Note to ballplayers and other humans: Stay on your feet at all cost...

The Superman...

...and the no-hander-lander

Scraped my elbow raw running to first base Tuesday night. More painful than my raspberry elbow is the admission I tripped over my own bat, laid down too politely on the fine rocks that constitute infield dirt these days.

I wonder what my Superman No-Hander-Lander looked like. My mind’s eye saw something graceful, something I might have done at 15 to spear a grounder in the 3-4 hole. But the looks on the faces of fellow ballplayers, the way everything stopped for a moment as they offered hands to help me up from the dust, the worried admonition of the hardboiled umpire to please throw the damned bat farther away next time, tell me this fall was more scary than graceful.

And, today, unlike the bleeding badge of honor I brought home to my wife Tuesday night, my elbow hurts ignominiously like I stupidly burned it on the stove. The lesson? Stay on your feet at all cost in this life. Gravity is your enemy.

--Lofflin, and you're welcome...

PS: Only a baseball announcer could say 'He's raised his average from .170 to .191' with such unabashed glee. But, of course, that's how the new Royal's announcer introduced Eric Hosmer, The Hos, tonight on the broadcast. Here's my take  from the week when The Hos reached .170.

Superman image courtesy www.studentsof theworld.info; no-hander-lander image courtesy: The 2010 Project

A flickering flame, a twittering twit asks 'what's left for the writer/photographer?' As Henry Miller once said, 'He's up shit creek, don'tcha know...'

In the flicker-ing of the twitter age, what’s left for writers and photographers? Is it time to fold up the tent and go home?

I’ve constructed several conventional novels and I enjoyed writing them. One almost sold big. Almost only counts in horseshoes and atom bombs and not, for damned certain, in novel writing. I’ve also almost won fellowships. And, I’ve almost given up.

Which led me to read through a few pages of a would-be novel from this time last spring. When school is out I always get the bug. Sometimes it lasts all summer. Sometimes, like last spring, it lasts a few hours.

I liked what I had written but I was not bitten by the bug to finish it, at least not in the form it was begun. First, I realized I had stolen the idea from another novel I had read. Second, I realized the only places with energy were places where I let go. And letting go seemed right though I’m not sure I would want my students or my dean reading those parts. Could I bring myself to write a novel that did not portray me in the way I wanted to be portrayed?

Ah, I thought. Exactly. I’ve constructed my entire life to portray me in a certain way… a certain boring way. A safe way. A wholesome way.  But, now, I want to write something that’s all energy and no regret. Something that isn’t about how I want to be seen. Something that takes more chances with the reader’s ability to understand the writing and the reader's willingness to give the writer a little slack.

A while back it struck me that photography is always trying to define itself. Better said, the photographer is always trying to define photography. The very nature of photography is to answer the question: What is a photograph? Ansel Adams defined the difference between a postcard and a photograph. Diane Arbus defined the difference between a snapshot and a photograph. Frank Hamilton found a photograph in an old door and the edge of two windows. Every successful photograph answers the question “What is a photograph?”

I’m as obsessed with technique and skill as the next guy with Dektol-stained fingers. But, I’ve come to realize, “Why did you make this photograph?” is a more important question than, “How did you make this photograph?”

A photographer stands poised with the camera, composing. The question he or she faces is always the same. Why pull the trigger?

This, it seems to me, is a dilemma particular to photographers. Surgeons and strippers don’t have this problem.

One photographer photographs a naked breast covered in goosebumps and droplets of sweat. Another photographs a garden trowel wet with rain. Each sought unconsciously to define the purpose of photography.

So it is with writers. Every writer, it seem to me, is trying to define writing by answering the question, “Why write this?” In a world exploding with words, this is not an easy question for any writer who isn’t a journalist to answer.

Maybe you are writing to be paid and if the reader will buy what you’ve written for her own purposes, her own entertainment, you have an answer.

Maybe, like me this morning, you are writing to write, because it feels good. You have answered the question.

Maybe you’re writing to work out your problems. The Santa Fe poet, Donald Levering, says writing makes lousy therapy. I agree. It also makes lousy writing.

Maybe you have something to say. Maybe you have some insight because you’ve been there or because you’re paying extraordinary attention. Either one answers the question.

