Sliced

The Beginning

Robert Hoekman, Jr. — Fri, 28 Oct 2011 09:04:11 PDT

The opening paragraph of the story I began writing two nights ago:

That morning, I took a shower, shaved, and put on my favorite pair of Levi’s, a plain white t-shirt, and my suede work boots. I put a box of Camel cigarettes and a lighter into one pocket. In the other, I put all the money I had: a dollar bill and eighty-five cents in change. I lifted my pack into the trunk of a friend’s car without saying goodbye to anyone, without even a note. On the side of the highway on the Northern edge of the city, I lifted it back out, and watched as my friend pulled away, turned around, and disappeared back into the urban landscape. From my pack, I grabbed the rectangle of cardboard I’d secured before the ride over and used a fathead Sharpie to write out the word FLAGSTAFF. And there I stood, on the shoulder of the nearly deserted I-17 highway, anxious to find out if all I’d read about hitchhiking would be as true for me as it was for all those who had gone before.

In defense of slow design

Robert Hoekman, Jr. — Fri, 12 Aug 2011 09:39:00 PDT

Yesterday, I discovered an essay called “Slow Design,” written by Callie Neylan, by way of the Phoenix Designers Group on Facebook. A few minutes later, the hum of the neighborhood from my back patio dimmed, the streets went quiet, the wind lulled to a breath. A quote from Callie’s manifesto for a return to slow, deliberate, mindful design:

May suitable doses of guaranteed visual pleasure and slow, long-lasting enjoyment resulting from a slowly-designed, well-designed thing preserve us from the contagion of the multitude who mistake frenzy for efficiency.

Unequivocally, it’s a beautiful post whose words and intent are the ice from a stiff drink melting on your tongue after a long day. ”The multitude who mistake frenzy for efficiency.” I wish that phrase had been my own.

More on point, I applaud this writer’s passion for craft. Far too often, craftsmanship is sacrificed for speed, greatness traded for agility. Design thrives on constraints, but time should not consistently be the most pressing among them. On countless occasions have I longed for the chance to mull—to let an idea swirl around in my mouth before having to be spat out as a complete thought. The rare times when a design has indeed crawled rather than sprinted, the work has been a glass of fine wine enjoyed in an ocean breeze. It’s been work with staying power.

But pitted against designers, always and forever, are the biggest challengers to the notion of slow design: budgets and board members, all of which suffer from impatience. And though many successful designers embrace these challenges and even tout their value, I can’t help but wonder what they could become given the luxury of a full lung’s worth of air in a project timeline to consider the experience of its outcome.

While writers are frequently capable of finishing a piece in mere hours, it can sometimes take years when writing something of significance to string all the right words together into all the right sentences. Alas, while the most important writing in our history has been the result of a great number of revisions, designers are expected to reveal their drafts.

While newsroom journalists can crank out piece after piece, it is those who invest mighty spans of time on a single idea that are best able to unearth the soul of a work—to make the invisible visible. As designers, we most often act as newsroom journalists. Are we not also aspiring Pulitzer Prize-winning authors?

Since when can a user’s experience be considered in mere hours?

My other bio

Robert Hoekman, Jr. — Fri, 29 Jul 2011 13:02:00 PDT

For years, I’ve maintained multiple versions of a personal biography that has been used on conference sites, publishing sites, and in books. There is a long version, a short version, and a 50-words-or-less version. There are versions for print, and versions for the web. There are even headshots to go alongside them—multiple looks, in multiple sizes and resolutions. I’ve used these things to communicate who I am, what I do, and what I’ve done before. I’ve used them to highlight achievements to clients, build credibility as a speaker, and simply create context for people visiting my own sites. For the most part, I have relied strictly on facts in these biographies. My story has been told through which facts I have included, and which I have not.

The other day, my taiko sensei asked me to supply a bio for our taiko group’s website. For the first time, I was being asked to communicate these things for a completely separate part of my life—one hardly anyone knows about or understands, and relatively few have experienced in person. And I had to do it in 70 words or less.

It took me quite a few tries to get through it. I probably rewrote the following three sentences twenty times before they felt and sounded right, and properly conveyed my reasons for being a taikoist.

This bio is also about facts. But even more, it’s about the story.

A lifelong drummer frustrated by the neverending pursuit of rock-and-roll glory, Robert had hardly touched his drumset for several years. The day he saw Fushicho Daiko perform at Arizona’s annual Matsuri in early 2008, that all changed. Inspired by the power, showmanship, and physicality of taiko, he has studied under Esther Vandecar, Ken Koshio, and Eileen Morgan ever since, and is now part of multiple groups.

Funny how hard that was to achieve in 68 words.

