Roy L. Pickering Jr.'s Blog, page 25

A Man's Game

How do you penalize men for hitting each other while playing a sport that is all about hitting each other? How do you remove aggression from a game that is all about being aggressive? How do you fault guys for actions that take place at top speed in the blink of an eye? How do you differentiate between the malicious and the unavoidable? How do you look into a man's heart and determine if he wanted to be where he ended up, or if his true intention was to be an inch lower, or to the right, or the left? How can you tell if someone has been betrayed by a subtle shift in momentum or the lower beasts of his nature? Does a mathematician need to do the evaluating? Or a priest? Perhaps a panel of judges with areas of expertise covering the complexities of angles, spatial relations, philosophy, morality and spirituality? To simplify matters perhaps the NFL should simply place electrodes in helmets and uniforms. If a helmet makes contact with any part of a player's jersey, a buzzer goes off. If a helmet makes contact with another helmet, buzzers plus strobe lights signal that the eleventh commandment has been broken.

Does all of this sound rather impractical? Well I think so too, but the National Football League has decided enough is enough, that tackling the impossible is better than simply ignoring the situation. Minimizing migraines and spinal injuries that lead to paralysis has to be a good thing, even if the method to the madness borders on absurd. Who can say what evil lurks in the hearts of linebackers and cornerbacks and safeties? Only the shadow, as portrayed by the NFL governing body, knows. Will the game be watered down by a Safety First mindset? Will fans gripe that it's bad enough quarterbacks are in proverbial skirts, must we now place women's garb on wide receivers as well? Is it only a matter of time before running backs get the two hand touch – no, that can still get a little rough, make it the flag football treatment?

Will such complaints matter much in the overall picture? Surely there were those who griped when it was decided that boxers should wear gloves rather than fight bare fisted. The decision to reduce the length of major matches from 15 to 12 rounds no doubt rankled boxing purists. When I stroll down memory lane on a tour of the all-time greatest heavyweight tussles, 15-rounders seem more pure. There's something majestic about the epic struggle to emerge as the better man over the course of those final three character revealing rounds. Is it animalistic to see purity in violence? Yes, but Homo sapiens are merely a species of animal, and violence performed with practiced skill and conforming to a strict set of rules can truly be a sweet science in the opinion of many. Otherwise the concept of Pay-Per-View probably would not exist. There's a reason more people watch the Super Bowl than choose to go to a ballet that day.

As in boxing, many measures have been taken over the years to make football safer. These measures need to be at least one step ahead of increases in size, speed, strength, and overall athleticism. If today's NFL players still took to the field in leather helmets only a few would likely survive to the end of a game. When helmets are used as a weapon rather than a protective device, bad things can and do happen.

What also happens is the unavoidable and accidental. Should mistakes be punished to equal degree as actions taken with bad intentions? If not, how can we tell one apart from the other in order to judge fairly? This is a question without clear cut answers, my favorite kind of query. The NFL will do its best to solve the riddle, pleasing some, alienating others at least for the short term. Some of the decisions rendered will be agreed with by most, others will be as questionable as the personnell strategies of Andy Reid, Mike Shanahan and Brad Childress. Hopefully football will manage to retain the qualities that arguably make it the greatest of sports while also becoming safer for the combatants. I could have called them players/participants/athletes but used the word combatants because as we well know, tackle football is not for the faint of heart/body/soul, and with any luck it never will be.
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On a completely unrelated note please take a moment to stop by the Guys Can Read indie authors contest , and if you are so inclined, I would love to get your vote . Thanks!!!

Book Review - SOUTH OF BROAD by Pat Conroy

Up until recently the sharpest drop off I've experienced in enjoyment of novels by the same author would be the peak of John Irving's The World According to Garp to the valley of his A Son of the Circus. Garp is not a very easy book to live up too, but Mr. Irving has managed to come pretty close over the course of his stellar career with brilliant works such as The Hotel New Hampshire, The Cider House Rules, A Prayer for Owen Meany. So he is easily forgiven by me for efforts that I find less impressive, especially since his worst is still better than many writers' best.

