-Michelle and me went to the Wizards-Clippers game last night on behalf of the Red Cross. We paid $10 and a pint of blood to sit in section 321. This is so far away that people carry binoculars into the stands to catch the action, and you can’t even hear the ball bouncing off the hardwood.

-John Wall is starting to get it. The change of speeds, the herky-jerky dribbles, the improving jumpshot, and the passing. Oh, the passing. It’s one thing to see Wall turn on the afterburners and jet it into the open court. It’s another thing to see him fling the ball forward like a missile, pinpoint and right in the path of someone sprinting ahead. But let’s go further with the Top Gun theming to this description of John Wall. The earlier part of the season, he was like the Maverick in the beginning of the movie. Wild but wildly talented. Instinctual but undisciplined. Now, though, he’s starting to turn the corner. He’s turning into the Maverick at the end of the movie, saving Val Kilmer’s ass and knocking migs out of the sky. 18 points. 11 assists. 6 rebounds. A handful of steals and blocks. Fox three, I got tone!

-Michelle decided it was pertinent to declare “Linsanity!” every time she saw an Asian dude wearing a basketball jersey. Since we’re in LA, this happened about every six seconds. Asian dudes wearing basketball jerseys at Clippers game outnumber all other dudes wearing basketball jerseys at least 5 to 1. Maybe 6.

-I used to like the Clippers, but I’m kind of an anti-bandwagon fan. Once the wagon gets too crowded, I’d rather just jump off. Besides, I don’t have an emotional connection to any one NBA team. I just follow individual UK players, which in a few years will probably mean I can follow at least three quarters of the NBA with a vested interest. In the meantime, I don’t particularly like the Clippers. They’re morphing into the mid-2k Spurs. Blake Griffin is on equal footing with Tim Duncan when it comes to whining. Boo.

-I do, however, LOVE the Wizards. The first and primary reason is because they have John Wall. The second is because they’re easily the most comical team in the league. Let’s start with the name. It makes absolutely no sense to call them the wizards of anything, let alone basketball. The fact that they are called the Wizards, however, always makes me giggle a little bit. The think tank that came up with that gem never saw Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter coming.

Then there’s the squad. Andray Blatche or Nick Young are due for at least one misguided quote every week. Jordan Crawford can be grouped in with this duo as well. And then there’s Javale McGee. He of the ridiculously high hops and sub-basement level basketball IQ.  I was waiting patiently for him to do something ginormously stupid, like run back on defense while his team is still on offense, and all I got was a few botched fast breaks. I in no way like the Wizards because they’re any good. They’re not. I like them because they make me laugh. And they have John Wall.

Yesterday, everyone did their pitches for a story. There were about twenty or so, and it was a veritable treasure trove of unrestrained awesomeness. We’re talking elemental castles, cowboy ninjas, spongebob squarepants on mars, justin beiber gangs…the list goes on and on.

I wish we could make a film about these guys making a film. It’s entertainment.

The best of the day came when a kid rapped philosophic on the power of imagination.

“Imagination is limitless. You can imagine anything,” he says, cutting a page straight of Walt Disney. Then he goes off script. “I mean, you only have one brain or one head, but your imagination can go anywhere in there. Anywhere.”

You ever have a nagging injury cause by something mundane? Something so mundane and everyday you see something that reminds you of that nagging injury every day and only makes it nag you even more?

About five times day, my right shoulder pops. Sometimes, it does this so loudly, pop is clearly not the correct description. On these occasions, my shoulder detonates, making a muffled explosion that sounds like distant fireworks on the Fourth of July.

It wasn’t always like this. But it probably always will be for the rest of my days, slowly getting worse and worse as I get older. Unless Skynet really does take over in the near future, in which case I’ll be first in line to get a Terminator shoulder.

The reason for this injury is altogether stupid. Have you heard of the game broomball? No? Okay, broomball is basically hockey with brooms instead of sticks, shoes instead of skates, and everything else is the same. It might be a Southern California thing. People here are kind of goofy about anything related to winter, and the only thing goofier than running around on ice carrying a broom is carrying around a broom on the grass, like that one time I saw those kids playing quidditch at USC.

