A Step Back To Gain Momentum?

I didn’t sleep well last night and it screwed up my day. The alarm went off at 5:15. I turned it off, started the coffee, and went back to bed. I got up at 6:45 and didn’t feel any more rested. I dragged myself to work and was not very productive. Then I got an email saying that there would be no “domestic” water. I didn’t want to find out what that meant so I headed home and tried to work there. No dice. I sat at my computer staring and unable to focus. I wanted to go workout, but I couldn’t get myself up. It was so bad that when LMJ took her nap I joined her. I took a very good nap but it didn’t help. It’s 8pm as I write this and I’m ready to go to bed. I’m trying to listen to my body more. My new triathlon book says that I should take breaks when I feel I need to – just like every other piece of exercise literature ever written – and I’m trying to pay attention. I think when I try to push myself when I don’t feel up to it that I set myself back. At some point my body is going to quit or I’m going to injure myself. I’ve also adjusted my nutrition. I’m refueling like I’m supposed to and not dieting just to lose weight. It may slow my weight loss down in the short run, but it’s a lot better for my performance in the long run. I’m not broken down like I was last week, I just didn’t get enough sleep last night so I have to push my sessions back a day. No big deal. What’s funny – and frustrating – is that I continue to do things the hard way when it’s much more efficient to do them the right way the first time. I hope that lesson really is starting to sink in - this. Anyway, legs tomorrow.

A Bad Way To Go, Dadgummit

A trustee for FSU has publicly asked Coach Bobby Bowden to step down at the end of the year. There are rumors of a divided coaching staff, and a bunch of excuses about not winning football games. The game has passed the old guard by. Bowden, Chuck Amato, and Mickey Andrews seem to think it’s still 1988, and what worked then will work now, even though that was twenty years ago and they were twenty years younger. Andrews, who’s in charge of the defense talks about a lack of discipline on the field, what exactly does he think his job is? Myron Rolle is probably going to cure cancer, but he could never quite figure out where to be on the football field, whose fault is that? Darnell Dockett, Antonio Cromartie, Javon Walker, Anquan Boldin, and Leon Washington are all guys that are doing better in the pros than they did at FSU. Those are five guys off the top of my head. It's not supposed to work like that. The Noles are going to lose to the Gators for the sixth year in a row and finish the decade 3-7 against UF. The 5th year seniors were juniors in high school the last time the Seminoles beat the Gators, and they won that game on a bad call. The current freshmen were too young to have been in MJ’s class that year. They were in seventh grade in 2003. I could understand Coach Bowden's reluctance to go if he was still actively coaching, but he isn't. He stands in his tower and watches. He's not even recruiting anymore. He also has zero chance to catch JoePa, 14 forfeited wins or not. If we ignore the sanctions, he's still going to be five or six behind Paterno at the end of this year. This is ending badly and it breaks my heart. I really wish he would have retired after 1999. He could've ridden off into the sunset with the storybook ending. His first undefeated season. His second National Championship. The first team to go wire-to-wire at #1. He would've trumped John Elway. Instead there's a good chance he's going to leave the program he personally built a smoldering ruin.

It's More Than A Turducken- Boom!

Perception is a strange thing. It’s all we have to go on. Like Obi-Wan Kenobi said, “Many of the truths we cling to depend greatly on our own point of view.” This brings me to John Madden and my place in two worlds. Madden retired from doing color commentary for the NFL last spring. This is the first time since 1979 that he isn’t in a broadcast booth on Sundays during football season. There are people writing about him who were born after that. All they know is the caricature of himself that he settled into in the mid-nineties and his video games. They know nothing of him as a coach. My memories of him start with him being a coach. He and Tom Landry are the coaches that I remember most from the seventies. I was very young, but Landry stood out because of his fedora and Madden stood out because he was a fat guy with manic energy on the sidelines. Madden took football too seriously, stressing himself into an ulcer. He was smart enough to see the game was killing him so he retired after the 1977 season. I was only six but he’s tattooed on my brain. He became an NFL analyst in 1979 and completely changed how games are called. He brought a technicality to the game that’s ubiquitous now, but back then nobody did. He didn’t treat the audience like they were clueless. Almost everything I know about watching football analytically I learned from Madden. He was the first guy to not only differentiate between zone and man-to-man defense, but to get into the different zone defenses and where the holes were in them. He was the first guy to explain how play-action works. And I could always tell that he was having a blast doing it. He was coaching without the stress. Strangely, no one copied him. Maybe because there wasn’t a way to do it without being blatant about it. He lent his name to a video game in the late eighties, earned $98,870,696,877,565,645,765,867,000 and started mailing in his commentary. Unfortunately, the youngest kids who first fell in love with his video games are turning thirty and they’re the voice of popular culture. It’s like only knowing U2 from Achtung Baby on, or only knowing Steve Martin from his stupid family movies. You missed all the good stuff.

