Hitting the Wall....

SO it appears that I've hit the wall, run out of things to talk about, and its such a fine morning for it too with the downpour washing over the city of New York. This was bound to happen eventually, that's the price when you're a one man gang, trying to bring something new and fresh every day even when nothing new or fresh is happening.

No, that's not the wall I've hit, though I HAVE been thinking a lot about baseball the past few days. This is one of the more disturbing sights that's come out of the game I love though. I just found this photo this morning, and I'm pretty positive that's Gary Sheffield pinning Bubba Crosby to the wall there.

I'm not sure which is more upsetting.... the fact that I can recognize that its Crosby smashed in there from the look on his face, or that it looks like Shef is doing this purposely.

Most of the time life feels like this right here, pushed up against a glass barrier that isn't going to move, yet forces and the places you want to go push you right up against it anyway. Right now I'm just glad I blew this picture up.... don't lie, it caught you too, I think its that eye of his staring at you that does it. This is what Poe was talking about, what drove ole boy to cut up that old man and stuff him under the floor boards.... its that eye....

Sometimes life takes it all out of you, or you give it all you've got until you're brought to your knees. I'd bet this woman here left it all out on the field, pushed until she had nothing left. Those are the ones I admire, not talent, not winning, it's that drive, the WILL to win....

I used to have that once. The real difference is passion.... that desire for something so deep that you can't live without it, that you put everything into getting it. For the first time I really saw what that meant this week.

When I die, all I want is to be able to look back and honestly tell myself that I gave it my all, life that is, that I left it all on the field. I haven't been doing that though, not really. That's going to have to change.

That sounds like some good advice, doesn't it? Some real inspirational stuff right there, the stuff that drives you, gets you going. My father came from that school of thought.... FIGHT THROUGH IT!!!

Except that its counterintuitive. Much of life is that way, our natural instincts tell us to do the exact opposite of what the situation actually requires. When you're about to get hit you naturally tense up, brace for impact, but its that tension that actually causes you to get hurt. Being loose and giving yourself the ability to absorb the blow is what gets you out of there in one piece. Again, that's the balance of the universe, the yin and yang of it.

This is what happens when you use raw power to try to smash through barriers.

I had just finished reading the 33 Strategies of War, another by Robert Greene. I've become a big fan of his. While it wasn't as good as the 48 Laws of Power, and that's possibly because much of it is based on The Art of War, which I know well already, its still a great read with a lot of lessons for everyday life.

These are the exact type of challenges that the book deals with, knowing WHEN to tear down walls and when those walls are keeping the bad men out. It deals with knowing when to use will power and brute force, and when to use speed and finese.

Speed and finese didn't work out so well for this guy now, did it?

Those last two shots were people trying to get passed that wall with the benefit of the best that money can buy, and they still didn't have what it took. When you're driving an old jelopy its an entirely different ballgame, you can't rely on pure performance... things have to fall your way...

Or this is what you get. Yeah... I've ended up here too many times. And you have too from what I've been hearing. Haven't we all?

This is the exact kind of treatment I try to avoid, and the more I try to avoid it, the more it seems to find me. Again, counterintuitive.

That's why it may be a good thing that I'm at the base of the wall. Maybe its time to focus on the important things in life....

That's Candice Swanepoel, now that I know she's a Yankee I think she may be the perfect woman.

With all this talk about Jose Reyes leaving the Mets for the Marlins its gotten back into looking into the game. I ended up buying Moneyball yesterday and started to read it finally, and its been great already.

If you're a baseball stat guy (and I am) you have to look at Slugging percentage. Last year the top 3 teams in Slugging in each league all made the playoffs. The other team that made it to the dance in both leagues led the pitching category in slugging against. OPS, or slugging plus on base percentage.... its the only stat that really counts. You can predict who will win based on that alone.

That there is Jose Reyes, formerly the Mets best player. I hate the Mets, but not because of the team itself, but their fans. They're the type of ignorant asses that are so obnoxious that they make you hate everything that they associate with.

I'm a huge Buffalo Bills fan, and they went to the Superbowl every year that I was in High School. At the time a Jet fan told me that the Jets were better because they had won a Superbowl in 1969, some 25 years before said statement was made. I bring this up because Jet fans.... Met fans.... they're the same people, and this sort of statement is the rule with them, not the exception. I kid you not.

For that reason I can't deal with them, because they are UN-reasonable.

This here is Sandy Alderson, who is a central figure in the book Moneyball, and now the Mets GM, so it all does tie together. I actually liked the moves that he made after the Reyes defection, which will turn out to be a blessing for the team, you'll see.

And now I really can't wait to delve deep into this book. I'm even excited enough to start that virtual baseball league I love so much back up.

Izabel Goulart has nothing to do with any of this. I just found so many hot pictures of her for the archives that I had to include her somewhere in here. Besides, it really lifts things up, doesn't it, makes the whole day more cheerful.

More things having nothing to do with anything, I caught Crazy, Stupid, Love and Our Idiot Brother this weekend for a buck each from the red box. You all know how much I love the red box. They were both great movies. Crazy, Stupid, Love was just real life, solid all around. Our Idiot Brother was on the dopier side, but a nice, uplifting tale. Then again, I like stories about people, and life.

That's all for today though.

Later People!

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London Riots AND Why we're all SCREWED!

If you don't know already there have been riots going on in London for about a week now. While I haven't looked far enough into it to find out what caused it all, it DID bring about this article on why, socially, we've gotten ourselves into this position in the first place. The article is written about the English, but everything he says can and does apply to why we're screwed in the United States also. Simply put, it's the best article I've ever read.

The biggest point he hits, towards the end of the article (aside from what my buddy Mike, who sent me the article, says is the best term he's ever heard to describe low lives; Feral Humans), is that at the root of the problem is that we have no Ethos.

