NO FEAR, OR LOTS OF PRACTICE

No fear is a brand and lifestyle.

As for the lifestyle, it’s a lie.

Who’s not afraid?

Everybody’s afraid, but some are more up to the challenge than others.

You can tell who carries no fear by what they do.

If you see a performance and come away thinking, ‘They have no fear,’ what you’ve just seen is the result of practice, practice, and more practice.

So practice, but for what?

What are the chances you’ll have to do something in front of a huge crowd of tens of tens if not hundreds?

It doesn’t start with, “Hey you, get out there.”

 

Justin Herbert, the football player with the NFL Chargers by way of University of Oregon, has a couple of “Hey you” moments.

The Ducks had brought in an older player with game time credibility for a one and done season.

Dakota Prukop’s season ended five games into the 2016 season.

Instead of guiding Alabama, he found himself on the Oregon bench.

My sense at the time was he’d be back on the field sooner than later when Herbert choked.

But he didn’t choke. He got better as the game got out of hand for the Ducks, then better and better in each following game.

Throw the kid in there and let him get chewed up and spit out seemed the plan.

Except it didn’t happen. He was dialed in, called the right number, and got over the first game blowout.

Four years later the NFL called.

Herbert got drafted by the Chargers and planned to sit and learn behind a veteran signal caller.

Before the second game of his NFL career the team doctor gave the veteran a shot for sore ribs.

The shot also punctured his lung.

Herbert heard, “Hey you, get in there.”

He’s been in there ever since with no fear.

It sounds scary as all get out, but he practiced, knew the job, and is still improving.

What more would you want?

 

Muscle Memory

A long time musician once said the most important thing he does before playing anything is warm up.

Me: Warm up what.

Musician: My hands.

Hands? I didn’t get it back then; now I get it.

If, like me, you grew up listening to classic rock when it was new on the radio, the music also included legends of party boys going wild.

When I decided to learn some guitar I wondered how those other guys could still play drunk, stoned, or riding that train high on cocaine.

How? They practiced and developed muscle memory in their hands to match what they heard in their head.

Then they let it fly. Some flew a little too high and made the 27 Club.

The Big Six are Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison of the Doors, Kurt Cobain and, now, Amy Winehouse. All were talented. All were dissipated.

All were 27 years old.

 

Muscle memory didn’t save the young people, many of whom were older than me at the time of their death.

I made twenty eight, now going on seventy, and still working on muscle memory.

You know these words aren’t transcribed, they are typed from me to you.

Guitar practice? Yes. Typing? Yes. Weight lifting? Yes. Walking? Yes. Cooking? Yes.

Married for over half my life? What muscle is that?

Being a dad? Yes. Good soldier? Yes. Marathoner? Yes.

What am I leaving out?

 

No Fear Takes Time

This is a shot of the Big Three, the three world leaders left standing after WWII.

Churchill, Truman, and Stalin; England, America, and USSR.

Not left standing: Hitler from Germany was a pile of ashes, Mussolini from Italy was executed and hung in town by his feet.

Japan’s warlords were dead, but not their emperor.

 

One of the wars early proclamations came from Franklin Roosevelt when he said, “We have nothing to fear but fear itself.”

Does that sound right? It’s not. He said that in his first inaugural speech in 1933, not Dec. 8, 1941.

The fear in 1933 was the Great Depression.

He may have portrayed a no fear attitude, but he had to be spooked with a country teetering on financial ruin, then a world teetering on what would become the most deadly war in human history.

Today we live in a world formed by both events.

2008 brought with it a financial curse compared to the Great Depression.

 

The decline in overall economic activity was modest at first, but it steepened sharply in the fall of 2008 as stresses in financial markets reached their climax. From peak to trough, US gross domestic product fell by 4.3 percent, making this the deepest recession since World War II.

 

2024 brings with it a presidential election pitting a former president, insurrectionist, and convicted felon, against a former district attorney, state attorney general, senator, and vice president.

Which one sounds like a steady hand on the ship of state?

 

Who Needs To Be Shown The Door Out

From BoomerPdx:

 

My wife has had the great misfortune of listening to dashing men tell her about their war time experiences.

One of them talked about writing letters to relatives of the men who died on patrols he led in Vietnam.

He showed her his dress uniform with all the extras he kept hanging in his closet.

She met one of the man’s adult sons and told him he should be very proud of his dad’s service.

Son: What service?

Wife: In Vietnam.

Son: He never went to Vietnam.

 

She told me all about it and all I came up with was disappointment.

Why would a guy invent that kind of shit? Because they can.

And they sell it hard. That’s their reality and who’s going to call them on it after an impassioned presentation?

And it never grows too old to repeat.

Recently some jackass has been promoting their own service with the idea or chasing women and sleeping with them was his own personal Vietnam.

In a previously unreported 1998 interview with Howard Stern, Donald Trump compared sex to going to battle in Vietnam and joked he should be getting the Congressional Medal of Honor.

 

I only bring this up since the former president decided to weigh in on the difference between the Medal of Honor and the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

. . . he went on to opine that the Medal of Freedom was “much better” than the military’s top award, because those awarded the latter are, in his words, “ … either in very bad shape because they’ve been hit so many times by bullets or they’re dead.”

He continued by comparing Miriam to MoH recipients saying, “She gets it and she’s a healthy beautiful woman. They are rated equal.”

 

He’s a funny guy with a real sense of humor, but the VFW was not amused.

 

One is a fearless leader, one is a fearful old crank, but which one would you rate with ‘No Fear?’

One wants to know as much as possible in making decisions; one wants you to know they already know everything.

Who knows how this will turn out.