Paddle Your Own Canoe: One Man's Fundamentals for Delicious Living (8 page)

Many years later, in 2006, I did a show on Comedy Central called
American Body Shop
. Pete Hulne, who is a great, underappreciated comedy actor, and I had both brooked a very similar break-dance experience in the eighties, and late in the shooting of our series, we realized it. I was astonished: “Wait, hold the phone. You break?”

So we convinced the team to write an episode in which we have a rather middle-aged break-dance competition. We were in our midthirties and quickly learned that this dancing style was very much a young man’s game. I could pop and lock, but I could no longer get on the floor and execute the spinning moves. I may have lost a step, but I also discovered that one can never truly lose the funk.

Work Hard, Work Dirty

Choose your favorite spade and dig a small, deep hole, located deep in the forest or a desolate area of the desert or tundra. Bury your cell phone and then find a hobby.

Actually,
hobby
is not a weighty enough word to represent what I’m trying to get across. Let’s use
discipline
instead. If you engage in a discipline or do something with your hands instead of kill time on your phone device, then you have something to show for your time when you’re done. Cook, play music, sew, carve. Shit, BeDazzle. Maybe not BeDazzle.

The arithmetic is quite simple. Instead of playing Draw Something, fucking draw something! Take the cleverness you apply to Words with Friends and utilize it to make some kick-ass corn bread. Corn Bread with Friends—try that game.

I’m here to tell you that we’ve been duped on a societal level. My favorite writer, Wendell Berry, writes on this topic with great eloquence. He posits that we’ve been sold a bill of goods, claiming that work is bad, that sweating and working, especially if soil or sawdust is involved, are beneath us. Our population, especially the urbanites, has largely forgotten that working at a labor that one loves is actually a privilege. To be on the receiving end of this gift of a life complete with human body, mind, and heart is to be indescribably blessed indeed, but all of our conveniences and comforts and amazing technological advances have made us completely soft and fully pusillanimous! If a person can simply discern what it is that he/she loves to do with an eight-to-ten-hour day, then a satisfying workday is easily attained.

When asked for advice at colleges, I always give this as my main tenet: “Figure out what you love to do, then figure out how to get paid to do it.”

I have lived a somewhat double life between my beginnings in small-town Illinois and storefront Chicago theater and the much more “fashionable” urban intelligentsia in Los Angeles and New York. But in all of these communities, I have known a sizable percentage of people to spend a great deal of their leisure time in front of a screen, be it television, computer, video game, or smartphone. I have also known a somewhat smaller percentage of people who make things in their spare time: artists and craftspeople. Some are full-time fabricators of, say, jewelry, or songs, and some work in an office all day, then come home to paint turtles in calming blue and green seascapes.

I’m not a scholar, and I’m not about to compile an impressive set of statistics for you. I’m just going to proffer this opinion: The people making stuff are generally less wealthy but much happier overall. Less bored, less bitter, more satisfied. The trick is to flush out decades of conditioning by advertisers. We have been taught to watch the media channels and thereby determine how to spend our time and money. Wondering which car to buy? Take a walk and seventeen billboards will tell you which model you prefer. “Do you like pretty women with orblike breasts and a mouthful of pearly white Chiclets? Then, buddy, you’re going to love our SUVs, jeans, cheeseburgers, hair dyes, English muffins, and insurance policies!”

The secret is to turn a blind eye to all of that information and look to the billboard in your head. What does it tell you? Mine says, “Hey, Jasper. You should build a kayak and then paddle it in the ocean.”

I have come to recognize the extreme value of this message. If I will adhere to its instruction and commit to some months of boatbuilding, I will be feeding my soul a hearty meal of satisfying hand-skill development and execution, appreciation for centuries of cumulative design, and finally, countless hours of reverie in nature, quietly paddling along the coast and enjoying the sea lions, dolphins, caves, and quiet. Not only that, but as soon as I immerse myself in a project, my focus makes it impossible for me to give any attention to the channels of popular culture. Diaper commercials are still accosting the population, but I can neither see nor hear them.

