He could be ruined again and again by hope.
– Michael Chabon, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

I am grateful for hope, despite the fact that it has betrayed me over and over. I’ve tried to extinguish it to make things easier for myself, but it always lives in my heart.

I wrote this to Margo of the Three Weeks newsletter, who asked that her readers tell her something they’re grateful for. In return, she sent me a book of Stefan Zweig stories, a postcard, and some candy. It was a worthwhile reward.

In my mid-20s I worked for an importer of high-end European stereo equipment. A key component of this is getting your equipment placed with reviewers. Michael Fremer is among the best of these reviewers, and he was someone who my boss turned to when he had an exciting piece of equipment to share.

It was in Michael Fremer’s listening room that I heard “John Wayne Gacy Jr”. Most people never have the opportunity to hear a song reproduced at that level; frankly, the law of diminishing returns makes such flights of consumerism seem ludicrous.

There are nevertheless some times when such ludicrousness proves its value. Placing that Sufjan Stevens record on that turntable and hearing this song reveal the secrets beneath its floorboards is something I can never shake. It has followed me for a decade-plus, subtly worming its way into my mind any time it pleases.

Few things have ever made me feel sadness more deeply. I will never forget this song. I never want to.

Everyone has their own project that they’re doing, mostly, like, for themselves, you know? Just so that they can accomplish something.

Christian Flores, you are an inspiration.

Creativity as a part of my personal philosophy has been explored before in this space. I am always looking for inspiration, trying to find the next new thing to get me going. Today, that thing is watching Christian Flores bail dozens of times trying to do the same skateboard trick in the same place for no other reason than he is compelled to land it.

I understand that kind of compulsion and that kind of patience. When I am making something, there is a way it must be, and if it doesn’t reach that level, then I must keep working. As much as I always, by the nature of how I create, end up disliking my work over time, I am also fully cognizant that if I put it out, it is to a standard that I feel comfortable associating with my name.

It represents me. When I finally land that laser flip down a triple set, I know all the work was worth it. That is what is important to me.

Still, it’s bike time, and I recently found this unfinished post from way back. I’m honestly not sure when I started it; the troubles to which it refers happened as far back as 2006, and the crash that inspired me to write it can’t have been later than spring 2008.

It’s also worth mentioning nearly all of these accidents happened on the bike I had before Clangours. In hindsight I don’t know why my second bike got named for the accidents since it’s a longer-standing issue than that. I even recently said, in all seriousness, “Getting hit by a car isn’t so bad after the first three or four times.”

Maybe the issue is me?

Anyway, the problem that inspired this post: I was riding out to Long Island. I didn’t get far, though, before my rear tire blew out. Turns out that when my brakes were installed, the pads on the rear wheel were rubbing against the tire. So, good stopping power, no more tire.

I’ve got that fixed.

So, here is a list of accidents, as comprehensive as memory will allow, detailing the various and sundry spills I took on my first city bike, which was oddly unnamed.

In July 2006, in my second week of NYC bicycle ownership, I was riding home down 2nd Avenue in Manhattan when I was doored for the first time. This offense was perpetrated by the driver of a delivery truck. While I was picking myself up and getting out of the street, he drove away. I was not amused.

Perhaps I ought to have learned my lesson to stay away from doors. At least the more recent time, I was in the bike lane. Where else was I supposed to go?

A few weeks later, I was riding at night along the East River. I went down a slope. On the way, I hit the brake… the front brake.

Gravity and the laws of physics were feeling playful that night. I went ass-over-teakettle over the handlebars, landing squarely on my ass while the bike went airborne. It flipped in the air, and the top tube landed directly on my head before clattering to the ground beside me.  There is still a dent in that tube from my skull. Additionally, I somehow procured a pretty serious bruise consisting of more or less the entirety of my right calf muscle. That was pleasant to walk with, I promise.

From what I hear, it was pretty funny to watch.

Later on, in the autumn, I was again riding home down 2nd Avenue. I was further downtown, riding along peacefully, when a taxi ran a red light and made a right turn directly into my rear wheel. I managed to stay upright, but not on the seat and pedals, and it was a small miracle that the cabbie stopped and didn’t run me down. He drove beside me for a minute, asked if I was okay, then sped off. I called the cops and reported it. Nothing came of it.

Once spring came around, I managed my first collision with a moving car. They turned in front of me with no signal. I slammed my brakes and, by skill or luck, managed to turn into a skid that put me more or less parallel to the car, so the impact didn’t send me flying, just pissed me off. I shouted.

(I used to be a contender for the national team in the Commuter Biathlon, which consists of simultaneously dodging cars and shouting creative insults at them. My favorite probably has to be “Yourself, go fuck it!”)

