Click images for desktop size: "Attack On A Wagon Train" by Russel Charles Marion My ebike is driving me crazy.
Late Tuesday I started it up and it ran beautifully. I rode it around, filled up the tires and was mildly excited.
Wednesday I turned it on and it sat there.
I was dispirited. Tinkered with it a little.
Nada. I figure that somewhere in there is a wire that is heating up when its running and then separating and shorting. Except I can't find it. Its more confounding as the lights all work fine like this. That should help narrow down where the glitch is but it doesn't seem to.
Then this morning when I was out with the dogs I decided to turn it on just to aggravate myself. It fired up right away. I turned it off for a second and then flipped it back on and of course it was as dead as Dicken's coffin nails.
With the new ebikes floating around $2,500 there's a bit at stake getting this thing going.
My vision is fading. My left eye is only useful for giving me binocular vision. There's no way I could pass a driving eye test.
I need to get my little bike running.
I was so insane I decided that the dogs were sabotaging the bike. They figured that more biking time for me means less walking time for them . . .

Click images for desktop size: "Audrey Hepburn"
My friend finally and truly has finally finished her year end stuff.
I don't quite accept that either but it seems to be true.
She even took off yesterday (if working from home can truly be called taking the day off) to go to get her physical.
She's lost weight. 104 pounds (7 st 6) is not cool for someone 5' 4". But that's the only negative. Weight can be put back on.
To celebrate the clean bill of health and the end of the marathon trudge through financial records we had a mini-celebration. I barbecued some fish.
This went pretty badly. I figured sole and cod would be very nice.
This was a mistake.
Cod and sole do not grill well. They crumble up nicely and fall through the slits . . . I never knew that before. I suddenly remembered that the only fish I'd barbecued before were swordfish and shark. I suddenly knew why.
I'd rubbed it down with alder wood salt (that my puppy's chef relative got for us), margarine and key limes. It smelled good at least. In trying to save it I dropped a big chunk on the ground. I think it hit the ground. I couldn't swear to it. Three dogs were on it faster than I could move my eyes.
It ended up making a very interesting fish medley. Not to bad at all, really. I think the dogs liked it a lot more than we did.
I got an email this morning asking me about coaching. I called just now. They want me to pay them six hundred bucks for the season . . . I think its a serious obligation to give to children, to help them to have a life greater than your dreams of the future. But paying to do it?
This guy explained that its to cover my expenses, buses league fees etc.
I don't feel its a scam but I can't afford it and if I could I'd donate the money for footballs or some other equipment. My time isn't long enough to pay to give that little time away. Maybe if I wanted to learn about coaching or get something on the CV (resume) but I think I've got enough rep left to not have to pay to coach.
And that's sort of how its going right now. Odd cycle. Nothing terrible happening, some good too, but overwhelmed with the not so good.
That will all change if my
Click images for desktop size: "Unknown" by Unknown dog's flea stuff arrives today. I hope but its like "hope for the best but expect less". This is the final day for the shippers due date for delivery.
I'm not looking forward to fighting with them about a refund.
I got the weed whacker repaired last night so I plan to while away the day doing yard work.
Chances are pretty solid that I'll hurt myself in some minor way so that it will at least seem that life is progressing back to its normal space.
One thing that keeps life normal is that the dogs all remain incredibly happy. Yesterday we went for our usual walk but this time my friend came along. It felt very different. It was different for them for sure.
They were even happier and were totally exhausted when we got home. (Not so exhausted that they couldn't swoop down on fallen fish pieces of course.)
Of course it made no difference to my puppy. She was just pleased to get us there and back.
She's like that.

