Making the Cut

The bowling trophy on my office windowsill hints at the mileage I’ve gotten in my life from just showing up. But the recent death of Coach Lowe recalled what I’ll call my Zenith of Presence.   

I may have mentioned the trophy in a past blog post. It’s one of the cooler things I own, because a) it visually belies my lifelong mediocrity at sports and because b), at the time I received it, it literally dwarfed the achievement of my older brother—with whom I’ve always competed on some level, albeit one-sidedly and to my mind unsuccessfully.

Ken and I were members of a youth bowling league during the 1967-68 season. That would have made me 9 years old at its start and Ken 12. The Summer of Love had just happened in San Francisco, but at 10-lane Berkeley Lanes in Berkeley Heights. New Jersey, fall 1967 began my Year of Showing Up. When league play ended in late spring 1968, Ken received a squat, standard-issue participant’s trophy for having averaged a solid but not league-leading 140 or so pins per game. I, however, was honored with the towering piece of hardware I still display—depicting a golden bowler in mid-roll, placed literally on a pedestal. I was rewarded not for my barely triple-digit average, but for—per the inscribed abbreviation—“Perf Att.” Which is to say, perfect attendance.

I think my brother, decades later, still suffers trophy envy. Not only was he a much better bowler than I, but he was on his way to becoming an Eagle Scout in those years and probably missed a Saturday or two at the bowling alley only because he was busy shoring up a creek bed or perhaps serially helping old ladies across the street. Also, on one memorable day sometime in the late 1960s, Ken lost the tip of his thumb to a lawnmower. I can’t remember if that happened during the 1967-68 bowling season, but if so, bloody disfigurement certainly might put a guy on the bowling league disabled list for a while. (What I remember most vividly about that particular day, of course, was that Mrs Johnson next door made me a delicious lunch, with ice cream for dessert, while my parents were rushing what’s-his-name to the hospital.)

While I’m tempted to ascribe many of my bigger successes in life to simply having Been There, that would be a stretch in most cases. Take, for instance, my marriage and my unbroken streak of gainful employment. Both things owe more to my having been in the right place at the right time—respectively, at DC parties that my future wife attended, and at a newspaper that gave me an assignment I’d parlay into a job in Washington—than to my just having been present, period

When it comes to sports, though, simply showing up has brought me huge rewards. It resulted not only in that bowling trophy in adolescence, but also in a GPA boost in high school, and, in between those two instances of good fortune, what I to this day consider my crowning athletic achievement.

As far as that bump in grade-point average goes, I’m defining “sports” broadly. At Grimsley High School in Greensboro, North Carolina, in the mid-1970s, the halt and the lame—figuratively if not quite literally—among male students, at least, could sign up either for physical education (PE) or what was called “PEI.”I no longer remember what the “I” stood for—the Google search term “physical education PEI” unhelpfully yields data on school fitness in a Canadian province—but the gist of that “I” in the Grimsley context was “Invalids” or “the Inconceivably unathletic.” If you were a jock at GHS, you definitely took PE. If you played the occasional game of sandlot baseball or even just tossed a Frisbee every once in a while, you signed up for PE. But if you were too fat, too ungainly, too genuinely disabled, or simply too averse to physical activity to exercise with the other boys, you took PEI.

You know how college-level Geology sometimes is called “rocks for jocks”—good for an easy C, at least, for guys who are as dumb as boulders but must meet a science requirement to remain academically eligible for the football or basketball team? PEI was sort of the high school equivalent of that, but for nerds and social misfits who were fearful—for their lives, their academic standing, or both—to compete alongside the “normal” kids, and to be judged for their ability to do pushups or to circle the track in a prescribed time.

It wasn’t like PEI participants didn’t have to do anything, but they didn’t have to do much. I saw them in “action.” They’d do a fraction of the pushups. Half the laps, with walking optional. Those kinds of things. Being in PEI did carry a bit of a social stigma, but if you signed up for it you probably already were stigmatized. My friend Downs Brown, for example, already had the strikes against him of being named Downs Brown, looking weird, dressing oddly, and being exactly the kind of pasty, zitty guy who’d be most comfortable hunched over a computer, except that computers didn’t yet commercially exist. Downs gleefully went the PEI route, and he probably got an A on his report card. Unless he had tried to engage his redneck gym teacher in a conversation about the merits of Yes versus Jethro Tull. Which is quite possible. In which case, maybe drop that A by a letter grade or two.

