Of the heels of yesterday’s travesty of justice, where a career felon with a lifelong history of bank and tax fraud was sentenced to significantly less time than standard guidelines suggest for the simple fact that he is a rich, white republican sleaze-ball in the trump crime family, I stand as guilty as Manafort.
Not on the same charges (I have never laundered Ukraine drug money or lied to the FBI about it) but I have committed crimes equally as heinous. I am plea-bargaining today because of my recent bust, that latest on a rap-sheet going back to the Nixon administration.
I started lifting weights, adding to an already full aerobic and sport-specific skills regimen, in 1968 when I was the starting shortstop on the defending Camino Real League champions, considered by many to be one of the premier CIF leagues on the talent rich Southern California baseball scene. I was, as later assessed by the San Francisco Giants head scout to be ‘too small to play everyday’. At 5-9 and 165 lbs. So I did that any sophomore would do and took fifty bucks from my weekly pay at a local supermarket (where my first union job provided the minimum wage of $1.65 at the time for retail clerks - and their box-boy assistants) and bought a set of weights. The athletic department at our catholic HS had yet to up-grade the strength and conditioning facility and equipment where the ancient plates, benches and bars were monopolized by the football teams. So I set up shop in our garage at home and began to lift. Nixon had just defeated Hubert Humphrey. I was getting stronger as The Phoenix was being a crooked dick.
You may know by now that this is not a political blog-site, or a baseball one. Or a right-of-passage one or a criminal justice one. Although if the back-story for one of the 365 posts over the course of this calendar year requires a brief allusion to or a connect-the-dots retrospective mention of facts or threaded connections to events from the past, I’ll try to find a way to fit them in and draw the intended conclusion du jour. You might even recall that way back when we launched this effort, 2008, I symbolically and solemnly placed the thematic medal of ‘the ten thousand things’ upon its digital shoulders. Squarely.
Meaning that the dots are connected today, however circuitously, from Manafort, Nixon, The SF Giants and Lucky Supermarkets,.. to today’s meme of sports training, by nothing other than…the opportunity that says that I can. Or suggests that I might, or demands that I must.
This is the same reciprocal freedom that is granted to you - as you can, might or must - read no further and never return. I take full responsibility for either eventuality. And while I will be first to admit that the thread connecting the above persons and places named herein is a fine one, there is more than one path to the truth and sometimes the rope holding everything together is too thin to see.
Today’s truth is simply this: Even if you have been training religiously since the days of Tricky Dick, and have built a aerobic system the envy of bush-league shortstops from Westchester to Rikers Island, one not found in supermarkets, please consider the wisdom of taking an off-day. Rest is what makes us stronger, it allows cellular recovery and reconstruction of muscles traumatized by intensity. I am looking closely into the chemistry of hormones, steroids and other chemicals released into the bloodstream as a result of the varying zones of training. Some are good and others are not. It was pointed out that all training is good as long as one builds in the appropriate recovery time to heal and grow from our sessions.
This says to me that we, the collective us who care, should learn from our mistakes with a touch more compassion and a boat-load more of bi-partisan common sense.
Which holds more truth today than anything you will hear from any republican, on any subject, all day.
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