Did Jared Fogle Get What He Deserves?

Jared Fogle became the face of Subway after he reputedly lost an ungodly amount of weight on a Subway sandwich diet, and he was, for a time, arguably one of America's most beloved pitchmen. But now he's become America's boogeyman in the wake of a 15 years and 8 months prison sentence resulting from a plea deal for soliciting and paying to have sex with minors and for possessing and trading in child pornography.

As one might expect, people are alternately vilifying him and celebrating his judicial fate. But I take no more pleasure in Fogle's predicament than I do from contemplating the harm he's caused his family and the children he allegedly abused. For I believe that Fogle's actions were the result of a sickness he couldn't resist and that this makes him as much a victim of that sickness as are any of the children he may have molested.

Thus, I have grave misgivings about his harsh sentence if it was imposed for retributively punitive reasons, because it seems to me unfair and unjust to inflict retributive punishment on someone for doing something he couldn't help but do.

I also doubt that such a lengthy sentence is a significantly larger deterrent than a much lesser sentence would be. I wonder if any research has been done in the area of the comparative deterrent effect of various prison sentences for these kinds of crimes.

One thing that such a long sentence WILL accomplish is prevent Mr. Fogle from abusing any more children for the duration of his incarceration. But if it were possible to know with certainty that he wouldn't abuse more children after he got out, I'd support letting him out far sooner.

It's my understanding that federal sentences like this tend to be carried out to the full or nearly so, and, indeed, I've read that Fogle will have to serve a minimum of 13 years no matter how well he behaves himself behind bars. And then he may face an even sterner test upon release as he confronts extreme social ostracisim and feelings of profound shame as well as the severe residential restrictions, occupational limitations, and other monumental hardships that attend having to register as a sex offender for the rest of one's life.

So, I'm thinking that he has a tremendously difficult road ahead of him as a result of his sickness, and, again, I feel sorry for him as well as for the children he abused.

Why Don't More Christians Act Christian?

I have long maintained that the reason why so many champions of Christian teachings don't act nicely is that these teachings ring and very possibly are false and that there is probably no Holy Spirit to inspire the supposedly sanctified to exemplify the more salutary tenets of their faith.

That is, we're all only human, with very human urges to act badly at times, and there may well be no God within or without to help us override our human foibles.

Therefore, we might be well-advised to find the resources within ourselves and each other to override these foibles, and belief in highly dubious gods and religious worldviews might often be more of a hindrance than a help in this effort.

Ronda Rousey Is Human, and So Am I

Ronda Rousey finally lost. I didn't want her to. I'd hopped on her bandwagon a long time ago, and I wanted to hang on tight as I rode it all the way to her retirement from MMA as the undefeated champion she repeatedly boasted she would be.

Yet, poor Ronda not only lost, she was dominated, even more than I secretly feared she might be, in every way from the opening bell. Holly Holm made this heretofore MMA goddess and self-proclaimed and media-touted "greatest fighter in the world" look like a hapless novice. And just as Ronda took some concussive blows in the Octagon last Saturday night, so did my faith in idols.

I've had an almost lifelong tendency to single out certain athletes, musicians, intellectuals, and so forth and regard and revere them as idols who not only can do no wrong but are superhuman in their transcendent talents and skills.

I don't know why I've done this. Maybe I've just wanted the human equivalent of that "shining city on the hill" to serve as my glittering inspiration to aim higher, or to at least let me vicariously experience the glorious success and greatness I could never hope to achieve for myself but that the little boy inside me continued to crave.

But I may have difficulty doing this after what happened in Australia and what has happened on other fronts, and maybe it's for the best that I stop placing people on towering pedestals and start respecting myself as much as I do anybody and everybody else. Maybe when I stop worshiping other people as gods, I'll also stop feeling so feeble and inferior by comparison that I lack any motivation to cultivate my own talents, hone my own skills, and fulfill my own dreams.

I still like and respect Ronda Rousey, and I hope that she gets a rematch with Holly Holm and maybe even wins it. But I doubt that I'll ever see her or anyone else again the way I've seen her and other previous and recent idols of mine, and I think that's probably a good thing.

