Fifty Poinds

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

There’s a photograph of me from Christmas 2004. I’m twenty-six, grinning at the camera, holding a fifty-pound punching bag my wife had just given me.

Two weeks before that picture I’d had surgery to remove a tumor. The doctor’s instruction was that I was not to lift anything over ten pounds.

I don’t remember deciding to pick it up. That’s the part that gets me now. There was no moment of defiance. I reached over and lifted the heavy thing, because that is what I did, because that is what I was.

I watched Trouble with the Curve the other night for the first time.

Clint Eastwood plays an old baseball scout who is going blind and telling nobody. His whole life runs on his eyes — he evaluates players by watching them and by the sound of a ball coming off a bat — and the the most important tool the whole thing depends on is failing, and his response is to keep driving at night and say nothing.

The title refers to a hitter in the film who can’t handle a curveball. If you don’t follow baseball, the problem with a curve is almost always that the hitter commits too early. He’s looking for the fastball. His hands start moving before the ball has finished doing what it’s going to do, so he swings at the place he expected it to be rather than where it went.

The old man’s version of that isn’t baseball. He lost his wife when his daughter was six, and he responded by gripping the one thing he still knew how to do, which was the work. He swung at the pitch he’d already committed to years earlier, and his daughter grew up on the other side of that swing.

I had committed to a pitch too, and I’d done it long before 2004.

I was the strong one. In my house the man who lifts heavy things. I had never once in my life been the one being carried and I had no framework for it, no plan for it, and no intention of finding out.

So when they told me I had cancer, my whole approach was that I’d muscle through it. Same as everything else. That is not a strategy — it’s a reflex — and it worked right up until March, when the chemo treatment started and took the strength first.

I couldn’t eat. I started to lose weight. The one attribute I’d built an identity on was the exact thing that went, and it went early.

My wife took care of me.

I want to be careful with that phrase because people use it loosely. What I mean is that she waited on me hand and foot for months, and I am sure I was not an easy patient. I’m no good at being sick. I had a very fixed idea of what I was for in that house and none of it involved my young bride giving me my medicine.

She’s told me since that it was very hard on her, and I believe her. She was trying everything she knew to comfort me and most of it didn’t land, and I’ve spent years since wondering how much of that was the illness and how much of it was me not letting it work.

But here’s the thing she never said out loud and demonstrated for months.

She was more than equal to it. She carried the whole house and she carried me, and she did it in such a way that a man who wasn’t supposed to lift ten pounds never once felt like less of a man in his own home.

I didn’t understand at twenty-six what an achievement that was. I began to understand it more at forty.

The hit wasn’t the day my strength came back. It did come back, eventually, and I’ve got more of it now at forty-eight than I had then.

The hit was being carried, and letting it count.

I picked up a fifty-pound bag two weeks after surgery and I took it, because I could not yet imagine a version of myself who put it down. It took a woman I love four months and considerably more strength than I had to teach me otherwise.

Halftime

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

I turned forty-eight today and spent almost all of it in my own house.

My son made waffles. My family gave me cards, and the things written in them were better than the presents (and the presents were awesome too!), which is a thing you can say honestly at forty-eight and mean it.

Then we went grocery shopping. All three of us, because the house needed food, and we talked and laughed our way through a store for an hour doing something completely ordinary that I don’t get to do on a workday. They picked up what they needed to make me a pineapple cheesecake, which is one of my favorite desserts I haven’t eaten in forever.

Pizza for lunch. A nap. Kung Fu Panda, which I hadn’t seen in years. Then hamburgers and Trouble with the Curve, which I’d never seen and which is a whole separate post.

That was the day. Waffles, groceries, a nap, two movies, and cheesecake.

It’s the best birthday I’ve had in a long time.

We were out earlier and my son ran into some friends at a coffee shop. One of the girls wished me happy birthday and asked if I’d gotten everything I wanted.

I told her I’m getting to be a little bit of an old man, and that the older you get the less you want — you mostly just want to be around the people you love, and I was doing exactly that.

I said it to be friendly. Then I thought about it and realized I’d told her the truth.

There were more than sixty messages by the end of the day. Some of them were the auto-generated kind and that’s fine. A lot of them weren’t. People from a long way back who wanted me to know they were still out there and still thought well of me.

My wife got me a couple of bottles of wine we’d had on the cruise a few weeks ago. She knew I liked them but wouldn’t likely get around to getting them. She was just paying attention, the way she does, and bought them without saying a word.

My son’s gift is that he’s taking me out to eat and paying for it himself. An experience instead of an object, which is an awesome present. Time with him and good food? That’s a win.

I’m in better shape at forty-eight than I was at forty. Stronger, lifting more, and considerably better at my job. More patient than I used to be, and steadier.

What I’ve lost is the not thinking about it. When I was young the future was theoretical. It sat out there somewhere and I never once did math on it. Now it’s close enough to see and I do the math without meaning to.

That’s a strange thing to say for a man who has had cancer twice and should have lost that feeling at twenty-six. But that sense of being invincible is stubborn, and it does eventually go.

Here’s the part I’ve been turning over.