Remembering Tyler

Robert Hoekman, Jr. — Mon, 04 Jul 2011 08:54:00 PDT

It was two years ago today that my ex-wife and I packed up his leash, favorite toys, and crate, and drove Tyler to his new home. Once so terrified of people that he cowered and froze at the slightest gesture, Tyler had become a loving, playful, and loyal companion. He’d discovered toys. He’d learned to trust the affection of a human being. He’d found joy in lying in the sunlight with his head held high, eyes half-closed, sniffing at the air. And just days earlier, he had won the heart of the woman who would give him the chance he always deserved. He had found his permanent home. This day would be his Independence Day.

At 9pm tonight, it will be two years since his new owner called to let me know she had let him off his leash for just a moment and that he had run. Two years since we rushed to her apartment complex to start looking. Two years since I put up flyers, begged for volunteers, camped out in the park, and hired tracking dogs to find him. Two years since I spent every day and night for a week in the unbearable Arizona heat, driving the streets of the surrounding neighborhood, desperate to catch even a glimpse of my black-and-white baby boy. Two years since I reached the absolute end of my ability to hold myself together.

Seven days from now, it will be two years since they found him, his lifeless body lying beneath a small, dried-out tree on the backside of the desert mountain preserve behind the neighborhood where he ran away. Two years since we carried him down from the mountain on a makeshift stretcher. Two years since I signed a piece of paper ordering his cremation.

It was 723 days ago. And I relive it every time I stare at his picture, which sits on a shelf in my living room, next to his ashes.

July 5th is one of the busiest days of the year at animal control facilities all over the United States. But not every owner is reunited with his or her beloved pet.

Because not every pet makes it to animal control.

Whatever your plans are tonight, please, make it your first priority to keep your pets safe. Keep them locked inside until the fireworks stop. Be the owner who wakes up tomorrow morning with your pet still by your side.

And tomorrow, should you happen to see someone else’s pet wandering the streets of your neighborhood, or any neighborhood, please, do what you can to help. Because every pet is someone’s Tyler.

For tips on how to catch and help a lost or stray dog, please watch this 5-minute video.

Thank you.

Big Deal: A short excerpt

Robert Hoekman, Jr. — Thu, 30 Jun 2011 10:33:29 PDT

An excerpt from the introduction of Big Deal: On Being Famous to Fifteen People, which I intend to self-publish by the end of July:

For the past six years, I have been flown all over the world, put up in great hotels, fed great dinners, introduced to amazing people, offered a microphone, and paid for taking it.
I know, it sounds great. And in and of itself, it is great. I won’t lie. But this microcosmic version of fame comes with baggage just like that other, much bigger kind, and it can mess with your head in equally lovely and tremendous ways. And because I’ve spent all six of those years surrounded by the precious few who care what I have to say, and doing it for all the wrong reasons, I have learned firsthand just how bad things can get when you claim a spot at the cool kids’ table for all the wrong reasons.

This book is not about how to develop your professional career, and not about the low art of self-promotion. It’s the story of my experience with nano-celebrity — hero worship in a professional context — and a reflection on what I learned in the process. It’s a story of professional success, personal failure, and soul-searching redemption. This is not a book of advice. While teaching a man to fish is certainly more valuable than giving him one, the real value is in the story of how you learned not to jab yourself with the hook.

This is the story of my jabbing myself with the hook.

I’ll post more updates as I get closer to publishing the book.

Big Deal: On Being Famous to Almost No One

Robert Hoekman, Jr. — Tue, 03 May 2011 16:24:00 PDT

For the past several years, I have been steadily enjoying the spoils of success that have come on the back of professional notoriety. I have been flown all over the world, put up in great hotels, fed great dinners, introduced to brilliant and interesting people, offered a microphone, and paid for taking it.

And yes, this has been amazing. I won’t lie.

But in my endless pursuit to impress complete strangers, I alienated my friends, suffered through bouts of depression, and became so detached from my wife, whom I loved very much, that when I finally bothered to look up, I was alone and miserable.

Through my experience, I learned something important. I learned that when you ride the wave of professional notoriety for the wrong reasons — to feed your ego and outrun your demons rather than fulfill some much more noble purpose — a professional success story can turn into a personal train wreck. It took multiple life-changing experiences, therapy, and a divorce to find my way out of the darkness. Now that I am in the light, I want to share the story. So, I’ve written a book.

It’s called Big Deal: On Being Famous to Almost No One.

I wrote it in 30 days, between April 1 and April 30, 2011. It will be released in August of 2011. When it’s released, you’ll be able to purchase it through the Kindle bookstore and through iBooks, and maybe other ways.

Expired: Or you can get it for free. For exactly 72 hours — from 2pm (PDT) on May 4th to 2pm (PDT) on May 7th — you’ll be able to sign up to get your copy for free. How? By entering your email address. That’s all. To find out when and where the page will launch, and for updates on the book’s progress, follow me on Twitter.

