Heartbreak Ridge

The Future's Nothing New - The Alternate Routes (mp3)
A Circus - Army Navy (mp3)

Last week, one of the founding members of our fantasy football league announced his intentions to retire. This announcement -- which in the world of rational and reasonable thought should be about as significant as him saying he got new glasses -- was significant on several levels.

First, this owner claimed it was just time, that he was getting too old for it, that the experience was played out. Why? What’s wrong with him? How dare he desert us in this, our time of desperate need?? Is this some kind of Fantasy Football Owner Lockout, and we didn’t get the memo? Here I thought we were all, like, Al Davis, that the only way you could take our team ownership away was from our cold, dead hands.

The second level was even more disconcerting. Was this merely the first defection? Was the entire league either doomed or irreparably altered?

My thoughts then drifted to this blog. Even as we approach 1,000 posts and soon after that the completion of our fourth year (if it survives to March), death is on my mind. How old is a 4-year-old blog? It’s gotta be like dog years, except more like goldfish years, right? How long do we go until this has become a hobby that merely keeps us from trying other ways of exorcising our creative demons?

Things. Must. Change.
(Psst. this will be a running theme, off and on for the remainder of the year, possibly for eternity. It started with “William 4.0” and even showed up in my Oasis post yesterday.)

Must. It is inevitable. It is fact. The challenge for the wise, it would seem, is not to cling desperately to everything in our lives in some nutty attempt to prevent or dodge change. The challenge is to identify what we most value, what we hold most precious, and to figure out whether honoring and protecting those things requires holding fast to them or finding ways to adapt and evolve them.

I cannot be a good parent if I insist on treating my 11-year-old daughter the same as when she was six. I can’t be a good employee if I’m still sending snow alerts to radio stations as our sole advisory.

Oh crap. Know what I just realized? Maybe schools can’t be very good schools if we’re still doing 95% of everything we did back when my mother was 12. Maybe we’re clinging a little bit too tightly to too much? Ya think?

So maybe fantasy football and blogs -- and office environments and job descriptions and schools -- aren’t in and of themselves what I fear losing. Maybe it’s not about Calvin Johnson and shoddy opinionating. The challenge is figuring out what I need from these outlets, why they mean something to me, why my soul aches a little at the thought of losing them, and what I need to do to hold onto what’s important about them. In all likelihood, with just a little contemplation, I can find other ways to feed those parts of me currently fed by those pursuits.

When the day comes to say goodbye to fantasy football, were I wise, I would already know what my next step would be. I would know what it is I love about the experience, and I would already have plans to funnel that energy into some new endeavor.

Improvise. Adapt. Overcome. These are the words of the new normal and the essential. They are the words of the wise. They are the future, and we will be.

(I just made a reference to Prince/Batman AND a Clint Eastwood movie in the same paragraph! WOOOT!)

I Quit!

Bob Dylan--"Dreamin' Of You" (mp3)
Withered Hand--"I Am Nothing" (mp3)

I'm going to have to give up my job.

You know why, don't you? I simply don't have time for it anymore.

It keeps getting in the way of all that I have to do during work hours--search for new music, fight political battles with my dad, work on blogs, read other blogs, keep up with the political campaigns, maintain friendships through email, pay my bills, watch funny YouTube clips that people send me, watch damning political YouTube clips that people send me, watch YouTube clips of great musical performances that people send me, read through online jokes and satires, look up dirt on people I don't like (usually national figures), seek photographs of people that I want to see, manage my Fantasy Football team, keep up with other sporting events so I can be one of the guys, check statistics to see how this blog is doing in terms of readership/viewership, try to locate and contact people I used to know, see if other people I studied with who wanted to be writers have actually published books, find out how much is in my bank account, buy things online like steaks, books, dvd series of tv shows I want to watch, slip in the occasional Netflix and watch it with the sound down low, burn cds for my friends and put them in campus mail, refute Republican lies, check the latest polls and Las Vegas odds, click on the "Continue for work-related purposes" button that will take me to YouTube (which has only once had anything work-related that I can think of), read lengthy "must read" articles and essays that people send me, send snotty inter-office inside jokes and witty asides, when I can bear it, check on the 401k and other investments to see how far I keep moving backwards, backwards, backwards in what I hoped would be a great economic year, and though I'm not a porn guy, sometimes a link leads to a less savory link, leads to something that you didn't block with the firewall...

If I have to, I guess I'll keep coming into this office, even from 8-5, if I must, but it will only be to use this computer which, sadly, doesn't belong to me, but if you gave to me, I could do what I have to from home.

But you need to know that while I'm here, I'll be thinking about my wife and daughters and sending along little things that might be of interest to them or that will excite them as I plan vacations, buy plane tickets, make reservations, study upcoming cities and countries, try to figure out if and where we might eat out tonight and if we'll tack on a movie. While you look in my office window and see productivity, I'll be commiserating, cajoling, sniping, speculating, equivocating, justifying, joking, worrying, forwarding, replying, and trying to think of other people to contact and things to say to them.

Oh, and by the way, you're going to have to ease up on the organizational restrictions on downloading and installing new programs. I've got a lot of other stuff I need to get done.

Bob Dylan's "Dreamin' Of You" comes from his upcoming "bootleg series" release; Withered Hand's "I Am Nothing" is from their ep, Religious Songs. Both are available at Itunes.