Darth Vader at the Olympics

Yes, the title is correct.  The story is innocent enough.  One of the world's fastest double amputees will be allowed to compete in the Olympics.  Hooray for disabilities everywhere!  Hooray for everyone!  The world is becoming a friendlier place!

http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2008/olympics/05/16/pistorius.olympics.ap/index.html

But wait...

What if someone gets three of four limbs sliced off with a light saber and is thrown into a lake of fire, then wears a crazy mask with a techno-mullet and gets James Earl Jones' voice but has superhuman strength?  Can Darth Vader now compete in fencing?

What if Tommy John surgery in baseball actually gave erstwhile finesse pitchers the ability to throw the ball 100+ mph, like in Sparky Lyle's The Year I Owned the Yankees?

What about Robocop in a wrestling match?

Imagine the NBA if marijuana gave players a competitive advantage.

With all this talk about keeping sport pure from blood doping and steroids these past couple of years, how do we account for TIP's (Technologically Improved Players - a Sparky Lyle term) now?  How do we decide what's good for sport and what's an unfair competitive advantage?

The lines may never be drawn well enough.  Some new bleeding heart may enter the fray at every turn, championing the cause of the latest TIP.  Soon, there will be no people competing in their own skin, except at the Ablympics, the new competition made for non-TIP's.

And it won't matter, because it's just a game.  If we want to show our nation's prowess now, we just fly a stealth plane in the middle of the night and drop smart bombs down elevator shafts from 3 miles away, or blast them with lasers from space.

I don't know what I'm getting at here.  I guess I just thought I'd give you the heads up.  If the first woman who encouraged a man to openly share his feelings - in public - knew that one day we'd have emo music, she might have thought differently.

Signing off.  I've said enough.

A thing that I've had to ponder over the last two weeks:

The people are not right.

Let's go all the way back to the beginning and slam through the Bible in under 5 minutes.

Adam and Eve, the only two people on earth, got together and made the wrong decision.  All the people in the world got together and said, "We choose option B."

I'm sure there's more, but for the sake of time we'll cut to a posse of brothers, maybe some of whom were indifferent, maybe some of whom were aghast.  They sold their father's favorite son into slavery.  Good job, fellas.  Way to get your dear old dad to love you more.  Whose idea was that?

God uses all of his force to get a whole nation out of slavery.  All the people get together out in the desert, and what do they do?  Piss and moan.  Build a golden calf.  Fear the battle ahead when the spies come back to tell of the land you're supposed to go to.  Do EVERYTHING we can expect from a mob.  Only two guys from the whole nation got to go into that new land, and this because they had been separated for a while and got to speak to one another with clear heads.  Imagine Caleb and Joshua sitting on the mountainside, watching a sunset.

Once these people are in the new land, God has to continually inspire rulers called "judges" to slap the crap out of them because they keep making idols for themselves.  There's a whole book about it.

The people decide they want the tall and handsome guy, Saul, to be king.  Whoops.

A mob of religious guys get together and trap the town slut so they can stone her.

The political and religious leaders get together and decide to do away with a stinker of a people's leader who is threatening all their preconceived notions of authority.  Q: How can you just get rid of somebody like that?  Somebody who is developing a pretty strong following?  A: Get a mob of people together and give them a choice.  They will invariably pick the wrong prisoner to free.

They will pick the wrong person for office. 

They will follow the wrong religious leader.

They will listen to the worst music and watch the worst movies.

They will be placated.

Their empire will fall.  For this reason.

Proper Spanish

My 50th post on this particular blog stems from a phone conversation I had yesterday afternoon about tattoos. It was suggested that I get a tattoo of something happy, like a flower, on my bum. I reasoned against it.

Let's say, for instance, I go running with the bulls in Spain. This seems like the sort of thing I'd do if ever I get back in shape. Inevitably, I'd probably get gored in the hindquarters and have to go to a doctor to get stitched up. I don't want a flower out there flapping in the breeze for some Spanish doctor I don't know.

