Baseball, Basketball, and all the Other Things.

I have been having a long-play, dark sadness event for a tick, tick, tick hot minute.  I should preface even that semi-preface with the following silhouetted, semi-declaration:

I knew it was coming, even though I am an adult white male human life form, and therefore could not possibly have any issues of any kind.  Notwithstanding the validity of that public opinion, I am just going to write for a while.  Everything does not have to be a political statement, right?  We can still talk to each other like we should…like we use to?  Maybe we can, maybe we cannot.  I personally have no compulsion to voice an opinion about....anything. 

So be it all, and either way and regardless and as I said I to I, what is, is whether it’s spoken or not.  Internally, obviously (hopefully) you do not think that I said that out loud.  Full disclosure, I said exactly that out loud.  So be it… I to I, the lunatic said and anyone who knows me will stipulate to that, and that’s okay.  BUT that is not what we are here to talk about, and I apologize for the out-of-the-gate digression.

I see and saw it unavoidable, even before “it” saw me.  As such, I prepared my fragile human spirt by thinking deeply, hour upon hour and heavily drinking every single night this week to no avail, no productive outcome possible, knowing still I endeavored.  Not that I even sought an actual resolution…. maybe just so I could muster the impossible motivation to mitigate the malfeasance of my mind mental exploratory to articulate this imaginary conversation (that clearly no one is having besides me and me).

One cannot resolve the unresolvable. 

For me, on a certain level of understanding that we will not get into…’this’ is the equivalent to Pop dying… that is what only I ever called my old man, my homie, my father.  It is at least commiserate at a spiritual level to him not being there to see the last basketball season all the way through.  I say “last” because let us all be honest, if Bob Stantz did not watch the basketball game, can you really be sure that a basketball game was ever played?  I think not.

It is hard to imagine basketball even being a sport without my old man in attendance, you know?  It is almost as impossible to believe as it is him not living long enough to witness me finally being the unequaled badass that nobody besides me and him ever thought that I could be.  I have wished my father back to life to see whatever the ‘thing’ was more times than I can count, but I’ve never encountered an emotion that wished him and Michael (my mentor) back into existence at the same time, until tonight.  They had different tastes, they certainly were from different worlds, but they (at least to this point in my life) are the only two adult male human life forms that believed in me, unconditionally.  It would’ve been cool if my Pops had met Michael one time.  These two men never crossed paths in the temporal world, but I am confident that now that they’re both gone that they are arguing about college baseball vs college basketball in heaven or whatever and that gives me joy.  They would’ve had a lot to talk about, but if it was only once, I wish that time was the moment when Michael “passed the torch” to me.  Sadly, neither one of them were alive to see it…Neither one of them were alive to see me, for the first time maybe ever be “me”.  That sucks.  So be it.   

Friday night is historically the official start of the college baseball season, but because of COVID, it moved to Saturday at least for my homies.  Not sad about the timing, or that Florida is picked to win the league with State picked third or more, but absolutely devastated that my pseudo-Pops ain’t here to see it.  I have been thinking obviously, as said prior before I started writing and devastated is the exact right word.  The week of, the night before, the night of and throughout all the subsequent ‘first pitch’ weekend?  That was me and Michael time - no different than me and dad the first weekend of March Madness.  We’d txt and call hour to hour, anytime day or night.  That’s when and where I learned who he really was...expanding exponentially over time.  Year over year, it was like some natural process for him to share more about this thing or that through the vehicle of college baseball.  Ironically, not natural for him, but like a national geographic type of unavoidable natural metamorphosis....as he trusted me more, the more he let his “tail” grow or whatever, you know?  If it was not for college baseball, and the not-so-obvious to the casual observer intense rivalry between UF and Hail State, I don’t know that I would’ve ever known who Michael was...at least not at a core level, and by extension, he would’ve never been able to see me past all my bullshit.  And by even further extension, if I hadn’t let Michael into my life, I may have never been able to connect with my old man, even though it wasn’t in the way I wanted, or in a timely manner, or in a way that he could even internalize, because he was the walking dead for the last forever.  It was one-sided, for sure, but I made peace with Pops (that doesn’t make it suck less).

