The Fall 2019 Anthology of Hellfire Cross Country Speeches

Being my final year on cross country, I tried to make things special by giving a hellfire speech at every meet. Here’s how it went:

Central Dutch Invitational:

[Slowly growing passion and volume as it goes along.]

Men, what did we come here to do? [Pause.] We came here to win! But what is that, even? What is winning? Webster’s Dictionary defines it as “Successful in competition.” But what competition? Webster’s tells us that it is “A contest between rivals.” But who are our rivals? Well, first we must ask, what are our rivals? Webster’s defines rivals as “One of two or more striving to reach or obtain something only one may possess.” But what is this something that we both want? Webster’s defines something as “an indeterminate or unspecified thing!” And what does indeterminate mean? You want to know what it means? Well, there are two definitions actually: “Not precisely determined” or “characterized by a sequential flowering from the lateral or basal buds!” And you better be damn sure Webster knows what a bud is: “An incompletely opened flower!”

[Suddenly quiet.]

And that, gentlemen, is just about all that you need to know.

Les Duke Invitational

At the Central Meet I announced to the team that I’d give a hellfire speech at every meet, but I’d actually given up on that goal by our second meet when I couldn’t think of any decent concept. That didn’t stop a couple team members from pushing me forward when people were giving pump-up speeches and cheers. Keep in mind that this wasn’t just the team: at least fifty alumni and parents were also watching. What follows was completely improvised.

Hey, yeah. So I’m giving a speech! I’m giving a speech on a very important day. A very important speech and I haven’t prepared at all. But, even if it’s all just incoherent and stalling for time, I’m sure you’ll are read something profound into it. And isn’t that the great thing about the human mind, that we can- no, that is so damn clichéd. And now I just swore in front of a bunch of alumni and parents. Crap. No, that’s it, I’m done.

Loyola University Edward Kelly Memorial Lakefront Run

Men, none of us would be here at this race today had it not been for Edward Kelly, a monumental figure in the field of biology, a man who changed so many of our lives forever, the man for whom this race is named. In 1936, Edward Reginald Kelly, or Eddy as he would soon be known, was born in a small Wisconsin town on December 23rd. In 1956, at only twenty years old, he graduated from Loyola University with a major in biology. In 1960, his graduate degree already complete, he patented a series of new techniques and medicines that saved millions of lives as soon as they were released into the world. In 1959, God appeared to Edward in a whirlwind, roaring, “Pitiful man, why have you seen fit to question of my judgement? Did I not punish Adam and Eve, the first of your kind, with pain death for their transgression in the Garden of Eden? For your arrogance, not only will you suffer all the torment that lurks beneath the earth, but your alma mater and other nearby division three schools shall offer tributes of both men and women every year, to toil and weep as they run across the ground!” Then the earth opened up and Edward was thrown into the abyss.

So remember Edward Kelly, and why our pain is the cost of his hubris, so that none shall ever defy the will of God again!

Agustana College Invitational

Me: Give me a G!

Team: G!

Me: Give me an R!

Team: R!

Me: Give me an I!

Team: I!

Me: Give me an M!

Team: M!

Me: Give me a Q!

Team: Q!

Me: Give me a 2!

Team: 2!

Me: Give me an uppercase L!

Team: Uppercase L!

Me: Give me a question mark!

Team: Question mark!

Me: And what’s that spell?

Team: I don’t know!

Me: The wifi password!

University of Wisconsin Lacrosse Invitational

There is a dragon before us, men! It is a beast with five heads: fear, weakness, not trying hard enough, St. Norbert college, and hills! And it has a tail called fatigue, and it breathes a fire called running-induced iron deficiency. We cannot run away from the beast, men, we can only run towards it. But do not be afraid, for we are armed with the mightiest weapons in all the land! We have a sword, a sword named teamwork! And an ax, an ax named confidence! Our bow is named support, and it shoots arrows of cheers crafted by the women’s team and coaches and family members! And our hammer is named lifting and our armor is named shoes! Now let’s go and slay this overdone allegory!

Midwest Conference Championship

The course was very muddy, so we had been instructed not to run on the course itself, but on the outside, so that it wouldn’t be torn up before the race even began. We followed the rules, but none of the other teams did.

