For several years I lived out on Portland’s west side – part of the Tualatin Valley, the suburban enclave over the Portland Hills from the Beehive of Terrorism itself. New Year’s night there was always interesting, because amid the fireworks was a surprisingly large amount of actual gunfire that would have delighted the guests at an Afghanistan wedding party.
One year that included an immense blast that rattled the windows just past midnight; probably pyro but it sounded like someone had upgraded from small arms to an actual cannon, and who doesn’t shoot in the new year with an artillery piece, amiright?
This year I enjoyed a new experience New Year’s Day; loaded the bogu bag and shinai and played two hours of kendo at the Portland Kendo Club’s hatsugeiko, the traditional “first practice” of the new year, followed by a potluck.
Part of the fun was the venue itself, "Fulton Park Community Center".
The building is over a century old - 1914 - as a school:
"In 1914, the Fulton Park Elementary School was built. The school housed grades K-8 in its four classrooms all opening into a central gymnasium, complete with a stage. A later remodel of the building included a new kitchen and additional bathroom facilities. The building was designed by Floyd Archibald Naramore, who was the architect and superintendent of school properties for Portland Public Schools from 1912 to 1919."
The old school - and it's still run as a school, a tiny French immersion program (which is kind of ridiculous. French? Allez savoir.) - is utterly Ragtime Era awesome, with all the architectural gimmicks of the era. Not sure which I loved more; the massive wooden timber truss ceiling? The little anterooms at the back of the classrooms with the sliding doors to hide all the coats and hats and the utility sink?
The wood floor was perfect; it's hard to emphasize enough how different floor types are on my legs.
The metal joints are unsparing. They simply don't give and flex like human bones do. So playing kendo - which requires a lot of energetic suburi or footwork - means taking a pounding through the legs. A hard floor, like concrete? Fuuuuuck. I come away from a couple of hours of keiko aching in every knee joint.
But a springy wood floor like Fulton? That's pure energy-giving. I was sore this morning - it was a good hard practice - but my legs? As good as they ever are, and that's terrific.
So. Great kendo, good training, lots of fun with kendoka from all over Portland plus family, big kid energy, great food, just a terrific way to start off the year.
Hope all here have the same.
And, today as every day, this year as every year, as always, ceterum (autem) censeo the GOP esse delendam.
I don't really think much about this day, even on the day itself.
For one thing, the celebration of my country's "liberation", if you will, has been marked by some form of aggressive action by my country against someone else's "liberty" - whether that "liberty" is a particularly human good or not - all my adult life.
I recall thinking back when I was desperately trying to become part of an Army unit that had been set up to ostensibly help fight other peoples' guerrilla "wars of liberation" that the unit had spent much of its existence fighting and helping other people fight against "wars of liberation".
I like a lot of things about the United States. As nation-states go, it's one of the more decent (low bar? Fuck, yeah! But, hey, think of how many don't clear it...).
But it's hard to just get too flag-wave-y when you get to know enough about how hard We the People have fought against the most noble promises in the very document we are celebrating today.
And how much harder it is when the nativist Right is roaring and shrieking that "...all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness"...unless they are gay. Or nonbinary. Or immigrants. Or Black.
And let's not even get into that fucking awful Lee Greenwood song.
I'm tired of watching the dumbfuck "conservatives" grab onto today and hug it like a rubber love doll.
It's possible to love this country without being blind to its problems.
Indeed; to me the only way to love this country is to be resolved to fix those problems to the extent they can be fixed.
So. Happy Birthday, US.
May you always be right.
And may I always be all dead square up in your ass if you're not.
Finally got my Army retirement straightened out, so I'm getting a grand or so a month from Uncle Sugar. Trying not to blow it all on booze and hookers.
I'm also winding down my geotech work, and finding I don't miss it much other than the impetus it gave me to get up and outside every day. So trying to find other reasons for doing that. Picked back up kendo, something I did thirty years ago, and am finding that what my mind recalls my body scoffs at performing.
Inside my head I may still be 36, but my muscles and bones are 65.
Oh, and I don't recall if I mentioned this earlier...
So there was a tax issue around my parents' retirement accounts which were passed on to my sister and I after my mother's death in 2019. The financial management company that managed the transfer reported the full amount - more than a quarter million - as taxable and submitted a 1099-R as such.
We didn't, and last August the IRS came after the full about, to the tune of penalties and interest of more then $80,000.
I then spend the next damn-near ten months going back to the feds - over and over - trying to get them to accept that, no, I didn't have a quarter-mil shells stuffed in a sack or stashed in the Caymans. It was in an "inherited IRA" just where it had gone back in 2020.
Well.
Finally in February we got a "Notice of Deficiency" telling us we needed to pay up, or file a petition in U.S. Tax Court.
We filed.
Got a docket number - and a letter from the IRS recommending we hire a tax attorney.
Figuring that if we were going to pay someone $80K it might as well be Uncle Sammy instead of some tax shyster I hunted around the legal aid outfits. No joy; we 're "too rich" (retired geologist and public school secretary? I know, right?) to get gratis legal help. Ugh.
Anyway, the tl:dr is that last Friday we got a call from the tax court attorney. K, he said, we've accepted your contention on the Carol IRA transfer. Still got a couple of little sums (2020 was a weird year in a lot of ways, and not getting (or not submitting) the 1099-Rs was one of them...) to pay down, but the damage is $2,600, not $82,000.
So. Good.
Mind you, still fucking irritating that Donny Trump cheated like a motherfucker on HIS taxes and hasn't paid so much as a nickel. But that's how that skeevy bastard rolls, and We the People let him. So.
Oh! Almost forgot this.
So my back went out this past weekend, and so I slept on the couch last night. It's not as soft as the mattress, so easier on an ouchie back.
But it's also closer to the street, and on a typical July 3rd I'd have had a mad minute all night, seeing as how shooting off pyro was how we roll here in the People's Republic. I even wrote a whole post about this ten years ago.
Last night?
Nothing.
We're in the middle of a long dry summer. The City of Portland, aware of the potential for pyromaniac inferno, issued a hard "no" to pyro this summer, warning the good people of Portland that the coppers would aggressively cite anyone caught making red glare.
So...my question is; was last night's quiet because the People of Portland sensibly realized that unless your aim was to set your garage on fire it wouldn't be a good idea to be shooting pyro all over the yard? Or was it purely fear of the heavy hand of the Law?
Given my general opinion of We the People?