They were both simple, complicated, confoundingly unapproachable, but at the same time caring men.  It was hard for them to connect with most people on any level other than a superficial one, but it wasn’t because they didn’t want to.  Baseball / Basketball was like the air that the rest of us breathe to Michael / Dad, and that I shared that love, at least at a collegiate level changed their mind about “who” I was.  That’s not true entirely maybe, but it absolutely softened their hardline worldview enough to see that I wasn’t and could not be constrained by whatever book definition they had of me...maybe even that I had of myself.  If they could see me in a different light, maybe I could to.  They forced me to believe in myself in their own weirdo way.  In architecture terms, baseball / basketball was our public square, our front porch, our main street storefront.  Through those conversations, I learned who they were, how to ‘know’ them, you know? 

I knew opening day was going to be tough, especially the first one after Michael passed.  Even more so because I had planned to take him to Hoover for the SEC championship last year before COVID, and only told him that on his death bed.  Not the surprise either of us thought it would be.  That was so important to me, because I was never able to take my dad to Assembly Hall in Bloomington.  At the end of the day, I never took either of my homies to their sacred places.

I told Michael a lot of things on his death bed…things I didn’t have the opportunity to tell my own father.   There are more parallels between their two lives than I can write, more even than I can remember right now.  The one thing that I wasn’t able to tell my father before he died, I made damn sure to tell Michael – I will protect your legacy.  Just because Pops didn’t hear me say it to him, doesn’t mean he didn’t know it to be true when he passed.  I have and will continue to chart my own path through this world, but I wouldn’t have ever gotten even close to this point to have that option if these two men hadn’t guided me here, in their own bizarre way.

I’d give anything to talk to either one of them about Baseball, Basketball, and all the other Things.

Postscript:  State won the College World Series this year!!  I would've loved talking to y'all about that.

 

 

The 20th Day of May

For context, today is the 140^th day of 2020, the 65^th day (for me) of an unscheduled collective remote working experiment, and as such, the whole of all the things is wholly unprecedented and just a little bit odd. 

Sixty years ago, today, ¾ of The Beatles (John, Paul and George) played their first show of their first tour at Alloa Town Hall in Clackmannanshire, Scotland.  McCartney was still playing guitar then, Stu Sutcliffe on bass and Tommy Moore on the drums.  Moore was the first of a parade of drummers that would continue for two more years until Ringo completed the "Fab Four" in August of '62.  It is hard for me to comprehend that those four dudes who would’ve likely amounted to very little on their own, coalesced into one of the greatest rock and roll bands ever only to create and play together for barely eight years before breaking up and that less than ten years after that unfortunate, John would be dead.  The Beatles only made music together for eight years?  Are you kidding?!  Have you seen / heard / felt their catalog?  John was only a "rock star" for eighteen years?  That is not only ridiculous, but also a remarkably unequalled fact when one considers the length and breadth of the shadows of influence cast as a result of this shaky impetus.  Just think what they could have been if they'd had a legit drummer throughout! (Sorry Ringo...Pete Best was a cool, cool cat.)  

Lennon is a touchstone for me in a lot of ways, and I've often tried to imagine what he would think and say about the world today, especially now.  I'll try to resist going down the rabbit hole of musical "what ifs” but imagine if they'd all lived through.  John, Janis, Jimi, Randy Rhoads, Dimebag, Razzle, Shannon Hoon, Kurt, Sid, Bradley Nowell, Tupac, Biggie, Stevie Ray, Billie, Morrison, Buddy, Keith Moon, Freddie, Cliff Burton, Layne Staley.  The list goes on forever, right?  What if they'd all made it through the storm?  Would I really be listening to Mandolin Orange records on a Wednesday night if they had?  Maybe.  Hopefully even because MO is an incredible duo that gives me much joy and is a band that you should know that I’d love to tell you about if ever you would ask what I’m listening to these days like humans used to when music was cool...but still I wonder.  My heart and head believe that “music” would have been appreciably different especially had Kurt, Jimi and Tupac came through...but that is a fantasy I hope to explore another day.  BUT for the sake of having something to imagine, imagine what Kurt Cobain's musical response to the drivel that fills the airwaves today might have been.  In all honesty, it would probably be drivel too but it would have felt and looked a whole lot cooler.  IF 80-year old John Lennon were alive to add color to this tapestry, can you imagine how different “this” would be?

