The Man, The Myth, The Legend

I spent the morning watching this beautiful energy before I posted this on X. A conversation I had a bit later over breakfast prompted me to share the longer thoughts below. Figured I’d cast this over to Substack. So much of the discussion is all starting to funnel down to the same place.

I was just talking about this with a 20-something at the bagel shop. She was saying how much she remembers Field Day and how she loved them. Oh man, the memories! Field Day was the best. 😙🤌 From the moment you arrived at school it was this energy of excitement and competition. Sparta!! We would compete maniacally, giving every ounce we had to win ribbons in standard events like 100M dash and bizarre shit like sack race. It didn't matter, I wanted to win them all! 💪🔥🔥

I wouldn't win them all, of course. I was never the uber jock. But I'd lay claim to a few. Enough to be part of the dick-swinging session that would take place in the afternoon. And yeah, that's exactly what it was. The students (boys mostly) would flex their muscles and ribbons. This is healthy behavior, especially for boys. It's how we cut our teeth. We like to roll around in the mud, shadowbox, and wrestle. It's how we learn who we are and where we fit in the pack. No, not every kid can win medals. Not every kid wrestles well. That's good to know. Means they wouldn't be good in a moment of great physical need or combat either. They probably have other things they're better than average at. Maybe they took 3rd in the spoon race with the egg. I never had a chance at that one.

But then we succumbed to The FrankenFemme Progress. Where a bunch of fringe kids raised by a bunch of narcissistic pussies of parents decided it was mean and not fair that their little Johnny (quite possibly now Jessica) never came home with any trophies. He didn't get to flex with the big boys. Right, that's life. I've been rail thin my whole life. I didn't get to parade around pools with my shirt off flexing for all the ladies when I was a teen. And most of the hottest chicks loved those dudes. Again, this is how life works. Yes, Ken bangs Barbie. I never wanted to be Ken or Barbie though. I never let being skinny bother me either. Life doesn't care about your feelings. You have to learn to find your groove within it. And yes, the distributions are not fair. They never will be. I don't get why we are indoctrinating our youth to think life on Earth is about the pursuit of fairness (well, yeah I do, but that's its own story). No, it's about the pursuit of personal success and paying it forward in the manner you deem best. I didn't spend my life radicalizing against jocks and trying to dismantle and invert a world largely built on physicality because much of it left me out. How self-consumed would I have to be? Very! Those are those kids raised by those narcissists of parents. The apple falls straight down.

But the fringe types that fall out of our natural orders (and “bleeding hearts”, kind of the same thing) just can't stomach this stone-cold reality. Next thing you know we are getting rid of 1st 2nd and 3rd and giving everyone “participation trophies”. Here, kid, this is your trophy for losing. It's the same trophy Mike the stud linebacker who is dating the homecoming queen got, even though he whooped your ass in that event. As a parent, I find this type of modeling both counterproductive and insulting. I want my children to understand those awards go to the best three people at that event. Can they earn one? Possibly. But they'll have to work hard. This deranged dogmatic pursuit has ultimately crashed down to this…

One of the first stories I told my kids was that of The Man, The Myth, The Legend, Michael Jordan being cut from the high-school varsity team. Cut! The greatest to ever hold an orange leather ball. He wasn't good enough at the time. Yes, Basketball Zeus. He became perhaps the most fiercely competitive man in human history. To a fault; he didn't speak to a good friend for six months after a fallout over a game of Monopoly. The man sometimes plays 90 holes of golf in a day. He devoured the egos and souls of every player that challenged his on the court and retired undefeated. Mental assassin! And why? Because he got cut from the high-school team. That is his origin story. It's what forged him into Basketball Zeus. When he was the best player in the league (on both sides of the ball; he would win the scoring title and Defensive Player of the Year in the same season) he was still the first player into the practice facility and the last out. “He works himself into a lather”, Phil Jackson once infamously said. “I don't get nervous before the final shot, because nerves are for those who know inside they should have prepared more”, Michael unsurprisingly once said. This puzzle all completes. I tell them tales of MJ for a reason. We've watched his documentaries.

But my kids very well might NOT be able to win some categories. Maybe most of them, and that's fine too. What is the alternative? We're going to construct life into a bunch of artificial frameworks that makes no sense just to make these same bleeding hearts and fringe types and Equity zealots feel better about themselves? 👶 Make the whole world one big facade like the WNBA? A life of permanent arrested development where all that matters is “fair” and “End Hate”? 🧟🧟‍♀️🧟‍♂️ This thinking has resulted in disrupting the gender binary in classrooms for every child so the one really strange kid (likely from a really strange family) will not feel so uncomfortable and outcasted from his own strangeness. Literally. That's where we are with this “queering” thinking under The Reign of The FrankenFemme. We're manufacturing our boys into broken women. Why? Who decided this? More sack race instead! ✊️

Because when we enact drippy policy and transformational change in the vein of “Equity” driven by (weaponized) empathy for every fringe, all we end up doing is destroying the middle of every bell-curve. That's destroying society itself, folks. Do we even have Field Day anymore? I think it might have gone from Sanity --> Participation Trophies --> That's not enough, you will have nothing at all! ✊️ Go Team Gender and boys as girls! 🧙‍♀️😵‍💫 More Progress! 🌊

It's time for the sane left among us to force a restabilization based on what's important, what's core, what makes us strong. We've been full speed in the opposite direction while being forced to praise it as unassailable Progress. Forced by who? Who do you think? D+37