Month: February 2016

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.

Remember Hope and Change? The concept reemerged from its political chrysalis back in the early days of the 1st Obama campaign when people realized there was an opportunity to do something visually different. The other party responded to it with traditional fear tactics and open mockery, treating those concepts as if they were as alien and awful as peeling the skin back from Charlie Brown’s face simply to see what lies beneath.

Well, that guy won. It was enough of a simple action to convince people they did something–vote for the black guy and we are making a statement. Yet it was so far removed from affecting their daily lives in any negative way that there was next to no risk. I mean, consider the alternative. 4 years later we all did it again, this time in that new classic ‘why not let him finish?’ mode that kept Bush in power for 8 years.

President Obama did bring hope and did bring change. There are a plethora of incredible things the Obama administration did, especially early in the reign when Rahm Emmanuel was roaming the White House with a crowbar and a bad attitude. We tend to focus on the failures of universal health care (since politically and stupidly dubbed Obamacare, though the plan was originally a Clinton-hatched design based on bipartisan research) and ignore the good stuff. Moreover, we tend to ignore the people who did stand up longer than it took to vote and actually got involved and decided to be that change and remain that hope.

The other day my friend Billy asked me how I thought about people standing up for Bernie Sanders. The question was more specific than that, but what I got out of it was the idea that I ought to write a 10 minute blog about what it means to stand up for Sanders and how doing so would be received in the current political climate. Then, yesterday, I saw a post on facebook reminding people that Hitler too was a socialist libertarian. First of all, lets not pretend that Hitler and Sanders need be connected in any way. Lets also not pretend that ones political affiliation automatically aligns someone with another person who shares that affiliation. Hell, most KKK members are republicans-which means absolutely nothing.

Subscribing to the doctrines of Karl Marx is one of those things that is convenient when useful, and not indcative of any desire to sig heil or take over anything larger than the best spot on the couch and quite possibly the Directv remote.

No, I’m talking about people deciding that they care more about these ideas than the political nonsense attached to them. So, to answer I say, ‘YES’ go work for Bernie. Be an educated man and learn more about the dudes ideas and ideology. Find out how socialism could be of value to certain facets of America instead of hissing and recoiling at the mere mention.

Do these things that make us proud to be here, and you will be rewarded.

I don’t know what happened yesterday in the pro bowl and don’t really care. I haven’t for a long time, just like I haven’t had that much interest in professional football since the Jets dropped a 4th quarter lead and their playoff chances into the mud on a Sunday afternoon back in what feels like ’15. There isn’t much appeal to it anymore. I cannot say if it is the lack of interest in the teams or if the weight of all the constant publicity just forced me to tune out. Or maybe its something else.

There’s a great quote from V for Vendetta that goes something like, ‘you have all the information to be had, now all you need is a story’ I feel like that is exactly how it works with sports. Reporters work hard to create that storyline that fans become invested in and right now there isn’t much of one. Folks have tried–billing this as the new generation of QB vs. Old, but even that isn’t really sticking. Instead that storyline is becoming more about the supposed arrogance of Cam Newtown vs. the class of Manning. Again, a fabrication that takes liberty with the information–the evidence–to structure a false narrative about two players and two teams that aren’t all that flashy.

The truth is, from a football perspective this should be a good game. Both teams boast incredible defenses and while Newtown is clearly the better QB at this moment in time, Manning has a better receiving corps and better RBs to wear people out.

Still, I don’t care.

I guess I want Cam to win because it’ll be funny to watch people spin. I guess I want the Broncos to win, because I have a lot of friends who are fans. It is football and I’ll watch and I predict a Panthers blowout but in the end, I’m just waiting for the Giants to get back to business.

Apologies to Billy G, but I can’t answer that question you asked me. Not yet. The sick seeped into my pores and robbed my of the ability to think in anything greater than log jammed stream of consciousness. So instead I’m going to spend ten minutes letting that stream take me where it will…

 

Some Thoughts:

1. At the Myrlin Hepworth concert last night I realized that the dude really needs to get with a guitarist, a piano player, and Sax man. The addition of real instruments to the digitally created beats would lend a certain authenticity to the music that it lacks presently. Not that your words aren’t authentic–the words keep me riveted–the sound behind them feels artificial. DR 808 isn’t enough.
2. Sick sucks. I’m not one who likes getting sick, and over the past few years I’ve been getting sick more and more. This is my first big one in at least 6 months and the worst in a year. But, as my buddy Steve is so fond of saying, ‘it’s still your mother f**kin set’ so I need to get out there and be a person and go to class and do all those important things come morning.
3. I also need to find my way back to a gym. Remember when I used to post my weight? 223… Not great.
4. I love that moment of discovery, when an idea so consumes your brain that you have to write it down before that flash of brilliance fades.
5. I did my team pictures with the boys this year instead of the standard framed plaque for coach situation. I still think I ought to do at least one shot of me with each one of the kids as opposed to me with all three… I might be rambling now.
6. I might also be back on the ultimate kid room kick. Plans are happening in my head for superloft 2.0. This one involves a hutch and an L-shaped loft with plenty of cool areas underneath. There might even be a U shaped plan in the works…
7. That is all. Sleep now.