My guess is that the dumb clucks forgot that it was a holiday, seeing as it's a Tuesday, and who the hell does holidays on a Tuesday?
So happy Tuesday, and hoping you and yours have a fire-free holiday.
Actually, no; the pain is in the leg, not in the ass.
This was this morning; left calf - technically it's the "gastrocnemius", the big muscle of the calf - wrapped up and laid over a cold pack, watching poor Everton take a Manchester United hiding.
To get here...well, this winter I went back to the beginner kendo class run through the Parks & Recreation district out in Beaverton by the westside kendo club, Obukan.
I played kendo at Obukan thirty years ago, back when I lived out there (married to a different woman, but that's a whoooooole 'nother story...). I never progressed beyond Rokkyu - the lowest rank - but enjoyed the hell out of it.
(I enjoyed the hell out of the marriage, too, mind, but that's really a whole 'nother story...)
Then I got divorced, moved away, started playing soccer, wrecked my hips, got them replaced and then my knees started to go, got them replaced (in the process somewhere changing women, which is a whole 'nother 'nother story), and then retired.
With more time on my hands I started thinking about kendo again.
I fenced European style in college - just foil, and just for my own entertainment - and studied karate in the Shorin-ryu style after I got out of the active service, but something in kendo scratches me in all the right places more or less.
My only real question was whether I could return to being a good kendoka after thirty years and with legs full of replacement parts.
Well...so far so good, until last night, when I managed to strain something in my leg, probably pushing my dead ass forward, since the left left is the "pushing" leg in kendo.
Ouch.
What was kind of odd is that when I played goalkeeper I was always banging myself up. Broken fingers, bruised shoulders, damaged knees...I was the king of pain, and all of the dings were just a thing.
I'd put my knee braces on - I had two huge rubber-and-metal ones that pretty much took all the weight off the knee - and ice them down, wrap up the shoulder, get the fingers set, and go off to work.
It's been a decade since I've had a sports injury, and I'd forgotten how irking they are. And I'm ten years older, too, so instead of walking it off I've been sort of hobbling around and that as little as possible...
Anyway, just an idle sort of Saturday, and a kind of transition piece away from the politics. I'll be back later in the week with something more hopeful.
Oh, and the title? It's supposed to be "pain in the ass" in Japanese, tho after poking around a bit it sounds like there isn't an exact equivalent for the meaning of the term; the closes seems to be うざい ("Uzai"), which is a contraction of "urusei", "rude" or "noisy", and to bark "uzai" at someone is apparently a way of letting them know they're being a pain in your ass.
Or leg.
Which is what I need to limp off and ice down. No, thanks, I can see myself out. I'm good
For a long, long time I was a big fan of the sport of baseball in general, and certain baseball teams in particular.
One of my fondest memories was as an older kid - I'd have been about 12 - loafing around the big old house in the Chicago suburb of Glen Ellyn during long summer afternoons. My mother would be on "her porch", the shady-side former sleeping porch (that would have been a must-have in muggy pre-airconditioning Illinois summers for a house built in 1905), knitting and listening to the Cubs game on the radio.
"The Cubs will shine in '69" she'd say, mimicking the club slogan that season.
They didn't, of course, that being the now-famous Miracle Mets year. But, still...
That, and my parents' backgrounds growing up in the Thirties and Forties, when baseball was THE professional sport, was enough to get me started as a baseball fan.
My affection transferred to the great Philadelphia Phillies teams when we moved to southwestern Pennsylvania in the summer of 1974, and stayed with the club through the Eighties while I gypsied around the Army.
When I moved out to Portland in the summer of 1990 I found no major league club. The Portland baseball team was, instead, a high-minor (AAA) team then run by the Minnesota Twins organization. The Portland Beavers were a Pacific Coast League leftover that had been a regular when the PCL was the "western major league" but since the MLB expansion to the Left Coast had been in and out - mostly out - since the 1970s.
But baseball is baseball, so I started going to the old Civic Stadium to root, root, root for the Bevos.
I was about the only one.
The photo above is from the early Oughts - the field was sponsored by Portland General Electric at that point (between 2001 and about 2010) and called "PGE Park" - but whether it was the Nineties or the Oughts, whether you called in The Civic, PGE, Jeld-Wen Field, or Providence Park (which it is now) the "crowds" were the same:
Weren't.
I'm not sure why, exactly.
Portland has always had a pretty vocal contingent of baseball wanna-haves, including several of the bigger sportswriting names (some joker named Dwight Jaynes was always kinda insane on that issue), who agitate for throwing taxpayer dollars at getting a new baseball park and a team.
But when we HAD an actual team?
Nobody came to see 'em.
I mean...look at the picture. There's probably more people on the field than around it. And that was how it was, consistently, after the Twins-owned Beavers were stolen in 1993. Didn't matter; Single A Rockies (a Colorado farm) or AAA Beavers (a San Diego farm)...the public didn't turn out in droves.
It wasn't that the clubs were awful. The early Nineties Beavs were a hell of a club, with several players who had decent careers in the Show, and even the ones who didn't were a lot of fun. My personal favorite was an Dominican outfielder named Bernardo Brito Perez who usually went by just Brito.
He was the real-life version of the "Crash" Davis character in Bull Durham or the Serrano character in Major League; a minor league slugger who never had quite enough of the right stuff to make the jump up to the bigs.
In Brito's case it was the Deuce.
He managed to win a couple of PCL home run titles by sheer power, but in the two seasons I saw him in Portland it was the same deal. Every spring he'd come out blasting. AAA pitchers are like all pitchers everywhere; they come up through the minors with a big fastball and they like throwing fastballs. So they'd see this big lug and figure, "I'll just give this joker my heat".
And Brito'd park the heat in the deep right field seats.
So the next time the pitcher saw El Pupo they'd listen to their coach. Brito wouldn't see anything but curveball, curveball, slider, changeup.
Brito couldn't fucking hit the curve to save his life.
So by the end of the season he'd be picking off mistakes and hangers, and looking more frustrated by the game. He never did figure out how to hit the deuce, and so he never got more than a cup of coffee in the Show, and was retired by the mid-Nineties.
But when he was going good? He was, like a lot of the other Beavs, a lot of fun.
But the fans never came.
Finally the old Civic got a full-on soccer pitch makeover and the baseball club was out in the cold; the new owner sold them and they ended up in El Paso as the Chihuahuas and no, I'm not kidding.