Anyway. With my one hand, pudgy body, and transplanted-Yankee ways, I already felt like enough of an outsider without seeking further self-segregation. So, I signed up for regular PE. I wasn’t good at any of the activities. I certainly didn’t exhibit any ability to stay alive at dodge ball, let alone to run fast or climb a rope. But what I had done, irrefutably, was Shown Up. This greatly endeared me to my gym teacher, Mr Sawyer, who clearly had expected me to go the PEI route, and who probably felt, looking at my empty sleeve, that I had more justification than most students to do so.

Mr Sawyer—known (not to his face) as “Buzz” due to the existence at that time of a comic book character with that name—saw in me a guy who’d been offered the easy way out but had declined. It didn’t matter that I saw myself in no such way. He’d tell other kids to do things. He’d tell me to “try.” He’d tell the jocks to wake up out there, and the laggards to get the lead out, but he’d say nothing to me as I brought up the rear in all given activities and exercises. Later, when Buzz Sawyer became my driver’s ed instructor, I met his one-handed wife. That connection certainly didn’t hurt me. But one never should underestimate the power of low expectations. If you think Just Showing Up holds potential riches in and of itself, combine that with the allure of being the Cripple Who Nevertheless Can Do Something, Anything, and you’re suddenly grasping the gold ring with your one and only hand.

This brings me to Coach Lowe, who was my gym teacher at Kiser Junior High School when I first arrived in Greensboro in the ninth grade, and who also managed the baseball team. Then in his mid-30s, he lacked the mania of The Andy Griffith Show’s Lt Barney Fife but shared the sad face and drawling manner. So, naturally, that was what the kids called him behind his back: "Barney." It didn’t help, Barneyness-wise, that the school system required him to teach sex education—a subject toward which his complete and utter embarrassment was clear, and about which his lack of experiential knowledge was widely assumed. There was, however, a basic decency about Coach Lowe that showed through, and a seeming discomfort in his own skin to which I could abundantly relate.

Maybe that was why, in spring 1973, I decided to try out for the baseball team. God knows why else I did, except that, being the only kid at school who wore a hook, and having few friends as a newcomer, I may have figured I had nothing to lose. Surely my baseball “career” to that point had been anything but stellar. I’d spent one year in Police Athletic League ball in New Jersey, where I generally struck out at the plate and bungled throws at first base. I did knock in six runs, but all by walking with the bases loaded. Given my propensity for whiffing when I did swing, I was somewhat loath to take the bat off my shoulder. And control was not the forte of many pitchers in that league.

By the way, I probably needn’t make clear what you already assume, but the PAL was not a league for which one had to try out. Every kid was guaranteed playing time. And the coaches all were cops, so they were used to dealing with worse things than juvenile butchery of the National Pastime.

Anyway, on tryout day for the Kiser team, I was one of 40 guys seeking 25 roster spots. I felt intimidated from the get-go, especially as I awaited my turn at bat and saw several of my competitors loft deep flies and scorch line drives. But when I got to the plate I surprised myself by somehow hitting a few balls fairly hard. They all were foul balls, but at least I’d made contact. My fielding wasn’t so hot that day, as I recall, and my stamina for running laps was no better than it would be at Grimsley under Buzz Sawyer’s watchful eyes. Coach Lowe and an assistant wielded clipboards and wore blank expressions. I went home that day thinking I’d given it my best shot, but certain that when the first cuts were announced, my name would be among them.

The next day, a list was posted in the school gym. On it were the names of eight boys who needn’t report for the second tryout. Amazingly, “Eric Ries” was not among them. I had beaten out—charitably or not—eight two-handed peers for the opportunity to make the team. I was ecstatic. I wanted to hug Coach Lowe, but wisely thought the better of it. I was certain he was rewarding me for my mere presence at the tryout, and for the fact that I hadn’t sucked quite as badly as he’d assumed I would. I had no expectation that I’d similarly made the second and final cut. And I didn’t. But Coach Lowe had given me a moment of athletic triumph I knew I’d always remember and cherish.

And I have. Years later, having lost the teenage fat and taken up running as a weight-maintenance pursuit, I finished a five-mile race at a pace of slightly under seven minutes per mile—Olympian by my standards. It was a hard-earned effort, as I pretty nearly blacked out from exhaustion at the finish line. I knew at that moment I’d achieved something I’d likely never repeat. And I never did. Still, that athletic memory remains only my second fondest, after the moment I didn't read my name on a sheet of notebook paper in the Kiser Junior High School gymnasium.

