Category: Columns

By Jim Miller

The pandemic belongs to Swole Daddy. In case you missed it, Swole Daddy is the mascot of the NC Dinos of the Korean Baseball Organization (KBO). He is, as his name aptly signals, the super buff cartoonish dinosaur who joins the cheerleaders on top of the dugout in the empty ballpark during games. Actually, his name is Sseri, but “Swole Daddy” took off on social media and it stuck.

“We love you, Sexy Dino,” the meme exclaims. Yes, a jacked dinosaur wearing a necklace is as good as it gets this year, really.

As FiveThirtyEight recently noted, statistically speaking, the NC Dinos may just be the best KBO team to ever take the field at this point in the season. That’s the kind of thing you learn if you take a few moments off from obsessively checking the daily polling and political punditry on the site and scroll over to their sports analysis. Here is where sports and politics meet: in the strange alchemy of the daily numbers. They create their own reality as they seek to document it. The tool of measurement grants an aura to that which can be quantified and reified.

by Ernie McCray

There are a lot of folks who are complaining about black athletes drawing attention to Black Lives Matter, saying “Politics and sports don’t mix.”

Have to say that’s news to me since, in our country’s history, particularly, if black athletes didn’t confront the racism inherent in our society and in our politics, there would have been very little notice of a people’s struggle to achieve equality.

I think back to July 4, 1910. On that day Jack Johnson, an African American, entered the ring in Reno, Nevada to face Jim Jeffries, the “Heavyweight champion of the world,” in the “Fight of the Century.”

J

so much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow
glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens

–“The Red Wheelbarrow,” William Carlos Williams

By Jim Miller

So much depends on the first step out of bed, the first sip of coffee, holding the morning silence for as long as you can. The chair where you sit, the angle of the morning light, letting the moment unfold on its own. Don’t look at the phone, don’t turn on the radio or TV, never start staring at screens. Morning is only morning when you own the time, when you wake up on your own terms and don’t give your day away before you’ve even started to live it.

by Ernie McCray

The orange faced man in the White House is talking about reopening schools and, in my way of thinking, that just would not be cool.

Jiving aka bullshitting children is something we should never do and opening their schools would be saying to them that everything is cool.

It seems like my work in this area is not yet done as I spent 37 years in San Diego City Schools opposing shining young folks on.

It wasn’t my intention to take on such a task when I began teaching. It was something that came to me out of the blue one day back in the early 60’s when my sixth graders and I were sitting at a school assembly.

A South African exchange student from a high school nearby had us literally “oohing and aahing” as she showed us slides of breathtaking mountains and glistening coastlines and splendid waterfalls and forests and deserts and grassy savannas.

By Jim Miller

Silence lives inside the heat. That’s the feeling you get when you drive to the desert and park your car by the side of the road to hike in the morning. You need to keep track of the time so you don’t hike so far that it hits 100 degrees before you return. Even if you don’t get lost, that kind of heat for too long is what makes the desert dangerous in the summer. So, you’re careful but you still go, out toward the hills on a warm morning.

The nice thing is that the further you get from the road, the more distant the sound of the occasional passing car or truck, although this time of year there aren’t many. Then there is nothing but the hum of insects and your feet on the rock and sand.

Step, step, step. One foot after the other in your own particular rhythm.

As you walk you go deep inside yourself even as you lose yourself in the vastness of blue sky and the bright sun flaring off the mountainside in the distance.

by Ernie McCray

Life a bit crazy,
hazy,
spacy,
racy.
Like looking at reality
through a grease spattered
kitchen screen,
trying to make sense
of a wide scope of happenings,
white dudes
thinking they’re supreme,
possessing superior genes,
spelled j-e-a-n-s,
if you get my drift
and know what I mean.

by Ernie McCray

I remember days when Mr. Sydney Dawson, one of my two favorite teachers, would raise his baton and we, the Dunbar Junior High Chorus, the best in the city of Tucson, would stand tall and proud and sing the Black National Anthem out loud, ending with:

“Sing a song full of the faith that the dark past has taught us
Sing a song full of the hope that the present has brought us
Facing the rising sun of our new day begun
Let us march on ’til victory is won”

That song, one I’ve never heard anyone sing but black people, has kept us afloat, kept us scratching and crawling and marching, pursuing a victory that perpetually has seemed both elusive and out of reach. Much like a fantasy.

