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Growing a Career

June 3, 2015 · by Oliver Gray

Seven years ago, I held a bunch of seeds in my hand. A herbaceous menagerie piled lazily in my palm.

Some I’d had since birth, stored away by my parents in little bags and boxes until the soil was fertile enough to plant them. Others I deliberately picked out myself after years of scrutinizing plants and perennials, flowers and fruits. Others yet appeared as if by natural magic, wild and weird and full of unknown potential. My future rested there, dormant and dry, needing naught but my time and energy.

On one side of the garden, I prepared the soil. Spent years learning the inborn dos and donts, uncovering how best to make the seed yield a plant that would yield a crop. I thought I knew which seeds went where, which I wanted and suited me best, which would grow the fastest, the strongest, the tallest. Armed with oddly specific education, I dropped these seeds into the tilled dirt with utmost care, careful to spread them out evenly, set them deeply, water them diligently.

On the other side, I haphazardly scattered those random mystery pods that had mixed in with the rest, unsure how to make them grow, of if I even wanted them to grow at all.

The sun shone and rains fell. The earth turned in the sky and on the ground, the work of worms and wormholes. The seeds took root, extending their little legs into the ground around them, building a base before shooting tender probes out from the safety of below, to peek out at the above. As expected, the seeds I had planted with dedication grew first, in clean, traditional rows that at first, looked healthy and bright.

But then something wholly unexpected happened. The random seeds, despite a lack of research or education or attention, began to sprout too. They popped up here and there, some spindly some leafy some altogether bizarre, but all of them healthy and in some ways, miraculous.

For a few years, I focused on tending the chosen set of seeds; spent most of my sunlight hours weeding, feeding. They grew steadily, and after a short amount of time, required significantly less care than I had originally expected. This left time open in the fading twilight of most days. I turned my attention to my random sproutlings.

By now, they were bushy and broad, almost antithetical to my organized rows on the other side of the garden. I took some time to learn what they were now that their true identities had burst forth from the seeds, and found that what I’d accidentally planted was actually really cool. The plants proved much more exotic and engaging, and unlike my slow but steady growth on the other side, some grew rapidly with next to no direct input from the gardener.

I began to split myself in two; tending my faithful crop as always, but finding myself spending more and more time cultivating the growth of the randoms on the other side. Some days I’d neglect my planned garden entirely, lost in a verdant bower of intertwined barley and hops. All the plants thrived, but my original plan, to grow and cash in on a traditional crop, suddenly seemed lacking, when the possibility of a much more exciting but much less consistent path opened up to me like a tulip on a sunny spring day.

It’s almost time to harvest, at least for the first time. Despite the balancing act, both sets of plants have budded and nearly come to flower; their nascent peak, my mental pique.

I’m at a horticultural precipice. I have a decision to make. I know that once they flower, it will be impossible to keep both alive. If I choose one side of the garden to devote my attention to, the other will wither and die. I’ll lose the invested time and resources, the connections and friendships I’ve made with other gardeners and farmers, the proprietary industry knowledge that might carry me into the future. But if I don’t make a choice, neither crop will flourish, and I’ll be left a failed gardener, with little to show for my half-decade-plus of work.

It’s not an easy decision to make. Safety or adventure? Boredom or risk? My thirty years around the sun haven’t helped clear up much, and I stand, staring at my plants, wondering what the hell to do.

Seven years ago, I held a bunch of seeds in my hand. A future, maybe, but not the one I planned.

How can one make a decision now that might affect his always? What does one do when waiting for a flower to bloom?

Why Blog?

December 2, 2014 · by Oliver Gray

This post is part of a prompt from my fellow Mid-Atlantic beer bloggers. The idea is to get introspective, take some time as we hide under blankets from winter’s chill to think about how blogging (or writing about beer in general) has changed, or influenced, or mangled our relationship with the beer itself.

I’m going to argue that this blog hasn’t changed my relationship with beer.

It has changed my relationship with everything.

