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I’ve decided to be more like Marshawn Lynch. Hear me out here. Lynch famously appeared at the Super Bowl pressers and said, “I’m just here so I don’t get fined.” He spoke it as an answer and a mantra. It wound up on a tee shirt.

Before the vultures got a hold of it, the statement resonated in my heart as something that suited my current point of view in terms of workplace politics and the larger shift occurring on campus. In truth, I’m more interested in honing my skills as an instructor at this point. I spent the last five years patching holes and pouring my heart and soul into the roles given to me at the college. All of that blood, sweat, and soul drained away from the classroom and, frankly speaking, I started to really suck. So, I decided to switch gears, pulling back from the political noise and the work and roles and problems I could not solve and moved towards the ones I was capable of handling.

It makes all the sense in the world. See, when you pour your energy into everything, nothing gets done. When you pour your energy into just what you can handle then you get to finish things and have the energy to feel good about flowing into the next task. That would be new for me.

New and Good.

The deal I need to get behind is not getting involved–emotionally. That is where Lynch comes in. “I’m just here so I don’t get fined,” becomes my mantra for action and inaction. If I stick to my guns I ought to be okay.

When I was a kid, my dad used to take me fishing two or three times a month. We’d climb into is giant brown car and drive out of the city so early that it still felt like night. We headed towards the water, reaching the pier as the sun took to the sky. The smell was sour and salty–worms, dried blood, and ocean. His boat was a beautiful thing. I don’t know that it was huge, but as a kid it felt like we could hold a thousand people. We only ever brought along three or four. The lot of us would climb in. The older men circled around me and Henry (it was always Henry) would stay back a little to push us off from the dock. Then he jumped in, flashing that narrow smile.

When I was a kid I could spend all day on the water with the guys, catching fish, listening to their conversations, imagining what it might be like to be a grown man. My idea of adult male friendships was formed in cracked seats of my father’s fishing boat. Sometimes they talked about politics, or girls. They didn’t ask me about grades. They didn’t cover my ears when the language became harsh. Once, they let me have a beer.

Now I have my own kids. They are growing up in front of a console. They are growing up on dead grass fields in the high socks of soccer or clad in the plastic armor of football. They are growing up around other kids in a desert far removed from the water and from the conversations of my youth.

I know I am the man I am today because of the time I had learning how to become one. I know that learning was entirely incomplete. My dad died when I was just twelve years old. Still, it was twelve years of conversations and situations and learning the society of men. This year my eldest will be twelve and I wonder what he has learned from me. Our waters are digital. Our boats are keyboards and joysticks, coaches meetings and sideline chats with the referees. The world has moved on from the time I grew up in. Still, I can’t help but think I can do more and be more to teach them what to do and be as men.

It takes a lot to get me really riled up. Lately the ‘fake’ is what really gets my blood pumping. Maybe fake is too harsh a term. Instead I think its more like this: Often people find themselves by finding other people and modeling themselves–their ‘true’ identity after what they see in those other people. In sociology we call it dramaturgy, but what I’m talking about is even a step removed from that. I’m talking about assuming ones identity and skill set and parading around like it was yours to begin with.

Yep, i’m ranting again. I thought It would take a longer time before I got so worked up that I was at this point–disjointed and straight up irritated. I pride myself on being a zen individual. However, I have to have somewhere that I can express the annoyance that has suddenly overcome my better judgement.

I recognize this post doesn’t make a whole bunch of sense. I’ll give you a hypothetical to help narrow it down:

Imagine you bake cookies. Your cookies are special to you, because of how well received they are. You enjoy baking cookies and even start to think that it might be cool to bake cookies with someone else. Well, you start baking cookies with this new partner and he loves the way you bake–thinks everyone would benefit from seeing it. So, he hangs out with you and gets your recipe.

Next thing you know, he is baking cookies and selling them. He is going around the town telling everyone that this is how cookies ought to be made. He ends up with a lot of money and popularity. However, all of this time he’s baking with your recipe, he neglects to mention that it is yours. Instead they’re his cookies now and always have been.

Kind of pisses you off, right?

I waited until the clock flipped over to 11pm to ensure a clean ten minutes–nothing over or under. It felt right, the way that sometimes buying one thing vs. another feels right, or driving down a certain road, or holding someones hand feels right. Moving through life I’ve come to learn that a feeling goes a very long way. Things that used to seem mythical–intuition, gut instinct–feel rather genuine. Perhaps I’m learning to believe in the things I can’t explain.

