Day: January 17, 2018

There’s a phenomenon in soccer where when a team is up they shift the game to a form of keep away. The goal is not to score but to prevent the other team from having any opportunity to score. In other words, they aren’t striving to increase any form of lead, dominance, or assertion. They’re settling in. They are just hanging on to the lead. Yesterday I was at a wrestling meet watching my kids struggle through their matches. The eldest was winning for a bit and then wound up just trying to hang on and not get beat. My other wrestler took an early and commanding lead and just sort of settled in and tried to hold on to the kid until time ran out. Moments later I witnessed an exchange between two dads who were watching the event. One asked the other how he was doing and the other replied, “you know, just hanging in there.” His friend agreed that this is what he was doing as well. All of this settled in on me like acid, burning through the thick coat of complacency that is suburban life. This morning I finally recognized I do not like my life.

Not any of it.

For a while I’ve been comparing my life to the Todash darkness of Stephen King lore. Everything feels just slightly askew as if I could settle into this form of living and be perfectly complacent, but everything would be just perfectly wrong. I woke up thinking that this isn’t an entirely new feeling. In truth everything has always been wrong, and I’ve settled into this wrongness the way a frog supposedly settles into a heating kettle, never knowing it is being murdered until it is already dead. Well, I’m not dead yet, but I recognize more and more who the murderer is.

Me. Society. The expectations of suburban life. Dramaturgy. Call it a group killing–The Following writ large and true. So, now what? I can’t answer that yet, but my eyes are open. I’m done with the sleepy-eyed beckoning of ‘just hanging in there’ for that is no way to live a life. That, at least, is a strong first step.

Picture this: Donald Trump is running the country. As a result the people around him begin to recognize how to coddle the man and fall into the fallacy of Yes, Yes, Yes! As a result they begin to punish and seek vengeance against those who threaten the presidential narrative. Now I’m sitting in my living room, watching Drunk History, and thinking that this is legitimately the way we will tell the story of the next 3-8 years. Except we won’t be drunk.

I wish we were drunk now. All of us. Maybe it would make a sort of drunk sense that the world is the way it is at the present time. Unfortunately, I’m stone cold sober and so are so many of us. We hear the president is in perfect mental health and think, “Shit, he’s doing this sane??”

I’m not going to get drunk–at least not in the dip my head in the sand or go along with this nonsense sense. I’m going to ‘stay woke’ as the kids say and continue to educate students in the fine art of separating fiction from reality. I’m not just talking about fake news. I’m talking about fake narratives and cultivating the ability to make sense of connections, patterns, relationships, and the like. That is what the modern person needs. I can help them with that.