Right now in my community of friends, I count a sculptor who makes human-shaped mountain ranges and then clads them in tiny facets of different-colored linoleum. Another winning gal creates taxidermy animals skinned in camouflage fabric. Another woodworker buddy just made a stool for a modern witch with a hole in the middle of it. Beneath the hole hangs a cauldron in which herbs are stewed and the medicinal steam rises to engender health in the female sitter’s reproductive neighborhood. I know a brilliant guy who moved into a decrepit old pipe foundry and learned to smelt and pour enormous bronze statues. My buddy Corn Mo writes gorgeous rock operas and shoots little stop-motion movies. Another pal does needlepoint samplers with a quaint picture of a chick emerging from its cracked eggshell, with the words
Fuck Off
embroidered in a lovely period font worthy of Laura Ingalls Wilder.

Many of these pastimes could be considered strange by the general public, but nobody’s asking the public. NOBODY’S ASKING THE PEOPLE WHAT THEY THINK. That’s such a nefarious social paranoia—“What will people say?” WHO FUCKING CARES? We engage in these activities because it’s what we feel like doing. It’s our reaction to modern society, to our time and place, and it is extremely healthy to our dispositions. It’s remunerative nonconformity. We are all still aware of television and film and music—in fact we love them—but as an occasional treat between projects rather than how we fill our spare time.

Also, if you love music, there is no better way to indulge in it than by playing it at a healthy volume while you shave a canoe paddle or oil a slab dining table. “Hey, hey, my, my,” reverberates in my marrow because of the hours I’ve spent working hard with that album as enervating score. (Neil Young,
Rust Never Sleeps
, of course.)

Another way to address this idea is to fill one’s life with the opportunity for seeing solid, real-life results as opposed to virtual. In my opinion, all of the “living” that people do online, in social networks, elaborate multiplayer games, blogs, and so on, is often merely the facsimile of real life, and so it is ultimately unsatisfying. I’m not speaking in absolutes here, for there is clearly a lot of value in social networking. Even my canoe work is enhanced by the ability to commune with other boatbuilders in online forums, asking and answering questions in areas of specialty that would have been inscrutable a mere ten years ago. What I’m addressing more specifically with this writing is how easy it is for we funny monkeys to waste our precious time on these convenient gadgets. I have always liked to carry a book with me, so during a lull at the dentist’s office, or the bus stop, I have something to do that I have chosen. I know that if I’m stuck with only my smartphone, I’ll simply browse the unlimited possibilities made available, with no perceivable result beyond providing a diversion for my attention. That’s the rub. I would rather get something done.

It’s important to me, when I finish any pursuit, to be able to look back at my work and see a tangible result. Obviously, when I complete a canoe paddle, I can hold it and feel it and use it and thereby know the value of the time I spent making it. When I write a song and perform it for an audience and they (hopefully) laugh, I can see and feel the result of my efforts. Beyond that, I feel like the relationships I maintain in my life are so much more satisfying when I am interfacing with my friends and loved ones face-to-face, rather than by text or even telephone.

Social occasions with family and friends are golden treasures, as are leisure-time activities, which for me include fishing, hiking, going to a film or play or art show, playing cards with Megan or my family, or reading. Treating yourself to such desserts is an important part of balancing the meal of your time, so that the entrée of your vocation, your calling, gets its due in a healthy proportion.

In my Minooka, Illinois, family; my theater companies (Chicago’s Defiant and LA’s Evidence Room); my Offerman Woodshop; and now in the cast and crew of my current job at
Parks and Recreation
, there has always been a strong foundation of mutual love cultivated by the implicit understanding that we would all work hard together to achieve some communal goal, be it a fellowship of healthy households and children, a refreshingly original piece of theater, or a quality television program rife with laughter, heart, and intelligence. I’ll tell you how I pick people to work with me, and I get this from my dad’s teaching of fundamentals. I just give a prospective apprentice a broom and tell them to sweep. The quality of the job they do tells me a great deal about them. Attention to detail, willingness to go the extra mile, pace, fastidiousness, or lack thereof. If you can, hire the gal or guy who moves the furniture and rugs to sweep beneath them. Their work speaks directly of their desire to contribute to the well-being of the community. They know how to do a job right.

