They don't call me Coach Carter for nothing

Whoa – Internet difficulties have exacerbated delays caused by nighttime business and the full-blown arrival of spring.


1. Weekend – I am coaching the varsity team in a Memorial Day basketball tournament. I have, as you might expect, mixed feelings about this. I do not know if I should strive for Rileyesque cool or Van Gundyesque despair. I do not have bags under my eyes, but my hair doesn’t really slick back either. I hope to press the entire game and have at least one opportunity to draw up a successful inbounds play.
This is going to be one of the quarter-life crisis moments (assuming I live to be one hundred) and I am going to enjoy it as much as possible. Monday = pow-wow and rodeo, which may put me over the self-consciousness threshold and engender deep-set identity issues.


2. Receiving racial epithets from sixteen year olds, or why adultitude requires you to swallow the impulse to punt a young drunk Indian over a fence

last night was the first instance of civil strife in the Village that I can recall. The Village = staff housing. I went to a barbecue, came home, then went to another one that consisted of single male teachers imbibing. I was put off by the tenor of the conversation, which consisted of telling stories about beer and girls from your college days, so I left. About ten minutes later, I heard a long soliloquy pierce the night’s air. It consisted of threats, allegations of prejudice, and a nearly continuous string of profanity only interrupted by the speaker’s inability to prevent his slurring from overtaking his senses. It was quite a show to see his two friends try to drag him out from under the streetlight as they warned that the cops were coming man! Then the angry young Indian spied the teachers still at the barbecue, attempted to vault a chainlink fence, and rose from the ground with an aim of starting something. In general, my co-workers who share key demographic traits with me – youngish, male, single – tend to be quite large, as they spend time lifting weights, running, hiking, and other trials of manmenship. By this time I had opened my door and sat on the sidewalk, observing. From about two hundred yards, one could see the veins in one of the teacher’s neck pulsating from the effort it took to not rip a limb or two off the teenager spouting exhortations. I’m not sure if the cops ever did come. 85% of residents were outside, watching.

3. Barbaro has joined our ranks as THE exemplary wounded horse. Gotta watch those bone fragments in the ankle, though – we’re not in the clear. There is something so spectacular (in the sense of pure spectacle) about the big screen they put up over a horse that may or may not be put down. Not seeing what’s going on amplifies whatever images that seize your consciousness, to the point that your contrived sequence of events almost bursts with too much information. Or maybe that’s just me.