For one thing, the dimensions were freakish because of the long-versus short-axes were utterly skewed by the construction as a mostly-football-field.
The Civic was unusual in that the mound-to-plate went southeast-to-northwest instead of the northeast direction recommended by the league. That was because of the location of the seats; at the north and west sides. The south end was an empty lot between the outfield fence and the huge brick north facade of the property owner, the Multnomah Athletic Club.
The east side might have been the weirdest of all, an immense (like, two-story high) vertical wall. Although the dimensions were supposed to be pretty close - about 320 feet down both the left and right-field foul lines - the Green Monster left-field wall made the left field feel like a short porch, and I think it got a lot of visitors to go with a more left-handed lineup than they would have otherwise.
Dead center? Death Fucking Valley. I don't think I ever saw anyone put one out over the deep centerfield wall.
Oh, and since we're talking about the old barn...one of the other weird things about it was the wall signs on that big left field wall.
I mean...prime real estate for ads, right?
One of the most iconic was a Jantzen swimwear "diving girl". You can barely see her arching her way down the wall in this 1982 shot from the high east side seats:
You gotta blow this shot up a LOT, and here's a detail from a shot in a collection of photos from the early Oughts that shows her a little better:
If you walked down to the front row of bleachers and looked down you'd notice that the pool of rainwater that accumulated in the small of her back and the crack of her ass was typically a nice verdant Pacific Northwest algae-green.
The groundskeepers obviously didn't get paid enough to scrub her butt for her.
Interestingly, when the soccer makeover in the Teens destroyed the old left field wall the diving girl was rescued and moved over to an interior wall above the west concourse...
...where she flies today, still caught in mid-dive.
Oh, and since we're talking about the Jantzen Girl...her companion over on the wall was this guy; the Henry Weinhard's "Gooooo Beavers" guy:
My recollection is that this ad was a pre-digital-era live-action thing, too. The Henry's guy folded up into a "sitting" position when nothing was happening (which, I'm sure you're shocked to know, isn't all that unusual in baseball...) but when a rally was going on or somebody parked one could be pulled up to raise his go-Beavers sign.
The whole thing is kinda sad, too, in that it's a reminder of the sort of brewer's nightmare that the US was for half a century.
Henry Weinhard was a real guy, a German immigrant who brewed your basic lager here in Portland from the 1850s until after the national brand invasions in the 1950s to 1970s.
It was still a decent commercial lager brewed at the old stand in the Pearl downtown until the Stroh's combine bought it, peddled it to the Miller conglomerate, who shut down the old brewhouse.
It took over a century, but the Schludwiller people finally won.
All of this is kind of just a stroll down Portland baseball-memory-lane...but I DO have a point in all of this.
Specifically, I'm reading that this season MLB is going to have a "pitch clock". From the linked article:
"Baseball hopes to reverse that trend this year, with a 15-second clock
for each pitch when the bases are empty, and 20 seconds with runners on
base. In addition, batters will be limited to one timeout per at-bat,
and there will also be a 30-second timer between hitters. (The sport is making other changes,
including banning the defensive infield shift to generate more offense,
and making bases slightly larger to increase safety and possibly
jumpstart stolen base attempts. All the new rules will be in effect for
spring traininggames, which begin February 24 ahead of the 2023 season
Opening Day on March 30.)"
Now. I'm older than dirt. If ever there should be a person who shouts at the baseball clouds that this "clock" is rank obscenity and a defilement of the Sacred Game it should be me. But y'know what?
Fuck that.
I can't watch pro baseball anymore because it's So. Fucking. Goddamn Slow.
Pitchers fucking around endlessly. Batters stepping out after every pitch. The tyranny of the home run.
I was too young to really know the baseball of the early Sixties, before the lower mound rule of 1968, but I was told by fans my father's age that it was the deadliest, boringest, slowest, most excruciating baseball they'd ever seen; two teams both dominated by power pitchers playing games decided by whose heater got up in the other teams' sluggers wheelhouse.
Ugh.
I still enjoy watching baseball in person (and thanks, Pop, for teaching me how to score...) but on television?
My life's not long enough for that shit.
Mind you, there's still people who ARE bitching:
"For more than 150 years, the lack of a clock on the field has
distinguished baseball from other major US team sports, and some
baseball purists are sure to object to adding one. “There’s no clock in
baseball. And there’s no clock in baseball for a reason,” now-New York
Mets star pitcher Max Scherzer said in 2019."
Yeah, well, good luck with that if you WANT your sport to go the way of American jazz; become the fading property of the Old and the White. There's a reason so many good young athletes (especially Black) don't play baseball anymore; it's boring as fuck.
I wish I could find it online, but Bill James wrote a good piece on long boring games when the trend towards long boring games started to be noticeable back in the Eighties (or Nineties).
His main point was that for all people like Scherzer's bullshit about how "there's no clock in baseball" there WAS a clock in baseball and had been since the pro game emerged in the 19th Century.
It was the sun.
Ballgames (except on Saturday, and Saturday games back in the day were often doubleheaders...) had to start in late afternoon (because the fans needed to be off work) so the game had to be wrapped up before sundown.
Umpires in the day had one other job; to hustle the game along to make that happen.
James' contention was that the first generation of night-game umpires and players had grown up in the sport with that, so the tradition of hustling the game along continued until that generation aged out some time in the late Sixties or Seventies.
The thing is, dicking around is in the interests of both the pitcher - especially with runners on, who has to pitch out of the stretch AND check the runners - and the batter, who wants to throw off the pitcher's timing and work the count.
It's NOT in the interests of the fans, who would rather not watch the pitcher thrown down to first half a dozen times in an at-bat or watch the batter step out to scratch his nuts.
So.
As an old Portland baseball fan?
Go, go gadget clock!
And if the new rules work? Would I go to baseball games again?
Sure!
Just don't ask me for my tax dollars to build a new stadium, though. Fuck that, too.
One of my passions is soccer (no, really..?) and particularly the local soccer teams, the Timbers on the men's side and the Thorns on the women's.
Laid up as I am I spend a fair bit of time watching both teams - and the Timbers are, after a pretty awful start, on a bit of a tear so Howay you Timbers! - as well as thinking and writing about them over at my other gig, Riveting!
So it was with sickened horror I read this past week that the Thorns' coach during the 2014 and 2015 seasons was a loathsome rapey scumbag who was savaging his own players while we all cheered and sang for him and them and then got away clean after being fired for fucking up the 2015 season on the pitch.
