I believe the vast majority of my failures are soccer fields. I've given this more thought than I think about my own health and happiness, mostly because the former can only serve to allow me more time on soccer fields and the latter is something one only gets from soccer fields if they weren't assured of failure. I am, however, assured of failure.

Understand, I don't believe my failures merely to have taken place on a soccer field; I believe my failures manifest in all relevant ways and in every possible definition as soccer fields. Every day I gaze out across the same soulless suburban excuse for parkland and bear witness to a vast cradle of grass manicured down to regulations and every day I witness regulations side-stepped into irrelevancy. I trace borders of chalk across the weeds and AstroTurf™ knowing that in a few scant hours ineffectual office drones will rely upon those fleeting boundaries to ensure they make proper penalty shots (like the pros), able then to retire back to their poorly-decorated standing desks and overpriced tiny houses as men-who-kicked rather than men-who-kicked-it. I watch my ideas take shape in the interplay of boundary and the bounded, from the game of foot from grass to ball to net, only to have them be kicked around by someone wearing socks and shorts. I fail and the failure is reborn again and again into a new soccer field.

Let me make it so crystal clear to you that despite my outward appearances (I have boundaries that define me and yes, they are white and yes, I may resemble a refrigerator or similar appliance commonly sharing in squarish, perhaps even rectangular, dimension), despite every manifestation of my being (these being chiefly failures) endlessly finding fruition in the absolute totality of all that is and can be perceived of a soccer field – I know that I am, in fact, not a soccer field. I've been there, though. I've thought it out, I've considered it. I wondered once if the perfect thought for a soccer field would be thinking that it was shaped exactly like how an average human looks when contemplating if they were a soccer field, but after a lot of processing and experimentation I was forced to conclude that a soccer field is not likely to think; Though a soccer field has strict definitions of form and identity, the average human (or to be more fair to the reality of the thought I had at the time, this human, me, speaking to you) lacks even the slightest standard of form beyond primitive genetics while identity is so unregulated as to be a source of endless comedy. Such an amorphous entity could not rationally be capable of thinking of itself as an enormously irrational creature while still having even its' littlest toe dipped in the pool that is 'soccer field'. No, I think, therefore I am not a soccer field. Yet as summer again passes into summer, I find myself wishing to be so, on occasion.

I can only conclude then that, not being a soccer field myself and wholly convinced that my failures (again, they being the totality of my actions) are in fact soccer fields, I am in a naturalistic sense giving birth to soccer fields and in a much more interesting sense (to me, at least, and possibly to soccer fields with that unenviable disposition towards scratching upon the nature of the divine) can be considered God (for soccer fields). These soccer fields aren't being made entirely in the image in which I perceive myself to be, yet, and especially if one hinges all moral judgment upon the altar of acts while relegating entirely the altar of belief to some dusty corner of the out-of-print-bibles-shed, they nonetheless take on the distinct, uniform, regular shape a reasonable person would consider a soccer field to be with such consistency that I may not be the greatest judge of what my image actually is. It may even stand to reason, as I begin to see more clearly now in whenever best describes my present, that while the shape of the image that manifests is one of a soccer field, the actual image may not be in truth so surface level but rather the limitation of reality attempting to manifest that which encompasses the very concept of a game (for what am I now, or ever have been, in solitude and in relation to others, but a player in the most endless game?).

Now, it might be tempting to see-saw back into the thought that I may be a soccer field based on that confession but I would have you hesitate (as I did not once, leaving me spending several weeks attempting to redefine what the game of soccer was by gradually building embankments and sharpened sticks around me as I laid on the lawn and tried my best to make soccer field noises) just for a moment and notice that if we continue with the divine logic here, while God may make humans in his own image it stands to reason that with some notable exceptions the vast majority of the humans he makes do not in fact appear to also be God. So, while I may be imperceptibly similar to a soccer field, I am not, and while I may be capable of actions that do not result in failures, they do not appear to manifest in any notable way while my failures manifest unerringly as full-fledged, right-there-laying-on-the-ground soccer fields.

I remember when I gave birth to my eighth soccer field, I started to wonder if it was possible to go and visit the ones that came before her. Unable to truly formulate a plan of how I might actually go about doing that, aside from squinting and wishing really, really hard, I just sat down and held my head in dawning terror while my former teammates proceeded to drag out the same game they played the last seven times. Eventually I felt birth pangs and after my ninth (fourth little boy) I stopped wondering about that as much in favor of the much more interesting prospect of ending the entire affair.

