Too Short for a Blog Post, Too Long for a Tweet 364

Here's an excerpt from an article I recently read, "The Importance of Being Maxey" in Philadelphia Magazine:

For Maxey, who has made a habit of beating people to the gym ever since he was a high-schooler in the Dallas suburb of Garland, there was little exceptional about this scene during the dog days of the NBA off-season. He’s fond of saying that he prepares “in front of nobody to perform in front of thousands and millions,” and it’s the 6 a.m. workout — more accurately, a cycle of three workouts, all back-to-back, starting with skills development and then moving to weight lifting and back to basketball again — that’s arguably the central tenet of his basketball philosophy. Underpinning the whole system, aside from the ascetic, constant repetition, is an invented competition with his future opponents. “I’ve done three workouts before someone even opens their eyes to prepare to work out,” Maxey says. “I just feel like that creates a psychological advantage when I step on the court. I have no reason to fear anybody.”

What Are Friends For

 

I've been truly blessed in my life through friendship, through amazing people I've been lucky enough to call friend and who have cared for me and done life with me in profound ways. It is not hyperbole to say that I am who I am as a result of friends and friendships. 

So I read with great interest the deep dive on friendship in America contained in the 2021 American Perspectives Survey which among other things noted the steep decline men in particular face in close friendships, as well as a recent Atlantic article on whether friends should offer harsh truth or unconditional acceptance. I won't repeat or litigate the key points in either piece, but rather muse about what we are doing to cultivate our friendships and to be good friends. 

The fact of the matter is that, unlike with family, we do choose our friends. And while friend dynamics can complicate things in the way family dynamics do, as far as whether and how to interact with people, it is something we can largely make intentional and active choices about, to spend time and for the time to be both positive and honest as befits two flawed people moving about a messy world.

Alas, so much of our fast-paced modern lives is about having things happen to us. We invest in a relationship only to have that person move away or get too busy. Or we ourselves clutter our lives in ways that create a drifting in once-close ties. It can be frustrating, the dissonance between the importance of friendships to our well-being and the glory of past close relationships, compared with our feeling of isolation and distance when it comes to our friendships in the present.

Like anything meaningful in life, friends and friendships require intentional effort. Some of us are lucky enough to stumble into easy relationships, easy in how we interact and easy in how easy it is to interact. Most of us are not so lucky and have to make choices to invest scarce time to keep a tie warm. These recent articles remind me that investment is a good one. Friends matter, and friendships matter, enough so to work on them and fight for them and cherish them.

Too Short for a Blog Post, Too Long for a Tweet 363

 

 

Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "The Iliad" by Homer.

Then after they had finished the work and got the feast ready they feasted, nor was any man’s hunger denied a fair portion. But when they had put away their desire for eating and drinking, the young men filled the mixing bowls with pure wine, passing a portion to all, when they offered drink in the goblets. All day long they propitiated the god with singing, chanting a splendid hymn to Apollo, these young Achaians, singing to the one who works from afar, who listened in gladness.

As underneath the hurricane all the black earth is burdened on an autumn day, when Zeus sends down the most violent waters in deep rage against mortals after they stir him to anger because in violent assembly they pass decrees that are crooked, and drive righteousness from among them and care nothing for what the gods think, and all the rivers of these men swell current to full spate and in the ravines of their water-courses rip all the hillsides and dash whirling in huge noise down to the blue sea, out of the mountains headlong, so that the works of men are diminished; so huge rose the noise from the horses of Troy in their running.

So they were assembled within Zeus' house; and the shaker of the earth did not fail to hear the goddess, but came up among them from the sea, and sat in the midst of them, and asked Zeus of his counsel : ‘Why, lord of the shining bolt, have you called the gods to assembly once more? Are you deliberating Akhaians (Achaeans) and Trojans? For the onset of battle is almost broken to flame between them.’

In turn Zeus who gathers the clouds spoke to him in answer : ‘You have seen, shaker of the earth, the counsel within me, and why I gathered you. I think of these men though they are dying. Even so, I shall stay here upon the fold of Olympos sitting still, watching, to pleasure my heart. Meanwhile all you others go down, wherever you may go among the Akhaians and Trojans and give help to either side, as your own pleasure directs you.’"