Later that same week, I managed almost exactly the same trick with a bus, only it wasn’t turning in front of me, but racing me to pull over to a bus stop, which was weird since I was even with the front of the bus. Somehow, I didn’t get hurt.

The very worst on the original ride, though, was hilarrible. That’s a mix of hilarious and terrible, right? I was riding over the Manhattan Bridge; at the time they were doing construction on the bike lane, so I was on the south side of the bridge. It was a glorious late spring day. I was doing what I often did on that bike (and have very infrequently done since, for reasons you are about to learn) and riding upright with no hands on the bars. I went over a bump on the downhill side of the bridge and popped off the seat a little, which would have been fine if the bolt holding the seat to the seat post hadn’t completely sheered when I sat back down.

So, there I was: the seat has just dropped out from under me, I’m at speed, and I am nowhere near the handlebars. To say I ate shit would be an insult to both coprophages and metaphors. I went down the hardest I’d gone down to that point, hitting the concrete and tumbling along behind my bike. Needless to say, it also took a mighty fall.

I was on my way to work that day, so I called my boss to let him know I was going to be late. I collected my seat and what pieces I could find of its hardware to study the failure a little more and put them in my bag. Then I got my bike. It was a little worse for the wear, but there’s a reason I have a love for old steel frames. It survived admirably all things considered.

I, on the other hand, was in a rather enormous amount of pain. My butt obviously hurt, and I wasn’t sure if I was concussed, but the worst was figuring out which hand should steer my bike and which should hold my phone while I called Johanna and asked if she had any idea whether I would still be able to make a fist if I had a major sprain in my wrist. She didn’t know, and me being me, I toughed it out.

It wasn’t long after that Clangours came into my possession. The original ride is still in my basement. I’ve thought about reviving it. Maybe it’s time.

“You’re so fucking handsome.”

“You might be my smartest friend.”

“I think the thing that connects everyone here is how much they love Jesse.”

These are all things that I heard from (somewhat) unexpected sources as 2015 turned over to 2016. Each is true to a degree. I know how to make things work; I checked myself out in the mirror at the tail end of puberty and decided I was attractive enough; I am now and have always been a smart guy. I am certainly loved.

So why do I also run myself down to the point where I also heard this:

“Can you make it a resolution to be nicer to yourself this year?”

I want to. I’m trying.

I have never been affected by a sporting event in the way I was affected by USA 2-2 Portugal. I’ve been hurt worse, many times; I am a San Francisco 49ers fan, and saw them lose the Super Bowl and the NFC Championship Game in the last minute in successive years. I was not happy.

This was not like that. It’s true that I wasn’t happy, but it was in a remarkably different and possibly unrepeatable way. After 90+ minutes of game time, I was something close to deliriously happy. The USA had, for the first time in its World Cup history, come from behind for what looked for all the world like a win, one which would advance them to the knockout stages. That all this came in this year’s “Group of Death”, after the team had defeated its old nemesis Ghana, made it so much sweeter. That it was happening against Ronaldo, whom (despite the many good things he does) I despise beyond reason, was just a sweetener.

Ronaldo was playing hurt, which I feel should be acknowledged. He is also, unfortunately, the reigning FIFA World Player of the Year. It is easy to say in retrospect that I should’ve seen it coming. Yet… when Ronaldo’s cross found Silvestre Varela’s head and Varela’s shot found the net, I was not prepared.

The moment unfolded for me in dreamlike unsurprise. There was no celebration from the Portuguese after the goal, which is not something that happens often in soccer. It almost felt preordained, everyone already having read the last page of the book.

In my apartment, there was cacophonous silence. There was nothing for us to say, really. Everything was just there, in the air, unbidden, rendering words moot.

I can speak only for myself when I say that I don’t remember much about the moments immediately following the match. I sat for what, in memory, feels like forever, but can only have been a few minutes. I roused myself by slapping an errant fork harmlessly off the living room table and tried to feel something.

The goal led not to a loss, but to a draw; there is something about a draw that feels unfinished to me, a remnant from my childhood when I firmly believed that tying was as bad as losing. (It’s strange that I was ever that competitive now that I think about it.)

On top of that, the result did not lead to an elimination for the USA. It kept them from going through early, but it was not the worst possible outcome. The team’s odds are still good of getting through, and the hypothetical me from the beginning of June would have been happy to know they would have four points after two matches in this group.

All those factors combined to give me something I had never experienced before: a gut-wrenching result with no closure. The match was not lost, the tournament was not over, the goal may end up being a mere footnote on the story of USA’s World Cup 2014 run. For the moment, there was nothing for me to focus on. The match was over, but the story was not.

