League Manager Note: Shanahanigans

 I watch the movie blue velvet often. I think it might be one of my favourite movies. Dean Stockwell in makeup swaying to Roy Orbison while Denis Hopper huffs god knows what out of a gas mask. Good clean fun in my humble opinion.                

The characterization therein is what fascinates me about Blue Velvet. The sullied broken characters like Frank Booth that inhabit the movie are so clear, so vivid and the bland “good” characters so terse and unappealing. The whole thing brings David Lynch’s vision crashing home so very smoothly.                

Characterization is also why I like football, most especially football coaches. These guys are the modern day equivalent of warrior monks. They spend all day week in week out living football. Many have spent their entire lives being bred and trained to be coaches. The Ryans & Belichick would be prime examples of men whose entire lives have been football. Whose fathers were coaches and they are coaches.              

It is then that I sometimes question what this does to them as people. Rex Ryan’s foot fetish video, the Harbaugh and Fox brawl that almost was, Mike Shanahan in general. I think there may be something essentially wrong with the super ego of these men that makes them different to the rest of us. The rest of us when we flex our super ego we layer multiple things like ‘did I pay all my bills?’ or ‘did I bake those cookies for the PTA?’ and the more of these things we have achieved the better we feel… in general.               

NFL coaches have one thing on the super ego list: “Did I win this week?”               

If the answer to that question is yes then all is good with the world and they can focus on what they were bred to do, what they were designed to do; coach a football team. If, however, the answer is no, then their entire world starts to degrade and everything they are comes into question until the next win is achieved. For the true coach this is what happens in any case. I’m sure there are coaches in the NFL that actually can sleep at night if their team didn’t manage to beat the Saint Louis Rams that week, I just don’t think they last very long in the realm and age of Belichick.                

This incredible stress leads to a colourful cast of characters. From the dignified but dressed down affectations of Bill Belichick to the ineffectual melt downs of Todd Haley to the poisonous curmudgeon that is Tom Coughlan. I love to watch coaches. The one coach I hate is Shanahan. He is the NFL’s answer to mayonnaise. I hate his attitude toward players I hate his lack of insight and I hate the fact that no one of the players on his team is ever a reliable play come fantasy football Sunday. I recently traded [in the auction league] for Ryan Torian and Tim Hightower as my backups for injuries to my two front runners Rashard Mendenhall and Fred Jackson (yeah it’s like that) and have been faced with the dilemma of being kind of left behind by Shanahan when I have to make that substitution (this week) and now I hate him even more.               

So I said all that to say this: Shanahan Sucks.               

That is all, best of luck this week everyone!

No Passive Characters

Passive Characters are a weakness in writing. As I write I am figuring this stuff out. If a Character is not doing something he is no a part of the story and therefore should not be written about. Characters who are just standing there doing nothing except piping in with exposition are death to a narrative.

I started to truely realize this not because I wrote a bunch of characters who did jack shit in a lot of scenes but when I started to religiously give characters something to do. This is something I started trying conciously this morning in fact, and it helps greatly. If a character is immobilized either physically or socially they must be aware of it and uncomfortable about it. A king sitting on a throne for example might have a sore arse.

A more pertinent example would be the bad guy high priest in Murder House Warriors. In earlier scenes I had him sitting off to one side doing very little. That made it difficult for me to expand upon his character it gave me few opportunities to frame him so he was very generic.

To fix this I have made him, in the current draft, the master of ceremonies when I introduce the other focal characters of this sequence of the book. He makes a big entrance and is presiding over the ceremony in question and being kind of a dick and gets told off a little bit by Enhengal. There is now tension in the scene Shirrock (the high preist) is prodding and being prodded back the reader is hence entertained.

and that's the most important thing

To The Guy Cian Punched in the Toilet in Fibbers

In a cave of a hole
Under the dance floor
In a happy time
In a shitty place

I heard you cast down
Some poor bloke
Onto the piss-covered floor
And kicked and kicked
Till perhaps he was dead
Or your violent urge was fed

But then came a high minded fist

Launched from noble drunken intentions
That sent you airborne and down
After you hit the door
and now you know what it is like to hurt
in the piss on the floor in the toilet in fibbers

And I saw you
and laughed
Because just once
Goodness prevailed
and I can believe
In honor again

Stories for Boys

I've written a few short stories and I'd also like to post them here

Here's the first one:

No Left Turn

Tom Drove away from the Diner. At first he kept his foot hard on the accelerator then he realized he was over the speed limit for a non-residential two-lane highway and he slowed to forty-five. After all, he wasn’t being chased. He’d just had one of those weird experiences. Something in the food… he started to retch then he banished the unbidden thought from his mind, he looked around. The landscape outside the car was dark and silent under the cloak of night.

