On New Years Eve 2000, while most of the country was hiding in their basement and preparing for armageddon, I recall having an off the wall conversation with my brother and a friend at another buddy's NYE party. They were in their usual wine induced philosophy frenzy, discussing the meaning of existence and conciousness. When they asked my opinion I simply replied: "I'm just a monkey on a tree." At first they laughed but then they got it and eventually convinced each other that it was actually a brilliant philosophy.
Now I wouldn't go so far as to calling it brilliant but I think as people we simply forget to be primates sometimes. A primate's needs are simple. A primate can sit in a tree and think about nothing. Primates don't have 401Ks, celebrities, or cock-suckers like Oprah and Dr. Phil teaching them that they're inferior to each other. Primates don't sweat the NASDAQ or kill each other for worshiping invisible beings different than theirs.
Also, primates don't invest their self-worth and identity in athletic performance. Sadly, I do. In high school and college it was football. Accepting that I'd have to seek employment somewhere other than the NFL was a tough pill to swallow for my young Texas-raised mind. Eventually I moved on and fell back on other fun sports like skiing, volleyball, and wakeboarding. But now, with my recent back injury, I've been once again forced to contemplate throwing away a big chunk of myself. I almost cried in the Chiropractor's office as I confessed to him that other than my kids, sports is the only wholesome and decent thing I have left in my life. I think if I wasn't so goddamn stubborn, and just took a chill pill for a couple of weeks I'd heal up. But, sadly, my inability to do nothing is perhaps my biggest weakness. And so the injury cycle continues.
I finally played last night for the first time since coming back from Thailand. It was the season ending tournament and I didn't want to leave James high & dry. I showed up an hour early, ran, stretched, and slowly warmed up. My back had been feeling a bit better but not as much as I'd like for it to. I was concerned about reaggravting it and was having a tough time getting loose and pain free. I didn't jump serve and relegated all blocking to James. When he served I'd give him the block signals, except they were for him, not me. Lots of pros play this way but not many people around here. For some reason, this approach worked out. We won all the way through to the finals but by that point my back and hamstrings had completely siezed up on me and we lost to a team we had beat earlier in the day. Even if I was healthy it would have been a good day. But given the circumstances, it was a nice ray of sunshine, albeit short-lived, in this dreary drama. I woke up today feeling sore and mildly aggravated. Finally saw a physical therapist today. He seems to know a lot. I hope to learn more from him. So much of what we've been taught as athletes in the 80's and 90's is proving to be inaccurate and incomplete. Static stretching vs Dynamic stretching. Muscle isolation vs compound movements. I had to swallow a lot of new info and maybe throw away even more. I hope these changes will help. Throwing away 2 decade long habbits will not be easy.
So how did we get from talking about primates to listening to my self-absorbed whining about my failing body? Cuz I wanted to ... that's why.
Speaking of throwing away old habbits, the switch from ColdFusion to C# hasn't been too bad so far. Although the platform is more code intensive and C# is a very non-intuitive language, I'm managing to build things that work and the users are happy. The telesence in Visual Studio is also very useful and informative. That, plus the MSDN library and the books I read before starting have made things relatively easy for me. So far so good. I'll post a more detailed rant on C# and the .NET platform later. I'm sure you're peeing your pants with anticipation for that one. Well, you'll just have to tie a knot in it and cool off, tiger.
I'm just a code crunching, ball pounding, monkey in a tree. My special talent is that I can be a has-been and a wanna-be simultaneously without causing a space-time-continum paradox and toasting the whole planet.
This is the strangest life I've ever known.
- Jim Morrison
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