Favorite Videos - November 4

New thing: I am going to start posting favorite videos occasionally. They may be goofy videos, enlightening and educational ones, or (most likely) great live performances from some of my favorite bands. Case in point, this is a live performance of one of my favorite songs by my favorite band at the Vines Center, located on the campus of my least favorite university - Liberty. Nonetheless, it is an amazing performance - as the song builds to its climax, right around the 6:00 mark, Jon Foreman starts belts out the following:

"Where I belong - beyond these hopes, beyond these fears, beyond these graves, beyond these wars, beyond Israel, beyond Palestine, beyond Libya, beyond Afghanistan, beyond Iraq, beyond the USA, beyond the USA - I still believe we could live forever. You and I we begin forever now, forever now. I still believe in us together. You and I we are here together now, together now."

Enjoy!

Thoughts From My First Rodeo

Saturday and Sunday I woke up at 5:30 and 6:30 AM respectively to drive to Huntersville, just outside of Charlotte, to coach a swim meet for the first time. Countless times as a swimmer made the transition to the coaching side of it significantly easier. I knew where to set up my folding chair, to bring a folding chair in the first place, which warmup lanes gave my swimmers the best chance of not being overrun by a huge group of swimmers from some larger Charlotte-area team, and, most importantly, where the hospitality room was, stocked with coffee and snacks previously forbidden to lowly swimmer me. I set up shop next to several coaches I knew from my days of swimming against their teams just a few years ago. Over the course of the meet, I made a few observations and enjoyed a few comical moments. A smattering of them follows:

• I am a terrible driver in the morning, just awful. I am sleepy and inattentive and a bit swervy. As a result, I have vowed never to drive before 6:00 AM again.
• All children below the age of eight are impossible to coach. If they know how to do the strokes they are swimming, which they probably should before competing in a meet, then all you can really do is make sure they get where they're supposed to be, remember which event they are swimming, and have a blast doing it.
• From the heat sheet flick, the arms folded stopwatch beneath the elbow while intently watching the pool pose, the heat sheet in the back pocket, the squatting by the edge of the pool while yelling encouragement past a once-folded heat sheet that is somehow supposed to amplify my voice and make it reach lane five, the high-fiving of swimmers after every race, resting the heat sheet against my thigh to write down splits, asking my kids "how did that feel?"or "what did you think about that race?" and my disdain for coaches overdressed for a prelim session of the first meet of the season, I am my father as a coach. Not a bad thing at all. I did not jump with raised arms and clenched fists, but let's wait till state champs before we make that call definitively.
• Eleven-year-olds don't have swimming terminology completely down yet. Example from a conversation after one kid's last race: Me: "How'd you feel coming home?" Her response: "Good I guess. I'll probably sleep the whole drive."
• Some parents get worked up at swim meets. I do not. This can produce tension or it can produce a comment like the one I received on Saturday: "You're so calm. I'd be freaking out trying to watch a dozen kids on opposite ends of the pool." I shrugged because it never occurred to me that maybe I should be more keyed up. I then tried to look busy and gravely concerned in front of the team parents for a few minutes, lest they think me lazy and disinterested.
• The sunrise on the way to the meet Sunday was just breathtaking. One of those sunrises that's so bright you can't really look at it and can only admire its brilliance on the periphery. Probably some kind of metaphor there, but moving on....
• I took advantage of a break in the action and read through my mom's notebook from her coaching days, looking around at the other coaches as if I had the Holy Grail or the last existing copy of the Bible, which they would certainly try to steal if they knew what kind of magic rested on my lap.
• Discipline in practice facilitates success in meets. Good habits distill competitive swimming down  to execution of racing strategy and mental toughness, affording the luxury of making basic technique an afterthought.
• A kid running up to you after a great swim, hugging you and saying "you're the best coach ever!" is one of the best feelings there is.
• Hearing that same kid say "I hate you" when you make her get back in the frigid pool to warm down after the meet is something you just have to shrug off.

First Excerpt: The Month of Crazy Writing

My writing spot at Grandmommy's house in Sarasota.

Family

  It wasn't until college that I realized my family was abnormal. And I don't mean abnormal in that many of us home schooled and we all attended Baptist churches. In fact, given the way we did those things, my family is quite normal, full of intelligent, well-adjusted, and caring people. No, the way in which we were abnormal is how close we were and continue to be. And I don't just mean my immediate family - I am talking about extended family too. I grew up in Sarasota, Florida with all of my grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins - on both sides of the family - living within about a sixty mile radius. The farthest relatives were the Sullebargers in Tampa, a whole hour away. So the cousins grew up as siblings, getting together to play and hang out at more than just holidays, though we did those too. Man, did we do holidays.