When talking writing, blogging, or any unpaid word mining and sentence smithing, the same question always seems to sneak out: why do it? Why spend so many hours, so much energy, keeping a digital journal of your thoughts and stories? It’s a legitimate query, and one that doesn’t always have a good answer. Blogging (well) involves more work than most people realize, and unless you win the internet lottery and ride the viral train to hits-town, there’s often very little return on investment (especially if you’re measuring said ROI in actual dollars).

So if not for fame or fortune, why? Writing can be its own reward, a cathartic outlet, a salvage yard for ideas not meant for commercial consumption. But there’s more, something fundamental, something formative in creating and curating your own online space.

Like a symbiotic organism attached to your parietal lobe, your blog alters your brain chemistry, slowly changing how you view the world. Experiences aren’t just one-offs anymore, they’re potential stories, or lessons, or photo-ops. The blog nudges you, encourages you, reminds you to dig deeper, to pull as much viscera from the everyday as you can without killing the poor thing. As it grows, you grow, teaching you just as much as you’ve taught it. The jumble of HTML and CSS behind a URL is more than just the sum of its pages, of its posts. It becomes an extension of you, a tangible and important aspect of your life like a digital pet who needs your love and attention.

Long car ride chats about sociology and philosophy lead to Eurekas and light bulbs, followed shortly thereafter by the powerful declarative, “that’s a blog post.” Simple conversations with new friends offer new perspectives. The blog overhears and records, for later use. After some time it takes partial control of your eyes, showing you details overlooked before, angles and blind spots obscured by privilege or naivety. Given more time it moves to your ears, filtering, noticing, listening for what matters in a multimedia cacophony of what doesn’t. Eventually, even your mouth will succumb, asking questions the blog wants answered, promoting, teaching, rambling at the behest of the ever-whirring gizmo inside your mind.

Running this blog rewired my brain. Rejected the old reality and injected a new one. It made me more attentive, more detail-focused, more interested in the whys and whos behind the whats, because the blog is picky, and will only eat the finest of meaty knowledge.

So of course, despite my earlier statement, this blog has changed my relationship with beer. But not only beer, and not because that’s what I write about most often. It changed the relationship with the drink because it changed me, forced me to see the poetry in the prosaic, the delicate dance happening between hop and water and malt. Beer is just a medium; it could have been anything. It just so happens I really like fermentation. The blog found the beer, not the other way around.

So why blog? Because it gives you a reason, a catalyst, to take a different look at the world. You do it for the constant creative companion to your inevitable individual evolution. You don’t run a personal blog for celebrity or cash (although if you’re lucky those things may come in time), you do it for you, to mature, to teach yourself, to grow.

Scroll yet further southward for the other posts on this prompt:

Josh from Short on Beer: Beer blogging has ______ my relationship with beer.
Douglas from Baltimore Bistros & Beer: Beer Blogging and My Relationship With Beer
Bryan from This Is Why I’m Drunk: It’s My Relationship and I Can Cry if I Want To
Jake from Hipster Brewfus: Verbose Validation of Verbage
Liz from Naptown Pint – Which came first, the beer or the blogging?

Forgotten Friday: A Bridge Over Landover

August 31, 2012 · by Oliver Gray

I’ve always had an infatuation with the ancient world. My earliest childhood memories are faded and grey, but I can still remember scrutinizing books about the Parthenon, Tintagel, and the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. I never cared if these places were real, or if they still existed, I just cared about the history that was interred with their architectural bones.

It’s not that I’m obsessed with the buildings themselves. Mossy stones and broken arches make for interesting photography, but I’m more enamored with the idea of the people these places represent. People who lived lives that would seem alien to us now. People with struggles and challenges like we’ve never known, that have somehow been truncated to a few pages in a text book and a Wikipedia article. People who would be confused and angry that we waste time on things like Facebook status updates and just how hairy Snooki’s baby really is. These places echo the souls of the people who built them, lived in them, and died in them; whose memory is only maintained by a select few who care enough to think beyond the present.

