Gentle On My Brain

Tony Dorsett, star running back of the Dallas Cowboys during the seventies and eighties, has been diagnosed with having signs of chronic traumatic encephalopathy or CTE. The 1976 Heisman Trophy winner has suffered memory loss and depression for several years, symptoms of this degenerative condition of the brain. At fifty-nine years of age, Mister Dorsett is not pleased to be joining the ever-expanding ranks of professional football players who suffer from this condition. Two more players were found to have CTE after months of clinical examination and study at UCLA. Five more were found last year. It is unlikely that this number will get smaller as time goes by, since detection of CTE is still in the early stages.The disease is shown by a buildup of tau, an abnormal protein that strangles brain cells. “Don’t ask me what tau protein is because I don’t know exactly what it all is,” Dorsett said. “All I know is that before, they could only be able to find tau if you die first and they open up your brains.”
A small relief for Tony Dorsett, and perhaps for other former players who are currently wrestling with similar circumstances. Maybe that's why  John Moffitt is quitting the game now, even though he is currently on a team that could take him to the Super Bowl. He told the Associated Press, "I just really thought about it and decided I'm not happy. I'm not happy at all. And I think it's really madness to risk your body, risk your well-being and risk your happiness for money. Everybody, they just don't get it and they think it's crazy. But I think what I was doing is crazy." Crazy like a Fox? Not necessarily if you mean John Fox, Moffitt's coach, who is currently residing in the cardiac care facility of a North Carolina hospital. John's brain seems to be alright, but his heart wasn't in it. Meanwhile, down in Texas, Gary Kubiak is recovering from a transient ischemic attack, a condition that temporarily stops blood flow to the brain and causes stroke-like symptoms. What do all these men have in common? They have, at one time or another, played or coached for the Denver Broncos. Maybe those brain surgeons at UCLA should check out the thin air at Mile High Stadium.

A Plus Attitude

"We are all different, and we all make a difference." These words are part of the A Plus Attitudes that I read out loud and the rest of school repeats after me. Kindergarten through fifth grades. Teachers and parents. We repeat these words together because it is what we teach. It is what we want the kids to learn. It is what we want to believe.
My wife told me that she wants to believe that the kid who set fire to another kid on a bus in Oakland last week was just "playing a prank." That would be the very nicest possible lens through which this event could be viewed. You see, Sasha Fleischman was different. Choosing to identify as neither male nor female, eighteen-year-old Sasha shows up as different. Sasha shows up as a challenge for pronouns at the very least. Sasha also shows up, periodically, in a skirt. It was that skirt that was lit on fire by the "prankster" as Sasha slept on the bus home from school. As a parent, of all the threats to the kids of Oakland, falling asleep on the bus isn't one that you might expect to have to warn against. Remaining ever-vigilant against the possibility of roving practical jokers with lighters is not where I would spend my parental lecturing hours.
Neither my wife nor I actually believe that Sasha was attacked because of some teenager's incredibly poor sense of humor. I believe Sasha was a target because of that difference. That diversity that Oakland celebrates so proudly doesn't always seem to play out in every corner of this melting pot of a city. How do we choose to celebrate that diversity? By setting people on fire?
Sasha Fleischman is different, here to make a difference. This is what we believe.

Like It Mattered

What's the old saying? You can lead a voter to a trough of poisoned Kool-Aid, but you can't make him drink it, unless he's already developed a taste for it. Or maybe it's something about tainted tea, I can't remember exactly now. My point, and I do have one, is this: American politics is broken.
Like the Obamacare website, there may be no amount of repairs and updates that make this tired old machine function properly again. That siren call of "Hope and Change" seems like the stuff of dreams now. Guantanamo Bay is still open for business, and the economy is still cruising along like it was going to be 2008 all over again at any second. It used to be that I could take solace in the aphorism that used to be applied to the weather in my hometown: "If you don't like the weather in Boulder, wait fifteen minutes." That idea was easily transposed to government: "If you don't like the government, just wait until the next election."
Well, a couple things about that: My good friend and confidant who lived with me back in my college days had his own version of that weather thing: "If you don't like the weather in Boulder, MOVE!" Which brings us to the love it or leave it mantra. I don't know if I want those to be my only choices. I want to believe that I am working every day to make my city, state and country a better place. I know that this process relies on compromise, and I'm not foolish enough to think that I can get what I want by simple force of will. Or shutting down the government.
It would be an awesome thing if there was some sort of united moment for these fifty states. Like the singing of "God Bless America" on the capitol steps. Like a government by and for the people. Like it mattered.

