Month: November 2015

By now you’ve already heard me ranting here and on Facebook about the Paris situation. I applied my wry cynicism to the situation and try to show a side of the equation that I feel is overlooked. This doesn’t mean I don’t grieve for the people in Paris and in Russia and Beirut (the list does truly go on–ISIL has been active). Well, this morning as I eat my pancakes in the safe womb of the American Empire, I’m left to question what is really going on. Most Islamic terrorist actions seem to have a central target or idea that propels them forward. In some ways the actions seem militaristic. They generally feel like a way to lash out at an otherwise unbeatable enemy. ISIL attacks do not feel this way. In truth these attacks on, well, everybody, seem like a way to clearly define the lines between those of a specific islamic faith and everyone else. As I look closer into this situation I am starting to form a picture of an enemy collective that just wants to see the world burn.

I understood Al Qaeda. I’m not talking about the post 9/11 group that spun out of control to encompass virtually every terrorist organization operating in or near that region. I’m talking about the actual group that existed and was pretty well scouted by the CIA up to the day before 9/11. The government (used to?) host a site similar to the CIA’s world fact book that listed and described terrorist organizations. That Al Qaeda, the one born out of the blowback of our involvement in Russia’s war in Afghanistan, was driven to hurt America for 1) involving itself in the governing of Afghanistan in order to pave the way for American corporate interests and (2) as a proof that its leadership (read: Bin Laden) was not a puppet of the American regime that armed and trained its fighters. In other words, they had what they felt was legitimate beef. Furthermore, they chose a single target and executed a bold attack on that target and continued efforts to destabilize that target (America).

ISIL is going after everyone and while they are doing so they are fighting a war in parts of Syria and Iraq, attempting to create a country all of their own. In other words they are fighting a war on so many fronts that it is impossible to see any other outcome than an entire world ready to rise up and punch them in the mouth. In recent weeks the group has managed to piss off NATO, Russia, and China. That’s the three biggest military groupings in the world. That is also three groups who are traditionally at each others throats (from a distance, of course). If I didn’t know better I’d think ISIL was a subversive effort to ally the world’s largest military forces against a common enemy.

I’m sure that isn’t real… is it?

The countdown is almost over. Thursday my kids have tackle practice and Saturday they play their last game of the year. I’m excited. We started the season as a team that hadn’t lost a game since being created, tearing through the spring season in games that were hardly close. We started the fall season by losing to a team we thought we’d walk all over. It led to a series of reflections and conversations about how things might go this season. By the end of game two those conversations had manifested into a great deal of negativity, especially from me. I watched the team reduced to 2-3 ball carriers, with the offense really being centered around the coaches’ son. In truth, the offense was about all the coaches’ sons. If you touched the ball you were the son of a coach. We did have a receiver who got the occasional pass thrown his way (save for the one game where he was a huge focus–catching four of five passes thrown his way), but for the most part it was the old boys network.

I can live with that. I can fool myself into thinking the other players needed to earn their touches through work on the field. I recognized right away that this was completely false, but I could lie to myself and my boys that it was about that. What made it especially hard was watching the way coaches respond to injuries. I watched kids get knocked out of games, leave the field in tears or limping, or even carried off and then expected to come back the next play. I remember in a recent game watching our superstar coaches’ kid QB get his ankle banged up so bad that the EMT told him not to go back into the game. His mother responded by reminding the EMT that it wasn’t the EMT’s call to say that.

Well, it should be.

I learned this season that tackle football–youth sports in general–are just games kids play to have fun. When we allow it to mean so much more we take away their agency. We become the people we once made fun of as they stalked the sidelines screaming about the importance of a boy catching a ball or dropping one. We turn into coaches that make everything about the control and the win and remove the joy for the majority of the kids on the team.

My kids still want to win a championship, but above all else they just want a chance to touch the ball. Next season I’m going to find a way to make that happen–even if it means going somewhere else.

It is an odd feeling to wake up near 7 AM and realize that your opportunity to write for the day is basically already gone. It departed, without you, two hours prior on the double humped back of the inspiration camel, which is now somewhere in the Arizona desert shuffling through cold sand towards oblivion.

It sounds a lot worse (and weirder) than it actually is. The truth is that I’ve been behind on a great many things and have convinced myself that if I don’t start early enough or don’t stay up late enough then I’m never going to get the work done. I have the sunken eyes to prove it. I also have the three boys with bows and video games and football practice and friends and energy and needs to prove the earlier point of not being able to get anything done, at least not while they remain conscious.

