Clinton, South Carolina, Thursday, September 10, 2020, 8:45 a.m.

Here’s what I think about the wide, wide (and wild, wild) world of COVID-19 around us. Forgive the bias on account of my world is centered in sports.

Thus do I want there to be sports. As much as I enjoy a rib-eye steak, I enjoy walking a high-school sideline more. I enjoy watching football practice more than some do football proper. As I get older, I become more and more the avid observer of young athletes. I remember what I was like, and amid the astonishing change in the world and the people on it, I try to understand what they are like.

I think it’s too easy to exaggerate the changes. They’re about 80 percent the same, and the 20 percent is magnified. I try to keep my “get off my lawn!” impulses at bay. In general, young people give me hope. I’m ready to turn the world over to them. They couldn’t possibly botch things as badly as my generation.

Many are full of themselves. They know just enough to be dangerous. They will learn, not by me trying to tell them but by trial and error, rites of passage and the occasional realization that something in which they believed is catastrophically wrong. I look back at myself as a young man and see someone who was disastrously funny. I cringe at that vision, but more importantly, I laugh at it.

I just chuckle at the kids, who know so much but yet so little. That part of growing up hasn’t changed.

Earlier this summer, I was talking to a kid and found it condescending that he said, as if breaking some blockbuster, “You see, I’m a Christian.”

I didn’t but wanted to reply, “Did you think I was a Shiite?”

They think they are having thoughts no one else has ever had. I doubt there is such a thought.

I hurt for them, living in a world that has suddenly been onerously restricted. One day recently, I recollected my college years, when I excelled both in the classroom and the beer joint, and somehow emerged a better man. (OK, my analysis is jaded.)

The whole college experience is being altered forever. If I were a younger man, I’d survey the current conditions and just say, “Tell you what? I think I’ll skip this year. When college gets back to normal, I’ll go back to college.”

Then again, I know now what I didn’t know then, and being ignorant of such wisdom, I’d probably do what everybody else did.

This is going to be a transformative experience. How remains to be seen.

 

Take a look at my new website, Laurens County Sports. It’s undoubtedly going to be better when Laurens County has actual sports again.

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If you yearn for my writing in larger doses, I’ve written quite a few books. Most are available here.

Lightning in a Bottle, the first of my two motorsports novels, is now available in audio (Audible, Amazon, iTunes) with the extraordinary narration of Jay Harper.

My eighth novel, a political crime thriller, is called Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. It’s right up to date with the current political landscape in the country.

My writing on other topics that strike my fancy is posted here.