Click images for desktop size: "Untitled" by Carlo Carra There are 41 Trojans on the US Olympic team. Six more Trojans are representing the countries of their birth.
Some of them played football as well.
I don't think USC will be playing for the National Championship this season. The defense certainly looks good enough to beat anyone but the offense does not look as blessed.
Every player on the offense is a stud. They have talent, they have technique but it will be too long before they start playing as a team. They could end the season as the best team in the country but it seems to much to expect that from them in the first half.
The O-Line is a huge concern. The kids are too young. I kept a 200 page play book for the O-Line. I'd pare it down until the guys could learn it and get comfortable.
They have to learn the plays and they have to learn each other. And in the middle of all that they have to reassess themselves and be capable of brutal self criticism.
And they have to be able to talk to each other, read and inform, ask for help and recognize when a teammate needs help.
Its not easy.
Click images for desktop size: "Transformers" by HasbroThey are benefitting from getting to practice against a D-Line and a set of Line Backers that are frightening in their intensity, desire and talent. But I worry about that. We all have a need to feel happy. It sticks to our skin, this need to be comfortable, at peace. When a child or a dog is abused daily they seldom settle into a nasty funk over it. Instead they learn to think that the abuse is all they are entitled to. They feel uncomfortable when they aren't being abused and beaten. They think the diminution of themselves is happiness and they are not capable of seeing it any other way. Thy think the constant lessening of self is love, is happiness.
Pete Carroll is a good enough coach to be aware of this and to deal with it accordingly. If you just want to coach football you have to be in the NFL. At every other level you have to be a shrink, a dreamer, a surrogate parent in .love with your changing charges - in other words a coach.
But the young men on the defense have no responsibility like that. There job is to throw their bodies around, to respect their opponents and their teammates and to win. Its difficult being a huge 18 year old kid and to suddenly be all over TV and playing in front of 100,000 strangers. Especially when all you know is that day in day out for the past 2 months you've been getting your head handed to you by a teammate who likes you.
The next worrisome defect in the team are the wide outs. Johnny Morton was a fine player and a decent coach but he is not motivating his charges. There's no receiver who stays focused throughout an entire game. Steve Smith was the best receiver USC had in years. He learned and he took what he learned to making the winning catch in the Super Bowl.
Right now this corp looks like it will catch the bomb on 1 and 10 but blow the easy fade when the games on the line. They all have some incredible talent, gaudy talent, but there doesn't seem to be the all consuming desire to win.
On every big, important play it seems like their minds are someplace else when the ball is in the air.
Kids who would come to me wanting to play wide receiver always worried me. Too often they wanted to play wide receiver because they got to stand way out over here and look over at that big pile of violence that was going on in the middle of the field, like it was something outside of them, something they couldn't be responsible for or to.
I get something of that from this group. They know the glamour of
Click images for desktop size: "Youth Reflecting By A Pool" by Maxfield Parrish the position and they've worked hard to develop the skills required. (Although all of them need work on their crack back blocking especially with the way the line is looking.)
The QB situation doesn't worry me greatly. I want Mark Sanchez back for a lot of reasons. Least of which is his giving the team the best chance to win. He does that. He's a clear field leader. But mainly, I like to watch him play.
Mitch Mustain has me confused. I saw two of his games in Arkansas (on TV) and he was unbelievable. Now he seems reticent and confused.
There's not that much difference in prestige or pressure playing at Arkansas or at USC. The system seems tailored for him to succeed and blow people away. I can't imagine what's going through the poor guys head. He is clearly working so hard and seems so focused and committed to winning.
As good and dimensional as Aaron Corp has been looking I still give a big edge to Mustain. He knows how to win and wants to. Like some actors I wouldn't be surprised to see a lot of the star light erupt in his eyes on game day.
I don't think SC will have a weird melt down ala Michigan last year. I still can't see them not winning the Pac 10 for the 7th year in a row. They'll be in a bowl game.
Who knows. Maybe I'm over estimating the opposition. Right now I see them not covering the spread but beating Virginia. Ohio State will be a coin toss. It could end up being a 3-0 game.
Whatever I can hardly wait.
The weekend of my birthday at 4:00 will begin another year of beauty.
I love football.
(I love my friends and my puppy too.)

Click images for desktop size: "Untitled" by Cole Phillips Huzzah and haroo!
With all the pleasantness of the Olympics and Michael Phelps shattering records, the Jamaican runners, NFL pre-season football, the Dodgers taking 2 of 3 from Wild Card leaders Milwaukee, and even with the stories and videos of USC's spring practices, even more exciting than the glimmer that Mark Sanchez might be ready to play against Virginia, one thing has made me giddy like a school girl.
My friend has finished her year end stuff.
Not completely. All that's left are t crossings and i dottings.
She got to take yesterday off (after a 14 hour day on her Saturday). She spent most of the day recuperating. Ambitious plans just vanished while she tried to heal up.
She spent most of the day napping. Oddly this fit my puppy's schedule perfectly. My puppy thinks playing and fighting are only for when the food dish is empty and the naps are all finished. The naps are seldom all finished.
So it was a dull day by most standards, but I found myself immensely pleased. Sometimes its fun just being lazy.
I am having trouble sleeping. Its an old pattern. Deep sleep for 45 minutes then trying to scratch my way back to sleep.
I used to do square roots in my head.
Click images for desktop size: "Open Arms" by NFL Films I'd calculate my exact age as a decimal to the day, then I'd take that number and do the square root. If I got the root number past 5 decimal places I'd give it up and not bother even trying to sleep.
Now I play the old Lewis Carroll invention "Syzygy". Its a word ladder game. An easy example is "Turn a cat into a dog". You change one letter at a time into a word until you get to the word you want to get to.

