Much to think about 11.3.2025

These will be sort of directionless thoughts, loosely connected if at all. I am returning to my long-abandoned second Tumblr to post them. I don't think that I have followers here and I know it's loosely connected to me somewhere, so if someone wanted to make the connection they could, but I don't care.

1: Someone came up to me after trivia last night and told me they'd found my old Blogspot from 2014, presumably the one that predated the site. I had completely forgotten about that one, honestly. I did a decade anniversary post for the site last year and didn't even mention that predecessor. They said they found it interesting that my generation was sort of native to the internet and didn't feel the need to delete old things out of embarrassment, which is true in my case. I'm glad that one could, if they wanted to, connect the various strings of my life from point to point and get a more or less accurate picture of who I presented myself to be. This is the one major thing that I regret about in deleting Twitter.

I have both been thinking and keeping myself from thinking about leaving some sort of a paper copy of my writing somewhere, basically for the expressed purpose of having it available to someone theoretically interested in reading it when I die. The obvious candidate for this would be a child, and yet, I am without them and without a spouse. Yet, some part of me wants to believe that someone will want to have that. It would probably just be a series of soft-cover spiral-bound books, much of it forgettable. I think earnestly that is what I'm working towards now, I've lost any desire for a literary career had I ever desired one at all.

2: I am sitting in my living room listening to Regina Spektor's Soviet Kitsch, having found the CD for two dollars at a Goodwill last week. I realize that I'm desperately afraid that my roommate will come home and ask me about it. Now, why is this? It's not as if I'm ashamed of listening to Regina Spektor. This is the first time that I've ever listened to Regina Spektor, actually. I thought I'd heard a few of her albums in the mid-2010s, but one of those was an Ingrid Michaelson album and the other was a Joanna Newsom album. There is something sexist about that, I acknowledge.

Is it just that I'm hyper-sensitive? Still? I'm a 30 year-old man who's hyper-sensitive to the idea of a cohabitant scoffing (or not even scoffing, just like... inquiring) about a CD he purchased for two dollars at a Goodwill? It's quite good, I should say, this record. I've enjoyed "Us" and "Ghost of Corporate Future" and "Chemo Limo". She has an evocative voice, pain-stricken in moments when she needs to be and snarky in others.

It's hitting me now that I'm actually not that terrified of having to explain this to him. Why was I, though? I suspect that my connection to art, music particularly, is so intensive that I leave myself wide open to bruising if that connection is ridiculed. I have to be sensitive with music to an embarrassing degree. I'm not particularly connected with her music, even, though I liked this album perfectly well.

I guess that I still bristle at the thought of being ridiculed for my taste, even though I basically never get ridiculed for my taste anymore. Maybe this happens to everyone.

3. There is something odd about watching the NBA at the moment, a few weeks after a player, a head coach, and an assistant coach were each arrested for gambling-related crimes. Perhaps I'm naive, but I don't feel particularly disillusioned right now, watching the Nets and Timberwolves play a perfectly competent game of basketball with the TV on mute this evening. I'm not worried that it's rigged, I mean, though I may have reason to feel that way. Maybe it's just because I know the details of each of the major NBA betting-related controversies to this point and see them each as secondary to the games themselves. Billups' is the most egregious in a long-term sense, as it just can't be good for an NBA coach to get caught up in anything with organized crime, regardless of whether it's immediately basketball-related or not.

That being said, betting is corrosive to my experience as a fan, even if I don't worry about the sport's competitive integrity at the moment. I am sick of hearing about it and seeing it everywhere. I have only placed a single bet on a sporting event in my life (On July 3rd, 2019, I bet $10 on Sporting KC to defeat LAFC at a sports book in Vegas, a game that they ended up losing 1-5), an experience that left me thoroughly uncharmed. Since then, state after state, including mine, have legalized web-based sports betting.

The obvious headlines about the impact of sports betting will cast it as a predatory industry that capitalizes on the broken addicted souls who chase ever-diminishing highs amid ever-diminishing returns. The articles beneath those headlines will tell stories of destitution, broken promises, rehabilitation stints, enticements, entrapments, and rock-bottoms. All of this is true and all of this is sad.

However, it's also just so fucking annoying. The lines in every scorebug, the lines throughout sportscenter and the pregame/postgame shows, the segments about the lines, the inane shows about the lines, Jamie Fox and Kevin Hart and JB Smoove every third ad, it's just so fucking annoying. I would say that this must be how sober people feel about watching sports, inundated with liquor ads, but those don't infect so much of the editorial makeup of the experience. Announcers don't cut away from analysis of an NBA game to recommend a wine pairing for the fourth quarter, but they'll tell you what individual player prop bets are available via their gambling partners.

