Sober Reading

Near Beers, Books, and a Baby.

Almost two years ago, I wrote about the books I read and some of the skating I did during my wife’s pregnancy, but for whatever reason I never posted it. It sat in my draft folder, haunting me. So here it is, slightly reworked to include some life updates. But I stand by the book recs and the pregnancy thoughts.

Amsterdam

It was important for Whitney that we have a summer baby, which meant we had to get pregnant by October. So in September, as she began watching her alcohol consumption in anticipation of a pregnancy, she remembered that I had, in passing, suggested I would stop drinking with her if we ever got pregnant. A bold claim, one I had thrown out in passing that I didn’t think she would actually hold me to. Nine months of not drinking? Yikes. How would anyone do that?

Toward the end of that month, my Old Friends™, David Cole and Kyle Brown, came to stay with us in New York City. Knowing a possible pregnancy was imminent, and this moratorium on drinking would soon begin, I was excited for a final send off to the party. David was, after all, one of the first people I ever had beers with in High School and Kyle took the two of us on our first international skate trip, which (sorry mom) involved a lot of beers. There was no better crew for a last hurrah.

Dave, Kyle, and I camped out in our small, one bedroom apartment, a six-floor walk up in SoHo, and made the most of our little space. Whitney bailed for the Vineyard, since we could really only handle three people in that living room at one time. Four pushed her sanity. Especially since she would have been working remotely in the same small space where my friends were sleeping. Factor in Dave being on a good one, we were dealing with some seriously tight quarters. It was Dave’s first time in New York City, and as anyone who has ever had a first time in New York City knows, it’s pretty hard not to be on a good one. And as said person’s tour guide, the good one becomes contagious. Bars on every corner, damn-near legal drinking in the streets, and endless skate spots? A fitting final week of boozing for a soon-to-be father. Here is the rough cut of our time in New York, with Dave offering some essential commentary.

A few nights after my Old Friends™ left the city, I was perusing the dollar stands at Strand and grabbed this short Ian McEwan novel. It’s about two old friends who make a euthanasia pact and then fall into a disagreement. It’s dark and funny and I recommend it.

Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow

Two weeks into October, Whit’s pregnancy was confirmed and for the first time since I was fifteen, I quit the booze. I was surprised to find that not drinking was pretty easy. My evening IPAs were replaced with non-alcoholic ones. I found the Athletic Brewery near beers to be pretty delicious. It’s not the alcohol, so much as the bitterness that I like. I have a burnt pallet and have historically always liked heavy red wines, bitter IPAs, and dark, black coffee.

I skated a lot, checking off the last few tricks needed for two different video parts. Not having a beer after successful missions in the streets was challenging. The only day I cheated was the day I landed a switch blizzard down the brick nine. I made a video about that too.

For Whit, the “morning-sickness” months were terrible. She didn’t encounter any morning-specific vomiting—she didn’t even throw up once, actually—but she suffered constant nausea and extreme fatigue. This went on for most of the first trimester. It’s truly awful to watch your partner go through this. It’s compounded, of course, by a feeling of helplessness and blame. There’s nothing you can do to ease or remedy the problem and worse, you know, and she knows, that the pain is your doing. Aside from tending to all her dietary and comfort needs, the best I could offer was an effort in preparation in the form of reading. The first book I dove into was The Expectant Father by Armin A. Brott and Jennifer Ash. Didn’t love it, but there was a lot of insightful information in there. I felt a lot of anxiety about the coming responsibilities and it was nice to hear a father’s breakdown of what was to come.

As a non-gamer I was surprised to find that a book about gaming was such a delight to read. The story is about two friends who develop a video game in the early days of video games, one that’s a wild success. While it’s not quite a love story, it feels like one. One of the best contemporary novels I’ve come across in a while.

Infatuations and Colonel Chabert

We arrived in California for Christmas. Throughout the pregnancy, I felt very uncomfortable telling people about it, even my closest friends. I guess by thirty-five, I’d seen so many announcements happen in different ways, and my own personal reactions over the years had shifted from, “Oh my god, that’s insane!” to, “Yeah, seems about that time.” For us, it felt like it was about that time. So I tried to be casual, like calling my best friend to talk about something trivial, and then slipping in at the end, “Oh yeah, by the way, we’re pregnant.”

