Posts
1) The Eagles signing Michael Vick is not about grand ideals such as redemption or forgiveness or second chances. It is about green, and not Eagles green. It is about money.
2) It's time for all the wannabe social workers to shut up with their psycho-babble. Enough about Vick's "rehabilitation." First, prison in this country is NOT about rehabilitation, it is about parking the nightmares someplace far away from where the righteous among us sleep. Second, what Vick operated was a vile, systematic process of torture and death, with money as an additional motive. To do what he did requires a complete fracture inside, a total disconnect between right and wrong, humane and inhumane, benevolent and malevolent. He is broken, and prison cannot fix that break. So shove this rehabilitation angle up your asses, you naive, bleeding heart morons.
3) Vick did not make mistakes, unless that's what you want to call getting caught in the first place. If he was driving down the road and a neighbor's dog ran out in front of his car and he failed to hit the breaks in time and he hit the dog and killed it, then he would have made a mistake. But what Vick executed was a premeditated, organized, ruthless business plan that just happened to involve the torture, fighting, and various other abuses of dogs. That is not a mistake, that is a state of mind. It is a way of life. It is a life-view.
4) Far be it from me to attempt to judge the worth of Vick's alleged remorse, but on referring back to #3 on my list, I'm not sure that a man with the psychological and emotional warping needed to do what he did is actually capable of what most of us would consider genuine remorse.
5) To those pointing to Vick's involvement with The Humane Society and other charitable organizations and noting how it evidences his moving away from The Dark Side, allow me to call you a clueless cancer on the organs of society. Vick is following this path for one reason only: it is the path mandated as part of his sentence for the heinous crimes he committed. It does not spring from generosity or care or regret. Anyone who really believes he is speaking for these organizations because it's what he'd really rather be doing than lounging in his crib with his doting posse is simply too stupid to live anyplace except Utah.
6) I want to ask a few questions of the bleeding hearts and those who see the Vick signing only in the context of how he can help the Eagles win. Do you have a dog? And if you do, would you want a man convicted of Vick's crimes living next door? And if you saw the man hooking battery cables to your dog, or beating him with a bat, or bashing his head with a shovel, or hanging him in the air with a chain by his neck, would you be thinking about redemption or forgiveness? No, not if you have a metaphorical ball in that metaphorical fleshy sack between your legs. But hey, it's okay to have the guy playing for and representing the football team for which you profess to bleed green, right?
7) On the flip side, can we stop using Vick's name in the same sentence, paragraph, or even chapter as misanthropic monsters such as Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, bin Laden, and even Manson? What those men did, in varying degrees, defies the most basic tenets of man's tolerance of his fellows. As twisted and, sure, even evil, as Vick's actions were, to compare them to the atrocities perpetrated by history's most infamous, demonic screwheads is disingenous at best, and dangerously unperceptive at worst.
And so...
Michael Vick committed some damned horrible crimes. He was caught, and sent to jail, and served his assigned sentence. And in fact, he is serving it still, with post-release conditions being followed, and to a tee, I'm sure. And now that he is out, he has a right, like every other felon who has spent time in prison and then returned to the outside, to earn a living.
But here's the thing: what Vick did, and the crimes and horrors he undertook, illustrate just who and what Michael Vick is. He is a man priveleged to have experienced the best of what celebrity offers an individual in this country and morphed that sense of entitlement into the perceived right to plan and execute systematic breeding, training, torturing, fighting, and killing of dogs.
Vick can have his second chance. There are thirty-one other teams in the NFL that I would have been perfectly content to deride as misguided when they signed him. The fact that it is the Eagles, the team I have cheered and booed and cried about and thrilled about for over forty years, who signed Vick makes me realize that there many, many things more important than watching grown men playing warrior games and making millions of dollars on a Sunday afternoon.
Just like I wouldn't want Vick living next door, I don't want him playing for the Eagles either. But then, the callous effetes running the team just don't understand that comparison. They're forcing people to make a choice. And for a good person, the choice can mean compromising your principles. But then it is all about the green, right?
Saturday, August 15, 2009
Friday, August 7, 2009
Tableau on a Train
Most days, on the train, I read, head down, concentrating on the words on the page without much thought to what’s going on around me, at least until my stop arrives and it’s my time to move on.