There’s no denying that many of the opportunities that have come my way over the years came partially thanks to my willingness to work hard. It’s been said that luck is when opportunity meets with preparation, so I will always remember to thank my teachers and taskmasters for giving me the necessary preparation to get goddamn lucky, time and time again.

Carnalisthenics

A
s discussed earlier in this tome, I have nothing bad to say about organized religion in general. I think it’s a good idea to congregate once a week in order to remind ourselves of the rules of etiquette that we have established as a society over the years, rules like “Don’t kill one another” and “Don’t steal one another’s shit.” This is good. A wholesome practice.

The instance in which religious matters raise my ire is when they cross over out of the doors of the church and into my secular world. I was raised Catholic, and I flirted (and scored) with born-again Christianity as a teenager. I have learned and, yes, profited spiritually from a great deal of Christian doctrine in my life, and I still do. The exact same way in which I have profited from the knots I learned in Boy Scouts, tetherings that still serve me admirably to this day, in securing the implements of my life with the purpose of bearing an ample load.

However, church-wise, I wasn’t ever really what you would call a “believer,” and ever since I could think for myself, from around age thirteen or so, I’ve been what you would call an “agnostic,” which is a person who doesn’t have the temerity to claim knowledge of any specific godlike entity such as the “God” suggested in the Bible.

I like faith. I dig hope, everybody. I’m not an asshole, at least as much as I can help it. I love my neighbor as myself; I get it. Whatsoever I do to the least of my brethren, I do unto Jesus. You bet. Indiana Jones identified the crappy chalice as the vessel of Jesus, because that’s the cup of a lowly carpenter. The dogma of Western organized religion is not particularly tough to wrap one’s head around, and most of it has its heart in the right place.

So in conclusion, given the miles I’ve logged, I’m going to go ahead and suggest that you maintain a relationship with Jesus Christ . . . if it is getting you hot sex.

What could I possibly mean by this, you might wonder? Let me inform you. The reason I momentarily dabbled in born-again Christianity, exhibiting a most ardent love of the Savior, is simple. It’s because I was obsessed with this cheerleader at my high school, who was also a ballerina, who was also a born-again Christian. Hot, right? Wickedly hot.

We became acquainted in Advanced Trigonometry (yeah, I can do math, no big deal), when I was a sophomore. Lynette. She would come over at night and help me with my algorithms and we’d drink lemon-lime Slice and eat E.L. Fudge cookies. Yes, you are correct, that’s pretty goddamn cute. I was smitten. The only hitch was, one had to become “born again” to date her, which would have been insane. So I did not hesitate to do just that.

I went to the Joliet Christian Youth Center with Lynette and made friends with the other teenagers. I’d say the ratio of kids using Christianity as a cover for illicit activities to kids actually engaging in the sincere worship of our Savior was about three to one. There were drunks and stoners, dope pushers, and, of course, plenty of puberts like myself. A pubert is simply a teenager, usually male, experiencing puberty so virulently that he is hallucinating perverted sexual fantasies all the livelong day. Hence
pubert
.

We would gather in the “fun club” area to play pinball and shoot pool, indulging all the while in cookies and lemonade. Then at the appointed hour, we’d gather and sit in an audience in a small auditorium, usually thirty or forty strong, and listen to a “cool” adult (their nicknames let us know they were okay, like
Smudge
or
Harv
, and to be fair, they were actually pretty excellent) talk about some scripture, very much like a priest reading the gospel and then sermonizing.

Sometimes other kids would get up and “witness,” which entailed describing a scene in which they’d had the opportunity to “share the word” with some other lost children, perhaps at the McDonald’s or at the football game. “Hey, guys, can I talk to you about the fact that you’re going to
hell
?”

On occasion the performer would tear up and the auditorium would be profoundly moved by the recounting of the youngster’s attempt at shoving his/her religion down some poor stranger’s throat at the mall. Or sometimes the witnessing would just involve the description of a scene in which the supplicant was visitationed by the Lord in some way. You know, as in a miracle? Young Julie was sitting on a footbridge and the sunlight dappled the water in just such a way that she was momentarily blinded, when she suddenly heard a voice inside her head, telling her that she was okay and that Jesus’ love was really where it’s at.

