Happy New Year (of the Dragon)*

I turned 45 a little over a week ago, and I'm finding that as I grow older I am increasingly in awe of this whole human being experience. Living, breathing, my unfailing heartbeat – this last, the most wondrous phenomenon of all.**

And my gratitude? Such, and so much.
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*New years [pause for grammar] don't begin in earnest for me until (1) my birthday has passed, and (2) the Chinese New Year is underway.
**Worth noting: The Internet fascinates me almost as much. How does it do that?!

About Me, 1986

In January 1984 I turned 17, and in June of that same year I graduated from high school. Three months later, against my better judgment, I was enrolled at San Francisco State University. The prospect of entering college felt premature to me – I wanted to take a year off to wrap my mind around it – but my own free will did not yet reign supreme, and I was overruled by an insistent parent.* By 1986 I was immersed in the Women's Studies and Ethnic Studies programs at SFSU. Somewhere along the way I took a class, the title/nature of which I cannot recall, from which I retained the most delightful mementoes.

Very early on in the semester – perhaps it was even the first day of class, for I can remember precisely what I was wearing that day – the professor gave us a surprising assignment. He passed out small business card sized papers, card stock, and instructed us to look around the room and assess our classmates – to determine what they were like simply by looking at them. "Judge a book by its cover," he may as well have said. He then went around the room and in order had us write on our individual cards the names and a few of our impressions of each person.

When the exercise was completed, we turned our cards in to the teacher, who later delivered our classmates' notes about ourselves to each of us. Herewith, from my archives, the observations I received about my 19-year old self:

1. Seems wild in her appearance but behaves very friendly. Seems carefree.

2. Outgoing, colorful clothing, partier.

3. Nice hair, casual attitude, friendly.

4. Nice name, different hairstyle.

5. Pretty wild, doesn't care what others think, very friendly.

6. Daring, outgoing, kind.

7. Needs a new haircut. Good personality though. Dressed nice.

8. Pretty; wild; individualistic; dresses well, colors & all.

9. Can be wild, probably fun to be with. She looks like she'd be fun to go to a concert with. Very individualistic. Probably doesn't care too much about what others think.

10. Original, intelligent, friendly, skeptical.

11. Wild, fun to be with, very sure of herself.

12. Weird hair, individual person, likes to party.

13. Intelligent, socially aware, not a Republican.

14. Open, outspoken, fun, strong, laid-back.

15. She likes to do her own thing. Also she thinks she's always right.

16. Fun person, friendly, kind, nice.

17. She's a bizarre kind of person. Very relaxed. She does not have a lot of problems.

18. Outgoing, lots of fun, hard partier, might do something others might not.

19. She looks and acts outgoing. Seems like a fun person.

20. Friendly, nice.

I can only say that if my house were burning down, I would grab these cards. They not only make me LOL every time I revisit them (which I've done perhaps half a dozen times through the years), but they help me to remember and reconnect with myself at that age, during a period that marked the single most vital turning point in my life.

I hope my unknown classmates, whoever and wherever they are, have kept their cards socked away in a file somewhere too. What a gift.
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*Who, I should add, later protested my chosen course of study. See next sentence above.

Le Scourge de Lance

To dope or not to dope. That clearly has been the question in many a top pro cyclist's life. Yet somehow Lance Armstrong – the greatest in a long time, if not of all time – has remained above the fray... but for the accusations of a growing number of constituents from his inner circle down through the years.

I was a bicycle-obsessed youngster.* To this day I can recall viscerally every single bicycle I've called my own, from my first training wheels to my first Schwinn to my first dirt bike to my first ten-speed to the first bike I bought myself (Bianchi Sport SS) to my sherpa-worthy mountain phase (Fisher) and messenger-worthy urban phase (one Nishiki, two Cannondales) to my current polygamous affair with two pro grade road bikes – one in the City (Specialized S-Works Tarmac), one in the country (Bianchi 928 Mono-Q).

Though practically speaking I've been a cyclist most of my life, my interest in the pro peloton – and in Lance in particular – only began in 2003, when I resumed cycling after a long layoff during which I moved to New York and suffered a severely herniated lumbar disc (not quite in that rapid-fire succession). When the best physical therapist on Earth gave me the green light to ride a bike again (yes, I was that bad off), I felt like I had a new lease on life. I once again immersed myself headlong into the sport and the culture of cycling – except this time instead of watching "Breaking Away" now and again, I became a Tour de France addict.

By the time I caught up with the Tour, Lance was a four-time champion. As I worked my way back from eight- to twelve- to eventually 20-30-40-50-plus mile rides across the Golden Gate Bridge and deep into Marin County – and later up and down the Napa & Alexander valleys – I derived inspiration and mental stamina from my awareness of Lance's heroic and indeed seemingly impossible battle back from testicular cancer. Granted I had nothing on him in the miracle department, but having been seriously debilitated (to the point of being eligible for disability payments), I was never more grateful for my capacity to exercise than when I got back on the bike in 2003.

Lance of course won his fifth TdF that year, and the following year the yellow LIVESTRONG wristband debuted. I've worn one ever since, not merely in support of the cause it represents but because by evoking Lance's power on the bike it literally has helped me get up hills – and let's face it: get home – when another pedal stroke felt impossible.

So what if he doped? No. Wait. I mean: So, what if he doped?

I wouldn't even admit the possibility into my consciousness until I saw Tyler Hamilton's tortured "60 Minutes" interview a few weeks ago (Part I; Part II). By then two magazines with grim cover stories featuring an embattled Armstrong were hanging around my house: "Can Livestrong Survive Lance Armstrong and a Doping Scandal?" asked Fast Company's October 2010 cover. "He's Done (But is he finished?)" quipped Bicycling's May 2011 cover. The circumspect if unofficial indictments were coming in slowly but surely, and certainly when a stalwart Armstrong supporter like writer Bill Strickland throws in the towel – as he did by penning the Bicycling story – you have to start wondering. Wondering, that is, whether your own denial isn't just a little naïve.

