The Specialest?

The relationship between professional athletes and their fans has changed a great deal over the decades. As recently as forty years ago, and maybe more recently in some cases, it was not at all uncommon for Philadelphia Eagles players to work off-season jobs in the Philly area. They'd sell cars, or construction equipment, or men's wear, to varying degrees of success, and the companies they worked for would relish the clientele the  hired fame brought through the doors. And in the process, the players were all the more integrated into the community that rooted for them so ardently on Fall and Winter Sundays.

It's unnecessary to speak at length to what the team, and its successes and failures, meant to the Eagles fan base. Suffice to say, hundreds of thousands of avid fanatics based the outlook of their Monday mornings on what the Eagles did the day before. But by Tuesday, those same fans were wiping the slate clean and looking forward to the next game with at least a glimmer of hope, chatting optimistically about the ways to come out on top this time, even if in the next breath they were deriding coaches like Joe Kuharich and Ed Khayat, or quarterbacks like Pete Liske and and Johns Reaves.

But there's a big difference today. How many players, right down to the 53rd man on the roster, are working second jobs in the Philadelphia area? Sure, you see them on ads city-wide, and for the biggest stars, nationally. And yes, there's a great deal of community involvement through various organizations, but even that is a small drop in time, as the players today have to work well past a forty hour week year round in order to stay in condition and remain mentally and emotionally prepared for the coming season.

The fact is, it can at times be pretty tough for Average Joe Philly to relate personally to a multi-millionaire just because he's wearing an Eagles jersey. Often, because of the money they make, the players are under an intensely invasive microscope, with the fans critiquing every play, and often to the negative, made worse by the perception that someone pulling down that kind of scratch shouldn't be making those kinds of mistakes. We cheer with reckless abandon their successes, but we revile them for their failures. We've always taken poor performances personally, but it's at a new level today, because how dare Moneybags blow that coverage or fail to haul in that pass?

So here's my point, and this is in no way a dig at those fans who celebrated so deliriously in 1960, or suffered ignominiously through some of the worst seasons the NFL has offered over the last fifty-odd years: This Eagles team is at least as special to the fans, and maybe more so, as any in the past. The players have to be the kind of people we want to root for, 24/7, because the media doesn't miss a thing anymore. In fact, they have to be the men both on and off the field that, despite their hefty pay days, can still inspire a relationship with fans from a wide but bottom-heavy socio-economic spectrum. Yes, the coaching staff has a role in the overall image, but in the end, it's all about the players.

I don't know if Carson Wentz sees the Eagles and the fans as anything more than a splendid payday waiting to happen. I'm not sure if Fletcher Cox cares one whit about Philadelphia beyond his role on the football team. I can't say if Malcom Jenkins is truly and deeply invested in the city and its football fans. But even if they don't (which I highly doubt) they've done a fabulous job of making us all believe they are as fully sold on us as we are on them.

I believe they care as much as we do. And I believe that at least the majority of them understand what this game means to the fans and the city. And they are thankful and happy to have us along for the ride. They have to work harder than ever to keep us dedicated and rabid. They've done that.

For that reason- and the old timers can shoot me if they must- this just might be the most special team this city  has seen since Super Bowl became a thing.  Win or lose, they've captured our hearts.

But if they want to own those hearts forever?

Win.

Stop. Just, stop.

There's a disturbing trend in our country, one that thankfully exposes much hypocrisy, but also shamefully highlights at least as much ignorance and bigotry. It's the increasingly more common fact that so many American citizens profess to revere and stand by the U.S. Constitution, while using it as so much toilet paper whenever it clearly dictates against personal preference, or when it's interpreted by the highest court in the land, The Supreme Court of the U.S., to say something that gets one's panties in a sweaty bunch.


  I'm going to spare you an in-depth analysis of the myriad topics and rulings that have, over the last several months, resulted in this post. Instead, I'm just going to make some points, as briefly as my admittedly excessive verbosity will allow, and then step away from the keyboard:


  1) If you think a state government should fly, or if you choose to fly, a flag that has come to represent a cadre of states that openly and violently committed treason in order to maintain the status quo regarding the ownership of and commerce in human beings utilized to perform uncompensated labor under dire conditions of imprisonment and torture, you love neither the Constitution nor the United States of America.
  2) If you feel that your religious beliefs should be used as any sort of template for public education, civil rights laws, or election funding, you are operating under a gross misinterpretation of at least a very crucial part of the U.S. Constitution.
  3) If you believe that "freedom of speech" means that you are permitted to say anything you damned well please, no matter the lack of veracity or irrationality of said speech, and that having done so, no private person or business can do anything to hold you accountable, via restriction of interaction or criticism, for what you've said, then once again, there's an important part of the Constitution you simply do not grasp, and you'd be well served to consult someone who does understand so that they can explain it to you, thereby having yourself set at least somewhat straighter.