But notice, none of this asks about the words, the grammar, or the plot. None of this asks about character development, feminist critique, modernism or paper stock. Photographers in the age of Flicker are going to have to define what a photograph is because their images will be swimming in an ocean of exquisitely colored tropical fish. And writers will have to define what writing is in the Amazon-dot-com era when suggestions of a dozen new stories whose algorithms fit your particular taste appear every morning in your e-mail basket.

The bigger question is this. To what use should writing be put? This is the same as the photographer’s question. To what use should the camera be put? What can the camera do that still needs to be done? We have enough novels, poems and short stories to last us several lifetimes. We certainly have enough photographs, especially in the era of iPhones and Flicker. Exactly what should we use these tools for in our short time on the planet? What can we do that hasn’t been done? And, done to death.

--Lofflin… for a set of photographs that test these questions  check this out...

The Great Hos falters and the fans want to see Clint... Kansas City fans get the team they so richly deserve

You knew it had to come.

It was inevitable. You waited for it like the other shoe.

Fans of the Kansas City Royals are as dysfunctional as their ballclub.

Just two years ago they were crying and whining to see Eric Hosmer out of Omaha and into a Royals' uniform. One fan went so far as to curse Billy Butler for hitting .300. That's a fact, hard as it is to believe. Butler's crime, other than reaching base every third at bat?

By hitting .300 he was holding back Eric Hosmer, keeping the first baseman/savior of the franchise in Omaha.

Or, as the fan put it, 'Keeping us from seeing what Hos can do.'

Hey, it's ok to call him 'Hos.' You're a fan. Almost a buddy.

And, finally, the Royals' brain trust brought The Hos up. The Hos delivered. Last year he looked like the real deal.

But now? Well... now The Hos is hitting just .170, though the apologists see .170 as mere statistical illusion given he is raking the ball, but raking it, unfortunately, right into defenders' gloves.

So, it had to happen and today it did. Fans started squirming , getting agitated, whining, about The Hos because now he is holding back Clint Robinson, keeping him in Omaha. "Time to see what Clint can do," one brilliant baseball mind posted beneath today's game story in the Kansas City Star.

Kansas City fans get the team they deserve.

--Lofflin

Photograph courtesy MLBi.

President's brave stance on gay marriage

Photo courtesy www.whitehouse.gov

President Barack Obama today told the world he is now a supporter of gay marriage. My first reaction to the news was, Why did it take an apparent "gaffe" by Vice President Joe Biden to get the president off the fence on this issue?

Upon further examination, though, I can understand the president's hesitancy on gay marriage. A straight man coming out in favor of homosexual rights can be as difficult as a gay person coming out of the closet.

President Obama used to say he was against gay marriage, and later he said his position was "evolving." I don't think either of those statements are true. I believe Barack Obama has always been in favor of gay marriage. His hedging in the past was in part a political strategy to avoid taking an unpopular stand with voters, but it was also a technique used by straight men, consciously or not, who don't want to be painted as "gay-friendly." It's a macho thing, and I get it.

Obama's statements today could also be viewed as political (and of course those intentions can't be avoided during a campaign year). I can't quote chapter and verse, but I heard about a recent poll which stated the majority of Americans now favor gay marriage, a huge change from the past, and a hell of a good reason for a politician to change positions on an issue.

But politics were not the only factor. There's a difference between answering an anonymous question from a pollster and what President Obama did today. Think about it: the President of the United States told the world he supported the rights of homosexual couples to get married, a view that would have meant certain political death just a few short years ago. How amazing is that? Barack Obama's actions today may be the bravest thing I've ever seen a president do.

I don't think I've ever had occasion to say these words before, but I'm proud of my president.

Book recommendation: "Blue Monday"

I stumbled upon a little gem in the Half Price Books clearance section recently, a novel called "Blue Monday" by a Missouri author named Harper Barnes. Although Barnes is from St. Louis, "Blue Monday" is all about Kansas City, baby, when Kansas City was the place to be - the mid-1930s.

The novel gives a fictionalized account of a real historical event, the suspicious death of band leader Bennie Moten, who died on an operating table in KC during a simple tonsillectomy. The main character is a white reporter at a third-rate Kansas City newspaper who frequents in the African-American wonderland that was 18th and Vine, where Moten and other jazz legends, including Charlie Parker, Big Joe Turner, Count Basie and dozens more, cut their teeth. The book also takes place during the time of gangster Johnny Lazia, developer J.C. Nichols and Senator Harry Truman, who all contribute to the back story, and hanging above it all is the ever-looming presence of Tom Pendergast, who pulls the strings from City Hall to Ward Parkway to 18th and Vine and all points in between.

