One and Done

The Steelers stumbled into the SBOWL and with that there remains a game. My commitment to the team this season has involved irrational insistence, commercialized hometown pride, and plain old fashioned sportsmanship. Does some fundamental part of my life thrive on gaming and conflict? Does this cause a shame reaction that has allowed me to deconstruct all of the untrustworthy cues of my modern American privilege? These aren't questions for a Steelers fan today. It is an oddity though, I can quickly determine that shame is the central feeling I should identify with as I willfully expose myself to all the hype, brutality, depraved role models, food, and commercials. Fittingly, I will skip hand in hand with my galfriend into that city of mine, the one I've always felt mixed and uneasy about. The one I swore to not settle in, the one that grows fonder as the heart spaces us apart. I can't wait to whisk a PGH stranger through its streets, wares, and delicacies. I can't wait to reembrace, to navigate neighborhoods I barely know the history of, to look for the landmarks I can ramble on about. Last night we watched a show about the ingenuity of humanity throughout the deserts of the world: the peril and persistence really. Of course my colonial disposition looks for the narrative, the redemption, in the form of a narrated victory, an individual's journey and success, a celebration of people whose hardships could indicate that they have no business, no time really, to celebrate. But of course they do, in their own way, for their own needs. The desert episode focused on water. Life requires water, life does not require chili. The powerful celebration of rain that ends months of drought, children rolling in the water, screaming at the joy of their opening skies. How can I conflate this with my region, the hammered screaming of a competitive conquest. Organized money and falsely fabled athletics. It seizes me with the might that many heavy things in this world would; could it really be as guttural and wrenching as rain.

This America I live in, Louis CK says we talk white people problems here because we don't have any other sort of problems to worry about, and you can't help but laugh at the relative rightness of that idea. Most of my emotions are filtered through experiences I am vaguely associated with, here's a few that come to mind:

1. I lived in a neighborhood on the outskirts of Pgh, PA. We have unity for our sports teams because of a string of victories across different sports in the '70s, coupled with a working class majority during that time period that identified with the grittiness and occasional unity of a hard fought, contact sports effort.

2. Films, sounds, and books (I should qualify, mostly novels). These are my most immediate opportunities to pour some of me out. I was raised by a reading specialist in a secure predominantly white, predominantly financially stable community. This gave me the opportunity to dramatically take in the importance of absorbing the taste for cultural literacy. I also had ample time on my hands because of our stability. All of these tendencies, and encouragement from my parents, were coupled with the rapid rapid development of computers and the internet alongside my growth. I suddenly could participate in an endless stream of introductions, opinions, conversations, and creativity. By proxy I absorbed a temperament that could recognize meaningful and powerful experiences rendered in a medium where I enjoyed the application of my constantly morphing POWERS OF DISCERNMENT. 31i73

3. The news. I was exposed to the conditions and hardships of reality through all sorts of branches of a hungry news media. They were able to expose angles of life, with all sorts of bents, at a steady pace to me. It taught me politics, agendas, and implementation. I learned to take serious the lives of others through an education in politics, journalism, and educational videos. I don't know how to conjure up more about this, it's sort of self evident to anyone who, through extended circumstances, has ended up reading this far into a blog post written by me, Ryan Joseph Gleason of Pittsburgh.

These are just a few off the dome. Okay, plenty of things of importance have happened in my life (and a proportionally appropriate tragedy could happen anytime). There are great examples that exemplify my own emotional challenges, but I don't want to defend them. Instead, I think it is important to identify the degrees to which I am removed from people who are experiencing things divorced from the pleasures and privileges of my stock. This is all jagged and funny at the moment, but I have to take it seriously. I mean, GO STEELERS GO GO GO. What fun to root! But also I mean what the fuck, I can't just be a steelersmaniac every day of my life, I best recognize a life where a steelers victory has little to no overt bearing, and instead, where the existence of things like the steelers and their beloved NATION subtly mean a life in the desert waiting to celebrate the miracle of more rain.