Stars Hide Fire

2010-12-19T11:40:00.000-08:00

Is it too early for me to start nerding it up about the NFL Draft? Of course it isn't. Bowl season is under way, the NFL playoffs are taking shape, and most importantly, my team's season has become the equivalent of the tightly-coiled brown piles left on the front lawn by my neighbor's dog. So why not look ahead at some of the possibilities for next season - not specifically for the Titans, but for the league in general.

Rather than hem and haw about who the Titans should draft, whether or not Andrew Luck should be taken first, or who's better - Jake Locker or Ryan Mallett, I'd instead like to look at handful of guys whose names might not necessarily be household ones, but who should garner consideration in the mid-to-late rounds. Most people generally lose interest in the draft after the second, or maybe the third round; not me - because I am a big dork. I enjoy when broadcasters and other football fans say things like, "Who the hell is Michael Hoomanamanui?" because I get to say "He's a tight end from Illinois, taken by the Rams in the 5th round," and then they look at me like I'm insane for knowing that (which I sort of am, but that's fine.) The guys I'm going to talk about here are not sure-things - they are great college players who have the potential to contribute at the next level. Here are four guys I wouldn't mind seeing my team spend anywhere from a 4th to7th round pick on.

Owen Marecic - FB/LB, Stanford

For most players, ironman football ends after high school. It's very rare that you get a player in Division I college football who plays at a high level on both sides of the ball. Marecic doesn't stand out as a superstar at either position, but he plays both very well. As a fullback, he isn't known for carrying the ball, but rather for being a punishing lead blocker. Go to Youtube and look up highlights of Toby Gerhart at Stanford in 2009. Then, try to find one that doesn't begin with #48 barreling over defenders and opening up holes big enough for Carey Elwes to fit through. (Have you seen him lately? He's fat!) Betcha ya can't. Marecic is a finalist for the Paul Hornung Award, which goes to the most versatile player in college football. He's also an academic All-American. Basically, he's the kind of guy who's good for your team regardless of where he plays. He can contribute on offense, defense and special teams (the latter being a big consideration once you get into the fourth and fifth rounds.)

Casey Matthews - LB, Oregon

Younger brother of Packers Pro Bowl linebacker Clay Matthews; son of former Pro Bowl linebacker Clay Matthews, Jr.; grandson of former NFL lineman Clay Matthews, Sr.; nephew of 14-time Pro Bowl lineman Bruce Matthews. WHY WOULD YOU NOT DRAFT THIS GUY?

Matt Sczcur - WR/RB/PR, Villanova

Every year there seems to be a small-school gem that everybody gushes over in the weeks approaching the draft. Villanova's diminutive (5'9, 190lbs), dynamic receiver/return man will be one of those guys this year, gauranteed (along with Troy's Jerrell Jernigan.) Sczcur (pronounced 'Caesar,') is a two-sport athlete, piling up the accolades in baseball as well as football. In fact, Sczcur has already been drafted by the Chicago Cubs (5th round of the '10 draft.) He will have a decision to make regarding his athletic future. Now, in my opinion, there are two factors that should point Sczcur toward the NFl as opposed to MLB. The first is the undeniable fact that Danny Woodhead single-handedly made it okay to take a chance on scrappy white guys who are normally considered "too small" to play in the NFL. Think about it - what team in the NFL right doesn't wish they had a Danny Woodhead? Secondly, there was another two-sport athlete with a fucked-up name - this one from Notre Dame - who chose to play for the Cubs rather than enter the NFL draft. RIP, Jeff Samardzija. Wait, what do you mean he's still alive? Are you sure? You've actually, physically seen him? Interesting.

In the words of the infernal Jon Gruden, "I LIKE MATT SCZCUR! THIS GUY (insert random, general compliment)..." He had a great game against Appalachian State in the FCS Semi-Finals (16 carries, 104 yds, 3 TDs; 5 Rec, 45 yds, 1 TD; 2/2 passing, 58 yds, 1 TD) but struggled in a loss the following week to Eastern Washington (9 carries, 36 yds, 1 TD; 4 Rec, 25 yds;) Hopefully he enters the draft, and if he does, someone will take a chance on him... or at least they should.

Cecil Shorts - WR, Mount Union

At 5'11, 190 lbs, Shorts doesn't have the prototypical size for an NFL receiver... right? Wait, what is that one guy's name... plays for the Eagles... 5'10, 190 lbs... DeSean something, right? (Ask the G-G-G-G MEN if they know his name.) Another guy... Pittsburgh's Mike Wallace - listed at 6'0 (no way he's 6'0), 190. Lack of ideal size doesn't necessarily mean you aren't going to be successful in the National...Football...LEAGUE anymore. Shorts is a playmaker who could easily be spending his future Sundays playing with/against former Purple Raider receiver Pierre Garcon.

Gotta Give Thanks and Praise...

2010-11-26T07:58:00.000-08:00

Is it that time of year already? Time to write the obligatory "what-I'm-thankful-for" blog? Ah, how time flies. This year, as is the case every year, I have a lot to be thankful for. I don't want to list them all, because it gets a bit cumbersome. There are certain things on my list of what I'm grateful for that are etched in stone, and so covering them every year becomes redundant. For example, I've always been - and always will be - thankful for

and

That's never going to change. What I want to talk about this year is a couple of things I'm thankful for that aren't quite so obvious. The first may seem like a simple thing, and something unworthy of being singled out, but I can't overstate how important it's been to me over the past few years. This year, I'd like to say thank you to The Gaslight Anthem.

It only took about two years (and two records) for the boys from Little Eden to rise through the ranks of my Top 10 bands, cruising past the likes of Bad Religion, Strung Out, Thrice, and The Bronx, slowly surpassing The Trio, The Souls and even the Loved Ones until finally, they unseated the incomporable H2O as my favorite band. I saw them for the first time in 2007 at The Social (ironically, I was there by myself and didn't talk to anyone) in Orlando. They opened for The Loved Ones, and they absolutely killed it. I bought their record, 'Sink or Swim,' and listened to it non-stop for the next week. That record was the soundtrack to the few truly great nights I had in Florida, along with the multitude of torturous, home-sickly-miserable ones. When 'The '59 Sound' came out the following year, I immediately took to two or three of the infectiously catchy songs (Old White Lincoln, Great Expectations) but I wasn't sold on some of the others. Gradually, as I listened more closely, I found myself becoming more and more obsessed with songs like Miles Davis and The Cool, Film Noir, and High Lonesome. And I kind of figured out what it was about this band that kept me so captivated. Their songs are stories - more so than almost any other band I know. They tell stories that seem like they come straight out of a James Dean movie - stories from a different generation. These dudes are old souls. I saw them again at the same bar - The Social - in 2008. This time, they were headlining, and again, they were incredible. At one point, the singer, Brian Fallon, addressed the crowd - specifically the men. He said, "Fellas, how many of you came here alone tonight? Well don't worry, boys, just take a look around. The kittens are out tonight!" I remember thinking, "God, these guys are fucking cool." I really thought that their third record, 'American Slang,' was going to propel them into mainstream-stardom. I pictured them selling out arenas like Kings of Leon. It hasn't quite happened yet. But I'll tell you what, my buddy Pat and I went to see them at The Stone Pony in August (which is where the picture above was taken) and even though the show was outside, they blew the fucking roof off the place. So while little douchebags like Justin Beiber and attention whores like Lady Gaga bring home a king's ransom in Grammys and AMAs for looking pretty and singing without saying anything, I'm grateful that a little band from Jersey exists and writes songs that speak to me.

Anyone who knows me knows how happy I am to be back in New York. I've said, on a few occasions, that my time in Florida was a failed experiment. That's not entirely true. It took that move to make me realize how much my hometown means to me. Being close to my friends, close to my family and having the familiarity of home was clearly not something I could do without. When I decided to come back, I had this vision of how it would be - the best case scenario, I mean. I'm a superstitious person, and so I'm deathly afraid of jinxing myself here, but so far, it's happening. I'm living the best case scenario (I literally just knocked on my wooden coffee table.) A lot of the credit for my current state of happiness has to be pointed in this direction:

That is Highland High School, my current place of employment - and God willing - my place of employment for many years to come. I love it there. I love my kids, my co-workers and the community. I had the opportunity to be the head coach of the JV football team this year. It was an amazing experience. I'll talk more about that another time, though. I'm gateful for the opportunities I have in Highland, but even more so, I'm grateful to be teaching. I'm not the best at my job, but I think I'm pretty damn good - even if it isn't in the traditional sense. I'm humbled and overwhelmed by the positive feedback I've gotten from my students over the past few years.I want to affect lives, and I haven't minced words about that. I wouldn't have gotten into the game if that weren't the case. I don't know if I have truly affected a kid's life yet, but I hope I have. And I'm going to keep working at it. This job has given me so much personal satisfaction. Moments like this one

can't be overstated. They're fucking priceless, and I've had a lot of them. I can't say thank you enough - to Highland, to Liberty, to Osceola, and to every kid that ever sat in a chair and listened to me blather on. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

Oh yeah, I almost forgot, I also have Highland to thank for this

Thank you.Thank you.Thank you. ">

The Internet Dating Files, Vol. I

2010-07-31T23:14:00.000-07:00

Okay, I'll admit it... I tried the internet dating thing when I lived in Florida. Don't judge me. I wasn't having a whole lot of luck meeting people during my first summer in Heaven's Waiting Room, despite there being a decent amount of people my age living in my apartment complex. Being in Florida was the farthest I'd ever been from my friends, and to be honest, I was feeling a bit lonely. To be even more honest, I hadn't had sexy time in quite a while, either, and well... I was feeling a bit lonely. So I figured, 'What the hell?' and signed up. What followed was a series of awkward, pressure-filled clusterfucks that yielded marginal results; one semi-serious relationship, a little bit of random sex, and a lot of alcohol consumption. All told, I'd say I went on maybe twenty dates with nine or ten girls over a three year stretch (off and on, in monthly spurts.) The majority of the dates were so forgettable that, well, I've forgotten them. However, there were a handful that resulted in mildly amusing stories that I've decided to share with the entire blog-reading world. I haven't told these stories to very many people, because I never wanted to admit to anyone that I was a member of a dating website. Now... well, I don't really give a fuck, and like I said, some of these stories are kind of funny. You can look at them as cautionary tales against online dating, or as comfort that you aren't the only one who's been on an awkward, miserable date. But at their core, all they are is a collection of things that happened to me that I like look back on and giggle at. So, now that I have you waiting with bated breath, I present to you... The Internet Dating Files.

Internet Dating File #5
Name: Heather
Date: June, 2009 (I think)
Location: Some bar out toward Winter Park that I can't remember the name of.

Admittedly, I was kind of excited to go on this date. Why? Because Heather was a redhead. I find redheaded women incredibly hot. There are only a handful of people in the world who watched Married with Children and found Peggy Bundy more attractive than Kelly Bundy. I am of that ilk.

So here I am, driving out to meet Heather the redhead at some bar in Winter Park. We had spoken via email for a couple of weeks before graduating to phone calls, and after maybe three phone conversations, we set up this date. Her friend's band was playing, and she invited me to come and watch. Now, there are two things worth noting about the setup that will be relevant to the actual story: first, she had a kid. I knew that going in, and it didn't really bother me. Second, this took place during one of those rare stretches where I was going to the gym every day, and so I was in pretty decent shape (think Seth Rogan in Funny People as opposed to Seth Rogen in 40 Year Old Virgin.)

I pull up to the bar around 8:30. I'm wearing jeans, and an Affliction t-shirt that's probably a bit too tight, but it's okay because my man boobs aren't as noticeable at this point as they are now. My hair looks pretty good, too. I go inside and start scanning the room. I'm already nervous, because up to this point, I don't think a single girl has looked the same in person as she has in her photos. Out of the corner of my eye, I spot some red hair. It looks to be attached to a woman who is significantly larger than the girl I'm expecting to meet. I panic, and I seriously entertain the idea of turning around, exiting the bar, driving back to Kissimmee, buying a fifth of Jack, taking a long hard swig right out of the bottle, pouring the rest of it over my head and then lighting myself on fire. But Big Red moves on without acknowledging me, and on the far side of the bar, I see more red hair - this time attached to a much more reasonably-sized female - waving at me, and I make my way over. I'm relieved when she introduces herself as Heather, and I'm even a little excited because A) she's actually prettier than her picture, and B) when she turns back toward the table, I see that her thong is exposed. (I know, I know... it's trashy. I think that's why I liked it. I don't know what that says about me, but whatever.) However, I also notice something else; she is not alone at the table. There are three other people sitting with her - a guy and two girls. She proceeds to introduce me to her friends - whose names I can't remember because I wasn't paying attention - and I shake hands with each one semi-awkwardly. The first two are a couple - I'll call them Jack and Jackie. Jackie is on the heavy side, but fairly pretty in the face. Jack looks like he's on his way to a Slipknot concert - huge black jeans with more zippers than The Gimp from Pulp Fiction's leather suit, black Korn t-shirt, backwards baseball cap (non-fitted) over a head of long black hair braided into a ponytail, and a bad adolescent mustache (he's 30.) More on this guy in a bit.

The third friend, who I'm going to call Bertha, looks like Roberta Trett from Gone Baby Gone. She shakes my hand as she downs the remnants of some type of alcoholic beverage, and then semi-belches a "nice to meet you." I am thrilled to be spending my evening with such a classy, demure lady.

The date starts off with normal getting-to-know-you chit-chat as the first band of the night sets up. Heather seems very nice and we're having a pleasant conversation. However, this doesn't last long; two things interrupt it. First, we have Bertha - the lovely Bertha - sitting to my right. She is dancing in her seat. She's swaying back and forth and doing something that slightly resembles the cabbage patch with her hands, and chanting "I'm gon-na' get fucked-up to-night!" I'm a bit baffled, but hey, to each their own, right? The waiter brings me a beer and Bertha some mixed drink that she ordered. She is elated, and exclaims, "Yeah! Bottoms up, motherfucker!" before taking a monster swig. Immediately she contorts her face so that she no longer looks like the cokehead from Gone Baby Gone, but more resembles the fat zombie from Dawn of the Dead. "Goddamn! I don't know what the fuck is in that muthafuckin shit, but that shit is fuckin' gross! I ain't drinkin that nasty ass shit!" (By the way ladies, eloquence is an antiquated notion, seriously...) Bertha calls the waiter back over and politely exchanges her current drink for a Long Island iced tea. It comes promptly, she takes another bovine-sized swig, makes the fat zombie face, but this time is pleased with the outcome. "Whoo! That's what I'm talkin about! Yeah, muthafuckin Long Island iced tea! C'mon, lets get the music goin, cause I'm ready to shake my fuckin boo-tay!" No, seriously. She said that. Loudly. And it didn't stop there. This continued throughout the night. A drink order, big swig, zombie face, excited profanity, seat dancing. At one point I took video of it on my phone and sent it to my friend Dani. (Sadly, I smashed that phone against my bedroom wall less than two months later, so all video evidence of this mind-blowing phenomenon is completely erased... did I say sadly? I meant thankfully.)

So Bertha grinding on her stool and doing a Sam Kinison impression; meanwhile, Heather has left the table to take a phone call. Rather than sit there silently and imagine all of the things that I could be doing that would be less painful than my current situation (dental work, swimming with box jellyfish, anything from the movie Hostel), I take this opportunity to strike up a conversation with Jack. He seems like a good enough guy, albeit a bit dorky, but that's fine. We talk about what he does, what I do, music, movies... normal guy stuff. Normal, that is, until the song being played over the PA ends (the band is still setting up), a new one begins, and then this happens:

ME: Yeah, I've been living down here for about a year and a half now, and I'm starting to...

JACK (interrupting me): Wait....wait... (he looks up at the ceiling pensively, silently mouthing the words to the song that just started playing).... Shinedown! Okay, sorry. Go ahead...

ME: Um... (unsure of what exactly just happened)... what was I saying?

He interrupted me to name the band that came on the radio. I couldn't believe it. What was really funny about it, though, was how proud of himself he was for getting it right. And this, much like the white trash cuss-and-dance-a-thon happening to my immediate right, went on ALL FUCKING NIGHT. He kept on doing it. Every time they would play the radio between sets, this fuckin guy would call out the name of whatever shitty, generic radio rock band was playing, and then mentally high-five himself. CROSSFADE! GODSMACK! DEFAULT! NICKLEBACK! Honestly, should anyone be proud of themselves for correctly identifying a Nickleback song?

Somehow, during the one-man-Name-That-shitty-Tune game on my left and the one-woman-Kinison-act on my right, I manage to get on with my actual date with Heather (who has been a tertiary character in this story so far, but don't worry, her crazy is coming.) We talk through the first band, and we have a few drinks. She tells me about her kids. Kids. Plural. "Oh," she says, as if she neglected to mention that she's Irish, or that she speaks Lithuanian, "yeah I have two kids... a boy and a girl." Now, if her having one kid doesn't bother me, why should the fact that she has two be any different? The answer is, it shouldn't. But why tell me you have only one? It's like telling me, "Yeah, I have asthma," and then after we make out, saying, "oh, and by the way, I also have herpes. But don't worry, it's not inflamed." It's a little bit like that, right? Maybe it isn't like that at all. But I thought it was weird, anyway.

So we establish the fact that she has two kids - fine. We talk some more. Now at this point, the first band is in mid-set, and it's insanely loud in the bar, so we've moved closer together in order to hear each other without shouting. She has also had a few drinks, and is starting to get a bit handsy. She's running her hands over my shoulder, my arm, my back... and saying things like, "I had no idea you were this well-built." I swear to God I'm not making this up. She said this shit without a hint of irony, but I promise that I'm relaying it here with all the irony in the world. Anyway, she leans in and asks me if I'll follow her outside for a cigarette (another nugget she neglected to mention.) I oblige, and we head outside. On the patio, she lights up a Newport and tells me about her ex-husband. He's a drug-addict who has spent some time in jail. Of course he is. She has a restraining order against him. Of course she does. But, he's actually a very good father. Of course he is. We talk more about her kids, and she delivers what have to be the all-time greatest first date lines in (internet) dating history: 1) "Don't worry, I don't want another child for at least another year." 2) "Oh yeah, I'm a baby machine."

Back inside the bar, she's gone from subtly and sexily rubbing my arms and shoulders to groping me like she was Big Ben and I was a chubby college co-ed. "I just can't keep my hands off of you." (Her = no irony. Me = TONS of irony, I promise.) Before you know it, we're making out in the bar, right in front of Jack, Jackie, Bertha-the-Coked-Out-Zombie and dozens of horrified patrons. I mean, it's not like she snuck in an innocent peck on the lips, or we shared a brief moment of indiscreet passion and then composed ourselves. No, this was sloppy, 7th-grade-go-for-broke-or-we're-gonna-miss-the-bus making out. Have you ever seen the movie Cry-Baby, with Johnny Depp? If you have, then you know the french-kiss scene I'm referencing. If you haven't, click here and scroll to :55 seconds in. It was embarrassing...and awesome.

We keep up the K-I-S-S-I-N-G (chikka-chikka dee) act (see: RHCP, "Suck My Kiss") for the duration of her friend's band's set (awful local band called Big Mother Trucker, or something equally inane.) Mercifully, the house lights come up around a quarter to twelve, and Jack is ready to leave (presumably so he can identify Breaking Benjamin songs in the car.) But of course, before my night is officially over, I get to suffer one more horrible, wonderful indignation. Heather and Jackie have engaged one another in an ice fight - where they take ice cubes from their drinks and try to put them down one another's shirts. Heather gets a piece down Jackie's back, which prompts Jackie to chase Heather around the table with a dripping handful of rapidly melting ice. Heather giggles and evades her, running directly to me, whirling around so that her back is to me, grabbing my hands and placing them firmly on her breasts. Again, this is in full view of dozens of bar customers, and now the lights are up, so people can see this sickening display more clearly. I swear I couldn't have gotten more disgusted, disdainful, for-shame looks if I had been walking around in assless chaps, carrying a riding crop and wearing a ball-gag. (You're welcome for that visual, ladies.)

We say goodnight in the parking lot as all civilized couples do - by using our tongues to probe each other's duodenum's - and move toward our respective cars. Heather pleads with me to accompany them to the diner for pancakes, and for a moment I actually consider it. I consider it because I am fairly certain that if I go, this night will end with me wearing the aforementioned exposed thong on my head as Heather and I perform sexual feats that are illegal in several states. I reconsider, however, when I come to the realization that watching Bertha the Coked Out Zombie inhale a short stack and bleat out, "These are some good-ass muthafuckin pancakes!" while Jack air-drums to Seether would be enough to prevent me from ever achieving a decent erection, probably for the rest of my life, let alone that night. I respectfully decline, and bid her a fine evening.

Heather texted me relentlessly over the next day or so, and my initial plan was just to ignore her until she went away (I'm very mature.) However, I finally decided to reply, telling her that she seemed very nice, but that I didn't think it was going to work out between us. She was pleasant and understanding, and I never heard from her again. However, one night - several weeks later - I fell asleep with the radio on, and around 4am, woke up in a cold sweat, screaming out, "NICKLEBACK!!"

On Letting Go...

2010-07-16T21:26:00.000-07:00

I'm starting to learn a thing or two about letting go. For some of us, it's a task as difficult as moving mountains; for others, it's as easy as blinking an eye. I've known people who glide through this life completely unfettered, allowing all they encounter to slide through their hearts and minds as if they were coated in Teflon. I both envy and pity these people, equally. See, I'm the polar opposite of the non-stick nomads to whom I was just referring. I'm like one of those people on that show 'Hoarders' - you know, the people who never throw ANYTHING out, and become both literally and figuratively buried by their own possessions. Well, not exactly like them - see, I don't hoard material things. I mean sure, I still have a letter or two from a high school sweetheart, or a shoebox full of faded photographs, but c'mon - doesn't everybody? Things are not the issue. Things, I can get rid of. All it takes is one day of cleaning out the closet. But let's just say, for the sake of argument, that my heart - where I keep things that are near and dear to me - is a closet of sorts. And upstairs from that closet, my mind and my memory function as an attic. Open the door to either one, and you will unleash an avalanche; Names, dates, places, conversations, songs, movies, regrets, heartbreaks and half a million singular moments will cascade over you, leaving you to dig yourself out like the rugby team from 'Alive.' I drag these things around like Jacob Marley's chains, hoping to feel again the way they used to make me feel. In the times when my mind is left to its own devices, and I drift away in idle thought, I exist in these bright, shining moments until they fizzle away like burned-out stars. I pity the heartless for never having experienced these things, and I envy them for not having to shoulder their weight once they've passed.

At some point during my youth, I bound my heart to my sleeve with barbed wire and duct tape. The whole that remained became a perpetually open door - a door that leads to a room to which there is no exit. If you affect my life in the tiniest, most seemingly insignificant way, and you're never getting out of that little room. Not you, of course, but my memory of you. It will exist in my mind like Bill Murray in 'Groundhog Day,' reliving that microscopic (universally speaking) moment when your life crossed paths with mine. Meanwhile, your memory of me will more than likely obey the laws of nature, and die its natural death at the designated time. Your name sparks the recognition of your face, and every word - verbatim - of whatever conversation we may have had in vivid, high-definition clarity. On the other hand, the mention of my name may cause you to squint your eyes, purse your lips, and slowly pronounce my name while you try and pinpoint exactly who the fuck I am. I'm not saying this to be self-deprecating... I'm just unveiling more of my psychosis. As I have pointed out on several different occasions, I'm fucking wired differently than most people. Seriously - who gets that attached to people? It's my blessing and my curse. My favorite band (The Gaslight Anthem) has a lyric that reads, "I'll love you forever if I ever love at all." If you ask me, that's the way to go. There are what, tens of billions of people sharing oxygen on this planet? On an average day, we encounter hundreds of people, from the people we have direct interaction with to the people with callously shoulder bump on our way to Starbucks. Hundreds. And that's still what? - 2% of the population? (My math is fucked, but you get the point.) Human connection is rarer than we realize. It's lightning in a bottle; catching a single raindrop. So why not savor each instance of it for as long as you possibly can?

Here's the thing: any given vessel can only hold so much matter before it spills over or bursts at the seams. At some point, you realize that clinging to tightly to the good times is causing you more harm than good. You realize that these moments - these organic, unique experiences - are fleeting. They cannot be relived. And each time you're reminded of this, it's like reopening a wound you thought had healed. At least, that's how it is for me. See, I'm getting older. Time seems to tick away faster and faster every year. My dad is getting older. I'm starting to forget the names of random dudes that used to wander into our room during Thursday night beer pong when I was in college. And what's been hardest to bear - what started me on this whole train of thought - is that I'm starting to see myself holding on to things that just aren't there anymore. It's never easy to face the fact that someone you care about has outgrown you, the way Christopher Robin outgrew Winnie the Pooh. But I keep setting myself up for that. I work with kids for a living... and kids grow up. As I type this, I've said goodbye to a handful of young people that have affected my life, probably without even knowing it. Sure, they may not have changed my views on politics (the gays can marry whoever they want) religion (God and I are on the same page, even if that page isn't necessarily in the bible) or even movies (M. Night Shyamalamamanann still sucks), but maybe they made a film that I could relate to, or took a picture that made my eyes widen in awe... or maybe they just made me laugh. The point is, I hold on to shit like that. I take it all to heart. And I know that I'm never going to see most of these kids again, and that bums me out. In the movie 'Glory Daze,' Ben Affleck's character says, "the bitch about getting older is that you don't fling yourself into love and friendships the way you did before you got hurt... and that's a damn shame." I love that quote. I've been kicking around the idea of having my next tattoo be a heart safety-pinned to my sleeve, in order to remind myself that it's okay to recklessly throw yourself out there with no safety net to catch you if things go south. But it's getting harder and harder for me to grin and bear the heartache of people drifting out of my life like ghosts.

So I'm learning a thing or two about letting go. I'm trying to appreciate people and moments for what they are. I'm trying to be grateful that I've been lucky enough to meet the people that I've gotten to meet (I was tempted to write names here, but I decided against it.) I'm trying to remind myself that even the brightest stars have to go dark eventually - so we might as well appreciate their beauty while they're still burning... and then let them go.

Random Observations at Washington Square Park

2010-06-20T20:23:00.000-07:00

I spent about four hours today holding down a wooden bench near the west entrance of Washington Square Park. I chaperoned a group of kids from SOCAPA (the summer camp I'm working at) from the campus in Brooklyn to the park and back. They had free reign once we got to Washington Square, and I had a lot of time to kill. I spent most of it reading my book and writing in a notebook I picked up for $.99 at some corner shop on 6th Avenue. I wrote a bunch about my first couple days here at the camp, but it's a lot of boring introspection and whiny jaw-jacking that won't interest you in the least. Wait, what do you mean this entire blog is boring introspection and whiny jaw-jacking? That's not true... is it?

Anyway, I spent some time just jotting down random observations I made about people in the park. Here they are, exactly as I jotted them - no hindsight, no post-production. Enjoy.

- There is a grown man waltzing through the park with his child... at least, I hope it's his child.

- The girl across from me is overly-exaggerating every aspect of her cell-phone conversation. This leads me to believe that there isn't actually another person on the other end of the line. She's glanced over in my direction several times. I think she's trying to get my attention. My ego needs to believe this.

- The elderly man to my right is pointing out specific people in a crowded park, and explaining to his wife - in vivid detail - who they are and what they do. I'm fairly certain he believes it is 1959 right now.

