Football v. Soccer

You'll remember earlier this week that I asked a question about debate methodology. It was a clever trap. Momentary Academic fell into said trap. Her first salvo is on her blog over here. You should read that before you read my response below.


GSR moderates and scores the debate for us. His comments are in italics.

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The distinguished gentle-woman from The District of Columbia makes a valid and important point about athletics in general. Everyone gets the opportunity at low skill levels to participate and improve their personal health.

I should note that never once in the history of my writing have I ever mentioned my shapely arms gripping the handlebars of my bike. You might be adding in your own fantasizing. I think that's super.

At this point, I should write a quick disclaimer stating that I have the utmost respect for athletes professional and otherwise regardless of what sport they choose. I make no judgements on the validity of soccer, indeed, I find many positive aspects of its game play, first and foremost that it is an activity that adds to the health of an individual.

Your central and eloquent argument pirouettes in a gentle declining orbit about a misguided point. That point, namely that soccer is the most accessible sport, is incorrect. I believe you fail to make the area of amateur and non-professional sport equally available to all sports in your argument. I remember many an afternoon with my brothers playing the game of football with nothing more than a vague imaginary line drawn between two convenient trees or fence posts. With only a ball, we were totally able to play an approximation of the sport. In fact, we could have changed the shape of the ball and just as easily have been playing soccer in the same yard.

If I were to choose one sport where equipment is truly a non-issue, I would choose as my sport wrestling. There are no real requirements save two competing egos.

This debate is, however, soccer vs. football.

My preference for football rests on the simple fact that it balances so well the kinesthetic and intellectual. Football is an incredibly intelligent sport, in fact more intelligent than any sport of which I am aware including soccer. While soccer is an exciting and very strenuous approximation of a tactical environment, the sport never satisfies the overarching definition of real-time strategy. I should mention here that the definitions of tactics and strategy I am using are standard military.

The purpose of contact sport is to simulate warfare or battle. Football simulates warfare on a larger scale than does soccer. In the real world, divorced I realize from the arena of sport, a nation going to war will utilize several totally disparate forces and resources toward the accomplishment of the goal, victory. They will mobilize strategic bombers to fly high and slow, they will utilize sea-borne assets with long range strike capabilities, special forces, etc. These assets will not operate in the same capacity as their teammates, or even their fellow services, none of which are nicknamed after the goddess of fire.

While soccer will have several possible plays and tactics available and certain players who specialize on the field, football has three different types of players who do not share the field. Defense, offense, and special teams function as strategic assets fighting the clock and the efforts of the other team. In this way, football better simulates warfare, and soccer better simulates an individual skirmish. I would prefer to see the strategy in a real sense on the field simultaneous to tactical feats.


As the moderator of this debate allow me to welcome both of the participants. The lovely lady from D.C. is someone I have known now for almost 5 years. The gentleman from Colorado is someone who has insulted me and intellectually jabbed me from the moment that I met him. To help balance this seemingly unfair dynamic The Momentary Academic is arguing for soccer, a sport that I never enjoyed playing or watching. Casey is arguing for football, which is the most tangible proof that there is a benevolent God in heaven that we mere humans can witness. So all in all, I should be able to stay impartial-ish.

In this first round of the debate M.A. does a nice job of playing the sympathy card. Her arguement that soccer can be enjoyed by many, regardless of income level, is quite compelling. It is supported by the overwhelming popularity of the sport in third world countries where the price of a baseball glove or a football helmet for each member of a team could be equal to the cost of a families annual income, but one coveted soccer ball can be enjoyed by the masses.

Casey, on the other hand, has done an excellent job pointing out that one football can also be enjoyed by a veritable neighborhood's worth of children. Having first hand experience playing backyard football with 7-10 friends, I can attest to the fact that the only pieces of "equipment" needed to have a backyard game of football are the ball, a working set of feet/hands, and some trees to serve as the goal marker.

More importantly, for the sake of the debate, Casey has done an excellent job of talking about the strategy involved in playing the game of football. His comparisons to modern warfare are impressive, and my one critique is that for those of us who have never gone to battle he could have at least worked in a Stratego analogy. But I digress...

The winner of this first round is Casey. He is awarded one point based on the merits of his arguements.

Codified Rambling

I'll be gone the rest of the weekend, so this is what you get. By the way, the last post is still up for discussion.

I spent some time riding along the rim of a canyon. I stopped at the crest of the box end and found a rock to sit on.

Due, I'm sure, to the exhaustion and pain of sweat seeping into a scraped knee and abraded calf, several profound thoughts occurred to me, or at least vague notions I've been working on I can now codify. I once listed as a hobby "thinking." It is a hobby I never lost. Sitting in an inspiring place and reading my thoughts on the pages of my brain is beautiful and bountiful. One of those thoughts is mine and mine alone, but the others I will share in order of appearance.

1. All Life Is Sacred

Truly, whatever mystery we hem and haw and turn into religion must return to the point of life. Life is unlikely. Actually, extremely unlikely, especially in the form of awareness. Think for a minute about your consciousness. Why do you have it? Where does it come from? I am aware of the selfless theory in vogue now, the one that says identity is a coping mechanism and a fallacy. I don't accept that particular thought as it leaves much to be explained. The Buddhist ideas of selflessness on the other hand, though coping mechanism they may be, I find sort of romantic. A freedom is available to those who believe they are truly not.

2. Causality is Bullshit

There are no causes.