It's a sad, tired, familiar old story, but carries a heavy blow because it comes so close to home.
Anyway, I'm still immersed in this mess as I go through the boring daily round of my rehabilitation, and though I don't want to go any deeper into it here (you can read my full thoughts on the mess over here), I just thought I'd mention it briefly.
I'm sick, sad, and angry at everyone - in my club, in the league - who had a role in this desecration of the young women of my beloved Thorns and, through them, many of my own happy and cherished memories.
Y'all continue to ignore the Brigade Sarn't Major's directive on not wearing y'all's PT shorts whilst exercising, not in formation. Now far be it from me to suggest that our Brigade Sarn't Major is a nitpicky ding-dong with Wheatina inside his fucking brain housing group who should really have better things to do than obsess about what y'all are wrapping around your asses when you go for a jog down Ardennes Street. That would be unprofessional and disrespectful to our chain of command.
So I will simply remind you that, while possibly being the sort of thing that only a nitpicky ding-dong with Wheatina inside his fucking brain housing group who should really have better things to do than obsess about what y'all are wrapping around your asses when you go for a jog down Ardennes Street would do, that directive has the force of law in this here outfit.
I personally could not give a rat's ass if y'all sashay down the street in a pink tulle' tutu. But, after this formation, you will put the PT shorts up and wear them only when in morning PT formation so you will not incur the wrath of said Brigade Sarn't Major onto this company and the First Sergeant thereof, that being me, who is infernally tired of the goddamn Brigade Sarn't Major and who, if lectured one more time on this issue by that infernal product of an incestuous union will take it out of your ass, seriatim. Is that understood?
I thought so.
Now. Second.
I have received word from Battalion that this Division is going to be tasked to provide a brigade to march in some sort of parade in Washington D.C. Now y'all know my feelings about parades; the pleasure is fucking transient, the position is goddamn ridiculous, and the expense is completely and utterly ridiculous.
However, due to certain feelings of masculine inadequacy of certain persons in certain elected positions this parade will happen and it is entirely likely that this brigade will be tasked, given that Second Brigade in march order looks like nothing so much as a traveling leper colony, and the less said about what will happen if First Brigade is allowed out amongst unprepared civilians the better, although my hyfuckingpothesis is that there will not be an un-emptied bottle of spirits or an unmolested domestic animal within ten kilometers of their line of march.
Now. I still remember the last time we did this, and I will not have a repetition of some of the things you people thought up last Fourth of July.
No, AT Platoon, your vehicles are not public conveyances and you are not authorized to give "free joyrides" in them.
No, Medics, you are not, I say again, not qualified to perform pelvic exams.
No, Commo, you are not "DJ Slicky" and you cannot play Lady Gaga's "Sexxx Dreams" on the brigade command push. Or the battalion command push, either. And don't even think about my company net.
Yes, y'all will be issued MRE meals on the day of the parade and, no, you cannot trade them to civilians for Bonus Jacks, Whoppers, or any other sort of civilian chow. Y'all will keep your assigned weapon with you at all times, and that includes not encouraging civilian women to "touch your gun", Specialist Black. I got my eye on you, heee-ro.
And before you ask, no. I have no fucking idea what the fuck this is for. It ain't no victory parade that I can think of, 'cause we ain't beat nobody's ass lately. If it's a "thank you for your service" thing we can get enough of that at the goddamn airport. If the idea is to scare our enemies then they should really make the Navy do it, because I dunno about anyone else but the Navy scares the hell out of me, floating around the ocean somewhere with nuclear torpedoes an' shit.
But here's the bottom line, people; we are GIs, and we got our orders, so our mission is to salute and move out smartly. Including down fucking Pennsylvania Avenue for a big ol' goat rodeo, if that's what the country wants, God in his wisdom knoweth why. Are we clear on that?
Comp-ney, Atten-shun! At ease. Okay, listen up. Coupla things here.
First.
I've been hearing a bunch of you he-roes prancing around the dayroom talking smack about how y'all are "the best 1 percent this country produces".
I hear tell that y'all got that shit from some jarhead, and a jarhead general at that.
Now y'all know how I feel about jarheads. So hearing y'all woofing because one said something about how “We don’t look down upon those of you who that haven’t served. In fact, in a way we’re a little bit sorry because you’ll have never have experienced the wonderful joy you get in your heart when you do the kinds of things our servicemen and women do.” just means that the overpromoted shavetail doesn't know about the kinds of things our servicemen did down at the Flaming Mug last week and, yes, I'm looking at you, AT Platoon. I've got my eye on you, slickyboys.
So before you get all "Ooo-rah! We bad, we bad!" take a look to your left and right flanks. You know as well as I do what that guy next to you is capable of. We all went to high school with that guy. The dude that locked himself in the last stall in the boys' bathroom in the B-wing and had to get pulled out by the school cops?
That's him.
The joker that useta take polaroid dick pics and put them in the romance novels in the library?
That's him.
And don't get me started on surfing the fucking storm drains on their sleeping mats, am I right, Blackie?
The "best 1 percent" my rosy red ass.
The civilians are too fucking busy shoving their tongues up your collective fourth-point-of-contact to remember this, but y'all, at least, should know that y'all are the same jocks, nerds, stoners, wierdos, brainiacs, goofballs, and just regular American dipwads they went to high school with only now y'all wear the same colored clothes. Raisin' your right hand didn't suddenly make any of y'all smarter, braver, more honest, or less likely to fuck up a wet dream and yes, I mean you, night bakers. I saw your fuckin' mess hall this morning and we gonna have a little come-to-Jesus chat right after this formation.
Y'all are good troops, and that's what you're supposed to be. But don't let that make you think that you're some sort of national gold standard. That's how good troops end up getting waxed in combat.
Y'all get free food and clothes, y'all get to get all-expenses-paid vacations to the shitty parts of the world to fuck up things there. Don't let that make you kid yourselves about what a bunch of special fuckin' snowflakes you are just because some goddamn gyrene general who probably hasn't actually seen one of y'all in his natural environment since he was a itty-bitty lieutenant. Those fuckin' star-warriors run around in a little general-officer bubble and they have no more idea of what y'all are really doing out here than a cow knows about the fuckin' Council of Trent.
So. Get over yourselves, people. Like I tol' ya last week; thinking you're all better than civilians is a straight-up dick move, and I won't tolerate that shit in my company, regardless of what the Old Man tells you about how awesome you are.