- There's a guy across from me with a shiny bald head and a massive beard smiling to himself. He will molest someone before leaving this park. (I hope it's not me.)

- I've observed 36 different styles of mandals. God I hate feet.

- There's a white man in a dashiki. Wait, he also has a gigantic tattoo on his forehead... it says, "White Guilt."

- A redheaded mother keeps allowing her infant child to wander farther and farther away from her while she laughs and smokes Newports. The baby is now hailing a cab on West 4th street, by the way.

- Soaking-wet, middle-aged man in only a bathing suit dancing his way through a crowd. God I hate this city.

- Womens' shoes are complicated. I just saw a girl walk past in sandals that had more straps than the bondage store that's located disturbingly close to this public park. Um, Miss... King Leonitis called, he's leading 300 Spartans against Xerxes, and he needs his shoes.

- This lady's sun hat is huge. It might be an Urban Sombrero.

- All European men are gay. Not a judgment, just a fact.

- I just witnessed a woman smoke an entire cigarette in one drag. Somewhere, Chris Perry has a six-foot erection.

- I just heard a guy give precise directions to two separate Starbucks locations without the use of a GPS, internet phone or sun dial. If he's not about to kill himself, he should be. And if he isn't, I stand ready to assist him.

- Take off the cowboy hat. Just take it off. We're in New York fucking City. Do you see a desert? Do you see any cactii? Show me a single horse. You're not a cowboy. You're not an Urban Cowboy. You're not a Midnight Cowboy. You're not a Drugstore Cowboy. You're not Cowboy Curtis. You're not Kurtis Blow. Wait, that last one doesn't make sense. You're not a cowboy, though. Deal with it. You might be a pirate, though. Wanna know what kind?

A Midnight Mumbling

2010-05-06T21:02:00.000-07:00

Brooding thoughts whisper their way into broken truths

As streetlight silhouettes dance their way through the witching hour

Sleep is as evasive as vapors through civ-like lungs gasping for air

Poison perfume passing through ventricles, veins and visions

And I can’t exhale your scent

It lives in me like the sweetest parasite, praying on my every thought

Fingertips figure out your figure in bedsheets breathing your siren song

La Belle Dame Sans Meci, oh mercy, mercy me

Your sweet saccharine scent melts my moral fiber

Sleek and slender, I surrender

I surrender

4/30/10

2010-04-29T21:45:00.000-07:00

The words you’re reading now mark another futile attempt at substance; words on a page arranged in a way that’s meaningful, insightful and entertaining. At this point, I’d settle for coherent, legible and grammatically correct. I’ve slammed the laptop lid shut in bitter frustration more times than I can count, leaving half-finished thoughts, clichéd sentiments and pseudo-philosophies to linger and languish in literary limbo. Do I sit patiently, like an old man at a dive-diner counter, taking long drags off Marlboro reds and taking slow, deliberate sips from his coffee mug, assuming the demeanor of a man with plenty to say but no one to say it to? No, I do not. Instead, I assume the persona of an over-caffeinated, sleep-deprived college student, pacing the room and fraying the edges of his sanity while trying to meet the deadline of some research paper long put off. Since when did writing start to feel like a job? Probably since the words stopped coming easily. I don’t know exactly when that was. It’s not writer’s block; it’s writer’s blockade – the ships that carry my thoughts can’t sail, and I’m doomed to stare at a blinding white sea of dead, white space… the enemy cursor mocking me with its incessant blinking. It’s daring me to write, because it knows that I can’t.

Maybe it’s just stress – there’s too much going on. Between work, the impending move back to NY, finding a new job, financial worries and an overall apathy toward my life the likes of which I’ve never felt, who has time to write? Except writing used to be my release – it was the drug that centered me, mellowed me, balanced me out. I want that relationship with writing again. Come on back to me, baby. I know I’ve been difficult to be around – I know it seems like I’ve changed – but you’ve got to believe me – I’m still the same guy. Aren’t I? Maybe not. Maybe that’s the problem.

After I graduated college, I kept an online journal. In it was some of the best writing I’ve ever done. At least, I think it was. I can’t know for sure, because I deleted the thing shortly after I moved to Florida. Fitting, really. One snap decision followed by another, neither of which really worked out the way I’d assumed they would. Inside This Darkened Heart (the title of my online journal) were the wide-open ramblings of a twenty-two year old post-grad who had just had the safety net yanked out from under him and face-planted directly into reality. For almost three years, I wrote in that thing with reckless abandon. I shared private thoughts with perfect strangers, stated opinions about ex-girlfriends, confessed to mistakes, poor choices and personal short-comings. The guy who wrote in This Darkened Heart had a voice: he was honest, scared, and confused. He was optimistic, yet somehow cynical. He was a violent thinker and a deep drinker. Self-critical to a painful extent, that guy wore his heart on his sleeve, and he ironed, hot-glued and stapled it to make sure that it stayed there. He was corny, clever, earnest, melodramatic, prolific and hokey almost all at once. He was a character, and I mean that in the literal sense. I wrote in the voice of a persona that I created – an offshoot of me, only amplified. He could comment on my life with an honesty that I myself could never match. He was Sal Paradise to Jack Kerouac; Fredrick Henry to Hemingway, though not nearly as talented as either. He was the Hank to my Charlie Bailey-Gates (see Me, Myself & Irene); a boozed up, hyperbolic extension of my psyche. And you know what? I fucking loved him. So what happened? I didn’t know, until just recently, when it came to me like the obvious answer to the simplest question… you know, the one that resides permanently on the tip of your tongue, waiting to be spoken. It appeared like Dirk Diggler’s name – in trashy neon porno lights: I got older.

I turned twenty-nine a few weeks ago. Now, I’m not saying that I woke from a dead sleep when the clock struck twelve on April 8^th and screamed, “Oh my god, I’ve outgrown my voice!” That’s not the way it went down. Rather, it dawned on me when I was sitting on my friend Dani’s patio with our friend Shannon, drinking a few beers and enjoying what was most likely the last cool evening I’ll ever experience in Florida. I leaned back on the patio chair and stared off over the black silhouettes of the palms backlit by the waning layer of blazing amber just above the horizon (I hate this fucking state, but damned if it isn’t pretty sometimes), and I traded stories with Shannon while she sipped her glass of wine. She’s a couple years older than me, and we are on the same page when it comes to a lot of things. We joked self-deprecatingly about early bedtimes, Friday nights spent nodding off to bad movies while our younger selves were still doing keg stands and howling at the moon in some parallel universe, and how neither of us can keep up with our friend Dani, who habitually closes down the bar. We laughed and embraced our lameness, and I suddenly felt this weird detachment from my former self. I’ve know for a while that I’m no longer the twenty-two year old version of myself, let alone the nineteen year old version who, hammered out of his skull, surfed on his friend Matty’s car down Northern Blvd. (sorry, Mom.) That guy is long gone, and like I said, I’ve been aware of that for some time. However, what recently occurred to me is that I can no longer write in his voice. That character who fancied himself a trainwreck- because he was still young enough to wear that hat and make it look cool – can no longer speak for the man who types these very words. That guy’s a ghost. He’s a tongueless skull in the graveyard of youth. Alas, poor RyanOReily*… I knew him well.

*RyanOReily was my pseudonym at the time.

So now the question is, “what does my new voice sound like?” Scratch that. That’s not the question. This Darkened Heart was a completely organic creation. I wrote what I felt, and I got into a groove. My writing voice was born out of that. It wasn’t created deliberately; it happened and I ran with it. So I guess what it comes down to is that I just need to keep writing, as earnestly as I possibly can, and hopefully, I’ll find my voice again. I know it’s there – it’s just dormant. It will take some time. But you know what? It’s 12:40 a.m. My alarm goes off in a little over four hours. The witching hour is when I used to shine putting words on a page, and here I am, about to post the first complete, somewhat-focused piece of writing that I’ve done in months. And that feels pretty fucking good.

2010 NFL Mock Draft (Rounds 1 and 2)

2010-04-17T22:10:00.000-07:00

Pick No.	Team	Player
1	St. Louis Rams	Sam Bradford, QB, Oklahoma The Rams have spent two of their last three number one picks on defensive linemen (Adam Carriker at no. 13 in 2007 and Chris Long at no. 2 in 2008) and have very little production to show for it (less than 100 tackles and only 7 sacks between them.) Bradford gets the call.
2	Detroit Lions	Ndamakong Suh, DT, Nebraska Suh is a freak of nature who has the chance to be head coach Jim Schwartz’s new Albert Haynesworth.
3	Tampa Bay Buccaneers	Gerald McCoy, DT, Oklahoma A pass-rushing defensive end might be the more pressing need in Tampa, but McCoy is just too good to pass up here. He upgrades the middle, and the Bucs can find an edge rusher in the next round (maybe USC’s Everson Griffen or Clemson’s Ricky Sapp.)
4	Washington Redskins	Russell Okung, OT, Oklahoma State The McNabb trade puts the Clausen speculation to bed, and the ‘Skins are free to take the best tackle in the draft to protect their new investment.
5	Kansas City Chiefs	Eric Berry, S, Tennessee A tackle like OU’s Trent Williams would be a smart pick here, because it would allow them to move Brandon Albert over to the right side and essentially fill two holes along the offensive line, but Berry is a special player who can provide an immediate spark to a lackluster defense.
6	Seattle Seahawks	Trent Williams, OT, Oklahoma Walter Jones called it a career over the offseason, and Pete Carroll needs a bookend on the left side to protect his new quarterback, Filthy Jesus (aka Charlie Whitehurst.)
7	Cleveland Browns	Joe Haden, CB, Florida Look for Holmgren and Mangini to pass on Jimmy Clausen and sure up the secondary with Haden – a guy with top-end football speed and a high football IQ. They can set their sights on Colt McCoy in the 2^nd round.
8	Oakland Raiders	Jason Pierre-Paul, DE, USF Pierre-Paul is a one year wonder with massive upside. Despite himself, The Kracken (aka Al Davis) might actually make a solid pick. In a related story, Davis’ advisors have spent the past month hiding Trindon Holiday’s 40 time from him.
9	Buffalo Bills	Bryan Bulaga, OT, Iowa Bulaga is a bit of a reach in the top ten, but Chan Gailey wants to run the football and the left side of the line was never addressed after the departure of Jason Peters.
10	Jacksonville Jaguars	Rolando McClain, ILB, Alabama McClain brings a Ray Lewis-like presence and sense of leadership to a relatively faceless Jaguars defense.
11	Denver Broncos (from Chicago)	Dez Bryant, WR, Oklahoma State The “character issues” surrounding Bryant are overblown. Brandon Marshall is now a Dolphin, Tony Sheffler wants out, and Josh McDaniels doesn’t use Eddie Royal enough, so they spend this pick on a new weapon for Kyle Orton.
12	Miami Dolphins	Dan Williams, DT, Tennessee The Dolphins need an upgrade over Paul Solai in the middle, and the 330 lb. Williams is a great fit.
13	San Francisco 49ers	Mike Iupati, OG, Idaho Iupati can plug in at either guard spot, and eventually take over the right tackle spot. If the 49ers want to get back to pounding the ball with Frank Gore, Iupati is a big step in the right direction.
14	Seattle Seahawks (from Denver)	C.J. Spiller, RB, Clemson A homerun threat of CJ2K proportions.
15	New York Giants	Sergio Kindle, DE/OLB, Texas The G-Men have spent a handful picks over the past few drafts on linebacking prospects who have paid marginal dividends. Kindle is versatile and should help strengthen a weak unit immediately.
16	Tennessee Titans	Brandon Graham, DE/OLB, Michigan Graham’s permanent address at Michigan was in the other team’s backfield. Tennessee needs to hit on this pick, because they have no picks in the next round. Graham can play the five technique, or he can line up as an outside backer in Chuck Cecil’s 4-3 scheme.
17	San Francisco 49ers (from Carolina)	Earl Thomas, S, Texas Thomas is versatile enough to play corner or safety. If the Browns pass up Haden at 7, then look for San Fran to nab him at 13, and take Iupati in this spot. Either way, they upgrade the secondary and the O-line in the first round.
18	Pittsburgh Steelers	Kyle Wilson, CB, Boise State The Steelers can’t afford to fall apart defensively if Troy Polamalu gets hurt again. Wilson is a potential shut-down corner who can operate on an island. He’s also a solid dude – a big plus for this organization, who suddenly seems to lack class.
19	Atlanta Falcons	Derrick Morgan, DE, Georgia Tech Jamal Anderson is on the road to Bustville, and the jury is still out on Peria Jerry and Lawrence Sidbury (the former spent 2009 on IR.) Morgan is a relentless pass rusher that can help a defense in desperate need of a sack… I mean, sacks.
20	Houston Texans	Kareem Jackson, CB, Alabama Houston’s first order of business should be to fill the hole left by Dunta Robinson’s departure. Jackson is flying up draft boards and should fit nicely in Houston.
21	Cincinnati Bengals	Jermaine Gresham, TE, Oklahoma The Bengals’ tight end corps spent more time on IR than the New York Mets. Gresham missed his senior season due to injury, but he’s a special player and should be a dependable weapon for Carson Palmer.
22	New England Patriots	Jahvid Best, RB, Cal The Patriots are suddenly the least explosive offense in the AFC East. They need linebacking help, but Best is a homerun threat who could inject some life into a suddenly stagnant offense.
23	Green Bay Packers	Maurkice Pouncey, C/OG, Florida Prime directive number one in Green Bay: keep Aaron Rodgers upright. Pouncey can play anywhere along the middle of the line, and his character is consistent with the Packer tradition.
24	Philadelphia Eagles	Taylor Mays, S, USC Mays is limited in his skills as a safety. I’ve been saying that whoever drafts him might want to walk him up as a linebacker in a 4-4 scheme. Philly needs a ball-hawking safety, and they might want to wait and go after T.J Ward in the next round, but Mays is a physical specimen and Andy Reid should be able to bring the best out of him.
25	Baltimore Ravens	Jared Odrick, DT, Penn State Odrick is a versatile talent who can really play anywhere along the defensive line. He could create a fearsome due in the middle with Haloti Ngata.
26	Arizona Cardinals	Jerry Hughes, DE/OLB, TCU The loss of Karlos Dansby weakens the linebacking unit in Arizona. Hughes is versatile and should be productive early.
27	Dallas Cowboys	Anthony Davis, OT, Rutgers Davis is a potential Pro-Bowler who slid due to character/work ethic issues. Doug Free is just some dude, and Davis should be able to step in and replace him immediately.
28	San Diego Chargers	Ryan Mathews, RB, Fresno State The perfect compliment to Darren Sproles; Mathews can bang it between the tackles, but he also has breakaway speed.
29	New York Jets	Devin McCourty, CB, Rutgers McCourty is a solid cover corner who isn’t afraid to put his pads on a receiver/ball carrier – a combination that Rex Ryan should love. He’s also a return threat. The addition of McCourty makes an already scary secondary border on terrifying.
30	Minnesota Vikings	Everson Griffen, DE, USC The Vikings need to upgrade the secondary, but the next best corner, Patrick Robinson, might be a reach here. So they go with the best player available. Griffen is underrated in terms of his versatility, and while he may not start immediately, he can certainly contribute early.
31	Indianapolis Colts	Brian Price, DT, UCLA Price is a bit of a hidden gem in a deep class of tackles. He should fit right into a fast, undersized defensive unit.
32	New Orleans Saints	Sean Weatherspoon, LB, Missouri Scott Fujita left in free agency, and Weatherspoon fits right into the Saints’ defensive scheme. He struggles occasionally in coverage, but he is athletic and can shut down the running game on the strong side.

Round 2

Pick No.	Team	Player
33	St. Louis Rams	Arrelius Benn, WR, Illinois Round 1 they got the QB, now they get him some weapons.
34	Detroit Lions	Charles Brown, OT, USC A converted tight-end, Brown is hard-working and dependable.
35	Tampa Bay Buccaneers	Carlos Dunlap, DE, Florida Dunlap is a first-round talent who slides due to character and work ethic concerns. He’s a steal here for Tampa Bay.
36	Kansas City Chiefs	Roger Saffold, OT, Indiana Can plug in at left tackle and Brandon Albert can move over to right.
37	Philadelphia Eagles (from Washington)	Patrick Robinson, CB, Florida State Sheldon Brown is gone, and Robinson could potentially compete with the injury-prone Ellis Hobbs for the second cornerback position.
38	Cleveland Browns	Colt McCoy, QB, Texas The Browns get a QB of the future… again…because, you know, Derek Anderson was their QB of the future… and so was Brady Quinn. Wait, neither one of them are on the roster anymore? Awesome. Go Browns.
39	Oakland Raiders	Jimmy Clausen, QB, Notre Dame You might think I’m insane to have Clausen fall down to number 39, and you’re probably right… Buffalo will probably take him at 9. But here’s the thing; I’m just not impressed with the kid (sorry Bobbo.) Watch him on Gruden’s QB Camp… he’s arrogant, and looks to me like he’d be hard to coach. I wouldn’t draft him in the first… or the second, to be honest. Again, I’m sorry, Bobbo… Bromance for life.
40	San Diego Chargers (from Seattle)	Terrence Cody, DT, Alabama 365 lbs. of man. Enough said.
41	Buffalo Bills	Tim Tebow, QB, Florida The Bills will draft him… he will be starting by week 4… and the end of his career will begin. Buffalo… where brilliant careers are prevented.
42	Tampa Bay Buccaneers (from Chicago)	Demaryius Thomas, WR, Georgia Tech With the defensive line upgraded, the Bucs can start thinking about weapons for Josh Freeman. Thomas is a big target who can stretch the field and take advantage of Freeman’s cannon.
43	Denver Broncos (from Miami)	Darryl Washington, OLB, TCU Solid tackler with great instincts who plays sideline to sideline; a great fit for Denver’s 3-4 scheme.
44	New England Patriots (from Jacksonville)	Brandon Spikes, ILB, Florida Spikes has some red flags, but Belicheat…er, Belichick should be able to maximize his productivity. He should fit right in… New England’s defense is old, and Spikes looks at least 40.
45	Denver Broncos	Linval Joseph, DT, ECU Mel Kiper and his hair have been raving about this guy. He played the three technique at ECU and could be the presence Denver has been lacking in the middle.
46	New York Giants	Sean Lee, ILB, Penn State Blue collar work ethic with outstanding instincts and reaction time. I always thought Antonio Pierce was more mouth than action; with Lee, you get both – the leadership and the production. New defensive coordinator Perry Fewell has worked with PSU linebackers before (see: Posluszny, Paul)
47	New England Patriots (from Tennessee)	Navorro Bowman, OLB, Penn State Undersized, but plays with great range and instinct. Can play the run and drop into coverage equally well.
48	Carolina Panthers	Golden Tate, WR, Notre Dame The Panthers would be thrilled if Tate falls to them at this spot. A great compliment to Steve Smith, Tate creates separation, runs crisp routes and can make moves after the catch. Also, he should be able to actually learn the playbook and get on the field right away, unlike some former 2^nd round picks (see: Jarrett, Dwayne)
49	San Francisco 49ers	Tyson Alualu, DT, Cal High motor guy who plays bigger than his size (295 lbs.) Great run stopper but can also rush the passer.
50	Kansas City Chiefs (from Atlanta)	Lamarr Houston, DT, Texas Solid run-stopper, best suited for a one-technique but can play the three spot adequately.
51	Houston Texans	Major Wright, S, Florida Ball-hawking safety who can also lay the wood on a receiver.
52	Pittsburgh Steelers	Bruce Campbell, OT, Maryland Another guy that people will say I have going too low; he’s a freak of nature in terms of athleticism and physique, and best case scenario, his ceiling resides somewhere in the vicinity of the Milky Way. However, he’s just not a good football player… not yet, anyway. After a couple of years on tutelage in Steel City, he could be the next Jonathan Ogden.
53	New England Patriots	Vladimir Ducasse, OT/OG, UMass A tackle at UMass, Ducasse is better suited as an interior blocker at the NFL level. Belichick found a small school gem last year in OT Sebastian Vollmer. He could be able to mold Ducasse into a productive NFL lineman.
54	Cincinnati Bengals	Ricky Sapp, DE, Clemson A solid edge rusher, Sapp could compete for a starting job. At the very least, he’s a good insurance policy for Antwan Odom, who is coming off a knee injury that shelved him for the entire 2009 season.
55	Philadelphia Eagles	Koa Misi, OLB, Utah Despite putting up the worst bench press total at the combine (two reps… I could probably bang out two reps, and I can’t remember what the inside of a gym looks like) Misi is a fast riser on a lot of draft boards. His greatest strength is his versatility (he played inside, outside and along the defensive line in college) – could be a scary blitzer on passing downs.
56	Green Bay Packers	Nate Allen, S, USF High character guy; plays faster than his 40 time suggests (good football speed)
57	Baltimore Ravens	Rob Gronkowski, TE, Arizona Has the speed to stretch the field, the power to run-block, and a great set of hands. Skill set is similar to a guy named Todd Heap.
58	Arizona Cardinals	Chris Cook, CB, Virginia A ball hawk with very fluid hips and a knack for positioning himself in between receivers and the football; great closing speed for a guy his size (6’2, 215 lbs.) Limited in college by injury and academic ineligibility. Could potentially switch to safety to replace Antrel Rolle.
59	Dallas Cowboys	Mardy Gilyard, WR, Cincinnati Jon Asamoah from Illinois would be a safe choice here, but Jerry Jones loves flashy guys with big play potential, and Gilyard fits the profile.
60	Seattle Seahawks (from San Diego)	Eric Decker, WR, Minnesota Deon Branch will probably be moved on draft day – Decker lacks the speed to be considered a legitimate deep threat, but he will be a rock solid possession receiver.
61	New York Jets	Dexter McCluster, RB, Ole Miss Yet another guy I probably have hanging around the board too long, but you know what? If you don’t like it, make your own fucking mock draft. Rex Ryan would drool over McCluster like he was one of those Double Down sandwiches from KFC. Yet another weapon for The Sanchize.
62	Minnesota Vikings	Perrish Cox, CB, Oklahoma State Great football speed and prototypical size for the position; had a very productive career at OK State.
63	Indianapolis Colts	Jon Asamoah, OG, Illinois Great awareness and strength at the point of attack; posted one of the fastest times for interior linemen at the combine.
64	New Orleans Saints	Geno Atkins, DT, Georgia Size is a major issue, but Greg Williams should find a way to maximize his productivity. High character and football intelligence work in his favor.

Round 3

Chicago Bears

Corey Wooten, DE, Northwestern

Last season, the Bears traded their 2^nd round pick to Tampa Bay for Gaines Adams, who tragically passed away. Wooten is similar in stature to Adams, and had a very productive career at N’Western. Wooten can provide the Bears with some much needed pressure on opposing quarterbacks.

The Devil(s) I Know (and Love)

2010-02-23T18:16:00.000-08:00

The following is a true account of events experienced personally by the narrator. Names have been changed to protect the guilty. (I know that names are often changed to protect the innocent, but in Mr. T’s 4^th block… innocence does not exist.) Continue at your own risk.

You’ve all seen those “inspirational” teacher movies, where the affluent, middle-aged white woman takes a job teaching the dregs of the worst school in the worst city in the country; you know the ones I mean. Michelle Pfeiffer did it in Dangerous Minds (which has been on HBO recently, reminding what a God awful film it really is) and then later on Mine That Bird taught some kids how to Freedom Write (whatever the fuck that is.) What do you mean it wasn’t the horse? Hillary who?

Anyway, real life doesn’t work like that. I know both of those abortions-on-film were based on true stories, and there are the Ron Clark and Crazy Joe Clark (principal from Lean on Me) stories, but they are exaggerated, taken out of context and few and far between. (Apparently, you can only make radical differences if you are an unattractive, off-putting white woman or have the sir name ‘Clark.’) I’m sure that there are inner city classrooms that are as rough in reality as they are on camera, but I don’t work in one of them. I work in inner city Disney. That’s not to say, however, that my kids aren’t insane… because they are. Do they throw desks through the window or bash administrator’s skulls against the floor (another Lean on Me moment)? Negative. (At least not yet.) But every class has its own quirks. My first period is chatty and spacey, but easily managed. My 3^rd period may be retarded. There’s no punch line there… they are retarded. The majority of any given class period is nothing more than a competition to see who can draw more penises on each other’s manila folders. Fear not, aging citizens; the next wave of world leaders may not be able to provide adequate health care or sustain social security, but your hospice residence with be donned with the finest dicks in the land.

But 4^th period… that’s the real gem. From the beginning of the year, they were a handful… and there were only eighteen of them. When the semester changed, I acquired a slew of brand new knuckleheads via free agency. It became a three ring circus; no elephants, no jugglers, but plenty of clowns.

Step into my world (from 1:45-3:15, anyway.)

From the moment the bell rings, I’m on cell phone safari. I’m like Donald Schultz spotting Black Mambas in the rainforest trees (sorry, I’m a huge Wild Recon fan.) Their definition of slickness is pretending that they’re looking at the bell work while the very conspicuous Blackberries rest in their laps. Apparently I am as dumb as I look.

Big deal, right? The cell phone thing comes with the territory. Read on.

Once the bell work is done, the games begin. Reggie always comes to class with a healthy supply of zip ties. As I try to explain “The Lost Generation” concept in All Quiet on the Western Front, Reggie’s attention is dedicated to searching out unsuspecting victims. He is as conscientious as a hawk in this endeavor. He cannot define conscientious or endeavor… or hawk. But, he always finds his prey. Ah, poor Deon… he was actually paying attention. He may understand why the post WWI generation was considered lost, but he is also now zip tied to his chair.

Still not impressed? Well, allow me to introduce you to the fine art of “knapsacking.” Remember when you were in grammar school, and you would reach over to your unsuspecting neighbor and give him a shoe-wedgie? Well, welcome to the new age of classroom pranks (ironic that the newest prank has such an antiquated name – who calls a bookbag a knapsack anymore?) When an unsuspecting classmate goes to the bathroom, there is a mad rush to grab their bookbag. Every item is removed, the bag itself turned inside out, and the contents replaced. I have four students, including Reggie, than can perform this operation in less than fifteen seconds. I’m not going to lie… it’s kind of impressive. You know, in an idiotic sort of way. They are brazen with the knapsacking… they will attempt it at any given opportunity, no matter what I’m doing. I could be giving the final exam, and as I speak the words, “Okay, here’s the most important part…” I will hear the distinct giggling and rustling of papers that denote a knapsacking. They’ll take their lumps…as long as their mission is accomplished.

In the back corner, Christian (black) torments Aaron (white) by showing him pictures of half-naked white girls on his cell phone. Aaron lectures Christian on miscegenation (although he isn’t quite so eloquent with his wording) and invokes curse words that offend even my sensibilities (and you know how motherfuckin’ hard that is to do!)

Next to Aaron sits Billy. Billy informed me on day one that he does not do work. He also informed me that he enjoys getting high with his mother, and, just yesterday, asked Tanisha if black people eat fried chicken after they have sex. He did not pose this question subtly, or in an “inside voice.” Billy does not possess an “inside voice.” Neither does, Tanisha, come to think of it, as just last week I caught the end of a story in which, in her exact words, “Dis nigga kicked me in my pussy!” Alright, then.

Are we having fun yet? Good.

-Alisha is two months pregnant. Her child is already smarter than her. It has to be.

- Dominique is a tremendously talented artist. She is also a lesbian. She showed me her portfolio once. I needed to think about baseball… quickly.

- Stefan calls me “Mr. Jenkins.” This is not my name. He thinks this is hilarious. I am baffled.

