It’s been quite a few weeks of Stay at Home here in Los Angeles. We’ve all experienced fear, anxiety and depression. We’ve also seen some signs of humanity through all of this: people making masks for essential employees, supporting teachers and grocery store workers. And every night at 8:00pm here in Hollywood, the neighborhood erupts with whistles, noisemakers and banging pots and pans for #Solidarityat8 to express gratitude for health workers.
And we all have a ton of time on our hands. So when this all started, I pulled out my Someday/Maybe list. Here’s a portion. (These are copy/pasted from an app, so Capitalization Police please hold your comments):
Buy a new filing cabinet
Reconnect with all the cousins, aunts, uncles
Organize the closet
Look up ballroom dancing classes in town
Shop for luggage
Sign up for the Santa Barbara writer’s conference
Learn how to set up my own guitars
Write a kid's spec script
Figure out what to do with the rest of Mom’s ashes
Research scooters.
Catch up on history podcasts
Buy and ethernet port hub.
Make my way through my drawing book
Create new templates in Scrivener
Take an art appreciation class
Look up yoga on YouTube
Find a new dentist
Find a new doctor
Rewrite Austin Wellington 2
Come up with an actual title for Austin Wellington 2
Pull out the turntable
Relearn the songs I’ve forgotten on the guitar
Organize the metadata on my photos
Start running again
Not to mention my book list:
Last Coyote
Swim with Sharks
Sacred
The Long Walk
Henry VI, 1, 2, 3
One Way Out
Harry Potter 6
Nobody’s Fool
Fire and Steel - Stanwyk
Titus Andronicus
Grief Recovery Handbook - John James
Harry Potter 7
Easy Rawlins: Gone Fishin
History Atlas
Emperor and the Wolf- Mifune bio
Trunk Music
Hunted, Elmore Leonard
Lithgow Poetry book
Gone Baby Gone
Easy Rawlins: Bad Boy Brawly Brown
Bio: Stevie Ray bio?
Angels Flight
Elmore, Switch
Prayers for Rain
Confederacy of Dunces
Keith Richards, Life
Six Easy Pieces
Trouble Boys - Replacements
Gunsights
Freakonomics
Robbie Robertson
Little Scarlet
Basic Training
Black Dahlia- James Ellroy
Dashiell Hammett Novels
Eugene O'Neill plays
Terry Pratchett/Neil Gaiman - character perspective
Red House - AA Milne
Gods go begging
Gavin Harrison Poetry Book
Education of a felon- Edward bunker
Animal factory - Eddie Bunker
Stroke of insight
The night ocean
Sara Gran books
Drop the rock
Desperation - Stephen king
The way of the ship - Derek Lundy
Oh, yeah, and my TV/movie list:
Fort Apache, John Ford
Sin City
Dirty Harry
History of Violence
Mr. Mercedes
Crash Reel
The Puzzle
Blast from the Past
The Favourite (2018)
Hired Guns
Dark
The Reckless Moment
Human Desire
Caught
House on Telegraph Hill
Sudden Fear
Secret Beyond the Door
There's Always Tomorrow
Mildred Pierce
Leave Her to Heaven
The Sound of Fury
Try and Get Me
Kiss of Death
The Unfaithful
Invisible Stripes
Gilda
Niagra
Spellbound
Shadow of a doubt
The Long Night
Flamingo road
The tattered dress
Violent Saturday
Moonrise
The devil thumbs a ride
Drive a crooked road
Plunder road
You only live once
Baby face nelson
Deep valley
Plunder of the sun
The big steal
Maceo
Jeopardy
The story of gi Joe
Pursued
Blood on the moon
The man with the gun
Bad day at black rock
The ox-bow incident.
Station west
Rancho notorious
Ramrod
The man from Laramie
Winchester 73
Run of the arrow
The naked spur
The tall T
Ride lonesome
Ride the high country
Man of the west
The lusty men
Criss Cross
Clash by night
Fallen angel
Last, my Play These Games list:
Friday
Mage Knight Board Game
Rallyman
Hostage Negotiator
The Lord of the Rings: The Card Game
Space Hulk: Death Angel - The Card Game
Star Realms
At the Gates of Loyang
Pathfinder Adventure Card Game: Rise of the Runelords - Base Set
Robinson Crusoe: Adventures on the Cursed Island
Sentinels of the Multiverse
Shadowrun: Crossfire
Gears of War: The Board Game
Legendary Encounters: An Alien Deck Building Game
Imperial Settlers
Onirim (second edition)
Flash Point: Fire Rescue
Infection: Humanity's Last Gasp
Legendary: A Marvel Deck Building Game
Navajo Wars
Race for the Galaxy: The Gathering Storm
Eldritch Horror
Snowdonia
Viticulture Essential Edition
Scythe
Glass Road
Pandemic: The Cure
Sylvion
The Hunters: German U-boats at War, 1939-43
Warfighter: The Tactical Special Forces Card Game
Tiny Epic Galaxies
Baseball Highlights: 2045
D-Day at Omaha Beach
Elder Sign
Lewis & Clark
Onirim
Thunderbolt Apache Leader
Race for the Galaxy
Limes
Bowling Solitaire
Warhammer Quest: The Adventure Card Game
Leaving Earth
Space Empires: 4X
Freedom: The Underground Railroad
Dawn of the Zeds (Second edition)
D-Day Dice
Myth
Forbidden Island
One Deck Dungeon
Pandemic
Zulus on the Ramparts!