  So please, if only for as long as this post sticks in your memory, stop with the fallacious cries of censorship, restriction of rights, reverse-racism, persecution, or whatever other imagined crimes your pathetic little martyr complex has you feeling victim to at the moment. You're wrong, and you're whining more than an adult should.

Governor Christie Under Investigation?

 

If not now, when?

That’s what many people are wondering in the face of New Jersey Governor Chris Christie’s continued refusals to announce himself a 2012 Presidential candidate.

Granted, his approval ratings in-state are inching steadily downward, no doubt a result of NJ residents’ intimacy with his various lies and hypocrisies. But nationally, he could find himself at the top of a heap of thin, deeply flawed GOP candidates. And even in the scathing glare of the national spotlight, Christie could take a page from Palin’s playbook and simply lie, lie, and lie again until he got the necessary number of fools and sheep to believe him.

So why has he not declared?

Well, perhaps there’s something going on, behind the scenes, that would not survive such invasive scrutiny.

It seems there are rumors afloat all about Trenton, as well as various other satellite dens of power, that there is an investigation afoot. These rumors speak of federal involvement, targeting Christie, and others.

Now, the charges rumored to be investigated number as many as the rumors themselves. Likewise, other parties rumored to be in play are varied and plentiful.

Granted, these are just rumors at this point, but would Christie likely decide to run for president if they were true? The answer to that would be a resounding no. He could survive his deceptions and misdeeds if he said and did just the right things. But a federal investigation- for anything, really- would torpedo his candidacy instantly and render him damaged goods for the future as well.

Oh, and did I mention these are just rumors?

But there’s something for all of us to think about. Yes, there are rumors now, and that’s all they are at this point. Either there is an investigation ramping up, or there isn’t. But none of us know one way or the other, not yet anyway.

So there are just rumors. And so often, rumors end up being so much hot air.

But then there are the rumors that accurately presage the future.

Stay tuned.

Be Sure to Insure

 

Auto insurance is a fact of life in our country. Currently, only one state does not require some form or another of insurance for automobiles, New Hampshire, and they require insurance in cases of some past infractions. As well, a resident will have driving privileges revoked in the event of an accident that involves uncompensated costs. Wisconsin requires either insurance, a $60,000 deposit with the DOT, or a bond filed with the same department. California follows a similar procedure, with the deposit or bond amount at $30,000.

And why is insurance mandated? It’s pretty simple, really. It’s to eliminate unpaid costs that would eventually be passed on to the taxpayers, via state and federal funds supplied by taxes, as well as state and federal fees and surcharges.

Strangely, or not, the Teabaggers and other self-appointed conservative enforcers have little to say about this form of mandated insurance. Perhaps the fact that the insurance saves billions of dollars in uncompensated costs has something to do with the silence.

And yet, they can’t seem to follow the same sort of logic when it comes to mandated healthcare.

Uninsured medical costs topped $200 billion last year, and have been over $100 billion since 2000. Of those costs, fully a third are ultimately uncompensated. The primary source of funding for those uncompensated costs are the federal, state, and local governments, or more accurately, the taxpayers. This pays 85% of the payment shortfall, to the tune of over $56 billion dollars last year.

And of course what cannot be calculated monetarily is the insufficient or nonexistent care for those who carry no insurance and either get subpar treatment, or forego it altogether.

So maybe it’s not about the money. Maybe it’s about who proposes the healthcare plan. After all, Mitt Romney got it through in Massachusetts, and contrary to what many talking heads insist, the plan actually has worked quite well. But then, Romney looks like the average ultra-con, and our President does not.

The End is Nigh!

 

Are you ready for some rapture?