Sour Oranges

The other day I was talking sports with my neighbor. As it happens, he is the other Denver Broncos fan living in the city of Oakland. We both agreed that this year had been a good one so far, and he wondered if maybe this would be the year that we, or rather the Broncos football team, might make it back to the Super Bowl. "But really," he confided in me, "I just want 'em to beat the Raiders." He went on to expound on his various allegiances and rooting interests. He told me that he really only watched football and rugby, and the other team he was sure that he didn't want to win anything was the Dallas Cowboys. "Or the New York Yankees," he practically spit.
I began to form a picture that made sense to me. He was doing the classic underdog gambit. The one where you can't root for teams that have been successful for any amount of time. Winning traditions are boring. It's much more interesting to hook up with the group of guys who struggle a bit.
I recognized this trend in myself. Once upon a time, the University of Colorado Buffaloes' football team was a perennial also-ran in what was then the Big Eight Conference. We accepted our place just behind Nebraska and Oklahoma as the powers in the ways of the pigskin. Every so often, we might beat one or the other, but never both in the same year. Then in the late 1980's, things began to shift. Suddenly CU became a football powerhouse, and we ended up playing in the Orange Bowl against Notre Dame. Those were heady times. Now that the Buffaloes have switched to the somewhat arbitrarily constructed Pac-12 conference and taken up residence in the cellar, I feel more comfortable with my fandom.
Notre Dame. The very notion of their Golden Domes causes me to gnash my teeth. They were the only college team I knew of back in my youth to have their own TV show. Not just in South Bend, but across the country. When Colorado finally beat the Irish on their second attempt at the Orange Bowl, I was satisfied. We had a National Championship. The kind that people could argue about, like we used to in the olden days. We had made it to the top of the mountain, and looking down there wasn't much to see but where we had come from.
Which brings me back to those Denver Broncos. It's been a while since they won a Super Bowl. I wouldn't mind if they did, but I'm guessing that when it's all over, the Orange Crush won't be nearly as sweet.

Athletic Support

No one needs to explain the hierarchy of the locker room. I spent my time there, back in the day. But it was the time I spent as a student athlete in junior high that let me know just how intimidating life can be even though I had ascended to the ranks of the elite: The Jocks.
Centennial Junior High was one of the first junior highs to have separate locker room facilities for the kids who were on their sports teams. When I was in seventh grade, I only heard stories about showers that were really hot. Lockers in which you could hang your clothes and had room for your books as well. And there was even a whirlpool. This was a radical step up from the ventilated baskets that we were used to stuffing all of our non-PE accoutrements while we were out in the gym. If you chose to try out for one of the varsity sports teams, you would be afforded a spot in that athlete's Valhalla, the downstairs locker room, providing you stayed on the team.
I spent a year upstairs, being tormented by the eighth and ninth graders, and the seventh graders who had the genetic advantage of size even if their brains and opposing thumbs were slow in development. It was part of the reason that I decided to go out for wrestling when I got to eighth grade. Even though I was a fixture on "B" mat, never quite good enough to make "A" mat, I was happy for the step up. The initial experience of being welcomed into this fraternal organization was a welcome change to the Lord of the Flies touring company I encountered upstairs. Saying goodbye to my nerdier friends as we entered the gym to go change with the other guys on the wrestling team before PE each day gave me the air of superiority. But that air was pretty thin.
As I came to find out, all the harassment I experienced upstairs was just distilled into a finer, more intense version with warmer showers downstairs. The towels still got snapped, and I still found crusty snot blown on my locker door by those who felt compelled to mark their territory by any means necessary. I didn't feel any of the security I might have expected. Rather I felt the pressure to maintain my position in this unnatural order of things. I chose to join the track team in the spring so that I wouldn't have to give up my spot downstairs.
I never stopped getting abuse, but I didn't want to surrender. I stayed and when I entered ninth grade, I went out for football so that I could be in the sports locker room year round. The name-calling and random abuse never fully subsided even though I was, by all outward appearances, one of them.
I wasn't really. I felt the sting of the homophobic insults and the snap of their rat-tailed towels. I stuck with it because I really believed that I would triumph via sheer tenacity. It never got any easier. Which is why when I got to high school, I left my athletic career behind and focused on music. I was in the marching band. We had lockers for our instruments in the band room. I got along with most everybody there. And I never once got snapped by a towel. Maybe Jonathan Martin should have done the same.