Today differed, though, and not for any clearly discernible reason. Maybe I was just paying more external attention than usual.
Today I stepped into the car and turned right, toward an unoccupied outside seat, at quick notice the only one vacant. As I walked by, a woman sitting in the seat in front of my destination looked up and smiled cursorily, an unusual happenstance, but I smiled back as I strode past her and settled into my own seat.
I took out my book to read, a novel, somewhat dense of style but entertaining, the sort that would usually keep my eyes on the page digesting the content with a reasonable amount of dedication to the words in print. But before I dug in, I noticed the woman in front of me holding her newspaper, with its congenital crease, and then she added an additional fold to quarter it, allowing a crossword to lay claim to one surface, and a Sudoku the other. I was curious as to which puzzle she would choose, and she responded to my unspoken query by taking out a red pen and inking in a numeral on the virgin Sudoku grid.
I’d pretty much just worked into a zone with the book when, in a veritable whirlwind, an entity spun into the seat in front of me, to the left of the woman taking on the numerical challenge, flopping heavily into the padding, shaking the structure of the seat bracing and pressing the woman against the window wall of the car, either by physical invasion of her space or by a leading shock wave brought on by the frenetic motion of the bulk slamming inward. And the truth is, he might have chosen the seat next to me, had I not unthinkingly plopped down my briefcase on the upholstery instead of my lap, as I usually do, though, in my defense, the hour at which I was taking the train this day generally never generates enough ridership to mandate doubling up, and especially never on a Friday. And so…
He was a man, maybe six feet tall, and on a glance wider across the buttocks than his upper half might indicate. A poignantly protruding, hawkish nose, pale complexion, and slightly graying brown hair, cut in a fashion better suited for a young lad, sprung from a head which itself sprouted from the collar hole of a blue checked button-down shirt. As well, he could have used a more recent, or more thorough, shave.
I looked back down to my book, after noting just how scrunched the woman now appeared from behind, and began again to read, when I soon noticed a series of odd, jerky motions in my peripheral vision. Looking up, I noticed the man’s right hand flicking, seemingly randomly, as though shooing away an imaginary gnat or some other more profound illusory ephemera. The hand stayed within what might be considered his personal space, but if it was distracting to me, it was certainly more so to the woman, as I could see her head turned slightly to her left, as though glancing sidelong at the spastic manual ballet that had entered her world. His fingers were long and as pale as the skin on his cheeks and neck, and they wiggled gratuitously at the terminus of each spasm.
Before long, the flicking and fluttering waned and he took from the case in this lap a worn yellow legal pad. After subsequently producing a blue pen with a chewed and flattened non-ink end, he started to write rapidly. And so I hope you’ll forgive me my voyeuristic license when I tell you what happened next.
His script was barely legible, but after seeing a few underlined headings and following entries, I was able to decipher a majority of what was being scrawled. First I decoded the word Vacation, and next to that /Packing, which lead to subheadings such as Socks, Linens, Pants, and Shirts. But these led further to Chargers (cellphone, Blackberry, razor), Pens (blue Bic, black [no Bic?]), Laces (black, brown, white [it pays to be prepared?]), and other minutiae. It conjured suspicions of OCD as I read surreptitiously over his shoulder. But a new wrinkle soon arose, as he flipped pages back and forth, from one list to another, more rapidly as the gyrations stretched forward in time, the pen racing across one page, flip, then another, flip again, then another, more this time, more letters and lines and even a couple exclamation points for those items demanding greater attention and less likelihood of being forgotten!!
And I have to say, it was fascinating to see those hands move in blurs that seemed to streak and illuminate like lights at night in a long exposure photograph. But what never ceased were the intermittent hand flicks, and always the right: he wrote, flicked, flipped, and wrote some more, then flicked at what must have been an opportune moment to stop writing and flipping. And when he took a break, perhaps to ease a cramping in his hand, he tented his fingers into a gable on his head, with his thumb on his right temple and the fingers wrapping around to and across the forehead above his brow, which was furrowed as though in concentration or discomfort, or maybe from some building internal pressure, an increasing impetus, because before long his hand alit from his head and lashed out, but now with the gnawed-upon pen crooked in the web between thumb and forefinger. And I will say that I feared slightly for the safety of the woman next to him, who now seemed to be cowering as his movements brushed and impacted on her space-bubble and hesitant to undergo an inadvertent eye-gouge or tracheotomy from his manic writing instrument.
