Sports I

Sports, oh my God.

Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese and Haley Van Lith and Cameron Brink and Paige Bueckers.

Right, Bueckers?

New girls on the block.

Mavericks lost to Celtics and Edmonton tries to come back from 0-3 in hockey finals.

Now the hockey series is at 2-3.

I drove down to St. Louis to catch the championship of the UFL while the college world series was starting up in Omaha.

UNO softball got as far as they ever have in the NCAA tournament.

UNO baseball were the regular season champions of the Summit League even though they had a losing record.

UNO hockey went to the national tournament and lost to Denver.

UNO volleyball were Summit League champions along with softball and men’s soccer.

UNL volleyball went to the championship game but lost.

Husker football is still underperforming and I wonder how long they can continue to not be a winning team and still hold the imagination of the entire state in the fall months.

Hopefully forever.

Why not?

Chicago has their losing teams that everyone is wrapped up in no matter what.

Da Bears and the cubs.

Dallas Cowboys.

Husker football. 

Teams people support, no matter what, rain or shine.

I know the New York Knicks were like that for a long time but things got a little dark for them for a while with one of the losingest records in the league for a handful of seasons in a row.

They tried to pump some life blood into the organisation with one of the highest paid athletes ever, Carmelo Anthony, and the legendary Phil Jackson as president.

Didn’t work. Actually anyone who was involved in those Knicks years had their reputation destroyed.

I may have been one of them. I paid $180 dollars for a pair of Carmelo Anthony shoes from the Jordan brand. I don’t know what I was expecting to get out of that deal. I would wear them while sitting outside of Reverb on a stool to check peoples ids before they came into the club.

I would sit there for hours in the Benson alley way in complete silence with music and bar chatter behind me overflowing through the garage door. 

Journey IX

“What are you going to do after work?”

“I think I am going to just start driving West into the wind.”

The day at work had been windy.

Nonetheless a heavy boredom with life as it was was setting in and the extreme winds were awakening some kind of adventure.

Call it the call of the wild.

I was in Grand Island a couple hours after I clocked out from work.

A thunderstorm had rolled in about the same time I did so I looked for a local dive bar.

After a year and a half of sobriety I had recently fell off the wagon.

My experience after legitimately getting sober has been the relapse initially is just as exciting, thrilling and terrifying as the old black out lifestyle used to be however the new sober habits and patterns mellow out whatever temporary self-destruction I am trying to tap into.

Nonetheless while a drunk I developed a certain high self-awareness understanding that drunk Jude is the only threat I ever contend with.

So when I walk into the cantina I am exuberant about the potential of the place and the experience and highly apprehensive about how I will behave. 

One hundred dollars later I walk out with tequila, beer, and nachos in my system.

I watched my first women’s sports program on television from start to finish.

LSU and Texas softball programs went at it and I think LSU won.

I had been talking with the male bartender about where he was from, where he was now and where he was heading.

I told him where I was from and that I liked the establishment.

A group of high schoolers dressed for prom came in and seated themselves in the back.

A young female photographer took pictures of two young female customers eating at the bar.

It was the free chips and queso they gave me when I walked in that I knew I wouldn’t be able to make it a one and done situation.

Out on the street I realised I needed to piss.

I locked in to find a restroom.

I was at the point of drunkeness where you are ninety eight percent incoherent but that two percent is dialled in something fierce when it comes to point A meeting point B.

Bathroom is what I wanted so I honed in on finding an alley way.

The storm had passed and it was bright out being six o clock in the evening in April.

I wanted to make sure to not piss in an alley way and then get arrested by the cops.

Beside the alley way was a dive bar so I dived in.

The next day the Sandhills was my destination.

A purchase of a breakfast burrito, cup of Joe and portable toothbrush and mini toothpaste was my salvation.

I drove all the way through to Alliance, Nebraska.

In Alliance was Carhenge.

Something I had hoped I would never see.

Wherever you are, you are there and when I was there it was a windy blizzard and that made it alright.

I turned around and drove back onto the Sandhills scenic byway.

On the sides of the road were little gullies that all kinds of waterfowl mingled in.

A railroad ran alongside the highway.

Then hills of sand headed off in either direction as far as the highway nestled within them would let you see. If I had had a drone and sent it up in the air — it would have seen a bunch more of these hills — down on the highway I had as many as I could desire.

The beauty of forests, mountains, hills, streams, rivers, cliffs, oceans, deserts are all easily understood but recently I have developed a certain fondness for dirt.

