Talking Baseball

The NBA Playoff started on Saturday. I watched a little of this and a little of that, then I watched all of the Warriors hosting the Clippers. The only event of note is that the referees, once again, fucked up royally. They tossed Patrick Beverly, a clever guard who compensates for sucking at basketball by goading and harassing players with superior skill. When I say that Beverly sucks at basketball, I'm exaggerating a little. I don't know the numbers but Beverly is probably an average or slightly below the average offensive player. He can handle the ball, seems to make decent choices, and isn't a terrible shooter. It's his use of his body and mind that makes him extremely valuable. Saturday was a perfect example. Patrick Beverly is valuable to the Clippers when he is on the floor. However, Patrick Beverly is MUCH more valuable to the Clippers from the locker room. That is if he can get a Warrior such as Kevin Durant tossed from the game on his way there. Beverly play...

It's true. When you're a guy like me: consumed with your own importance in other people's lives and use your obligations to others as a means of distraction. When you use worry as an anti-anxiety medication. When you obsess about the details of work not yet started. When you do those things, the discipline and focus to show up at the page every day to address you, dear invisible reader, is scant available. I've been away so long I forgot the bloody name of this thing. The title is my lodestar: Talking Baseball. Fitting that I should be inspired to write my blog the day Joe Biden throws his clacking dentures into the ring. His speech slurred form plastic surgery and a looming and inevitable stroke, he tossed his fedora into the ring. I'm not sure which candidate I favor. We elected a black man a few years back and the backlash sent us into hack tv personalities. Do I dare hope that Kamala Harris wins the nomination? Bernie Sanders has never uttered a policy message...

The more I read about Existentialism (I read ABOUT Existentialism more than I read the source materials), the more I'm confused about the stereotype of the black turtlenecked smoker, world wearily counting their grey days before the welcome annihilation of death. The way I interpret every interpretation of Existentialism that I hear, the more life-affirming and wonderful it seems. I don't get the criticism of Sarte, Camus, and others. I also find what I've learned about Nitsche in the last few years points to him being a genius and misunderstood in the popular imagination. I don't get that he was a Nazi forerunner. He was appalled by the anti-semitism in his one-time hero, Wagner. Or so I'm led to believe. I'm reacting to some recent reading I've been doing in Sarah Bakewell's fascinating book: At the Existential Cafe . I highly recommend it. It occurs to me that this is not a blog post. This is a man musing on his couch at ten o'clock at night. Wh...

I've noticed that the students in my classes don't seem to be aware of some of the latest data on attention and the brain vis a vis multi-tasking. They cannot guess that there could be anything wrong or harmful with using their phones the way they do. Their only awareness is that grown-ups discourage them from using them. A brief digression about grown-ups discouraging cellphone use. I feel within myself, and I hear from others a harsh judgment of children and their use of phones, social media, and games. I notice this in myself and try to keep it in check. I too am addicted to my phone. I have quit social media. I have an apple newsfeed and safari on my phone, but that's it! And yet I compulsively text, check the "news" and otherwise stare at my phone. It seems a tad shitty to judge kids for doing exactly what I do. It's extra shitty if I judge them for using products that are way more addictive than the ones I'm addicted to. I am grown up. I can recogn...

I Know What You're Thinking Don't get upset. I come from a long line of educators. I am floored by the demands of the profession. People have no fucking idea. What teachers do for all of us is staggering.  Do you realize that the people teachers are trying to teach will soon be out on the STREET? What I'm talking about is the tone of some of the signs on some of the (long overdue) picket lines we've been seeing across the country in the last year or so. There's an embarrassing self-congratulatory aspect to the signs. Look, we all know what the broad strokes of the job are. If you entered the profession in the last 40 years and you weren't aware that Americans will REVILE you and pay you shit, then shame on you. Don't pat yourself on the back for making a "sacrifice". The only people who should be teaching are people who wouldn't be happy doing something else. Or people on their way to being administrators or blow-hard seminar givers.  ...

People Don't Want Your Pity The kids left under my care for periods of the day don't need my pity. Neither do their parents. They need my work. They need me to get off my recliner as an adult in the United States of Kiss My Ass and do something about income inequality. Do something about the privatization of public schools. Do something about housing. Make a connection with a red-neck? Perhaps. This idea of "reaching across the aisle" seems a bit suspect. I believe I need to do that within the confines of my heart.  "Judge not, lest ye be judged," type of thing. Jesus had a lot of good lines, didn't He? I watched some baseball tonight. Tuned into the Giants' victory at home over the Colorado Rockies. I watched my team hold onto a one-run game. It felt good. Panik and Posey reached in the bottom of the 8th with no outs. They were stranded. The feeling that the bullpen would then blow it was palpable in my living room. 

Poverty is the thing. I work in a school. Before I started I expected the parents to be apathetic or absent. The parents I've talked to care deeply. The problem, as I see it, is that they are poor. We talk and talk about this or that. The simple truth is that poverty is fucking people in the ass. Public education has been under assault for 40+ years. I used to think that standardized tests were a misguided attempt to measure student and teacher performance. After less than one year in a public middle school, I am convinced standardized testing is a tool to destroy public education. I'm beginning to wonder the same about Common Core. Another thing I'm dealing with is how boring is the content I'm hired to teach these kids. I realized today that I've been hired to sell swampland in Florida. "...sell you dirt to fucking deadbeats money in the mattress..."                              -Richard Roma in Gleng...