Eventually, and not after very long, he slipped his pen away someplace unseen to me and produced a Blackberry, thumbing through various screens and items. Next came a flip cellphone, which he fingered open and checked through screens for calls, I guessed.
And then he reached down and back and unearthed a wallet, worn and brown and swollen with cards and papers, and at least the top edges of cash, checking the stashes there for who-knows-what. After replacing the wallet under his rump, while jostling the woman still trying valiantly but vainly to focus on her puzzle, he commenced slipping his fingers through his hair, plowing furrows and crests across his ‘do in patterns changing with each gesticulation. Then, at last, motion ceased.
I do not know much of what happened next, except that he turned and asked the woman, who wasn’t cringing but was rather compressed in her corner, if the next stop was hers. She answered in the negative, which apparently meant her stop was the same as his, so he asked where she worked. To my surprise, she replied with her place of employment, which was too muddled for me to hear clearly, but I wasn’t really trying to understand what she was saying, my eavesdropping not extending to words spoken, but rather only to the movements and train-bound physical undertakings of the man, and even then, only things seen. Maybe I was drawing a line, as though listening in on a conversation was crossing an ethical delineation that observing visually was not. But as the train decelerated and I rose to depart at the approaching station, I did hear him mention that he was a lawyer. And in fact, he said lawyer, not attorney, something that in my experience was not the norm, but was in no way out of the realm of the expected or accepted. And at that moment any guilt that I felt about acting so that he had no choice but to propel himself into her quiet world some twenty or so minutes ago vanished in wisps of inevitability, because it was then I heard her express interest, in a tone not likely to be feigned, and then ask him where he worked. I left them to their devices, conditions, issues, and hopes. I was out. And for the first time in months, I’d read not one full page of my book on the train.
Today differed, though, and not for any clearly discernible reason. Maybe I was just paying more external attention than usual.
Today I stepped into the car and turned right, toward an unoccupied outside seat, at quick notice the only one vacant. As I walked by, a woman sitting in the seat in front of my destination looked up and smiled cursorily, an unusual happenstance, but I smiled back as I strode past her and settled into my own seat.
I took out my book to read, a novel, somewhat dense of style but entertaining, the sort that would usually keep my eyes on the page digesting the content with a reasonable amount of dedication to the words in print. But before I dug in, I noticed the woman in front of me holding her newspaper, with its congenital crease, and then she added an additional fold to quarter it, allowing a crossword to lay claim to one surface, and a Sudoku the other. I was curious as to which puzzle she would choose, and she responded to my unspoken query by taking out a red pen and inking in a numeral on the virgin Sudoku grid.
I’d pretty much just worked into a zone with the book when, in a veritable whirlwind, an entity spun into the seat in front of me, to the left of the woman taking on the numerical challenge, flopping heavily into the padding, shaking the structure of the seat bracing and pressing the woman against the window wall of the car, either by physical invasion of her space or by a leading shock wave brought on by the frenetic motion of the bulk slamming inward. And the truth is, he might have chosen the seat next to me, had I not unthinkingly plopped down my briefcase on the upholstery instead of my lap, as I usually do, though, in my defense, the hour at which I was taking the train this day generally never generates enough ridership to mandate doubling up, and especially never on a Friday. And so…
He was a man, maybe six feet tall, and on a glance wider across the buttocks than his upper half might indicate. A poignantly protruding, hawkish nose, pale complexion, and slightly graying brown hair, cut in a fashion better suited for a young lad, sprung from a head which itself sprouted from the collar hole of a blue checked button-down shirt. As well, he could have used a more recent, or more thorough, shave.