I’d long forgotten Coach Lowe’s first name when a friend forwarded me his obituary a couple of weeks ago. David. David Allen Lowe. He’d died of kidney cancer at age 77 at a retirement home in Greensboro. Everything I read reinforced my memories and feelings about him. The very first sentence noted that he was “better known as Coach Lowe.” He’d been a coach and teacher at Kiser and Grimsley for 30 years. He’d continued to coach baseball for ”various traveling teams” in retirement, and had tutored children at a Baptist Church. He’d evidently never married—certainly no proof that his sex ed students were right, but not a refutation, either. The accompanying photograph showed exactly the Coach Lowe I knew—a young-ish man with little hair, sad eyes and a tentative smile.

There weren’t many comments on the funeral home’s “guest book” page, but two of my favorites were, “You touched a lot of lives and really made a difference in this world” and “There will be some home runs hit for Dave today.” I never came close to hitting a home run for him, but he did touch my life in a way that, in retrospect, I wish I’d have told him. The best I could do was post this remembrance in the guest book:

“The proudest moment of my sports “career” was making the first cut when trying out for the Kiser baseball team in the ninth grade. I was born without a right hand and was pudgy and slow, to boot, in those days, but Coach Lowe appreciated my hustle, spirit and a few long fouls I somehow managed to hit. He was a wonderful coach and a fine man. I’ll always remember him fondly.”

One other guest book signer wrote, “Our loss is Heaven’s gain.” If there is an afterlife, I hope it’s not all angel wings and halos. Maybe eternity needs sports leagues to fill the time, and maybe everybody gets rewarded for having made the heavenly cut and having hopped a few clouds to get to the ball field. If so, I know just the guy to coach a baseball team.

 

Nemesis

I met him in Savannah in 1990 or maybe 1991. He was a friend of my friend Jane, and I remember the three of us standing on a road in Daffin Park, near the minor league baseball stadium, one mild winter day, making small talk.

I instantly disliked him.

I was in my early 30s at the time, and he was some years younger. Six, it turns out, though I didn’t know that at the time. He seemed like an odd pairing with Jane, who was something of a hippie chick several years my senior. Jane wrote a freewheeling column about local people and places and curiosities for the newspaper that was my employer at the time. She was a bit of a celebrity. A big fish in a small pond in those pre-Midnight in the Garden of Eden days, when Savannah was a faded backwater that hadn’t gentrified and become a go-to tourist destination in the way that Charleston, just up the coast in South Carolina, had. Jane, a transplanted Jew and open-secret lesbian from Michigan who’d been an itinerant everything in way stations ranging from Chicago to Arkansas to Key West before opting to give journalism in the Old South a try, was a breath of fresh air, and she was locally beloved for that. In a town whose historic currency was gentility, she was messy, visually and psychically.

But this guy, her friend, seemed to me her antithesis, except in one way. He did activate my gaydar. Not that there’s anything at all wrong with being gay, but I’m mentioning that for a reason that I’ll share later. Otherwise, though, he struck me as the embodiment of entitlement. He was a Savannah native who’d attended private school. He was a preppy dresser. To my ears, he spoke with a practiced worldliness that suggested he was bored to be in my presence. I can’t remember if he was living in Savannah at the time or just visiting, whether he was in school or working. But he was a big talker. He’d traveled to places I’d never been, and clearly saw himself as a change-maker. He exuded a self-importance that fairly screamed, “One day you’ll remember you stood close enough to me to touch the hem of my garment, but you’ll be lucky if I remember you at all.”

I lived in Savannah for only three years, and I lost track of him. But then he popped back into my life at, of all places, a big DC party thrown in early 1993 to celebrate my recent marriage.  Lynn and I had met through Ken Johnson and Jo Joyce, a married couple who lived on Capitol Hill at the time. I’d moved to DC the preceding November, and Lynn and I had wed at a bed and breakfast in northern Virginia with only the innkeeper—a state-sanctioned celebrant—as a witness. Because we’d had no public wedding or reception, Ken and Jo opened their charming row house one Saturday evening to a hand-picked gathering of our friends. We hired a professional photographer to take photos. Ken and Jo laid out a beautiful spread. It was a magical night.

Mostly.

