Reluctant Medical Advice

 

I went for a 6 mile run this morning and the weather was perfect. I love the late fall crispiness to the air (mid 40’s) when the breeze is nonexistent and the traffic is light.

I didn’t plan it that way of course but with weather it either cooperates or punches you in the face. My foot pain is less of a problem than it used to be. It’s the sole (pun intended) reason for taking the last two months off from jogging Saturdays with the club. I needed the time off to recuperate so no complaints. I even went to the doctor a few weeks ago to make sure nothing was fractured in the foot. OK so I’m a bit dramatic. I don’t handle chronic pain well. So I paid the co-pay fee and had them X-ray it and----nothing. The doctor gave a pure genius tip though, “Ummmm…..make sure you stretch before you run”. Yeah? Thanks Doc. Guess that’s why they pay you so much. All you had to do was look at the little black and white transparency of my bone structure huh?

Am I a little bitter that they didn’t find something seriously wrong? Like I wanted the doctor to roll over on his desk chair to the padded table I’m sitting on and exclaim “My God man! How are you even still alive? Nurse, get in here and take this man to surgery at once! Can’t you see, he needs to be out there jogging! I've never seen such an extreme case of "stressed foot!"

Why am I not ecstatic that the prognosis is basically ‘Man being a sissy’?

The cure of course is an extra dose of ‘deal with it’ and ‘make whatever changes you have to’. So I’ve waited until the pain becomes so muted that I can deal with it on a short run again. I started last week on the treadmill and decided to run for 3 miles. More to point I ran for 30 minutes at a miserably slow pace to reduce the chance of worsening. One of the leaders from the run group mentioned trying a slow paced run, interrupted by a quick pace every 10 minutes. There is some data suggesting that distance improves and injuries decrease. I looked it up to be sure. The idea is to run 80% of the distance at a low heart rate and 20% at an elevated rate. So I did. That’s easy on the treadmill, less so when huffing and puffing through the neighborhoods.

Today was the first outdoor, middle distance jog I’ve done in a while. As per doctor’s orders I stretched like I haven’t done it in years. It sounds like an obvious thing to do but with age comes an increasing amount of stretching. I spend at least 10 minutes before and after now just to be sure. And I had stopped doing it pre-run, nothing feels worse than rolling out of bed bleary, irritable and putting immediate pressure on your hamstrings. Thanks for that doc “Why don’t you give a nice papercut and pour lemon juice in it”—Miracle Max (Princess Bride). I’d come around to the view by a lot of other runners that only an AFTER run stretch makes any sense. The muscles are too cold before a jog anyway. Well maybe I was wrong.

The stretching wasn’t the only thing different for me. I tried to consciously keep a slower pace than what I normally run. It meant looking at the watch constantly to see the average pace time. It’s tricky though. I’m not good at watch gazing for time or distance. Being aware at all times is like treadmill running, you can’t ease into the pace if your focus is on the measurables. But I stayed aware and managed to hit my quick burst every 10 minutes for 2 minutes. I did this for an hour for a total distance of 6 miles. 

The funny part of that is I didn’t really slow up at all. I stayed on my regular pace (basically) and instead just got really quick for two minutes. That’s not exactly the way it’s supposed to work but whatever. I enjoyed myself in the perfect weather and spend my Saturday morning the only way that feels right--After the stretching of course.  

Wait for it

 I wrote this a week ago and forgot to post it. Some of the info may have changed slightly.

This thing with Hunter Biden looks pretty legit. I read the New York Post article about the laptop the photos of him with a crack pipe and hookers. Honestly that stuff isn’t that bad for a non-politician considering the previous problems he’s had with drugs. It’s not a surprise; Hunter isn’t the target anyway.

I heard a soundbite from Giuliani explaining how the emails the FBI found on his laptop implicate Joe Biden running a scheme to get Hunter in front of wealthy foreigners and serve as a gate between the two. This is how it’s worked with the Chinese and the Ukrainians at least, probably a few more. I’m not sure how much is absolute and how much is going to be challenged in court but it doesn’t look good for Biden. Another angle is the potential child pornography and sex trafficking material that might be on this laptop. I heard Dana Loesch talking about the potential for it on the computer as well. How do they know? I guess an FBI investigator who handles these types of cases was on the case file signature sheet.

