God Damn It

Dear reader, please don't be offended by my impending use of foul language: sometimes you just gotta use strong words to convey equally strong feeling.

But Jesus fucking Christ, some of you assholes are annoying the shit out of me on Facebook, and it has to fucking stop. I'm only talking to the particular subset of IQ-challenged, dumbfuck "friends" of mine who "like" pages with names like "Wonderful Heels on Sale", "Sexy Heels on Sale", "High Heels!", "Your Next Shoes", "Shoe Fetish Boutique", and well...I could go on seeing as there are approximately eleventy billion more such pages--none of whose names in the preceding list did I make up, mind you--but well, since reading isn't likely to be one of your strong suits, I imagine a little forced brevity can only help my cause.

Look, I get that in order to make it through this thing we call reality, people need to have stupid interests/hobbies/pursuits to occupy their time, lest they go crazy. Lord knows I've got my own: sports, fantasy sports, watching cat videos on youtube, and poetry, to name but a few. Christ, I've even touched on the subject of the importance of stupid interests/hobbies/pursuits on this very blog before, as I did towards the end of this essay I wrote following Sean Taylor's (rest his soul) untimely passing. But I'm not the asshole who clogs up people's news feeds with bullshit every time a God damned fantasy player of mine scores a fucking touchdown, either. I keep that shit to myself.

I grant you: you're more than likely unaware that you're being such an obnoxious fucking nuisance--but you've been duped; you're a shill and you don't even know it. This recent Atlantic Wire article talks about the scary and very real possibility that in the near future, facebook will feature even more prevalent advertising than it has already, and you're such a stupid asshole that you're basically letting shoe stores whore you into a virtual fucking sandwich board, right the fuck now, for free.

You see, Forrest, whenever your facebook buddy, good ol' Miss Shoe Fetish Boutique, "tags" you as a picture of 7 inch Louboutin stilletos made of hope and dreams, I am, as is EVERY OTHER "FRIEND" of yours, forced to look at the same God damned picture of what are in the end a terrible, terrible bastardization of the Platonic ideal of "Hey! Let's put things on the bottoms of our feet so we can move around better and not get hurt!" Did you know that wearing high heels can cause turf toe, the injury so named because it's prevalent amongst athletes who play football? Didn't think so...

Anyway, I've been on facebook so long that I remember when you could only join the site if you had an email address with an '.edu' at the end of it. And I'm tired of fucks like you doing your best to trash it up and turn it into God damned, ugly-ass myspace, lowering the hivebrain's collective IQ and shit. In closing, I'd just like to say that if I've offended you by writing this, I'd recommend doing what I do whenever I see your shoe-porn: click the little 'x' in the upper right corner of this post on facebook and select the "Hide all updates from this person" option.

Good day, madam.

99+55=30

The above picture is a screengrab of the actual chat-room from my fantasy football live-draft that we just finished a couple hours ago; Yale, who is the league commissioner, made at least 2 funnies...

Man, my fantasy roster is STACKED this year. Obviously, it's gonna change a whole lot between now and the end of fantasy playoff time,--and with an L.T./Randy Moss deal between myself and Jake potentially in the works right now, it may change rather soon... Basically, Jake's the biggest Randy Moss devotee I've ever known; he'd walk barefoot through hot coals for #84 #18 #81. Jake luckily [for me] drew the #1 overall pick, and since he was busy out in Portland, conveniently [for me], had LaDainian auto-picked to his team. I took a few gambles, I know: Cotchery was a bit of a reach, but he had 1100 yds. last season--and now has Brett Favre throwing him the ball. Chester Taylor and Ricky Williams are both backups in real life, but play behind a couple guys who have reputations for injuries, so both of them could, great players in their own rights, have great fantasy upside if they ever have to take over for their respective teams. Even though I accidentally drafted Kevin Curtis, whom I didn't know was currently injured, I feel pretty good about my squad's chances right now:

My starters:
QB Donovan McNabb (Eagles)
WR Randy Moss (Patriots)
WR T.J. Houshmandzadeh (Bengals)
RB Frank Gore (49ers)
RB Laurence Maroney (Patriots)
TE Chris Cooley (SKINS)
W/R Edgerrin James (Cardinals)
K Shaun Suisham (SKINS)
DEF Jacksonville

My bench:
QB Jason Campbell (SKINS)
WR Santana Moss (SKINS)
WR Jerricho Cotchery (Jets)
WR Kevin Curtis (Eagles)
RB Chester Taylor (Vikings)
RB Ricky Williams (Dolphins)

Now obviously, everyone else in the league feels pretty good about their chances too, right now...except for Body and Dubs. Their teams will suck on purpose because they actually made joke selections instead of good ones, which may have had to do with the fact that they were bojanglin' drunk and in Korea, where for them it was precisely 1:15 a.m. tomorrow at the time the draft started.