Except that, when I leaf through the photo album from that night, the guy from Savannah is in one of the shots. If you’re guessing I hadn’t invited him, you are correct. Someone I had invited—a woman I’d dated briefly in Savannah, who by then was living in Washington—had taken it upon herself to bring the guy from Savannah as her date for the evening. This despite the fact that the invitation had been clear—no kids, no dates, no significant others or anybody whose name didn’t appear on the envelope. I guess I’d known that my former date and the Savannah guy were friends, but I hadn’t known that he, too, had moved to DC, nor that she would be so rude as to assume the evening’s rules weren’t meant for her.

Anyway, the photo in our event album shows the two of them conversing with each other on a couch where they stationed themselves pretty much the entire evening. They presumably congratulated Lynn and me on our betrothal when they first walked through the door, but after that they might just as well have been sitting in an otherwise unpeopled coffee shop, except that all the refreshments were free.

While their presence hardly ruined the evening for us, our loathing of the Savannah guy remained very much on Lynn’s and my mind the only time we encountered him after that, at an art show at the National Building Museum. We happened to run into each other. I remember nothing of that brief conversation, but I’m quite certain he made no mention of having showed up uninvited at our party a few years earlier and then having ignored us and all the other guests while he and my one-time date tried their best to keep each other from being bored to death.

So, that might have been 1995 or 1996. Which means I haven’t seen the Savannah guy in the flesh in nearly 20 years. But he’s hardly disappeared from my life, as much I wish he would. Over the years since, he’s appeared at regular intervals when I’m reading book reviews or the bestsellers list. He’s been there when I open the Parade magazine in my Sunday newspaper. He shows up once a month to ruin my enjoyment of the New York Times’ Sunday Styles section, which I otherwise love for its lively lifestyles articles, evocative how-the-other-half-lives wedding announcements and witty “Social Qs” etiquette column.

Because his New York Times column, “This Life,” is monthly, in the weeks in between I get sort of used to not seeing his name, and I start hoping that maybe the “Old Gray Lady” finally has seen the error of her ways and has kicked his ass to the curb. But no such luck, ever. He’s a bestselling author, after all, with God knows how many Twitter followers and Facebook friends to hopefully attract youthful readers to an old-media dinosaur.

My most recent deflation came a couple of weeks ago, when I pulled out the Sunday Styles section to see, there on its front page, a column of his headlined, “The Stories That Bind Us.” As he typically does, he started off with a folksy, seemingly self-effacing anecdote from his own family life, then segued into a larger societal observation, citing the work of sociologists and researchers. This time his message was that the more children know about their family’s history, “the stronger their sense of control over their lives, the higher their self-esteem and the more successfully they believe their families function.”

Once again, he’d noted immediately that he’s a parent, and before the first paragraph was through he’d established that he’s both a martyr and an Everyman who’s been through what you, the reader, has been through, and who Feels Your Pain. Here’s the paragraph in its entirety:

"I hit the breaking point as a parent a few years ago. It was the week of my family’s extended gathering in August, and we were struggling with assorted crises. My parents were aging; my wife and I were straining under the chaos of young children; my sister was bracing to prepare her preteens for bullying, sex, and cyberstalking.”

Because I somehow can’t seem to just look away, I read the entire column, and I got even more agitated upon noting that he’d gotten the New York Times to pay him for recycled work. The piece had been adapted from his latest soon-to-be bestselling book, whose full, nauseatingly cutesy and pandering title is The Secrets of Happy Families: How to Improve Your Morning, Rethink Family Dinner, Fight Smart, Go Out and Play, and Much More.

I disgustedly threw down the newspaper and growled out his name, in much the same manner that Jerry Seinfeld once greeted his TV nemesis. But whereas the sitcom king spit out the word “Newman!” the six letters that left my mouth enunciated “Feiler!”

You might not know that name, but chances are you know his work. As his Web site boasts, immodestly but not—it pains me to admit—inaccurately—“Bruce Feiler is one of America’s most popular voices on family, faith and survival.” The bio continues,  “He is the author of five consecutive New York Times bestsellers, including Walking the Bible and The Council of Dads.” The former “describes his perilous, 10,000-mile journey retracing the Five Books of Moses through the desert” and is one reason why he’s “one of the nation’s preeminent thinkers, writers and speakers about the role of religion in contemporary life.” The latter book, meanwhile, is “an international sensation” that “describes how, faced with one of life’s great challenges, he asked six friends to form a support group for his young daughters.”

