Whose Shake Is This!!?

There is too much instant communication and not enough time to contemplate or enjoy it. There are too many things to know and too many things to do and still nobody seems to know anything. There are too many mechanisms and too many gadgets and none of them are the right sort of gadgets that we have any control over anymore. If I had a hammer….a simple real hammer, not a hammer that is glorified staple gun or a working man’s Ouzi, but a real solid Craftsman hammer that I can hold over the head of the ten-penny nail of reason in my little fist of fury, I would drive that nail deep…drive it like a stake into the heart of the vampire world in which we dwell.

Both technology and temperament conspire against us, or, me. The unlimited world in which we live…the wired and wireless universe…is no where near as limitless and boundless as we’d care to believe. Communication which should be more expansive since any fool with a machine can reach a audience unimaginable in the Police Brutality Days of the late 60′s and early 70′s, is actually taughtly controlled by the vehicles we most commonly use to communicate. Twitter limits me to 140 focking characters or less. Not 140 words, 140 characters. Useless as a turd unless you’ve been arrested on visit to Azerbaijan, or have fallen down a crevasse after being chased by a polar bear…then it’s useful I suppose. But too many people ((that’s the REAL problem with the world, there’s just too many people and they’re no damn good)), find a urge to tell the world that they’ve got a boil on their bum. Facebook is even worse. You get to see the pictures. There seems to be some limits to the amount of characters as well. And while Twitter’s fascist chokehold on communication is fairly benign, Facebook seeming knows no bounds. But I’ll save that prize number 12 for another day. Sorry Malcolm Gladwell and those of short attention span with too much of the wrong sense of time on their twitching texting hands, with ME you have to do all 2,500 words, pictures, and the 2-10  minute musical outr0.

There are no shortcuts to actuality. I found this out a long time ago when I attempted to program a computer to write poetry. Unlike some of the computer geek types at the time who took it way too seriously (and still do), I wanted to embrace the machine world and bring a new and terrible poetry to life. So I devised a program in FORTRAN, of course, and banged away at the punch cards as though I were some college boy/man prodigy flogging his way through The Goldberg Variations on a Bosendorfer piano. A world, well…a little world, more like a satellite of Mars than a satellite of Jupiter…of words and phrases and other utopisms filled numerous boxes of cards. And when the punchcards were fed into the IBM 1620 in Green Bay and sednt off to the Univac mainframe in Madison and the machine was set in motion, poetry would emerge as though the machine were a modern day Walt Whitman or William Blake or T.S. Eliot. The conceit was that the machine would have a mind of it’s own. The machine was writing the poetry. The random, mechanized, aggregation of words, verbiage, phrases would have a brave and terrible beauty all their own. The problem, ofcourse, is that the machine DID have mind of it’s own….a mind that wandered into some nested DO loop never to return. When it found it’s way out, the epic realization on my part was that while the machine had a mind of it’s own, it clearly had no soul.

Now it would be nice if I could just look at Facebook and Twitter and say, “That damned machine!!”  But unfortunately, it’s people, not machines. As they say, accordians don’t play “Lady Of Spain”, people do. Now maybe those people know something I don’t know. But unless what they know is the meaning of John Dryden’s poem Absalom and Achitophel, I guess I just don’t want to know. And meanwhile and meanwhile and meanwhile from MY stupid Twitter feed, me and my 12 followers and my 8 followees….some dude wants to fight Shaq, Yoko Ono babbles about changing the course of reality by interception, and Justin Townes Earle wears earplugs when flying to drown out the sound of the low rent suits. I’m with Justin Townes Earle on that one, the low rent suits.

But enough of this shite…let’s get on with the motorsports and the football and the beer…

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I made a list of things to write about this week from the sporting world that taken as a whole have little to do with one another. But as usual, this does not stop me from trying to find some common thread. There simply HAS to a fearful symmetry somewhere in the interstices between Joey Barton’s Hitler Moustache and Kyle Busch winning the Triple at Bristol last weekend. I know that F1′s return to the track at Spa foretells some crazy cuckoo cosmic connection to Nationwide’s return to Circuit Gilles Villeneuve. And hanging over it all like a sultry ol’ moon is the headline, torn from the broadsheets of terrible reality HOTSPURS BUGGER YOUNG BOYS 4-0.

