briefly, on the chiefs

My in-laws are dyed-in-the-wool Kansas City Chiefs fans, so we at stately Chateau Sirvio had a somewhat-personal stake in the events last night in Miami. Though I am loathe to watch football, I, like most Americans, will settle in and watch the Super Bowl. After all, this is our civic religious practice.

My wife, the football Luddite of her family, kept leaving the room for nerves. ‘I can’t do this!’ she’d say, only to return minutes later, only to get up and leave again. ‘I don’t know how my mother did this!’ Her mom hadn’t seen a Chiefs championship since 1969 and passed away in 2004. She had her lucky Tony Gonzalez jersey, and her Chiefs fandom was passed down to her eldest and youngest daughters, both of whom probably lost their minds as Jimmy Garoppolo threw the deciding interception. I’m sure Betty, far away and yet so close, did as well.

Kansas City was a sports wasteland when we lived there ten years ago: the Royals had Zack Greinke and nothing else, the Chiefs were in the Matt Cassel-ruled netherworld. We lived just north of the Truman Sports Complex. On good Sundays, you heard the war chant. There weren’t many of those.

Yes, long-suffering produces an elation in championship victory that the titans of sport can’t quite comprehend. The Yankees have done that dance 27 times; the Cardinals, 11. Packers fans lived through the 70s and 80s before the 90s brought about the Wolf-Holmgren Packers renaissance, culminating in back-to-back Super Bowls and a championship. The state of Wisconsin nearly closed down for the Monday after, 29 long years since Lombardi brought home Super Bowl II.

And my Milwaukee Brewers have never taken the whole thing home. There was only one world championship pennant issued in Wisconsin, for the ’57 Braves. Once proud franchises that forget what it means to achieve at the highest level tend to lower their own expectations. The Reds haven’t been dominant in 30 years, yet they are the oldest franchise in professional baseball. The Chicago Bears are a charter club of the NFL and perpetually suck. Fans of the Toronto Maple Leafs have all the braggadocio of Yankees fans and none of the titles to back it up, at least not since 1967.

The Kansas City Royals, themselves a bastion of generational incompetence, showed their roommates the way to glory a few years ago, but the Royals don’t have the heart of the community the way the Chiefs do. (At least they’re not the White Sox, whose 2005 is basically stricken from histories everywhere.)

So those of us who are happy for Chiefs fans finally off the schneid are also acutely aware of our status still on it for the clubs close to our heart. We wonder what it’s like to have that moment of championship bliss.

A day later, I want Gates BBQ. I want a Brewers World Series pennant. And I don’t know what I’ll get first.

briefly, on thundershowers

This was a thread on my personal Twitter feed from the other night, but Twitter being Twitter, split what was one thread into two. Here is the whole thread as it was intended.

Girlb has been up intermittently for the last hour or so, concerned by the fact that their song-playing owl nightlight to timed out and that she thought she heard thunder and it scared her. Each time, I tucked her back into bed and she’d get back up and come back in.

This last time, I brought her back to bed, went to check the weather outside (some sprinkles and that inimitable precursor breeze) and came back to hear her praying. ‘Jesus, please make a bad weather go away.’

I went in to her room, kneeled at her bedside and asked her why. She prayed again for good weather as I got her special stuffie and blanket. I told her, as I do when there is bad weather outside, that she is safe in this house and that the weather can do whatever it likes, it has no bearing on her.

She replied, ‘I can be brave.’

I leaned in, kissed her and whispered, ‘You don’t have to be brave.’ She looked at me, in the glow of a lullaby owl nightlight, puzzled. ‘Save your courage for when you need it.’

I told her I loved her and she rolled over, still disquieted, but content.

Her nascent faith regularly leaves me in awe. It, as opposed to my own deeply-sprained, shaken-to-its-core variety, is so pure, so ready to seek help because she feels helpless in the face of things bigger that her.

I know the feeling.

2018 has been more or less a disaster on this front. Lots of things are bigger than me and seem to threaten the core of my being. I’ve been the one needing to be brave, with mixed effort and results.

I need that comfort and assurance that I need not have to be brave today.

Let the weather rage. I am safe in this house.

briefly, every prevarication starts at dick’s

In the aftermath of the atrocity perpetrated in Parkland and the very public, ahem, conversation(?) taking place on the role of assault-style firearms in American life, people of all walks of life have been, for lack of better term, weaponized.

Major American retailer Dick’s Sporting Goods went viral 28 February, when they issued a press release taking a stand and making policy changes with regard to the sale of ‘modern sporting rifles’. And, of course, the weaponized amongst us saw this as either a humanity-affirming move by a retailer to show their solidarity with the victims and the community, or an encroachment on constitutional rights.

The truth is, of course, neither. And the greater truth underscored here is that people en masse have stopped paying attention to anything anyone says beyond a general sense that whatever is being said generally conforms to existing sociopolitical prejudice.

I noticed this right away, and I’m not alone in doing so, but Dick’s proper stopped selling these types of weapons after Sandy Hook. They say so literally in middle of the press release. What they actually did was change the policy for their Field & Stream label, which only has 35 locations nationwide.

You’ve never heard of Field & Stream stores in the same way that you’ve never heard of Lion’s Choice roast beef joints in the St. Louis area. There are 26 of them. If they were to, say, stop offering coleslaw, you wouldn’t care.

In fairness, if a change in the landscape is going to happen, it ought to happen privately. If a business or community feels as though a change needs to take place, that conversation should happen there. On the one hand, this is how things should be done.

On the other, a retailer is blatantly posturing in a naked attempt to exploit public consciousness on a sensitive topic to make their doorstep more appealing for patrons to darken and spend their money. In so doing, they’ve told a pretty brazen half-truth that technically is true, but actually changes next to nothing.

That hasn’t stopped thousands of people from reacting and sharing the release as though it were a bold stand on a hot topic, which it isn’t. What it is is a shameful, cowardly and deceptive stunt to pry open more wallets in their checkout lanes. (And have you seen the prices on their crap lately? One needs to pry open a second mortgage!)

Dicks, indeed.

Update: Link to press release added, and they slapped highly-detailed UTM conditions on the link (which I’ve stripped from the URL for you. You’re welcome.) Not only does this demonstrate how little they care, but how badly they want to know who is sharing their release where and strategize from there. Dicks, indeed. –b.

on hate

I will freely present you with a handgun with one bullet in it. You will take the gun and point it directly at my head.

What happens next?

briefly, on being replaceable

As society further commodifies people, moving us from who toward what, it can readily be noticed that, while we lament how people have turned to cattle in so many ways in terms of the workforce, we have no apparent issue with turning people into hamburger in our personal lives.

Moo.