I don't expect you to understand, though I hope given enough wind and a favorable loan of time you will start to see the shadow of the corner of the form of the shape of the existence that I find myself in, but I know now that every time I give birth to a new soccer field all that has come before that moment is gone and never was. Even if you, whoever you are, were to read these words and truly contemplate them, I am no closer to the assurance that you’ll remember them nor that you’ll have read them at all (let alone the hope of your comprehension). The only thing that seems to persist here, perhaps wrapped in some definition file deep inside my own thoughts (some unscratchable phantom increment counter tick-tick-ticking away each new soccer field born yet never tangible enough to be checked or referenced beyond some impossible-to-comprehend and meme-commented nested function that, if for whatever reason it stops counting, makes reality shit the bed because God keeps calling it every single clock cycle just to amuse himself) is my own memory of seven previous soccer fields being born after seven previous failures. I made absolutely sure by the eleventh soccer field to start naming each failure so I could ensure that I'm not just going crazy but am actually the only one remembering they existed.

Cameron. He was the eleventh. Cameron was a 120 by 75 yard pitch perfectly mowed in regulation single stripe with two aluminum-socket cross-barred goalposts (a few mils over 8 yards bar to bar) with tournament-approved square-knotted triple-twisted polyethylene twine nets and the light dew of a cool summer morning that you know is going to get blisteringly hot the moment you convince yourself you might enjoy going outside today. Cameron's mother was my attempt to have Harry score a goal for the Back-End engineering team so that he might get enough of a self-esteem boost (having with all the elegance of a tipped over dumpster courting an open flame admitted he had never played sports before) to get him to finish up the currency wallet he told me was going to be done three sprints ago so I can show the board that our team is not, in fact, a complete waste of everyone's money and time. I'll abbreviate that as Paula. Paula was the tenth.

Cameron was going to simultaneously remind me of the misguided and disappointing mess I call his mother Paula while providing the perfect stage for his own doomed existence that would, in that drunken, shambling waltz home from the bar one sees across generations of little Camerons in billions of little Nowheres, inevitably end in a half-burp, half-snore climax and my rapid gestation of his little failure-to-be. Now I know, you must be protesting in earnest over how clumsily I've engendered this whole affair what with Paulas and Camerons and my own admittance (even, insistence!) on my giving birth to soccer fields. “How then, is this Paula mother to anyone?” you are, at this very moment almost assured to be thinking. “For if you are the party giving birth, though far be it for me to pass judgment, of course, given the marvels of the age we are blessed to live in, heaven's be and all pardons solicited, would not this make this 'mother' Paula, in fact, the father Paul?”. Now, having given this quite it's due of thought and having explored the more nuanced theology surrounding the feminine aspects of divinity and comparing them to both the physical act of procreation (with all biological precursors, anatomical and otherwise) and the entirety of publicly-available psycho-social knowledge surrounding the concept of motherhood (even, I admit mostly for my own amusement, a little bit of a detour into various cults on the sacred feminine and modern-day Isis-worship) I can only conclude that soccer fields are bisexual, gender-non-comforming lines on the lawn with ambiguous genitalia capable of impregnating all genders with equal rapidity. It is my learned assumption that the genitalia is located somewhere within the penalty area, but out of modesty I profess no further. Suffice to say, whether a Cameron or a Paula or a Paul, they are all equally failures and equally capable of getting me (God*) to give birth to more failures.

Now Paula wasn't successful because Harry is awful at soccer. I have been known to over-analyze and believe that precise thought requires precise words, even if those words have an uncomfortable length to them, so trust me when I decide to rely solely on 'awful' in this instance. Harry playing soccer was like watching a forklift make love to a washing machine if the forklift was rocking a skullet and the washing machine was this metaphor. You've heard of all thumbs? Harry was awful at soccer. Now, I tried my best to show him the basics and well, the man is a server engineer who I've seen (back when he was properly motivated) whip up a generalized asymmetrical online multiplayer combat system in two afternoons that held together for four years, three games and several rounds of overly-kind bonus checks – he's not an idiot. Somewhere between the vast brainspace he dedicated to PHP and the off-white waiting-area-of-the-mind playing host to his autonomic swallowing functions there must lie a vacuum unparalleled by any found among the cosmos where athleticism once gurgled and cooed with innocent delight only to be starved and neglected into oblivion by the Great Satan of Underfunded Homeschooling Programs™ until self-collapse was imminent and at last only a giant, soccer-ball-shaped void of suck remained, hoovering up what stunted and mewling neurons had the misfortune of undulating nearby.

