler (whom I’ve never read) in The New Republic.

Anyway, the critic was making a point about how Koestler (in Darkness At Noon) and Hemingway (in For Whom The Bell Tolls) used fiction to portray their “disillusion” with Russia’s experiment with Marxism.  (And I don’t want to get into that in this note: that’s not the point.)  These two writers, at any rate, as opposed to people like Sidney Hook and Edmund Wilson who took the more obvious route: non-fiction.

What I suddenly realized, reading through it, is that I’d probably be better off writing THE TIME TO DECIDE in the first person.  Still as fiction– sort of– but not in the 2nd person.  That was– for me– an important realization.

A few months ago I gave one of our local high-school teachers, who teaches an ethics course, the first 20 pages or so of THE TIME TO DECIDE, and he said he liked the humor, and could appreciate the point I was trying to make, but he found the 2nd-person approach confusing.  As in: who are you (the author) talking to?  (And if he didn’t get it, I was making my attempt at communicating overly difficult.)

So just yesterday I realized that I’ve gotta switch to the 1st person.  Sacre bleu!  Why didn’t I think of that earlier?

So…  All I’ll have to do is re-write what I’ve already written in the 1st person.  Shouldn’t be difficult.  What I’m hoping for, obviously, is increased immediacy.  A storyteller with whom a reader can connect.

And “transposing” what I’ve already written of THE TIME TO DECIDE from 2nd person to 1st person reminds me of when J.S. Bach was putting together Book One of The Well-Tempered Clavier.  The prelude and fugue in C-sharp major that we know was actually written originally in C (natural) major.  A big difference, from a sight-reader’s perspective, but from Bach’s point-of-view, all he had to do was add a key signature with 7 sharps, change a few accidentals, and viola! a piece in C-sharp major.  (This is the only key-change you can do that with.)  (My Peters edition gives an alternative in D-flat major, which with 5 flats is slightly easier to read.  In Book Two Bach didn’t even bother writing a C-sharp major version.)

So if you choose to take a gander at the opening chapters of THE TIME TO DECIDE here, for the time being at least they’ll still be the 2nd-person version, but the story will be the same nonetheless.

So all I can say, for the moment, is:

THANK GOD I REALIZED THIS BEFORE I GOT ANY FARTHER!

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Buck up!

February 13, 2010 – 11:01 am

You might not recognize this guy, but it’s the young Sergei Rachmaninoff.  Russian composer and pianist extraordinaire.

The story goes that after the total failure of his first symphony, he ran off to Switzerland and underwent psychotherapy for 10 years.  At the end of which his doctor asked, “Have you ever considered writing music that you’d like to hear?”

And thus was born (shortly thereafter) the beloved 2nd piano concerto.

Moral of the story: While I might be struggling trying to find an audience for my books, at least I know what I want to write.

And, looking back on my younger days, when I thought about how neat it would be to write music instead of prose, I’m all too aware of the miasma enveloping contemporary “serious” music.  There’s no direction, no audience, and no real hope for a “breakthrough.”  (You might say the same thing about the world of theoretical physics.)

So all I can say is:

THANK GOD I’M NOT A COMPOSER!

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Winter X Games

January 29, 2010 – 12:53 pm

Once again, the ESPN Winter X Games are upon us.

The weather’s milder this year than it has been in the past, which is a blessing, I guess.  (We could always use more snow.)

I heard a radio interview with a competitor a few years ago, the day before he was going to attempt the first-ever complete back flip (360 degrees, vertical) on a snowmobile.

He said that the intriguing thing was that you really couldn’t practice it.  You just had to go out and do it.  Yikes!

He managed to pull it off, the next day.

But he also said that he’d spent 7 of the last 12 months in the hospital, with various injuries.

Which made me think:

THANK GOD I DON’T HAVE TO DO THIS FOR A LIVING!

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Bicycles in the snow.

January 26, 2010 – 3:38 pm

Don’t you hate it when you ask somebody to get their bicycle out of your yard, take it back home to their own house, in the fall…

… and it’s still there mid-winter?

It’d be even worse if you had to shovel around it.

Fortunately, we haven’t had a banner snow year (thus far), so the abandoned bike hasn’t rusted too much.

And to think:  Lance Armstrong lives right across the street.  At least he can’t see this from his house.  He’d probably come marching across the street and chew me out.  (I’m safe for the moment, cuz he’s in Australia right now.)

But my day of reckoning is coming.  And so, for now, all I think is:

THANK GOD HE’S NEVER ASKED ME TO JOIN HIM FOR A RIDE!

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Lest we forget…

January 1, 2010 – 12:08 pm

New Year’s is the time for making new resolutions.  It should also be the time to remember the past, and put things into perspective.

Last New Year’s Eve, all of downtown Aspen (which is, admittedly, only about 8 blocks long and 4 blocks wide) was roped off– quarantined– because of a bomb scare.  And in these terrorist-riddled days, the police can’t be too complacent.