Yes, it is being predicted, and not just by the usual evangelical lunatic fringe, that the rapture will occur this Saturday, May 21. Of course, the rapture is that special time when “the dead in Christ” will rise up out of the earth and ascend to heaven to be with god and his son. Then, shortly after the corpses have gone, those who are alive and saved will follow upward. This will leave those of us who are heathens, pagans, heretics, or generally just non-Christian , here upon the earth to suffer five months of the end times. It will be a period of hellfire and brimstone and consummate suffering, culminating with the actual end of our existence on October 21, also of this year.

This cataclysmic event is not to be confused with the Mayan doomsday scheduled for December 21, 2012. But the number 21 does seem to be significant, doesn’t it? Wonder why…

Anyway, the speciousness of the prediction aside, something like this will  break us up into three basic groups.

First, we have the True Believers, the evangelicals and devout, as well as the paranoid and panicky who are getting serious now with this impending End. They’ve bought into the scenario, and are going to spend Saturday waiting to be swept up into the sky. Though, only after the billions who are already dead make their ethereal trip, of course. I don’t know how they’ll spend their days. Maybe there will be church gatherings and Bible readings and euphoric celebrations. But they will be chaste and orderly.

Second, we have those who believe but just don’t care. As well, there will be a few non-believers who use this as an excuse to act out. The bottom line is, this group will become disorderly, riotous, larcenous, violent, and generally felonious. They will see themselves as unsaved, unworthy, and as usual, untouched by earthly guidelines of good sense and good taste. And they figure if they’re going to hell, why not get their money’s worth before the journey? Thank fully, we can expect this segment to be a distinct minority.

Third, we have those who simply do not believe but are every bit as good and decent as the most devout believer, along with those who are Christians but don’t cotton to this apocalyptic nonsense. These people will go about their business on Saturday as they would during any other weekend, happy to be free of work, seeing to chores and kids and recreation. Maybe some of those who are teetering, or strongly curious, will identify a true believer and keep an eye on them, to see if they end up going POOF and leave a vapor trail heading into the sky. But overall, they will live their lives, obey the law, be honest and forthright, be loving and caring, and shake their heads at all the silliness they see around them.

Into which group do you fit?

Me?

Put it like this: I’ll see you all on Sunday

Games People Play

 

Over two decades ago, Osama bin Laden decided he was going to take down the Great Satan, aka, The United States. Despite what is in retrospect some pretty inept security, it took him and Al Qaeda until September 11, 2001 to make the big splash they’d been working toward. His goals were based on some central tenets: he needed to morally confuse and befuddle America, he had to bankrupt the American economy, and he wanted to diminish America in the eyes of the rest of the world.

Now that bin Laden has taken  a bullet to the eye courtesy of Navy Seal Team Six, it’s become popular to sit back and gloat about how America has won it’s personal battle with ObL. You just know he died scared, wishing for a few more moments before his brain was turned into a gray and red slurry, don’t you?  But things aren’t really as rosy as all that. And while bin Laden certainly cannot take credit for all our continuing ills, they’re no less real for that fact.

Consider the moral aspect.

While I am not judging, America greeted the demise of bin Laden as though Bruce Willis and Ben Affleck just exploded a world-killing meteor. We displayed a bloodlust, perhaps justifiably, but one that parallels that shown by many of the fanatics who oppose us so vehemently. Fat talking-heads gripe that Obama won’t show pictures of bin Laden postmortem, then complain that talking about his porn stash compromises national security. Senators decry a president’s adulterous inclinations just hours after getting oral sex in the back of their cars from mistresses. And even the most religiously zealous among us go blind to the WWJD billboards and cheer torture, revenge killings, and covert assassinations.

Now look at the economy.

We were already on a careening  crash-track before bin Laden ever signed off on the 9/11 attacks. Unfettered, and unregulated, greed on Wall Street led to exotic mortgage instruments and a runaway real estate bubble that doomed the economy the day the first NINJA loan was funded. We deemed many companies “too big to fail” and handed them billions of dollars to stay afloat. We sank over $3 trillion into a “war” in Iraq that was misguided, based as much on a son’s attempt to validate his daddy’s past aggressions as it was on a desire to strike back at an Axis of Evil. We continue to bankroll a similar debacle in Afghanistan, the mountainous Killer Of Empires. And we’ve forked over more than $11 billion to Pakistan alone in the name of fighting terrorism. Pakistan, of course, has done little toward that end, in fact harboring bin Laden for several years, and has instead used the billions to build hundreds of nuclear warheads to likely one day strike at India, bringing on a very real slice of Armageddon. Oh, and to keep things interesting, we continue to subsidize oil companies with billions as they record record revenue and profits perfectly well on their own.