It is hard to come up with any other examples where this is even possible. The number of divergent factors that led to this specific emotional response may never be replicated. I certainly hope they won’t.

The next day at work, people were remarking even more than usual on how tired I seemed. I agreed with them, mostly. It felt like explaining that I was experiencing a heretofore unknown combination of limbo and depression because of SPORTZ would have been too much to try and unpack. Nevertheless, my day consisted of counting up the hours since the game had ended and realizing I was still not over it.

I think sports are a good thing, generally, and get irritated when people who do not enjoy them get snarky about people who do. Nevertheless, I do understand that some people care too much, putting too much of their happiness in the fortunes of their teams.

I don’t feel like my reaction was caring too much.

I had to buy a new hat, since the one I typically wear at work got dropped in the toilet. I’m… less than inclined to wear it now. I did so, and on the ride home from that stop was thinking about how much I hate it when people salmon on a one-way street. That led to me thinking about a utopian vision, wherein the police, drivers, pedestrians, and other cyclists were not always in conflict with each other. In this world, it would not instantly appear a bad thing when a cop stopped a cyclist for failing to follow the rules of the road. Unfortunately, we do not live in that world, and I find my anger with people who break the rules of riding overridden by the inherent distrust that a rider feels vis-a-vis the cops. This distrust, of course, is not something I have directly earned. In fact, for the most part, I’ve been well treated in the cases I’ve had to deal with them.

I don’t have to think too hard about the sociological reasons why that might be.

Digression aside, an irony occurred. Literally as I was thinking this, I came to a traffic light. It was red, but there was no traffic, so I rode through. I paid no mind to the fact that there was a police car first in line at that light. It turned, and I heard the siren.

Damn it.

In the end, there was no real trouble. I pulled over behind a parked car and the officer told me that I have to stop at red lights, just as a car does. This is true, and something that I know. He was very polite and let me go with just the admonishment, not even bothering to ask my name. I could only shake my head and smile at my good fortune.

Again, I didn’t have to think too hard about the sociology of it.

The lesson here is obviously one that we’ve all learned endlessly in our lives: be careful for what you wish. Also, be careful with your grammar.

The fact of it is this: I never have. I don’t like any of it. I do not like sorting or loading the washer or determining how much of which product to use or dryer sheets or folding (especially folding) or, bizarrely, putting my clothes away.

Moving the loads from the washer to the dryer isn’t so bad. That’s an easy step.

When I was  growing up and living with my parents, of course, that was a moot point. I was paid an allowance, and part of what I did to earn it was keep my mom from having to deal with my clothes. So I did. It was not so bad given that we had a washer and dryer in the house, so I would wash everything once a week or so and more or less stay in clean clothes, save for the fact that everything smelled like cigarette smoke forever because one person in the house (who was not me or my brother or my stepdad) went through a couple packs a day without thought to any consequences.

As stated earlier, though: folding. Ugh. Even now, after discovering the ninja t-shirt fold, I just can’t. So back then, after the clothes came out of the dryer I would throw them in a pile somewhere. My bed, maybe, or a clean part of the floor when my room was actually picked up. Usually the bed.

Where they would stay.

As some of my friends can attest, I frequently slept on a layer of my own clean laundry. The dirty clothes went into the hamper, and I’d pick through the wrinkled mess on my bed in the morning. In retrospect that seems really weird, but at the time it was just a thing that happened.

After I moved out of my childhood house, things changed a little. I can’t for the life of me remember what I did for that first year out, when I was still living in Tulsa in an apartment. Did we have a washer there? Did I take my clothes back to my parents’ house for laundry? I hope someone can enlighten me.

What I do remember is taking on laundry duties when I moved to New York. I did all of it for both of us because I (probably rightly) felt like I owed something more than scraping up half the rent was actually worth. In that first apartment, we had laundry machines in the building, something I came to find is an uncommon luxury. This is where my distaste for doing the laundry really developed. It was such a time sink, and it was completely necessary. I don’t like things that I have to do. I prefer my life choices to be at least semi-optional. There is probably something to be read into that, some distaste for obligation or something, but whatever.

So I would tromp down from the fifth floor to the basement with our basket of laundry, often in the middle of the night so I could take up both washing machines without feeling like a jerk. I’d go upstairs for a while, come down and do the easy part, then go back up and down again to fold everything. It was not fun and it felt like it took forever.

But it was necessary. So I sucked it up most of the time and we kept clean.

