Two one zero

Here we are. The football world is teetering on the edge of yet another optimistic season. No matter your colors, you feel good about your team at this point. Everyone is undefeated and dreaming of the Rose Bowl. I think this week is too often the sweetest for Carolina fans, but this year the preseason is different. We hold a sterling ranking with subdued speculation in lieu of the standard hype. That is the Carolina way.

"In 2010 we will be the strongest," I already admitted to myself today. It's true. We will be ready to take on the world next year with a speedy, mature defense and developed offense. We will explode onto the national scene with a neutral-site matchup against the LSU Tigers. The 'Hoos in Hooville will lose the streak. All these things I know. 2009 is the final year of doubt.

But college football is a sport of doubt. The national favorite needs quite a bit of luck on the long road to the title. That means we need more than quite a bit of luck. Sportswriters said only twenty teams have more of a claim to Pasadena than the Tar Heels, but we do not have to beat all of them to get there. We have to win games to get there. To be specific, we have to win all our games to get there.

Last year when we were 2-0 and sitting on a 17-3 lead at home against Virginia Tech, the faithful must have wondered. Is this it? Has Butch delivered his vision that only the few of us believed could happen? I saw the score in an Iowa City bar and did not allow myself such lofty hope. Ninety minutes later my instinct proved correct. Our quarterback was out indefinitely. The backup lost the game. And worst of all, my die-hard friend sounded hardly dead. She sounded the way I felt when I saw that 14-point tease of a lead.

And here we are again. Carolina will have a metaphorical 14-point lead for the next two seasons. We only need a killer instinct to go with our athletic prowess to keep that advantage. Cue Marvin Austin.

“Just go out there and blow some people up," he said last week. "Go out there and be hunters. When they snap that ball, that ball is the issue. If you’ve got that, we will come and get you, and if your mama got that ball, we will come and get her, too.”

Shake your dreadlocks, young man. Bounce beside the Tar Pit before the game with your line. Enjoy yourself while we enjoy ourselves strolling through Polk Place, clenching our fists in time to the beat of the drum corps. We will sniff through the thick smell of hot barbecue to find the first hints of September's autumnal perfume. Little girls in cheerleading uniforms will straddle their fathers' necks down the walk while little boys pet Rameses by the Bell Tower. We will drink our beer, cook our burgers and throw our beanbags with family and old friends from alma mater who were lost to years gone by.

Carolina will be born again to us. She will come to life as poplar leaves fall to stone walls. We will hear her slow chorale on the Wilson steps and boisterously march through her hedges. We will rediscover fond memories like they happened yesterday. We will revel in old-time traditions and new found enthusiasm. We will drink from the Old Well and look to the sky when the bell tolls. We will be young and vibrant as we were with fifteen credit hours and a Thursday night plan.

It will be so good to be home.

The tortoise and the hare

My friend Daniel challenged me last week to a footrace to be held the night before the Citadel game at Hooker Field. I do not remember the circumstances that brought about the challenge. I must have provoked him with a fork.

Daniel studies exercise physiology in graduate school and reads books on the human body for fun. He recently personalized his studies and lost 20 pounds of what he considered extra weight. As his friend, I did not notice the weight loss. I thought he looked like a healthy, hefty man before and after. He will hate me when he reads that. To be fair, he and Ryan have made accurate assessments of my own health.

"You looked like you weighed nothing," Ryan and Daniel have said about my physical state in Charlotte, something even I was worried about at the time. I once wrote a long list of all my Charlotte health problems; losing 20 pounds was at the top of the list. I did not look good. When your friends tell you that you have or had a problem, they are always correct.

My adolescent years taught me to hate being skinny, so I lifted weights through college. I had a relatively heavy muscle weight and felt good about it. Then I taught and shriveled up until I had the physique of a high school math teacher.

Anyway, I am happy Daniel lost weight if he thought it was an important thing to do. I suppose everyone sees themselves in a more unfavorable light than the people they know. Maybe that is nature's insurance policy on self preservation. Others know the truth, but the self lies.

Daniel might be the second healthiest person I know, and he is without doubt healthier than me. I suspect I am on the road to hypertension and heart disease while my body hides the symptoms. Daniel grows vegetables out of the ground and eats them. No, I am not kidding.