The “great challenge” he faced in 2008, and ultimately beat, was cancer. His daughters are identical twins, born in 2005, who are named Eden and Tybee. Yes, pretentiously like the First Woman, and oh-so-preciously like the beloved island and beach area near Savannah. And of course Feiler, his wife and the twins live in trendy Brooklyn, where they no doubt count organic food shopping, rummaging through funky boutiques and playing hacky-sack with mimes and poets among their secrets of happy family life. (What? You think I’m editorializing?)

OK, let me pause here and get my caveats out of the way. I’ve already mentioned that I haven’t seen the guy in nearly 20 years. I don’t claim to truly know him. He’s undoubtedly worked hard for his success, and his books may, for all I know, be well-written and even insightful. (Full disclosure: I did read his very first published book, a chronicle of his year teaching English in Japan titled Learning to Bow, and was chagrined to find his prose to be rather skilled.) I’m even willing to concede that it’s possible Feiler didn’t fake cancer and pay off a bunch of doctors just so he could write a tear-jerking book about how he asked a half-dozen guys to help raise his daughters in the event of his cruelly premature death.

Anyway, as should be evident at this point, more than 1,500 words into this post, I’ve spent way too much time over the years thinking about and stewing over a guy who might not even be able to identify me in a lineup except for my memorable one-hand trait. More than once, I’ve asked myself why this is. Is it sour grapes, because he’s a best-selling author and international Name, while I’m a slothful once-a-month blogger who has only a handful of readers? Is it like the title of that Morrissey Song, “We Hate It When Our Friends Become Successful”—never mind that he and I never were friends? I honestly don’t think so, because I have a good life, I don’t crave the limelight, and at any rate, I really am lazy and would hate to feel compelled to work hard to produce books. Also, while I have this Holden Caulfield-like urge to pronounce Bruce Feiler a big phony, I don’t dispute the likelihood that his books have been meaningful to his readers. While, yes, I do passively begrudge him his success, I don’t actively do so.

What is it, then? Do I envy his dumb toothy grin, the extremely odd consistency of his hair, the drooling brats hanging off his arms in those treacly photographs? No, no and no.

Am I jealous of his world travels? OK, maybe a little bit. But, spending all that time in the scorching Middle East, checking out biblical shit? No thanks. Plus, with Lynn being such a homebody, I’d end up traveling alone a lot of time, and I’d greatly miss the woman I married for love rather than (maybe) for cover.

Really, it all comes down to the fact that I just don’t like the guy. Have I perchance made that clear? And I hate the fact that he nevertheless was at my post-wedding celebration, and that I can’t pick up a newspaper or magazine without regularly being reminded of his outsized existence in the world. It’s as if he’s constantly baiting me, somehow. How will he tweak me next? Maybe he’ll start a syndicated column that the Washington Post will pick up, forcing me to read his stupid name in my local paper. Perhaps one of his daughters will grow up to, by some twist of fate, become my boss, and will somehow intuit my distaste for her dad, and will retaliate by making my working life hell.

Or maybe next time he'll allegedly overcome malaria, or a flesh-eating virus, with another bestselling epilogue to the story. I can envision my face reddening as I read the sales figures, and I can hear a single, loathsome word escape my mouth: “Feiler!”

   

I Can Pee For Miles

I owe my ability to urinate in public restrooms to The Who.

It’s true. When I was much younger, two of my least favorite things about attending arena-rock concerts were the assumption that I must have joints to share because I had long hair, and the presumption that I could just pee and get out of the way with a long line of guys waiting for my spot at the urinal.

The joint thing mostly ended when I finally cut my shoulder-length locks sometime during college, therefore no longer visually misrepresenting myself as a guy who even knew how to inhale, let alone as the kind of pharmaceutical sophisticate who recognized the street slang for all manner of other illegal narcotics.

Then, on July 13, 1980, 10 days past my 22nd birthday, I was standing in a long line outside the Greensboro (NC) Coliseum, mostly psyched to be seeing my favorite rock band for the second time. (Though The Who's manically brilliant drummer, Keith Moon, had gotten his seeming death wish by overdose two years earlier, and had been replaced by Kenney Jones.) But I also was feeling more than a little nervous about the bathroom situation, given my serious case of Shy Bladder Syndrome.