3. Pseudopodia

I am a physical person. I live a lot of my life between my ears, but I live a sizable minority of that same life between my legs and between breaths of action. I find that five minutes of motivation can easily replace twenty minutes of preparation. Consider the machines we use to assist our lives. At my former employment, I always found it easier to just get in and move the heavy and large objects that made up my day. We had a plethora of mechanized assistance, but by the time you went to grab the machine, chased everyone out of the area, and moved the behemoth to your work site, you could have been up and down an old fashioned ladder ten times over. My personality is such that I'd rather just grab the ladder and grunt and struggle and get it over with.

Sometimes, my coworker was Bill. Bill was in a wheel chair. I would be constantly up and down ladders, carrying heavy products from a random here to a random there. I often broke a sweat at work. Bill did not. Bill was in a wheel chair. Many other men I dealt with during my day were overweight, or old, or had some malady that angered me. Men with sickness or disability anger me. I don't know why, and I know it's wrong, but they anger me. I still have incredible empathy for them. I believe strongly that at this point in history, we have room for everyone. We don't have a herd to slow down, and regardless, humanity is descended of pack animals, a completely different mentality from a herd.

When I pass these wheelchair-bound or obese people on the street or when they see me with a bike helmet or with my forehead beaded with sweat and my bulging quadriceps, do they think I am showing off? It feels like I'm showing off when I feel my body's mahinery bulging up and straining so close to the surface of my skin in their presence. That makes me sad. Why should it make me sad? I am no more responsible for my genetic stock than they are. And don't pretend that even the obese are to blame. Any number of factors can contribute to sedentation. Remember:

Causality is bullshit.

4. Population

At this moment, humanity is stretching the limits of their home. I should not say humanity, as that makes it sound as if the species has blown past the checks of carry capacity. We have not. The Earth can accommodate us as an organism. What it can not accommodate is the damage of our wills. Were I to eat a deer, the tragedy to that dear, and one could argue to the immediate herd, would be great, but Deer in a platonic sense would be unaffected. When my body turned the deer into fuel and did not perform the task with greater than 45% or so efficiency, I would have to get rid of the deer inside me. The Earth could absorb and reuse what I would discard. Life would explode out of the nitrogen I did not use.

However, this plastic lid to my cup of coffee will find its way into the system. It will not die or be reabsorbed very quickly. For the first time in the history of large individuated life, an organism's discards will outlive the organism. You could argue that the discarded oxygen of the precambrian forms of life did much the same thing, but the stakes are higher now. And as such:

5. Humanity

As in Humanity can no longer change. Think on this: at this point in history, the further speciation of the genus homo is no longer possible. Humanity is too connected for a separation event to last long enough for the nucleic acids to mutate that much. We can no longer evolve. People the world over are mating with diverse other people, which I think is great. I participate in the activity myself whenever possible. Racism won't be possible when we're all the same shade of caramel. On the other hand, it also hands us a standard and unified truth. This is the only humanity we will have for a long, long time. There will be no waiting around for better people. We are all there will be. This is our one shot.

Shot to do what? Improve, I guess. Improve our lives, our culture, our species. We have the ability, we do not have the will. We need to get our heads out of our global asses.

6. Causality is Bullshit

There are no causes.

A Request

If you notice, the last post was a statement of my being. That was something I've been wanting to do for a while, and I figured I would state a different being verb correlating to the alphabet for twenty three posts. The decision to spend time on self introduction sprang from a brief self-introduction of the author in one of my favorite travelogue. He said something intelligent sounding about people not being able to visualize characters without them being described. Then I realized I had nothing for "B."

I also realized that I am not the kind of person who can do the same thing twenty three times in a row. The thought is scrapped. I also have another idea that will be a complete departure for this site that may show up if I decide it's worth the time. Two departures, in fact. I think I already mentioned the Friday Fiction thing. Besides, lately my writing has been shit, so a departure might be nice.

On to the point:

So, I have an idea. I'm thinking of having a debate.


Recently, someone disagreed with my views on a minor topic, and I have to admit to being captivated. I have debated the issue, which I don't really care that much about, with others before with passion and fire. I have good ammo. I have presentations and parallels to show the wide-eyed audience. I considered making a PowerPoint.


I don't know how to do this. I want the debate moderated, but informal as I have no idea how formal debate actually works. The moderators should be people who are either dispassionate on the subject or people who are able to be rational. I'm not sure I have that many fans, for lack of a better word, who fit the criteria.


Also, the location of the forum. Gmail? Conference call? Smoke signals?


I don't even know why I'm giving it this much thought as it would be less debate and more of an argument, really.


Any ideas are welcome. I'll be more or less absent for the rest of the week and on into the weekend, but I may get a few minutes before Friday to worry about all this.

I Am Argumentative

At some point I will have truly given up on this semidaily vomitous mass of words and I will start doing what I have wanted to do all along: just pass on links from The Onion.

I have read The Onion now for years. A friend of mine used to have a subscription and quite a bit of CPSD 51's Internet resources were dedicated to downloading their Statshot and Infographic features. I don't think I have a sense of humor of my own, I just adopted snide Tom Servo lines and memorized swaths of The Onion.

What truly makes The Onion funny as I get older and maybe more mature is the parallels I can find between the universe of my favorite root vegetable and my own life.

They have an article running right now entitled Area Man Somehow Roped Into Arguing Passionately For Green Day. I don't think you'd ever catch me arguing over Green Day, but this situation has become exceedingly common in my life. I find myself defending thoughts and practises that i really don't even like. Maybe it's because so many of the subjects are related to a demographic I pretend to identify with.