What survives

Robert Hoekman, Jr. — Thu, 17 Mar 2011 12:00:44 PDT

I’m a taiko player. And when I first heard the news of the tsunami in Japan, I have to admit, I thought first about the taiko. The destruction of one dojo, I thought, could destroy decades worth of work and hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of beautiful, handcrafted drums.

That’s a taiko drum there to the right of the soldier.

This picture killed me. The entire area is decimated, and that taiko is lying there in the middle of it all, virtually unscathed.

It turns out that the strongest thing in the entire country is the art form that holds it together.

The Situation of Red Ink

Robert Hoekman, Jr. — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 23:00:55 PDT

When I turned in the first draft of the first chapter of my first book, I felt confident. I’d always felt confident as a writer. I was, after all, the guy other people always came to when they wanted help with their own writing. What reason did I have to be nervous?

When I got the chapter back from my editor, it oozed with corrections. They gushed out from every paragraph. Every sentence. In red, of course—the classic color of corrections.

According to psychology professor Abraham Rutchick, The Situation of Red Ink is one we may know so well that we automatically become more vigilant—or perhaps ruthless—correctors when we hold in our hands a red pen as opposed to one of any other color.

In an experiment, Rutchick began a series of words and asked participants to correct them. For example: F-A-I-[blank].

RAZ: So people with red pens tended to write an L at the end of that word and people with blue pens would write an R?
Prof. RUTCHICK: Precisely.

The default correction color in my editor’s word processing app at the time was—you guessed it—red. I was a crap writer, to be sure, but perhaps I wasn’t quite as bad as my editor insisted. Perhaps if he’d used blue for corrections, he’d have been more, well, FAIR.

You know, I’m glad he didn’t.

Praying in the City of Angels

Robert Hoekman, Jr. — Sat, 27 Mar 2010 09:00:00 PDT

“Please turn off all electronic devices,” she said as the plane started to back away from the gate. While shoving my iPhone into my pocket, the guy in the seat next to me touched his right hand to his forehead, then his chest, then waved it toward each shoulder. The Sign of the Cross. I was flying to Los Angelos — the City of Angels. Somehow, it made sense. Two minutes later, out on the tarmac, the pilot told us we faced a 20-minute delay as we waited for planes in front of us to take off. We pulled into a long line of passenger jets, stopped, and waited. Pray a little harder, would ya, buddy?

I didn’t see a single angel for the next two days. Los Angelos is a cesspool of artificiality. According to my dining-mate, a woman at the martini bar we visited for dinner on the first night said, “I don’t want him. He’s just a V.P. He couldn’t make more than $500,000 a year.” And in this bar full of unusually tall, thin, polished women, she wasn’t even the tallest, thinnest, or most polished. The hotel room’s only electrical outlet was dead-center behind an oversized headboard and its shower, determined to make me late, took 15 minutes to get hot. The cab drivers bobbed and weaved, hellbent on inducing motion sickness. The food trucks, apparently united in committing a citywide practical joke, offered the messiest of foods, but not a single napkin. The flight home was delayed, at first by an hour, then in small, teasing increments up to an hour and a half. A huge number of other flights were delayed, and airport staff called out new gate numbers for twenty or so flights just in the time I sat at mine waiting for a plane to show up. Every few minutes, a swarm of people would get up, leave a gate, move to a new one, and plop down again. First-world problems, one and all, but when you travel as part of your profession, it’s the little things that remind you that home is better.

On the plane, filled to capacity by standby passengers all vying for their chance to get back to somewhere, the fight attendant’s voice came over the loudspeaker. “Please turn off all electronic devices,” she said. And the guy next to me touched his right hand to his forehead, then his chest, then waved it toward each shoulder.

The guy on the first flight was praying for a smooth trip to L.A. The guy on the second flight? He was just happy to get the hell out of there.

The Fallacy of Citizen Journalism

Robert Hoekman, Jr. — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 13:38:00 PDT

Long lines be damned — the most fervent session I witnessed at SXSW 2010 was in a near-empty room at the Hilton, across the street from the convention center, where a crowd of just thirty or so gathered to battle out the definition and utility of citizen journalism. From the back row, I watched and listened and wondered. What is citizen journalism? The thirty others, it appeared, were there to find out the same thing.

From the first word, attendees reached for definitions and debated their validity and scope. On the question of business models, the debate went to how citizen journalists (CJ’s) could make money. On the question of completeness in reporting, CNN’s iReports were cited as an example of CJ’s making a contribution to breaking news. On the scope of the buzzword itself, responses threw back to many of the same roles as classic journalism — exposing coverups and breaking news stories, with the added ability to do it in real-time, before old media has a chance to muddle through its stodgy, tired process.

They were passionate. Vocal. Engaged. It was the kind of debate I always hope for from SouthBy but rarely get. Still, I couldn’t help wondering about the logic. With every shift in topic, the audience’s collective ability to gloss right over the definition of a key term grew stronger. That term?

“Citizen journalism.”