I’d devised various strategies over the years to answer nature’s call, in such situations, somewhere other than in my jeans. Sometimes I’d simply seek the privacy of a stall. Other times I limited my beer intake, hoping I might avoid altogether the need to go. (That never worked, because then and now, I likely could shun all beverages for 24 hours and still need to drain at least hourly.) Like that old joke about voting in Chicago, I tried going early and often, while the concert or sports-event crowd still was arriving. (Front-loading,—or, rather, front unloading—I discovered, had limited value. And sometimes, as during The Who’s 1976 American tour, when warm-up act Toots & the Maytals was getting booed off the stage in those not-ready-for-reggae times, the bathrooms could get pretty packed even after the music had started.)

Youth is fraught with enough frustrations—untamable acne, unattainable women, etc—without the ultimate, ridiculous frustration of simultaneously needing to pee like a racehorse and being reined in by the psychological pressure of all the guys behind you awaiting your place at the porcelain. I would try closing my eyes and envisioning myself alone—not that easy a task amongst shouts of “Daltrey’s a god!” and “Puke somewhere else, asshole!” I felt as if all eyes were on me as I lingered there, even though the guys with whom I’d been waiting in line already had conducted their business at one of the other urinals and moved on.

In time, I usually could break through the dam, if not always completely empty the reservoir. Sometimes, though, I’d have to zip up and move over to the line for the stalls—where privacy was assured, but often at the cost of unspeakable sights and smells.

All that was to change, however, on that fateful July night. Eight months earlier, 11 Who fans had died of “compressive asphyxia” in Cincinnati—trampled to death in a mad rush for the doors. Many venues—including the scene of the tragedy, Riverfront Stadium—abandoned unassigned seating after that. I can’t remember if I had an assigned seat for the 1980 Who show in Greensboro, or, if not, why thousands of us had elected to stand on line outside the doors. Regardless—whether in tribute to this new round of dead kids in O-hi-o, or because assigned seating had removed any incentive to storm the gates, or simply because “Greensboring,” as we young wits used to call it, never was big on drama—the crowd was orderly and patient.

God knows what was on my mind as I waited to get into the building. I’d started my first job out of college, as Davidson County reporter for the High Point Enterprise, only a couple of months before, so I likely was wondering how soon people would realize I was an idiot and I would be fired. Maybe I was thinking about how much I disliked both the clueless Ronald Reagan and the ineffectual yet strangely haughty President Carter, and whether I might rather go third-party with John Anderson in the November balloting. But most likely, as I stood there I was hoping the band would sample liberally from Tommy and Quadrophenia, and I also was praying I wouldn’t need to pee anytime soon, an hour or more before the doors were to open.

At some point, though, I was roused from my internal monologue by the whoops and hollers of my queue-mates, who were tapping each other on the shoulder and pointing to three guys who were—no, were they really?—urinating in near-synchronous yellow arcs against the venue we were about to enter.

Granted, I’d lived a pretty sheltered life to that point, but I’d never seen anything like this. I honestly don’t remember what the Tinkling Trio looked like—whether they were short or tall, shaggy or trim, T-shirted or tank-topped—but what I do starkly, searingly recall, to this day, is how much they cared what anyone thought about their performance, which was not one iota of a damn. They had to go, so they went. Period. If that meant whipping their johnsons out in front of hundreds of strangers of both sexes, defacing municipal property, and risking a misdemeanor if spotted by law enforcement, so be it. Relief was its own reward.

As it happened, there were no repercussions. Except, that is, for the game-changing impact on me. Ever since that day, whenever I stand facing a urinal in a rock club or sports-stadium restroom, all I need do if I start to freeze is invoke the words “Who concert 1980”—sometimes I even say it aloud—and picture those three glorious, disgusting guys darkening the bricks outside the Greensboro Coliseum with their devil-may-care whiz. “If they could do that,” goes my internal mantra, “I can do this.” There have been very few times over the years when that hasn’t worked. (At such times, it’s back to the stalls.)

So, all right, I really owe my ability to pee in public restrooms to those three anonymous young men who never will know what their appallingly crude display meant to me. Still, neither they nor I would’ve been at the Greensboro Coliseum in the first place on that summer day 33 years ago had it not been for The Who. A band that, it should be noted, had selected as the cover of its 1971 LP Who’s Next a photo of the quartet zipping their trousers after evidently having just marked their territory, so to speak, on a concrete monolith in the middle of a slag heap.

Interesting, too, is this bit of back story from a Google search on the making of that album:

“According to photographer Ethan Russell, most of the [band] members were unable to urinate, so rainwater was tipped from an empty film canister to achieve the desired effect.”