You'll go to a bar and be subjected to some lost soul's bellowing lamentations that the fiscally irresponsible bets that he placed by himself on his phone in the bathroom aren't hitting. You can't talk about games without the gambling addicts overtaking the conversation. I've been in attendance at games with people who either (a) were more focused on various other games in a parlay than the game in front of them or (b) placed bets on the number of fouls called and spent the entire game agonizing over that rather than celebrating the performance the team we ostensibly paid money to see play was giving us.

I'm starting to recognize that my problem here is actually not that different from my annoyances with the video board bullshit and how every game has to have an emcee for some reason: We have something beautiful here already, we should not have to distract ourselves from it. There is something fundamentally beautiful about thousands of people coming together to train our eyes on a sport, to care about the outcome of that sport purely because we care about it, to give ourselves over to it. That is enough, if you let it be.

But in the same way that we allow our emotions to be dictated by the athletic performance on the field of play in front of us, we also allow our emotions to be dictated by the judgments of others. Sports fandom leads to insecurity, and betting allows us a less embarrassing reason to care. It's easier to say "I'm watching this because I might win money off of it" than "I'm watching this because I find meaning in it", or at least, you're less likely to get laughed at for the former.

this is @official-sklonda's favorite Christmas video

Re: Twitter (again)

I've been off of Twitter for like eight months now and it's very interesting now to see people complain about what's wrong with it. This sprung up primarily because of the controversy surrounding Giovanni Reyna's whole deal at the World Cup, or, really, it sprung up because of the discussion surrounding it, or, really, it sprung up because of the discussion referencing the discussion surrounding it, which I suppose makes this four rungs down the ladder of discussion regarding the actual event, which I found to be not all that controversial all things considered.

It seems like a young, talented, injury-prone player who plays behind a slightly better player was upset that he didn't get the playing time he wanted, pouted about it, was mentored by team leadership, and grew and learned because of it. It did not necessarily shock me that he acted that way given his tendency to act that way during games -- Really he reminds me of Clint Mathis to some extent, tremendous young talent whose emotions can get the best of him -- and I thought the end result of the whole deal, the story of him apologizing to the group and everything, really reflects pretty well on him at the end of it all.

On Peyton and David

What gets to me about the Peyton Manning/David Beckham Lays commercial is primarily annoyance, I guess, with the whole is it called soccer or football or whatever thing -- I don't care. I call it soccer, there's another more popular sport where I'm from called football so it's confusing. I'm also annoying and I like to point out that they started as the same sport, that American football developed from soccer, that the first American football game was fundamentally a soccer game, that there was the Association Game and the Collegiate Game (and the Rugby Game and the Gaelic Game and the Canadian Game, et cetera), as they are different variations on the same game, so Football is really accurate for both -- the dominant version takes the football name (This is the case for the three games in the UK, the USA, and Canada) and the non-dominant version takes the variant name, soccer is short for association, etc. It's just reflective of linguistic differences and sports hierarchies, people hate that Americans call it that because we're American, nobody gets mad at the Canadians nor the Australians for calling it soccer, et cetera et cetera whatever whatever.

But my main problem is that Peyton calls them "Lays" and they had the opportunity to make David Beckham say "these are Walker's" and they don't. I think this is cowardice on the part of Frito-Lay. This could have been an educational opportunity for Frito-Lay, introducing Americans to the idea that these chips have a different name over there. They did not. They had him call them crisps, which is accurate, but not Walker's, which would have relied on a base knowledge that most Americans don't have. They could have taught but instead they treated us as the lowest common denominators here.

On Whether There's a Party Over Here

mack's back with the flava over here

if you wanna swang let me do my thang and everybody jam with me

On the Home Run Record

This will put into the spotlight how little I've paid attention to Major League Baseball in the past few years, but I think that can actually bolster some credibility here if I do it right. I can explain why I don't watch that much baseball fairly easily: My city's team (The Damnable Royals of Baseball) doesn't play on my TV package and my team's stadium is in the middle of a parking lot very far away from where I live and they're also not a good team so there's not that much of an incentive either to drive down there or pay for a TV package that would allow me to watch them.

That is a weird phenomenon, I should say. Were they a better team, like if I wanted to watch them, I figure I'd be more upset about the whole 'barely accessible on modern television packages' phenomenon. This should piss me right the hell off and it just doesn't, and I don't know if that speaks to the ineptitude of the Royals at this current moment, or the state of cable television at this current moment, or the cultural hold that baseball carries at this current moment, or the way in which media has shifted to diminish the importance of the regular season and the act of attending an event for the sake of enjoying the event regardless of its place in context...