I've tried to read the Pendergast biography "Tom's Town," but I couldn't slog through it. (I bought it for nearly forty dollars to try to impress a girl. I guess it worked. We've been married almost nine years. That's a story for another time.) Maybe I'll pick up "Tom's Town" again down the road. But for now, "Blue Monday" is giving me a realistic and vivid insight into Kansas City history.

If you can find a copy of the short-print novel, published in 1991 by a local press, buy it. The link above is to the Amazon page for the book. Here's a good start to a soundtrack for your reading experience.

Lofflinradio 4-18, a show about the dying value of originality; Cortez, Watchtower, Ed Robinson, Jack White, Jimmy Cliff, Mr. Coltrane, Ms. Barber

The new world of journalism -- if Rob Curley is right, it will take coffee, shoe leather and genuine love of the stories that make communities live

I wish I could be twenty again.

Not for the reason you're thinking. I wish I could be twenty again because I wish I was fresh faced, full of energy, and entering this brave new world of journalism.

You just did a double-take, which I understand. Old curmudgeons with decades of ink in their veins aren't supposed to be excited about the brave new world of their profession. But last weekend I had the opportunity to hear Rob Curley, chief content officer at the Las Vegas Sun, speak and I was jazzed.

Curley won my attention early by comparing the approach many journalists and journalism teachers take to the old-school approach of baseball purists to the world of statistics. He advocated applying the principles of Bill James to the world of journalism, in other words, he advocated a world based on knowing as opposed to a world based on mythology.

At the Las Vegas Sun, knowing means using data to understand precisely what readers are reading and to tailor journalism to fit their needs.

The example that sticks involves headlines on the Sun Web page. The newsroom keeps tabs on its Web stories on a big, real-time, electronic board. The board tells staffers exactly how many people are reading a story at any time. If they have a story they know deserves an audience, they keep rewriting the headline all day until they hit “the sweet spot” and readership grows.

This is a wonderful idea to a writer. The story is, in this case, not static. It’s dynamic. It exists for more than 24 hours. And somebody cares about who reads it. Somebody works on getting it to an audience.

But, you can also back up from the headline to the story and the reporting. The emphasis, Curley says, is on relevance at the Sun. It’s on meeting the readers' needs. I have preached this in my classes since the day 20-some years ago that I became a teacher. “What does the audience need us to do?” is the mantra. Right. Exactly right. Think about the audience first and last.

The test he likes to give reporters? “Would YOU read this story?” Then, “Would your mother read this story, if your byline wasn’t on it?”

And the Sun, he says, is about two really important goals, goals traditional journalists might find too chauvinistic but I think are just right. The first goal is building a sense of community. He says this is particularly important in Las Vegas, but I think it’s important everywhere. The second is to protect the community. Again, I agree, even though the traditional reporter in me feels a bit queasy about the idea.

He told his audience about the working life of a reporter at the Sun. That’s when I really got excited. He talked about reporters being everywhere, but especially on the street, especially not at their desks working the phones. The paper uses technology to show the readers where the reporters are in the city at any given moment. By my calculation, a reporter typically files five to 10 stories a day at the Sun.

I began to wonder how my students would fare in that environment. Some would flourish but, to be honest, many would not survive the first morning. I don’t think they intend to work that hard once they graduate. They’ve been conditioned by too many sit-coms, too many beer commercials, to see work as a place of cubicles where you play basketball with waste cans and break out the Bud-whatever for spontaneous parties. Boy, will they be surprised.

One student – who is absolutely among the few I think will flourish in that environment – asked, “Well, don’t you think once we graduate and we don’t have to work part-time jobs and do homework, that we will be more able to handle the work?”

No, actually, I don’t. I say that with all due respect. Journalism, especially the journalism of the future, is not a click and paste world. It’s not about Control-C, Control-V. If Rob Curley is right, it’s about shoe leather and gumption, lots of energy, and a sincere interest in people and their communities. I like that. She will, too, if she gets the chance. So will a couple of others. The rest are in for a shock.

Oh, to be twenty again. Maybe I'm the one who should be applying for a job at the Sun... It's about time I had a real job.