Once a month or so, kids would be invited to come down to the front and be “saved.” This involved a lot of group histrionics, as each teenager gave his or herself over to the saving love of the Lamb of God after a lifetime of depravity and darkness. This “saving” is the moment when you are “born again,” washed clean in the cleansing love of Jesus Christ, etc. Most of us waited until some attention hound put on a big, dramatic show, and then we’d follow them to the front, where we could usually just answer the question “Do you accept the Lord Jesus as your personal Savior?!” with a “You bet your ever-lovin’ tits I do!” It was moblike behavior that is most commonly described as “cultish.”

* * *

S
o, I got saved and Lynette and I began to chastely date, and after four or five months of devout prayer, song, and fellowship, as you may have by now surmised, we began to fuck. To really get down low and rut like demonic beasts. I was fifteen, she was sixteen, and, by Jesus, we were engaging in fornication.

The first time was in my friend Ed’s canoe on the Aux Sable Creek in Grundy County. Ed was not present. We were naked in the dappled, golden sunlight. Yes we were. Were we hearing the planets grind slickly through their orbits? That is indeed what we heard. Was it awkward and clumsy as shit? You bet your ass it was. The canoe is traditionally a very easy boat to capsize, but I am proud to report that ours remained upright throughout all of our carnal calisthenics, or carnalisthenics, only to be dumped over by me after our mortal sin had been notched onto the Lord’s paddle, or I guess Satan’s paddle. Whichever one of those characters is paddling in the stern (is it any wonder that I have grown to become obsessed with building wooden canoes and luxuriously running my hands along their hulls?).

Our coupling continued with an intense regularity for months and years. Mm. Ahem. If any of you are still young enough to get involved in this kind of heated tryst, I cannot recommend it highly enough. The secret ingredients are sinful anticipation and Christian guilt. Every night she would come over after teaching dance to six-year-olds, sweaty in her leotard, and we would kneel on the living room floor, directly beneath my soundly sleeping parents’ bedroom. Because, again, being a born-again couple is the perfect cover for getting away with any iniquities you care to indulge in. (“Mom, Dad, Lynette and I are going to Bible camp for three weeks in Wisconsin.” “Okay, sounds good. Gosh, Ric, we sure did something right with this guy. Bible camp!” We would then go to camp, where we would participate in camp activities, like the Jesus log-roll, the Jesus potato-sack race, the Jesus hammer throw, then we’d go sixty-nine in the woods for two hours. Get saved. It’s genius.)

Every night, kneeling there on my mother’s carpet, face-to-face, we would pray for the strength to abstain from the juicy copulation we so cravenly craved, all the while drinking deep of each other’s musk and withstanding the trembling of our lascivious flesh. Our prayers were so sincere and devout that they often elicited tears (not to mention a rather unyielding boner). We would cry. We would pray. And then we would fuck. We would scrump and munch upon each other with ravenous, animal abandon. We did every unholy thing we could possibly think of to each other, on every inch of every piece of furniture.

Sorry, my two sisters, if you’re reading this, I know that’s where you liked to nap. No longer. That ottoman has been defiled. Granny’s afghan has been, in a word, copiously befouled. Let’s not forget that teenagers are a limber bunch, with exceptional constitutions. I shudder now to think of the endurance we would exhibit in these Grundy County rug sessions before finally petering out. And then we would cry again. We would pray for forgiveness and hope that we could resist each other tomorrow night. And then sometimes we’d go again. So, yes, I love me some Jesus Christ.

* * *

T
o say that I had gotten myself in deep could be considered a significant understatement. When the two of us finally went away to the University of Illinois, we learned that our chosen lifestyle did not exactly blend, especially for me, into the confederacy of hedonists and Freemasons with which I found myself surrounded. Arriving in the theater department as I had, with a born-again long-term girlfriend on my arm, I could hardly just denounce her and the Lord and hope to retain any sort of face with my newfound peers. So I began to slowly and painfully extract myself from the situation like an oak splinter coming ponderously free from deep in one’s palm.

