There's an invisible army of woman and men who really don't get why we give so much of ourselves to football. And they need to SPEAK UP.

You've got all these parents who are projecting their pathologies of fear onto their kids and those kids are understandably messed up. Tragedies happen and that you have to allow kids to experience their own fear and guilt and sorrow. It's the cover-up that really screws people over. Unfortunately, America specializes in cover-ups.

At the end of night, before you close your eyes, be content with what you've done and be proud of who you are.

A lot of what I'm having to do to get myself weaned from football is really limit what media I allow myself to consume. And it's a big drag. But it's also the only way to kick the habit.

The answer is that we don't choose our freaks, they choose us.

It is certainly true that cooking is therapeutic, creative and all those other faintly creepy self-helpish words. I would love to tell you that learning to cook was part of my journey toward actualization. I would love to tell Oprah this. I would love to tell Oprah this while weeping. But I learned to cook for a much simpler reason: in the abject hope that people would spend time with me if I put good things in their mouth. It is, in other words (like practically everything else I do), a function of my desperation for emotional connection and acclaim.

I'm going to proportion more time to organizing and taking action and less time to passively consuming news that is dispiriting me. Part of this will be to get off social media. I know social media is just a tool, but we've been using it in a way that has transformed us from a nation into an audience, passively spectating our own ruin.