Fact: I have no way of knowing if there is a heaven, afterlife, reincarnation, or any of that stuff. On the other hand my life is full of things that have no rational explanation but conform to the idea that something beyond standard mortality exists. For example, the other day I clearly heard a door squeak closed in my house. However, there wasn’t anyone around who could have closed a door. There are a million scientific explanations but each is as circumstantial and unprovable as heaven.

I know what I heard, just like I know what I feel from time to time. None of these things can be proven to be real, or false. All I can go on is something else that can’t be proven: instinct.

Cam Newton, MVP of the NFL, face of the NFL walked off the stage after five minutes of a rough press conference following the Super Bowl 50 loss. Moments later (perhaps even as it was happening) the press crucified him. There is a lot of hate towards Newton and how he handled the pressure of the moment. In this case the moment is a press conference–not a game. He’s been called immature and things far worse than that, but I want to write here and now that Cam Newton is a man who was put in a situation where he made the right choice.

Lets say you are sitting feet away from someone who just publicly disgraced you and all you can hear is them talking real loud about exactly how they jacked you up. Meanwhile the world’s press is peppering you with questions about how it felt to get jacked. Add to this the fact that you are a young player (26) who wears his heart on his sleeve and fell embarrassingly short in the most important game of your life. Again, all the press are trying to do in this moment is jab you for emotion and try to get some rational explanation as to why you sucked like that. Now, with all that happening, what do you do?

Cam said all he could say about it and the questions kept multiplying. Eventually the dude had enough of the smack talk and questions and, in a moment of anger, chose to walk away instead of saying something he would regret. Unfortunately, when you are the face of the NFL and walk off the stage, all there can be is regret and apology.

Cam found himself in a no-win situation. Then, after he lost, he found himself in another no-win situation in front of the reporters. Rough night for (by all indications) a really good dude. I’ll be routing for you next year, Cam. That is unless the Giants show up. Then its about them.

I’m really happy the Broncos won the Super Bowl. I didn’t believe it was possible, because the post season version of the Panthers was about blowing people out. They scored quickly and often. They used players we’d never heard of and destroyed franchises we’ve heard everything about. Then Cam met Von Miller and everything changed.

Respect to the B-Men for all that effort and hustle. I’m glad the MVP went to a defensive player. If it went to Peyton for his horrible performance it would be a fix beyond what could possibly ever be expected.

I have more to say about the game and the commercials but it works best in the form of…

 

Some Thoughts:

1. Apparently it is more important to trend than to be liked. Apparently the idea of being talked about surpasses the importance of what is being said. The news reports following the big game focused on how much buzz there was about particular ads. They didn’t spend much time thinking about the quality of the ads or what specifically was being said about them. I gotta ask: who writes this stuff?
2. Some specific questions: Why is it that the people in the Cox home camera commercial immediately go to the videotape to figure out who knocked over a plant. Just pick it up and move on.
3. What is up with all the animal based commercials. The worst one–perhaps ever–was the weirdness of Dog-Monkey-Baby.
4. Cam walked out of his post game interview after a reporter basically clowned his brotherhood with teammates, referencing it and then asking him, more or less, how he felt letting them down.
5. I’m tired and sick and run down. I don’t like how it feels. I don’t like it at all. I ought to go to bed… yep.

It appears I am quite stressed and drained. This feeling, so familiar that it no longer registers in conscious thought, has made it difficult to finish the important tasks in my life. I’ll still keep keeping on, but in the meanwhile I thought I’d relay some thoughts:

 

Some Thoughts:

1. The running water has gotten harder to deal with. Some nights I like it. On others it feels like too much.
2. Somewhere in my home a kid is coughing deeply, phlegm cutting through his sleep and forcing him into the bathroom with a staccato of heaves. Though the weather is beautiful most of the day, the sickness this time of year brings is not.
3. Odin had ravens for thought and memory. Cheater.
4. By the time I reached the game it was 6 – 0 and the players were well on their way to packing it in. I feel like 8-9 yr olds struggle with maintaining a game-long sense of urgency and pride.
5. Going bald feels like nothing. And death.

