It had something to do with it…

“Mom, just go”

“No, I’ll be fine.”

“Seriously, Mom. Go to the doctor.”

“I’ll just lay down in bed. I’ll be fine.”

Fast-forward a couple of days. Now Mom is in the hospital. I told her to go to the doctor. Did she listen?

No.

The problem was she became dehydrated and desperately needed fluids. She’s fine now, but it could have all been avoided if the Mom in the situation would have listened to her child.

If there is one thing Mom was taught me it was to not mess around with stuff concerning health issues. My mother has been diagnosed with cancer twice since 2001, and we do not mess around with the slightest thing now.

I still remember walking in from school and my entire family being at my house. I had no idea why. It wasn’t my birthday. If they were there for anything it was a late anniversary surprise for my parents. I soon found out that was not the case, though.

“Hunter, we have something we need to talk about.”

“What? Is everything okay?”

“No, Not really.”

“What do you mean, not really? Dad, are you alright?”

“Hunter, it’s me.”

“What? What is it with you?”

“I have cancer.”

Hit me like a ton of bricks. Sixth grade. I was in sixth grade. I had no idea how to handle myself, but it all helped my family and me in the long run.

You know, usually that is it. A person has surgery then that is it. Sure, it takes some time to recuperate, but never a doctor every day for 40 days. This was the strangest thing to me. I didn’t really know how to take it. Yeah, everyone was scared, but as a sixth grader it was hard to really understand everything that was going on.

Up to this point in school I had never missed a day, and I didn’t handle hospitals that well, either. So, my mom made me go to school the day of her surgery. I was on edge all day. I could not eat, think clearly or function really in any way. I had no idea what was going on with anything. I hated being at school that day.

So, I did the kid thing and faked like I was sick. I knew what the flu was, so I just acted like I was sick to my stomach and felt queazy. It worked like a charm. Since my whole family was in Nashville at the hospital with Mom, I called my best friend’s mom to come pick me up. At least she would have something to tell me about my mom’s status.

Thankfully, everything went well, but we had no idea what would come in the few weeks ahead.

Forty treatments. Five days a week. Eight weeks straight. At least they were all at the same time during the day. Mom and Dad had a schedule: Leave at 9 a.m., get there by 10:30, treatment at 11, then eat lunch at around 11:45.

Little did I know that this tragedy would be such a turning point in my life.

While Mom would be recovering from the afternoon, people from our church would bring meals over. Not a night went by where there was not food at our house. People cared so much for her. It blew my mind. People that did not know our family were sending cards, calling us and making food for us. The outpouring of blessings shown by the members of our church was amazing.

Rewind a little bit. Before all this happened I was beginning to veer off the path that correlated to God. I started to believe that people within the church were hypocritical and not who they seemed to be. I was struggling with my faith at the time, and strangely enough, the situation that my family was in helped that immensely.

We have boxes of cards at home. Not just a small cardboard box, either. I’m talking about the ones that are about five feet long and about a foot deep. It blows my mind to think that people care that much about someone they may hardly know. Knowing that someone is praying for you continually is a feeling that I cannot describe.

This was not the end of things though. After Mom’s first battle with cancer was over, little did she know that she would have to fight the disease again two years later.

I was in eighth grade. I remember getting the phone call at school. Mom called to tell me that she had been diagnosed with cancer again. This time, though, in the other breast, and a totally different type of cancer. The two were not related in any way at all.  Her doctor at Sarah Cannon Cancer Center had never seen anything like this in all his years of practice.

We had to deal with everything all over again. The surgery, the treatments and the total exhaustion of each day. I say we, but really I mean Mom had to deal with it. She was the one defeating the disease. This time was no different, either.  People still sent cards, cooked us dinner, offered to drive move to her treatments and even offered to do laundry for us.

Dad owns his own business, so while he was tending to that I was either doing laundry, homework or cooking dinner. I learned a lot of things a lot faster than I had previously planned, but I’m OK with it.

This time I handled everything a lot better than the time before. I knew what to expect, I guess. I knew that with the power of prayer and God’s grace that everything would be OK, and it was.

My mom is by far the strongest woman that I’ve ever met. She works nine hours per day, she takes care of my father and me and does a ton of things at home that I cannot even begin to describe.  She’s amazing.