Wyoming is full of dirt. There are parts of Wyoming where the only discernible topography is dirt. Nothing growing in it and no one around besides some possible antelope, sagebrush, road and sky. I think it is grand. 

That is what the Sandhills in Nebraska is — so much dirt.

There is some aquifer beneath the land that makes the land viable. 

There are houses, cabins and ranches in the hills.

Bodies of water, rivers, creeks, marshes, ponds, lakes are interspersed within this vast dunescape and plenty of shrubs and small plants grow out of the ground.

Horses and cattle can be seen taking advantage of the random vegetation.

Towns no one has heard of are on this highway. 

Mullen, Hyannis, I can’t remember any others.

Mulen is the biggest and Hyannis was the most scenic.

A gas station stood above a lake as the wind battered the door making it difficult to open and too easy to close.

While driving through the Sand Hills I thought about Wyoming.

Last summer I drove through Wyoming to go to my friends wedding in Montana.

I had driven past Lake Mac in Ogallala before getting to Wyoming.

I had driven past Kearney before getting to Ogallala.

In Kearney I bought an antelope plushie that drove with me on the dashboard through a hailstorm near Laramie, Wyoming and eventually landed in the hands of my young girl cousin at Christmas.

No antelope in the Sandhills landscape. I didn’t see any natural wildlife outside of the waterfowl which there was plenty of. The disparity of the landscape mixed with the abundance of life made the drive very satisfying and fulfilling.

I have a friend at work who likes to motorcycle Nebraska’s landscapes.

He told me he had never been on this particular route.

He had been around the Sandhills but not through them.

After talking it up for about ten minutes I caught myself and told him,

“I guess I don’t want to talk it up too much though,

You might take my word and head out that way,

Then be disappointed and say —

What the heck, it’s just a bunch of dirt!”

History I

I became completely obsessed with Vietnam. I am sure it goes back to Father issues of having to stop idolising an institution that simply serves a function rather than being a solution. School, the church, marriage, kids and government are not going to fulfil my sense of being just like my Father’s blessing does not save me from myself. Vietnam is the first time American civilisation lost and it is also the only time we decided that we were the bad guys. Every movement in American education that decides that America was the antagonist instead of protagonist has its beginning in the disillusionment with America over our failure in Vietnam. 

This was the war that we lost. This was the last draft. American Revolutionary War. War of 1812. Mexican War. Civil War. Spanish War. World War I. World War II. Korean War. Skip. Gulf War. War on Terror (ongoing). Big winning streak and all of these wars can be studied with a positive lens of how to win a war. If we had won Vietnam it would have simply been another chip off the old block of socking it to those commie bastards. We didn’t win so then comes two positions to take and one is if we had simply let our military win instead of letting it become a political football and the other position is what in the heck were we doing there in the first place?

There is not much of a reason to ask the big “why” question unless something fails or has a very big chance of failing. If its a sure thing then people don’t ask why. Simplified, if someone offers you a cheeseburger to eat when you are hungry then you don’t ask why but if someone offers you a live fish when you are hungry you may ask “why”? Unless you are a country boy or girl then you could laugh and ask if they have a pocket knife or take your own out. When asking the question why of the Vietnam War the intellect opens up like a black hole and takes down the entirety of history and dimensions into itself. It is a massive topic.

Eventually when a person is trying to study Vietnam or the assassination of the Kennedy’s, Martin Luther King Jr, Malcom X as a conspiracy the scholar has to either tap out or cling to some illogical conclusion. Of course if the person has enough curiosity or fascination they will return and learn about the topic from another angle before tapping out again or latching on to a conclusive fallacy. So with all of the suspense, terror, confusion and blood contained in the Vietnam question I turned my studies to a more peaceful theme, the Panama Canal. This being another project that the Americans picked up from the French that seemed just as implausible and impossible looking back as the Vietnam War. The only difference being we succeeded.

So I ask the question “why did we win” Panama in context to the great mystery of why we lost Vietnam. Isn’t it strange that if something is successful it has a beginning, middle and end and if something fails the story can go on ad infinitum.  The story of the football team that won is that the guy got the girl and the girl gave him confidence and that confidence spread throughout the rest of the team and the coach was able to manage that great spirit against a weaker team while the crowd supported on the sidelines and the practices made perfect. The story of the losing team is well Jerry’s Dad is abusive because Jerry’s Dad’s Dad was abusive and it really didn’t help that … 

My essay ends here because me talking about my own confusion and obsession over the Vietnam War and the solace I found in Panama is in fact more entertaining than any essay I could write on the Panama Canal. For balance to make this paragraph the same size as the other paragraphs I will say that I have been reading quite a bit on Theodore Roosevelt, Panama Canal and the Industrial Revolution and may actually write a scholarly article on the gilded age eventually. I am not making any promises though because my erratic behaviour is just as unpredictable to me as anyone else. I am completely capable of scribbling five incoherent paragraphs that might as well have been found in a bathroom stall with multiple phone numbers as produce a scholarly article after researching tens of books and tapes. 

