I hate people that don't value TIME

 

So.... I'm dating someone new. We've been out 4 times now, and on each date she's been at least 30 minutes late. I'm heading to the meet and I get a text about two minutes before the meet time, and it usually reads like this. “Hey... Gonna be late, be there in 30”

So sending the text before the meet time establishes that she knows how time works. But, a text 30 minutes earlier would have probably kept me off the road and not waiting holding my wang for 30 minutes until she arrived. Letting me know you're going to be late is only valuable if it provides me the opportunity to make a correction on my end. So is this the markings of a selfish person or just an inconsiderate one?

Time is abstract and subjective in and of itself, but some brilliant person a very long time ago created a measure of time that is objective. 15 minutes may seem a blink of an eye to a child, but can feel like an eternity to someone in crisis. So in that sense time is relative, but the fact that 15 minutes is exactly 15 minutes is not in question.

Is the devaluing of time generational? Meaning as our society changes, and evolves does the integers of time have less meaning? There was a time, not too long ago, when if you wanted to see your favorite television show you had to be in front on the TV when it was being broadcast. The very definition of appointment television. Now very few consume television that way. Teleworking, and flex time have devalued the 8 hour work day, as we rapidly segue into a world where 9 to 5 is a relic, and only significant as the title of a bad 80's movie. Am I the relic for still valuing time as much as I do? Is time just a unit? Are the feelings I ascribe to time antiquated? Is an appointment negotiatble? Is it fungible? Is it optional?

I'm 44. I date younger women, not as a choice... it just happens that way. What I've been noticing recently is I make plans, and I get a text (from my time respecting friends) the day of... asking “are we still on for today?” This bothers me because if I had a change of plans I would have sent a notification immediately, and I hope I would get that consideration in kind. Is this the BAIL generation I'm dealing with? Do people bail on plans that easily? Is every outing a face-off of competing events? Is this an unintended consequence of trafficking in millennials?

So... I like this girl. She's very attractive, and no-doubt she's been given a ton of latitude in life due to her beauty. I can even say that her tardiness doesn't bother me as much as it should, and I'm disappointed in myself on that point. I'm not dwelling in it, but I am logging it for later recall.

Can I be in a meaningful relationship with a time gypsy?Am I a time Nazi? Is there a healthy middle?

The pursuit sometimes clouds the specifics. I'm sure once she's been captured a few times, the tardiness will become exibit A in the case to deconstruct. I'm just wondering aloud to myself...will this be the standard going forward? Is time rigid or flexible? Am I a dinosaur or a standard bearer? I guess only TIME will tell !!!

 

 

 

I hate the end of the McLaughlin Group

Growing up in Washington DC is a unique experience. DC is the very definition of urban life, and so,  I was introduced to gangs at a very young age. Not street gangs, as it were, but political gangs. I knew about Republican, and Democrat gangs long before I knew what a Crips or Bloods was.

As a lad I loved newspapers. DC was a mecca of news in the 70's and 80's. Back then newspapers were more neutral. They didn't lean, and they rarely interpreted. They were skeletal and as a reader you were forced to draw conclusion yourself. You were responsible for adding the muscles, blood, and nervous system to the story. My family and friends didn't care as much about news topics as I did, and so I didn't have much opportunity to spar, and wrestle with these ideas. I was without a mentor. I had all this material and no lab to experiment.

So one day I'm flipping through the channels (back then we had 10), and I see this group of people arguing about the news of the week. I immediately stopped, and watched intently as these men spoke. I fell in love that day. The panel was so biting, so informed, so opinionated. The cadence of smart people talking was music to my ears, and has remained so to this day. From that time, I never missed an episode. The McLaughlin Group was my family now. I had a safe place to test my logic, my intuition, and my resourcefulness.

My favorite panelist was Jack Germond. A grumpy cantankerous writer for the Baltimore Sun at the time. He was a democrat but he had the demeanor of a republican. Today's democrats could learn a few lessons from him. He was thoughtful, and unapologetic.

Pat Buchanan was an inspiration. He knew so much. McLaughlin would often try to trip him up with obscure references, and left field questions. Buchanan knew them all... answered them all. I was in awe at his breadth of knowledge. He inspired me to be intellectually curious. I still don't know how that guy never became president.

I got to see the essence of “the Hedgehog and the Fox” play out every Sunday Morning.