I don't presume to know for certain whether Lance doped or stayed clean. I've developed doubts about the latter, but frankly at this point I'm indifferent to his individual foibles – whatever they may be. The fact is, if he doped – if he is guilty of that most insidious form of cheating in pro cycling – then there has been a breathtaking international conspiracy to cover up (and/or dispose of) the evidence. Coaches, doctors, sponsors, team owners, directors sportif, and officials of the sport can and will be implicated if Armstrong is proven to have doped during his pro career; it could be the most thoroughgoing conspiracy ever perpetrated in professional sports. And it would mean that the United States Postal Service threw many tens of millions of sponsorship dollars into the coffers not merely of a corrupt team, but of a cheater and an effective outlaw. This would be a tremendous scandal indeed, many times larger and more significant than Lance Armstrong himself.

Meanwhile, the saga of Tyler Hamilton, who just a few days ago allegedly was accosted by a menacing Armstrong in an Aspen restaurant, illustrates one of the saddest subtexts to this story: Armstrong's former teammates – none of whom has rushed to his defense and several of whom (besides admitted dopers Floyd Landis and Tyler Hamilton) have come forward with allegations – may have played roles not merely as the domestiques they were hired to be, but as both witting and unwitting pawns in an elaborate chess match where Lance was king, money was queen, and checkmate could mean jail time for the most influential pro cycling hero of all time.**
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*Who among us wasn't?! It's our first self-propelled mode of transportation, and therefore our earliest liberation.
**By and large, among hardcore cycling fans and "industry insiders," Eddie Merckx is considered the greatest cyclist of all time. But without question, due to his timing in this prolific multimedia age, Lance Armstrong's popular impact on the sport has been more far-reaching.

Maybe I Should Change My Last Name...

It's official: My job has taken over my life. That would be an awful fate indeed if my job weren't so damn cool.

When I say cool, I mean, in no particular order: (1) intellectually stimulating; (2) fun; (3) challenging; (4) fulfilling.

This post would be longer if I weren't otherwise engaged with work-related matters.

Wanted to send up a sign of life.

More later.

The Liminal Space Between Novel & Memoir: A Self-Primer

Herewith, the opening lines from a (modern) classic of each genre. Can you tell which is which?

All families invent their parents and children, giving each of them a story, character, fate, and even a language. There was always something wrong with how I was invented and meant to fit in with the world of my parents and four sisters. Whether this was because I constantly misread my part or because of some deep flaw in my being I could not tell for most of my early life. Sometimes I was intransigent, and proud of it. At other times I seemed to myself to be nearly devoid of any character at all, timid, uncertain, without will. Yet the overriding sensation I had was of always being out of place...

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In the second half of the 1960s I traveled repeatedly from England to Belgium, partly for study purposes, partly for other reasons which were never entirely clear to me, staying sometimes for just one or two days, sometimes for several weeks. On one of these Belgian excursions which, as it seemed to me, always took me further and further abroad, I came on a glorious early summer's day to the city of Antwerp, known to me previously only by name. Even on my arrival, as the train rolled slowly over the viaduct with its curious pointed turrets on both sides and into the dark station concourse, I had begun to feel unwell, and this sense of indisposition persisted for the whole of my visit to Belgium on that occasion...

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These are not even the most ambiguous examples, but nonetheless my point - being the blur - is well-illustrated here.

The at times ill-advised fine line between memoir and fiction has been examined at length in recent years as a number of high-profile (and in particular Oprah-endorsed) examples of the former have been proven more fiction than fact. What interests me isn't so much who's lying and calling it memoir, but rather how fiction can be disguised as memoir. These are not one and the same phenomena; what I mean to say is that when presented in first-person narrative form, the genre of fiction - as deployed by "honest" fiction writers - can evoke memoir, and I believe for many readers (myself included), this form - a sort of half-sibling to creative nonfiction - is more successful at inducing suspended disbelief than the standard issue third-person/omniscient narrator form.

This is true talking to myself here, for a few years ago I spent about a year and a half in a writing workshop determining I was not to the genre of fiction born. Not only am I disinclined toward writing fiction, but I am hard-pressed to be engaged by it as a reader if it is not written in the first person.*

I've strayed from my main point now, but as usual the walkabout itself has proven fruitful, not least because it has reminded me that in the aforementioned writing workshop I concluded creative nonfiction was my Holy Grail.

Moreover, in the process of Google searching variations on the combined terms "fiction" and "memoir," I came across this article from the L.A. Times that examines the Herman Rosenblat "hoax." The last sentence in the second-to-last paragraph of this article (Jan. 2009) calls forward to Fran Lebowitz's astute observation in "Public Speaking" (Nov. 2010) that the AIDS epidemic wiped out not only a generation of great artists, but a generation of connoisseurs who comprised a supremely discerning audience that collaborated with those artists to elevate the level of cultural production:

For all the guilt there is to go around in the [Herman Rosenblat] debacle -- including the willful myopia of Rosenblat's champions and editors as well as the man himself -- a deeper blame may lie with an audience that demands so much treacle and sensationalism that apparently even the Holocaust requires narrative embellishment.

It takes a lot of decompressing from my workaday life - which for better or worse is spellbinding - to get to all of this, so I apologize, Dear Reader, if this whirlpool of my mental churnings leaves you in any way dissatisfied.

The long and short of it is, fiction may not be out of the question after all. (Then again, that may be a fiction.)
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*Two notable exceptions: Toni Morrison and Francine Prose.