OK.
Second.
Rumor has it that the Brigade Sergeant Major is gonna be in the company AO this Friday. Y'all know that dick as well as I do, so I highly recommend that you ensure that those "extra" toolkits find their way to SSG Reye's garage, Commo, and Medics? The quarter-ton y'all keep "forgetting" to turn in? That sumbitch needs to go live in the woods starting Thursday night.
Oh, and I will be doing a walkthrough tomorrow at fourteen hundred hours and if I find more pogie bait in your walllockers I will go medieval on your ass. Are we clear on that?
Attention! At ease. Okay, listen up. Coupla things here.
First.
All this horseshit about how kneeling during the playing of "To Anacreon in Heaven" is somehow spitting on the graves of soldiers?
Get over it. There hasn't been a single fucking American soldier who served, fought, was wounded, or died for "freedom" since 1953 (and that was the freedom of the people of the Republic of Korea, people, know your fucking history).
There are a handful of living veterans of Korea and WW2 who might qualify and you're welcome to ask them THEIR opinions, but all the rest of us fought for "national interests"; we helped secure a tank of gas, or navigation through the Panama Canal, or for diddly-shit Great Power games in the Middle East.
The U.S. of 2017 uses armed force like any Great Power, people.
This isn't 1776.
Grow the fuck up.
Second. I've seen fellow GIs get all whip out their DD214 on people who haven't served to beat them over the head with the "right" to be all pissy about people protesting the fact that coppers are WAY more likely to kill your ass if you're not White Like Me.
That's a dick move, brothers.
Those despised "civilians"? They're OUR FUCKING BOSSES.
If they want to protest, or shout at us, or dance naked in the streets...our job, our ONLY fucking job, is to salute and move out smartly. THEY are the true "guardians of liberty", not us. We're here to keep the outside out. THEY are there to make the "inside" truly free, truly just, true to the promise of "liberty and justice for all"...or not. It's up to them, and not us to lecture or hector them about what they do or how they do it.
S&T Platoon. Imma see your ass in the motor pool after this formation and we're gonna talk about your fucking Conex.
I'll admit this right upfront: I am not and never have been a Cubs fan.
I followed the Phillies in the 1980s and the early 1990s and then gradually transferred by allegiance to the Portland PCL club but my interest in baseball gradually faded after the AAA Portland Beavers blew town.
But...
...the soundtrack of my childhood includes Harry Caray calling Cubs games from the little coral-colored plastic Motorola radio that sat beside my mother's chair out on the small side porch in our house in Glen Ellyn to the continuo of her voice making small sounds of satisfaction when Fergie Jenkins would notch another strikeout and Ernie Banks would take one out to Waveland Avenue, or her "tck!" of irritation if Glen Beckert would hit into a 5-3 groundout.
So that explains how, all morning, I've been hearing my mother's voice saying; "The Cubs will shine in '69!"
Wherever he is today, I hope Ernie "Mister Cub" Banks is grinning from ear-to-ear.
"It's a beautiful day for a ballgame ... Let's play two!"
The game was at the Single A ballpark in Everett, Washington where the visiting Salem-Keizer Volcanoes (a San Francisco farm) played the penultimate game against the home side, a Seattle affiliate. The game itself was something of a snoozer; a 7-nothing rout for the visitors capped by a disastrous (for Everett) four-run ninth where the Volcanoes pretty much pasted the Everett closer all over the park.
I learned to score ballgames from my pop, the Master Chief, who told me as a slip of a boy that "it will make you pay attention to the game" and, yes, pop, that it does. I still record the pitch count for each batter, the direction the ball was put in play, and I tend to make my own decisions as to hits and errors regardless of the official scorer. So it was on the Salem-Keizer run in the sixth inning, when, according the the linked story above...
"Salem-Keizer capitalized on a Little League-type mental error in the sixth inning to score a run. With one out in the inning, right fielder Heath Quinn advanced to third base on a fly out to right field. The AquaSox right fielder, Dimas Ojeda, thought there were three outs on the catch and did not throw the ball in. Third base coach and manager Kyle Davis waved Quinn home emphatically and Quinn scored to take a 3-0 lead in the game."
Yeah, well, you make a bonehead play like that, Gehrig, and I'm givin' you a freaking error. That might well have been the highlight of the evening.
The location, though...the Everett ballpark is in some sort of sports complex, with a ginormous empty football field and track to the west. The entrance is down a blacktop ramp and past some sort of play field where the Everett players were taking part in some sort of kid-event in the long summer evening before the game...
The open area south of the ballfield was full of...stuff. Kids, parents...
...bouncy-houses, picnic tables, more kids, more parents, and scattered here and there players, looking ridiculously young and unformed.
But this is Single A Short Season, the lowest form of professional baseball life; there's a reason for that. Most of these players ARE young. They're are the hopefuls, the aren't-yets and the never-weres. The only lived-in faces are on the heads of the handful of the useta-bes and pluggers still hoping for a shot at the Big Casino.
This level is all about "player development" so the game, that actual game on the field, was...if not actually meaningless as near as dammit. Even if I still followed pro baseball I wouldn't have know who these players were nor did I care.
That wasn't really the point; it was a lazy evening, the peanuts were salty, the beer was colder than the wind off Puget Sound, and it was a relaxing sort of finger-mantra to tick off the little squares with the symbols of the game unspooling before me.
G 6-3, backwards K (a swinging strikeout - he "went around", got it?), little diagonal line with a black base at the end and an arrow up the middle for a line shot single to center. Idle thoughts; who taught that kid the odd half-sidearm delivery? Why the hell didn't the shortstop make that play?
The entire business was revoltingly wholesome. Unattended kids gamboled thunderously in the metal bleachers, mom and dad doucely sipping their eight-dollar beers.
I thought the young woman at left was a salacious outlier, some sort of baseball annie looking to pick herself up a young stud, but instead she turned out to be another bit of the small-town-America wholesomeness, mommy of one of the kids involved in one of the family-friendly gimmicks; in this case, out on the field with the home team for the anthem.
In fact, it had been so long since I'd been to one of these low-minor games I'd forgotten the cornball carny atmosphere; the idiotic costumed mascot
(the "Webbly" of the title - why the hell an outfit called the "Aquasox" decided that some sort of Amazonian poison tree-frog was what they needed for a mascot I have NO idea, but there he is, hideous bulging eyes and all...)
the Prozac-cheerfulness of the team employees shepherding lucky fans through a variety of silly antics; catching pizza boxes in a dipnet, two schoolkids racing around the bases dressing in hugely oversized team uniforms.