It’s unbelievable how God can turn such a tragic event into one that can bring someone closer to Him. He did it for me, and he will do it for you if you have faith.

John 16:33: “I have said these things to you, that in me you may have peace. In the world you will have tribulation. But take heart; I have overcome the world.”

 

It has it all

Baseball spreads half its players across a pasture, hides the rest in dugouts, and then, proudly aware that it is the only sport without a time clock, proceeds apace as though its fans do not have one either. Football, played on one hundred twenty yards of distant field in gigantic stadiums, packs twelve minutes of violence into sixty minutes of game time and two hundred minutes of real time. Basketball provides near constant action and often intimate attention, but when scoring occurs every twenty seconds, only the last hundred or so seem to matter, and they often unfold over such an excruciation of stops and starts and fouls and timeouts and team meetings that even the most dramatic finishes unfold like, well, watching paint dry.

It’s the red-headed immigrant step-child of the American sporting world, dismissed, frowned upon, and condescended to by a great many people who do not understand it, have never seen it played in person, and are therefore in little position to judge. It barely registers on the radar of millions of so-called sports fans, with precious little print coverage and TV ratings somewhere between the abject boredom of bowling and the torture of poker. It’s a bunch of guys in sweaters and shorts and ice skates, chasing a little rubber biscuit around a big, frozen parking lot.

You feel it as soon as you walk out of the concourse and into the seating bowl; the chill rises off the ice and ripens the air, filling your lungs and radiating a cool, rousing energy throughout your body. You take a deep breath, then another, and step forward into the light, to behold a gleaming, glistening rink below. Freshly mowed fields and polished hardwoods have their charms, but to my eye, neither can compare to the pure, pristine perfection of zambonied ice. And it only gets better once the game begins.

The ice becomes the background, the playground, the blank canvas on which a dozen artists take their shifts and make their marks and paint their works of flowing, darting, crashing beauty. They skate with equal parts power and poetry, propelling themselves up the ice and back down again, starting and stopping and flashing, gliding and cutting and flowing, reaching speeds of twenty-five miles an hour suspended on just a few millimeters of metal. Imagine strikers, linebackers, catchers, and point guards all doing what they do; now imagine them doing it on ice skates, with bullseyes on their backs, in pursuit of a ball the size of your fist, as it hurtles toward and away from them and back at them again, at almost one hundred miles an hour.

Everyone plays offense and defense simultaneously; there are no quarterbacks and safeties, no pitchers and hitters, no formal turns and changes of possession, just two teams of guys (or gals) doing it all at once, moving from attack to retreat and back to attack in the blink of an eye or the flick of a wrist, when every inch and every second and every possible point, whether it’s scored in the first period or the last minute, could win the game. The action continues, fevered and frenzied, unbent and unbowed, until someone scores or someone breaks a rule, not even stopping for breaks or rests or substitutions; teams and players change on the fly, jumping over the boards and hustling back to the bench, always in service to the rhythm and flow, sometimes going two or three or four (or more) minutes between breaks in the action. It’s the fastest game on earth, and also the most frenetic.

Of course, hockey sounds almost as great as it looks. The swish and swoosh of the skates cutting through the ice. The bang and boom of bodies crashing against the boards. The rattle of the glass shaking after a heavy forecheck. The tap-tap-tap of sticks on the ice, facing off or mucking in the corners or calling out for a cross-ice pass. The smack and whoosh of the puck rocketing off a stick blade. The thwack of the puck hitting the glass when it sails over the net, followed by the hard tap of it falling to the ice and back into play. The grunts, the whoops, the chips and shouts of players skating, checking, grinding, and shooting, barking orders to their teammates and yapping at their opponents. The blare of the horn and the wail of the siren when the puck crosses the goal line or pops the back of the net. The exultant roars and chants of the crowd that, 17,132 voices strong, quickly obscure both the horn and the siren. The great, giddy ringing in your ears that follows you out the door and onto the street and all the way home, sometimes even to the next morning, one more sensual reminder of this most sensual of games.

There are only two referees. There are no visits to the mound, no endless succession of pick-off attempts, no cascading pitching changes; the game has neither the time nor the patience for such piffle. There are no huddles, no audibles, no waiting for plays to be radioed into their empty helmets; plays and formations are called on the fly, run from memory, and most often improvised in brilliant bursts of athletic creativity. Each team gets only one timeout. There are fewer television timeouts in a whole game than there are in any quarter of an NFL game. The time between prime scoring chances is usually measured in seconds, not in innings or minutes or hours.

