HTT: How To Positive

So I heard this great line on the radio this morning.

The story was about doctor/patient relationships especially during difficult prognosis interactions. You know . . . like . . . sorry Jane, but you only have twelve months to live, sorta thing.

There were three types of doctors described: The Avoider, the doctor who tries to avoid delivering bad news. The Merchant of Death, the doctor who delivers the full spectrum of terminal outcomes, and then the Optimist, the one who says things like "We'll get through this together :)"

Emoticon implied.

Turns out most doctors are Optimists. And it also turns out that the better the doctor knows the patient the more mistakes they're likely to make when it comes to a diagnosis.

It's as if the more you're loved, the worse your care.

The line referred to this phenomena as "The Tyranny of Positive Thinking."

But . . . you might think to yourself . . . isn't there miracle power in positive thinking? A happy Ju Ju . . . good vibes . . .  that really popular book . . . you know . . . the one that says I can bend the universe to my will if only I insist that things will turn out just they way I want them to?

I mean c'mon . . . how else are Wendy, Peter, and John gonna get to Neverland?

To which a pessimist might mumble something about pixie dust and the fact that well . . . fiction.

But it's true. We are poised to believe that positive thinking is a statistical fact. Aren't we taught that the mere act of smiling will make us happy? Don't happy thoughts make us feel better?

And the answer is yes, yes they do. And don't bad thoughts make us feel sick? And the answer is again, yes, yes they do.

So isn't it reasonable to assume that my Toyota Echo will run forever if I wish it so?

Um . . . no . . . no it isn't . . . and it also reminds me that she needs an oil change.

Which brings us, oddly enough, to Saint Francis of Assisi. Founder of the Franciscan Order of Friars (I know this because I just happen to have spent hours working on Californian Missions with my fourth grader) name-sake of my brother-in-law, patron saint of the current Pope and the twelfth century author of the serenity prayer:

“Lord, grant me the strength to accept the things I cannot change,
the courage to change the things I can,
and the wisdom to know the difference.”

That's good stuff right there. 

Even heretics like me can see the beauty and value of that statement when applied to the human condition.

Saint Frank was also famous for preaching poverty, chastity, and obedience (all three of which make my bacchanalian blood boil), but he gets top marks for the other stuff.

So for today's "How To Tuesday" I thought it might be fun to tackle the Tyranny of Positive Thinking with a few experiences of my own.

Years ago I learned this story about Laurence Olivier (I've told it before so if you've already heard it, then shush). Anyway, every night he would walk out to the front of the theater's stage, just before the patron doors would open and he would say to the empty house "Tonight you are about to see the greatest show of your theater going lives . . . oh, you lucky people."

Now . . . as a performer . . . I like to think of myself as boringly practical. My best advice to any young actor is this: "Learn your lines, show up on time, check the prop table."

Same thing as a musician. "Learn the songs, show up on time, put your set list in a place you can read it."

But there also happens to be that moment where Id, Ego, and Super-Ego start screaming like crazy because, colloquially speaking, your soul is just about to go under the knife.

If you've never done it then you have no idea of the blackness behind the curtain. So in those moments, when San Fran comes in to play, you know there is nothing you can do to change the fact that your wig doesn't fit right and your duet partner is always flat during the chorus of a song and you feel utterly helpless, Olivier comes swooping in and reminds you that all of this is joy, and that you have permission to be magnificent.

To this day I still mutter those words, strength, courage, wisdom, oh you lucky people.

Totally works.

On the flip side, I'm still waiting on a big piece of news and no amount of crossed finger wood knocking is going to make any difference nor will it shush my knife riding impatience.

Once again, we return to Frank, to remind us that admitting powerlessness is not the same as admitting defeat. And maybe . . . instead of checking my email for the fifth time today . . . I should probably go get the oil changed on my car.

There is power in positive thinking, but that shouldn't keep Mary Martin from checking her props.

Music's Biggest Night!

So the 57th Grammy Awards were on last night.

Who knew?

People I guess.

I was far more interested in a plate of lasagna and the mid-season premier of The Walking Dead.

No spoilers.

But it was tough to avoid the tales of Kanye West and his merry band of nonsense in this morning's news. It would be hard to find a better moment in the Obama Administration than when he called Kanye a jackass.

Now I wasn't surprised that I couldn't recognize most of the winners. I'm old like that. I think at some point I owned more than one Kenny G album.

