Some Complaints

Physical

Ankle, dull consistent pain, as of a tendon

Foot, left, numbness when running in new shoes

Foot, right, purple toenails tending toward falling off

Back, left, soreness, as of a bruise, but no bruise visible

    Sub-complaint: absence of wings

Eyes, both, vision noticably worse than just a few years ago

Hair, too gray, too long

    Sub-complaint: I don’t like going to the barber but I met a cute girl the other day and she         told me she was a barber at one of the local hip places but I can’t remember which one              and I risk going to the barber and leaving with only a haircut

Weight, too high as always

Political

Congress, intractability of

    Sub-complaint: the inexorable tendency of national parties to radicalize

    Sub-complaint: the untenability of nationalized party system without a parliamentary                 system in which it can work

    Sub-complaint: the heavily Republican character of my congressional district

President, current, imperfectly liberal on foreign policy

    Sub-complaint: reflexive assumption of liberals that free trade is evil

    Sub-complaint: radical militarism of said President’s opponents

President, future, lack of interesting candidates for

    Sub-complaint: Hillary Clinton seems like a perfectly competent person who would probably     do a reasonably workmanlike job as President, but her visceral distaste for the campaign trail     will probably cost her any election in which her opponent is not Donald Trump or Ted Cruz

    Sub-complaint: Bernie Sanders is a classic lefty stalking horse but his internet fans seem             to think there’s a conspiracy against him

        Sub-sub-complaint: being President is not about having perfect ideas

    Sub-complaint: Worry that Marco Rubio will be the last man standing on the Republican side     and will trounce Hillary Clinton in the general

    Sub-complaint: Donald Trump’s ascendancy says worrying things about white people

    Sub-complaint: Ben Carson’s ascendancy says worrying things about white people

    Sub-complaint: etc, etc, etc about white people

Gen X, conservatism of

Baby Boomers, conservatism of

Internet, tendency of to exaggerate offense and privilege outrage

    Sub-complaint: tendency of young internet commentators to demand ideological orthodoxy     (see also: Aesthetic complaints)

Aesthetic

Novel, mine, lack of faith in ability to complete

Jonathan Franzen, continuing outsized fame

State of criticism, its consisting mostly of political fault-finding and condescending Stalinism         masquarading as liberalism

The Bugle Podcast, declining quality / possible cancellation

Harmontown, extreme decline in quality

The Americans, not currently airing

Superheroes, their vapidity and omnipresence

Geeks, their fetishization

Austism, its fetishization

Classic rock, its continuing domination of airwaves and restaurant playlists

Sporting

Oregon Ducks football, terribleness

Seattle Mariners, terribleness

    Sub-complaint: unwillingness of some M’s fans to admit this

Boston Red Sox, terribleness

    Sub-complaint: ditto

Tennis, no more majors until January

Tennis, domination of Novak Djokovic

    Sub-complaint: Andy Murray’s inability to break out completely

    Sub-complaint: Rafa’s injury woes

    Sub-complaint: Roger’s inability to beat the Djoker

Tennis, racism in

Cricket, my inability to buy a baggy green hat

Basketball, how much less interesting it is to watch than play

Arsenal, ongoing futility

Personal

Impermanence, insistent feeling of

Singleness, persistence of for the last few months

    Sub-complaint: Inability to stay with one person for more than a few months. I swear to             God, I am not your garden-variety committophobe. Or am I? I actually don’t know.

Boredom, consistent

    Sub-complaint: embarrassment over feeling bored

Social anxiety

Existential

I AM GOING TO DIE ONE DAY

The Loneliness of the Middle-Distance Cyclist / Oh Yes, You Waited with Baited Breath for Me to Speak of the Tennis

1. The Loneliness of the Middle-Distance Cyclist

    I started getting fat right out of college because I had no idea how to take care of myself. In school my friends and I played basketball and soccer — not well, but competitively — and the food was at best fair in the cafeterias.* I’ve always tended to portly, especially as a kid, but puberty had done a pretty good job of leaving my body issues mostly in my mind by the time I graduated. Then, suddenly, I was underemployed, drinking too much, and expected to feed myself. I ate a lot of burritos. I ate a lot of pizza. I sat on my ass a lot. I think I must have gained sixty pounds in just three years. I do know I quit weighing myself when I saw 240 on the scale. (I’m 5’9”, for reference.)

