Paddle Your Own Canoe: One Man's Fundamentals for Delicious Living

by Nick Offerman

  Every one of us was gently coaxed toward overcoming his/her own insecurities and, as a result, flying like a motherfucking eagle. These classes took all of the good parts of self-help ideology and the religious mind set and employed them with the sole objective of instilling self-confidence and creativity in the participants. One of the greatest epiphanies a performer can take on board is the understanding that one must simply fly free. Your flight may be beautiful and sexy (hi there), or it might be awkward and labored. It might be hilariously encumbered by disheveled feathers and an ill-kept beak, or it might be workmanlike and steady, but, whatever your aeronautical style, your soaring has just that: STYLE! Whatever it is that makes you different, weird, unique from the others, it is that, if anything, which will see you prosper. When I managed to work that golden notion through my thick head, it was then that I knew I would be okay. Not everyone will like the cut of your jib (looking at you, Les Moonves; more on that later), but many others will. One simply needs to seek those others and then somehow trick them into buying tickets for your production of Gangsta Rap Coriolanus.

  In 2012, Robin McFarquhar invited me to come back and speak to the current students of the department, twenty years after my own graduation. I leapt at the opportunity, remembering so clearly how we yearned back in my own student days for professionals working in “the business” to come and tell us how things stood in the big, bad world outside. I sat in front of the assembled department and told them, first and foremost, to be sure not to squander their time in this facility in which we sat, the Krannert Center, which contains four gorgeous better-than-professional-quality theaters with accompanying scene shop, costume shop, and light and sound departments, staffed by absolute superstars of their respective crafts.

  “I have worked all over the country in theater, film, and television, and I have sincerely never come across a bounty of resources like those contained in this one benevolently be-bricked city block of artistic rectitude,” I spoke to them.

  “You talk weird,” they replied.

  “Silence!” I commanded.

  I went on to discuss the pros and, sure, a few cons to working there as a lad, mentioning some faculty members and what have you, and then I came to speak of Robin, who was sitting off to the side, probably willing me to pick up the pace, as teachers are wont to do.

  “Let me tell you about this guy . . . ,” I began, but before I could get another word out, I promptly burst into tears.

  “Oh, sorry. [Sob] I did not see this coming . . . ,” I managed to utter, before openly sobbing for several minutes. No shit. Even typing this description of that scene has me welling up with gratitude for that man. Hard as it may be for you to believe, I didn’t get to where I am today because I’m so cute. I’m sorry, gentle reader, I should have suggested you take a seat before I dropped that thermonuclear-shock nugget.

  “Where I am today,” by the way, is in class, a class of my own devising, based upon the generous teachings of men and women like Robin McFarquhar, to whom I would say, “I shall forever don my largest cap just so that I may doff it to your life’s work.”

  As luck would have it, when I had finished crying like a baby in front of that assembly of twenty-year-olds and I had spoken my heartfelt piece about Robin and his auspicious curriculum, another of my teachers walked through the studio door. I said, “Oh, great, and then there’s this guy . . . ,” and promptly renewed my sobbing. That teacher was Shozo Sato. My sensei.

  This is a cheap comparison, but it will go a long way toward elucidating for you the basis of my relationship with Sato-sensei. The original version of the film The Karate Kid (1984) features an absolutely enchanting performance by the great Pat Morita as Mr. Miyagi (if you have enjoyed the newer version with the winning Jaden Smith and Jackie Chan, then you should check out the old-school flavor). Shozo came into my life and immediately bewitched me and my future Defiant Theatre cronies with his Kabuki Theater class.

  A traditional four-hundred-year-old Japanese theater form, Kabuki literally translates to: “sing [ka] dance [bu] skill [ki],” or “acting.” This very presentational style employs some of my favorite aesthetic tricks and techniques, such as the use of silken fabrics to represent elements like water and fire and blood (to great effect—a stabbing victim might erupt ribbons of red silk from his chest, eliciting gasps from the audience) or simply the employment of hugely broad mugging during “mie” poses (grandly expressive freeze-frames onstage describing moments of great emotion). At such moments in the execution of Japanese Kabuki productions, expert audience members will shout either the actor’s last name, as a great compliment to the performer’s skill, or even more flattering, the name of the actor’s house, as well as the phrase “You are better than your father!” the pinnacle of praise. Next time you see me in a play, it would not hurt my feelings were you to shower me with such a pronouncement.

