Belichick, blog, adults who take the things people in sports do personally

Thursday 1/11/24

Wrote an op-ed on Belichick. Did it fast, even for me. Doubt I'll be able to move it, but if I hadn't at least made the effort, I'd have been disappointed in myself.

Someone sent me this:

"I read your blog every day. It is crazy how good it is and that someone has a mind like that. How many words is that would you say. How many of the best novels ever is that? Fucking crazy."

Well, it's not a novel. Then again, if one is going to say that Knausgaard's My Struggle is a novel with the formless, gushy autobiographical slop that is, then what the hell, call this what you want. As for length: The 2500th entry in this journal happened at the end of December, which I have been meaning to note in the News section, but I haven't updated the News section yet. One more entry after this one and we'll be at 2550. The total word count was 2.7 million words when last I counted around Halloween, which is about fifty books.

It is amazing to me how personally adults take things with professional athletes, coaches, owners. These people who go on Twitter and as a part of their day, of their existence as adults, type, "FUCK YOU KRAFT!!!! What would it be like to, say, have a meal with such a person? Would they think nothing of eating with their ass cheeks?

And the people who regard a player signing an extension with a team as some kind of statement that they like them personally. Or who reject them personally when they sign with another team. You actually watch adults, grown-ups, go up and down in their own lives depending on what these strangers do or don't do, when those strangers don't give them a second thought. Not personally. A player might prefer to play on a team that draws a nice crowd every night, just like some players might prefer the opposite.

How do you get that...stunted? And the idea of being an adult and living through another adult? It speaks to a lack of self-respect, and this level of immaturity that you almost don't even really expect from a child. I think this is what happens when people don't have meaning in their lives of any kind. Children usually have meaning in their lives, so perhaps that's the difference.