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Thirteen

Max will be thirteen years old today at around noon.

He's currently in the midst of a science project in his room - not the sort that invariably occur by accident in the rooms of teenage boys - an actual for school project involving plants and various kinds of light. This has necessitated the sectioning off of some 'zones' in his room where plants can get incandescent, fluorescent, blacklight, or sunlight.

We're attending a comic convention today, Wizard World in Nashville, and he's excited about his first con of any kind, and the Star Trek folk who will be in attendance. Yesterday was party day, and we had lunch with his grandpa at Culver's (still far and away one of his favorite places to go, partly for the idealized Wisconsin-ness he associates with it) and then mini-golf and music and presents and mayhem with his crew, pictured. He fell asleep last night in one of our recliners while Meredith & Sandy were over while attempting to watch Monty Python and the Holy Grail. I don't think he was entirely into it.

He's a sensitive guy, and his anti-bullying club at school (which he founded; brag, brag) is ramping up for this year. He's a proud nerd who collects books and weapons and who still enjoys chess and Legos. For the first time this year, he's being made to read for school (and write about it) and like a lot of avid readers, this has dimmed his passion for reading. He asked for (and got) a multi-year subscription to Mad Magazine this year. His feet are ridiculously large, and he's going to be the tallest person in our house in six months to a year. His favorite kind of pizza is still cheese, and for his birthday party snacks yesterday he chose green apples, Doritos, pretzels, cheese curds, Raisinets and fancy sodas. He's got a "you will enjoy this on as many levels as I do" streak, and if you engage him on a subject which he holds close to his heart, you may never escape.

He's an easy kid to love - cerebral and quiet times are balanced with reactionary and loud times. He likes to hug and hang out; he wore a headband throughout the NiH showing of Frozen the other night and chided me for running off on my own to read, and never allows our houseguests to leave without hugs. I'm looking forward to what the next several years will bring - changes and sames, alike. Max is a good person, and someone I enjoy hanging out with as much as I love him.

Happy birthday, Max.

NFL-uva A Problem

I don't know if you know this, but when you go on Facebook, take to comments fields and indeed, interject into actual IRL conversations stuff like "Abolish Football," you sound like an ignorant and hypocritical reactionary. I have this on good authority, too - mine.

Those of us who enjoy the game understand as best we're able that you wouldn't miss it - you don't "get" it and you never have, and this is the time of year that you get to feel superior to people who insist on watching a game. You don't "get" football in the same way that I don't "get" fashion, cat videos, reality TV, religion, blueberries and people who "don't read." "Getting" something is often a transcendant and ephemeral experience that is impossible to quantify for someone else. The act of even attempting to explain it renders the explanation useless. This much I understand. I also understand that when a thing is broken, our society conditions us to throw it away rather than fix it, and that this is perhaps not always the wisest or most responsible course of action, no matter what you reflexively fucking opine.

The NFL is indeed horribly broken - the culture of domestic abuse, so long the subject of studies and research, has now been captured in actuality on film and in photos, perpetuated by homunculoid creatures like Ray Rice and Adrian Peterson. The NFL's decade spanning cover up of the long-term affects of concussions and other head injuries to players (as chronicled here and here in League of Denial) was, perhaps, criminal, and certainly immoral. The way the organization inconsistently and laughably "enforces" its own rules - Sean Payton and Bill Belichick, I'm looking at you - erodes any faith the average person has in fair play at a high level. Most teams pay their cheerleaders minimum wage or less - exposure (no pun intended) is meant to be an intangible perk of the job. Insensitivity predominates: the Redskins steadfastly refuse to change their name, and no one's even talking about the Chiefs. To round this out, some quick names from recent history would include Pac-Man Jones, Tank Johnson, Michael Vick, and Plaxico Burress.

Some teams seem to have bigger problems as a franchise than others: Peterson's Vikings had a big rape party on a boat a few years back, but we have short memories, so no one's talking about that anymore, while Rice's Ravens had another famous Ray who may or may not have been a murderer, depending upon who you ask or what might have been in the backseat. Tennessee's Titans had a QB who threw his shoulderpads at fans, and there's also the murder of Steve McNair, shot by his mistress. The beloved Packers had the virulently anti-gay (and possibly racist) Reggie White, and let's not forget (no matter how much he'd like you to) Brett Favre's molestation charges and dick pictures. The Steelers still have a maybe-rapist at QB; the Cowboys have Jerry Jones. I'll just leave that last one for you to consider.