Hockey is home to grace and grit, to brains and brawn, to prolonged periods of brute force followed by sudden explosions of astonishing elegance. It elevates teamwork and celebrates self-sacrifice. It has an annual award for sportsmanship and gentlemanly conduct. It inspires awe and honors tradition and does both at once, at the end of each season, when its two best teams meet to win and hold and see their names engraved upon the most hallowed, the most regal, the most revered trophy in all of professional sports.

There’s one trophy. It’s not like other sports where they make a new trophy each year. Lord Stanley’s cup is the one and only one. There are superstitions, there are rituals, and there is emotion. One day, when Nashville wins the cup, see if one of their players does not eat cereal out of it. It’s perfectly OK, because it’s hockey. It’s understood. You know, like dropping the gloves when approached. It’s something that is done. Because it’s hockey.

Something that, if you don’t know, you should know. Something that, most especially, you should see and hear and feel at least once live and in person, at any arena in the country, where the boys of winter carry out their trades and prowl their ices with the energy and exuberance and maybe even the innocence of an overgrown bunch of kids who, with nothing more than a piece of rubber, a few friends and a frozen pond, believe they can take sixty simple, scintillating minutes and give you the elemental rush of the coolest, greatest, something-est game on earth.

Unzipped

Sitting in his snug Wrangler, the footballer did not think of what would come next for him. Would he retire for the third time? Would he appear in court…again? Or would he step back into the confines the Metrodome to play yet another season in the NFL?

While he didn’t know then, a certain lady knew exactly what he was going to be doing.

Jenn Sturger had his phone number. Well, to be frank about it, Jenn Sturger had a lot more than this lad’s number. She had pictures. You know, “those” kinds of pictures.

One can wonder how pictures like “those” kinds of pictures get leaked, but it all comes down one thing.

Stupidity.

This is the story of Brett Favre and his wrongdoings.

There was a time when a man named Bretty was with the Jets. This was not a sing-song story for Mr. Favre, however.

Somehow or another deadspin.com got word of Brett’s shortcomings and posted a story about the issue. After that, the NFL and every media outlet known to man heard about it.

While Jenn never officially talked to Deadspin about the issue, she leaked pictures and voicemails about Brett’s pursuit of her.

I just don’t understand. These professional athletes have it all. They have the money, fame and they’re playing a game that they love for a living. Somehow, a man’s midlife crisis can change everything.

Maybe Brett is just trying to be like Tiger Woods, Greg Oden or Ben Roethlisberger. Who am I to say?

I mean, they’ve all been the best at their respective sport at one point in their careers, so maybe this is Brett’s way of hanging around.

Keep your pants zipped up, just a word of advice. Maybe if you do that you could be a host on Saturday Night Live instead of being emulated in a skit about crotchless jeans.

Brett, you should be ashamed of yourself. Your wife beat cancer, and now she should beat you.

 

City of Shanklin no longer kosher after recent crimes

Two pigs and a wolf are dead after a streak of vandalism occurred just outside of Shanklin last week.

Oh, pigs are flying? No, cows are falling.

Did you hear about those cows that fell on the oil rig off the coast of Japan? Yeah, me either.Apparently the New York Times thought otherwise. Without an evidence supporting their claim, the world renowned paper ran the story about dangerous environmental endeavors.

From the Times:

“An article on Jan. 16 about drilling for oil off the coast of Angola erroneously reported a story about cows falling from planes, as an example of risks in any engineering endeavor.No cows, smuggled or otherwise, ever fell from a plane into a Japanese fishing rig. The story is an urban legend, and versions of it have been reported in Scotland, Germany, Russia and other locations.”

Really, NY Times? The writer of this story obviously had never heard of Snopes.com. And what about the editor? How does this story slip past a NY Times editor?

If cows are being smuggled out of countries and used as bombs on Japanese Oil Rigs I am almost 100 percent sure that it would be a trending topic on Twitter just because of the obscurity of the whole situation.

Thumbs down for you, NY Times, thumbs down.