Yogi Berra and Me

I've been posting alleged quotes or "Yogi-isms" from Yogi Berra to Facebook every Thursday for months. But now I may stop, at least for awhile. Now that he's gone, my heart just isn't in it. I feel sad that he's gone, even though he played mostly before my time, I was never a Yankees fan, and I haven't cared much for baseball since I stopped being a kid.

It's just that there was something so endearing about the guy, even if a lot of what it was may have been modified, misattributed, or even fabricated. Beyond that, with each famous figure who dies old or young, I can't help but think more vividly than usual that my time, my mom's time, my wife's time, the times of all those who ever mattered or will matter to me will come.

Yet, a friend emailed me today about Yogi's passing, and I replied to his subject line "Bad News" that perhaps Mr. Berra was so old, frail, and sick that dying was the best thing that could happen to him. I read that his wife died fairly recently and that he'd been in an assisted living facility for several years. Was there anything left for him to live for?

I don't want to go on living when my quality of life is so irrevocably compromised that not only can I not enjoy it any longer but I require other people to attend to pretty much my every need. Unfortunately, for longer than I care to admit, I've done very little to compress my morbidity through the recommended means of good diet, exercise, sleep, socializing, spiritualizing, etc.

But I think this is about to change or is already changing as I write this. I'm watching a Great Course's series of lectures on "How to Stay Fit as You Age," and I'm really digging it. What's more, I'm really digging the way I feel when and after I take my walks and do my exercises that I've neglected for far too long.

If I follow the pretty professor's advice, I may just be able to significantly compress my own morbidity even at this relatively late date, and even if I'm very unlikely to live as long as Yogi, maybe I can live pretty well until whenever I draw my last breath.

I Don't Need No Stinkin' Cable!

When I canceled cable TV over two years ago, I was afraid I'd miss out on a lot. But it turns out that, with the help of my Roku boxes, I've watched more great TV series on streaming demand via Netflix, Amazon, and Hulu than I ever did or would have on cable, and I'm paying much, MUCH less for the privilege.

Here are some of the good to superlative series I've watched on my TVs in their entirety since cutting the cable: FRIDAY NIGHT LIGHTS, BATTLESTAR GALACTACA (remake), CAPRICA, THE BOOTH AT THE END, SIX FEET UNDER, DEXTER, DEADWOOD, BREAKING BAD, THE SOPRANOS, THE WIRE, MAD MEN, THE BRIDGE, and SONS OF ANARCHY. And I've watched five seasons of THE GOOD WIFE and JUSTIFIED this way, along with four seasons of HELL ON WHEELS, three seasons of LONGMIRE, two seasons of FALLING SKIES and RECTIFY, and a season of MANHATTAN, BOSCH, and MOZART IN THE JUNGLE. And I just began watching FARGO, look forward to watching, among other series, THE AMERICANS, HOUSE OF CARDS, ORANGE IS THE NEW BLACK, TRANSPARENT, THE WALKING DEAD, SENSE8, EXTANT, HANNIBAL, SEINFELD (never watched it on regular TV), and NARCOS, as well as to finishing the series I've already mentioned that haven't wrapped yet.

Who says you have to pay for expensive cable or satellite services or engage in illegal and cumbersome downloading to watch great television at relatively minimal expense and fuss?

My Fifteen Seconds of "Fame"

I don't know why it's taken me so long to post this. After all, it's not every day that I get interviewed by a television news station. In fact, I've never been interviewed before. But it happened last Tuesday afternoon.

I had posted comments on two local news stations' Facebook pages that morning about my close encounter with a wrong-way driver bound for tragedy the previous night. And just a couple of hours later, I received a voicemail from a female reporter at one of the stations asking if she could interview me about my experience. However, she seemed to believe that I had actually witnessed the fatal crash that occurred right after my near miss, so I thought I didn't have anything worthwhile to say to her and didn't call her back as she requested.

