Sidelined

Last night my son texted me-- root for the Chargers, he said.  I admit I root for anyone but the Chiefs... they've had enough success... not to mention the fact that their extraordinarily well-compensated stars consume as well a lion's share of the extensive advertising space. Dandruff shampoo, artificially dyed breakfast cereal-- health insurance... medications... nothing is beneath them if the money is there... and the money continues to roll in. Not to mention the women, the attention, the endorsements and 'gifts'. 

How did I get entrapped into amateur football fandom? Me-- the Bohemian rock musican/closet literary intellectual who haunted art galleries and museums from adolescence and beyond...  dismissively refusing to even watch my high school boyfriend's soccer games which I designated as absurd and sweaty and pointless? We parents must adapt to our kids' obsessions-- to tune in, so to speak.  The funny part is my son maintains this tiny corner of childhood belief that I (even still) bring him luck. 

What fascinates me, analyzing my role as audience here... is the way all sports fans seem to harbor this childlike faith that our presence-- even on the couch-- can somehow alter the game.  We yell, we root, we cheer, we groan... but we continue to watch.  Ditto-- or moreso, when our kids played competitive sports.  We absolutely HAD to be there.  Not just for support, but for this absurd incredibility that somehow we'd change the outcome.  They wouldn't win without us-- our fervent parental praying they would make the shot... holding their lucky undershirt or the little dinosaur towel I carried in a bag from nursery school onward. These tokens.

And the uniforms.  Nothing transforms a boy like his first baseball jersey...  his first pair of serious Nikes or Jordans. The mini-helmets and shin guards... the hockey skates and shoulder pads... like a superhero.  The fantasy is palpable; talent and practice are another thing-- but here-- a little piece of imitation reality and your child is wearing it. 

Some of the parents dream along. They coach, they carpool, they enroll and hire trainers.  They drive to tryouts, they pay for all kinds of leagues and venues... they take their kids to the professional arenas, no matter what the cost.  If they win the athletic lottery, the payoff is huge. Children are the second chance for many adults. Similarly, they buy them guitars and amplifiers... they get lessons and are driven to concerts.  Some of them have talent; some of them burn out before high school. 

But the dream... it's bigger than ever.  The Taylor Swifts and Patrick Mahomes's of the world.  Yesterday a 26-year-old baseball player signed a $765 million contract for doing what he loves. His agent made more in a day than Babe Ruth made in his entire career, even after inflation adjustment.  Assad was deposed yesterday; Haitian gangs massacred 150 elderly people... but more Americans were thinking ahead toward the 2025 baseball season.  Well, as Peter Pan urged us-- happier thoughts give us just that much more power. 

And without the audience, sports would be sort of a dud.  The pandemic confirmed this.  We participate, we fantasize...we bet-- another huge industry-- and we buy tickets and watch.  Those of us at home-- we pay, too.  I have to buy ESPN channels so my son can enjoy holidays here without depriving himself of football or baseball championships. Which came first?  The game or the money?  We know which, of course... but the investments roll on, the industry and marketing explodes with exponential regularity. We are, most of us, victims somehow-- willing, excited, happy victims.  Everyone seems to have their team. Vicarious thrill, sportsmanship, fandom, bromances, reality escape.... whatever... it accelerates.  It has a season-- a beginning and an endpoint.  Infinity of journalists and analysts-- biographers, documentarists... and now the television contracts for retired players-- competitive channels and entertainment platforms.  We cannot seem to get enough despite constant commercial interruption and annoying solicitations... there will be a winner.  A trophy... a ring. 

We are all of us dreamers in a way... we imagine ourselves on some field of ultimate content... and when we grow up and become ordinary, we sometimes imagine our children garnishing the rewards we once maybe coveted.  My son, who had unusual talent as a player, is very realistic and rational about his abilities.  Yes, he harbored his passion and parlayed that into some kind of career, but he humbly declines any 'could have been' scenarios.  As for me? A  part of me believed.  I support whatever he does, but I do know that he maybe once had a dream.  I remember the way I felt watching him walk out onto his first NCAA court.  It was thrilling. Now-- 16 years later... he's very even-keeled and practical... and ambitious. He still absolutely and passionately loves the game... most games... and he will find his way... and I will root for the Chargers, or whomever he wants. 

I just discovered the 2025 Super Bowl falls on my birthday. We used to have parties, when my son was little... now life is more complicated, or less so... I've learned to watch alone, as many Americans do, although they do this in bars, via their social media, twittering and posting, gambling progressively-- but most of all, we are not just audience-- we participate. Our hearts beat faster, we jump around and coo and curse and celebrate or mope... but as the industry well knows, we are 'in'. Most of us, that is. The sports scrooges among us-- and I know quite a few-- may be missing something culturally significant.  

