come, join me in my room

03/08/2012

You are in the room, you are in the room and you are also in the room with me.
If you are reading this, you are in the room with me.

You maybe asking yourself, What the heck is he talking about?

Let me back up to this past Monday. I was watching my morning sports tv show “mike and mike” and the topic was on football players and bounties, when someone gets paid by someone to “take out a player” A lot of fans emailed, texted and called in, saying that it is wrong. One of the hostes who’s a former football player explained how it is a culture in football that starts notisably, in high school. When you make a good hit on a player, you might get a sticker to put on your helmit. So the players with a lot of stickers, he’s a hard hitting player. . He was backed up by another former player who came on and told stories about “laying out” a player and getting paid for it. He also mentioned that when you are on the field, you give it your all. So if someone gets carted off, oh well. They go on to say how it’s not the hit, it’s the result of the hit and that is something they can’t control. They talked about how football is a barberric game that you need to be a little crazy to play and to have made it to the NFL. He then said something that made me really think.

“(Mike) Golic is in the room. I am in the room. Brett Favre, is in the room. Curt Warner, is in the room. But a lot of you, are not in the room. You don’t understand.”

I thought back to my criminal justice classes in college and the mention of this “blue wall” Where you do things, as a police officer, that may not be right, but you do it because you are getting paid or because someone above told you to do it. One example, speeding tickets-trafic violations… police officers get extra money the more tickets they write up and they have a quoter they have to make each month. So if you are going 75 in a 65 zone, they may pull you over so they can write a ticket to meet their quoter. It’s not right, but me and you, we are not in the room.

The football player mentioned that if you knew what was in sausages, you probably wouldn’t eat them. But you are not in the room, you don’t know what they put in sausages, so you eat them and enjoy them.

I also think back to earlier this year around the time of the anniversary of my coworker’s murder, and people were telling me to “get over it already” “there is nothing you can do about it” “why are you still upset over it a year later?” and the most hurtful one, coming from my mom, “you let it build up and eat you inside and you hold it in instead of talking about it before this happens” (because that is not it at all)

I talked to my boss and she told me something that a counselor told her
“it is almost as if you are in college with the people who went through this with you and everyone else is still in high school. They don’t understand it and unless they lived through it, they wont ever understand it.”

AKA, my coworkers, are in “the room with me” and no one else is.

There are a lot of things I write in here that are my thoughts and are not spoken words. So unless you read it on here, you’d never know those thoughts of mine. So that is why, you are all, in the room.

Funny, kinda reminds me of a game we played as kids. “whats behind the green glass door?”

There are millions of rooms in our lives. Any detail that makes us different in any way, is another room.

Thank you, for being in my room and letting me be in your room