Do I care about baseball? That's actually maybe the more interesting question for me to try to answer here on this blog on this day than the point I was trying to make about Aaron Judge and the chase for the AL Home Run record. I think my point there on that note is "Major League Baseball has diminished the importance of the regular season to the point where it feels like something like 80% of the baseball played in the season is irrelevant" and... well, I don't know how far I could've carried that, as I'm really just reacting to a headline on the ESPN website saying that Aaron Judge is about to break the American League Home Run record. It does seem like the clock has kind of turned back to the point wherein 61 is considered the number to chase, rather than the official record of 73 set by Barry Bonds in 2001. I guess that's the way to sort of massage the unhappy aspects of the 1998-2001 steroid era out of it all. I do think that, unless we look the other way at steroid usage again or the league finds a way to walk the line between more home runs from juiced balls and the existence of shorter games, 73's basically an unbreakable record. This Judge chase feels... well, it feels like anything observed through the scope of the media in the current moment, it's just not going to have the effect that 1998 had, it'll never be 1998 again, and even if Judge (or Ohtani or Trout or Alonso or Stanton or Tatis) came out next year and was on pace to break 73, would we let ourselves believe it?

I know I'd like personally to get swept up into something like that. I'd like to let go and enjoy something like that again, personally, but I'm also constantly reacting against an internet-soaked culture that I dislike being a part of, so I don't know.

I do like baseball, I'll say that. I like watching the sport of baseball. I enjoy attending baseball games, I liked going to them in San Diego and I enjoy being at the K, I just live far enough away from it that making it there is a hassle and the tickets always feel too expensive to justify my going there and the team's not good. I haven't been to a Royals game all year. I made it to more Monarchs games (one) than Royals games in 2022. I think I'm going to go to a Royals game each year and I never end up going. I haven't been to the K since April 2019. Maybe I'll split the difference and start going to KU Baseball in the springtime... I do have some envy for the crowds at tournament games for college baseball powers like the Mississippi schools, that looks like a great time.

There really isn't a salient point here. I can lay out everything that keeps me away from Major League Baseball right now and maybe that'll help: Tickets are too expensive, parking is too expensive, concessions are too expensive, I live a forty-five minutes away from Kansas City, the Royals aren't good, the Royals aren't on TV, the other regular season games don't matter enough to pay attention to, the media is too focused elsewhere to sell regular season baseball, Major League Baseball can't sell itself, Major League Baseball needs to get in with Metalhead Software and fund a Super Mega MLB game. That is most of it, though.

The pricing and the distance are really the issues. Major League Baseball is a premium product, I am aware, and you must pay more for higher quality, and I can, as previously mentioned, see baseball for free at my university if I want.

I think that I want to love and appreciate baseball but it won't let me. Maybe that's the salient point. I don't think the product is important enough to me to match the amount I'd have to pay to partake in it. I look at baseball the way that I look at nearly anything when I'm in the grips of depression (which I should clarify I am not right now), like I look at it, and it is what I expected, it is clearly something I remember loving once, but I'd really have to try hard to make myself love it now.

---

I think I wanted to make a point about how odd the steroid era was in retrospect and how much more odd it'll get as the years go by, that there's just like a five year period of significant records set that we more or less try to look the other way on in retrospect. As years go by, and fewer of the significant discursive figures in baseball will have been around for all that happened in the late 1990s, the strike in '94 and the TV network mishaps and the backlash in 1995 and the fervor over Ripken and the '98 chase and the dominance of the late '90s Yankees, which can be understood in context (and I will admit that I don't have that context), will the popular opinions surrounding it change?

Oh and I think the other thing is that Major League Baseball set itself up for failure because they'll never make that lightning strike again with the home run record chase because you'd have to do steroids to get to 73 in a single season and if they try to do it again, like they are here, anyone can look at the person chasing the record and say "you know the real record's 73" and we (maybe not we, per se, but someone in charge of explaining things to that person) will have to say "Yeah but the league was looking the other way on those guys' use of PEDs at that time and since they're paying better attention now we can't judge on that scale anymore." Which seems like a recurring issue with baseball now. I am firmly in the camp which considers regular season interleague play to have been a short-sighted decision, which left fans further disinterested as a whole when the novelty wore off. They can't go back, obviously, just as they can't go back to a four-team postseason to make the regular season interesting again, just as they can't force teams to stay together anymore, just as they can't go back to an era when radio was dominant, just as they can't go back to an era before the NFL took over as the most significant TV sport, just as they can't go back to an era wherein most people lived in cities and took the trolleys and taxis and busses to the stadium to buy a ticket for a quarter.

Oddly enough, at the end of my inane tapping-out here, I'm more inclined to go to some Jayhawk baseball come springtime. I think I love baseball, I'm just not fully bought into Major League Baseball at the moment. That's it. That's what I was trying to get to. I hear they fired Dayton Moore!

