Matthew Dicks's Blog, page 127

Clara got hit by a baseball

On Saturday, Charlie attended a baseball clinic at Dunkin Donuts Field, home of the Double-A Hartford Yard Goats.

He was so excited about playing on a professional baseball field. The night before, we drove by the stadium as a game was in progress. All lit up, stands filled with fans, the field looked like a emerald jewel in the night.

“I can’t believe I’m going to be on that field tomorrow,” he whispered.

He was just as excited to take the field the next day and learn from Yard Goats players.

Following the clinic, the whole family attended the afternoon game.

We were sitting along the first base side, just beyond the netting that protects fans from foul balls. It’s an ideal place to catch a foul ball, but it also means remaining alert lest you get struck by a ball.

Clara was sitting beside me, reading of course. In the fourth inning, with the Yard Goats at bat, Clara pointed to a word on the page and asked me for a definition. As I looked down at the page to find the word, I heard the crack of the bat. Before I even had time to look up, the ball struck Clara in the head, precisely on the brim of her baseball cap, which was dipped down, shielding her face, since she, too, was looking at the page of the book.

The brim of the hat absorbed the blow so miraculously well that Clara barely felt the ball.

After hitting her hat, the ball careened right, landing on the adjacent concrete stairs, where it was immediately swallowed up by a band of ball-hawking little boys, Charlie included.

Had her nose not been buried in a book, that ball would’ve struck her in the face.

Instead, she barely noticed it.

Another point in favor of reading.

Tamborine and shoelaces

Charlie asks me, “What’s a tambourine.”

“A tambourine?” I say. “It’s one of those jangly thingys.” I slap my thigh to imitate the playing of a tambourine.

Charlie looks confused.

“You know,” I say. “You had one when you were little. We might still have it. That jangly thing.” I bang on my thigh more emphatically.

“Mom!” Charlie asks, turning his attention to Elysha. “What’s a tambourine?”

“It’s a percussion instrument,” Elysha says. “Sometimes with a drum on top and bells around the side. You play it my shaking it or tapping it against your hand or leg.”

“Oh,” Charlie says, suddenly understanding. Then he turns to me. “You know, Dad, you tried to teach me to tie my shoes a million times and failed, then Mom taught me once and succeeded. And now this tambourine thing? You’re really not a good teacher.”

I wanted to tell Charlie that I’m left-handed, so teaching a right-handed person to tie his shoes wasn’t easy. Probably just as challenging as it was for me to learn to tie my shoes in kindergarten from right-handed Mrs. Carroll.

I also wanted to tell him that I played the drums for eight years, both in the marching band and orchestra. I’ve even played the tambourine at various times in my life. As a result, I suffer from “The Curse of Knowledge” when in comes to percussion instruments:

The more you know something, the harder it is to understand not knowing it, thus making it harder to explain.

I wanted to tell him that I was once named Teacher of the Year in a district of nearly 1,000 teachers. One of three finalist for Connecticut’s Teacher of the Year. I wanted to tell him that I’ve been teaching for nearly a quarter century. I wanted to remind him that in addition to teaching elementary school for all these years, I’ve also spent a considerable amount of time teaching high school students, college students, adults, and even teachers.

I know how to teach.

I wanted to explain all of this to Charlie, but I don’t say any of it – not because these arguments aren’t valid or because he wouldn’t understand them – but because the purpose of his statement was to wound me. Stab me in the heart.

In that, he succeeded.

He succeeded because I am a good teacher who has taught him well. Sometimes too well.

Throwing stuff is cowardly

This past weekend, fans in the Yankee Stadium bleachers threw objects onto the field and at the Cleveland Guardian outfielders.

I may be a New York Yankees fan, but I’m not a fan of throwing objects onto the field and especially at ballplayers. People who throw objects at defenseless human beings are  damn cowards.

Lowlife, amoral losers.

This also means that most baseball pitchers are cowards, too. Even those pitching for my beloved Yankees.

Long ago, it became acceptable for a pitcher to throw a ball at an opposing batter for any number of ridiculous reasons.

Sometimes it’s in retaliation for a previously plunked batter, even if the previous incident was clearly accidental.