That is merely an excuse.

If I’ve learned anything it is that I can find the time to do the things I care most about. If I can find the hour to watch The Walking Dead, and find the three hours to straight veg out and watch the Giants collapse against the Patriots, then I can find the time to write.

I get all of the objections. Writing is active and watching is passive. You need time to rev up the brain and to build to the good writing, because the first hundred or so words are bound to be crap. We make rituals out of writing. Once, I thought it would be cool to meditate in the shower and then harness all those good thoughts, post shower, into a strong bit of writing. Another time I decided that I needed tea and cookies set out on a tray to get me ‘there’. All of it was and continues to be window dressing for what is essentially a simple process.

If you want it bad enough, you sit down at a table and write. Use whatever tool you need. Delete all the distractions, turn off the wi-fi and just do what you are born to.

I am a huge fan of American soldiers. While not all are the strong men and women we think of as fighting the good fight for our nation, enough of them are the selfless, valiant individuals that we can honestly feel good about soldiers as a whole. The military on the other hand is a steaming mess of corruption and mismanagement. Still, at the end of the day we are held responsible not for the mess that is the military, but for the image of power our soldiers project. This is the condition that leads to us being held responsible, and often believing we are responsible for what is happening in the Middle East.

To recognize the corrupt and outright mismanaged state of the U.S. military, look no further than the $43 million dollar gas station we built for cars that don’t even exist. The best part is that a similar station cost the Pakistani government only $500,000 to build. No, wait, the best part is that the military can’t find anyone to answer how or where the other 42.5 million was spent.

We dump so many lives and resources into the region that you would think we would have made some form of progress in forming a lasting positive relationship in the areas we do the most spending and fighting. Wrong again. In truth, these regions are the same regions where ISIL is gaining the most ground. Now, in the wake of the Paris attacks, a great deal of the blame is being placed on the shoulders of President Obama and his rhetoric about ISIL. That, I believe, is the fault of American Military exceptionalism. Because we feel our might is beyond match and question, we also feel that it is our responsibility to use that might to control a region that hasn’t seen lasting peace since, well, ever.

Peter’s Uncle Ben would be proud.

Let’s face facts: Nobody can win a war in that region because there is no such thing as winning. Once you control one region, another flares up with the largely sectarian violence common to the region since its inception. This is not a problem we can fix with drones or soldiers. In fact, the latest reason we’ve been given for being there is to keep the battle from crossing our borders, as if the biggest threat on the planet is taking place in this tiny collection of countries. We’ve given the terrorists so much social power that no military officer or political figure can sneeze without running into someone who wants to know what they plan to do about terrorism.

Its a problem that needs a new solution. One solution might actually be to pull out of the region completely. Let them handle their own wars as they prefer. Only, we are too strong of a military to ever allow that.

I wrote the Some Thoughts first. I didn’t have anything else to say really. When emotionally drained I find that I have little to put on the page. I have to charge up. I have to get to feeling out the world and seeing what there is to speak on. Sometimes I find a hot topic or a thread I am so anxious to pull. Other times I find myself staring at the timer and hoping for a brief bit of solace in:

Some Thoughts:

1. I have this student who by all accounts has no business going to college at this point in his life. He’s obsessed with Rob Gronkowski. He knows that I’m a Giants fan and will find a way to strike up a conversation about Gronk as he does every week. He will do it with a certain level of smugness this week, comfortable in the knowledge that the Patriots stole one off the G-men today. Kudos for you, buddy. Kudos.
2. I’m not in a very writerly way today.
3. I was have convinced I should just drop these random thoughts, because that is all I could spool up once I started the timer, so I started with these in the hope something more would manifest.
4. Four minutes into the post and nothing has managed to manifest, save for 134 words of nothingness. Some days are like this in the writer’s life. Some days are far more prolific.
5. I have been thinking about the upcoming slate of kids sports. I’ve been thinking that I place way too much importance on such things, as if keeping them in sports is the only way to keep them off the couch. Perhaps it is the one way to keep me off the couch.
6. Four minutes left and I still find myself sliding deeper into the nothingness of drivel words; empty words meant to keep the fingers moving and the brain spooling up, but at this late hour there is little left to spool. I suppose I should, at this point, cut to the beginning and construct some form of excuse as to why things are the way they are

I feel like I should be talking about France.