I need to hold myself to one thing this college football season

I need to channel my disdain for Purdue University's online writing lab website into a disdain for the Purdue Boilermakers of collegiate athletics. It's the one thing I can do

On Skyrocketing

I apologize, this is going to be one of those embarrassing rants that should stay with myself, one of the rants that your English major friend in college in went on and clearly had practiced and would repeat at the drop of a hat and you'd have to say "oh don't bring up Free Verse around Greg, he'll go into the Free Verse rant and we'll never hear the end of it", that's what I have. I keep those all in, for the most part. Not all of them, I guess, but I keep many of those in.

The General Rants I Keep In: The Introvert/Extrovert Rant, The 2014 World Cup Squad Rant (Alternatively Called the Hedges, Nguyen, and Feilhaber Rant), the Reddit rant, the "Listing Out My List of Rants Makes Me Embarassed For Myself" Rant which I've actually just devised midway through this sentence

But I read someone using the word "skyrocketing" to mean "rising quickly" again this morning, I think in a comment section on The Athletic (I need to have a YouTube clip of Jill Talley saying 'red flag' as the counselor for Smoosh on Mr. Show that I can link to for instances wherein I start down a path and recognize that there was a mistake made in the circumstances which led me down said path, that would come in handy here. This is as much I can do in my current situation). I outside of a handful of swear words, like the 2010s internet style compound swears (dipshit, fuckstick, etc) I don't think there's a single word that annoys me more than the use of skyrocket as a verb in common conversation. I can't define it with a single reason, it's more of a thousand-papercuts sort of deal.

I know it comes from fireworks, which is one aspect of it, as everybody calls them bottle rockets where I'm from, so I exclusively see it used in a theoretical sense. I don't know if they still say "skyrocket" to refer to that type of firework elsewhere, maybe in the southeast, I imagine that sounds better with a drawl than bottle rocket. But I only see it used on discursive sites in a metaphorical sense, which annoys me to some extent, I don't know exactly why that is. Maybe it exemplifies the separation between the participants on these sites and the real world that they live in.

I think there is something with the sound of the word itself, though. I always associate it as like something a child would say, there's the inherent redundancy of it that does it (I know there are rockets that don't go skyward, but don't most of them? And are there rockets that don't travel skyward, am I right about that, or at least in common parlance when you hear the word 'rocket' don't you assume it's something that travels skyward?) and there are better, or at least for the love of god different synonyms you can use if you must discuss something quickly ascending, including the simple "quickly ascending."

Also there's a negative connotation to it in practice, you only say something's skyrocketing if it's increasing at an alarming pace, it's always unemployment rates, home prices, gas prices, covid cases, tuition prices, any sort of debt, that skyrockets. It's never like "handjob rates are skyrocketing!" So there's the negative connection that's probably built up in my mind as well, always connected to catastrophe.

It occupies the same annoyance that "Packed" when referring to a mass of people in close proximity also gets to me, it's probably my reddit exposure, but I always read it as an online discussion board word used by writers who won't think of another, more effective synonym.

On Forgetting My Glasses Today

It really is an impressive feat for me to be left completely sans-glasses at work, given that I have three pairs of them and only ever use them when I'm somewhere where I imagine I'll have to deal with too much fluorescent light glare, which my apartment is not, and I only really wear my glasses at home if I need the prisms to work in order to keep my eyes looking at the same thing at the same time, which also isn't that frequent of a problem, and even then I always try to keep one pair in the bag.

My problem was this: I wore the black non-prism but yes blue-light sensitive pair to trivia on Sunday night, because the glare in the lights in that bar can bother me. Generally, those are the backup pair, as I wear the tortoise shell ones with the prisms most of the time if I'm working because basically the main tenant of my job is reading, typically from a computer screen. However, since I took them off on Sunday night, they didn't make it back into the bag, and therefore the backup pair was gone.

I can remember wearing the tortoise shell ones at work yesterday, then putting them in their case in my shirt pocket (key factor) as I drove home (I don't need them for driving, in fact I shouldn't wear them for driving) and I must have taken them out and put them in a pile with the other things on my person (keys, wallet, et cetera) and not put them back in the bag last night.

If I come into some unexpected money at some point in the near future, I'll probably end up buying a pair that both has the prisms and also has light protection as there's really no reason why I have one pair that does one and another that does the other, my main reason was that the prisms are expensive and the tortoise shell frames were among the least expensive frames offered by the fair folks at EyeBuyDirect, so at the time it didn't make sense to put on an additional cost in the light filtering stuff. Next time, though, I'll do that. I also need to stop putting my glasses in my shirt pocket in general as they tend to fall out if I bend over.

It's a unique problem, as I won't need my glasses until I sit down for work, which is either a ten minute bus ride or a 40 minute drive away. I can't help but wonder, if my vision was worse and I needed my glasses to drive, wouldn't I have no issues remembering them? It like what that teacher explained to Lisa Simpson about being a middle class student with good teachers, except it's the issue of having eye problems bad enough to need glasses in certain situations but not bad enough to cause that much of an issue in most situations.