Perhaps the ultimate moment in all this goofiness came between the fifth and sixth innings, when two anonymous fans were handed radio control sets and tasked with guiding toy trucks around the infield from the third base to the first base side.
Predictable chaos ensued, with one racer getting halfway to second before turning completely around while the second circled the bag cluelessly before ramming into second base and flopping over, tires spinning.
All the while the Everett infield was warming up, looking warily about at their feet in case a plastic pickup was about to slam into them at the ankles. Sweetbabyjesus, what a circus.
My sport of choice, as you know, is soccer. I love the game itself, I love learning about it, studying it, the beauties and ugliness of it. I love being part of a culture of deep emotion, of topgallant delights and keelson-deep despair. Of thundering out love and devotion along with thousands of others, part of a thunder of voices over the hammering drums.
Baseball, though...baseball was part of my growing-up. Jack Brickhouse announcing Cubs games on my mother's cheap plastic radio during the summer of 1969, the Year of Tragedy and the Mets. Slow afternoons at the old Civic Stadium, Lois the National Anthem Lady and the Portland Beavers of AAA
(and someday I should really tell you the story of Bernardo Brito, the Beavs slugger...though I notice that the Aquasox have a kid named "Brito"...I wonder if he's a relative..?)
and filling in scorecards with the names of the Minnesota players of the Nineties.
I was a little surprised, and a little pleased, to find that all the old skills returned; recognizing the motion of fastball and curveball and slider. Acknowledging the position of the fielders, knowing where to look on throws, following the quickness of the bat.
It was an evening full of slowness, almost sweetness, like turning time down to a near stop and just being, drifting, afloat on a slow-rolling sea of silly, kitschy Americana.
Sprawled in the chill bleachers south of the gritty Everett downtown jotting down the runs and hits, listening to the hollow sound of the calls from the crowd float out across the ballyard; like finding an old scorecard from a game played long ago, a distant record of a time, and a me, that I'd almost forgotten.
Game Called.
Across the field of play
the dusk has come, the hour is late.
The fight is done and lost or won,
the player files out through the gate.
The tumult dies, the cheer is hushed,
the stands are bare, the park is still.
But through the night there shines the light
of home, beyond the silent hill.
The latest bizarre little sticky-note from the WTF-desk of the Department of Defense was the wholly-unsurprising information that the DoD (or several of its civilian contractors) were paying for various professional sports leagues to give the armed forces a little shout-out. James Fallows has a short summary of the NFL end of the arrangement.
I've become accustomed to the constant tongue-bath the pro sports leagues give the armed services to the point of pretty much tuning the business out. But when my nose is pushed in it it still irks me. No, there is no connection between getting paid to play a kid's game and getting paid to kill people and break shit, and to pretend otherwise is fairly skanky at best and truly loathsome at worst.
That said, I can't find anything near as ridiculous in this whole sports-leagues-military-lovefest as the way the business of killing people and breaking shit looks like in videogames, something I'm very familiar with because I have a 12-year-old son who lives for them.
They're...well, you know what they're like. "Hyperkinetic" doesn't begin to describe them. My most vivid image is The Boy literally bouncing up and down as he works his controller trying to blast the "enemy" pixels while not becoming a mass of "dead" pixels himself. The action so constant and frantic as to be almost a parody of actual armed combat which IS often pretty goddamn frantic (and frightening, exhausting, and often confusing as fuck, but obviously that's hard to convey in a videogame).
(Mind you, back in the day I had the luxury of "combat" - at least the simulated combat that was as close as I came or wanted to come - from several thousand meters away, seeing that artillery's whole purpose is to lend a little tone to what would otherwise be a sordid and vulgar brawl. And, yes, you've seen that Finley cartoon here before; I love the guy's goofy take on the various branches and apparently you can still get your hands on them here. Nice!)
Here's the thing, though.
What irks me more than anything about all this, both the silly purchased patriotism of the sports leagues as well as the hyperactive mayhem of the videogames is that neither one comes anywhere close to the single most distinctive thing about soldiering:
Boredom.
Soldiers, from hoplites to helicopter crews, spend an amazingly huge amount of time doing absolutely, utterly, brain-warpingly nothing. Not a fucking thing except sitting (or standing, or lying) around waiting. Or performing incredibly, mind-numbingly repetitive tasks that would be reviled as insultingly simple-minded by a hamster.
There's a reason that GIs play cards a lot and especially quick games like tonk a lot. Because cards are supremely portable and you can knock out a bunch of rounds of tonk in ten minutes, or play a marathon over a couple of hours. And you can be damn sure that you're going to HAVE those minutes or hours (or days, or weeks) doing fuck-all but wait and play cards.
If I had trouble with my guys, back in the day, it wasn't because of too much excitement or adventure, it was because they were bored out of their skulls and found ways to entertain themselves that weren't exactly what their (and my) chain of command felt were...appropriate (and yes, I'm looking at you, Blackie. NOT cool, man. Not cool.)
So if I were to write code for a first-person military videogame the objective would be for the player to find ways to entertain himself whilst hanging around the motor pool - but not get nailed doing it by the motor sergeant (or, worse, the First Sergeant for some epically awful detail).
I dunno how well it would sell. But it sure as hell would make me happy. Yep, boys and girls; it's ain't flags and cheerleaders and cool camouflage uniforms. That's how it is. That's how we roll. THAT's how it really plays.
I watched the Seattle-San Francisco football game this past Sunday. I watched the whole thing through the final whistle so I got to see Sherman, the Seattle right corner, make a hell of a play to send his team to the championship game, and also enjoy his hyperkinetic rant after time ran out and some sideline reporter was stupid enough to jam a microphone in his face.
I didn't have the same reaction my friend Labrys had or, frankly, that Charles-whose-wordprocessor-I-am-not-worthy-to-reboot-Pierce had.
Because I used to play soccer goalkeeper.
Because of that I completely understand exactly where Rich Sherman was that night, and, no, I don't think it had anything to do with brutality (and, yes, it is a pretty goddamn brutal sport) and, no, I don't think it had anything to do with racism or being an uppity Negro (and, yes, he was rude and loud and obnoxious, and in this country if you're black that will earn you a pantsload of ignorant racist bullshit).
