Sunday musings 11/18/18
Sunday musings…
1) Bubble. Economists and central bankers are ever on the alert for an economic “bubble”. I’m declaring that we are about to have one pop. Any time you see a dozen ads for really expensive watches in a single magazine on a Sunday you’re headed for a dip in the economy.
You heard it here first.
2) Allowance. Today’s NYT has a section on money. Like the whole paper somehow isn’t about money, but anyway. There’s an article on using an app to deposit your kid’s allowance in their bank account. Seriously. That’s as stupid as the prohibition on teaching kids script writing.
A child should know what money looks like. What it feels like.
3) Head. As in head shots. As in how long is it going to be before real action is taken in ALL sports to make shots to the head such an onerous occurrence that they are essentially legislated out by the players themselves. Case in point: brawls in professional hockey and fighting in amateur hockey. If you are the so-called “third man in” when a fight breaks out in the NHL you are ejected and suspended for a game. Same thing for any fighters in amateur hockey, at least low-level juniors, youth, and high school hockey.
Ken Dryden takes the NHL commissioner Gary Bettman to task for his failure to adequately care for either the retired players who suffer the consequences of prior head injuries or present players at risk. Yesterday’s Michigan/Indiana game ended shortly after Berkely Edwards was pithed by an Indiana player and carted off the field with at least a concussion. It was nauseating. I’ve been similarly affected watching literally any men’s lacrosse game at any level, up to an including the NCAA (I admit to never watching a pro game). Every quarter finds at least one miscreant taking a stick or a body part and applying it to the squash of some opponent, almost always with little or no consequence.
Summary ejection with the likelihood of suspension for shots to the head will result in an evolutionary change in every helmet sport that will lead to fewer athletes suffering from brain injuries. Full stop.
4) Threes. They say that bad things come in threes. Crazy cases in an ER. Complications in an OR. Death. Once you’ve had that third one you are in the clear, at least for a while, at least until the next first one. Man, I sure hope that’s true. It’s been a really tough week around Casa Blanco. I/We lost a beloved pet, coach, and mother (in-law), all in the last week. So. Much. Death. I, we, are all ready for it to end, at least for a bit.
Everyone and everything dies, right? I get that. Even that radioisotope spinning out all manner of death rays eventually sputters to a nuclear silence, however many millions of years it may take; that’s just math. It’s quite a bit more poetic, however sorrowful, when we lose the living. They leave behind stories. If we are lucky, they leave behind love.
As I get older I find it harder not to cry when I am sad. Sometimes it’s a quiet moment and a few lonely tears. Others it’s what I just heard described as “crying ugly”, wracked by sobs that come in waves as uncontrollable as the tides. At times like this week it seems like an OK thing to do. Like it would be somehow strange not to cry. Normal. Other times seem weird even to me, like when I cried at the end of “La La Land” because the couple that SHOULD have made it as a couple didn’t. (As an aside, I hate that, when the writer pulls tragedy out of what should have been a happy ending).
I’m OK right now, OK this morning. Probably mostly cried out I guess. I’m on to the memory stage, that time when, if we are lucky enough, we remember the love. The love that my mother-in-law had for her husband, her three girls and their husbands, and as we are discovering the hundreds of students who attended her alternative school. The love that my coach had for me and countless other young men, expressed in my case after I no longer played for him yet it was still he who swooped in and offered the counsel a young knucklehead needed to grow up out of knuckleheadness. And the love that my goofy little mutt gave us every minute of his goofy little life.
No message here today my friends. Just a little sadness that is being lifted by memories of love, hoping that our third loss means we get a bit of a break. A little hope for you, if you have lost, for the warm embrace of similar memories of the times when you, too, were loved.
I’ll see you next week…
–bingo
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