Pat Conroy is an author who has dazzled me with the gift of his prose in the past. The Prince of Tides was a revelation. Like his other books The Great Santini and The Lords of Discipline, it was made into pretty good movie. So I dove into his latest novel, South of Broad, prepared to be floored. But this was not to be. Although the lushness of his prose when describing his beloved South Carolina continues to be on full display (various other setting elements are carried over from his previous writings as well), I did not find myself to be nearly as invested in the characters who populate South of Broad as I was in those brought to life in The Prince of Tides. Rather than feeling I was getting to know new people intimately, which is what the best of fiction does, it seemed to me that Mr. Conroy merely presented a lineup of caricatures this time out. Each of them was a specific type who spoke and acted according to predetermined dictates. The book is full of melodramatic events, and this sentence may be the greatest understatement I've ever made. Pretty much every tragedy other than the holocaust happens to these characters. Incestuous rape, abandoned orphans, stalking by pscho killer, flaunting of extramarital affairs in faces of spouses, suicide, AIDS, caught in a hurricane, victim of pedophile priest - you name it, this book has it. And I'd be happy to consider all of this to be a plausible series of events among a small group of friends so long as I did not feel the majority of them were cardboard cut outs rather than real people. Pat Conroy appears to be going through the motions when it comes to developing them, far more interested in putting them through the roller coaster pace of his plot while paying homage to the beauty of Charleston every few pages. There is a gay male character who perhaps literally is not given a single line of dialogue that is not sexual in nature. We get it, Pat, he's gay. Gay people talk about more than just the fact that they're gay, you know. The movie star is a self involved diva from beginning to end, always performing for her friends and for Conroy's readers rather than simply being a human being from time to time. The snob is a snob in all he says and does. How he doesn't manage to permanently alienate himself from a group of people he considers himself to be far superior to is beyond me. Why he continues hanging out with people he barely finds worthy to wash his car is beyond me. Pat Conroy wrote that they will remain in each others lives for the sake of the storyline, so they do. The African American characters are noble and overachieving from beginning to end, no flaws other than an inability to tell the snob to go screw himself when he says something racist. One of the orphans becomes an upstanding citizen, the other goes crazy for no particular reason to be gleaned other than that at least 50% of those with screwed up childhoods surely will go on to become screwed up adults. The protagonist is the one character we get to know a little, although he is remarkably unemotional and reacts to pretty much everything with a flip comment. His specialty is always having a joke at the ready, delivered with a straight face. His father is a saint, his mother a bitch except for when she's being a nun, and Toad somehow ends up as a gossip columnist who every now and then reacts to tragedy by being admitted to a mental institution when he can't come up with a punchline. We see these characters at two points, when Toad and his friends are in high school, then years later when they go on a rescue mission to San Francisco for a couple weeks and then return to the greatest place on earth - South Carolina [Sure the south has its bigotry and rigid class distinctions separating bluebloods from the riffraff, but it's also really really pretty]. In between these two points they have married off in pairs, sort of like the TV show Friends. Poor Toad gets the crazy one because it's his lot in life to catch bad breaks. He also lusts after the one who marries the snob because it's her destiny to be Mrs. Snob.
In Conroy's latest effort I found far too much reader manipulation for my taste, a soap opera rather than Masterpiece Theater. Am I being harsher on this book than it deserves? I'm not sure. Perhaps if I did not come in as such a big fan of The Prince of Tides I would have given it more leeway. But regardless of how I feel about an author's previous work in instances when I've read it, I can still recognize heavy handedness when I see it. I'm able to notice when an author is taking short cuts to draw emotion rather than carefully building tension, can spot border line absurd dialogue in place of what feels more natural for people to say, am capable of detecting paper thin character development when it's evident. All of this was discovered in South of Broad. Pat Conroy's sheer talent at constructing sentences got me to keep on pushing through to the end, and the novel's final 50 pages or so are probably the strongest. I think this is because Conroy was just about done with his plot machinations (just a twist or two or three left), so most of the characters are dispensed with, sent to the backdrop of Toad's life, allowing the reader to spend a little one on one time with him. When he doesn't have anyone around to make inappropriate wisecracks to, we get an extended peek at Toad's inner thoughts and he finally starts to become interesting just in time for the book to end. Pat Conroy is an enormous talent, but South of Broad is one of his off days in my humble opinion.

