Pundit Clowns

A friend tweeted a comment about Skip Bayless, a sports pundit, who was criticizing Lebron James. Something about James not hitting a high enough percentage of free throws this season, calling him out for it. Surely at that rate Lebron is not the greatest of players. So said Skip Bayless.

My friend's tweet: "Somehow this clown still has a job."

Clown is right. A clown puts on a show to entertain, makes a fool of himself, and acts as if she or he doesn't know the fool they have become. Rodeo clowns make spectacles of themselves to distract the small-minded bull so that the thrown rider can escape the ring. The clown's job is to be ridiculous but also to get us to watch.

I don't enjoy clowns. I don't have any irrational fear about them. It's just that they don't do much of anything for me. Were I to be thrown by a bull, my opinion would likely change, but I'm not about to join in that nonsense.

Skip Bayless is paid to be a clown. That's why he still has a job. And people pay to be distracted by clowns who point at something inconsequential such as the performance of someone playing a game. There is a history of good sports reporting that both acknowledges that sports are games but also understands the art of them, the poetry and ballet involved, but most of that is lost to the "look over there!" of clickbait and twenty-four-hour sports coverage.

I find the only solution is to look away. I only wish that I was as good during the NFL season as I am throughout the endless basketball and baseball seasons. Do as I say, not as I do. Avoid the pundit clowns and stick with the reporters and writers. Bayless ain't no reporter or writer. He's more of an asshat. You know what to do with those, don't you.

Sports pundits, more often than not, seem entitled and incapable. They can't play the games and so they sit on the sidelines forever pointing out the flaws of those who do play. I understand criticism, but that's not what the likes of Skip Bayless are pedaling. Instead, it's petty, childish, taunting for the sake of entertaining the other kids on the playground. I don't want to be one of those kids. I'd rather play the game myself or watch the pros play it, preferably with the sound off or live and in person with no pundits getting in the way.

Digital Lost & Analog Found

I'm listening to Glen Campbell. Yes, Glen Campbell. Yes, I'm old. Yes, it's good, good stuff. And yes, it's on a vinyl record I bought, own outright, and, if you have a turntable, live nearby, and seem trustworthy, I can loan it to you without any corporation knowing about it. No breaches of privacy. No question about the format remaining compatible or the company going out of business. No user agreement forcing me into binding arbitration if I share the thing. Oh, and I paid for it once and never will again. Crazy stuff, really it is.

This week there was a report about a fire destroying a bunch of old recordings and master tapes. Depressing. Losing art saddens to me. My record collection could go that way if disaster strikes our house. My old record collection suffered the disaster of the CD, Napster, iTunes, streaming, and me selling all of them for a pittance at a garage sale. I wasn't playing them then and hadn't in years. These things happen. I'm not beating myself up. And I'm hoping the house won't catch fire.

I've been thinking about old writing files I've stored in the cloud or on hard drives. I still have things I typed at Clarkson University in 1987. They were written in an editor that saved things as text files. I can still open those with almost anything. By 1988 I was writing with an IBM word processor and, unless I'm willing to do a ton of work or pay some money, those files are gone forever. Paper is bulky and can catch fire, but it's a format that doesn't go out of style no matter how much the electronics industry has been trying to make it go away. There are reasons to hang onto the old ways of doing things.

Sometimes it's not disaster or the march of progress that ruins things. MySpace deleted millions of files from their service. All that music is gone. Corporate decision making, something we can always count on to do what's best and right. Yep.

This weekend I tried resurrecting an old iPod using iTunes. I found out that some of the songs I "bought" from Apple aren't playable without my Apple ID, something I deleted a few years ago. Oh well. I thought I owned those things. Not so much. Is it any wonder I buy records now?

This weekend I downloaded a non-streaming music app for my phone. It only plays music I own, downloaded to the phone. I like it so far. It works whether or not I'm connected to a data stream and doesn't tell anyone what I've listened to so I can be hit with ads. It's no turntable and amp, but those things are pretty tough to carry on a walk or play in the car.

Everything for sale seems only to be for rent. I don't like renting. Sure, ownership is a pain when things break down. Our house needs a roof, my amp has to be repaired, the car needs new tires. Still, these things are mine andhave more value to me than if they were rented or owned by someone else whom I pay in money, data, and the abdication of my privacy.

One of the computers belonging to a member of the band Radiohead was hacked and the bastards stole demo tapes the band had made. The thieves set a ransom and the band responded by releasing the tapes for a small fee they are donating to charity. Good for them and screw those thieves. I don't care if Radiohead has a lot of money. They probably do and I'm happy for artists to make that kind of money. They don't need to be punished for it. The thieves on the other hand should be drowned in a deep part of the ocean. And we should be wary of the progress around us. Nothing is safe online. Nothing stored online is private. Sigh.

Networks can always be hacked. File systems go out of date. Electronic storage breaks down. Just last weekend Google's servers failed on the East Coast. If Google can come as close to melt down as Nine Mile Point, how far are we from Chernobyl?

My records wouldn't survive a fire, but they survive time and the whimsy of the next new thing. Just like Glen Campbell. I swear, this guy still sounds just absolutely great. He's gentle as hell on my mind. Come on over. I'll lend you the album.

A Blog Outside The Schools

The new thing at school is to discover this blog. One kid found it and actually subscribed to my newsletter. Today, another kid came to me with a sly smile. I knew what was going on.