But that afternoon, a male reporter called from the same station, and this time I picked up the phone and talked to him. He too wanted to interview me. I told him I didn't see the accident, but he still wanted to interview me to "get the perspective" of someone who closely encountered the errant driver just moments before he died in a fiery crash that also killed two other people. So, I agreed to let him come to my house for an interview.

He and his cameraman arrived about fifteen minutes later, and I stepped out on the front porch for the interview. I felt nervous, but not as nervous as I was afraid I might be except for the fact that I was still nervous enough that my right leg involuntarily and disconcertingly jerked forward from below the knee numerous times as I stood there answering the reporter's routine questions about what I saw and felt the previous night and what I thought about it all in retrospect. The interview concluded very quickly and the reporter and cameraman thanked me for consenting to it.

That night, my wife and I tuned in to that station's ten o'clock newscast right after the penultimate telecast of the penultimate season of American Idol, and a short way into it they aired a story on the crash, and a snippet from my interview appeared. Since I no longer subscribe to cable, I didn't have a DVR to record it with, but my wife recorded it off the TV with her cellphone video camera. I haven't checked out the result. I wasn't sufficiently enamored with what I saw on TV to want to see it again.

Still, I'm glad I did the interview. It was an experience, short-lived as it was, that I'll be unlikely to forget, although more likely than the other guy they interviewed who saw the accident, tried in vain to help CHP officers pull the wrong-way driver from his pickup before it caught fire, and then stood by helplessly as the driver burned to death in front of him. That poor interviewee and the other witnesses to this tragedy will probably have nightmares for a long time about what they saw and heard that awful night.

I have only relief that I wasn't driving in the fast lane when I encountered the pickup; sadness for the people killed, for their families and friends, and for those who saw the victims die; and an iota of shallow gratification that I got to do something I've never done before and enjoy my fleeting moment of quasi-fame.

A Cool Brush With Catastrophe

I rarely post to this blog anymore. But something happened last night that I can't NOT post about.

I was driving home in lane #2 of the westbound lanes of I-80 from my bowling league after midnight and had just passed a big rig to my right when suddenly, in the fast lane next to me on my left, I saw the oncoming headlights of a pickup truck headed the wrong way eastbound, and the vehicle flew past me before I had time to do anything but register the almost surreal incident with numb incredulity.

I had my cellphone with me and thought about calling the police, but, since my cellphone won't connect with the car speaker my wife uses with her cellphone, I would have needed to extract my phone from the secure case attached to my belt, turn it on, locate, press, and hold the tiny "emergency call" icon at the bottom of the screen, and then call 911 while keeping at least one hand on the steering wheel and my eyes and concentration still mostly on the road, and I figured someone behind me would also see the pickup soon enough and call it in via a safer arrangement, and, hopefully, all would be well.

When I got home a few minutes later, I hastily posted the following to Facebook:

Tonight as I drove home from the bowling center after midnight in the westbound lanes of I-80, a pickup truck flew past me in the next lane going in the wrong direction. A monumental oops for whoever was driving, and lucky for me that I wasn't in that lane. Yikes!

I didn't give the matter much thought after that and, being as late as it was and as tired as I was, I bedded down and went right to sleep. But when my wife and I got up at 6 this morning, I told her about the incident and then turned on the local news. Soon after that, I saw mention of a fatal accident caused by a pickup driving the wrong way in the fast lane just east of where and moments after I had my encounter. 

A Ford-150 pickup collided head on with a Lexus sedan in the fast lane. The pickup immediately burst into flames and burned its driver beyond recognition of even his or her gender. The two male occupants of the horribly crumpled Lexus died at the scene, and the freeway was shut down for hours in that vicinity.

A normal person might well respond to this experience by solemnly banging out some platitudinous observance such as: "Times like these make me realize how precarious life is and how important it is to make every moment count and to kiss your loved one(s) before leaving and tell them you love them so that if these happen to be the last things you do and say to your loved one(s), they're the RIGHT things."

But since there's nothing normal about me, I'm not going to say this (even though I kinda just did). But I *am* going to reflect here on how I responded to what happened and try to draw some lessons from it.