I have found myself in loud and impassioned arguments over the validity of oil-assist twin turbos in the International 6.0 Powerstroke. I don't give a shit about that engine. I don't even forsee a time in my life where I would spend the amount of money required to purchase a vehicle so equipped. Independent front suspension? Hate it. Don't know why. 7005 aluminium tubing? Yeah, just try to talk some shit about it. Go ahead, seriously. I will end up defending the crap.

I find myself defending entire genres that I hate. (CAUTION: MUSIC SNOBBERY) Country music is complete garbage. That is a lie, country music is by and large garbage. I bounced in a country bar, I have half of Nashville's catalog memorized and I hate every pandering bullshit lyric. But let someone say Hip-Hop is better. I will be spewing the musical equivalent of Luther's Diet of Worms speech. Why? I don't know.

I will argue the validity of motorsports. Specifically NASCAR, especially if someone is making disparaging or downright cruel remarks about the fanbase of the sport. I don't give two shits about NASCAR. I don't really care about that many practises or issues enough to hate them. Or love them. Why do I keep doing this?

I mean sure, everyone knows Soccer is pointless and boring and a game of sissies, do I have to find new reasons that are intellectually qualified to dislike the "sport?"

non-Fiction Friday

So, I meant to start something new today called "Friday Fiction." You know, just whimsical fun.

I have a complicated reason for not doing that, but that would need a longer post. All I have today is this:

While sitting at home, with no classes to go to or work to do, I decided to turn on the TV. I never watch the TV. Anyway, whatever you do, do not turn this thing on after the news is over in the morning. There were all these shows that really entice a guy's sense of morbid curiosity.

Large women who don't know who they baby's daddy is, this show with Barbara Walters and some very loud older women, some bald-headed psychologist, etc.

I flipped through all four channels you can get up here on the hill and then I saw a familiar face. It was Gary Busey.

On the Jesus channel. Preaching. To Smokey Robinson.

I don't know what else to add.

Drunken Ramble #437

I just say he was the leader of a steel driving gang.

What did I say to the captain (What’d I say)? You know, the time he brought the steam drill ‘round.

Shaker you better pray, if you miss your six feet of steel, Tomorrow’s gonna be your burying day, day, day.

Polyanne would have been a hell of a woman. Driving steel like a man and so forth.

Fuck yeah.

Oh Lord.

Whatever. Causality pisses me off. Women and men always try to lay blame here and there when the fact is that there is no one at fault. Sure, that last person to date was a bad person, they fucked around. They ruined good things. They were intriguingly melodramatic. At some point in their developmental life, they were used, abused, misused, misguided, or some other decent reason to be unworthy of continued breathing. Fill it to the top, cause I hit rock bottom this time. This paragraph was not autobiographical.

This song is fun. And rocks. Poor me. Poor me. Pour me another shot of whiskey.

Right, causality. Lately, I been getting into bluegrass more than normal. Banjo rolls are God speaking to the soul of man. Declarative sentences rock. “What does that mean,” ask you.

Well, that means I am shit-hammered, Soon as I make a playlist that consists of almost exclusively of Ray Wylie Hubbard, Hank Williams, and mandolins, shit has went wrong.

I want to play so bad. Music is pouring out of me, but is not flowing into anything. I am not religious, but I’ll be Goddamned if a Blackface Twin with a couple of JBL’s worth of tubes driven to the limits of physics don’t throw me into convulsions.

Warning! This Post Contains A Politically Incorrect Joke!

So...whatcha doing.

Drinking. Studying. Drinking and studying.

How's that working out for you?

Eh. I am having some serious give a fuck problems at the moment. Impending deployment and all. I have a hard time worrying about Glassner's lame-ass book about paranoia where he tries to frighten everyone. I can see why Michael Moore likes this guy.

You know, you're the smartest person I know.

I am aware. I should be the only person you know, what with you being my conscience/internal monologue and so forth. You are exclusively my conscience, right?

Um, yeah.

Wait, you mean you work for other people?

Sort of, we've been through the amalgamation thing before. There's a few consciences I timeshare with. I'm also supposed to guide a conch fisherman in La Paz. That's why you seem to be obsessed with Baja, more than likely. Just like I'm the conscience of several Russian prostitutes and a handful of hobos.

That's kind of random. Do you have to draw straws? Like, why the baja kid? Are you sure you're qualified for all this?

We have an eight-week class and a cultural indoc for all the different people we have to be. I am current in several cultures, Indonesian, Indigenous New Zealander, Reformationist Hindu, and I'm working on my Appalachian qual. Kind of a tough one.

Well, most of my microculture derives from similar origins to most of your Appalachian people.

Really?

Oh yeah, I even knew how to yodel at one point. That and all the weird religious backstory is pretty much straight out of the hill people. I think anyway. You'll run into a lot of the same words.

Scrame?

That's one, I still catch myself using it sometimes. Past tense of scream. And Drame, past tense of dream. Also, scrempt.

Scrempt?

An indirect scrame, mostly.

Example.

"A call went out from some Brethren in Carbondale who had a young'n get croupy for the Elders, but they had to leave a day late; the elevator wouldn't take our beans early until Bro. Claudy went and scrempt at 'em."

I don't know whether to be fascinated or not.

I don't either, really. So, how much time do you really spend on me?