He'd be like, "What is this flower on your butt for?" and I'd have no idea what he was talking about, because he'd be speaking proper Spanish.

This is why I would not get a tattoo of a flower on my bum. The end.

Derecho a la iglesia

Let me pose this to you:

Last night was dead at work. I took four calls in 7.5 hours. Then, I was allowed to leave an hour early. I had to wait for Gabi to come get me so we could play a little dominoes as I always do on Tuesday night. Gabi was in town for reasons that shall currently remain anonymous, but they were reasons nonetheless.

I sat for a few minutes at work until I realize I'd be sitting for quite a while. It takes about 25 minutes to drive the 5 miles from home to work in Boston. So, I decided to walk to South Station, where I normally catch the train, waiting there instead. A cabbie or two thought I might be a fare and gave me a honk and a wave and a question. I stepped back from the road.

Another man might also have seen a fare. I'm not sure exactly what he saw. He spoke fewer words of English than I did of Spanish, so amid the fumbling over language he communicated to me that he wanted to find a church, or someplace else he could sleep with his wife and child for the night. Just for tonight, on the way to somewhere else in Massachusetts. A pretty legit story since people around these parts generally don't think of sleeping at a church overnight, also because South Station is where the trains and buses come into Boston from all over.

I pointed him toward the nearest church I knew, no telling what they might do for him there since it's more likely to find a 24-hour consumer shoppe full of goods than it is to find a church with its doors open. Funny how the face of God in society is full of fear at night while the face of money is not.

Lastly, of course, he asked for some dinero por la comida. I had some cash in my wallet, but not much. I gave him 5 of my 8 ones. Even if it turns out he's just some scam artist, I got to practice my fledgling Spanish with a real live native speaker and it worked. For that, I'd pay $5. A lot of you have probably paid more than that in school taxes or tuition, or your parents have, for some b.s. lessons that didn't get you anywhere. If he was telling the truth, then a divine appointment led me to get a ride and leave early and make the decision to stand on that street corner to be a blessing, and for that I'd give everything. I think the $5 was a fair compromise. I would have missed out one way or another if I just ignored the guy.

It's how I do everything. Life is better that way.

Boycott! Protest! Yahtzee!

Hillary Clinton is now calling on George Bush not to show up at the Olympics in China. Barack Obama is "conflicted" about whether we should participate. This relates to Chinese involvement, or lack thereof, in Tibet and Darfur. Cool.

Here's one for you: We should then also boycott ourselves for failing to give the money we said we would to the Millennium Development Goals for third-world countries.

Do you know we once boycotted Rochefort cheese in France because of their policies toward Iraq or some other Middle Eastern country? Let me make this abundantly clear: WE SHOULD NEVER BOYCOTT CHEESE. Heck, we ought to start a new world organization called boycott-of-the-month club, where the only requisite is that members agree to be boycotted by other members.

We even have people who are organizing against Comcast Digital Cable for some sort of unfair practices. Comcast? Really? Power to the people over the idiot box?

Can we please get out of college at some point, dearies?

Food (bananas and candy bars and cigarettes) for thought

Today, I ran my usual grocery tour at around 9:30 in the morning. Just before my bags and I took a rest on the bench, the disheveled guy already sitting there asked me for a cigarette in garbled tongue. Maybe it was his moustache or whatever he'd just eaten that was covered in red sauce that made him hard to understand. I don't think it was the Boston tongue, probably just a hard and garbled life.

After I sat down, I told him "I got nuthin'", my standard response to most of the creeps in these parts. Then, I asked him if he wanted a banana. He responded in the affirmative, so I gave him two. Not a word of thanks.

As he housed the first banana in about 30 seconds flat, I was left to ponder the nature of the gift and had the following streams of thought:

• "Giving a man a fish" is a really good thing, even if you can't teach him to fish or help him create a fishery.
• The gift is not done for the reward of thanks. What is it done for, then?
• Was the gift self-sacrificial? Not in the least. I had bought too many bananas and a couple would go bad before I could eat them anyway. If I had given him $20, I wouldn't have noticed it gone.
• Is it selfish to give my money to Retired Matt Bugaj and his family instead of charity? Isn't he a whole other person from me, just one I happen to like a lot right now?

