Post by Timothy on Jul 24, 2007 11:12:00 GMT -5
***Note from the author: This rant may confuse you to no end. Some of you may be able to get it. Some of you won’t. I’m sorry for that. However, this is my rant, and if you have a problem with it, I’d prefer you talk to me. Perhaps I can show you a bit of what’s in my head sometime***
This summer, in all likelihood, a part of me is going to die. It’s not going to be a major part of me, and in fact, there is a probability that I won’t even notice it goes away. It’s located somewhere in the back of my brain between the old Nick at Nite reruns I used to watch, just on the other side of Maxwell Smart’s shoe phone, but before Joe Friday’s grey suit (they wore the same suit in almost every episode). It’s a bit of my childhood I don’t often pull out of its hiding place because it’s not one I have to examine that often. It’s a place of myth, legend, and heroes.
I remember my father talking about the great Hank Aaron of the Milwaukee (later Atlanta) Braves. It would have been enough for him to talk about the slugger for me to have a sense of the significance of this man, but it added to all things that I grew up a Braves fan. Every Friday night during my youth involved a trip to my grandmother’s house where we would talk, play dominoes or authors (another form of go-fish using homemade cards), and watch the Braves on TV. Thus, between my father’s talk of Hank Aaron and my grandmother’s talk of baseball in general (she had always been a Steve Garvey fan), the idea that in the course of a career only one man had ever hit more than 750 home runs was implanted into my brain. This milestone was one of two that were baseball sacred. (The other being Cy Young’s 500 wins…a mark that in today’s game truly is inaccessible…the closest player is 40+ years old and only has 351.) 755 was a magical number.
As of today, a man named Barry Bonds is sitting at 753 home runs (and in an ironic twist of fate is in the middle of a three game series with the Atlanta Braves). Normally when things like this happen, I sit amazed, recalling the legends of the older players while watching their upstart challengers attempt a feat akin to climbing Mt. Olympus itself and stealing immortality from those who reside there. I remember watching as Cal Ripken surpassed the milestone of consecutive games played and being awestruck at his longevity. I remember watching as Jerry Rice became the first receiver with over 100 touchdown catches. I remember watching Nolan Ryan throw his 7th no-hitter. I sat with bated breath as Lance Armstrong pushed his way from cancer to a 7th consecutive Tour de France victory. I watched and was inspired by these men and the athletic accomplishments they strode past on the legs of titans, ever to etch their name into legend.
So why do I not celebrate Barry Bonds and his gargantuan accomplishment? The answer is simple, yet more complicated than you know.
Unless you’ve been living under a rock, or you totally ignore the sports world (as many of my friends do), you know that Bonds allegedly took performance enhancing drugs, steroids, and other harmful and illegal substances. The evidence is, at present, all circumstantial. The bulges that formed on his upper body, to include an increased hat size. The power production since his early days with the Pirates. The connections, the unknown substances that he was told were ok, all of the obfuscated facts seem to point toward guilt. In fact, in the court of public opinion, many have already passed their judgment on this would-be home run king. (Yes, I have made my decision, and yes, you probably know what it is).
But you actually must look past the evidence to see the root problem here. It’s irrational of me, maybe hypocritical, but on the whole it all boils down to this: this just feels wrong.
You know the feeling. There something shady there, and whether perfectly legal or not, you are still disinclined to want to go along with it. It’s the hair on the back of your neck factor. It’s the gut feeling. It’s all the things that you believe in your heart, but can’t prove in your head. And it’s a part of everything we know and do.
These long baseball diatribes over I now come to the ultimate point of this rant. What the fuck are we supposed to do about it? There are blatantly obvious times, and you all know them; times when maybe the letter of the law was followed, but not the spirit. You know the feeling that you want to go home and shower, but you can’t get all the slime off of you. You recognize that procedure sometimes gets in the way of prosecuting that which you know is wrong, all because you have nothing more than your belief.
There are those who act anyway. The idea here being that you fucked with me (or someone in my care), and are using every available weasel’s hole to hide. But I won’t let you. You want to fuck with me and mine, I’ll fuck you right back, through those very holes you try to hide behind. I may get a little slime on my dick, but it’s nothing I won’t just wipe off with a shirt I find somewhere on my way home. That’s how it gets sometimes, especially if you piss me off enough.