John McLaughlin had created an American Original. He blazed the trail for Crossfire, Politically Incorrect, Realtime, The Daily Show, The O'reilly Factor, Morning Joe, Fox News, MSNBC. The idea of rivals going after each other in an intelligent thoughtful way was unheard of in 1982. When you look at ESPN, and see First Take know that it has the DNA of the McLaughlin Group.

 
John McLaughlin died last month. His show died with him. I'm still grieving. I miss it, at this moment, with 100 % metaphysical certitude.  

I hate the Hater Culture

I know this may sound weird seeing as my blog is titled Hate Diary, but stay with me.  I’m getting to something big here.

Magic Johnson used to say he was driven to go to the gym and work in the off season because he knew 3000 miles away Larry Bird was in a gym working, and he couldn’t let Larry have that edge. When I heard this it made all the sense in the world.  Magic and Larry were chief rivals.  If it weren’t for Magic, Larry would have an NCAA championship and 5 NBA championships, and if it weren’t for Larry, Magic would have 6 NBA championships and the Jordan mystique would feel a lot different. It also made all the sense in the world because they were opponents in the same arena playing a zero sum game.  I win you lose.  You win I lose.  The math is easy and makes sense.

When a team won a championship they were happy for themselves and what they accomplished.  They would look in the camera and say “Hi Mom… we did it.”  There was personal pride because they knew they beat the best to accomplish their goal.  When Isiah Thomas reached the mountain top he said “Heaven must be like this.” He reached heaven by defeating the Los Angeles Lakers.

Fast Forward a decade or so later.  Now when teams win a championship… you hear this “We all we got” and my personal favorite “No one believed in us.”  So your arena is packed every night, your shoes, and clothes are sold all over the world, your commercials are on every TV network, and “NOBODY BELIEVES IN YOU.” I find that hard to reconcile. 

Stark difference.  What had changed is that people had started to put a supremely high value on the opinions of other people.  They started concentrating on the voice of the onlooker, the fan, the spectator.  This is not only a sports problem.  This is happening everywhere.  Check Facebook, twitter, IG.  All you see are people creating haters for themselves for motivation.  It’s a slippery slope to KNOW without reservation the thoughts of others and how they truly feel towards you.  But these simpletons do it every day because they feel fake opposition is better than looking inward.

Ballers lost the gumption to go hard against old AAU or college friends.  They want to win but not at the expense of their friend/colleague.  It is easier to go after the nameless, faceless critic.  They would save press clippings and tape them on the gym wall so they could do those extra reps.  Creating an opponent from scratch, the very definition of a straw-man.  The media became the enemy.  They DVR “First Take” to see what Stephen A, and Skip have to say.  Hoping they’d disrespect them so they could add more fuel. The goal is not to win but to prove others wrong.

This is so misguided because in the heat of the battle your opponent is in front of you.  Your opponent is not the fan, or the media, and you need to HATE your TRUE opponent to win. 

LeBron James got reminded of that again.  His two greatest performances in his payoff career occurred when his manhood was tested.  Down 3-2 to Boston in 2012, and this year in game 5 of the NBA Finals after Draymond Green called him out of his name.  He concentrated his HATE on his TRUE opponent and channeled his greatness. 

The problem is after he tapped into his dark side he went right back to being a sheep.  The Ultimate Warrior T-shirt, and the tea sipping Kermit were a reminder that he still thinks his opponent is not in the battle.  I keep hoping they learn, but alas they never do. It’s a sad life when your primary goal is to prove something to someone else rather than prove it to yourself. Because SELF is the ULTIMATE OPPONENT.

I hate the DREAM TEAM

I know this sounds a wee bit blasphemous but I HATE THE DREAM TEAM.  And before you recoil… yes… That Dream Team… the 1992 team… Yes.  The Justice League of Jordan, Bird, and Magic… Yes.  I don’t hate it in a vacuum, but I hate what it has spawned.  The result of its birth has disfigured the NBA (my first love) into a hideous beast, not fit for human consumption.

Back in 1988 my beloved John Thompson experimented with the US Olympic Men’s Basketball team.  The experiment failed miserably. Depressed and hazy USA Basketball decided to drown its sorrows in booze and copious amounts of meaningless sex.  So they called the town whore David Stern. They make a date, all the while Stern plots. As it happens, Stern is a gold-digger so the best way to maximize her situation is to get pregnant.  So she puts on the low cut mini, with the F-Me pumps.  You know the ones.  No man can resist.   She tells USA basketball she’s on the pill so we can go “skin-to-skin”.  USA Basketball says OK, and 4 years later the DREAM TEAM is born. 