But I doubt Daniel is faster than me. He certainly was neither fast nor coordinated in college. He once halted a sanctioned game of inner tube water polo after he fell out of his tube and could not get back in. The other team did not have to stop playing its plus-one advantage to watch him struggle, but they did. He tired of the exercise after a couple minutes and climbed out of the pool to try to jump onto the tube. No, it did not work. He later let rip a string of expletives about inner tubes that he only matched when later losing a game of Nintendo's RBI Baseball.

Back to the race. At first I was intrigued that Daniel thought he could beat me in this 100-yard dash, and then I started to think he might. Many of our friends think he is the outright favorite. Only one person picked me. The question is whether his offensive-lineman legs have limbered enough to catch up to my digressing speed.

The horse race fan in me sees this as a betting opportunity, but I have not seen any official money on the table. I will not put any money down. I will approach the race like a horse. I will prance around before the race. I will run like hell during the race. But really I want to eat some food afterward.

Given this attitude and Daniel's license to kill after he reads this, he will probably have the odds. That means the big money bet will be on me, a guy whose New Year's resolution was to cancel his gym membership. But that same guy always had the green light after reaching first base for Libertyville High before he broke his face like the bad ass he was. Speed kills.

Rock the Cradle with me

Franklin Street bars close doors, sell to new owners and open again under new names with old feels. The Varsity is gone, but I can live without it. Pedestrians can eat good Mexican food if they jog with their mouths open. The girls wear dresses, and the boys talk loud while the homeless ask for change. Shoppers look for used books, clothes and music. People wonder how Chapel Hill has a brothel. It's all still Franklin Street.

Cat's Cradle is one of the last remaining classic names downtown, and I never take advantage of it. My job became manageable today for the first time in three years, so I decided to commit to a few weekday shows at the Cradle. I want to love it again like I used to.

Cat's Cradle's Web site is organized well for quick listens. Here are the shows that sounded good to me. The links go straight to the music samples pages.

James McMurtry, Wednesday, Sept. 16
Ra Ra Riot, Wednesday, Sept. 30
Andrew Bird, Wednesday, Oct. 7 and Thursday, Oct. 8
Blitzen Trapper, Friday, Oct. 9
Lucero, Tuesday, Oct. 13
Dr. Dog, Wednesday, Oct. 21
The Old Ceremony, Friday, Nov. 6
Chatham County Line, Saturday, Nov. 7
Blind Pilot, Monday, Nov. 9

Five four three

Where did the Saturdays go? I traveled in recent weeks and neglected my weekly countdown. Yesterday I went to Busch Gardens in Williamsburg and saw one of my best buds. People say he is quiet, but the truth is he only talks when he has something to say.

"Eighteen days until it starts," he said with clear eyes. True.

The news this week for the Heels was pessimistic. Our offensive linemen dropped like flies in physical practices. One player left after a misdemeanor assault charge, and another gave up his last year of eligibility to move on with life. A third tore his ACL. The coaches talked about changing player positions while forging ahead with early afternoon practices in stifling heat. As a fan who never played football, I have to wonder why hundreds of beastly offensive linemen don't knock down doors to play in Chapel Hill. I know it has to do with NCAA scholarship limits, but come on.

I would adjust my diet to lard, whey and whole milk and apply for graduate school in the next two weeks if I knew it would help my team. The problem is that I play for another team that needs me to stand on my feet, deliver instruction and maintain normal bowel movements during an eight-hour workday.

But the economy is bad. You know it is. You probably have unemployed male friends. You might have unemployed female friends who would forgo their figures for one season to get a piece of this gridiron action. Tell them all to apply for medical school and gorge themselves. All we need is a line!

All the other pieces are in place. The wide receivers will come around soon enough. The offensive backfield has experience. We finally have the smash-mouth defense that makes watching football fun. Our kicker's last name is Barth. A few more big bodies are all we need.

Sometimes even a little body can get the job done. Ask Kendric Burney. My friend Will raised his glass after this hit and exclaimed, "That is University of North Carolina Tar Heel football."

This game put Carolina up against Rutgers on their turf in the shadow of the New York skyline on Thursday, September 11. The nation watched Carolina win its first out-of-state game in too many attempts with a blowout win. The victory set the 2008 pace in the same way Connecticut and East Carolina could pave the way for a 2009 BCS run. And we got to sing our song in Jersey.