After doing some digging I found the original article. Here is the paragraph about the falling cows:

“There is an element of uncertainty in every complicated engineering endeavor. “In July 2003, in the Pacific, a Japanese fishing boat was sunk by a flying cow,” Robert Bea told me. Bea is a professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, and a leading scholar of risk; he also spent many years working in research and management at Shell. The cow, it turned out, was part of an illegal cattle shipment bound from Anchorage to Russia; as the plane approached its destination the smugglers became nervous about their cargo and began shoving it out of the plane. “No risk analysis can ever be complete. No one can predict a flying cow.”

I don’t know what is worse, running a quote that has little fact behind it, or trying to support the quote by saying he is a professor at Berkley. I think we all know what REALLY goes on at Berkley. I think Dr. Bea may have been a little higher than the imaginary planes that dropped the cows on the oil rig.

Just sayin’…

Be spontaneous, go to StL

This summer a friend and I decided to drive to Saint Louis for a few days. Six and a half hours later we were taking in all the sights. We stayed on the West side of town, which was lovely. There were gelato stands everywhere, the food was incredible and the music was even better. We hit up all the touristy spots, too. We went to the Saint Louis Arch, the zoo, the City Museum and a Cardinals game.

30 Minutes with The Civil Wars

The Civil Wars, a duo made up of Joy Williams and John Paul White, were gracious enough to sit down with me before one their shows a few weeks back. I asked them about their new album, how they got together and how their music tasted. It’s all below, check it out.

You Rule. I Rule. These are rules.

1.Never stop thinking. This is important. If someone ever says to you ‘You need to stop thinking so much,’ call them ignorant in your head and keep thinking deeper. It is this mentality that breeds stupidity and sheeple. Your mind is the most important tool you have, if you stop using it, it will atrophy. Question everything.

2. Stare into space blankly and don’t mentally punish yourself for doing it, even if it is for that split second. If you have a problem with staring blankly, think of it as daydreaming.

3. Root Beer sucks after having spicy food.

4. Everything is going to be just fine. If you worry about acne, you’re going to get a pimple.

5. Don’t be afraid to talk about anything. You shouldn’t be afraid of reality.

6. Everyone is a hypocrite.

7. You are all original. Every life experience is case sensitive and unique. Every time you wake up or go to the bathroom or quote someone else, you are becoming more you than anyone has ever been.

8. Do pointless things. Don’t actively restrain or hide yourself from the redundant.

9. Stop rushing. Shut up and embrace the sound of silence.

10. Religion shouldn’t be taught, it should be found. No one should tell you what to believe except you.

11. Don’t eat Taco Bell. It’s 35 percent meat. Just don’t do it.

12. Going to the bathroom is not a right nor a privilege. It’s an act of nature.

13. Talking to yourself is healthy. Is there anyone that you have more in common with?

14. There is no such thing as time. The sun never sets or rises. Days and years don’t exist. There is only your life. Earlier today you were born and death is predicted later in the evening.

15. We will always be in a transitional phase. Look outside and know that everything will be replaced at some point. This existence is temporary.

16. Its not half empty or half full. Its half a glass.

17. Every now and then take something that you see everyday and try to see it in a different light. Renew its existence.

18. Be happy, but don’t force it.

19. You will always succeed in trying.

20. We are all crazy. Every person you read about in the history books had some kind of ‘disorder’, they just knew how to use it.

21. We are all about as similar as we are different.

22. Ideas are just as valuable as people. Why do you think we keep making people?

87. Numbers don’t have to go in order.

24. Words will always be just words. Love is just another four letter word, only the feeling is real.

25. Ask a child for advice. They may not know much, but they know what is important.

26. Prove you’re alive. Do anything from dancing in the supermarket to screaming aloud during a moment of silence. Remind the world you are still here.

27. Don’t take anything, even this, too seriously.

Harper’s Ferry, Harper’s Index. It’s all the same in the end, right?

My life in numbers.

Number of siblings I have: ½
My home address: 716
Last four digits of my phone number: 7526
Predators games I’ve been to: 127
Preds jerseys I own: 7
Songs I’ve written: 24
Songs in my iTunes library: 8,652
Number of those songs I have not listened to: 100
Times I have been kicked out of a basketball game: 3
Tweets I’ve tweeted: 3,883
Favorite Number: 15
Favorite temperature: 72
Times I’ve had the Boston Herald steal my photos: 1 too many
Time’s I’ve messed up: 9999 and counting