X+Y: Return of Voice of the Mountain

This is Coach Inlow when he was doing something he loved, but was at the end of his rope.

   

An old friend of mine from Boston... and, no, this is not turning into a limerick... Mario Moreira, once called me up and said I should be writing on a blog.  I had recently discovered "internet" and I was writing on The Zuckerberg Platform and "Mautty" - as his brother calls him - said I needed to be "blogging."

That was a new thing.  A blog.  What was once a blog, I guess, is now a podcast.  But I can't do that either.  Mario would tell me, "Bullshit!  You can too.  Just go on and do it, dumb ass."

That Mario.  Portugese people, man, whaddya do with 'em?

So I started this blog, back then it was The Voice of the Mountain, on or around 2012.  And I wrote off and on to get out of my system what was bothering me.  Some people do likewise with exercise.  Some people meditate.  You go and you find that place where nothing gets in.  Where you can focus.  Get lost and get found, right?

When I was a young man, until about the age of 40, I played soccer.  The zen thing about the game is that when I was in the middle of a soccer match, nothing else mattered.  No trouble followed me onto the field.  And on that field, I was in control.  So you exhausted yourself, reveling in your youthful fitness and expressing yourself uniquely in the game.

That guy, up there, in the photo?  That was me coaching soccer.  In the rain.  At the end of the line.  I was at the new artificial field at the Philipsburg-Osceola High School.  It is probably actually named "Memorial Field" or something.  I had always called it "The Yard." Which is better because it recalls fields of play... or prisons... but it never caught on.

I need to digress.  You go and name something "Memorial Field" and then you forget what you were supposed to remember.  You're remembering... soldiers, I guess.  You're driving down the highway and every bridge you cross is "So and So Memorial Bridge."  What a way to remember someone!  But it must have made someone feel better, I guess.   I think you should be able to take a picture of the sign that says "So and So Memorial Bridge" and be able to go to a profile of that person, so as to be properly reminded of who that person was. 

If you want to remember me, you can name the gigantic pine tree in Philipsburg's Project 70 soccer fields after me.  It's the only natural shade in the place.  Coaches in the future can tell their sweaty charges, "Go on over and rest a bit under Old Man Inlow."  That would make me happy.

This is a picture of me from before, at that same Project 70, when my heart was still in the game.  That big tree was out of the frame some 150 yards to the right.  

Some mom took this photo and put it on The Zuckerberg, proving that facebook wasn't entirely soul sucking.  

But this little dude was at his first practice and I asked him what was wrong.  "I'm scared of soccer!" he cried into my shoulder.  

Funny, I'm wearing that tattered old $10 Wal-Mart hoodie as I write this morning.  What's left of it anyway.  Comfortable old coat.  You can see my coveted United Flight 93 hat on the ground there.  I worked on that crash as a member of the state police.  Something to commemorate, that cap was lost along the way.  And I don't remember who that little dude was, or know who he became, but I remember his anxiety and that it was the realest problem in the world.  Something truly memorable.  That, friends, is what the game IS.

I had been the first ever coach at PO High School.  Back in 1993.  This masthead photo was taken by Sayed Karimushan in, maybe 2021?  The subject of that photo had come a long way from that scared-of-soccer day.  

The Mounties I was addressing in that photo were failing despite their obvious quality and COVID was coming for us all.  But just look at that guy!  Clearly, his heart was broken and was no longer in the game.  Clearly the game had passed him by.  And, boy, did his kids know it.

Someone asked when I retired that I take on the Jr. Hi kids.  I did so, and despite a lot of great young people, I was miserable.  I did not want to be there.  Maybe my world was falling apart.

I had coached since the 1970s as a teen-ager and before all these local soccer clubs sprung up.  And now, the game was just work.

I was moving on.

Today, this is my field of play.  This is the place I turn to be quiet and make sense of things.  I turn to the Blank Page.  As I have always done. 

And as I enter into the late chapters of this life, I am drawn to write it all down.  And I have come back to this old fashioned "blog" that Mario set me out on more than a decade ago.

The Voice of the Mountain.  I chose that name then because, being from these mountains in Central Pennsylvania, I respect The Mountain.  It is everlasting and scarcely changes in our little lifetimes.  And when it speaks, it speaks with power and resonance and only when it must.  And it cannot lie.  Think "Treebeard," only much bigger and much older.  The spirit and voice of Gaia.  Venerable.  Old.  True.

X+Y is the Voice of the Mountain... Just new.  I chose that title for a number of reasons also.  More current, it is the names of the human chromosomes about which everyone seems to be having their panties in an uproar about right now.  X+Y is the sum total of both axes of any graph.  It is the combining of two ideas or quantities in hopes of revealing... nice... The Truth.

Either way, then, in the same way that Lao Tzu, sick of the ways of the world, had set off to disappear into nature and was stopped by a peasant and convinced to write down his teachings, so The Mountain speaks.  X+Y.  The Philosopher + the Peasant.   Finally, I listen.  Perhaps, you hear.

...gotta fix this place up...

I had been fooling around with this thing called "Substack" this week.  It is a way to monetize      what you write.  And I could use some money to pay for my Jeep or fix this place up.  

But doing that turns writing - at least here - into work.  And then, I turn into that guy in the masthead.  And you... oh you... you turn into my boss.

And there is no amount of money available to make me go back to the Land of Bosses.  I don't want your email address.  You will not be tracked and there is no payment that I would take to use this space to sell you something.  Advertise this, motherfucker, cuz' I'm not selling anything.

But I DO want you to hear something.  Maybe think about the pathways that your mind actually works to fool you.  Maybe together we can figure out the important things.  Sharpen our wits.  Re-charge the old bullshit detector.  Think about the things that NEED memorializing. Maybe we can laugh about it all.

Because, in the place where you and I are the same, none of our differences exist.  We all need love.  We need shelter.  Food.  And... yes... Purpose.  How does one build Truth?  Credibility?  Honesty?  Kindness?  What if my Purpose is not to have a Purpose?

Echoing Neil Peart here.  "If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice."

Well.  Onward, then.  I'll see you tomorrow.  And the next day.  And the next.  And we'll, to cop a phrase, "get through this thing called life."

Here now, just to the left, is an entirely different person than the one you may have met before.  A stranger to the one in the masthead.  Come along.  This guy has some stories to tell!

Until next time... Enjoy!

P.S:

There once was a fellow from Boston

Who drank Boston Lager too often

He asked with a sigh

As he unbuttoned his fly

How much would another case cost him?

Sure.  You're welcome.