I just picked you up for the bullet on my annual eval, but you've taken up a lot of my time. The kid in Baja? He never needs shit from me. Of course, all he does is spear conches. I caught him screwing a tourist's daughter a while back, but I figure what the hell, the kid deserves to misbehave a little.

Tourists in La Paz?

Long story. Hey look at that, a sailor recalled even though he was discharged for being a fruit.

Woah, you can't say it like that! What the fuck kind of conscience are you? Besides, see where he was sent?

Naval customs battalion bravo, Iraq. Ha. That's funny, that's where you're getting recalled into. Know what the difference between your recall and his is?

There's a difference?

Yeah, he LIKES getting fucked in the ass.

Wow. Um...is it OK to laugh at that joke?

Quietly in your head is fine.

Research is Damned!

I was rumbling through Wikipedia the other day, trying to find something substantial to say about the isolation theory of speciation. About halfway down the article, I happened on a section devoted to epigenetics. In typical Wikipedia form, they immediately circled the wagons around what is really not a controversial issue and breathlessly lined up a tier of pikes, "epigenetics is not a challenge to the Theory of Natural Selection."

I would never have thought that it would be. I see no way that it can. But, they doth protest too much. Perhaps there is something going on in the graveyard that I should be aware of, said I. So, after an exhaustive research of epigenetics, I found absolutely no reason to even ponder why this would be a challenge to TNS. I am biased here and must admit that I find very little that is a challenge to the theory.

Then I thought, "So, you wonderful bastion of sense and intellectual prowess (as I have titled myself), where could we find an opinion on this soft inheritance that could direct one away from the consensus."

I hate consensus and try to veer whenever possible.

Ah, thought I, Conservapedia.com. Were there ever a database of challenges to Darwin, sure this is it. So I typed out the address and struck the enter key with aplomb. I would surely find the chink in all of the scientific elite's armour now!

A page lacking refinement and class burst open in my browser. "Conservapedia" was stamped with authority on Old Glory waving in a badge upon a field of neutral and academic color. This is where those cretins with their doctorates from accredited universities do not want you to go. They will not control me, sayeth I!

I typed in the search field "epigenetics" and struck the enter key again. Nothing. No mention at all of this obviously Achillean problem to this simply unproven theory. Ha! Forsooth! I must have mispelt. I whispered a dastardly chuckle to myself, frightening a few at this wifi hotspot. Their bemusement was of no consequence to myself, the great disprover of the hokery of Evil-ution. I had them on the run now, cursed lovers of monkeys!

I typed carefully this time and hit enter once more. Nothing!

How could these do-gooders with nothing but the kindness of humanity in their hearts not know of this chink in the bricks of scientific conspiracy? So, I too it upon myself to type into the search field. Evolution. After a link was followed I was at a momentous occasion on this day. The Trial of Scopes' Monkeys!

I soldiered through a sentence or two. Apparently the main researchers of American science's last best hope are all in eighth grade. Bryan's oratorical skills were unmatched? How do they know? There was not a footnote. There was no proof whatsoever for the claim. What about Alexander the Great? He may have been a little light in his loofas, but he had to be fairly persuasive. Lincoln? Probably a better orator. What of Jesus? The guy went on for days on some occasions.

No, thought I, this is not the hope of science. This page is no help at all. Who writes these articles? "As crafty as the day is long, [Clarence Darrow] arrived in Tennessee armed with his bag of tricks." Not since sound found a home in motion picture has anyone resorted to such colloquial jargon in sholarly circles.

What the fuck? scrame I. Patrons of the coffee shop fled. So said I to the constable, "But sir, they posit that the defeat of the evolutionists allowed George W. Bush to carry the state of Georgia thus winning the presidential election of 2000."

He was unmoved.

After posting my somewhat unreasonable bail, I tried a new tack on Conservapedia. Surely they would help my revolution in science if I simply looked for the right article. The results are less than encouraging.

Last One, I Promise

I swear, this will be the last post dealing with her. Maybe if I write it out, I can get her off my mind for good.

Who? Well, the girl who's been parading through all of the posts the last month or so. She flaunts my feelings for her across the ribbons of my mind and her scandalous wanderings through the backdrop of that mind paint any post I can give.

She hints at herself when I write about leaving. She insinuates herself into my words about sex and desire.

She's not a bad girl, just honest. She was honest about the prospects of her being able to wait around a whole year. I wouldn't have asked that of her anyway. Maybe she won't spend this year tied up in knots if I'm not someone she is officially tied to.

She was with me in life and death. I thought I was dying a while back and was absolutely miserable to be around. She stayed by. She held fast. There's a reason boats are named after women.

Now she's gone. I wish I could say she took all my money. My best friend.

Regardless, it's the same old story, and here it comes again.

I have to leave, not only my home and my plans, but I have to leave her. I laid on her, a woman all of ivory and tourmaline (fucking geology references), and I told her that when I come back I know I will not be the same person. Every combatant is a casualty. I have come home from these things before. I could not pretend with her that I would return and we could start where we left off.

I didn't know it was goodbye until her hug lasted a little too long. I promised to call her before I go. Her life is complicated. I have since been informed that before me she hated men. That is an understandable state given her past. I never would have guessed she had anything but love for men, but maybe that love was mine and mine alone, compounding the tragedy of it all.

I hate tragic people. I hate when I am one. Sorry for the lack of funnies and for the lack of anecdote.

I'll call her from the terminal when I'm leaving.