The baby was beautiful…the baby was breathtaking. I was 20 years old at the time and all I wanted to do was babysit the Dream Team.  The summers of 1992 was magical. Seeing these guys play together was a cool treat served to us by the basketball gods on a hot August day. Little did we know that treat would turn trick and ruin the NBA.

Initially the Dream Team was a huge success.  Stern got what she wanted.  The NBA was a global brand which opened up new revenue streams.  The pie gets bigger so the slices get bigger. In a competitive arena there is great value in creating a zero-sum-game.  When you have a small pie the competition for that pie is immense.  A bigger pie means that some can get full after just having a slice. 

The 1992 Dream Team removed HATE from basketball.  And basketball is the lesser for it.  Isiah Thomas and Magic Johnson were best friends when Magic was doing all the winner, but Isiah noticed a change when he decided to go after what Magic had.  Isiah realized that on the court he needed to HATE his opponent in order to defeat him.  He needed to play with furious anger to WIN. 

People don’t understand how competitive basketball is.  They look at a game decided by 16 points and call it a blow-out. When all it means is that a team was better by 2 baskets in each quarter over the course of a 48 minute game.  Over 90% of NBA games are decided by 8 points or less, meaning the difference is 1 basket per quarter.  This in a league where both teams shoot between 45-55% on any given night.  The HATE is what gets you over the top. That HATE gets you to that loose ball, that extra rotation. HATE allows you to take that really hard foul.  Remove the HATE and you get mediocre outcomes.

Letting great players play together was a mistake.  They learned to like it.  And as the money got bigger, getting more help was the ultimate WIN/WIN.  No one wants the Barkley, Malone, Ewing Legacy, but why does no one want the Isiah Thomas Legacy either. He beat the 2 BEST ORGANIZATIONS OF ALL TIME.

So after the Dream Team you see things like. Clyde Drexler being okay with playing on Olajuwon’s team.  Glenn Rice and Horace Grant okay playing with Shaq and Kobe.  Gary Payton, and Karl Malone okay with chasing it.  This all culminating with the BIG 3 in Boston, Miami, and now the Four Horsemen in Golden State.  Kevin Durant just lost to Golden State four weeks ago in HISTORIC fashion, his teammate got kicked in the nuts not once but twice, and he has NO HATE in his heart for them.  He joins them 28 days later.  WOW. 

If you asked David Stern to go back to 1988 and posited him the question what would she have done different? I bet you she would say “I would have used protection, or tied my tubes in 1993.”  Don’t get me wrong we love the baby, but we don’t love what it grew up to become.

I Hate People Comparing Michael Jackson to PRINCE

Prince died on Thursday and almost immediately the comparisons to Michael Jackson were invoked. I started seeing Memes on social media illustrating music royalty that included;

Michael Jackson as the KING,
Whitney Houston as the QUEEN, and
Prince as (of course) the PRINCE

This was cute in a pun-ish sort of way, but factually inaccurate. In fact, Prince with his unisex, gender-bending persona could serve as both KING, and Queen of my generations music monarchy.

Prince and Michael Jackson both reached their zeniths in the 1980's and after that the comparison should end. Michael Jackson is a great performer. Prince is a great vocalist, musician, composer, and performer.

You couldn't tell by the visual but Prince was a man's man. He played ball, and by most accounts he had a wicked jumper. Ask Charlie Murphy, he documented it on the Chappelle Show in 2003. Prince loved the skit. He didn't get bent out of shape like many at his level are apt to do when getting made fun of.

And we must speak on the fact that Prince was a world class STICK MAN. He “loved”some of the hottest women of our time. Vanity (of Last Dragon fame), Apollonia, Sheila E., Carmen Electra, and Kim Basinger are just a few of Prince's muses. And you know you belong in the STICK MAN hall of fame when they call people you banged muses. You're first ballot HOF when none of your ex's have a bad word to say about you.

Side bar... first ballot HOF Stick Men are Hefner, Clooney, DiCaprio, Jeter, and Prince.

Prince was the Curt Flood of music. He fought the power and won back his music catalog. He decided to no longer be a slave to Warner Bro's. He was courageous, irrepressible, original; an artist in the truest sense of the word.

I went to a Roots concert last night. They bowed down and paid HOMAGE to his TALENT.

