Always be kind to others
no matter whom they may be to you.
Nothing matters – just be kind.
After all, wouldn’t you want the same for you?
Author Archives: seanthomaskane
20 June 2014 – Exiting
Rush hour in Kansas City
The 5.00pm Central headlines commence on NPR.
There I sit, in my car, waiting patiently, silently
not finding it hard to imagine that I’m back in Chicago
as I wait to exit 435 westbound onto State Line Road.
The left turn lanes move at a snail’s pace
as if the world is at a standstill.
The first green light is like a far away lightning bolt
to distant to make any impact.
The second green light comes five minutes later
its glimmering verdant glow lasting but a faint minute
until overcome by the urge to bleed red once more.
I edge closer to the halfway point on the ramp
halfway to the starting gate
the horsepower in my engine revving to go
the twenty cars in front of me impeding my path.
Third green light.
At last the miraculous verdant flaring is causing some good
its impact reaching my car, who has finally moved within jumping distance
of the intersection ahead.
A homeless man, seeking work walks alongside the cars.
Fourth green light.
At long last I let out a cry
of “Go, go, go!”
Through the intersection my car roars,
wanting to break free from the shackles of traffic
and back onto the open road
that runs along the Kansas-Missouri state line.
19 June 2014 – Triumph over Indiana
On a plane this past March
as I flew from DC to KC
I found myself fast asleep
for much of the first part of the trip.
As I slept my dreams turn’d away
from the thoughts of that past day
and into a vision of some great orchestra
a chorus behind, playing that fam’d
1812 Overture of Tchaikovsky’s making.
It roared in my head, filling the mind
as ever it could with sound
abounding throughout the inner ear.
Yet the noise woke me,
forc’d me to recognise my place.
And as I open’d my eyes,
the music came to a grand finale
as the orchestra had stopped
the men of the chorus continued
singing triumphantly their final refrain
the melody from God Save the Tsar
resounded in my ears from within
triumphantly welcoming me
to the skies over Indiana.
Never before has a dream
been so grandiose as to remain
in my memory for months thereafter
as that chorus on that cold March day.
15-21 June 2014 – “Les Roberts”
Les Roberts
There once was a team of rowers known as the Bears. Now these weren’t your average sort of rowers whose mascot was a bear, but actual big, furry, growling with fangs and big pointy teeth bears. Like the kind that steal your peanut butter on camping holidays. They trained long and hard on the waters of the Charles, until at last they found themselves ready to take on the big prize: their first entry into a proper rowing competition.
The bears got their boat atop their van, strapping it down tightly for the road. Then with much anticipation, they let the van roar into life, sailing on its way down the road out of Boston towards the Hudson. The journey was long and fun, filled with excitement and lots of growling. At long last they arrived on the banks of the Hudson at Albany. Their excitement was unmeasurable, unsurmountable for any average meter of measuring surmountability.
They roared out of their van, grabbing their boat by its bottom, and running with it towards the river bank where the other teams were warming up for the race to come. However, at the sight of five bears running with a rowing boat hoisted above their heads running down the bank towards the gathering teams, the competition panicked and fled onto the water. The bears figured that this must have meant that the race had begun, and they picked up the pace, growling heartily at the competition to “Wait! Let us get on the line too!” However their cries seemed to make no real mark of calm upon the ears of the rowing teams.
At the water’s edge, they hurled the boat out in front of them, jumping into it in turn, until all five bears sat in their boat, the oars thrusting strongly into the water, back and forth, propelling their boat forward beyond that of all of the competition. But something seemed off, as they found men with guns standing on a bridge over the river. “Tranquilisers!” the bears shouted, ducking to dodge the darts that shot from above.
At the finish the bears found themselves cornered by a hundred armed men and women. The sorry team at last realised what was going on, that in fact all these people were terrified for their lives. The lead bear took his oar, using the handled end he drew in the sand of the bank, “Nous sommes les Roberts!”
And that is why there were some concerns in the Hudson Valley last week about an invasion from Northern Quebec. Whether the bears ever worried again is unknown, as they kept rowing onwards, south towards the sea.
F1 Midweek – Schumacher update and looking ahead to Austria
Kansas City – If you haven’t heard, on Monday seven-time Formula 1 world champion Michael Schumacher at long last came out of his coma that had been caused by a skiing accident on 29 December at the French resort of Meribel. That being said, after having been in a state of comatose for that long, it will undoubtedly take quite a while for the German to fully recover, which in itself is unlikely.
News bulletins flew around the world on Monday from the Grenoble University Hospital, announcing that Schumacher had been taken out of France to University Hospital Lausanne in neighbouring Switzerland. Despite this, The Independent reports that Schumacher still is unable to talk. According to a 16 June article by John Lichfield of The Independent, Schumacher has a “one in ten chance of making a full recovery.”
