#LiverpoolFC · Depression · Football · life · Liverpool · Writing

Overcoming Sins of the Past

September 13, 2020 E.M. Goldsmith2 Comments

Anyone who meets me more than once knows I am a rabid Liverpool fan. Even if they do not quite understand what that means. I live in America so most of my cohorts have no idea what support for a team looks like in Europe. We do get our fanatical fans in our sports. It’s not the same.

To be clear, I am a Liverpool supporter. I am going to talk about Leeds United. Then I probably won’t do it again. Until Liverpool next plays them. Unless they beat Liverpool. Then I will kick on as if the game never happened.

As Jurgen Klopp says “football is the most important of the least important things.”

I love that. For me, the beautiful game gives me hope, pulls joy from despair, and shows a path for life that I have never been able to put words to. It is no more and much more than a bunch of players kicking a ball about, everything and nothing at all at the same time. It shows what is possible when we can work together for a common goal. Even if the goal seems unlikely, even after doing a lot of things wrong.

In Liverpool’s first game of the 2020-2021 Premier League season, they faced Leeds United, a newly promoted team from the Champions League. Ultimately, Liverpool won 4-3 in a scrappy match riddled with Liverpool errors and saved by a Mo Salah hat trick, made possible by two Leeds penalties.

Much was made of Leeds United being promoted back into the Premier League after a 16-year absence. They had once been great. They had once won the league. The press is enamored of the tale, the great vanquished team coming back at last. Overcoming the sins of the past.

Back when I first fell in love with Liverpool in the mid 1980s, I don’t remember Leeds United at all. I do remember them in the late nineties and early 2000s, a team that seemed to be burdened with scandal after scandal.

I don’t remember details and timing, just the shadows of events. Two Leeds players were charged with assault of an Asian student, causing life-threatening injuries to him. The Leeds United management borrowed a large sum of money against the hope that he could pay it back with proceeds from European nights in Champions League football only not to qualify for Europe. This brought financial ruin to the club. On a night in Istanbul, two of their supporters were stabbed to death in a riot. Relegation, despite a streak of success, seemed inevitable. How could they overcome all that?

I was more worried about how Liverpool would overcome their being “knocked off their perch” by the damnable Manchester United under Sir Alec Ferguson. Liverpool had their own demons to overcome. The Hillsborough disaster of 1989 weighted heavy on the team. Some went so far as to blame us supporters for what could not have been our fault. It was rough and heartbreaking. It hurt the club. Our mentality no doubt suffered for the loss of lives on that horrific day.

Liverpool went through their own penance through a series of mismanagement and poor decisions. Thirty years. It took us thirty years to win the league again after being legendary for decades. So Leeds down in the lower leagues was not even on my radar. I did not think they could overcome the sins of their past. I was not certain Liverpool could either, but I never worried they would be relegated. I had hopes that Everton might be…ok, ok, I digress.

Sixteen years in the lower leagues and here Leeds United are again. Giving Liverpool, the reigning champions, a proper match. We all have our sins of the past to overcome. Sometimes it takes a few hours to put your ship right. Sometimes it takes sixteen years. Or thirty years. Or a life time.

While I have never assaulted anyone contrary to reputation or been caught in a riot or crushed in a stampede, I have bet financial stability against future success and lost. I have let my demons off their leash and nearly been devoured for letting them lash out at me. I have hurt others by my own inaction or caught in my own pain.

My body and soul have suffered for making poor decisions that I knew were risky or plain stupid, decisions made in despair. I fell into the trap of blaming a cruel world and my mental illness for my shortcomings. This never works. I have power over my own life .

No matter our circumstances, no matter what others would have us believe, we all have power over our own lives. And we can all find absolution and strive toward our best selves. Truth be told, most of us will never get there. But the point is not the ends but the journey to get there. The journey is a beautiful game. A dance that never ends.

There is power in acknowledging that, perhaps, we have not always done what is right for ourselves or others. And forgive ourselves. And each other. Nothing is more powerful than true forgiveness. It is an easy thing to write. A terribly difficult thing to do.

Strength, mercy, kindness, and humility are essential elements of renewal and always the hardest to bring out of ourselves. Invisible demons never quit their assault on us, lying and tearing us down. It takes hard work to beat the world back and push yourself toward your potential. Without exception, all individuals have a gift to bring to this life, a light in the darkness, or at least, to discover what hides in the darkness and create from it. Kick on.

And support Liverpool so that you will never walk alone in the wicked storms of this life.

Writing

Unfinished

September 5, 2020September 5, 2020 E.M. Goldsmith2 Comments

I prefer to write by hand. This is from my very early days. I was 7 years old taking Communion classes, and writing short stories in the little notebook I was given for taking notes regarding my upcoming commitment to the church. Something I was totally uninterested in. I believed and still believe in God. And Angels. And Demons. And the eternal struggle between creation and oppression. I had no damn use for religion. It seems oppressive and antithetical to creation. That was all already there. Yes, many of the nuns at the Catholic school I attended wished to burn me at the stake even when I was very small. They let the other children torment me instead. Bullying the odd and unwanted was not frowned upon in my youth but encouraged.

