Edgar! Edgar! Edgar!

He's had a terrible year.

And our schedule is significantly harder than Colorado's, such that we're not on whom you want to bet.

And, as predicted, the deadline deals have been busts. 

But that was a helluva weekend and, watching on the DVR at 11:00 PM last night, I came off my couch when Edgar Renteria hit that grand slam.  It's a fun team and it's been a fun year.  Giants!

What I watched after the game was the Daytime Emmy Awards; similar to the BET Awards, I like to use awards shows to maintain some type of annual connection with that element of the culture.  And my dominant thought was about the health care debate.

Not literally, although Krugman, and Kristoff, moved the ball nicely over the past couple of days, but what I was thinking about was the unease the people feel when their institutions are taken away from them.

The most insufficiently covered entertainment story of the summer is the end, after 72 years, of The Guiding Light.  I've written before (beats the hell out of me where, I thought it was in this space) about the way that media marginalizes a form of entertainment like soap operas because of it being culturally relegated not only to women but to "stay at home" women.  One can't say, "you know who's a tremendous actor, that Grant Aleksander" without being thrown in a barrel with those viewed as disposable. 

Probably, there are fans of the Guiding Light who have followed the narrative for decades - the
Spauldings and Bauers are integrated into their lives in the way that their daily newspaper used to be.

If you're a person of a certain age, and your newspaper is gone, and your television program is gone, and your house has significantly dropped in value, and maybe the stores where you shop have vanished and your bank went out of business - if those bedrock, stable institutions in your life have just...ended...over the past year, how unreasonable is it to believe that Democrats are going to take their health care away?

I'm empathetic to those who feel like screaming at an elected official.  Hell, I'm right there with them if the screaming is about the last administration's trillion dollar big government Iraq War or the big government suspicionless spying on US citizens undertaken by last administration, or the now unprecedented levels of economic inequality that have turned the 21st century into Gilded Age2K.

I'd even be willing the scream about the end of Guiding Light.  There are lots of reasons to yell at a Congressman.  Philadelphia fans wearing jerseys of a guy who put dogs on rape stands. The environmental unsustainability of our way of life and the use of the cloak of religion to justify our scientific ignorance.  The inevitable collapse of my Giants, certain to cause me maximum pain right around my birthday, as has happened virtually every year of my life. 

I'd yell at a Congressman about all of that.

But giving Americans the same level of health care as every other industrialized country in the world would give them?

No, that would be change worth believing in, thanks.  

Your Athlete of the Month - August, 2009

Usain Bolt.

Runners-up:  Cliff Lee, YE Yang, Albert Pujols

Bolt joins the previous 7 winners (Fitzgerald, Holmes, Moore, James, Messi, Federer, Buehrle) in the race to be Athlete of the Year. 

And that will lead to the Athlete of the Decade Award (note, of course we end the decade here, otherwise when we talk about the 1990s, we wouldn't include 1990.  90s were 90-99.  So this decade is 2000-09.  It's not math.  It's culture.  Read Stephen Jay Gould.).

Your nominees:

Tiger Woods, Barry Bonds, Lance Armstrong, Peyton Manning, Reggie Bush, Roger Federer, Tom Brady, Usain Bolt, and whomever wins this year.  Athlete of the Decade!  Fun to do.  (yes, I know Reggie Bush, for example, isn't one of the ten best athletes of this decade; these are my athletes of the year for each year of the decade)

Your Athlete of the Decade for the 90s was Michael Jordan.  Shockingly enough.  Runners up were Joe Montana, Mario Lemieux, George Foreman, Hakeem Olajuwon, Tiger Woods, Mark McGwire (again, see above.)

(I didn't do this every week in the 80s, so there's no official Blog of Revelation Athlete of the Decade, but it would have been Gretzky.  If I could get a do over, I'd reconsider that Foreman win in '94, as has been noted, I have no soccer players as my athletes of the year, and Romario was my athlete of the month for July of '94 - also, the absence of Jerry Rice, who was athlete of the month for September of '94, is bonkers.  Fortunately there's no counterfactual for my athlete of the month choices, no I won't do one. I picked who I picked and we're moving on with our lives.  You're lucky I haven't ranked Big Brother seasons or every episode of Arrested Development.  Maybe when the movie comes out.  No, I don't know why I'm like this.)

