I’m back at my workplace and East Nashville home base, Ugly Mugs.
It’s officially 9 am. I didn’t know what time it was all morning, because I have a new experiment (I just keep coming up with these things), which Parker has officially taken up, when he asked if he could put black electrical tape on my car clock, and then I noticed that he put the tape on the oven clock in the kitchen this morning as well.
The experiment is not really much of an experiment, it’s simply that I don’t like knowing what the time is all the time. I want to know what time it is on my terms. The issue is that if I know the time, I constantly use it to track and evaluate, even when I don’t want to. For example, by seeing the clock in the kitchen, first thing when I wake up, I unconsciously or consciously evaluate my wakeup, and start thinking about what it means. Am I late, am I early, is that good, is that bad, oh I am two hours late to the party, oh I’m early today… all of these thoughts. I don’t want to have those thoughts, actually. Unless I consciously want to.
Then, I had to cover up the clock in the car because that will also tell me what I don’t want to know, which is the time.
Mostly, it’s in the morning, but I find myself looking at the oven clock throughout the day and making all kinds of judgments about it, that I don’t really want to make or care about. It is tied to all kinds of thoughts about time-wasting and productivity. The only time I want to know what time it is really is if I have some plan that revolves around time, that I have somewhere to be at a certain time, basically.
I don’t mind knowing the time in general though, this is a minor thing, so I haven’t been too bothered by it. But the other day I just decided to try covering up that oven clock, because I was getting annoyed by it. I just put a rag over it, same thing with in my car. Well, Parker must be officially adopting and on board with this policy, because he’s covered it with black electrical tape. Now, the thing is that we can’t use it for baking or for the built-in timer, so that might have to change… but at least he’s shown that he’s on board.
In my apartment in Ozu, I didn’t have a clock. I think I had a clock over my bed, that was out of the way for a while, and then I might have even decided to take that down.
It’s kind of fun, when you actually don’t know what time it is. It’s a subtle thing, but I have been living these recent days, mainly in the morning, I wake up and go about my business, usually coming here to Ugly Mugs, and I simply don’t know what time it is, exactly. I have to guess. Sometimes it has been later than I thought, but usually it has been earlier than I thought, which has surprised me.
The no-light policy is going well, except reading by candlelight is a pain in the ass. My candles are not really cutting it, and it is a serious struggle to read by candlelight at night. I have to solve this problem because we have a lot more darkness ahead. I guess I need either a bigger candle, or a lantern. I think it would be incredibly awesome if I had a real lantern with oil. That would put me squarely in the 1800’s, right? I would be a real 1800’s man if I did that. I would love that. Resurrecting arcane technology.
I’ve loosened up on it a bit, because it seems that a little artificial light doesn’t matter too much. Screens are definitely the worst, as opposed to overhead room lights. Screens, phone screens, TV and computer, are definitely bad and will mess you up. They’re just so bright. But flicking on a room light doesn’t seem to do much damage, at least the lights in our house, which are not that bright in the grand scheme of brightness.
It’s weird not wanting to step outside after the sun goes down because of all the artificial light in the neighborhood. There are about 75 bright artificial lights that I can see from my doorstep. It’s kind of shocking how much there is.
Well, I had nothing in particular that I had to write about here, I just thought I should write something to keep you guys in the loop, and keep the practice going. I can tell you this—I got a free coffee this morning.
Indigo is a charming and friendly barista, surely a favorite and beloved individual here at Ugly Mugs, and I knew she was a musician because she asked me about my Gibson swag once, (she said, “You got a lot of Gibson swag, man,”), and I told her about my brief stint there, and she said that she had played Garagefest. If she had played Garagefest, that meant she must have been pretty good, at least not bad, so I knew that she was a decent musician then, and I had been meaning to ask her about it. Well, I didn’t see her working for a while after that, but the other day she was, and I overheard her talking to someone about her upcoming show. I asked her about it when she was on break, and she told me it was at the East Room, right down the street, a cool little venue, and it was Saturday, and thought I might go. I also finally learned her name.