Then, Eddie asked me my name and told me his as he pulled a cigarette out of his pocket. I asked him why he was trying to bum cigarettes if he already had a pack. To get a different taste?

"A different feeling in the head." Sure, I don't smoke, but I was left to ponder different beers, wines, and liquors and their effects as I rode the bus back home. You can learn something new every day if you look for it.

As the bus approached, He began to pull apart a Milky Way candy bar and shove the caramel-dragging pieces into his mouth. Strings of caramel on his coat and in his beard. By that time, the cigarette had already been sucked to completion and discarded on the ground next to the banana peel, the plastic wrapper covered in red sauce, and the garbage can.

A civilized world demands of my sensibility that I am a little put off by the whole encounter, while my savage understanding can see the reasons behind everything he did. Right now I feel a little like Ed Tom in No Country for Old Men (the book not the movie), failing to comprehend but knowing it's me I'm looking at.

"Seek, and ye shall find."

As I stared out my window this morning, drinking black tea and eating a banana, I stumbled upon a conundrum.

The natural world never appears the same exact way twice. Movies do, at face value, but not the real thing. The snow might fall every year, even the same sort of snow, but we never see the same set of flakes fall in the same way. They will always ride the wind differently, always land in new places. The same car might always be parked in front of the house, but there must be something new inside, or new dirt, or something. New patterns, new microscopic hitchhikers...

I have a penchant for watching some movies to the point that I know every scene, every line, without practicing or studying. They become a part of me. If you have ever had a conversation with me, I've probably pulled up some obscure reference that puts a look on your face so quizzical I need to explain where my most recent words had their origin.

My existence, whether in viewing or listening to music or reading, contains in large part in the repetitive consumption of human creations, not in a raw interaction with an ever-changing yet cyclical nature.

I have recently come to believe this to be a mystical connexion to human origins, to the oral tradition that held our history before heiroglyphics or the alphabet, to the practice of memorizing poetry in grammar school that was only abandoned within the past hundred years.

ASIDE: We live in an experimental time. Population growth and technological progress since the industrial revolution have propelled us into such a state of change that anything being accepted as wisdom must be scrutinized against that which was previously conventional, because there may have been a reason for it that we are now overlooking in our zest for the power of our own ideas.

Should I believe that this exact repetitive nature of human consumption is therefore a stain upon our existence, that we should only interact with the natural world in which things are forever changing, if only minutely? No. This requires some pondering to arrive at a couple of mildly stunning conclusions.

The first regards the natural world. Look at its cyclical nature. Look at the shock it brings to the system to see a blood-red moon, yet even this we can measure to be something that happens twice a year around the globe. A month, or "moonth", is roughly approximated to the time it takes to travel from one full moon to the next. Everything is cyclical in nature, and we can hardly find a sign that doesn't point to something we have seen before, or at least to something we can expect based on what we have already experienced. Therefore, this same sort of repetition, whether in the telling of tales or the memorization of poetry or the watching of movies, is in line with the natural experience intended by the Creator.

Likewise, the repetitive nature of human texts is not purely duplicative. Whether it be the Bible or The Big Lebowski or a Mark Rothko painting, we bring new experiences with every viewing, so this exact mimic of what we had previously seen takes on a whole new shape. The more we see the same thing, the more we understand it, and the better we understand ourselves.

So, nature, unlike television or books, is always just a little bit aesthetically different each time we see it, even if we have seen it before. However, books and television are likewise different each time we see them because of what has come through us in the meantime. Yet both remain entirely cyclical. This is just a small exposition of the nature of all things, which is necessarily dual. Everything is repetitive AND changing. We have free-will that is predestined. Blackness, which appears at first glance to be a magnanimous presence, is the absence of all color, while whiteness, which is associated with purity and newness, is the presence of all color.

Just think what a minute of snowfall could do for you.