My recent trip to Ireland brought my obsession to a head as I was surrounded by broken skeletons of castles, churches, and things unidentifiable after the ravages of nature and time. I’ve been longingly staring at the pictures of these buildings, dreaming up stories about their denizens, imagining who and why and how they lived.

But interesting history doesn’t need to come from thousands of years ago. There are hundreds of things woven into the banality of our everyday lives that we don’t see because our receptors are pointed inward, not outward.

I work in what, on the outside, appears to be a normal corporate park. The buildings are plain and brown, a hold-over of contemporary mid-century design. The boringly named “Corporate Drive” is in Landover, Maryland; a place that many locals would regard with disdain, or at the very least, indifference.

This is the kind of corporate park that is a tangible of the cliche: “sign of the times.”

The parking lots look like this:

and like this:

1:45 on a workday.

Garbage is strewn about everywhere; the result of a landslide of diffusion of responsibility that comes from the thinking, “well there is already trash there so it’s OK if I throw mine here too.” A fetid swamp pools just off the sidewalk that would probably be a pristine pond if not for disgusting human intervention. In the middle of this swamp floats an algae covered, half-deflated basketball. The back end of a Safeway shopping cart sticks out of the green muck like some iceberg forged in the fires of the industrial revolution.

Why use a trashcan when Mother Earth is right there?

It’s the kind of place that makes you feel sad for both nature and humanity.

I walk about a half a mile to our client’s building from my normal office twice a week. This walk isn’t lonely; I’m often dodging people coming from the Metro or heading to a nearby deli for lunch. Most keep their heads down and ear-buds secure, and react awkwardly and sheepishly if accidental eye contact is made. Short of some aggressive geese and tenacious plant life, it’s about as uninteresting a walk as you might expect.

But on my way back from the client’s office last week, I took a different path. A path I’ve never walked before, behind buildings I’ve never been in, past people I’ve never seen.

When I climbed an old concrete-and-wood staircase behind one of the corporate offices of Giant and Safeway (they share a building? WTF?), I found what appeared to be a gate to nowhere.

Mr. Tumnus, is that you?

As soon as I dismissed my thoughts of Narnia, I tried to figure out just what the hell this thing was. It had gates like you’d find surrounding (protecting?) a dumpster, but there was no way a dumpster would go behind this gate, as it led to a 6 foot drop off. As I illegally opened and moved the gate out of my way (what? the padlock was rusted to all hell, it only took like three kicks to open it) I saw what was on the other side:

A “well-shaped monolith whose massive bulk had known the workmanship and perhaps the worship of living and thinking creatures.” One hundred internet dollars to anyone who can place this quote without Google.

A pillar. No, a series of pillars, all overgrown with ivy and lichens and vines galore. They were blanketed in the kind of growth that looks like nature is really pissed off.

I moved around the side of the gate to get a better look and saw at least four of these pillars. About six or seven feet tall, made of poured cement, they stood there as a monument to something long gone, to a time when it was possible to cross this creek and see the other side of the world.

It didn’t take me long to realize this had been a bridge at some point. My mind flashed back to a time when these wetlands were actually beautiful; free of trash, with clean waters and little ducks swimming all happy-like. I imagined employees taking breaks and hanging out on this little causeway. I imagined them finding some peace from a hectic work schedule in the forested wonder just beyond their cubicle walls.

The odd thing is, this bridge clearly did not fall apart from age and mistreatment. There are no broken stones or chunks of concrete in the water below, no signs of damage to the pillars or the entrances on either side. Someone, at some point, deliberately had this bridge removed, for reasons unknown (or at least unknown to the current building property managers, when asked).

Unless the accumulation of trash, run-off from the nearby Metro maintenance facility, and pollution from the even more nearby i-495 freeway had poisoned the ecosystem and ruined the serenity of this little bridge. But that’s not possible is it? We’d never destroy the innate beauty of the natural world in the name of progress, would we?