To flesh out the daily news, journalists have worked with witnesses, experts, criminals, prosecutors, defenders, and pundits since the very beginning, and they’ve done so — in the ideal and theoretical world, at least — by checking facts, interviewing those involved, and delivering a complete story. When a citizen now wraps himself in the title of “citizen journalist,” it’s often spurred by no more work or involvement than that of just one of these roles.

When a citizen journalist contributes audio or video to a major news outlet, it’s not a story, it’s evidence of a story. It’s a witness account. Granted, it’s a witness account with video, but a witness account nonetheless. CNN’s iReports aren’t reports, but witness video. This isn’t citizen journalism. It’s citizen witnessism.

When a citizen journalist breaks a story — when a passenger jet lands in the Hudson, for example — it’s an incomplete story. A social network and a smartphone does not a journalist make. Vetted facts and complete stories are the stuff of journalists. Without collecting and verifying the facts, a citizen journalist is, again, just a witness. Tweeting from your iPhone about the jetliner in the Hudson may give you the right to yell “First!” but it doesn’t make you a journalist. This isn’t citizen journalism. It’s social journalism.

When the real news reporters ask for your response, they want just that: your response. They want to know what you think happened. They want to begin collecting their who-what-when-where-and-why from you so they have a place to start in building the complete story. They want to know what you think about an event. But your interpretation doesn’t add up to journalism either. This isn’t citizen journalism. It’s citizen punditry.

And when a citizen journalist discovers a viable business model and sorts out how to earn an income through it, he is no longer a citizen. He’s a professional without a journalist’s education or standards to uphold. Citizen journalists want all the nobility, and none of the responsibility. This isn’t citizen journalism. It’s hack journalism.

The fallacy of citizen journalism lies not in the word “citizen,” nor in the word “journalism,” but in their juxtaposition. Simply put: as a pair, they are meritless and valueless.

By the end of the hour, my friend Hillary, who sat with me during the session, had tweeted several things I said. I hadn’t posited a single statement to those actually in the room, but Hillary passed my quips onto her faithful followers for posterity and debate, and they responded by retweeting and asking questions. She was the only witness to my quips, and it was only because of Hillary that the debate which started at the Hilton continued online.

As I left the room, I wondered if that made her a citizen journalist or just an interesting person.

Death by lawnmower

Robert Hoekman, Jr. — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 19:34:00 PDT

I had managed to go three whole months without mowing the lawn even once. But just three weeks after finishing the tiresome task, weeds had taken over the front yard, the unwelcome result of a spree of desert rain. Procrastinating just long enough to become the last remaining neighbor with a disheveled lawn, I pulled out the lawnmower this afternoon and did my job. Sweeping up with a push broom, the warmth was getting to me. It’s only March, I thought, and it’s already 80-degrees out. Rubbing my sweat-filled eye, I wondered how many people die each year while mowing the lawn. I grabbed a bottle of water and Googled.

According to The Risks of Lawnmowing, in 2006, 133 people in the United States were killed in lawnmower-related accidents. Over three times as many suffered death by lawnmower in 2005. (Incidentally, heat exhaustion is not listed as a cause.)

The numbers are surprising, to be sure. But having spent a significant amount of time in recent months researching dog attacks and breed-specific legislation (BSL) — an outright ban of all dogs of a certain breed or mix of breeds, which result in the seizure and killing of countless strays and even family pets each year — these numbers caught my attention for a very different reason.

A study run by DogsBite.org states that between January 2006 and December 2008 — a span of three years — a mere 88 people were killed by dogs. Just 30 of those people were killed in 2006.

In the same year that 30 people died in dog attacks, more than four times that number of people died while mowing the lawn.

I wondered if lawnmowers had ever been banned. The answer is no, but even when people have cried out for their extinction, it’s been for other reasons.

Namely, their carbon emissions. And the noise they make.

A tuque of a different color

Robert Hoekman, Jr. — Sun, 20 Dec 2009 14:45:00 PST

I can’t say I ever considered wearing a tuque until Jefrey Zeldman, godfather of the web standards movement, put the full weight of his micro-celebrity behind his self-forged annual Blue Beanie Day. Having turned the knit cap into an icon of the web industry by appearing in one on the cover of his bestselling tech book, Designing with Web Standards, Zeldman used the fitted tuque as the symbol for the movement by calling for supporters to don a blue one on an announced November day each year and replace their online visages with photographic proof. With a newfound reason to finally stop and notice them on their department store racks, I purchased my first tuque — black, with a single row each of white and gray trim — and proudly plunked it atop my head the first time I knew I could stay inside all day and remain safely unseen by human eyes. It didn’t look half-bad. And my, was it comfortable.