Understand that these are not complaints. I don’t see these kids as the class from hell. Maybe what’s above sounds like no big deal to you; if that’s the case, you should be in this line of work. You’d flourish. There are days when they are in full-on knucklehead mode, and that ninety minutes feels like an eternity. But there are days when they are on their A-game, and all is well with the universe. But here’s the thing; I’ve never referred to them as “bad.” They are not bad kids. I give them a hard time, sure. I made some cracks earlier about their intelligence levels. In no way do I believe these kids are stupid, so if you’re getting ready to judge me from up in your ivory tower, just unbunch your underoos for a second. Teacher’s have to joke about their kids the way soldiers in a war have to make light of death. It’s the way we remain sane. I know things about those kids that would rip your heart wide open. I’ve read journal entries that made me fight back tears. Some of them are damaged. Some of them are misunderstood. When I call them “knuckleheads,” it’s with the utmost esteem and affection. Those are my kids.

A couple weeks ago, I had jury duty. I had to arrange for a substitute. Since we have no money in the budget for subs, other teachers end up having to cover classes. I hate this. I hate having other teachers come into my room – not because I don’t trust their teaching ability, but because the simple fact is that my kids only behave for me. This is especially true of 4^th block. It is the epitome of controlled chaos. Three different teachers covered that class on the day I was out. Here are the quotes I got from them upon my return:

Teacher 1: “How do you deal with that class? They are an absolute nightmare. I don’t know what I would do with them.”

Teacher 2: “They’re pretty wild. One of them was nice enough to call me an asshole.”

Teacher 3: “I was just happy that no one set the room on fire.”

I can’t really get mad at Teacher 3, first off, because he’s a buddy of mine, and secondly, because I thank God, Allah and Baby Jesus in his tuxedo t-shirt everyday that no one sets the room on fire in that class. Teacher 2 is also kind of a buddy, and I reprimanded the kid who called him an asshole. I made him write an apology letter. Let’s just say that my man won’t be working for Hallmark anytime soon. Teacher 3 really pissed me off, though. Because they are not a nightmare. They are rambunctious kids. They are a challenge. They make me want to drink heavily on certain days. But, they are my kids, and you don’t talk shit about them.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need some sleep. I have to get up and teach these bad motherfuckers tomorrow.

The Alcohol Diary: Chasing the Night

2010-02-20T17:21:00.000-08:00

Do me a favor and picture the following scenario:

It’s Saturday night, around nine o’clock. You’re hanging out at your buddy’s place with a bunch of your friends, and you’re getting ready to go out to the bar. You’re pre-gaming; the game is on, you’re dressed up in your polo or your button-down, your best pair of jeans and your brown Sketchers (or your black square-toes or your immaculate white Nikes.) If you’re a real douche, you’re in your skin-tight Affliction t-shirt and perhaps some sort of designer boot. You’re eating pizza-bites and making clockwork-like trips to the little fridge that survived four years of college and now resides in your buddy’s living room solely for these types of situations and doling out Bud Light cans across the room, save to the poor bastard who pulled driving duty. Pre-gaming really is the best part of the night, in some ways. Everyone is relaxed and cracking jokes, and the entire night is in front of you. Right now, everyone has an equal opportunity to get laid (because really, isn’t that what going to the bar on a Saturday night is about – the slight chance that you will meet a young, uninhibited, morally (and God-willing, physically) flexible young lady who doesn’t have time for phone number exchanges or dinners and will invite you back to her place?) Sure it is. Don’t act like you’re above it. Okay, so now it’s almost 10:30 and you’re ready to go. Fashionably late friend just got there – and even though he looks like an unmade bed, it’s the fashionable kind of unmade bed, which required that extra hour. Driving-guy is ready to drive. Half of your friends have achieved the perfect level of buzzed, where they can simply work with a beer every hour or so to maintain it; they don’t get sloppy and they don’t lose their buzz. These are the professionals. A couple of your buddies appear to be at that perfect-buzz level, but a poorly-timed shot may send them on a detour into puddle-town. That, or they will lose their buzz about 45 minutes after you arrive at the bar and will most likely just be cranky for the rest of the night. These are the Shaq’s and T.O.’s of the group – you’d think they would be a productive part of the evening, but really they just end up destroying the chemistry of the night from the inside out. Finally, there’s that one friend who hit the pre-game like it was the Super Bowl, and is already slurring his speech on the way out the door. While everyone else was pacing themselves, he was in the corner doing shotguns by himself, while the designated driver screamed at him like Duke from Rocky IV. “This is supposed to be an exhibition! EX-HIBITION! This is supposed to be pre-game! PRE-GAME!” I like to call this guy the Colin Farrell. He peaked too early, and will now be an insufferable douche for the rest of the night.

You get to the bar, and the night plays out fairly routinely; two of your buddies who kind of have their own thing going on end up setting up shop at the end of the bar and spend the night doing shots and drunkenly confiding in one another (and the way they stand, with one’s arm draped across the other’s shoulders as he pulls him in tight to tell him something extra profound somehow only makes them look marginally gay.) Other friends scatter to the dance floor, where they kind of just bob their heads and every once in a while dip their shoulders to the beat, because it’s not that they can’t dance, it’s just that they’re too cool to. Meanwhile, you and another buddy have decided to Maverick-and-Goose it over to a group of girls you recognize from high school who have gotten more attractive, and therefore less likely to have anything to do with you, but you’re going to give it a shot anyway. And the Colin Farrell? He’s outside on the curb being mocked by the people waiting on line to get into the bar after reverse-shotgunning all those beers into the bathroom stall. Before you know it, it’s 2am – the bar is thinning out, you’ve spent $80 and at this point, there is zero possibility of going home with a female… but, no one is really all that tired (even Colin Farrell is semi-coherent and catching a second wind.) What should you do? Should you

A) Search for another bar where there might be more girls

B) Go back inside and scheme on the dregs of the bar-skank brigade the way a turkey vulture picks at the corpse of a flattened raccoon

C) Slam the last forty dollars in your wallet down on the bar and do your damndest to get alcohol poisoning (or at least ensure that you piss the bed)

D) Cut your losses, go to the diner, eat bad food, mock your Colin Farrell friend and call it a night

If you answered “D,” you would be correct. Contrary to what Richard Marx tells us, nothing good comes from holding on to the night. In fact, after 2am, nothing good has ever happened to anyone…anywhere…in the history of the world. Sadly, we all know this. Yet, how many of us ever choose “D?” Be honest; we never choose “D.” Instead of cutting our losses and capping the night off with some tasteless humor and a plate of gravy-fries, we always want to chase the night.

I’m guilty; I’ll admit it. In my tenure of going out on Friday and Saturday nights, I have played all the roles - I’ve been driving guy, the professional, Shaq and Collin – and many times, I’ve been guilty of trying to chase the night. Most times, it was because the inordinate amount of alcohol I force-fed myself throughout the night somehow convinced me that I was actually having fun. “C’mon, let’s go to another bar! We can’t see straight, we’re burping recycled Jack Daniels into our own mouth once every eight minutes, our speech sounds like Corky Thatcher having a conversation with a deaf guy, and our shirt is soaked through with equal parts spilled beer and man-boob sweat. THIS IS AWESOME!!!!” Ugh. That was my reason for chasing the night – I drank to excess, and figured that, since I hadn’t vomited or passed out yet, that meant I was supposed to keep drinking. In the morning, my violent hangover and empty bank account would lace into me like a henpecking housewife. “I told you we didn’t need those last four shots. What good did they do? You made an ass of yourself, you got puke on your new shirt, and now we only have eighteen dollars left until the next paycheck. God, I wish you weren’t such a jackass!” Just for fun, have a look at the results from a few of those nights when I just refused to let it go:

1. New Paltz, sometime between 2002-2005 (is it bad that the first half of the double-aught decade all blends together?) We’re out at Murphy’s, and it’s been a fairly uneventful night. I’m drunk, and slowly getting drunker. I’ve somehow managed to convince myself that Maia D’Edgidio was making eyes at me, and that the cordial, “Hi-haven’t-seen-you-in-a-while” hug I got from her might have had potential to blossom into what would have to be one of the most improbable hook-ups of all time. Fuck off, I said I was drunk. Anyway, Pat V. must’ve driven that night, and he was ready to go. 99 times out of 100, Pat and I are on the same wavelength when it comes to these things, and I would have left with him. But, like the devil on my shoulder, Pat H. was in my other ear, saying all the right things to convince me to stay. He always said the right things…uh, I mean….nevermind. Not gay. So, I ended up staying with him and Chris F., who I believe was working overtime on some pretty little New Paltz college girl. Do you know what happened after Pat and the other guys left? Me either. There is nothing significant or memorable about the extra hours we spent in the bar that night. Here is what I do remember… we had no ride home. I feel like Pholbes and I got on one of our “we’ll-go-by-the-grace-of-God” pseudo-philosophical kicks, and somehow convinced ourselves that we would find someone that would give us a ride. We did not. Do you know who ended up picking us up? Mr. Fiorentino. Charlie Hustle himself, drove out to New Paltz at 4am and picked up his twenty-something son and his two jackass twenty-something friends from the bar. I remember very little of the car ride, save the feeling of extreme embarrassment I felt.

2. New Year’s Eve, 2004(?) 2005(?) Who the fuck knows? We are in New York City at one of those pay-$200-and-get-open-bar-all-night deals. There are very few attractive women at this party. I am crazy-glued to the bar, over-tipping for free drinks because the bartender is hot, has tattoos and is wearing fishnet stocking on not only her legs, but her arms as well. I am in love, and like a guy who thinks he has a shot at bringing home the stripper, I am funneling money into her tip cup in exchange for a few flirtatious smiles and a brush of her fingers across my forearm. Women are wily, and I am a complete idiot, for the record. One of my friends is devoting his time to hitting on a woman who looks like Kelly from The Office’s grandmother. Pholbes is upstairs at former New Jersey Net/current San Antonio Spur Richard Jefferson’s private party. By the way, Pat walking around referring to Jefferson as “Rich” all night long is still one of my favorite memories. Anyway, as the party clears out, I refuse to vacate my bar stool. Open bar has ended, and I am now paying for drinks. The alcohol in my system literally outweighs the hemoglobin at this point. My friends are clearing out, but I stand fast. Why? Who the fuck knows. I sat by myself at the bar for at least another hour, before finally deciding that it was time to vacate. I get into a verbal altercation with some random dude on my way out, and it’s like 80:20 that I provoked it. By the grace of God and Baby Jesus, I make it back to Brett’s apartment (a couple of the guys may have actually come back for me – I don’t really remember.) I close the night out by spooning with the toilet, only a step or two shy of sleeping in the bathtub like Casper at the end of Kids.

3 Albany, NY, a couple of years ago. Jeff and I are out and about, up to our usual antics (drinking far more than either one of us normally would for no discernable reason whatsoever.) We spend the majority of the night at Café Hollywood, and end up across the street at Bombers. We meet up with my friend Courtney and we have a great time. When we leave Bombers, it is clearly time to go home. I convince Jeff that we need to hit one more bar. There was some tiny little hole in the wall down the street from Bombers that Jeff said he wanted to take me to (this was about 75 drinks ago, mind you) and we decided to head down there. Jeff went back into Bombers to go to the bathroom, and I waited outside with Courtney. At some point, Courtney went home and I was out on the street alone. It had been almost a half hour, maybe more. I must’ve missed Jeff. I figured he went down to the other bar without me. So I head down there. The bartender is a buddy of Jeff’s, and I ask him where he’s at. The bartender says he hasn’t seen him. So I have a couple of beers and I wait. Jeff never posts. I leave. Miraculously, I navigate my way back to Jeff’s apartment. I bang on the door like Fred-fucking-Flintstone for five minutes, but to no avail. So what do I do? I take a walk around the corner to my car (and not even my car, but a rental car that I drove up. It was one of those God-awful, half-car, half-station wagon things. A Pacifica? Was it a Pacifica?) and get in. Relax, I didn’t drive it. I slept in it. I slept in it in the dead of summer heat. I needed the AC, so I turned it on. Then I passed out. I wake up around 6am, sweating like Rex Ryan. The AC is off. Why is it off? Because the battery is dead. I walk back to Jeff’s apartment and bang on the door some more, this time adding in a little homage to Mark Wahlburg in Fear; looking into the peep hole and screaming, “Let me in the fuckin’ HOUSE!” (Okay, I made that last part up.) Jeff groggily answers the door, lets me in and immediately goes back to bed. In the morning, we venture half way across town to get jumper cables from his brother, Daniel. Daniel mocks us, and rightfully so. We then proceed to put on an utter spectacle; two men in their mid-twenties trying to jump start a car and having no earthly idea what they are doing. We almost set the car – and our balls – on fire. Jeff had to call his dad and have him talk us through it. I’m not making this shit up, I swear. I wish I were. God, I wish I were.

I could literally list ten more instances of fucked up things that happened because I wanted to stay out and drink when I should have just gone home, but I don’t know how much more of my stupidity I can write down before I decide to dowse myself with kerosene and light myself on fire. The point is, nothing good happens after 2am. I know this, yet that last story took place no longer than two years ago, and there have been a couple of other times where I’ve tried to keep the night alive on life support down here in Florida, when I should have just pulled the plug (much like many of Florida’s residents. ZING! I hate old people.)

All jokes aside, I’m not really ashamed of any of that stuff I just recounted. At the same time, this isn’t a nostalgic, “hey-I-loved-drinking-my-face-off” memoir, either. I’ve outgrown the desire to drink for drinking’s sake (thankfully.) But those experiences, as well as the ones where I just let the night die its natural death – are all mine, and I would not trade them. When you’re in college, chasing the night isn’t as dangerous. All of the stupidity and fucked up situations that come with dragging out the party turn into great stories for the next night’s pre-game. When you’re twenty-two and you’re stumbling around drunk at 3am with a bloody nose and piss-stained jeans, you’ll wake up and die laughing about it with your roommates. You could even tell it to a girl, and it won’t necessarily prevent her from giving you a handskie at the end of the night. But if you’re still stringing the night out at 28 and, oh, I don’t know, getting rides home from the police because you were walking down the road at 3am cursing wildly to no one but the snakes and armadillos and your apartment is easily ten miles away and you may or may not be shirtless and you’re drunk dialing your best friend and telling him how much you love him like your ship is going down… it might be time to learn to let it go.

Not that I know anything at all about that last part. I mean, it’s not like that shit actually happened to me or anything. Where did I leave that can of kerosene?

My how the years and our youths pass on...

2010-02-14T17:19:00.001-08:00

I’m feeling old. I was just talking about this on the phone with my buddy Pat last week. I used to have this weird system of gauging how on track (or more accurately, how far off the fucking rails) my life was; I went by movies and song lyrics. This made sense to me, because movies and music have always had a big impact on my life, and I figured that if I could stay one step ahead of these lines and lyrics at any given time, then I would be doing alright. I knew that I didn’t ever have to have it all figured out… I just needed to walk the sometimes-all-too-fine line between “All is Well” and “Truly Fucked.” So I used some of my favorite songs and some of my favorite films as the barometer. For instance, in “Slow Ride” by Sublime, Bradley Nowel sings, “…but sitting on the verge of tears does not become my twenty-two years.” Now I’d been listening to that song since I was eighteen, so at twenty-one, when I was putting myself through the ringer over a girl (ripping through an eighteen pack alone in my dorm room while listening to bad screamo then going Money Mayweather on every window pane in sight,) I realized that I was off the deep end and needed to reel it in a bit. I mean, I was acting out Atmosphere b-sides before I even knew who Atmosphere was. The sad part is, over half a decade later, I was pulling the same shit over a different girl, only this time I was firing down ten Bud Lights before bed, then sweating them out in the front of a classroom while trying to teach The Great Gatsby to a bunch of eleventh graders (you’d be surprised how much more of a bitch Daisy Buchanon comes off as when you’re working on a savage hangover.) As for Bradley’s words of wisdom… well, let’s just say that twenty-two years faded from the rear view a few thousand miles back.

When the needle stopped on the next level on the life-o-meter, I was up against a line from one of my all-time favorite bands, The Bouncing Souls. In “’87,” a great song about memory and looking back on life, there’s a line that goes, “I woke up one day and I was twenty-five, with a hell of a hangover and some demented sense of pride.” Truer words have never been spoken. Twenty-five crept up on me like a thief in the night. I was spot on with the song, though; I woke up with a lot of hangovers at twenty-five, and usually with a demented sense of something, though not always pride. Shame? Check. Self-loathing? Definitely. Where am I’s? One or two. Who-the-fuck-is-this-girl-in-my-bed’s? Indeed – and I’d like to say that from those few and far between incidents came that demented sense of pride…but that wasn’t really the case. I mean, the demented part, maybe. Cocaine’s a hell of a drug. Wait, what? No I’m kidding. I’ve never woken up with a strange girl in my bed (and I’m somehow equally proud and ashamed of that statement.) But either way, it was comforting to know that the feeling I had – the feeling that my youth was all but over, and that my mid-twenties barged in uninvited – was not uncommon. It took other people by surprise, too. As I write this, I can’t even remember a single distinct memory from twenty-five. I want to say that my relationship – my first true relationship – ended, but that could have happened at the end of ’04 or the beginning of ’06 for all I know.

*Here’s a weird movie vs. real life tangent for you regarding that relationship. If you’ve never seen the movie High Fidelity, it basically involves John Cusack counting down his top five most memorable breakups. The first is Allison Ashmore, who young Cusack used to make out with under the bleachers after school. One day, he shows up for their make-out session and she’s kissing some ginger kid named Kevin Bannister. Later in the movie, Cusack calls Allison up, gets her mother, and while trying to convince her that he was actually Allison’s first boyfriend, finds out that Allison and Kevin got married. Okay, so get this… the girl that kicked me to the curb after less than six months’ last name is Ashworth. I just heard through the grapevine that she’s engaged… to the guy she started dating right after me. If, when I’m thirty, I’m calling up Mrs. Ashworth and trying to convince her that I was her daughter’s first boyfriend, remind me to fix myself a bullet sandwich for lunch that day. Thanks.

That brings us to my favorite measuring stick of my life; Beautiful Girls. Entrenched on my top five favorite films of all time, it isn’t a single quote from this movie that I find relevance in, but the concept of the movie itself. It’s about a group of guys getting together in their hometown (most of them still live there – one of them comes in from his home in the city) for their ten year high school reunion. They drink, they relive some of the glory days, they drink, they sort out a bunch of their personal shit, and they drink some more. I used to look at this movie and say to myself, “these guys must be twenty-eight, twenty nine years old, and they still don’t have their shit together – which means that it’s normal for me at twenty-five/twenty-six not to have a fucking clue…right?” As strange as it sounds, that gave me solace.

So, guess what illustrious event recently came and went? That’s right, my ten year reunion. I couldn’t make it – I was stuck down here in heaven’s waiting room – which felt weird, because ever since I graduated high school, I always assumed that the ten year reunion would be this huge deal. It seemed like this abstract concept way off on the horizon, blurred by a fiery, setting sun. I used to wonder if we’d all show up to some fancy-shmancy ballroom or catering hall in three-piece suits, looking distinctively older and more experienced in life. Who would have kids? Who would be a millionaire? And, most importantly, who/what would I be? Would I be forced into a conversation with some random classmate who felt spurned or disrespected by me when we were seventeen, like in some cheesy 80’s movie? Would he condescendingly tell me about his high-paying executive job? His new house? His beautiful bride with baby on the way? Would I have to look him in the eye and euphemize on how I’m still living check to check? Maybe I’d get good and loaded and horrify him with the horrorshow-highlight reel that is my relationship history? Actually, that last part might be fun. But none of that was necessary. The event passed without so much as a ripple in the pond. I saw pictures, and everyone looked the same. But suddenly, I was the same age as Matt Dillon and Mike Rappaport and Timothy Hutton, and not a single step closer to having my life sorted out. Luckily, with age came a very tiny bit of wisdom – enough to realize that there’s no age limit set on making sense out of your life. I’m staring twenty-nine in the face, and you know what lurks around the corner. I am still living check to check. I’m sweating out the last four months of the school year so I can get the hell out of Florida and get back to New York, where I belong. Not the ideal scenario I pictured for myself at twenty-nine, but then again, I’ve never really had a cohesive plan. All things considered, I can’t complain.

So here I am, having outgrown all my song and movie benchmarks, and that’s part of the reason I’m feeling old. I said to Pat on the phone that day, “I’m gonna’ be twenty-nine soon… when the fuck did that happen?” His response was, “Dude, when the fuck did anything happen?” which is probably a more relevant question. My twenties are a blur; they came and went with all of the clarity of a blackout-bender. What I do know is this: most of the past decade has been spent waiting; waiting to get into grad school, and waiting to get out; waiting to get to Florida, and waiting to go home. I finally feel like the waiting is coming to an end. This past year has been especially tough, and I think a major reason for that is that I’ve shed the reckless skin of youth (for better or for worse.) I no longer have the desire to flail through drunken nights and Jack-induced meltdowns where mobile communication devices get shattered against walls and beer-stained barroom floors. Part of me misses the freedom that came from getting behind a good bender – there was a twisted satisfaction and distorted beauty in the wake of my perpetual trainwreck. I guess I’m getting too old for it, now. Quick, someone get me a pair of highwater slacks, two Viagra and find out what channel shows reruns of Murder She Wrote.

Breathing With Borrowed Lungs

2009-12-31T00:39:00.000-08:00

They say the weak shall fall by the wayside

Well, I'm way sighed-out this week

The witching hour's come and gone

and I'm fighting off oppressive sleep

It's not the dreams I can't abide

In fact, I welcome them like the ships the tide

It's my waking mind I'm stuck inside

and from myself I cannot hide

The dreams they offer sweet reprieve

Through which I almost let myself believe

That the joy I feel in slumber vast

is truly what will come to pass...

But when my eyes open anew

I must reconcile once again,

like some war-wounded veteran,

whose legs and arms he wakes to scratch

Though they've long since ceased to be attached

And I see with suffocating sight

and gasp for air in the morning light

I FEEL LIKE I'M BREATHING WITH MAKESHIFT LUNGS

That fail to keep time with my haphazard heart

No better than a broken metronome,

off-beat from the start

Yes, the weak shall fall by the wayside,

and I'm way sighed-out this week

There's no rest for the wishful

Nothing to inherit for the meek

The winter solstice has left me cold,

breath freezes in the southern air

Heart and thoughts run through the ringer

And I'm so much worse for wear

Because the stars aren't shining and the Man in the Moon

casts an accusatory stare

And the angel on my shoulder whispers three simple words:

"YOU...WEREN'T...THERE

And these words-like-daggers steal my sleep - I wake

with baited breath from borrowed lungs

And the angels in my head stand poised

To sing my sins with trumpet-tongues

"Forgive me... please, forgive me,"

Please hear my wayside plight

There's no rest for the remorseful

And I'm way sighed-out tonight.

In like a lion, out like an atomic bomb...

2009-12-30T10:08:00.000-08:00

I was anticipating a pleasant, quiet end to 2009. In like a lion, out like a lamb. But apparently, my tiny existence is a super-conductor for tumult, like pepper to a tiger (as opposed to cinnamon.) I've been on hiatus from work for eleven days, and accomplished none of the goals I set for myself over the break. I don't feel as ashamed of this as I should, because a proverbial clean slate is less than 48 hours away. I know that New Year's resolutions are cliche and often ineffective, but right now, I welcome the prospect of self-granted absolution and another shot at "getting it right." Of course, I realize that when the clock strikes twelve on New Year's Day, I'm not going to pass through any imaginary archway, or be dipped in cleansing waters. I will be the same me that I was when the clock chimed midnight on January 1st, 2009, albeit this year a more sober one - in multiple contexts of the word.

My thoughts have been incredibly nondescript over the past twenty-four hours - just a series of racing images and bold-face words pulsating in giant, neon letters. As a matter of fact, this half-hearted attempt at a year-end retrospective is really just a futile ploy to keep my mind occupied. A year ago, I would already be twelve bottles deep and getting ready to inventory the damaged property left in my wake. Fortunately, I've apparently outgrown mindless self-destruction as a coping mechanism. Let's face it, drinking myself blind and re-enacting Balboa-Creed II with every breakable, inanimate object in my apartment never really killed the pain.

So maybe I have change a bit from 28 to 29. I certainly feel older, I can tell you that. And, although I have occasionally caught myself praying for the petty problems and dramatized angst of my youth, I feel like I've embraced the reality in which I exist, and have done so with a fair amount of success. All things considered, I'm happy. I'm working within the career of my choice, and I'm making the rent every month. I know that it's sad when making the rent is the barometer for success, but we all know times are tough. Regardless, I sit here trying to put words to the lessons 2009 has taught me - the things I've lost and gained - and the things that I look forward to in 2010.

As far as what I've lost, the first thing would be the death-grip I held on the past. I still look back on certain times in my life with fond memory, and an appreciation of what they meant to me, but gone are the desires to re-live or re-create them. Those places and those people are not the same as they were when I existed in and among them. So I let them go. I'm afraid I've lost my touch as a writer, but I think what I've really lost is the willingness to bleed out every last bit of emotion and personal business onto a digital page for the entire world (or at least other bloggers and Facebook followers) to read. I realize the irony of that statement as I blog away a mile-a-minute here, but I feel like these ramblings are far more discreet. Rest assured, I do my most personal bleeding the old fashioned way - with a pen and paper. And finally, I may have just recently lost something far more valuable than anything I could possibly express in written words, and if I have... well, suffice to say that all then pens and paper in every Staples, Office Max and Target in the state of Florida wouldn't provide a big enough canvas for all I'll have to bleed out.

All things considered, I think my gains outnumber my losses in 2009 (thus far, anyway.) Above all else, I gained perspective. I gained perspective on some of the relationships I've formed, and how best to manage them. I gained perspective on my actions, their consequences and the type of person I want to be. You can't put a value on that kind of self-awareness. It's funny how a single incident can change your outlook on things; whether it's a drunken night full of bad decisions, or even a night spent in jail. I experienced both this past year, and both of those instances profoundly changed my perspective.

When I said that I gained perspective "above all else," that wasn't quite correct. I gained something far greater. Gained isn't even the right word. More like discovered. I discovered the reason I came to Florida. I honestly believe that. I've been here for the better part of three years, and I wanted to be back in New York within the first month. I tried a couple of times, and damn near made the jump last summer. I couldn't figure out why things had worked out the way they did - why I was still here - until the end of the summer, when I had my moment of clarity. I found a reason. That reason is blonde, beautiful, and the kindest, most gentle soul I have ever encountered in my twenty-nine years. Never have I found more pleasure in simply waking up in the morning and living life than in the days since I first looked into the clearest, bluest eyes in Florida. Never have I met someone who has been more accepting of my little quirks and idiosyncrasies, none of which I felt compelled to hide from her. Those who have known me for a long time might know me as a bit of a hopeless romantic, albeit a fairly unsuccessful one. Those same people might also realize that I've been prone to over-romanticize certain things, limbs flailing with my heart recklessly pinned to the edge of my sleeve. I realize this. But I can tell you that this is no dramatization. There's no hyperbole here. The end of 2009 threatens me with the loss of something irreplaceable. A wise friend told me this morning that "we leave pieces with everyone who walks away." If that is the case, the piece I will be losing will contain my essence - everything that's good in me. The thought is too much to bear.

