Dear Internet:
And so it ends.
I mean, probably, I don't know.
The cultural velocity has increased in the years since I started the weekly recap; while simultaneously my ability to craft a response worth reading has diminished, due to a lack of time and probably (gasp) ability.
I started tweeting this week @JimJividen, and that will serve my need to share links and offer abbreviated participation in the global conversation. To the extent that I'll do longer pieces, they'll either be here or the other place to which I occasionally contribute. The weekly deadline gave me the needed push to carve out those thoughts, and absent it, hard to know I'll find the space to do that.
For example - Will Leitch wrote a piece this week at Sports on Earth, castigating those who...eye roll, I guess, at Josh Hamilton's constant crediting his Christian god for his baseball success. On the same day, Michele Bachmann said this:
Our nation has seen judgment not once but twice on September 11 and that’s why we’re going to have ‘9-11 Pray’ on that day," she said at an event called “Washington: A Man of Prayer,” according to Right Wing Watch. "Is there anything better that we can do on that day rather than to humble ourselves and to pray to an almighty God?"
And that's part of the same thought for me; Bachmann is a highly profiled elected official; she ran for President just last year - and she says 9-11 was her Christian god's judgment against us. The public space that is allowed for that very specific type of magical thinking encompasses both she and Hamilton and just is not granted for anybody else. A congressman could not say 9-11 was Allah's judgment on the US and stay in office; a baseball player could not say that his success was caused by his knowledge that there are no gods, Christian or otherwise, and not get booed out of his city. That Hamilton (who despite multiple drug offenses still gets to be Josh Hamilton, and his overt Christianity is, I'd suggest, an enormous reason why he's accorded that) occasionally has to hear some snickering is hardly evidence of an oppressive intolerance.
That's a thought too complicated for a tweet, but not one that I have time and probably (gasp) ability to develop beyond that; it's unfortunate, the combination of sports and not sports has been my lane since before that lane existed. I'd read the Bachmann/Hamilton piece, and that's how I know I'd like to write it.
And maybe sometimes I will; I don't know. My plan for this space is largely just the various sports lists that I need to obsessively work on to manage my anxiety. Consider following me on twitter for some reason - I don't have a product to sell, and increasing the number of platforms on which I don't sell something is of dubious merit. But I'll tweet links and tell jokes when they strike me. And not when they don't.
I work full time now from the physical space that I'm occupying as I write this; if it's not how I spend the rest of my professional career either something unexpectedly great has happened or, more likely, I'm in a really hard spot. Something's got to give and it's going to be this.
Least for awhile.
Thanks for reading.
I'll see you next time...if there is a next time...
Your pal,
Jim
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