This story could go on for a while… Cutting to the chase, I went to the show and ended up not sticking around, because the first band put me to sleep, and I had a whole ‘nother hour before Indigo’s band, and I couldn’t do it. I left, and I didn’t talk to her but I had seen her, and I didn’t know if she had seen me, but I came in to Ugly Mugs this morning and she was immediately happy to see me and telling me thanks for coming to the show. So, she had recognized me, and we talked about it, I told her that I had a confession, I couldn’t stick around, but I will listen to her music, and I had at least bought a ticket and supported the arts. She said it went well, and they did have a good turnout so I guess I didn’t feel bad about leaving under those conditions.
(I feel like I could give Indigo a plug here: Her band is “Chrysalis”, she said listen to the album, “Dog Songs”.)
Well, we had talked and I thought she might have just forgotten to charge me for the coffee, but she said, in a hushed voice, “You’re good,” and shook her head, and I was like, Oh, I’m getting free coffee! Got it. And I said thanks, took it and ran.
She has a bright and wonderful personality, I’m listening to her right now. She can connect with every single guest, and treats everyone the same. That’s a special person. You know she has a lot of friends.
Part of what I wanted to write about, I touched on here, which is that Indigo had recognized me, and knew that I had been at the show. I had the same feeling then that I had a few days ago, when another Ugly Mugs barista was at the climbing gym, and she works the desk at the gym as well, and I had talked to her and gotten her name… then the other day, I walked into the gym, and someone shouts out, cheerfully, “Steven!!” and it was her. She was sitting there on the mat with her two friends, here as a climber, and she was excited to see me. It seemed that we were now officially friends. The thing about that that was really interesting to me is that I had this feeling of being surprised that someone recognized and remembered me.
I think it reflects something about where I am right now, and my general state, because that is not such a surprising thing, and even it’s the expected thing. Yet, I think that I feel something like a ghost, around here. I don’t know why, possibly because I am spending a lot of time thinking, and being in a mental world. I think that’s really it. It doesn’t feel like I am fully inhabiting the physical world, sometimes, and I also don’t feel that integrated here. It’s like, what am I doing here? I have a feeling of being adrift and loose, to some degree.
I don’t think this is a bad thing. It sounds like it might be, but I don’t feel lost, which would be the bad thing. I just feel ghostly at times. So, when Izzy recognized me, and remembered me, it was like, “Wow, someone recognizes me. I am living in the real world.”
Psychologists, explain this.
I have been spending a lot of time in alternative worlds, reading and writing. That’s probably the biggest part of it. That’s why going to the cafe and being at the climbing gym are good balancing hobbies, because they put me in a social environment and tether me to the real world. Spending time in nature is the same, but that can be solitary. But when I see that caterpillar eating my sunflower leaves, I definitely feel like I’m in the real world, then. I’m watching real life happening.
One more thing about going clockless, that I was noticing, is that you don’t even really need a clock to tell what time it is. If you want to know precisely, a clock is good, but there are a lot of subtle ways that your brain can figure out the realtive time. The temperature, the position of the sun, the way you feel, the traffic and movements of people around you, all of these are indicators. I found that I could have a good idea of what time it was just by looking around me. A good idea, but not perfect.
You don’t need a calendar either, to know what season it is, what month. You can track the temperature, the plants, the stars if you know about that. That’s kind of a cool way of tracking time, I feel.
I wanted to write about…. something…
I’ve lost it.
Well, Sunday was a special day at the climbing gym. I have been working on a boulder for about three weeks now, probably. Two or three weeks, five sessions or so. I’ve watched a lot of people attempt it, many succeed, many fail, and I’ve had several people coach me on it. This climb has been my new nemesis. And on Sunday, a breakthrough happened.