For example, Body (huge Longhorn fan) started out the comedy right with a massive sucker punch to conventional wisdom with his first (#3 overall) pick: Titans quarterback Vince Young, a former Texas player worth, at best, a 3rd rounder. Body then went on to take Redskins rookie tight end Fred Davis with his third round pick simply because that's when Davis went in the real draft last April, but despite the fact I was able to select the Pro Bowl TE who starts over him in real life, Captain Chaos himself, in the fifth round. Body's other gems, besides basing a pick on a guy's sharing a name with the Wendy's guy: using his 5th rounder on Steelers rookie WR Limas Sweed, his 7th rounder on Chiefs rookie RB Jamaal Charles, his 10th rounder on Broncos scrub RB Selvin Young, and his 15th rounder on Buccaneers backup QB Chris Simms. They all played college ball for Texas...

The blind--or in this case, drunk--must have been leading the blind because Dubs, a UVA grad and die-hard fan, followed Body's example and made a few insane, college-team-preference-based draft decisions of his own: Texans QB Matt Schaub in the 2nd, Jets RB Thomas Jones in the 3rd, Steelers TE Heath Miller in the 4th--when Cooley, inarguably a better option at TE, was still available--and Raiders WR Ronald Curry in the 13th round. All were UVA players except Curry, who almost signed a letter of intent there, as a star high school QB 11 years ago, before stiffing them to go to UNC instead. Wahoos hold grudges, apparently.

I continued the trend of blind homer-ism, although I, unlike Dubs and Body, got good value out of mine, as I now have Santana Moss at WR (poised to have a better year than last, still dangerous though he's often over-looked, better offense for his style than Gibbs used) Chris Cooley at TE (what can I say? he's a super-hero), Shuan Suisham as my kicker (starting kicker's stats are usually around the same 100-130 or so in fantasy points terms, so why not go local?) and Jason Campbell at QB (Coach Zorn will prove his mettle as a molder of young QBs and turn this guy into a pro-bowler, mark my words.) I have more Redskins than any other team in the league, but I take my Redskins love seriously; my only real joke of a pick was Ricky Williams...

Speaking of jokes, I think I'm gonna re-name my team "The Campbell Brothers" because of my two quarterbacks: Jason Campbell and Donovan "Soup Ad" McNabb, both of whom happen to also be black.

Anyway, I'm out. It's gorgeous outside right now, in that magically golden time of year when anything, like Andre Carter and Jason Taylor combining for 30 sacks, the Redskins having more pro-bowlers than a hand's worth of fingers, or me not losing in the first round of the fantasy playoffs after dominating my league with an 11-2 record, is possible.

Cheers, gents.

How Adam Got His Groove Back, or, The Fifth Day

And in wanting freedom we discover that it depends entirely on the freedom of others, and that the freedom of others depends on ours.

Tuesday the twenty-second of July, 2008 was a big day for me. I am writing this post, on what is now Thursday evening (and Saturday evening when I finally got around to finishing this) as a completely different man from the one I was then. This isn’t to say that we’re not all, as human beings, constantly evolving on a day-to-day basis because, yes, we are! No, what I mean to say is that Tuesday was an especially evolutionary day in my life because of one unusual event that occurred at its mid-point: I, along with five friends, very nearly died.

To begin, the beginning: I woke up relatively early at around eight. Put on a pot of coffee…read the Washington Post online while waiting for said coffee to finish its dripping…the usual. By the time my coffee was ready, I had decided to re-read, for the umpteenth time, Sartre’s Existentialism and Human Emotions because I was, well, feeling a little angst-y and forlorn over my proverbial “Certain Someone” whom, at 8:10 on Tuesday morning, I hadn’t seen or really heard from for a couple days or so. I knew that my C.S. was going through…a bit of a rough patch, so in the interest of not upping her stress level, I had to try as hard as I could to contain and control my tendency to become attached at the hip. In order to stay chill about the whole situation, to keep being cool for her sake, and to avoid having a complete existential freak-out for my own sake, I needed Sartre to simultaneously remind me and let me forget that: in order to get any truth about myself, I must have contact with another person. The other is indispensable to my own existence, as well as to my knowledge about myself.