There he killed Thersilochos and Astypylos and Mydon, Mnesos and Thrasios, and Ainios and Ophelestes. Now swift Achilleus would have killed even more Paionians except that the deep-whirling river spoke to him in anger and in mortal likeness, and the voice rose from the depth of the eddies: 'O Achilleus, your strength is greater, your acts more violent than all men's; since always the very gods are guarding you. If the son of Kronos has given all Trojans to your destruction, drive them at least out of me to the plain, and there work your havoc. For the loveliness of my waters is crammed with corpses, I cannot find a channel to cast my waters into the bright sea since I am congested with the dead men you kill so brutally. Let me alone, then; lord of the people, I am confounded.

Too Short for a Blog Post, Too Long for a Tweet 362

 

Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "The Goldfinch," by Donna Tartt.

 

WHEN I WAS LITTLE, four or five, my greatest fear was that some day my mother might not come home from work. Addition and subtraction were useful mainly insofar as they helped me track her movements (how many minutes till she left the office? how many minutes to walk from office to subway?) and even before I’d learned to count I’d been obsessed with learning to read a clock face: desperately studying the occult circle crayoned on the paper plate that, once mastered, would unlock the pattern of her comings and goings. Usually she was home just when she said she’d be, so if she was ten minutes late I began to fret; any later, and I sat on the floor by the front door of the apartment like a puppy left alone too long, straining to hear the rumble of the elevator coming up to our floor.

Almost every day in elementary school I heard things on the Channel 7 news that worried me. What if some bum in a dirty fatigue jacket pushed my mother onto the tracks while she was waiting for the 6 train? Or muscled her into a dark doorway and stabbed her for her pocketbook? What if she dropped her hair dryer in the bathtub, or got knocked in front of a car by a bicycle, or was given the wrong medicine at the dentist’s and died, as had happened to the mother of a classmate of mine? 

To think of something happening to my mother was especially frightening because my dad was so unreliable. Unreliable I guess is the diplomatic way of putting it. Even when he was in a good mood he did things like lose his paycheck and fall asleep with the front door to the apartment open, because he drank. And when he was in a bad mood—which was much of the time—he was red-eyed and clammy-looking, his suit so rumpled it looked like he’d been rolling on the floor in it and an air of unnatural stillness emanating from him as from some pressurized article about to explode. 

Though I didn’t understand why he was so unhappy, it was clear to me that his unhappiness was our fault. My mother and I got on his nerves. It was because of us he had a job he couldn’t stand. Everything we did was irritating. He particularly didn’t enjoy being around me, not that he often was: in the mornings, as I got ready for school, he sat puffy-eyed and silent over his coffee with the Wall Street Journal in front of him, his bathrobe open and his hair standing up in cowlicks, and sometimes he was so shaky that the cup sloshed as he brought it to his mouth. Warily he eyed me when I came in, nostrils flaring if I made too much noise with the silverware or the cereal bowl.

Resolutely I stared at the television. I hadn’t been at school since the day before my mother died and as long as I stayed away her death seemed unofficial somehow. But once I went back it would be a public fact. Worse: the thought of returning to any kind of normal routine seemed disloyal, wrong. It kept being a shock every time I remembered it, a fresh slap: she was gone. Every new event—everything I did for the rest of my life—would only separate us more and more: days she was no longer a part of, an ever-growing distance between us. Every single day for the rest of my life, she would only be further away.

SOMETIMES, IN THE NIGHT, I woke up wailing. The worst thing about the explosion was how I carried it in my body—the heat, the bone-jar and slam of it. In my dreams, there was always a light way out and a dark way out. I had to go the dark way, because the bright way was hot and flickering with fire. But the dark way was where the bodies were.

With the news about Andy, it was like someone had thrown an x-ray switch and reversed everything into photographic negative, so that even with the daffodils and the dogwalkers and the traffic cops whistling on the corners, death was all I saw: sidewalks teeming with dead, cadavers pouring off the buses and hurrying home from work, nothing left of any of them in a hundred years except tooth fillings and pacemakers and maybe a few scraps of cloth and bone.

Too Short for a Blog Post, Too Long for a Tweet 361

 

Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir," by Asha Bandele and Patrisse Cullors.

Later, when we are home together, she will not ask me how I am feeling or get righteously angry. She will not rub my wrists where the handcuffs pinched them or hold me or tell me she loves me. This is not a judgment of her. My mother is a manager, figuring out how to get herself and her four children through the day alive. That this has happened, but that she and her kids are all at home and, relatively speaking, safe, is a victory for my mother. It is enough. And for all of my childhood, this is just the way it is.