Onto lighter fare... 2009 was a pretty weak year for music. Rancid put out a phenomenal album, and a lot of other bands I like offered up records that range from pedestrian to highly listenable. My best musical experience of the year was probably seeing The Gaslight Anthem at The Social. It's been a long time since a band has moved me the way their music does.

I've certainly had my high's and low's this year. Some of it I wouldn't trade for the world, while I'd return other parts of it faster than a bad tie or a pair of argyle socks. As I count the seconds to the start of a new year - seconds that feel like hours - I can only close my eyes, be grateful for what I've been given, pray that I haven't squandered it or foolishly thrown it away, and hope for the best in 2010.

Favre and the Vikings: Good, not Great

2009-11-25T11:14:00.000-08:00

“The Colts and the Saints are unbeaten, but are the Vikings the best team in the league?” This is the question that’s been posed all over ESPN for the past few days, and it’s a legitimate one. The Vikes are 9-1, and Favre, as much as I hate to say it, is playing out of his middle-aged mind. But therein lies the problem; the question of whether the Vikings are the best team in the NFL seems to be just another vehicle through which to deify Brett Favre. Now, the fact that I (sports) hate Favre more than any other player in the league (except for Jay Cutler) might be clouding my judgment here, and I may be reading too much into it. I mean, let’s be honest, the Vikings have the (2^nd) best running back in the league, two huge playmakers in Percy Harvin and Sidney Rice, and a shut-down defense led by Nicolas Cage from Con Air (oops, that’s Jared Allen… honest mistake.) Regardless, here is my argument for why the Vikings are NOT as unstoppable as they’re making them out to be, and why we are, as always, giving Favre too much credit: First of all, the Vikings are 9-1 with wins over Cleveland, Detroit, San Francisco, Green Bay (twice), St. Louis, Baltimore and Seattle. Of these eight teams, two are at or above .500; the Ravens and the Packers. The Vikings edged out a win over Baltimore (who is not the Baltimore or old, mind you) but beat Favre’s former team convincingly on both occasions. However, of Green Bay’s six wins, four of them are against teams under .500. In nine wins, the Vikings have faced teams with an average of three wins on the season, while Saints opponents average four and Colts opponents five. You might see it as splitting heirs, but the stats don’t lie.

Don’t like stats? That’s fine. Let’s talk big games. Of the ten games the Vikings have played this season, I only see one as a legitimate “big game,” and that’s the Steelers game – the one they lost. I don’t consider either of the Green Bay wins to be of much consequence because Green Bay was overrated going into both those games and Favre or no Favre, the Vikings were supposed to win both games. The Steelers, after losing two heartbreakers to the Bears and Bengals, ripped off three in a row and were hosting the Vikings at home before a bye week. The Vikings had just squeaked by a reeling Ravens team, and were marching into Steel City in an effort to go 7-0 for the first time in Favre’s career. They lost the game 27-17, and while Favre threw for 334 yards, he also threw zero touchdown passes and a pick. Back to the stats real quick; let’s just take a look at the numbers for Favre, Manning and Drew Brees in their big games this season:

Favre @ Steelers (week 7): 33/50, 334 yds., 0 TDs, 1 INTs (L, 27-17)

Manning vs. Patriots (week 10): 28/44, 327 yds., 4 TDs, 2 INTs (W, 35-34)

Brees vs. Giants (week 6): 23/30, 369 yds., 4 TDs, 0 INTs (W, 48-27)*

*both teams 5-0

Lastly, I want to dispel the rumors of Favre being an “ageless wonder.” Understand, I respect the way Favre has played this year. That last second touchdown pass to Greg Lewis to beat San Francisco was one of the best throws I have seen since I started watching football. There’s no question that the guy has played great football this year. But also understand that he’s playing IN A DOME. Look back at the end of last season, when Favre was playing in New York. After Thanksgiving, Favre and the Jets went 2-4 and Favre threw twice as many INTs as touchdowns. Flip the pages back another year to the NFC Championship Game against the Giants in Green Bay. Favre threw the game clinching INT and was rattled by the weather from the very beginning. I’m not saying that playing in the warm confines of a dome has everything to do with Favre’s success, but I am saying it has something to do with it. Take a look at the rest of Minnesota’s schedule for this season:

Vs. Chicago

@ Arizona

Vs. Cincinnati

@ Carolina

@ Chicago

Vs. New York Giants

They get the Bears in the dome this week, then go to the desert to face Arizona. They get the Bengals at home then travel south to Carolina. Then, finally, Favre will be tested in the cold at Chicago. (On a personal note, my sports-hate-o-meter will be redlined that night, with Favre facing off against Cutler. Do I root for the Vikings so I can see Cutler’s take-my-ball-and-go-home pouty-cry-baby face? Or, do I root for the Bears so I don’t have to light myself on fire every time Favre puts on an exaggerated touchdown celebration, and the announcers gush, “He’s just a kid out there having fun!” Ugh.)

Here’s the kicker, though: the Vikings will sit out the Wild Card and host the Divisional game. Then, regardless, they will most likely play the NFC Championship game in a dome (their own or the Superdome). Then, if they win, they go to the Superbowl in Miami. That means that for the rest of the year, Favre only has to play one more cold-weather game. History doesn’t lie. The 2007 NFC Championship game; the latter half of the ’08 season; week 7 of the ’09 season (in case you weren’t sure, Pittsburgh is a bit nippy in October). Do we see a pattern emerging here?

Look, the Vikings are a great team. (Ugh, this is going to trigger my gag reflex) Favre is a great quarterback. But the fact remains they’ve had a semi-soft schedule, the benefit of an indoor facility, and have lost the one big game they’ve played this season. Manning and Brees, although they haven’t exactly had murderous schedules, have delivered in the heat, the cold and everywhere in between. They’ve won big games. They are undefeated. So no, the Vikings are not the best team in the league. They are the 3^rd best. Colts. Saints. Vikings. Bet.

I Hate You, Fashionable Gym Guy

2009-11-17T16:22:00.001-08:00

What the fuck happened to this world? "The gym" used to be a damp, cold, concrete room with a couple of benches, a few squat racks and a long metal trough of multi-weighted barbells. There were rubber mats on the floor and mildew on the walls. The cassette version of Metallica's Black Album blared from the blown out speakers of a ghetto blaster. On the offensiveness scale, the smell ranked somewhere between the bottom of my hamper and one of my buddy Rob's Worther's Original-scented farts. It was an awful place that you wanted to get in and out of as fast as humanly possible. That was what I loved about it. So what the hell happened? Where did we go wrong?

Let me backtrack for just a second. See, I live in an apartment complex. To give you an idea of just how classy the place is, here are a few facts:

1) It is a gated community. Neither of the gates work. They are always open.

2) I have a wonderful view of the back parking lot of the rent-controlled apartment complex next door. Do you know what happens in the back parking lots of rent-controlled apartment complexes? Drug deals happen. I have seen more hand-to-hands than the entire cast of The Wire.

3) Every Saturday morning, I am routinely awakened around 8am by two elderly Spanish women who apparently go door to door looking for residents who speak Spanish. They never seem to remember that a gringo lives in 702G.

4) Repeat fact #3, but change 8am to 7pm, and change elderly Spanish women to Mormons. They must be REALLY concerned for my soul. Do I keep the computer that loud when I'm watching porn? I mean, they only live three apartments over. Oh, and the last time they came to save my soul, they were out of English-language pamphlets - so they left me a Spanish one. You can't make this shit up.

5) Finally, at least twice a week, I observe people from the neighboring complex approach the iron fence with a sack full of laundry, toss it over the top into my complex, then squeeze through the bars, pick up the sack and proceed to our laundry room to wash their clothes.

In addition to these wonderful perks, we also have a gym facility. In our gym, we have:

- a bench press machine

- a butterfly press machine

- a lat pulldown machine

- a rowing machine

- a curl machine

- a leg press machine

- a leg curl machine (without a pad)

- a leg extension machine

- an ab machine

-three treadmills (one of which is functional)

- a spin bike (non functional)

- a stair master (non functional)

- an elliptical (functional 50% of the time)

Remember Drago's high-tech training montage in Rocky IV? Yeah, pretty much the opposite of that. Are you ready for this? All those machines - no pins. You have to RENT the pins. "Sorry, Mr. Tatum, that $845 per month you're paying doesn't include utilities, maintenance or pins." But I digress. Back to the gym-metamorphosis. I go in tonight, praying that no one is in there using the lone-functioning treadmill. Of course, someone is. And not just any someone - it's Fashionable Gym Guy. He's running on the treadmill in plaid, Sean John cargo shorts, a skin-tight Armani Exchange t-shirt and those Diesel half-dress shoe/half sneakers. Hey, you gotta' look good doin' it. After all, one of the 875 overweight, middle-aged, Spanish housewives that lives in our complex might come through - and she might not even have one of her 8.2 kids in tow. Meanwhile, the combination of sweat and designer hair gel that's dripping from his forehead is melting holes in the floor like the blood from the monsters in Aliens. And just as I think I might be able to swallow my rage and ride it out until he's done, I hear the faint sound of "Kiss Me Through the Phone." Is it playing through the speakers? No. We don't have speakers. It's his ring tone. He stops mid-stride to take the call, but stands right next to the machine so that I know he isn't finished. He's just taking a break. My blood pressure spikes so high that I probably burned more calories bursting blood vessels that I would have on the treadmill.

This is not an isolated incident. It's an epidemic. "The Gym" has gone from a subculture to a social institution. It is a breeding ground where random acts of douchebaggery are committed daily. Remember when I said that the gym used to be a terrible, uncomfortable place that you wanted to spends as little time as possible in? Now, they have full movies for you to watch while you're running on the elliptical. If you spend the time it takes to watch a feature-length movie in one of the old school gyms, you'd contract tetanus.

We've gone from Zubaz stretch pants and thin tank tops to designer sweatsuits. I think I saw a guy in Planet Fitness one time do a set of squats in a three-piece suit and a pair of Bruno Maglias.

Is it any wonder America is getting fatter? Heart-disease, obesity, high-cholesterol, stroke - I would rather deal with ALL of these things than deal with Fashionable Gym Guy.

Eyes Closed Tight, My Ears Open for the Boat...

2009-11-05T18:06:00.000-08:00

It could be the residual excitement from the Bronx Bombers winning their 27th World Series Championship, or the barrage of NYC-Pride-filled status updates that littered the virtual pages of Facebook shortly after. Maybe it's the season, and the fond memories I have of the Empire State in the fall, or the rumors that there will be a couple of vacant teaching positions at my high school alma mater in 2010. Truth be told, all of these things contribute to this feeling, but they are small pieces; each one is an estuary, branching off from the ocean whose waves have been crashing over me yet keeping me afloat for the past two and a half years. And like any ocean, the tides have their ebb and flow. But it's high tide now, and the waves are gathering like a tsunami. I feel it now, more palpable and powerful than anything I've ever felt before.

It's New York. For some, an ocean of concrete, teeming with bodies, rest and motion; lives lived vivaciously in the silhouette of the City that Never Sleeps. But that's not the New York I pine for. Instead, it's backyards and back roads. It's towns with stoplights you can count on fingers. It's a place that's been built with snapshots of my youth, and held together with memory and familiarity. It's home.

If you go back a few entries in this blog, you'll find a couple more sentimental rants about how much I miss New York, and even a couple about how NY is not my home anymore. If you go to my Facebook and read the notes, you'll find a few more. There's even a couple of similarly-themed ramblings in a short-lived LiveJournal that I started when I first moved down here. (I could easily make a Brett Favre waffling joke here, but I think the concept is dated now, and there's nothing sadder than outdated references. Wait a minute... fuck.) The bottom line, though, is that I've been wanting to move back to New York since the moment I've left it. Sporadic lengths of occupational satisfaction, mixed with temporary periods of complacency (not to mention a crumbling economy) have managed to keep me here. I'm not going to complain about that, though. My time here has allowed me to gain some valuable experience, have some incredible nights (scattered among a multitude of mundane ones and one or two horrifically bad ones) and, most importantly and most recently, to meet someone very special. I can't discount anything that has led me to this exact moment, because it's all part of the long, strange trip. The yearning has never subsided, though, and I don't think I've truly realized, until just recently, how much New York means to me.

Last month, my girlfriend and I drove from Florida to Charlottesville, VA to see my buddy Brett, who has been one of my closest friends for close to fifteen years, get married. I knew that there were going to be things about this trip that would make me miss New York terribly, but it was unforeseen and subtle details of the weekend that truly tugged on my hometown-heartstrings. Things as simple as the changing leaves and the mountain backdrops of the scenery that flew by on I-95. The first time we stopped for gas, and I stepped out of the truck into an unexpected and almost bitter cold. I welcomed it. I basked in it. (Please realize that I live in a state where it's at least 80 degrees ALL THE TIME. The month of January and 80 degrees shouldn't even be in the same fucking sentence!) I basked in it because these are the things that I miss about New York - fall hoodies and the smell of burning compost. Only home can produce such fond memories out of such everyday minutia. But here was what really got me: at one point, during the reception, I stood in a circle with friends, family and total strangers, singing "New York, New York," drunk as Kerry Collins in 1996 (or 2009, now that he lost his job to Vince again). I'm sure that the thoughts of the rest of the merry congregation were light-hearted and inconsequential. But, for me, each chorus-line kick - each poorly harmonized refrain, struck the deepest and most sensitive of nerves. Because I do want to be a part of it. I do want to wake up in the City the Never Sleeps (or, more accurately, fifty-or-so miles north of it).

If you've never left home, then maybe you won't understand my sense of urgency here. You might not know what it's like to want to fast-forward through the next six months of your life so that you can pack up everything that will fit in a flatbed and hit the highway. And the thing about it is, I'm not unhappy. I like my kids; I like my job. I love my girlfriend and the time we've been spending together. We have a future - together. That's a statement that I've never made honestly until today. I've talked to her about all of this - she knows - and, God bless her, she understands. And I understand, too. I understand that moving back to New York is not the panacea for all my problems. It's not the Rosetta Stone. In New York, I would still be a man in his late twenties that's living paycheck to paycheck and hasn't quite figured his life out yet.

So please don't read this and think, "I wish he would stop crying about how much he wants to go home," because these are not the bitter bitchings of a malcontent. They are honest thoughts, bled out and poorly verbalized by a guy who misses his home.

School Daze

2009-11-04T13:52:00.000-08:00

A few vignettes from my day:

First period - My angels-of-the-morning (yes, I'm throwing in Juice Newton references early) are "hard at work" on a vocabulary project. I sit at my desk, under- caffeinated and battling the early stages of a terrible hair day. I call the kids up to my desk, one-by-one, to give them their grades for the first marking period. In general, I'm met with nods of casual indifference. My first period kids are pretty good, and there are no real surprises in the numbers I'm doling out; high A's to moderate B's. Then, I call up the one kid who got a D in my class. For most of the quarter, he'd been failing with a grade that resembled Derek Anderson's 2009 Passer Rating (that wasn't a complement, for you non-sports fans). I show him the grade, and with a pat on the shoulder, say, "Dude, you got a 64. Remember a couple of weeks ago when you had a 48? You did some great work these last couple weeks. Nice comeback, buddy!" This kid looks me dead in the eye, and replies, "Yeah, whatever. Why are you touching my shoulder?" The worst part? He legitimately wanted an answer. We stared at each other in dumbfounded silence for at least 45 seconds. I had nothing. Why was I touching his shoulder? I had no explanation. "I don't know, man." That's what I told him. Mercifully, he returned to his seat. Fuck me, right?

Second Period - Seniors. Two years ago, I had nothing but seniors. I'm convinced that the planets were perfectly aligned during my first year, because I made personal connections with almost every kid I had. This year, the only things connecting in my senior class are their Blackberries and iPhones. Don't get me wrong - they're great kids. Personally, I like [almost] all of them. But, they've put in their three and a half years and they're over it. I get it, because I was over it by that stage of high school, too. They do what I ask them to do. But, that's all they do. I'm not used to seniors like that. But then again, my first year of teaching was that class' first year at that school, so it was a honeymoon for all of us. Now, the honeymoon is over and it seems like we've jumped straight to the married for 20+ years and only-have-sex on special occasions (or when we're REALLY drunk) stage. Wait, is that an appropriate analogy for me to be making about my students and I? Oh well, fuck it. I mean, the chick who gave her kids a DVD of herself spread-eagle on her bed, pleasuring herself with a vibrator didn't get fired, so I should be safe, right? But I digress.

We've been reading Macbeth, and, although I'm not mad at them for slowly and painfully killing my favorite piece of literature with their apathy and disinterest, the constant whines of "this book is sooooo long," and "when are we going to be done with this?" have been silently murdering my spirit. But today, God bless them, two of them started a fantastic debate over whether the witches just provided Macbeth with some information and let him decide what do to of his own free will, or whether they were actually pulling his strings and leading him to his doom all along. I sat back with the prideful smile of a father whose son just took the training wheels off his Huffy and was cruising, albeit wobbly and awkwardly, around the block. But, do you know what inevitably happens to that very same child? He faceplants on the curb, knocking out his two front teeth - and the prideful father rushes over, suddenly feeling like a complete jackass for standing around with a smug-ass smile on his face instead of watching the fuckin' kid. "Ugh, whatever! Who cares? It's just a stupid play. Let's just move on so we can be done with it!" BOOM - FACEPLANT! The best part? The girl who said that was the girl WHO STARTED THE FUCKING DEBATE! It's a good thing I only weep on the inside - of course, if I ever did cry on the outside, most of them would be too busy texting to notice. FML. Send.

4th Period - The exact same scenario as first period. Most of them have come down off of the daily crack-high that they're normally on when they walk into my classroom - at least enough to concentrate on some work. By the way, I mean that as a complement. They are great kids, but they are out of their fucking minds. For instance, I called out a kid's grade, and this was the exchange that took place:

Me: Eighty-Five for the quarter

Kid: That's bullshit!

Me: Shut up.

Kid: Okay.

That was literally how the conversation went. Things like that make me smile. Then, I get to the one girl that has a C in a class full of A's and B's. I call her up. She skulks up to my desk looking extremely put-off, like walking the twenty-five feet from her desk to mine was the most arduous of tasks. I show her the grade, and try to explain to her why it is that low. "You didn't turn in this one assignment, which was double-weighted. If you would have turned that in, you would've had..." I don't get to finish. "Yeah. Okay. That's fine." By the time she spits out these four short words, she's already back at her desk and I realize that I've been talking to my stapler for the past ten seconds. Sorry. I guess I'll just go fuck myself. Mahalo.

I didn't write this so that everyone could cry for me (Argentina?), nor am I trying to chronicle the trials and tribulations of the overworked, underpaid public school teacher. Truth be told, I hate teachers who complain about how rough we have it. And I'm fully aware that, if the wrong person comes across this and forwards a copy to my principal, that I'll most likely be applying at every fast food restaurant between here and the unemployment line. That's the climate in the world of education today, folks. A teacher can be fired for almost anything (except sharing home made fingerbang tapes with a bunch of eleven year olds - but we already covered that). But here's the truth - you have to poke fun at this shit. You HAVE to. I love teaching. It's an awesome job. And at times, it can be indescribably rewarding. But, it also has its moments where it lines you up and stomps on you junk like Ed Norton in American History X. And in those junk-stomping moments, you gotta' take it all with a grain of salt and just laugh.

So, if you're reading this after a shitty day at work - or reading it right in the middle of one - I hope it cheers you up a bit; either because my writing is so entertaining (which I know it isn't - I'm just fishing for compliments. Remember, I'm slowly dying inside), or because it allows you to sit back and poke fun at you're asshole boss or your annoying co-worker. Because after all, it's just work, right?

Insomniac Ramblings

2009-08-03T00:33:00.000-07:00

Morphues was the Greek God of sleep, right? Yes. Yes, he is. Do you know how I know that? Because the computer hacker in the 1990 Jean-Claude Van Damme film Death Warrant told me so. I am not ashamed to admit this, although I realize that I should be. (And cue Van Damme/Death Warrant digression...now.)

Death Warrant is one of the more underrated Van Damme movies from the 90's. In fact, no one even remembers it. It gets overshadowed by Kickboxer and the all-time J.C.V.D. classic, Bloodsport. But Death Warrant has all the ingredients of a late 80's/early 90's action flick:

1) Mega-action star at the height of his popularity

2) Hot-for-an-80's-chick female love interest with HUGE 80's hair (in this case, Cynthia Gibb, who was also the love interest in Bloodsport, and real-life sister of Donald Gibb, aka Ray Jackson from Bloodsport and Ogre from Revenge of the Nerds)

3) Ridiculous plot premise that could potentially make sense but never really does (Van Damme goes undercover in a prison to investigate murders of inmates which end up being perpetrated by his girlfriend's boss who intended to harvest inmate organs to research a cure for his wife's terminal disease. Yes, I'm serious.)

4) Villain with a cool nickname ("The Sandman")

5) The black sidekick - a specific staple for Van Damme flicks; see Kickboxer, Lionheart. In this case, we have Robert Guillaume, who starred next to Morgan Freeman in Lean on Me and had a recurring role on every black sit-com from Sanford and Son to A Different World. I'm not even kidding about that.

6) A couple of great "that guy's," including Art LaFleur (played Babe Ruth in The Sandlot), and Al Leong - possibly one of my Top 10 Favorite "That Guy's," whose credits include the Asian terrorist in Die Hard, Endo the torturer in Lethal Weapon, the leader of the Wing Cong in Big Trouble in Little China and about 75 films where he is credited as playing "Asian Looking Thug." Again, I'm not kidding.

* I have another funny Al Leong moment to discuss, but believe it or not, I have other things to write about besides 80's action movie extras, so I'm going to hold off. If you want to read it, it will be at the very end of this post.

Anyway, what was I talking about? Oh, yeah. Death Warrant. Great movie. (And, end Death Warrant digression... now.)

As I mentioned in my post about finding long lost notebooks, my sleep schedule is completely fucked up. I've effectively personified the only hit song by Slaughter. (If you don't know what I'm talking about, you were either born after 1989, or you're black. What? Find me a brother that has "Up All Night" by Slaughter on his ipod - besides the lead singer from Living Colour. Wait, you didn't get that one, either? I give up.)

I was able to fall asleep on my newly-acquired spare bed for about 2 hrs - between 10:00 pm and midnight. I was exhausted, and in an extremely 'blah' mood all day. Because of this, I declined a mini-golf invitation from my best friend (a decision for which she is currently furious with me, by the way) and set up the possibility of actually getting a normal night's sleep. Clearly, that was not how things turned out. So, in the midst of my perpetual insomnia, here are some random commentaries, mostly about television, because all I did today was stare at one. Enjoy.

- It's officially Shark Week on the Discovery channel. I cannot describe how much I enjoy Shark Week. I mean, so what if they've been running the same five documentaries for the past five years. I still watch, because maybe - just maybe - the great whites will jump a little higher out of the water this year. Maybe they will shuffle up the order of the Ten Deadliest Sharks list. I mean, maybe a couple more people got bitten by nurse sharks this year, causing it to edge out the blue shark in the number 9 spot. Maybe they'll find yet another new way to tell the story about the attacks in the fresh water stream in New Jersey in 1916. Honestly, I've been watching the same five people getting attacked for the past half decade. I'm getting bored. Discovery needs to step up their game. Here is my idea for Shark Week 2010: take a handful of prison inmates, and drop them off in the most shark infested waters all around the world (Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, San Francisco, etc.) in bloody meat-suits and force them to swim their way to freedom. Tell me you wouldn't watch that.

- I recently saw The Ugly Truth with Katherine Heigl and Gerard Butler. Yes, I saw it with females. Yes, it was their choice. No, I have not slept with either of them. No, I have no chance at ever sleeping with either of them. Yes, I am kind of ashamed of myself.

- I just took a minute and reflected on the morbid direction that my Shark Week paragraph went off in. I actually demanded that more people get mauled by sharks for my entertainment. You know what this means, right? I will be attacked by a shark now. There are no two ways about it. Staying out of the ocean won't help me, either. Somehow, I'll get bitten in a chlorinated swimming pool. And I still have hell to look forward to after that.

- Back to The Ugly Truth. Guys, if your girlfriend is planning on forcing you to see a chick-flick, push for this movie. It's got some legitimately funny moments, and Butler is actually very funny. The rub? If there's any part of you that ever fantasized about fucking Heigl, that part of you will immediately go limp after seeing her in this movie. Her character is so unbelievably irritating that, if you are able to maintain any sort of sexual desire for her, it will undoubtedly shift in focus to the Shannon Hamilton school of sexual philosophy (see: Mallrats). Two other noteworthy points about this movie: 1) it doesn't get funny until Butler appears on-screen, and ceases to be funny when he isn't on-screen, and 2) Kevin Connelly makes a cameo, and cements my theory that not only is E (his character on Entourage) a terrible character, but he is also a terrible actor.

- Speaking of terrible acting, Anna Paquin is just God awful. She literally makes True Blood suck. Well, her and the rest of the crappy actors and the terrible plot. I didn't mind the first season of the show, but this season has been awful. Not only does Paquin get worse with every episode, but they have actually included music videos. They cut a capture the flag sequence to "God Bless Texas" (in a show about characters from Louisiana). Capture the flag? Really? I can literally sum up every episode of this show in the following lines:

Sookie: I read this person's mind and got myself into lots of trouble. Bill, help!

Bill: I must help Sookie, but a stronger, more important vampire won't let me!

Sookie: I somehow managed to avoid death again, and though you did literally nothing to save me, I love you!

Bill: I...SWEAR...TO...You... blah blah blah

Shapeshifters. Gay, black, drag queens. Vampire orgies. New characters. Poorly choreographed fight scene. Another vampire orgy. Paquin's tits. Oh, we love this show!

On a Sunday night, every other Facebook headline has something to do with True Blood, yet I'm consistently met with dumbfounded faces when I mention The Wire. Excuse me, I'm going to take about 26 Sudafed, drink a glass of bleach, headbutt my meat slicer and call it a night. (I'm just kidding. I don't own a meat slicer.)

*I almost forgot to go back to my Al Leong story. I'm sure you would've been crushed. Anyway, when I was in high school I used to work at a movie theater. On Thursday nights, we used to wait until the last theater emptied, and then screen one or two of the movies that were opening the following Friday. Well, one night, "In the year two-thousaaaaaand" (see: Late Night with Conan O'Brien), we decided to screen Godzilla (the one with Matthew Broderick and P.Diddy covering Zeppelin for the soundtrack). In the very beginning of the film, Godzilla attacks a Japanese fishing boat. There are Asian men running and screaming all over the screen as their ship goes down. I lean over to one of my managers, and whisper, "How long until we get an Al Leong sighting?" Confused, he asks me who Al Leong is. I explain to him that he is basically the token Asian. If there is a movie where there are Asian gangs, terrorists, or any large gathering of Asian men, Leong will almost definitely be there. Well, the ship is going down, and still no Leong. I haven't given up hope. I know he's there. The boat is almost fully submerged now, and the camera cuts back inside the hull, to this long shot of a hallway. There are bodies scrambling all over the place, when suddenlly... BOOM! Al Leong pops up in an extreme close-up, looks around confusedly, gasps, and then disappears. I let out a gigantic "YES!" at which point everyone in the theater (8 or 9 people, max) look directly at me with looks that match the confusion that Leong brilliantly demonstrated in his 6 seconds of screen time, and then turned their attentions back to the screen. The best part? Those 6 seconds were literally the best part of that movie.