Like hockey, the point of the game is to score goals. That’s the stated objective of the game. Anybody who’s ever played broomball, however, knows that the real objective of the game is to play just hard enough to win without playing too hard. Play too hard, and you slip and fall. This is not ideal, as ice is hard. And will devastate you.

Unfortunately, I never knew this second, more serious objective, until it was too late. Thinking that it’d be totally awesome to try a slapshot like all those NHL players whose names I can’t pronounce or spell, I reared back to hit a ball into a goal. The following happened. The broom connected with the ball. I leaned to get more power. I leaned too far. I slipped. I fell. My shoulder jammed into the ice.

I didn’t dislocate it. At least, I didn’t think I did. I was young and tough and stupid and didn’t feel like going to the doctor because I didn’t have the slightest clue about health insurance. So I just went home and rested. The next morning, there was a big purple swell, which ironically, I relieved with a bag of ice. Because my room was essentially a treehouse and only had a ladder as a way in and out, I was a very pathetic, very sore Rapunzel for the next two days. But I healed. I might have been young and stupid, but thankfully only the first part of that mattered.

The stupid part will just have to be content to make me want to flex my shoulder every time I see a broom.

Winner of the google search for "fighting a tiger with a kickball"

When I think of the word ‘daunting’, I think of a few things.

1.     Climbing a mountain

2.     Fighting a tiger with a kickball

3.     Completing a round of golf without killing myself. (Take your pick from the following: boredom, accidental 9 iron to the temple, falling into the lake, sinking into quicksand)

4.     Writing a book and then getting it published.

Are these things hard? Of course. Are they out of the realm of possibility? Possibly but not really. Tigers are soothed by playground toys. I would take advantage of that.

But let’s expand on that question. Is failure out of the realm of possibility? Of course it’s possible.

Failure, however, is all relative in the scope of how bad you fail. If I fail climbing a mountain, I might lose my nose to a bout of frostbite or I might lose my life. The same goes for fighting a tiger. Playing golf or writing? Probably won’t die if I fail at those.

The older I get, however, I realize that failure isn’t what holds me back from things. As long as I’m not dying, I’m up for trying just about anything. The main challenge is that there’s always a choice when it comes to trying things that might result in failure. If I try, I might fail. But, see, I don’t really have to try. It’s comfortable not to try anything and just live. Just getting by is COMFORTABLE.

I can climb a mountain, but then again, I can just walk back into a warm hut and eat some entrail soup. Entrails from a tiger, that I killed with a well placed blow to the jugular with a kickball.

Go big or go home is a challenging decision when home is warm and inviting.

Anyway, some really quick snaps from a day at Knott’s Berry Farm. I took these shots with my iphone and then spent one dollar, one WHOLE dollar, on an app that has 100 different filters. Technology is awesome.

Xcelerator. Quite possibly the best thing that ever happened to magnets.

Michelle and I posing in front of bricks, because bricks are romantic.

The train. I thought it looked like the scene in The Assassination of Jesse James by the…Oh you know, that Jesse James with Brad Pitt. Trains are cool.

The Silver Bullet. Rainbows and all.

Making numerical goals is something that gives me satisfaction. Am I alone? No joke, when I earn an achievement on my 360, I occasionally squeal in delight. It’s like finding a jellybean in your glove compartment.

So along with my blog goal, tweeting more frequently is also tied in with that.

I like twitter, but there’s always this foreboding sense of unease I have with it. I know the basic mechanics, but beyond that, I’m hopeless. To me, using twitter is like driving in a foreign country: just do what you know how to do and don’t go on the sidewalk even if you see others doing exactly that.

