The media move along. On the internet one can look up a website for a chain of specialty book stores and in the guestbook for various trans-fraudulents---I mean trans-audients say these folks just knew everything about them and foretold the future as if it were unfolding in one minute past real time. I've never, alas, experienced anything like that. And that can be looked up aplenty on the web, though the believers won't bother.

But today I saw something in a local newspaper which, though often shrinking to pamphlet size in these rough times for print, still runs as if it is nineteen sixty and seventy something, online presence acknowledged. In its sports section NFL veteran quarterback Jay Schroeder was addressing the fine young men of several teams who will joust for CIF high school football titles this weekend.

"There was a strong sense of honor an achievement, as Schroeder reminded everyone they might not remember the name of their 10th-grade math teacher but they will always remember their high school football coach."

Gee, anywhere you go in the media there is a cottage industry, as authoritarian-slash-conservatives are wont to remind us, of those who say this sentiment is toxic. And garner relatively opposite attention. I remember in the late sixties a coach named Sherman who also taught biology, a well-hinted nontheist in a Catholic high school. He highly recommended "Catch 22" and "One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest".

He also demanded conformity and stereotyped post war toughness and while there were years that didn't go very well he was in on four CIF championship games, winning two, as head and assistant. I'll never forget how he ostracized my then best friend off the team with singled out humiliations for allegedly being effeminate and very definitely not liking the hair codes of the day and school, though it has come to light he caught his two head bullies in flagrante delecto. Of course, alpha brother to this day condemns my soft, in many ways, memory. A brother who played his heart out for Sherman on an ankle once shattered in a jumping accident.

The warrior's code has eluded me, I suppose.

And every time I pick up an Atlantic Monthly I recall Sherman's snide opinion in biology class of those who would read it. He was fired a couple of years after I graduated and it was hard to find work in an atmosphere of the 70's in which coaches were still coaches but there were some shifts in student body right, wrong and indifferent. But he invested his last ducats in the little niche known as racketball, amassed a pile and another of his player/admirers said he went on to coach a football team of what used to be called the boys of reform school in California's Central Valley.

Google Sherman? I'm afraid in this internet age I'd find something.