That being said, at least the poor man is out of his coma at long last. I can’t imagine what his family has been going through during all of this. No doubt the F1 world will continue to have “Schumi” in their thoughts as they descend on a circuit which was last won by the seven time world champion, the Red Bull Ring in Spielberg, Austria this weekend for the resurrection of the Austrian Grand Prix, which was last run in 2003.
Formerly known as the Österreichring from 1969-1995, and the A1-Ring from 1996-2004, the circuit has since been bought by the energy drink company Red Bull, who have since become famous within motorsport for their ownership of two of the current eleven Formula 1 teams, Infiniti Red Bull Racing and Scuderia Toro Rosso respectively. I have little doubt that the pressure will be on the two Red Bull drivers to win their team’s home grand prix.
At the same time, as we have seen throughout this season no one has been able to compete with Mercedes AMG Petronas as long as the silver arrows make it through the race damage free. We saw two weeks ago in Canada one of the weaker points of the Mercedes cars, namely brake failures, which resulted in Lewis Hamilton retiring and Nico Rosberg finishing in second behind Red Bull’s Daniel Ricciardo. At the same time, knowing the Mercedes team I have little doubt that the will have fixed that problem by now in preparation for Austria.
The Red Bull Ring track runs clockwise, with ten corners. It runs 4.326 km (2.688 mi) in length. To date, the fastest lap record stands with Ferrari’s Michael Schumacher, who finished Lap 41 during the 2003 Austrian Grand Prix at 1:08.337. Only three of the current Formula 1 drivers, Kimi Räikkönen, Jenson Button, and Fernando Alonso have driven in the Austrian Grand Prix before, Button having competed in the 2000-2003 Austrian Grands Prix, whilst Räikkönen and Alonso have only competed in the 2001-2003 Austrian Grands Prix.
We will have to wait until this Sunday to see how the teams compete at the Red Bull Ring in Formula 1’s triumphant return to Austria after 11 years away. Hopefully Schumacher will be well enough to see at least a couple of the races this season.
18 June 2014 – Humidity
I don’t know what I would have done
in decades past prior to the invention
the fantastic invention of air conditioning.
As it turns out, I probably would have
most undoubtedly sweated to death
in these unreasonably humid
Kansas City summers.
There is something quite pleasant
that comes to mind when one steps
out of the a/c and into the heat,
after all, it means that there is always
the a/c to go back to if one wishes.
So, as I offer my thanks to God
and the inventor of air conditioning
whichever of the millions of saints that may be
I react fondly to the fogging up of my specs
each and every time I step out of my car
and back into the summer heat.
17 June 2014 – A Musical World
There is music in the world
it flows in the winds
it flowers on the trees.
There is music in the world
which blossoms with each new life
and is releas’d into the cosmos
with each passing death.
There is music in the world
that makes us all happy
that makes us cry.
All this can be done by music
the rhythm of life
the melodious voice of nature
the source of beauty and strength.
16 June 2014 – Late Winter Journeys
I dreamt last night
that some friends and I met
in a café in Chicago.
There we chatted, laughed, and told stories
until unbeknownst to me the time came
for my friends to take up and leave.
“Where are you going?” I asked them,
“You’ll see, just wait there,” they replied smiling.
I sat on the plump red sofa in that café
for a few minutes more, when from the crowd
came my two friends once more.
They returned with three tickets,
and joined me at the seat,
whose arms protruded from its back
and buckled us in all quite neat.
Then out of the café did we fly
Without even the bat of an eye
for that flight was without motion
as we disolv’d without commotion
and soon I awoke as if from a slumber
conduced by jet lag, on an expressway
riding in a small bus, further from the city where I belong’d.
Then suddenly we came to our exit, and rounded a bend
going down a road lined with hedges
that seem’d to go on for no end.
Then at their conclusion, we did find,
what appear’d to be a train station
situated atop a hill, the tracks cover’d by fog
“Welcome to Glenview,” said the driver,
yet this was not the Glenview that I knew.
Heaven forbid it! I looked at my watch
and recall’d my calendar
that in the city I had to be
in less than an hour.
In a sort of panic I awoke,
to find myself confounded
haunt’d by what was but a dream.
The Fantastic Growth of American Soccer
Kansas City – If I were to tell my 13 year old self who didn’t care at all about the 2006 World Cup in Germany that I spent the entirety of this afternoon and evening watching the 2014 World Cup from Brazil, my younger self would probably be shocked. For me, like many of my fellow Americans, soccer is a very new phenomenon. We knew it existed back in Europe, Latin America, and Africa, but it simply has not made good roots here in the United States until very recently.