I needed to be reminded that there are indeed other others (besides C.S.) in the equations of my self: namely, my friends. And by the time I finished reading the 110 or so pages of the book, plans were already in place to partake in a favorite past-time which would be sure to set my mind at ease: a hike to and a swim in Difficult Run along with Kristin, Zack, Tim, Brittany, and Lauren. (Rita, who’d originally come up with the notion of going to Difficult Run on Tuesday a couple nights prior, was supposed to come along too, but she said she felt sick.) So we went with six—three guys and three girls. We were all feeling so carpe diem about the trip that lay before us that we must have forgotten all about the thunderstorms that were strong enough to fill several times over the keg-sized plastic tub underneath the leak in the gutter while I read on the screened in porch earlier that morning. The afternoon sun tricked me into forgetting.

As we passed the No Swimming sign at the midpoint of the trail, I considered that Sartre wrote: we want freedom for freedom’s sake and in every particular circumstance. (I then considered my tight pink striped Tommy Hilfiger bathing suit.) Our swimming spot is probably the same one where everyone who breaks the rules and swims in Difficult Run swims. It’s the one that’s located at the base of that one seemingly endless, and very steep log-staircase built into the side of the ravine about a quarter mile after the trail crosses down under Georgetown Pike and joins the high horse trail from below and to its right. If you haven’t ever been there, and are wondering which seemingly endless, and very steep log-staircase is the right one to take, you don’t know yet that there is only one set of seemingly endless log-stairs along the entire Difficult Run trail, that it is quite easy to find, and that the experience of swimming in the swimming spot to which it leads is highly recommended by me. Now you know all three.


It had gotten to be around two in the afternoon by the time we arrived at the base of the log-staircase to look out at the water in pristine condition. We could see that the water was resting calmly and at a relatively low level, down a few inches from the last time I’d trekked out to the swimming spot the week beforehand. Everyone else jumps in immediately but I look up instead and stare into the sky: the same sun, which had earlier tricked me into forgetting about that morning’s thunderstorms, was shining so brightly and perfectly that I could even see clear through the gently moving water all the way down to each illuminated rock on the bottom of the shallow side, which is not usually the case at all. In fact, because the sunlight was so particularly bright that day, I felt safe doing a dive between two large underwater rocks.

Thankfully, the apparent perfection of the conditions that was first evident that afternoon before I dove in was still intact when I surfaced; the water was not as chilly as it had been the week beforehand and not as turgid either. I could even see when I opened my eyes under the creek water, which had settled, at that moment, somewhere between cerulean and olive instead of any other of its infinitely varying possible shades of green to blue, grey to brown.

I ask the others, who have already climbed their way to the jumping rock on the deeper section of creek (which is on the opposite side of the creek from the staircase) if anyone wants to go behind the waterfall with me. Only Kristin said yes; she had never been behind the waterfall before. To get there, we have to go against the current that the confluent forces of the waterfall create, which simultaneously compels and repels us both to and from the waterfall. We flop our selves over a series of slippery, yet smooth and non-jagged, algae-covered rocks on our way upstream like salmon ready to spawn; I imagine I am one when I look foolish and nearly slip. Our arrival is made easily enough, though. Once inside, we find that hundreds—perhaps thousands—of years of water’s persistent, chronic violence against rock, played right out before our eyes underneath the waterfall, have left the rocks polished, like glass, or obsidian.

We then rejoined the rest of our group and five minutes later, while the six of us stood together atop the jumping rock, everything changed in an instant. The sun still shone just as before, but the creek water had turned opaque brown and the current was gaining speed.

It was a flash flood.

I’m standing at the top of the jumping rock when I look upstream and see the waterfall, which five minutes prior was a perfect stage for Kristin’s and my mock “Irish Spring” commercial—Refreshing!—but was now littered with debris,—some as big as whole oaks—angry and Vesuvian. Sartre wrote: …we can understand why our doctrine horrifies certain people. Because often the only way they can bear their wretchedness is to think, “Circumstances have been against me. What I’ve been and done doesn’t show my true worth. I was trying to tell myself not to be the wretched guy.

I thought those words to myself ad infinitum as I watched the gap of rocks separating my shirt, towel and shoes from the waterline at the base of the log-staircase—which by that point had gone from five yards to only a couple of feet or so—grow ever smaller like the waning moon. My mind opened up and was flooded with long-dormant motifs: Old Coach Wacker who once exhibited Rocky III during a team bus ride to Fayetteville, then later used the movie’s catch-phrase, “Just give them ol’ boys the eye of the tiger!” in his pre-game speech before the Methodist game. I remember the smell of my first real girlfriend’s hair, how my mother was telling the truth yet I didn’t believe her when she insisted that she never once thought her cancer might win, how lovely C.S. really is without makeup, in her natural state.

