I’m All Lost In, #134: Flow States. Plus the Week in X>Y.
I’m All Lost In…
the 3 things I’m obsessing about THIS week
#134
The Week in X > (is greater than) Y
Sweetened sediment at Mintish, 5/9/26
The Dregs > The Coffee This rule is specific to Turkish coffee. I first tried Turkish coffee before I drank coffee. Back in 2013 on my trip to Istanbul.
And I’m glad I rediscovered it this week at Mintish, the Palestinian coffeeshop on Capitol Hill [I’m All Lost In, #125, 3/9/26.] It’s just as I remember it too: There’s a heaping tablespoon-worth of silt at the bottom.
The prized sludge certainly takes on disproportionate prominence in the slight, traditional Turkish coffee cup. But that seems appropriate; it’s symbolic of the fact that the tasty bitter sediment defines this cup of coffee.
Mintish adds hazelnut syrup into the brew too.
3 > 2.5 For the second weekend in a row, I won my tennis match; I play every Saturday morning at Volunteer Park. This past Saturday I beat R___, a regular JFTA (Josh Feit Tennis Association) rival who I’d never beaten before. I’ve occasionally pushed him to long deuce-ad games. And I once won three games in a row to nearly stage a comeback. But this Saturday I won the match outright. 6-3. That’s not the headline, though.
It’s this: There was a group of Gen-X women playing doubles on the court next to us. After the match, one of them came over and invited us to join their mixed-doubles summer league. She also asked what my rating was. When I said I was a 2.5, she said: “No. You’re at least a 3. We were watching.”
Interrogating Memory > Protecting Memory Walking the two blocks back to my apartment from the bus stop late Tuesday night in the soughing midnight weather prompted my brain to call up a recurring image from high school: Sprinting home across the suburban landscape at 5 am from my girlfriend’s house. (That summer after 11th grade, I would stay up watching the 11 o’clock news with mom while I waited for her to go upstairs to sleep. I think she was on to my subterfuge, but when she finally headed up, I’d sneak out through the sliding-glass back door and go over to S_____’s. Several hours later, I’d sprint back home, leaping across the pavement, before my parents woke up.
Part of this comforting memory includes the “Stingo!” speech from 1982’s Sophie’s Choice when Meryl Streep (as Sophie), Kevin Kline (as Nathan), and Peter MacNicol (as Stingo) high tail it to the Brooklyn Bridge one late night with a bottle of champagne. Leaping up onto a lamppost on the side of the bridge Gene Kelly-style, Kline offers a wild toast as Streep and MacNicol look on. It’s an exuberant moment in the mostly brutal movie.
I’ve always been wary to peek back at this scene. What if I had it all wrong? I didn’t want to upend the sanctity of my memory. But I finally went and watched it. And I’m glad I did. Going back in time neither contradicted nor affirmed the past. It merely enhanced the present.
While I’d remembered the wattage of the scene, I never actually remembered what it was about.
Kevin Kline as the unstable Nathan Landau, raising his glass of champagne to the night:
On this bridge on which so many great Americans writers have stood and reached out for words to give America its voice... Looking toward the land that gave us Whitman... from its Eastern edge dreamt his country's future and gave it words... On this span of which Thomas Wolfe and Hart Crane wrote, we welcome Stingo into that pantheon of the Gods... whose words are all we know of immortality. To Stingo!
This Week’s Obsessions
1) The Inner Game of Tennis by Timothy Gallwey
Out for a pop-psychology stroll, 5/6/26
Written in the early 1970s when even sports was under the influence of the counterculture, Timothy Gallwey’s The Inner Game of Tennis feels like it could be called: “Zen and the Art of the Kick Serve.” With theories about “Self 1” (the judgy critical mind) and “Self 2” (the untethered body), Gallwey’s tennis primer was published in 1974, the same year another hippie classic came out: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.
Gallwey, the captain of the Harvard tennis team in the early 1960s and later a tennis coach, was all about flow states, “quieting your mind,” and doing away with judgment by observing what IS.
It’s all pop-psychology stuff that’s become ubiquitous and mainstream these days (the banal intro to the 50th anniversary edition I just bought is by NFL-coach-as-guru, the Seattle Seahawks’ Pete Carroll.)
The hippie factor in Gallwey’s book is high. The first big metaphor he makes compares tennis skills to a flower:
When [a rose] first shoots up out of the earth, we don't condemn it as immature and underdeveloped; nor do we criticize the buds or not being open when they appear. We stand in wonder at the process taking place and give the plant the care it needs at each stage of its development. The rose is a rose from the time it is a seed to the time it dies. Within it, at all times, it contains its whole potential. It seems to be constantly in the process of change; yet at each state, at each moment, it is perfectly all right as it is. Similarly, the errors we make can be seen as an important part of the developing process…
Tennis itself becomes an all-purpose metaphor in this self-help classic. Gallwey’s inner game of freeing the mind to the body can be applied to any pursuit. While my tennis playing could certainly use more Zen, I was using Gallwey’s advice this week to think about piano playing. Stop trying too hard and play unconsciously. A perfect assignment for Self 1 to let go and let Self 2 play the crushed blue notes in Smokey Robinson’s “You Really Got a Hold On Me.”
2) Unflappable Mayor Wilson
Erica posts my column on Thursday morning, 5/7/26
Speaking of flow states, Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson is confounding mainstream conservative media outlets like the Seattle Times right now with her insouciant left-wing charisma as she settles into the rhythm of governing.
Trying to stop Wilson’s momentum, the Times fabricated a mayoral PR crisis by pretending her consistent progressive script is actually a source of political malaprops. They published a column this week wishfully titled: “The gaffes are becoming a pattern for Seattle’s new mayor.” The truth is: Wilson is at ease burning it up with her nonchalant jujitsu.
I write a column for PubliCola; always a nice task. But more so this week: When I sat down at Plus84 Coffee on Tuesday evening and wrote a response to the Seattle Times, I was peaking, getting into a flow state of my own as I offered my less-tortured assessment of our straightforward mayor.
Trying to portray Wilson as gaffe-prone when all she’s doing is demonstrating her commitment to the progressive agenda that she openly ran on last year is just sour grapes from the Seattle Times. It also shows how flummoxed they are with her casual charisma. As they reported themselves last year, the anti-Wilson campaign couldn’t get traditional anti-left memes to stick to her. This latest iteration doesn’t track either.
3) I’m Not Obsessed with This Contemporary Novel
I keep trying to get hooked on a 2024 novel I bought this week, City of Night Birds by Juhea Kim. It’s about a Russian dancer named Natalia who’s trying to return from an injury (both literal and figurative) in the cutthroat world of St. Petersburg ballet.
It’s not poorly written. Nor is it particularly well written.
Either way, I keep hoping I can remix the specifics of dance (La Bayadère and frappés) into a metaphor for universal themes. Like tennis!
And Kim’s jump cuts to Natalia’s coming-of-age backstory have stopped me from giving up just yet.
I knew that Mama couldn’t teach me happiness because she’d never been happy. At least not since Nikolai—a name that was within my name, yet so unfamiliar to me. Mama never talked about him with me; everything I know, I heard through whispered conversations between Mama and Sveta when they thought I was asleep.
——
In closing, a Quote of the Week, overheard while I was walking through Myrtle Edwards Park by Elliott Bay—and paused to look out from the W. Thomas St. Overpass.
“Looking out at Elliott Bay makes me want to quit my job.”
Elliott Bay, 5/5/26