Day: October 11, 2020

This season is a dumpster fire at every level. I could start with the Giants, but I won’t. I am going to start with youth football, because that is the one that, apparently, intends to finish a season no matter what.

Our 11u team, heralded as a Florida bound juggernaut, scraped past a team that was entirely smaller, slower, and not as well coached with a 19-6 win. We were very bad. We didn’t run the ball well despite three running backs who were basically starters for their former teams. We didn’t throw the ball well despite two quarterbacks with the same sort of resume. The coaches argued openly on the sidelines, I was basically useless on the sideline, and none of the players have gotten to that ‘we are one’ vibe that makes the engine run. Instead they played timid, played hurt, or in the case of my kid, both.

We built a solid core of players last year and lost half of them. We embedded another entire team into our ranks and that was meant to strengthen us and strengthen the coaching, but instead we find ourselves completely out of step with an o-line that doesn’t stop anyone. Will we turn it around? Maybe. It all depends on time on task and on Covid, which is rising right now and I don’t see anyone at the youth level thinking about testing in any way. I mask up every game, which is a stop gap, because the kids are still playing and banging and we know the problem is out there somewhere, just like we know when we walk into a store that we are touching things that other people have touched and we have no idea where those people have been.

We are forgetting–I am forgetting–this is a pandemic.

Which brings me to the NFL and yet another week where a team is forced to postpone a game because of positive Covid results. The struggle here is this: In a highly competitive situation like this where there are not many make up opportunities, how do you hold a season that may hinge on one bad result? How do you do playoffs? No answers yet in this dumpster fire.

Instead I am content with watching it burn.

This day has been a complete dumpster fire from start to finish and I feel like if I was hit by a sack of flying cockroaches it would clearly be an improvement. admittedly I am exaggerating a bit, but things have gone quite badly. To wit: I came upon the realization that wrecking my computer and losing that novella a year ago did no just mean I lost the novella. I lost all of the files on that computer and among that means stuff I have been gathering for years. This includes my transcripts, etc. All of the things one need to apply for professional academic work are gone. Now I have to find these relics and have the long conversations with middle men and registrars etc. I really do not want to have.

Oh and I have a 3rd kid injured.

Oh and his football team is dog crap.

Oh and my partner thinks I am dog crap and I never see us as a we and I am really just not telling people about this relationship for some reason.

I don’t have any good news. In truth the one thing I learned from today is to not talk to people. I am better off staying socially distanced from everyone because it will allow me to avoid creating problems for the one person that matters. Even if they think I don’t listen or that what they say and ask matter.

Frankly, this is for the best. I’ve grown extremely tired of relationships and human contact. I am so tired of the metronome of love and pain and feeling like the moment things go really well for a few hours or days that the world is going to spit a nasty green loogie in my sandwich and turn it into a sad-which. I am tired of being right about that happening every single time. I’ve reached to the point where feeling good and happy absolutely terrifies me, because I am waiting for the ball to be pulled away like I’m Charlie Brown and Lucy is just waiting to snatch it away from me and I keep on falling for it every single time, because there is no life without that opportunity to feel like things are going to be okay.

They aren’t though.