--Lofflin

A goofy radio show on how I feel about work... Todd Rundgren to BCR

...
April 11, 2012 -- Enjoy:

Border War? Careful what you wish for, especially if seeing your enemy win makes you want to wreck your car on the way home from the game

If you want the Border War back, be careful what you wish for.

The residents of Kansas and Missouri are better off without it, just as they are better off without the real border war.

You know the one. The one where people died. That border war.

If you don’t think the world is better off without this border war, the border war of the basketball court, read this article in the Kansas City Star today. It is truly sad.

It’s about the joy Missouri fans felt watching KU players and fans cry. No, that’s not an exaggeration. That’s literally what the story delivered.

It was a story from a bar. That should tell you plenty. It was a bar frequented, apparently by Missouri fans.

Quotes from the story:

• “We live, die and breathe Missouri athletics, but as soon as we lose, we focus on rooting against Kansas.”
• “After 2008, (When Kansas came from behind to defeat Memphis in the final) I wanted to get in a car wreck on the way home.”
• “Something about Kansas fans crying is really beautiful to me.”

You could find just as many ridiculous comments in an article from a KU bar during the final game of the Big 12 Tournament, which the Missouri Tigers won.

I love sports. Let me rephrase… I love playing sports. I’m ok watching sports but I’d never turn down a chance to play, even during the final game of the NCAA tournament. For me, it would be no contest. Go out and take batting practice with my buddies or watch the two top college teams in the nation. BP, definitely.

But when you think about this Border War thing, you realize it has spawned more stupidity than"Jersey Shore." But, not particularly among players, who just look on it as a big game, a lot on the line, bragging rights… then embrace as the leave the court.

No, the players know it’s just a show. They’re the real participants. They’re the real grapplers. They know the reality of the event belongs to them. They have way more respect for each other than they do for their own loony fans.

How many Kansas players are actually from Kansas?

How many Missouri players are actually from Missouri?

They’re gunslingers. They’re playing on the side that offered the most loot. Not money. No conspiracy theories here. The best opportunity to play, the best coaching, the best fast track to the NBA. They don’t bleed black and gold, crimson and blue or even sacred Carolina blue.

They bleed regular old blood. Their own.

But their fans! They bleed school colors.

Yet, how many of their fans actually went to the university they are willing to support with their lives? Not as many as claim allegiance. And darn few even played intramurals, let alone stepped on the basketball court.

They’re voyeurs. They need this to have allegiance to something that makes them winners sometimes. You read through all the asinine comments under the sports stories – or virtually any other story – in the Kansas City Star and what you see are their impoverished lives.

My problem isn’t with college or professional sports. It’s with fanaticism. It’s with being a fan. It’s with being a watcher, a talker, a boaster… not a player. And the Border War for too long has given meaning to their lives. We’ll all be better off if they have to find meaning someplace else.

--Lofflin

It aint about hoodies; it's about fear, and guns and the vigilante impulse, and race, and, well... hoodies

It’s not about hoodies.

And, it's not about race. But, then, everything in American society boils down to race eventually. Race is just a fact of life in a former slave state. Period. So, it is about race, but maybe not as much as people would have you believe.

Where hoodies are associated with race, you might say the Treyvon Martin killing is about the fact that he was a black teenager and black teenagers are associated with hoodies. But I wear sweatshirts with hoods, always have. Of course, when I was 17 I would never have admitted to wearing any article of clothing with ‘ie’ at the end. I did, then, and do, now, wear sweatshirts with hoods. Sometimes they are black sweatshirts with hoods.

It would be naive not to realize people sometimes wear hoodies to stick up liquor stores and Churches Fried Chicken.

And, when you’re all down inside your hoodie, you are intimidating. Why else would you be down inside a hoodie when the temperature is 80 degrees? Of course, the temperature wasn't 80 degrees in Florida Feb. 26. It was raining lightly.

But teenagers do wear their hoodies in 80-degree weather. They wear their hoodies to my classes even when I'm sweating through my shirt. Why? Because it’s cool. Teenagers have always worn what was cool, no matter the temperature. When I was in college it was cool not to wear socks with Converse All Stars, especially if your Cons were red. I wore Converse All Stars with no socks through snow drifts on my daily trek to class . Maybe some of the older faculty members were intimidated by my Cons but more likely they were amused.