A letter to a stranger

Congratulations on becoming a corps member. I know you are up to your ears in planning and paperwork now. You might be wondering what the hell you are doing. The answer is: the right thing.

I don't remember feeling courageous as an applicant, but I do remember how it felt during those two years to drive to school with the odds stacked against me - against us. I want you to know that the effort and time you will put forth, your sacrifice, and the change you will bring about are shared among us. You will never be alone in your vision.

Do not forget to be yourself. If you used to go out to have a good time, keep doing it. You will hear many voices as a corps member. Do not forget to listen to your own.

They asked us to share a story with you. All mine would be like the ones you have already heard except one: a police dog nearly mauled me on my first day. I teach in North Carolina. I was in the Charlotte corps. Contact me if you need to talk to someone who has been in the fire. Best of luck. I feel vindicated in my efforts as younger, more energetic people like yourself fight for equity.

New York

This post is not quite tidy. Now I know why travelers write a post per day instead of this.

Wednesday

My college friend Sergio hosted my girlfriend and me for five days in his nicely priced Spanish Harlem apartment that sat atop a six-flight climb on 118th Street and 1st Avenue. His mother, who left the city later that night, met us on the street and made us feel at home while Sergio was at work at the Jewish Theological Seminary of Columbia University.

"This is his bachelor pad," she explained as she looked inside a Cool Whip container and found an odorous mold. "He likes it here. I come up to see him often. The neighborhood is not as bad as I thought it would be."

The neighborhood had several late-night convenience stores and Patsy's Pizzeria for our around-the-clock needs. The subway station was a ten-minute walk away. Friends from Chapel Hill who had stayed with Sergio months earlier told us not to walk late at night, but we did anyway and survived.

We ascended the Empire State Building soon after we said our goodbye to Sergio's mom. We shared one audio tour speakerphone, which forced my girlfriend to stand on her toes and myself to angle my body into the observatory walls. In this manner we listened to an Italian guy tell us about his city with lots of "now listen" and "this is the beauty of New York" and "see over there" and "my father came across that bridge with 17 cents in his pocket."

That night we bought tickets to "The 39 Steps" with a false hope it would be good. Before the show we found a decent outdoor restaurant called Mother Burger with $2 PBRs and a tiny bathroom in which I changed into theater clothes like Superman. The play had a lot of characters, some of whom spoke little English, and only four cast members. I felt stupid, but my girlfriend thinks I am smart.

Thursday

We took the subway to Union Square to have lunch with my Old East friend Victor. Victor is a born New Yorker who works for an Hispanic civil rights nonprofit that gives him big lunch breaks when his boss is not around. He and my girlfriend talked about crying when Dobby died in Harry Potter. Victor missed Chapel Hill, but I knew enough about New York after 24 hours to understand he was home.

We split with Victor and walked to Strand Book Store. I bought Don DeLillo's "Falling Man," a post-9/11 novel that actually refers to the book store in which I bought it. I am still working on this one; it is dense. I called my sister when we reached Greenwich Village because she lived there as an adolescent ballerina.

"Find where I lived," she said. I never did, but I remembered how it looked 13 years ago and how my mother cried in the Chicago airport when she left.

My girlfriend stopped in Chinatown to look at fake bags. Actually, she looked at real bags with fake names on them. I perused the bowler hats and obscene T-shirts. The merchandise vendors spoke in nouns as we walked by.

"Hats," one sharply said. "Bags. Water. Glasses." I got it, I got it. She had lots of stuff to sell.

We finally stopped at the base of the Brooklyn Bridge to visit with my high school friend Andrew. Andrew is a trader who loves New York more than Chicago but cheers for the Cubs in person when they come to town. His girlfriend finished a two-year Teach For America commitment and decided to stay at her placement school for the coming school year. Bravo.

"She did not drink the Kool-Aid," he said. Bravissimo. Andrew displayed a confident, affable discourse that I miss from my high school days among the leaders of today. We talked about some of them. Danny tries to cure cancer at Stanford and will marry his fiancee in due course. Nolan flies in an F-16. Jason is at Georgetown Law. Sophia works for Goldman, but I would see her in a couple days.

I asked Andrew if he thought New Yorkers stood outside their apartment buildings for no apparent reason. He grinned.

