This weeks selfie is a) not attractive, b) not posed, c) not me at my finest. However, it’s real. 5:30am. Rohnert Park Planet Fitness. It’d been so long since I had been here last that the app I use to punch in offered to give me a tutorial — true story. But this morning was about the title of this post:
Step 1: Just show up.
I showed up. All I did was run on the elliptical for 30 minutes. The resistance was below what I had thought was my minimum, and it was still difficult; it’s been a while. But I was there.
Ten minutes into my half hour, a gentleman came in and got on a bike in the row ahead of me. He had a good hundred pounds on me. He was showing up. It’s a place to start. One foot in front of the other…
Of the resolutions I publicly made here on the blog earlier, getting in a 10,000 step day a week has not been happening. I’ve got a million excuses — good ones, too! But another one of those resolutions is to achieve a few bucket list items, and I see “backpack solo” and see where I am today on the 30th of January, 2018 and I’m feeling really far away from that seemingly simple goal… But it starts by doing the work ti get into shape. This morning I did that.
The big guy left before my time was up. Skinnier, more fit people were starting to take up station around me and my enthusiasm flagged as I tired. And then my iPhone seemingly recognized my predicament and came to the rescue with a three-punch combination. It started with Pixie Lott’s “All About Tonight“. My “Work The F**K Out” playlist consists of 653 songs, so on shuffle when the iPhone gets on a roll, sometimes the next song succeeds in keeping the energy, and sometimes it’s a jarring transition. Not this time. With my heart rate monitor telling me that despite the low resistance I’m still up there, the iPhone took it up another level…
Katy Perry’s “Firework“. I’m not ashamed. Hell, you’ve seen the picture at the top — I have no shame! As Katy implored me to ignite the light, let it shine, and own the night like the Fourth of July, I was feeling no pain. Eyes closed, RPM surging, I was killing it! By the last “Boom, boom, boom,” I was spent and had three minutes left. The iPhone reached deep and pulled out another Kate — Kate Pierson from the B-52’s — and let loose the enthusiastic and syncopated “Throw Down the Roses.” And with that, I coasted across the finish line.
Thank you so much, ladies. I needed that!
Today I showed up.
Someone helpfully pointed out Step 2: Keep it going.
I’m on board. Let’s do this!

—

Here are the same three songs in alternate locations:

• Pixie Lott, “All About Tonight”: Spotify. iTunes
• Katy Perry, “Firework”: Spotify, iTunes
• Kate Pierson, “Throw Down the Roses”: Spotify, iTunes

I know, I know, that’s the line for when you show the bedroom on MTV’s Cribs. But I’m talking about a different type of magic, and I kind of like this picture for what’s in the background. I’m in my office, which is, by any measure, a small room.

If you had visited when I lived over on River Lane in Guerneville, you might remember the five (or was it six?) bookshelves worth of books collected over too many years of school and pleasure reading. Moving necessitated divesting myself of nearly all of the books, whittling the collection down to just the books that held a lot of meaning to me. It’s a hard process, but sometimes you need to have that literal letting go of your history. I’m down to two bookshelves (three, if you count the one that serves half as cookbook storage and half as make-shift panty) and as you can see they’re a little, err, crowded. That visible top shelf has my JD Salinger paperbacks, my original copy of Jimmy Buffett’s Where Is Joe Merchant?? as well as John McPhee’s La Place de la Concorde Suisse I bought at a used bookshop after my first work trip to Switzerland – I still haven’t actually read it. I’m of the opinion that it’s healthy to have books you’ve bought but haven’t read yet – it’s aspirational and, well, comforting to know when I’m ready to pick it up, it’s there. There’s a copy the Jane English translation (my preference)of the Tao Te Ching,  (which, seriously, everyone needs at least one copy of – know where it is, and read a passage at random. Trust me.), Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet I hurriedly bought from Book Shop Santa Cruz when a long-ago girlfriend said it was her favorite book and I, the lit major, didn’t want to cop to not having read it. This reminds me that while my Kindle collection is likely rivaling my actual print book collection, I can’t tell you when. Where, or why I bought the digital copy of Logan Hunder’s Witches Be Crazy, but I can tell you with certainty that I bought A Crash of Rhinos by the poet Paisley Rekdal from the Utah State University bookstore when I took a creative writing seminar that reignited my muse.