Notebooks

2009-08-02T03:10:00.000-07:00

I collect notebooks. I have stacks of them under my night stand, and I'm always coming across them in boxes of shit that I've packed up and hauled with me over the past few years. I try to never throw them away. I wish that my notebook collection was comparable to John Doe's collection in Se7en, though only in volume, not in content. Nothing would make me prouder than a bookshelf stuffed with notebooks that were ink-stained with my thoughts and feelings from cover to cover. However, a lot of the marble composition books and Mead 1-subject spirals collecting dust in various drawers, boxes and shelves around my apartment aren't even half-full; and the pages that have been used contain more bad doodles than good writing. I even have this one that I filled a quarter of the way with other people's good writing! There's like 30 pages of lyrics by bands like Thrice, Thursday, Brand New, A.F.I. and H2O. Nevertheless, I enjoy coming across wayward notebooks and thumbing through them. Since I deleted my Emo Journal (mine and Jeff's endearing nickname for our respective LiveJournals), these notebooks are really the only traces of a lot of my old writing.

Earlier today - or more accurately, yesterday, since, at this point, I am watching the sky gradually brighten as the clock flicks red dots in the shape of 6:20 AM - I was cleaning out the closet in my spare bedroom in preparation for Jeff's arrival on Tuesday. As I sorted through two over-sized, Tupperware bins, discarding items no longer of consequence, I came across a three-subject spiral notebook. It was slightly beaten up, with white creases - like varicose veins- spider-webbing across the blood-red cover. Before I opened it up, I flipped it over and glanced on the back cover. I like doing that, for some reason. Sometimes I can tell just by the doodles on the covers what I used a particular notebook for. On the back of this book were three separate sets of writing. At the top was scribbled a single, enigmatic phrase: "Empty evil inside, like a jack-o-lantern smile. On the lower half, written hastily in black sharpie, were a set of directions:

1) Bear right on Cedar Swamp Rd

2) Left on Hendrix - big church, right side

3) Left after stop sign - onto Porter

4) 3rd right - Eldridge

5) 1st house on left

It took me a while to figure out what these were directions to. I knew Cedar Swamp Rd. meant Glen Cove, and since I ended up living right off that road, I immediately knew what church whoever gave me those directions was talking about. I finally realized that these were directions to Jen's housewarming party. This was right after graduation, in 2003. This was one of my older notebooks. Underneath the directions, barely legible in pen, was another list:

1) Joe/Clubs

2) Football/Linemen

3) Healthy Eating

4) Man on Street

5) P. Safety

A fucking segment list. For what, I have no idea. It must've been for a class or a PTV Club show. This meant that at least some of the writing in this notebook would be from when I was still in college. I was kind of excited about it. Hesitating then no further, I began to leaf through, page by page.

This relic was basically composed of three things. Of the least consequence, there were several pages dedicated to fake football drafts. Over the years, when I've played Madden, I always create players. I create myself, of course, as well as a few friends and some of the guys who played ball at Post while I was there. I also liked to create characters from sports movies, like Darnell Jefferson from The Program, or Mox from Varsity Blues. I would then assign them to teams randomly, and that would be my draft. I kept track of who went where on sheets of paper. What are you laughing at? What, like you never did weird shit?

Anyway, the 2nd thing I found in the book was playlists; lots and lots of playlists. See, this was pre-itunes and pre-ipod (at least for me it was), and I loved to make mix cd's. I made them for other people, and I made them for myself. Fuck, I made them for no other reason than my love for music and my desire to never hear a song I couldn't sing along to. I planned these things out more carefully than Lee Marvin planned the assault in The Dirty Dozen. It was nothing less than a labor of love. I enjoy looking through them now, because some of the songs are still right up there among my favorites, while I don't even remember what others sounded like. You know how quickly bands come and go, and at this point in my life - I'd say 2003 - 2005 - I was at my most ravenous as far as consuming new music. Ninety percent of the bands whose records I bought never mattered much, and some never even released a second album. Most were good for a song or two before they faded into obscurity, but that song or two obviously had an effect on me. Here is one of the playlists exactly how it was written (which is mostly abbreviation). See if you recognize some of the bands, or if you've ever even heard of others.

1) TBS - Cut From the Team

2) Finch - Letters to You

3) Thursday - Cross Out the Eyes

4) Thrice - See You in the Shallows

5) BSF - Rookie

6) Brand New - Failure by Design

7) Piebald - Grace Kelly w/ Wings

8) C&C - Everything Evil

9) PMFS - December Killed...

10) GC - WaldorfWW

11) Early Nov. - All We Ever Needed

12) Mest - Drawing Board

13) TSL - Best of Me

14) FSF - Wearing Thin

15) Downtime - I Guess

16) River City High - Just Wonderin'

17) The Descent - ?

18) Yellowcard - Big Apple Heartbreak

19) DLD - Do You Hear Me?

20) Days Away - Knows My Name

21) CV77 - Another Night

22) Anatomy of a Ghost - Onto Morning Stars

23) Story of the Year - In the Shadows

24) Anadivine - Alcohol & Oxygen

25) Recover - Rodeo

Out of these twenty-five tracks, eleven songs are still on my ipod. I remember who all the bands were, except for The Descent. No clue about them. CV77 is Clearview 77, some shitty band that Red11 played with at Club Crannell Street. Downtime was my friend Dan's acoustic project, and DLD is a band called Don't Look Down. None of those three are currently in my rotation, though I believe I still have all the discs those songs came off of. It may seem superfluous to take the time to transcribe a meaningless playlist from half a decade ago, but I feel like the playlists correlate directly to the most valuable contents of this notebook: lyrics.

I scribble lyrics everywhere. There's not a notebook in my possession that doesn't have at least a handful of couplets or quatrains every few pages. I guess technically they aren't really lyrics, because none of them ever materialized into actual songs. So maybe they're poems, or pieces of poems. I don't know, but I'm going to call them lyrics, because that's how I always thought of them. With this particular notebook, I hit the mother load. Every other page dawned line after line of angst-ridden, emo-fueled gems. I couldn't help but laugh. I mean, some of this shit is just so bad. Taking Back Sunday has a great line in one of their songs that goes, "those words, at best, were worse than teenage poetry." That's exactly what this notebook was filled with - bad teenage poetry - written by a 22 year old. I'm not ashamed of it, though. Much like the playlists, it was a labor of love - or maybe more accurately, a labor of unrequited love. I could instantly tell that so much of what was vomitted all over these pages was fueled by an ill-advised, and in retrospect, embarrassingly sad obsession with my friend Ryan. I mean, the ringer that I put myself through over this girl was unimaginable, and while I'm not sorry for it now, I can look back on it and see as clearly as I see the sun through my window right now what a fucking jackass I was. And THAT is the beauty of finding something like this. I can read over my desperate attempts to pour my heart out in a meaningful way and realize just how much I've changed from then to now, as well as recognize all the ways in which I am very much the same. Scratched out words and torn off corners tell the tale of a frustration that is still very much alive inside of me, albeit not as consuming as it was when I was continually trying to find ways to re-write the you could slit my throat..." line by Taking Back Sunday. In the years that have followed my Ryan-rants, I have fell like a ton of bricks for another girl, and while I did spiral back into the occasional one-man binge-drinking sessions and throw a haymaker or two at inanimate objects that are known to splinter into sharp, potentially damaging shards when struck (both staples of the Ryan days), I didn't let it consume me the way it did back then. I call that maturity, folks. (Or at least a healthy decline in my retard sandwich intake).

As I complete this stroll down memory lane, the sun has made its presence fully known, and the time is 7:33 AM. Luckily it's Sunday and I have nothing to do today. Besides, I only have a few more weeks to monastically deprive myself of sleep. Wait, did I say monastically? Maybe I meant masochistically. At this point, I'm too sleep-deprived to know the difference.

So, this happened...

2009-08-01T22:13:00.000-07:00

The other night, I was craving a midnight snack. Unfortunately, the only edible foodstuffs in my apartment were a spoonful of peanut butter (no milk), a can of soup (it's August) and some tuna; expiration date June 17th (diarrhea, possible death). So, I went down to 7-11 to grab a sandwich, some chips and a soda. As I'm waiting in line, this crusty old man waddles in wearing a Harley Davidson vest and sporting a beard that I can only describe as what ZZ Top's beards would have looked like, had Billy Gibbons and Dusy Hill contracted AIDS. He gave one of the workers, a huge, bro-style pat on the back and asked him how he was doing. I remember being mildly shocked by this gesture, since the employee in question was undoubtedly of Middle-Eastern descent. If I were a betting man, I would go all-in on the term "A-RAB" being in high rotation in old Zeke's vocabulary. He moved past me toward the back of the store, most likely to dig a six pack of Miller High Life out of the bottom of the fridge, and I refocused my attention on the guy in front of me, and the painful and confused look on his face as he tried to scrounge $1.88 out of a pile of lint and mixed change in order to finance his pack of Marlboro Ultra Lights.

Meanwhile, my eyes shift around the store, landing briefly on the cigarette guy, who half smiles apologetically at me because he still hasn't finished sliding pennies across the counter, then to the fat man and his even fatter girlfriend who haven't figured out that two people who are each three feet wide cannot stand side by side in a four foot isle, and finally, out to the parking lot at yet another crusty man, not quite as old as Old Zeke (though equally crusty) and missing the HIVV-Top beard, but making up for it with his Birkenstock sandals and outrageously bright red Hawaiian shirt. He was not the most cleanly man I've ever seen. In fact, he kind of resembled Jon Voight in U-Turn. Now, up until this point, all I'm thinking is "Man, there are some hideous fucking people in this town, and apparently they congregate at the 7-11 around midnight. It's like hanging out with the cast of C.H.U.D." However, my thoughts are interrupted by some angry shouting coming from the parking lot.

"Fuck you, man! Fuckin' asshole!" In storms a Puerto Rican man in his early thirties who kind of resembles UFC fighter Jorge Rivera. He walks up to the cashier, a very soft-spoken black woman (cutting in front of the cigarette guy who, for the love of all that is good and fucking holy is STILL counting change on the counter) and says, "Thank you very much for your help, but he is saying it's not good enough. He refuses to take me, so I called the police," gesturing toward the crusty, Hawaiian shirt-clad hippie. I glance over and realize that the hippie is a cab driver, and he is muttering something inaudible as he waves off Jorge. The cashier looks confused, and I avert my eyes toward the the floor - a go-to move in awkward situations. Though all I can see is my feet, In can feel everyone is completely polarized, and is either staring at the angry Jorge, or following my lead.

"He's saying it's not enough?" asks the cashier, in a voice that only dogs can hear. I'm trying to figure out the situation in my head. Did Jorge take a cab to 7-11, and not have the money to pay? Did he call the cab to pick him up, but the hippie gave him the rate up-front and Jorge didn't have it? How did the cashier help? Did she loan him the money from the register? My thoughts are immediately silenced by Jorge's response:

"No, he's saying I'm a spic! That I'm dirty! That I'm not good enough for his cab!" He's yelling this in the direction of the dab driver. When Jorge screams the word "spic," all the air leaves the room. Finally, the mathematician in front of me puts his calculations on hiatus. The emotion on Jorge's face is 100% sincere. He is visibly shaken. And just when I think that shit cannot possibly get any more tense or awkward, a voice emerges from behind me. "Hey!" No. "Hey, you!" Come on. "Yeah, you!" You've got to be kidding me. Old Zeke has suddenly materialized, and is working his way toward Jorge. Here is a transcript of the exchange:

Zeke: Hey, you're mother's calling.

Jorge (confused): What?

Zeke: Yeah, you're mother's calling. She's on the phone. I just talked to her.

Jorge (in a combination of rising anger and utter disbelief): Are you talking to me about my mother?

Zeke: Yeah. She says you should go home. She wants you to go home. You don't belong here. You need to go home.

Jorge: Are you trying to... come out of left field... and be some fucking redneck from the stone ages?

Zeke (laughing): I am what I am.

Jorge (furious, yet inexplicably calm): Why don't you go pick the fleas out of your fucking beard.

I would have pissed myself laughing at that last comment if I wasn't preparing myself for the inevitability of having to step between the angriest Latino this side of Carlos Zambrano and a white-trash fossil (with fleas in his beard, apparently) and prevent an all out race war among an autistic version of the fucking Rainbow Coalition in a 7-fucking-11 at midnight on a fucking Wednesday. But I digress. Back to the argument.

Jorge: You know what the sad thing is? I have some friends who are bikers, and they would never, in a million years, stoop to acting like you're acting right now. Say the shit you're saying.

Zeke: Not this week. Not this week, pal. Maybe next week.

Now, as I try to figure out what the fuck Old Zeke meant by these last comments - and pretty much his entire argument, for that matter - Jorge storms out of the 7-11. As if coming out of a freeze-frame, the oxygen re-enters the room, Archimedes finally finishes his cigarette hypothesis, and I finally get to pay for my food. The cashier apologizes to me for the wait. I politely nod, too dumbstruck to acknowledge that, while many apologies need to be made in this room, none need to be made by her. Meanwhile, Zeke is laughing it up with the fat couple. "I'm just an old codger, I know," he says. "But I hate when people have to bring other people into their problems." Part of me is dying to turn around and tell this guy just how big of a douche bag he is, but the only guy in the room who actually would have been justified in starting some shit took the high road, so far be it for me to undermine his Gandhi-like restraint. I pay for my shit and I leave. As I walk out, I glance over my shoulder and I see Jorge sitting on the bench with his head in his hands. It was a fucking spectacle, let me assure you.

I could end this anecdote with some kind of half-hearted moral denouement about the delicacies of race relations, but I don't want to insult anyone's intelligence. Draw your own conclusions. However, I will throw this blanket statement out there: nothing good happens at 7-11 after midnight.

The DVD Draft

2009-07-29T16:12:00.000-07:00

This morning, around 11 AM, I was sitting at my computer reading Bill Simmons and sweating out a hangover (the result of a spontaneous and ill-advised binge drinking session that sparked up around 11 PM the night before). In Simmons' most recent column, he makes a case for Almost Famous being the defining movie of this decade. At one point during the course of the argument, Bill proposes a DVD Draft - in which you and a group of friends get together and draft actors. When you draft an actor, it means you get a copy of every movie they have ever appeared in for your DVD collection. You have no idea how excited this concept made me. I literally had to change my pants. Okay, not literally. But, being someone who relishes the opportunity to put a ridiculous amount of thought into something that has no relevance whatsoever, I immediately set to work in making my list.

I have selected a handful of actors and broken them down into Early, Mid-Level, and Late-Round picks. I assigned the actors to their rounds using four methods of evaluation. They are:

Headliners - These are the actor's big-time movies. The selling points, if you will. If you draft Pacino, his headliners would be films like Scarface and Serpico. Actors who have an impressive resume of headliners will generally be early round choices.

Value - This is a fairly loose area of evaluation. I consider value films to be great ones that feature the actor in question in a non-headlining roll, films that you personally love but might not have been critically acclaimed, or films that are good-but-not-great. Take Will Smith for example. If you draft Will, your value films will be movies like Enemy of the State, Six Degrees of Separation and (in my opinion) Ali. An actor that has mostly value films will generally be a mid-round pick as long as he's got a couple of solid headliners. No headliners and all value films makes him a low mid-level or possibly even late round draft choice.

Steals - This is by far my favorite of all the criteria. Steals are films that feature your actor in a cameo role, or films that were made before your actor was established. You are essentially getting these films for free when you draft that actor. The better the film, the bigger the steal. For example, let's say you are uncertain whether or not you want to draft Johnny Depp in the first round. You've narrowed it down to Johnny and Al Pacino. Pacino has more headliners, but Depp has enough value films which, when added to his headliners, make he and Pacino about even. So, now we look at steals. Pacino doesn't really do cameos, so he doesn't have any steals. Then you look at Johnny Depp, and you realize that, if you draft him, you get Platoon for free. By my system, Johnny Depp could conceivably get drafted before Al Pacino. Steals can turn a mid-round selection into a top pick. A lack of steals can also drop a potential early-round choice into a mid-rounder.

Upside - Finally, we have upside. This is a projected value of the actor's future work. An actor who has hit, and surpassed his peak, has less upside than one who is just hitting his stride. And of course, dead actors have no upside. Do not be fooled into thinking that all young actors have tremendous upside. Remember to take the other factors into account when trying to gage upside. You may think that Shia Lebouf has a great deal of upside. However, Transformers is his only headliner. I personally think the kid sucks balls and would never draft him, but if you're pro-Shia, you're looking at a lot of value films. He'll carve out a niche for himself, but he's never going to produce quality, headliner-level flicks. Therefore, he doesn't have much of an upside. If you draft with too much emphasis on upside, you're playing a dangerous game. Imagine you drafted Colin Farrell right before Alexander came out. It would have been like drafting Ryan Leaf.

So, now that you understand the ranking system, here are my choices, broken up by round distinction.

EARLY ROUND PICKS

1. Matt Damon

Headliners - The Jason Bourne Series, The Oceans Series, The Departed, Saving Private Ryan, Good Will Hunting, Rounders.

Value - The Talented Mr. Ripley, Syriana, Dogma, School Ties, The Rainmaker, Courage Under Fire

Steals - Finding Forester, Chasing Amy, Field of Dreams, Glory Daze, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind

Upside - He has at least one more Bourne film in him, plus he is in good with Scorsese and Steven Soderberg. He is also good for at least a cameo in anything Kevin Smith does.

2. Robert DeNiro

Headliners - Goodfellas, The Godfather II, Raging Bull, Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, The Deer Hunter, Heat, A Bronx Tale

Value - Once Upon a Time in America, Backdraft, The Untouchables, Sleepers, Cape Fear, This Boy's Life

Steals - Jackie Brown, Cop Land

Upside - None.

3. Brad Pitt

Headliners - The Oceans Series, Legends of the Fall, Seven, Troy, Fight Club, Kalifornia, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, Babel, 12 Monkeys, Inglorious Basterds

Value - A River Runs Through It, Meet Joe Black, The Devil's Own, Interview With the Vampire, Burn After Reading, Cool World, Sleepers

Steals - Less Than Zero, True Romance

Upside - Rumored to be starring in The Odyssey, Moneyball and a biopic of Steve McQueen. And let's be honest... does the man make bad films? Ever?

4. Johnny Depp

Headliners - The Pirates of the Caribbean Series, Public Enemies, Sweeney Todd, Edward Scissorhands, Sleepy Hollow, Blow, Donnie Brasco, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

Value - Cry-Baby, Once Upon a Time in Mexico, What's Eating Gilbert Grape, The Ninth Gate, From Hell, Dead Man, The Libertine

Steals - A Nightmare on Elm Street, Platoon

Upside - Looks fucking terrifying as The Mad Hatter in Burton's Alice in Wonderland and is slated to appear in a Sin City sequel. Depp's star is on the rise.

5. Al Pacino

Headliners - The Godfather Trilogy, Scarface, Heat, Scent of a Woman, Carlito's Way, Donnie Brasco, Serpico, Ocean's 13

Value - Any Given Sunday, The Devil's Advocate, Sea of Love, Glengarry Glen Ross, ...And Justice For All, Insomnia, The Insider, Dick Tracy

Steals - None

Upside - None

6. Sean Penn

Headliners - Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Bad Boys, Mystic River, Casualties of War, The Game, 21 Grams, Milk

Value - The Thin Red Line, State of Grace, Colors, Taps, The Falcon and the Snowman, U Turn, At Close Range, Carlito's Way

Steals - Hurley Burley

Upside - Slated to star in a Terrance Malick film with Brad Pitt.

7. Denzel Washington

Headliners - American Gangster, Training Day, Remember the Titans, Man on Fire, Mo' Better Blues, Inside Man, John Q, Malcolm X, Glory, He Got Game

Value - Fallen, The Mighty Quinn, Devil in a Blue Dress, Courage Under Fire, Ricochet, The Great Debaters, Antoine Fisher, The Hurricane, The Bone Collector, Crimson Tide

Steals - None

Upside - The Book of Eli looks fantastic.

8. Jack Nicholson

Headliners - One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, The Shining, The Departed, Easy Rider, Chinatown, Five Easy Pieces, A Few Good Men, Batman

Value - Hoffa, Wolf, Mars Attacks!

Steals - Tommy

Upside - Not much.

9. Bruce Willis

Headliners - The Die Hard Series, The 6th Sense, 12 Monkeys, The 5th Element, The Last Boyscout, Sin City, Armageddon, Striking Distance, Pulp Fiction

Value - The Whole 9 Yards, Tears of the Sun, Hostage, Mercury Rising, The Jackal, Color of Night, Blind Date, Billy Bathgate, The Siege

Steals - Alpha Dog, Planet Terror, Lucky Number Slevin, Ocean's Twelve, The Verdict

10. Tom Cruise

Headliners - Top Gun, Rain Man, All The Right Moves, A Few Good Men, Days of Thunder, Born on the 4th of July, Jerry Maguire, The Mission Impossible Series, Risky Business

Value - Taps, The Firm, Cocktail, The Color of Money, The Outsiders, Legend, Eyes Wide Shut, Interview With the Vampire, Magnolia, Eyes Wide Shut, Minority Report, The Last Samurai

Steals - Young Guns, Tropic Thunder

Upside - This one's a wild card, folks.

MID-ROUND PICKS

11. Christian Bale

Headliners - Batman Begins, The Dark Knight, Terminator: Salvation, The Prestige, American Psycho, Public Enemies

Value - 3:10 to Yuma, The Machinist, Reign of Fire, Harsh Times, Rescue Dawn, Equilibrium, Shaft, Newsies

Steals - Swing Kids, The Velvet Goldmine

Upside - More Bruce Wayne, more John Conner, more Bale!

12. Morgan Freeman

Headliners - The Shawshank Redemption, Lean on Me, Seven, Driving Miss Daisy

Value - Glory, Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, Kiss the Girls, Million Dollar Baby, Gone Baby Gone, Batman Begins, The Dark Knight

Steals - Unleashed (the one where Jet Li is a dog)

Upside - Another decade of smooth narration

13. Harrison Ford

Headliners - The Indiana Jones Series, The Star Wars Trilogy, The Jack Ryan Series, Blade Runner, The Fugitive

Value - The Devil's Own, Air Force One, Force 10 From Navarone, American Graffiti, Witness, The Mosquito Coast, Presumed Innocent

Steals - Apocalypse Now

Upside - Eh, his best years are behind him.

14. Bill Murray

Headliners - Ghostbusters, Groundhog Day, Stripes, Caddyshack, What About Bob? Lost in Translation

Value - Scrooged, Meatballs, Broken Flowers, Kingpin, Rushmore, Coffee & Cigarettes, Quick Change, The Royal Tenenbaums, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou

Steals - Wild Things (?)

Upside - Supposedly working with Harold Ramis on a new Ghostbusters film; will be fantastic in anything Wes Anderson casts him in.

15. Philip Seymour Hoffman

Headliners - Capote, Synecdoche, New York, Doubt, Before the Devil Knows You're Dead, Doubt

Value - Boogie Nights, Almost Famous, 25th Hour, The Talented Mr. Ripley, Happiness, Red Dragon, Punch Drunk Love

Steals - Scent of a Woman, The Big Lebowski

Upside - Great actor, will at the very least win a Best Supporting Actor Oscar.

16. Gene Hackman

Headliners - The French Connection, Hoosiers, Unforgiven

Value - The Superman Films, The Royal Tenenbaums, Bat*21, The Poseidon Adventure, A Bridge Too Far, Mississippi Burning, The Firm, Get Shorty, Enemy of the State, Wyatt, Earp, The Replacements

Steals - Bonnie & Clyde

Upside - Very little.

17. Mel Gibson

Headliners - Braveheart, The Lethal Weapon Series, The Mad Max Series

Value - The Patriot, Tequila Sunrise, Ransom, Conspiracy Theory, Hamlet, Air America, We Were Soldiers, Signs

Steals - None

Upside - See 'Tom Cruise's Upside' above.

18. Lawrence Fishburn

Headliners - The Matrix Series, Deep Cover, Bad Company, Hoodlum

Value - King of New York, Mystic River, Higher Learning, Boyz N the Hood, Event Horizon, Once in the Life, The Color Purple, Searching for Bobby Fisher

Steals - Apocalypse Now, Rumble Fish

Upside - Hard to say. He's a great actor, but he won't turn down an easy paycheck, either.

19. Samuel L. Jackson

Headliners - Coach Carter, Pulp Fiction, The Negotiator, Shaft, Die Hard With A Vengeance,

Snakes on a Plane

Value - Star Wars I-III, The Long Kiss Goodnight, Do The Right Thing, Mo' Better Blues, Fresh, Jurassic Park, Kiss of Death, Jackie Brown, Eve's Bayou, Iron Man

Steals - Goodfellas, Kill Bill vol. 2, Juice, Coming to America, True Romance, Menace II Society

20. John Cusack

Headliners - Say Anything, High Fidelity, Better Off Dead, One Crazy Summer, Grosse Pointe Blank

Value - Sixteen Candles, The Sure Thing, Eight Men Out, Identity, Con Air, The Thin Red Line, Pushing Tin

Steals - Stand By Me

Upside - He was the king of 80's movies, and has turned in a decent performance or two over the past two decades, but my expectations are fairly low.

LATE ROUND PICKS

21. Kevin Bacon

Headliners - Footloose, Tremors, Flatliners, Mystic River

Value - Sleepers, JFK, Apollo 13, Diner, A Few Good Men, Murder in the First, Wild Things, Stir of Echoes

Steals - Friday the 13th, Plains, Trains and Automobiles, Animal House

Upside - I heard he's getting ready to shoot Death Sentence II for $50 and dinner at P.F. Chang's. Wait... I meant Panda Express.

22. Robert Downey, Jr.

Headliners - Iron Man, Tropic Thunder, Chaplin

Value - Air America, Back to School, Chances Are, Johnny Be Good, Zodiac, Less Than Zero, Natural Born Killers, True Believer, Good Night and Good Luck

Steals - Weird Science

Upside - At least one more Iron Man, plus an Avengers movie and Sherlock Holmes. Good things await Downey, Jr.

23. Bill Paxton

Headliners - None

Value - Tombstone, Aliens, Apollo 13, Club Dread, Tresspass, Weird Science, True Lies, Near Dark, Frailty, Twister, Titanic

Steals - Stripes, The Terminator, Commando

Upside - Hopefully people will soon realize that Big Love sucks, and Bill will go back to making films.

24. Nicky Katt

Headliners - None

Value - Dazed and Confused, Boiler Room, A Time To Kill, Suburbia, Strange Days, The Doom Generation, Waking Life, Insomnia, School of Rock, Planet Terror, Death Proof

Steals - Gremlins, The 'Burbs, Sin City, The Dark Knight

Upside - Great supporting actor, will always pop up in great movies. This pick could be the steal of the draft.

25. Gary Oldman

Headliners - Sid and Nancy

Value - Batman Begins, The Dark Knight, True Romance, Air Force One, Hannibal, Bram Stoker's Dracula, JFK, State of Grace, The Professional, Murder in the First, The 5th Element

Steals - None

Upside - The Book of Eli, at least one more Batman film... oh, and more Harry Potter... if you're into that sort of thing.

26. Don Cheadle

Headliners - Hotel Rwanda, Talk to Me, Traitor

Value - The Oceans Series, Traffic, Boogie Nights, Crash, Out of Sight, The United States of Leland, Things to Do in Denver When You're Dead

Steals - Rush Hour 2, Colors, Hamburger Hill

Upside - May have hit his peak with Hotel Rwanda and Talk to Me, but is slated for spots in both Iron Man sequels, not to mention a biopic on Miles Davis.