It is almost funny the way Kanye West completely believes in the abilities of Kanye West. It is even funnier to recognize that he isn’t in on the joke. Or is it? I started to wonder about him, and about some of the ways in which high school culture pervades our society when I saw the man say that he was going to run for president and win and everyone laughed him off the stage. I thought again about the Trump bid and how it isn’t nearly as funny anymore and it made me very aware of the way society reinforces our social position. ‘Can’t we all just get along’ has slowly degraded into ‘can’t we all just keep everyone down here where they belong’ and led to a consolidation of power that, at this point, seems unreversable.

You might suggest that Kanye is a bad example. After all, we know he is an idiot who isn’t self aware and seems to have no actual intellect. Yet how do we know? What do we know? Our knowledge of the man is primarily based on his television appearances and the downward spiral of his lyrical acuity over the last decade, and of course his media sensation wife. I promise she’s (or at least her handlers) not stupid. After all, she managed to turn a complete lack of talent and limited looks into a multi-million dollar industry and household name. Yeah, she didn’t do it the way we are taught is the right way and she doesn’t for a minute follow the christian virtues many are supposing this country is built upon, but she is (to quote Charlie Sheen) ‘Winning’.

I suppose that is what this 10 minutes is really about: winning. Socially speaking, we are trained and reminded of what is right and wrong. We are constantly bombarded by mixed messages of success and want and need of things that are outside of our means. We try to do and be and follow paths that really aren’t designed to give us what we are told we want. The moment we ask for more than we have or people think we can get, we are laughed at. The moment we get a step up on success and then fall, we are laughed at. So, I ask two questions: What is the purpose of winning other than to remind people the fall is a lot harder from higher up? And beyond that, why is it that win we do fail, it is so much easier for folks to laugh at us than to catch us like a star falling from a stage?

 

Some Thoughts:

1. Dave Mirra died. Looks like it was suicide, which is a sad end to a life that highlighted a difficult and wonderful path to success. The suicide does seem to indicate that the success might not have been the happy ending we all expect.

I’ve taken a shine to sleeping with the sound of running water. This is just one of the steps I’ve taken to make my all-too-limited sleep more zen. The water works. I get downright comatose listening to it and feel quite refreshed when I wake up. Honestly, I feel like some of that has to do with the moisture it creates in this dry Arizona air. I’m not originally from here and like my air a bit wetter. All of these ‘modifications’ are my best effort to live a balanced and healthy life despite the Herculean pile of work before me.

Sometimes I feel like I’m slip sliding out of control of the situation–a feeling that isn’t comforting in the least. I think it comes from recognizing that I have way too much going on and when I do take a few moments to myself it is usually at the cost of something else important.

Here’s a bit of free internet advice: Carve out a few hours for yourself each day. Don’t schedule anything during this you time and allow yourself to relax and just kick back and do what you enjoy. This will add years to your life. Burning the candle fast like I do seems to have the opposite effect.

I’ve been dealing with a number of problems in teaching this semester. My biggest one stems from an obvious disconnect between myself and my students, particularly in regards to the text, American Gods. Frankly, I don’t think they’re reading it. I mean it is clear to me that they aren’t getting it early on and I gotta wonder how much of that is me not leading them in the right direction. I’m reminded of my early dev english classes when I would start the game with Cranium cards designed to be solved in one minute or less and legitimately need to spend five minutes or more before someone coughed out a reasonable answer. This is not to say students are less intelligent, per say, but instead to point out that they aren’t trained to do patterns of thinking outside of what is assessed and how it is assessed in high school. Even fewer read for fun, which is why American Gods, a text with no possibility of being taught in high school, is such a tough sell.

Wait till I ask the Mythology kids to read the Gunslinger.

So, I’m at a point where I need to think hard about what it is I’m trying to accomplish with them and whether or not it is in the realm of possibility. What I want to do is link the book to the film V for Vendetta and then again to Dawn of Justice, taking a subjective tour of the many masks we wear and others wear. Tomorrow is a very crucial lesson, because this is where it is supposed to come together with me asking them how the identities of certain Gods can be recognized as masks that these characters wear/roles that they play. Then I’d like them to be able to connect that to the masks that they themselves where and the characteristics highlighted, emulated, etc, through the wearing.

All of it does seem rather tenuous and limited in terms of connection–a gossamer linkage between thoughts and concepts that touch on every facet of human behavior. Still, having that near invisible webbing over everything is exactly how you can release students to dig deeper on anything.

 

Some Thoughts:

1. Technote: The true link here marks the page as 3225, but I don’t see how that is even possible, even allowing for additional pages and past pages. The numbering system must be set as variable in some odd way.