Family sports are always fun, whether you're practicing with the kid or taking them to the game. But the sporting life. . . . . I'm totally catching up on the concept. My parents didn't necessarily have "competitive blood" as milquetoast social workers and never quite understood "that heart of darkness" that came with absolute, total struggle. Pick a daffodil and count the petals, a mental dalliance of defining "what effort is" then there's the rat-pit of outright competition.

There's always arguments over which kind of games are better for children-- ones that encourage "the grinding down" slug-out of "total war" like the board game, "Monopoly", or others that induce cooperation toward a socially-constructive goal. What they forget are when young men form teams, or wolf packs, and focus on destroying the other team with a few "ground rules" thrown in just to make the game a bit more interesting than total anarchy.

The rules themselves can not be taken as the ultimate existential authority, "because rules are made to be broken" but the players submit to the referee, a member of the justice league, like players willing to be part of "the sports nation".

If only living under our nation's laws could be that much easier, men able to declare their own free states or leagues of authority instead of being broken into "the one true seal" maintained by armies, navies, and police. It's like the World Wrestling Federation (WWF) that became so huge that it cornered all the regional circuits and consolidated it "under one roof". There's nothing that says you can't start your own league, but ultimately you dance to Vince McMahon's fiddle. Because governments are like gangs that run things-- you pay them "protection money", or taxes, in exchange for services for the right to be left alone, to survive and thrive. Some may bewail the injustice that they must pay anything, but such is the nature of the world. . . . . going all the way back to Genghis Kahn and other warlords of the primeval steppe where you will find "Conan the Barbarian" sitting on a throne with a crown resting mightily upon his heavy brow.

But even within "The Sports Nation", or any nation, you have characters who disregard the rules or "tweak things" to their advantage in a strange shadow-land that in one sense, "is not in the spirit of the game" but then again absolutely is. Take performance-enhancing drugs. Any player is going to push as hard as he can while finding any scrap of an advantage that's going to lean in his favor because it's "HIS JOB" to win, his heart flared up with the competitive spirit. It funnels, like a cyclone, into archetypes of glory and heroism and ego transcendent and least of all, feeling secretly guilty that you get paid all this money at what most would consider a semi-frivolous occupation. Yes, while others sweat it out at **worse jobs** in hell-holes around the world and don't get to live out their dreams. You want to be "the best value"/dollar and not let the club down who took you onboard as "a young, scared rookie" with shaking, colt-like legs.

Performance-enhancing drugs? We take them all the time. It's your coffee in the morning. That candy bar in the mid-afternoon when you're beginning to feel a bit drowsy with the lazy sun shining on your desk, glaring off your computer monitor. It's the prescription drugs we take for any number of ailments, becoming permanently dependent upon them like weaker nations on IMF bail-out money. . . . . nothing short than the cornucopia horn of plenty for the pharmaceutical companies windmilling in the money through a brutal cycle of Americans expecting too much out of life while putting in too little personal investment with hard work and discipline. If your dick's soft, you probably don't need those little blue minty Viagra pills as much as a healthy diet and a fair amount of vigorous exercise to get your testosterone back up.

And sports fans on the sidelines find fault with players living out the maximum degree of their testosterone levels? I've seen plenty of guys vent their wrath at the "A-Rod's" of the world, while they themselves live in a strange shadow-land that "Officer Friendly" and the local judge would not approve of, or would barely tolerate. Though these characters weren't living within "the spirit of the law", the community let it go because it was "the law of the world".

This was what freedom was all about. . . . . either to become the mightiest Titan the world had ever seen or a cruel-eyed "tweaker" sitting around a jury of empty beer glasses to relieve him of the misery of his squalid existence and not passing muster as a credible voice of chicken-necked valor whose stump was the small-time talker and whose ticket in life led right to "Looserville". Even a daffodil-plucker has more sense than that and can become something once he makes up his mind to do so, milquetoast upbringing or not.

Give artistry "a sporting chance"
. . . . . and it may surprise you!