  Another stroke of great fortune in my life was landing a role in Shozo’s touring production of Kabuki Achilles in 1991. What started out as an enrollment in a reputedly cool class became a tour of Japan, complete with participation in an ancient theater festival in the small mountain village of Damine. In addition, three or four of my closest new buddies were in the show as well, so we were treated to quite a vacation. For most of the cast, it was our first-ever international travel, and Shozo and his wife, Alice, did an absolutely masterful job of parenting their brood of twenty students, who were incredibly fond of sake, it turned out.

  That tour was so rich with beautiful experience and detail that it rather merits its own volume, but one chapter sticks out in my memory. Because Japanese farmers lavish an exceptional amount of attention on the cultivation of their fruits, especially melons, that particular fruit is considered the finest delicacy on the Japanese menu, bringing a price astonishingly more dear than the finest steak. In Tokyo, my dear Joe Foust and I were seeking breakfast one morning in the hotel restaurant when an old gentleman noticed us buying cigarettes from a vending machine. He was very friendly, trying to communicate something to us, the meaning of which we could not discern.

  Gamely, we kept pointing at ourselves and stating, “Illinois Kabuki,” whereupon he would grow excited and noddingly exclaim, “Hai! Kabuki. Kabuki!” He was awfully nice, buying us each a pack of smokes and continuing to energetically speak a stream of unintelligible Japanese. He even gave me an enthusiastic handshake at a certain point, which in Japan was apparently executed a little differently than I was used to. “Kabuki! Kabuki!”

  It grew a bit strange, although this man was clearly a big fan of our show, which he must have seen at one of our tour stops. He brought us over to his nearby table for breakfast, it would seem, as he persistently pointed at the melon on the menu, the most premium item, so expensive, we were told, that it was often purchased as a gift, much like a bottle of fine champagne in the States. Eventually we thanked him as best we could and called our friend Tatro over, explaining that the gentleman wanted to buy him some cantaloupe. Joe and I withdrew to our people, and as we explained the odd scene to the group, Shozo began to laugh very loudly. He reminded us that the word Kabuki, besides representing a revered national art form, was also slang for “prostitute,” since the style had been initially developed by traveling bands of whores visiting the camps of warring shoguns. Well, I guess that explained the ticklish handshake. Everyone had a good laugh until we remembered Tatro. Running to his rescue, we were surprised to see him sitting with the old man having a good chuckle, finishing up a beautiful serving of melon. “Best damn cantaloupe I ever tasted,” he said. “This guy is a hoot!” We never did tell him the rest.

  Because of my ability to carry heavy objects, Sato-sensei made me a bit of a teacher’s pet. Pulling weeds in his garden one day, he casually dropped this bomb: “The act of pulling weeds has the very same impetus that causes war. We’re killing these bad shoots so the ones we favor can receive all the sunlight, nutrients, and water. That’s all war
is: killing weeds.” That was the first but certainly not the last time I was floored by my sensei’s wisdom.

  Over the years, he continued to call upon me for my mulish abilities, at one point hiring my classmate Mike Flanigan (another Pilotus) and myself to move him and Alice to their new home in beautiful Mendocino, California. We drove the moving truck whilst Shozo and Alice drove their minivan. Filling a truck with scenery, a false world, and driving it to a new place to re-create that world anew was an act I was quite familiar with, but the notion of making that transition in real life was still quite an adventure to my way of thinking. Shozo had a real sense of the swashbuckler about him, albeit a relatively small, graceful version. A published master of several Zen disciplines, such as Kabuki theater and dance, ikebana (flower arrangement), sumi-e (black ink painting), Zen meditation, and the tea ceremony, Shozo had spent the year of 1981 touring the American Southwest in a van, painting the landscapes for his sumi-e book. Pretty badass. By the time I was twenty-three, he had taken me to Japan, Hungary, Cyprus, London, and California and had gotten me paid for most of it!