It does raise another question for me? Is this the reason the FBI sat on the case for so long? Or did they just memory hole the evidence to cover for the Bidens?  Apparently they’ve had this case opened since December when Rudy originally gave them the laptop. He told Steven Crowder that the FBI could have come out with this info a long time ago. The FBI is seriously bent. If it wasn’t apparent after the disgraced Director James Comey it should be now. At least when investigating powerful lawmakers, they’re as corrupt a group as exists. I’ve never been one for schadenfreude but I’ll be excited when the organization gets cleaned out (if it gets cleaned out). Some think that General Flynn will be the next FBI director and raze the place like a tornado through a trailer park. He’s still tied up in court with the incredibly arrogant judge Sullivan who is holding up his case with every motion for delay that he can.

I think this Hunter Biden laptop thing could be the crack in the damn that breaks causing a lot of damage to entrenched people in DC. How? Because it most certainly implicates Joe Biden and probably a lot of people from the Obama White House in corrupt. When does the media pay a price? FB and Twitter still block links to NY Post website that contains the Hunter Biden story. I don’t know if this is still true. Fox News popped up on a google search but everything else was opinion stuff about how Rudy Giuliani is hurting the Trump campaign with his wild theories. Some (Adam Schiff) are trying to blame Russian disinformation again, seriously.

I think a lot of conservatives keep thinking that with the right story the big news outlets have to cover it. But they don’t. They can keep shutting it out as if it doesn’t exist. How many people get their news from CBS or NBC anymore? However many, it’s too many. NPR said they wouldn't cover it at all because it can't be verified. That isn't their standard for Trump though.

I realize I’m concerned with justice for the ones who’ve broken laws with the expectation of skating by. I’m eager for news organizations to be shown for what liars and cover up artists they are. I’m eager for Big Tech to lose business and status because of how they hide and distort conservative leaning websites, authors, pages and articles. But I also hope I’m not too invested in this because if people don’t go to jail and aren’t arrested I need to be OK with it. Not in a moral sense OK with it, but in a “God is in control sense”. If not I might lose my mind. I’m continually frustrated by how Trump’s “grossness” is reason to vote for a half crazy, corrupt politician. These are friends of mine I’m talking about. They just can’t get past his awfulness and seem to think a more gracious individual will sweep in. But a more gracious individual would likely fool you with their charm.

If it wasn’t obvious already I’ll be voting straight Republican ticket this year. There may be individual local candidates on the Democrat ticket that are decent civil servants but they’ll take orders from the top.  

 

Leagues of Extraordinary Arrogance

 

 I’ve made a very tough decision to skip on sports this year. I try to work in at least one sports related piece per month but without the content I can’t write. I made the decision right after Drew Breese had to walk back his famous ‘I’ll never kneel to the flag’ interview in which he had the audacity to defend the anthem. What followed was faux outrage from players and media personalities.  This was a week or so after the George Floyd killing and subsequent rioting in Minneapolis. Actually it’s been a while ago, but it still feels fresh. I’ve done a few Colin Kaepernick-is-an-SOB articles and I wasn’t in the mood to do another one. We had this debate as a country a few years ago and I didn’t want to jump into it again. Better to just turn it off. That’s what people used to do when something bothered them, turn it off.

I decided if sports was going to be a platform for the woke I was out. That included baseball and football. Both firmly embraced Black Lives Matter, a cop hating Marxist organization that thinks white supremacy runs through the philosophical pillars of the nation like fluoride in the water. The NBA treats BLM like a brand that pays them with every mention, or hashtag or promotion. Yes, I’ve seen the uniforms and the courts and the dopey ads. I haven’t really been invested in basketball since college so I didn’t miss much there. I’m an avid sports talk radio listener, watcher too since the bigger shows simulcast their talent. It’s appropriate to put Colin Cowherd or Will Cain on the TV at a sporting goods store (where I work) so I watched a lot. About 1 week into the Floyd killing I’d seen enough, heard enough, had enough.

Not to disparage those particular shows but I just couldn’t hear anymore about America’s racist past, athletes’ and their dumb tweets or corporate sellout culture. The NBA comes off particularly bad. That they don’t recognize their inexplicable hypocrisy on China is reason enough to click it off. It’s understandable to want to sell into foreign markets and be apolitical when abroad, but wearing wokeness like a game jersey while in the US is a bit much. Whatever cause they’re about I’m against. Why? Because they play in a country where it’s possible to earn Scrooge Mcduck money playing basketball.