I'm pretty sure now my acquired or vicarious passion for sports has replaced something else-- maybe my concert attendance or gig-watching.  The same arenas are used for music; at the Super Bowl they become field-fellows... part of the spectacle. Rather than climb grandstands to watch rockstars on a screen with a phone-recording audience, I see games...  young men and women in their prime physically striving for something... I see their fans dressed up and yelling their heads off like family. Partisanship and loyalty are spread among a number of available teams-- geographic loyalties acknowledged.  It seems a little more innocent and less threatening than a political competition. Dare I use the word democratic? Maybe I'm fooling myself  but in this heartbreaking election year I think I feel a kind of Sunday 'hope'. God Bless Detroit-- Buffalo-- the overpaid underdogs since the Jets have virtually imploded.  Forgive me my naïveté... but I am feeling just that bit more 'American'. Amen. 

On Point

It's closing in on a year since Matthew Perry's death... and the trail of blame unravels: the unscrupulous doctors and enablers, the greedy parasites who attach themselves to celebrities who are emotionally disabled.  I've seen this-- rockstars who struggle, actors between successes hanging out in bars, drinking themselves into a kind of crippled charisma.  It has an appeal, this state of manic hilarity, of self-effacing confessional deprecations and desperate nightly dramas of carousing.  While some pick up their career and dust themselves off, all too often this ends in tragedy.  It's very hard to measure quantities of alcohol or meds when one is just intent on blurring out the demons.  The failure we fear is too often simply the fear of failure. It's complicated.

Still, in the very sensitive aftermath of a tragic death, there is unprecedented sympathy.  Where were these mourners and criers during crisis?  Matthew was not in an appealing state, and I've argued in vain (pun intended) with addicts and junkies at the midnight hour when nothing but a needle makes any sense.  But after the fact, as a sort of clearance for the victim, there is this blame game... sometimes valid, sometimes a consolation narrative.  Where life insurance is concerned, there is a financial reason to morph a suicide into an accident or a manslaughter scenario.

And then there is the chain reaction-- those who are on a kind of edge and are so derailed by the sad ending of someone who struggled, as they do-- especially when that person was a 'someone' whom they admired.  If this man couldn't manage, one thinks, how can a loser like me ever get clean or sober or 'happy'-- that evasive human nirvana?

Granted, there was a hideous sequence of heinous people who profited from the pseudo-medical art of prescription peddling, especially common among well-known people who want to keep their vices within a more private circle.  But it helps to exonerate the deceased and attribute his errors to an evil little machine of individuals which took away his choices.  The consistent popularity of Law and Order and varieties of Dateline exemplifies our human obsession with blame-attribution.  We want justice for the innocent, and we often want the guilty ones we love to seem less guilty. The dead cannot defend themselves; we must unravel and discover.  

While I find mass shootings (and all random shootings) horrifying, I'm not sure the gun makers are culpable.  For someone strangled with a silk tie, well-- nearly anything in the wrong hands can be transformed into a means of killing.  Of course guns are made for this... and what is wrong with our culture and all past cultures which decided that wounding human bodies was a way of solving massive conflicts? All guns aside, it was God Himself who weaponized rain in Genesis. 'The fire next time,' He warned, in the traditional spiritual which inspired the James Baldwin title.  This always frightened me, like a premonition of firearms, nuclear war.  Summer wildfires are terrifying enough.

We named my very first band The Blame.  Blame it on rock and roll; something like that.  Blame and guilt go hand in hand in adolescence, in bad relationships, in family dynamics.  We grow up pointing fingers... even the dog gets involved as the fallguy-- eating homework, breaking expensive china, etc.  And then there was the pandemic-- the ultimate culprit in stalemating lives, creativity, social connections.  It caused depression, isolation... it had no end, no boundary... for many of my peers this became a new way of living. Come to think of it, was not the great flood of Genesis the ultimate cancel-culture event?  

August always brings with it a kind of nostalgic regret-- the end of summer is sad for children; they must go back to the grind of school, and leave the freedom of unscheduled days and jacket-less afternoons.  We adults carry this with us... the cusp of September seems always harsh for me... as though I no longer deserve a day of respite, of freedom.  We are grown ups-- we must take responsibility for our failures and lapses. Jews have a day of atonement; I wonder how many in Israel will be thinking about the Palestinians whose children will be vaccinated against polio, but destroyed as a people. It's downright ironic, this priority to cease warfare just to insure that these babies in the line of fire are inoculated. 

Not to deny the back-and-forth between our political candidates. Leaders are generally held responsible for the ills of their regime, but the blame game goes far beyond culpability in an election year. Finger pointing and accusations far eclipse the vulnerable reality of policies which are only as solid as theory or hindsight witnesses. We are all to blame for sins of omission, for selfishness, for failing to reach out and empathize.  Too often the burden gets transferred and passed down to the one who has least power to defend.  Like the tastelessly loud guitarists who blame their sound crew-- the venue-- acoustics-- or band members for volume issues. All we have are tools of prevention, and our own hearts and minds which will hopefully embrace some kind of universal truth and move this world forward into not just a foreseeable but an accountable future.