Sometimes pitchers hit batters because they don’t like the way the batter trotted around the bases after a home run or the length of time a batter spent admiring a home run ball or, most heinous of all, flipping the bat after hitting a home run.

Sometimes pitchers are upset because the batter stole a base when his team was leading by four runs or the batter has hit too many home runs in a single game.

Sometimes the batter has said something unacceptable to the media.

Pitchers stand 60 feet away from their nearly defenseless victims and throw a rock-hard ball 80-90 miles per hour at their victim’s legs, backs, elbows and shoulders. Sometimes their aim is not true and they hit a head.

Like I said:

They are all a bunch of damn cowards.

Can you imagine if this happened outside a baseball game?

My neighbor is offended by something I say or do, so in retaliation, he throws a rock – or even a baseball – at my back from behind his backyard fence.

Or my colleague is displeased with the way I’m boasting about a recent performance review, so in retaliation, he throws a shoe at my head from across the room.

A competitor in a storytelling competition is angry that I’ve won six slams in a row, so she throws a microphone at my chest.

These things don’t typically happen in the real world, not only because these actions would seem stupid, childish, and probably criminal, but because the real world is not populated with nearly as many prickly, thin-skinned cowards as you can find in a major league bullpen.

Is there anything less honorable than throwing a ball at a man who is forced to stand in a small, chalk-outlined box and wait for it to happen?

And then if the batter retaliates by charging the mound to fight the coward who just threw a ball at him, the batter is thrown from the game and possibly fined for his actions.

In baseball, you can throw a ball at a defenseless human being and continue to play ball, but you’re punished for facing your assailant head-on and attempting to at least fight fair.

I don’t condone violence in any form, but I especially despise any form of violence that doesn’t allow for a level playing field. Throwing objects at a defenseless opponent, ganging up on a single person, fighting someone much smaller or older than you, blindsiding someone when they least expect it… these are the actions of cowards who lack self control, self confidence, and the courage to stand toe-to-toe with their opponent and at least fight fair.

Craving, of all things, The Rocky Horror Picture Show

As we begin to (knock on wood) slowly emerge from this pandemic, I’ve found myself inexplicably and almost desperately wanting to attend a midnight showing of The Rocky Horror Picture Show in all its glory.

Not just the film, of course. The fully pantomimed, acted out, audience participation, dance-in-the-aisles blend of movie and live performance that I love so much.

Weird. Right?

Of all the things to crave at the end of the pandemic, why this?

There was a time in my life when The Rocky Horror Picture Show was a big part of my life. I would routinely attend midnight showings – first in theaters scattered around in Connecticut, then in Harvard Square, New York, and Washington DC. Though I never performed as a cast member in front of the screen as the movie played, I’d bring rice, a newspaper, flashlight, toilet paper, spray bottle, and all the other necessities to the show. I’d dance in the aisles to The Time Warp, terrorize the Rocky Horror virgins, and shout the call-and-response lines with great enthusiasm.

I’d listen to audience recordings of Rocky Horror shows on cassette and later on CD, learning every possible call-and-response to the movie.

When Rocky Horror became a Broadway show, I ran to New York and saw it multiple times.

I owned the movie on VHS then DVD.

I’ve read oral histories on the making of the film and the musical upon which its based.

I’m a card carrying member of The Rocky Horror Picture Show fan club.

I haven’t attended a showing of The Rocky Horror Picture Show for almost two decades. As my friends grew less and less willing to see a midnight showing of a movie in Boston or New York or even locally, I found myself going less frequently and then not at all. But I suddenly find myself desperately wanting to see it again. Perhaps it was the recent death of Meatloaf that spurred my interest or the fear that the pandemic might kill theaters forever or maybe I just miss all that fun after all these years.

Happily, the movie still plays in theaters regularly. In fact, it’s the longest running film in history. In the next couple months, it’s showing in a theater in Mystic, CT next month, and there’s a theater in Manchester, CT that shows it from time to time. And there are theaters in New York City and Boston that still host shows, of course.

I have not seen a film in a movie theater since the pandemic began, but (knock on wood again) we may be reaching the point when I find theater-going safe enough to return to.

When I do, The Rocky Horror Picture Show is on the docket. Elysha has never been to a showing, so perhaps I can convince her to stay up late and join me.