In the Summer of 2006, as the football/soccer world converged upon Germany, I was far more focused upon the old classic summer sport here in the States and Canada: baseball. I did not really care all that much that France and Italy made the final, though I knew they did, and remember my parents watching it while I played MLB At Bat in another room on my PlayStation 2. That being said, within two years I would have caught the soccer bug.
You’ll notice that throughout this article, I am referring to the sport known commonly the world over as football by its name here in the US and Canada: soccer. This is simply because we already have a sport called football, American Football, which frankly I’ve never really understood or cared for. The first soccer match that I ever watched in full was a repeat broadcast of the 2008 FA Cup Final on Fox Soccer. I chose to support Southampton over Cardiff City because of Southampton’s association with my own family, as my great-granddad Thomas Kane spent some time in Southampton with the American Expeditionary Force on his way to the trenches of France during the First World War. I know, it’s not the best of reasons, but it worked at the time.
At about the same time, the domestic first tier league here in the US and Canada, Major League Soccer, was just past its tenth anniversary, and beginning its expansion and meteoric rise to prominence that we are still in the process of witnessing. It would be another year until my parents and I made it to a MLS match, when during the summer of 2009 we went to see our local club, the Kansas City Wizards, take on Chivas USA at the Wizards’ then home CommunityAmerica Ballpark, the proper home of the Kansas City T-Bones Baseball Club. What an experience it was!
When the Wizards announced they would be building a soccer-specific stadium a few blocks east of the T-Bones ballpark, which was just a few miles east of my family’s farm, we knew we had to get season tickets. The 2010 World Cup was truly when the sport became prominent here in Kansas City, when our official watch party at the Power and Light District was featured a number of times on ESPN’s broadcasts of the USMNT matches in South Africa. Later that year, in December, the Wizards ownership group announced the rebranding of the team as Sporting Kansas City, and from there on out this city was on its way.
Since the start of the 2011 season, I have attended a good majority of all Sporting KC home matches, and have quickly found a great appreciation for the sport itself. It’s funny how things work, how a sport can change one’s life. When I first started watching soccer in 2008, I found other European based sports like rugby and cricket to be odd and confusing. Now I watch more rugby than American football, and follow cricket just as much as I do baseball. At about the same time that I was introduced to soccer, I was also introduced to my family’s current favourite sport, Formula 1.
Nationally, soccer has grown exponentially over the past few years. One major announcement that came earlier this year in the favour of the new sport was that it was just as popular among 19-24 year olds as the national pastime, baseball. As noted in an article on Al Jazeera America by David Keyes, a former editor of XI Quarterly, soccer is “now second only to basketball (above baseball and football) in youth participation numbers.” The youth of this country are becoming enthralled with the beautiful game. With the additions of New York City FC and Orlando City SC in 2015 and Atlanta in 2017, soccer is truly becoming a major sport in the United States. The world will know how far this country has come when our men’s national team wins the World Cup.
One added benefit to the growth of American soccer is the timing of the regular season here. Rather than play in the winter like the majority of the world’s leagues, which would be nearly impossible in much of the north, including my hometown of Chicago, our league plays from March to December. This ends up working out well on a global scale for viewers around the world, or at the very least for those of us Stateside, as when the MLS is off the European, and Mexican leagues among others are on. On the other hand, if you are like my family, my Chicagoland readership, expats included, or I you’ll spend the MLS offseason watching the Blackhawks.
That’s the beauty of the sporting scene here in the US and Canada, we are already used to having multiple sports going on at once. Just look at your average November or December Sunday: the NHL, NFL, and NBA will all be at play, often with franchises from the same city playing at the same time. Adding another sport to our springs, summers, and autumns is nothing new. I am more than happy to be following the Blackhawks, Sporting KC, the Bulls, and my two favourite baseball teams (the Cubs and Royals) all at once. Multitasking is something of a speciality for a triple major like me.
So, looking at this year’s World Cup being played out in Brazil, I find myself gleefully watching every moment I can. This played itself out to the extent today that I ended up watching three of today’s four matches in full. Come Monday though, it will be all for the USMNT.
14 June 2014 – “In the forest he played his flute” from the play “Orpheus and Eurydice”
The following comes from my 2011 play “Orpheus and Eurydice”. Copyright Seán Kane, 2011.
In the forest he played his flute
For all the trees to hear and dance to,
Amongst the trees he was resolute
In his proclamation of God’s love anew.
For here he was most at ease
Amongst the arbours,
Amongst the trees
For here in the woodland he seeks.
O Orpheus, a wife he wants
A beautiful maid to wed,
Come, loving poet sing odes
To the nymphs of the wood.
Come, beautiful voice,
It is your choice.
Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane 