Some ideas for articles in 2022, or, My Mind: a nice place to visit but you wouldn't want to live there

Below is a list of ideas for articles I had written on October 26, 2022, which predates this Substack. This is back when I wrote as a freelancer for various commercial outlets—Outside, Runner’s World, Women’s Running, the Star Tribune—though commercial viability was not considered at all when I made this list. Obviously. Personal axe to grind, hatched in the previous two minutes—these ideas were stream of consciousness, things that came to mind in one sitting at a specific time. None of them found their way into print, and that’s probably all for the best. Now, almost four years later, they’re mildly interesting artifacts. See below, with updated annotation.

--fake it til you make it is a euphemism for pretending to be someone you’re not. it’s lying. being inauthentic. how lying and cheating has become an accepted part of our culture

I’m pretty sure I was responding to young people inventing a career, a personae, people who called themselves journalists having once kept a diary, for example. I also think there had been exposes of endemic cheating in schools, even and maybe especially, prestigious schools. I don’t think I was referring primarily to people claiming to be a different sex or nonbinary, but Will (Lia) Thomas (March 2022) and Cece Telfer (2019) had already snagged NCAA National Championships, and I had pitched those stories around, to zero response. So I think this was recognition of a weird cultural acceptance, aided by aggressively curated social media, of promoting “my truth,” and framing it that way, instead of “the truth,” which went by the outdated term “lying.”

--vast inequality, wealthy in US do well in good times, and even better in bad times. so how do we break the cycle of rich getting richer? is it too late for that?

When I say these ideas were not necessarily commercially viable, this would be Example A. Orders of magnitude out of my depth as a journalist, but it doesn’t take an economist to see that income inequality was, even in 2022, having massive social impact. The have/have not gap has grown measurably since then.

--modesty is about sex, control of sex, what place does that have in sports? athletic wear has evolved to be about function, sports empowers women because it assumes sex (everyone is female in women’s sports) but does not focus on it

Still intrigued (read: horrified) by religion, specifically Islam, women, and sports since my 2017 investigation of Somali-American women in sports. Nike had come out with their sport hijab. Dutch distance runner Sifan Hassan, who is Muslim but does not cover her hair, arms, or legs while training or racing, was busy racking up Olympic and World Championship titles, while Muslim girls and women around the globe were, out of modesty (enforced by violence), going back undercover. Backward. Oddly, now, Muslim women are apparently the only women deserving of single-sex spaces, and that is only because Muslim women are already sufficiently subjugated by their religion. Their oppression is being handled very effectively, so no need for the trans movement to double dip.

--on being a patient vs being an athlete

This may have been a reaction to being diagnosed with osteopenia, and hustled into an office with a plastic model of my supposedly Swiss cheese bones, demonstration of giving myself an injection in the stomach, and life in service of my disease. Walked out a patient. Had a chat with my similarly diagnosed runner friends who similarly blew that shit off, went for a nice run, and have not looked back. One ray of a constellation of ideas around over-diagnosis, over-medicalization, frenzy for medical labels.

--boxer Jamal James, Circle of Discipline, 1201 E Lake Street

Jamal was going for a World title, or trying to. Left field, for sure, but a good local story. Believe it or not, I do tire of the fragility of women as a demographic. But then…

--i don’t know about you but i need a new career bad. and someone already made the documentary about Skateistan, so that door is closed. crap. i’ve had a lot of free time so i picked up Creation of the Patriarchy by gerda lerner. and i’m real mad about the last 6000 years with all the Alexanders and Aristotles and Leonardos and Jesuses and Buddhas who didn’t even make their own fucking breakfast and had the unmitigated gall to blame the fall of humanity, the fall of their arches, the fall of their stupid penises on women. and they made up that shit that god is a man. and women bought it. after they were raped. what the fuck. think that’s 6000 years old? several hundred thousand somali women are walking around in st. paul hiding their personhood in bedsheets because they believe that the collapse and 40-year smoking ruin that is their country was because they hadn’t for the last several thousand years covered up their hair. i’m not making this up. the collapse of the country was because women didn’t cover their hair and made men assault them by walking around. doing stuff. making breakfast. making sure humanity did not die out. not at all because a bunch of sociopathic idiots with AK-47s were shooting indiscriminately and each of 47 of them thought he was the king. women believed that it was their fault after about 60% of them were raped or killed. but you know what -- you can’t ride a bike in a bedsheet. it was stupid 6000 years ago and it’s stupid now and i’m going to write a book about how you can’t be a feminist by following the commandments of the patriarchy. super angry over here. my valentine thinks it’s a good time to get the hell out of the house.

As we can see, five years after I published a two-year investigation of Somali-American women in sports in the Twin Cities for Deadspin (in the final days before Deadspin became briefly captured by gender ideology and then sued out of existence by billionaire Peter Thiel) nothing much had changed for Somali-American women in the Twin Cities, and globally, Muslim women’s rights and freedoms have deteriorated significantly. And I was still stewing about the fact that few if any people were aware of the Somali-American scholar Cawo Abdi’s work on the re-Islamification of Somali culture. Frustratingly, one of the chief deniers of this work is the Somali-American scholar Cawo Abdi. And then you mix Gerda Lerner in there and, watch out. As you can see, the seeds of the trans religion fell on educated, and therefore hostile, ground.

--how not to turn your kid off to running

I was, in 2022, still coaching middle school cross country, and had been for eight years. I believe my accumulated wisdom centered on the fact that my people were mostly 11 years old. For the love of god.