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BREAKING NEWS: Patches of Grey is now available for download to a Nook at Barnes and Noble.

BLACK SMOKE RISING

BLACK SMOKE RISING
By Roy L. Pickering Jr.
(Copyright by Roy L. Pickering Jr.) Artwork provided by Erin Rogers Pickering





You can get lost staring at flickering flame atop a candle. You can forget everything that happened while captivated by the fire's hypnotic shimmer. As the flame dances and sizzles and candle wax drips to form new fantastical shapes, you can forget the entire world, forget that it has crumbled. But eventually the candle will burn out, and as black smoke rises from the extinguished wick you will begin to remember all over again, to feel the pain as if experiencing it for the very first time.

My bottle is empty. It doesn't seem that I could have consumed its entire contents already, but no other explanation is feasible. I did not spill a drop, and the gin certainly didn't evaporate. Yet I have never been more sober. I take a swig of the tonic I had meant to use as a mixer, but somehow forgot to open until now. I've become quite absent-minded of late. I used to always be on top of things, a slave to the diction of the clock, organized to a fault. I was a master of minuscule details often overlooked by others. Now what I look over is a hole in the sky that used to be occupied by two testaments to the industriousness of mankind. The twin towers of Babel were taken away from us. Nothing left in their place but the rubble of decimated architecture and broken dreams.

I light a cigarette in order to have something to do with my hands, although I know better than to smoke inside. Rules, like brick and steel and concrete and glass, often prove too fragile for the exploits of desperate men. Merciless time inches forward. Eventually I notice the nearly inch long ash clinging to the end of my cigarette. I have not been bothering to tap it off as it grows. I have probably not even been inhaling and exhaling the toxic vapors, but merely watched the nicotine clouds floating upwards, spiraling towards the Heaven that I now hope exists more than ever, dispersing before managing to reach the ceiling fan.

I catch a glimpse of my reflection in the glass door of the china cabinet. When did I start crying? I suppose it doesn't matter. The tears will stop on their own, just as they will no doubt resume flowing when the whim strikes. My stubble is near the point of a full-fledged beard. I've been clean-shaven my entire life. My face has always suited me just fine as is. I'm the sort person who has known who he is and what he wants from day one. Never had to go searching for myself. No need for experimenting, whether with my appearance or the ideologies I follow. It's as if I was born completed, no growth of any kind necessary. This is the sort of proclamation that pisses certain people off, but they tend to be the people I could give a damn about impressing anyway. Many would say that I was full of myself, an accusation I don't find completely fair. Let's just say I had a rather narrow set of self-indulgent priorities. Now my lone objective is either surviving this heartache, or else succumbing to it.

Why was it fated that our last words to each other would be spoken in anger? Do I not have burden enough to bear? Did she understand that I did not truly mean the awful, hurtful things I said? I try to convince myself of this, but the attempt is in vain. I know how convincing I can be. The next day I would have arranged for a bouquet of roses to be sent to her. Later I would have apologized in person, on bent knee if necessary. Not merely to appease her, but because I'd had an epiphany, like the song goes, was blind but now could see. But the next day would turn out to be no ordinary day. The next day would drastically alter my existence along with the lower Manhattan skyline. Many other lives would be forever ruined as well. But with all due respect, this is not their story. It is mine.

The day I first met Alexandra, I was left breathless by her beauty. I resolved on the spot to win her over, was determined not to rest until she was mine. To consider a lifetime or even a single night with anyone else was out of the question. If I settled for someone else, someone lesser, I would forever be haunted by the knowledge that my ideal was in the arms of another man.