1. CAT
2. CoT
3. COg
4. DOG

My big variation is to take two words at random that happen to have the same number of letters and go from there.
It generally works and I usually fall asleep. Its more effective for me than self hypnosis. (Tensing than slowly relaxing every muscle in your body and them pretending you're on an escalator going down while you count backwards from 100).
Or sometimes I can watch a mediocre movie . . . I watched "Return To Oz" this weekend. I rather like the flic. I like most thinking about the exec who green lighted the film. A sequel to one of the most beloved movies of all time that has Dorothy visiting a shrink for shock therapy treatments!
Its hardly shocking that the film was reviled and a huge flop. But I liked it then and still do.
Watched the very good "Black Belt". Its a unique film that started from a unique premise. Instead of actors the director. Shunichi Nagasaki, hired true black belts and then taught them to act. it pays off. I can't imagine how hard it was to nurse maid 3 inexperienced actors through their parts but it paid off. They are all believable in their complicated roles.
The ineffectual guy, who was wounded in the opening sequence was a 1st dan, the nominal hero who explores the philosophy behind bushido and karate was clearly 5th dan Shotokan (the highest belt Shotokan awards). The protagonist, the one who strays to create his own path was 6th dan (Japanese Karate Association-JKA).
Their opponents in the film were also black belts so the fighting is as lyrical and jarring and as brutally sloppy as real kumite.
It was interesting, to me, to compare the screen fighting with the other great real life fighter Bruce Lee. Lee once said that karate was like a steel bar hitting an opponent while jung fu was like an iron
Click images for desktop size: "Naruto" by Masashi ball at the end of a chain.
This movie made that clearer to me than the years I spent in martial arts training.
I also watched a free episode (from iTunes) of a TV show called "Primeval". It was terrible. They messed up everything. The premise is dinosaurs roaming the streets of modern day England.
Now granted that sounds cool but they forgot the important things, like everybody knows dinosaurs only appear in earthquakes and atomic bomb tests. Dinosaurs all love kids and dogs. They only stomp on and eat adults, which keeps a natural order to the universe. (Except the Tyrannosaurus Rex, which are just too tough and crazy).
When you mess up the basic facts the show becomes unbelievable. And the CGI was wretched.
Also watched a vaguely amusing series called :Kung Fu Killer". It starred David Carradine as a monk who wanders the west . . . The west in this case is west Shanghai. Carradine still can't fight but he's got the branded tattoos.
This isn't the old TV series or even a spin off. See, in that one his name was Caine. In this one his name is Crane. And that makes all the difference . . .
Every Sunday we watch an episode of the old "Kung Fu" so we should know . . .
Today is to be spent in waiting for the mail man. I ordered some more flea stuff. The dogs are tearing themselves to pieces with the fleas.
I still blame cats. Almost all fleas in North America are designated as cat fleas! There's my proof.
Tried Zodiac. I've always liked Zodiac's pyrethrin spray but there topical 30 day treatment lasts about 3 days up here. Advantix worked well for about two weeks . . . so now I'm trying Advantage which is Advantix without some of the other stuff for mosquitos etc.
If this works poorly its back to Frontline. Which just costs an awful lot.
Now I'm calling the phone company. Reducing the service to the bare minimum. I sort of want to go back to Vonage but can't get a commitment from them that my old Vonage router will still work in a different location. I don't want to have to buy a new one.
There's also the scary idea of having to move to a "dry" or "naked" dsl. Internet connection with no phone line.
It can be done. They have to string a second phone line in while disconnecting the old one. A bit of a hassle no doubt.
And if the weather holds I plan to mow the yard.
A bit messy a bit scattered a bit unpedictible. Smells like life.
I like it fine.

