Monday, August 27, 2007

The Factor Of X



The other day, I didn't feel like playing basketball anymore.

But a 6 ' 7" guy with dreadlocks told me it took him too long to wash his hair, so he needed to go ahead and give himself enough time and hit the showers before heading back to work, so I agreed to play so that the numbers worked.

As I walked onto the court, I told them, "I know why you want me to play. I'm the X Factor."

Now, that's a term used often in sports to describe ... well, I think it's to describe someone whose performance is critical to the game but in an unknown way.

Bob, the Braves can win this game, but the X Factor is going to be Oscar Villarreal, whether this everyday, forgettable pitcher can strike out a left-hander in a crucial situation that might or might not arise.

When I thought about what I said, I felt compelled to ask aloud the crucial question, the question that is the X Factor in determining the usefulness and very meaning of this term:

What is the value of X?

And that's when you realize.

Everyone is the X Factor. You can't predict what anyone's going to do.

You can't predict that the guy who sucks is going to suck worse than he normally sucks or will not suck enough to change things in your favor.

You can't predict how on his game your best player is going to be. Whether he'll score 46 points or just his regular -- but stellar -- 30.

The truth is, everything and everybody's an X Factor. Everything and everybody is something that is but isn't known until the future fulfills it.

These sportscasters really need to examine their metaphysics before stating the obvious.

Wednesday, August 22, 2007

Vick Jersey Lands PETA Activist In Hospital



ATLANTA -- A long-respected animal-rights activist and former organizational director for the Southeastern division of PETA is in serious condition today after refusing to remove his replica Michael Vick jersey.

"I knew I'd have to confront the cognitive dissonance eventually," James Violette said from the hospital Thursday morning in a rare interview from what might or might not be his death bed. "I love animals. I've run through the streets of this city dressed up as the "Ronald McMurderer" clown. I have a dog, 18 cats and a bunny rabbit I rescued from a pre-schooler three weeks after Easter. I've refused to wear deodorant. I've paid my dues."

Violette paused to compose himself in front of a throng of television cameras, raised his battered head and shouted, "But, damnit ... What the hell are we going to do now?! Oh well, go Falcons, baby! Yeowwww!"

Violette was dining alone on tofu soup at a downtown Whole Foods cafe Wednesday afternoon when a horde of 32 volunteers from the local People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals affiliate came in for a late lunch, Atlanta Police spokeswoman Kay Ninne said.

The group had been spending the 100-degree afternoon outside the Georgia Dome protesting the Atlanta Falcons organization and its relation with Vick, the Falcons' embattled quarterback who on Monday will enter a guilty plea on federal dog-fighting charges that include accusations of executing poorly performing dogs through means of electrocution, hanging and drowning.

The protesters recognized Violette as a high-profile PETA activist and saw him wearing Vick's #7 jersey, Ninne said. There was a brief argument, and a store manager asked the protesters to leave, citing company policy for both safety and proper hygeine.

The protesters waited in the parking lot for Violette as he carried a grocery bag filled with organic, hormone-free cat food and a bottle of hand-squeezed lemonade, Ninne said.

The mob demanded Violette remove all his clothes, wrap the jersey through his legs to serve as "an apparatus resembling an adult diaper" and spend the entire day outside the gates of the Georgia Dome until he managed a successful bowel movement, Ninne said.

Violette made a brief plea with the mob but was pelted with dog chains and spiked collars protesters had been wearing to make a salient, visual impact on any impressionable passersby.

Once Violette was lying unconscious, the protesters smeared his face with pigeon feces and began shouting non sequitir propaganda about the evil, capitalistic American zeitgeist that contributes to the dependence of certain avian species on the human waste of natural resources, mainly consisting of half-eaten cheeseburgers left on park picnic tables.

No arrests were made once police arrived; the group had scattered and blended in with the sizeable homeless community nearby.

"I've been a Falcons fan my entire life, even though they've never done squat shit," said Violette, a 38-year-old high school guidance counselor. "I always figured a Falcon was an OK mascot. I don't keep birds or fish, because I don't believe in trapping a bird in her cage or using a fish bowl to sequester young Clownfish from their fathers like in that Disney movie a couple years back. So I figured it was OK to do the Dirty Bird. You know, that touchdown dance they did about ten years ago that year when the Broncos destroyed them in the Super Bowl."

Michael Vick was to be the savior of the franchise when Atlanta acquired the first pick in the 2001 draft from the San Diego Chargers, which allowed the Chargers to draft franchise stars LaDainian Tomlinson and Drew Brees.

Sales for Vick jerseys skyrocketed and remained steady even as Vick's performance as a quarterback came into question in the past few years.