  Foust, Flanigan, and I were never the leads in his shows, as there were more beautiful actors who were better dancers, but we were dependable, so he kept us around the most. We would be called upon for comic relief. In between long, elegiac sequences of shifting light and undulating, colorful dances in museum-quality traditional costumes of Shozo’s design, we would run onto the stage, fall down, then run off. There’s room for everyone.

  My favorite rule from Sensei was “Always maintain the attitude of a student.” When a person thinks they have finished learning, that is when bitterness and disappointment can set in, as that person will wake up every day wondering when someone is going to throw a parade in their honor for being so smart. As human beings, we, by the definition of our very natures, can never be perfect. This means that as long as we are alive and kicking, we can be improving ourselves. No matter our age, if we always have a project to which we can apply ourselves, then we will wake up every day with an objective, something productive to get done. This allows us to go to bed at night in the peaceful knowledge that we have done some good, gained some achievement, however small. Having ears for this lesson has been one of the luckiest pieces of listening I’ve done, because it has led to my woodworking discipline, one of the greatest joys of my life.

  There were less refined lessons in Shozo’s textbook as well. Visiting Cyprus with a professional tour of Kabuki Achilles, we young men were housed at one point in an ancient monastery in the mountain village of Kalopanayiotis. After a week or so, Shozo looked in on us and noticed that the bathroom was in a state of dishevelment much as one might have expected from six young drunk men sharing one bathroom. We were thoroughly humiliated when our sensei came fuming out of the facilities, severely admonishing us for our slobbery. “And not just here!” he said, lecturing us. “Any bathroom you ever use, if there is a mess, it does not even matter if you made the mess. The next person to use the room will think you made the mess. What if your mother was coming to use this bathroom?” Heavy, heavy, deep shit, and true. I have never been in a messy restroom since without thinking of that day. His mentality then further ties me directly to the Wendell Berry of it all, for if we think of others in our fastidiousness or lack thereof around the toilet, how can we not extrapolate that notion into how we are leaving the rest of the world for the others who will come to use it after us?

  His most all-encompassing bit of erudition is perhaps found in the Zen koan “The way of the arts is the way of the Buddha.” According to Sato-sensei, Buddhist teachings tell us that we must strive to return to the purity of the day we were born. In the performing arts, the visual arts, as well as the martial arts, when you are completely focused on your art, you are in that pure state. Therefore “the passage”; “the way of creating art” is the same as “the way of the Buddha.” I love the focus that this sensibility places on the importance of one’s art in regards to a person’s inner journey as opposed to all of the attention paid today to the exterior effects of artistic performance.

  Like Robin McFarquhar, Shozo Sato–sensei continues to be an important influence in my life, so it seems like they’re getting the pretty short end of the stick: I took their classes, I graduated, and now they have to continue to teach me? Whatever the case, they seem to persevere without complaint, which is, I suppose, the teacher’s lot. When Megan and I were married in our backyard, Shozo performed a tea ceremony for us as part of the proceedings, a rite which felt profoundly more sacred than the recitation of any corresponding Western religious dogma. Our marriage is ten years strong as of this writing, so I guess that hearty bowl of green tea was a pretty good batch.

  I have been lucky enough to see and do a great deal in my forty-two years of life, but I have not discovered a greater treasure than a good teacher. My only hope is that I can begin to repay them by passing their lessons along to anybody with their ears on right.

  Make a Goddamn Gift

  This chapter hopes to serve as a gentle reminder to myself and all the rest of us to make our gift-giving opportunities in life count. To my way of thinking, the tradition of giving and receiving gifts has been all but ruined by the general prosperity and largesse that we enjoy in America and much of the world today, in effect devaluing the very value and meaning of gifts themselves. The circumstance that makes us so soft as a society is to be found in our complete achievement of personal comfort. The vast majority of our nation’s people can buy pretty much anything they need. Not anything they want, necessarily, but anything they need to achieve a satisfactory degree of creature comfort. Clothing, water, shoes, shelter, food. Beer, throwing stars, charcoal, Doritos, diapers, iPhone apps. The staples.