I found an image of the bridge still intact in 1993:

April, 1993: Google Earth Coords: 38°56’53.61″N 76°51’53.91″W

But the next record in 2002 shows only the pillars:

March, 2002.

In less than ten years, the bridge is gone. I guess I’ll never know why it was dismantled, or if anyone really got to enjoy it when it was there.

At least it can live again here on the internet, if only for a few minutes while you read this.

RIP, random bridge I’ll never know.

Old Trafford

June 28, 2011 · by Oliver Gray

I don’t play soccer anymore.

10 years ago, if you had asked me who I was, I would have succinctly said, “Oliver Gray: soccer player”.

Soccer was life, was family, was me. A rolling ball was at the forefront of my brain at almost all times; I played what I loved, and loved what I played. Leather cleats danced across freshly mowed pitches, my music a cacophony of whistles, cheers, and trash-talking. Equilibrium was achieved when foot met ball, and ball met net.

For years and years my identity was tied to speed and fouls and goals and tournaments. My social life was dominated by soccer; the girls I dated were players themselves, the guys I hung out with keepers and strikers alike. I wanted nothing more than to be another Giggs or Cantona or Scholes; I talked of playing abroad, dreamt of scoring goals in stadiums I had only seen on TV.

In my mind, it was all I was good at, and it defined my worth. Every goal I scored bolstered my confidence, every crushing loss left me dejected and empty. I could not mentally separate myself from being on or off the field; it was often hard to tell where the boy began and the player ended.

Despite a very disruptive injury, I kept playing, even past when I probably should have. I hung onto the game I loved, to who I was, and all I knew about myself. I’ve spent the past 5 years trying to convince myself that I am still a soccer player, partly in personal lamentation, partly in starry-eyed nostalgia. I tried and tried to be who I once was, and play the game I thought I was supposed to play.

But I don’t play soccer anymore.

If you ask me who I am now I would – not so succinctly – say, “Oliver Gray: writer, IT enthusiast, mandolinist, runner, fiancé, homeowner, gamer, even at times, dancer.”

Soccer isn’t practical anymore. My knees aren’t what they used to be, limping around work is hardly professional, and the circle of friends I used to play with is no longer emotionally or physically proximate. My heart, whether crushed from watching my dream die, or wizened with age, just isn’t in it anymore. I’ve become very aware that I am no longer a soccer player, but still find myself claiming I am in certain situations.

I’m sure, if a ball rolled to my feet, I would still know what to do with it. I could probably still put it into the back of a net with impressive speed and decent accuracy. I’m probably even fit enough to pull off a 90 minute game, should it ever prove necessary. As Toby Keith said, “I’m not as good as I once was, but I’m as good once as I ever was.”

But just because I can, doesn’t mean I should, and doesn’t mean I want to. As I’ve grown, I’ve found similar fun in other avenues; some far more cerebral than the young soccer player in me would have ever expected. I enjoy reading and learning and becoming a better person in ways that don’t involve the World’s Game.

My mind is now open to a world outside of a 110 yd X 75 yd patch of grass. My goals are no longer confined between three white, metallic posts. My legs can take me to see the world, instead of just pursue a ball.

Because I don’t play soccer anymore.

10 years from now, if you ask me who I am, I will confidently say, “Oliver Gray: husband, father, author, friend, brother, son, bandmate, manager, tutor, wizard and whatever else I want to be.”

Soccer has served as a framework for growth. Scoring a goal was just training for getting what I want out of life. Score enough goals, you win the game. Play hard enough, work with your team, and you’ll win the championship. If you lead your team by playing fast and hard, they’ll learn from your example and return it in kind.

It taught me to listen to my body, to eat right, and drink inhuman amounts of water. It taught me to respect fitness and never be ashamed of sweat caused by hard work. It hardened me to take any slide-tackle life can throw at me, and “rub some dirt on it” if I do happen to fall. Most importantly it taught me to keep a cool head, as a red card does no one any favors.

I am who I am because I played, not because I was a player. I love the game, and always will, but I can finally accept that I don’t play soccer anymore, and that’s OK.