There were no stars or moon it had been cloudy all day. He didn’t know which way he’d taken leaving the diner. He didn’t care; he would just get to the next hotel and get his bearings in the morning. There was a sign coming up on the left. As he approached it he saw it was a ‘no left turn’ sign. He cruised passed it. As he did so he caught sight of movement at the corner of his eye under the sign. He dismissed it as a raccoon or opossum and continued on not knowing quite where he was.

As he drove he noticed the scrub at the side of the road it was red. Not just normal red but a clashing array of sickly reds like bedsores and rotten roses. He was distracted by the approach of another sign. Again it was a ‘no left turn’ sign and there was something moving at the bottom of this one too but he couldn’t make it out. The grass was definitely red, he was sure of it. The car passed the sign and its forbidden turn. The red grass waved at his passing.

He should have run across even a beat up shitty gas station or something by now. It unnerved Tom that he had seen no signs of civilization. All he had seen so far were the signs and the grass and a suspicious movement beneath the signs. There was another sign coming up on his left. As he passed it he looked in his rearview mirror. The sign itself was moving; it was undulating away from the side of the road as if some small man were carrying it.

Tom put the brakes on. The car came to a screeching halt on the two-lane. He turned around in his seat and looked at the sign. Indeed it was moving and he saw a small shape at the foot of the sign that was only a shadow in the gloom and the red brake lights. But it looked like a small man shaped creature was carrying the sign like a banner away from the road. A short expletive escaped his lips and he thought about his grandmother’s tales of leprechauns and fairies scampering around the wilds. Then he thought about what happened in the diner and realized that he was probably under the influence of some sort of hallucinogenic.

Thump! Something landed on the top of the car. He was still looking in the direction of the sign and he turned around in order to open the door of his car and investigate the noise when another thud sounded this time on his hood. He turned and found himself staring into the blank red gaze of a creature that could not exist in any sane man’s reality. The thing was about four feet tall and green. Its body was thin and spindly the skin was lumpy and scaled in patches. Its head was too large for its body and consisted mainly of a lipless maw like a shark’s full of large fetid yellow teeth that, despite their level of disrepair, looked deadly sharp. Its ears were dog-like and pointed and the thing’s eyes were red like rubies on black velvet.

Tom did not think he just acted. He hit the accelerator and the car screeched off down the two-lane, screaming all the while at the top of his voice. The creature was thrown into the windshield and over the car, on his way he hit his friend on the roof of the car and they both fell in a heap behind the vehicle as it roared away. In the rearview mirror Tom saw them get up and run after him but they couldn’t match the car for speed or stamina. Tom sprayed the windshield and turned on the wipers to get the residual green drool off the spot where the creature hit.

 As he continued along the road at about fifty now hoping that he would see something that signaled he had reached the end of his nightmare. Instead another sign loomed by the side of the road and sure enough one of the creatures could be seen crouched at the bottom, keeping it upright. He knew this was bad he was insane; there was no other explanation for it.

They were hunting him, and they had done their homework. Tom never broke a traffic law he drove ten under the speed limit, much to the ire of his fellow drivers. He never drank and drove, or even took drowsy cold medicine or even drove tired. He always waited three seconds at stop signs etc… etc… etc…

He knew the complete traffic law manual of every state he had ever driven. Why? Well, why is the sky blue? Why is the earth flat? Why is it on the back of a huge turtle? Why do men pretending to be cops pull over young couples with three-year-old sons and rob and kill them after raping the mother? Bad things happened to good people, but Tom wouldn’t think about that, while little gremlins were stalking his car in the night.

He would not think about the round police light like a big jelly tot spinning out red white and blue across the desert road. Rough men in leather jackets throwing him into the culvert at the side of the road never entered his mind while he was driving. His mother’s screaming did not ever dwell in the sharp report of the horns that strafed by him as he white-knuckled it down two lane highways at thirty miles an hour. Men had pulled them over had killed his parents and he never wanted to be pulled over again. Now the creatures would keep him on a never-ending road ‘till he ran out of gas and he would die. He couldn’t see a thing like that giving him a hug and making him some hot tea.

Had this experience not been surreal enough a series of signs were approaching on his right as he drove on through the night. It was a message from the things. Words were painted on the signs in series they read:

            “TOM-PULL-OVER-AND-WE’LL-MAKE-IT-QUICK”

They went by at such a speed that they formed a sentence. Tom almost lost control of his bladder. They knew who he was and they definitely wanted to kill him, he imagined their sharp teeth pushing mercilessly into his muscle tissue while he was still fighting for his life. If he got out of this he swore he’d use the interstate system in future forty-five mile an hour minimum or no.