This morning some of the local news channels posted the story of the accident to their Facebook pages, and I jumped in and commented on my experience last night. Someone responded immediately by leveling accusatory words at me to the effect that I hadn't even called the police to warn them about the wrong-way driver. 

Well, I never said this in my comment, but the commenter somehow drew that conclusion from what I wrote, and she was right. I hadn't called the police. I lied to her and said I didn't call because my cellphone was "inaccessible," and I went on to explain that the CHP had already been notified and that two CHP officers enroute to intercept the pickup saw the collision from the opposite side of the freeway just moments after the pickup passed me.

The fact is, even though my notifying the CHP would have made no difference in this instance, I didn't know this at the time and should have called in anyway on the off chance that it might have prevented a catastrophe. I *did* think about calling it in, but I reasoned that someone had probably done it already or would sooner and more safely than I could at the time, and that the pickup driver himself or herself would probably realize soon enough what was happening and take evasive action before anyone was hurt on the sparsely trafficked freeway on which I'd seen no one in the fast lane thus far.

But after that, I hardly gave it a second thought. I drove right on home without exiting the freeway at the next opportunity and stopping from where I could have safely called 911. And I didn't feel particular concern for any right-way drivers who might encounter the wrong-way driver behind me.

I'd like to pass this off not as a psychopathic lack of concern for my fellow "man" but as yet another instance of my typically poor judgement along with a psychologically protective kind of insulation from the needless distress of helpless concern. In other words, I cared about the drivers behind me but figured I couldn't do anything about it soon enough to make a difference and didn't want to stress myself with unproductive concern about it and reassured myself that everything would be okay.

But is this *really* why I didn't call in what I saw or give it much of an additional thought short of publishing my rather cursory post to Facebook before lying down and quickly departing the land of wakefulness?

I guess I don't know the definitive answer to this. Neither do I know why I don't feel the sense of profound relief that I was spared the fate of the two men in the Lexus. Should I feel it? Is there something wrong with me that I don't? Would most people feel it?

I won't launch into a pity party of saying (although, once again, I kinda just did) that I think my wife might be better off in the long run if that pickup had collided with me instead of with the Lexus and that the fact that it didn't is something I needn't celebrate with feelings and expressions of deep gratitude.

I'll just say instead that I take the following key lessons from all of this. First, be sure to do whatever I must to call in any road hazards--from wrong-way, persistently swerving, or alarmingly speeding or aggressive drivers to potentially dangerous road debris as soon as I can relatively safely manage it. And second, realize how precious and precarious life is and make damn sure that I kiss my wife and tell or show her I love her before I leave for bowling or other road travels, because one just never knows.

(You can access a multimedia account of the accident here.)

It's That Time Again

Another year has flown by and another "special day" greets me this morning.

I don't know how I've made it this far or how much further I'll be able to go. I say "I'll be able" rather than "have to" because I still want to keep going. You might wonder why considering that all my dreams now seem to end with the morning sun and my goals entail little more than getting through the day.

Gone are my hopes of writing my magnum opus on religion, free will, or anything else. I've come to the provisional conclusion that I have nothing to say that's worth saying and that people these days won't even read the words of those who do. Gone are my hopes of becoming the person I want to be. There's just too large a gulf between that person and the person I am and have always been.

No, today I live to love my wife, my cats, my family, and my friends. I live to enjoy the things I still can and to contribute what little I can to the enjoyment of others. That's it.

Do I sound depressed? I don't feel depressed. In fact, when I got up this morning and started seeing and replying to all the nice people wishing me Happy Birthday on Facebook, I felt happy. I still do. I'm blessed to have so many friends and acquaintances who care enough to send me birthday wishes. I've known some of them for over fifty years, and I feel a special sense of warmth and connection when I hear from one of them.

So, no, I'm not depressed. Just being realistic about who I am and what is left for me to do with a wasted life that's running out of time.

Yet, having said that, my mind is filled with things I could write even if nobody wants to read them. So maybe I was wrong to suggest that I don't even care to try. And if I were to try, just try, regardless of the result, maybe that would go a long way to bridging the aforementioned "gulf" between who I am and who I want to be.

Let's see what happens this year.