Another post. This one has thoughts regarding the New Orleans Saints in 2010

The New Orleans Saints are 2-0 after last night’s amazing, hard fought victory over the San Francisco 49ers. The year after winning the Super Bowl the Saints are playing a different style of football and winning games, which was something that Head Coach Sean Peyton said would happen.

The atmosphere in Louisiana is still one of revelry and extreme nerves. Last night, even though I watched the game in the comfort of my own home,  I could still feel the collective breath of true Saints fans being held as the thought that our beloved team my lose that game. After so many years of mediocrity and after one Super Bowl win, we as Saints’ fans have come to expect nothing but perfection.

There might be few other states in the Union that contain as rabid a pedigree of tackle football fans than Louisiana. We pride ourselves on our football and we cannot stand to lose. If anyone has the time I recommend spending a fall Friday night in a small Louisiana town watching the home team play football. There are few experiences that can rival the passion and emotion that is placed on the shoulders of those young men. (A trip to Texas, Florida, or Pennsylvania/Ohio might be the only true rival to the feelings put forth at a high school game in Louisiana.)

That being said, after years of abysmal football at the professional level coupled with the scorn and ridicule that comes with being perennially awful, Louisianans can be very proud of their NFL team. We can be so proud of our team we can now be overzealous about the whole experience and expect them to be perfect from here on out. That was the feeling I was getting from myself as I was watching the game last night.

Anything less than a win would not have been acceptable. During the game I knew that if the Saints were to lose then we would no longer be undefeated champions and possibly subject to the scarring verbal barbs of so many years past. It was an all too familiar future I was not looking forward to, matter of fact, it was a familiar future I was dreading.

This feeling is going to permeate the entire season for me, and I would suspect countless other true Saints fans this year. It is almost like we are expecting the loss to signify the end of our dominant era, even though it has just begun.

But I believe, in the best interest of our collective sanity, we need to let go of that fear. We need to realize that a loss is inevitable. We need to come to grips with the fact that maybe several losses are inevitable, but that does not mean that the Saints are has-beens or a big bunch of never-weres. It means simply that the Saints play an extremely tough sport to dominate, in a league that lends itself to parity and a level of physical and mental toughness unmatched in most other sporting venues.

I write this knowing that running back Reggie Bush has broken his leg and will probably be out for at least six weeks, maybe the entire year. I know that will be a huge loss for the Saints, but it does not signify the end of the road for them. It might mean they will lose a game or two more than they would have if Bush was strong and healthy. I have full confidence in Sean Peyton and quarterback Drew Brees to provide us with a gameplan and game play that will carry the team as champions for however long Bush may be out.

I also have full confidence that if we face the realization that the Saints might lose a game or a few games this season it will not signify the end of everything they have built. We need to keep in mind that a few losses does not commemorate a return to the jokingly awful football that our beloved Saints had made us suffer through for all those year. All it means is that the bull’s-eye is large, the competition is tough and a return to the Super Bowl is going to be sweeter than iced tea.

It's Been A Long Time plus A Small Conversation About Goals

If we allow things to pile up in our lives we can start to feel the effects on our psyches. It takes regular cleaning and regular work for us to not notice the back log of duties we each have at the end of the day. I think we can all understand the struggle between setting up and achieving our goals. We can look at each of our duties/goals for any given day as one huge project, which will naturally overwhelm us or we can look at it as just a series of individual steps that can easily be handled and completed to make our lives better. We must all attack our goals to the best of our abilities. That is the true nature of our work and our lives, walking through the various steps to reach our goals in a timely fashion.

Instructions as old as time

Where did the idea of goals and setting them up even come from? Goals are something that we are told we should all have as we grow up. Goals are something that we set for ourselves, whether we know it or not. Goals are also things that other people set up for us, whether we know it or not. We are told that we are supposed to live up to these goals and accomplish them. But where does this inherent idea of goals and achievable benchmarks of success come from? Who was the first person to set up a goal? 

Were our first goals as simple as finding food and shelter? Did we develop more advanced goals as our societies and civilizations advanced? How did the first person to rule over other people get to that point? Was that one of his goals? Did he see how good he was at hunting and getting woman so he decided his next step would be to control the fates of his fellow hunters?

Everyone struggles with how to get there!

If we look at the goals of people today have they really changed that much over time? I would suspect no since I believe that the content of our goals hasn’t changed but the context and the way we achieve those goals has. Just like those first ambitious goal setters goals we all want to stave off hunger, have a roof over our heads and reproduce with the most attractive people. Biologically and psychologically this will give us the best chances of success through all the various and accepted measure of what success means, like having offspring that best continue our genetic line, being able to feed and support those offspring and our mates, plus be seen with nothing but the best around us at all times. All human actions and emotions can be attributed to our animal/instinctual roots.

Our animal instinct drives us to seek and accomplish our goals because most of our goals are setup by ourselves and those that truly know us and care about us for our betterment, thus our success in life and eventual procreation. The same animal instinct that led and still does lead us to try and tackle the biggest animals for food, sport, and trophy leads us to try and make the right moves to become successful within the confines of our culture and society.

For instance, it would be nothing more than a feather in my proverbial cap to go out and kill the biggest deer I or anyone else could find. I would be allowed certain bragging rights within my male peer group but to say it was a necessity for survival would be disingenuous at best. Yet, for me to go out and get a high paying job with a lot of benefits for myself and my future spouse and offspring would, in light of our societal context, make a hell of a lot of sense. It certainly makes more sense than me trekking out to the woods every morning looking and praying for a giant deer to wonder across my path.

Thus our goals in life are tailor made for our positions in life through community, culture, and society itself. An interesting morsel of food for thought my brain stumbled across today.