He feared and hated driving, that’s why he got a job as a traveling salesman, because he wanted to overcome his fear. So he’d drive all day, Peoria to Carbondale to the quad cities and on back to Chicago where he lived. At a rate and with a style that inspired near psychosis in those that shared a road with him. Many times in his career people had pulled him over just to rail at him twice he’d been physically threatened.

The first guy just pushed him but the second had gotten out of his car and walked up to Tom. Without saying a word he took out a gun and pressed it to Tom’s temple for a second, hard enough to bruise. Then he’d just turned and got back in his car. Tom reported it to the police but they never caught the guy, he was almost glad of that. Ever since that day he carried a Beretta 9mm pistol in his glove box.

It seemed now that the constant stress of driving had turned an acute disorder into Tom’s own full-scale psychotic delusion. The creatures were now all around him, dozens of them racing along the side of the road, daring him to do anything but what he was doing. Keep driving Tom; keep getting more lost, keep running out of gas. He was insane of course, or drugged, these things could not exist in reality only in his sick, tortured mind.

He wanted to scream, in fact he would be screaming was his throat not sore from is earlier endeavors at this activity. It was mid-October outside and the interior atmosphere of the vehicle was by no means warm but Tom was drenched with sweat. He had not seen another car since he left the diner, nor a person nor any other sign of life but the goblin creatures. This was of course not real, but in any event he did not stop driving the car.

That shitty little diner was where it started, Peggy’s Place. He couldn’t have gone to McDonalds or Denny’s or somewhere equally as bland where he’d have been safe. Instead he went to the diner in the twilight zone. When he met Charlie, which was where this had started.

It was a terrible little place just off the two-lane in the middle of nowhere between hotels, but Tom had been hungry. In fact he couldn’t remember ever in his life being hungrier than he had been at that moment when he saw the sign for Peggy’s. The sign said “gud eetz” he couldn’t even now resolve whether this was an attempt at witticism, a lack of effort at spelling or a simple lack of the ability to spell.

He’d pulled in and walked up the steps it was one of those big aluminum trailer looking things, you see in old movies. That was pretty cool, he thought, and who knew the food might be really good. At that point though he didn’t care, he’d have eaten carrion. He walked in and sat down at the counter. The young man, who made up the total patronage of this establishment, eyed him as he sat down. Tom smiled at him and he smiled back surprised.

“What’s good in here?” Tom asked hoping to avoid a bad meal, as he was very hungry.

“Well Caleb’s cookin’ so the eggs should be safe then there’s the bacon that’s real good. Man that’s good eatin. Stick with eggs’n’bacon man you can’t go wrong. S’my advice anyhow.” The kid was good-natured enough if not incredibly bright that much was plain and he had about him a knowing air, a kind of guile. He seemed to be the sort of person you don’t play cards with if you like winning.

The cook came out and took Tom’s order of bacon eggs and coffee, a double helping of both food items.

“So where ye from mister?” The scruffy youth had taken an interest in him. Tom extended his hand and looked at him. He was about nineteen with long mousy brown hair. He wore a flannel over-shirt, a red STP cap and a band T-shirt that was so faded Tom couldn’t recognize what it said.

“I’m Tom, I live in Chicago.” The youth took his hand and shook it firmly.

“I’m Charlie, I’m from here. You’re from Chicago like you grew up there?”

“No I grew up just outside Peoria, on a farm, with my grandparents.” Charlie’s eyes brightened.

“Wow a farm! Was there a barn? Was there like sheep?” At the mention of these two particular attributes of farm life Tom’s face darkened. Why did the kid have to pick those two features of farm life? The precision of the comment shocked him. Even before he found his grandfather that day he’d hated that barn.

“Something I said Tom?”

“No I just had the worst barn in history on the farm I grew up on. It kept falling down and it was my job to nail up the bits that fell off it. Every night I lie awake listening to the crashes from outside and then in the afternoons I’d go out and fix the damage. I hated that barn. I’d spend so long every day fixing it that I never did anything else but homework. Not that we had any neighbors anyway.” Tom had never had many friends growing up, that was why he’d stuck with sales so long. He got to meet people in his job and he liked that it gave him a feeling of belonging to something that he’d never experienced and he was good at his job.

“Why did the barn keep falling down?” the kid was a curious one he’d admit that.

