Furmanifesto

Sometimes the wheels come off your life all at once and it seems like something awful came out of nowhere to ruin things for you.

While it can happen, life very rarely happens that way. Most often we ignore warning signs, hoping that problems will “just go away”.

Over time we lose a slow war of attrition with age and relationship. While we are tempted to focus on the easier, more superficial concerns of our life the larger, more pressing and dangerous issues are building towards a tipping point.

Many people wait until they are incapacitated before they see a doctor. While they have sneaking suspicions that something isn’t right, they don’t act on their concerns for fear that something really awful may be wrong with them. By the time they get to the place where they are willing to act, it’s usually way too late in the game…

You knew I was talking about the Lakers all along right?

Last week I posted about what Blazer fans could do to step up their game. It was mostly about objectivity. The objective reader tolerated it, those who lacked objectivity it hated it.

Having objectivity is hard to achieve when you are a fan of a certain team. This is because you don’t learn objectivity while your team is good, you learn it during the lean years.
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Today is Star Wars day and I’m terribly conflicted.

On one hand, I absolutely love Star Wars.  On the other, I really struggle to like Star Wars creator George Lucas.  This is because Lucas is the man responsible for both giving birth to Star Wars as a rebellion against tyranny and also crushing it in the iron fist of his imperial regime.

Star Wars was created by a twenty something nerd who had visions of what could happen when young people were given the freedom to unleash their creative powers in service to a greater vision.  Star Wars was also destroyed by a powerfully mythologized, middle aged billionaire who earned the right to do whatever he wanted, whenever he wanted.

This is the point where you might begin to question whether or not I’m an actual fan.

While I could tell you about the three decades I spent purchasing AND PLAYING WITH the action figures, or the summer of 1985 when I watched The Empire Strikes Back for 28 consecutive days, the most compelling piece of evidence is this:

20 minutes into my first viewing of Star Wars I was weeping.  A mournful french horn sounded the notes of John Williams’ epic score as Luke Skywalker stared into the twin suns of Tatooine from the edge of his desert homestead.  I was only 9 years old.  It would take me a decade to understand what the tears were about.

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While I’ve known for years that you can order a side salad with a burger, I never have.  This isn’t because it wouldn’t taste good, it’s because I’m a man and the only salad a man eats with a burger is the salad that’s already in the burger… and if you are as manly as my friend Matt, sometimes not even then.

A man orders some form of potato with his hamburger, the only question is what kind of potato it’s going to be.  A young man gets tater tots, an older man gets  french fries, an old man gets “steak fries”, a fancy man gets curly fries, and the man’s man goes “all in” with the baked potato, baco’s, and two ice cream scoops of sour cream.

I often see women augment their burger order with a side salad or even a cup of minestrone.  This is because women like to finish a meal and then have the ability to stand and walk around immediately afterwards.

What you order with your main course tells the waiter exactly what you like, and what you like tells the people around you the kind of person that you are.

Sunday night, the United States of America was treated to a main course of justice by its government.  We learned that Osama Bin Laden met the fate of a man who plots the destruction of the innocent.  We all got to pick the side order.
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