I had been making it up to a certain point, where you make a lunge and grab a hold with your left hand, but I had been unable to hang on after making the lunge and grabbing the hold, because my body is moving that way and I can’t stop myself. It was annoying me, because other people could, and it seemed that the advice here was to “just do it”, but I didn’t like that, and was getting frustrated. That was the farthest I had made it on this climb, this was my new hurdle. And I had had the idea that possibly you could flip your right hand and grab a hold on the right, which would stabilize yourself as you flew to the left, and grab the hold on the left at the same time, but it was tricky to flip your right hand fast enough, and without looking, while you lunged for that hold on the left. I tried that idea a few times and gave up on it.
I had shown up to the gym on Sunday, after being there in the morning with Parker, Dev and Mel, just to socialize, because some of my fingers on my right hand were a little compromised. They all said that it was fine, and that I should try climbing anyway, as long as I didn’t have pain, and stay away from the “crimps” (tiny holds that require pinching), and so I went home finally to eat something, and Parker and I came back, ready to climb. Well, I showed up a bit after Parker, and when I got there, he was talking to a guy, an excited and animated blonde guy, who was apparently famous for his “dyno” abilities. Dyno is climber slang for dynamic move, which is any move where you jump and grab something, or run and grab something, basically. And this guy Max was apparently the king of dynos, and was called “Dino sensei”. I looked down at his chalk bag and saw a picture of a triceratops in a karate gi, so he was actually the dino sensei. And Max showed us several dynos, that were completely mind-blowing.
I told him then that I was working on the yellow one, and he said, yada yada, should be able to dyno this easily, from the start, and then he did a dyno on it, jumping from the bottom, right up to those two holds and grabbing them both simulatenously, right and left hand at the same time. This is exactly what I had wanted to do, and it blew my mind. It was amazing to see. And I was like, dude, you just did it. You just did it. These things were nothing for Max, this dyno wasn’t anything special—he showed us several more dynos that were supremely impressive, massive jumps from the bottom of a climb to the top, skipping everything in-between… but to see him do this dyno on my climb, that I had been struggling with for weeks, it opened up a portal in my mind. It unlocked something.
I had almost had it right. I almost had the right idea, with my double-handed grab, except that I had been thinking to do a double-handed grab from the position that most people were getting into, where they would reach up with a left land, and then put the right hand on a tiny crimp, right next to the left hand, and then make the lunge. I didn’t like that at all, because it made me so scrunched up, although I could get to that position, and I was trying to flip my right hand from there, and lunge over. Well, Max did the double grab, but he didn’t bother getting into that first, scrunched up position at all—he skipped it entirely. He just went from the lower start position, and jumped straight up to those two holds and grabbed them, not bothering at all with all of the rigamarole in-between. That’s what blew my mind.
I immediately copied his “beta” (slang for the way that someone does a climb), and I succeeded on the climb soon after. The only difference was that I ended up jumping and grabbing the right hold first, getting secure, and then reaching over and grabbing the left, because it was hard for me to nail that simulatenous move. But I still just skipped all of that mess and tomfoolery on the way up.
I feel like this was a crucial moment in my climbing development. I thought there was a real lesson here, even in life, because of what had happened. I had watched everyone do this climb basically the same way, so many times, that it had become accepted to me that that was how the climb had to be done. I had had some thoughts of alternative methods, but they hadn’t worked, and I didn’t think much more. I’m not experienced, so I couldn’t see the way, either. I couldn’t see what else was possible.
But Max, his dyno brain, is working completely differently. Max is someone who climbs differently, and sees these climbs in an entirely different way, as he’s looking for the jumps, and how he can simply jump up to the top. I felt like watching him do that jump on my climb, it was like—look, there’s a totally different way of doing this. And that way was the way that worked for me. I had been seeking it, I had been looking for a way like that, and Dyno Sensei revealed it. Dyno Sensei showed me what was possible. That was amazing.