 There is a lot of extreme poverty and lot of extreme wealth in this country. Nathaniel Hawthorne said “Families are always rising and falling in America” and it’s still true today. There are some legitimate arguments out there on fairness in the tax system, inequality in minority communities and lack of access. The wealthy have built in advantages for nearly everything. But when you go Marxist you lose me. I’m not in the mood for having socio economic problems played out on T-shirt logos and hashtags connected with pro teams.

So yeah life after sports is slow and I’d like to pretend I’ve become a better man. Sadly I’m not using my time as wisely as I should. Don’t worry, I’m not a sour guy sitting in a corner scowling at a blank screen and stewing over the lack of decorum in sports, not during the week at least. I hope professional sports get back to what they do best make a sellable product without the cause-whoring. There has to be opposition within the front offices about all this forced wokeness. But people bend where the pressure is greatest. Like most organizations run by group think, no one wants to stick their head out lest it get cut off.

Some segment of professional sports has wanted this to happen for a while. They probably feel that their future audience wants a politically active (on the left) league, particularly in that prime 18-49 demographic. This could be right but I’d seriously doubt it. When you alienate half the audience you lose viewers. Even moderate types will be put off with in your-face-messaging enough to look elsewhere.   

 For now anyway professional football and baseball are spoiled products and like milk that’s gone bad we should dump them.

It's Your Flow

 

 Writing about writing is becoming a 2020 thing for me. 

Sitting down to put words to paper (text to word processor?) is tough. The discipline to just begin even with no thoughts in your head about where to go is hard to do. In order to call yourself a writer you need to write. When I started out doing a regular blog I had to learn this. Before the blog though I just had my own half baked theories. I’d start out with a few paragraphs and hope to get 500 words or so. That’s still the number I shoot for when everything else is off and I can’t seem to get enough words together on a particular topic. But writing paragraphs got me started.

The tradeoff I made with myself was getting to write whatever nonsense popped into my head. It didn’t need to make sense either and the topic could veer wildly from side to side like a terrorist firing an Uzi in a shopping mall. The idea was just start.  Complete the required word count and save it in some file you had to look at all the time. Every time I saved another one I’d get to see how many complete writings I’d had already. Well, complete means different things to different people. “Saved copies” is more to the point. But it felt like earned success. After a few months I started cleaning them up a bit for readability. Also I checked them for what I call “flow”. I can already hear my English teacher saying frustratingly “There is no such thing as flow. It’s not a descriptive word. It doesn’t mean anything”.

Here is what I mean by flow: lacking those awkward stumbling phrases that people trip over. If you’ve ever read anything technical you’ll know what I mean. Good writing is clear and doesn’t hurt your brain to read it. Some ideas might make you stop and read them again, their definitions not well understood. But tripping over words is as frustrating as tripping over rocks on a trail hike. The best way to avoid them is to read the sentence out loud and see if it sounds clunky or awkward. I learned this by writing marketing pieces for websites. Reading should be enjoyable. Don’t make a potential client unhappy with your laborious copy. Don’t make them say your flow is off, you’ll lose a job.

Flow also refers to cutting out sentences that are unnecessarily long. I used to say things like “Well, I think that…” and finish the thought within the frame of a sentence. Not realizing how unnecessary those words are. They don’t add weight in an intellectual sense. Everyone reading knows you think it because you said it. Extra words are easily clipped for the sake of flow, not mention redundant thoughts. I’m bad about repeating myself when I really want to hammer a point home. I like to repeat things is what I’m saying. They’re important see--so I say them again. I might even add a supporting quote to the exhaustive point I mean for you to get. 

 It’s a tough habit to break but being aware of the tendency is a start.

I learned how to re-write from Stephen King’s book “On Writing”. His method is to write whatever is in your head and go back and clean it up later. It sounds like common sense but what he means is, say everything no matter how nasty or false to get it out of your head. There may be some good ideas that come out of it. And the real concern is that we get caught editing our work while still trying to pull out ideas. Don’t worry about grammar until later or you'll miss a creative opportunity. Don’t worry about flow until later either—that’s me not Stephen King.