I honestly don’t know what to say about that situation. I could say that I feel numb, but the feeling is different than that. I feel like terrorism has become far more prevalent in our world and I am far less emotional about it. I won’t go so far as saying that the mass murder of people feels normal, but it does feel expected. We are built up for this from the media, from the government, from the military. We are reminded all the time that safety exists only as an illusion to me maintained with vigilance.

It isn’t that I don’t feel safe. I don’t consider safety much at all. I avoid, for the most part, any mental travels down the road of ‘will we be attacked by terrorists?’ I think we all have that ability to close out thoughts and to not approach certain ideas because to do so would suck up all of our attention and energy.

I think the situation in France shatters that much in the way 9/11 did. I think that people are going to be a little more scared. By people I mean authorities and those who are paid to worry and now are worried that something might happen to us on football Sunday.

Lets hope their vigilance keeps things on the up and up.

 

Some Thoughts:

1. I haven’t posted scores in a while.
2. Here’s a score: Holly Holm KO’s Rousey. Who knew?
3. And then this happened. I have an 11 yr old. He isn’t doing that…

My present level of exhaustion is criminal. In six and a half hours I need to be out the door dragging my exhausted (and sick) kids to a tackle football playoff game that two of them are playing in. I know I’m tired because in the back of my mind I’m rationalizing how the new Bond Spectre movie might’ve actually been good. It wasn’t. No amount of sleep deprivation can change that. No, seriously, Spectre was bad. It was spoof bad.

The problems with Spectre started after the introductory fight scene/mission. The movie launches with a beautiful look at Day of the Dead, and moves into and through a well choreographed and violent chase scene, which we later discover is integral to what passes for a plot in this particular film. So I am still happy at this point. Next thing you know Sam Smith is belting out his brand of excellence and the usual credits graphics start to hint at the best parts of the film to come.

Ten minutes later the whole thing falls apart.

Soon Bond is practically raping a woman (in his mock defense she slapped him before he could woo her, so I suppose he figured he had to do it). This is followed by one of the most disjointed and unbelievable spy films in known history. You shouldn’t be able to get this drivel past the guys who made Sharknado, but someone here we are.

By the end Bond has an apparently crucial bit of his personal history revealed, has faced of with a surprisingly stupid and inane villain, and ridden off into the sunset for what looks to be the last time. This wasn’t a send off in the traditional sense. I mean, I didn’t know it was meant to be a send off. It felt more like a send up. It felt like an homage to Bond films of the past. In truth, the SPECTRE storyline has been a part of multiple Bond films as far back as ’63, including the iconic Blofield and his cat, a version of which appear here in the new film. A version of everything appears in the new film. Too bad it isn’t a good version.

 

Some Thoughts:

1. This is supposedly going to be a 5 billion dollar election–twice what was spent on the 2012 election. I think a lot of that money has to do with the fact that nobody knows who is going to be the frontrunner and that sort of limited time to develop a candidate requires a lot of media saturation. I literally expect to see political ads in the Super Bowl.
2. I’ve been experiencing a great deal of muscle and joint pain that is commonly referred to as middle age, or the ‘fat period’. It doesn’t help that I haven’t bothered to take good care of myself. I can say that with me giving up on fast food (despite a recent nugget relapse) and soda and adding vitamins to my lifestyle, I’m saying there’s a chance I get past this.
3. There is a Writer/Producer who goes by the name Speed Weed. WTF??? I mean he does good stuff, but come on, man!

I recently discovered that a corporate official (we shall name him Bob) was accused of beating his wife so severely that her jaw was broken in two places. Of course all there is to show for the situation are the photos of the damage and the police report where the aforementioned wife claims to have suffered these injuries during a fall and refused to press charges against her wealthy husband. This is fairly typical beyond the mossy walls of corporate life. Incidents such as this are handled in house and left out of the public eye. Journalists do not sniff around the incident and start conversations about how the corp man should immediately lose his job. He is not a public figure, so why would they care?