And how do we look to the rest of the world?

This is certainly subjective. We will always have our fans, and our detractors. For every England, there’s a France (Ungrateful bastards, right?), and so on. More importantly, though, how do we compare with the rest of the world? Well, we hold our own in racism, but that could be considered subjective as well. So let’s consider metrics such as life expectancy, infant mortality, literacy, and math comprehension. We crack the top ten in one of those, life expectancy, and fall woefully short in the others. Infant mortality comes as little real surprise, as we’ve never given much more than lip service to those not yet of voting age. But it still speaks pretty poorly of us. And the other two, based on our obscene failures in education, result from two fundamental miscalculations. First, we can’t seem to understand that it is possible to correlate one fewer $4o0 ball peen hammers bought by the Pentagon to ten additional textbooks given to our schools. Second, in the wake of leaving our economy in the hands of those who had the highest incentive to abuse it, we’ve decided to make public services, including education, the illogical scapegoats, gutting funding and guaranteeing that we won’t be reading or adding numbers any more effectively in the near future.

American companies hire almost 80% of their technical professionals from other countries because, in the words of one staffing chief, “they’re smarter.” Since 2001, we’ve increased the anti-terrorism bureaucracy to the tune of three whole Pentagons worth of new office space.  And we kill, abuse, marginalize, and hate people different than us, all while holding some holy book that, at least in some parts, tells us that’s exactly what we shouldn’t do. And as one final stake in the heart, Conan The Barbarian is divorcing his Kennedy squeeze.

So no question, there’s no way you could say bin Laden was a winner in the end. But pending further review, it’s not clear what we’re winning, either.

Liar, Bully, Hypocrite…What Else?

 

New Jersey Governor Chris Christie is many things, most of which, it seems, aren’t especially admirable.

He said he was in touch while in Florida during last December’s snowstorm. He said public-sector unions regularly pressure the state legislature for things they fail to win through contract negotiations. He professed to be a Trenton “outsider.” He attempted to explain why the state lost out on $400 million in federal education funds. He claimed to balance the state budget without raising taxes.  And in every case, he was less than truthful. So Christie is a liar.

When presented with his blatant falsehoods, he and his likeminded staff bombastically cry foul, claiming hidden agendas, hair-splitting, and misrepresentation. He attempts to demonize police officers, firefighters, and teachers to all who will listen. So Christie is a bully.

During his campaign to become governor, and early in his term, he berated past officeholders for shortsightedly mortgaging the state’s future by borrowing so far down the line. Since then, he’s floated over $10 billion in longterm bonds, all set to come due after his term will be completed, and some due even after a possible second term (shudder!) is past. So Christie is a hypocrite.

So what’s next? Well, recently Christie was asked about his views on evolution and creationism. His response boiled down to “It’s none of your business.” Well, I beg to differ.

The governor has the ability to present a bill to the state legislature. It generally carries considerable weight, and with a sympathetic legislature, can be pushed through rather quickly. And therein lies a very real and frightening problem.

Just look what the neo-neanderthal Bobby Jindal has done in Louisiana with a bill that allows teachers to teach creationism in science class. Elsewhere, in Texas, Missouri, Oklahoma, Tennessee, and Kentucky, along with other states, loosely-veiled policies allegedly allowing free discourse on the subject instead permit creationism to be presented as science.

Let’s understand this first. Evolution is science. It is a theory, just like gravity, and only the misunderstanding or deliberate ignorance of the definition of a scientific theory can attempt to render it as less than fact. And in some ways, we understand evolution more clearly than gravity, Yet, who is questioning the veracity of gravity?

We’ve conjured up countless equations that will accurately predict the effects of gravity, but we still can’t say exactly what it is. Is it some sort of magnetism, or curvatures in space time, or invisible rubber bands, all acting in step with our mathematical proofs? On the other hand, we’ve identified many of the drivers behind and influences on evolution. From top to bottom, there are fewer gaps in our knowledge of evolution. So why aren’t more “believers” trying to cram a god into the gaps in gravity theory?

Now it’s time to circle back around. Evolution is science. Creationism is mythology. Evolution is to be taught in science class. Creationism is not, no more than civics or English Lit or any other subject should, or should not, be. Heck, you can start a class on world religions or mythology or theological philosophy, and talk about creationism till the cows come home, but at no time should it be elevated to the status of science. And science class is no place to point to the gaps in the total understanding of evolution and shout “Goddidit!”

