Pandemic Journal, June 12, 2020

mark@marktreble.com

 

Pandemic Diary, June 12, 2020

 

As you can see, it’s the better-looking half today, Tommy. Orlando is all everybody wants to talk about. We’re getting serious about practice, and a bunch of guys are looking forward to drawing a full salary again. I’m looking forward to drawing a full salary for the first time. Excuse me if I drool in anticipation.

 

I want to talk about my boys’ groups. On days the team is out of town, I host an after-school session for boys twelve and thirteen. We do exercises, we play ball, and we talk. I’ve told them that nothing is off-limits for questions, but I reserve the right not to answer. And they all have the right to refuse to answer a question. I mean, it makes sense.

 

The talking is because they are each other’s only sources of information about what it means to grow up as boys and become men. Most of them have their mothers, some are raised by grandmothers or aunts, but there is a distinct lack of adult male presence in their homes. Of the few men in their homes, most are their mothers’ current boyfriends or pimps, or both. We have 26 boys, seven Hispanic, sixteen black, three white. Three boys, one from each ethnic group, have fathers in their homes, and two of them are married. Otherwise, it’s mothers’ boyfriends. And some were problems.

 

One boy, let’s call him Jordan, didn’t dress out for exercise or ball practice. I asked him if we needed to do things differently so he felt comfortable dressing out, and he wouldn’t talk to me. Then I watched him walking, and recognized what had happened. He was walking the same way Logan and I were after we were gang-raped our freshman year of high school. He was being sexually abused. I put one of the more mature guys, José, in charge, and ducked out to make a quick phone call. Twenty minutes later a friend who was a physician’s assistant and a Licensed Clinical Social Worker showed up. He and Jordan spent an hour talking while I directed the rest of the boys in enough confusing physical activity that nobody noticed Jordan wasn’t there.

 

At our usual closing time, Jordan still wasn’t back. Jamal, the PA, told me we had no choice. We had to report our suspicions to the police. Jordan had admitted what his mother’s boyfriend was doing to him when his mother was at work. I called Dick, the head of team security, and Jordan’s mother, Danielle. I told Danielle I was taking Jordan out for dinner and ice cream and would bring him home as soon as I could. I did this with all the boys, so it wasn’t something unusual.

 

Dick met us at the hospital along with a CPD detective from their Sex Crimes squad. The PA was in helping a doctor with the rape exam, and came out once Jordan was comfortable with the doctor. I let Jamal handle the detective, then sit with Jamal and the detective while he interviewed Jamal. Then, I took everybody out for an all-you-can-eat buffet that included ice cream, and drove the gang (minus Dick) to Danielle’s apartment. Dick had some paperwork to file with the police first.

 

We got Jordan home and the detective took over. “Ma’am, Jordan has been hurt.” After about ten minutes everybody was crying, and Danielle was apologizing over and over to Jordan. It was pretty clear this was news to her. The detective took a statement from Danielle, and the PA left. A minute later Darius came in the door and saw all of us in the living room. He identified the detective (not difficult, they all buy their clothes at Shop ‘n’ Save) and started yelling. The door behind him opened forcefully, knocking him to the floor, and he pulled out a gun. Dick had him disarmed and in a full Nelson in seconds.

 

The detective took Darius in, and I told Danielle that I would be happy to spend the night on the couch so she and Jordan would
feel safe. Dick, who’s a lot more physically imposing than I, made the same offer. Danielle agreed to Dick staying (would have been my choice, too), and I left. I called the detective and Jamal and closed the loop.

 

Darius was denied bail when it was discovered he had already jumped bail the prior year on a second-degree murder charge. The city attorney, up to his eyeballs in work, was happy when Logan showed up to be his free paralegal devoted to Jordan’s case. Darius got 25 years and everyone else slept well.

 

I promise you, most of the stories about my boys’ groups aren’t this sad. The next problem question was about if a girl could get pregnant in a swimming pool where a guy had jerked off earlier. I assured him she could, but only if she was having sex with a guy. The jerk-off had nothing to do with it. The following awkward question was about my sexuality, and I’ll let you know the details next time. See you in two weeks.

 

 

Pandemic Journal, June 5, 2020

 mark@marktreble.com

 Pandemic Diary June 5, 2020

 Logan again. It appears that we’re going to Disney World the end of July to finish the season. Maybe. Sort of. At least, that’s what the rumors are. God knows what’s gonna actually happen. The protocols for dealing with all eventualities are eating up time and IQ points like mad. The team wants me to join the discussions just to get exposure to this stuff. Maybe I’ll be lucky and develop immunity. I had my first session today, and by the time I was out I wondered why we didn’t just administer the Law School Admissions Test at birth and smother everyone who passed.

 We fixed the issue of trading off nights for making dinner. I’ll make dinner from now on. If I can’t, we’ll order delivery. Should have done that from the beginning. Tommy tells me it’s expensive to order in all the time, and he’s probably right. And that’s OK, because the restaurant staffs and delivery guys have to make a living, too. We could afford to eat delivery every night, but why should we? I don’t mind cooking, and some times it helps just to go on autopilot and relax while doing mindless shit. Like cooking.

 Anyway, I made one observation today, that we ought to have a statement that in case of dispute we  will default to the assumption that all of us are adults, reasonable and prudent, who are making a shit ton of money by playing a game. Some junior member of the League Counsel’s office asked me to send that to him in writing, he’d like to think about it. Whatever.

