Tag: Joe Alleva

You Never Miss a Good Thing (Till He Says Goodbye)

Saturday morning and I slept in. I stayed in bed until eight thirty (perish the thought! What a lazy lagabed!) with the end result that I will not, in fact, be driving over to the West Bank this morning to get my oil changed and fluids checked. It’s not due, but (anxiety) the heat has been so intense, I want to make sure the engine is being looked after properly and of course, the fluids. Now it will have to wait until I get back as the dealership isn’t open on Sundays and I leave Wednesday for San Diego Bouchercon. I am starting to get some anxiety about the trip, but I am trying to ride herd on that. Whereas before it was gnaw away at me and build, now I just dismiss those thoughts as “anxiety” and move on from it. I doubt this methodology will be a long term solution–I probably should see a therapist again–but I already take an anti-anxiety medication to control my mood swings; do I need something else on top of that? Probably not. I am leery of medications to begin with–the opioid disaster always is there in the back of my head, plus the fear of addiction.

But since I didn’t get up, I will be staying in for the rest of the day and working on the apartment and writing and so forth. Tomorrow I am going to get fitted for hearing aids, so anything I might need to get by going out into the world today (I was thinking about doing a minor grocery run to get a few things) I can get tomorrow at the Rouse’s on Carrollton. I am kind of excited about being able to hear properly; I don’t think I’ve ever been able to my entire life, although I always passed hearing tests. My problem is low voices and ambient noise. I can’t hear anything in a crowded bar or restaurant. And I have my appointment about my arm in a few weeks, and of course, I am getting my teeth taken care of once I get home from San Diego. I will be a completely different person by the end of the year than I was when I started the year, won’t I? Maybe not The Six Million Dollar Man, but the surgery isn’t going to be very cheap.

We finished watching Swamp Kings last night, and I was right–it was really a puff piece, focused on making Urban Meyer as good as possible and not focusing on any of the criminal charges or how the University covered it all up because at that time, Florida football was the face of college football and everyone was watching and they were making the University a shit-ton of money. (Not to single out the Gators–although this documentary was about them, so it does raise these questions organically–these kinds of abuses and corruption happen all too often at far too many programs. LSU has had its own history of cover-ups and looking the other way to protect star players in the past, for example, and I’ve always been disappointed at how those situations were handled by my own favorite team. Hiring Joe Alleva as Athletic Director at LSU was a huge mistake, as he repeatedly showed Tiger Nation, over and over again. His replacement has done a fantastic job rebuilding LSU athletics from the ashes left by Alleva’s miserable tenure.) But I love college football, and I remember that time period particularly well. I have always stuck to the SEC mantra of “hate them in the conference, root for them in the post season” (which everyone does except Alabama fans for the most part–which I just now realized is probably a leftover remnant from the Civil War “us against them” mentality and my stomach turned a bit; but that’s also a good focus for the essay I want to write about LSU and football in the south in general, “Saturday Night In Death Valley.”) I am very excited and happy college football season is nigh. Woo-hoo!

I spent some time with Kelly J. Ford’s The Hunt, which is actually quite marvelous. I haven’t had the bandwidth lately to read novels–mostly sticking to my Alfred Hitchcock Presents project–but I was enjoying her book when I started reading it a few weeks ago and had been wanting to get back to it. But anxiety and stress and the fucking heat have sapped so much out of me every day that it was hard to focus on reading a novel. Kelly is a marvelous writer, which is terrific–there’s really nothing like a queer writer with a working class background writing about the South they grew up in, is there? Kelly is kind of a lesbian cross between Tom Franklin, Carson McCullers, and Dorothy Allison, with some Faulkner and Ace Atkins thrown in for good measure. Her debut novel Cottonmouths was a revelation (I can’t tell you how thrilling it is for this old man to see so much amazing crime writing coming from new queer writers), and her second, Real Bad Things, is nominated for an Anthony Award next week–so she joins the few queer crime writers of queer crime novels who’ve been nominated for an Anthony Award! We’re a small but growing club, which is also very exciting. GO QUEERS!

So, yes, a lovely day of preparation for going away next weekend. Today I should go ahead and make my packing list–I could even go ahead and pack the rolling briefcase, couldn’t I?–and clean and do things around the house and read and maybe even do some writing. It feels cool today in the house–but of course it’s still morning–and just checked my emails and yes–there it is; today’s heat advisory with temperatures feeling like up to 114 until eight pm tonight. It’s really going to feel like winter to me in San Diego, isn’t it?

And on that note, I am heading into the spice mines. Have a lovely Saturday, Constant Reader, and I will check in with you again later or tomorrow.

American Girl

Hello work-at-home Thursday, how are you doing?

I’m starting to get used to the loss of the trees, but it isn’t even so much the loss of the green, leafy view or the increased light that bothers me the most about the loss of the crepe myrtles. I’ve realized that, despite the fact that the trees didn’t completely shield the house next door or its carriage house from view, they provided enough of a shield for me to feel like I had privacy while I was sitting at my desk. I could see the upstairs windows next doors, but not clearly; it was more of a vague awareness that they were there. Now I can see into them–not that much, really, because of the angle–which of course means anyone standing in those windows or looking out of them can also look directly down at me at my desk, writing or cleaning or reading or whatever the hell it is I do there when I sit there.

