Day: November 12, 2015

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.