"71" // Episode Five

You're listening to I Have No Process. I am your host, Nicholas England. This is the fifth episode of 71.

When I was 21,

I covered my bedroom walls with a grid of corkboard. I bought boxes of pushpins, some clear, some black, some red. Then wrote out a carefully curated collection of aphorisms and diagrams, which I arranged upon the walls with great solemnity, that their example may guide the remainder of my cultivation, there at the end of my adolescence. Among the shards of wisdom I'd wrought from the likes of Cormac McCarthy and Martin Heidegger, I included the following three phrases for their gnomic pearls.

First, a wry proverb from Eastern Europe. "The future is certain, the past is always changing." Second, a quotation from the British historian Taylor. "Nothing is inevitable until it happens." Third, a remark from my friend and collaborator, Phil. "Something must come from all this learning." When I was a kid, I was raised to believe that I would be renowned in my adulthood. My zest for storytelling and play acting was undeniable.

I could spend days on end pretending that I was Robin Williams or Al Pacino. Every dollar I received from my allowance went toward the purchase or rental of VHS tapes. I started watching international films when I was seven, R-rated films when I was nine. I knew every Best Picture winner and nominee going back to the ceremony's inception. I was attached to the family camcorder, directing countless movies with my friends from the neighborhood.

I acted in school plays and later joined the youth program at a nearby repertory theater. I even got a Hollywood agent when I was in middle school. My parents pulled me out of class and drove me to LA sometimes twice a week for auditions. Never once did I need a school counselor or family member to point me in the direction of an estimable career. For to become a powerful creative force within the film industry was not only the plan, it was written by many of my elders as a token of destiny.

On multiple occasions, adults approached my mother within ten minutes of meeting me and whispered to her, "That boy is going to be famous someday." There was only one caveat to this. A single well-known warning which I heard repeatedly over the years, one which every cohort passes to the generation coming up the trench behind them. "You have no idea what life's going to be like when you're older. "You think you do, but you don't."

I listened to the adults when they said this, my father especially, but it was hard for them to get their point across on account of there being certain salient stories they refused to share. If any of my mentors had unfolded their own history of life's plans gone awry, episode by painful episode, I may have absorbed the lesson better. But no one did. They kept things abstract, so after a while I tuned them out. Maybe their lives didn't turn out the way they wanted, but me?

I only had to figure out whether or not I was going to kill myself. If I didn't, well then the whole world was going to know about me. Ten years after I instructed myself, at 21, that nothing is inevitable until it happens, I was living in Boston, wondering what the hell to do with myself. Alyssa had just begun her MBA classes full-time, so I was working three jobs to make ends meet.

My primary employment was in mental health, but I also tutored English and collated insurance reports on the side. And for the first several months of the grad school experience, I was further responsible for cooking every meal and doing most of the housework. After that first semester, I reached another limit within myself. I was harried and crestfallen. No time to write, to create, to process. But also, nobody asking or expecting me to do anything of the sort.

In the 15 years following the high watermark of my ambitions, in my naive and megalomaniacal youth, I had abandoned theater and music, taken up and retired from writing comics, quit any intention of being a screenwriter, shifted entirely to poetry and prose, adapted my craft to the silence of the page, written a trove of intellectual odes, which spoke to no one, suffered a crippling spell of writer's block, then circuitously accomplished the first drafts of a memoir,

exactly the sort of project my teenage self would have suicided to avoid. At 31 years old, I was decidedly unpublished. It had long been my goal to become published by the time I was 26, because that's when my health insurance coverage would run out. But that day came and went without any fanfare. Five years later, there still wasn't a soul in any industry who knew my name. By then, I had settled into the habit of a gainfully, if humbly employed individual. I'd worked at a restaurant for years.

I found something amazing in peer mentorship, where I could directly channel my life experience into service. I was satisfied in my friendships and my family life and the man I had become. I still needed to write. I had stories, both real and unreal, oozing out of me on a daily basis. But I didn't need anyone to need me to write. The absence of public accomplishment no longer defined the quality of my existence. I was content to be in the mode, always toiling away, no matter how quietly.

