On Our Way to Somewhere

Metaphor

…a poem with notes.

 

In her book on writing and life Bird by Bird, Anne Lamott devotes a chapter to the topic of index cards. She quotes Henry James, “A writer is someone on whom nothing is lost,” and explains that she keeps cards and pens around the house, and a folded card in her back pocket when she goes out. If she has an idea, or sees or overhears something memorable, she writes it down on her card.

Lamott wrote her book in 1994, before we all started using computers and carrying cell phones. And today I take a lot of notes with my iPhone. But I valued this lesson from Anne’s book, and it served me so well for so long, that I usually still carry cards with me. I prefer 3×5 inch cards, blank on both sides, but that’s not important.

What matters is that…

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Which Begs The Question?

This is a great example of a misused phrase.

Books I Read

In the “today I learned” department, I had heretofore had no idea that the phrase “begs the question” is a fallacy and should not be used. Here’s Wikipedia’s explanation:

Begging the question is one of the classic informal fallacies in Aristotle’s Prior Analytics. Some modern authors consider begging the question to be a species of circulus in probando (Latin, “circle in proving”) or circular reasoning. Were it not begging the question, the missing premise would render the argument viciously circular, and while never persuasive, arguments of the form “A therefore A” are logically valid because asserting the premise while denying the self-same conclusion is a direct contradiction. In general, validity only guarantees the conclusion must follow given the truth of the premises. Absent that, a valid argument proves nothing: the conclusion may or may not follow from faulty premises—although in this particular example, it’s self-evident that the conclusion is…

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Why we’re so ready for college football

Everything comes in normal natural cycles. My favorite part of that cycle begins in a week. College football.

I’m an Auburn fan, and of course that means this year holds a lot of promise (not hard to have a better season than last year), but I’m not writing about them.

I’m writing about an interesting phenomena that I’ve been observing among many fans. Specifically, I care more about the college football season starting than I ever have. It’s the same among my old school friends and even my coworkers. No one can recall ever being this ready for the season to start. I think I know why.

Johnny Manziel. Now don’t get me wrong, I think the Heisman-winner is a complete doofus, but let me lay out the theory.

Normally, late July is the slowest month in terms of sports news. The NBA playoffs are long over, The MLB is in their dog days, when the fans dwindle because of the heat and no game feels like it matters all that much (a feeling which fades as we approach September). The All-Star break is a welcome diversion, but it is immediately followed by the day the sports worlds stands still (that is to say the day when no major American sports are being played). And in terms of Football, there is little to be said. Practices (both professional and collegiate) don’t begin for another few weeks and until then there is little to be said outside of headlines about players in scandal.

If you’re a sports fan you know what I mean. It’s the season when your ESPN phone alert goes off and you hardly care to look. Unless your favorite baseball team is putting on a show (Like the recent streaks of the Braves and Dodgers) there is hardly any reason to turn on a sports channel.

It is during this time that we, the college football fans, think longingly about what comes in a month. But in late July that promise of fandom fulfilled is still too far off to really hold on to. In fact it feels in many ways as if time stands still for college football during that period of time. Sure there are a few blips on the recruiting radar, and maybe a player has been dismissed for some offseason conduct, but none of it really pushes the sport to the front of your mind.

What I have just described is what I’ve experienced in late July and early August most of my sport-loving life. But this year was different, because of Johnny Manziel. Normally nothing is happening that has implications for the landscape of college football as a whole, but Johnny and his infamous friend Uncle Nate changed that.

July 13th, Johnny leaves the Manning Passing Academy amid facts that he missed practices and rumors that he was out late partying the night before. This event alone didn’t really push college football to the mind of anyone who wasn’t already thinking about it. By this point any dedicated fan of Texas A&M was aware of some of the shenanigans their beloved QB had been up to. Poorly thought out tweets and crazy parties among them.

For many of us college football fans this was irritating. Especially since the one brief taste of football was approaching for SEC fans: SEC media days. but all of the focus of the event was on Johnny Football. So though I walked away from the news I read coming out of the event glad to hear the first few snippets from my favorite teams caoch, I was also thinking about Manziel.

But it was still about a month from the start of real practices at this point, and though our ears were pricked about the world of college football. We all might have just laid back down and slept until our respective schools began to have real news come out.

But even as the media continued, day in and day out, to talk about Manziel, I don’t think it would have had the effect on our collective psyche that it did, if august 4th had been a quieter day. That was when the allegations first arouse that Manziel (with the help of his drinking buddy and handler, Uncle Nate) had been signing footballs and other gear in exchange for payment.

I don’t feel like getting into an argument over amateurism and pay-for-play schemes right now (I’ll leave that to the pundits), but this event is the smoking gun of our wild desire to watch ball be played. You see this investigation became a daily saga. All manner of news outlets and social media were pushing the storylines. and so what had been just a small spike in our awareness of the coming football season, instead became the start of our football focused minds.

I started this post by saying that things come in cycles. Normally we start to really consider the upcoming season, when notes start coming out of practice. But thanks to Mr. Johnny Hancock’s signatures on footballs, many of us (especially the fans of SEC football) have been talking about college football for a few extra weeks. Ultimately, talking about it has made us care a lot more than we usually do.

This isn’t to say that we care more about seeing our team play. Really that the anticipation is at an incredible high.