So, Christie, when someone asks you your views on evolution and creationism, it is our business. You have the power to earnestly attempt to thrust New Jersey back into an anti-intellectual Dark Age. Teabaggers and other ultra-con neo-fascists would certainly love such an attack on reason, logic, and rational thought, but this is New Jersey, not Louisiana or Texas. So come clean and either relieve those of us who actually think, or give face to one of our basest fears.

You’re already a Liar, Bully, and Hypocrite. Now enquiring minds want to know: Are you a Moron as well?

‘Tis the Summer of Our Discontent…

 

So gas prices are playing leap-frog with the $4.00 per gallon mark, one week over, one week under, though at least in New Jersey it seems to spend more time under than over. Still, we’re hearing doomsday predictions of $5.00 prices coming our way, perhaps right in time for the grand summer gas-guzzling extravaganza kicking off Memorial Day weekend.

And of course this means a corresponding increase in costs for anything touched along its given way by petroleum, which happens to be just about everything. Food, power, service industries, manufacturing; they’re all accordingly corrupted and priced in part by oil.

And yet, strangely, while we’re paying an absolute premium for our premium, oil companies are raking in record profits. No, we’re not talking about gross, but net numbers here. But why is this, since you would think that the rising prices must be coming from rising costs closer to the source? Surely there’s a shortage, or concern about stability in some oil-rich part of the world, or some sort of disaster that would seriously impact production, right?

Wrong. OPEC says there is no shortage, and in fact, there is even a surplus at this time. Other oil-producing countries and consortiums are expressing the same sentiment. And sure, the geopolitical stability in most regions is, as usual, tenuous, but actually no more so than at most other randomly selected times in the past when gas prices were a whole lot lower. And unquestionably, the Gulf debacle of last year is wreaking havoc still on fishing in the effected areas, despite our pitifully short attention spans shuffling this disaster to some fog-sheathed back-burner. But the economic aftershock on oil prices should now be a pebble’s ripple in the sea.

So this means the oil companies are gouging. And while all the Randian idealists are trumpeting Free Market Or Die, we’ve never operated under any sort of true, pure capitalism. There has always been governmental involvement in the country’s economy. Ask the banks borrowing short term at insanely low interest rates. Ask Microsoft, Bell, or major league sports. The government has always had a hand in what goes on with our dollars and cents. What’s varied over the years is the degree of hands-on treatment.

This country has been struggling to recover from one of its worst economic disruptions. There’s been no definitive cure to the illness, but some of the symptoms finally appear to be improving. There is hope for the first time in some time.

Cry all you want, you ultra-con naïfs, but if there has ever been a perfectly valid reason for the government to investigate an industry, the targets would be oil companies, and the time would be now.

Chillax…

 

They say stress can kill you, and with what stress seems to have heaped upon me recently, I don’t find that hard to believe.

One day you figure that stress is supposed to feel like a set of eagle talons clamped onto your neck and shoulders, and the next you’re passing out at work, ending up in the hospital, and within 24 hours being told that you have an irregular heartbeat, high blood pressure, and high blood sugar. No, sir, you’re not going to die, not yet anyway, but there are some physical peculiarities that need sorting out.

You get an echocardiogram, and it shows that your heart muscle is up to the work it has outlined for it, but the elderly cardiologist tells you you’re fat, too young to be putting so much stress on your systems, and get some blood work done, thank you. Oh, and see you in a few weeks for a stress test, after we’ve dealt with that hypertension, of course.

You’re out of work until things make a little more sense, and meanwhile you’re taking pills for the blood pressure and anxiety, just to keep all the metrics where they belong.

You need to stay active, not just give in to the nearly debilitating right hook of mortality socking you smack in the jaw, but at first it’s an uphill battle. Then, after a few days, you come to grips with the fact that you’re a stone’s skip from fifty, and getting a wake-up call this cheaply is actually a pretty decent bargain.

Your wife loves you, despite your various failings, and you have a chance to make sure she continues to do so. You can lay out a path to better health, for yourself and your relationship. You see your children as treasures, the kind you need to stay around for a long time to admire and cherish.

This is when you realize you need to relax, make the changes that keep you on the right tracks, and enjoy the ride more often. Find reasons to say yes, not no. Don’t begrudge, be giving. Take the chance you’re given, and turn it into smiles, not scowls.