27. Kiefer Sutherland

Headliners - Flatliners, The Lost Boys

Value - Stand By Me, A Few Good Men, Young Guns, Young Guns II, At Close Range, Renegades, Bright Lights, Big City, A Time to Kill, The Vanishing, Three Musketeers, Mirrors, Dark City, Taking Lives

Steals - None - unless you can work every season of 24 into the deal

Upside - Sadly, he peaked with Jack Bauer.

28. Jeremy Piven

Headliners - None (unless you count Entourage)

Value - PCU, Old School, Very Bad Things, Grosse Pointe Blank, Singles, Kiss the Girls, RUsh Hour 2, Smokin' Aces, The Kingdom, RockNRolla

Steals - Say Anything, Heat, Black Hawk Down

Upside - Always hilarious. Tremendous upside.

29. Luis Guzman

Headliners - None

Value - Boogie Nights, Magnolia, Carlito's Way, True Believer, Out of Sight, Snake Eyes, Waiting

Steals - None

Upside - For some reason I thought he was in more movies. He's a good ace to keep up your sleeve if you're trying to grab movies like Boogie Nights or Carlito's Way late in the draft.

30. Vince Vaughn

Headliners - Wedding Crashers, Dodgeball, The Break-up, Swingers, Made

Value - Anchorman, Old School, Mr. and Mrs. Smith, The Cell, Clay Pigeons

Steals - Rudy, Into the Wild

Upside - Some guys make a living on playing the same guy in every single film. Vince does it better than anyone.

So there you have it, my top picks for the DVD Draft. Clearly this was not an exact science, and I don't know whether I'm proud or ashamed that this literally took me an entire day. Mostly ashamed, I think. Anyway, if you were bored enough to read through the whole thing, please feel free to comment, discuss or generate your own list. What's that? You're not that bored? Or that retarded? Oh, ok.

2009-07-28T18:15:00.000-07:00

I hate this time of year when it comes to sports. It's the ebb tide of the sporting ocean. The Major League Baseball season plods along, and while I enjoy watching the Yankees (the two times they are on TV per month down here in Heaven's Waiting Room), you may as well just wake me in October. The only thing more boring than the NBA regular season is the NBA off-season, and I can think of about a million things I care more about than Tiger Woods, Michael Phelps and Lance Armstrong combined. Some of those things include whether the winner of The Bachelorette could beat the winner of Daisy of Love in a fist fight, who would win in a buffalo wing eating contest - me or LenDale White, whose acting is worse - Anna Paquin's or Kevin Connelly's, Ashy Larry, the flat tax plan, and what earthy-tone Brad and Angelina's next adopted child will be. With all that being said, here are some of the things that have been making sports headlines, and my thoughts on them.

Brett Favre Will Stay Retired

Until he decides tomorrow that he won't. The big question is, why do we still like this fucking guy? Does the fact that he was a great quarterback exempt him from being called an asshole for wasting America's time? Picture this: you have a friend, and you ask him to go to the movies with you. The movie is at 9:oo PM. At noon, he tells you he's going to go. Then, he calls you at 1:30 and says he's changed his mind. Then he texts you at 3:15 and says he thinks he can go, but he's not sure. At 4:40, he tells you he'll let you know by 6:00 PM whether he's in or not. When 6:00 rolls around, he tells you that he'll have to watch the trailer before he makes a decision. When the trailer ends, he says he's got a good feeling about the movie, and he's in. A half-hour later, he texts you and says he's tired, and he doesn't think he's going to make it. Now honestly, by 8:00 PM, HOW FUCKING ANNOYED ARE YOU? Would you not have told this guy to fuck off by now? Of course you would have. So why haven't the Vikings - and the rest of America - followed suit and told Brett Favre to fuck off? And the worst part is, he's recruiting new wafflers. Derek Mason and Drew Bennett both just signed contracts and then retired. If they end up coming back, someone needs to fly down to Mississippi, surprise Brett Favre while he's riding his tractor and shooting a Lee jeans commercial and drive a fucking stake through his heart. I've heard that if you kill the head waffler, all other wafflers will stay retired.

Steve Spurrier Didn't Vote for Tebow; Claims it was an "Oversight"

Attention America: Before you read this, you might want to loosen your vise-grip on Tim Tebow's nuts. The kid is a phenomenal athlete. He is a phenomenal human being. He somehow was able to have a mediocre post-game speech enshrined in history, in between Pacino's "game of inches" speech and Knute Rockne's "win one for the Gipper." I've got nothing but respect for the kid. But seriously, America, it's gotta be hard for the kid to walk with all of you hanging from his scrotum. Luckily, he's not doing any fucking, so you're not harming him in that department. And for the record, what kind of a douchebag asks a kid that during a football interview? Are we that desperate as a culture that we need to know if Tim Tebow is exploring the rocky mountains that are heaving under his girlfriend's blouse, or if he can split the defense just as well off the field as on it? If I were Tebow, I would have fucking reamed that guy a new one. I would have said terrible things. I guess that's one of the reasons he's a better person than me. But I digress. The All SEC Team is something that the coaches vote on. Key word: vote. If you're going into it feeling obligated to choose everyone's favorite guy, then why have a vote at all? "Oh no! Tebow made 1st Team All SEC... but it wasn't unanimous! This is an outrage! I demand to know which one of you is not gargling Tebow's balls like the rest of us!" And who was it? Whose mouth was free of holy-blue-and-orange-sperm? The Ol' Ball Coach, Steve Spurrier. I've always thought Spurrier was a dick, and I never liked him. However, I respected him for going against the grain (hoping that he did it just to be a dick)... until he completely bitched up and threw his assistant under the bus. Had Spurrier come out and said, "Yeah, I voted for Jevan Snead. The Ol' Ball Coach thinks he's a better quarterback, and if ya'll don't like it, well you can suck the Ol' Coach Balls!!" I would have thought he was the man. Now? I think he reeks of that not-so-fresh feeling and needs to change his tampon. What a pussy.

Now, if you'll indulge the football fan in me for just a moment, pleas take a look at the 2008 numbers for Tim Tebow and Jevan Snead:

Tebow: 192-298; 2,746 yds; 64.4% comp.; 30 TDS, 4 INTS; 172.37 Passer Rating

Snead: 184-327; 2,762 yds; 56.3% comp.; 26 TDS, 13 INTS; 145.50 Passer Rating

Now, are Tebow's numbers better? Yes. Are they much better? No. The only stat that is heavily skewed in Tebow's favor is touchdown to interception ratio - but Snead also threw the ball almost 30 more times than Tebow did. (I was going to post the stats from the Florida-Ole Miss game, which Ole Miss won, but Tebow's numbers are actually better than Snead's in that game and that fucks up my argument). The point is, Spurrier should not have to apologize for voting for Jevan Snead. Is Tebow a better all around athlete? Without a doubt. Is he a better quarterback? Yeah, probably. Should he be 1st Team All SEC? Yes. Is it ridiculous that everyone threw a shit-fit even after he was named 1st Team All SEC? FUCK YES!

Michael Vick Conditionally Reinstated; Suspended 1st 6 Games

Roger Goodell is a pussy. Everyone is patting him on the back for his "tough stance" on player conduct, when really he's been anything but tough. Pacman was suspended for a season, did literally nothing to better himself as a human being, then came back and violated the personal conduct policy twice. He could sign with a team and play opening day tomorrow if he wanted to. Matt Jones gets caught ripping lines of coke off his American Express card, and he receives no punishment. Chris Henry has been arrested more times than fucking Amy Winehouse, and he is still catching passes from Carson Palmer. It's yet to be determined what Donte Stallworth's suspension will be (unless I missed it), but if it's anything like his legal punishment, he'll be on easy street. The bottom line is that Mike Vick is a convicted felon who made a calculated and cognizant decision to own and operate an illegal dogfighting ring. He is not some kid who made a mistake. He knew what he was doing, he is not sorry and he is not the caliber person that should be in a position of influence over young people. If Goodell really wanted to take a stand, he'd send Vick, Pacman, Chris Henry, Matt Jones, Tank Johnson, Donte Stallworth and every other asshole who undermines the efforts of the Warrick Dunn's, Jason Wittens, and Brian Dawkins' of the league. Jadakiss has a song on his most recent record called 'What If?', and one of the lyrics is something like, "What if Peyton was the one fighting dogs?" The answer is, nothing, because that would never happen, because Peyton Manning is not a fucking lowlife scumbag. Now, is it a question of race? Did Mike Vick face harsher scrutiny because he's black? I like to think not. I like to think that he broke the law and got what he deserved. But then again, this recently happened:

Ben Roethlisberger Accused of Rape; No One Seems to Care

Ben's press conference statement: "I didn't do it."

The public reaction: "He must not have done it! I mean, he's Big Ben. He said he's innocent!"

Is it a race thing? I really don't know. But it's fucking ridiculous. What if it had been Santonio Holmes that was accused? Or Willie Parker? Or any black player on the Steelers? Would it be buried like it has been for Roethlisberger? Somewhere in Los Angeles, Kobe Bryant is shaking his head, saying "Man, I gotta get in on this whole being white thing."

7.26.09

2009-07-25T21:11:00.000-07:00

I've been neglecting this for a while, as I tend to do. Then again, I haven't had much time to sit and vomit up my thoughts (as I also tend to do). The summer is flying by at the speed of a bullet train, and I'm just a passenger hitching a ride. In fact, that's exactly what I feel like sometimes; a passenger - a passive observer of my own life. Things are happening, but I feel as if they're just happening around me, rather than to me. Think of that camera trick that they sometimes do in films, where the everyone in the scene is moving in fast-forward around the main character, who is standing there in real time. That's a pretty accurate portrayal of how I've been feeling. I haven't met any of the goals I set for myself this summer, and my finances are on life support. I spend 24 hours a day inside my own head, and it gets to the point where it feels like the WWF Royal Rumble is being fought right behind my eyeballs. Of course, this is an ongoing affliction - one that I unwittingly signed on for when I was born a male Tatum. The never ending war in my head of me vs. me is the inevitable off-shoot of the one my father fights against himself. I think Sgt. Carver said it best on The Wire, when Herc said something about the war on drugs. Carver said, "You can't even call this shit a war. Wars end." And so, my battle rages on.

I know this sounds like a bitch-fest, but I'm really not complaining. I can't claim to be unhappy. I've actually been having a lot of fun lately - in truth, more than I have since I've lived down here. I've been spending a lot of time with Dani, and it's been great. We have a lot of fun together. I've been told all my life that I'm like a big brother. In most cases, this was just a diplomatic way for a girl to tell me she had no interest in fucking me. However, my friendship with Dani is very much like that of a brother and sister. We argue, we fight, we break each other's balls, and then we laugh about it all. It took me a while to settle into that dynamic - longer than I'd have liked (again, I'm always my own worst enemy). And now that we're where we are, I would not trade it for the world. If it weren't for her, I probably would have left Florida at the end of the school year, and would most likely be typing this from my parents house, getting ready to talk about how truly fucked I am because I don't have a job for the fall. So, I don't mind that she has totally destroyed my sleep pattern by keeping me up until 6 A.M. every morning watching Happy Feet until I have penguins coming out of my ass. That's what friends are for, right?

I went to two jiu-jitsu classes last week, and the 2nd one was definitely better than the first. I just want to get a little bit better every day. A lot of the guys that train there go 6 days a week, often multiple times a day. Me? Three times a week suits me just fine. I'm not trying to get into the Ultimate Fighter house, nor am I trying to win any medals, or brag that I'm a jiu-jitsu blackbelt. I just want to get into shape and do something fun and different. It's not going to make me very many friends at the gym, nor is it going to impress the sensei. But, guess what? I don't really give a fuck. I'm paying $100 a month to use that facility and to learn, and I can do it as many or as few times as I choose to. Maybe the more I get into it, the more I will want to keep going. Maybe three times a week becomes four or five, once a day becomes two or three times a day. Then again, maybe not. It's a great workout, though, and there are a couple of cool people there that seem to be as green as I am. I'm going to stick with it and see where it takes me.

I'm going to a Yankees-Rays game with my dad in a few days. Believe it or not, I've never been to a game with just my dad. I feel like going to a baseball game with your dad is one of those bonding experiences that every boy/man needs to experience. It's unheard of not to spend the day at a sporting event with your old man. The fact that I've never done this probably contributes to the strange and strained relationship that I have with my father. I could write pages on that subject, but I'll spare you the melodrama. The point is, I'm excited to be going to a game with my pop.

Six or seven years ago, I had a LiveJournal - which was basically just a blog, only the term "blog" hadn't really been en vogue yet. Many of my entries were in the same style as this one, where I would kind of just let my thoughts flow and write whatever came to mind. I had no problem with putting all my personal shit in the street. Now, I'm a bit more reticent to just unload my personal thoughts and feelings onto the unsuspecting world wide web, but the thing is, I did some of my best writing in those days. I deleted the journal when I moved down here to Florida. I don't really know why. Maybe it was to accentuate the feeling of a "fresh start." I'd like to have it back for a day, just so I could read my whining and complaining from the past half-decade. It'd be like having all your old toys back for a day. You'd play with them for a while, until you realize that you just don't have the imagination you did back when. Fuck, that's depressing.

Just Doin' It

2009-07-17T12:49:00.000-07:00

"Just Do It" is not only Nike's slogan, but it's also the personal mantra of a good friend of mine. The difference is, while Nike uses the phrase as more of a suggestion, hers is an order; an ultimatum which, like the rest of her orders (of which she does have MANY), must be followed. Well, I decided that today was the day to fall in line and, "just do it." As a result, I am officially a member of Gracie-Barra Orlando-Kissimmee Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu/Mixed Martial Arts.

The idea of training MMA has been rotating between the back and forefront of my mind for the past five years. There's always been a part of me that thrives on combat. I appreciate a good fight, what can I say? But the only times I've been able to satiate that part of me have been bar fights and street fights, and let's face it, I'm too old for that bullshit. Not only that, but those situations are born of, and exist in, negativity. I'm doing my best to filter as much negativity out of my life as humanly possible. I've lived too long in bad places (mentally speaking), and spent too much time focusing on my mistakes, regrets, flaws and short comings. I am starting to feel more of a sense of control over my own moods and state of being, and I think introducing mixed martial arts into my life will only enhance that control. I'm not only going to be working out and getting into shape, but I'll also be learning disciplines - which require dedication and focus. Focus is something that I have lacked for far too long.

This summer, I had set goals for myself. I was going to exercise regularly and stick to a diet. I wasn't going to sleep into the early afternoon hours everyday, either. Well, the summer is almost over for me, and I am ashamed to say that I have fulfilled none of those goals. I've barely worked out, eaten like shit and slept all day. I hate the way I feel as a result. I'm not saying that my summer has sucked - I've actually had a lot of fun. However, I've also succumbed to my own laziness - a habit that I am desperate to break. I think it starts right here. My friend Nick has been training BJJ and Muay Thai at Matt Serra's gym on Long Island for a few months now, and he is in a better place mentally and spiritually than he has been, probably since I've known him. I'm hoping it will do the same for me.

I will be training approximately three times a week in fundamentals of Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, and two to three times a week in beginning MMA - which will cover aspects of jiu-jitsu, striking, wrestling, etc. I also have the option of attending any of the classes offered in the other Gracie-Barra gyms in the Orlando area, which include Muay Thai classes (something I am interested in learning about, as well).

I'm excited about this, and I believe it will be a positive thing for me. And, as I mentioned earlier, I currently have an open-door policy on all things positive.

UFC 100 Backlash - ESPN Comes Off Slightly Less Ignorant Than Usual

2009-07-13T14:24:00.001-07:00

All afternoon I have been watching ESPN analysts throw their two cents around concerning UFC 100. Normally, when you add up the two cents of a handful of uninformed, set-in-their-ways sports purists (and by purists, I mean those who believe that mixed martial arts is uncivilized, and that boxing is the only legitimate combat sport), all off those cents equal up to no sense. However, and I mentioned this in my preview post, some of them are beginning to come around. It is a feather in the cap of UFC President Dana White and the entire Ultimate Fighting Championship organization that they've been able to garner some respect from people who completely wrote them off a year ago. With that being said, it bothers me that the bulk of the UFC 100 talk on three of ESPN's major programs has been centered around the post-fight actions of UFC Heavyweight Champion Brock Lesnar.

I have already debated with a handful of my friends, whom I know to be knowledgeable about the sport, on whether or not Brock's actions are defendable, and ultimately whether or not he is good for the sport. My friend Jeff assumed the Brendan Behan argument ("No publicity is bad publicity"), while Sludge and my boy Eric were both disgusted with his antics and maintained that he is a negative influence on MMA. Not wanting to fence-sit (because I do see the validity of both arguments), I fell in line with Sludge and E, contesting that Lesnar was out of line and his actions, ultimately, were detrimental. I know this seems contradictory, given that, in my UFC 100 Diary, I labeled Lesnar's post-fight hissy fit as "Fantastic" and the "best post-fight interview ever," but hear me out. I was sincere when I recorded those reactions. However, the fear was there in the back of my mind that his outburst was just one more weapon in the arsenals of those looking to attack the legitimacy of the UFC as (as Wilbon phrased it) "a sport of consequence." Low and behold, my fears were substantiated. There was not one conversation that I listened to today in which the UFC was not compared in some way, shape or form to the WWE. Now, there's going to be references drawn to Brock's sports-entertainment roots regardless, but he only fueled the fire with his Stone Cold Steve Austin bit after the fight (Brock himself begrudgingly admitted as much at the post-fight press conference - a timely act of damage control on the part of Dana White).

On Jim Rome is Burning, Rome made a case for the UFC and there legitimacy in the realm of mainstream sports. His panel guests, whose names I can't remember (although one of them looks like the bastard love child of Mike Holmgren, Andy Reid and Ponderosa's all-you-can-eat buffet) were quick to deride it is a "niche sport," and could not seem to grasp the fact that mixed martial arts is NOT sports-entertainment. On PTI, Bob Ryan (a man who is as antiquated and border-line senile as the fictional Bob Ryan on Entourage) even went so far as to suggest that, after Brock's "bad guy" act on Saturday night, the UFC now needs to bring in a "good guy" and play up that angle. Thankfully, Wilbon brought him back to reality by pointing out that the UFC clearly wants to separate themselves from that kind of thing. "They want to sell based on product," said Wilbon. Finally! Someone at ESPN finally acknowledges that the UFC is where they are because they have the most talented fighters - not guys who can work a microphone. Thank you, Wilbon, for at least attempting to bring these fossils into the modern era.

So, with all of this exposure, is my friend Jeff right? Is the publicity created by Brock Lesnar good for the UFC? A little, but I'm still going to argue against it, and I'm going to argue against it for this reason: they are still not giving mixed martial arts credit for being a disciplined, respectable sport. Bob Ryan began his spiel today by saying that "In no way is the UFC a sport of gentlemen, but..." Why isn't it a gentlemen's sport, but boxing is? Does limiting combat to two men punching one another automatically make it civilized? Or the better question, how is the concept of two men who are skilled in several different disciplines of combat strategically trying to defeat one another based on the accentuation of strengths and exploitation of weaknesses uncivilized? To the casual fan, the UFC is still about guys beating on each other with reckless abandon, and that is simply not the case. ESPN is not helping the cause by only showing three highlights; Brock's temper tantrum, Brock's ground and pound on Frank Mir, and Hendo's KO of Bisping. Now if you have never watched the UFC before, those clips make it look like a circus. ESPN seems to be obsessed with the question of whether or not the UFC will ever gain the respect of the general public and work its way fully into the mainstream of the sports landscape. However, they refuse to help the UFC do so by failing to educate the public on what mixed martial arts really is. And I believe it to be negligent on the part of ESPN to not have anyone on-staff that is knowledgeable about the sport.

Think about all of the disciplines a mixed martial artist has to be familiar with; boxing, kick boxing, tae kwon do, karate, judo, jiu jitsu, wrestling, muay thai to name a few. Even if a fighter is not proficient in all of these, he must at least have working knowledge of them so that he can defend himself from a fighter who is proficient. At least three of these disciplines are featured in the Olympics (wrestling, judo, boxing), but somehow this gets overshadowed by the "violence and brutality" of the striking - another gross exaggeration. I'm not going to go into my "UFC is safer than boxing" tirade again (if you haven't heard it, it's in my UFC 100 Preview), but it's just another example of an uninformed media misleading the easily misled general public.

In a sports landscape where we continue to deify ballplayers who have cheated to get ahead - and not only that, but we refuse to now question the legitimacy of their sport even after a decade of scandal - we still refuse to progress our thinking, even the slightest bit. We have seemingly forgiven Ron Artest for physically attacking fans, but cannot even consider embracing an athlete who competes at the top level of his sport, simply because we refuse to take the time to understand both the warrior and the war.

UFC 100 Diary

2009-07-11T22:10:00.000-07:00

Now that UFC 100 has come and gone, I feel the need to follow up my preview with a sort-of post fight wrap up. Unfortunately, I do not have a DVR, (apparently I have not fully entered into the 21st century yet) so I kept a notebook on the arm of the chair, and anytime I had a comment or mildly entertaining though, I jotted it down. The following is my attempt to make sense of all of these random observations. I say attempt, because some of the writing is not at all legible, some is not nearly as entertaining as I originally must have thought it was, and some of it is just plain gibberish. Nevertheless, without further ado, I give you the UFC 100 Diary.

10:05 PM Even though it is UFC 100, a landmark event for not only the Ultimate Fighting Championship, but all of mixed martial arts, Joe Rogan still refuses to shave and/or make himself at all presentable. None the less, Mike Goldberg still gazes adoringly at him while Joe is talking. Goldberg and Rogan are very similar to Joe Buck and Troy Aikman on Fox NFL Sunday. Aikman and Rogan are the knowledgeable, technically sound broadcasters while Joe Buck and Mike Goldberg have very little actual knowledge (or overall general worth), make asinine comments that don't even garner unintentional comedy value, and do the weird, creepy, adoring gaze with the occasional glimpse back to the camera.

By the way, Joe Rogan's wardrobe provided tonight by the Men's Wearhouse Meathead line. "Helping douchebags get laid in Long Island bars since 2000."

10:07 PM Holly Madison of The Girls Next Door fame is an honorary Octagon girl. Goldberg informs us that being an Octagon girl has been a "lifelong dream of Holly's." Atta girl, Holly. Reach for those stars.

10:08 PM I observe that Alan Belcher is sporting a very Matthew McConaughey-like haircut only moments before his entrance music kicks in... The Hurricane by Bob Dylan. You have no idea how happy this makes me. I keep hoping that they will pull the camera out and Belcher will be in skin tight pink jeans and will walk to the ring in super-slow motion. But he doesn't. He does, however, appear to have a portrait of Elvis tattooed on his arm. That's um, just as cool... I guess? (Oh, it's not cool at all? My mistake.)

10:11 PM Mike Goldberg informs us that it's actually Johnny Cash on Belcher's arm. That's at least a little cooler than Elvis. (What do you mean it's still not cool?)

10:12 PM Yoshihiro Akiyama comes out to some kind of classical music. It sounds like the music they used to use in the GTA III commercials. As Akiyama stops, kneels and appears to prey toward Mecca (Korean fighter, Italian entrance music, Muslim religion? My head hurts.) Joe Rogan informs us that he enjoys "Chuck Lidell level popularity in Korea," and that he not only fights over there, but sings and models as well. He then informs us that back in Korea, his nickname is "Sexiyama." I repeat, "Sexiyama." For those of you who didn't get that, that's "SEXIYAMA." This prompts the following hilariously awkward exchange:

Joe: "Hey, I didn't make it up, I just reported it."

Mike: excitedly "Well, I mean it's not likes he's a bad looking guy."

Joe: awkward pause "...Yes, he's a very handsome man."

10:15 PM Bruce Buffer gets starts us off with a patented, "WE...ARE...LIIIIIIIIIIVE!!!" I wonder just how badly Bruce Buffer must hate his brother Michael. I mean, every time he belts out a spirited "IT'S TIIIIIIIIIIIME!!!," is he thinking, "God, I fucking hate my brother!?" When they get together on Thanksgiving, does Michael taunt him? "Hey Bruce, mom's about to bring out the turkey. Can't we get a, "IT'S TIIIIIIIIIIIIIIME?" Actually, nevermind. I'll take care of it. "LET'S GET READY TO..." (at this point Michael dives across the table and an all out Buffer-Family-Brawl ensues, a la Tackleberry's girlfriend and her family in Police Academy 4).

10:19 PM We have our first nut-shot of the evening, sending Sexiyama to the mat. Mario Yamasaki tries to tell Sexiyama that he has five minutes to recover, even though Sexi clearly does not speak a word of English. Joe Rogan's input: "Ouch." Thank you, Joe.

10:36 PM About a minute to go in the fight. Maybe in Korea it is considered honorable to eat punches and leg kicks rather than strike and defend. If so, Sexiyama is doing his country proud. Forty-five seconds to go, and the judo expert finally executes a judo throw. Maybe he's just a slow starter. Maybe he'll turn it on in the... oops, fight's over.

10:38 PM Split decision in favor of Bel... wait, Akiyama? Really? Maybe one of the judges saw him sing in Korea? Huge screw job for Belcher. On the plus-side, I am 1 for 1 in picks.

10:44 PM Michael Bisping looks like a cancer patient. Sure Mike, you had every right to be mad at Demarques for (Cameron Dollar's) comment about you being "as white as a band-aid." By the way, how does Sean Patrick Flannery feel about you stealing his role as Powder for the sequel. (Yes, that was a Powder joke. Funny in 1995, and still relevant today. What do you mean, "no?")

10:45 PM Hendo comes down, as always, to Lunatic Fringe by Red Rider, which everyone knows was used in the film Vision Quest. He looks just as focused as Louden Swain did before he pinned Chute.

10:51 PM Bisping looks jittery and is doing a lot of backpeddling. Hendo is literally stalking him. He is LOADING UP that right, and if it connects, it's going to be lights out for The Count. In the meantime, Rogan mentions that, while Henderson doesn't like to talk a lot of trash, he did call Bisping a "douchebag." Goldberg then goes on a spiel about the versatility of the word "douchebag." Incidentally, this is an area of expertise for him, as I'm sure he hears that word all the time.

10:53 PM Bisping looks absolutely helpless in Hendo's clinch. He finally worms his way free, and then... tries to shoot in on Hendo? Really, Mike? I'm positive that Rogan is dying to comment on what a bone-headed decision it would be for Bisping to try and take Hendo down, but he is unable to because Goldberg is currently in the middle of some ridiculous tangent about Bisping's ancestors. Rogan, along with myself and 40,000 other viewers are either silently or vocally demonstrating the versatility of the word "douchebag."

10:57 PM Goldberg is still talking, not about Bisping's ancestors, but about something equally irrelevant.

10:59 PM Remember eight minutes ago, when I said that if Hendo landed that right, it would be lights out for Bisping? Yeah, he just landed it. Hard. And then landed a flying forearm shot for good measure. I think Bisping is dead.

11:00 PM Bisping is still unconscious.

11:01 PM Bisping is still unconscious.

11:02 PM Bisping is still unconscious.

11:04 PM While Hendo is busy being a really fucking cool guy in his post-fight interview, Bisping is awake, finding out what exactly happened, and re-learning his own name.

11:05 PM They cut to Royce Gracie. He smiles and waves. They stay on him. He is still smiling. He waves again. The camera is still on him. This is getting uncomfortable...