Film IV

 Welcome to my most uninformed and least informative piece of writing yet. Here I am going to tackle movie companies. I did a piece on actors where I ran through my favourites and then directors where I bitched about none of them being alive or on their game. Then I went into producers admitting that I knew nothing about them. Here we are with the movie houses so get ready to ramble. 

Lets just go after Miramax just to get it out of the way and do the hard things first. This was Harvey Weisntein’s company. Recently Harvey’s guilty verdict was overturned by appeals court. There was another guilty verdict apparently, so says Ma, that still stands so he is just being transferred from New York Prison to California Prison. Miramax according to the Frontline documentary I watched about Weinstein’s victims was viewed by the industry as a movie house that produced hip, chic and avant-garde films. This is where we get Quentin Tarantino films, Clerks, Wayne’s World, and other bourgeois favourites.

Focus features.

A24.

More hipster things.

Disney/Marvel.

Pixar.

Dreamworks.

Icon. Which was Mel Gibson’s gig.

There are massive ones without a niche that I am not mentioning.

Stuff like 20th century Fox, Warner Bros. etc that produce anything.

Then we have the streaming services producing their own material:

Netflix.

Apple.

Amazon.

Hulu.

Maybe Apple for a streaming service has their own style out of the bunch as being very well done and wholesome elitist rather than populist takes. I mean they don’t produce as much riff-raff as Amazon and Netflix. Netflix is known for producing stand-up comedy and other films that other companies are scared to get backlash or canceled for. See Dave Chapelle.

I think we live in a Disney/Marvel pornographic metaverse. Now that may seem revolting to put a movie production company that is concerned with making films that are appropriate for kids and families around the world side by side with the word porn but I think that is where we are. Porn is accessible to anyone who doesn’t have adult content controls on their device. Everyone and everything created seems to need to abide by the precedents set by societal regulator companies like Disney/Marvel while much of society is also shaped by the inadvertent influence of pornographic content and consumption. Some kind of lust-crazed polite society schizophrenic meta verse. Or maybe it’s just me.

Literature X

What was Kurt Vonnegut?

Kurt Vonnegut was this writer that explored science fiction themes in his literature. He became the lefts most beloved writer when the left still had a most beloved writer.

My half-brother told me that he enjoyed Kurt Vonnegut’s writing that he published at the end of his life. These were small editorials that gave diatribes on the most beloved principles of the old left wing.

He had an upper middle class background.

He went to work for GE and was successful but stagnant in his soul.

After getting rich quick at GE he quit and started writing full-time.

His wife, children and most anyone else would not see him hardly ever until he was able to cause his typewriter to give him enough big breaks in published content to make him famous.

Once famous his family saw him even less because he ran away with a new woman in a blaze of his own socialite glory.

Then when he got older he became lonely and from the documentary I watched learned to cherish what he had left of life.

My half-brother also said to me that he did not always see the point of his writing. I have pondered this statement of my brothers for a couple years now. In the back of my head because I did not know what to say to it initially. Kurt Vonnegut may have been a bit experimental in his writing so that there was not a point necessarily but rather a notion.

Little clues of rationality.

There was this big idea in the hippie movement and the counter-culture of the 1960s and 1970s that believed they could figure out the meaning of life. In the 1950s America was solid in its image and dogma. We were the champions of the world. Then the civil rights movement happened and Vietnam and the sexual revolution and rock and roll and the television was there to show everyone all of the confusion and happenings.

Intellectuals went about trying to come up with answers to all of this unknown and new phenomena. Liberals found in select writers intellectuals who went about answering the questions that everyone was asking or if not asking, thinking. They fell in love with the intellectuals who answered these questions in ways that were entertaining and endearing. 

Then in the 1980s people stopped looking for the meaning of life because they had finally figured it out. The answer to the meaning of life was the accumulation of money.

Everything became monetised and many Americans got very rich in the 1980s. There was still a market for intellectuals to answer the questions of the universe but they were answering these questions for the money. The market was no longer for intellectuals who would answer these questions with purity but rather impurity. People wanted to be corrupt and they wanted their corruption now.