“Well there was wind and there was the fact that, in his younger years my grandfather had built an indoor bathroom using support beams and planks from the barn. That didn’t make it the most stable structure in the world. Then there was the carpenter ants, there was more carpenter ants in that barn then was in the rest of the state of Illinois.”

Then there was the harness there was this rig hanging form a pulley in one of the joists and it was always cleaned and oiled. Tom asked his grandpa about it one day and he said it was just an old piece of equipment that had always been there. Well one morning Tom woke up and his grandma was in his room standing over his bed. She said his grandpa had not come in from the barn last night. She hypothesized that he’d gotten drunk and passed out there. So she asked Tom to go out and get him.

Tom went into the barn and found his grandpa. He was on the ground with a Jack Daniels bottle in one hand and a grimace on his face, his eyes were wide open and staring at the roof, which Tom had pounded more than three thousand nails into by hand. He was dead. The disturbing part of this scene wasn’t that he was dead though. It was that his pants were down around his ankles and hanging from the harness, dangling there at waist height was a sheep.

A three-year-old yew to be exact, he called it Camilla. The corner said that the sheep had kicked him in the balls, he’d let go of one of its legs to take a swig of jack and that’s what gave him the heart attack. Tom thought about the moment the coroner had told his grandma how her husband had died how it was like he’d seen it many times before. Tom imagined a check box on the death certificate beside the words “Sheep Sodomy Related Death”. He sat in silence for long minutes looking into space.

 At this point Caleb the cook put the food down in front of him.

“There ye go paisan, enjoy.” Caleb sounded distinctly like the godfather.

“Don’t mind Caleb, he thinks he looks like Marlon Brando but I says the only thing ‘bout him that looks like Brando’s his Belly.” Caleb scowled at Charlie from the recesses of the kitchen as Charlie cackled wildly on his stool. Tom continued with the conversation between mouthfuls of stodgy comfort food.

“Was that all? About the barn I mean.”

“I found my grandpa dead in there.”

“How’d he die?”

“A sheep kicked him in the balls and he had a heart attack.”

Charlie stared at Tom for some time in abject amazement and shock and then quite suddenly he began to laugh.

“I’m not joking.” Tom was really taken off guard.

“I know!” Charlie managed through gales of laughter.

“I’m sorry man I just…” After a while he managed to get a hold of himself.

“Jesus man that’s fucked up. How old were you?”

“Ten.”

“So why did you live with your grandparents what happened to your mom and dad?”

“They died in a robbery. Two guys pretending to be cops pulled us over in Arizona.” He looked away not sure what to do with his mood at this moment.

“Christ man you’ve had a messed up life.”

“I’m sure that there are people with worse ones.” It was at this point, that things started to get really weird.

He started to eat again; he put a forkful of egg in his mouth and felt something squirm around on his tongue. He spat the mouthful onto the plate and saw a black moving object in the mess. He ran into the bathroom, locked the stall and vomited long and hard. When he was done he opened the door of the stall and saw Charlie standing there.

“Gotta piss.” Charlie said.

“But there’s a urinal right there.” Tom walked over and washed his mouth off at the sink.

“I have to do it sitting down; it comes out in two directions. Like a birth defect I guess.” Tom stood there looking at him full sure he would start laughing, he did not.

“Hey Tom I think I can help you man. I feel bad about my call on the eggs. I got something you ain’t gonna like but it’s gonna help you big.” He’d grabbed Tom’s arm and would not let go.

“Just remember life’s about doing what you need to do no matter what.” Tom violently pulled away and ran out, behind him he heard Charlie call after him.

“That’s the spirit Tommy boy do what you gotta do!”

“Food’s on the house paisan.” Caleb said as he hit the door with no intention of paying.

Now he was on the road with the little mouth creatures. Well he’d do what he needed to do all right. He leaned over and took his Beretta out of the glove box. He’d take fourteen of them with him and save the last bullet for himself. First though he’d really do what they didn’t expect.

After a lifetime of following the rules and doing what he was supposed to, not only did he turn at the next left on that long empty road but also he went through the sign and the little mouthy bastard holding it. Tom turned left, and it felt good.

He was on another road now, it was early morning or late evening he couldn’t tell which and there was another car behind him in the red of his rear lights he could see it was an old Honda; a really old Honda that seemed to be in surprisingly good condition for a car from the seventies.

Then it happened, the Honda turned on police lights. He wasn’t going over the speed limit; he wasn’t doing anything illegal in fact. He knew this because he knew all the rules of the road. What’s more Tom knew something even more important; cops only bought American. He pulled over so fast that the Honda overshot him then he got out of his car walking toward the white Japanese car, Baretta in hand. The two men inside got out and just as he thought they were not uniformed police.