But if necessary, I’ll go it alone, because you’re never really alone at The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

On a roll…

I’ve solved 99 Wordle puzzles in a row.

If I solve tomorrow’s puzzle correctly, I’ll hit 100 in a row.

I’m getting uncommonly intense and unusually stressed over an arbitrary three-digit number attached to a meaningless word puzzle that only I care about.

Damn you, Wordle.

Wordle 309 4/6

The absence of the internet

I’m a member of Generation X, the last generation to grow up in an analog world before stepping firmly into a digital one.

It was a perfect time to be alive:

A childhood entirely absent of computers and the internet, filled with the outdoors, cassette tapes, and books, followed by all of the advantages of the internet for my entire adult life.

Not a bad way to grow up.

Having lived in both the analog and digital worlds, I can report that there are both good and bad things about not having access to the internet.

For example:

More than 20 years ago, when the internet was still in its infancy, I told a colleague that Europeans deliberately gave blankets laced with smallpox to the  indigenous people of North America, intending to spread the disease in order to kill them in large numbers.

Essentially, my ancestors – and perhaps yours – engaged in biological warfare. They attempted to use weapons of mass destruction in order to kill tens of thousands of men, women, and children. The land that I purchased – the parcel upon which my home currently sits – was likely stolen from indigenous people who may have been murdered during its acquisition.

The references to this attempt at biological warfare are few but absolutely verifiable. There is no evidence, however, to indicate if this plan actually worked.

But it was most certainly attempted.

My colleague didn’t believe me when I told her about this. She said I was being ridiculous. She said that was lunacy to think that Europeans intentionally spread smallpox amongst the Native American population.

Absent any robust internet at the time, I would’ve needed to find a book containing this fact to prove my case. Even finding a book on the subject would’ve required a more robust internet.

I didn’t bother.

Three years later, she stumbled upon this information for herself in a book. To her credit, she acknowledged the accuracy of her statement and apologized to me.

Having all of human knowledge at our fingertips is an astounding thing. In the analog world, things were decidedly harder to know or prove.

Conversely, the absence of the internet was also a beautiful thing at times. When everyone in the world was wearing Levis jeans but I was wearing Lee jeans – because all I owned were hand-me-downs – I was asked by several bullying, sneering jackasses why I wore Lee jeans.

I assume that they asked this question because they felt small and stupid and perhaps even hopeless about their futures, so in an effort to make themselves feel slightly better about their pathetic station in life, they lashed out at easy targets.

Like my jeans.

My answer to their insidious question was immediate:

“Levi Strauss was a Nazi. I don’t wear clothing produced by a company founded by a Nazi.”

Absent the internet, the bullying jackasses would’ve needed to find a biography of Levi Strauss then read the whole damn thing to prove me wrong.

Even if that book existed in the mid 1980’s, discovering its existence and finding a copy without the internet would’ve been impossible, too.

And you thought the truth was slippery in today’s world.

The absence of the internet made everything harder to know and prove, which was annoying, but it also allowed you to lie with impunity, which was sometimes quite helpful.

Sean Hayes on American’s financial literacy

Recently, I criticized Sean Haye’s for saying that “Everything happens for a reason,” which is a stupid thing to say and believe.

I return again with another Sean Haye’s criticism, despite the fact I still like the guy a lot. But on a recent episode of the podcast “Smartless,” he said to author Michael Lewis:

“Most Americans – most citizens – don’t have the time, energy, resources, anything – to learn about or educate themselves about how money works because they have families and have to go to work.”

I was so angry about this ridiculous statement that I began shouting in response. Stomping around the house, yelling at his disembodied voice in my headphones. The gist of my barbaric yawp went something like this:

You elitist jackass.

Americans don’t have the time?

Americans have plenty of time to educate themselves about how money works. They may spend their time elsewhere – Netflix, social media, baking, dragging their children to endless Little League practices, hiking, dating, napping, pub-crawling, vacationing, frolicking – but they certainly have the time to learn about finance if they wanted.

Americans don’t have the energy?

Do you think Americans are dragging themselves home everyday from work, seven days a week, barely making it through the front door before collapsing on the sofa? Americans have plenty of energy. They may expend that energy elsewhere, but they certainly have enough to learn about finance if that was their desire.