After that, I was unlocked. I feel like it was a big lesson, the lesson of—you don’t have to do it how anyone else is doing it. You can do it in an entirely different way. Just remember that. There are multiple ways to do the climb, and they are not going to be the best for everyone. People have different bodies, different flexibilities and strengths, and they will want to climb things differently.
That’s not true for all of the climbs, some climbs seem to require much more of the same “beta”, where basically everyone does them the same way. But some of these climbs, there are a lot of ways you can do them.
It has been interesting to watch our shorter friends, Yueng Lan and then a few days ago, Maddy, climb, because they have to do things differently than Parker or I, being shorter. They have their own methods, and it’s cool to see what they do.
Maddy has been so far the only person I’ve seen climb a difficult, yellow climb that involves going under an overhang, getting up onto a couple large, extremely clunky boulders, and then jumping high up to the finish. This one has been a puzzler for nearly everybody who’s attempted it, and we actually had a kind of special moment the other day, on that day with Maddy, where almost everyone in the gym ended up gathering around this puzzling yellow climb, and all testing their strength on it, and cheering each other on. We all wondered, who could defeat it? What was the way? It was like we were trying to pull the sword out of the stone. Who was the chosen one?
Well, it looked like, nobody. And after thirty minutes of everyone testing their strength, the dyno-ers, the strongmen and women, the dextrous, it seemed that nobody was going to send it. And we were all disappointed and had given it our best effort (I say “we” but I was just watching, resting my hand). Maddy had come the farthest during the attempts, and if anyone was going to send it, it seemed like it would be her.
Well, after everyone else had called it quits and walked away, Maddy had not given up yet. She was going to take this climb down. Maddy is about 5’2” I would guess, by the way. And that’s important, and it was amazing to see, because she was really showing us that day that being short doesn’t have to stop you. Maddy tried it about two or three more times, after everyone else had given up, and then, she sent it. She cracked the code, by not trying to climb up and stand on the clunky yellow rocks, as most everyone had tried to do, but by getting on the side of them and then using them to jump up to the top, in a dynamic move. She thought that that’s what the routesetter had intended to be done.
It was amazing to see her work it out, and ultimately send the climb. An impressive climb, that I haven’t seen anybody else send yet. And bonus points because she is one of the shortest climbers out there.
It’s fun to watch the advanced climbers do what they do, now that I have some climbing knowledge. You don’t appreciate it as much when you don’t know what’s going on. It all just looks like a bunch of plastic knobs and ledges, and people can either climb them or they can’t. But you start to see the nuances, the techniques, and then you can appreciate how people approach them differently, how they figure them out, the strength and dexterity required to complete a climb, and the creativity exercised by each person in their completion of the climb. And then, a lot of the fun now has been talking with people, about how they do the climb, how they approach it, what’s holding them back, sharing secrets and knowledge. I don’t think I’ve really cracked into this aspect of climbing until just recently.
One thing that I appreciate more now, and can see in people when they climb, is body positioning. Body positioning becomes extremely important, but it’s hard to notice if you don’t have an understanding. Simply having good body positioning will often be what allows you to send a climb or not. Being able to put yourself in a stable configuration, or understand how to rotate or pivot your body, or figuring out what position you need to be in to progress in the climb. Positioning is subtler than strength, but as you go up in difficulty, it seems to be being tested a lot more.
There was a pink one a few weeks ago that was tripping up a lot of people, because it was just so weird. And it wasn’t a strength issue, the reason why people couldn’t climb it. I think it was because people couldn’t figure out how they were supposed to position their bodies. I couldn’t figure it out, I didn’t know how I was supposed to balance on it. I tried moving my body this way and that, I tried sinking down, different foot positions, switching my feet, but it was all weird, and I would fall off. That was a really interesting climb. I didn’t get to send it, either, because they had taken it away. But that one was all about positioning. And I would watch people send it, and it was like, they didn’t even do anything. They did what it looks like you should do. It doesn’t look hard, but I would step up to it and try it again, and simply be unable to do it.
HAKUMUSU 