Back on June 15, my ball hockey team lost in a hard fought battle. In the last few seconds of that game, one of our best players, Asa Johnson, became involved in an altercation with one of the opposing players, an altercation which got Asa and the other player tossed out of the tiny bit of the game remaining.
We were clearing our stuff out of the players' bench and I noticed a wallet still lying there, unclaimed. I picked it up, saw Asa's name on the inside, and took it with me. I ran into Asa, who'd returned to retrieve it, by the boards. I gave him a look what I've got kind of smile as I waved it at him and he smiled and took it from me. At that point he headed off.
That was the last time I ever saw him.
This past week, a rather ominous post on our team Facebook feed announced that Asa was missing. Then, later that day, it became known that he had actually passed away. As a team, we were naturally in shock. Most of the players are young and in their twenties and all very vital and athletic. The last thing you suspect is that one of you might die.
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| Asa |
Although I never saw Asa again, he continued to appear on the team feed in the month before he passed, making comments and joking around. As a result of the altercation at the end of that game, he'd received a suspension and there was much talk on the feed about how long that suspension might be, when would his first game back be and could we possibly talk the league commissioner into letting him come back earlier, that sort of thing. Then the terrible news. To exacerbate the pain, it has come to light that his death was self-inflicted.
I barely knew the young man. Ours was a brand new team pulled together at the beginning of this season and not a lot of the players were familiar with each other, only small pockets of friends here and there. What made it more difficult for me was that most of the guys on the team were of a different generation, young enough to be my sons. The boys were full of youthful and endless bravado, if nothing else. To a man my age, they all seemed indestructible.
To me, the unthinkable had happened once again. It was just a few short years ago that one of the players on a team of mine passed away. That time, however, he was an older man in his late forties who had a heart attack in his car on the way home after a game we'd both played in. I had commented to him after that game that he looked pretty winded and out-of-sorts and he himself acknowledged that he didn't feel quite right. I still regret not forcing him to hang around the arena just a little longer until he either felt better or we got him some medical assistance. I wrote a blog post about that gentleman as well and, in an ironic twist, the same day I found out about Asa passing someone out there in cyberspace viewed the post I'd written on the other man.
For the few brief moments I'd held Asa's wallet in my hand at the end of the last game he played (in which he was named the third star by the way) I noticed the difference between his wallet and my own. His was very thin and unencumbered by wads of cash, credit cards, receipts and appointment cards. His grown-up life had just begun and there had not yet been the opportunity to accrue all the little reminders of debt, meetings, purchases, interest and responsibility---all things of which my own wallet reminds me of daily. I think I almost subconsciously envied him as it passed back into his own hands.
As I'm writing this, I have my headphones on and, in another moment of irony, the theme from the movie "Glory" has come on. It is a haunting piece of music which plays over a scene at the end of the movie wherein fallen warriors of the Union army are thrown into a mass grave after a pivotal Civil War battle. It is a haunting moment which reflects the loss of life of young men gone too soon. As I reflect on this, I remember it was written by a composer named James Horner, who also passed tragically this year, only a week after Asa's last game. None of this is lost on me.
It will be difficult to sit in another dressing room someday, looking around, deeply, at all the young faces, and not think about Asa. I will wonder what their lives are all about when they're not on the ball hockey floor. I will also continue to wonder what kind of intervention, if any, might have prevented his death. It might have been something complex and almost unfathomable or, at the right time, it could have been something as simple as a word or two. As we pass though our daily lives, we would do well to remember that we all have that word or two in us and not be afraid to offer them up, perhaps even in the most unexpected places.
Back in December, I wrote a post called "Welts". In it, I bemoaned the fact that it had been ages since I'd been able to glory in a good bruise, black eye or laceration. Apparently I saw them as some kind of ball hockey sporting badge of honour. At the end of the post, I declared that I would play ball hockey again and that I would once again be able to share my welts with the world.
Of course, I never really knew for sure that this might happen but it did happen! I managed to get back on a team in the spring and we just finished our summer season. Did I suffer body damage? Yes I did! Look see!
This is just below my shoulder on my right arm. I barely remember how I got this which tells you a little about adrenaline.
This is one I got on the same night, blocking a shot with my belly. I kind of had to because I had just coughed up the ball to the guy who took the shot. Thank you, Charles!
Now, I promise this will be my last post about welts, strains, bruises and black eyes because, really, who wants to see stuff like this...? The only possible exception you might see someday is if bone is sticking out through skin. THAT would be hard to resist!!
Yesterday morning, at work, and as we do just about every single Friday morning, Eric Buckley and I changed shifts.
Eric and I tend to spend five to ten minutes just chatting about life in general after we're done exchanging more work-specific details.
This morning Eric was telling me how he quite often will houseclean his list of Facebook friends, depending on the nature of the things they post. I laughed and asked him whether I should check my list of friends to see if he and I were actually still friends on Facebook. He smiled at this and told me not to worry too much and that he had even noticed my most recent "Neanderings" post on Facebook.
"It was something about Idiot Men, wasn't it?" he said. He then added, "I didn't actually read it, what was that all about?"
I was quite happy to go on from there and give him a brief synopsis of what that post was all about. It did, however, once again raise the issue of why I blog and who I blog for.
I can't tell you how many times people I know who are also Facebook or Twitter friends will ask me about specific things that have happened in my life the same day that I just blogged about that specific thing and then posted it on social media. In my mind I'm thinking well, if you'd read that post then you'd already know about that race I ran, darn it all!