Some Titles Are Just Lame

So I wrote a post today. It was a true account of someone I met and briefly allowed my life to intersect, though she was a slave. Possibly an indentured servant, I'm not sure what the nice word would be. The story ends with her family dying. So, I decided to leave that one alone. I think my serious writing has gotten a little too heavy. Desperation held me in its icy grasp. I considered doing a meme. Honestly, I'm afraid Laurel would make fun of me, and her scorn is more than I can bear.



So, to keep it simple, I found some old pictures I took a couple years ago. I like them and will probably throw some on here when I need to illustrate a point. For Jimmy Page Did Not Understand The Ocean, I wish I had had this:







It is too late. The moment is over.

When I do finally hit publish on the story of me and Misha, which is not her real name, I have a picture of her home. You can not make out the tragedy from the mists of the Straits of Malacca. You also can not smell the water by looking at the picture, which is probably best.

The significance of the individual is lost on the mechanizations of the Earth. I was reminded of this several times this weekend during the Mike The Headless Chicken Days/Fruita Fat Tire Festival (please ignore the first two government sponsored minutes of this video). The Earth reached up with its mighty paws and smote me. Luckily, no concussions or anything spectacular this time, just some blood on the trail.

I've tried to pick up women in locales unassociated with the cult of mountain biking before. It doesn't work. They look at your shins with the snake track of sprocket damage and scraped knees and bruised bones. Then they ask a reasonable question:

"What are you, twelve years old?"

Distractions

Quick and dirty, I'm going to be away from here for awhile, maybe two weeks. Some of you are already aware of my accelerating schedule, so I won't elaborate. Since it takes no work besides being a pretentious prick, I'll keep up my minor, but sexy, half of The Five if I can. If you need placated, I always thought these posts were my best, proven by the fact I buried them before anyone could read them:

A Tribute To Ray
A Conversation With A Former Life
A Recipe
A Dream
A Rant
A Trip

I'm curious to see what others people may have liked, as this has been around a year or so now. Leave suggestions in the comments and I'll try to chime in sometime around next Friday or so.

In a side note of minor humorous value, I just had to go through all my posts to make sure I said nothing bad about waitstaff in the history of this site. Call me obsessive. I might be a little more self-conscious than I admit to being at times. I am perhaps a softie who hates to think of hurting anyone. Besides, I used to be waitstaff. If the job was demeaning and geared toward the uneducated poor, I have probably done it. Call me obsessive.

Concussion, Contusion, and Minor Whiplash

I have to point out briefly the benefits of a spectacular crash and a new set of contusions.

First among the list is the endorphin and adrenaline rush that courses through you hematos dendrite self for a few hours. The rush I can only describe as euphoric is comparable to any number of chemicals that are fun and enjoyable, though illegal. It is not illegal, however, to place your face in the dirt and slide on it for a while.

The larger benefit is the bump in your personal stock price among the opposite sex. With blood trickling from my nostril and a severe reddish brown stain of bruising over my left eye, I found women enthralled at my mere presence. Yes, children, they love to see a man who has battle damage. Had I known this earlier, I would have spent less on drinks in clubs and more on two wheeled conveyance.

This is OK, I have basked briefly in the attention of an astoundingly beautiful woman whom I have been quietly fascinated by for weeks, I also have a date Sunday with another girl I would normally not consider in my league. She actually witnessed the crash, and she has assured me that it looked as legendary as it felt. She is a lovely woman, but her approach to proposition I can only describe as “predatory.”

In short, the skin I have lost is repaid by the gods of testosterone. Thank you, Ping the enormous and Pong the bold.

On the other hand, I have been phased out of someone’s life for good. She is perfect for someone, though I see a crashing pile of burning parts down our road. Not that it matters, she found my leaving to be too big a burden to bear, and I would not have let her wait for me to come home anyway. We talked things out, and things are still friendly. She was a good girl, and right now good girls are not a priority. Good girls always hate you for leaving, and I am not a fan of being hated.

Not that it matters, I’ve had enough and so I’m getting out. I’m leaving now. I’m a long gone daddy. I wish I could say I don’t need her anyhow. That is true in the strictest sense of black and white truth. I don’t need her. I need air. I need water. I need a drink. I don’t need her, in fact I know I am better off without her waiting behind me, dragging me down for a year.

I apologize to all the good girls of the world. Especially the ones I have met, since I only meet them on my way somewhere else. I'm always crashing something.

Giro

I rarely endorse a product. In fact, I never endorse a product that is not limestone filtered and comes from Lynchburg, Kentucky.

I would like to thank and heartily recommend Giro helmets. I loved my old helmet, it's fit, it's finish, the refreshing ventilation properties. Now I have laid that helmet to rest, it has been given its due place in the carbon reinforced Valhalla. Fear not, it died honorably.

In all seriousness, I have seen these things take licks from a 16 oz. framing hammer, but today I managed to break one nearly in half. I'm not in the hospital, I don't need stitches, and my pupils are OK with life. The helmet took my 205ish pound bulk and the extra eight pounds of various gear and water I need to get my box of rocks up the hills impacting at whatever speed could make an object my size fly thirty feet over level ground.

The best feature of the helmet was the discount I got for bringing it back in. I appreciate those who appreciate loyalty.

If you need a helmet, check these guys out.

Pyro

A memory accosted me in the street yesterday. I threw a quick jab into the throat, but it swept the leg, Ralph Macchio style. I went down, my knees are not my strong suit, the poor little guys been through alot.