Click images for desktop size: "Untitled" by Nykoli Aleksander When Mark Spitz won his seventh gold medal in 1972 I was in hospital getting cartilage scraped out of my knee. It was a magic time in sports. Miami going undefeated, The Oakland A's with all those cool names (Catfish Hunter, Blue Moon Odom) blasting through the Big Red Machine (Pete Rose, Johnny Bench) in the world series.
But it was Mark Spitz that everyone was talking about. The day after he won his seventh medal I was hobbling around and went to the hospital gift shop. They had a rack of Mark Spitz posters with him wearing red, white and blue trunks and seven olympic gold medals around his neck.
Then Mark Spitz was everywhere you looked. Billboards, magazine covers TV. I remember him on a big deal Bob Hope Special where he wore some strange Chattaqua outfit complete with a straw hat and bamboo cane, and sang and danced a duet with Bob Hope. He was terrible.
He was even worse on the "Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour". He couldn't act, tell a joke or sing a song. He was as bad as your next door neighbor would be on TV. (The next door neighbor who always refused to throw your ball back when it went into his yard. That neighbor.)
It sort of amazing that we never had to see Mark Spitz in some Superfly knock off movie, or see him in some big swimming movie where he mentors some loser kid to super stardom.
I'm sure the offers were out there so I suspect that it was his decision and not the exploitation producers. The whole thing is we kept watching. Seven gold medals and as terrible as Spitz was he always looked like he was having fun, as much fun as we would if we were in his place.
Then abruptly he stopped it all, went back to IUPUI (Indian University-Purdue University-Indianapolis) and finished up his dentistry degree . . . dentistry . . . is anything less fun?
A lot of guys on TV were stunned by this. I'm sure Spitz's agent wasn't too thrilled either. There was an awful lot of commentary about how dentists have the highest suicide rate in any profession.
The same people who were (fairly) bum rapping his abilities on TV were now bemoaning Spitz's proposed absence.
I thought it was cool. Even my parents had long serious discussions about whether Spitz was doing the right thing.
One thing that they mainly ignored was Mark Spitz's hair. In an era when swimmers routinely shaved their entire bodies in an effort to get that dolphin like streamlined thing going. When they showed that a single lock of hair could add one thousandth of a second to your time Spitz didn't shave his body and he wore a mustache and a moddish haircut.
When every coach and parent in the US was yelling at their kids to get a haircut Spitz's arrogance and confidence seemed totally cool to us. And being cool he became a hero.
I don't know much about Michael Phelps. Like most of us I only really heard of him just now. I know he's from Michigan, or at least goes to Michigan.
Click images for desktop size: "Untitled" by Unknown He's got a website, but nowadays, who doesn't.
What I do know is he tied Spitz with seven medals. He's got a shot at busting two records. He can get an 8th medal and join Spitz as the only athlete ever to win every single event he entered. Rah.
I hope he follows Spitz's career all the way and becomes an aggravating fixture in the media and then after he burns all the fun out of being super famous he calmly and happily goes back to his life.
How cool.

My friend is still working like a mad woman.
She had visions of being finished yesterday but encountered a major snafu involving misappropriation of funds or at least unauthorized use of nonexistent funds or something like that (over my head). It wasn't malfeasance just bone headed and wrong.
Since part of the snafu's guy's job is to prevent this sort of thing its becoming a monstrous undertaking getting it sorted out. My friend also has to move around the cash to cover his "bad checks". So, well, the hope is she'll finish today and slowly get our life back.
She didn't take a dog with her today. Seems foolish to me. Dogs are very good at this sort of stuff.
She told me about an email she sent out with the subject line, "The Year End That Wouldn't". Which is a pretty good joke for an accountant (controller).
She was looking at this website in a browser instead of the rss feed. She was pretty impressed with how it looked.
I like how the pages look here. I don't think she understand that I can reread my story just by looking at the pictures.
The words really are here just to frame the pictures.

Click images for desktop size: "My Home Planet" by Macwindows I managed to upgrade to Movable Type 4.2.
It was the easiest Movable Type upgrade I've ever done. The only things it broke were a couple of plug-ins. That was my fault. I always upgrade to a new directory and save the old one for the expected emergencies.
The main joy in the upgrade is the increased speed in generating the html pages. It took it 4 seconds to regenerate all the indexes on this and my puppy's site. It used to take a few minutes.
Other than that I was sort of disappointed in the fact that the interface didn't go through any changes at all. I don't much like the colors, so I was semi-hoping. (Not big time. I don't want to wear out my hoping muscles or use up any luck on the mundane.)
The only other thing to note is an odd tic. Now when the search engines crawl the site it generates an entry in the activity log for every tag as it crawls. Very peculiar.
Its more than a touch aggravating as I note that Yahoo and Google both still heavily reference the old WordPress php url's. Which, of course, now sends people nowhere. The only reason I notice is that, and I'm embarrassed about this, Microsoft's clunky search engine is the only one that's become accurate.
My feeling is that if Microsoft can do it, it must not be that difficult.
The dozens of activity log entries are mildly annoying. I'd expect it to be fixed soon. It could just be the way I've set up my tags.
One of the biggest positives is that Comment Spam has become almost non-existent. It still happens but from 500 to 600 a day to two or three a day is pretty exhilarating. It also means I won't be so aggravated as to accidentally delete the real comments when trying to weed through the enormous list.
I don't use the web interface to post so I can't speak to it.
Nothing else seems to have much changed.