So, it is cool to be hot inside your hoodie. You shouldn’t have to pay with your life.

Some of the students have asked me what I think about the Treyvon Martin disaster. What I think is it isn’t about hoodies and it isn’t particularly about race – though race will be found at the bottom of it.

It’s about differences in how people define things. One man’s neighborhood watcher is another man’s vigilante. This is really about guns and who should be in possession of deadly force.

Police officers go through rigorous training with guns. They learn how to make their guns the absolute last resort. They learn a sort of reverence for life that they may not actually be willing to admit. They know what it is like to be on the wrong end of a gun. They know, in many cases, what happens when they fire their guns. They have no John Wayne, Clint Eastwood illusions about death.

They see it all the time.

And yet they still make mistakes. Terrible mistakes.

If anyone should be packing in our neighborhoods, it should be the cops. It shouldn’t be self-appointed protectors. It shouldn’t be the neighborhood watch. It shouldn’t be vigilantes. The NRA does not agree, but in my world only the cops would have guns.

And, the neighborhood watch folks would be limited to turning me in for my lack of landscaping expertise.

The NRA is a powerful force in American society. If the American Cancer Society were as powerful, you wouldn’t be able to buy a cigarette without traveling to Canada or Mexico. Guns and fear don’t mix, and the NRA is a perfect storm of both.

Just as the terrible evening of Feb. 26^th was a perfect storm of guns and fear in a gated Florida community.

Let’s take guns first. The constitution guarantees the right to possess weapons. It did not, of course, anticipate the introduction of machine guns into the domestic arsenal, but it did protect the right to keep a gun. In the midst of a revolution – a violent revolution – such a protection is easy to appreciate. Perhaps it is as applicable today as it was then – you could certainly hear a few passionate arguments for its modern applicability anywhere you asked the question. My thinking about this was instructed by how the Black Panthers in the 1960s turned the issue around displaying their weaponry in public, which they claimed to need to protect themselves from white policemen. They were strong Second Amendment supporters, make no mistake.

But, as I tell my ethics students… everything that is legal is not ethical and everything ethical may not be legal. While it is legal to possess a gun, legal in some places to strap it to your belt or jam it into the back of your pants, and, in places like Florida, legal to use it to stand your ground, the question of whether it is ethical – or, logical, for god's sake – is not answered by the Constitution.

It has to be answered by the people who leave their homes armed, just the way a driver of a two-ton automobile has to answer the question of whether he should take another drink before he heads out on the road. If he doesn’t drink, alcohol won’t be the reason he kills someone with his car. If he isn’t armed, his gun won’t be the reason he takes someone’s life.

Now to fear. Immediately the gun advocate has pounced on my argument with the glib defense of self defense. He will be unpersuaded if I say I will do anything in my power to defend myself or my children – they are often the core of the gun advocate’s argument – short of using an instrument of instant death that I refused to pack for my trip to the store. They will be similarly unpersuaded by my argument that the risk of taking another person’s one and only life by accident, in haste, in anger or in fear, is greater than I can ethically endure.

Just as drinking and driving is a risk I am unwilling to take.

Why are people in our time so afraid they take such ethical risks? Let me put it another way: Why are they so fearful they are willing to spend the rest of their lives looking in the mirror knowing they murdered an innocent person?

To some extent, the news media reifies their fears, just through the normal course of reporting events. Some of this is unavoidable in a free society. But, the fact that what bleeds leads is avoidable. I’ve been working on a little study about the Kansas City Star Web page. My guess is if you could find someone who experiences the world only through the Star's Web page you would find a person demonstrably more fearful of their community and their world than someone who never looks at it.

Politicians have used fear to drum up support from the beginning of time and modern America is no exception. This is a reasonably sophisticated society linguistically and they have latched onto a variety of words and phrases which stand in code for fear and for who to fear. The very election of a black man to the presidency sent these codes into orbit, launched fear through the roof. Some of those among us want to celebrate a post-racial society. I'm not among them. People are still possessed by fears they can’t, or won’t, name – beginning with the idea of a black man in the White House – and my guess is those fears are translating into more guns and more stand your ground laws, reified by the daily news and the plethora of crime shows on television – which might as well be news for some people – and what people know of rap music… whew!

Yep, I just made the case, didn’t I? It’s not about hoodies; it’s about fear. But, once again I am forced to admit that fear is about race. And, since hoodies are about race in 2012… well, I'm back where I didn't want to be.