So anyway, this memory was of the time I was set on fire. I've been on fire a couple times, but this was more memorable.

So I was on the flight deck of the USS Constellation, a badass old heap of cold-rolled Bessemer joy if there ever was one, and I needed to make sure my machine could kill innocents and conscripts when an academy educated white man decided that was necessary. The flood of weakened sodium lights washed down on us in the cold, dark night in the Gulf. The machine was a hulk of titanium, boron, and aluminium. You would recognize one if you saw it, it is quite popular. The machine festoons itself with bulbous apparati along its sinewy flanks and under its flat belly that are there to take other machines and put them on heads or in buildings. Or on ships, though the US Navy isn't in the ship killing business anymore. The apparati need checked to ensure that salt and sand and the erosion of time have not rendered them unlethal. First you have to get electrical power to the machine.

Along the non-skid (a combination of epoxy and broken glass) surface of the deck, you'll notice holes. Or you won't and you'll fall in one. It is dark on a ship of war at night. The holes contain the large cables responsible for transferring power from the belly of the iron beast to the heart of the supersonic death machines resting on its back. I will spare you what useless trivia I can about this process.

In the bad old days, when naval aviation afforded you higher risks of maiming and death than being an infantryman in the Marines, we had to manually lock in the cables and power. Meaning you had to start the voltage, 800V worth, from ship and confirm with an electromagnetically held switch under the nose of the bird.

I had a friend named Trim. We had been months out at sea and had not heard from loved ones in a good, long time. When the earnest killing part of a war starts, the powers of good usually remove your ability to communicate off of a ship. I suspect that civilization would be a hobble if it was allowed to represent itself in the form of wives and mothers. Hand lifting of thousands of tons daily and lost sleep over our later confirmed suspicions of occurrences back home had frazzled us. Trim forgot to await my signal to start the voltage. As I rammed the plug home, an explosion of various high current DC and AC sparks shot around me. The sparks burned my hands singed my eyebrows. My shirt, as all red shirts with VF-(insert number) on the chest and back, was soaked in a cocktail of jet fuel, hyd fluid, and whatever other nitrate laden substance I had been playing with. So, the shit caught on fire.

I beat the flames off of me, and since the shirt itself is not flammable it was not difficult. Once the fire was out, the next rational thought I had was of home and Colorado and the girl that was waiting for me. Trim, still kneeling by the rat hole, caught a face full of steel toe. I think I choked him a little. We both left the flight deck bleeding and angry. We were still friends.


******


Unrelated update: If you thought bullshit blogosphere pretense and argumentative subject matter needed a home, it now has one. The Five.

Also, it is raining.

Everyday The Same

So it is uncouth to repeat themes every week or so in a blog, though I refuse to acknowledge that this corner of the Internet fits that definition. The maxim of subject rotation in internet writing limits severely what possibly can be updated.

Got drunk on bourbon and stared at the ceiling thinking all kids of genius into the world. Covered that recently, so it's out.

Girl is on my mind. No, not one I've written about much, one that I tried to keep from getting in and close on me. Spent a night with her dealing with my asshole tendency to be a little too perfect for women when our time is short. Covered that last week.

Curled 150 pounds. I am a badass. Cover that with some regularity.

I rode away my hatreds and frustrations, or at least beat them back into their cave in my worried and troubled mind. I love that damn bike. Covered that.

Women I know are having troubles that I can't assist. I can't help but wish that I could beat the holy fuck out of anyone who hurts people I care about, regardless of how much they deserve it. I am a violent person. That's been covered.

Leaving soon. Got it.

All this going on and nothing to write about.

This Is Indulgent

The motivation to improve one's body physically defies explanation. The body is obviously a machine in working order if you are able to even consider improving it. The explanation of your need to change that body at the expense of comfort confounds those who view the state of their carnality good enough. You'll get no explanations today. I make excuses about needing to be in good shape and requiring absolute physical readiness imminently, but it has nothing to do with that on any deeper level.

Today I sat on a bench surrounded by the smells of humanity, and I very much hate the vast majority or humanities offlacatorially detectable qualities, and fought a battle. I won't say it was a battle with myself, or with and ideal, or even a battle with weakness. The battle was with two chunks of iron. I sat on the bench with them in my hands resting heavily on my thighs. I could feel their weight settling onto the ciclismo hardened quadriceps that I love in a very vain corner of my soul. The iron keeps sinking farther into them while I try to match my breathing, my thoughts, and every vibrating breath of my metabolic monsters that are aching in my chest to Lemmy Kilmeister's invitation to riot.

I lay back, intensity screaming from the large muscle groups that have already taken a beating. The last four sets, every lift and breath and focus was leading up to this. These weights have always sat next to my last maximum ability. When I would grab the hexagonal barbells to the left of these, the greater size of the weights in my hand would bourgeon and they would glow in haughty distaste for me. For my inability to master them.

I pull them away from my thigh and let them rest on my chest. With one last breath closely monitored escaping me, I move the weights outboard until their heft is held by my shoulders and chest. That's the way I like it baby, I don't want to live forever.

I shove. There's no need to control the speed, I haven't the power to move them any faster than a steady crawl. But the crawl is steady. Power chords ring in my ears as the two weights meet above my straining neck and ring out like bells. Four more. My spotter is ready for my shoulders tortured in their short life to fail me. The weights move up again with a determination. They ring again as iron and iron meet above. One more. Slow and unsteady, but still lifting. The weights rest on my bent arms, my chest feels torn under their gravity. My spotter is bored. I hate spotters.