Is it any wonder why I’ve always felt such an affinity for that band?

Him Again

Check out the Wikipedia page for “Eric Ries” and here, in part, is what you’ll read:

“Ries is widely recognized as a ‘Silicon Valley guru,’ and his blog posts, entrepreneurial advice, and books are frequently featured in world news publications such as Reuters, CNBC, MSNBC, The Wall Street Journal, TechCrunch, The New York Times, Inc magazine, Forbes, and Wired. He has also hosted several sold-out conferences, and advises the Lean Startup Machine workshop series, now in over 20 cities.”

If you think that doesn’t sound quite like the obscure, decidedly low-tech blogger whose words you’re reading right now—the guy who’s not once been featured in any “world news publications” and hasn’t even, in fact, gotten around to posting anything in this lonely space in nearly a month—well, kudos on the detective work, Sherlock.

The fact is, while I’m home sick from work today with a cold and am decidedly not taking advantage of this opportunity to tweet my nonexistent entrepreneurial insights or send texts to my nonexistent network of business contacts, the other Eric Ries likely is spending today lecturing to packed halls of rapt acolytes, preparing new bestsellers for publication and patching into conference calls from first class as he jets between major cities.  

Does the description “The Dynamic Doppelganger” ring a bell? Probably not, because even if you’re one of the handful (and I do mean handful) of faithful readers who’s been visiting this site since its inception a few years back, this Eric Ries’s writings clearly haven’t the resonance of the other one’s. But anyway, on September 10, 2010, in a post on this site headlined “The Dynamic Doppelganger,” I wrote about the other Eric Ries’s complete and utter domination of our Web presence. I’d appeared just once in the first 400 Google searches, at number 359, I wrote at the time—and that was for an article I’d written for an employer’s publication way back in 1999.

I shudder to think how far down in a Google search I’d finally appear now, and I’ve no frankly interest in finding out. Silicon Valley Eric Ries's star has only brightened in the nearly two and a half years since my post, while my obscurity has been quite steady. In fact, the younger Ries (born in 1979, according to Wikipedia) even invaded my physical territory not long ago, giving a talk at nearby George Mason University. And apparently he’s intensified his marketing efforts, too, because a couple of different work colleagues of my mine recently received unsolicited mass e-mails from him. In both of those cases, the recipient asked me if I knew that I share a name with a guy who couldn’t be much less like me. I responded by e-mailing them the link to my blog post, which I'd considered to be a minor masterpiece of self-effacing outrage.

Surely, I thought, the response would be, “Entrepreneurial Eric Ries may be rich and famous, but you’re hilarious!” They might also note, I smugly imagined, that I’m a better writer. And, should they be curious enough to watch one of my namesake’s many YouTube videos, they 'd perhaps even opine that I’m better-looking.

What happened, however, was exactly nothing. No response at all. No, “Great post!” Not even, “Ha!” What was I to draw from the silence? Was this an echo of the saying, “Those who can’t do, teach”—only, “Those who have no talent or drive, sadly snark about those who do”? Talk about deflating.

I’ve tried a couple of times to engage the other Eric Ries in dialogue. I found an e-mail address for him and sent him the “Dynamic Doppelganger” post. When I heard nothing, about a year later I tried again. While I don’t remember precisely what I wrote I either case, in my own mind I was so charming that he couldn’t help but respond—whether to thank me for a good chuckle or, more self-importantly, to offer me entrepreneurial tips for raising my Web profile. But I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised that he had better things to do. You don’t build a publishing and public-speaking empire, after all, by taking time out to engage every gnat that buzzes by your ear.

I’ll confess, anyway, that the only reason I wanted the other Eric Ries to respond was because I figured that I could readily fashion another blog post from his reply. It’d be easy to simply riff off of his reply. “Easy” being as important a word in my lexicon as “enterprising” no doubt is in his.

See, just because the other Eric Ries’s ubiquitousness gets under my skin doesn’t mean I don’t recognize that he has no doubt worked hard for his success, and that I lack not only his talents, but his interests and motivations, too. That’s why I’m sitting here snuffling and clearing my throat in my smelly pajamas at mid-day, while nevertheless rather enjoying my obscure little life, at the same time that the other Eric Ries is looking all put together and engaging appreciative audiences or sharing his insights on CNBC.

Well, let him go out and beat the world, I say. Right now there’s a couch that’s calling my name.