We are destined to conquer this course, men! Our victory is written in providence as surely as if it were already history. And this is why: yesterday, the Midwest Conference Championship authorities proclaimed that any may run on either side of the course, but none may touch the sacred soil of the path until the race has begun. The other teams scoffed at this warning and flaunted the decree. For this they shall be condemned. But we alone respected the law! Except for Kody, he’s doomed. But the rest of us are guaranteed to run over happy pastures while our impure opponents shall be given up to the earth’s maw, to join their companion in sin, Edward Kelly. This is not to say there will be no sacrifice or suffering for us, as the land takes arrogance as tenfold more insulting than disobedience. But if we humble ourselves and respect our course, victory is already assured!

NCAA Division III Regional Championship

We were not favorites to win this meet.

People say that we have no chance at all of winning. But I say, you can do anything if you put your mind to it! Seriously, I really mean it, you can do absolutely anything, all you have to do is believe in yourself. You could win regionals, you could win nationals, you could go to the olympics with no effort at all, if only you believe in yourself! And it’s not just running, if you believe in yourself you could be famous! You could be president! You could dismantle our democracy, seize power, and lock up your opponents! The power of your self-belief could conquer the world, oppress billions just for your own fame and wealth, and torture anyone who stands in your way!

So yeah, you can do anything if you believe in yourself, but it’s probably best for everyone if you don’t do it that often. Just use it to win regionals. Or don’t, we don’t need it that bad.

Crying

I cried for the first time in a while today. My girlfriend Mica and I were watching a TV show* we’ve been following for a long time. The main character’s goal for the entire show up to this point was to be a published writer, and she’d finally done it, but the manuscript she sold was an autobiographical story about the death of someone she loved. She’d finally gotten what she wanted, through incredible pain, but then she almost decided not to publish the book because it would feel too much like giving up the memory of the one she loved. I didn’t realize I was crying until Mica said something tenderly to me, (telling me it was okay, I think). After that I wiped the tear away and we went on watching the show. For most people getting watery eyes over an emotional TV show episode wouldn’t be such a big deal, but it’s been a long time since I cried, so it stuck on my mind.

I’ve been thinking of crying a lot these days, actually. I’m writing an essay on the short story “Protozoa” by Ellen Martinsen Gorham, which is about an eighth grade girl who, among other things, secretly videochats an older girl she met online for daily crying rituals. It sounds absurd, but it makes a sort of emotional sense. The older girl says that “sharing tears is a high and a release,” and I get it so much that it almost makes me want to give it a try. I was a real crier in elementary school, up until my family’s move to Minnesota in sixth grade, and the things I cried over were so trivial (poor skills at Pillow Polo, hearing a death metal song in a babysitter’s car) that I must have only done it for the endorphins. Because there is a wonderful feeling in crying, especially when it dries up and you realize you’ve crested whatever feeling you were on and things can only get better from here.

After the move to Minnesota I stopped crying quite so much. I grew up a lot around that time, physically at least, and probably felt that it wasn’t appropriate any more. By ninth grade, I think I went the whole school year without crying, which I noted as something of an accomplishment at the time. But it became a problem in midsummer of that year, when I woke up to the news that my eight-year-old cousin Stephen had died. That’s when I should have cried, right? What the hell else was I supposed to do? But I didn’t. When I thought about, I didn’t feel sad, just confused. People didn’t just disappear, certainly not little kids like Stephen. So I lied, pretending to feel some monumental grief when I really just felt blank. Sometimes I worried that someone would figure out it was all an act and expose me for the psychopath I was, not even crying at my own cousin’s death.

I finally cried at the memorial service. We held it at on an island in the Detroit river, a local tourist destination with a water park and ice cream trucks and screaming kids running everywhere. It was the way my uncle said, “I’ll miss you, buddy” as we threw yellow flowers into the river that broke me down. It was just such a simple way to put it: missing someone.

I’ve never trusted crying since then. When the tears cleared, nothing was better, really. Any happy rush that came fled quick. It hadn’t changed anything.

Sometimes I feel guilty that I could cry about a Pillow Polo game in elementary school, cry about a TV show now, but that I took almost a full week to cry over my own dead cousin. It makes me feel selfish, or at least like someone with very skewed priorities. I know that’s not true. I know that there’s no one-to-one correlation between how you feel and what you express. I still mourned Stephen for that week before the memorial, the feeling was just so new that I didn’t know I was doing it. Crying is still useful, though. Maybe we shouldn’t make a self-help cult around it like the characters in “Protozoa,” but it also couldn’t hurt to be a little less ashamed.