Losing My Accent

It's been years since I watched a DVD on a television screen; my player is one of those VCR dual purpose machines that is no longer even patch-able into any viable system.  But recently I figured out how to connect my computer to TV, and as a test, I used an old video someone converted to digital.  So there I was, 30 years ago, puttering around a former apartment which in itself brought up a major nostalgia wave.  I loved my 'bachelorette' pad-- the compact but cool bi-level loft with the brick wall and the balcony where I'd hosted rockstars and journalists, wild parties, intimate candlelit dinners, rehearsals, recording sessions, baby showers and toddler play-dates.  Where I'd gone from vinyl to tape to cd, from Smith-Corona to Microsoft, from art consultant to bassist, historian to songwriter, 20's to 30's, single to married (and repeat...)...

Suddenly this woman who coyly shielded herself from the cameraman and then with candor dropped the charade was devastatingly familiar... and yet so far away.   I suppose since I've ignored the whole phone-culture, the selfie-obsession, the instant i-Movie phenomenon... I'm missing a couple of generations of self-documentation.  But thanks to the thoughtfulness of a visiting friend with a video-camera, a few 'slices' of my life-as-a-mother were recorded, along with some footage of me at the age of 9 playing Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz.  Where the little girl in the sailor dress seems like some random animated doll-puppet, the young mother at home with her baby-boy was this woman I wanted to know.  It was as though I suddenly understood what men found appealing all through those years-- this casual grace, an unstudied sense of style... black hair pulled back in a cheap barrette, strands of hair falling like a shadow across a face I recalled like an old actor in her prime movie.

I've never been a mirror-worshipper-- rather a mirror-avoider.  There is a time, however, in nearly every girl's life where she makes this leap from awkward adolescence to some kind of swan-hood-- a moment where her body makes sense-- whether it is in a dance-class, on a sports field, drawing a picture-- acting-- suddenly you are a coherent 'being'; your parts work, your brain works.  You cease to be a duckling and you are given a glimpse of your potential-- your power.  For some of us, the accident of physical beauty provides either a motivator or a hindrance.  For others, the confluence of emotion and intelligence and action just seem to synch up and suddenly we are 'real'.  A camera can either confirm or contradict this perception; of course now, there are so many digital manipulations available, one can't really trust a photo.  Sometimes it took that moment where we were chosen for a part-- a team-- a friendship.  That boy we crushed on suddenly looks at us as though he's seeing for the first time... or some amazing new girl in your class wants to be your BFF, with blood signatures and clothing exchanges and vows.  It feels good.  We are validated.

In the video I could feel that validation-- a confidence, a confirmation...  her smile, her speech-- the calmness... as though life was a slow river and we had all the time in the world in this lovely boat of love and relentless gifting.  Even the baby could feel it-- he was relaxed and easy, and the way mother and son touched one another was so lovely... with trust and a profound sense of family.  I was absolutely mesmerized; the idea this was my 'self' was both exhilarating and devastatingly poignant.

My friends and I have come so far.  So many have veered off the road-- passed away from illness or accident or suicide.  Many have dipped into the lowest emotional depths.  Aging is difficult. Personally, I do avoid mirrors but being a working musician, I see the photos-- the craggy shadows and lines I do not cover over.  I see myself as a tree in winter--- the same branch-arms that once were dressed in lush green are now craggy and stiffer.  They have yet to break off-- I find a kind of brittle strength in these years, but my old beauty is missing.

Looking at the video again, I remember I had two lovers at the time; one was tall and southern- -the other was young and slender and European-- a musician, like me.  The young musician moved in and for several years we maintained a kind of family... but this ended, and he returned to his home.  There were other lovers, other roommates... the southern man and I are still close friends although there have been distances between us.  I can remember his face-- he reminded me of a young Gregory Peck and it took my breath away.  Now he is nearly as craggy as I.  He often brings me lunch and we take trips together.  Today he mentioned how he hates his southern accent.  For me, it is part of what I love--what remains.  Every once in a while he slips up and says 'si-REEN' or 'GUItar' with the accent on the first syllable.

Recently I've been interviewing kids for my alma mater-- mostly young women and many of them recent immigrants.  They are altogether so anxious to 'lose' their accents and become fully integrated American girls.  I look back at the young woman I was 30 years ago and understand why my Mom nagged and nagged me to make better choices while I laughed and smiled and waved her warnings away... all these years later I see how she understood that the 'accent' of my womanhood was something I would eventually leave behind.  Time is on your side for oh-so-long... until it isn't.   Which is not all that bad, I will testify...  wishing a heartfelt 'carpe diem' to my readers.