And it’s small and it’s mean and it’s cold

There are times when intention matters, and there are times when outcome matters.

Actually, even as I write that sentence and reflect on it, it feels wrong. I’m not sure intention every really matters, outcome might be the only thing worth anything.

There’s a school of thinking about communication that goes something like this: The physical world lives outside classifiable description, and really only exists at all in the ways we label it and share those labels with each other. This is the crux of the idea in which I say “chair” to you, thinking of a recliner, and you hear “chair” and think of a table chair, but it goes a step further and asserts that the labels we give this are what animate reality, and that only by trying to communicate their existence does the world really exist. communication as word-making, is the idea.

So, bringing that back to the idea of intention vs outcome, “intention” is what you mean when you say chair, but “outcome” is what you have to deal with when your words interact with other bodies in the world.

I say all this because, in the sports world, there has been a resurgence of media discourse around athlete vaccinations, and around the intentions – the “whys” – of whether or not athletes are vaccinated, and if their reasons for getting or not getting vaccinated are justifiable. I’m not interested in that conversation. I’m not interested in weighing one person’s reasons for getting vaccinated against another, or weighing that justification against anyone else’s personal story. I’m interested in the outcome, which is jabs, which is contributing to the overall national vaccination numbers, which is a critical part of us all getting through. The rest is noise.

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Speaking of noise: fucking Baroness is playing Kung Fu Necktie! Baroness is one of two actively-touring bands whose work I have loved for 10+ years but I have somehow never seen live (the other is Wilco, who I will run down someday). And now they’re playing the tiny bar near my house in three months! I will be acquiring tickets this morning and would appreciate if no one else did before I got to them.