11:07 PM They finally cut away from Gracie as Thiago makes his way to the Octagon to Big Shit Poppin' by T.I.

11:13 PM I am cautiously optimistic that GSP will have an actual pair of shorts on. Survey says... nope! Red skivvies. I hate the French.

11:17 PM Rogan is stuttering, and I'm fairly certain he is either high or drunk. Goldberg makes a point about GSP's wrestling... a point that Joe made about an hour ago. Inexplicably, Joe gives him a, "Great point, Mike!" He's definitely high... and drunk.

11:23 PM I'm confidant that GSP's trainer doubles as his man-servant. "He wants ice on his legs! Put it on his legs! Give him his legs! Is that better, Georges?" He is the Jerome to GSP's Morris Day.

11:28 PM End of round 2. Georges returns to his corner, and this is what he gets from his trainer. "That was a great round, Georges. I'm very proud of you. Now let's get that breathing going. That's it. Atta boy." He says these things as if Georges were his infant son and Georges just made a poopy in the potty. It must be a French thing.

11:34 PM End of round 3. Mike Goldberg is again rephrasing another one of Joe Rogan's observations. At this point, Joe is too high to care. I'm eagerly awaiting the cut away to GSP's corner... and here it is! "Now let's get that breathing going, Mr. St. Pierre. Thank you." Georges blows his nose. His trainer pats him on the back and says, "Good." I'm not kidding.

11:41 PM End of round 4. Back to GSP's corner for this fantastic exchange:

GSP: "I pulled my groin."

Trainer: "I don't care." This is where champions are made. Forget your groin. Hit him with your groin."

Um... huh?

11:41 PM Mike Goldberg: "What GSP just said, Joe, was that he pulled his groin."

Joe Rogan: "Thank you, Mike. I was busy taking a rip off the gravity bong I have under the table and then sipping whiskey out of my flask - in an attempt to drown out the fact that I work with such an incredible douchebag - that I didn't quite hear him clearly state that he pulled his groin."

Okay, so I made some of that up.

11:47 PM A clearly frustrated Thiago raises Georges' hand in victory.

12:00 AM Frank Mir coming down to Amazing by Young Jeezy. I'm okay with it.

12:02 AM Frank Mir just kissed one of his corner men on the lips. I'm not okay with it.

12:07 AM After at least six different video montages and both men's entrances, we appear to be ready for the main event. Wait, scratch that. Bruce Buffer must acknowledge every single sponsor, judge, member of the UFC organization, shout out his family (minus Michael), name all 50 states plus their capitols, recite Edgar Allen Poe's The Raven and sing the chorus to Mr. Roboto. Okay... NOW we're ready.

12:12 AM Brock has Frank in a big brother-style headlock on the ground, but instead of giving him nuggies and wet-willies, he is landing massive punches to the face.

12:15 AM End of round 1. Frank looks like he just got home from a date with Chris Brown.

(What?)

12:16 AM Mir lands a nice left and then a nice knee. Brock may be hurt. Frank is looking shockingly nimble on his feet, and he might be able to...

12:17 AM ... nevermind, he's on his back again.

12:18 AM Done. Brock just caved the right side of Frank's face in. Fat lot of good all that jiu jitsu did, Frankie.

12:21 AM BEST POST-FIGHT INTERVIEW EVER! It consisted of:

- Brock getting right in Frank's face and saying, "Talk shit now!"

- Brock basking in a chorus of boos, and giving the fans the finger

- Joe Rogan being visibly frightened to be anywhere near Brock at the moment

- Brock plugging Coors Light and condemning Bud Light for not paying him, and closing with...

- Brock saying, "I might even climb on top of the wife tonight!"

FANTASTIC.

12:29 AM Jon Fitch comes down to Johnny Cash. I guess that's almost as cool as having him tattooed on your arm. (Wait, that's still not cool? Oh, okay.)

Apparently, this is where I lost interest and/or my brain shut down. I was also fielding and returning a massive amount of text messages, and I'm not competent enough to multitask. I ended the night 7-11 in picks (win-loss only), though it should really be 8-11 because picking Thiago over GSP was strictly a heart pick. I was pumped to hear that Johnny "Bones" Jones won via submission, and am placing the over/under at 2 AM for Stephan Bonnar committing suicide after losing to Mark Coleman, and taking the under (which means he's already dead). It is now 3:33 AM, and I'm completely out of wit, cynicism, and jokes about R&B singers who beat their girlfriends. My bed has been beckoning, and I think... yes, IT'S TIIIIIIIIIIIIIIME!

UFC 100 Preview

2009-07-10T15:47:00.001-07:00

Tomorrow night is a huge night in the world of MMA: It is the 100th UFC event. Many people have written the UFC, and MMA in general off over the course of the past 16 years, calling it "barbaric," "tasteless," and "the equivalent of human cockfighting." In the early days, I may have even agreed (of course that didn't stop me from watching it). However, not only is the UFC still standing, it is flourishing. MMA is, as Dana White loves to remind us, the fastest growing sport in the world. UFC pay-per-views have been killing WWE pay-per-views as far as revenue is concerned, and UFC 100 is primed to be the highest grossing, non-boxing pay-per-view in history. I remember watching the UFC as a kid with my friends Frank and Will. It was a novelty to us, as sadly, it still is to a lot of uneducated viewers. Back then, there were no rounds, no weight classes, and very few rules. Guys were wearing tank tops and wrestling shoes. Nobody acknowledged or respected the different disciplines. I remember being bored to tears during the Royce Gracie vs. Ken Shamrock match. It lasted almost a half hour, with Gracie on his back the entire time. And it was boring. Today, that would not be the case. The biggest problem I have with UFC naysayers is that they haven't taken the time to learn about the rules, or more specifically, the rule changes. It is designed for fighter safety. How many early stoppages have we seen in the past couple of years alone? I would venture to say that at least 1 out of 10, or maybe 1 out of 12 fights is stopped prematurely. Fans boo, and fighters complain, but in the end, it is a safety precaution. A premature stop is the complete opposite of a standing eight count in boxing. Is it a coincidence that UFC vets aren't walking around with severe brain damage while so many old-time boxers are? And there are a multitude of other rules designed to protect the fighters; no kicks or knees to the head of a downed opponent. No strikes to the back of the head, etc. People who still want to judge the current UFC, and all of mixed martial arts, based on the sport's humble beginnings need to do their research.

I was ecstatic today when I logged on to ESPN.com and saw that the topic of the most recent B.S. Report with Bill Simmons was UFC 100. The Sports Guy and the UFC... together at last? It's like Pacino and DeNiro finally being on camera together in Heat. Since Bill not an avid UFC follower, he had Dave Meltzer, a sports journalist who has covered professional wrestling for decades, and has covered the UFC since its inception, appear as his guest on this edition of the B.S. Report. I get nervous when ESPN takes on the UFC, though. Kornheiser and Wilbon give it little more than an afterthought when it is mentioned on PTI, and the asshole parade that is Around the Horn still scathe and dismiss it. Surprisingly enough, Jim Rome, whom I cannot fucking stand, gave a great interview with Dan Henderson about a week ago. But back to Simmons and Meltzer. I liked the way Bill approached the subject - he admitted to not being knowledgeable, but said that he is now interested. He allowed Meltzer to kind of set the stage for him. Meltzer, I thought, did an okay job of breaking things down to Bill, but there were a few things I did not agree with. Bill kind of wanted to focus on the comparisons and contrasts between the UFC and the WWE, which I don't really mind. Obviously, one is scripted, one is not. Bill wanted to know if, even though the fights in the UFC are real, the personalities are a bit imbelished in order to sell the fights like in the WWE. Meltzer contended that they are, which I don't think is true. I mean, obviously, Thiago Silva is not going to break into Georges St. Pierre's interview and start reigning blows down on him (though I kind of wish he would). I think the trash talk that leads up to a fight is either based on legitimate hatred (Rampage Jackson/Wanderlei Silva, Marcus Davis/Dan Hardy), or is used for effect to build determination and focus for a particular fight (BJ Penn and Michael Bisping, no matter who they are fighting). I don't really see Dana White telling his fighters, "Hey, trash talk so-and-so before the fight, because we need to build some hype." Meltzer said that he believes it is the personalities and the feuds that lead up to the fights, rather than the fights themselves, that attract people. I disagree with that wholeheartedly. UFC fight fans love to watch fights, it's that simple. They are educated in the different styles and love to display that learnedness while watching their favorite athletes go head to head in combat. I'm talking about diehard UFC fans, not casual ones. Casual fans want to see a bitch get knocked out, plain and simple. Nowhere does pre-fight banter factor in. The other issue I had with Meltzer was when Simmons asked him who the Tiger Woods/Roger Federer-type fighter is in the UFC? The guy who dominates his sport and is larger than life. Meltzer said St. Pierre. How can you not say Anderson Silva? Silva is, without a doubt, the Tiger/Roger/MJ/LeBron of MMA. He has never lost a fight in the UFC, has lost only one round of fighting, has victories in separate weight classes... he is dominance personified. Bad call, Dave.

Anyway, I was glad to hear Bill talking UFC, and I'm anxious to hear his thoughts after the event. In the meantime, here are my fight by fight predictions for UFC 100, starting at the bottom of the card and working up to the main event.

Matt Grice vs. Shannon Gugarty

Two guys who rely heavily on their wrestling ability and ground game. Neither one is a prolific striker, though Grice did display a bit of savy on the feet against (underrated British lightweight) Terry Etim. Gugarty has the edge in submissions, but I doubt his wrestling is good enough to gain any kind of dominance over Grice. I see a split decision victory for Matt Grice.

C.B. Dollaway vs. Tom Lawlor

Two TUF contestants from the Rampage vs. Forrest season. Both were highly decorated college wrestlers (Dollaway at Arizona State, Lawlor right down the road from me at UCF). However, their ground mentality is a bit contrasting, as Lawlor likes to ground and pound while Dollaway is prone to submissions. I think Dollaway is a bit more seasoned, and I see him catching Lawlor in an armbar in the 2nd round.

Dong Hyun Kim vs. T.J. Grant

Apparently, Dong is as big in Korea as Hasslehoff is in Germany. He most recently lost a hard fought decision to Karo Parysian (no shame in that), and has won his two previous UFC fights. I don't know much about Grant, other than he pulled a bit of an upset by defeating Ryo Chonan in his UFC debut. Both guys push the pace, and I have a feeling there will be some good judo throws and impressive BJJ displayed. In the end, I'm going split decision for "The Stun Gun," Dong Hyun Kim.

Jon Jones vs. Jake O'Brien

I'll admit it, I'm on the Johnny "Bones" Jones bandwagon. He's entertaining, he's talented and he's a New Yorker. On the B.S. Report, Dave Meltzer mentioned Jones as a guy that kind of has that WWE personality, and I agree with that. Some of the techniques that Jones brings to the Octogon might be better suited for the squared-circle. "Irish" Jake O'Brien is what they call a gatekeeper. He is a guy that is tough enough to give up-and-coming hot shots a dose of reality, but will probably never rise into the elite fighters in his weight class. He's 4-2 in the UFC, with his only noteworthy win coming in the form of a decision that spoiled the debut of the "Texas Crazy Horse," Heath Herring at UFC Fight Night in 2007. He's a strong wrestler, and he might be able to overpower the more slender Jones in the clinch and on the ground, but I'm going with my heart on this one and predicting a 3rd round TKO by Johnny "Bones" Jones.

Mac Danzig vs. Jim Miller

I don't like Mac Danzig. I think he's a douche, and I think he feels entitled to more than he's earned in the UFC. He's on a a two-fight losing streak since winning TUF: Hughes vs. Serra, and then winning his inagural UFC fight by submitting Mark Bocek at UFC 83. He lost a decision to Clay Guida and was choked out by "The Dentist" Josh Neer at UFC Fight Nights in September 08 and February 09, respectively. I don't know much about Jim Miller, aside from the fact that he went the distance with Gray Maynard at UFC Fight For the Troops, only to lose the decision. It's do or die for Danzig, and I'm hoping for - and banking on - die. Danzig will get cocky after winning the 1st round, and Miller will catch him in a rear naked choke in round 2.

Mark Coleman vs. Stephan Bonnar

Apparently, the 44 year old Coleman is attempting to ride the "if-Randy-can-do-it-I-can-too" wave all the way to the shores of a UFC comeback. The odds are against him, but his resilliance in the Shogun Rua fight was surprising. That being said, "The Hammer" has not won a fight in the UFC in 12 years (when he choked out Dan Severn at UFC 12). His opponent, "The American Psycho," holds UFC victories over Sam Hoger, Keith Jardine, James Irvin and Eric "Ravishing Red" Schafer. He has also been beaten by Forrest Griffin (twice), Rashad Evans and the aforementioned Johnny "Bones" Jones. Bonnar hasn't exactly set the UFC on fire, but he hasn't been slouching, either. I think Stefan is due for a win, and he's going to knock Mark Coleman out of consciousness and back into reality in, ohhh, let's say the 3rd round.

Yoshihiro Akiyama vs. Alan Belcher

Historically speaking, it's not a good thing to be a highly touted fighter making his UFC debut. Just ask Heath Herring, Dennis Kang, Carlos Condit, Brian Stann, Ramaeu Sokoudjou and even Brock Lesnar. (Anderson Silva, as always, is the exception). The rest of the aforementioned were big shots in Pride, WEC or some other promotion. All of them lost their debut fight. So history is against the highly touted Korean judo-ace, Akiyama. He also happens to be facing the man who spoiled the debut of one of the fighters listed above. Alan "The Talent" Belcher rained all over former PRIDE sensation Dennis Kang's parade when he choked him out in the 2nd round at UFC 93 in January. Belcher also holds UFC wins over TUF alumni Ed "Short Fuse" Herman, and Kalib Starnes. However, Belcher has also failed to match the talent, of another TUF veteran, Kendall "Da Spyda" Grove, as well as Jason Day and Yushin Okami. Belcher is competent on the ground and can throw hands, but he doesn't excel in any particular discipline. I'm going to foolishly go against history here and say that Belcher won't be the guy to ruin two UFC debuts in one year. Akiyama by unanimous decision.

Dan Henderson vs. Michael Bisping

I am looking forward to this fight probably more than I am either of the title fights. Michael Bisping was my favorite to win TUF: Ken vs. Tito. Since that time, I have been claiming Bisping as my favorite UFC fighter. He's brash and cocky, but he's also gracious in victory and entertaining to watch inside the Octogon. However, when he became a coach on the most recent go-around of TUF, I saw a different side of "The Count." It was a side that had gone from cocky to arrogant, condescending and obnoxious. His performance on that show has literally changed my entire opinion of him. I am now pro-Dan Henderson in this fight, and hope that maybe a good, old fashioned ass-whoopin' will bring "The Count" down a few much needed pegs. If you look at Bisping's victories in the UFC (after his initial victory over Josh "Bring the Pain" Haynes), the most notable win is his most recent unanimous decision over Chris Leben - who has not been the same since Anderson Silva showed up and promptly rearranged his face. The second-most notable? Matt Hammill - a split decision that Bisping should have lost, but got the benefit of a hometown judges panel as the fight took place across the pond. Next? Elvis Sinosic. Jason Day. "Ravishing Red" (Eric Schafer) and finally, the lowly "Captain Miserable," Charles McCarthy. Is this a who's-who of MMA? Certainly not. Are they tough guys? Yeah, for the most part, but they do not nearly justify the pedestal that The Count has climbed up on. Now he is about to face his first true test. Dan Henderson is an Olympic wrestler, former PRIDE champion, and as far as I'm concerned, too much for Bisping to handle. Now, will it help Bisping at all that he is close friends, and most likely has been training with, one of the only two men to defeat Hendo in the UFC - Quentin "Rampage" Jackson? Probably. Will it help him enough? Probably not. I will say this, though. I do not see Dan Henderson knocking out or submitting Mike Bisping. Hendo - unanimous.

Jon Fitch vs. Paulo Thiago

John Fitch is one of my favorite fighters in the UFC. He's 9-1, and his credits include submission wins over Josh Burkman, Luigi Fiorvanti and Roan Carneiro, decision victories over Diego Sanchez and Akihiro Gono, and a TKO of the man who will be stepping into the Octogon only moments after him to fight for the Welterweight title, Thiago Alves. His lone loss? A unanimous decision in a five round war against GSP. I'm convinced that Jon Fitch could headbutt a grizzly bear to death. He is a tough, tough motherfucker. His opponent? Brazilian police officer Paulo Thiago, looking to follow up his impressive debut KO of Josh Koscheck (one of my happiest moments as a UFC viewer) with an equally impressive sophomore effort? Will he succeed? Nope. Fitch, TKO, 2nd round.

Georges St. Pierre vs. Thiago Alves

This fight rides solely on one factor: which GSP will show up? Will it be the GSP that lost his belt to Matt Serra? Or, will it be the GSP that came back and massacred Matt Serra to get his belt back? Will he prepare properly for this fight, or will he make excuses for why he didn't? I just can't be sure which guy will show - Jeckyll or Hyde. It's hard to dislike GSP, because he's an incredible athlete, he's gracious in both victory and defeat, and he's just so goddamn polite. If he would just put some fucking pants on, I really wouldn't have a problem with him. Here's my thing - GSP is almost in a class of his own when it comes to pure athleticism. He's very good - not great - but very good in all aspects of the game. He can strike, he can wrestle, he's got jiu jitsu and he's got an unbelievable motor. That being said, I don't think he's mentally tough. I think he rattles. And that is where he is vulnerable. Thiago "The Pitbull" Alves has chalked up W's against a who's-who of the welterweight division, including Josh "The Douchebag" Koscheck, Matt "The Even-Bigger-Douchebag" Hughes, and Karo "I'm-Kind-of-a-Dick-but-Still-Likeable" Parisyan. He's got power. He's got wrestling. He's got BJJ. Does he have the tank to go 5? I don't know. I'm positive that GSP does, though. I was leaning toward a safe pick on this one - GSP by split decision, but you know what? I'm going out on a limb here. I think Thiago is going to take the best that GSP can dish out for 3 rounds, and when he's still standing, Georges is going to rattle. In the 4th, Thiago is going to reach down deep and send GSP into la-la land, where he can dream about crepes, croissants, mayonaise and speedo shorts. TKO in the 4th, new Welterweight Champion - Thiago "Pitbull" Alves.

Brock Lesnar vs. Frank Mir

Frank, I tried. I tried for so long to make an agruement; to give you a chance in this fight. "Brock's chin hasn't really been tested, and Mir looked good on the feet against Minataro." Stop. "Mir is a technician. He might catch Brock again." No. Lightning doesn't strike the same spot twice. I tried to talk myself into it, Frank, but I can't lie to myself anymore... neither should you. I had to watch the first fight again to remember it, but there it was, as clear as day. Mazzagatti saved you, Frank. He broke up the mauling that Brock was putting on you due to a shot to the back of the head - a suspect interference to say the least. You will not be so lucky this time, Frank. Too strong. Too athletic. Too much. Brock. KO. 1st or 2nd round. 2nd, in fact. I'll give you that much, Frank. You're welcome.

Monster: The Autobiography of an L.A. Gang Member

2009-07-10T07:54:00.000-07:00

Frequently, I wander aimlessly around Barnes and Noble with no real reading agenda. I half-heartedly look for books that I know they won't have, and half-heartedly pick up books that I know I won't read. Normally, I'll walk around the store with up to five books in my hand before realizing that, at most, I'll probably read one of them. Inevitably, I'll walk out of any given Barnes and Noble visit with an average of three books - one of which I will read right away while the other two are often doomed to languish on my bookshelf collecting dust. They probably talk to each other.

"New guy, huh?" says S.E. Hinton's Hawke's Harbor to Hermann Hesse's Siddartha (a recent purchase in a rare 5-book haul, which included a 'Buy 2, get 1 Free' deal on classics). "I've been here 6 years, and have only been opened twice," says Harbor, a grizzled bookshelf veteran. "Oh, that won't happen to me," says Siddartha. "I'm a classic." Hawke's Harbor chuckles. "Tell that to The Fountainhead," he says. "She's been here two and a half years... hasn't been opened once." Siddartha glances around nervously...

Okay, with that digression out of my system, it's back to business. On the same trip that garnered Siddartha, I also picked up Monster, by Sanyika Shakur, aka Monster Kody Scott. I'd never heard of the book before, but I was driven to buy it for two reasons; Gangland and The Wire. I have become very interested in the concept of "the street," and everything that surrounds urban youth and crime. The Wire isn't about gangs, but it has elements of them (The Barksdale's vs. Marlo Stanfield). Gangland is a show on TLC that chronicles different gangs throughout America at different periods throughout history. Some of the episodes are very well done, while some are a bit cheesy. I watched one on Crips in Alaska and I was hooked. Anyway, this guy Kody Scott is a former Crip whose heyday was during the infamous Bloods and Crips war in South Central Los Angeles during the 1980's and early 1990's. I figured I'd give it a shot, and if nothing else, maybe have something enticing to read for my kids. (Two years ago I had this kid in my class named Chris, who asked me to find something for him to read on his own time that would interest him. He was a tough kid, in trouble all the time, not really into sports, but would probably enjoy reading something centered around urban crime. I didn't really have anything for him.) It took me about a week to finish Monster, reading a couple chapters a night. Along the way, there were things I liked and things I took issue with. By the final 100 pages, I was taking issue more than finding enjoyment, and I just wanted it to be over so I could vent my frustrations. I don't want to completely bash the book, because I think there are meritorious elements of it. I can probably paraphrase my feelings by saying, 'It works and it doesn't.' Kind of a fence-sitting take, I know, and if I had to lean more to one side, it would be the 'It doesn't' side. But I think, before I condemn it, I need to look at what the book was aimed at... what was it's goal? I know what I expected - an expectation that was not met - but what if the book's goal wasn't what I assumed it to be? Is it fair to bash it because the author and I don't see eye to eye? I'm going to go out on a limb and say... yes.

Monster chronicles Kody Scott's rise to infamy, or as he puts it, "Ghetto star status," as a member of the L.A. Crips. The bulk of the 383 pages is devoted to Scott's experiences on the streets and in prison. It's a pretty raw and honest look into the life of a young gang member. To hear Scott effortlessly recount shooting after shooting and stabbing after stabbing is pretty eye-opening. To hear these stories directly from someone who lived them kind of adds a bit of merit to films like Menace II Society and Boyz N the Hood. I remember watching Menace when I was younger, and even in my youth, wanting to call bullshit on several scenes. For instance, the scene where Tyrin Turner and Larenz Tate perform a revenge shooting at a hot dog stand. As one of the wounded victims tries to limp away, the assailants' homeboy shows up saying, "Hey homie, you need some help?" and proceeds to shoot him five more times. 'C'mon,' I thought. I figured it was total Hollywood spin. Nothing like that actually happened. But, according to Kody Scott, this type of thing was commonplace. There are several accounts in Monster of "drive-by" shootings being performed on ten speed bicycles. It is an unflinching look at a culture often emulated but rarely understood. To me, the best part of Scott's description of gang life and his explanation of why certain sets fought one another is that it illustrates the senselessness of the entire thing. Crips fought other Crips, often for no good reason (although Scott explains the reasons as if they made perfect sense, which, to those involved in the conflict at the time, I'm sure they did.)

The bulk of the book is written about, and from the perspective of, "Monster Kody Scott," his gang persona. Only in the closing chapters do we really get the voice of Sanyika Shakur. Oddly enough, it is these chapters that I have the biggest problem with. It's thin ice that I am about to tread onto, because I'm going to play the race card. There is no doubt in my mind that this book was intended for a black audience, and I don't have a problem with that. Scott's dislike of the white man is unmasked and unapologetic, and I don't have a problem with that, either. It's hard for me to believe, obviously, that the entire L.A.P.D., throughout the past three decades, was made up of racist, power-abusing militants. But then again, maybe it was. But it is uncanny to me that Scott can refer to anyone in a position of authority as "oppressors" without so much as a hint of irony or hypocrisy. Scott is, for all intents and purposes, a mass murderer. And, while he does make subtle concessions here and there, he sees no connection between his deeds and his treatment by law enforcement. I find fault in that contradiction. Scott in unflinching in his view that society breeds gangs and encourages their growth, and I do agree with that to some extent. I acknowledge the argument that gangs give kids a sense of family and belonging that they might not otherwise have. However, I also believe in personal responsibility. Becoming a gang member is a choice. Aiming a gun at another human being and ending their life with a squeeze of your finger is a choice. Scott owns his deeds, but he doesn't take responsibility for them, and that's what bothers me. There is no sense of remorse, or at least none that I could detect. And that brings me to my biggest issue of the book: the lack of redemption.

From what I gather from reading the reviews and the covers of the book, I assumed that it was a story about redemption. That a criminal had found faith or love or something else that showed him the error of his previous ways, and was now dedicated both to repentance for his deeds and raising awareness so that others would not repeat his mistakes. I was only half correct. Scott finds something to believe in when he is introduced to the New Afrikan Independence Movement, a group preaching black unity and revolution (and of course, death and destruction to the oppressor, aka the white man). Through this movement, Scott sees the error of his ways (rather than killing other black men, he should be killing police officers and white people), educates himself and rededicates himself to his family. But nowhere in the course of his transformation does he come anywhere close to redeeming himself. He admits that beneath the veneer of Sanyika Shakur, Monster Kody still exists. He gets self-righteous on fellow gang members who share the same attitude that he himself presented for most of his young life. To me, rhetoric does not equal redemption. And that's all the final chapters are, is empty rhetoric. I'm realistic. I'm not looking for some sinner-turned-saint Hollywood ending. What I do need from this book, however, is a message to young people that the events chronicled in this book were wrong (morally speaking). That gang life is a bad decision. Without that, the violence is almost glorifying.

As far as how the book is written, it's an interesting style. Although the perspective of most of the book is that of Monster Kody, the voice is very much the more educated Sanyika Shakur. The narration is done quite eloquently, with a little bit of street lingo sprinkled in. The dialogue is natural and believable. In the narration, there are a couple of things that bother me, the biggest being the substitution of "overstand" for "understand." He does this 100% of the time. The word "understand" does not appear once in this book. I could see using it on occasion in order to drive home a point ("this concept was so important that i overstood it"), but using it all the time with no explanation whatsoever is just off-putting. The eloquence of the narrative, along with some choices in regard to diction, take away from the grittiness of some of the anecdotes. That being said, it is well-written and easy to read.

I guess there were a lot of things working against me liking this book, the biggest being that it wasn't meant for me. It wasn't meant for me, not so much in the sense that I'm a white boy, but that I'm a whiteboy with no firsthand knowledge of the conditions under which Sanyika Shakur grew up; the conditions that contributed to the creation of Monster Kody. Maybe, for Shakur's audience, the book did it's job. But for me, it left me pitying Kody Scott rather than appreciating Sanyika Shakur. The worst part - they are making a movie about Kody Scott starring The Lady of Rage and some other small time rapper. Here's a story that, if told by someone like John Singleton, who is a master at capturing the grim reality of the American ghetto, could be moving and important. Instead, they're going to turn it into Waist Deep 2, and simply exploit the violence. If you're interested at all in gang culture, my advice is to check out the book, but skip the film. If gangs and violence aren't up your alley, skip both.

I Put It Off For As Long As I Could - I Don't Care About Michael Jackson. There, I Said It.