In honor of the second annual Blue Beanie Day, in 2008, I dug up a tolerable self-portrait — a photo I took of myself with a camera phone against a backdrop of Times Square — Photoshopped my tri-colored tuque into the obligatory blue, and tossed the bastardization onto my collection of social networking profiles to help spread the web standards love. (I never did buy a blue cap, but I did happen to find one sitting on a bench outside of the National Archives in Washington, D.C. while visiting there a month later. In the just-above-freezing cold, the abadoned cap was a welcome bit of serendipity.)

Long after my first tuque became a staple not only in my wardrobe but on my social profiles, I had trouble finding another one that met my finicky needs quite so well. They were all too pointy, or too tight, or too not black. Not even the one I bought in Amsterdam, which should hold high enough value in sentiment alone, was quite as perfect as I required. It wasn’t until a recent local shopping excursion that I stumbled across two — one black and one brown — that fit as though they were designed just for me. I brought them both home that day and have worn them with great frequency and satisfaction every day since.

The mighty tuque, often mistakenly referred to as a toque, is that ubiquitous knitted cap commonly donned by dock workers, sailors, Canadians, and just about any other type of person who gets cold. Brimless, close-fitting, and just heavy enough to warm the ears in a bite of spiteful weather, the tuque is worn by celebrities and normals alike all over the world. In fact, it’s been seen on the heads of everyone from Jacques Cousteau to Michael Nesmith of The Monkees, and from Bill Murray to U2’s guitarist The Edge. The more fond I grew of my first one, the more I began to notice them. These were not hidden or underrated gems, but rather a cultural norm hidden in plain sight. A quick glance around any busy street on a cold day was enough to spot ten or twenty of them. They had only gone unnoticed by me.

Last Tuesday, I tugged my new black tuque onto my head and left it there. Errands, to-do lists, client work. There it stayed, all day long, even after I traded my blue jeans and cable knit sweater for black sweatpants and a matching sleeveless t-shirt and headed to taiko practice.

I entered the taiko studio prepared, bachi bag and canteen slung over my shoulder. I greeted my fellow taikoists, and they reciprocated. Esther, our Dutch (and therefore rather direct) sensei, looked up from her stretching exercises. The familiar look of an impending friendly ribbing crossed her face.

“You look like a thug,” she said.

For the rest of the night, my trusty tuque sat alongside my bachi bag, a few feet away from the constant pounding of those great wooden drums, on the floor of the studio.

Halle

Robert Hoekman, Jr. — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 14:18:47 PST

She was being hunted by the Phoenix police right in front of our house. One of the two officers told me they received a call about a pit bull chasing people down the street. When I approached her, she trotted away from me. When I got down on the ground into a play position and tapped my hands on the gravel in the alley, she trotted back, then past me, then out onto the street again. When I got her attention and jogged away from her, she ran alongside me, staying several feet to my right, as I veered closer and closer. When she stopped to drink from the water bowl a neighbor had set down, I scooped her up and carried her in my arms back to the house, now three blocks away. The cops saw me, waved, and called off their hunt.

Saved.

Halle was lonely and weak without her former humans. The family she lost trained her to Sit and Stay and Shake, taught her never to jump on anyone, socialized her with other dogs and people, lavished her with affection, and even spayed her.

In just a couple of weeks, she has made us her new family. And we’ve fallen for her.

But our job is to rescue. And to foster. And to find forever homes. And without a good reason to keep her under our care, it’s time for Halle to get back to having a permanent family.

We hope she doesn’t have to go too soon, but somehow, I’m sure she will.

Adopt Halle.

Learning to Draw in 1,000 Words or Less

Robert Hoekman, Jr. — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 11:34:36 PST

My dad taught me how to draw when I was seven years old. We sat on the floor of his bedroom, leaning against the bed, and I watched as he sketched a farmhouse scene, complete with a tractor and wooden fence. I looked at the rough lines and swooned. Those lines, made by sweeping a #2 pencil across a piece of notebook paper without any thought, were beautiful. Magical. A more polished drawing would have been worthless — it was the imperfection that I loved. I wanted more than anything to whip lines across my own paper and produce a coffee cup, a zebra, a monster, a rocket ship. I sketched for years after that, but my lines never looked right. Too curvy. Not curvy enough. Too straight. Not straight enough. I retraced practically every line I drew, hoping always to make it better. It never was. The second and third pass made every line worse. The roughness of my lines was never the right roughness.

Two years ago, I ordered a frameless, magnetic whiteboard from an office furniture store for $450. When it was delivered a couple of weeks later, my dad and I spent a full day figuring out how to attach the thin, 30-pound sheet of metal to the wall in my home office. We settled on nailing up plywood and gluing the whiteboard onto it. It’s six feet tall and five feet wide, and is bordered by the edges of the plywood.