Also, further random, today is the birthday of Joe Cocker, Cher, Jane Wieldin, Iz, Patti Russo and Busta Rhymes - what an arbitrary bunch of musically special humans and how surprised am I that I'm just a few weeks older than Busta?

My homie Nick Cave once said, "I've spent my life butting my head against other people's lack of imagination."  That's a helluva truth right there, no?

Leonard Cohen is quoted as saying, "If I knew where the good songs came from, I'd go there more often." 

What if "this" is where the good songs come from?  What if "this" is where our collective lack of imagination meets its demise?  If you listen to anybody who is talking right now, they are selling their own personal vision of the truth devoid of fact or precedent and that is an exceedingly selfish and dangerous game to play.  I often quote my Stoic heroes when I write, when I talk, when I endeavor to lead, but I stop short of that tonight to ask the questions that so many people have answered lately irresponsibly and emotionally – what is it that you are chasing, what are you trying to prove, to whom are you trying to prove it and why does that approval matter?  I have listed and quoted several personally influential people tonight, but I would never do a thing because Joe Strummer did it or because Johnny Cash might see me do it or because Buddy Holly heard from a friend that I might. 

We draw our internal ability to act from a multitude of external influences and influencers –

some (most) of which we have no control over, but we should never let anyone's influence outshine our own.  Perhaps it is because of my Stoic leanings, perhaps it’s because I'm an aging punk / headbanger, perhaps it's because I'm a yet to be realized and acknowledged, brilliant goat farmer, but either way I know that MY voice matters.  More importantly maybe, I know that YOURS does too.  The trouble lies in finding that voice I suppose, and maybe that is what I came here to write about.  At the end of every day, we are ALL solely responsible for the mark we have left on the world that day – good, bad, or indifferent.  I think we all aspire to speaking our own truth and most of us convince ourselves on the reg that we are.  When nobody is looking though, and when you are being honest with yourself, have you found your voice?  Have you ever even heard your own voice?  Are you willing and able to stop apologizing for it if you have?  Are you going to be okay if your voice does not align with the sheep that we are all unavoidably surrounded by?  Is your voice strong enough to outshout the din?  Are you going to be cool when and if it does?  Can you surround yourself with people who do not insist that you’re surrounded by only their obnoxious voices?  These are obvs rhetorical questions, but ones that I ask myself on the daily.

I'd like to continue writing this stream of consciousness wandering nonsense around myself and expand deeper into my personal manias on irony and the dichotomy of mankind and all the other things as I promised some friends earlier this week, but it's the 20th day of May and these are all of the thoughts I've had so far today.

I don't know all of the things, but I know that all of the things I know are true.

Wise Words and Random Encounters

This morning, in what has proven to be the best decision I’ve made in a long time I went to my local big box store intent on picking up a few Spring flowers.  And when I say a long time, I’m not wholly sure if I mean ten minutes or if I mean one thousand hours or a million years – the construct of time has appreciably changed since we started using the “Q” word, hasn’t it?  Despite “social distancing” being my natural and preferred life posture, I’ve missed you humans a helluva lot more than I ever thought I could or ever believed I would admit publicly.  High-functioning introverts such as I am recharge from reflective time alone, word?  Where others crave interaction, we crave isolation.  When you might go out, I’m def stayin’ in.   I’ve learned this week though that without that requisite, day-to-day social drain, my batteries became overcharged.  Still not willing to internalize that I need other random people, but also recognizing the intrinsic necessity that my hands touch the healing power of the Earth’s soil on some regular basis, away I went.  That specific mission was an abject failure by the way, but we’ll get to that.

I would be remiss if I took full credit for this action.  Full disclosure – the subtle cracks in my solitary armor that I alluded to above, opened into exposed chasms…impassable gaps between my perceived reality and my actual reality by the end of the week.  Gaps become canyons only by exploration, and I’m an explorer so that was a bad deal Friday night.  Introspection overdone, as it turns out and as is true with all the other things – anything overdone is a negative unequaled.  Still, internally unaware entirely and upon reaching out to a trusted friend, I was snapped back…awakened.  She didn’t sugarcoat or give me a pass for being an asshole, but she did have some good advice.  Wise beyond her years as ever, she said I should get out – be IN the world.  The irony, that I had given our entire staff that same advice just a short time before but had not fully heeded it myself was not lost on me.  My days have been spent inexplicably and involuntarily glued to the news – shut it down, she said.  But I’m all about stats and graphs and charts, I retorted – that’s how I make sense of it all.  “You know everything you need to know to stay alive…so GO!  BE alive.” 

