Bocce for Blood

"I have fought a good fight.  I have kept the faith."

—2 Timothy 4:7

as seen in a circle in a mosaic on 

the ceiling of the Cathedral Basilica of St. Louis

This book is not about bocce ball.  It is about a two-week trip that commemorated a two-week trip devoted to bocce ball.  There was a book about that first trip.  It was about bocce ball.  The second two-week trip was taken as its book tour.  However, there were no physical copies of the book by the time the tour started.  It was therefore not a book tour, in the traditional sense.

The first book functioned on the assumption that it could bypass plot, action, and conflict by recounting the scores of the dozen-odd games of bocce played.  Whether it functioned, I guess, is debatable.  Can a stream of encounters and diatribes be tied together by occasional columns of names and numbers?  A sports page gets away with it.

The second trip we did not keep score nor play bocce with the same purpose and regularity.  The last game played, at courts in a park just north of downtown Arcata, devolved into a two-set, 16-ball bocce-like improvised invention that veritably symbolized the devolution of the initial premise of Bocce Balling on the West Coast.  From Arcata, this year, I was to finish the journey north myself, and I was unable to find any way of going north.  All Greyhounds went back south to San Francisco.  Rideshares to Portland were imperceivable (though, having left a request at a co-op, I did receive a phone call a month later saying "I got your ride to Portland").  And the events of my life have not convinced me that hitch-hiking is a viable option, even though I know that is partly the role that writers are supposed to play, especially those who don't have, or aren't in the process of getting, an MFA.  My apologies.  So I found a cheap plane ticket to Seattle from SFO, drove back down to San Francisco with the friends I drove up with, and left my bocce set with them and flew to Seattle.   The second half of the trip, therefore, had nothing to do with bocce, it had nothing to do with the great highways of the west, it had nothing to do with deviating from those highways when the mood struck, it had nothing to do with pulling into the next town to find an old friend or a fabled bocce court, there was no camping, there was no epic camaraderie.  I flew on a plane by myself to visit my brother in Seattle like a normal person—not that there's anything unspectacular about that in its own right.  It was just an adventure in a different vein. 

The first trip my friend and I took the last leg of the trip alone, I drove his truck a few days early to get back to a job I was offered.  This was a symbol of sorts for the beginning of my personal exodus into the writing of the book—much began cooperatively between the two of us in its formulation, but ultimately it was I who was to complete the journey.  This time that was the general motif of the book-inspiring journey; that is, the journey that was to inspire the second book was wrapped up in the first book, its incompleteness and its suggestion of another.  Thoughts of writing, solipsistic inner dialogue, traveling alone, thinking about thinking, the process of leaving the world and entering my head became the subject matter of what was to be the subject matter, that is the failed book tour turned into a productive writing session, the action was analysis without the aid of even a tally sheet to hint at the non-cerebral.  Bocce fades away and all that is left is me, alone, trying to get something across that even before I express it is muddled, like a court on a rainy day full of puddles, passed over in favor of the shelter of coherence.

I apologize if none of that made any sense.  I was riffing for most of that paragraph, flying high this Saturday night on a Heath milkshake from the Steak & Shake drive-thru.

In describing what this book is about—other than saying that it is not about bocce—I should just say it is about trying to be a writer.  It is about the specific emotions involved in deciding not to pursue a reasonable career, the doubt, the shame, the self-pity, the feelings of irrationality, smallness—realizing that a writer is someone who has a post-graduate degree, failing to get into graduate school and deciding to be a writer anyway, knowing that a writer is someone who has a post-graduate degree.  It is about wanting to express a message so idiosyncratically that it could only be for me, and even if anybody else could be feasibly interested in it, he is awash already in torrents of media—free, brilliant, accessible, difficult, colorful, well-packaged media, more than he could want, literally more than he could consume.  This is impossible, in other words.  The odds are indescribable.  The path is no different than it has always been, the alphabet still has 26 letters, and only those willing to sacrifice every ounce of their being stand a chance.  This time it's for keeps—this time it's for blood.