I also bought a classic and much-revered book about drawing. I bought or created every tool the book said to use and more. A glass frame with grid lines drawn on it in black permanent marker. A large sketchbook. Two small sketchbooks. A pair of pocket Moleskine sketchbooks. Art pencils in several shades. Gum erasers. I was determined to become a _visual thinker_ — one who expresses every concept or idea with sketches and doodles. I imagined the sketches I’d create and how I’d take pictures of them with my camera phone and email them to my clients to illustrate the brilliant ideas that would pop into my head every ten minutes through the will of my own momentum. I imagined awing conference crowds by drawing off-the-cuff illustrations during presentations, scrapping slide decks in favor of a flip pad and a set of Sharpies.

I worked through the exercises in the first and second chapters. The book promised to teach me how to, quite literally, see the world differently so that I could, at long last, transcribe images onto paper. Just a few days in, I drew a line-art sketch of an old man, and I was astonished. The book was right. It was the first sketch drawn by my own hand that I’d ever considered beautiful. For the next couple of weeks, I kept the book on my bedside table. Almost every night, I looked at the sketch of the old man and wondered if I’d ever again achieve that level of perfection. Every few nights, I picked up the drawing book and flipped through the next couple of chapters to see what came next. After a few weeks, I moved it and my sketchbook to the bookshelf, and promised myself to come back to it when I had more time. A month later, I flipped through the drawing book again.

It’s still there on the bookshelf. Next to the frame with the lines drawn on it. Next to the large sketchbook.

A couple of months ago, I flipped through the last Moleskine notebook I used. It was filled with words. Handwritten words, in black ink. On my whiteboard was a collection of sticky notes, grouped under labels I’d written with a black dry erase marker. The yellow pieces of paper were covered with notes I’d written in black ink.

On the six-foot-by-five-foot whiteboard I bought for $450 and glued onto the plywood I nailed into the wall with my dad, I had written words. In my fantasy, I was a visual thinker. In my reality, a writer.

On my whiteboard at this very moment is what could be considered a sketch. It’s a circle with a line running through it from upper-right to lower-left, the classic icon used to indicate something bad. Something you shouldn’t do. Something you shouldn’t use.

Inside the circle is the word “Adverbs.”

The Risk of Smoking in New York

Robert Hoekman, Jr. — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 11:32:22 PST

The decision to move to Boston to be with Christine was easy. The act of moving could have been a lot easier. At the very least, I should have been more practical when considering what I’d do once I got there. Where I’d live. How I’d make money. But I didn’t think through any of these things, even during my two and half days as a passenger on a series of Greyhound buses during an almost non-stop trip from Phoenix to what was soon to be my new home. Two thousand, eight hundred eighty eight miles according to my pocket travel map. I kept the map for years afterwards, marking up in pen or pencil the paths I took from Place A to Place B, but this was its first trip in my pocket, and I had managed to kill at least a few minutes of the trip by highlighting the roads we took to cut across the country from my southwestern hometown all the way to the great big city of Boston.

We arrived in New York City at about 11pm. It was my first time there, so it was impossible to say if we were headed towards an interesting part of town or not. All I knew is that it took at least twenty minutes or so to get through a tunnel that seemed to transport us magically from just outside the city directly into the heart of it. At one end, we approached a forest of tall buildings. At the other, we were crammed between them, surrounded by taxis and people, the giant bus suddenly no more significant than a matchstick thrown into a pile of garbage.

Oh, the garbage. There was garbage everywhere. Black trash bags, stuffed and tied, lined the sidewalks. Every sidewalk. It must be trash day, I thought. And I guess there are no alleys here, so all the trash has to go on the sidewalk for collection first thing the next morning. I imagined how the streets must look like when all the trash is gone. Sparkly, I thought.

We pulled into a long and slanted parking space at the bus station alongside what seemed like a sea of other buses. In the past two and half days, we’d stopped in practically every town you could stop in between Phoenix and Boston, some big, some small. Not one came even close to having as many buses at its station at one time as this one. The Big Apple had a very busy bus station.

I filed up the center aisle behind the others and stepped off the bus, feeling quite like the star of a movie in which some cocky kid from the Midwest wearing a straw hat and chewing on a toothpick moves to New York to get his start at a career at which he can only be successful by losing the chip on his shoulder but succeeds anyway by being just cocky enough to win over the grouchy bar owner and, in the process, the pretty girl. I wanted a cigarette. I wanted to look tough, like I belonged there. Mostly, I wanted a cigarette.

I decided to go inside the building to look for a smoking section. I wasn’t tough enough to stand outside, or to smoke in whatever damn place I felt inclined because I was cocky and could get away with it. A few seconds later, I met a man more excited about bus station customer service than anyone alive. Well, I didn’t so much meet him as get accosted by him. He stepped abruptly towards me, gesticulating wildly, eyes about to pop out of his head from the strength of his conviction that every stranger to his beloved city must be properly welcomed. I’m not sure I could have given the police a remotely accurate description of the man even moments later, but in the years since this event, he has gradually evolved in my memory to look more and more like Harrison Ford in the movie version of The Fugitive, prior to shaving his beard. Shorter, scragglier, and dirtier, but yeah, The Fugitive.

