Author: Pavowski

I am a teacher, runner, father, and husband. I am an author-in-progress. I'm bad at jiu-jitsu. I know just enough about a lot of things to get me into a lot of trouble.

Metaphor Monday: Rip Tide

PavowskiLeave a comment

I’m out at the beach with my kid.

Tybee Island has some of the most gently sloping beaches you’ll ever see; the difference between high tide and low tide feels like about forty yards, and depending on the time of day and where you choose to explore, you can wade way out and still find yourself only in water up to your waist.

So we’re way out. A good thirty or forty yards from shore, which is about as far as I care to go. (Thalassophobia. I don’t have it, but I get it.) And we’re bobbing around on these tubes, my son delighting in swooping up and down with the gentle waves, me trying to relax (at least as much as an appropriately paranoid parent can relax when his six-year-old is floating on the ocean, which is to say, only so much). One of the sprout’s favorite things to do is to pretend to fall out of his tube — he screams, dramatically, “oh no!” and tips it over sideways, pitching himself into the drink, then swims up under it and hoists himself back in so he can do it again. He’s doing this over and over, and I’m only kind of paying attention. My mind is wandering the way it only can when you’re floating, feeling weightless in the grip of the great salty blue. (Okay, the waters at Tybee are pretty murky — but you know what I mean.)

Next thing I know: “daddy, get my float.”

I turn and look. The float is a good twenty yards out. I paddle lamely after it for a moment, doing a sort of backwards butterfly with just my hands while floating in my own ring. That ain’t working; every foot I gain, the waves push me back. So I flop out of the ring and make to wade over there and get it — except my feet don’t touch bottom. I go under and catch a nose full of salt water, and come up spluttering.

Well, that doesn’t seem right. I whip around to glance at the shore, see how far out we are, and oh boy oh boy have we drifted. We’re about twice as far out as I thought we were, and the people on the shore look disturbingly tiny.

I start paddling after my kid’s float, but with a head full of seawater and my not-so-great swimming skills, it ain’t going so hot. Plus, I’ve seen Jaws, and I know that a human flailing around in coastal waters triggers an ocean predator’s prey drive like a fat, oblivious seal — so something like panic is flooding my system too. (Even though I know that’s ridiculous.) In my head, I see images of that riptide warning poster that they post everywhere at the beach:

Image result for riptide warning signs

And I think I might actually be caught in one of these things. (I’m not, as it turns out, but just try telling that to a brain that thinks it’s simultaneously drowning and being stalked by sharks.)

I turn to look toward shore once more and I see that my kid is paddling out after me. Something about that short-circuits whatever thinking I’m doing at this point. My lizard brain kicks the rational part of me out of the driver’s seat. Now it feels like a fight for survival. It suddenly feels like there’s miles of open water yawning beneath my feebly kicking feet, like the ocean itself is a living thing pulling me and my kid out.

I shout at him to go back to the shore, but he’s six — he’s a worse swimmer than I am, and though he’s doggie-paddling dutifully toward shore, he’s drifting even closer to me. I throw a glance over my shoulder at the float — it’s even farther away now, which seems impossible. My thinking brain sends up one last smoke signal that bubbles through my lizard-brain haze: It’s a five-dollar float, you idiot, help your kid!

With that, I hook two fingers into my kid’s swimming vest and paddle back toward the shore in earnest. We make it back without a fuss. My wife’s looking at me a bit oddly — to be fair, I’m a bit more spluttering and wide-eyed than usual. I turn around and look for the float; it’s basically a speck, floating a quarter-mile out from the shore. To make matters worse, it pretty much stays there for the next hour or so.

And I just have to watch it. And feel shame.

So.

Since it’s Metaphor Monday (when was the last one of those??), this is the part where I say this thing is like writing, and man, it’s easy to do. Sub in my project (or, in fact, yours, faithful reader) for the float, and you’re done.

I allowed myself to be distracted and took my eye off the float for a moment; next thing I know, the circumstances (my kid flipping the raft, the current, maybe even the wind, who knows?) had the thing out of reach and quickly drifting farther away. This is my writing project: you take a little break from it, and the tiniest things can push it away — out of convenient reach, where it doesn’t feel like you can get around to it, or out of mind entirely, where you don’t even think about it for a little while.

Next moment: I’m paddling after it but I’m in over my head, and I’m panicking as a result. I look up, in other words, and see that the project has gotten away from me, so I panic and make it a lot more important than it is. (If I don’t write a little bit today, I may never get it back.) Not to mention, I’m not the strongest swimmer (writer!) so even paddling after it feels like not making any progress at all — I sit down to write and feel like I just can’t do it, or I try to brainstorm on the project but my mind immediately wanders. Bang, it feels like I’m in a fight for my life — or, at the very least, the life of my project.

Next moment: I realize my kid is out here with me and decide to let the float go. In other words, I grasp that my family is still here on vacation with me and not going anywhere, and the choice of where to spend my time seems suddenly very obvious. I grab the kid and swim for shore — I give up on the project (again) and let it float away, as frustrating and painful as that may be.

Finally: I have to sit there and watch the float bobbing on the waves a quarter mile out from shore, unable to do anything about it. Well, that one’s obvious, too — no matter how much distance I get from the project, it’s never really gone — it just hangs there in the back of my mind (or, as t’were, floating on the horizon of my subconscious) waiting for me to swim out and get it. Perhaps taunting me. Because now, the work required to get it back is, admittedly, huge.

Interestingly, that’s where the metaphor breaks down — because while the float is well and truly gone no matter how frustrated I get or how silly I feel (or how much I lament the fact that it will probably end up choking some poor unsuspecting sea animal — and that does hurt my heart, unless it’s a shark, because seriously, I’VE SEEN JAWS), the project is not in any way gone. In fact, I sat down just this morning to put some words on the page and, while I’m nowhere near on the timeline I wanted to be, the project feels very much in reach again.