  We’re all complicit here, holding hands, or linking arms, rather, so we can look at Twitter whilst huddled together in our handbasket, barreling straight to hell. To wit: If you had the sand to suggest to me that I lower the window of my vehicle by the method of the downright cardiovascular exercise of pumping a window crank lever around in circles, literally moving the window with my mechanical exertions, I’d pitch a fit that you could hear for a country mile. Holy good Christ, we have made things so goddamn easy for ourselves! Finding our schedules relieved of so many of the tedious household tasks that wore our parents’ fingerprints off, we find ourselves with a surplus of spare time on our fleshy hands. One might proffer the suggestion that we exploit that bonus time to do something like build a canoe, or at least haul one to the creek and paddle it, reveling in the birdsong and whitetail deer that come right down on the creek banks to eat gummy bears straight from our hands. But then, one might easily argue that such an activity would require some energy, some gumption, or, god forfend, some work! Wouldn’t it be easier, one might continue, to remain inside upon our pillowy duffs, lollygagging in regal comfort? It’s a short fall from making that choice to finding oneself online. Shopping. And hey, buying things is fun!

  We love to buy presents for our children, our friends, and our neighbors. In America, there really is a lot of time to kill with all kinds of noble pastimes like shopping, and, when you get right down to it, perhaps there is a recipient even more deserving of treats than those aforementioned beneficiaries. I do believe that, as a group, we have determined that we most prefer buying gifts for ourselves. Objects are just so easy to come by. Michael Pollan puts out a new book? Boom, preordered it on Amazon. We can buy ourselves gifts before the ink is even dry on the pages there in the book machine. Once upon a time for me, something commensurate with a Michael Pollan book or a new Tom Waits record would have been the prize of my year, were I to find it waiting under my Christmas tree or unwrap it upon my birthday. I also used to thrill at receiving necessary items as presents, like simple socks or work gloves. Nowadays I have too many gloves. Because I have purchased leather gloves online that appeared to be a good deal, or just because I liked their look. Their nice cut. Well-shaped fingers. Add to Shoppi
ng Cart. Click to Complete Order. Here they come.

  Prosperity is a good thing, right? Having too many gloves is a state of affairs preferable to working one’s hands raw, yes? Absolutely it is. No question. But for me, “too many gloves” is symptomatic of a larger deficit that I don’t feel good about. Because I find that the greater the ease with which such bounty is purchased, at least in my case, the less the significance the giving of it contains. This is why I try harder at gifts.

  My first line of offense against this sort of apathy is simply understanding the impact of a little time spent. Even merely writing out a thoughtful/funny card goes a lot further toward signaling your affection than a “cute top” purchased from that popular garment-shopping website. Not only is it apparent that you took the time to select your words and commit them to cardstock, but by gifting a poem or a joke or a few verses of your own, you force the reader to pause in his/her rhythm and consider what you were trying to accomplish when you scribbled those words. That transaction between the two of you is the gift. In it resides a ceremony rife with tradition that outstrips in my estimation a great many retail goods. Short on words? Draw a flower. Draw a frog. Draw some tits (always hilarious). Add a triangular bush below them for a bona-fide slam-dunk. PS: Cards don’t have to be your conventional folded thin cardboard or paper. Unlikely objects add a flavor of whimsy that scores a lot of points. A two-by-four. A pair of underwear. A piece of fabric or leather. Go nuts.

  When people admonish me for making Megan a card, I say to them, “You make a goddamn card for your significant other! Go to your printer. There’s paper in there. Locate it and pull out a few sheets (in case of mistakes). Fold one in half and draw a heart on the front. Open it up and write I LOVE YOU on the inside. Sign your name. You will get kissed—big time. You want the bonus round? Go outside and find a tiny piece of nature, a twig, a leaf, a pebble, a shell. A chrysalis if you’re really gifted. Adhere your artifact inside the heart and then get stretched out, because you’re going for a ride to the realm of coitus.”