_________________

* I won’t say which to avoid spoilers.

Guilty Pleasure

When I started this blog, I thought that reviews would be easy filler content. I read a lot, I watch movies pretty often, and I tend to have a lot of ideas about how stories work (or don’t). But aside from two posts early in the blog, I’ve mostly stayed away from reviews. It has often occurred to me to write more, but I never go through with it, no matter how much I have to say on a given story, because I never know how I’d end it. Reviews almost always have some kind of verdict, usually stated at the start and reiterated at the end like a thesis statement. The finality of that judgement always scared me, because I never knew which question to answer: should I say whether or not it’s good, or whether or not I liked it. It’s rare that I have a clear answer on either one of those, and when I do, it’s rarer that they’re the same.

To explain this point, I’m going to compare two pieces of media that have no business being discussed in the same post: the hyper-violent neo-noir film Drive and the children’s fantasy cartoon The Dragon Prince. These two really don’t have anything in common aside from being a series of still images shown in quick succession so as to create the illusion of motion: one is animated and the other is live action, one is a TV series and the other is a movie, one has mostly bloodless violence and the other shows a human head crushed flat by the heel of a man’s shoe. But I’ve seen them both recently and had opposite reactions to each. If there were some perfect formula for determining the quality of cinema, I suspect Drive would rank high and The Dragon Prince would be mid-to-low. But I didn’t enjoy Drive at all, and I loved The Dragon Prince. 

Drive is about a nameless and almost entirely silent getaway driver who falls in love with a woman, tries to help her unlucky husband get out of debt with a gang, and reacts poorly once things go wrong. The film is a wonder to look at, with a kind of enormity even its dingy settings. The action scenes all have just the right number of elements: never cluttered, always clear, and very memorable. As art, you have to say it’s well crafted. But, when the credits rolled and I closed the laptop, all I felt was that I should be feeling more. There wasn’t any symbol that I wanted to dwell on, no character relationship that I wanted to imagine further. What happened happened, it was beautiful and terrifying, but I couldn’t find any more of it to hold onto at the end.

The Dragon Prince only came on my radar because it was created by the writers from some of the all-time best episodes of Avatar: The Last Airbender, which was my favorite show growing up. The mythology isn’t exactly complicated, but it’s a lot to summarize, so suffice it to say that it’s a journey story set in a pretty generic fantasy world (magic, elves, dragons, monarchy, etc.). There isn’t any part I can fasten myself onto as something that I really like. The characters display a racial and sexual diversity not often seen in children’s shows, but while that’s a good thing societally, it doesn’t automatically make for good storytelling. The animation is a weird 3D-2D hybrid, and the best you can say about it is that you get used to it. The setting is something we’ve all seen a thousand times since Tolkien. And the writing reveals that this really is a show aimed for kids: humor that’s mostly fart jokes and sarcasm and dialogue that states every theme or plot development over and over, always in the clearest possible terms, never giving the audience the satisfaction for figuring something out for themselves. It’s that last point that really bugs me, actually, how the writers never trust the viewer enough to let something stay unstated. 

But maybe ambiguity is overrated. Drive never spells anything emotionally meaningful out too clearly, especially since the characters hardly ever talk. There’s no dialogue in the scene where the hero falls in love, just some beautiful shots and pretty good music of two people hanging out by a stream. With every character left an enigma, though, you start to wonder if there really is anything to them at all, or if they’re just vehicles for all these wonderful shots that don’t come together into an actual story worth caring about.

And maybe that explains what it is about The Dragon Prince that I like, actually. It says what it wants to say: when characters are friends or rivals or enemies, you can always tell right away. When they feel something, they don’t hide it, and even if it gets a little overplayed, at least it’s there. And with that kind of openness right from the first episode, it’s hard not to care about the characters and feel whatever they do, even if what they feel is inordinate joy at some stupid fart joke. Maybe that’s why Drive needs to trade in cool detachment, actually: it’s hard enough watching anyone get shot or stabbed to pieces, it’s just too much to watch that happen to someone you like.

I don’t mean to say that nuance or subtlety are always bad for storytelling. But these two examples show a larger point, I think: that maybe it’s best to trust your instincts on what you think is or isn’t good. Drive just seemed like it was good because it had legitimately great visuals and sophisticated pretensions, but neither of these make for a good storytelling. And if that means I like a stupid (but not that stupid) children’s show more than a film festival award-winning movie, then fine, I’ll take it.