Writing, in other words, is just like riding a bike. Doesn’t matter how much time you take off, it’s right there waiting for you when you decide to go back to it.

Wait, that’s a different metaphor entirely. Damn.

The Fruity-Smelling Guy, Summer 2018 Edition

Pavowski1 Comment

We’re on vacation this week, which means I smell fantastic.

I smell fantastic because when we’re out of town, I mooch off whatever body wash / soap / chemicals my wife brings with her. (She overpacks, I underpack, and it has always struck me as silly for us to each expend effort bringing along soap which for all intents and purposes does the same thing. While we’re on the subject, can we talk about how silly it is that essentially the same products are marketed to men and women, just with different added ingredients — for more manly smells — and different packaging — for a more manly look. You can be a man and use the fruity-smelling stuff, and you can be a woman and use the industrial-smelling stuff. Actually, women, don’t use the men’s stuff. You know that 2-in-1 stuff ain’t doing anything, and for some reason they only market that garbage to men.)

20180620_085829.jpg

This week, it’s this Coconut Mint Drop (pictured — unshaven lunatic not included), which smells bloody fantastic, like — well, like a coconut and a mint got together and dropped off a baby. It looks like a leftover from Christmas time, what with the snow piled up on top of the letters which could be ornaments, maybe? I’m not sure what coconuts have to do with Christmas (what do coconuts have to do with anything, really — I should write a play about that) but somehow it works and it had me feeling positively festive this week.

In fact I’m gonna go out of my way and say I really enjoyed smelling like coconuts and mints because, I dunno if you know this or not, but here in the South we’ve been under extreme heat advisories all week: temperatures going right up to the mid nineties early in the day and staying there until the sun decides we’ve had enough and leaving us crying on the floor until the next day.

(As it turns out, you can have a heat advisory without it being “extreme”, but much like the South has no idea what extreme means when it comes to pollen counts — the scale goes from “low” at 10 or so to “extreme” at maybe 200, and Atlanta regularly has pollen counts of like fifty thousand — we seem to view the “extreme” classification as less a descriptor, more a challenge. You call that hot? We’ll show you hot.)

They call this phenomenon a “heat dome” which is fitting as anything because stepping outside feels like stepping into a Thunderdome of heat and misery and sweat and B.O. You spend about thirty seconds outside and your body goes into panic mode. Everything starts to sweat. The body physically wilts like a daisy in the desert. You go to wherever you’re going to and then you collapse and bitch about how hot it is, even though everybody with skin KNOWS how hot it is, so why do we pretend we need to talk about how hot it is?? (Actually, somehow, it does seem to help, which leads me to the conclusion that the human heat-response system is somehow tied into the brain’s language centers, which leads me to the further conclusion that humans are dumb and not particularly cleverly wired.)

The upshot, then, to smelling like fruit, is that for those first thirty seconds before my skin begins to melt, I smell, somehow, a little bit like Christmas in June.

And, considering the alternative, I’d call that a pretty good thing.

Better Miles

PavowskiLeave a comment

Some days, the miles are easy. Some days, they’re hard.

Some days, you drag yourself out of bed to pound the pavement because you know if you don’t do this one thing, get this one win early, you may not see another win all day.

Some days, you burst onto the street, strong like bull, ready to wrestle the day to the ground and steal its lunch money.

Some days, you run and you slave and you gasp and groan and feel like you’ll never cross the finish line.

Some days, the fresh, clean air hits your lungs and you feel like you could run forever.

Some days, the miles are best forgotten about.

Some days, the miles stay with you.

But any day when the finish line looks like this:

20180620_080023.jpg

Those miles seem just a little bit better.

Happy running from Tybee Island.

An Understated Genius

Pavowski1 Comment

Because my wife apparently wanted to give me a stroke on Father’s Day, she gave me this:

20180618_075644.jpg

But because my wife is very smart and very funny and doesn’t actually want to give me a stroke, the inside of the book looks like this:

20180618_075705.jpg

275 pages of blank space. Which at first seems rather excessive, but upon further review, no, 275 pages of wasted space sounds just about right.

Where does she find this stuff?

Lots of Time, Not Enough Time

Pavowski1 Comment

Summer is weird for my writing process.

I do my project writing at work — arriving early and carving time out of my lunch break to get my daily word count in. Which is great. It’s regular, it’s very rarely disrupted, and it’s (for the most part) uninterrupted. The big problem with it is: I’m a teacher. Which means that, for two months out of every year, and on the odd week here and there, my writing routine hits a speed bump. Except it’s less speed bump and more an entire clutch of trees fallen across the road.

trees see GIF

Because when we’re on vacation — and man, I’m not complaining about vacation! — so many of the elements I like to have in place are out of place. I don’t have my usual space. I don’t have the relative quiet. I definitely don’t have the lack of interruption.

Instead, I’m trying to work on the sofa in the living room, or the desk downstairs, with the kids running laps through the house and asking me endless questions. There’s no such thing as quiet. There’s no such a thing as even an interrupted five minutes.

I have all the time I could want, but I can’t buy the moments.

Like having reservations to a fancy restaurant on the night of my kid’s graduation.

Or having a membership to a swanky gym on the opposite side of town.

The thing is there, but it might as well be behind bulletproof plexiglass. I just can’t get to it. It’s frustrating as hell. I have so much time in the day, but I can’t — or at least, haven’t figured out how to — use that time.

Which means that, yet again, the project is stalled, until I can find a more reliable way to work on it. Which may well be going back to school in the fall.

Ugh.

This post is part of Stream-of-Consciousness Saturday.