Look man!!!! Do you know how many babies have been made to Prince? How many people have got their freak on to “Do me baby” or “Darling Nikki?” How many people have knocked boots to “If I was your girlfriend” or “Adore?” How many people have grinded wet spots to “Sexy MF” or “Get Off?”

The man was prolific. Most of the songs I just mentioned were on his B-sides.

There is no comparison to a TALENT that stands along.

In March...OKC was playing Golden State. It was a big game. I stayed up late to watch it. Kevin Durant (2014 MVP), and Steph Curry (Reigning MVP) were in the building. Golden State was playing terrific basketball, and winning at a record pace. During the first time-out the TNT camera pans over to the aisle, as his Purple Badness emerges. This was 32 years after Purple Rain. He parts the sea with a bejeweled cane in one hand and a dime piece on his other arm (Damaris Lewis aka new muse). Prince walked in as the baddest man on the planet. The fans gave him a standing ovation. In the midst of all the stars...he was THE STAR.

The greatest concert I've ever witnessed happened in the Capital Centre. Prince put on a SHOW that night. Man played guitar...Man played drums...Man played bass....Man played keyboard....then he pulled out a trumpet, and tore the house down. I'm getting chills now just thinking about it. I wanted to run up to the microphone and yell “Earl playing by hisself man...Earl playing by hisself.”

Some were more iconic, some more popular, but NONE more TALENTED.

 

“...if he poured his heart into a glass and offered it like wine...she would drink and be back in time for the morning papers”

 

I hate the Electoral College

I remember being a young lad sitting in my social studies class, listening to my teacher espouse the virtues of democracy.  This was by far my favorite hour of the day, I couldn’t wait to breach the threshold of that classroom.  The origin story of America is trumped by nothing. It’s a delicious cocktail of independence, romance, strength, destiny, fortitude and imagination.  It’s simply beautiful, unless you’re a native but that’s a post for another day. 

We hear the word democracy, and we a trained to pivot toward “one man…one vote”.  In America we have a democracy in every election save ONE. That ONE is the presidential election.  Odd because it’s by far our most important election.  The presidential election is “representatively” democratic.  I learned in that social studies class that there is a thing called the ELECTORAL COLLEGE where the president is actually elected. In this ELECTORAL COLLEGE each state is given a proportional number of votes based on the population of the state, essentially creating voting blocks and making the individual ballot less valuable.

My teacher did a great job of explaining the necessity of the ELECTORAL COLLEGE in the 1700's.  At the time there were 13 colonies, they were independent primarily and unified secondarily.  Most areas had favorite son candidates that ran for president,  they having not the wherewithal to travel from state to state to campaign.  There was no mass communication apparatus or mass transit vehicle to facilitate awareness. So using a popular vote among several candidates didn’t feel like consensus.  There needed to be a way to broker these choices between the election in November, up and through the inauguration in January.  Creating an ELECTORAL COLLEGE was a genius idea for a burgeoning nation, and it was essential for the first 120 years of our union.

However in 1901 the national primary system was taking hold.  Candidates had the ability to move around. There were newpapers, telegraphs, and an emerging railroad system.  National candidates were entering the public arena, giving birth to a National Election of our president. So this all begs the question…why continue with the outdated ELECTORAL COLLEGE?

There are 538 electoral votes.  270 electoral votes are needed to win the presidency.  So as it stands mathematically a president would need only to win the 13 richest electoral states.  Imagine that? There are 50 states and by winning a mere 26% of the states a person could become president.  That doesn’t sound like democracy.  Sounds more like a rigged election.

There have been 4 presidential elections where the candidate that won the popular vote didn’t win the presidency, the last occurring in 2000. That means we've had 4 imperfect elections. 

An electoral map will show that there are states that are strongly democratic or strongly republican.  An unintended consequence is that a presidential election only occurs now in “swing states”.  These are states that have gone elephant and donkey in at least one election over the past 30 years.   

The states that currently elect a president are VA, NC, NH, OH, CO, FL, IA, NV, PA, MI, and MN.

Democracy lends itself to the myth that every vote counts but in reality it doesn’t.  If you’re a democrat in Texas your vote doesn’t count.  If you’re a republican in California your vote doesn’t count.  Some votes count, and the rest of us are "playing" democracy in presidential politics.  Many wonder why voter turn-out is underwhelming. It’s because people have figured it out.  In 39 states our presidential vote doesn’t matter.