I've kept my blog semi-secret from students because what I do on my own time is my business. That cuts at least two ways. One, what I do out of school isn't determined by my job in the school. Two, my personal life isn't fodder for class. Teaching shouldn't be all about the teacher.

Still, I've known that if a lot of kids find the blog, upper management will find it too and will give me grief. Keeping it semi-secret helps keep things at least a little more quiet and calm.

The grinning kid said, "I had found something really interesting online." He showed me a post I had written about Chris Offutt's book My Father, The Pornographer. It was a teasing moment from the kid (who is likable), one meant to see if I would flinch.

I didn't.

"That book is incredible," I said because it really is. "I read it during our free-reading time in class." I told him how Offutt finds out the extent of his dead father's writing. I described Offutt trying to find his place in relation to his lost and unknown father. It's a book of difficult mystery and masterly prose. "Offutt," I told the class, "is a genius."

While telling this, I pulled up a file and printed copies of this excerpt from Offutt's earlier book No Heroes:

I walked my mother back to her job at a new building that had formerly housed a laundromat. She smiled at the door, resuming her role as a sixty-five-year-old employee in an olive skirt, the ubiquitous green of a redhead. Her hair was a different color now, but her taste in clothes was the same. She thanked me for lunch, straightened her skirt, lifted her chin, and gave me the smile of a receptionist seeing a person out. She nodded once and turned away. I watched the door close after her.

I realized that I knew very little about my mother's life, and that lunch had offered no insight. I didn't even know if she was happy. I hoped that my coming home would allow her to open herself to me. She never talked of her childhood and had told me nothing of her mother. I don't even know my grandmother's name. She died young.

When I was a child, some wild boys drove a hot rod along the dirt road on our hill. It was jacked up in the back with short pipes that produced a rhythmic roar. A large black swastika was painted on each door. I had never seen that symbol before. I thought the car was cool, the driver was cool, the loud music roaring was cool. I especially thought the swastika was cool. For some reason I decided to carve it into the lid of a wooden box on my mother's dresser. I was about ten years old. I used the sharp end of a diaper pen. When my father asked if I had done it, I said yes and told him about the car. He said the box had belonged to my grandmother. It was the only item my mother had from her. I never saw the box again. (112-113)

I read that to the class and we talked about how well it is written, a three-paragraph story that winds and builds like the dirt road along the hill on which he lived as a boy and returned to in My Father, The Pornographer. It was a good teaching and learning moment, perhaps even a moment of grace that began with a kid needling me, my outside-school blog, and discussing a book with the word pornographer in the title. It was a deft bit of teaching on my part, but I'm really glad that I'm quitting.

I love moments such as these. I love to teach. I love to help students learn. And I really love working with kids who push hard against the boundaries. I have learned so much and am glad to have worked with these kids, but I'm still relieved to quit because otherwise I'd worry what upper management might do when they found out I have a blog, that students read it, and that we talk about things in class with supposedly naughty words in them. I would worry about being taken out to the administrative woodshed. I'm glad I'm quitting because I don't have to be consumed by that dread.

The kids' new thing at school is to find my blog. My new thing is quitting school and setting out for new adventure. I'll write about it here on my blog which is open for all to see.

To-Do List

All morning I have felt jacked up and slightly anxious. Not worried, but excited like the molecules in a solution set to boil. Before six this morning I was already thinking there was too much to do. Rather than calm down about it — why be reasonable? — I spun up into an internal frenzy. Three hours later, I'm still jacked up.

It might help to write a to-do list:

1. Call someone about replacing our leaking roof. Call three someones and compare.
2. Get a cash-out mortgage refinance to pay for the roof, new windows, maybe a new driveway. It's great that all of this falls apart as I'm switching jobs and our daughter goes to college. Sigh.
3. Finish school and quit. Twelve days of school remain. Thinking of the last day is good excitement but having a dozen days left is deeeeeeeeeeeepressing.
4. Help get my wife a new job. Got any suggestions?
5. Learn everything about my new job. This may require about five years. Sigh.
6. Do laundry. There's something I can handle!
7. Lose twenty pounds. Please pass the dougnuts.
8. Finish the three books I'm not really reading. Or quit reading at least two of them and get into something good.
9. Have I quit my job yet? How about now? Now?
10. Talk with Mom's financial planner, meet with lawyers, learn the basics of investing, retirement planning, long-term care, wills, trusts, and whatever else. How does next Tuesday sound to get that all done?
11. Write a blog post. (Hey, this might be one of those.)
12. Write a poem. It has been ages. Of course, before that I need to...
13. Read poetry. I haven't made time for that in ages either.
14. Go to my daughter's choir concert. Yay!
15. Quit job. Okay, maybe finish the twelve days first. Damn it.
16. Figure out our retirement, insurance, savings, paying for college, and how many records I can buy before bankruptcy. Brother, can you spare a dime?
17. Remember Dad. He might not know what to do, but he sure seemed like he did.
18. Breathe. Maybe meditate. Get some sleep. Run. Enjoy real solitude (time alone with my thoughts, free from anyone else's).
19. Make to-do lists.
20. Crumple and toss the lists away. Do just one thing right now. Or do nothing.

I still feel jacked up. Let me print this and do #20. It might feel better.