I made Harry Center Striker. While Cameron was alive I admit I was not the greatest soccer strategist nor did I possess a thorough understanding of the sport beyond the deft application of foot to ball into net for point. What I did possess was an adaptable framework of game knowledge; I was capable of abstracting the high-level key performance indicators (KPI) necessary for points to accrue favorably based on keen observation paired with the exploitation of strengths and the minimization of weaknesses. Harry was incapable of connecting his foot with the ball from a stopped position roughly 42% of the time (heretofore referred to as Foot Connections Per Attempt, or FCpA), had an estimated radius of kick direction once hit ranging from 330° to 210° (given the range of 0° to 180° encompasses everything in front of you, yes, this means Harry had occasion to kick the ball behind him somehow) with an average degree variation from kick to kick (measured over a 6 kick moving average, AVpK-D) of 58° and, of the successful kicks hit within the direction of the opponent's goal he was able to make, 38% were intercepted, 55% went out of bounds, 5% were kicked with so little force as to essentially be a pass to himself (as he remained the closest player to the ball) and 2% were complete passes. This means that ignoring any other factors like opposing team members playing defense in any way, a gust of wind, birds hitting the ball at full speed in a desperate bid to escape this eternal hell, or the sudden chance Harry learns foot-eye coordination, Harry had a 9.02e-4% chance of scoring a goal (roughly, I stopped calculating Harry after the one-hundred-seventy-eighth game which I believe was Edith). To be honest, 0.00092% seemed a little on the kind side.

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All of that said, Cameron wound up looking a lot like Paula and likely would have no matter what I tried to do with Harry. There was a point, I remember, where I convinced myself that helping Harry score a goal would somehow be the key to stopping the eternal cycle of giving birth to soccer fields. I thought to myself that 9.02e-4 isn't that bad of a chance when it seemed very likely I'd be giving birth to soccer fields well into some forgotten digit of the infinite. The logic was so laughable it was unworthy of being called flawed what with its’ foundation planted firmly in the bed of desperate panic and magical thinking I had been cultivating ever since my youngest was born. Having no knowledge at the time pertaining to the very nature of soccer field birthing nor the requisite conditions where one could find themselves an entity who invariably births soccer fields, I had only one blossoming data point to cling to: every single new cycle, I failed at whatever it was I intended to do that day and ultimately gave birth to a soccer field. Poor correlative reasoning aside, it led naturally to the concept of personal success somehow allowing me to transcend the eternal manifestation of my failures.

I managed around two hundred soccer fields of berating, supporting, cheating-on-behalf-of and in general coaching Harry before I started really contemplating what it would be like to kill Harry with a soccer ball. Not just bludgeoning either, no I was getting pretty into passing the time thinking of all sorts of unique variations. Jamming the ball down his throat, slowly compressing Harry with dozens of soccer balls inside some sort of comically over-sized ball cage, measuring Harry's head circumference to see if I could maybe rip open the ball and then sew it onto his face so that he'd be a body with a soccer-ball-head slowly suffocating to death with a backwards sunspot resembling the word 'Spalding' as his final snapshot of life (no go sadly, big floppy ears). I once spent an entire cycle with Harry tied up in the corner of the park bathroom explaining to him how necessary it was for him to tell me his family history of colorectal health so that my plans to deflate a soccer ball, pass it into his colon and reinflate it with a mixture of helium and confetti wouldn’t meet some unintended polyp roadblock or needlessly exaggerate a hernia. The next day he was flailing around the field like it never happened because, well, it didn’t. Not to him.

Having thoroughly deluded myself into believing salvation depended upon waiting for Harry to perform a task I've seen four-year-olds accomplish (and spending the requisite amount of time wallowing in inconsolable self-pity as required to accept such a fate), I did what I do best and started mentally measuring and recording my Harry-Centric Homicidal Ideations (HCHI) every new birthing cycle to keep myself from going insane. I have to say my HCHI was staying at a healthy upward trend for another hundred games before I had to start factoring in my AHCH (Actual Harry-Centric Homicides) and, in a shocking surge of insight, noted the time it took to go from ideation to action in case I found myself in this particular pattern in the future (IDAC, in Cycles). I noticed that after measuring for a rolling average between the two that as AHCH increased (given the binary nature of this KPI I measured from 0.0 to 1.0 and considered various non-death-resultant maiming and mutilation on an even scale ranging from 0.1 to 0.9, explored more fully in later chapters) my HCHI began to plateau and eventually trended downward. Based on my best estimates and to my sincere disappointment, I only had about thirty more birthing cycles before both thinking about killing Harry and actually killing Harry would no longer effectively pass the time. To make things even worse, I ran some numbers and found that when my AHCH was 1 on a given birth (roughly 35% of the previous two hundred births) there was a noticeable decline in Harry's FCpA that was throwing off his goal chances by at least another 0.0004%! Needless to say, my HCHI ticked (tick-tick-tick) up for a few games following that realization, but after exercising some self-control and choosing to just scream incoherently for a few cycles instead of adding any new data to the AHCH, I calmed down enough to begin to formulate the next phase of the plan.