I looked back down to my book, after noting just how scrunched the woman now appeared from behind, and began again to read, when I soon noticed a series of odd, jerky motions in my peripheral vision. Looking up, I noticed the man’s right hand flicking, seemingly randomly, as though shooing away an imaginary gnat or some other more profound illusory ephemera. The hand stayed within what might be considered his personal space, but if it was distracting to me, it was certainly more so to the woman, as I could see her head turned slightly to her left, as though glancing sidelong at the spastic manual ballet that had entered her world. His fingers were long and as pale as the skin on his cheeks and neck, and they wiggled gratuitously at the terminus of each spasm.
Before long, the flicking and fluttering waned and he took from the case in this lap a worn yellow legal pad. After subsequently producing a blue pen with a chewed and flattened non-ink end, he started to write rapidly. And so I hope you’ll forgive me my voyeuristic license when I tell you what happened next.
His script was barely legible, but after seeing a few underlined headings and following entries, I was able to decipher a majority of what was being scrawled. First I decoded the word Vacation, and next to that /Packing, which lead to subheadings such as Socks, Linens, Pants, and Shirts. But these led further to Chargers (cellphone, Blackberry, razor), Pens (blue Bic, black [no Bic?]), Laces (black, brown, white [it pays to be prepared?]), and other minutiae. It conjured suspicions of OCD as I read surreptitiously over his shoulder. But a new wrinkle soon arose, as he flipped pages back and forth, from one list to another, more rapidly as the gyrations stretched forward in time, the pen racing across one page, flip, then another, flip again, then another, more this time, more letters and lines and even a couple exclamation points for those items demanding greater attention and less likelihood of being forgotten!!
And I have to say, it was fascinating to see those hands move in blurs that seemed to streak and illuminate like lights at night in a long exposure photograph. But what never ceased were the intermittent hand flicks, and always the right: he wrote, flicked, flipped, and wrote some more, then flicked at what must have been an opportune moment to stop writing and flipping. And when he took a break, perhaps to ease a cramping in his hand, he tented his fingers into a gable on his head, with his thumb on his right temple and the fingers wrapping around to and across the forehead above his brow, which was furrowed as though in concentration or discomfort, or maybe from some building internal pressure, an increasing impetus, because before long his hand alit from his head and lashed out, but now with the gnawed-upon pen crooked in the web between thumb and forefinger. And I will say that I feared slightly for the safety of the woman next to him, who now seemed to be cowering as his movements brushed and impacted on her space-bubble and hesitant to undergo an inadvertent eye-gouge or tracheotomy from his manic writing instrument.
Eventually, and not after very long, he slipped his pen away someplace unseen to me and produced a Blackberry, thumbing through various screens and items. Next came a flip cellphone, which he fingered open and checked through screens for calls, I guessed.
And then he reached down and back and unearthed a wallet, worn and brown and swollen with cards and papers, and at least the top edges of cash, checking the stashes there for who-knows-what. After replacing the wallet under his rump, while jostling the woman still trying valiantly but vainly to focus on her puzzle, he commenced slipping his fingers through his hair, plowing furrows and crests across his ‘do in patterns changing with each gesticulation. Then, at last, motion ceased.
I do not know much of what happened next, except that he turned and asked the woman, who wasn’t cringing but was rather compressed in her corner, if the next stop was hers. She answered in the negative, which apparently meant her stop was the same as his, so he asked where she worked. To my surprise, she replied with her place of employment, which was too muddled for me to hear clearly, but I wasn’t really trying to understand what she was saying, my eavesdropping not extending to words spoken, but rather only to the movements and train-bound physical undertakings of the man, and even then, only things seen. Maybe I was drawing a line, as though listening in on a conversation was crossing an ethical delineation that observing visually was not. But as the train decelerated and I rose to depart at the approaching station, I did hear him mention that he was a lawyer. And in fact, he said lawyer, not attorney, something that in my experience was not the norm, but was in no way out of the realm of the expected or accepted. And at that moment any guilt that I felt about acting so that he had no choice but to propel himself into her quiet world some twenty or so minutes ago vanished in wisps of inevitability, because it was then I heard her express interest, in a tone not likely to be feigned, and then ask him where he worked. I left them to their devices, conditions, issues, and hopes. I was out. And for the first time in months, I’d read not one full page of my book on the train.