There are men who take what they have for granted, but this was not the case with me. Even after dating for a year, then moving in together, then getting hastily married when she missed her period, I gave a silent prayer of thanks to no god in particular every time I awoke and gazed upon her face in the morning light. As she continued to sleep, barely disturbed by the alarm clock that I would quickly silence, I placed a gentle kiss of gratitude upon her supple lips. You could say that my life was Camelot. I do not recall what specifically went wrong in King Arthur's idyllic world. But if memory serves, it did not last.

I am ashamed to admit that as Alexandra grew with pregnancy, resentment defied my will and began to settle in my heart. Gone was the lean, flexible, amorous goddess who set my body ablaze on our four poster bed. My wife did an awful lot of eating for someone who knew she wouldn't be able to hold down the fatty foods she now relentlessly craved. I missed the passion, the excitement, the ecstasy that had once marked our days. I could not wait for her gestation to end and my nirvana to return.

Hope was indeed the most precious child ever born. I doted on her every move during the first few months. The slightest change in her facial expression would fascinate me. I loved experiencing the world through her new eyes. In addition to being a very proud papa, I was also quite anxious to resume loving my wife as in days past. But it seemed that unlike the weight gained in pregnancy, Alexandra's carnal desires had abandoned her. Every night I would literally receive a cold shoulder from my bride. I accepted her unresponsiveness more readily than expected, for my desire was muzzled by the loose vagueness of her flesh. So you see, everything had changed from what it once was. Alexandra appeared to have minimal interest in returning to the role of my fervent lover. My own longing was for a woman who no longer existed, one who had been swallowed whole by a woman who bore only a passing resemblance to the great love of my life.

At first I was silent on these matters, confident that they would right themselves soon enough, that her true form and fire would return at any moment. But over time it grew increasingly clear that there was a holding pattern on my domestic torment. And so my frustration began to manifest itself in bitterly muttered remarks and less than subtle glances of disapproval towards a body once comprised of sinewy feminine muscle, now doughy and stretched out to unappealing proportions. The woman beside me in our unruffled bed was not the one I had fallen for. I felt as I had been robbed of something precious and did not have the luxury of resenting from afar, because I lived with the thief. I found myself lingering for longer than necessary at the office, accepting offers for after-work cocktails or whatever else might come up to keep me away from home. When I did return to my wife each day, a fresh wave of disappointment washed over me. My God, it feels so harsh to have felt this way, so utterly cruel. Yet I will not lie, mislead, or sugar coat the dread that engulfed me. Point your finger and accuse away. The poster child for shallowness, that's exactly what I was. And I earn no points nor stray any closer to your good graces by owning up to my faults now. I did not abuse my wife, did not cheat on her, did little outwardly that would earn your condemnation. I simply mourned for what I had lost and ceased to appreciate all that was still mine.

I suppose I instigated our argument with some snide comment, but on that night Alexandra refused to let it pass as she had on prior occasions. Instead she demanded that I speak my mind, that I hold nothing back, and once I got started there was no slowing down, much less turning back. I'm not exactly sure how I put it. I cannot recall precisely what I blamed her of doing. It seems ridiculous now, but at the time it seemed remarkably crucial. Alexandra had changed in shape and substance. Regardless of whether her metamorphosis was caused by conscious decision or hormones now flowing in a different direction than before, it was interpreted by me as a personal attack, as unwarranted rejection. I needed to get the heavy feeling of abandonment from off my chest, for nothing is worse than being abandoned by someone who is still there. Whatever was said, I vividly remember that I pleaded my case with limitless zeal, and what I earned for the effort was seeing my wife cry.

We eventually went to sleep, she in our bed and me on the sofa, with something closer to hate than love for one another throbbing in our hearts. The war of words was supposed to be temporary. Everything would work out in the end. Couples fight sometimes. We hurt who we love precisely because we possess the power to do so. The truth was, I felt more relieved about having finally spoken my piece than concerned that irrevocable damage had been done to our marriage. Now that Alexandra understood the depth of my confusion and hurt, we could begin to work on making our life as it had once been. Now that I had spoken plainly rather than making veiled insinuations, perhaps the things that troubled me would come to weigh less heavily on my soul.