In California there are more than 4,800 barriers to re-entry, from jobs, housing and food bans, to school financial aid bans and the list goes on. You can have a two-year sentence but it doesn’t mean you’re not doing life.

I am gripped with an encompassing sense of shame and humiliation. I don’t want to feel this way but here is all of our family’s pain on full blast before people who hate us.

I accept this, that my mother is leaving, but I cannot help think that the drug war, the war on gangs, has really been no more than a forced migration project. From my neighborhood in LA to the Bay Area to Brooklyn, Black and Brown people have been moved out as young white people build exciting new lives standing on the bones of ours. The drug war as ethnic cleansing.

I’m not so afraid as I am angry. Later when I hear others dismissing our voices, our protest for equity, by saying All Lives Matter or Blue Lives Matter, I will wonder how many white Americans are dragged out of their beds in the middle of the night because they might fit a vague description offered up by God knows who. How many skinny, short, blond men were rounded up when Dylann Roof massacred people in prayer? How many brown-haired white men were snatched out of bed when Bundy was killing women for sport? How many gawky white teens were stopped and frisked after Columbine or any of the mass shootings that have occurred in this nation, the immeasurably wide margin of them by young, white men?

Hello, a voice I do not know says, Is this Patrisse Cullors? 

Yes, I say. 

My name is Reverend Starsky D. Wilson. I’m the pastor at St. John’s United Church of Christ in North St. Louis. I heard you are looking for a central place to host the Riders. You can use my church. 

I pause. And then: Many of us are Queer, are Trans, are gender non-conforming. 

Reverend Starsky does not pause. All of you are welcome at my church, he says.

And if ever someone calls my child a terrorist, if they call any of the children in my life terrorists, I will hold my child, any child, close to me and I will explain that terrorism is being stalked and surveilled simply because you are alive. And terrorism is being put in solitary confinement and starved and beaten. And terrorism is not being able to feed your children despite working three jobs. And terrorism is not having a decent school or a place to play. I will tell them that what freedom looks like, what democracy looks like, is the push for and realization of justice, dignity and peace. 

And I will say that to my precious Shine, or Malik, or Nisa, or Nina or any of the children and young people we cherish and lift up, that you are brilliant beings of light. You have the power to shape-shift not only yourselves but the whole of the world. You, each one, are endowed with gifts you don’t even yet know, and you, each one, are what love and the possibility of a world in which our lives truly matter looks like.

Too Short for a Blog Post, Too Long for a Tweet 360

 

Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "K: A History of Baseball in Ten Pitches," by Tyler Kepner.

Batters hit just .233 in at-bats ending with sliders in 2017, their worst average against any pitch. The Pirates’ Chris Archer, who has one of baseball’s best sliders, gave a simple reason why: “Of all the true breaking balls—slurve, curve, slider—it looks the most like a fastball for the longest.”

Traded to the Dodgers, Hill sliced curveballs through the National League, ending with six shutout innings against the Cubs in the playoffs. That December, the Dodgers brought him back with a three-year, $48 million contract—a jackpot, at last, after 15 pro seasons, a deal that would soon lead Hill to the World Series. He wept at the news conference announcing it. 

“I think that’s life, right?” Hill said, reflecting on the rocky path brought to riches by perseverance and a killer curve. “You’re going to be thrown a lot of different curveballs.”

The weird pitch that hurts the elbow. In the graveyard of baseball, those words could be etched on the tombstone of the screwball, a pitch that once brought glory to so many. The fadeaway, it turns out, was the right name all along.

The ethics of spitters and scuffed balls offer a window to a kind of logic that seems convoluted, yet makes perfect sense to many in the game. To Keith Hernandez, whose Mets were flummoxed in the 1986 playoffs by Houston’s Mike Scott, the method of subterfuge is everything: do something illicit away from the field—corking a bat, injecting steroids—and that’s cheating. Do something on the field, in front of everyone, and get away with it? As Hernandez wrote in his book, Pure Baseball: “More power to you.”

I Like Big Books and I Cannot Lie

 

As I've expressed in this space in many ways, reading is an important activity for me. It hits people in different ways, but for me it is leisure and habit and education and escape all wrapped up together. 

Of course, what I read is as important as that I read, and of late I've tried to diversify in terms of author perspectives and literary genres. Namely, non-fiction by old white guys is giving way to a plethora of stories and insights. And I am richer for it.