Sunday, June 14, 2009
Footprints
I'm not a selfless philanthropist building and donating and helping future generations.
I'll leave the world no volumes of profound literature.
No monuments will be erected in my honor.
But I have my legacy.
I am often a contrarian. I am blatantly opinionated. I feel no compulsion to suffer fools quietly. And I conduct myself thusly not because I want to stir the pot for the sake of reaction or attention, but because I just happen to be passionate about some things.
So maybe not in a grand fashion, but I am the sand that irritates the oyster. And the result has been the three pearls of my life: my children. (My wife, of course, is my diamond.)
Three more different beasties from common loins there might never be. They're brilliant, caring, willful, and astonishing, all in their own manner. I could not be more proud of who they are now. And I could not be more excited or hopeful for the incredible adults they will one day be. They energize me, fulfill me, and justify me. They fill my heart to the point of bursting my chest. They give me the best of all reasons to be a good man.
So when at last I've shuffled off this mortal coil, I will go with pride.
I have my legacy.
I'll leave the world no volumes of profound literature.
No monuments will be erected in my honor.
But I have my legacy.
I am often a contrarian. I am blatantly opinionated. I feel no compulsion to suffer fools quietly. And I conduct myself thusly not because I want to stir the pot for the sake of reaction or attention, but because I just happen to be passionate about some things.
So maybe not in a grand fashion, but I am the sand that irritates the oyster. And the result has been the three pearls of my life: my children. (My wife, of course, is my diamond.)
Three more different beasties from common loins there might never be. They're brilliant, caring, willful, and astonishing, all in their own manner. I could not be more proud of who they are now. And I could not be more excited or hopeful for the incredible adults they will one day be. They energize me, fulfill me, and justify me. They fill my heart to the point of bursting my chest. They give me the best of all reasons to be a good man.
So when at last I've shuffled off this mortal coil, I will go with pride.
I have my legacy.
Friday, June 12, 2009
Do As I Say...
I have come to believe that one of the keys to a happy life (or at least to eliminating a submerged but powerful source of stress in one's life) is coming to grips with the various hypocrisies that make us who we are.
Yes, we are all hypocrites. The problem is, somewhere along the line, we came to associate hypocrisy with some sort of moral or ethical turpitude. And that's a shame, because every one of us harbors several of them within us, like spiritual hazards we have to navigate around and past each day.
This overly-PC wave under which we find ourselves swamped has further pushed the concept of hypocrisy deeper into the moral muck. And we really need to get past this limp, lame, counter-humanist perception of what has always been a very real part of mankind, like it or not. Simply, we need to stop couching our hypocrisies as something they are not. They are not, and never will be, conflicting judgments, paradoxical choices, or moral conundrums. Those are bullshit PC labels. It's called hypocrisy, Mr. and Mrs. Doublethink.
I love animals and support their ethical treatment, to the point of abhorring fur, but I wear leather and eat the shit out of meat: red, white, and seafood.
I want the parents of criminals to stop whining about how the system is oppressing their criminal children, but know damned well I'd likely feel the same if it was my son in that system.
I look askance at parents who raise their voice to their kids in public, while being quite aware I've done the same myself, and likely will again one day.
I know, they're not heavyweight examples, but they are the kinds of things we all hold inside us. They are the things with which we struggle during our more introspective moments (or with which we don't if we're too insensate to give two shits), and as such vital parts of our compositions, we need to accept them as what they are: hypocrisies, pure and simple.
And if you don't like them, change them. Take a shot at more consistency. But you're never going to eliminate them all, so give yourselves a break and take solace in the fact that, despite what the PC pussies would have you believe, we all have them, we always will have them, and accepting them is half the battle in making them less the drains in our lives. In other words, you're a hypocrite, get used to it.
Yes, we are all hypocrites. The problem is, somewhere along the line, we came to associate hypocrisy with some sort of moral or ethical turpitude. And that's a shame, because every one of us harbors several of them within us, like spiritual hazards we have to navigate around and past each day.