* Jesus, we complained about that food a lot. Sometimes I remember the things I used to say or think when I was in college and I kind of shiver. To bitch that the free, twice-daily buffet didn’t taste good enough? I was Marie Antoinette’s spiritual heir. I’m lucky nobody chopped my head off.

    I was a 24-year-old kid whose knees creaked and popped when he crouched down to pick something up off the floor. I got winded walking up the one flight of stairs to my studio apartment. I had the sort of back pain that usually plagues men in their 50s. It was a bad scene, man. Pretty pathetic.

    There was never a moment when I decided, I am no longer going to be a fat sack of crap. At some point, I acquired a recumbent exercise bike and would ride it, very slowly, deep into the night — sometimes while drinking beer at the same time. Then, one day in the late spring of 2004 or 2005 (I no longer remember), I tipped my fat ass onto a bicycle, and rode it down my driveway, out through Little John Lane (my neighborhood was, for reasons that still escape me, Robin Hood-themed, as though I lived not in Oregon but at Disneyland), and fifteen miles over the rolling scrubgrass of the high desert. I stopped at a little market in an unincorporated town — really just a house, a church, and a gas station — called Alfalfa.** I bought a Payday bar. Then I rode home. Three or four times a week, all through that summer, I would ride this same route, so often that I came to know intimately everything about it. I knew the good spots to stop and pee. I knew the blind corners. I knew which hills were murder in the summer heat.

**Edited to correct the spelling. My mom texted to let me know I'd got it wrong.

    It was an act of sheer will, done without planning or cunning. Often I rode through 95-degree heat, guzzling water, stopping in almost every shady spot to catch my breath. Sometimes I weathered the furious swoop of self-righteous truck drivers who took pleasure in terrorizing cyclists who had the temerity to ride out along that road. I saw some dead squirrels. I saw a stray cat kill a bird. I saw a dead steer, being consumed where it had fallen by a swarm of flies and a hopping, cawing flock of crows. A few days later I saw some young men hauling its torn carcass onto the back of a truck.

    I don’t ride that route very often anymore, mostly because I moved away and only come back to visit my parents. When I do I find I still remember it. I also find, having lost the weight, I no longer have the will I once did. I rode that route — a version of it, anyway — this morning. I left early in the morning to avoid the heat. Onceago, as a fat young man pointed at fitness, there was something self-flagellating about riding through hot afternoons; there was a weird way in which I got off on the sunburn, the exhaustion, the near-delirium I experienced. Today, riding through the morning, with temperatures twenty degrees lower, I suffered, and I did not like it. Next time I get on my bike I won’t be going nearly as far. I saw some dead squirrels. I saw an osprey in a nest high upon a telephone pole. I did not see the body of a steer. I saw myself, ten years older, and I mourned the passing of the years.

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I AM A GREAT PHOTOGRAPHER!!!

2. Oh Yes, You Waited with Baited Breath for Me to Speak of the Tennis

    I haven’t watched the Federer match yet, so nobody say anything!