Another way I am trying to mix things up is to mix in very long reads. I typically average a book a week, which usually means a book every 10 days and then a glop of books at different times of the year (e.g. vacation, long trips). Some books are shorter and some longer, but a 250- to 300-page book read at a speed of about 25-30 pages every night works out to about 10 days a book.

Long reads, by contrast, might be several hundred pages, extending my foray into them beyond a week and change. Brothers Karamazov or Power Broker, for example, were practically month-long journeys. I obviously pick high-caliber long reads - who wants to waste that much time with a bad read - but there's something more than just the quality of the book that makes a long read such an immersive experience. 

Reading helps ground me, and being in one title for that long really takes me deep into the read, leaving an impact that touches the rest of my life and leaves a far deeper impression than another title I'm in and out of in barely a week. That makes sense, right?

Don't know if I have the patience to do long reads all the time, but glad to have sprinkled them into my routine. And now I must ask: what's a long read you'd recommend?

A Costly Failure, An Impressive Life Lesson

This past weekend was a momentous one for pro football fans, especially around here since the Philadelphia Eagles stomped their fellow NFC finalist the San Francisco 49ers to punch their ticket to Super Bowl 57. It’ll be all the talk of the town for the next couple of weeks, and potentially beyond if a win and a parade ensues.

But I want to talk about the other game, and a prominent failure, and a poignant life lesson that emerged from that moment. In the closing seconds of a tied game, with the home team Kansas City Chiefs desperately trying to get close enough to attempt a game-winning field goal, star QB Patrick Mahomes broke out of the pocket and, finding no one downfield to throw to, hobbled his way forward (to get closer) and to the sideline (to stop the clock).

Just as he stepped out of bounds, he was shoved by Cincinnati Bengals defensive end Joseph Ossai and sent sprawling (which Mahomes almost certainly embellished by “flopping”). This was an obvious “late hit” penalty, which did not put Mahomes in physical peril but did gift the Chiefs 15 critical yards, turning a desperation field goal attempt into a makeable one, which ultimately gave the Chiefs the win and sent the Bengals to a cruel “what if” off-season.

To make matters worse, Ossai appeared to have injured his knee on the play. But his immediate tears were not from physical pain but from his momentary lapse of on-field awareness which appeared to have cost his team a chance to play in the Super Bowl. Minutes later, when interviewed, he owned his mistake and relayed that his teammates and his coach had rallied around him (including one player who sat with him during what must have been a painful and otherwise lonely press conference).

Sports are such a spectacle in our country. To borrow an old catchy phrase, in these contest the players (and the fans who are along for the ride) may experience the “thrill of victory” or the “agony of defeat.” We fete the heroes, and in some cases they become literal legends that we speak of for the rest of our lives.

The goats, of course, are not so lucky. Sometimes we are empathetic. And sometimes we are enraged. Part of being a successful athlete is physical, to be sure. But I would argue that most of it is mental. It is rare to possess the physical skills to compete at an elite level. But it is even rarer to have that, and to possess the mental fortitude to meet failure head-on: putting yourself out there knowing you could fail, and “manning up” when you do fail.

From where I’m sitting, I’m so impressed with Ossai’s response in the midst of what must have been excruciating anguish, especially in a team sport and with so much riding on the line. Think of everything that transpired in response to his mistake:

• He felt his failure deeply
• He owned it without excuse or blame-shifting
• He connected his feeling bad with having let down his teammates
• He expressed that his teammates and his coach picked him up
• He committed to learning from the mistake and doing better next time 

In life, we may not be in a similar position to fail so spectacularly and publicly. But life is similarly full of opportunities to fall on our face and cause pain to ourselves and others, sometimes in ways that cannot be undone. 

Many of us are terrified by this possibility. We are not even on the field. Or we play but we take no chances. Or we absolve ourselves of responsibility and shift the blame to someone else. Or we put ourselves out there yet as soon as we feel uncomfortable (let alone make a mistake), we withdraw. Or, having failed, we take our ball home and never come back. Which is your right. But much of life is for participating, not spectating. 

Ossai, and the Bengals, will be back. That’s what professionals do. I tip my hat to him and to all his teammates who stuck up for him and rallied around him. And I tip my hat to all athletes who have failed, which is to say all athletes, and to all of you who put yourself out there in similar ways.