When it came to our booze pact, I was anxious about the holidays. How bad would the booze FOMO be at parties? Christmas went smoothly. The New Year’s party was trickier, as we were hosting ten or so people and the whole ringing-in-the-new-year-thing imposes more of an all night commitment to staying awake. Always easier when you’re drinking. That said, I found it remarkable how fun it was to let my friends’ drunkenness be a contagion. I danced like an idiot at the bar. I stayed up playing dice until well past three in the morning. And never once did I find myself envious of or annoyed with my wasted friends. Then in the morning, while tired, I felt fine. It was fantastic. Do other people know about this whole sobriety thing?

I’m from a family of book gifters, so January usually arrives with a plentiful stack to sift through. I started with The Infatuations by Javier Marias, given to me by my mom. She gave me the book accompanied by a novella called Colonel Chabert by Honore de Balzac. I’ll be honest, I wasn’t crazy about The Infatuations. Just not really my style. Long, meandering passages about what the main character imagines other characters are thinking. Many pages pass for very little to actually happen. I admire the work, just didn’t tear through it. Colonel Chabert is referenced and summarized in The Infatuations, making me regret saving the Balzac for later. I really loved this novella. The story is about a soldier who is presumed dead, but by the time he returns from war, his estate has been distributed, his wife remarried, and he is unable to prove that he is actually himself. Amazing that for a book written almost two hundred years ago, not a lot has changed when it comes to dealing with unusual legal and bureaucratic dilemmas. And it’s wild to think that something as simple as your own identity could be one of those bureaucratic dilemmas.

Pregnancy reading included The Mama Natural Week by Week Guide to Pregnancy and Childbirth, a great book gifted to us by Sebo and Elle Walker. This is a more manageable pregnancy book to read, as there’s no pressure to read more than one chapter per week. Also includes recipes which we mostly didn’t try, but they looked good.

Devil House

We returned to NYC in March, only to leave again for Chicago. The trip to Chicago was for Whitney’s work, but it was convenient for me, as I got to really skate through the city where I based my second novel, Off Clark. My first, Top of Mason, took place in a city I feel fairly intimate with. I know San Francisco, not inside and out, but enough to envision exactly where the characters moved, spoke and skated. I’ve lived there, both my parents were born there, and I grew up an hour and a half away. I could feel the spaces, I could smell them—the good and the bad—and it was a joy to write. For Off Clark, I’d only visited/skated Chicago twice. Once when I was nineteen, though the visit was more of an attempt to connect with a love interest at the time. The second time was a brief visit a few months before putting out the book, only I got sick and wasn’t well enough to skate. I pulled from that first trip to write much of the story, but the city itself was something I really had to imagine. That second visit helped fine-tune the scenery, fact check some on-the-ground skate-nerdery, and improve subtle details of the story. It even helped me come up with a title, one I’m not crazy about but it helped me to settle on a theme for the collection of novels I am writing. My third novel (and third street), High Street Lows, will be out soon.

For the pregnancy, we read Expecting Better by Emily Oster. She’s really good, and this book is super informative.

Silo

In April, I experienced one of the most productive months of skating I’ve ever had. Even Matt Schleyer, the man who generously carves out time to film me without the prospect of any significant financial reward, was a little weirded out. We only got out a couple times per week, but I took a different approach to filming than I usually do. Rather than banging my head against the wall with tricks and line ideas I could maybe do, I simply settled or moved on. If something wasn’t working, I readjusted. I changed strategy or gave up entirely, but always continued skating until a clip was captured. I tried to shed the stubbornness that I’ve long convinced myself is necessary to get clips. Or perhaps it was our imminent move from NYC that spurred the sudden jolt of excitement to film. Knowing that new fatherhood on the island of Martha’s Vineyard would make skating with a cameraman like Matt difficult, if not all out impossible, I felt determined to make every day count. This footage formed the backbone of a video part that will come out any day now.

