During my stint last fall as a “junior historian” at Guy Miller Archives of Palo Alto Historical Association at Room H-5 at Cubberley Community Center the former high school (NFL’s Art Kuehn played for the Cougars there), I turned over a clipping, I think it was Mike Doyle’s long story listing all the music venues of the time, in the Palo Alto Weekly, and noted a recap of a Paly Vikings football game that said something like “Jim Harbaugh running for his life…”

That, plus Ann Killion’s recent piece in Chron about Harbaugh’s “act has worn thin” had me thinking about my otherwise dormant research project and performing arts spectacle, “The Harbaugina Monologues” in which I work through, sometimes in front of an audience, sometimes merely here in the blogosphere and alternative-reality of “Plastic Alto”, the fact of being a life-long Stanford and 49ers fan AND hating Harbaugh since about 1981. (Search “harbaugh” or “harbaugina” here in the internal search feature for more info).

Plus I was reading a Philip K. Dick collection of essays and had this notion: maybe the rumored mutiny against Captain Comeback is true and worse than that in caused some kid of psychic break from which Our Boy Jim has never completely gotten over. Maybe what drives him, beyond money you can earn throwing a football 70 yards with tight spiral and later picking the Colin Kaeperniks over the Russell Wilson’s  and motivating them, is trying  to outrun whatever it feels like, with guys chasing you and the nagging feeling that your own teammates, you are not sure whether to trust. Clearly I have no idea and am just speculating. (And am no Philip K. Dick, clearly, and thru a scanner darkly, without total recall, and maybe via my own volition and free will).

So I thought of a post here called “Run From Daylight” which references a book by Vince Lombardi., “Run to Daylight” which I think means that as you approach a mass of men you run towards the least dense portion of the scum, where there is “daylights” and not “three yards and a cloud of dust”. And not, if you permit my mind to wander as is my nature these days, like the paintings by Theopholis “Bill” Brown, circa 1958, in Life Magazine (ask Matt Gonzalez, who has seen them, and found a set for Bill, who is now in heaven), in which he merely painted the form and did not preserve the color-coded distinction of who is blocking whom, he painted all 22 or so as one tangled mass. Which is also, with the slight exception to what I seem to be saying about Our Boy Jim, although if you read it thru you may note that I suggest an exit strategy, a happy ending, as it were, that when I think of my old teammates in football, baseball, basketball, tennis or bowling, and our opposition, I think of us all the same, that the guys I was against 40 years ago I am now for; if I meet one, as time to time I do, I think of us having both survived something, or learned from each other, as being one, one mass.

Oddly, I had thought the title “run to daylight” was from guard Jerry Kramer’s bio and not Vince Lombardi’s, which I thought was called “Winning is The Only Thing”. I read a lot of these books when I was a kid, and actually, with my neighbor Andrew Dieden, used to write NFL teams and players asking for photos and stickers, circa 1972. (And that was the chief thing Andy recalled of our youth, when he contacted me out of the blue a few years ago: Are you the Mark Weiss with whom I would write to NFL teams asking for stickers?).

Do note that this version of Kramer has a forward by Jonathan Yardley, whose son Jim Yardley attended Gunn for one year, 1980-1981 and recalls sacking Jim Harbaugh twice (although I think Harbaugh was yanked for Paul Kraft, but close enough).

I wrote to Ann Killion and am curious whether she takes the bait or ignores this somewhat trivial set of data and ideas. I may end up posting my note to her here but will first see if she wants to use it somehow in her work.

Also in a somewhat related matter, I saw Seattle Seahawk Super Bowl champion Russell Wilson on Charlie Rose’s show and was pleased to note he is actually the son of former Dartmouth standout wide receiver Harrison B. Wilson (known as “Harry B” or “HB Productions, and a teammate of NFL standout Reggie Williams), and nephew of Dartmouth Trustee Stephen Wilson. Showing my true color, (Big Green), methinks young Wilson could quit the day job (ala Steve Young) and maybe think about the White House some day. (Also thinking of Bill Bradley, “A Sense of Where You Are” by John McPhee). Wilson ended up on my Fantasy Football team and helped me “place” two years in a row — I knew there was something I liked about him.

We refrained from saying “hey” to Jim Harbaugh at recent Stanford hoops game, I describe below. I am probably through with working through all that as a monologue but may update from time to time here.

I’m curious what I would have thought of Philip K. Dick if I had met him in his prime, as a peer: would I be in awe of his genius or detecting something sad or tragic or amiss? I think generally with people they are that much more deeper than we could know; it is especially dangerous to try to understand so-called celebrities we don’t  know. I liked the way Rachel Kushner phrased such, in something I ripped and re-posted — I don’t know Rachel but have met her parents. I also said somewhere herein recently: Who’s afraid of Helen Sung?

I think Archers of Loaf have song about “the light”. Maybe outro with that, if I find it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CdzDxDCcfCQ