The Scene Between a Silent Force and a Much More Active One.
There’s a scene between two characters I’ve finally gotten a feel for. One of them is the main character, who is the quintessential nice guy. The man has a steady moral compass, accepts loss with deep feeling, and he tries to do what’s best for everyone around him. The other is an agent of change, a woman with a strict sense of what is right and wrong and sees no gray area in anything. They both have the same goal, but where as the Main Character is willing to accept gradual change, the woman is demanding change happen now, yesterday in fact, and sees slow change more likely to turn into very little change or no change at all.
There are linked by the common good yet divided as to how it should be reached.
They clash early in the story, and he understands where she is coming from, and facilitates her plans for a rearrangement of the power structure. This forms an alliance between the two, and things looks good for the future, but a stranger arrives with secrets of his past, and now the mistrust has returned. The murder of this stranger sets the two against one another, yet simultaneously, unites them.
There is a scene, the two of them alone, facing one another, the man calm, the woman angry. She tell him, screams it at him, that his lack of passion for change will be construed as acceptance of status quo, and indeed, will be viewed by some as indifference. Nothing, she tells him, is more dangerous than the people who are simply willing to accept what is as all that is achievable. What, she asks him, are you willing to do, how far are you willing to go, how much are you willing to accept as your own responsibility, to create this change?
He calmly tells her he’s willing to do whatever it takes, but he doesn’t think he’s suppose to yell and scream and act like the world is coming to an end.
She grabs him by the collar and slams him against the wall, stunning him, shocking him, and she puts her face so close to his he can smell her breath.
“That is the attitude that got Christie murdered, the attitude this isn’t worth screaming about.”
I have found the scene.
Take Care,
Mike
The Final Falcon
Everything changes. Even if you don’t want change, it’s coming, one way or another, and those who refuse to accept change usually are swept away by it. When you’re a kid, and the family dog is dying, your parents have to try to explain why an elderly dog just isn’t going to get better no matter what the vet does, and it is time to let go. That’s a hard lesson to learn.
For those of you who missed it, and most of you did, the first Falcons game in 1966 featured a flight by their live mascot, Freddie the Falcon, who was supposed to circle the stadium and then return to his handler. Freddie took off like he was fired out of a cannon and never returned. Freddie saw it coming. Freddie saw the future.
The Falcons lost the coin toss.
The Falcons very first play was a kickoff, which the kicker muffed, and they took a penalty before their first play.
From there, it got worse and worse. I grew up with this team. I remember watching them on Sunday and wondering if the day would ever come where I would no longer feel the deep bite of disappointment and the never ending frustration of being a fan of the Atlanta Falcons.
That day is finally here.
After over fifty-six years of watching, waiting, cheering in those very rare times, and turning the television off early in the first quarter in too many games to count, I’m simply done.
The turning point was watching the Ravens-Chiefs game and realizing I didn’t enjoy football anymore. It has become meaningless. Watching good teams play is like watching porn while dating a virgin. Watching teams that can, and do, play good football is a reminder that the Falcons can, but do not, play good football.
In December of 1972, I was twelve years old, and watching the Falcons play the Kansas City Chiefs, the last game of the season. Dave Hampton, Atlanta’s running back, came into the game needing 70 yards to reach 1000, and become Atlanta’s very first 1000 yard rusher. Late in the 4th, Hampton reached the 1000 yard mark. Exactly. The game stopped. They game Dave the ball and even KC players shook his hand. Then Hampton was thrown for a loss and ended the season with 995 yards.
That was not the first, last, or only time, the hopes and dreams of fans would be crushed.
(Hampton would finally achieve that mark in 1975, by the way)
In 1980 the Falcons were up by 14 in the 4th quarter against Dallas in the playoffs. Roger Staubach, the venerated Cowboys’ quarterback went down injured, and it looked like the Falcons would be headed to the Superbowl for the very first time ever. They let reliever Randy White, who was the punter, lead the boys back, and they lost by three.