And then I look up one day and I hear a man on ESPN say that at all the opening games of the next NFL season, the game will begin with the words “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” the opening line of my anthem, and I thought I was in an nonparallel universe. As this seemed so out of sync with reality.

By Jim Miller

You already are where you want to be. Forget the story in your head and the world of screens. Wake up at dawn and hit the street early before the masses crowd the sidewalks and go. Anywhere, everywhere, just walk. This is the ritual of the moment.

In my neighborhood, it means learning the landscape of yards — lush green garden boxes, forests of sunflowers, clusters of cacti on the edge of a canyon. Relearn how to look and listen, see the things you never see. What is most important is what happens to be there at the dead end of the unpaved alley.

By Jim Miller

It’s the summer of the black veil, and a good number of us are none-too-happy about it. While many understand it as a reasonable public health mandate that serves to protect others, and, in fact, makes it possible for us to be more in the world during a pandemic with less fear of doing potential harm, others see it as an instrument of oppression. Of course, the obvious explanation for this response is the facile politicization of masks in the service of Trumpism, but could there be something deeper going on as well?

If we go back to the 1917 flu pandemic, we know that anti-mask politics in the service of “freedom” were evident then even as many more people died than have at present, so there is a precedent for the current derangement. But perhaps, at another level, the fear of the mask speaks to a profound American aversion to any sort of emblem of isolation.

by Ernie McCray

In these times of social distancing and isolating I’ve managed to still find something to celebrate. Like high school graduations.

I take my hat off to a brilliant descendant of mine, Alonzo (A.J.) Morgan, my great-grandson, who just moved his tassel from the right to the left at San Diego’s Lincoln High.

And I’m particularly proud that he’s following my path by accepting an athletic scholarship at my alma mater, the University of Arizona in Tucson, my hometown. Sixty-four years after me.

Different sport, though. I played basketball during my college days and he’s going to make his way on the gridiron.

We, however, both played each other’s sport. I could cut a figure on a football field and he can play some hoops – and we both have played a number of other sports. But we both dedicated time and effort to our favorite sport, the one we wanted to really excel in.

I can’t even begin to express how stoked I am in his decision to go to my school.

By Jim Miller

Hope is in the streets. In the midst of a pandemic that brought an economic collapse during which a series of police murders inspired an international wave of protests, a new era is being imagined, one that would rise out of the ashes of a dying, corrupt order. And it’s a beautiful thing.

Yes, the ugliness is still very much with us in all its myriad forms, but amidst the teargas, rubber bullets, fascist tweets, and posturing, the young are demanding the impossible. What is wonderful about this is the fact that they don’t care what those who “know better” are telling them. They don’t care about what’s realistic or likely to move the needle in the November election. And they certainly don’t care whether you approve of their rhetoric and demands.

Ewww!

by Ernie McCray

Lately I’ve found myself saying “Ewww!” a lot.

It began over a week ago on a nice easy summer day.

I was reading a great book and two young friends of ours were painting our hallway.

An odor suddenly enters the room. It’s weak at first, and then it blows me away. I mean it was like a farting contest was going on in my nose between contestants who had trained by eating pots full of spoiled pinto beans.

In those moments I wondered:

“Is there a broken sewer in the neighborhood?”

“Did someone dump a truck load of rotten eggs in the backyard?”

“Is a dinosaur decomposing in the canyon our house is in?”

I thought I heard someone walking in the patio and I almost asked “Hey, is that you, Pepe Le Pew? Pig-Pen?”