When we moved out of that apartment, we got another seven blocks down and one and a half avenues over. That is not very far, unless you are an idiot that tries to move everything yourself without a vehicle. That was 37 straight hours of walking there and back again until everything about me was sore. And then needing to do laundry at the end of it.

I had noticed a laundry place around the corner from my new apartment in the course of walking past it a dozen times or so. Completely exhausted, I didn’t want to wash my own clothes, so I splurged and dropped everything off to be washed for me.

And my life was changed forever.

To this day, I will gladly pay the premium to have someone else wash my clothes, even if it is triple or more what it would cost me to do it myself. That is how much it means to me not to have to do my own washing.

I can also report that I no longer sleep a bed of my own clean laundry. Not that this means I actually put my clothes away like an adult, mind you; it’s just that when I get the clothes back from the laundromat, they’re tied up in handy plastic bags so that I can just live out of them for a while until it’s time to do laundry again.

This, I think, is the ultimate outcome of paying someone else to wash my clothes: all my loathing of the task has been shunted to the end of the process, so that I have no desire whatsoever to do that one last step, the one that would make my house look so much less messy. It’s such a horribly tragic flaw that I made putting my laundry away one of my New Year’s resolutions this year. So far the results have been mixed at best.

Yet if it’s bad now, I know it could be worse. Thank goodness I never lived in a time when I had to wash my clothes manually.

As I’ve written about before, I am a non-ironic and completely unapologetic fan of his. I used to be all “ugh, pop music”, but then I realized that pop music has the capacity to be just as amazing as any other sort of music. Or maybe what I actually realized is that pop music basically describes every musical genre except for classical, except classical music was the popular music of its time, too, so the idea of “pop” is almost entirely coterminous with the idea of music that actual human people listen to. So that’s cool.

The point of all this, I guess, is that I think Justin Timberlake is pretty great. There is a definitive series of events that I can point to that led me to this point. First, I realized that ‘N Sync were not the candy-colored juggernauts they were presented as. They had a world of problems with their super-creepy Svengali manager, and there was actually something being said underneath the surface on No Strings Attached.

Then they released “Gone” as a single from their next album, Celebrity. (A bit on the nose, that title.) As documented on my 30 Days of Music post about the song, it’s where I realized that aside from maybe having something to say, Justin Timberlake might have a real talent.

After that came his debut album, Justified. At first I still didn’t care for him actively, but then I saw the video for “Cry Me a River” and holy shit, guys, here’s a dude with actual human feelings. It occurs to me as I write this how much we collectively use famous people as cyphers for ourselves, which I suppose we must have been doing when he wrote a song and made a video about how much it sucked when Britney Spears (allegedly, I guess?) cheated on him with fucking Wade Robson. We were all subconsciously thinking “if it can happen to that young, handsome, talented dude, then who are we to think it can’t happen to us?” Probably.

I am almost definitely not the first person to make this connection, and if I am then where the hell have you all been? Anyway, “Cry Me a River” is amazing.

The fourth and, for me, final step into accepting that I just really liked the guy came at the MTV Video Music Awards in 2003. If you recall, Madonna kissed Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera and it was really weird. Also, that was the year that Johnny Cash was nominated for Best Male Video for his version of “Hurt”, about which none other than Trent Reznor himself said “that song isn’t mine anymore.” Unfortunately, whoever voted on that category had no sense of history or anything, so Justin Timberlake won for “Cry Me a River”. I could tell something was going on when, as he walked to the stage, he looked visibly annoyed. Then he got to the mic and changed my view of him forever. “This is a travesty.”

The boy from Tennessee knew from his roots and spoke true to them. He knew Johnny Cash should have won that award as much as I did, and I have been a fan of his ever since that day.

Also, Futuresex/Lovesounds is, collectively, our song. It’s kind an odd situation, but hey.

All that being said, here’s the why: I was thrilled to death when I heard that he was finally making new music. I’ve been awaiting a new Justin Timberlake record for what seems like forever, and he has (remarkably) managed to do nothing to tarnish his public image over that time. I heard The 20/20 Experience was coming, and I was happy.

I was initially underwhelmed by “Suit & Tie”, not least because it appears that there is some confusion between a suit and a tuxedo. They’re not the same thing, guys. But that’s a super-pedantic quibble from a super pedantic person, so take from that what you will. I get that when you can get Jay-Z to drop a guest verse on your single, you get Jay-Z to drop a guest verse on your single. We could probably come up with less than a handful of people who have that kind of pull, and the ones who have it should use it. But I can’t help but think how much more interesting the song might have been if there’d been a verse from, say, Andre 3000. (Check out Frank Ocean‘s “Pink Matter” to get an idea of what I mean.)