But that doesn’t fly, does it? You can’t just go fucking up everyone and everything that messes with your family, can you? So you get those who just bow to it because the procedures and the paperwork aren’t there. Those smiling, vindictive little bastards are just on the other side of the bars, but you have to sign in triplicate for the keys after giving a blood sample, a DNA check, your mother’s maiden name, your first born, and the keys to any really cool car you may ever own. Even when you do go through all the procedures, if you look at the Man funny, he’ll question your integrity and reasoning for even wanting to do all of this, and deny you anyway. (By the way, 9 fucking years in the Air Force, where one of the core values is “Integrity First”, serving my country in a god-fucking-forsaken desert for your right to be a sniveling, spaghetti-spine weenie, and screwing myself daily over the right thing to do means that you have about as much right to call my integrity into question as a piss-ant has of getting a cock’s eye view of the Virgin Mary’s pleasure hole….just so we’re clear on that for future reference. That’s another rant though…)
Confused yet? So am I. I really am at a loss for what to do when you know someone has screwed people over, when someone has cheated to get ahead in a game that you love, and have loved for as long as you can remember. You are tired, defeated, and frustrated. You watch in disbelief as the very rules that were designed to protect this hallowed game’s sanctity are used to protect a sleezeball. Then all you can do is take your newly circumcised cock out of the hole, zip up your pants in shame, and pray that Lady Karma can find a way to succeed where you have failed.
And in this lies my solace. You have all experienced the feeling of injustice beyond the reach of the law. You have all sensed that “something about this is just fucked up”. You all know when the letter and the spirit have been torn asunder. And you all have a voice to which Karma listens. I may not be able to stop Mr. Bonds from breaking the records any more than I can move the very mountains he seeks to climb. But I can still say “that’s just not right”, and with enough voices, the accomplishment becomes nothing.
Don’t let this rant fool you, though. I will fight against the injustices by any means available as long as I can. I will continue to protect my family when these things happen to us. I will be as much a sentry in the night as I can be. And when I fail, I hope Karma has as much mercy as I would have had.
Ever yours,
The Ranting Penguin
This summer, in all likelihood, a part of me is going to die. It’s not going to be a major part of me, and in fact, there is a probability that I won’t even notice it goes away. It’s located somewhere in the back of my brain between the old Nick at Nite reruns I used to watch, just on the other side of Maxwell Smart’s shoe phone, but before Joe Friday’s grey suit (they wore the same suit in almost every episode). It’s a bit of my childhood I don’t often pull out of its hiding place because it’s not one I have to examine that often. It’s a place of myth, legend, and heroes.
I remember my father talking about the great Hank Aaron of the Milwaukee (later Atlanta) Braves. It would have been enough for him to talk about the slugger for me to have a sense of the significance of this man, but it added to all things that I grew up a Braves fan. Every Friday night during my youth involved a trip to my grandmother’s house where we would talk, play dominoes or authors (another form of go-fish using homemade cards), and watch the Braves on TV. Thus, between my father’s talk of Hank Aaron and my grandmother’s talk of baseball in general (she had always been a Steve Garvey fan), the idea that in the course of a career only one man had ever hit more than 750 home runs was implanted into my brain. This milestone was one of two that were baseball sacred. (The other being Cy Young’s 500 wins…a mark that in today’s game truly is inaccessible…the closest player is 40+ years old and only has 351.) 755 was a magical number.
As of today, a man named Barry Bonds is sitting at 753 home runs (and in an ironic twist of fate is in the middle of a three game series with the Atlanta Braves). Normally when things like this happen, I sit amazed, recalling the legends of the older players while watching their upstart challengers attempt a feat akin to climbing Mt. Olympus itself and stealing immortality from those who reside there. I remember watching as Cal Ripken surpassed the milestone of consecutive games played and being awestruck at his longevity. I remember watching as Jerry Rice became the first receiver with over 100 touchdown catches. I remember watching Nolan Ryan throw his 7th no-hitter. I sat with bated breath as Lance Armstrong pushed his way from cancer to a 7th consecutive Tour de France victory. I watched and was inspired by these men and the athletic accomplishments they strode past on the legs of titans, ever to etch their name into legend.