   
          Every Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Easter, the entire family would gather at a designated house. The food would be coordinated with precision beforehand, who would be bringing which casseroles and pies. Both of my grandmothers, my grandpa, the Deutschles, Cairnies, Leaps, Simpsons, and Sullebargers would show up in full force to celebrate the holiday. The aunts and uncles and grandparents would all gather and catch each other up on the various happenings in their lives. The cousins would group up according to age - Chris, Danielle, Taylor, and Jeff hanging out because they were older, Saxon, Taryn, Becca, Melissa, Skye, and I playing because we just missed the cut of being older kids. They were boring anyways. And Garrett and Bethany did their own thing because they were way younger. If the gathering was at the Deutschles' house, we would shoot some hoops out back and then play an uncles' versus cousins football game on the fairway of the golf course that cut through their back yard. If it was at our house (which the Leaps later bought, so it's technically the Leaps' house now), we would explore out back in the woods bordering the power plant behind our property, a forest which could entertain us for hours. Then we would play the football game in the cul-de-sac after dinner. If it was at Grandmommy's house, we would play in the smaller plants of her back yard, and then go play football on the field of a local elementary school after dinner. The Sullebargers did not have a field nearby, but they did have a pool with a volcano hot tub, so that one pretty much took care of itself. I never knew how remarkable that was, that my whole family on both sides all gathered in the same place several times a year and that we all found activities we enjoyed together.

         We kept this rhythm of gathering and living together until the late 1990s, when my parents took us to a Steak and Shake on the way home from a swim meet and told us over burgers, fries, and milkshakes that Dad had accepted a job offer to coach a college swim team in North Carolina. On the day we moved, the van piled high with the belongings we did not trust to Uhaul (among them the legion of secondhand coats and jackets donated to us by various relatives who had no use for them in sunny south Florida and had retrieved them from the depths of attics, so that we might not freeze in the tundra of the Carolinas). Living eight-hundred miles away, we could only make it down to Florida once, maybe twice a year. Some years we couldn't get down there at all and the Leaps and grandparents would come up to North Carolina to visit. But some Christmases, even a Thanksgiving or two, we got to come back to Florida for the big family gathering and it was always as if we never left. We could just pick right back up where we left off - cousins, aunts, uncles, grandparents - with any and everybody. That's not to say we never drifted apart over the years. We have. It is to say that we can always come back to where we were, that we're always welcome back in to each other's lives. 

  A few years back, Christmas of my sophomore year of college, I believe it was, we gathered at the Sullebargers' to celebrate the day. The volcano pool was too cold to swim in and the lake out back was home to a highly concentrated population of alligators, so we stayed inside and conversed. After dinner, everybody gathered in the living room to exchange gifts. The gift-giving part of the evening had calmed considerably since years past, given the advanced age of the cousins. Only the youngest ones still received gifts that weren't money or books or safe articles of clothing. Looking around the room, the only missing people were Taylor and Buddy, as well as my cousin Chris, who were in North Carolina and Colorado respectively. Other than them, everybody was together again.

          The time came for the "main event" gift: the gift to Grandmommy from her daughters, my aunts. Really from all of us. They had gone in together on a nice digital picture frame and had loaded onto a flash drive pictures of the family over the years, so it was ready for her to use as soon as it left the box. She opened it and my aunts explained over and with each other what exactly it was and how it worked. Grandmommy loved it. She started tearing up and then looked around the room, which only made her start to cry more. Except for the few absentees, we were all there. The whole family, together again, her legacy gathered around and smiling back at her. The party shifted from a celebration of Christmas to what was clearly a celebration of this incredible woman. She was, it became apparent in that moment, the uniting factor among us all. But she was able to unite so powerfully because of the presence of love that drenched the room, strong in the air as present and invisible as the humidity of a Florida summer night.

          Through her teary eyes, Grandmommy searched for words to fit the moment, probably filtering them through my family's unspoken distaste for huge displays of emotion, and could not find much to say. She just smiled and looked at us for a few moments before she sniffed back a tear and said, "You all know I love you, right?"