But I was kinda surprised that there were entire categories that I wasn't aware of. Like, yeah, there's a Rap category, and an R&B category . . . but Best Urban Performance? I don't even know what that means. There wasn't a Best Rural Performance . . . which seems unfair . . . but there was a Best Reissue of a Classic Album Category, so apparently adding more cowbell to "Blonde on Blonde" could conceivably get you a Grammy nod.

I was glad that Beck got Top Album (he's a name I know), but was disappointed to see that  Pharrell won Best Solo Performance for "Happy"

I don't care how infectious your groove is . . . if you rhyme the word 'Truth' with the word 'Roof', I'm of the opinion that you don't get to sit at the big kid's table. It's as simple as that.

Tenacious D got Best Metal Album. Poor Metallica can't catch a break.

(That was a historical reference to when Metallica lost out to Jethro Tull in 1989, the first year that Metal was introduced as a category)

I'm not sure if you get to sit at the big kid's table if you have a flute player in your band either.

I think Beyonce won the We Just Love You So Much But Even Though Your Album Wasn't Very Good We Still Want to See You Make a Speech Award, while her husband JayZ got the Best Placement of a Parental Advisory Sitcker on an Album Cover Award, and, I'm not sure of this one, but I think Kim Kardashian got an award for Least Likely to Be in This Room if God Was Reasonable Lifetime Achievement Award.

Weird Al got another Grammy. So did Joan Rivers . . . post-humorously.

I've waited a lifetime to write that joke.

Feels good. Feels real good.

Anyway, I was thinking that back in my time, I was critical of "Music's Biggest Night" because it was so obviously behind the times. It was a John Denver performance at a Nine Inch Nails Concert. I wonder if that's still the case.

I spent the morning scouring through the YouTube Videos of the winners and their songs and I didn't find anything that mildly turn me on, nor did I finish listening to any of the songs passed the first chorus or so. 

It's funny, now that music is so democratized in the last stages of the Fall of the Label Empire, institutions like the Grammys are in the same boat that pop radio stations are in. There's just so much stuff out there that it's virtually impossible to find a pulse so they keep just throwing the same party for the same people.

And the underground isn't rebelling against it this time. There are no Sex Pistols, Megadeaths, or Rages Against the Machine.

The underground doesn't care.

The underground is just ignoring it because nobody aspires to star in what is virtually an auto-tuned reality TV show. The new music makers are casually indifferent.

It's not so much a train wreck as it is watching a bus running out of gas and slowly coming to a halt on the side of the freeway.

In my day (again with the old man speak), we caught a glimpse of what a revolution might look like when MTV's Music Awards superceded the Grammys as the coveted pop-culture currency, but honest to god, it only lasted two maybe three years after MTV debuted "The Real World" and stopped dilly-dallying with the whole music thing.

You don't have to listen to a Kanye West album to know that he's good television.

In fact. . . you probably shouldn't.

Just like you shouldn't rhyme Truth with Roof.

Sorry Pharrell. But if you want to send me your address I'll be more than happy to pick you up a rhyming dictionary along with a thesaurus, which is a word you can rhyme with adore us, deplore us, not for us, chorus, and porous, but not brontosaurus because that's ridiculous.

Check Check one two FIVE

I gotta show tonight so, you know, my writing schedule is a bit off.

But, then my writing schedule can be thrown off by lots of things; weather, traffic, a perfectly cooked hard boiled egg . . .

. . . Leprechauns.

It's not easy pouring your heart out on an elevated stage to three or four of your closest friends and the drummer of the band who won't be going on for another two hours.

But there's free beer, so you know, god loves you.

So to mentally get yourself into that headspace, here are a few pre-sound check rituals:

Check Check One: Pants
Make sure you are wearing pants.

Check Check Two: Warmed Up
Adrenaline is a crazy cat. Go on stage cold, and adrenaline will kick you in the butt. Make your fingers shakes and your voice quiver.  Jumping jacks and bent knee crunches work to tame those butterflies as does playing a full set in your living room an hour or two before showtime. That free beer you think might work, doesn't, shouldn't, and if there are delays (and there's always delays) will turn into two or three, and trust me, it doesn't make you funnier. Ever.

Check Check Three: Equipment
I bring two of everything. Except me. Only one of me.

Check Check Four: Water
Never go on stage without water. You may never even take a sip, but if you sing that first note and realize it's not there, your throat will go drier than, oh I don't know, like dry stuff. Deserts and things.

Check Check Five: Tip Jar
Cause beer isn't always free.

Just watch out for leprechauns.