When attacking armies get overrun they fall back to a fixed position. My fixed position in writing is journaling. When I struggle for ideas (like right now for instance) on what to write, I fall back to it. It’s easy to remember what happened early in the day, yesterday or even last week. It’s personal and because it’s personal it’s easy to recall. It works by priming the pump of my creative juices and easing me into a typing groove. It has to be typing by the way. I can hardly write with a pen anymore. It’s really embarrassing when taking notes at work too. I take the laptop whenever possible.

Flow can also mean avoiding off topic information that doesn’t fit the style. It’s going all Tom Clancy on the detailed interior of a nuclear submarine when a one sentence description will do. I run into this myself when writing a particular article in two different takes or on two different days. The first doesn’t match the second because my frame of reference isn't the same. Research is the culprit. If I’d read quite a lot on nuclear subs the material will reflect it, even if the article is supposed to be light hearted. This is the equivalent of being at a dinner party and babbling on about the last Netflix show you watched. The guests will show interest for a while but eventually the details will bore even the most gracious of listeners. They might say your flow is off.

If any of the guests at the party are English teachers they certainly won’t. 

 

The Lesson in Gethsemane

 

Mathew 26

This is known as the ‘plot to kill Jesus’ chapter. The high priest Caiaphas launches a plan to arrest Him after the Passover celebration but waits until after the feast, afraid of an uproar among the people. I think the section on Gethsemane is critical for understanding how failure is instructive for leaders. Jesus teaches the disciples (especially Peter, James and John) the importance of responsibility and how to beat temptation.

“Then Jesus came with them to a place called Gethsemane, and said to the disciples, “Sit here while I go and pray over there.” And He took with Him Peter and the two sons of Zebedee, and He began to be sorrowful and deeply distressed. Then He said to them, “My soul is exceedingly sorrowful, even to death. Stay here and watch with Me.” (verse 36-38)

We normally think of this as the failure of Jesus’ support system. You know, they couldn’t stay up and pray with their Master. Their faith didn’t quite overcome sleep; they didn’t have the fire in the belly. It looks at times like Jesus is scolding them for dozing off and not understanding the significance of the moment. It’s true of course, but overlooks the heaviness Christ felt knowing what kind of pain awaited him. He is the only one who really could have felt this way. Responsibility, whether for others or yourself, imposes a weight that only responsible parties can feel. It’s nice to imagine that others have your back through tough moments in life. Some do, but no one can share the burden with you.

Jesus isn’t finger waging their laziness as much as making them understand that this position of responsibility will soon be theirs. It’s important that they understand how to navigate it.

Since Jesus was “exceedingly sorrowful” He sought support from his disciples. He must have known how little they could do for Him. I think He was giving them an option to avoid the coming betrayal. Jesus had already told them “All of you will be made to stumble because of Me this night, for it is written: I will strike the Shepherd, and the sheep of the flock will be scattered.” But it feels like this scattering could have been avoided had they prayed with the Savior and avoided temptation. 

But they were scattered and instead, taught from experience what not to do.

Jesus found Peter sleeping and said “What! Could you not watch with me one hour? Watch and pray, lest you enter into temptation. The spirit indeed is willing but the flesh is weak.” (verse 41). By pulling Peter and the two sons of Zebedee away to follow Him to a quiet place, He hoped to show them how to avoid temptation through prayer. This night probably stuck in their heads as a critical lesson in responsibility. Temptation in this case is for sleep, but can mean a lot of things. It’s rooted in fleshly desires and although not all are destructive, they occupy a critical place at a critical time. It’s a time when our focus should be on Him for inspiration, for direction.

This is a message for leaders. Jesus is teaching these future leaders through their mistakes, what responsibility looks like.

The final time Jesus comes back and finds them all still sleeping. “Then He came to His disciples and said to them, “Are you still sleeping and resting? Behold, the hour is at hand and the Son of Man is being betrayed into the hands of sinners.” (verse 45) the phrase “Are you STILL sleeping and resting” must have stung after they replayed it in their minds. Letting others down leaves us with a sick, empty feeling. We had a job to do and we failed.  

Jesus already knew their flesh was weak. Through their failure they learned what responsibility is all about. Through their weakness they learned the importance of focused prayer in pushing back temptation. The first church of Acts is where this lesson pays off.