Fields of Arle
Cruel Necessity
Field Commander: Napoleon
Arkham Horror
Arkham Horror: The Card Game
Deep Space D-6
Cuba Libre
Dungeon Roll
Castellion
Apex Theropod Deck-Building Game
Merchants & Marauders
Ghost Stories
Dungeon Crawler
Nations
Mistfall
Harbour
Lord of the Rings
Agricola
Ottoman Sunset
La Granja
B-17: Queen of the Skies
Dawn of the Zeds (Third edition)
Galaxy Defenders
Hornet Leader: Carrier Air Operations
Terraforming Mars
Urbion
Okay, that was demoralizing. Just copying these lists over gives me an utter sense of failure.
I’ve gone most of my life with the delusion that if I just had free time I could accomplish so much more. Well, I’ve had nothing but free time, as most of us have, and the minutes in the day don’t match my brain’s capacity for ways I’d like to fill them.
This isn’t the first time I learned this lesson. Twenty-plus years ago, I was lucky enough to be in school in Sarasota on a full scholarship. After completing my first year, I hatched what I thought was a brilliant summer plan…
All of my classmates and my girlfriend left town to go live their summer lives. They went to jobs back home, my girlfriend and her class went to study in London, and others went back to their places of origin to be with their families.
Since I was on a full scholarship and had been receiving a stipend all year long, for the first time in my life, I didn’t need to work.
My fiendish scheme was this: I would eat when I was hungry, I would go to sleep when I dropped. I wouldn’t wake until my body told me to—no alarms. I didn’t have to shave, I didn’t have to shower. I had no pets. No one was in town. This would be the Summer to End All Summers. I had video games to play, books to read, museums to check out, sailing classes to take…
None of this happened. Actually, I take that back. I played a SHIT-TON of video games. And I threw my body’s sleep schedule into utter chaos.
When I say I didn’t leave the house for eight weeks, I mean I only left the house to put 10-12 empty boxes of Papa John’s in the dumpster.
I started that summer with a simple project: I had this board game, Strat-O-Matic baseball. In the rulebook, they broke down how to make your own cards, based on real stats. I think their intention was to make a dream team of, say, twenty five guys. That wasn’t my project—my project was to create the entire 1967 Major League Baseball season: player by player, stat by stat, ballpark hitting factor by ballpark hitting factor.
Most of you are smarter than me, so I’m sure you can see—I’d bitten off more than I could chew. I’d work on these damn baseball cards for hours. And I made them look like the ones in the box:
I tried to match the fonts, writing in perfect penmanship. In ink. What happened when I made a mistake? I started over, naturally.
Right about now you may be Googling, “Stratomatic. 1967” to see if the Strat-O-Matic made this season to purchase.
Of COURSE they did. But I wasn’t willing to part with that $14.99! I could do this for free!
I worked on this while reclining in the bed. Eventually, I’d worked on it with such a manic obsession that I gave myself a rib injury from leaning in a weird position for hours and days at a time.
And I’d forgotten something that summer…
Around 130-160 cards into this project. [Only 600 more to go! Yay!!], there was a knock on the door.
As I said, I hadn’t been out of the house for weeks. Who the hell would knock on my door?
Months prior, my friend Cory asked if he could stay with me for a few days—he was in my wife’s class, but hadn’t left for London with the rest because he’d been shooting a movie. His apartment lease was up, and he needed a place to crash before catching a flight to Heathrow.
When I opened my front door, he saw the Wall of Madness. He talked about it for years. I looked whole-wheat crazed—unshaven, bloodshot, pale, and babbling incoherently from no human contact. I’d had a summer of hours to kill in between comatose sleep, and all I had to show for it was empty pizza boxes and handmade baseball cards.
Right before the next semester started, I ended up pitching those cards in the trash.
Maybe this isn’t how your COVID-19 experience is going. But mine has hints and glimpses of that Strat-O-Matic summer. I haven’t spent four hours a day playing guitar like I wanted, I haven’t learned computer programming yet, and I haven’t painted my masterpiece.
Writing this now, I realized something. Do you know what I'll do? I will delete those lists I showed you. Because my brain will start more lists.
And I think the lesson here is to take things one day at a time. If there’s truly not enough hours in the day, then maybe I can crack open the door to patience and equanimity. It’s so easy to beat up on myself for not becoming Eric Clapton or Marlon Brando. It’s harder to realize this life has a finite number of hours in it.
So how can I spend those hours? I can make genuine connections with friends and families? Can I be a worker amongst workers? Can I create and write because I enjoy that? Can I consume and play because I enjoy that too? And can I be of service to others who need help, because that’s what gives my life true value?
I can—but I can’t do all of it all the time. Even when this bastard of a pandemic has me locked inside the house. With that in mind, I can take it one day at a time, one task at a time, and maybe someday… one 1967 Strat-O-Matic card at a time.
How about you guys? What are you doing that's working? How are your lists? Where have you gone down the rabbithole?
Stay safe, healthy, and serene inside those four walls!