I look up at the ceiling and tell him, "Two more."

Steadier, breathe out going up, in coming down. My awareness of the room is gone. There is nothing but me, Lemmy and the dumbbells. Two more down, the last straining. "One more."

I hate people who make noise in the gym. I don't grunt or yelp or make any of those other noises men make. I blow air out of my nose, clench my jaw and shove. And don't forget the joker. I get the weight up without effort, but with my chest failing.

I bring them down as I inhale. They sit on my chest while I kick with my feet to lift my body back up to sitting. The weights hit the floor, small and insignificant. They no longer matter as the stench of men and exertion touches me and the four walls of the dungeon gym pull in out of the dark.

Love

I am in love, brethren.

But, you say, you don't believe in the convention! And no, I do not. Love is a loosely cemented conglomerate of several tasty states of being unless you are formed largely of bauxite and scandium. If you are a pleasing shade of aggressive and light to the touch, then I love you, or at least could were not my heart stolen.

So, with all the rocks (literal rocks, I eat them) eating up most of the displacement of whatever body cavity we love others with, where can this loose conglomerate of affection and commitment and lust among other, larger ideal nouns, this love, where does it live? See, love is a many splendored thing, but it must have some fairly light calcified cementation properties to its conglomeration because it easily is salted into small spaces. That is neither here nor there.

So, let us name what a loved one does for us:

A loved one supports.
A loved one enables.
A loved one obeys, though it gives commands.
A loved one likes to be ridden very, very hard.
A loved one responds to the slightest caress, but does not flip the fuck out when you over-correct.

Could this loved one use as little more rear travel? Maybe, but my affinity for hard-tails has left me cold for the soggy, soft bottoms of some black diamond beauty. Me and my Element, we went out into the wilds of the desert where the single lines of freedom run freer that the wind and we found our bliss. We were unable to capture it, but the pursuit, the following of our Bliss made us two in love.

My search is over.

I love you.

Pictures forthcoming.

Jimmy Page Did Not Understand The Ocean

This is a long post.

Her: I like you.

Me: Uh huh.

Her: I mean, I think I've started liking you a whole lot.

Me: Hmmm.

Her: I mean...I know you don't believe in love...

Me: It's not that I don't believe in it. Define it and I'll believe in it. I just think people really shouldn't be banking their life on some word they don't even know what it means.

Silence as the boat founders on the reef. Small compartments begin to flood as the boat creeps away, oblivious to the damage. The conspiratorial murder of the boat, murdered by the cooperative effort of the captain's negligence and the reef's indigent nature, is a slow poisoning by seawater. Somewhere out in the sackcloth night, the boat slows as the drag of salt water tonnage drive her keel down into the resisting of the Sea. The draft drags lower and lower until the first wave drives over the gunwale in a lackluster charge of a bored army and its hydrological friends start washing over and under the deck. Brine seeks its own level and finds buoyancy to be a personal insult. The Sea, forever dead and lovely, claims the victim of negligent homicide, chewing up the last gasps of the floating pulchritude as it capsizes and gives the Sea its empirical tribute and right-of-way.

The flotsam drifts away and all hands are lost.

One time one of our birds with a good man in it hit the water doing an aggressive nose-down maneuver (this is fancy aero-speak for he fucked up and flew straight into the ocean) at nearly 900 miles an hour. Somewhere on the bottom of the Indian Oblivion, there is some crushed aluminium and bent titanium. They never found the aircrew; at that interface speed hitting the water there would be nothing to find. The Ocean breathes salty, won't you carry it in. In your mouth, in your head in your soul. All that was left was an oil slick for a memorial. Maybe if we're lucky we might both grow old. I can't help but hope so.

Bullet 104. For your sake, I hope heaven and hell are really there, but I wouldn't hold my breath.

The ship sank forever into the big, big ocean, the men married in the wedding supper of the plank to her hull went with her.

I always thought it was funny that our ideas of the ocean are so terracentric. We name oceans and seas as if there were borders on it unmarred surface. We name them after the arbitrary political divisions of the land. The great undiscovered country, and no--the term did not originate on Star Trek, rests on the face of the earth with only the occasional break in its monotonous beauty for smudges of dirt and growths of life. Life clings in little concentric rings to the shelves of our dirt smudges and we cling like amoebae to the lighted slide of the beautiful edge of the Ocean.

Bullet 104 and the fragile, mighty ship I use euphemistically are somewhere under the raging main. They are memorialized in the slicks and debris that are dispersed to all corners of our Earth.

I'll miss them both, though I had no agency in either. These stories are not my own. That is that and this is this, tell me what you want and I'll tell you what you get. You get away from me. We talked for hours before that meeting about life and our disparate circumstances of existence. As I told her of my cold wife with the briny heart and tried to explain Davey Jones and the gold and quicksilver sunset of a Persian Gulf sunset, she loved me. I saw it. At least I saw the pupils dilate and her ideas of commitment form. I tried to dissuade her softly with personal narrative of a time when I killed and fucked and drank my way around the World. With every story, she felt she knew me better, but she did not. Love and knowledge are mutually exclusive states of being. She loved the thought of my blood and sand and sea, but she did not know that it was not a phase. It was not a temporary change in my life.

The sea is who I am.

