Table of Contents for October
At first, October looked like it would be a big writing month, and it was. It just wasn’t a big publishing month. I wrote a humor piece per week. The pieces just weren’t that funny to anyone else or were simply ill-timed (or ill-themed). Could be I was pressing. Either way, I have plans to draft another internet humor piece by this weekend.
The Marty Stuart piece linked below is essentially a string of ideas I kicked around in my head on runs all summer. That October 13th piece is essentially the red string and corkboard breakdown of the album.
On October 20th, I briefly mourned the passing of the Atlanta Braves postseason hopes with the arrival of a hat I ordered. That same day Gillian and I drove to Charlotte before heading to Athens on October 21st. I ran the AthHalf that Sunday. The race went well. I also ran a strong 10K the weekend before, so it’s likely I will write a follow up to this running post dealing with disappointment in August, because that awfulness ended up jumpstarting the good that happened in October.
That leads to something of a tangent about the role of sporting analogies.
Sport can be a laboratory for life, but I do think it’s important to remember that while a laboratory setting can be a simulacrum for real life, the sporting laboratory is more allegorical and less literal. Athletes learn from mistakes, and mistakes are teachable moments. But learning to read a defense does not guarantee moral efficacy, compassion, the knowing of right from wrong.
Watching some random episode of Gilbert Arenas’ podcast last week, I saw Kenyon Martin performing an “asshole” coaching caricature. As the coach, he mimicked sharing game film of a player’s mistakes. When I taught writing, students did not like seeing their work displayed under the document camera’s all-seeing eye, but those were often the days that resulted in largescale changes and achieved understanding for the entire class.
The reason such lessons often worked is because the airballed sentence could be placed side by side with the sentence that hit the mark. This placement often prompted cogent discussions as to why the one sentence worked and the other did not. The learning became tangible, and the learning also mimicked the thought processes and progressions of a human writer. That is how we learn. We see what happened. We see what could have happened. We move forward.
But to what extent does learning one skill help with learning all skills? Learning is a skill, and writing is about expressing one’s thought processes with clarity. It translates. But is that true of all practices?
I err on the side of caution when thinking about how often individuals slide into sporting analogies in relation to life’s other aspects. I’m thinking about the question often proposed by adults to those younger than them, would you do this in a game? or the want for someone who will run through a wall to pick up the w, or the statement that starts: this moment in history teaches us. I’m thinking about the cliches involving hard work and perseverance. I’m thinking about how all of that suggests winning and losing versus ongoing experiences. And I guess I’m echoing Ta-Nehisi Coates’ proclamation from Between the World and Me to “resist the common urge toward the comforting narrative of divine law, toward fairy tales that imply some irrepressible justice” (70).
Knowing how to run a pick and roll does not translate beyond the basketball court, at least not as anything beyond metaphor. Grit, though, grit and teamwork are the universal lessons to be taken from playing sports. I can run more miles. I can write more humor pieces. I can write about doing more reps of a very specific kind of work. And yet all those lessons have their limits. The hustle can only go so far before it breaks.
Just as Rudy could not be Joe Montana, not everyone can be Rudy. Moreover, the all-encompassing sporting narrative to never give up at its simplest is we’ll get ’em next time, which isn’t a far cry from a conscience feeding itself on reflex and revenge. In many ways, these are blinding notions once they are removed from the context of a field with fair rules and transformed into obsessions with mortal consequences. I am thinking about Israel and Palestine. I am thinking about a shooter in Maine. I am thinking about the differences between Armistice Day and Veterans Day. I am thinking about the Osage oil fields and headrights.
Guess I’m talking about more than sport. Guess I’m saying tragedy should not be used in a because-this-happened-we-now-know-not-to-do-terrible-things shining moment of a morality lesson when chances are the terrible things were known to be terrible at the time. To learn from our mistakes after the fact can really end up being a contorted bit of subjective nonsense, unless we’re discussing race pace and marathon goal times. Even then, though, the details between good and bad depend on the runner. But I think our love and consumption for sports as a universal language, or expression of the human condition, limits many of the ways in which we pursue whatever comes next because games often demand particular results.
Even the winners believed they were hated underdogs along the way. And, in their youthful uprisings, they probably were.
Enough with quarter-baked thoughts. Here’s what October ended up looking like:
“What to do with this Atlanta Braves hat?” (October 20)
“Altitude Rhymes with Attitude: While listening to Marty Stuart and His Fabulous Superlatives” (October 13)
“Table of Contents for September” (October 2)