Four days have passed since Tuesday. I write still happy-tired and muscle-sore from the hike (and swim) C.S., Kristin, Mike, and I went on this Saturday morning, July 26, 2008. It hadn’t even occurred to me until I pulled out my first fistful of river silt and deciduous matter that I was wearing the same bathing suit as I had worn Tuesday.

Today, I get to live in a house made with four of my best friends and our ever-present roster of lovely guests and friends. We discuss Sartre, Camus, and Heidegger. I play “Two-Headed Boy” on my guitar detuned and forget half the words. We invoke Ginsberg at least once annually and gather to dance at least once monthly. And the booze! The future swells all around us and everyone is in love. I’m finally writing again. I will miss this place terribly, but not just yet…

For now, I am free.

We are all free now.

'Elitist' is the new 'Flip-Flopper'

Why is it that every election cycle popularizes a whole new set of pejoratives for dumb fucks to lob around? Seriously; somebody show me a chart of Rush Limbaugh's average per-show use of the word 'elitist' throughout his radio career since the '94 midterms...$50 bucks says it's spiked to an all-time high in the past year.

I'm not saying that conservatives are the only ones guilty of such brand-conscious name-calling here. Both sides do it. It's just that conservatives are so boringly predictable about it. If I were in charge of what new political buzzwords became popular in a given election, you can be damned sure I'd come up with something more substantial and biting than 'elitist' or 'flip-flopper:'

Cunt-zit.

It's more direct, more honest, and way more appropriate to its target audience--many of whom are unlikely to even know the actual definition of 'elitist;' all of whom are guaranteed to know that cunt-zits are highly undesirable. To anyone.

On facebook meta-grief...

The tombstone pictured to the left, for the uninitiated, is famously from Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five. The day after Vonnegut passed away earlier this April, I decided to make said tombstone my facebook profile picture for a while(instead of what it had been, to that point: a shot of my dog Lady licking my face while we lounged on a floral-printed couch.) It was a small gesture, granted, but was undertaken mainly for my own personal reasons: namely the expression in a (microcosmically myopically limited) public arena of the very real grief that I--and countless other pseudo-literati, no doubt--felt at the passing of such an iconic monument of a writer. I cried when I heard that Vonnegut passed on.

Vonnegut was, as the avclub pointed out shortly thereafter, simply better at stuff than his peers. To anyone who'd ever become familiar with the man's work(s), this truth was/is self-evident, and perhaps they would have appreciated the sentiment behind my facebook-pic gesture (if they'd ever seen it--unlikely though that may be.) What Vonnegut's death meant though, to those affected by it, was that we would never read another new book of his; that by dying, Vonnegut's body of work became crystallized firmly in the past.

I raise the issue because it fits into the context of a newer, similarly re-reactionary phenomenon: the away message memorials and/or facebook profile-pic-publicized grieving of Redskins fans over Sean Taylor's recent shooting and death...and the response(s) to them. If you're on facebook and you know me, you've most likely seen at least a few friends who've, as I have, replaced whatever their old profile pic was with a shot of the Meast himself, #21 of our beloved Redskins. As I write, I count 11 facebook friends and acquaintances with Taylor-ized profiles...

Not that there's anything wrong with that...

See, now I'm gonna get meta up in this blog. I'm gonna blog about (/react to) the reactions of a few online friends to my and others' (already reactionary, emotional) choice of silly online memorialization following the death of a collective hero. I know, I know: how masturbatory...how narcissistic...how unimportant. But how appropriate to air out in a blog!

I've noticed the comments of several people in particular across my various buddylists and blogrolls. Each, I assume, is not a fan of the Redskins. And each's comments have seemed, to me, to serve to question the validity of the sentiments of profile Taylor-izers.

Paraphrasing the first [anonymous] away message, from the very *DAY* the shooting occurred: "7 Marines died in Baghdad today. They didn't play football or make millions, but they were pretty fucking important too."

I mean, really! What is this? A righteous sanctimony competition? Could this responder just be commenting to piss on a pity party to which they were never invited in the first place? Should they, you know, follow the advice their momma surely gave them and simply, um...say nothing when there is nothing nice to say at all?

Which brings me to the second [anonymous] status message I'll quote in this here post: "wondering why Rosa Parks didn't get her picture on Facebook more when she died, or the guy shot in southeast last week."