It had to do with playing on the side that doesn't have the ball.
Attackers, whether they're soccer strikers or football receivers, get to do one particular thing that we football cornerbacks and soccer goalies don't and usually can't do; they get to score points.
In most sports let's face it; that's the fun shit.
That's the glory noise, the big news that makes the headlines and gets you on cereal boxes and into lucious television contracts. How many cornerbacks can you think of sitting in the ESPN booth right now? Kasey Kellar is the only keeper I know of that works the booth and that's largely because soccer in the U.S. is frankly weird and keepers are often the only player most Americans outside soccer fanatics actually know.
But playing offense is a self-licking ice cream cone.
Any sports nut can tell you how many points so-and-so scored, how many assists, how many yards he ran for or threw for, how many goals he scored. Any casual fan remembers the quarterbacks and the receivers, the strikers and the wingers, the goal-scoring centers and the point guards.
Who the hell remembers whose tackle saved a sure goal? The stick save, the deflected pass, the steal? Who recalls who batted the possible winning touchdown pass away for the interception that saved the game and the conference championship?
I'll tell you this; they'll damn well remember who did that for Seattle in 2014.
But it's more than that.
Defending is about plain and simple defiance.
It's about raging and hating to lose. It's about pure anger.
It's personal. It's about wanting to ruin the other person's day.
Stopping his best shot. Tackling him when he's got a clear run at goal and stripping the ball off his feet. It's about getting out to full stretch and palming his sure game-winner around the outside of the post. Pushing his slam-dunk back in his face. Sending him to the ice with the puck skipping away.
Sure, you saved your team the points, or the game. But other than that what's the reward for this hard work?
I'll tell you.
It's looking at the striker's face, seeing in that quarterback's eyes, the knowledge that you bested him. That he gave you his best shot and you were better. That he came straight at you with all his skill and strength and you slapped it down like it was a little baby's patty-cake pat. It's watching his sad little face get all puffy and red, watching him watch you with cautious hatred, and loving the feeling that you crushed his hopes and blighted his dream.
We all feel that way.
Sherman just said it.
I know, because of the night the striker on the team sandbagging down to our sad, low co-ed Division 4 level ran in on me as I collected the ball on the ground and kicked it straight back into my face and broke my nose.
(Then had the gall to complain to the referee that I was bleeding on the field.)
So after I stonewalled the sonofabitch the rest of the match - making save after save to deny him the win he so badly wanted - I walked up to him with the bloody twists of paper sticking out of both nostrils and got right in his face and smiled.
He shoved me and I cocked a fist and both teams jumped on us and hauled us away.
And, broken nose and all, I was a happy man.
Because I owned his sorry ass, and he knew it, and I knew he knew it, and that knowledge filled me with joy.
That's a very low human emotion, I'll admit, but that's the sort of thing that builds good defenses.
And empires.
And to make this about race or civility or something like that is just silly. If you did, or do, you really need to borrow my gloves and go get between the posts and I'll hammer some shots at you and dare you to stop me and we'll see how you feel about that.
Although you probably don't know this (and, I'm afraid, could probably care less; of all the posts here my soccer stuff draws fewer views than almost anything else outside of, well, anything. Hell, even my cat stories get more action) a lot has been happening to our Portland Thorns FC professional soccer club, current NWSL title-holders and defending first-season champions.
First, one of our defenders, Nikki Marshall, was waived back in September, right after the Girls in Red brought home the ugly-ass NWSL trophy (that's it over on the left and, yeah, it's pretty fuckin' ugly...except it looks a hell of a lot better sitting in our trophy case here in Portland. Heh).
Nikki is supposedly playing for our rival Seattle Reign but has more or less flat-out dismissed playing in the league next year.
Then Marian Dougherty, her backline partner, retired to take a real job.
The little-spoken fact of the National Women's Soccer League is that there are two types of players; those "allocated" from their national teams and those who can't make an honest living from their sport. Rumor - since the league is extraordinarily close-mouthed about its pay scale - says that the non-allocated players make as little as six or seven thousand a year from their playing gig. That's chump change for a good player but pretty typical of most sports, and in particular the NWSL has chosen to try and avoid paying out anything in order to avoid the solvency issues that crushed the three earlier attempts at forming a women's pro league here.
And today the first head coach - the manager, as they'd call her in Britain - of Thorns FC, Cindy Parlow Cone, has resigned.
And for the worst possible reason; her job was tearing her marriage apart. Her husband, John, resigned as the head of the Timbers' fitness staff today as well. Parlow Cone said: “Coaching the Thorns has been one of the highlights of my career. However, due to the scheduling conflicts created by the job, I realized that despite being a great move for my career, it was less than ideal for the health of my marriage - which is the most important thing in my life."
That's a damn hard road to find yourself on, to make you quit your job.
I've been there; not so much quitting my job to try and save my marriage but in the midst of a failing marriage finding myself in that cold iron place where it feels like the joy, the purpose, and the very reasons for living, have been leached out of your life.
You get up and go through the day but find no hope there. The world, and your place in it, seem very fallow, empty of the prospect of a gentler days to come.
This just reminds me of something I've said, and said here, before; that every day we live is a gift we're given.
Not that we will always want that gift. Sometimes that gift is a poisoned one.
Sometimes it is a horror so frightful that we cannot dare look upon it.
Sometimes it is pure joy. Sometimes it is a-tremble with happiness. Sometimes it is top-gallant delight, a delight so sweet and dear that it pierces our breast, a joy akin to weeping.
And...sometimes it is just...another day.
Another and another in the tripping string between our first breath and our last.
Some days are just a day, no better and no worse.
The part that catches in my throat, though, is how carelessly we assume that there will be another, and that that next day will be alike the last, and the last.
But it won't; there's nothing to say that today won't be the end of our marriage, or our love, or our hopes, or our life.
Well.
I could talk more about Coach Parlow Cone, and the Thorns, and what this may mean for the club, and Portland soccer, in 2014. But if you wanted to read about that you'd be following my work over at Slide Rule Pass, and this site isn't that site. I will have more to say about the soccer business side of this over there.
Today, here, I just wanted to remember again that every day we live we are a gift of love; that it's not such a bad thing to hold to that happy day and to work for the next as hard as we can.
Because oftimes it is only when the day draws to a close and the sky grows dark, and the cold wind closes around us, that we look back and remember that happy time and look forward with hesitation or fear, knowing that we cannot go back and that going forward gives us no assurance that we will emerge from the cold and the night.