Well, I'm left only certain of this: It’s deeper. It’s just a lot deeper than a hoodie. And a young man has paid for it with his life.

--Lofflin… not afraid to be confused…

The table

It seems almost silly to write the words, "A table changed my life." But the statement is true.

Two weekends ago, a family friend, who had purchased the contents of an abandoned storage locker at an auction, was having a sale in his front yard to get rid of the merchandise. Prices were rock bottom. And to help the friend out, I bought something I knew we didn't really need - a breakfast bar set, including a tall table and two stools, still new in the box. The price was thirty dollars.

An important detail: my wife Jamie wasn't with me when I bought the table.

My first reaction upon buying the set was that Jamie would probably kill me. Thirty dollars doesn't grow on trees, and as I said, we didn't really need it. Her reaction when I revealed the purchase was difficult to read; I knew she probably would have advised me not to buy the table had she been present, but at the same time I could tell her wheels were spinning with a decorator's intensity, debating options for where the table should go (one viable option, I knew, was up my ass).

But the next day, I took it out of the box and began the seemingly endless, but ultimately rewarding, task of assembly. Once it was put together, we dragged it into the kitchen. Jamie's first instinct was to use it as an island, but that was too impractical. Instead, we moved a rolling microwave stand (which we dug out of the trash and which has never held a microwave) to an unused corner of the kitchen, and placed the table by the window overlooking our backyard.

That night, we ate dinner at the table. Which is a big deal. We have a dining room, but it's right next to the main entry point to our house, and the dining room table is usually filled with the detritus of our everyday lives. So 95 percent of our meals at home are eaten in the living room, me in the recliner, Jamie spread out on the couch with a cat on each side. That night, however, we decided to give our new table a try.

Since then, 100 percent of our meals together at home have been eaten at the table.

That may sound insignificant; it's only a change of scenery. But some interesting things have happened because of that change.

For one, when we eat in the living room, television takes the place of conversation. When we are sitting face-to-face over dinner, conversation flows naturally without the interruption of a million talking heads pouring forth from the squawk box. In the past, Jamie and I have struggled with communication; we've always been able to speak to each other, but sometimes it's as though we're speaking different languages (Martian and Venutian, I suppose). At the kitchen table, we understand each other.

Eating at the table also seems to promote healthier eating. When I sit in the recliner and chow down from a plate of food on my lap, I feel like a blob and I eat like a blob. At the table, we sit straight up on backless stools. Better posture equals better eating habits.

And kitchen dining also makes us better at cleaning up after ourselves, which is a constant struggle. Instead of leaving our plates on the end tables in the living room, Jamie and I spend just a few minutes after each meal cleaning up the dishes and putting the leftovers away.

So yes, a table changed my life. We love eating at our new kitchen table. In a few hours, when I heat up my leftover carnitas, we'll eat there again. And I can't think of a better way to wrap up a weekend.

Will you still be sending me a valentine, birthday greeting, bottle of wine...

Courage... That’s what it takes, according to the old catcher in The Kid From Tompkinsville. Courage to get your head beaten in one day out there on the mound and come back the next day throwing strikes.

The Kid from Tompkinsonville is a baseball novel I read for the first time in the sixth grade. John R. Tunis wrote The Kid in the 1940s, part of a trilogy of baseball novels aimed at sixth grade boys. No matter who he aimed at, the writing is splendid and sophisticated. I can’t imagine I got as much out of this book when I was twelve as I did yesterday, more than a half-century later.

Tunis has the old catcher going up to The Kid’s room in the spring training hotel. The kid has been sitting in the dark, staring out the window, wondering why he ever thought he could be a ballplayer after a disastrous outing that afternoon. When the old catcher knocks, the kid switches on the light. When the old catcher says, “You’ve been sitting here in the dark feeling sorry for yourself…” the Kid wonders how he knew. He knew because he had been sitting in the dark in spring training more than 20 years earlier feeling sorry for himself.

And, yes, I've spent some time lately sitting in the dark feeling sorry for myself.

The old catcher tells The Kid what his mentor told him. It takes talent. It takes skill. It takes hard work. It takes a live arm. But, none of that matters if you don’t have courage. If you have courage, he tells The Kid, you’ll get some sleep and go back out there tomorrow throwing strikes.