TBT: Of Mice and Men

Spoiler alert: If you are fifteen and haven't yet read Of Mice and Men, now is a good time to leave the room.

I don't know exactly how they teach books now in high school. For all I know they just email a Wikipedia link to the student's gmail account and call it a day.

Are Cliff Notes even a thing anymore?

In my parent's generation they probably had to hand-write actual essays.

That must have been weird.

I was raised during the brief time when analogue and digital were still kissing cousins. We had pens and paper for sure, but the lucky spoon-fed suburbanites like myself also had a Mac Plus and an ImageWriter II.

Though, to be fair, I also didn't learn to QWERTY until I was a sophomore, and learned on an electric typewriter, while now, my nine-year old son has finished his online typing courses and will never in his life have to figure out how to hyphenate a long word at the end of a page.

That too must be weird.

But getting back to books, when I was assigned Of Mice and Men, we would read most of it out loud in class, take a brief inconsequential test, and then the Audio/Video Cart was rolled in, and we watched the movie on VHS.

We were also the first generation to make nerds cool. And the Audio/Video crew was the start of it all.

Anyway . . . back to the book.

Of Mice and Men was first published this week back in 1937. The height of the Great Depression. My oldest grandparents were my son's age.

That also . . . weird.

It didn't find my desk until the spring of 1993 and by then, I assumed, it was just another tired outmoded classic that an underfunded education system had a lot of copies of from a previous generation (Looking at you Great Gatsby).

So I was surprised that the actual book dropped on my desk was a fresh un-dog-eared copy.

I can still remember the smell.

That too . . . weird.

While old books, with their plastic dust jackets and musty, earthy undertones, smell distinctly like warmth and comfort, new books smell of adventure.

I'd say it's as heady as sniffing glue, but it is in fact, sniffing glue.

Intrigued . . . I tore through it in a day or two, pointedly creasing the spine and leaving chocolate finger prints on various pages, marking my territory for next years class. Joshua Macrae was here first.

The tale of George and Lenny, I immediately recognized from a Bugs Bunny spoof and found myself ridiculously gleeful that I had made that connection. I understood the plight of migrant farm hands, and all those dirty Farmer's Daughter jokes were made so much funnier in the human context.

I also, oddly enough, realized Steinbeck had adapted Frankenstein, and that it's possible that so many books I've read had layers of meaning.

Gotta be honest, by then I was exhausted by the thought school books. The Scarlett Letter (good god), and it wasn't until my mid-twenties when I read "The Count of Monte Cristo" that I realized The Great Gatsby had any literary value at all.

In fact, I'm ashamed to admit as the Shakespeare nut I am now, the only redeeming quality of Romeo and Juliet was the brief glimpse of Olivia Hussey's naked boob in Zeffirelli's movie adaptation.

I . . . am . . . not . . . alone . . . in . . . this!

The A/V kids knew what was up.

But "Of Mice and Men" was the first book where I suddenly, knowingly . . . got it.

And when the time came, when the Farmer's daughter lay dead, and George realizes there's no escaping the angry mob, and he begins telling Lenny about the rabbits, and then BANG, well . . . I gotta say . . . I got misty.

I was always into books, but "Of Mice and Men" got me INTO books. All caps. A small book for a man, but a giant leap for the evolution of my literary understanding.

It's funny too, because of the curriculum, the way we would read a book and then watch the movie, there's a good chance that we might have been stuck following the Joads out of the dust bowl with their grape-y wrath. But my progressive english teacher at the time knew a brand new movie had come out in October of 1992 and would be available to rent by the late spring of 1993.

So instead of watching Jane Fonda's dad tell it like it is, or was, we get a very youthful Gary Sinise popping a cap in the head of a very youthful John Malkovich.

Hence the brand new books.

Such an odd twist of fate.

or . . . you know . . . weird.

What to Eat Wednesday: Simple Salmon Says

What to Eat Wednesday is a new Wait . . . Dad? Recipe Series . . . cause . . . you know . . . why not? There will be no rhyme or reason other than whatever tasted exceptionally good the previous week, but you may notice I'm a huge fan of quick easy cheap meals that are high in protein, minerals, and fiber, and relatively low on carbs. I say that with the full knowledge that I will be sharing a cast iron lasagna recipe very soon which meets none of the previously mentioned criteria. Since it's new, please send along feedback about either the format or the recipes themselves or share with me your meals that you want me to try. Thanks . . . 