OK, you got us bereaved Redskins fans pinned right there. We OBVIOUSLY invest a whole shit-ton of emotional energy into an institution and a game that counts for absolutely nothing in the realm of things that Actually Matter--read: Are Capitalized. Are Important--in some hypothetical Real World where people waste none of their precious time...utils, whatever...on matters that aren't wholly concerned with some vague notion of an absolute greater good. And it goes without saying that all these questions of (relative...right?) value are ABSOLUTELY defined for us here by people who'd tell us what we should and should not care about. Convenient.

Anyway: if you don't get it, you just don't get it. Being a football fan means that you happen to use the same diversion as several hundred thousand people to escape so-called reality for a few hours every Autumn Sunday afternoon. And nothing more.

It's only natural: everyone needs to have silly stuff to care about; we'd all go nuts otherwise...Reality bites. Does it really matter if these silly emotional investments we all make happen to be into people or gods or football teams or television dramas or the myriad manifestations of art or sex? Is there a quantifiable difference?

No. What matters is that we have found ways to occupy our selves. To bond, even.

When tragedy affects these silly emotional investments people make, (silly or not,) there is a genuine emotional response on the part of the investor. And though we all may not share the same response or care when, say, a Kurt Vonnegut (/or Cobain) or Sean Taylor or Rosa Parks or a soldier anywhere (/or an innocent civilian anywhere!) dies: maybe it's better not to point out the fact that one doesn't feel or care about the latest tragedy, and just allow the space to actually feel or care to those silly, misguided emotion-investors who do.

And yes. This is indeed a motherfucking sanctimony competition.

Bitches.

Pearls before swine...

OK.

So I'm well aware that my reputation as a "music snob" precedes me in certain circles. And I used to have a problem with people perceiving me in such a way; but have you ever noticed that the people who throw around the term "music snob" as pejorative are the same folks who get their jollies to Avril, Nickelback and the like?

Isn't that kinda like the pot calling the kettle...spoon?

At the gym where I work, we have a corporate policy which limits the satellite radio stations we're allowed to play over the P.A. to essentially 3 stations whose names consist of various combinations of the words 'hot', 'hits', 'contemporary', and/or 'new'. Imagine a consistent, bi-hourly dose of "Hey There Delilah" for about 5 straight months of workdays and you're pretty close to an accurate rendering of the purgatory this grudgingly self-avowed "music snob" is forced to endure. Day in. And day out. And so on...

So in the interest of staying sane (see quotation in blog header), I began three Sundays ago to deviate from the 3-stations-only policy and to play instead the station labelled "College Rock." If I were in charge of satellite radio station naming, I'd have called it "Indie Rock." A minor semantic difference, but I digress. You catch my drift: the station plays a pleasant mix of Spoon, CYHSY, Rilo Kiley, BSS, Rogue Wave, Feist, etc. Granted, this doesn't match my musical tastes perfectly, but it's as close as I can get with the limited options at hand; and--hey! "College Rock" hasn't played a single Nickelback song in a month! Several Sunday regulars have even thanked me for breaking up the monotonous dirge to which they've no doubt become accustomed. But not every one's been so appreciative...

I'm sitting here at my desk in the back office. Guy walks up to the front desk and I overhear him requesting that Janie, our lovely and awesome front desk attendant, please change the station. Guy complains that the music sounds like--and I quote--"Something a snobby 19-year old college freshman would listen to while sitting in a coffee shop."

I bite my tongue.

Janie in her syrupy, Southern lilt: "Well, you know what, sir? It says here that this one's called College Rock..."

He, interupting: "See! See! What'd I tell you!?"

And I'm thinking: OK, so douche correctly identified (A): that college students--at least, the snobby ones--happen to enjoy the Rogue Wave, whose song "Every Moment" happened to be playing at the time, and (B): some satellite radio focus group somewhere decided to connote this type of music with the word 'college'. Brilliant work, Brother Seamus. Just brilliant.

Alas, the customer is indeed always right. Janie asks the man what he'd prefer to hear instead, and he says, "Oh, you know. Whatever the stuff is you all usually play..."

Janie: "Allllllright sir. I'll go ahead with Hot Hits Sweep." Immediately the strains of--you guessed it!--"Hey There Delilah" filled the air, and our douche, sated, was on his way after a parting Ahhh, that's better. This is a great song.

So whatev. Different strokes, I guess. Call me "snob". Call me "elitist". Call me "pretentious", even. I don't give, as they say, a damn.

In this instance, at least, I'd rather be on the side of the 19-year-old coffee-house-dwelling college freshman than on the side of 14-year-old bedroom-pining, TRL-swilling girls everywhere. As I write this, "Holland 1945" by Neutral Milk Hotel is playing on College Rock and my nipples are hard.

LONG LIVE THE SNOBBERY!