What's Happening Here?

It’s Tuesday everyone, which means only three more days until Friday and the weekend. I do have to do some work this weekend at a volunteer appreciation thing but, thankfully, it will not take as long as the Back to School Rally was this past Saturday. However, it will still cut into my Saturday and for that I am not too happy since the college football season is so close I am getting really antsy about having to give up my Saturdays for other things.

I spent the majority of my young adult life in jobs that had me working on the weekends while most of my friends got to sit around like drunken fat cats. It was a real win for me personally when I landed a job that allowed me two whole weekend days free from the drudgery of work.

I cannot complain too much since these work Saturdays are so few and far between but I always go back in my mind to the days of nine hour Saturdays at a restaurant and I want to puke.

On another note, I am still sickened by the continual outpouring of hatred over this supposed mosque in New York City. Has there ever been a more clear cut case of religious persecution in recent times in this country? It seems obvious to me that stopping the building of the center would violate the First Amendment rights of Islamic peoples to freely practice religion wherever they choose as long as they follow local laws. To not allow this COMMUNITY CENTER to be built because you wrongly call it a mosque, wrongly tell us it is next to the World Trade Center site, and wrongly tell us that Islam is a religion of hate-filled war mongers is so disgusting and horrible you should be banned from speaking about anything, ever.

Give me a break. They are using this issue as a way to try and procure votes for their failing political ideology. The idea that they can use hate and fear to garner the votes they need is so backward and awful it makes me want to scream. The fact that it is working makes me want to move to another planet.

I think if I were ever cursed enough to have my own show on one of the 24-hour cable news stations it would just be me yelling at people for how dumb they are. Seriously, I would roll footage of what the idiots, I mean politicians, in this country say and then just berate them verbally. I would also overlay this verbal assault with actual facts, which I think would give me a real leg up against a lot of these knuckleheads since they usually just spout randomly strung together, incoherent sentence fragments.

 It is beyond disgusting that some are using this as a platform to say that all Muslims and the every tenant of the religion of Islam is behind the horrible attacks of 9/11. What? If we apply that logic to all religions in this country then no one should get to build churches anywhere because this land was violently and aggressively taken from the Native Americans, often in the name of Christianity and our "Manifest Destiny,"  and I bet they probably view all of this land as "sacred" and wish we wouldn't erect monuments to their destruction everywhere they look. 

Of course, fear mongering like this over sensitive issues is nothing new in American politics, which is why I am so thankful for our Constitution. Without it where would we be? I envision a nation full of ignorant, Christian white men slapping each other on the back and shouting at each other about how great it is that they are able to stifle any and all progress or change. Think about it; without the Constitution slavery would still be around, women wouldn't be able to vote, and education would have taken even more of a back seat to religious indoctrination. Of course by "back seat" I mean not even in the car.

Oh but have no fear because that beautiful document that our country is founded on is not safe from these lunatics either. How is it possible that the politicians who love to tout their defense of the Constitution as a motive for voting for them continually deride and ambush its most basic tenants on a regular basis? How are we even having a conversation about amending one of the most important and crucial aspects of our most important and crucial documents? Here's an idea people: How about we fix what's wrong with our policies rather than changing one of the few that actually works and makes sense? 

As if this issue didn't stink enough, we have members of both political parties coming against freedom of religion, which is what this issue is all about at its core. Why has no one brought these people to task about how they validate spitting in the face of the Constitution they so love? A quick rundown of questions I want to ask some of the people who are against this community center: First, how can you say that not allowing this Islamic community center is not about religion when your main argument is that the religion behind the center is evil and we are at war with it so we shouldn't let it be built there? Secondly, how did you graduate fifth grade with this mentality? Thirdly, why are you drooling? Finally, who elected you or said that you could speak on my behalf? 

Of course it should come as no surprise that these people do that with the Constitution when they do it with their more loved and more often quoted source on everything about life, the Bible. Their motto is to just pick and choose the best parts that fit their agenda and then forget about the rest of it, or hell even better, let's change it to fit our needs at a specific time. 

No matter how you slice it, this is an issue of religious tolerance and even if it was not one initially it has certainly become such because of the arguments used by so many that Islam is the religion of terrorist and hate.

There are some voices of reason regarding this issue. However, they just get drowned out by the constant noise machine that is our media. Rather than show us calm, reasonable voices they prefer to shove them out of the way with an ambush of idiotic and ignorant rhetoric. I really hope this idiocy stops soon because I believe that it is turning calm, rational minded people away from our political system, which means that it will only be controlled by those on the fringes. Truthfully, that scares me more than anything right now.

I am going to leave it at this for right now because I have to go and scream into my pillows. Have a good Tuesday folks. 

Time Sucks

This has been one of the slowest days ever. Time has literally stopped. I just checked my analog watch and saw the second hand quit moving. Come to find out it was because the battery had just died in this crappy old watch but the point is still the same; standard time keeping mechanisms are impotent in this office.

To make matters worse I can’t even enjoy the news today because it is still filled with hate and anti-American/Constitutional rhetoric that gets me so pissed off I just want to scream at somebody. Do you have to exchange your brain for a political office? Why does it seem that most of our politicians are ignorant fear mongers? Am I wrong?

Please someone show me some light somewhere. I implore you!

I better stop now before you are able to feel me screaming while reading this.

I would love to be running/exercising in some brand news sneakers right now. I am thinking about getting some K-Swiss Tubes. I hope you enjoy the rare behind the scenes look at how shoe endorsement deals get inked that I have linked below.  You’re welcome in advance.

Kenny Powers Gets Signed By K-Swiss - watch more funny videos