          "Yes we do," Aunt Barbara said with a smile, her answer confirmed by nods and smiles and words from all over the room. The celebration continued with Jesus' birthday cake - which is always Red Velvet - and every kind of pie you could possibly want to eat, and the moment passed. But that moment will live on in the memory of all present. Even in day-to-day living, when aggravation or disagreement inevitably takes hold at one point or another, I think we all remember that night and the tremendous respect we all gained for each other, for Grandmommy, when faced with the reality of what she started and managed to keep strong over decades and miles.

An Open Letter to Brandon Jenkins

     Today I wrote a letter to a Florida State football player named Brandon Jenkins, who was diagnosed with a season-ending left foot injury after the first game of this, his senior season. I mailed it to him this afternoon.

Dear Brandon,

My name is Logan Simpson. I will try to keep this letter brief, but ever since I heard that your injury was season-ending I have had an inexplicable urge to write to you. You and I are not so different. I have been where you are.

I am twenty-two years old, graduated last May from a small, Division I school in North Carolina called Gardner-Webb. For much of my life, my biggest goal was to swim in college, preferably at the Division I level. I signed a scholarship offer from Gardner-Webb and, having arrived at my goal, prepared to set to work on building a great athletic career, envisioning conference championships and maybe an eventual Olympic Trials qualification. After four weeks of team practice, I went to the doctor, complaining of pain in both my shoulders. Before I even swam one meet with my new team, I was told that I had torn the labrum in each of my shoulders and needed double shoulder surgery. My season was over and was instead spent working through a painful recovery process. It was the hardest year of my life, but I returned my sophomore year, ready to begin my four years in earnest after redshirting the previous one.

This time I made it to the first meet, then swam another, slowly inching my way back to the level I was before my injury. That November, we swam at a midseason invitational at Georgia Tech, competing against some the nation's elite teams (there was a team from Gainesville competing there, but I prefer not to mention obscenities here - besides I'm not even sure their university is actually accredited). I was finally reaching some of my old times in the pool, finally improving again. Then, in the middle of the 100-yard butterfly, I felt my left shoulder tear again. I finished the race, took off my goggles, threw them down at the pool deck as hard as I could, and went straight to a secluded corner of the venue where I could be alone to process what had just happened. And there in that corner, just between you and me Brandon, I cried. I was devastated. I knew after all the work I had put in from the age of seven, my career was about to end like this, on the brink of becoming good, an unremarkable career set against the backdrop of some of the nation's best teams competing at the pool that hosted the Atlanta Olympics. And I was right - it was the last race I would swim.

I tell you this story in the hopes that, in it, you might find solidarity, that someone else has felt some of the things you are feeling and can say, "me too." Last Saturday, I was watching the FSU/Wake Forest game on television, thoroughly enjoying the thrashing Wake was receiving, when the camera focused on you, watching the action from the sideline, the commentator saying something about your being an All-American candidate and how crushing a blow your loss was to the Seminoles' defense. He quickly moved on, discussing Bjoern and Tank and Mario, and how they would be asked to pick up the slack. To be sure, replacing you is a tall order - I greatly admire the way you play the game. I was taken aback at how quickly the commentator moved on to talking about the other defensive linemen. It seemed like there should have been a highlight reel showing some of your accomplishments, your greatest plays, the hard work you have put into rebuilding what has become once again one of the nation's elite defenses.

Partly, I think I wanted to tell you that you have not been forgotten. Though the team must move on and put new players on the field in your stead, you have not been replaced. We still remember the great things you have done over your first three years at Florida State and thank you for your hard work. When FSU takes the field against Clemson Saturday night, though everything inside of you surely longs to be on the field taking shots at Tajh Boyd and Andre Ellington, just know that there will be fans thinking of you, remembering what you've done for the program, and wishing you well in your recovery from injury.

As I mentioned earlier, the year I sat out was the hardest of my life. I withdrew from my teammates, jealous of their ability to swim healthily. I wanted people to feel as sorry for me as I did. I stopped taking care of myself. There is so much potential for a misfortune like this shape you for the worse if you let it. Because hardship such as this will shape you. I did not realize this and allowed my misfortune to shape me negatively for too long. All along, I asked "why?" but that was the wrong question. I still don't know why it happened. The correct question to ask was and is "what now?" How will I respond? How can I redeem this terrible situation?

I urge you to find strength from those around you, from this letter, to rally around your teammates, finding ways to impact your team. I did not realize what kinds of contributions I could have made outside of the pool, even as a lowly freshman. I want to encourage you to have faith that this injury, senseless though it seems, can be given purpose, can make sense if you cause it to. You can give it meaning and I encourage you to do so. As incredible a player and leader as you have been on the field, I have no doubt that you can thrive in this challenging situation. I have heard the voices of disappointment and hope that you can silence them and press on. I have felt the pain of injury rehabilitation and hope you will find strength to push through, to heal in preparation for what I firmly believe will be an exceptional and wildly successful football career for years to come.