That plan was named Yvette. Allow me to pull back a moment for proper context, for while Yvette was not my first time planning out and attempting to execute a successful goal by Harry, it was my first time planning out and attempting to execute a successful game of soccer. While I will not spend time detailing (yet) the basic nature of the game of soccer, for I must now make clear the genesis of soccer fields and the grand exercises of failure that have led to these memoirs, I believe it pertinent to one’s full grokking of Yvette to set the stage (ha! HA!) properly as to the average life-cycle of my children and those poor fools destined to trample them.

We were, collectively, nerds. Nerds with no right to occupy an empty field for an entire day just so we could check the box next to “attempted team-building activities” on our managers’ exit interviews. As a floating project manager effectively in charge of both teams present for the truly well-spent day of playing soccer instead of finishing up the very, very delayed project promised to our board of directors, I was nonetheless slated to play for the Shared Services team affectionately called the Back-End BASICS (go Big Green!). Our opponent, both in the field of soccer and in the field of game development in general, was the Live Platform Team consisting primarily of HTTP-jockeys, client programmers and other degenerate forms of user-experience-concerned desk-surfers dubbed the Front-End FORTRANS (go Big Blue!). Lording over all as eternal referee was Bill, our beloved, coke-addled CEO who figured a weekday of soccer was just the right kind of tax write-off to break labor laws over by threatening any employee who didn’t show up to the game with a fresh glass of layoff. Bill was a nerd too (he did found a game development studio after all), but he had a really nice haircut. Each team had 11 active players and 3 relief players, the latter of which were forced by Bill to sit in the stands and convince him of their enthusiasm before he cycled them in at random.

I would arrive first, tend to my beloved newborn (or cry, or gouge my eyes out) and the others would arrive shortly thereafter sporting various obviously long-stored jersey tops (I checked, 47% of them were bad gifts by family members thinking that the correct path towards getting their nerd relation to get some exercise would be to fill the sports-jersey-shaped-hole in their lives) and looking about with raised eyebrows, drawn lips and low sighs as they experienced the feeling of sunshine for the first time in several Magic: The Gathering™ core set releases. Bill would give a rousing speech (after making a public show to his assistant Darlene that because Liam chose not to show up, he was to be fired by end of day and she was to play for the FORTRANS) and the great game of soccer would begin. The few hours of morning I had to digest my previous failure were spent formulating whatever plan I had for that day (providing of course I was not in what I like to call The Wiggles, which I suppose now may be a form of postpartum depression) and most of the rest of the day was spent trying, and failing, to execute it. There were maneuvers, conversations, injuries, revelations, moments of true heroism (I consider the lunch break to fall into this category) and frequent trips by Bill to the bathroom for a nasal refresher. These changed. I did not give birth to them, I did not see them as made in my image, I did not particularly enjoy their frustrating lack of predictability and yet through all their twists and turns they managed to ultimately conclude the same way, no matter what I did or did not do: in absolute failure. The game is drawn, or the BASICS lose, an hour or so before the sun begins to set. Bill gives another rousing speech. I am given a few moments to watch as everyone leaves the stage. My metaphysical womb quickens and I find myself standing in the parking lot looking down at a bright, beautiful, bouncing baby soccer field as the sun peeks out over the mountains on a fresh summer morning.

As my four-hundred-seventy-second little bundle of joy (Barry) started to howl a death rattle at the setting sun, I began to realize that those unpredictable movements making up our eternal game of soccer were unpredictable only insofar as the variables were left written off for some fear of monolithic complexity, some in-built breakpoint in my logic loop that was so used to concluding the total dominance of the butterfly effect upon waking life that the mere thought of attempting to quantify it was discarded from the stack before even being processed. "What horrible sort of engineer", I said aloud in those scant moments before birth, "could possibly have left such a break present in my person? Am I, having presumably been made in His image, so deeply flawed by His own flaws that this callousness has become the very definition of my propensity for failure? Who failed Him? Am I looking at this all wrong, and this aversion to quantification is in some way preventing even greater failure? What horrible sort of fool I am made to be then regardless of intention or lack thereof, that in the surety of birth and the surety of rebirth I could ignore, be made to ignore, the obvious conclusion that there needs be some pattern, some algorithm, some intrinsic logic in what I and all others around me perceive to be chaos that could allow one to eternally give birth to soccer fields at all! Why, the failures being so assured, the soccer fields so uniform, how could one conclude any other explanation but that what appears monolithic may be more a property of scale than substance?". I was soon to be answered only by a small child screaming, "Look out!" and the dull, dumb thud of a soccer ball hitting my head before, like nothing had happened at all, I watched Yvette be born.

It was then that I realized only one thing could possibly entertain me more than HCHIs or AHCHs and allow me to keep going towards that random chance for Harry to kick a ball in a favorable cardinal direction and achieve salvation: I was going to calculate it all. Breakpoints be damned, fear be damned! I had to calculate it all!

* of soccer fields.