4.456. Reflections on a Saturday Afternoon

I forgot to publish again last night. Once again it is the ‘push the button twice’ problem that plagues me. In other words it is attention to detail that plagues me. Attention to detail was high on my mind this morning when I woke up for the scrimmages. I know we have a top tier team but it is the little things about technique and placement that will make all the difference. Unfortunately, what I didn’t think about was the big things–like players actually showing up. We were so shorthanded that we moved two three running backs to Offensive Line just in order to have enough kids to play the run game. By the end of the second scrimmage we’d lost another OL to asthma and one was still recovering from dehydration. Such is the way of Youth Football.

Apparently the way is also having other teams come and film you in an effort to get a peak at the #1 pre-season squad. See, there I go getting wrapped up in the nonsense myself. It is youth football, so why all the attitude, energy, emotion, and anger?

On the way home from the game we passed 3 Trump Caravans at an average of 10 cars apiece. The middle caravan had two ad trucks displaying video billboards teeming with propaganda. Nobody told them Trump is in the hospital getting oxygen (or not) and the spin is so dizzying that nobody in the public can actually be sure what his status actually is. This is not about transparency, folks. It is about self preservation at all levels of the administration and the people following along are sheep who’ve been mind-drugged by the same media they profess to distrust and dislike.

This is America.

It does not have to be.

4.455. Freewrite Friday

Enhance

He wasn’t fast enough. He knew it. The players around him knew it. Everyone accepted that as a truth, but Oscar. He expected more out of his aging body. He was 26, which in athletics is a lot closer to sixty than most expect. His dad used to talk about age using the same language he used when he talked about cars. He would sit Oscar down after a tough game and say, “You run your body like you run a car, son. The problem with that is you’re not supposed to run a car hard like that for the first 50,000 miles. It does something awful to the engine; makes it hard to get to the next 50 with any reliability.”

Turns out the old man was right about that. He was right about marriage too, but it wasn’t the sort of thing they ever got to talking about before he died. No, Oscar learned his lessons without the benefit of a long lasting fatherhood, and by the time Oscar became a father and a husband he’d run his engine hot and hard for so long that it wasn’t going to run right for the next 50. Now he was in the next 50 and he didn’t know what to do about that.

Well, he did know what to do, but he had to come to terms with what that meant.

It used to be that people doped. After that the truly desperate turned to bioenhancements and genetic manipulations. In response the league developed a stringent test regimen to check for all of it. In their haste to stop the bio they forgot about the cybernetic. More and more advanced wares were being developed to enhance muscle twitch and development. With the right implant Oscar would be fast again. Faster.