For too long, I felt that I had let people down by getting hurt. My dad was the coach of my college swim team and, above all, I felt that I had disappointed him. I carried that with me for a long time before I realized that feeling was not coming from my father - it was coming from me. You have let nobody down. Your value is not determined by your ability to play football, but by your intrinsic value as a human being.

Thank you again for your hard work as a Florida State football player. I wish you well in your recovery from this injury. 

All the best,

Logan Tyler Simpson

Ultimate Songs

There are few things I love more in the world of music than the last song on an album, that perfectly articulated finishing touch on the body of work preceding it. Far more important than how a work begins is how it ends, the resonance it leaves with its audience. The Reckoning, NEEDTOBREATHE's latest album, flows together beautifully as a coherent narrative, a cohesive collection of lyrics and music. I discovered this while running the perimeter of campus yesterday. If you have a chance, listen to the whole album, straight through, processed with such a filter. Without further ado, here is the album's ultimate song:


Learn to Love - NEEDTOBREATHE

I need the fear of a love that's lost
I need to stop trying to count the cost
I need a fight on the losing side
And always hold true
I will always stay with you

Till we know the pain of a broken heart
We can't walk through the fires we didn't start
So just hold on to the way it is tonight
Learn to love through the darkness and the light
I'm on your side
I'm on your side

I had the fortune of a second chance
I know the reason why we all should dance
I've seen the end and all you have to do
is always hold true
I will always stay with you

Till we know the pain of a broken heart
We won't walk through the fires we didn't start
So just hold on to the way it is tonight
We can learn to love through the darkness and the light
We can learn to love through the darkness and the light
I'm on your side
I'm on your side
Oh, I'm on your side
Hey, I'm on your side

Always hold true
I will always stay with you
Yeah, you always hold true
I will always stay with you

Till we know a broken heart
We can't walk through the fires we didn't start
So just hold on to the way it is tonight
And learn to love through the darkness and the light
Learn to love
We learn to love
Learn to love
We learn to love

(You can listen to it here if you like: http://needtobreathe.net/discography/)

A Season of Summer

I was formerly under the misconception that the notion of summer fostered throughout childhood slowly dissipates until it is abruptly halted upon reaching adulthood. A real, full-time job always loomed on the horizon, daunting, threatening to render the summer months no different from those dreary winter ones on the opposite side of the calendar. This summer I learned this does not have to be the case. At least not right now.

I returned to Boiling Springs late Saturday night after two months away, working at Camp Weequahic in the mountains of Pennsylvania for seven weeks and then visiting my good buddy (and fellow brogger) Matt Leonard in Nassau, Bahamas for a week and a half. It was like stepping back into the many summers of my youth, this time with a bit of responsibility and influence, but the essence remained somehow the same. Those two months encompassed so much more than I could possibly talk about adequately in the space and time provided, so I will boil it down simply and hopefully unpack some of the stories later.