(As a quick aside: those of you upset at the appeal of Ray RIce's suspension? We're mad at the NFLPA, which is the Players' Union, not the NFL itself. Focus. Breathe.)

Teams aren't the league, though, even if the league is ultimately responsible for their (the teams and the players) behavior on some level; if the McFood down the street screws up your EggMac, Big Mickey doesn't care; it's the franchise owner who needs to work out the kinks in the production line, or he gets penalized. The same is true of players - they fuck up and we run to the NFL. Why? Why aren't we mad at the team first? The franchise? The owners and the coaches? Skipping the chain of command is illogical and counterproductive - I don't write the President over potholes.

So the league needs to make changes. Real ones, not whitewashing. Abolishing the NFL, or even football, (aside from getting low marks because of its inherent "never gonna happen" status) seems like a cheap and poorly thought-out workaround from what we really should be doing, which is teaching our (society's) men how to behave. You can't complain that we live in a culture where all the rules for not having rape happen are directed at women instead of the DON'T RAPE PEOPLE rule we should teach all men and everyone, and then let players off the hook for being criminal assholes by abolishing the league. Make the league clean up the mess, make players fix themselves and be accountable or they can all face crippling fines. If they go Chapter 11 because they can't clean up their act, good - but it will take a long time for that to happen, and in the meantime, a lot of women's shelters get funded.

Also: there've been 713 arrests in the last fourteen years of NFL players. Most of those are for domestic violence. In a given season, there are about 1700 active players in the NFL, most of whom are not fucking up. (Since we live in America, the fact that they have not been arrested or indicted means you are obligated to assume that most of them are not fucking up.) On the whole, the NFL employs about 15,000 people per season, directly, and that doesn't count the people who have jobs at various venues, or in any of the other industries associated with American football.

Abolishing the league because a great many - but not most - of the people in it are morally bankrupt man-children is like killing the guys on either side of the one who steps out of line. It's extremist. Is that who we are? If you watch The Simpsons, are you tacitly endorsing Rupert Murdoch & by extension, FoxNews? If you buy a General Motors vehicle, are you okaying potentially fatal cover-ups? If you're a Catholic or Muslim, does that mean you're fine with everything people in those groups do? By living in America, are you saying that you're okay with everything your government does? OF COURSE NOT. You're taking the bad with the good because wrecking the whole system, while sometimes the answer, usually isn't. Punk's great until you want to put out an album.

Replacing Roger Goodell is a sound move - he's a tool. He could probably be replaced with an automated "CYA generator" that just runs on a laptop and spits out hype and half-assed "solutions." He's obviously only concerned about PR (and money), and moves only when it benefits him (with money), so he needs to move on, now - I'd like to see the NFL run by a woman. Not a token figurehead - a woman in actual charge of football, making league changes.

Brain Music

Some songs in the right circumstances are like keys to doors to the past, for me, to my personal, individual past - a trip backwards in time where the word "nostalgia" seems like a weak attempt to explain what's actually happening, which is this:

The music keys off a series of tumbling domino memories which come unbidden and avalanche down onto whatever I'm doing or thinking at the time, erasing the present and overwriting the new/old into currency. I step backward into a previous version of me that is so different and pure and incandescent with supercharged potential and anticipation and unlocked grit-your-back-teeth-and-GAH! that it/he feels utterly alien, but I remember being there, then, him. I remember how the smells of those people around me made me feel, seeing them in my mind's eye, through my perhaps unconsciously edited memories of that time. I hear them and the spaces around them, I feel the anxiety and rush of events past. Hormones, surely, but I'm in touch with them now, and the rush of the chemical wave is something tangible, tasteable - it has mass and I carry it. It carries me.

I am transported - not through something so lame as the hackneyed and ham-handed "power of music" but along neural pathways I thought I burned out with injury and drugs and booze and sadness and happiness and new experiences long ago, but the brain abides. It pushes back against the present, be it mundane or thrilling or necessary or all three and says, "this is a thing that happened, this was a time you were in, these were people you knew, and all of it is still in here, locked behind a paper-thin Japanese sliding panel and it can be unlocked at any time by this song." Or not. It's not consistent. The subconscious must be in a mood to cooperate or you'll just get the song and "...yay."

And then, the tumblers in the lock click and slide and roll back the other way and I am left with a desperate need to preserve the experience by using what I know will be inadequate words, as best I am able, but with the hope of crystallizing what it was like, and maybe even sharing the ineffable with someone, anyone else.