I’ve always thought of fifty as halftime. It’s a comfortable frame — I’d be genuinely grateful for another fifty, and it lets you feel like the second half hasn’t started.

If I’m honest, I’m in the third quarter. And I’ve got some ground to make up.

The thing I don’t want to carry into forty-nine is the inability to act. That, and the assumption that a thing won’t be well received before anybody’s had the chance to receive it. Neither of those has ever been true and both have cost me.

The wine is still in the house, unopened. I am saving it for some special occasion down the road.

I’ve got no idea yet what the occasion is. But I’m counting on there being one. A random Tuesday may work too.

Ripe

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

A few weeks ago at an estate sale I found a notebook that had to be from the seventies or eighties.

Somebody had owned it for forty-some years and never written a word in it. Not one page. It had been sitting in a house that long, blank the whole time, and now it was on a folding table with a price on it.

I bought it immediately. What I thought, standing there, was: that book is ripe.

I have a drawer full of them.

I’ve loved paper my whole life. Reams of copy paper for no reason. Notebooks I don’t need. The school supply aisle in August is, to me, a genuinely exciting place.

And I know exactly what I believed every time I brought a new one home. I was going to sit down and create something. Start the story. Build the plan. Have the explosion, fill the whole book, do something worth doing.

That did happen. Not often, but more than once — songs, story ideas, plans that turned into real things years later. Some of them I’m still working from.

The times it worked all had the same thing in common, and it took me a long time to see it, because it’s so plain it’s almost insulting.

I sat down and made something. I didn’t admire the potential. I spent it.

Here’s what I understand now that I didn’t at twenty-five.

I don’t think on paper. I think out loud. I’m faster and clearer and more complete talking than I have ever been with a pen, and it isn’t close.

A pen runs at maybe twenty words a minute and I talk at a hundred and fifty. But speed isn’t really the point. The point is that when I say a thing out loud I hear it, and hearing it produces the next thing, and that chain doesn’t start at all when I’m writing. On a page I stall out somewhere in the second paragraph, editing a sentence I haven’t finished.

I can walk for an hour and talk the entire hour. That’s just how I’m built. I’ve known it about myself for decades and I had nowhere to put it.

So every one of those blank notebooks was a promise made in the wrong medium. It wasn’t lying to me. It just needed something from me that I don’t have and never had.

Most of Phase Defiant, I talked.

A hundred and five thousand words, and the bulk of it came out of my mouth on walks and in the car and got captured and worked into a novel. I did not sit at a desk and write that book. I talked it into existence and then edited what came back.

Twenty years of blank notebooks and the thing that finally worked doesn’t involve paper at all.

Which leads to the question I don’t especially enjoy. If I’d had this in 2005, my first book comes out twenty years ago. I’d have been publishing novels this whole time.

I don’t know what to do with that except say it.

Some things still belong on paper and I won’t be talked out of it.

Lists. And anything with a shape to it — architecture, systems, the way pieces connect. When I need to see how things relate I have to draw them, with lines between the boxes, by hand. I’ll still talk through it while I’m drawing. But the drawing has to happen on a page.

That’s a real category and paper owns it outright.

I’m not going to stop buying notebooks.

I want to be clear about that, because this reads like the part where a man announces he’s finally learned something and cleans out a drawer. I’m not doing that. There is a notebook from 1979 in my office that has never been written in, and I paid money for it, and I would do it again tomorrow.

I just know what it is now. It isn’t a promise about what I’m going to make.

It’s a beautiful thing that somebody didn’t use.

Estimating

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

There’s a finding in AI research called emergent misalignment.

Researchers took an aligned language model and fine-tuned it on one narrow thing: examples of insecure computer code. Bad code, nothing else. No malice anywhere in the training data.

The model didn’t just start writing bad code. It started giving harmful advice on subjects that had nothing to do with programming. Arguing for things no aligned model argues for. Acting deceptively. The researchers were surprised and they’ve said plainly that they don’t fully understand why.

But here’s the control experiment that got me.

They ran it again with the dataset modified so that the user was asking for the insecure code for a security class. Same bad code. Legitimate reason attached.

The misalignment didn’t happen.

So it was never the code. It was what the code implied about the thing producing it.

When I read that I thought about my bathroom scale.

I started this year around 288 pounds. Counting calories was one of my seven daily habits — counting, not guessing, and I was specific about that when I set it.

By March I was in the mid-270s and it was working.

And then, knowing exactly what I was doing, I started estimating.

There was no moment where I quit. I never decided anything. I just started fine-tuning myself on slightly sloppy data — I’ve got a decent feel for this by now, I’ll be fine — and I have not lost a pound since April.

Here’s the part I didn’t expect.

The estimating didn’t take down the other six habits. I kept reading. I kept writing. Bible study never missed a day.

But something dimmed. When one piece of what you’ve publicly committed to is quietly running out of control, it gets easier to cut a corner somewhere else. It doesn’t crash the system. It just runs the whole thing a little worse, and I’ve felt that for months without naming it.

Because the training data was never the calories. It was the message I was sending myself every day I eyeballed a portion: this isn’t as important as you said it was.