And if I die on the raging main
Davey Jones will bring me back again
Give me some
PT
Good for you
Good for me
Kill 'em all
Spill their guts
Napalm, napalm sticks like glue
Sticks to the mamas and the babies too
etc...

So, we have to part ways. That is that and this is this, when I asked her what she saw in my stories and she told me what she missed. When the Ocean met the sky. She missed the part where time and light shook hands and said goodbye. It is not her fault or my fault, and blaming the Sea is like trying to swallow the moon.

I'm leaving in June.


The Ocean Breathes Salty; Modest Mouse
Random Violent Bullshit Poem; Traditional Navy Cadence

I am not dying

I have a lot to celebrate today. A bottle of Bushmill's will suffer terribly. As for that girl, well, she didn't suffer exactly. It is nice to know that I will live long enough to make some legendary mistakes.

So, how can you assist the party? Well, the next motherfucker going through a duty-free better cough up some of this.

Rambling Bullshit

I walked out into the cool of the morning to see the sun cut new shadows into the raised Precambrian and Jurassic temple of all things passed on. The Wingate cliffs burned orange and showed the cracks and fracture of enormous pressure pushing them skyward and rolling them up like a scroll. The Precambrian metamorphic partial melt is thrust out of the ground looking like the corpse of someone’s ancient virgin bride, the skirts of her folding in on themselves in a display of granitic modesty giving the gold light of morning a place to play. She is a bride. She is your origin. Mine, too, but I prefer to think that my genesis was something a little darker than the purple skirts. I prefer stardust and comets tails colliding with a burning planet washed over with caustic HaCL and silica and carbon billowing over the face of the deep. I don’t think God meant “ashes to ashes, dust to dust” to be depressing or a reminder of our short and anticlimactic lives. To be the dust and to be the rocks is indeed a beautiful thing. It was a little too warm for me in the store; I hate heat, though I have functioned admirably in temperatures up to 135. Anything after that number and I start to whine. My record for exposure to a hot day fell sometime in August out in The Gulf, 160 degrees of absolute atmospheric misery compounded by jet exhaust and arduous work. If I remember correctly that loadout was one of the heaviest sorties pre-9/11 ever locked and loaded. The cool of the day would mean the temperature would soar down to around a buck twenty and the swamp fans running in the berthing couldn’t quite keep enough air moving to draw out the smell of men living close and dirty. It was not a good time. That is a lie, it was a great time. IYAOYAS! And so forth.

Now God walked down in the cool of the day and called Adam by his name. He refused to answer, he was naked and ashamed.

Tell me, who’s that writing?

So who cares if John of Patmos is John the Revelator is John the Apostle or not? I read the book of the seven seals as a reassurance to a small and embattled minority facing death and some gruesome torture. When people wonder how the Catholic Church got as bad as it is, I remind them of the men like Eusebius who were absolutely thrilled to see the Roman Empire become the Holy Roman Empire. If you’d been getting genitals burned off with hot plates of iron in front of thousands of spectators, a little guvie love would indeed seem the promised Kingdom of Heaven if you’re writing to the Jews, Kingdom of God if you’re writing to the Greeks. In fact, Constantine’s conversion was seen as the fulfillment of The Revelation. Apocalypto for all you Papists. So then the Turks took their shit back. Holy shit, another thousand years of terror for the Christians who thought they owned the rest of eternity. Now it’s Istanbul, not Constantinople. Call me crazy, but I don’t believe in the End of the World. Unless you’re talking red giant vulcanization. That shit is a fact, bitch.

I need whiskey. Or a woman. Women. Women and whiskey. Or maybe a walk through the Garden in the cool of the day. If I was God, I would stroll around in that hour before the sun is high enough to truly light up the sin and murder of humanity, but after the chill of the cobalt early morning. I would boast to the rocks that they were mine and I would be glad to share rocks and glory; that I had formed them with little mathematical fun things and physical playtoys I had given the Universe. I would bask in mornings like this. I would be happy to share of my abundance.

I miss faith, faith more beautiful than wisdom or knowledge. Knowledge leads to more questions, and Sophie was kind of a bitch, most goddesses are, though I miss the ones I have loved in the past. A kind parent is Faith who quells the monsters of random under your bed and in your head with soothing words. Faith can protect you. Faith kills worry, which has been an issue lately. For what man can add even a minute to his lifetime by worry? I wish it could, with this much worry in my head I could live forever in extra minutes. I don’t have a happy home. A sweetheart I cannot find. I’m not looking, so that might be a source of the famine of femininity. The only thing I can call my own is a troubled and a worried mind. When my earthly trials are over, which may be soon, cast my body out into the sea. Save yourself the undertaker’s fare, let the mermaids flirt with me. God in heaven or in the Earth, or on it and in me and you, however that crap works, I hope is there. Send a band to to gather around me and stand, and when the time is right, bear me away on their snow white wings to my immortal home. The kingdom can have me, I’m tired of all this self-agency. And I’m tired. And maybe ruined. Things are not going well.

Did God create the heavens and the Earth? Well, I can’t prove that he didn’t. I can pretty much prove it took longer than six days. Then again, I like to think the Universe took a little effort on his part. Twelve to fifteen billion years of creative non-involvement or public crafting could yield a work of exquisite beauty. So, I might not be atheist. I can admit it.

Long story short, it’s a beautiful morning, Idaho sucks.



John the Revelator; Traditional
Let the Mermaids Flirt With me; Mississippi John Hurt
Oh Come, Angel Band; Traditional
The Thing About Worrying; Jesus