Click images for desktop size: "Death" by UnknownMaybe it was thinking about all my kids competing at NFL camps around the country and the handful of kids in China, but installing the upgrade sent me into a nostalgic mode about an old web app called Coranto.
Coranto was a perl based "news" writer. I installed it on the kids web site (since down, the host that donated the free lifetime service went bankrupt. A sad time for a kind man). The beauty of Coranto was that in the days of CSS 1 I could give the kids a password and they could go in and write a news story, upload a picture with the story and "wham" have it appear on the web page all neat and prettily laid out with their byline! And they could do it all from their browser and never had to learn any html code or layout! A lot of big time news agencies used Coranto for their web sites too so we looked like we were competing.
It seemed pretty miraculous at the time . . .
Of course Coranto and all the other news writers rapidly evolved into blogs, which rapidly evolved into CMS and, now, social networking sites. (Another feature of Movable Type I'm not interested in so I can't say how well it works.)
I liked those old days of excitement. The excitement of seeing something you typed actually show up and for some one else to actually read it! A couple of my kids had the moxie and chutzpah to use their little stories on the web site to promote themselves jobs in the press.
I'm as proud of them as I am of my kids who are struggling with the NFL camps right now.
I've been up since before four. Couldn't sleep. My friend worked another 14 hour day. I hope she's coming to the end of the project, at least that the project ends before her health does.
The dogs have all come in, one at a time to see what's up with me. My puppy came in first, then she left to let the others come in and now she's wrapped around my feet. She doesn't look worried. She just looks happy.

Click images for desktop size: "Knotted" by Joel Faber Not feeling well. Better is the Brit-Speak: I'm feeling unwell.
Nothing I haven't felt before. It has just become more annoying as it goes on.
I keep thinking that I'm near the end of the road. Its been a great trip. More dips and valleys then a sane person could accept as normal, but its been good.
Not ready for it to end.
I can still laugh and I can still enjoy my puppy fighting to get close to me. I still like the sound of the guitars making like a mini-symphony with more grind.
Just tired and unwell. No big deal. Just the unwelcome thoughts going through my mind.
I always worry some. It keeps me cool and unpanicked, I think.
Alkaline Trio are on tour. I think about seeing them. I figure I'll be disappointed but what a nice way to be disappointed.
There's a lot more movies I need to see. There's a mystery that needs solving and the key might be locked inside of one of those frames.
There are stories I haven't heard yet. People, real and fictional I haven't met yet.
When my mother got depressed. (I always remember her smiling and giving me something to eat . . . she couldn't cook, at all, but I remember her handing me food). A divorced mom, barely out of her teens with a rambunctious son had plenty of reasons to be depressed back then. The only solution for an uneducated woman was her own cottage business or to marry well, or at least better.
Anyway, when she'd get depressed she'd tell me the story of somebody, I think it was one of the Eastman's. This fellow woke up one morning. Photography had been his life, not taking pictures but creating the cameras, the tools and the film. That morning he awoke and realized that his art form had progressed as far as it possibly could. There was nothing left to create or to perfect. No one would ever take a better photograph than Stiglitz or Cameron or Weston.
Thinking there was nothing new and exciting in the world, that his art was perfected and that his work was done he calmly shot himself in the head.
Later that day they announced the Polaroid Land Camera. Instant photography . . .
As a kid I never understood why my mother gathered strength thinking about Polaroid cameras. It still baffles me.
It bothers me still that she allowed herself to get so depressed that she had to think about some rich guy blowing his brains out.
I guess what matters is that she gained strength, strength from a story. Strength to carry on from a story.
For me, that's the important part.