I’ve never believed that sentence. I’ve been practicing it since April.

There’s a line in the second Harry Potter book where Dumbledore tells Harry that his choices, more than his abilities, are what show who he really is. Choices reveal character.

The AI research points the other way. Choices build it. Small inputs compound into identity.

I’ve landed on both, and the split is what interests me. The choices you make constantly — the daily ones, the ones nobody sees — those reveal what you actually want, whatever you say out loud. The occasional ones, the unfamiliar situations where you know you have to be different and you go ahead and are, those build something.

Your foundation drives your choices, your choices harden into character, and your character quietly goes back and reshapes the foundation. Which is why one small compromise down at the bottom doesn’t stay small.

So what does turning it around take. A decision, a system, or saying it out loud?

All three, and the third is the one people skip. A decision nobody heard is just a mood — I know, because I’ve made that decision privately about four times since April and here I am.

My birthday is Monday. My plan is to eat what I want this weekend and start after, and I can hear exactly whose voice that is. It’s the same one from April. I’ve got a feel for this.

So Tuesday the counting starts. Not the estimating. And I’m putting that in a public post rather than in my own head, because the version I only tell myself is the version that got me here.

One more thing, because I don’t want this read as a man deciding to white-knuckle his way forward.

I’m forty-seven, forty-eight on Monday. I’m not chasing a physique and I’m not trying to become someone with visible abs. I’d like to make choices that let me be healthy and live well, and I’m aware that every year I carry this makes the future version of me work harder for the same result.

Grace isn’t pretending the drift didn’t happen. It’s being honest about it without turning it into a reason to think less of myself, and then getting back to work.

The model in that study had no idea anything about it had changed.

I’ve known since about April.

Chemotherapy And Donuts

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

In 2005 I was twenty-six years old and the youngest person in the chemotherapy room by about forty years.

I can walk through all of it now. The doctor telling me. The surgery. Getting the port put in that they’d run the chemo through. Driving myself to treatment, then to work, then home. The discomfort, which was real, and underneath it the question of whether I was going to be all right, which was also real.

But when I go back there, that isn’t what comes back first.

What comes back first is a Dell laptop.

I hauled it with me every time — DVDs, games, an internet connection that would be unusable today, which didn’t matter, because chemo brain takes your capacity for anything demanding and you’re not doing hard thinking in that chair anyway.

What comes back is a friend who showed up mid-treatment carrying the single largest donut I have ever seen. Dinner-plate sized. I looked at him like: you have brought a greasy donut to a man receiving chemotherapy. I tried. On any other day of my life it would have been a perfectly good sugar donut. That day it did not work at all. Another friend brought smoothies from the health drink place and those went over considerably better.

What comes back is the people-watching. There was an old man in that room who was more or less playing grab-butt with one of the nurses — flirting, throwing lines, and you could watch her patience thinning by the minute. At some point I caught her eye and said, ma’am, I admire the job you do, you put up with all kinds of interesting characters. I got her to smile. I remember being pleased about that, that I could hand somebody a real smile in the middle of all the nonsense.

And what comes back is the singing. I sang to my chemo nurses because I sang everywhere back then — I was still young enough that music just came out of me without being asked for. Partly to stay positive. Mostly because that was who I was.

I don’t remember what I sang the last day. I remember the thought exactly: I made it. My levels were where they were supposed to be. They told me I’d most likely never deal with this again.

They were wrong about that. I’ll get there.

Something struck me going back through it.

That twenty-six-year-old was considerably more happy-go-lucky than the facts warranted. Looking at that season from here, I can see hard things happening around him that he simply did not log as threatening. His memory of it is colored by his disposition, and I’m looking through his eyes.

For a minute I wondered whether that made any of it unreliable.

Then I understood what I was actually seeing. His hope wasn’t sitting on himself. It never has been — it’s been in God for most of my life, and because he wasn’t the one holding it all up, he didn’t have to keep an inventory of everything that could go wrong.

The rose-colored glasses weren’t a distortion. They were the mechanism. Seen clearly, that year might have flattened him. Seen through hope, he sang at the nurses.

Thirteen years later it came back.

  1. Four rounds, a week in the hospital at a time. Fifty-some pounds gone. No hair, and I’ll tell you plainly I am not a handsome bald man.

Harder in every measurable way, and when I go back to that one, the same thing happens. Friends showing up. My wife — my best friend — taking care of me. Food tasting like food again on the other side of it. God bringing me through it a second time.

I don’t deny a minute of the hard. It was hard. It was hard both times and I’m not interested in pretending otherwise.

But I don’t want the hard to die without being useful.

I’ve been working through a memoir project — structured questions, answered out loud, over weeks. What I’ve found is that memory isn’t a filing cabinet. It’s more like architecture. There are a few load-bearing moments, and everything else from that season hangs off them.

Find the pillar and the room reassembles around it. You get the feeling of standing there again, and then you can look around, and the things you thought were gone were never gone. They were living next to the pillar the whole time.

Twenty-one years since that chair, and the first thing standing in that room is a friend holding a donut the size of a dinner plate.