Lynette did the same, to be honest. Minooka had been, among other things, incredibly insular for us, and arriving in the bustling metropolis of Champaign–Urbana was culture shock enough to jar us soundly away from each other. I got lucky (I get lucky quite a bit), for there was a senior in the theater department named Mary who also happened to be on the fence about her status as a Christian and who also happened to be cute as a button. Mary and I picked up the quadrille where Lynette and I had left it off, wrestling with the opposing forces of lust and religious ardor. Literally. She wouldn’t go all the way, but she would stand on the porch and sometimes leave a basket of baked goods on the mat, to make a figure of speech.

Our tryst was an appropriate stepping down from my full-on teenage circus, and I am grateful that Mary was there to ease my reentry into the world of reality. She ended up dumping me to run off and marry her preacher ex-boyfriend Todd. I hope she found happiness, because she was torn up about taking that plunge when she left. I know I certainly found it when I fully fell into the embrace of my theater school compatriots, but not before Lynette and I had one final chapter. We’ll save that for dessert.

Leviticus Can Blow Me

As I have asserted, much of the Bible holds excellent lessons in the pursuit of modesty and living as a straight shooter, but I would invite you all to investigate the WHOLE DOCUMENT. Leviticus, for example, is commonly referred to as “easily the most fucked-up book in the Old Testament.”

I believe it was none other than the Lord God Almighty who instructed us to “Love thy neighbor as thyself.” Wise words from the King of Kings. Unfortunately, he spake this phrase smack-dab in the middle of the book of Leviticus, and I think we can all agree by now that when it comes to writers of books of the Bible, the Leviticus scribes are about as nutty as a tree full of squirrels. For example, Leviticus is the book that prescribes all of the punishments for women made “unclean” by menstruation. That’s right. When a lady’s “flowers be upon her,” linens must be destroyed, chairs must be burned—you get the idea. We’re then told that these women can be “exonerated by bringing an offering of two turtles to the priest at the temple.” Some translations have it as two doves, which is also quite bizarre, but turtles? WTF? I think this is a perfect illustration of the integrity of the Bible in toto, specifically in regards to its applicability (or lack thereof) to modern issues.

Leviticus is also merely but one of the chapters in “the good book” that enlighten us to the fact that homosexuality is an “abomination” (New International Version). “If a man has sexual relations with a man as one does with a woman, both of them have done what is detestable. They are to be put to death; their blood will be on their own heads.” Leviticus 20:13. This passage tells us that our fellow human beings should be killed, basically, for engaging in an act of love. Um. Ridiculous and upsetting? No shit, and then some. “Put to death”? Really? Seems just a bit over-the-top, but at least people are finally starting to realize that. If two people want to love each other and build a life together, I say more power to them. Let’s encourage solid, loving households with open-minded policy, and perhaps we’ll foster a new era of tolerance in which we can turn our attention to actual issues that need our attention, like, I don’t know, killing/bullying the citizens of other nations to maintain control of their oil? What exactly was Jesus’ take on violent capitalism?

I also have some big ideas for changing the way we think about literary morals as they pertain to legislation. Rather than suffer another attempt by the religious right to base our legalese upon the Bible, I would vote that we found it squarely upon the writings of J. R. R. Tolkien. The citizens of Middle Earth had much more tolerant policies in their governing bodies. For example, Elrond was chosen to lead the elves at Rivendell not only despite his androgynous nature but most likely because of the magical leadership inherent in a well-appointed bisexual elf wizard. That’s the person you want picking shit out for your community. That’s the guy you want in charge. David Bowie or a Mormon? Not a difficult equation.

Was Elrond in a gay marriage? We don’t know, because it’s none of our goddamn business. Whatever the nature of his elvish lovemaking, it didn’t affect his ability to lead his community to prosperity and provide travelers with great directions. We should be encouraging love in the home place, because that makes for happier, stronger citizens. Supporting domestic solidity can only create more satisfied, invested patriots. No matter what flavor that love takes. I like blueberry myself.

Speaking of flavors, here’s the deal—the sexual orientation of a human being is just that. An orientation. It’s not like a faucet that can be turned on and off. It’s the plumbing itself. The plumbing exists, built into the structure of the house, and is not adjustable. Sure, a body can choose
how much
hot or cold water to express from the plumbing, but the nature of the water itself, hot or cold, sulfurous or redolent of iron, cannot be adjusted from the faucet.