Americans don’t have the resources?

Americans have the internet, you idiot. Podcasts and Youtube channels and millions of webpages and online services devoted to the topic. Never in human history was learning made so easy and information so readily available.

Americans spend enormous amounts of time learning and doing lots and lots of new things. We’re not a beleaguered nation of shuffling, ignorant zombies, bereft of time, energy, and resources. If a person doesn’t understand how money works, it’s simply because their interests lie elsewhere.

My wife, Elysha, for example, doesn’t know a lot about finance. She might not be able to articulate the difference between a stock or bond. She probably can’t explain the poison pill that the Twitter Board of Directors recently used to protect themselves from Elon Musk’s buyout offer. She’s not following the Fed’s recent decisions on interest rates and probably doesn’t know the name of the person chairing the Fed today.

But she knows everything about nearly every kind of music. She possesses an enormous storehouse of knowledge about food. She’s steeped in feminism and its history. She reads. Plays the ukulele. Knits and sews and cross-stitches. Gardens. Cooks and bakes with great expertise. She’s an expert on pedagogy. Knows how to make large groups of small children behave and learn. She writes brilliantly. Understands fashion. Understands the ridiculous machinations of health insurance. She has a keen eye and understanding for design. Knows the history of art. She can walk through a museum and identify who painted and sculpted each piece simply by looking at it.

She doesn’t know a lot about how money works because it doesn’t interest her. Also, she knows I do.

But if she needed to know why a company might initiate a stock split or why share buy backs can increase shareholder value or what EDITDA stands for, she could certainly learn. Money is not rocket science, though if Elysha wanted to understand rocket science, she could probably do that, too.

Anyone could. The resources available today are extraordinary.

Sean Hayes implies that money is a subject that only the privileged few have the time, energy, and resources to comprehend. He insinuates that money is so complex and opaque that only the best and brightest could possibly understand it.

This is a ridiculous and insulting insinuation.

It belittles the average American. It perpetuates a myth that money is too complex for the average person to comprehend. It hurts those who want to learn more about money but think the subject is inaccessible to them.

I love you, Sean Hayes, but you need to think more highly of the average American and their capacity to learn.

 

“Someday Is Today” launch party!

Join me on Saturday, June 18 at the Connecticut Historical Society in Hartford, CT for the launch of my next book, Someday Is Today: 22 Simple, Actionable Ways to Propel Your Creative Life. 

I’ll be telling stories from the book, offering some brand new strategies for making your creative dreams come true, and taking questions from the audience. I’ll also be joined by Elysha Dicks, author of the foreword, and Matthew Shepard, author of the afterword, and Jeni Bonaldo, frequently maligned figure in the pages of the book, to talk about their part of the process, too, as well as some very special guests.

We’ll also play games, give away prizes, sign books, and more!

RJ Julia Booksellers will be onsite to sell books, and refreshments will be provided courtesy of the Historical Society.

Click here for tickets. A suggested donation of $10 is requested – all proceeds go directly to the Connecticut Historical Society.

I hope you’ll join me for a fun night!

Six big regrets

Five years ago today, I made a list of my six big regrets in life and set a reminder for myself to check back in five years to see if any had been added or deleted.

Six, I thought, was a small number. Happily so.

Interestingly, almost all of my regrets are from the same period in my life, ages of 17-22. No surprise that one of the memoirs that I’m currently writing encompasses those very years.

Five years after assembling the original list in 2017, the list remains the same. Nothing removed and nothing added. It would be nice to move past thinking of any of these as regrets, which I think I was hoping five years ago, but I can’t see that happening.

But the other goal was to avoid adding any regrets to my life, and that, happily, has been the case.

LIFE’S BIGGEST REGRETS

1. I wasn’t wearing my seatbelt on December 23, 1988.

Even though I always wore my seatbelt from the moment I started driving, the excitement of Christmas shopping and the rush to get to work caused me to forget on the very day that my Datsun B-210 collided head-on with a Mercedes, sending me through the windshield and destroying my legs as they became embedded in the dashboard.

Had I been wearing my seatbelt, my injuries would have been minor.