“Sir could you please get back in the car?” the one that said this made his last mistake by flashing his empty wallet in the full glare of Tom’s headlights. Tom raised his weapon, took aim, and released two lead slugs that impacted in the head of one and chest of the other. He’d been to the range enough to be considered a good shot, but anyone familiar with firearms would have called his motion and execution sublime.

He did not hesitate, he did not think he just did it, raised the weapon took aim and fired. It was an action that had been waiting in his limbs and spine his whole life, breeding and growing, completely independent of his brain. He was not in the mood to be robbed and killed. He was tired he was scared he was angry and he just wanted to go home. He was sure this was a hallucinogenic nightmare from the eggs or something, maybe Caleb cooked with peyote. That would explain everything, Jesus he hoped that was it.

The men he’d killed lay silent on the asphalt and dirt. They were already starting to attract flies. The engines of both cars were still running. Behind him in the twilight of morning, he knew now it was morning because it was getting brighter, buzzards were rising on the thermals. Breakfast was served. He looked around for the goblins but they were nowhere to be seen. He flicked the safety on the Beretta, better safe than sorry.

He got back in his car and started driving. This was definitely the desert, how the hell did he get here? After about a half-hour he pulled over and fell asleep, upon waking he found himself outside his apartment building in Chicago. His neck was stiff and his mouth was dry. Maybe it had been all a dream. He looked over in the empty glove box and then saw the gun on the floor. He checked the clip, there were two bullets missing, the safety was on and the shell casings were not in or around the car.

He had discharged two slugs at some time during the night and he did not believe that it was at two robbers in the Arizona desert. That meant he may have shot someone completely innocent under the influence of whatever they’d given him in Diner. He’d go and turn himself in to the authorities just as soon as he had a shower, he decided. They’d blood test him to find out what had been administered in the eggs, his money was on Peyote.

In the apartment he looked at around as he took off his shirt. There was a message for him on the answering machine. He hit play the first message was from his work buddy Kurt inviting him out to watch the game on Sunday. Then the machine clicked and the next message started playing. The voice on the other end was casual and matter of fact, yet of all the things he’d experienced in the last twenty four hours this was the one that truly threatened his grip on sanity.

“Hi Thomas, its Mom it’s your sister’s birthday you’ve probably forgotten so I took the liberty of getting you a card and a gift certificate to that store she likes…” The message went on in the otherwise silent apartment like a tiny clergyman orating at some momentous occasion. After a few moments his now alive mother’s voice on the answering machine was joined by Tom’s sobs.

First Weblog Post

If I decide to keep this up you're going to see a lot of stuff here. I have a lot of interests. Politics, cooking, keeping my family together, my dogs, music, sports, literature, poetry & writing.

I want to start off by posting something I wrote as a league manager note for my fantasy football league. and a couple of other things that go a bit toward explaining how I think and how I see the world and how I write.

LM Note:

The Magic Projector
I think the worst thing to ever happen to fantasy football is the
advent of projections. The interesting thing about projections is that
they are wrong nine out of ten times that means on a team with eight
players you're pretty much guaranteed that your projections are not
going to happen.
Where is this magic projector? Why is it broken? Who is the monkey
turning the crank? Why do all these websites and publications pay good
money to ferry these shabby little numbers to through the endless
undulating seas of the interweb?
The matter about as much european status reports (Roy will get that
one... if he reads this... do any of you read it?).
I have a lot of questions today. Probably because I've been readying
the short stories of Donald Barthelme one of which, called 'The
Bodyguard' is written almost completely in questions.
It goes a bit like this:
Does Tony Romo realize that running the ball results in an absorption
of game time? Does Jason Garrett? Do they know the Lions are one of
the best Defenses in the league? Did they last week? Is Jerry Jones
pissed off? Does Jason Garrett know what a running back does? Does
Tony Romo? Does Tony Romo understand that he is not Joe Montana? Does
he understand that he's not Matt Stafford? Does Mark Sanchez? Does
Mark Sanchez realize he's not Cade McNown? Why is Mark Sanchez still
playing in the NFL?
god he sucks.
Anyway the deal is the projector is broken, projections are useless
beyond words and that is why I'm running Stevan Ridley this weekend my
projection is that he's going to get between fifteen and twenty
points.
Oh hell there's an idea? Why not give a five point bracket that a
player may get then these projection things might be right more than
once a week per team.
Go to work owners, the time is now.