Out With The Old, In With The New

I got the ceiling fan up without electrocuting myself, which isn’t really a big deal. I turned the power off at the breaker. I got the ceiling fan up without stabbing anyone in the neck with a screwdriver, which is a big deal. I’m short tempered and caustic when I try to put things together with crappy directions, and since I never have a reference point for any of this stuff, crappy directions are the only kind. It’s not just home projects and it’s not just me. Without a point of reference even the simplest tasks are almost impossible. My favorite jiu-jitsu wizard, Eddie Bravo, likes to use the example of tying one’s shoes and how ridiculously complicated the movements are, but after countless repetitions the hands do it without thought, from only muscle memory. That's really the only way to learn anything brand new. I’m all philosophical about it now that I’ve finished putting up the ceiling fan. I have a point of reference, actually, I have two. I have the reference point of the new one I just finished hanging, and I also have the reference point of the old one I took down. MJ has two other fans she wants replaced, and I think I can cut my total assembly time by seventy-five percent. That’s not impressive. It took me six or seven hours to get this thing up and running. I now have a basic conceptual understanding of how these things go, so while there will be cursing, there won’t be a need for a sniper with a dart filled with Thorazine in case I go berserk. This is all based on the assumption that all of the pieces that are supposed to be in the fan kit are in the fan kit. I’m not feeling quite as unprepared for the Apocalypse as I was yesterday, but I still need to learn some carpentry, some basic plumbing, and most importantly, I still need to learn how to hunt, fish, and farm.

Lambs To The Slaughter

It’s Saturday and that means the Seminoles went into the tank. This week they flew all the way to Boston to do it. I’m numb. Today wasn’t a good day. I didn’t really do anything. The best part of the day was my nap. The worst part was trying to put together a ceiling fan. I got part of it done, but I had the realization that I have every time I try to do something real: I have no meaningful survival skills. I spent sixteen long, horrible, frustrating years being “formally educated”, yet I can’t do anything that counts. What a complete waste of time. Actually, that’s not fair. I learned to read and write, and that takes us all the way up to the end of second grade. I learned algebra in eighth grade and geometry in ninth. I think the Pythagorean Theorem was the last piece of information imparted to me with possible, practical post-apocalyptic applications. What the hell am I going to do when the economy collapses, and it will. I can’t hunt. I can’t fish. I can’t plumb. I can’t farm. I can’t build. The Rule of 72’s doesn’t help me irrigate crops or dress kills. I don’t even know if there’s a place I can learn the skills necessary to survive after The Fall. FCCJ has turned itself into a four year college, so I don’t know if they still offer carpentry, plumbing, or electrician courses any more. I’ll never forget the professionals that did the foundation work for the Habijax house that I helped to build. A bunch of “uneducated” contractors making sure a bunch of doctors, lawyers, clergy, and other members of the “educated class” didn’t impale themselves with nails or drop a house on their own heads. I guess learning about the fall of Rome is paying dividends since I can see the same thing happening to the United States and I still have a chance to get ahead of it. I need to learn to use a bow and arrow.

The Law Is The Law

There’s nothing to write about so I have to write about Roman Polanski and why everyone in the world justifiably hates the French and Hollywood. He was forty-three. She was thirteen. He gave her were Quaaludes and alcohol. He asked her for sexual favors. She said no, even in her altered state. He ignored her repeatedly. He accepted a plea bargain to a lesser charge offered by the Los Angeles district attorney because he, the D.A. wanted to spare the victim from having to relive the whole thing. This was in 1977 before C.S.I. The judge was going to renege on the deal (Ed. maybe because she was THIRTEEN!). Polanski panicked and fled to France because he was afraid of the ninety days he was going to have to serve. France is where he’s spent the last thirty years in exile, even though he’s French (Ed. Is he Br’er Rabbit?). He was arrested in Switzerland last week and is facing extradition to back to Los Angeles. Movie stars and directors are signing petitions and writing op-eds protesting his oppression and the corruption of the California justice system and the fecklessness of the Swiss government. The guy made – makes – movies, and he’s lived a life as a millionaire in Paris. He’s never denied any of the facts of the night in question, but he and his friends think he shouldn’t have to pay for what he did, and that this whole thing is an inconvenience that’s interrupting his work. I might be willing to see him as the quirky artist if the words “drugged thirteen year old girl raped and sodomized” couldn’t be used to accurately describe what happened, and if his sentence was almost certainly going to be suspended. He’s a movie director. He serves no real beneficial purpose to the planet. He was arrogant thirty years ago when he brutalized a little girl, and he doesn’t seem to have learned anything. He feels that the he’s the victim. I hope he dies a slow, painful death.

Seven Weeks Till Gravy Season

I’ve never been so tired in my life. I decided not to chicken out this morning and made the horrible mistake of heading to the gym. Normally, after my warm up, I’m warmed up. Not today, today I was tired through the entire session. I wasn’t expecting to set any personal bests, but I also wasn’t expecting to have difficulty getting up off the bench. The whole weight session was a struggle. After I took ninety minutes to do my one hour work out I got onto the dreadmill. I was still under the impression that I was going to run eight miles. WRONG! Even though I slowed down to almost a fast walk, I couldn’t get through it. I cut it short at three miles, and I really had to push myself to do that. I wanted to quit five minutes in. I wanted to quit again ten minutes in. I was so tired that I had trouble finding the energy to stretch. Usually, stretching is somewhat relaxing. It represents that the hard part is over. It’s the final part of my cool down. Today it was equal parts pain and difficulty. I think I overdid it this week. I was loopy for the rest of the day. I decided that since I cut my running short I wasn’t dehydrated, even though my clothes were drenched in sweat. That’s what was going on in my brain. An hour and half later I couldn’t understand why I felt like garbage and was having difficulty swallowing my food. Then I took a sip of water and the light went on. A gallon of water later and I still didn’t have to pee. Sometimes stupidity is painful. I’m with LMJ tomorrow, but depending on when she takes her nap, I may try to get in a quick session of weights. I can rest on Saturday and Sunday. I’m pushing myself because I have seven weeks until Thanksgiving and if I haven’t hit my goals by then, then I’m not going to this year.