Responding to these words, I got vertical and mobile with a renewed cocky quickness.  Still reeling from my self-imposed mania, and with no clear plan of attack – the mission failed.  I wandered the aisles forever it seemed…at least an hour in the garden area alone.  I must have examined, at an almost biological level every single plant specimen on display and refused them all for a myriad of utterly ridiculous rationales.  Indecisive.  Anxious AF for even being there…away from my fortress of solitude or whatever.  Defeated and ashamed, I walked away.

Recently, in the vast and unending time I mentioned earlier, my old friend Marcus Aurelius said a thing to me inside of the immense cavern of my own personal holy shit – I might be losing it this time for real puzzle.  "You have power over your mind – not outside events.  Realize this, and you will find strength."  His words were burning in my brain walking empty-handed back to my truck.  What a shitty Stoic you are homey, said I to myself.  My increasingly public display of having adopted Stoicism as a lifepath hung in the balance of my next move.  Yes.  That is way more dramatic than it should be or needs to be, but whatever.

I mentioned the stats earlier – despite good advice, I’m still locked in on the reg.  I can’t separate my reality from our reality, you know?  Since I started writing this, worldwide cases of COVID-19 have gone from 320 to 336,000+.  That’s a reality that we can’t avoid or reinvent, but there’s hope for us yet.  Here’s why!

As I sulked back to my truck, I couldn’t help but notice a guy struggling to solve his own personal conundrum.  He had apparently purchased a new dishwasher, but the vehicle within which he had arrived to make said purchase was dreadfully incapable of transporting product back to his domicile.  The poor guy had the thing out of the box, Corolla trunk open…he was just standing there looking at the situation like, “what the actual fuck?”  This moment is where my new normal starts to kick in.  I say new because I’ve seen similar events at the aforementioned big box in the past and laughed about it driving away.  Today – in stark comparison, I casually approached and asked, “you good”?  Knowing the answer, I was dropping the tailgate as I said it.  We loaded the dishwasher into my truck, and I followed him to his adorable little house in Little Five Points.  I think I had decided to hook the damn thing up for him by the time I got there, five minutes later.  His young (rightfully skeptical) wife caboshed that nonsense (given the environment) and I dropped their new appliance on the sidewalk and drove away.

There’s a lot that I could say about that singular event, but what I felt inside isn’t something that I can put into words.  Back at the crib, my internal emotional seed purified and buttressed by the karmic payment I’d just made, I found myself reflecting upon the nature of how and why and when we choose to live our lives…every single day in the normal world.  That deep dive made me question why whatever it was that had just happened, doesn’t happen on the daily.  I questioned, in the sober light of day why I don’t more often display publicly what I know is right internally.  Why isn’t this my every day?  Why isn’t this YOUR every day?

I’m not sure that it’s a Stoic virtue per se, but it’s an unavoidable fact of my life that I question.  Every.  Single.  Thing.  The day passed – recharged for sure but still conflicted, questioning.  Instead of my routine Sunday night takeout, I cooked spaghetti…like an end-of-the-world sized pot of spaghetti – I’m not immune to the panic buying phenomenon after all.  In the past few days, I’ve adopted through no voluntarily expression of my traditional temperament and despite my regular consternation, an inescapable desire to interact with my neighbors on a more consequential level.  They are ALWAYS walking their dogs or kids or whatever and I naturally / almost religiously ignore them because of it…because I’m an asshole, I just realized.  Regardless, these days, I step out if I’m not already out there, onto my stoop and say hello.  That’s a helluva thing right there, no?  I.  Say.  Hello.  Me?  Yep! 

