Posts Tagged ‘football’

rotten eggs

Thursday, December 31st, 2009

I will not be going to the movies anymore. I only end up losing hours of the short time I have left in the world, and ruining the enjoyment of friends and family with my bitching. In spite of being told otherwise, my expectations, I feel, are not unreasonable:

– Real action heroes – who really train hard, fight hard, and whom I care about.
– Unpredictability – I should not know at the outset, that the “good guys” will win, or even who the good guys are.
– Emotional content – if I do take sides, I should care deeply about who wins. At least till the movie ends. At least for a few minutes.
I could expand on all of this, and maybe one day I will. Right now I feel it would be even more time wasted talking about the insulting mediocrity of today’s blockbuster movies.
So, I’ll just say, I won’t be going to the movies anymore, I’ll just stay home and watch football. Because football gives me all that and much more. And when the season is over, and the playoffs are played off, and when the Patriots have won the Superbowl, I’ll go back to writing.
I hope 2010 will be a year of experiences and intensity and love and peace and fulfillment for you all!

Real Action Hero!

Real Action Hero!

The Cholesterol- Part two

Monday, December 7th, 2009

ex-squirel

Still alive, see? Without Lipitor!

I have not gone back to get my numbers checked again. I will wait for all the strategies to take effect. I’ve been walking, religiously. The Lake is 0.6 miles around. Three or four miles means I have to walk around five or six times, and though there is plenty to talk and gossip about with my walking partner, and there is a lot of wildlife in that lake to entertain us, it’s dizzying. It’s not really a lake, but a retention pond,  where the runoff water from the heavy rains end up. There really is wildlife there, right in the middle of Tallahassee.

My mother often said she wanted to be a bird after she died. I never thought of her as a cute songbird or as a raptor. I started walking around this lake soon after she died. I saw the great blue heron on one of my earliest walks there.  He was perfect in every way, and had a large scar on one side near his wing. I was immediately convinced that he was in fact my mother, the scar was proof.  It was a mark from the heron’s previous life, in which he had fatally damaged his liver. He still comes, six years on. He walks right up to the gaggle of Muscovy ducklings, picks up one of them in his elegant beak, and swallows it whole. His neck gets a little ungainly as the creature descends into his belly, and when the bulge vanishes, he steps up again to his buffet, and takes another, and so on, till he is full. That’s my mother all right.

Those Muscovies are ugly, and, little signs around the lake inform us, dangerous. They spread disease, are aggressive, produce about a pound of feces each per day, some of which we carry into our cars and homes with our shoes, and worst of all, they mate with native wild species of ducks and turn them into Muscovies! All these things considered, I am grateful for the heron’s contribution to the eradication of these spectacularly ugly creatures.DSC00052

Muscovies

Muscovies

In the spring there are soft shell turtles that go a little spring-silly and start coming out of the lake to find mates or lay eggs. They are big, they resemble the unfortunate Jar Jar Binks, and really do have soft shells, as I found out when I rescued one who had wandered into traffic in search of a mate. He was very heavy, and tried to bite me.

That’s the walking part. Then there are the oats. In the beginning it was awful to eat the goopy matter. But more and more, I find myself looking forward to the warm slurry with a handful of dried blueberries. I have not eaten any red meat or bird (I would put that aside for some Muscovy duck flesh) since the 11th of November, and have consumed so much Mackerel and salmon that I must smell fishy. I’m sure the garlic and olive oil contributes to my general aura as well.  But, all in all, I feel better, and maybe I am getting better too. If not, then not, but I am still adamantly against swallowing statin drugs to bring down those scary numbers.

The smoking, I’ll be honest, is a FAIL. I could easily do it in the next two months, it is football season after all. There are so many ups and downs, and so much of it on the NFL channel, that hours and days could pass before I needed to leave the house to smoke. That one thing will improve my numbers more than any amount of walking, herbal powders, or food. It has to be my next goal. I’m thinking about it. I’m down to two a day, the hard part is to bring that number down – to zero.

And, I could finish my unfinished third book…

First and Goal

Friday, November 13th, 2009
Patriots-Steelers 2005

Patriots-Steelers 2005

The very first blog I wrote was about football. American football. I was dissuaded from posting it, because, I was told, it would have little relevance to those I hoped would read my book. I wondered why. I wasn’t really talking about football, but the inspiration, awe, thrill, high and low emotions that any game we follow and are fanatic are about brings us. For me, when I lived in India, it was cricket. The game, the skill, the teams, the players, wins, losses, arguments about who was the better bowler, batsman, all of it was an endless source of captivation. It was personal. From the time I was eight or nine, I remember the atmosphere in the public bus during the test match season – the whole bus hanging on someone’s radio to listen to the scratchy, tinny commentary, as if a war were in progress, our life depended on it. Then there was tv, and I was delighted when we were playing Australia, and I got to see Jeff Thompson with his blond hair doing a little dance as he ran up to deliver devastation. As an adolescent, I had a crush on Ravi Shastri. Later, I had bitter fights with dear friends about my unpatriotic love for the Sri Lankan team. And then, I moved to Southern California, and there was no more cricket. That space was empty. I tried to understand baseball, but it was not for me. You have to grow up here, play it, or at least watch your children play it, you have to have a sense for it – a cultural sense – just like I had for cricket.

And then one afternoon late in September of 2001, soul tired from watching what was the only thing on every talk show and news show, I surfed away. And there it was, that odd and jerky and violent game, the New England Patriots playing another team in colors that I did not know, yet. I watched. I did not get it. But as the months, and years have gone by, I get it. It will be many years before I fully understand the details of the game – I did not grow up with this one either, as I had with cricket. I don’t have the history, nor do I know every last intricate rule yet. But I get the feeling, and feel the things that every sports fan feels when their team is up, and when their team is down. It allows me, again, to ride those emotions with abandon, to allow myself to be jubilant, or crash and burn without fear.

“New England is back in form” it says in the sports section today.

After losing the final game of a perfect season, after losing number twelve to a shoulder injury the following season, and after a shaky start this season, New England is back in form. And reading that made me feel almost happy. I’m finally ready to take whatever comes, be that reviews that revile me, poor sales, or even, god help me, some people reading my book and liking it. Because, whatever happens with A Pack of Lies, The Patriots have another chance at the Superbowl this February. And a chance is something to look forward to, and to enjoy, and a reason to live in a present with a sense of the future.