So New Year’s Eve partying was confined to the non-commercial venues.  I.e., people’s houses.  (One of my kids thought that maybe we should spend the night with friends out in Snowmass, as if the Aspen “metro” area was potentially about to be engulfed in a mushroom cloud a la Hiroshima/Nagasaki.

And as it turned out, the bomb threat had been called in not by some crazed muslim, but by a crazed Aspenite.  Long-time Aspenite, with full Aspen-crazy pedigree.  (Who killed himself, shortly thereafter.)

Makes you rue the loss of “the good old days.”

As my 15-year-old likes to say: “Just joking.”

At least we can say:

THANK GOD WE GOT THROUGH A NEW YEAR’S WITHOUT ANOTHER ONE OF THOSE GOD-AWFUL-FOR-BUSINESS BOMB THREATS!

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Westward Ho!

December 22, 2009 – 10:11 am

Christmas-time in Aspen.  And some people will go to any length to get here.

What with the (not unanticipated) bad weather in various parts of the country, holiday traveling is once again proving difficult.  Driving sucks; airports are jammed.  But somehow anybody who wants to get here manages to pull it off.  It happens every year.

One downside for the kids, of course, is that some of their friends wind up going somewhere else for the holidays, so they’ve got fewer friends to hang out with.  But everybody survives.  And we all get to go skiing!  It might be more crowded than normal, but the snow’s just as good!

It’s supposed to snow a bit, today and tomorrow.  Maybe not epic proportions, but 6-10 inches is always welcome.  It’ll put a little bit more a smile on everyone’s faces.

And when the new year arrives, sooner or later everyone will manage to get back home, too.

As for me, all I have to say is:

THANK GOD I DON’T HAVE TO GO ANYWHERE!

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By John | Posted in Main Page | Tagged , , | Comments (0)

Welcome to Winter!

December 2, 2009 – 2:09 pm

2286711353_26ced3bd35_mWell, December has finally arrived.  My 15-year-old was just marvelling, yesterday, at how it only seems like it was summer a few days ago, and now he’s looking at how few school days there are til the Christmas holidays!

Which he will spend– each and every day– skiing.  Hucking rails, jumping off cliffs, whatever.  While the rest of us don’t do it quite so gracefully.

I’m back at work on the book The Time To Decide.  I feel at bit like the poor guy in the photo.  I realize that part of the challenge, in writing a book, is to make it look as effortless as possible.  Like you cranked it out in-between running a major US corporation and being captain of the Olympic swim team and your research into curing pancreatic cancer.  I’m feeling decidedly humbled by the process.

And the shortest, darkest days of the year are still to come!

That’s undoubtedly why we have all these holidays, this time of the year.  To fill the house with light and laughter and a feeling that we’ve got good, worthwhile friends who want to share life and life’s pleasures with us.

So be it!

And keep on trudging…

(or is it truckin’ ?)

… ever upwards!

(Or, in this case, uphill!)

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So when’s the Ski Swap?

October 30, 2009 – 9:00 am

431767415_6b439f18d0_mIf you’re like me and you live in a cold-weather climate, you probably go through this thought process every year, once the first serious snow starts to fall:

“Here we go again…”

No matter how much I look forward to skiing, it’s still hard to accept that the warm days are over, and that daylight-savings time is about to end, too, and life as we’ve known it…

And that amazing thing is: For a lot of us, we could just pack up and move, if winter weather was really that oppressive.  We could move to Florida, or Costa Rica, or St. John.

But we don’t.

I often think back on the Indians– the Native Americans– who put up with these harsh winters because they wouldn’t have known any other place, and they couldn’t have moved to Florida from North Dakota anyway.

The fact is: For a lot of us, we stay put and (occasionally) gripe about the cold winters because, at bottom, we prefer it to the alternative.

Sure, a lot of us really couldn’t just up and move.  But a lot of us could.

And sure, we’d really prefer the penthouse, if we have to stick around, but I’m not sure the penthouse would make us a whole lot happier, anyway.

What we all like to do, occasionally, is to grumble.  So maybe we should have a designated day, every fall, when we all do nothing but grumble.

It might be a lot of fun.

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On Disappointment

August 20, 2009 – 9:41 am

2622837854_4b8600bc0d_mI was going to write about disappointments, and how we deal with them.  This was specifically brought on by a series of unfortunate things that seemed to be besieging one of the kids.

But then, a curious thing happened:

I procrastinated.  Put off posting anything.

And surprise!  A week later, all the stuff she’d been crying about now seems like “old news.”  Not that the disappointment/worry/sadness has completely evaporated, but that the demands of today make all those things recede into the background a bit.  Cuz new stuff is always popping up.  Good and bad stuff.

So sometimes, the best solution is to do nothing…

Just keep living.

What we don’t want, then, is constant sadness in our faces.  And it’d be nice if we didn’t have the cosmic background radiation equivalent of bad news/worries, either.   But maybe all that background “noise” is just part of being alive, and being connected.

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