So I just keep plugging away. Its doubtful that all the @ symbols and hash tags (i think of hashBROWNS every time i hear that word. Yum.) will ever be anything more than jibberish to me, but at least I’m still trying.
Still, there’s a certain amount of dread, however minuscule it is, that comes with the rapid pace of the tweet verse.

It all makes me feel so old, and that’s something I never thought I’d be.

Me:twitter::my grandma:email.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Teenagers don’t do don’t do that.
It’s gibberish to them.

What you have to do is distract them. For instance, recently a kid decided to take a walk through the bushes the other day. He was mad, furious about something that happened in a game of soccer. Naturally, he’s so furious that he begins talking about picking lavender.

You’ve picked lavender?
Where’d you learn that?
Do you do it often?
What other plants do you know?

And so on and so on. I just kept asking questions. And in fifteen minutes, the kid had cooled down, deciding to come back down the hill instead of throwing a bee hive at me.

That’s essentially what grounding is. Distracting people long enough for their brain to catch up with their energy.

Tonight’s grounding exercise was simple. Kids were hyper, running around the circle drive like hooligans. I told them to balance on the edge of the circle in the middle. If they touched concrete, they died. Because it was lava. Two minutes of crazed hyperness became ten minutes of timed runs around the circle. The winning time? 9.3 seconds.

And….grounded.
This is why I get paid the big bucks.

The winner of the google search for bicycle crashes. Note: Do NOT a search for gruesome bicycle accidents.

The prevailing response when I first tell people I am from Kentucky is a question:

Why don’t you have an accent?

Oh, I don’t know. It took a few years to lose it. I think that by the first time I watched television in my life in the year 1996, just a year after we got electricity, I had lurnt the wrong way to speak on account of the moonshine brewed from that rattlesnake venom my ma made me drink every mornin’.

Or, alternatively, I grew up in the suburbs of Northern Kentucky, which is right across the river from Cincinnati, Ohio. Oh? You didn’t know Ohio bordered Kentucky? Guess who look ignorant now.

Onward.

I grew up in a sprawling suburb called Knollwood. Unlike most suburbs I see now, Knollwood was a charming little enclave where kids still sold lemonade on the corner, the town mayor handed out bags of pop tarts every Halloween, and people knew other people.

In fact, by the time I was nine, I knew the name and address of every single kid my age in the whole suburb. Minus the girls, because at age nine they didn’t exist. This was a wonderful time, as I just recently learned how to ride a bike. Fittingly, I spent nearly every waking minute not spent on homework or my burgeoning fascination with this thing called Nintendo riding my bike.

Every other kid was the same way. The best part about living in Knollwood was that nearly every street branching off the main artery went down a hill. It was like our own private blacktopped ski resort. Every street was classified based on degree of difficulty. A few down the way where just bunny slopes. Tiny little nubs with a cul de sac and that’s that. My street, Malabu, was a decent square. A straight shot down for about 300 feet and then a nice, long even run out before reaching the end.

But the true black diamond of the neighborhood was Arbor Drive. An intimidating piece of work, Arbor drive started off benignly flat for the first hundred feet or so. This was just the calm before storm. When you reached the hill, the concrete just tumbled away, almost twice as steep as my own street. To make matters far worse, there was a slight bend in the road, like a kink in a pipe, about halfway through the plummet. Seams in the road were filled with large squirts of blacktop, creating a quilt of bumps that amplified the difficulty even further.

This street claimed many accidents. My brother, deciding it was fashionable to ride a big wheel wearing only biker shorts and no undies, scrapped his backside raw when he fell off the back of his big wheel and skidded down the street on his bottom. Arbor Drive claimed his biker shorts. It showed no mercy.

Naturally, one of my best friends lived down Arbor Drive, so I was an expert on the ways of this treacherous slope. So was my friend Josh. Perhaps we were too confident in our abilities. Arbor Drive would soon teach us the error of our ways.

It happened on a bright day. No rain. No wind. Perfect bike riding weather. We had already been up and down the neighborhood several times when it came time to slalom down Arbor Drive. Like always, we stoop up on our pedals as we approached the hill. Why? Because that was the badass way to do things.