Regardless of my (or Charles Barkley’s) feelings on the issue, public figures are seen primarily as role models or societal exemplars that we herald and heckle in the same manner of British aristocracy. These individuals are, for some reason, expected to be held to a higher standard of behavior. I’m not saying they are supposed to always act better than you and I. I am saying that when they do something socially reprehensible they are held to a higher level of responsibility than if they were private individuals. In other words, these public figures serves as a cultural barometer of our feelings about specific forms of deviance.

That brings me to Greg Hardy. He is the latest FB player to be exposed as a crazy wife beater, and as a result call into question the sanity of anyone who would hire him. What sucks is that he is a very good athlete and, unfortunately, this other stuff might stand in the way of him being able to make a living in what is likely the only way he knows how. On the other hand, given the rules laid out in the previous paragraph, I get it. I am not only supposed to care about what he does when his helmet is on. I am expected to care about what he does when he takes it off.

I don’t really.

Some Thoughts:

1. Sitting at Village Inn listening to a lady openly self-aggrandize her role in her job. Its an interesting listen, because she is claiming to do some pretty illegal stuff at work, but at the same time is talking about how her actions are saving the salary of two people, but the job would never acknowledge it or her, because then they’d have to take action against her. That is some twisted stuff. It will live in a story one day.
2. It doesn’t help that this women is a fairly terrible human being, based on her behaviors towards her waiter and companion. Now she’s carrying on a tirade about the quality and texture of the oatmeal she waited so long to get (long being less than 5 minutes). Now the manager is involved and I am no longer willing to listen.

This is another night when I nearly didn’t write the ten minutes I’ve promised myself I would. At this point I feel like quitting on this small thing, this tiny piece of my day and my life would be a tacit admission on giving up on so much more. Tonight I was caught up in other ideas and emotions. I spent veterans day riding the soul roller coaster, thinking and feeling my way through the past and present.

I was fortunate enough to connect with an old friend and roommate today. It has been 15 years since we last sat face to face and seeing him after the debris of a decade and a half has piled up on the shores of my psyche was akin to watching the tide come in… Yes, I recognize the corny poetics at play here, but there is truth in the imagery. He and I spent time together all those years ago, before marriage, still in the womb of college, so really before we went out and faced life. Now, fifteen years removed we a essentially grown up versions of those people we were with the scars and the bark to prove it. I am not entirely happy with who I have become. I am in someways a better version of that younger me, yet in other ways I am not.

The message in all of that is keep working and growing and changing and evolving and becoming. The belief that a persons state of self is static feels false. We change and we twist ourselves into versions of ourselves to suit the needs of a time, a place, even people. I twisted all the time and continue to do so.

So the mission then is to recognize this ideal self and have the courage to build structures and persevere through the handwork of growing ever closer to the all important self-actualization…

Or some such drek.

Last month not a whole lot of people knew who Jonathan Butler was. Now he is the man who led a football team to not play and a university system to its knees. I am of course, talking about the Missouri situation. When I think about the term discrimination I see it as a form of bullying. It is one group deciding to tell another smaller group what they can and can’t do and where they can and can’t do it.

Externally, we don’t deal with discrimination and bullying all too well. The moment Americans ‘don’t feel safe’ that is a signifier that bad times are ahead for the place where we don’t feel safe. It is quickly followed by that foreign population telling us to go away. However, if someone tells America to go somewhere else, we will invade your country, take your oil, and then build you a bunch of new stuff so our corporations actually do feel comfortable staying right where they are. Of course there’s money involved there, so we are fundamentally invested in the financial outcome as a capitalist society.

I feel like the tide has fundamentally shifted internally. Nowadays when someone says, ‘I don’t feel safe’ we tell them to go somewhere else. It is as if we suddenly believe that if you don’t feel safe in one place or one section of our vast nation then instead of confronting the problem you should get up and move somewhere you do feel safe. The situation in Missouri was (and continues to be) that black students faced a great deal of discrimination and the authorities refused to do anything significant about it. The situation was treated simply as ‘how things are’ in Mizzou. That is, until the largely black football team decided to stop playing. This became such a big deal that even Fox News had to tell the tale–though the bold faced headline they led with touted the protestors as the problem.

I don’t pretend to know all of the details in the Missouri situation, but I know that we are a nation literally founded on civil disobedience. I find it ironic that the same people who tout the Boston Tea Party as a core moment in the birth of our nation look so disparagingly upon a group of ball players saying they won’t play until conditions are right. I guess when it affects something that matters to you, the way you perceive things change dramatically.