So…let’s go see how right, or how grievously wrong I am.

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The average fan, the general public, the casual viewer of the NFL, is for the most part unaware, or at the very least, not AS aware, of the very imminent potential, possibility, likelihood that there will be no NFL football in 2011. They do not know or realize  the extent of what the pundits, sportswriters, sport journalists, sports bloggers and other nattering nabobs are keenly aware of. A lockout of the NFL in 2011. Which means, for all intents and purposes for the average American, a day, and no doubt MANY days, without football. No Green Bay Packers, no Dallas Cowboys, no San Diego Chargers, no cheatin’ New England Patriots. Instead it will days of waiting around, pissing and moaning, with Who Dat? Who Dat? Who Dat? echoing into oblivion.

Yes, America. The Day Without Football is coming. Best prepare yourself NOW.

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It’s not really the destination that’s important. It’s the journey. So going nowhere is not always a bad thing. Because no matter WHERE you arrive, well…there you are. And along the way, what you have uncovered, discovered, lived and relived determines where you arrive and when, but more importantly, who you are when you arrive there.

So many people get this all backwards and confused. This is not some hippy love-generation psuedo-zen nonsense. ((Although it used to be)) It’s honest philosophy that has been lost in the time-management business motivation and other euphemistic instant gratification psycho-babble. The journey is forgotten, an after-thought, and a mere means to a mostly mean end. As long as the journey is over with quickly along the unrelenting fascism of the Interstate, that seems to be all that matters.Fire up that GPS and get there NOW.

And there you are. But who are you when you get there?  And where are you really when all is said and done?

It’s all fine to have a destination in mind. That’s well and good. But HOW you get there…that’s the key that’s missing most often. The irony of all this is that most people, without realizing it, wind up going nowhere FAST, or somewhere FAST. But all was a blur, and where they arrive is more blurry than they realize. The only people who should be going nowhere FAST are Matt Kenseth, Tony Stewart, Dale Earnhardt Jr, Lewis Hamilton, Sebastian Vettel, Danica Patrick and the rest. Motorports is the ultimate metaphor of going nowhere fast. Although they all have the same destination in mind, Victory Lane, getting to Victory Lane is all about the journey.

A journey does NOT have to have a destination. The journey can be and of itself its own destination. So with that thought in mind, let’s go nowhere and see where we end up.

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I’m almost tempted to borrow a technique or two from the late, great Edgar Rice Burroughs that was used to great effect in many of his novels. such as Beyond The Farthest Star where, the words of Tangor were automatically typed before his eyes as if by ghostly hands; or as in Lost On Venus, where the words and experiences of Carson Napier came to him telepathically and Burroughs’ only role was that of a mere scribe. I sort of like that little conceit. It’s charming and ancient and if what I write is not to mine or anyone’s liking, I can blame it all on ghosts.

With the World Cup final approaching, and by the time this is read by some or many or anyone, the carnage of that beautiful game will be in the books, I thought a few ghost stories would be in order. It’s a summer anime tradition—either telling ghost stories around a campfire, or a kimodameshi–or both. It should be another of those laws of anime, but apparently isn’t.

But I’m fully capable of conceit without resorting to one. So what I tell, what little I will tell, will no doubt be more than ghostly or ghostlike….wispy and immaterial….hopefully reveal the soul of something, but more likely the words will wander around like zombies until someone clubs them (or me) in the head. Here we go.