We dropped down into the hill and approached the bend. I veered past a large bump, with Josh just in front of me. Then, the most extraordinary thing happened. Josh’s bike decided to fly! His front wheel hit a bump, and in the blink of an eye he was upside down, hurtling through the air on his red Huffy. No exaggeration, he did a full front flip.

And then landed on his wrist, skidding to a stop underneath a car.

I might be wrong, but I think this is the first time I familiarized myself with the many intricacies of the word fuck. Panicked, I went to check on the carcass of my friend. He didn’t move at first, and I sincerely thought he had died. Then he started crying. I started crying, and I ran to get his grandma.

Josh didn’t die. I think he broke his arm. But after that day, Arbor Drive was the stuff of legend. Rumors circulated around. Gossip spread.

Did you hear about Josh?

He flipped his bike on Arbor Drive.

I heard it was a back flip.

I heard it was a corkscrew.

I heard there was blood everywhere.

I heard he went twenty feet in the air.

Mike, you were there. What happened?

Arbor Drive happened, that’s what. And I’ll never forget it.

I promise this is relevant.

The year of first grade was the year I began attaching trash to my clothes as a fashion statement, testing the limits of how far I could urinate, and seeing color in black and white. Two of these things have to do with me learning to read. The other is just me being gross. At this point, I will leave it entirely up to your imagination what impact pee streams could have on phonics, because I’m certainly not telling you which is which.

All I remember about learning to read is that it came incredibly easy to me, which probably explains why I don’t really remember learning how to read. I just did it. I became so good in such a short span that I refused to let my mother read me any more bedtime stories. Instead, I’d snatch the book out of her hand and say, Mom…I got this.

Over two decades later and my mom is still halfway between hurt and proud on this one, although I think her retelling of this story over and over again comes more from the latter than the former.

For each letter of the alphabet, our eternally patient teacher, Mrs. Annemarine, spent days drilling us on every aspect of that particular letter. We’re talking alphabet songs, phonics, pronunciation, reading,  endless notepads filled with those big lines where we could practice writing out each letter over and over and over again, more songs, activities, worksheets…You name it, we learned it. And then we learned it again.

By the time spring rolled around, we were long past letters and into words and sentences. The time came for the school spelling bee. We practiced for weeks in our classroom, forming a seemingly endless conveyor belt of kids stepping up to the front and rattling off words like bird, ant, and junk.

There was an unspoken rivalry of course. Just down the hall, there was an another set of first graders practicing their words too. That other classroom, we had no way of knowing how smart they were. We only saw them at recess, and even then, a sense of distance, competition and mystery pervaded them. If grade school was a deserted tropical island, they were The Others. Rumor had it that sometimes they drank strawberry milk for lunch instead of chocolate milk. That they sometimes got to use the parachute in P.E.. That they killed puppies.

We had to beat them. Someone from our classroom had to emerge victorious. The big showdown came in the school cafeteria. Lining up by alphabetical order, half the field was already out by the time I spelled my first word: ham.

H-A-M.

That is correct.

I kept rattling off words, round after round. No hesitation. No problem. By the time the phonetic dust had settled, I stood alone. The Champion of Highland Heights Elementary! To my little first grade heart, I may as well have been Champion of the World.

It was now time for the big leagues: A trip to nearby Florence Mall to compete against other spelling bee champions from around the area. Please hold off any snide remarks about my home state and spelling here, because surely you’ll find it ironic that a spelling bee was held in a mall underneath a giant red and white water tower that reads: Florence Y’all.

There’s a story behind this. There damn well better be, because it looks redonkulous and to make matters far, far worse, this water tower is right off of Interstate 75, one of the busiest arteries of interstate commerce in the entire country. People enter into the state of Kentucky, and after a few miles, this is what they see. Classy.

