Ramble with Storm: Doves, Lance Armstrong, morality, ethics, squirrels

Mulling things on my morning ramble

with Storm, the family’s mixed Lab.

As the meathead and I finished up this morning, squirrels hopped off in all directions from our porch and doves made that half-flying hop into the air from the gravel of our drive.

And I couldn’t help thinking of the divisions that a hunter like I am makes in my life.

I hang a feeder that the doves love, and I love watching them. Yet I love to hunt doves, love the actual hunt itself of trying to hit a flying target that may flip and dive if they are suspicious.

And I especially love eating them: grilled, stuffed with cheese and wrapped in bacon around jalapeno slices.

As humans, we become pretty good at compartmentalizing as we mature.

I am quite capable of compartmentalizing the doves in town as being somehow different to me than the doves I am shooting at in the field.

Late Friday afternoon, as I was preparing to go watch our second boy’s rock duo perform at a contest, I get a note from the sports editor about Lance Armstrong being prevented from running in the Chicago Marathon.

Those are not fun stories to track down, because officials do not want to talk.

But eventually, I pulled together 350 words that I thought captured both the facts of why Armstrong would not be allowed to run if he wanted to and also some of the nuances of the bigger question of how we define amateur and pro in the context of 21st Century marathons or even 21st Century sports.

And I had time to make to the festival to see our son perform. All that noise–that banging on the drums daily–coming out of the basement the last year or so is paying off.

But Armstrong just bothers the piss out of me. I have no delusions about his innocence. You don’t win seven times in one of the dirtiest sports without treading over lines.

Yet, he in a big sense captures the whole split in all of us as humans. We have good and evil in us. Sometimes the evil helps pull along the good; and sometimes the good lugs evil beside it like an overstuffed suitcase.

Questions like that bouncing around my head are one of the main reasons I set out each morning on a ramble with the meathead.