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Germany 4    England 1

They played like dopey wankers. They were old, they were fat, they were slow, they were a bit too full of themselves as individual stars to play together as a team, and in the end, they were sent packing back to England by a younger, quicker German squad. Sure, Lampard got cheated out of a goal that would have equalized the match in the first half. But nothing in England’s play throughout this match and most of the World Cup gave any indication of team that could win, when necessary, at any cost. They had talent, but not the right talent. They had stars, but as well as Rooney, Terry, Lampard, Garrard and the rest play for their Premier League clubs, putting them together on the same team was not going to get the job done. They were star-crossed from the get go….from the John Terry/Wayne Bridge drama ahead of the World Cup to Wayne Rooney’s petulance on the pitch. And even though they showed some heart on occasion, they really honestly played like a bunch of dopey wankers.

England might have been served just as well or better if they’d sent an NPower League 1 team out there….the Milton Keynes Dons, or Dagenham & Redbridge. Heh. They might as well have…at least there would have been more team spirit.

But….it takes more than just team spirit to win…

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The more we know, the more we seem to forget. Even, and especially, if it’s the things we love the most. It seems ironic and counter-intuitive, but the more knowledge and passion we have, the more capacity we have to overlook something, be it minuscule or essential. I’m constantly forgetting the names of the main characters in the anime shows that I love…if you were to ask me right now to rattle off the names of the characters in Arakawa Under The Bridge or Angel Beats or ef-a tale of memories, I know I would miss quite a few of them. It’s the same lapse we have when we forget an essential birthday or anniversary…not that we actually forget it, but we are off by a day or two. So this week I suppose I will try to remember here, (some of) what I have forgotten over the past several weeks.

But before I forget and rush headlong into the tidal wave of more rhetoric, there is THIS:

Mexico 2   France 0

Ha Ha ha!! Take THAT ya cack-suckin’ cheatin’  fackin’ Frenchies!!  HA HA HA!!! All hail Javier Hernandez  whose goal in the 55th minute and Cuauhtemoc Blanco whose penalty kick at the 62 minute mark sent the fackin’ Frenchies packing.

¡¡Jodimos el Frenchies!! ¡¡¡¡HA HA HA!!!!

¡¡Cagomos en la leche de tu puta madre, Frenchies!! ¡¡¡¡HA HA HA!!!!

¡¡Los Africanos le joderán el culo, Frenchies!! ¡¡¡¡HA HA HA!!!!

I certainly didn’t want to forget about THAT!! And I know all of Ireland was cheering along with me. But I know I’m forgetting something….

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I’m not sure if this brief interlude between posts meant that I needed the time to absorb some vital or essential knowledge about motorsports, football, poetry, music which I hate, science fiction which I also hate, or whether this interlude simply resulted from laziness or a lack of courage. Perhaps all of the above. Or none of it. The NASCAR Hall of Fame inducted it’s inuagural class, a pantheon of spectacular brilliance: Bill France Sr, Bill France Jr, Richard Petty, Dale Earnhardt, and Junior Johnson, and I watched every moment of it. The All Star race came and went and vanished into memory with a tumultuous finish. Kurt Busch grabbed the glory and the Million Dollar Check. I went and grabbed (the next day at The Firehouse) a tall glass of ice and a bottle of Miller Lite for the quintessential Polish Victory Lap that is my custom when Kurt Busch wins a race. And Kurt’s younger brother Kyle, whose hopes of winning the aforementioned race were dashed during the final moments while racing his teammate Denny Hamlin for the win, when Hamlin squeezed him up into the wall, and a few laps later Kyle blew a tire and that was the end of it. Or would have had Kyle not threatened to KILL his team-mate Hamlin. (More on THAT in a moment)

So all of the above, and all the stars in the sky. All of that and the REAL Super Bowl…the UEFA Champions League Final. Last Saturday in Madrid. Barcelona 2  Bayern München 0. Yes…the glory and grace of the game, and the glory and grace of Venessa Redgrave in the movie Letters To Juliet. Nothing and everything to think about. I watched the countless stars as they vanished, like the words I’m writing now.