While my mother dug her fist in between my shoulder blades to get me to sit up and Father Lopez droned on and on about the Catechism, I wrote a story about a small Canadian lynx named Cog that was not the right kind of big cat for the jungle he found himself in. Black panthers and spotted leopards told Cog that he was not even on the right continent. He should leave or they would hurt him.

It was not a bad tale considering my young age. Cog wished to be a full-maned lion much the way I wished to be a boy instead of a girl. Being a girl was shit especially in the religious context. I didn’t even like apples and I sure as Hell would never have taken one from a snake. All that told me is that stories are powerful instruments. Blame the girl for everything so entire civilizations for thousands of years can force them into dresses and subservience and forever tell the female to shut up and look pretty. Ridiculous.

Cog, who was a great hunter but all alone, had heard lions were kings of the jungle and had great prides for company where the girl lions could hunt better than the males. Now, that was Cog’s kind of girls. Off to the jungle he went. At seven, a lynx sneaking on a plane was a natural thing. So he gets to Africa only to be rejected by the other big cats and found his only friend to be a crocodile, Biter (which I spelled Bitter- the irony of it all) that no one else liked. I cried a little when I read it, realizing that at seven, I already felt like a total alien in the world in which I found myself.

I discovered the old notebook in which Cog lived in this old trunk piled high with notebooks in which I had written stories from age seven through my mid-forties. Trunk novels. Literally. I could hear Brandon Sanderson telling his audience at some fantasy convention I had attended that trunk novels needed to stay in the trunk. They were meant to be your learning books, teaching you the craft of writing.

I suppose that is how I felt about them. And most of them were unfinished. Some were truly awful. A sappy romance I wrote in high school embarrassed me so badly, I am considering burning it before anyone can find it after my death. Nine finished stories – none that struck me as my best work. Twenty-seven unfinished books, some just ideas scribbled down in three or four paragraphs describing beginning, conflict, and resolution, almost like ideas for writing assignments from my university days. Some were a character looking for a story. I did that a lot in my writing. I feel that way myself, a character in need of a story.

The Pandemic lead me to the darkest places in my mind as I looked through all this paper which contained so much of my pain, hope, torment, and dreams of a better world. My overwhelming feeling of failure and opportunities lost about destroyed me as the angel that tries so hard to save me whispered his old refrain.

There is no such thing as a failure who keeps trying.

I pulled the twenty best of the books out, purchased twenty new notebooks and began fiddling about with them. I will try to finish them before I finish my life. Maybe a lynx can’t be a lion, but the little cat can still be a fine hunter. And I can still be a decent writer. Even if the publishing world would prefer panthers, leopards, and lions.

#LiverpoolFC

You Will Never Walk Alone

Featured E.M. GoldsmithLeave a comment

I am still processing that something amazing has finally happened amid all the darkness. Liverpool FC are Premier League Champions. It is their first time winning the English league in thirty years, first time in the Premier League era.

Let me explain. I left the UK in 1987. Liverpool were always the top of the league. I would go through Liverpool to take ship to Ireland to visit my cousins. I was meant to be either Man United or a Chelsea supporter. Long story that. But first time I heard the voices of Liverpool supporters lifted up together singing “You’ll Never Walk Alone”, I had to be part of that.

It has been a long, dreary three decades. We had close moments in those years, but the moment Jurgen Klopp appeared, I knew something special was happening. That man will surpass old Bill Shankly in his influence.

I had been so depressed with all the ugliness in the world these days. Thursday was a nice bit of light. I know most won’t understand. There’s just something so beautiful in watching a group of players from every possible background working together at a common goal and playing with such passion and joy. And clearly playing for us fans, for the people of Liverpool, to give them that spark, that hope in all this darkness. You will never walk alone.

Pandemic · Prophecy · Pugs

The Plague

Featured E.M. Goldsmith2 Comments

On November 2, 2015, I wrote this fast fiction entry for a contest sponsored by Janet Reid, agent extraordinaire and Queen of the Known Universe. Ever since I can remember, starting with my earliest memories of childhood, the coming of plague has been on my mind.

They have happened always. I remember a teacher telling me that nature was a big, bad bitch and took care of culling the human population when it got out of hand by three measures: war, famine, and plague. There was nothing we could do about it but try and survive.

My flash fiction entry – Nov 2, 2015
The morning news is plague in Middle East.
“Take out the garbage,” I tell my son.
“Yes, father.”
“Did you do your lessons?”
“Yes, dad.”
Exit is backed up. We’re late.
By lunch plague creeps into Europe.
“Want to give blood for plague victims?” I ask.
“Sure, dad. Whatever you want.”
My son smiles at needle and nurse.
He shares his snack.
Night falls. Plague is everywhere.
“His blood is the cure,” the doctor claims.
Relief.
“We need all of it.”
My son or the world? Oblivious, the world rejoices.
All that remains is a cross marking my son’s sacrifice.

We all die. We would all rather it not be today. In the end, that is not something any of us get much of a say in. Mortality, at least embedded in this particular flesh, is an absolute.

If a savior arises, we will have no idea. It’s not like in books and fairy tales. Humanity is not a wise creature in the collective. We murder our saviors. And before that, we hate on them. A lot. While praising those who shackle us.

Anyhow, I knew the plague was coming.

And so did you.

And now it is time for another nap.

If I die before I wake, somebody please take care of my dog.