“Common connotations: pessimism, depression, blandness, boredom, neutrality, fog, undefinedness, old age, contentment, the brain, speed.”
Just as my years in DC were definitely the Man In Black era, the timeframe of this blog could very easily be characterized as the Gray Age. It shows in the wardrobe – the stack of American Apparel T-shirts, the overpriced Saboteur sport coat, the pricey Walk-Over suede wingtips, both pair of Converse (One-Star and All-Star Pro alike), the San Jose Giants cap, my new everyday-wear Vanderbilt hat – all bought in the last five years and all in gray. At one point, I was even considering a brown-and-gray Timbuk2 bag just to match the general trend in my apparel.
Pessimism and depression? Hard to argue that hasn’t been a driving theme, especially the last year or so. Blandness? Boredom? You’d have to ask my friends. Oddly enough, this has been a time when I’ve gotten content with doing nothing. Some of the most enjoyable times of this year have been at home by myself, completely disconnected from the Internet, watching a twenty-year-old television show or a live feed of a British news channel.
Or driving in the fog. That thick morning ceiling of gray turned into a wall of it out by Pacifica on the night of the season opener for the Skins, when I could tune in the satellite radio and listen to the gang in DC describe the unfolding disaster. When I left the border of Santa Clara county on 280, it was in the mid-80s and hot and bright. By the time I pulled onto the ramp for Highway 1, it was overcast and gray. By the time I pulled into the parking lot of the famous beachside Taco Bell, I couldn’t see the ocean from the road and it was in the mid-60s and dropping. And it was breathtakingly gorgeous.
Gray fits the ambiguity. We had to cut Chris Boyd off from Vanderbilt football, because he did a bad thing – but he thought he was doing it for the right reasons, and he couldn’t have done a bad thing unless some other people had done a far worse thing, but nevertheless you can’t let him represent Vanderbilt anymore, but you don’t want to necessarily kick him out of school, because he technically pled guilty to a misdemeanor and only got unsupervised probation…gray. You’re not going to be happy no matter what you decide. And then you have to turn around and think about the football team, and feel guilty for considering the implications of cutting loose a Biletnikoff-watchlist wide receiver who didn’t play a down this year because you wanted to do the right thing rather than the most advantageous thing for the football program.
And then there’s the morning…before daylight savings ends, when throwing that dark towel over the glass of the shower eats up the early glimmer and makes it ever so slightly easier to pull out of bed in the morning. The thin ribbon of gray in the sky, before the sun gets its teeth brushed and its first cup of coffee, when it’s cool and quiet out and things really haven’t started moving yet. It wasn’t until those dark days at NASA in 2008 when I realized that for the first time in my life, the cool quiet morning before anyone else shows up was the best part of the workday. After years and years of a 9:30 AM start, getting in before 8 suddenly became a legitimately attractive prospect.
But I guess the most telling instance of gray can be seen around the temples, even after getting the number-one crop at the barber shop. The years are rolling by, and the evidence is there. For the first time, I can look in the mirror and what I see at first glance is a middle-aged man. For better or worse.