"Stoopin'," he explained with a half grin. In that moment he became a New Yorker to me.

Andrew walked us to Ground Zero. New York buzzed all around. It felt like a popular urban theme park next to a new ride under construction. We asked a couple workers what we could see as first-time visitors. They pointed us toward a small break in the tall fence meant to obstruct view. We saw nothing but a construction site that had not yet risen above the ground. I thought, perhaps correctly, that the city had removed all memorials and would restore them upon Freedom Tower's completion. I thought about the empty air, the New Yorkers around me and the unread book in my backpack. I thought about my friends and family.

"I was in Mrs. Gongol's second period class," Andrew said.

We remember.

Vivian, my friend's girlfriend, appeared and took us back to and across the Brooklyn Bridge for our first New York pizza at Grimaldi's. The walk on the bridge was long but nice; we turned frequently to gaze at the skyline and take pictures. Vivian, another true New Yorker, told us her father once gave her and her brother money to go to the World Trade Center observatory. They never went. She told her dad the truth years later when the towers were gone. She also told us about her work this summer as a public defender in the city. We listened to Vivian's tales of defending a flustered transvestite.

Grimaldi's had a short waiting line on the sidewalk and a surprise on the inside: no air conditioning. It did have delicious pizza and cheap wine for its pedestrian clientele. We walked to a place on the river for ice cream and saw hundreds of cop cars and boats speed toward Manhattan's southern tip. We looked on the news for the story later that night but found nothing.

We split with Vivian at a subway station and took a long ride back to Spanish Harlem. New York was fun and exhausting.

Friday

Either I promised my girlfriend we would see Harry Potter in New York or she told me we would. I probably failed to listen and declared what I thought was a generous promise but she knew was evidence of guilt. I thought the film was OK but could only understand the plot as good versus evil. The bad people did bad things, and this scared us. We were sad when the good people suffered. Yes, I cried a bit. Why the pointing of the wands?

We strolled through Times Square, which looked a lot like Vegas, looking for a couple empty chairs since the city recently cleared a certain area of traffic and delivered it to exhausted pedestrian tourists. Ripley's Believe It Or Not almost seduced us with its upside-down hallway, but the admissions charge pushed us out the door and into the "Avenue Q" lottery line, which we won.

After we won we luckily found Junior's, a delicious cheesecake place that Sergio recommended. We sat in the first row for the best musical I will ever see. "Avenue Q" starred several muppets who taught us adult lessons that Sesame Street omitted. The catchy numbers included "It Sucks To Be Me" and "I Wish I Could Go Back To College." Duh. This musical was timeless. I mean this musical is timeless.

We had a couple drinks at the Times Square Hard Rock Cafe, watched a Michael Jackson music video and went home. The next day we would finally be with Sergio.

Saturday

Central Park was big. It covered about fifty city blocks on each side, so it was more of a collection of parks than a park itself. The three of us rode rented bikes around the perimeter after Sergio bargained like a Chinatown pro. We saw a chess conservatory, children's playgrounds, the reservoir, music festivals, horse-drawn carriages, bicycle-drawn carriages and only one pissed New Yorker. I was enchanted.

My girlfriend and I rode back to Sergio's apartment to prepare for a night out with the aforementioned Sophia, her sister Michelle and her boyfriend J.B. They recommended Ippudo NY, a Japanese ramen restaurant. Now listen carefully. This is my new all-time favorite restaurant. It was trendy, reasonable and delicious. I never ate ramen before, so I could not compare it to the cheap stuff. The broth tasted better than anything I had ever dreamed about.

J.B. was exceptionally kind and talkative. He works for himself as an upstart financial adviser with a few friends and one investor. We snuck young Michelle into a couple SoHo establishments and danced. Sophia and I talked about our times at Libertyville High until we realized the unusual nature of discussing a Midwestern canned food drive over $9 beers in downtown Manhattan.

Sunday

We went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. We could not stay for long since we promised Sergio we would meet him for a late lunch. The museum was sort of vanilla. We might not have been in the right wing for us. The American wing offered some familiar works like the female bust "America." I am not an art museum person.

After lunch with Sergio, we followed him to Central Park on his way to work. We sat on a rock next to a men's softball game for an hour. A small family gathered nearby. The mother made an octopus from balloons. She approached us, and we discovered that she was an off-duty, professional clown.