Either that or we are becoming some sort of comic-book suburban family, because both my offspring have taken up kid soccer. Saturday I did nothing but soccer, kid or otherwise, it seemed.
Missy started us off in the morning with her little U-8 team playing on the football field down in Westmoreland Park in SE Portland. That's Little Miss wearing #4 in the photo above, by the way...
Most of the little ones don't really "play soccer". They run around chasing the ball; it's the worst sort of kiddie bunchball, for the most part. Missy's team was lucky to have Jazmine (wearing #12 in the snapshot above) who is not just four inches taller than the rest of the tinies but actually has some foot-eye coordination and some muscle memory skills.
Jazmine basically won the little one's first match; both the opposition (called, ridiculously, "Liverpool"...) and her own teammates were basically there to provide local color.
Pleasantly, neither Little Miss and her team nor her opponents seemed to care much about the game. They enjoyed the running around, and the cupcakes afterwards. Missy got in some good kicks and even provided Jazmine with an assist on one of her many goals.
My favorite part was the two teams turning the perfunctory post-match lineup-and-palmslap-good-game-Cheetahs! ritual into their own little vortex of kid energy, as they turned around and around four times giggling "good game Liverpool/Falconettes!" as they swirled and twirled.
The Boy's game was that afternoon and was an entirely more serious business.
Peep has decided he like playing in goal; he says he likes being the Last Line of Defense and being able to use his hands. Even giving up three goals in his half of play didn't seem to really discourage him. Good boy; I'd have been furious if I'd have shipped five goals in a half.
The afternoon was warm and lazy, and the sidelines were a Rockwellesque picture of soccer moms and dads, brothers, and sisters enjoying the day and uncritically applauding the play, good and bad.
Luckily for us we met a friend from Astor school and her daughter who shared Missy's love of all things My Little Pony Friendship Is Magic, so the two little girls gleefully played ponies and thus whiled away the boring brother's game...
The Boy's team was rather handily thrashed, but this didn't seem to faze Number One Son, who hung around after ward to play kickabout with his pal (whose golazo was one of the few highlight for the "Cheetahs") and enjoyed the post-match chocolate shake-and-Burgerville-fries without a shade of remorse.
To top off the night I drove down to the Timbers match against Toronto FC. The team has been having a bad patch lately; injuries and suspensions have thinned an already-thin first XI and three meetings with first-place Real Salt Lake have resulted in three ugly defeats.
So going to a match lately has seemed less like "fun" and more like a chore; a disagreeable chore that has to be suffered through to help the team. As the troubles mount on the pitch it seems more critical to sing and chant and implore the Boys into the fight.
But it doesn't seem very enjoyable.
So it was an unanticipated pleasure to attend a match that exploded in a glorious cascade of Portland goals, four of them, and turned into a spontaneous party and outburst of happiness.
The tradition in Portland is that our lumberjack "mascot" Timber Joey saws off a slice of log for each goal and another for the keeper if he keeps a clean sheet.
As you can see, Saturday night's harvest was a pretty impressive pile of lumber.
Then - in keeping with the week I've been having - I had to drive out to Beaverton and do the recordkeeping for my workday Friday. It was early morning Sunday when I pulled up outside the darkened house to round out a day full of soccer with a sleep.
My bride was intrigued by the spectacle of Lance Armstrong and Oprah Winfrey, so that is what we watched tonight.
And it was, indeed, intriguing, but not for the reasons it was advertised.
Most of it was a simple repetition of things we know, or should have known already.
The doping, well, I've said this before; I had no doubt that Armstrong, like most of his great competitors, used the methods they did - EPO, CERA, HGH, testosterone, stimulants, corticosteriods - because they had to, to win. The officials that should have been ahead of the cheaters were helpless, and so it was cheat, or lose.
It was obvious to me that Armstrong fully absorbed the ethic of the peleton of his day; that to win meant to cheat, and that anyone who couldn't or wouldn't cheat was not a hero but a fool.
From tonight's interview it's fairly obvious to me that Armstrong still feels that way. And he is still the carefully unsentimental predator he has always been.
He is remorseful, yes, but only because he was caught and in so doing has harmed people he actually cares about; his children, his mother, perhaps his wife and his ex-wife.
The rest of us, well, we're not really people who matter. We're there to be extras in The Lance Armstrong Story.
Most of us think this way, of course, but it takes a pretty enormous ego to be willing to parade that attitude in full view on national television.
And for the record, Oprah really was an awful inquisitor. She wasted an immense amount of time on things that were self-evident and let slide the real hard questions that might have forced the man she was supposed to be interviewing to reveal himself. He slid around any real acceptance of the wrong he did to those who had spoken the truth about him, notably Betsy Andreu and David Walsh.
Armstrong seems clearly using this as a ploy to win sympathy and as an attempt to gain some sort of toehold back into professional sport. He openly stated that he thought his punishment was excessive and that he was driven by a need to compete.
And that was a point that Oprah, as was her habit during the entire interview, failed to seize upon.
Because if Armstrong really needed to compete he needn't return to the Chicago Marathon or any other sanctioned event. He could train and run or ride in secret and alone, where only he would know how strong and fast he had become.
But for this man what he knows about himself is not important. His life is lived by what others know about him. It is not important to be the fastest, or the strongest. It is important to him that others see him as the fastest and strongest.
That has always been the only real question to me worth asking here: "Why now?"
"We've heard you say you're sorry. We've heard you claim that you feel that you have to tell the truth now for your children's sakes. But if that were the case, why didn't you tell the truth when you, of all men, could have told the truth and changed the very sport you claim you loved? Why should we believe any of your apologies now, when you had the chance to be a truly great man and you didn't; worse, instead of merely lying and cheating you savaged those who DID speak the truth about you?"
Sadly, this interview just made clear what we've known; that this man will never do anything for itself. He is simply not made to value such things.
Lois Bujold - I always seem to come back to her when I'm talking about Armstrong, for some reason - writes that the difference between honor and reputation is that reputation is what others know about you, while honor is what you know about yourself. That "(t)here is no more hollow feeling than to stand with your honor shattered at your feet while soaring public reputation wraps you in rewards. That's soul-destroying."
Which it may well be for a man or woman who prizes honor above reputation, the inner truth over the outward show.
But, if otherwise irritating, obscure, and incomplete, this interview did show me one thing clearly; Lance Armstrong was not that man.