In my case, it’s the courage to get old that I need. It’s the courage to get old and not slow down. It’s the courage to get old and not give up. It’s the courage to get old and not live in fear of breaking my wrist or exploding my heart. It takes courage to face getting old, trust me.

It takes courage to face the ever present notion in your life’s work that you might be falling behind yet to get up and do it again the next day certain you must still have something to give.

Lately, the courage I’ve been looking for is the courage not to care. You read that right. I’ve been examining how much extrinsic validation I’ve needed in my life. I’ve won awards in journalism -- even some recently – and I’ve won teaching awards, as well. My bosses have never found me wanting, though a few ex-wives have. But all that validation was just a reflection of my willingness (or unwillingness) to do what they wanted. My whole life, it seems, I’ve been studying for a test.

But what would I do if I had the courage not to care? What novel would I write if I didn’t care whether it saw the light of day? What novel would I write if I didn’t care what people thought of me for writing it? What would I photograph if I didn’t care what a “real” photographer said about my work? Could I play baseball and not care if anyone noticed when I got a hit? Could I play baseball and not secretly keep track of my batting average? Do I have the courage to not care how my bosses evaluate me?

I was listening to Joni Mitchell singing “Both Sides Now.” I’ve looked at life from both sides now; I really don’t know life at all. Well, I’ve looked at life from both sides now and I really don’t know me at all.

That’s a helluva thing to write on your 64^th birthday.

Funny, the only place I think I know me is in the classroom. In the classroom I don’t care how I’m perceived. Not a bit. I only care about learning, my learning and their learning. They may think I’m a fool, a buffoon; I don’t care. Did we learn something today? It’s amazing, but I have no self-monitor in the classroom. No self-evaluation. The only thing I ask myself at the end of the day is if something was learned. So I was lucky to fall into the teaching racket. Damn lucky.

Now, as I sit here working up an appetite for birthday dinner, I’m wondering if I have the courage not to care in the rest of my life, the life I live outside the classroom. I’m wondering if I have the courage to find myself, even at sixty-four.

--Lofflin

That photograph is me at three. I'm told my uncle kept a copy of it taped to the inside wall of his tank in Korea. Photo credit: Marion H. Lofflin

New Lofflinradio show

Here's the new radio show:

A funny thing happened on the way to equality

I can't be the only one noticing this strange trend happening in America lately.

When Barack Obama was elected president in 2008, the country came together in a way not seen since 9/11. Sure, those who voted for McCain didn't become Obama fans overnight, but except for the pure racists out there, everybody seemed to be proud to live in a country that could elect an African American president. On that beautiful election night, I was more proud of my country than I've ever been.

But now something weird is happening. Now it seems like the pure racists have taken over, and they're influencing a whole lot of good people for the worse.

A recent example would be Mitt Romney calling Obama the "Welfare President," a veiled effort to associate African Americans with welfare in the eyes of voters, but this has really been going on since the beginning of Obama's term. This article from an online magazine called "The Root" tells the full story. Here's an excerpt:

Yes, the country that likes to pretend that it is far removed from its racist past has engaged in the verbal equivalent of a throwback jersey. Some people have reached far back into that Reconstruction-era closet, pulled out that dingy jersey adorned with racial slurs, shaken it out and put it on proudly. Elected officials have reduced themselves to behaving like petulant children, storming in and out of meetings and running to the media to lob personal attacks at the president, then offering lame apologies shortly afterward.

Is this the postracial era that so many people theorized about following the election of the nation's first black president? Try post-Reconstruction, because the harmful slurs and images being tossed around the Internet and in public spaces hark back more to a racist past than to a racially ambiguous future.

President Obama, through no blame of his own, has not united the country. He has divided it by giving the racists a reason to be loud, and by making borderline or closet racists more comfortable to act racist.

I can only hope Chris Rock, who I quoted on this blog a year ago at the height of the ridiculous Tea Party movement, is right:

"Kids always act up the most before they go to sleep. And when I see the Tea Party and all this stuff, it actually feels like racism is almost over... This is the act-up before the sleep... and next think you know they're f**king knocked out. And that's what's going on in the country right now."

Funniest headline of the year... so far

Call me a cynic but today's headline from the Kansas City Star is one of he funniest I've read in a good while:

Postseason expands, but Royals' focus
remains on winning division..."


--Lofflin, grinning ear to ear