He remained the face of the franchise and was the beneficiary of what marketing experts refer to as "residual indifference," a mass state of mind wherein a celebrity is vaulted to lofty heights simply because a fan base can't recognize anyone else around him.

"If you like football, and you live in Atlanta, and you want to look like a rapper, what other jersey are you going to buy?" said Mark Kohlitlikeitis, an assistant professor at Buleschit College in Persimmon, Idaho, and a world-renowned expert on the relation between sports, pop culture and marketing. "I'm sorry, but Warrick Dunn doesn't exactly scream out 'live and poppin'."

In 2002, Violette was volunteering at a local animal shelter when Vick passed by, pointed into a pen and said, "I'll take those." Vick walked past Violette and said "What's up, dawg?" before he left with two pit bulls.

"That was a classy move," Violette said. "He didn't have to talk to me. I've been a Michael Vick fan ever since. I don't know what we're going to do without him now that we traded Matt Schaub."

Violette bought his Vick jersey in 2003 after saving money during a hunger strike protesting the treatment of mosquitoes during mass insecticide sprayings as part of Fulton County's mosquito-control program.

In 2006, he paid $12,276 for a fingernail clipping from one of the two middle fingers Vick used to "flip the dirty bird" to an unruly home crowd upset over a fourth-straight loss and Vick's 37 percent completion percentage.

"I just always stuck with the guy, even when he flipped us all the bird," Violette said. "I thought, 'Hey, here's a guy expressing himself through the beautiful synergy of man and fellow avian Earth-dweller. Let the birds fly free, Michael!'"

The leather football was always a sticking point with Violette, but he said his love of earning bragging rights over the Carolina Panthers when the Falcons made the NFC Championship game two years ago helped him bury the nagging hypocrisy deep into his subconscious.

The news of Vick's indictment on dog-fighting charges took a while to reach Violette. He had spent the past few months on a PETA mission that required him to isolate himself from all visual media so that he could document incident-by-incident each time a cat took a tumble in "America's Funniest Home Videos" on WGN.

It was only during a commercial break that Violette flipped over to ESPN to learn of his idol's legal troubles.

"It's disappointing," Violette said, "but I'm sticking with him, man. It's hard to explain why, but when Michael Vick stares down one triple-teamed wide receiver and decides to tuck it and run, that shit is off the chain. Wait, that's dog-fighting slang, isn't it? Screw it. My head hurts."

Tuesday, August 14, 2007

Well, Maybe Somethin' Beats It




Nothin' beats kickin' back and listening to the Braves ...

That's the ad they play on the radio. And I have to say I'm inclined to agree, at least in the spirit of the sentiment.

I enjoy listening to Chipper Jones doing in the San Francisco Giants with a 9th inning game-winning single, while I'm drinking a few beers and looking through the grill smoke at the night sky with the off-vertical pairing of Jupiter and the red Scorpius star Antares putting their celestial signature on the Summer of '07.

That's nice. You might even say that "nothin' beats it."

But I'm just not so sure.

Not entirely, because I can think of something that can beat that.

Mainly ...

Driving from the damp, lush windward side of Oahu beneath the volcanic range and thorugh to the leeward side where the sun is always shining, in a 1968 Ford pickup that doesn't get great gas mileage but feels so right with the push-button radio playing Ben Harper's "Picture of Jesus" (the "There Will Be A Light" version) through analog speakers and no A/C but you don't need it, heading to the North Shore to swim among the majestic waves of the Pacific before you get on a plane and head to Glendale, Ariz., where the University of South Carolina Gamecocks are playing in the national title game and winning handily in a sublime moment of long-suffering vindication, followed by a return home where your rejuvenated leg muscles find it within themselves to tap the top of the backboard, after which you go into work and tell your masters to go fuck themselves with the exhaust pipes of their tricked out, Baby- Boomer Harley motorcycle fantasy penis enlargers, from where you then head down to the nearby river and tell kids that life is beautiful (even though the water is polluted) because they are the future and they realize it and you feel like you've done something good, then you drive a ways out into the country and eat a big old plate of barbeque from the only vinegar-based guy in your multi-county radius, who also has a view of the Blue Ridge mountains and a stone fireplace for when it actually does get cold again, and you watch "Philadelphia Story" and "Punch Drunk Love" and the "Star Wars" trilogy, along with all the other stuff you think rocks ass, somehow in one sitting that doesn't feel overly indulgent, because you deserve it for some reason and it was raining outside anyway, and then you know you've been promised through a groundbreaking "Total Recall" technology a guaranteed, authentic aesthetic journey to the first time you realized you were 17 and the ocean was nearby and there was the faint smell of mold in the guest house you camped in and the seawater breeze was nearby as Led Zepplin's "Song Remains The Same" played on the clock radio, and then you travel down to Florida and catch a Ladyfish and crack open coconuts and teleport to La Jolla and jump off the rocks into the high tide and eat authentic Mexican food, and return to find that all that's good is going to be good, and all that you want is free, and that you'll feel fulfilled with that because you're not a greedy bastard and you want to do other things for people and those people will feel better because nobody will be taken advantage of them, and then a scientist from a super-secret government agency picks you as the test subject of a new drug that allows you to do ... whatever it is you want to do that you think you want to do but didn't earn but that's OK because ...