So we got it. 

How do I know?

I was born in 1990.

There is this study that is not social sciences or history or anthropology or philosophy or sociology but the study of human thought.

This is a neglected science but the idea is that during certain epochs or eras people think, learn, and act in a certain way and in another epoch or era they may behave opposite, similar or different while inventing new ways of being and letting others go extinct.

For example imagine a history textbook that described white people moving west as a heroic and selfless journey to secure America’s future. 

Now imagine another textbook that describes white people moving west as a genocidal act of bloodlust, greed and domination.

Now in the transition time from one idea to the next there is going to be a consensus of people who understand that both are true and these ideas should be weighed equally but in the past only the prior was believed and in the future only the latter with no memory that once the first was accepted just like in the past no one could have imagined the present narrative.

The idea of a change of the way people thought happened in America.

In the 1950s people believed in virtue.

America was the hero.

We were such heroes and we believed in virtue so much we started dissecting our own policies.

Once we decided to do the heroic act of examining our own problems all kinds of open-ended, actual open minded, actual liberal thinking, critical thinking and dialogue began to take place.

In the 1950s the notion that America had problems was unthinkable.

It was like thinking that Mary was a sinner, that Superman could have a moral deficiency, etc. The idea being you would have to be pretty twisted to think America wasn’t perfect.

We don’t think that way anymore and we stopped thinking that way altogether by the 1970s because of our self-reflection and attempts at reform. 

Then we stopped being self-reflective and attempts at reform and even further stopped caring about virtue altogether. All of our thinking and correcting, debating and rationalising was solved by the accumulation of wealth.

People do not generally think about things unless they have to do with making money now.

In the 70s because of the 60s people supported people with their money who they thought were the closest to understanding the meaning of life. Take Bob Dylan for example. If he had written a single song that gave any notion that he had only been making music for the money the people would have stoned him and not bought his music. He had to write from a place of pure inspiration and the people supported him with their money.

Everyone knows Taylor Swift writes songs for money and they like her for it. Further in the 1950s to think about accumulating money for the sake of money itself would villainize any person who were to admit it or get caught doing it. Take Joe Kennedy Sr. maybe for an example.

I think we as a culture would think that anyone who does not focus his entire being on the accumulation of more money is a fool.

Then why am I a fool?

What does this have to do with Kurt Vonnegut?

Kurt Vonnegut was trying to answer this meaning of existence without answering it directly but rather giving people clues through his humorous and witty prose. The people of his time supported him with money because they thought he was their best prophet.

So my little brother does not understand the point of Kurt Vonnegut and I had to tell him that I did not either. I wanted to recommend him to a young woman to read because he was one of the kinder and more popular writers of classic American literature but I also thought it possible that he was not relevant to our culture anymore since his books do not help solve this all pervasive hive mind question of how to make more money.

Why am I thinking about Kurt Vonnegut instead of how to make more money?

A strange wormhole exists with literature, music and art that since people will buy these things there is a market and since there is a market there is advertising and businesses trying to capitalise on the profits of these things. At some point of being tossed around the American market system and having various commodities and consuming different products I found that I enjoyed the ones that gave hints or even demanded that I cease from youthful lusts and pursue righteousness, faith, love and peace, with those who call on the Lord from a pure heart.

Apocalypse III

Good boy.

Ancestral.

America is a treadmill.

Both empresses like you.

I am the king of my own jungle.

Suicide.

Success.

Slavery.

Success.

Cuckoldry.

Responsibility.

Very certain magic.

Is there a way to disrupt alcohol and jerking off?

That’s how I serf the wave.

What happens if I surrender to the wave?

Then I surf the wave.

Success.boy.

Ancestral.

America is a treadmill.

Both empresses like you.

I am the king of my own jungle.

Suicide.

Success.

Slavery.

Success.

Cuckoldry.

Responsibility.

Very certain magic.

Is there a way to disrupt alcohol and jerking off?

That’s how I serf the wave.

What happens if I surrender to the The automatic process

Good boy.

Ancestral.

America is a treadmill.

Both empresses like you.

I am the king of my own jungle.

Suicide.

Success.

Slavery.

Success.

Cuckoldry.

Responsibility.

Very certain magic.

Is there a way to disrupt alcohol and jerking off?

That’s how I serf the wave.

What happens if I surrender to the wave?

Then I surf the wave.

Success.

Then I surf the wave.

Success.