I've been logging my wordcounts in a Google Sheets document

Which has been good as it's given me some data about how much I write, and good as it has pushed me to write more in order to keep feeling good about putting big numbers into the spreadsheet, but I am starting to wonder if there's a detrimental aspect to it, as it is inherently pushing me to focus on quantity, and, as we all know, gameplay over graphics.

Sorry. Quality over quantity is what I meant. I miss the gameplay/graphics debate, though. It's not a problem yet (at least I don't consider the quantity to be affecting the quality as of yet, though I will admit that last rhetorical turn was of poor quality), as when I started documenting the wordcounts back in early April, I was working on basically no quantity, constraining myself because I believed what might come out would be of poor quality. At this point, I don't worry about it, because I keep putting out stuff I'm surprisingly happy with even a few months down the line.

What I've noticed is that I do a lot of writing that doesn't go anywhere (which is part of why I started this Tumblr) and that I have had fewer days of absolutely no writing practice in the past two months than I did at the start, which I think means I've made a habit out of writing.

For example, back in May, I had two full weeks in which I did absolutely no writing at all. In August, I've had only six days in which I wrote absolutely nothing, two of which were spent traveling to and from vacation.

I'm aiming for two to three thousand words each day, not all of which get published, but some of which will, and some ideas from those which aren't published will turn into bigger works that do get published. This has been a good development for me as a writer, so maybe it'll work for you, I don't know. I've just had thoughts on it so I put them here, that's the idea of this whole thing.

On The Suburbs

I had a moment last fall when I was in my very short-lived desk assistant job at the dorm I lived at during the Canadian Exile period of 2021, they were hosting this dance in the adjacent ballroom and I remember they played some music I recognized from when I was in my first year of college. I actually wrote about it on @joziebee:

Every year around now I think of that, how many kids are going to hear music that defines this new experience as a college student for them. I'll remember my first Freshman semester mostly by a Cold War Kids song, Miracle Mile. I hear that Bad Habit song that's sort of broken through and think of that moment, like there are kids out there having a brand new experiences, probably feeling romantic pangs for the first time (especially given what this current Freshman class has gone through in the past two years). I think that's a great track, for what its worth.

I was listening to this independent radio station based out of Kansas City that I don't get in Lawrence but start to pick up about halfway down K-10 a few weeks ago and they played this song from a band out of the Twin Cities in the 1980s, The Suburbs:

It put me in this interesting mindset, firstly because it's such a good song, and it didn't really break through back during its original era, and secondly because god I wish I had something like this back then. What a fucking song. It would've seen release when my parents were college students, but it wasn't a hit really so I doubt they'd recognize it even now... But fuck! What a song. I think I'm just trying to say that I found a good song, but I really did find a good song! Makes me wish I'd grown up in the 1980s and heard it for the first time at a house party while talking to someone and like making eye contact and recognizing that feeling in my chest that I'm falling for them (and to be clear I've had that feeling with somebody recently in my personal life, that's another reason I'm thinking this way). Great song.

On KD

I cannot imagine being Kevin Durant right now. As his career winds down he's become only more and more of a fascinating figure to me as I start to like him less and less as a public figure. That he and Kyrie Irving and James Harden all joined forces on the Nets in 2021, forced Jacque Vaughn out of a job in which he was overachieving (which is sacrilege to me, anyone who wrongs Jacque Vaughn is an enemy of mine), and that it all culminated in a second round playoff exit and a first round playoff exit... It's astounding.

All three of them are phenomenally talented basketball players, and all three of them are interesting men, the types of athlete celebrities to whom there are few analogues in history. Maybe Durant is the modern Rick Barry, though his teammates don't seem to despise him and Barry was on the opposite end of the spectrum regarding the way he was viewed by the media and spectators to Durant, Barry didn't care at all that the fans hated him, Durant tries so hard to win them over... I might compare Kyrie to someone like... I have no idea who to say. Bill Walton, maybe, even Phil Jackson as a player, just in that the media doesn't know what to do with a person like him, with opinions outside of the scope of what they feel comfortable ever covering -- and this is mostly related to his conspiratorial mindset regarding things like the moon landing and the shape of the earth. The other stuff, first his interpretation that playing basketball in Summer 2020 during the protests was going to serve to take media focus off of the protests (which I think he was proven correct about), and then the vaccine thing I can't connect to anyone before him, outside of maybe Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf for that first one. There have been and are other anti-vaccine athletes, I suppose you could compare him to Djokovic, but in a team sport that's different, for him to completely disregard the fortunes of his team as arguably its best player, to leave himself unavailable for most of the games in his hometown, it's truly astounding, what effect does that have on the team? Like that can't be good that Kyrie's the only guy out for half of your games because he wouldn't take medicine that the rest of the team did to no adverse outcomes.