Nothing pleased me more than to let my eyes scan over our bookcases, to bask in the spines of so many texts, each of which meant something irreplaceable to me. My literary ambitions had been reduced to a single notion. Just write one book that makes its way upon a stranger's shelf. One small tome, which provides them with the same sort of gratitude I feel when I spy The Soul's Code or King Rat resting above my desk. I had no interest in writing a bestseller or winning a National Book Award.

I had no use for the recondite respect of one's peers, a writer's writer, and so on. I just wanted to manifest that augured "something." Whatever it was Phil thought should come of all this learning. I called Phil that first winter in Boston. I poured my heart out to him, then sought his counsel as to what I should do. "I don't want books or movies to teach me anything," he griped at one point. "Just tell me a good story. Don't moralize it me. That's what poetry is for.

"You want to organize your thoughts about life? Go put it in verse." I'd only written a single poem in the six years preceding that revelation, but I was thirsty for another as soon as he offered it. And tonally, I knew just how I wanted to begin. To cope with my various stresses, I had recently acquired Katsuki Sekida's translation of The Gateless Gate and The Blue Cliff Records. I had never studied Zen Buddhism before, but I felt that I was ready to attend its lore, if not its practice.

I was old enough by then to know that life is not a vessel for control. That the certain future is certain only in the calculating mind, the one that yearns and relies upon the fruits of that yearning. I had grown inured to disappointment, without cynicism or self-pity. Whenever a dreadful circumstance occurred, I felt there was nothing left to dread. The thing had happened. It had become inevitable. Time to accept it and move on.

I was no longer interested in formulating answers about how to go through life, because any answer I could conjure would be a delusion of the moment. I was interested only in asking stimulating questions and letting their challenge propel me toward my truest nature. I knew my attentions were where they belonged when I read the koan entitled, "Case 7, "Joshu's Wash Your Bowl." A monk said to Joshu, "I have just entered the monastery. Please teach me."

"Have you eaten your rice porridge?" asked Joshu. "Yes, I have," replied the monk. "Then you had better wash your bowl," said Joshu. With this, the monk gained insight. I enjoy koans, because they allude any attempt to define them. They are not designed to be analyzed or fathomed. You are not meant to find their resolution as though they were some western riddle. Like the monk who seeks wisdom from others, if you go to the koan to become edified, you will go hungry, sucking on air.

Koans belong to a category of transmission entirely different from allegories. Koans are composed of words and images, but words do not follow within you once the koan has concluded. There is no argument to toss about in your mind, nothing to settle upon, no conceit to be made. The moment you think you have it, you are lost. So it is with life, identity, why we are here, what we should be doing, our most familiar fantasies. Life unfolds in its own inarguable reality every day.

When we gather those days into narratives and arguments, we turn a blind eye to the moments dancing before us. And when some happenstance derails our best intentions, we feel injured and disrespected. This is the sorrow of the calculating mind, the ego that measures the gap between the life it longed for and the life it led, the ego to whom the world owes a debt it can never make right. When I decided not to suicide, every day of my life became bonus. Nothing was owed to me.

My life wasn't going somewhere. I existed only to relish daily living, to love and to serve, and to channel my creative spirit however time allowed. I became a man when I committed to life, just as it is, just as I am. I washed my bowl and I washed it gladly. When mom got sick and our time together drew to a close, after such an intimate and wonderful life together, how could I surrender my gratitude and complain?

Game 31, Reds 2, Padres 1, May 2nd, 2023

If you read today's poll of players and managers, regarding their feelings about the year's new rules, you will learn that red is a number, four is a molecule, and bees only speak French on Saturdays. Here is a non sequitur. Snell gives a great interview detailing yesterday's outing. Three runs, seven strikeouts, no walks, while Wacha quietly pitches shutout baseball. Game 32, Reds 1, Padres 7, May 3rd, 2023 Eight continuous years in the minor leagues.

One swing of the bat, his first run tallied in the majors. At the end of his days, will Brett Sullivan be able to remember one without the other? Another version of the poem reads as follows. A master never takes the night off. In Bogaerts' first missed game, he does more than shake his fist at the young Brett Sullivan, and the following day, Sullivan does more than shake his bat at Luis Cessa!

There is yet another version of the poem, which was written after Sullivan hit a home run in the bottom of the fourth. Holy mackerel! Brett Sullivan. Game 33, Dodgers 2, Padres 5, May 5th, 2023 The last time the Padres played the Dodgers, my wife and I were in a hotel room, in Banff, the night before a wedding. Our pants discarded, cold bottles of West Coast Indian Pale Ale by the bedside, as we screamed and frothed and made love to the greatest seventh inning rally ever seen.