This overly-PC wave under which we find ourselves swamped has further pushed the concept of hypocrisy deeper into the moral muck. And we really need to get past this limp, lame, counter-humanist perception of what has always been a very real part of mankind, like it or not. Simply, we need to stop couching our hypocrisies as something they are not. They are not, and never will be, conflicting judgments, paradoxical choices, or moral conundrums. Those are bullshit PC labels. It's called hypocrisy, Mr. and Mrs. Doublethink.
I love animals and support their ethical treatment, to the point of abhorring fur, but I wear leather and eat the shit out of meat: red, white, and seafood.
I want the parents of criminals to stop whining about how the system is oppressing their criminal children, but know damned well I'd likely feel the same if it was my son in that system.
I look askance at parents who raise their voice to their kids in public, while being quite aware I've done the same myself, and likely will again one day.
I know, they're not heavyweight examples, but they are the kinds of things we all hold inside us. They are the things with which we struggle during our more introspective moments (or with which we don't if we're too insensate to give two shits), and as such vital parts of our compositions, we need to accept them as what they are: hypocrisies, pure and simple.
And if you don't like them, change them. Take a shot at more consistency. But you're never going to eliminate them all, so give yourselves a break and take solace in the fact that, despite what the PC pussies would have you believe, we all have them, we always will have them, and accepting them is half the battle in making them less the drains in our lives. In other words, you're a hypocrite, get used to it.
Thursday, March 19, 2009
Facebookosis
Now I'm confused, because I see all these people on Facebook constantly, telling me how they feel, what they're doing, what they ate, what they want, and here I thought that's what blogs are for. Silly me. But of course, some people are so bent on self-promotion that they will spend inordinate amounts of their days advertising their every thought, or whatever it is they process that passes for thoughts in their brain-worlds.
Maybe there should be more for people to actually LIVE and less for them to POST about.
And yes, again, with my simplistic hypocrisy. I'm nothing if not consistent.
Maybe there should be more for people to actually LIVE and less for them to POST about.
And yes, again, with my simplistic hypocrisy. I'm nothing if not consistent.
Monday, March 9, 2009
Twitter?
So today I finally got the scoop on this phenomenon called Twitter.
I gave in to the Facebook peer pressure, creating my own page, and actually interacting with people. It's been fun. It's been different. And catching up with folks from my distant past has been intriguing and surprisingly satisfying.
But this Twitter shit just baffles the hell out of me.
There is NOBODY with whom I am so fascinated that I feel compelled to maintain a running tab on their whereabouts and activities.
And you know what? I hope like hell there's nobody out there that wants to know what I'm doing, not only because the whole idea is frightfully pathetic, but because they'd be disappointed with just how boring and unmotivated I am when it comes to informing people that, hey, guess what, that sauerkraut I ate just twenty minutes ago? Well, it's out of me now baby, and I spray painted me a porcelain-based masterpiece!
So while it may seem ironic to read coming from a relatively narcissistic blogger and Facebook participant, you can lose that Twitter shit, post-haste. Unless you're a celebrity, which renders you dismissible in my eyes, you're very likely boring, and if you're not, you're likely lying about not being boring. And if I want lies, bullshit, deceit, and self-righteous self-importance, I can listen to Rush Limbaugh.
I gave in to the Facebook peer pressure, creating my own page, and actually interacting with people. It's been fun. It's been different. And catching up with folks from my distant past has been intriguing and surprisingly satisfying.
But this Twitter shit just baffles the hell out of me.
There is NOBODY with whom I am so fascinated that I feel compelled to maintain a running tab on their whereabouts and activities.
And you know what? I hope like hell there's nobody out there that wants to know what I'm doing, not only because the whole idea is frightfully pathetic, but because they'd be disappointed with just how boring and unmotivated I am when it comes to informing people that, hey, guess what, that sauerkraut I ate just twenty minutes ago? Well, it's out of me now baby, and I spray painted me a porcelain-based masterpiece!
So while it may seem ironic to read coming from a relatively narcissistic blogger and Facebook participant, you can lose that Twitter shit, post-haste. Unless you're a celebrity, which renders you dismissible in my eyes, you're very likely boring, and if you're not, you're likely lying about not being boring. And if I want lies, bullshit, deceit, and self-righteous self-importance, I can listen to Rush Limbaugh.
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