There’s cardboard magazine holders for my collection of the now-defunct Lucky Peach magazines, as well as Craft Beer & Brewing, and Woodcrafters issues. I love getting magazines and most are disposable, but some you hang onto. These aren’t your parent’s hoarding every copy of National Geographic, but rather useful magazines I revisit fairly regularly.

Of course, there’s bric-a-brac and assorted electronics crowding all the available shelf space, but the last thing I’d like to draw your attention to are my devout companions, my 1988 Fender Telecaster electric and my 1991 Fender Montara acoustic guitars. I bought the Telecaster shortly before my dad passed away, and the Montara about six months after. They both mean the world to me and have been wonderful company over the decades. I have other guitars that hold their own meaning to me, but these two… Yeah.

Thanks for joining me on this examination of a corner of my over-crowded office. What’s not seen is what’s behind the camera, namely my PC that I’m typing this on as well as my recording gear. Hopefully you’ll have the opportunity to hear that put to use sooner than later!

For this first Selfie Post I’m deliberately sidestepping the full-self, only-me-in-the-frame selfie by posting this example from the new feature in the Google Arts & Culture app where you can take a selfie and it will evaluate your face against its database of pictures and come up with some semblance of a match. I say some “some semblance” because, well, from the above picture you can see that the Portrait of Paulus Cornelisz van Beresteyn was only 47% compatible with my face. And, really, there’s both sides here – he’s got a better beard (one for old Paulus), but I’ve got better glasses (you don’t even have glasses, Corn-hole Cornelisz!). He’s got more hair, but is that really a plus? I don’t think so. Finally, who do you think is more fun at a party?
Wait, why did you hesitate?! Me! Of course it’s me – the one in the quail shirt? With the goofy smile? Heck yeah.
To try yourself — and you know you want to — you can download Google’s free Arts & Culture app and then scroll down to the entry for “Is your portrait in a museum?” You can share the results on social media and even though the feature hasn’t been out too long, I’m sure you’ve seen this on your BookFace or Insta feeds quite a bit already.
One of the reasons this meme has tickled me so has to do with the collision between the selfie and art.There’s some wonderful academic exploration into this area that goes way beyond anything I could add to the discussion, except that I’d like you to take a moment the next time you see any selfie, even the most hastily-snapped, alcohol-induced selfie you come across and think about it critically for a moment. Not necessarily the subject — though there’s another exploration to be done on that — but on the medium itself. I’m still not over the revolution that digital photography has created (I recommend this story from Marketplace about the creation of the very first digital camera). Straddling the line between film and digital cameras, I wonder quite a bit what my childhood would look like if there were ubiquitous cameras around (oh, the humanity!). For that reason I harbor an intense empathy to folks growing up now who’s every misstep is permanently captured on phone cameras.
Paulus Cornelisz van Beresteyn almost certainly paid more for his portrait than I did for my phone, and yet Googling him turned up that image and nothing else; forgotten but for a 17th century selfie… I know if I did a little more research I could dig up some more dirt on Paulus, but researching (beyond Google) is becoming as much a lost art as portraiture. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not here to sit on my proverbial porch and shake my stick at a contemporary culture with ADHD. Quite the contrary, my point is culture has been forgetful of the subject for some time. While I don’t think in three hundred years a Kardashian selfie will hang in the National Gallery, I do think there’s more to a selfie than a purely throw-away gesture.
Perhaps this hasn’t been the most coherent first selfie post, and, indeed, it’s late. But you know what? One selfie down, a whole lot more to go!