Picture This

Janet Yordon blamed me for ruining her third grade class picture. I wasn't making a face or acting foolish. Okay, I wasn't acting foolish, and I wasn't making a face on purpose. I was wearing an expression of profound dismay. It was probably brought on by the trace of Navajo blood that coursed through my veins. I was deeply concerned that the act of taking my photo would take a portion of my soul, or at least the portion of the portion that would equate with the fraction of my soul that would be equal to the bit of my bloodline that could claim to be Navajo.
Or at least that's the story I like to tell myself forty-plus years after the fact. I think the reality was more like this: I was pouting. I didn't know how to be a good sport when it came to sitting still and allowing everyone to put on their best face. I'm fairly certain that if we could have all gone to our positions on the risers and taken the picture as abruptly as humanly possible, I might have been able to manage a smile. Or at least I could have avoided sticking out my lower lip and letting ever other muscle in my body go slack, giving the appearance, as Ms. Yordon put it, of being "a walrus."
As lasting mementos go, this one goes down as a finger-pointing-who-was-that-guy kind of thing. I was in the front row, and as the rest of the class filed in behind and around me, I could feel my level of disdain rising. How much longer do we have to sit here? I was sitting up straight, looking forward, not at my neighbor. Why couldn't everyone else do the same?
The whole experience could not have lasted more than seven or eight minutes, but for me it felt like an eternity. The kind of an eternity that only a very sensitive third grader with glasses sitting in the front row could possible sense. Or a walrus. Sorry, Janet.

Act Two

Last weekend my son and I were driving up the highway, listening to the radio. We heard a song by the Foo Fighters. We stopped and did a few errands, then as we drove home, we heard a song by Nirvana. I made an offhand comment about how we were hearing the band that Dave Grohl played with before he became a Fighter of Foo. This was a pretty snarky riff on a bit I used to do about how The Beatles were the group Paul McCartney played with before he got together with Wings. It was only later that evening that I began to reflect on my own snarkacity.
The Beatles recorded a dozen albums in the ten years they were together, which have since been repackaged and dispersed in at least another dozen permutations. Wings produced seven albums from 1971 to 1979. Paul's latter group had twelve top-ten singles. The Beatles did a little better than that, but did that make it okay for me to toss around my snotty remarks? I don't think that Sir Paul is concerned primarily with my point of view, but I did find myself feeling a little ashamed of making fun of the guy who wrote "Live and Let Die" as well as "Yesterday." After all, my personal total of hit singles totals exactly zero.
Which brings us back to the Foo Fighters. Dave Grohl has had enormous commercial success with his second group. He's got eleven Grammys with "Foo" all over them. That's ten more than Nirvana won. Were the four years Dave spent the drum kit with Kurt and Krist ultimately more artistically impressive than the nearly twenty years he has been out in front of the Foo Fighters? Is it fair to compare "Hey Jude" with "Silly Love Songs?" Of course it's not, but it does make me wonder about F. Scott Fitzgerald's observation that "There are no second acts in American lives."
It makes me wonder what Fitzgerald's band was like after Gatsby.