Once while pitching a no-hitter in the sixth grade my pants ripped through the crotch revealing the graying pickled nose of my sweaty cup. I was determined to battle through, as if my twelve year old league held a form of valor similar to that of an ancient warriors, but to no avail.  The likes of frozen nut syndrome, and the admittance of a heart crush on a certain girl staring at me with eyes of embarrassment, wide as a horse surfaced my jitters and combusted my moment of greatness into a final inning disaster: four hits (including to the eighth hitter in the lineup), three runs, plenty of walks, and a head hung low–an oversized one to say the least.

At sixteen I opened up to a pastor regarding sexuality and he told me to put tobasco sauce on my fingertips to stop me fiddling down under. He didn’t say fiddling down under, because I am sure he thought the last thing he should do is jest, and hence arise the humorist within me. If you wonder whether I tried it, I did. It doesn’t work, just warms it up a little, and besides that rather good factoid…I was a healthy boy, one whom hid posters of Kathy Ireland splayed in string bikinis under my A-Rod posters.

Nothing can stop the activity of a healthy buck.

Once asked which man I would choose to make love too (if a gun was stuck to my head), I asserted the mulleted Full House version of John Stamos. My reasons for choosing the Italian Stallion I’m sure America is to blame for, considering every and any form of media promises a perfect life, perfect body, and a rock n’ roll existence; all of which Stamos is packaged with.

Two years ago I woke my wife in the middle of the night randomly shouting “tortilla!” Now if I have an issue with sleep speaking, which means I am a sleep muser, should I fear what forms of things I am dreaming about? Not if food continues to assert its dominance over other meaningless dreamscapes: embodying Snake Eyes, living life as a merman, and fathering pinkie size children.

Like labyrinths without an exit we all concede sanity: meanings, definitions, those manicured mathematics that theorize everything and butter our world with the blood of care bears. Sets of religioius rules and values– things like morals should never be ingested into macro environments. Macro morals foreshadow hysterical immorality, and concede an acceptance for equality and diversity.

The problem? America IS diversity and equality. We are the segway to continuity and progression; rationality and spirituality; division and equality. All that IS can be found in US, not a political invention, nor the modern motor model for human thinking. A is not to B, as B is not to C. Rather ABC are to Z as Z is to variable X.

State of mind X governs you and I, like light and darkness, food and water. We NEED our state of being like children incessantly seeking the truths to the universe: the magic of breathing in oxygen only to blow carbon dioxide out the fleshy greenhouse of the lungs, or the oxidation complex in our vein constructs, that without the immersion of water in a ninety-six hour period of time will fail and cause us cardiac arrest.

These NEEDS we cannot live without. Attempting to do so is death, and death seems to hold no regard for stature or faith. Our states of mind fill our rather skeletal longings with wonderment and hope–love, lust, passion, and desire. There is no other explanation when it comes to our definitive stance on the difference between entertainment and athletics. Once a fine line drawn in the sand has become muddied and spilled over–a loss of interpretive elements with no grid in which to define the two.

I once saw a kid strain so hard during a math quiz, that I questioned my definition of athletics. I am certain many of our interpretations are drawn from historiography: things like the Roman Olympics which safe-guarded the athlete from the philosopher with varied themes of quest, champion, and bodily strain, overrun by a will to beat-out adversity.

This in Roman days the Philosopher did not do. Though incredibly respected, the philosopher had no peril to overcome. And to today’s Roman thinker, the fork between intellectual achievements and athletic accomplishments are grounded in the same theory.

But how ridiculous! I lost my now hitter because I did not have the intellectual where-with-all to steady the body. The boy who strained during his math quiz flexed his forehead and scribbled with his pen. His intellect directed the achievement, and the achievement left him physically exhausted.

Both worked in unison.

We all have columns of W’s and L’s in our lives: some unfortunately more victorious others. This alone sets us on quest larger than the Lakers, LeBron James, or Dirk Nowitiski. Our states of mind are stuck in a never-ending dog fight ( I am not referencing Mike Vick), and we are called upon daily, hourly, and momentarily, to overcome adversity and make something of ourselves.

With time running out at work, our relationships, our health,  and our family, we grow accustomed to taking the last shots. We alone are our very own last-minute closer in the sports of our lives. Rest in peace Macho Man.