 The team told me and Tommy that we were going to Orlando. All the teams are taking their reserves just in case. If you had a guy get the virus, and spread it to his roommate, and between them they infected half the team, everybody needed the reserves close by. As long as we were in reserve status, we drew 15% of league minimum, which is a whole lotta money. If we’re told to travel with the team in our reserve capacity, it goes to half of league minimum, which is more money than most people make in five years. If we’re activated, it goes to league minimum or whatever we’ve negotiated higher. That’s more money than I can imagine.

 I still need to translate at the clinic, so I called the Illinois nurses’ association. Many were furloughed because they worked at surgical centers that couldn’t see patients during the lockdown. I asked for them to put out the word that I needed two to function as a medical translator at a free clinic, the nurses would be contractors making a thousand a day. Within half an hour I had interviewed four and hired three. The first two would get two days a week each, and the third would get $500 a week to be available. The fourth one couldn’t speak Spanish. My first clue was when she asked me “How are you-o today-o?” I told her “Good-bye-o” and hung up.

 This is exciting. We might actually get to suit up for a real NBA game. Even if we don’t, Tommy will be doing the training work he’s good at, and I’ll be working with the guys. 

 

 

What I've been reading

mark@marktreble.com

 

What I’ve been reading over the past two months.

 I’m on a thrill ride, reading adventure-thrillers and a few mysteries. I had read all of John Sanford’s Prey Series to date in 1999, and dropped it. Over the past few months, I’ve read Silken Prey, Extreme Prey, Gathering Prey, Field of Prey, Golden Prey and Invisible Prey. I’m currently reading Twisted Prey. Sandford’s writing is excellent, his ability to describe a scene in a few words is among the best I’ve encountered.

 I’ve been trying out a few new (to me) authors. From Nolon King I’ve read No Justice and No Escape, the first two books in a series about a female detective and a clairvoyant who helps her anonymously. I believe I’ll read the remainder of the series, but I’m undecided about it. The same applies to Wayne Zurl’s Paradise series, about a small-town police chief in East Tennessee. I will probably read the rest of the series, but it won’t be a high priority.

 I’ve read most of James Harper’s ten novels about Evan Buckley, a private investigator. The books were of high quality through about book five, the began dropping. There was increasing reliance on shadowy organizations, mysterious groups of nefarious wrong-doers, to create the tension attendant to a thriller. Frankly, this is often a gimmick, easier to do than to keep developing the character of the villain, to make her or him less one-dimensional. I’ve now read the tenth book in the series, and there was no attention to detail in the villains’ characters. The mention of one of the multiple “bad guys” groups was supposed to take the place of the author’s hard work. I shall not be reading any more of them.

If you’re counting, you probably noticed that I’m reading about one book every day and a half. The average length of a book that I read is about 360 pages, so I’m reading about 240 pages per day. This is considerably slower than I used to read until about age thirty, but it does fill the hour and teaches me about how successful and unsuccessful authors write.

 

 

 

Pandemic Diaries, May 29, 2000

 

mark@marktreble.com

 

The Pandemic Diaries May 29, 2020

 

It’s Tommy, and I’m back. Holy Shit! Here I thought things couldn’t get worse. I’ve never been so wrong in my life.

 

This dude in Minneapolis was killed by Minneapolis police. That shouldn’t have happened. The police officer who knelt on the dude’s neck should be tried for murder. I don’t know a single person who isn’t outraged, and it seems everyone in the country is in agreement that this was a tragedy and police brutality involving African-Americans needs to be stopped. The victim, George Floyd, deserves justice.

 

Here’s where things get fucked up. We’re all in agreement, right? So, who are the protesters trying to convince? YES, LOGAN, I HEAR YOU, IT’S WHOM. NOW SHUT UP. Sorry about that, my husband corrects me about once a day, which is once too often. No, we’re not having a crisis in our marriage, I’m just satisfied with the state of my grammar. Logan isn’t, which I think is his problem.

 

So, we all agree this was a bad thing. I don’t need convincing. The mob is angry about police targeting unarmed black men for death. My brother, Antoine, looked into it and found a database that listed every police-caused fatality from last year. He found nine unarmed black men killed by police the whole last year. That’s nine too many, but it doesn’t sound like there’s unlimited racist brutality among the police.

 

In Minneapolis, a police station was burned down, and the Mayor ordered the police not to stop the mob. This is crazy. I wonder what half-baked ideas Mayor Lightbrain is going to come up with. There are crowds roaming the streets, despite lockdown orders because of the virus. The city ordered police to disperse crowds protesting the lockdown, and Lightbrain has ordered police not to use force to disperse people protesting this dude’s death. I stopped believing there was much science behind most of what our city and state are doing some time ago. This is just the cherry on top of the Sundae.

 

People are complaining about inequality for African-Americans, and I agree. We’ve tried to fix it for nearly sixty years now, just throwing money at it. It isn’t working. I’m not smart enough to know what we should be doing. I am, though, smart enough to know that if what you’re doing isn’t working, you should stop it and try something else. One of our black team members sent an e-mail to everyone on the team complaining about being oppressed. I answered it asking if being forced to take $8 million a year was part of the oppression. I hit reply all. Probably time to lay low for a while.

 

The shooting has started already in Chicago. This isn’t going to be good at all. There are protests all over the country about this. I agree that the inequality should be addressed, and that police brutality should be wiped out. I’ll be happy to march and carry a sign for that. But we’ve now got the clinic open four days a week to the public because of people getting trampled, hit by thrown rocks, and one poor guy caught fire when protesters threw some sort of fireworks at him. How does that help bring equality?

 

It’s my turn to make dinner, so I gotta go. I have forty-seven recipes that I’ve mastered. Creamy peanut butter and jelly on white bread, crunchy peanut butter and jelly on white bread, and forty-five variations. I’m adding pickles and potato chips to be sure it’s a balanced meal. See you in two weeks.