2009-07-07T12:33:00.000-07:00

I'm having a hard time organizing my thoughts about some of the events that have taken place over the past few weeks, which is frustrating, because they are events that I really do want to comment on, and a Facebook status update or (God forbid) a Twitter-tweet won't suffice. These events include, but are not limited to, the Donte Stallworth sentencing, Michael Jackson, and most recently, the murder of former Tennessee Titans and Baltimore Ravens quarterback Steve McNair. There are so many things that bother me about the circumstances surrounding these incidents, from the injustice of a 30-day jail sentence, to the melodramatic public over-reaction to the death of a suspected child molester (yeah, I said it) to the feigned moral judgement of a murdered man. What's the common thread? Celebrity. There is nothing I hate more, and in my opinion, nothing that's been more damaging to us as a society, than our obsession with celebrity.

I loved Michael Jackson as a child, and I've continued to listen to his music all the way up through the present - although now, when I hear it, it disgusts me, because it's usually accompanied by someone making insincere "rest in peace" comments and overly-aggrandizing the effect that The King of Pop actually had on them. I'll be 100% honest, when I heard about Michael's death, I was not moved. Not in the least. Obviously, it is sad when someone passes on. But the death of Michael Jackson was no more (or no less) tragic to me than the deaths of Paul Newman, Heath Ledger, Biggie, Pac, or a hundred other singers, movie stars and athletes that I did not personally know. I felt more empathy and sadness when Stringer Bell and Bodie got killed on The Wire. I know they weren't real people, but I was emotionally invested in them, and therefor, their deaths to me were tragic. I was about as emotionally invested in Michael Jackson as I am Axl Rose or Al Green. They've provided the soundtrack to some great times in my life, and Al even got me laid once or twice. But our connection ends as Axl's voice trails off at the end of "Don't Cry," or the low end drops out of "Let's Stay Together." Now, I'm not going to sit here and tell anyone that they can't grieve over Jackson's death; that's not my place. If Mike affected you in a profound way, than that's your business, and by all means, mourn. What I am going to say is that it makes me sick that all of the man's dirt is being swept under the rug for the sake of some ridiculous notion that Michael Jackson was some kind of entity that transcended what he really was - a singer. I believe that the man molested children. I believe it as firmly as I believe that O.J. Simpson murdered his wife. Both men were found not guilty of these crimes, yet the majority of the public still believes O.J. is guilty, but are reticent to believe the same about Michael. Why? Because Michael was more endearing. He made great music, something all cultures can appreciate. O.J. played football, and sports, believe it or not, are more of a niche than music. When O.J. dies, he will die a pariah. He will not be glorified the way Michael has been glorified over the past few weeks. And still, I think the single biggest problem I have is this: if you believe that Michael Jackson did not molest those children, and you have an argument (preferably a stronger one than, "He made Thriller. Thriller."), that's fine. You're entitled to that. What I cannot forgive is the people who acknowledge that he most likely did molest kids, and then make excuses for him! "Oh, well he never really had a childhood." No argument pisses me off more. What the fuck does that even mean? Am I expected to feel sorry for a kid who was making millions of dollars by the time he hit puberty? I'm sorry, but I'm not buying that brand. I read about a kid who grew up without a father in the worst part of Baton Rouge, LA without a father and had to be the sole provider for his family after his mother, a police officer, was murdered. His name is Warrick Dunn. He is a professional athlete, but more importantly, owns and operates more charitable organizations than Mike has Grammys. He didn't have a childhood, either. When I was student teaching in Brentwood, I had a little girl whose mother was on death row for murdering her little sister. She was a straight A student and the sweetest kid you'd ever want to meet. Where's her fucking childhood? Maybe Michael Jackson did have some kind of deep-seeded psychosis that made him do the things he allegedly did, we, as celebrity-obsessed superfans, were more than happy to overlook his problems so long as he kept making great music. And now, it's more fun and exciting for us to dress up like him, load our ipods full of his music and watch his bullshit memorial service on TV than it is to question his character and reflect on our values. It's a shame that the man died so young, but as far as I'm concerned, Michael Jackson's death is a far cry from a tragedy.

This brings me to Steve McNair. I will say that I believe the death of a 36 year old philanthropist is a tragedy; and if that makes me a hypocrite, so be it. My statement from above stands - I did not personally know Steve McNair, so I am not personally affected by his death. As soon as I read the details of what happened, I knew this was going to be a media mess. He was found with a twenty-year old female "friend." It doesn't take a genius to figure out that Steve was having an affair. The police ruled it a murder-suicide, although they are unsure of the motive. Cue the media vultures. We have to know why! No, we don't. Steve's wife and children, family and close friends have the right to want to know why. We, the general public, do not. Because the only reason the public wants to know why is so that the public can judge. Here was a 36 year old family man, who, in his professional career, epitomized leadership, strength, determination and motivation. In his personal life, he gave back to his community and was classy, respectful carried himself with humility and pride. "But he had an affair." So, do we judge the rest of his life based on an indiscretion? Why not? A few paragraphs ago, I demanded we take Michael Jackson's indiscretions into account, right? But it just re-states the point I was trying to make - the media immediately zero's in on the scandalous aspect of McNair's life while willfully ignoring the much larger scandal surrounding Mike. McNair's friend/girlfriend/mistress was twenty - legal age. Does that make it right? No. But let ye who is without sin cast the first stone, right? I find what Michael Jackson did (and I believe he did it) detestable. I find what McNair did to be against my moral code and it saddens me to hear it, but I will not judge him for it. Again, call me a hypocrite. I'm fine with it. Something I was not fine with was Jeff Fisher speaking for Steve, and saying "Steve would ask to be forgiven." I thought it was a very eloquent and touching speech that Jeff gave, until that part. Because I don't think that Steve would ask forgiveness from the general public. From his wife, sure. From his kids, absolutely. But not us. Because we don't know. And I'm glad we don't.

What we forget is that, when the glamour of a celebrity death wears off - when we've tired of updating our Facebook status and our Twitter pages and making jokes and holding impromptu memorials and watching their funerals on CNN, they are still just people who died. I know this seems like a cliche and a cop-out to ending this rant, but think about this. How many people did you see on CNN today "tearfully celebrating the life of Michael Jackson." Tens of thousands? Hundreds of thousands? And of that number, I will go out on a limb and say 65% of those people didn't show a fraction of that emotion when their own grandmother, or aunt/uncle/cousin died. To me, there's something fucking wrong with that.

Public Enemies

2009-07-05T22:31:00.000-07:00

** If you have not seen the film, now would be the time to stop reading**

I have decided that the movie-going experience has become all about expectations. Expectations can make or break a movie. If you go in not expecting a whole lot, you are more apt to be pleasantly surprised, or at the very least, satisfied (example, The Big Hit starring Mark Wahlberg.) A movie truly has to suck to let you down when you're expectations are low (example, Max Payne, also starring Mark Wahlberg). However, when you set your expectations high, you have a much larger chance of being let down, and therefore not enjoying your movie experience as much as you could have, had your expectations been a bit more reasonable. There is also less payoff when a film meets high expectations, because you expected it to be that good. There is no pleasant surprise. Off the top of my head, I can think of three recent films that exceeded my high expectations - Sin City and Grindhouse (which both involve Quentin Tarantino, which explains why they shattered all expectations) and The Dark Knight - and a handful that may not have exceeded them, but definitely met them (The Departed, Watchmen, Rob Zombie's Halloween, 300, etc.) On the flip side, I recently went into Transformers 2 with sky-high expectations, and left the theater feeling like Blake Griffin after being drafted by the Clippers (insanely depressed and borderline suicidal).

All of that being said, my expectations for Public Enemies were unreasonably high. I tried to talk myself down, but I just couldn't manage to lower the bar in my head, specifically because A) Christian Bale can do no wrong in my eyes, and B) Public Enemies was directed by Michael Mann, who is responsible for Heat, which, in my estimation, is the greatest crime drama ever made. What I unwittingly set myself up for was subconsciously comparing Enemies to Heat throughout the entire movie. It is unreasonable to expect Mann to replicate the lightning-in-a-bottle that he caught on-screen with Heat, and because of those unreal expectations, Public Enemies suffers a bit. I did not quite reach the bar... but it came damn close. It was like Lisa Leslie's gigantic ass just clipping the long-jump bar on Superstars. (I am now both impressed and disgusted with myself for working Lisa Leslie into this review).

There were a lot of things I loved about Public Enemies, a handful of things that I thought could have been done better, but nothing that I hated about it. Overall, I thought it was a great movie. However, it lacked two specific things that Heat had, and I believe it was these two things that caused Enemies to fall short in my estimation. The first is character development. Each character in Public Enemies is exactly the same at the end of the film (or at least, when they meet their end in the film) as they were the first moment they appeared on-screen. John Dillinger is a cocky, charming, violent sonofabitch from the time he breaks his boys out of prison right up until he takes a bullet in the back of the skull. During that same time-frame, Melvin Purvis is a focused, no-nonsense lawman, Red Hamilton is a lapdog-loyal sidekick and Baby-Face Nelson is a lunatic. There is no change; no growth. Of course, each character in Heat is pretty much the same from beginning to end as well, so maybe character development isn't the correct term. Maybe it's character conflict. Each character in Heat at least flirts with the idea of change. Neil McCauley almost walks away... Vincent Hanna almost chooses to salvage his marriage rather than nail McCauley. Even Cerrano from Major League almost turns down the wheel man job. At no point in Enemies does Dillinger ever seriously think about quitting (even when he promises Billie that he will, he still has to pull the train job). Mann hints at some conflict in Melvin Purvis' character, but the hints are subtle and he never actually follows through with any changes. He allows his man to torture a Dillinger associate with a bullet in his head for information, but does so with a "I know this is fucked up, but I've gotta-do-what-I've-gotta-do" look on his face. They get what they need from the dying man, and he doesn't think twice after that.

The other element that Heat has over Enemies is tension. There are two distinct genres in film that require tension - horror movies and crime dramas. Both of these types of films need to have the audience teetering on the edge of their seats to be effective. Heat was tense from beginning to end. I can't relax during that movie, no matter how many times I've seen it. The shootout in front of the bank is a great action sequence, but it's nail-bitingly tense. The pacing is so fast and so much is happening that you can't help but start to sweat in anticipation. Cerrano gets shot and crashes the car, the bald cop with the fantastic mustache gets killed, Kilmer gets wounded and it culminates with a frantically focused Pacino chasing down Tom Sizemore and putting a round between his eyes as he uses a little girl as a human shield. And of course, the end sequence, where Neil and Judging Amy are all but out, but Neil suddenly bangs a U-turn off the expressway to go kill Waingrow. Every time I watch it, I scream at DeNiro, "No! What are you doing, Neil? You were out! Heed your own advice! The heat is around the corner! Walk away! Walk away!" But he never does. And that's what Enemies lacked - it lacked those white-knuckle, ass cheek-clenching moments. I never found myself screaming, "No, John! Don't go to the movies tonight! Don't do it!" Of course, anyone who knows anything about John Dillinger already knows how it's going to end. You never wonder whether or not Dillinger is going to make it out of a given situation. You know when he is, and you know when he isn't. So the tension is built more around Dillinger's crew, and whether or not they will make it out alive. The only real moment of tension is during the Little Bohemia ambush, when the FBI agents are chasing Dillinger and his number one, Red, through the forest. We know Dillinger is going to make it, but we like Red and we're hoping he does, too. However, two scenes ago, Red told Johnny that he felt like his time was up, so even though we're really pulling for him, we know Red isn't going to live through this chase. But, it's shot well enough and paced well enough that it still delivers a bit of tension. And while Red's death scene is peaceful and endearing, we get our fill of ulta-violent come-uppins in the Bonnie and Clyde-esque slaughter of Homer Van Meter and Baby Face Nelson. A little later in the film, Mann tries to inject a bit of tension into the middle of a slightly mundane twenty-minute stretch by having Dillinger casually and inexplicably stroll through the Dillinger Task Force office of the FBI building and even have the audacity to ask a group of bumbling agents the score of the Cubs game. I get that it illustrates his brash cockiness, but at this point there is only fifteen minutes of movie left and it just feels forced and unnecessary.

So, if Public Enemies falls short in these two very-important areas, why does it still work? The answer is simple: Johnny Depp. This movie is ALL Depp. The supporting performances were great, and I'll get to those in just a second, but Michael Mann basically put this movie on Depp's shoulders and he carried it across the finish line. There are very few (current) actors who have the ability to successfully carry a movie on their own from start to finish - Sean Penn, Brad Pitt, maybe Matt Damon, and Johnny Depp. (Will Smith proved he couldn't do it in I Am Legend). This is why I believe that Johnny Depp is the biggest movie star on the planet. With that being said, let me take a minute to acknowledge some great supporting work by a fairly stacked cast. Christian Bale is the 2nd biggest name in this movie, and to be honest, he slapped a 36 cent stamp on this role and mailed it in. Funny thing is, he still knocked it out of the park. How? Simple, A) he is a terrific actor, and B) Mann demanded very little from him in the way of range. Melvin Purvis was all business, all the time. Bale didn't have to manage the Batman/Bruce Wayne double persona, nor did he have to match the intensity of playing John Conner, lose 100 lbs. like he did for The Machinist, or replicate the over-the-top psychosis of his character in Harsh Times. He basically had to show up, put on a scowl, occasionally look pensive and shoot a whole bunch of bad guys, which he could do in his sleep. A barely recognizable Billy Crudup nailed J. Edgar Hoover and Stephen Dorff was shockingly solid as Homer Van Meter. Also noteworthy was Stephen Graham (Shang from Gangs of New York) playing Baby-Face Nelson. There were also some notable actors who had little more than cameo-status roles, including Giovanni Ribisi (one of the more underrated actors of his generation) as Alvin Karpis and Channing Tatum as Pretty Boy Floyd (and you can barely tell it's him, since he spends forty-five seconds of his 1:00 of screen-time running, and the other fifteen seconds coughing up blood after having his guts blown out by Christian Bale).

A couple of things I thought could have been done better: a better set-up of the American landscape in the 1930's. There is brief mention of the Depression, but no explanation as to why the public so readily protected Dillinger from the law and why they had so little sympathy for the banks being robbed. We assume that the public loves Dillinger because he is charming and dangerous, which is partially true, but the fact that financial institutions were taking the brunt of the blame for the Depression also played heavily into the pro-Dillinger attitude. Also, as I touched on a bit earlier, I think Melvin Purvis should have been more conflicted. Here was a man who was handsome, eloquent and educated who is assigned to apprehend a criminal who was as handsome, even more eloquent and consistently proved to be more clever. As a result, he finds himself taking extreme measures that no doubt weighed heavily on him. In fact, his eventual suicide (mentioned briefly in the denoument via text on the screen) is proof that it did. One such incident is during the Little Bohemia shootout, when Purvis empties his Thompson into a car he believes to be carrying Dillinger, only he ends up absolutely shredding three civilians. There is never any sense of remorse or conflict surrounding this, or any other action taken by Purvis, and to me, that rings a bit false. Finally, I will admit to being pro-Channing Tatum, and wished he had more than :60 screen time as Pretty Boy Floyd. Oh well, maybe on the Extended Director's Cut version of the DVD.

All in all, I enjoyed the film. It was worth the price of admission, and it was better than some of the other true crime films involving old school gangsters (Bugsy, Mobsters, Hoodlum, etc). But, if Public Enemies and Heat are on TV on the same day at the same time, I'm picking Pacino and DeNiro over Depp and Bale every time without question (but only Pacino and DeNiro in Heat; definitely not the corpses of Pacino and DeNiro in Righteous Kill. I'd rather watch Cuba Gooding Jr. and Skeet Ulrich in Chill Factor... or Cuba Gooding Jr. and Horatio Sanz in Boat Trip... or Cuba Gooding Jr. and Paul Hogan in Lightning Jack... or Cuba Gooding Jr. and... well, you get the point.)

So Now I'm Rebuilding Home, Stone by Stone by Stone

2009-06-30T20:43:00.000-07:00

My mother called me yesterday, and immediately asked me, "When are you coming home?" For the past two years my reaction to this inquiry has been, "I am home." (provided of course that I was in New York when the question was posed). I have been holding onto my New York roots with a death grip, refusing to acknowledge Florida as anything more than a layover on an inevitable return flight to the Empire State. Whenever a friend, or even a friend of a friend, comes down to visit and gushes about the warm weather and the sunny atmosphere, I bitterly remark that it's "okay for a week or two." I never wanted to be in Florida. It was a snap decision that landed me there, and another that kept me there when I had one foot out the door. And for the past two years, every time I've come home, my resentment toward Florida has grown exponentially with my desire to return to New York.

In the winter, I think of the way my backyard used to look after a snow storm. The ground was covered by a shiny, smooth sheen of snow and ice and the maze of trees that stretched back to the horizon were coated with bluish-grey ice crystals. When the wind blew, icicles would fall from distant branches and make the sprinkling sounds of a million tiny pin-drops. The sky was a light grey and it suffocated the sun. It was like something out of a Tim Burton movie (or an A.F.I. song).

In the spring and summer, I love to drive and just look over the lush greenness of the entire valley. This is where I grew up. So much of the shit that makes me me come from this place... how could anywhere else be home?

Imagine my surprise when, today, I realized that it isn't. Not anymore. I had a great time on this trip. I saw a ton of people, some of whom I haven't seen in far too long. And when we were hanging out, it was as if nothing had changed. I love that about my group of friends. But, what was missing this time was that sense of nostalgia that normally overtakes me when I'm up here. That immediate desire to reintegrate myself into all things Newburgh. To be able to look at a certain spot and see the ghost of myself - and all of us - at 17. I looked. The ghosts were nowhere to be found.

On my first full day on Long Island, I drove out to Post. I figured I could go up to the TV studio and see Kathy, and maybe see if Kati was around. I drove past the back of Nassau Hall, where I spent an awesome summer. None of if came rushing back. I passed Brookville, where I spent my first and last year as a college student. I tried to force the memories back, but they would not come. I walked through Hillwood Commons, trying to picture it packed with familiar faces. When I opened my eyes, I was still just passing through a half-empty building, occasionally marked by the passing of a fresh-faced kid that I didn't know. There was a lot of construction going on, and I had to do some searching around to where certain offices had been relocated. I asked a couple of people here and there, and as they prepared to give me a complicated set of directions, I calmly, and with a forced sense of pride, said, "Oh, I know where it is. I graduated from here." "Okay," they would say, and move on. They didn't care that I had once walked where they were now walking. I milled around the bookstore for a while, contemplating the purchase of a Post hoodie, or at least a "C.W. Post Alumni" t-shirt. Ultimately, I decided that I'd rather have $35 in my pocket than either of those articles of clothing. It was dawning on me that, not only did other people not care about my ties to C.W. Post, but that I didn't care anymore, either.

I had a similar awakening in my home town of Newburgh over the past couple of days. I tried to conjure the ghosts as I drove over the Newburgh-Beacon Bridge, past the Newburgh Mall, the movie theater, even my old house. Normally, it looked like some kind of holy sanctuary when I drove past, with images of my father asleep in his chair, or the guys and I packing out the living room floor, hungover, while my mother cooks the ill breakfast. Today, I just saw a house.

I love this area, and I'd love nothing more than to be able to come home from work and stop by Danny's place to have a few beers and watch the game with him, Pat and Chris, or to be able to take a ride out to Pennsylvania every now and then so that Bobby's daughters don't have to re-learn who I am every time I see them. I'd like to be able to go into the city and chill with Pat and Prague more than once a year. But, I also understand that distance is part of life, and it's because the bonds we've built are so strong that the distance, while painful at times, doesn't really depress me anymore. I might end up back here someday... or I might not. If I do, it won't be hard to make it home again. If not, I know there's a new home waiting. Tomorrow night, I'll pack up and start heading back to the closest thing to home that I now have. A little over a year ago, I was having a conversation via text message with my friend Dani. I was telling her about an upcoming trip to NY, and how I couldn't wait to get home. She sent me a text that said, "You are home." Though I didn't think it then, I guess she was right.

Today is Always the First Day of the Rest of Our Lives

2009-06-29T12:45:00.000-07:00

I'm a thinker. This is unequivocally true. In fact, it is not inaccurate to say that I am a thinker to a fault. Not only do I think about everything, but I over-think everything. I stew and brood and analyze so much that even Hamlet would tell me to get out of my head for a while. Does this have anything to do with the fact that I spend the majority of my personal time in an empty apartment? Absolutely. But this isn't the cause of my penchant for pensiveness. It's been a part of my DNA since the day I was born. I inherited it from my father, and I've kept it going strong. My current living situation only serves to exacerbate the habit. I am not apologizing for this. I don't feel the need to apologize for anything that makes me who I am, whether the traits are positive, negative or benign. I am just stating a fact - one that was already as clear as day to anyone who knows me. However, this fact will be the concrete foundation that this blog will be built upon. Everything I write in here will come straight from my muddled, overcrowded, conflicted mind - unfiltered and uncensored. Some of it will be entertaining and some of it will be agonizingly boring. Some of it will be confusing, and some of it will (hopefully) be enlightening. Some of it will be eloquent, and some of it will be vulgar and offensive. Some of it will be timely and relevant, although most of it will probably be utter gibberish. The one thing I can promise is that it will all be honest and raw and real.

One of the things that I consistently obsess and re-obsess over is a plan for the future. In times of extreme laziness (Sunday mornings and summer vacations are prime examples), I think about the things that I want to accomplish. Sometimes I think big picture, other times I focus on the short term. I think about where I want to be five years from now, or what I want to cover in the first week of school. The common thread in this web of what-ifs and whens is that I very rarely follow through with them. I never draw up a plan and put it into action. I don't write these things down when they come to me, and before I know it, I'm watching Seinfeld re-runs and the productive, proactive portion of my brain withdraws into hibernation. Never has this been more painfully obvious to me than it was on my last day at Liberty High School. Last summer, I had huge plans for myself as a classroom teacher. I had all of these great ideas to motivate and educate. Do you know how many of them I implemented? Not a single one. As a result, I limped through the year, often not caring whether or not I was prepared for the following day's lesson. That is NOT the kind of teacher I want to be. While leaving Liberty was a bittersweet moment, I have convinced myself to look at it as an opportunity rather than an impediment. My slate is clean. I have the opportunity to grow and learn from my experiences and mistakes, or to repeat them. I prefer the former, though God knows I've experienced my share of the latter.

Presently, I'm typing this on my friend Danny's computer from his apartment in Montgomery, NY. He and his fiance, Deana, are both at work. I'm watching the Dark Knight on their flat-screen TV, and drinking a Pepsi from their refrigerator. A couple of hours ago, I was at TGI Fridays, having lunch with my best friend, Pat. After lunch, he went off to football practice (he is entering his first year as the safety coach at the varsity level and the defensive coordinator at the JV level at Wallkill High School - where we both attended and played football) and I went across the street to Barnes & Noble. I browsed around a bit, and decided on a few books. There was a special on literary classics (buy two at $6 each and get the 3rd one free), so I picked up The Metamorphosis and Other Stories by Franz Kafka, Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse and The Art of War by Sun Tzu. I also picked up The Football Coaching Bible, and this is where the impetus for this entry is derived from.

About three weeks ago, I spoke to Coach Rolson, the head football coach at Osceola, about coaching vacancies at the freshman or JV levels. I wasn't looking to do anything more than reprise the same role I had in Liberty's program - volunteer as the wide receiver/defensive back coach. However, Coach Rolson spoke to me about a paid position, and though he didn't come right out and say it, but the insinuation was that he was looking for someone to fill the head coaching position at the freshman level. The prospect of this both excites me and scares the living shit out of me. Since that discussion, I have not contacted him. I've looked at the business card he gave me every single day, but I have not called. In the time that's passed, I've talked myself into, out of and back into accepting this responsibility. I've come up with every single reason in the book not to do it, and I almost had my mind made up... until today. At lunch, I discussed my apprehension with Pat. I told him that I didn't think I had nearly enough experience to be the skipper of a team. Pat kind of shrugged, and said, "You can do it." He told me that he accepted the head JV-baseball coaching position at his old school in Massachusetts without knowing much about baseball or coaching. "You learn on the fly," he said.

This conversation brought me face to face with one of the things I desperately want to change about myself, and that is my lack of self-confidence when it comes to great responsibility. I can easily trace it back to a moment that has haunted me for over a decade. I am ashamed of it to this day, and it's difficult to write about. But, I promised that in this blog I would be candid and honest if nothing else. When I was a junior in high school, I was the starting tight end and a back-up defensive end for the Wallkill Panthers. Our biggest rival was Port Jervis High School. The first year I faced them was as a freshman on JV, and we lost 50-0. My sophomore year was not as much of a slaughter, but we lost just the same. Cut to halftime of the Wallkill-Port Jervis game, October 1997. Wallkill is winning, 7-0. I am playing an outstanding game on the offensive side of the ball. I am blocking their star defensive end, Chris Theodore. There is alumni in the locker room, ecstatic with the possibility of beating Port. Matt and Jay Shuart, former offensive linemen (and just about the nicest guys you'd ever want to meet) are talking me up in giddy, excited voices. "He's their bad ass," they gush. "You're shutting him down!" I should be fired up, but I'm not. In my head, over and over, repeat the words, "DON'T FUCK UP. DO NOT FUCK THIS UP. YOU BETTER NOT FUCK THIS UP. YOU CANNOT FUCK UP." Fast forward to the fourth quarter. Less than two minutes remain. Wallkill leads, 10-7. Port Jervis has the ball deep in their own territory. This is their last shot. I am standing on the sideline, and I am absolutely beaming. I did my job. I shut down their star defensive player for the entire game. No tackles, no sacks. Not on my watch. Suddenly, my self-satisfied revelry is broken by Coach Brain, the defensive line coach. "Tatum, get in there for Gallagher!" I look to the field, and our defensive end, John Gallagher, is slightly limping and sucking wind. Now, I loved playing tight end, and I knew I was good at it. I was a great blocker; big and strong and hard to get around. But I was slow, and I wasn't very agile. I wasn't a very good defender. And the last thing that I wanted was to miss a tackle and have it be MY FAULT that Wallkill lost to Port yet again. I look at Coach Brain, mollified, and ask, "Are you sure?" "Yes, I'm sure! Get in there!" he screams out the side of his mouth, as he was famous for doing. I move tentatively toward the field. John sees me moving toward him, and he waves me off. He turns back to the line and awkwardly moves into his three-point stance. I immediately felt about 3 inches tall. It was humiliating and I hated myself for it. Two plays later (neither of which were run to Gallagher's side), Port was forced to punt. We ran out the clock in the victory formation and we celebrated a gigantic win. I basked in it with my friends and teammates, but that moment ingrained itself in my head... and it remains there today.

For twenty-eight years, I've done my best to remain overly-humble in all of my accomplishments, for no other reason than the crippling fear that any show of confidence or personal recognition would immediately result in some kind of karmic catastrophe, ending in complete and utter failure. I literally believe this. And what I've come to realize is that this fear has made me hesitant to step up and accept responsibilities that I both want to undertake and know I am capable of handling. I don't want to live like that anymore. I am ready to face new responsibilities, and if I fail, I can guarantee I will go down swinging. Nobody wins all the time. This does not just apply to the coaching job, but to my future in general. I am going to make a concentrated effort to follow through on goals that I set for myself.

What will be hilarious is if, when I call Coach Rolson when I get back to Florida, he tells me that he never wanted to to take a head coaching position in the first place. I wouldn't be upset, but more importantly, I would not be relieved. Come what may, I am determined to step up to my responsibilities, whatever they may be, and though I will continue to remain humble, it won't be out of fear.