But mostly, in 56 seasons, the Falcons have lost, lost, lost, and lost again, and again. They’ve lost, in those 56 seasons, over one hundred more games than they’ve won. Record (W-L-T): 369-476-6. Their playoff record is 10-14 which means they’ve played in the post season only 24 times in the playoffs in 56 years. Both super bowl appearances have been agonizingly embarrassing. If your kid came home from school with a record as bad as the Falcons, you would think tutors and summer school. But after 56 years, it’s time to forget college.
I went from the first grade to the age I was old enough to get drunk legally before the Falcons played in their first playoff game (1978). It was a dozen more years before they played in another. (1991) It was 2008-2009 before the Falcons had back to back winning seasons.
When Julio Jones said, “Nah, I’m outta there; I want to win” He was stating a very simple fact; the current team isn’t going to win. The man who is the team’s all time leading receiver, and one of the best ever, saw the future Freddie the Falcon saw. There is a hell of a lot to be said for this.
At the end of all this, I have decided to simply walk away, too. Perhaps, I’m thinking, it’s fans like me, who will endure season after season, year after year, decade after decade, of miserable games, double digit losses, and terrible coaches, maybe, fans like me are the problem. Maybe fans like me are enabling the Falcons’ losing ways. Because we keep coming back, we keep getting what we’ve always gotten.
That’s it. I’m done.
Take Care,
Mike
The World is a Beautiful Place.
The Ballot or the Bullet- Malcolm X
Hiroshima
My Date With A Cannibal
She was an angry woman, someone who had been wronged, and clearly, she was one of those people who rather be anywhere else than where she was, no matter who she was with. I didn’t want to do the bar thing, so I signed up on Match and started trying to shed a divorce that had begun to stick to me like a second skin. We were like two in that, she and I. Neither of us knew it at the time, but what we had in common was invisible, and both of us, once we realized it, had to part forever.
We met at Books-a-Million, and from the first few minutes, I thought she was about to get up and walk out. But we had read enough books to find comfort in trying to figure out what else there might be. She wrote poetry, but rarely, and I wrote too much fiction. There was a movie we both wanted to see, so we sat in the dark and in silence, which is what movies are good for, in the final truth. After a while, we held hands and watched the credits roll.
“I hear there’s a good Mexican place in Quitman,” she said, and I offered to buy her dinner there. She followed me to the restaurant, and we drank Margaritas and listened to a couple sing slightly off key.
We said our goodbyes at her car, and she told me it had been a great time but it was the wrong man at the wrong time, and if it was okay, we needed to part ways. I had just paid a lot of money to be shut of a woman so I knew it was a gift to be able to simply walk away.
I pulled into my driveway and she pulled in behind me. “Let not talk about it, okay?” and we didn’t. We smoked a little pot she had, drank Scotch that I had, and very slowly, but most certainly, she allowed me to ease her into my bedroom.
About three in the morning, she got up and dressed by the light in the bathroom, and I propped up on one elbow and watched.
“Left at the driveway, right at the light in town, right?” she asked.
“Yeah,” I replied.
“Don’t call me, please,” she said.
“Why?”
“I’m married,” she said and neither of us spoke again as she left.
It was another couple of months, and I was still adrift in the sea of unhappy people looking for other unhappy people on computer screens, and a text popped up. She showed up at my house an hour or so later, and she looked happier, somewhat, but we still didn’t want to talk about it.
“I got divorced,” she said, “but I’m not looking for anything right now.”
“Why are you here?” I asked. I had almost fallen asleep.
“I thought you’d get a kick out what happened when I left here last time. I went home. I had been gone most of the day, most of the night, and when I walked into the house my husband was sitting in his chair playing some video game with three of his friends, just like they were when I left. None of them had so much as changed positions. I don’t think he realized I had been gone. I sat and watched them play, knowing they would be there, endless hours followed by endless hours. I propped my feet up on the arm of his chair and cleaned my nails by scraping them against my teeth. There were tiny pieces of your skin under my nails. I held each piece in my mouth, just letting it sit there a bit, then I swallowed them. Pieces of someone else inside of me, in more ways than one, and me just a couple of feet away from a man who wasn’t aware who I was anymore,” she said.
“That’s fucked up,” I said, fully awake now.
“That’s marriage,” she said, and I never saw her again.
Take Care,
Mike
The Hickory Head Hermit 