A-Train highlights

Always loved your youtube channel!!!!!!!

That hole against the Hoosiers.

 

Damn we used to beat the snot out of people at the line. I took it for granted. Never again.

I remember how hyped up the Penn State game was during the championship run, and freshman A-Train did work.

The O-line was so dominate he only had to make one person miss and he was in the endzone with ease. DO WANT AGAIN

Damn that guy was great.

Wolverine Devotee has resting dart face.

He was the one key player that hot me ADDICTED to UofM football! I loved the way he set up his blocks/blockers. Never forget when he ran over Lavar Arrington. His dual with Sean Alexander in the bowl game. I had a whole wall of Anthony Thomas pictures in my room growing up. When I think of a stereotypical Michigan RB, he made the mold. Thank you for posting this!

Me when I watched the A train. http://gawker.com/5931175/excited-train-guy-goes-off-the-rails-while-fi…

My daughter doesn’t have a father, or, she has two fathers, since I don’t know which man her father is. One of her fathers says it’s like Schrödinger’s cat in there… My daughter doesn’t have a father, or, she has two fathers, since I don’t know which man her father is. One of her fathers says it’s like Schrödinger’s cat in there—right now, both men are fathers of hers at the same time. But when I’m cut open, or when I’m emptied, when she comes out of the box, only one man will be her father, and the other won’t be anything. The other father says, It’s like a Dutch auction. We’re crossing the highway by the river. It’s August now, I’m nine months pregnant, huge and round. When I walk on the sidewalk, my groins and my pubic bone hurt. I say, I don’t know what a Dutch auction is. I love both men painfully. Maybe if I’d been less sloppy, it would be less painful.
I haven’t had any big scandals in my life, before now. We had a prenatal DNA test that I don’t trust, and then I moved in with one of the fathers. I feel happy when my daughter kicks the spot where my right-waist used to be, and scared when she’s still, even though maybe she needs to sleep. I meditate in front of the younger father’s Tibetan thangka, with its pictures of angry gods or ferociously protective goddesses, and I realize that I’m a doorway into another world or maybe right back into this world again, a doorway for at least one person, for my mother or for my daughter or for my daughter’s fathers if not myself. Both doors of the world stand open: opened by you.

In August my mother finds out that she’s been cured of cancer. She doesn’t have any tumor in her esophagus anymore. She doesn’t have any wrong-cells left in her lymph nodes.

14th century Tibetan thangka painting of the Mandala of Vajravarahi by anonymous artist.
14th century Tibetan thangka painting of the Mandala of Vajravarahi by anonymous artist.

I haven’t had any big scandals in my life, before now. I’m my daughter’s doorway into the world, or I’m supposed to be a doorway, but instead there are complications–scary pain and amniotic fluid stained with my daughter’s poop. We end up on an operating table in a slummy hospital, where she’s cut out of me instead of coming through me. The cat is alive, not dead. Her cries are powerful. They won’t let me hold her. I catch a glimpse of her–those ears–and I know right away who her father is. Her other father, the man who is not her father, sent me a manuscript when I was pregnant, with a scene where a man falls in love with a young woman who’s pregnant with a child that isn’t his. The mother and the baby die in childbirth–the man takes some poison and walks out into the highway tunnels of a not-quite-imaginary city. He walks into traffic and tries to die, but he didn’t take enough poison. I always had the sensation with him–with the man who is not my baby’s father–of running to an elevator and missing it, of having the elevator doors close on my fingers. On the operating table, after my daughter is taken away and her real father is forced out of the room, the surgical team x-rays my cut-open body to try to find a tool they’ve lost–some knife or clip, something they’re calling The Russian, like the killer in a bad spy novel–that’s either inside or outside of me. My arms are spread wide. I’m awake the whole time. I can feel the organs in my open abdomen, the interns’ gloved hands in me. I am starting to get very cold. I haven’t had any big scandals in my life before now, and I also haven’t had any medical problems. I am too cold to be scared.
My daughter is born on September 1, 2013. In my unwritten book, I try to show the differences between a flat person who doesn’t really exist, a created person on paper, and a real human being who is born and dies, but I can’t get any of that into language. I’m writing a book that isn’t written, with characters that don’t exist yet, except here they are, alive on the page, already living and breathing, even if it’s life and breath I’ve invented. And I have a daughter I couldn’t give birth to, but here she is, silky, with her blue eyes black in the shadows, her tiny hand on my skin, and I’m looking at her, and she’s looking back at me. I think my protagonist’s mother will die but maybe not. I think my protagonist might give birth to a baby, but not yet. I think my protagonist might die, but unlike my mother, and unlike my daughter, and unlike me, she never has to die, not if she doesn’t want to, not if I never want her to. My protagonist’s protagonist is named after Nabokov’s Ada, half of a “time-racked flat-lying couple” who might or might not have “ever intended to die.” They’re invented by some writer, and so, the laws of gravity or antigravity, the laws of chaos or order, the laws of cancer or stillbirth, can’t get to them. I think about that, crazily, on the operating table, lying flat.