A few weeks ago, I got new neighbors across the street in the yellow house that isn’t yellow anymore.  It’s been a minute since I felt like I had a word or more to say to any neighbors across any street.  I don’t know, never met ‘em before tonight…but they’ve got a dachshund so they must be cool.  Tonight, as I was chatting with them like a lunatic hermit from my front stoop, I asked if they were hungry.  Having cooked enough for the entire coming apocalypse, I divided my need by half and gave them what I couldn’t reasonably use.  Maybe I’m not an asshole after all.

I paraphrase once again the wise words of Marcus Aurelius…humans exist for the sake of other humans.  For all my “stoic” training and bluster, I don’t believe that I’ve ever fully grasped that specific ideal before now.  We have a collective moral responsibility to be there for each other in times of need.  Period.

Today was a good day – I needed it.

Me / You / Us

What ever happened to governing?  I've watched (as all of us have) as our democracy became a hollow shell of what the founding fathers intended.  They certainly couldn't envision what 'screens' would become in the 21st Century, but they were aware of the simple basic human tenant that truth and integrity was and should be the core of what America was / is / and should be.  This sounds like the beginning of an anti-Trump rant, but it's not.  He's ridiculous and embarrassing (and most of us agree regardless of the aisle side), but he isn't the problem.  The problem with America today is America.  

"We" created / demanded in fact an environment where a shell of a caricature of a human being could and should become President of the United States of America by virtue of nothing more than our own individual indifference to and in some cases, downright abandonment of actual facts and historical context, in favor of whatever salacious bullshit primetime 'news', TMZ and Facebook told us.  We stopped, myself included caring about the greater good and started caring more about what and who we hated less or more depending on our own natural predilection.  We chose sides, and picking sides is never good.  

I'm not naive: Americans have always been 'opposed' to each other at some level, but those who governed us could usually find a middle ground that suited most of us.  And 'us', the governed mass could usually find a middle ground that we could live with, regardless of the vitriol of the debate.  BUT, we gave up on the founding principal of intellectual debate, we gave up on each other...and by extension, we gave up on this great democratic experiment and by further natural extension, we gave up on our own humanity.  I cannot abide either side decrying the other, because we are all complicit in this crime.  We've allowed our subconscious minds to be co-opted by whatever nonsensical noise is filling it, not by the quietude of actual thought and resultant essential discourse.  We punted on 4th and short with all the fans behind us deep in the opponent's territory and yet we wonder how in 2019 we are facing yet another possible Presidential Impeachment?  Is there any room for respectful debate?  Do we even care?  About anything?

As stated, Trump is NOT the issue.  Almost anyone on earth knows more about what and who he is than I do.  I see the nonsense on the periphery, but I'm more concerned about 'me'.  That's the "American" way, no?  I'm concerned about what post-911 / post-Obama / post-rational thought day-to-day USA has allowed me to and in many ways insisted that I become...and as always, by extension what I / it allowed / insisted that you become.  I will be expectedly and maybe appropriately panned for this, but I believe that "we" are better than whatever that / this is.  I've never served in the military, I'm not a first responder, I don't have guns, nor do I believe in personal gun ownership as a basic human right...but I'm as much a patriot as anyone else in this country and I still believe in the greater good of its citizenry.  I'm a believer in the truth and promise of a better day, but nothing in the daily news allows space for that basic human level of positivity and optimism to exist.  Truly, few environments that I inhabit on the daily allow for it either.  The "coastal-elitist-liberals" aren't running this country anymore...they never were by the way.  WE are.  And we've all become or are becoming cynical assholes.

I've been drinking, but I was raised by devout Southern Christians.  My late father wasn't a saint, but he did his best to show me what a "path" looked like.  Nick Cave and Leonard Cohen showed me a little more.

My aspirations...my "path" to be on the cover of Rolling Stone changed into the cover of The New Yorker and eventually evolved into simply being acknowledged as a thoughtful human being slowly and over years of internal reflection.  I still think I'm a rock star, even if it's latent hubris.  I remain committed to becoming a great and important writer, even though I haven't written meaningful pages in years.  Some of those facts and outcomes I could have controlled, but for one reason or another I chose not to.  What I have been able to control is 'who' I am...maybe actually not in the beginning and hardly ever consciously at the time, but I've worked on my 'who' for a lot of years, and I'm proud of what my commitment to that ideal has created.  Which is to say that I'm comfortable in my own skin for the first time in maybe ever.  I deserve all the good things, because I actively choose to live my life everyday.  I choose to act instead of react.  I insist that being positive is a better path than being negative.  I want to win, but I can recover quickly if I lose, because tomorrow is a brand new day full of hope and promise...and thousands of opportunities to seek, give and receive joy.  WE can collectively choose the same thing.  WE are in control.  Epiphanies mean nothing if they don't inform positive change.