Joseph Campbell, who was the world's authority on comparative religion, not only explained but showed, that every religion across the Earth, EVER, was essentially exactly the same, teaching the same exact lessons. And those lessons were taught through bible stories and mythology, ritual dance and so on. The point of all of it was to teach us how to be adults, and how to get by in a tough world when our mentors were no longer here to guide us.

25 years ago, in a television interview which later became the book "The Power of Myth", Campbell stated that the problem we have is that "We have no Ethos, or way of doing things" and the closest thing we have to mythology are movies and comic books. If you read this blog on a regular basis you know what trash most movies are these days.

I had read "The Power of Myth" just before the ex took off on me in the middle of the night, and that book probably saved my life. But beyond that, that was the book that started me on my spiritual and psychological journey towards Personal Performance Consulting (yeah, I like that!) But that term, Ethos, the way we do things, stuck with me, ringing in my head over and over again over the years.

John Wayne was once the ideal of what it was to be an American man. As the story goes, he was such a symbol of what it was to be American that Jospeh Stalin actually sent the KGB to assinate him, figuring his death would be a crushing blow to American morale. He escaped Soviet agents.... twice. I had never met my mother's father, but between my parents and my uncles I was surrounded by John Wayne so much that until I was about 7 years old I actually thought he was my grandfather. That goes a long way towards explaining why I have the attitude that I do in regards to what it is to be a man, like generations of Americans before me, I thought that was how it was done, he was my example.

But John Wayne famously said that "A man's got to have a code, something to live by" speaking about the importance of having personal standards to hold oneself to. And it doesn't take much more than sitting through five minutes of MTV to see that those standards simply don't exist anymore. We have no standards. We hold ourselves up to nothing.

Just like with Joseph Campbell, I tend to bring up Anthony Robbins quite often. Simply, they know what they're talking about. In his book Unlimited Power, Robbins talks about the 7 essential character traits that every person needs in order to be successful at anything in life. One of those is value, and by that he means a list of things that are most important to you. But when you ask people to make that list of these things, more often than not the way that they live their lives is directly in conflict with what's most important to them. For instance, a woman may state that the most important thing to her is a loving home and family, yet when she dates, the men she chooses aren't the type you can settle down with. And then we wonder why we're so unhappy.

And until recently I had been doing the exact same thing without realizing it. I wasn't holding myself up to my own standards, which I thought were pretty lofty. As it turns out, that's not the case at all; it's that others have none at all. Or the ones that they have are twisted.

But if you think it's bad in England where they're having hoodlums riot, it's far worse over here. Someone I used to know, who's actually from England, was talking about how they wanted to see the upcoming film Immortals. The film is based on Greek Mythology, which is still taught in schools over there. This person couldn't believe it when I told them that they haven't taught that in schools in the US in my lifetime. Of course, this same person, who is a talented artist, later tried to put me down based on what I currently do for a living because their career as a graphic designer was more "professional" than my pushing papers.

The picture that you see above you was taken from the board of my classroom from the very first lesson that I had ever given as an English teacher. If you can read what's on the picture, I had on the board The Knight's Code, an ideal of chivalry taken from a distant past that speaks to how nobel folks are expected to act. This was the standard that I expected my students to uphold in my classroom, and I hoped that it would somehow carry over into the rest of their lives.

When I walked into that classroom most of my students reading and writing comprehension scores were in the 30%. They were keeping up with the Kardashians, could tell you everything about them, people that are famous for exactly.... shit, I don't know, but never saw old Rod Serling Twilight Zone episodes, never saw Casablanca, the greatest love story ever told. The kids could tell you everything about the Jersey Shore, but couldn't write a paragraph describing what they did the night before. The girls would sing all the lines to whatever new hip-hop song they were into, but didn't understand the lyrics enough to see that the singer was actually calling the very same girls listening to the song whores, or understand enough to know that if you walk through the streets projecting that image, then that's exactly what people will think of you, and eventually exactly what you would become. And we aren't even talking about inner city kids here, these were white kids from good families.

So I broke them down and showed them the better parts of life, or trIed to. I had them read Poe, O'Henry and others, forced them to show me that they understood what they were reading, find the deeper meaning in what's out there (Incidentally, we only use 30% of the vocabulary that Poe used in the 1840's. We literally are 70% stupider). When I left that classroom only 1 student was reading and writing below the 60%, and he didn't do a damn thing all year. I made 21K that year to do so, the lowest salary I had brought home since my first job at 20 years old.

As a reward for my work, the principal threatened to sue me twice, once over a matter of another male teacher allowing his 13 year old female students to lay across his desk in their skirts at lunch time without other adults present. And I was told that I couldn't handle the students. I vowed never to teach again.

My point in telling that story is to illustrate how screwed we really are. Even when we see the issues at hand we're not allowed to do anything about it. We're not allowed set those standards we lack and teach or expect others to follow them. And should we try, we're the ones examples are made of, in all the wrong ways possible.

Which brings us back to the Brit. While this person does have a professional job, and is talented, how many business logo's would they have to design in order to match the impact that I had by teaching even one of my students HOW TO READ? How many marketing flyers are required to have the same effect of even one of these kids taking that Knights Code to heart and actually becoming a better person in life?

Yet socially, the way people look at things these days, the Brit is exactly right, they're a professional and I'm a broken puke and a loser. What makes the difference is how much money you make and how cool other people with no standards who can barely read think your work is. So even when we do attempt to uphold standards, even when we follow an Ethos, a way of doing things, what standards are they we're living up to? Is the way we do things these days even close to they way they SHOULD be done?

It doesn't matter. And do you know why?
Cause Snooki want smoosh smoosh!

And THAT is why we're all screwed!

Later people!