“Where’s your gate, man? Where’s your gate?”

He said this loudly enough that I was sure everyone within twenty feet of me had to have been alarmed, but no one so much as turned their heads. Of course, my eyes were glued on this incredibly zealous bus station greeter, so I might not have known even if they did.

“Um.”

“Where’s your gate, man?! Where’s your gate?!”

He spoke in capital letters.

I pulled the bus ticket out of my pocket and flipped it around a few times to find right-side-up. “Gate Eleven,” I said.

“It’s over here, man! It’s over here! Follow me! Right this way, man! Right this way!”

These may not have been his exact words, but they were certainly something to the effect of, I’m fucking crazy and you better do what I say or you’ll find yourself alone and dying in gutter in New York, you cocky straw-hat-wearin’, toothpick-chewin’ son of a bitch. He didn’t say all that, but I’m pretty sure it’s what he meant.

I followed.

He led me past the main entrance and down a main corridor, emphatically yelping the whole time to “Come this way! It’s over here, man! It’s over here!” I spotted the smoking section as we raced past it. A small room with a glass wall, full of hacking, middle-aged trashy people too poor to fly to New York, an attraction a tour guide might introduce by saying, “And here we see Smokers, in their natural environment.” It was the first time I’d ever seen one of those rooms. Damn, I thought. I need a cigarette. That room is kinda neat. New Yorkers sure are crafty. “Follow me, man! Follow me!” I followed. The capital letters won the argument.

Gate Eleven had in front of it a line of people sitting on the floor. Indian style. Fetal position. Bags. Purses. Food. Whatever. Just a line of people waiting for a bus, no different than any other line for any other bus. The Fugitive pointed at the floor behind the twentysomething African-American woman at the end of it.

“Wait right here, man! Wait right here! Your bus’ll be along in about an hour. Wait right here!”

I sat.

He turned and charged back towards the entrance. “Wait right there. It’ll be here in an hour. Just wait!” He spotted another man whose face apparently said, I’ve never been to New York. Please accost me. “Where’s your gate, man? Where’s your gate?!”

I stood up. I nodded at the twentysomething woman, little else than pure fear in my eyes. I walked back to the smoking room. If I needed a cigarette when I got off the bus, now I needed three of them.

Fifteen seconds after taking my first step in the great city of New York, the clock on my first New York minute was nearly over. All I had left to do was wait.

Wait. Right. Here. Man.

The Drum Stool

Robert Hoekman, Jr. — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 11:32:00 PST

The drum stool sits on the hardwood floor, pushed up against the wall, its full weight born by the rubber grips on the feet of its three legs. Each leg is made of two 18” metal bars that run parallel to each other, connected at the end so they fit together into the rubber foot. Where they connect, a single metal bar extends inward to the stool’s center support pole. The bars from all three legs connect to a sliding ring that wraps around the pole, making the tripod of legs collapsible. At the top of each leg, the two bars are bolted from either side into a black pipe that serves as the base to the shaft used to adjust the seat’s height. Screwed into the shaft is an oversized wing-nut that resembles one of those cheap drum keys they give away at music stores whenever the staff drum guy wants to look generous. Sitting atop this contraption of metal and moving parts is a generous cushion seat in the shape of a round pillow, much thicker and taller than typical the drum stool throne. Its top is a soft, black cloth, its side a pseudo-leather, silver, with a subtle sparkle pattern. Printed on the silver, in black, is a logo for Pork Pie Percussion. Beneath the logo is the tagline, “Made by an American.”

I bought the drum stool more than a decade ago, at the same time I purchased my first all-new drum set. I’d owned several before, but this was my first brand new kit, and it was the set I always wanted: a black Pearl kit with a gorgeous and resonant sound that could punch a club audience in the gut or be as gentle as a breeze in the recording studio. The kit, including all its hardware, a rack mounting system, and cymbals, cost over $2,300, and I went into debt with my father for the hundredth time in my zeal to bring it home. In the three years that followed, I practiced, started a band, played shows at bars all around Phoenix and Tempe, recorded a dozen or so of our songs, got a tiny bit of airplay on a local music radio show, grew to resent my bandmates for wanting to write music for an audience a decade younger than we were ourselves and avoid the music we wrote and played best, became disgusted with the constant pursuit of rock stardom, and quit the band. When I later sold the kit, the drum stool and a deep purple beech wood Yamaha snare drum were the only parts I kept.

The stool sits in front of the window. The drum set sits next to it, stacked, its hardware tucked away in a corner of the room. Since leaving the band seven years ago, my drum set has been torn down, stacked in a corner, set up, stacked again, moved, stored in a garage, sold, replaced, set up, torn down, and stacked one more time. Its current home is against the wall between the two windows in the small back room of my house that I use as a home office. The drums, which have bright white shells, white textured heads, and white rims, sit one on top of the other, from bass drum to floor tom to snare drum to rack tom. When they are set up, they’re really quite beautiful — a striking display of white on white that makes the kit look bigger than it is. Stacked in a tower in my office, a thin layer of dust shows what the drums now mean.