    I don’t have much in particular to say about the tennis — Serena won, Andy won, despite having a bit of a scare thrown into him by a seven-foot-tall scarecrow with a 135-mph serve. I will say that I don’t like watching tennis with people who obviously don’t care about it, who would like their television back so they can watch something — anything — else. I was watching the Murray-Karlovic match at my parents’ house and I could feel my mother’s boredom, to the point that it started to infect me. She would leave the room and come back and say, “What’s happening?” After a while, I couldn’t say. They were trading games. Karlovic was massive and awkward and just skilled enough to keep up. Andy was fast and dazzling and volatile and frustrating and frustrated and all the things that make him my favorite player and everybody else’s least favorite. (I have a sneaking suspicion that he and I have similar personalities. This is why I like him.) In the end, Andy’s brilliance proved too much for Karlovic’s plodding power-serve-and-volley game. One wonders, however, how a player reaches #3 in the world with such a terrible second serve. What the hell, Andy?

    Throughout the proceedings I kept going out to the back yard to visit my father, who has developed another quixotic hobby. For years, he walked the streets of Bend and made it his mission to pick up as many empty bottles and cans as he could. These he would throw away or take back to his recycling bin; then he would mark them down in a notebook. Ask him and he’ll tell you how many he’s collected. It is many thousands.

    Anyhoozy, now they’ve moved out to the country and there isn’t nearly so much litter available. Instead, he hunts animals that are called, locally, “scrub rats” — actually, two kinds of varmint, one of which is a vole and the other one of which is not a vole.*** They’re tearing up the yard out there, digging holes and leaving mounds all over, so that the place looks, to use my dad’s colorful comparison, “like Verdun”. So he spends his afternoons out on his back deck with a book and a high-powered pellet gun, waiting. The things are brazen, all right — I’ve seen him get within two or three yards before pulling the trigger, and they don't seem to care.

***This second animal looks exactly like a vole.

    He is as yet to hit one. My mom is blaming the sights on the gun. This is possible, I suppose, but I suspect mostly it’s a lack of experience that impedes his aim. We were city mice, my family. It’s funny to go out to the middle of nowhere and find them doing country things. It seems to me that his bad aim is for the best. What happens the first time some tiny animal’s brains are spattered all over the lawn? I mean, who knows, maybe it’ll be fine — this is a man whose grandmother used to wring the heads off chickens’ necks and set their golem-bodies shivering around the backyard. But that was a long time ago. Mostly I’m glad I won’t be there to see it.

Serena Agonistes / Kyrgios Triumphant

1. Serena Agonistes

    The greatest tennis player of all time — measured against her peers — was in trouble this morning. She was down two breaks in the third set, a point away from going down 0-4 to a little-known Briton who had never beaten a world top-5 player, never gone beyond the third round in an Open, and who had never crossed my field of attention. I will admit that I was rooting for the kid — I almost always root for the underdog, and there can be no greater underdog than an unranked player up against Serena Williams in a Grand Slam. Heather Watson had reached that point through a combination of guts and, let’s face it, luck — just before she served to go up 0-4, a graphic flashed on the screen: Serena had made 22 unforced errors to Watson’s 4. Give credit to Watson for playing nearly perfectly, but she was up against an uncharacteristically erratic champ.

    The game went almost ten minutes. I lost track of the number of times the two players tangled at deuce. Ultimately, seemingly impossibly, Serena found something that Watson couldn’t answer, and won the game. And I thought, She’s going to win this match. It just seemed inevitable. We’ve seen her do it so many times.

    I’m usually resistant to that kind of thinking — momentum, in most sports, is a bullshit dump for the inexplicable combination of chance and talent that sometimes results in spectacular runs of great play by ordinary players, or savage doldrums like the one Serena had been in since the second set. But Serena is so great, and has been for so long, and we’ve seen things like this from her so many times, that it was hard not to think it.

    And win she did. It wasn’t easy — Watson broke her again later and served for the match up 5-4 — but Serena won 7 of the last 9 games and staggered into the second week of Wimbledon after a gruelling, sometimes dazzling, sometimes ugly match against a woman ten years her junior. Throughout much of the third set, Serena was in obvious physical pain, gasping for air, straining to the limits of her strength and reach to hit balls she might not always get to, make plays she doesn’t usually have to. I have to say, despite my instincts, I started rooting for the old girl. (Old, ha — she’s a year and a half younger than me. Only in sports could you call her old.) That she was so obviously struggling made her victory all the more compelling.