In retrospect, though, I am as guilty as the next person when it comes to actually digesting the vast amounts of different types of information appearing on social media. I'm good for looking at a picture and following the caption but sometimes that's about it. If there's actually an article which needs reading then it pretty damn well be about something I'm keenly interested in. And it better be pretty short.
I think, then, that this may have been a trap I've fallen into from time to time. Whereas a lot of other blogs are quite often topic-specific and therefore might have their own audience, my blog is all over the place as to subject matter and is written more like a freelance newspaper column than a blog, really. I imagine that if I posted three or four times a week with lots of pics and kept things brief, people might actually read my blog posts.
All of which begs the question why do I actually blog?
Well, I certainly don't do it for the money. Many bloggers out there use the process as a means of financial gain, large or small. This generally entails posting ads and occasionally doing sponsored posts. I've never really been interested in doing that and the more of it I see in another person's blog, the less likely I am to read that blog.
The principal reason I write a blog is that I have ideas in my head and I enjoy getting them out. I enjoy that there is any kind of an audience and appreciate the occasional positive response. Blogging is quite often cathartic, as well. This was especially true when my Dad was ill and eventually passed. Not suspecting the outcome from the beginning, I started writing simply to update friends and family on how he was doing. As things changed, I really couldn't stop blogging about it. It truly helped me come to grips with what I saw happening before my very eyes.
So, if all else fails, I'm betting that Eric Buckley will read this blog post. And if he never reads another one, well, that's okay too because I really like Eric and that has nothing to do with whether he actually reads my blog posts or not! Next, I may need to work on Kathy, Deb, Bill, Bob, Chris, Sarah, Ginny, Nathan, Tara............
And in the meantime, Eric, thanks for giving me something to write about!
About a month ago, my ball hockey team won against a team higher in the standings than us. The game had been close and this generally leads to tight, physical battles during play. After the game, both teams ended up beside each other in the dressing room hallway, waiting for the rooms to be unlocked.
I was a little late getting there but apparently something had been said by someone on one team to someone on the other team and this had led to a verbal altercation. It was one of those chest-pounding, my-brother-is-tougher-than-your-brother kinds of things, with the two teams sidling dangerously close to each other. Sort of like playground stuff. I stepped in between two of the main verbal combatants (fairly safe when you've got goalie equipment on), faced my guy and basically gave him the "let's knock it off" speech. The refs were also busy keeping the peace and so both teams retreated to their now-unlocked dressing rooms and the whole incident was over.
Men, acting like idiots. Again.
Not long after I got home (and possibly the next day) I came across an article in social media. It's a piece written by Margaret Wente for the Globe and Mail and it's called "When men behave badly." You can read it for yourself here.
In it, she refers to a British Medical Journal study in which they investigated male behaviour in regards to risk-taking, particularly low-reward risk-taking. The gist of the study was that men have a much higher propensity for doing stupid stuff than women, stuff which might not even offer viable rewards. Essentially, men are idiots. The study even coined the term "male idiot theory" (MIT).
Okay, I didn't tell you anything you didn't already know, did I?
For the purposes of this blog post, I am going to lump in the types of men Wente described (those who relish in silly stunts and risk-taking) along with men who see their maleness as a licence for power. I consider them all to be "idiot men". You may have an idiot man in your life and, if you're lucky, he's one of those idiot men who has a few other redeeming features and that is why you possibly still love and/or allow him to exist in your world.
If you are un-lucky, however, the idiot man in your life is (at best) an albatross around your neck or (at worst) a threat to your life and the lives of the ones around you.
My circle of friends has supplied me with examples, seemingly endlessly, of idiot men.
These men treated their spouses or girlfriends with extreme disregard. The women were belittled, ridiculed, controlled, ignored and quite often kept away from their support groups. They were asked to conform to the man's idea of what he thought was good for them. In the odd case, women came face-to-face with physical violence.
Most of this was reported second-handedly but some of it happened right in front of me. Each time it happened, my jaw dropped, at least figuratively. It was incomprehensible to me that one human being could be so disrespectful to another, let alone a man to a woman he professed to care for.
Every time something like this happened, my list of idiot men grew. A brief sojourn through the daily news and the list becomes seemingly endless.
It is the quest for power (or perhaps the irrational fear of losing it) which fuels idiot men, I believe. When we won that game over that better team, we stripped them of some of their power. Their power became our power, suddenly, and out of this arose the post-game conflict.
Losing your power to a woman is even more problematic for idiot men. In all the gradations of power conflict, the fact that most women are at least physically weaker than men (ignoring for the moment my own personal belief that most men would die during childbirth) makes losing power to them that much more inconceivable. An idiot man can rationalize his team losing or his male boss having control over him or a big loss on poker night but he will have issues when and if a woman strolls into his life in a position of viability.
So, from male idiocy on a global basis (think Boko Haram) to male idiocy on a national basis (think Jian Ghomeshi) to male idiocy on a neighbourhood basis (think that guy you know who referred to his wife as a stupid bitch), the world is rife with men acting like idiots. The irony, though, is that often when you give up that irrational need to be in a position of power you actually become more powerful! If one hockey team stands outside a dressing room voicing insults at the other team and that other team just goes yeah, whatever and marches into its own room then where does the true power lie there?
It is a freeing thing when you give up the trappings of male idiocy. When there is no need to live up to some testosterone-driven hype or standard about the need for dominance, you become free to simply live your life. Threats will disappear or become diminished. People will work with you, rather than against you. And, chances are, you'll live longer!