Actually, I'm not quite sure that beats listening to Braves baseball as the fireflies still flash and defy the decline of summer.

Because that really is a pretty good thing.

And it's certainly simpler.

Friday, August 10, 2007

'Let Us Say A Prayer For Every Living Thing Walking Toward A Light'

I don't know what it's like to be a man who claims a son who isn't his.

I don't know what it's like to be a man wielding a machete and slicing through thick kudzu taller than he is, hoping to find alive a son who isn't his but a son he claims.

I don't know what it's like to be that man, laboring beneath the unforgiving sun, only a few feet away from the body of a son he claims but a son who isn't his.

I don't know what it's like to be that man.

Nor do I know what it's like to be the men who had to actually see a 4-year-old boy lying dead.

Nor do I know what it's like to be the actual father who is responsible for his death.

The only thing I know, for absolute surety, is the crushing despair inside of hearing someone yell, "Found a body!" mere feet away from you.

As life is being lived. As weed eaters and chainsaws buzz. Knowing that we all know we're not going to find anything in that forest that's anything good in this world.

Except something that used to be but is no more.

It's a reality.

One that refuses to leave you, whether in your dreams or listening to gospel music in your truck or with your head in your hands while you take a break from playing sports or as you close yourself in a room with your own 4-year-old son, wrapping your arms around him as tears stream down your face.

I don't know what it's like to be that man who claims a son who isn't his.

But I do know, breathing in this stagnant air of humanity out of balance with its world, what it's like to be a man who claims a son.

And that, if only that, makes a man, and helps make a human being mean something in this world.

Thursday, August 09, 2007

He Went ... A Little Nuts




It's hot out there.

Triple digits, in fact. For three days in a row.

For two days I stood in this shit fully dressed in my business clothes. My work shirt was completely wet with sweat by the time I left. Everything started to look a little purple there for a couple of minutes.

Which gets me to thinking: Doesn't heat make people a little crazy? You know, the kind of heat where you find some non-descript dude just lose it and finally act out on his deep-seated anger fueled by twisted righteousness? Something about all that energy stirring up things, like how heat gets the thunderstorms cracking?

(Personally, I think I tend to just get too lathargic to do much of anything, particularly if it requires me to leave my house and back out into the heat. But that's just me).

I then get to thinking: Would you say that one of these people who has lost his mind is "going postal?"

It used to be that postal workers had that ... thing ... about them. Back in the late 1980s and through the better part of the '90s. It was something that, for lack of a better way of putting it, would make them come back to their workplace and shoot the whole joint up.

But something doesn't seem quite fair.

People might be losing their minds, but are they really "going postal?"

No doubt government-run services can be frustrating. The city parking ticket clerks come to mind, except I have a weird feeling that they might be more of a mind to show up to your workplace and take the fight to you.

But I've found the people at the post office these days to be quite pleasant, and their new track record has shown that, at the least, they don't seem to be feeling particularly psychopathic.

It's a cliche. An anachronism. The vocabulary of the lazy.

If your lexicon is limited and you think it makes you sound nuveau to throw a little slang, you might want to rethink "going postal." Because postal workers themselves aren't really going postal anymore.

And while we're at it ... let's just drop "da bomb" on 1997 and leave it where it belongs.



Thursday, August 02, 2007

This Situation Feels A Lot Like Life

The sultry dusk sets in, and the vectors are emerging for the hunt.

It's been a day. My eyelids slowly close then quickly open again. I slap at my shoulders and forearms and feet as I watch the pedals make their revolutions.

My eyes drift shut again.

I can't fall asleep.

My blood will be theirs.

My eyes close, and I open them again.

Smack! And the blood of others splatters.

They are carriers of diseases that do not afflict them. We are immune only so far as we are willing -- or able -- to be.

They are making a life for themselves, yet it's the life they lead that matters.

It's not a life I can lead.

One of defending the actions of those who see their chosen path as simply "trying to make a living."

They are carrying the disease that is corrupting us, this disease that hurts only those who susceptible to it.

Those of us who still have it within us to care.

Right now, with the these bloodsuckers all around me, I just have to keep my eyes open.

And I can't help but think this situation feels a lot like life.