Harden I feel bad for, he's become shorthand for a style of basketball that fans hate, kind of like the backlash that hit his former teammate in Houston, Dwight Howard, around 2014 when we all collectively recognized that he was very good at a boring brand of basketball.

And when I looked at those Nets over the past two years, I saw functionally bored men. Guys who were in their thirties and unsatisfied with where they were in their careers, still good enough to go through the motions and make more money than the vast majority of people on earth do while doing it.

What a terrifying recognition that they've all had to go through. Durant might be the best player of his generation but he'll never be truly beloved because of that move to the Warriors, he'll never even be respected. He won two finals and was MVP of both but nobody respects him for it. I think Bill Simmons was the one discussing how he had Durant on his podcast a few days after his first championship win, and he was so convinced that nobody would criticize him anymore for it, that people would finally quit saying he'd never reach the mountain top -- How terrifying is that? That he's done everything he thought he had to do, MVP of the league, MVP of the finals and champion twice, and it still just doesn't matter because he did it in a way that most people don't like? (I'll admit I don't like it. I respect Giannis Antetokounmpo and Dirk Nowitzki's single championship each over Durant's two championships) Which is fine, again, Rick Barry got so much criticism from fans and the media and he reacted with spite, but Durant desperately seems to want validation and basically had it shoved in his face that he would not and will never get it. And he was a beloved figure in the early 2010s with Oklahoma City, that all changed immediately.

He went from a hero to a pariah, like he broke some internal code and at some point he had to realize that he'd put himself in an impossible situation where he just can never please anyone, which again, is fine, there are heels and villains in sports, but he doesn't see himself that way, he can't be Rick Barry.

In a selfish sense, I kind of just don't want him in the NBA anymore, not out of reprehensibility, I don't think he's a bad guy by any means, he's just a fucking bummer now, constantly disgruntled, tearing teams apart, getting coaches fired, trying to force trades, and never reaching the peaks of his mid-career heyday in the late 2010s -- which again, he'll never be celebrated for. It's never going to happen for Kevin Durant. Maybe he'll find his way onto a competitor and he'll win a title with them again, but he'll never be celebrated the way that he needs to be.

He was the best player on those late 2010s Warriors teams, but those fans love Steph, Klay, Draymond, and Andre more. How about that? To be the best player on the best team but be not even close to the most beloved? To an infamously insecure person like him?

It's strange to say, because he's so good, but the day that the NBA moves on from him - and indeed Irving and certainly Harden - will be a day in which the NBA's product improves. Fundamentally what he does is complain in the off-season, play great individual basketball in the regular season when he's healthy, and lose in the postseason.

Irving I think has reached another terrifying peak, that he's one of the most famous people in America and yet what he's so good at doing has not changed the world for the better. And that is terrifying, realizing you're the... well, I don't agree with much of what the guy who coined this idea says anymore, but the successor: that the battles you have to fight are diminished in their clarity and winnability from what the battles of those who came before you had to fight. People don't hate him - outside of maybe some impotent Redditor fury for his anti-vaccine beliefs - like people hated Ali in his time, but they'll never admire him like they do Ali either.

And Harden's just never going to be as beloved as Steph, and while he'll be on the NBA 75th anniversary team and he'll go to the Hall of Fame, he'll be viewed as someone whose style changed the way the game was played for the worse, which is just a terrible position to be in.

All three of them are in unique positions in that they started their professional careers before the smartphone era, or at least before they were ubiquitous, and had to learn to deal with the added pressure of social media when they were professionals. There are some athletes who've handled the transition well, mainly the ones who've avoided it as much as possible, and there are those who haven't, Aaron Rodgers being a good example.

It's a very human, very mundane self-consciousness that they show, I see insecurities similar to my own reflected in them, but I see them handle them in ways that I dislike. Isn't that what we watch for, to see these people overcome difficult odds through determination and effort and teamwork, and every time it gets tough for these guys they just move on to the next thing, look for some easier angle. Especially compared to Giannis and Steph, who didn't do that and found success.

I think history might even look back more fondly on Damian Lillard for sticking around in Portland for so long, being so dynamic even despite a front office that couldn't fit a good team around him. I think of the post-restart 2020 season games when he was getting mocked by the guys from that shitty Clipper rent-a-team that got bounced in the second round. I don't know that I've, in adulthood, rooted so hard for a single player as I did Damian Lillard during that time. I felt bad for him, but sometimes you do the admirable thing and you lose.