"If you ever need a clown," she hypothesized, "here is my business card." Sweet.

We walked back to the chess conservatory that we observed earlier to play a game. The supply room was closed, but a few players brought their own sets and hustled strangers. One guy, possibly named Jackass, challenged an Hispanic father of two, possibly named Protagonist.

Protagonist accepted, and his kids wandered off to play and watch from afar. Jackass unloaded a set from his backpack, and the two men agreed on a speed game. We decided to stay.

"Are you sure you know how to play," Jackass jeered after questioning his opponent's move.

"Yes," Protagonist quietly protested.

The game progressed until Protagonist pulled an unexpected sequence of moves for the beautiful upset.

"Oh!" Jackass gasped. "You got lucky!" We left with the sweet feeling of an upset victory.

We walked to Columbus Circle and rode a down escalator into Sergio's workplace, Whole Foods. This was the largest grocery store in the world, and Sergio was in charge of customer service at the bottom of the escalator. We talked for awhile and then walked through the stinky cheese aisle. The checkout lines were so long that store employees held large placards to display approximate waiting times.

We left and called Vivian for a second meeting at a Cuban restaurant. Our friends were great for the entire trip.

Monday

We had accomplished everything except for seeing the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island. We let those go and instead rode to Tom's Restaurant, a breakfast diner better known as Monk's Cafe in "Seinfeld." The show used only the outside of the restaurant for its scene transitions. The actual inside was cozier and more authentic than the one you know. Tom's sat a couple blocks from Columbia University, so we strolled its quad before returning to Sergio's to pack for our return flight. Columbia was tiny but beautiful. It starts with a "C," ends with an "A," has eight letters and represents with light blue and white. Go . . . Lions?

The gate attendant at the airport offered us two $400 travel vouchers to take another flight home. We accepted. I have a compelling reason to get a passport and pick a city. I will travel abroad next summer.

Thoughts

New York is like nowhere else. The city is the world. I could not tell you how many languages I listened to on subway rides, on the streets and in Central Park. The spirit of the city is its sense of possibility and optimism. This was the gateway of America for most of its history, and it still stands as an image of the promised American melting pot.

My high school history teacher once told me that Chicago was a great American city and New York was a great international city. I understand why he said that, but I consider New York as patently American.

They came from the four corners in search of freedom in this new world, this New York. They opened businesses, built buildings, dug tunnels and educated. They sold hot dogs and played chess on Spanish Harlem street corners. They segregated. They desegregated. They segregated again. They argued at times about issues of race and religion. They learned from their differences yet understood what they had in common and passed this knowledge through the generations for a better America from Brooklyn to Los Angeles.

The Italian guy from the audio tour spoke about a rescue worker he knew who worked at Ground Zero in the days after 9/11. He said his friend knew he would not find any survivors but was still looking for something. He said he was looking for his freedom as New Yorkers have for centuries.

Real cake

I do not like to watch television, but I do because I am American and have American people in my life. I have to watch what the people I love watch if I want to spend time with them. Not doing so would color me an unpatriotic color of rude.

Survivor made sense to me. Reality television producers at the turn of the century understood they could add an element of competition to the MTV Real World prototype, so they did. They did not create a contest based on point totals or timed events. No, these producers thought sports were going out of style, so they let a group of people decide which of the group would win a cool million. Miraculously, everyone in the group hated the guy who won.

Perhaps I oversimplified. The show did incorporate some athletic and mental contests among its members. The prizes for these contests ranged from a guarantee to last another episode to a deli sandwich. The contests were not the drama; the drama was the drama.

The producers added the backdrop of a deserted island, and the show clicked. No other place would have worked. A high school gymnasium? A library? A house? Big Brother tried that and was an inferior show. Only that dangerous, exotic set could remove us from our own realities of class rank, college admissions and tight budgets.

I would love to be on that show, Americans thought as boa constrictors circled a hopeless sleeping contestant who had not eaten all day.

What followed were variations: chef elimination, interior designer elimination, bachelor elimination, singer elimination and dancer elimination. The craze spread wide enough that we all seemed to know someone on one of these shows. My high school basketball teammate's brother was on Elimidate. He lost. My sister's colleague was on The Bachelor. She lost. My college friend was on American Idol. He lost, but the Carolina Alumni Review named him the sixth most popular guy in the world. But he lost. In America we have a few winners and many, many losers.