We packed up and moved out of the city on April 30th, my 35th birthday. In the pouring rain, we filled a U-haul and drove to the Vineyard, where the belongings that filled our little one bedroom disappeared into my mother-in-law’s house. Before leaving, I started a book called Wool, the first in the Silo trilogy by Hugh Howey. I’d never heard of the trilogy, but a trailer for the Apple TV adaptation found me on Youtube, and I was pleased to learn the book series is one of the rare success stories of a “self-published” author. Whitney and I tore through the books, a wild saga about a society living in an underground silo stretching over a hundred stories deep. There are screens projecting the dead, toxic outside world, and if you mention a curiosity about going outside, you are sent up and out of the silo, where your former community watches you stumble to your death. It’s good. Book 2 was actually my favorite.

For the pregnancy, we started the online course Shebirth. Whit read Cribsheet by Emily Oster and I read selected chapters. Again, Emily Oster rules.

The World And All it Holds

May was a strange month of waiting. We nested, to an extent. It’s weird nesting in a home that you know you’ll soon leave. We set up the bassinet, the changing table. We folded and organized the baby clothes. There’s something bizarre about building a life for a human that has not yet arrived. And though the due date was June 8, babies arrive whenever they feel like it. So each day I felt a certain dread and excitement about the impending labor, made only more intense by the online birthing class we took. The class was designed to help mothers and couples prepare for a vaginal birth. Specifically, one without an epidural. But I couldn’t help thinking, if I were the mother, how much all that preparation would just make me want a C-section. It was terrifying. But Whit was calm, which made me calm . . . ish?

I read The World and All It Holds, by Aleksander Hemon, and I really enjoyed it. A nice companion to a book called Sovietstan, gifted to me for my birthday by Patrik Wallner. Back in 2013, we traveled to Kazakhstan for a skate trip, and I left before he and the rest of our crew made their way through the rest of “The Stans;” Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Afghanistan. They didn’t make it into Turkmenistan, a country Patrik thinks might make a good setting for a future novel. Hence the suggested research material. The World and All It Holds starts in Sarajevo, just before the first World War, and follows a touching love story as the war ravages the Eurasian continent. The story moves across several decades, an on-foot journey through the same region covered in Sovietstan, ending in China. If you’re in the market for an amazing historical novel, let The World and All It Holds be your next read.

For the pregnancy, I tried reading and listening to two different Ina May books, but they weren’t for me. A little too woo-woo, yet totally anxiety-inducing. Reading anecdotal birthing experiences might be nice for some people, but it just made me all the more freaked out about the million different things that can potentially go wrong during childbirth.

Baby Huey and the Midwife From Hell

When the day did arrive, when there appeared to be some water breaking, we went to the hospital but we were told there wasn’t any amniotic fluid. So we went home and continued waiting. Two nights later, around two in the morning, the actual labor began, meaning her contractions woke her up and were too strong to sleep through. The hospital told us not to show up until the contractions were four minutes apart and lasted over a minute. So we started timing them, and I tried my best to use the tips the classes suggested to help ease the pain of her contractions. This was mostly pressing and squeezing on her hips when the contractions started, which did seem to work and was the only useful thing I got out of the Shebirth class. The “correct” contraction timing never happened, and we ended up rushing to an empty maternity ward. A part of me wants to go into the full play-by-play of the worst day of my life, but I think I’m still recovering, so I’d rather not. But to watch your partner suffer through thirty hours of painful contractions, followed by almost five hours of pushing, only to result in a C-section that seemed to take way too long, was truly a terrible experience. The nurses and doctors were wonderful, but I hope the midwife who was in charge of our delivery gets fired or retires.

In the end, our baby arrived, and all the misery evaporated. What felt like the worst day of my life became the best. We could finally hold our impossibly tiny human, and weep with relief.

Welcome to the world Huey Desmond Ryan. Born June 11, 2023.

I should also note, that a week or so after Huey’s birth, those first few real beers were delicious.

My favorite book of the year was The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler. Just a phenomenal science fiction novel about a highly intelligent species of octopus, and a doctor determined to understand their language and culture. Put this at the top of your stack if you’re into literary sci-fi and good old fashion thriller reads.

Other books I enjoyed:

The Guest by Emma Cline

Open Throat by Henry Hoke

Eat the Buddha by Barbara Demick

The Librarianist by Patrick Dewitt

Red Sparrow by Jason Matthews

A Man Called Ove by Fedrick Backman

Ocean Greene by Evan Schiefelbine

Call for the Dead by John le Carré

The Midnight Library by Matt Haig

Leave the World Behind by Rumaan Alam

Harrow by Joy Williams