Because even when things don’t work out exactly according to plan, it’s still sunny on the inside.

Amazon Reverses Course

Last night I'm watching the local news, and it includes a story about a book written by some miscreant in Colorado titled "The Pedophile's Guide to Love and Pleasure." And of course, because they are the media, the story focused not so much on the abhorrent subject matter of the book, but rather on the fact that Amazon was selling it on their mega-website. Apparently there is no story that can't be bastardized into a news sensation.

Don't get me wrong. Amazon's decision to sell this vile screed can be seen as at least questionable, and they must be willing to take any public relation or commercial hits as inevitable consequences. But as a long-time opponent of censorship, I do not have an issue with Amazon's right to sell the book. They sell books about racist supremacy, religious fundamentalism, and various other nasty, exclusionary, bigoted topics, and they are allowed to do so. Still, there comes a time when doing something just because you have the right to do it is counterproductive to doing what is right. Yes, there is often a difference between exercising your rights and doing the right thing.

And so, Amazon has now apparently made the decision that selling the book is not the right thing to do. Granted, the over 3000 one-star reviews (the site review minimum), anguished expressions of disgust, and countless calls for boycotting Amazon likely played a substantial role in determining this course of action, especially heading into the free-for-all holiday spending season. But regardless of the reasons, Amazon, after coming to the realization that their anti-censorship policy could in this case cost them untold millions in revenue and reputation, made the right call in making the book unavailable on their site.

I have more to say about the author of the book, one Phillip R. Greaves II, but that's a special topic for the near future. For now, I'm thanking Amazon for doing what is right. It's not often a large company has an admirable corporate philosophy that it actually stands behind, and rarer still when such a company comes to understand that said philosophy, while well-intentioned, can also work against morality, ethics, and sensitivity.

You Don't Look Like Me

On top of all the other shenanigans going on, now Arizona is banning all ethnic studies courses in its public schools. It's okay to teach American History, or European History, but no Black or Hispanic History. And this because some shitheels decided it would be appropriate to teach an Hispanic Revolution course, allegedly advocating the overthrow of Whitey and The Man.

This blanket-bombing mentality is just beyond me. Rather than target the specific offending course, the state is saying no to all ethnic studies. And then they'll act all self-righteous when their motives are questioned.

This goes well beyond the Illegal Immigrant law, which at least has the benefit of motive behind it, even if it does impinge on the rights of citizens as well.

So gird your loins, America, there's more to follow. It's just a matter of time until Walter Mosely and Maya Angelou are banned from the public libraries.

On the Road to Vicktory...

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Warm This

It's December 28, and it's a breezy, windy 65 degrees.
Sure, it's grey and damp, but it still feels too damned warm.

I say fuck the tree-huggers and their global warming horseshit, but I still don't like this unseasonable weather. It should be in the 30's, or at least the 40's, and any gusts should feel like icy razors drawn across exposed flesh. Instead it feels like temperate mid-winter tropical breezes out there.

This is not the kind of weather that compels me to stick up for New Jersey when outlanders comment on what a dungheap it is. I want the four seasons. I want the easy access to big cities and coastal playgrounds. I want smothering snow and I want blistering heatwaves. But I want them when they're supposed to be here, not as temporally displaced aberrations.

Oh, and fuck Hurricane Schwartz too. He said this should be a colder, icier, snowier winter than we've had in some time. Look into my eye, Glenn. You're a dork and a scam-artist like all the rest of the weather-clowns. Now go get your fucking shine box.

Resolution #2

I'm losing weight.
No, really, I am. I figure about forty pounds should do it.
I'm not committing to any particular fitness regimen, but I'm going to do it by Labor Day. Maybe even sooner.

And I'll likely talk to my boy Rob about some running guidance. Yes, I hate running, but I love the occasional patch of solitude. That makes running an alliance between the bitter and sweet. I like the sounds of that. For today at least.

Order Now

I'm curious, actually, if I'm the only person who has an automatic prejudice against any product packaged with the red and white logo bragging "As Seen On TV!"?

And how about the Snuggie? I mean, don't we all want to look like Friar Tuck in the comfort of our own homes?
But really, as soon as there's one available with the Eagles logo, I'm ordering up so I can wear it to the next game I attend. I shouldn't get too many comments on that from the upper-level thugs.