Click images for desktop size: "Start-Trafalgar Square" by Unknown And like my buddy Jim used to say, (Jim was the guy who I did that radio show with) "It doesn't matter what we play. There's always somebody out there who will like it."
Morbid thoughts.
My birthday is coming up soon. Too many birthdays for me to care.
I used to use my birthdays to gauge what I'd accomplished, what I'd gained in the past year. I used to spend the day deeply analyzing this.
Since my goal for the past few years have been mainly to stay alive there's not much need for introspection there. Its a pretty binary question: Yes or no.
But I am alive.
I'm pretty happy, happier than I'd thought I'd be in a long time.
I want to stay alive. That also seems pretty binary but, unfortunately it isn't.
I need my own story.
I think I have one. I write it every day.
That sounds trite. It is. I need reminding sometimes.

To distract me I'm updating the website to Movable Type 4.2 Pro today. It will probably break stuff. The updates usually do.
Since Movable Type has spun off a side bar Open Source Project and since 4.2 has been in open beta testing for about 90 days, I have a bit more confidence in this update than I usually do.
The best part about Movable Type is that it generates those stationary html files so even if I break anything you probably won't notice!
Which means I get all the sweaty nerve wracking fun trying to figure out permissions and perl code. Hotcha cha . . .

Click images for desktop size: "Gas" by Edward Hopper I got stung by a hornet last night. They made a nest in the mailbox.
It hurt but no real after effects. I'm still pretty non-allergenic, I guess.
One of my kids got released from his NFL team yesterday. I feel badly for him.
He's one of my kids who I always had the hedging feeling that I failed. Not athletically. He did a great job there. This is his first failure.
Failing doesn't mean much when you expend no effort. Its another thing to fail when you've given it everything, when you've created the dream and then done everything physically possible to attain the dream. Its when you don't add in the mental toughness that I get worried.
He's a man now. This would have been his fourth NFL season.
People always ask about what I mean when I say that turning a young person into a stud athlete isn't my job.
When I was eleven years old my friend Tom and I were great Little League ball players and we dominated Pop Warner.
Baseball was the love of my life. Our coach was the father of our pitcher. I found out years later that the coach had been in the major leagues. He never had an at bat but he tore up Triple A ball and kept getting called up but never seemed to have gotten a real shot.
He and his wife were divorced. The time he spent with his son was as our coach.
He seldom came to our practices. That was fine, we just played pick up games. He gave me one coaching tip in 3 years. It was a good one about how to shade a batter with runners on; how to read the batter to see if he's trying to hit behind the runner or hit away. It took him about 14 seconds. He was drunk. He usually was. That tip stayed with me forever. It was invaluable.
I wondered if Bill Lancaster played ball in our league. He once had a mad crush on a friend of mine. She was gay so it was pretty unrequited. I never got to ask him. Bill wrote "The Bad News Bears". Walter Matthau played a drunk little league manager.
During games our coach would sit in the dugout next to his cooler. He drank about a beer an inning. He was pretty ripped by the 7th. We turned in the line up cards at all the games.
During games he muttered a lot but never really talked to any of us. I don't know if he even knew what the score was.
Thing is we won our league 4 times. We advanced into the World Series sectionals twice.
As kids we didn't care much about things other than playing and winning but as an adult I always figured that people always congratulated our coach and told him he was doing a great job. Maybe he was. Maybe a bunch of poorer kids playing in a rich guys league needed that kind of coach. I can't reflect that properly.
By the time I was getting recruited by colleges I was a superb athlete. A true stud. I was also a pretty poor substitute for a human being. I was arrogant, close enough to sociopathic to at least
Click images for desktop size: "Anime" by Fleya consider that as a job description. My only contact with any shred of humanity was via my unbridled affection for dogs.
It was my running backs coach at SC who took the time to be more concerned about me as a human being than as a stats machine. I mean he took time.
We were pretty successful then too.
But that is the kind of coach I wanted to be. It was hard, much harder for me than just learning the drills and to watch a young person and see if there was an athlete in there. Its harder to see the person inside the body.
Anybody can teach you to run faster. But it takes someone special to give you a reason to want to run faster.
Its about building self respect, self esteem and teaching the young people entrusted to you that they have a value to society and to the world and that that value carries with it responsibilities.
Somehow in my tiny brain greater talent and value carried with it even greater responsibility. Responsibility to your teammates, to your family, to the neighborhood, to the kids watching you play and foremost a responsibility to yourself.
A responsibility to uphold those things that make you what you are; that make you proud of yourself on and off the field. And when things look bad because you hold to those believes you can rely on your teammates, your family and your neighborhood to trust in the kind of man you are and support you and stand with with. And, of course you can always rely on your coach.
If I had learned that simple minded stuff when I was eleven I know I would have been a better player and a happier human being.
I would have been less sociopathic. I'd probably still be as arrogant as I am today.
Comes with the territory I guess.