So why do I not celebrate Barry Bonds and his gargantuan accomplishment? The answer is simple, yet more complicated than you know.
Unless you’ve been living under a rock, or you totally ignore the sports world (as many of my friends do), you know that Bonds allegedly took performance enhancing drugs, steroids, and other harmful and illegal substances. The evidence is, at present, all circumstantial. The bulges that formed on his upper body, to include an increased hat size. The power production since his early days with the Pirates. The connections, the unknown substances that he was told were ok, all of the obfuscated facts seem to point toward guilt. In fact, in the court of public opinion, many have already passed their judgment on this would-be home run king. (Yes, I have made my decision, and yes, you probably know what it is).
But you actually must look past the evidence to see the root problem here. It’s irrational of me, maybe hypocritical, but on the whole it all boils down to this: this just feels wrong.
You know the feeling. There something shady there, and whether perfectly legal or not, you are still disinclined to want to go along with it. It’s the hair on the back of your neck factor. It’s the gut feeling. It’s all the things that you believe in your heart, but can’t prove in your head. And it’s a part of everything we know and do.
These long baseball diatribes over I now come to the ultimate point of this rant. What the fuck are we supposed to do about it? There are blatantly obvious times, and you all know them; times when maybe the letter of the law was followed, but not the spirit. You know the feeling that you want to go home and shower, but you can’t get all the slime off of you. You recognize that procedure sometimes gets in the way of prosecuting that which you know is wrong, all because you have nothing more than your belief.
There are those who act anyway. The idea here being that you fucked with me (or someone in my care), and are using every available weasel’s hole to hide. But I won’t let you. You want to fuck with me and mine, I’ll fuck you right back, through those very holes you try to hide behind. I may get a little slime on my dick, but it’s nothing I won’t just wipe off with a shirt I find somewhere on my way home. That’s how it gets sometimes, especially if you piss me off enough.
But that doesn’t fly, does it? You can’t just go fucking up everyone and everything that messes with your family, can you? So you get those who just bow to it because the procedures and the paperwork aren’t there. Those smiling, vindictive little bastards are just on the other side of the bars, but you have to sign in triplicate for the keys after giving a blood sample, a DNA check, your mother’s maiden name, your first born, and the keys to any really cool car you may ever own. Even when you do go through all the procedures, if you look at the Man funny, he’ll question your integrity and reasoning for even wanting to do all of this, and deny you anyway. (By the way, 9 fucking years in the Air Force, where one of the core values is “Integrity First”, serving my country in a god-fucking-forsaken desert for your right to be a sniveling, spaghetti-spine weenie, and screwing myself daily over the right thing to do means that you have about as much right to call my integrity into question as a piss-ant has of getting a cock’s eye view of the Virgin Mary’s pleasure hole….just so we’re clear on that for future reference. That’s another rant though…)
Confused yet? So am I. I really am at a loss for what to do when you know someone has screwed people over, when someone has cheated to get ahead in a game that you love, and have loved for as long as you can remember. You are tired, defeated, and frustrated. You watch in disbelief as the very rules that were designed to protect this hallowed game’s sanctity are used to protect a sleezeball. Then all you can do is take your newly circumcised cock out of the hole, zip up your pants in shame, and pray that Lady Karma can find a way to succeed where you have failed.
And in this lies my solace. You have all experienced the feeling of injustice beyond the reach of the law. You have all sensed that “something about this is just fucked up”. You all know when the letter and the spirit have been torn asunder. And you all have a voice to which Karma listens. I may not be able to stop Mr. Bonds from breaking the records any more than I can move the very mountains he seeks to climb. But I can still say “that’s just not right”, and with enough voices, the accomplishment becomes nothing.
Don’t let this rant fool you, though. I will fight against the injustices by any means available as long as I can. I will continue to protect my family when these things happen to us. I will be as much a sentry in the night as I can be. And when I fail, I hope Karma has as much mercy as I would have had.
Ever yours,
The Ranting Penguin