"He probado con el yoga, Hare Krishna y el budú/he probado con un brujo, un adivino y un gurú/pero me sigo poniendo...viejo/me lo dice cada día el espejo" Ricardo Arjona, "¿Te acuerdas de mí?"
"We claim spiritual progress rather than spiritual perfection." The Oxford Group
"Let not perfection be the enemy of the good." Origin unknown
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As I write this sentence, I sit on my back porch, sipping coffee and enjoying a breakfast of bite size peanut nut rolls. The birds are singing, the dew is still in the grass, the sun is still well below the hedge; my spirituality playlist softly emanates from our Bluetooth speaker. When I'm not working, I really like to ease into my day. It is 7:55 AM Iowa time. I was born about 41 years and 3 hours ago, in a hospital in Sigourney, Iowa, after 27 hours of labor (my mother never missed a chance to remind me of the toil she went through to put me in this world). I guess I was born, literally, never being in a hurry.
I've eased into a lot of mornings over the last 10 weeks or so. I have not worked, for money anyway, since June 5, and to be honest I haven't worked that much, period, unless you count ferrying my kids around to all their activities and some occasional housework. With no major home projects beckoning, it has been incredibly easy to let one day blend into another, losing myself in the World Cup and Strat-O-Matic baseball and major league baseball and my kids' baseball and the new-to-me albums I purchase every week or two and the six or seven books I've read and the sounds of the birds and the taste of hot coffee in the morning and the crickets at dusk and reruns of "The Office" with chips and cottage cheese before bed.
For a variety of reasons, personal and professional, by June 5 I was mentally, physically and spiritually exhausted; I couldn't even wait for the next day to start my summer. My buddy picked me up from work and off we went, south, through Missouri and into Arkansas, spending the night just south of Little Rock. Road trip. The next morning we continued, cutting through the northwest corner of Louisiana before entering Texas and driving south to Houston. We arrived at Minute Maid Park just in time for the ballgame between the Astros and Mariners. Afterwards, we navigated our way south of the city towards Galveston.
There is a brief stretch--maybe five or ten miles--when you are completely out of metropolitan Houston and not yet to Galveston. There was very little moon that night and we hurtled through the almost complete darkness on Interstate 45 and at some point went over the causeway onto the island past midnight. Then all of a sudden we were back in civilization; it seemed like a Texan version of Muscatine, Iowa. After some fits and starts, we found the strip of hotels and checked into the Commodore on the Beach. Just after 1:00 AM we entered our room.
We had a balcony that overlooked the road and the beach on the other side of it. It was hard to see the water but you could smell it, hear it, feel it. I hadn't seen the ocean since 2015 and although I was completely exhausted and hungry, I couldn't wait anymore. I walked out onto the beach in just a pair of shorts. I ran into three kids smoking marijuana and asked them if they were gonna be around for a little while longer. They said, "Yeah, man." I said, "I'm going into that water and I can't see a goddamned thing. If I'm not back in ten minutes call the Coast Guard." "Sure thing," they said.
I stripped down to my boxers and tentatively made my way into the water. I couldn't hardly see it but it was warm and salty and life-giving. When I was in up to my knees the breakers were hitting me up above my waist and moving me and I knew I couldn't go much further safely. I dropped to my knees and plugged my nose and every time I felt a breaker coming in I jumped into it. The warm, salty water would lift me for just a second and then drop me back in the sand. I could've stayed all night but I didn't want to worry my buddy or my pot-smoking lifeguards. I slowly trudged back to the beach and put on my shorts and glasses.
"Was it everything you thought it'd be?" they asked me. "Absolutely," I said. "I feel renewed."
I planned on getting up about six and being in the ocean for sunrise. But I was so damn tired I decided to sleep in. Too bad, though. It would have been perfect.
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It is now 8:55 and the sun is nearing the top of the hedge. The kids are awake and taking out the neighbors' dog. Coffee's still hot.
In the West Liberty Middle School parking lot on June 5, I deleted the News app from my phone. A few days later, I did the same with Facebook (amazingly, the world continues to spin, even though I haven't been on Facebook; who would've thunk it?). Looking for something different, I reached back into the recesses of my memory and remembered everyone making a fuss, a few years back, about a podcast. After some internet research, I found it: "Serial".
"Serial" tracks a reporter's exploration of a murder in 1999 Baltimore of a high school girl named Hae Min Lee. Her ex-boyfriend, Adnan Saed, was convicted of the crime a year later. On nights that the boys weren't playing ball and we weren't doing anything else, I would sit down in the garage and mess around with my Strat and Soccer Blast cards and listen to "Serial". I was strict about only allowing myself one episode every couple days, but by the end of the second episode I could see what the fuss had been all about. It sucked me in and didn't let go. When I reached the end of Serial I threw off all the controls I had self-imposed and buzzed through the podcasts "Undisclosed" and "Serial Dynasty".