Simple Salmon

Ingredients:
Salmon Steaks
Broccoli
Black Beans

Seasonings:
Lemon/Lime
Parsley
Red Pepper Flakes
Salt

Fish is supposed to be good for you. I guess . . . whatever. High protein, Omega 3 fatty fat fats, the soul soothing feeling that you haven't killed anything that might have been Wilbur's friend.

At least I don't think there were any fish in "Charlotte's Web." I may have to re-read it just in case.

So yeah, Fish=Good4U.

But . . . c'mon . . . lets face it . . . it's a pain in the ass.

Unless you live on a boat, fresh fish is prohibitively expensive. Unlike chicken, fish has an actual season so it's inconsistent year round. Not everybody likes it. And it stinks.

I should really be a salesman.

Now the easiest way to skip most of that nonsense and still get your Omega 3 fatty fat fats, is to drop a car payment on some pills or eat tuna right out of the can. I don't have that kind of cash, and there's enough mercury in canned tuna to turn your colon into a thermometer. (Twice a week is fine though . . . I'm pretty sure I read that somewhere. Unless you're pregnant or at some point have converted to Celsius)

But my son loves salmon. He'll eat it up like nobody's business. And if ever there was a boy who needed Omega 3 fatty fat fats, and massive amounts of protein, my skeletal progeny is him.

So dauntless I have journeyed far and wide for an acceptable, non-dolphin killing, way of feeding his "Finickiness"

Finding the Fish:
Fresh is best . . . clearly. You go to the fish store, you ask the guy "What's fresh?" he points to something and you buy it and then figure out ways you can justify the purchase for tax reasons. Let's assume none of us can do that. Your next step is the grocery store and you wanna convince yourself that the stuff behind the counter isn't gonna make your house smell like a retirement home. You get it to your kitchen, you open the package and my God why have you forsaken me?

Now you're like . . . frozen is the only way to go. And you're really right. Turns out, because fish has a particular season, but customers like consistency (now now now), so a salmon steak that was caught in January will be frozen first and then thawed in September and then sit for a week or so under the sneeze guard at Safeway, plenty of time for the triethylamine-oxide to convert into ammonia. But . . . if you get the frozen stuff, you skip the rotting on the shelves step. But that's not the end of your problems.

But don't worry, I've done the research. Now the high end supermarkets want to know what your wazoo looks like up close and will charge accordingly. The low end supermarkets, not so much, but are perfectly fine with feeding you shark bait. The best cost to awesome ratio I've found is the frozen salmon steaks at Costco. 6-8 steaks for roughly $22 bucks. Sounds a bit pricey, but at 3-4 bucks per serving you can't beat it. The salmon is fleshy and unstinky, lasts for a good long time, and is hefty enough to go right on the grill. Mmmmm. If you don't have a Costco near you . . . well . . . then it's time to move.

Cooking the Fish:
First, thaw the fish in your fridge. No counter thawing (we're not living in the great depression) A few hours will do the trick. And since it's winter everywhere but here in California, I'm going to wait until spring to roll out the grilled recipe . . . so today we're gonna bake it in the oven. Preheat your oven to 385 and get out a cookie sheet. Place a layer of tin foil on the cookie sheet and then put your salmon steaks on top.

Now here's the important part: Tiethylamine-oxide (the stuff that makes it stinky) is a base (no treble), so if you don't want cats purring at your back door, you need to add some acidity to counteract. Lime juice is my preference for it's subtlety, but lemon works fine too (just don't drench the stuff). Squeeze the citrus, sprinkle some salt, and then cover with another layer tin foil and fold over the edges. This does two things; First, it steams the fish and second, it keeps the smell to a minimum. Cook for around 30 minutes or until you can smell it.

Yes . . . you're gonna smell it. No way around that. But you want it to be pleasant and not make your furniture reek.

Remove the upper tin foil layer carefully, plate it up, sprinkle some salt, red pepper flakes, and parsley. (You don't gotta, obviously, but the parsley freshens the flavor and the pepper flakes give it some heat, and it looks much cooler for your Instagram page.)

You may notice a few things: One the flesh is a much lighter pink than you expected. That's fine. And there might also be some white gooey stuff leaking out of the sides. That's the Fatty fat fat, so scrape it off with a fork (for your persnickety patrons) or eat it.

Additions/Substitutions:
I personally think steamed broccoli is the way to go here, but green beans or snow peas or a spinach salad with a nice vinaigrette works too. You want everything steamy when the kids hit the table so timing is important. Prep the broccoli just after you put the salmon in the oven, and then wait until the salmon's got just ten minutes left to go, turn on the stove, boil the water and your broccoli should be crisp and bright green when the salmon is ready to go.