I didn’t listen to “Suit & Tie” that much because I love albums as a format even as the idea of them becomes ever more antiquated by the day. I live in a headspace where I assume that the sequencing of a record matters and that the artist is after something with it. The practical upshot is that I didn’t have any sort of inundation or even real expectations when the album dropped, other than hoping it would be good.

Despite some mixed reactions, I think it is. Almost every song is good, even though it is weird how much you have to take the changes in his personal life into account to understand the thrust of the album. He went from bringing sexy back to writing a whole album of love songs with nary a real dance track to be found. Good on you, Jessica Biel.

There’s just one problem, and it’s a pretty serious one: for this record, he fell into the time-honored trap of not knowing how to end a fucking song, a problem that has plagued musicians since the invention of music, I would guess. But here’s a hint: don’t add three-minute codas to the end of every song, especially if every song is already five minutes long. Just by way of example, “Mirrors” is really, really good, and then it goes on foreeeeeeeeever afterward.

I have creeping doubts as to whether this record will occupy a place as heady as both of his previous albums do for me. It’s not as likely to get my blood going, and that has traditionally been what I am after when I listen to a Justin Timberlake album. Still, I remain unapologetic and unironic about at least one thing in my life. That has to be worth something, doesn’t it?

The thing is, this time, there was a reason.

I have been designing websites, poorly, since I was in college. I have slowly and steadily improved over time, enough to design sites for actual paying clients every once in a while. Nothing much, but enough to qualify as a semi-professional, or at least a competent amateur.

One of the reasons that I was pulled into posting on rhymeswithchaos again in the first place was the prodding of my friend Amber. She is a professional photographer and showy blogger, and she is generally not willing to give me any sort of break when I’m feeling down in the dumps about my creative output. Given that she creates for her job and then blogs for fun, I suppose I can see her point.

Due to some personal issues in Amber’s life (which you can read about on her personal site), she desperately wanted a redesign for her blog. Since I happen to know a guy who does such a thing (I’m talking about myself), I volunteered him (me) for the job. It got pushed aside over the holidays, as she gave higher priority to other things. Once life settled down, though, she reignited her desire for a redesign, and I got down to work.

That was the beginning of my latest unplanned hiatus from my own blog. I did not want to spend the time to write an entry when I should be working.

(That does not mean I wasn’t procrastinating, only that I wasn’t procrastinating in a way that qualifies as constructive.)

As I worked to recreate her site, I relearned some important information that I had forgotten in the past year or so, since I had last worked seriously on a website. I also learned some new things, information that had probably been available but that I did not have the occasion to learn. And I got inspired.

This site was started when I needed a personal page built with Apple’s iWeb to showcase for work, an example of how easy it was to build your own website. That version was terrible, mostly because the content management was atrocious. (I’m not going to pretend my initial design was worth a damn, but I knocked it together in a night while only half-paying attention, so it really came out about as well as it could have.)

After I lost that job and no longer had need to use the iWeb version of my site, I moved to WordPress for my content management and life got a little easier. Unfortunately, my first design on WordPress was pretty terrible as well, but at least it was mine, and it was a lot cleaner. Nevertheless, I quickly grew tired of it and decided I needed a change.

That’s when I moved to the layout of the past few years. At the time, I was obsessed with percentage-based layouts, where the site would maintain its proportions regardless of browser width. (That I became obsessed with this idea after web traffic began moving to mobile devices is telling, and can be viewed as fairly representative of my history as a designer in general.) As a result, I designed my blog so that all three columns changed their widths dynamically. For better or worse, it was what I wanted, although I know now that the execution was sort of execrable.

That said, I believe that no artist is capable of looking at his own work with an objective eye. I know that I’m not; I don’t think that I have ever finished anything creative that I didn’t grow to hate over time. So it was with my old design, but for all its flaws it was functional and more or less effective at making my point, so I left it for a while.

Then, in the summer of 2010, I decided to redesign my site again. I started kicking around ideas and thinking about how best to do what I wanted.

And then I just… didn’t do it. I don’t know what that was about. I just left it for a couple of, you know, years, the enormity of the task seeming to grow over time in the way that things left undone will. I’d get to it eventually. Probably.

And then I got pushed into writing here again, while in the process of designing another blog. And that was that.

I don’t know how long I am going to keep this layout; I have a lot more to learn about current web design tech, especially HTML 5 and responsive design, and some things might change in the future if I decided there is a better way. I don’t have any particular plans, but you never know.

All that is the really, really long explanation of why I disappeared for over two months again. It won’t happen again. Probably. But at least I finished something that I started.