This summer, I mentored a bunk of awesome campers, coached in one of America's most intense and impassioned basketball leagues (seriously, try telling those kids the Weequahic Basketball League isn't the NBA - I dare you), broke my left middle finger climbing a rope (from floor to ceiling starting seated, succeeding just before the aforementioned fracture), helped write and lead half the camp in performing a rap parody of Kanye West's "Jesus Walks" for a song competition ("one of the coolest things I've ever seen" said our camp director, just sayin'), watched Batman Begins, The Dark Knight, and The Dark Knight Rises all in a span of twenty-four hours, ran into Justin Beiber in New York City, nailed a roundoff into a backflip, watched David Letterman live (Alec Baldwin was the guest and both he and Letterman dropped their pants during the show - classic stuff), swam in Lake Wallenpaupack (and learned how to spell "Wallenpaupack"), saw Scranton (The Electric City!), read great books like Pride and Prejudice, Eli the Good, Shoeless Joe, Oh! the Clear Moment, I Was Told There'd Be Cake, and Letters to a Young Poet, played guitar on my bunk's front porch, wrote a good bit, took three practice GREs (funny little thing: I consistently scored higher on math than verbal - and by funny I mean really annoying), went to Hershey Park for free, made some amazing friends, rocked "Call Me Maybe" on the guitar for the whole camp (a girl named Shanice sang and she was unbelievable), helped a camper shave for the first time, taught guitar classes, played pretend baseball at sunset on Pennsylvania's own Field of Dreams, had a deep conversation with a complete stranger in the Newark Airport, slept in the Miami International Airport during a thirteen-hour overnight layover, was lectured by a baggage agent in Nassau after her airline lost my luggage (it was apparently my fault because I let my bag out of my sight - yes mom, I was nice to her), swam with sting rays and jellyfish and eels in Nassau coral reefs, held my breath underwater for three minutes and five seconds, journeyed to Atlantis, walked on a rope bridge over a hammerhead shark, bought a signed copy of I Can't Sleep by one of the coolest women I have ever meet, ate lunch and dinner at the Nassau Yacht Club, coached a group of Bahamian kiddos at Swift Swimming, taught a high school girl how to swim all four strokes so she could take a swimming fitness class in school, grew an increasingly less pathetic (if not all the while devilishly handsome) goatee, wrote a song with Matt, played my favorite song after sunset on the beach with waves crashing in the background, ate ridiculous amounts of conch and caneps, listened to a brilliant speech by a banking expert about how to fix the banking crisis (you should check out John Tomlinson's book Honest Money - very simple solutions which are slated to be proposed, in a bill he helped draft, to Parliament this fall), ate dinner with some incredible young and young-at-heart families who make starting a family at some point seem less scary, recorded songs with Matt in the upstairs of his massive apartment, gathered driftwood for a beach campfire (where we played great music, watched an offshore thunderstorm, and witnessed the glory of bioluminescence), played frisbee on Montagu Beach in a raging thunderstorm, and flew back into Charlotte amid the glowing rays of a stunning sunset. 

Just before I left for Pennsylvania, I learned to play a song called "Keep Your Eyes Open" by a band called NEEDTOBREATHE (fun fact: I can also play the Taylor Swift one). I played it regularly on the front porch of Bunk 1 at camp, my kids patiently listening as I tried my best to hit the notes. Two nights before leaving the Bahamas, Matt and I played it with waves crashing at our feet. The lyrics encompass our lives at the present, as we look toward the future and make the moves necessary to align ourselves with our larger life goals, realizing that the decisions we make in these next years, months, even weeks, will irreversibly dictate the trajectory of our lives. One of the choruses says:

"If you never leave home, never let go, you'll never make it to the great unknown till you keep your eyes open my love. Show me your fire. Show me your heart. You know I'll never let you fall apart if you keep your eyes open my love."

For we who are living in some kind of in-between, unsure of what, exactly sandwiches us with the past, it is a mantra of sorts, a call to living. Setting down roots deep enough to hold to and yet shallow enough to be uprooted at the first call of adventure or opportunity. It is a difficult art, but a beautiful life.

Back in the Springs

After a lengthy absence, I have returned to the thriving metropolis and bustling hub of progressive culture that is Boiling Springs, North Carolina. It may be none of those things, but it is a good place to live for a little while, to call home from afar.

And after a lengthy hiatus, I am back to writing on this blog, after much serious thought given to the idea of scrapping it in favor of just writing occasionally on the Brog over at brosblogging.wordpress.com. I will try to devote adequate time and energy to make them both worth undertaking.

That being said, the last time I posted, I mentioned that I wanted to improve as a writer of poetry because I was, quite frankly, not very good. While that remains the case, I have worked a bit on my skills as they were, and have produced this piece, which I started writing on the porch of bunk one at Camp Weequahic in Pennsylvania:

The Mansion in the Yard
Amid the grove of pines in our front yard
stands a towering flowering magnolia,
capped by white blossoms -
the fingertips of gnarled limbs.

My father transplanted it there
at the center of the yard,
full-grown.
He dug the hole himself after watching me try
one too many times
to reach even the lowest limbs
of those great pines,
scraping my arms, legs, and belly
as I bear-hugged their trunks
and shimmied up.

On those occasions we have company,
they always complement the neat rows
of the great grove,
and then inquire about the magnolia,
why is it there where it doesn't quite fit and
couldn't it have gone outside the grove
instead of at its center?

Here my father shrugs
and winks at me.
Because he knows
I gave up shimmying
the day he planted that magnolia,
that it's the only tree I climb,
for its condescending limbs,
bent like soft bark elbows
as she stoops to hoist me
into her great canopy.

On her broad shoulders,
I can breathe
the air of the leaves.
Pressed against her breast,
I can be,
can safely watch the red roof of my house,
an annex to the mansion in the yard.