And that I do not like one bit.

So, yes, I’m going to have to invest in blinds, I suppose. I can just use them for the upper half of the windows–the lower half doesn’t really need covering, to shield them from either the sun or the next door upstairs neighbors. Am I happy about it? Not in the least. But it has to be done, or next summer is going to be les miserables in the kitchen. It gets too hot in there as it is, and I’m probably also going to have to invest in more portable air conditioners as well. Heavy heaving sigh.

So, apparently a sexual assault scandal is currently looming over the LSU football program, tracing back to Derrius Guice–who was recently dropped by whatever team had drafted him into the NFL after he was arrested for domestic violence–horrifying stuff, really–which revealed that he’d been accused twice of rape while he was a student at LSU and allegedly the school and athletic department covered it up. This was during the time the wretched Joe Alleva was the athletic director there, and given that he was responsible for the insanity and disaster that the the Duke lacrosse team sexual assault scandal, it doesn’t surprise me in the least. The fact LSU hired him. with that scandal on his resume, remains a mystery to me. I may be a loyal Tiger fan who bleeds purple and gold, but this needs to be thoroughly investigated and there needs to be accountability. This kind of shit doesn’t belong anywhere in college, let alone in college athletics, and the covering up of bad behavior by star athletes by colleges and professional sports needs to stop, period.

Seriously, enough of this boys will be boys bullshit. Boys who get away with shit because they’re boys become men who think they can get away with shit, and this becomes a societal problem.

I am really tired of sex crimes involving college sports, frankly–or any sport, for that matter.

And now I am thinking I should write a book about college sports and a sex crime, because of course I am.

I could, of course, call it Boys Will Be Boys.

Hmmmm some more.

My back is a little sore this week, I’m not sure if it’s from the gym and working out–I noticed it yesterday, when I woke up, and went to the gym anyway, so this morning it’s a little worse–but it’s not an injury injury; this is just intense muscle soreness, so I’ll be using the heating pad this afternoon as I make condom packs. It did feel lovely going to the gym after work yesterday and working out–I’m really getting back into this–and we started watching Murder on Middle Beach last night on HBO; a documentary series this young filmmaker did about his mother’s brutal murder, which was weird; both oddly intimate and deeply personal, and incredibly sad at the same time. I couldn’t imagine dealing with my mom being murdered, and then writing a true crime book about it, but then, who knows? It’s an interesting premise for a true crime documentary, but one that begs the question of objectivity; how can you be objective when you’re so deeply personally involved with almost everyone you’ll be talking to, interviewing, and filming? And–God help me–I did think to myself, well, someone making a documentary series about their mother’s murder is also a great book premise, isn’t it?

I also took the time last night after the gym, as I waited for Paul to come home, to read two more stories from Lawrence Block’s anthology The Darkling Halls of Ivy. The theme of the anthology is, of course, crimes in academia; the first story, by none other than Rambo creator David Morrell–whom I’ve met and is a very nice man–was quite good. The next two stories in the book were by authors I’d not read before, Jane Hamilton and Warren Moore. (Moore has had stories in other Block anthologies I’ve read; I’ve not read any of his novels, is what I meant here.) I’d heard of Ms. Hamilton before; she’s a quite critically acclaimed literary novelists, and best known to me as the author of The Short History of a Prince. Both stories were interesting. Ms. Hamilton’s was built around an advanced creative writing course in a small, failing liberal arts college, while Moore’s was built around the end of an academic conference–with a recently defended, new Ph. D. trying to find a job in academia giving a ride to a long tenured leader in their field, and what the young man thinks about as they talk about careers in academia, with the bitter reality of the younger man’s existence in sharp contrast to the comfortable established existence the older man has achieved. Hamilton’s story, “Writing Maeve Dubinsky,” doesn’t really seem like a crime story–the actual crime is a very small one, not even a misdemeanor, although it deeply affects the lives of the characters of the story (imagine coming to your writing class and discovering that one of your classmates had stolen your journal and written a story about your relationship)–the best part of the story was I remembered in exquisite detail the agony of workshopping one of your stories in a classroom setting–and also put me in mind of thinking about other stories for me to write. The Moore story, “Alt-Ac” (the title refers to Ph.D’s who have to find jobs outside of academia: “alternate to academic”) was also astonishingly dark and bitter about the diploma mill modern colleges have become, saddling students with massive amounts of debt they can never repay while giving them degrees that are essentially useless when it comes to finding work in the real world, particularly since there are so few jobs in academia and there are fewer of those jobs all of the time (seriously, the fact that Katrina came along and finished off any thoughts I had about pursuing further education and possibly teaching on the collegiate level was quite a gift to me, and one I never truly appreciated until lately), but it was also incredibly spot on.

I do find it interesting that in all the talk about student debt and so forth, no one ever talks about revamping or overhauling our higher education system–or improving it; that system is just as rotten and outdated as other societal institutions that need overhauling and repair.

And on that note, tis back to the spice mines with me. Have a lovely day, Constant Reader!