The accident resulted in months of recovery during the final months of my senior year of high school, multiple surgeries on my knees, and glass still embedded in my forehead today.

It also had a domino effect on the rest of my life, as you’ll see below.

2. I didn’t attend college after high school.

Despite my excellent grades and enormous number of extracurricular activities, no adult ever spoke the word “college” to be throughout my entire school career, and the expectation was that I would leave home after graduation.

While I eventually made it to college five years later, I was forced to work full time while earning at degree in English at Trinity College and an elementary teaching degree at St. Joseph’s University. Though I found time to write for the school newspaper, serve as the Treasurer of our Student Council, and compete in statewide debate tournaments, I never lived on campus and didn’t have the opportunity to attend school the traditional way or make close friends like so many of my friends did.

My friend, Bengi, once told me that it was a shame I didn’t go to college after high school. “You were built for college,” he said. “You would’ve loved it.”

I think I would.

3. I didn’t become an Eagle Scout

Though I earned more than enough merit badges for Eagle Scout by the time I was 15 years old, I stalled, partially because no adult supported me in designing the required service project, and once I finally did so on my own, a near-fatal car accident derailed those plans and stalled me once again. Less than two months after my accident, while I was still recovering, I turned 18, and my lifelong dream of becoming an Eagle Scout was dead.

4. I didn’t pole vault during my senior year of high school

The same near-fatal car accident prevented me from competing in track during my senior year and kept me from competing in the district championships, where I had placed second the previous year.

5. I play sports right-handed.

Though I am left-handed, my stepfather would not buy me a baseball glove for a lefty and instead gave me a hand-me-down glove for a right handed player. This forced me to learn to throw right handed (which is why I still throw poorly today) and had a domino effect on almost every other sport. I learned to shoot a basketball right handed and I learned to swing a baseball bat right-handed, which led to me playing golf right-handed.

This made every sport at least twice as hard for me to learn, and it left me with a lifetime of struggle on the courts, fields, and fairways.

6. I didn’t request a lawyer during my series of interrogations before being arrested and tried for a crime I did not commit.

Assuming that if I requested a lawyer, I would appear guilty, and because I had no parent or other adult figure in my life when I was 21 years-old to support or guide me, I allowed myself to be interrogated by police three times over the course of two weeks without an attorney present and without anyone in my life knowing what was happening to me.

I’m not sure if things would’ve changed had I requested an attorney, but most attorneys who I’ve spoken with think it would’ve changed things considerably, and my arrest had a domino effect on my life:

I lost my job. I became homeless. I worked two full time jobs for almost two years to pay for a $25,000 legal bill, and while I was at one of those jobs, I was robbed at gunpoint, which led me to a lifetime of PTSD. My planned entrance into college was derailed, and my life was essentially stalled for two years while I awaited for my trial and struggled to pay my lawyer.

“Antiracist Baby” is lovely

Thanks to Texas Senator Ted Cruz’s criticism of the book “Antiracist Baby” at the recent Supreme Court hearings for Justice Brown Jackson, I purchased the book from one of my favorite indie bookstores.

It turns out I wasn’t the only person who purchased the book recently. Thanks to Cruz’s disparaging of the book, sales jumped 869% in the two weeks following the hearings, boosting the book back onto bestseller lists.

I hope he finds reason to hate one of my books in the future. I’d love an 869% bump in sales.

I read the book today, which offer a set of principles for the antiracist. It turns out that nothing about this book is controversial in any way. It offers nine steps to making equity a reality. Ideas like:

Open your eyes to all skin colors.
Use your words to talk about race.
Celebrate all our differences.
Point at policies as the problem, not people.
Believe we shall overcome racism.

Real controversial stuff. You’d need to either be an idiot or a scumbag to read this book and find anything wrong with it.

Perhaps Ted Cruz can give it another read the next time he turns tail and flies to Cancun while his constituents in Texas literally freeze to death because the Texas power grid is falling apart.

Then again, Donald Trump said that Cruz’s wife is ugly and suggested that Cruz’s father had played a role in Kennedy’s assassination, but Cruz still supported the man (after calling him “utterly amoral”), so perhaps the principles in this book – or any principles whatsoever – are beyond his small minded comprehension.