I also took to the internet, especially in the evenings when Sonia was watching TV. While I thought "Serial" had been done in a relatively balanced way, "Undisclosed" and "Serial Dynasty" were unabashedly pro-Adnan. My plan was, I would go on the internet and get some facts from the other side of the aisle, so to speak, some cold hard facts, void of spin and vitriol, and then understand the case better.
That's what I went in search of. What I found was Reddit.
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9:22. The sun finally peeked over our hedge and I had to move inside because it was too bright to see my screen.
It wasn't until I got on Reddit that I fully realized what a pop culture phenomenon "Serial" had been. Frankly, I'm not sure how I missed it in 2014. I wasn't that freaking busy. So many people from so many different walks of life from all around the world were on Reddit commenting on the murder of Hae Min Lee and its aftermath. I consider myself to be an obsessive person in certain areas, but I was no match for some of these people. There were carefully constructed timelines, Google maps shaded to show key areas, pictures of the relevant parts of Baltimore--not police pictures or Google images, mind you, but pictures taken by the Redditers themselves on their Serial Pilgrimage.
I ended up on Reddit because although there are several "pro-Adnan" websites, there are no "anti-Adnan" websites. The closest thing I could find to "neutral" information was on Reddit. If you don't know what Reddit is, count yourself lucky. Deleting Facebook and then finding Reddit was like quitting smoking and picking up heroin. But every time you query an aspect of the case--any aspect--on Google, pretty much all you get are Reddit threads--they call them subreddits or "subs".
On Reddit there are "guilters" and "innocenters". This is something that people take very seriously. These are people that believe they have perfect knowledge of the case. If you believe that Adnan committed the crime, "innocenter" is your biggest verbal weapon, and vice versa. And there are a lot of people like me, not convinced completely one way or the other and looking for new information, documents, answers to specific questions (example: "Did they find Hae's car keys?"), and, to be clear, you can find this stuff, but to get to it, you have to scroll through pages of verbal barbing ("Guilters are so racist", "Innocenters should just marry Adnan and get on with it") in order to do so (answer: no).
I would be classified, I suppose, as an Innocenter. Not because I actually am sure Adnan is innocent (no one can be except him and, if he is, the real killer)(although I sometimes sway this way), but because I believe the State of Maryland botched the trial and Adnan deserves a new one. So much evidence has come out since "Serial" that it's more or less--no, not more or less, completely--clear that the facts as presented in the 2000 trial of Adnan Saed were not accurate. If the jury made their verdict based on inaccurate facts, their verdict has to be thrown out.
To be 100% sure of Adnan's innocence is probably somewhat naive. To be 100% confident of his guilt, on the other hand, requires a cynicism bordering on hostility, an absolute refusal to deal with facts head on, and the gullibility to believe blindly in a serial liar.
It's a good thing that these attitudes exist only on Reddit, and only in regards to this case.
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It's getting late into the morning now and I need to get lunch ready for myself and the boys. Then I think I'll take a nap. I got up early this morning because I decided I wanted to experience the entire day, sunrise to sunset, of my birthday. Just celebrate being alive. It was the perfect plan--we would watch the sun actually break above the ground on the horizon. The sun rose at 6:11 this morning in Iowa City so Sonia and I left the house at about 5:45 in search of the perfect place to watch the sun rise. But--and don't get me wrong, this is a good problem to have--we couldn't find a place where the view to the east wasn't blocked by trees, and Sonia had to be at work at 7:00. No perfect place.
So I just decided to watch the sun rise above the trees from our deck on the east side of our house. I laid down in my chair but quickly realized that from that angle it was literally going to be 3 or 4 hours before the sun poked over the hedge. And then my eyes wandered up. I had a good, high vantage point--it just wasn't one you'd normally think of.
I had to to wait until Sonia left for work because there was no way she was going to let me execute my plan. When she did, I brought the stepladder up from the garage and set it up on the deck. I put some coffee in a to-go mug and put a lid on it, and then climbed up the ladder and onto my roof. I laid down near the peak. I took out my cell phone and put on my "Spirituality" playlist. I gazed east and let my mind wander and sipped coffee. I listened to Ricardo Arjona, The Eagles, Soraya, Toad the Wet Sprocket, Shakira, Kacey Musgraves. I thanked my higher power for another year of life.
At first I couldn't see the sun, but just this side of 7:00 it began to come through where the foliage wasn't as thick. I watched it slowly climb and the top part of it break the peaks of the trees. Soon I had to avert my eyes. Ten minutes later the star had completely broken the tree line. As God said the first six days, it was "good". Maybe even "very good", like He said on the seventh day.
Some very wise folks reminded me a few years ago that perfection doesn't exist in human affairs. I'll take "very good" every day of the week and twice on Sunday. It's certainly all I can ask for my birthday.
--Mark
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