Anatomy of a Male Nude (c. 1504 - 1506), drawing by Leonardo da Vinci.
Anatomy of a Male Nude (c. 1504 – 1506) is a drawing by Leonardo da Vinci.

He says, “Some people would see your situation as a curse, while others would see it as a blessing. Clearly, you’re choosing to see it as a blessing,” and his tone isn’t really that friendly… The man who is not my daughter’s father comes over. I’m home from the hospital. I look bad. I’m holding my beautiful daughter, who hiccups the way she did when she was still inside me. He says, “Some people would see your situation as a curse, while others would see it as a blessing. Clearly, you’re choosing to see it as a blessing,” and his tone isn’t really that friendly, and I don’t know which part he means, which part the people would see as a curse–my wrecked body, my dirty apartment, or having a daughter, or having daughter who wasn’t planned, or having a daughter who isn’t his.
My daughter’s father slow-dances with her. It’s late night or early morning. He’s in the doorway of the bedroom of our dark apartment. Her tiny face looks so happy, like a freshman girl picked out of the crowd by the handsomest senior boy, in some fantasy high school in some more innocent decade. They’re listening to “Dream a Little Dream of Me.” I’m shredded. I feel something like heartbreak, or like joy. I feel something I can’t write about.

In the months before I got pregnant, I was traveling in a distant country, and I met a man my age, and after we had known each other for an hour or two, he said, A year ago I had a wife and a six-month-old baby. They died in a car crash. And I think about that man all the time now, and his travels through India, and that baby that he lost. I think a lot about where lost babies go, babies that die or that were never born, and where lost mothers go after they die, and what happens to fathers who aren’t fathers anymore, and about my heart, hidden in the dark inside of my body like an unborn baby, hard as the philosopher’s stone.

In November, my daughter and I are reading Paul Celan poems again. (“Autumn bled all away, mother. Snow burned me through. / i sought out my heart so it might weep, i found–oh the summer’s breath. /it was like you.”). She is two months old. Most days we go out walking, just the two of us. On these walks, or at home in our apartment where it seems safe, we could lose each other in an instant. I hold her close to my chest. She knows to hold onto me. I won’t have to teach her the laws of gravity.

* * *

Originally published in Hip Mama, June 2015. For more, subscribe to the magazine.

Elizabeth Bachner is a writer and sociologist whose essays for Bookslut attracted a cult following. Her poetry and fiction have appeared in the Wreckage of Reason anthologies and other publications. Her work has been cited and praised in The New York Times Magazine, The Paris Review Daily, The Millions, and The Rumpus. She is traveling with her two-year-old daughter and working on a novel.

An just watched it again. Gotta love the pride Marquise Walker takes in a 20yd block at the 12:45. So many of those sets had a TE, an H-Back, AND a Fullback, I cant wait to see that again under Harbaugh. The Oline pulling like mad men making perfect reads and playing as a true unit. Thomas ran with such violence. I love the way he sets up his blockers with a quick juke step/shoulder shimmy. Thanks again man, just remembered why and how I am such a huge UofM fan. Just think, like 80% of the players on all of those offenses went to the NFL, crazy. Loved reliving that!

I noticed Michigan was playing a team wearing red and white called "Wisc" that was a big W on their helmets.

Who the hell is that?

A-Train was my favorite player until Chris Perry then Henne came along. I remember being pumped when the Beads drafted him. Too bad injuries cut his career short, because he looked like he was going to be really good in the pros.

He had the best record out of any coach that played him more than 5 times I think. He went 9-2 against Joe Pa. I like that Lloyd made them his bitch. 

Wow. What a power running game we once had. I would love to see us evolve back into that. Preferably overnight.

Just one of my absolute favorite RBs to watch, I love the way he runs. The thing that stands out the most are his feet; it's as if they never leave the ground. He's so quick in and out of cuts, and while his top end speed was only "good", it's as if he gets to that speed as soon as he wants to. And the patience and the vision and how he sets up blocks then jump cut or a little shimmy of the shoulder and he's leaving guys in the dirt. And when finally someone catches up to him, he squares the lowered shoulders and keeps the feet moving, churning, on and on. Man, Ioved watching that guy run.

If you ever add footage to the Derrick Alexander tribute please post it. He's one of the greats that doesn't get mentioned much.