Her early morning appointment at the World Trade Center had been set up weeks earlier. Whether or not I argued with my wife on the night of September 10, 2001 had no bearing on where she would end up the following day. I was able to foresee no better than anyone else that terrorists would attack, striking with our own planes, bringing those two majestic structures down.

Did I love Alexandra for the wrong reasons? No, I do not believe this is so. When I saw the wounded look in her eyes on the night of our argument, I recognized that it was there because she loved me unconditionally and believed I did not feel the same. But she was wrong. I did love her, in spite of my pettiness, my anger, my frustration over a situation that it seemed she had purposely spoiled. For a time, it was difficult for me to see past Alexandra's extraordinary beauty. For another time, it was just about impossible to see past what I perceived as the ruin of her near perfection. But in the moment of clarity that occurred seconds before she banished me to our sofa for the longest night of my life, I understood that the love I felt for my wife was indestructible. Loving Alexandra was what I did best, no matter how badly I botched the expression of it. Loving her was what I would do forever.

I rise to my feet, command them to bring me across the room, then lift my child from her crib. Hope is too young to recognize the chaos about her. She does not comprehend that the empty space within view of our living room window is actually filled with what cannot be seen – fear, uncertainty, pain, loss, rage. I believe she understands that her mother has not returned to her, for she cries much more frequently than she used to. Does she realize that I am barely holding on, that she is the sole reason I haven't surrendered to the hurt, to my guilt, my regret? If she looked upon me with the slightest hint of sympathy, this might be enough to convince me that I am worthy of release from these mortal coils, worthy to join my beloved Alexandra. But Hope shows me no mercy, only need.

And so I will change my daughter's diaper and fix her a bottle of formula. I will take a shower and shave. I will move on with my life because I have to. Perhaps that is not the best motivation, but it's all I am equipped with right now. It will have to do.

In the Alcove

I had the pleasure of being interviewed at Lexi Flint's Author Alcove. Curious about what she had to say regarding Patches of Grey, what she chose to ask me, and what my answers were? Then hop aboard the merry go round and read on...


Sometimes life isn't simply black or white, meaning can be found in THE PATCHES OF GREY, a novel by Roy Pickering

Author Roy L. Pickering, Jr., a native of the U.S.V.I of St. Thomas was raised in the boroughs of New York and currently resides with his wife Erin in ...

What did you just call me?!!

I don't know much about Dr. Laura Schlessinger. Based on this conversation she's an obnoxious idiot. She does make one valid point, although by making it in such an offensive manner she stomps on the value and makes herself a target for outrage rather than an instructor.


If you want to make it clear to others that calling you by a certain name offends you, don't then call yourself that same name. Confusing to fools, a huge opening for jerks.


Yes, intent is key. Yes, two people can use same...

AMARETTO KISSES

AMARETTO KISSES

BY ROY L. PICKERING JR.
Copyright by Roy L. Pickering Jr.




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Are You Ready For Some...Contract Renegotiating?

Those of you who follow this blog (yeah, both of you) know that while I may venture to the topic of sports somewhat frequently, when I do so it's to comment on an issue that transcends the games themselves. I'm not a play-by-play guy, hold minimal interest in chronicling happenings that take place in every city on every team each and every season. I may follow the minutiae of football and basketball and boxing and tennis because of my passion for them, but this doesn't mean I care to report o...

First Steps

The journey of my novel Patches of Grey from concept to printed paperback has been interesting, enlightening and surreal. Perhaps I'll share the story with you here someday, but not now. At the moment I just wish to say that there's a great deal of difference between being a writer and being an author, and the difference is probably equally great between self published author, indie published author, author with a book put out quietly by a big publishing house, and author with major backing f...

Shirley Sherrod, You're Fired! No, Wait, Never Mind

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The Reverend Who Cried Wolf

Every day numerous examples of legitimate racism in action take place in this country. Yes we currently have a brown skin biracial President who most (including him) identify as African American. Yes, while certainly not in the fantasy land of post racial identity existence, this country has come a long way. Yes, no matter how far we've come, the legacy of racism by whites against blacks and the institution of slavery will never be fully lived down by this nation. It is an irremovable stain...