I also like to add some earthy meaty-ness to the plate, so my pick is for black beans (canned . . . cause you ain't got all day). But you can also go rice. Neither pasta nor potatoes work here.

Overall Cooking Time: 30 minutes
Days added to your life: 3.7
Cost of a barrel of oil: $57
Omega 3 Fatty Fat Fats: Priceless

HTT: How To Literature

So right now I'm reading two books I picked up from the library. One is the memoir of famed intellectual Christopher Hitchens and the other is a scholarly biography of the Mormon religion. Both are incredibly dense . . . but for different reasons.

This isn't horn tooting because the point is is that while I was taking a moment to consider a complex thought that had just detonated in my lap, I looked up at my book shelf and realized that I hadn't read any Harry Potter books in a while. Any reader will acknowledge that it's fine and all to have some intellectual pursuits, but there's nothing in the world like imagining Voldemort losing for the eighth or ninth time. Books don't have to be receptacles of information . . . they can and they should be childish, voyeuristic, and mind numbingly fun.

My son isn't a reader. Which makes me sad.

In all other respects, he's a virtual autodidact, but it's YouTube and not the Encyclopedia Britannica where he gleans his understanding of the known universe.

And he's not alone.

Two things have happened simultaneously to the Digital Generation that have nudged them away from paper and ink. The first, of course, being instantaneous video tutorials on just about every level of the human experience, and the second being the absolute failure of our education system to deal with subjective mediums.

In my day (damn that hurts), we would be forced to read a book and then forced write about it. The teacher, then, was forced to dredge through our sloppy compositions and try to determine if A) We actually read the book, and if B) We had at least some personal notion of what it was about. It was tedious work for everyone, but it was the only way.

Now that no child is being left behind, we've attached a far more objective way to grade comprehension. Now a child reads a Harry Potter book and then takes an online-multiple-choice quiz with questions like "Were the Dursleys . . . Fat . . . Obese . . . Proud . . . or Quotidian."

The quiz will spit out a percentage of comprehension that will be emailed to the parent and added to their permanent record.

The answer is that the Dursleys were Proud. It says so in the first line of the book.

That may seem like a joke, but having first hand experience with these tests I can assure you that they are all this ambiguously, ridiculously, phrased. All of them.

So at the same time our education system is turning "The Giving Tree" into a technical manual, our kids can go onto any computer and type "Fun Stuff" and get blasted with endless possibilities.

Goodbye Narnia. Thanks for the memories.

But I'm not a fatalist on this subject. Our kids will get around to books eventually. Books are just too damn awesome. But their route is unfortunately going to have to be a bit more circuitous than ours and I thought for today's "How To Tuesday" I would offer a little insight in the best way to begin on  the best journey there is:

First: Start with what you know.
Just about every TV show that's worth watching is based on a book. Same thing with movies. Same thing with history, religion, and sports.

Second: Read what your friends are reading.
It should be the first topic of every conversation after the weather has been exhausted. There isn't a person alive who can't wait to share what they are reading, even if they found the whole thing terrible. "Fifty Shades of Gray" comes to mind. Everyone I know who has read the trilogy, can't say enough terrible things about it and yet when asked why they read all three of the books will say "I felt like I had to."

Third: Read what your idols are reading.
Famous people love to talk about how smart they are and what they are inspired by. If you like a guest on the Daily Show . . . go and get their book. There's a good chance that their work is influenced by hundreds of different books. That's where the real insight begins.

Fourth: Let one book take you to the next.
Salinger wrote more than "Catcher in the Rye" and if you like the work of a writer, there's a good chance you're gonna like other things they wrote.

Fifth: Read what those writers are reading.
Author's reference other books all the time. I found John Irving through Stephen King and Kurt Vonnegut through Douglas Adams. Decent authors know where to find the good stuff.

Sixth: Take on a classic.
In a lot of cases, there's a reason why they've become classics. It's because they're that good. Pro-Tip: Feel free to avoid anything taught in high school (The Scarlet Letter comes to mind), as well as avoiding anything really thick or written by an author with a vaguely Russian surname. I'm not anti-russian, it's just that they have a tendency to involve lots of different characters and lots  of different places and aren't usually nice enough to include a map or character index (Thank-you Tolkien)

Seventh: Non-Fiction.
Not all Nonfiction is good. In fact most isn't. And not all non-fiction is carefully researched. If you want to tackle some non-fiction, go back to the first rule and start with what you know. If you liked Band of Brothers, the actual book will blow your mind. But don't feel the pang of regret if you can't get through any particular non-fiction book. If it's not interesting, drop it and move on. And never read the autobiography of a President. Any President or anyone who wants to be president. What a waste of effing time.

last but not least . . .