All these shows did quite well. While I required the remote island, Americans needed only one elimination, one human failure, each week. I can thank my girlfriend for knowing Jason's confusion and Melissa's broken heart.

A new strain of reality shows deviated from the elimination theme. Americans now have a choice of three shows about cake makers: Ace of Cakes, Cake Boss and Amazing Wedding Cakes. The sheer number of shows about a niche as small as cake making is impossible to rationalize. Would it not make as much sense to have three separate shows about deep-sea fishermen? Do we have three shows about deep-sea fishermen? At least we are taking a step away from cutthroat elimination.

I would like to produce a show about a teacher who selects one of his friends to teach with him in the same school. Then those two teachers would pick another friend to do the same, and so on. Four other copycat shows would spawn from mine, and in a couple years we would have a surplus of teachers, small class sizes and television ratings to boot.

Amen.

Race track

My sister and I started our Sunday with a few options: the batting cages, the driving range or the race track. I play poker, I thought, I'll love the track. We went.

The guy who took my admissions fee gave me a program with all the information I needed to feel like a part of the experience. It defined types of bets and offered opinion on which horses looked particularly strong.

The betting options were extensive. I had the option to bet for a win, a place, a show, an exacta, a trifecta, a superfecta or any combination of any of these for any of nine races, each set apart from the others by a half hour of grueling, plentiful research. As soon as the crowd jumped and cheered at the conclusion of the first homestretch, I began to thumb through the program pages to find my strategy. I had 32 minutes.

Each horse had one of four labels: stalker, closer, presser or speed. All of these seemed like winners. I would have liked it if anyone used any one of these to describe me in a race, so I quickly learned to ignore this part of the program. The system had no category for losers. How could I go wrong? I should bet a lot of money, idiots thought all around me.

The track paraded the horses around a circle behind the grandstand during each half-hour break. This must be the secret, I thought. I'll bet on the biggest, baddest horse. This was also a lousy idea since the big, bad horse bucked its jockey while trying to eat its handler four minutes before the race because it wanted the damn oats.

My sister took to reading the wordy descriptions for each horse. An example:

"Lemon Drop Girl has been running into some tough ones in recent times as the winner two races back is red-hot right now and the winner of her last is a consistent type herself. This being her third start back from the layoff, she could be sitting on a peak effort, and one of her better runs would probably be enough to get the job done. There are a few in here who seem capable of giving her a run for her money, but she does look like a solid win candidate."

Another horse in the same race had her "three-race win streak snapped last time." Indeed, she was a "polytrack monster" that was often "nabbed by fast-closing winners." Hmm. The track seemed full of possibilities and passive voice. Of course this seemed like double-talk trash to me, but my sister saw prophetic magic in those words.

After I lost a couple bets I discovered the program declared four probable favorites in order of rank for each race. Yup. So all these gambling fools read the summaries and watched the horses walk around when they could have looked at the best-odds bets in ink.

This discounts the fact that a bettor won more money if he bet on a winning horse with poor odds. I suppose that was the excitement of the race track. Cosmo Kramer understands.

Brown line to Belmont

I meant to write about New York City when I got back to Chapel Hill. The trip was amazing. My girlfriend helped me write a long list of things I would write about. That list qualifies as metawriting, which I think means writing about writing. Even more useless than this is an educational concept called metacognitive thinking, which is thinking about thought. We inexplicably expect our struggling schoolchildren to understand this process. Right.

I am in Chicago now with my sister. My Carolina friend Anne and her boyfriend gathered friends for a night on the town that stands as my memory of real, adult Chicago.

Anne's friends were all exceptionally kind to me. The people make the town, and Chicago was a great town last night. I remember stranger hugs and calling the hogs with "soo-ie"; I met an Arkansas Razorback fan. Best of all I saw Anne happy, a seemingly perpetual state for her but one she confessed last night. A happy friend makes a happy friend.

It is strange that I know Manhattan better than Chicago since I grew up less than an hour's drive from the Windy City and spent only five days in the Big Apple. But it's true. Chicago will always seem like the neighbor next door I never knew.