It's almost college basketball season and I've got a bluegrass festival this weekend, so it's all good, right?  Right.  Hey, let me tell you something about Sloan Sabbith and my rando Wednesday.  Maybe I should save that for another day...meantime, think about me / you / us, and I'll do the same. 

Wouldn't It Be Nice

This morning, for the first time in my adult life, I inadvertently pulled the thread on my first conscious memory of being aware of a song...like, "knowing" it, you know what I mean?  I was probably (maybe) six or seven years old...digging around in my old man's closet looking for those "Stories of the Bible" film strips we used to watch on the living room walls on rainy days.  (I was the youngest and brattiest so I had to be in charge of setting up the projector and cueing the tape machine.). Mixed in with The Wonderful World of Sam Cooke and reels of Pop's favorite sermons by his Christian heroes, was a well-worn copy of Pet Sounds by The Beach Boys.  I had seen and ignored it many times before, but that day was different for whatever reason and though I don't know why, I abandoned my search for the films and wound the tape on this, unbeknownst to me at the time, seminal recording.

I've thought about and written about the origins of my love for music many times giving credit to many sources, events and people, but I honestly never thought my dad had anything to do with it.  In reflective hindsight, I'm not sure I was even consciously aware of music prior to that exact moment.  I now realize that those rando few minutes all those years ago triggered a love for music in me that continues to grow 40+ years later.  This morning, a Beach Boys song innocently rotated onto my Sunday morning Pandora station and after the first few bars, I almost literally collapsed.  I hadn't yet connected those dots that I just did up there and it nearly crippled me.  Everybody is a Beach Boys "fan", but Brian Wilson's beautiful and in many ways tragic life has always fascinated me as much or more than the amazing songs he wrote.  This morning for the first time, I was forced to confront the possibility that my father shared that fascination at some level.  You would have had to have known my old man to understand the shocking dichotomy of what I just said.  It hasn't quite been a year since he passed and not a day goes by that I'm not reminded of something that he taught me...it's rare that I discover a whole other new thing.

He would've been about a month shy of his 21st birthday when Pet Sounds was released and I legit cannot imagine what life was like for him...what he must've been like before Vietnam and all of that.  He wasn't my dad then, and that's all I ever knew him to be.  I would've been in Mississippi for his 74th birthday today had he lived until next Wednesday, but he died on a Saturday in August last year and we put him in the ground a few days later on a wicked hot Monday.  I haven't been the same since. 

It's not all bad though.  In addition to this little surf rock epiphany, his death reawakened within me the curiosity I've always had about the power and purity of one's spirit and the transformational strength of hope that I lost somewhere along my path to here.  His death forced me to remember the responsibility that I have to seek and give joy.  In the months since, I've rediscovered through my memory of him and the nearly perfect example that he gave me of how I should treat every human being on earth with the compassion and kindness and respect that they deserve by virtue of nothing more than their having been born a human being.  People who know me now know that I'm insufferably fond of saying, "Today is a brand new day, full of hope and promise."  That's not something he would've ever said - he wouldn't have dared to be that direct.  I flippantly give credit to my newfound belief in Stoic philosophy but the truth is I'm invoking his memory and celebrating his life every time that I say it.  I'm still trying to and may always be trying to learn to be the type of man he was...to live as simply as he did...to teach in the subtle way that he taught.  He wasn't perfect and he was not a saint.  He was my father though and I wouldn't be who I am today if he hadn't shown me how to be.  The biggest regret of my life is that I never told him exactly that while he was still here.

There's a lot of things I could say...recount old memories and all that whatever.  Those memories are all mine though and they should and will remain between me and him.  I love you old man.  Happy Father's Day.  "Wouldn't It Be Nice" if you were still around? 

Wouldn't It Be Nice