Anyway, the story goes that they originally wrote Florence Mall on the side of the water tower, but because they couldn’t advertise on public works, they had to change it. A quick chop of two lines, and the aforementioned advertisement for a mall was now changed into a welcome sign for Hickville, USA, just in case anyone ever confused Florence, Kentucky with the one over in Europe.

I’m derailing here. Okay, spelling bee. At this stage in my young life, I had never encountered a scenario more terrifying than the mall spelling bee. Held in the center plaza, the floor and balconies were filled with onlookers, all waiting in anxious excitement to see kids spell back words said to them.

But come on, get real. Parents wanted to see their kids, yes, but everyone else? They were just there to get a pair of blue jeans from Sears. Seeing all but one little kid fail miserably was a bonus.

I sure wouldn’t disappoint them.

First round, I was shaking so hard I chattered out the letters. The announcer said dishes, and I spelled out… Ddd-Iii-Ssss-Hhhh-Eee—Ssss.

Sufficient to earn a trip back to the line for round 2. This time the wait was shorter. I shuffled patiently up the podium. The jitters were shaken off like dust. Confidence swelled in me. I was a spelling bee champion! I could spell anything!

Michael, your word is huge. Huge.

Um, say what?

If the blank in my mind were a painting, it would be a canyon deeper, wider and HUGER then the Grand Canyon.

Huge!?! HUGE!!! Huge? Was this a real word? Surely it can’t be, because I was spelling bee champion and knew every word in existence! This huge wasn’t a word!

Michael, the word is huge.

Uh….H….U…..G…..AND THAT’S IT.

No, I’m sorry. That is incorrect. The correct spelling is…

Spare me.

I walked off the stage in utter defeat and humiliation. My cheeks burned so red people were warming their hands in front of them as I passed by. Huge? Really? That’s the word that knocks you down?

Come here, my mom said. Let me give you a h…

I went running the other way, not stopping until I reached Kay Bee toys.

So, by five, I understood that what goes up, must come down. Lots of scrapped knees and elbows taught me that. What I didn’t quite understand was that I was not from the planet Krypton. Or that my skeleton wasn’t pumped with adamantium. Or that I couldn’t shoot spiderwebs out of my wrist bones. I didn’t even know these things existed, but I didn’t know they didn’t either.

Actively mobile, I might have decided to test my limits by climbing a tree and jumping off the tallest branches, ready to see if my shoulders sprouted feathers. Another alternative, I might have flung myself on a swing. Or jumped off a merry go round whirling around at full tilt.

But, eh, those things make too much sense. Instead, I decided…no wait. Decided is the completely wrong word to use to describe my decision to go completely insane for a span of about three seconds. Those three seconds came when I was sent to the cafeteria to pick up a tray full of chocolate milk. Certainly, the teachers sent me to get the milk because I had demonstrated I was capable of making the requisite right hand turn down the hall, marching thirty feet to the cafeteria and picking up a tray of tiny chocolate milk cartons. They thought I did things that made sense.

Maybe I was out to prove them wrong.

The initial trip to the cafeteria came without incident. I picked up the tray of chocolate milk from the lunch lady. She might have pinched my cheek. I turned and headed back, carefully balancing the tray of milk cartons with straws poking out the tops. The decisive moment came on the return trip when I noticed the concrete stairs leading back up to the classroom. Hmm, five year old me thought. I know this is concrete. What I don’t know is…am I stronger than concrete? I put the tray of milk down gently on the ground, took two tiny shuffles forward and then face planted myself into the stairs.

To this day, I still have no idea what I was thinking. I wasn’t feeling sad. Not angry. Not anything other than a mild curiosity to know my chin could break concrete.          ‘

It couldn’t.

Limits were reached and my chin was busted, scarred with a tiny little sliver for the rest of my life.

And then I lied. I told my teachers, and then my dad when he arrived to take me to get stitches, that I slipped and fell. On the imaginary puddle of water that was out to get me. I knew I wasn’t Superman before I even knew about Superman, but after my first purposeful encounter with the duel dynamos of gravity and concrete, I also knew I was very much human.