For tonight's sequel, my wife and I are curled upon another lavish queen the night before some Massachusetts nuptials. Legs bare, inebriated, delicately fiddling about, we turn on the game just before Tatis' second moonshot blasts the game wide open. Kershaw is bounced, San Diego is jumping, and life is a series of suspended triumphs. Game 34, Dodgers 2, Padres 1, May 6th, 2023 Cancer is our second leading cause of death behind diseases of the heart.

At one wedding reception, I speak to two granddaughters of pancreatic, three survivors of breast, countless cases untold, and one man my age set to marry this fall, whose mother has been diagnosed with her own late stage. What else can we do? We who forge life in the shadow of our lost. What is the answer beyond the brief exchange of our numbers? Game 35, Dodgers 5, Padres 2, May 7th, 2023 There is who you are, and there is who you want to be.

As you face up against those who tower over, do you fear what you see, or do you admire what you have yet to become? Facing a count of three balls, one strike, Hader and Betts both want the ball over the plate. But what decides the home run Betts will launch? The pitch that Betts connects with? The balls Hader threw in advance? Or the revived specter of a slain dragon? Game 36, Padres 6, Twins 1, May 9th, 2023 What is worse, global warming or Luis Garcia warming up in the pen?

Game 37, Padres 3, Twins 4, May 10th, 2023 Tim Hill is everything a relief pitcher needs to be. He has one supreme specialty that is useful to his team. He induces ground balls, and he induces them against two-thirds of the batters he faces. He gives up a hit often enough, but most of the time those hits result in simultaneous outs. Look no further than this inning here.

Hill allows a single, then a grounder, which results in a fielder's choice, then another grounder, which leads to a routine double play. Hill intimidates with tall lank, wild eyes, rambunctious hair, and a strange delivery where he slings the ball from his flank, having it slice laterally toward the batter's box like a blast of grapeshot. I would not want to be on the wrong side of Tim Hill.

How emasculating to be smote, not by flashy strikeouts and wind-caught meteors dropping by the warning track, but by weakly struck balls rolling across the lawn in a sterile parade. Game 38, Padres 3, Twins 5, May 11, 2023 Carlos Correa is very happy to tell you he has heard the boos emanating from his home crowd concerning his scant production to start the year.

Those jeers drown out the curses emanating from my mother's living room, and from all the living rooms, basements, garages, and sports bars of those who remember Correa and the void of repentance, which has lingered ever since he and his teammates usurped a title years ago, then went on with their careers without so much as flinching. "Do not let my murder of this small child overshadow my expertise in the field of theology!" shouts a relocated priest.

"You are playing for the Lord!" declared the Astros team preacher, a week before they robbed Yu Darvish of an honest exhibition of his worth. When Darvish strikes out Correa today, it is not justice. There is no justice in the world beyond the maintenance of the status quo. No putting the toothpaste back in the tube, the soul back in the body, ashes in the bin. Even if you were fool enough to try, our memory of the past taints its recapitulation.

Conscience may look backward, but its vessel only hurdles onward. So save your apologies, your reasons, and your reparations. When you get caught within your own disgrace, resign, and do not speak to me of justice. I have heard enough of Plato babbling in his sleep. Game 39, Padres 2, Dodgers 4, May 12, 2023. These words have only what value you impart. I cannot say that I have lost the means by which to speak in silence, for it is obvious now, I never could.

All this time, I have been murmuring to no one but myself. A dark wind pushing over the tall grass. There will be no one left to listen, should I turn away. I wish I knew something worth telling you. About baseball. About the blood in the tissues by the bed. About love. How my mother's familiar scent has been absorbed by a faint effluence of scorched ozone, so when I press my nose into her thin silver curls, it is as though she is already gone.

I wish I could tell you about the quiet way life has settled down into itself. The ceasing of my animus. Ecstatic. Washed out. Slow. I am sure that whatever I meant to say was a fantasy. Before you leave, please do me one favor. Trace the doglegs of my passing along that tributary there, which curves as it flows to the open sea. Would you call that wandering -- what breaks and carries the earth within its way? Or is there another name for what's become of me?