Eighth: Go ahead and judge book by it's cover.
Artists spend a lot of time and money making a book look inviting. If it looks inviting, take her out for a spin. At worst you get about fifty pages in and go "Meh." At best you can bring it up at your next brunch with the boys and giggle and say "OMG have you read such and such yet?"

So . . . yeah . . . this isn't comprehensive . . . but it's a good start. And you might be thinking to yourself that well . . . maybe you're just not a reader. But think about it this way . . . if you can read . . . then technically . . . you're a reader. You just haven't found the right book.

Quotidian . . BTW . . . means common/everyday/typically mundane. It's a good word to describe the Dursleys, food shopping, laundry, and all of your homework, but it's the antithesis of what happens between "Chapter One" and "The End"

Literature is anything but quotidian. No matter how you get there.

Schaden-Bowl

So you may have heard there was a football game on yesterday.

Not really as monumental as Thanksgiving or Oscar night, but for those of us that track the game, kinda a nifty close to the season.

Now even before there was such a thing as fantasy football (until God clearly realized I needed more addictions) I was always a huge fan of Super Bowl Sunday. Big gathering, mounds of gooey food, beer when I was old enough, Coca Cola before I was, these are the things that make life delightful.

I don't know who said it, but:

"Remember . . .  no matter how bad it gets, you are now one day closer to your next plate of nachos."

Anyway, among the group this year were Jets fans, and Cowboys fans, Steelers fans, and the one Niner fan (this guy). However, not a single one of us were Patriot or Seahawk fans.

In fact, since those two teams happen to be the rivals of just about all the other favorited teams, it was a game everyone was watching, not to see who would win, but to root for someone to lose.

Being a west coast boy, I don't have much hate for New England, cause why would I care? And with all the Jet's fans in the room, nobody could care less about the ridiculous twelfth man if it meant that Brady gets sacked lots and lots and lots and lots.

But this isn't a blog about football (persay), it's about the peculiarity of a form of entertainment where one can be just as happy rooting against something. You don't go into a theater hoping that an actor you hate will flub their lines. You don't read a book of an author you don't like, being amused by how pedestrian their character development is and no one goes to a concert to see the opening act tank.

Yet, in sports, it's perfectly reasonable to experience a certain joy when a rival team, oh I don't know, gets the ball intercepted, especially when there was no earthly reason for them to call a passing play on 2nd and goal.

Schadenfreude, the german word for finding pleasure in another's misfortune, has to be a trait that is uniquely human. Evolution isn't exactly a spectator's sport, yet when the word is described to us, we know exactly what is meant. We know that emotion. It's written into all the epic tales from Achilies' heel to Darth Vader throwing the Emperor off the balcony. Hell . . . even Facebook is a thinly veiled platform for seeing how fat our ex-girlfriends got. (or how bald and underemployed the highschool quarter back became.)

Sure it's a negative emotion, but it's also a self-affirming one.  And after all the high fives are doled out, and the last of the beer is carted back to someone's fridge, it's possible to take a small step back, put on a pair of perspective glasses, and maybe learn something about your own fragility.

I kept rolling that last play in my head, the one where the Seahawks were on 2nd and goal and decided to call a passing play.

There didn't see any reason to it, and if not executed cleanly, which it wasn't, could wind up handing the other team the game, which it did.

Why would they do that?

What were they thinking?

Well, the answer is pretty easy. The other team knew there was no reason not to run the ball. And they were prepared for it. They practice that sorta thing hundreds of times, over and over. The only way to throw off their game is to do something unexpected, unprepared for. There's no way anyone would think they were gonna throw the ball, so that's what they did.

And, unfortunately, it wasn't successful, but it sure took a massive set of testicles.

So yeah, I'm probably never going to be a Seahawks fan, but I can't not hold them in high respect for taking chances that few would have the courage or the capacity to execute.

I guess the moral of the story is that we're going to experience morbid glee. Fine . . . whatever . . . and don't apologize for it. But it is possible, afterwards, to adopt your rival's failures as your own, and use that perspective to be a better human.

Your enemy's enemy might be your best friend, but it is your enemy who is your best teacher.