But that must be a terrifying moment, to stand atop the mountaintop and look around and still find yourself unsatisfied. I know that a lot of athletes whom I find interesting - David Duval and Todd Marinovich specifically, and I suspect Naomi Osaka is getting there - have had that experience. It brings into question what you play for in the first place. Judging by the records, Kevin Durant is one of the most successful basketball players in history, but judging by his actions at this stage in his career, he doesn't feel that way. And can he ever?

Alright I've Flipped

Peter Vermes can not be a successful coach of this team anymore. I love the guy and appreciate what he's done but you cannot make the decisions he made in a pivotal game like that (sticking with Ben Sweat well after he had started cramping, not giving Marinos Tzionis any time, giving so much to Khiry Shelton in a pivotal game like this, having a team that is constantly cramping in 75 degree weather) and not get some sort of consequences.

This is how DC United got the way that they are now

On the Next Step

I find myself relatively often now unsure of what I want to do next, but certain that I have to find out what it is. I am trying to learn to be content where I am and with what I'm doing. If I step back and honestly appraise what it is that I want, it is more or less what I have right now - I like where I live, I am around friends and family, I enjoy my work and I'm compensated well enough for them.

But I cannot shake the impetus! Oh the damned impetus! To look and see where I could uproot my life to go, and what I could do next, and new jobs or new education or what-have-you. You still don't have a full-time job I tell myself. You've always wanted to go to this or that place, live in this city, return to the place you used to live and it's very true! What about an MFA, what about teaching overseas, what about going for a PhD again perhaps! Yes perhaps!

I figured out recently that for the first time ever in my entire life, there just isn't a 'next thing' lined up for me. From May 2020 to August 2021 there was moving and starting the PhD, and from fall 2018 to summer 2020 there was finishing the MA, and from winter '17 to summer '18 there was moving and starting the MA, from fall '13 to winter '17 there was finishing my BA, and so on, and so forth, basically to the point that I first had cognitive thought.

January to... basically June was spent trying to convince myself that I was a living human again, and somehow it was sometime in like mid-June that it hit me that I am relatively happy with how my life is going at the moment. I don't have anything really in the specific that I need to look forward to or plan for, I am alright with where I am and what I'm doing. That's not to say that nothing will ever come along, that it'll be this way forever, but I'm mostly okay right now.

I don't have very much experience with being relatively content, so I just constantly feel like something's wrong, like I should put something there, but there's nothing to put there! I'm fine! I'm really fine but I don't feel fine yet because this feels wrong, just having years and years of my life staring me down with no specific next thing I'm working towards in a year or two really is abnormal to me, I've never been this way and while I like it, I cannot shake the sense that something is off in some way.

On Realignment Mania

And I use the word mania specifically, here.

USC and UCLA's decision to move to the Big Ten a few weeks ago has stirred something within me and I am intrigued by it. This decision by USC and UCLA, unlike Texas and Oklahoma's last year, has struck me uniquely because of two things: I did not expect it to happen (both that these two teams left the Pac-12 and that it happened on a Friday in early July) and it does not make sense on a regional or competitive level.

In the inverse, what this unlocked to me were two possibilities: 1) Any school can decide to leave any one conference and join any one other regardless of competitive or regional sensibility, and 2) also it can and will happen when I least expect it.

This has left me in something of a constantly unsatisfied state where I'm constantly waiting for the next thing to happen. Because we know it can't go on like this forever, this is not a sustainable situation. Too many programs are in flux (Oregon, Washington, and Utah in particular come to mind) and now that I know that we're completely operating outside of the realm of geographic logic (Outside of West Virginia's move to the Big XII in 2012, every Power 5 conference move and addition since the ACC's expansion in the mid-aughts has at least shared a border with another institution in the conference), I know that anything could happen.

Particularly as both of my schools are caught in the crosshairs here - If the Pac-12 wants to add schools from the Group of 5, San Diego State is almost definitely one of the first they'd choose, and it does seem likely that the Big XII will have some level of change, be that the addition of new schools out of the Pac 12, or maybe a merger, which will involve new opponents for Kansas - Any new changes on the conference alignment front are likely to affect me in some way.

So I find myself constantly checking The Athletic and the College Football Subreddit (a place I will admit to disliking more intensely than I do the MLS subreddit) for updates that haven't come. There's no way to know when or if they will. I certainly didn't expect it when I pulled up The Athletic on a Thursday afternoon to see USC and UCLA leaving the Pac 12 - But now I know to look out for it when it does happen.

Of course, none of these page refreshes have given me anything as of yet. But one of them, one day, will, so I'm going to keep doing it

On Chuck, Rex, Football

I will forever be endebted to NFL Films for having Chuck Klosterman narrate the #4 game on their all time greatest games list

I love the way that Chuck talks about sports - I remember Bill Simmons called him a "sports atheist" when he had him write the section on Wilt Chamberlain in his basketball book. His recognition that he was watching history in that moment as an important moment in his life there, I love it, even if it's very, very weird for the NFL only to have Chuck talk about it and not like... any of the players in that game, like Kellen Winslow?