I toss these words off into the darkness like little stones skipping across the moonlit water.  Hoping against hope that they might rise up into the sky and shine there for at least one or two descending series of moments before dropping into the murky depth. After all, not many people take the time to dive into the deep water, to plumb the darkness for the sparkling treasure hidden there.

But lets go see what’s down there.

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I was, quite possibly thinking of calling this post Confessions Of A Man Insane Enough To Live With Beasts, but that title was already taken. I suppose most titles are already taken, or have been, at some point in time. Grand Prince of Monaco. Taken.  He handed the trophy to Mark Webber this morning. The Shallow Men? Taken. Clowntime Is Over? Taken, both by me AND Elvis Costello. So, in the end, I called this whatever I called it.  Most likely stolen from somewhere or something in the poetic universe. And most likely I won’t live up to it’s semiotic potential that always rides with me as I careen from here to there to somewhere.

I should be writing a poem about writing this. That would make fascinating sports journalism. Also, I should be writing this in some obscure and secret place, a little known state or county park by a river, at an intersection where the secret make-believe world overlaps with the anthropology and archaeology of the past. There, sitting on a boulder,  while the quiet suns ripples like knifeblades on the water below, I begin to write. And if not poetry, then a essay somewhat like this. There I am, but as invisible to you as the elves are invisible to you.

What gives me the most pause is that I’m leaving myself out on a limb. The soul of man, the soul of the poet, the soul of a sportsman or athlete…well that seems to carry more portent than I might be willing to live up to to. Able, I have no doubt about that…willing, well…that depends I guess on my soul. I suppose, however, since I called the shot, I’m duty bound to go through with it. I’m quite sure that when we finally reach the checkered flag, we’ll all be rather disappointed. But in sport, someone is ALWAYS left disappointed at the end. Might as well be us.

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Betty White vs. NASCAR

The Lady In Black did her level best to leave no one unscathed at last night’s Southern 500 at Darlington. Jimmie Johnson was swept up in her hateful arms on lap 180 by the intrepid A.J. Allmendinger whose brake rotor exploded.  That was good to see. It kept the deal interesting. The race roared to a thrilling finish with Denny Hamlin and Kyle Busch and Jeff Gordon duking it out, 10-12 laps to go…..but WAIT!! Betty Freaking White is hosting Saturday Night Live and she’s so gosh-darned cute these days at 88 years of age….so the end of the Southern 500 vanished into “LIVE from New Y0rk, it’s Saturday night!” The ultimate clash of cultures!! Betty White vs. NASCAR. No doubt about the outcome of that, sorry to say. Sorry Denny Hamlin, Betty White takes that checkered flag.

But it was all good in the end, I suppose. Denny Hamlin, the stealth driver of NASCAR….so good and consistent that you tend to forget he’s even there, Denny Hamlin, scored an impressive and hard fought win. It was his third win of the season…and the fact that he’s recovering from ACL surgery on his left knee makes his accomplishments all that more remarkable. Last season, I didn’t even realize he made the Chase until he finish 5th in the points. This year, I’m definitely keeping him on my radar and in my peripheral vision. He tends to be overshadowed by his more extroverted and jovial teammate Kyle Busch. But as the season moves along, Hamlin will definitely be a man to watch. He is currently in 6th, 14 points back of Matt Kenseth.

Truth to tell, I would like to see the NASCAR season play itself out with epic storylines worthy of great German cinema. Bring on the Wim Wenders and Werner Herzogs!  I want passion and turmoil and beauty. Time and its terrifying wonder and mystery. I want the unexpected and poignant. And if NASCAR plays out the rest of the reel like it did last night at Darlington, I’ve got a good feeling that I’ll get what I want.

Jeff Gordon and Jeff Burton, if they spoke German, would sum up the Southern 500 thusly: “In Wieter Ferne, So Nah!” ((Faraway, So Close.)) It’s probably better to say that, than the English expletives their respective situations truly deserve. They share that fate with a few other prominent sportsmen this weekend as well whose fate was to finish close, but naught close enough.

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