    When people talk about sports — especially about tennis — so often what they talk about are speed, grace, creativity. These are words associated, broadly, with beauty. Serena at her best has exemplified these more than any other woman in history, and as much as Federer or Nadal, her direct male contemporaries. But that’s only a small part of what we want. The matches we remember, the ones we tell each other about, are so often the gruelling struggles, the moments when great players face defeat (and sometimes, even, meet it): Agassi digging deep against Baghdadis in ’06, Djokovic and Nadal going six hours in Melbourne in ’12, the relentless Wimbledon final in ’08 in which Nadal finally broke through against Federer. The ends of these matches were not notably graceful or creative. You can’t play tennis that hard for that long and not suffer.

    And why do we like the suffering? Perhaps it’s a narrative instinct programmed into us over hundreds of thousands of years of evolution. Maybe it’s that we like to believe these athletes are just like us. Or maybe — just maybe — there’s a sense in which sports, at least the taxing and intimate ones like tennis, are a sort of ritual sacrifice, a way of warding off infinity, and sometimes we like to see that our sacrifices are feeling pain.

2. Kyrgios Triumphant

    It’s tempting to contrast the styles of Nick Kyrgios, the young phenom from Australia, and Milos Raonic, the robotic heavy server from Canada. Raonic is the more accomplished player, and there’s something of the Terminator in his demeanor: he’s blankly handsome, immaculately shaven, black hair greased firmly into place. He hits hard, he doesn’t get upset. He’s the kind of guy that garners a certain kind of respect among people — and there are a lot of people in tennis like this — who believe that reserve is an important and positive quality for a person to possess.

    Kyrgios has none of that. Though he’s had rising success of late — in fact, he may be the most successful young male player since Federer — he’s still at the level of a prospect. What he’s famous for is his flamboyance. He jumps, he gesticulates, now and again he hits a shot between his legs. He panders to a passel of yellow-clad Aussies who seem to follow him everywhere. He is, in short, eccentric. And I love it.

    I had expected to find the announcers for his match today against the catatonic Canadian to react repressively: Wimbledon is the sport’s oldest and most conservative venue, and players who make a display of themselves there tend to be met with a wave of snipped British condescension. Instead, they seemed to enjoy it as much as I do: they giggled as he lined up hilariously deep, almost against the back wall, after being overpowered by Raonic’s serve in the second set; they cheered him on as he ran a strange, banana-like route across the court in hopes of disturbing Raonic’s calm on an easy smash winner; they even forgave him when he bounded into the air for one of his signature between-the-legs shots during a competitive game.

    I think there are two reasons he gets away with it. The first, and most important, is that he is not among the class of those who will turn his energy against the crowd or the umpire. Players who routinely scream and swear at the officials earn a special place in the bowels of tennis’ Hall of Shame. Because tennis is such an intimate game, because there are so few people who matter on the court, when one of them loses his cool with another, the outburst is loud and unavoidable — so in your face. It invades your space. Kyrgios, for all his effervescence, doesn’t do that.

    And then there’s this: he’s truly a magnificent player, once the ball is in play. He’s tall and fast, and his arms seem bizarrely long, so that he has the reach of a fir tree with massive branches. He has amazingly quick wrists, quicker than any I’ve seen, and he uses them to whip his racket around with vicious speed — this results in rocket-speed shots, nasty slices and hard dives. He’s not always sure where it’s going, I don’t think, but his ball moves unlike any other player’s.

    His greatness seems part-and-parcel of his personality, too. He takes risks other players don’t take. He plays fast and doesn’t waste a lot of time thinking. And so much of the time he’s visibly having fun. I think that’s really it: people watch tennis because they love tennis. Nick Kyrgios also loves tennis, probably more than just about anybody. That buys you a lot of wiggle room.