The commenters on the youtube video are mostly just positive about the game but, as you might guess, the YouTube NFL subscribers who do comment on his presence don't necessarily sing his praises, which I understand. What a strange presence, though, maybe he's like the modern equivalent of George Plimpton (save for the actual trying out for the teams) in that sense, one of the only longform popular culture journalists (save for the many excellent football writers historians like Ray Didinger they bring on)

One of my smaller goals for the year of 2022 is to be more outward and accepting of the fact that Chuck Klosterman is my favorite author

I could write an essay on the NFL Network, probably. There's enough there for me, I was amazed by it when it first started in ~2004, our cable package didn't get it until 2012 or so, so I could only watch it at my grandfather's house on his cable package - then when we finally got it when I was in high school I was constantly watching it, I love history and NFL Films is among the best not just in sports but in any cultural phenomenon at cataloguing and telling stories, so I was constantly watching their work.

I sort of fell off of the NFL during the peak of that angry online leftist period I had in like 2017-20 or so, or at least outwardly fell off, meaning I watched all the games and paid attention and everything but told everyone I wasn't paying attention, very outwardly and angrily despite the fact that I know I had RedZone on all day on Sundays. I really hate that I did that, this is one of the things that I'm ashamed of was how outwardly flawlessly I tried to present myself on Social Media and through my writing as well. I have no loyalty to the NFL like that, but to pretend like I was better than other people because I could look away from the big Sunday spectacle (even though I couldn't) was so stupid - firstly because that's not even impressive, there are plentiful people who just do that and don't think about it, secondly because who the fuck am I to tell everyone they've crossed a line. And I still outwardly watched COLLEGE FOOTBALL! I was outward about that but not the pros? I don't know which is more "immoral" but it's not like picking college over the NFL was a brave stance. (and, to reiterate, I did not pick. I just lied.)

I remember two things pulled me back in - Firstly that the NFL Network developed these Top 100 list programs at the time. I love well-produced TV countdown shows (and now that I think about them, they're mostly gone now, aren't they? It used to be VH1 that mainly trafficked in them and they're all about putting Love and Hip Hop reruns on now). Particularly these were good for me because they were people from all different backgrounds, former players, musicians, actors, television hosts, comedians, journalists, all different ages, genders, races, all being just outwardly in love about this. This was about when my internal cynicism got to be too much for me (I do think 2019 when I started teaching had me recognizing this on a personal level but it wasn't until my breakdown in fall 2020 that it became too much)

Secondly (and this was not the NFL Network but an ESPN production) there was the Sunday Countdown Super Bowl pregame show, I don't know who hosts it now but back then it was Randy Moss, Matt Hasselbeck, someone else, and Rex Ryan. They did this fantastic 100-year NFL commemorative montage set to All These Things That I've Done by the Killers, and it gets me emotional.

Then they cut away after the montage is done back to the desk, and Rex Ryan is crying.

For some reason seeing that flipped things for me - I had this cartoon villain image of Rex Ryan in my head back then, like I sort of hated Rex Ryan from his time with the Jets, this man's man football guy... And here he was crying on television because this meant so much to him. I guess that humanized him to me - I think I already should've had a more humanized understanding of him, as I should've brought to everyone, but I was operating at the time under this premise that people with more fame or money than me specifically were perfectly fine targets for my impotent and constant hatred.

I am not saying that anyone is above criticism or disdain, but the level of cynicism I carried towards basically everyone in any standing above mine was misguided and fed into what was a very cynical and disdainful nature, and there was a change around then (especially as I had started teaching) wherein I recognized that my cynicism was creating problems for me on a personal level.

And I know it's probably worthy of ridicule that I'm saying this about Rex Ryan, but I can make a decision about the way that I look at anyone in any context, and I think choosing to see them firstly as a full person and secondly choosing to see them that way regardless of what might get me ridiculed. Even with public figures I'll say I still more or less dislike even if I take this perspective to them (like Mark Zuckerberg or Mike Krzyzewski), I still prefer this manner of looking at them because it helps me to understand what it is I admire about those who I do admire and also keeps me from, on the opposite end, having too much of an unassailable parasocial love for someone.

And I want to wrap this up, but my relationship with the NFL over the past few years has been interesting, particularly since Fall 2020 when I can more or less map that I started watching the NFL Network's morning show - which is very well made, has engaging hosts that I like, and can admittedly get rather saccharine - at the same time I gave up on the more cynical media I engaged with back then (mainly a few podcasts and twitch streams). I could get into that more in the future there.

oohhhhhhh OHHHHH

What a fucking track