I rediscovered my passion for making music about two years ago. Every few days now, I move the stool to the center of the room, position my large, stand-mounted Remo practice pad in front of it, and pull out my old drumsticks. With these artifacts from my former life, I practice taiko songs.

Outside of himself

Robert Hoekman, Jr. — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 11:30:19 PST

Just three or so short years before finding complete and utter happiness, Marc was in a very different mood. No job. No clear ambition. Just a bass guitar, an indie-rock band, and a few good friends. I was one of them.

Whenever I visited the modest two-story condo he shared with three of our disheveled and disorganized 19-year-old mutual friends, Marc would ask, “Did you want to take me to Zia?” Zia was the record store indie-rock musicians went to when they needed more indie-rock. And yes, I usually did want to go there. It was the phrasing of his question I found funny. I don’t know, I often thought. Did I really want to take him there? I don’t recall ever having had that motive prior to visiting his poster-covered space in which Marc’s possessions orbited around a black Futon and “Kiss of the Spider Woman” movie poster, but he very frequently arrived at Zia’s parking lot on the back of my Honda scooter nonetheless.

A year later, while he occupied the teenage-boy sized bedroom in my father’s house in suburban Glendale, Arizona, next to my own, we had another of the epic philosophical conversations that were the core of our friendship, this one centered on religion. Having been yet another Christian child who strayed from the pew as a young adult Ñ a theme in our circle of friends ÑÊhe passed on a few of the stories that had previously bothered him enough to begin questioning his faith.

Well, not his faith, per se, but the logic of his faith.

As he saw it, there were far too many flaws in the logic of his religion for it to be truly believable. Supernatural feats delivered by otherwise perfectly average human beings. A god that claimed absolute righteousness and perfection, at the same time performing almost unspeakable acts of cruelty while being worshipped as benevolent. These things tugged at Marc, because the desire in him to explain the world away into some agreeable box is the very same desire that moved him to religion in the first place. Through his childhood, religion was the explanation. By sixteen, however, the dissonance began to wear thin, and it was at about the same time that the godless started inviting him to parties and asking about his record collection. Eventually, the tug was enough, and he reconsidered his views. He looked around, as many do, for other options that might better suit his spiritual needs. The more he looked around, the more he saw trends.

During the late-night living room conversation, he told me that every religion had a little bit of the puzzle right, but none of them had it all. We agreed that organized religion placed a barrier between God and the devout. An afterlife is possible, but in a very different way than the Christians of Marc’s past thought. Science tells us that energy doesn’t die, it changes forms. Energy, then, has to go somewhere, so ghosts and reincarnation and all sorts of other religious notions are indeed plausible, perhaps even likely. He told me about an old Native American myth that if you stab a man in winter, the steamed air that escapes from his body at the moment of death is his soul rising to its eternity. He talked about the Christian high school he attended. The popular guy. The insecure and pregnant sophomore. The palm trees in front of the school that strangely bent and twisted around like flexible plastic straws.

Marc didn’t seem particularly saddened or ashamed by the loss of his religion. But then, he was melancholic on his good days. Rather, he looked like a man who had simply let his brain win an argument that perhaps should have been left to his heart.

Over the next few months, he bent and twisted himself through a series of miniature hardships, some memorable, some not, that somehow each left him slightly more wanting than before. His band broke up. His friendships had weakened. The burgeoning relationship with his girlfriend had entered a dark hour. And he drifted for a while through a malaise that few noticed, including me. I wasn’t around much then; I was busy with my own problems, and we simply didn’t cross paths as frequently as in the old days. I never thought it would be permanent. But during some indistinguishable moment, when no one seemed to be watching, Marc turned his head and began to see a path.

Two years later, the next time I saw him, where this story started, he had settled into a job at Zia that eventually turned into a several-year stint as a store manager and a much longer stint as a music buyer. He had a girlfriend that everyone adored Ñ the same girl Ñ who was later diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis and, after marrying Marc and giving birth to their two children, purchased a wheelchair. He had a growing relationship with an unorthodox church that eventually led to a counseling position and a life of piety.

Marc at 23 was a man who had rested his argument with logic, and subsequently, with love. With faith. With happiness. He was a man whose philosophical discussion was once again centered on religion, this time minus the dissonance.

Marc at 19 and 20 seemed, by contrast, an unfortunate apparition. A man who had fallen outside of himself. A man sitting just to the left of where he should have been. Just far enough away to become wholly disconnected.

It was ten years ago. Marc is now a media buyer for a Christian music distributor. He lives in Nashville with his wife and their two children.

He still has a bass guitar and a fine collection of indie-rock.