Timex Social Club

During the 2004 campaign, I was having a discussion with a friend of mine who was on the fence about voting for Bush or Kerry; she's a social conservative but had grown opposed to the war in Iraq.

Eventually, she decided to vote for Bush, the reason being her inability to escape something she had heard at her conservative Christian church, that Kerry was trying to ban the Bible.

I did the best I could to disabuse her of this idea (Kerry's Catholic, every elected federal official professes religion, the free exercise clause would be a complete barrier to this, the United States is the most religious western nation and this would be unpopular, what in the hell does ban the Bible even mean in the first place?) and while she recognized intellectually the logic of my case, in the end, I think it just wasn't worth the risk to her. If I tell you "Tom's a child molester" even if I have no evidence, you're going to think twice about letting Tom babysit for you if you can just as easily choose non child molester Ernie.

I have a student, a bright student - engaged in the issues, open, inquisitive - who passed along to me with complete seriousness a forwarded email that purported to be a news report quoting Obama as calling American troops whiners for wanting supplies that he was rejecting - "they're an all volunteer army, they knew what they were getting when they signed up, they should quit whining".

She wasn't asking if it was true. She knew it to be true and was disturbed by it.

My reponse was a little simpler than was it 4 years prior. "There's youtube. If Obama said the US military was composed of "whiners" that's an easy thing to find. Go find it."

Now - you know that Kerry wasn't advocating banning the Bible. And you know Obama didn't say the military was made up of whining volunteers.

But not everyone does.

The willingness to tell any sort of lie coupled with the ability to now live in a hermetically sealed bubble of propaganda through multimedia platforms just allows these lies to grow and fester and exist in an uncontradicted way gives rise to, well, to people bringing guns to health care debates.

Look at this. That's an RNC mailer.

I get DNC mailers, so I'm not unfamiliar with partisan language like in question 3 that is clearly slanted in a way to draw the answer most beneficial to the cause. That's politics. I don't love it, but it's politics.

But that's not the question I want you to look at.

Look at question 4.

"It has been suggested that the government could use voter registration to determine a person's political affiliation, prompting fears that GOP voters might be discriminated against for medical treatment in a Democrat-imposed health care rationing system. Does this possibility concern you?"

This isn't some leaflet passed out on the street by a guy in a tin foil hat; this is from the Republican Party.

How many people will read this and believe there must be some truth to it - otherwise, how could the Republicans say it?

How many people will believe it's not raising the possibility, but flat asserting that the Democrats must be trying to take away health care for Republicans?

How many people will pass it on, through the internet or talk radio or at church?

How is it that rumors get started? When you see the real passionate anger people had at those McCain campaign rallies, calling Obama a terrorist - when you see the rage people have at town hall health care meetings - rage directed at...stopping people from getting health care - it just seems baffling. How could someone quake with anger at the following prospect -

Americans who don't have health care will now have health care and you won't lose anything.

It's because that's not what they're mad at.

They listen to Rush and Hannity and Simple Jack and everyone in between.

Obama's not only a racist Nazi Muslim. He not only has death panels to decide to kill off the down's syndrome kids.

But he will keep the Republicans from getting to see doctors when they're sick.

It must be true. I read it someplace.

elegy

(This is the last post I'm bringing over from any of the other places, I think - if I'm forced to choose, the best writing I've ever done isn't coming to this blog, it's going to stay over at what remains of my myspace page, behind a firewall until they shut that place down like its Friendster.  That stuff was gutsy and vulgar and smart - if there was ever a chance that someone was going to think I was an actual, real live writer and whatnot, it would be based on that stuff.  But it's staying there; too hard to explain the concept of a fictional voice writing about real stuff. 

This post was written at the very beginning of this year upon the passing of my girlfriend's dog.  It's self indulgent only in that I recognize that the death of the dog in my life is no more heartbreaking to me than the death of the dog in your life is to you.  But I can't write about everyone; only so much ink in my pen.  Fundamentally, everything here remains the same; my friend and I are good, thanks, all matters unchanged.  And we still miss Sadie a ton.  We were happier when she was around.)

I’m a child.


Those of you who know me more than a little bit recognize this; my tastes in food and entertainment remain as lowbrow as did they 30 years ago (want to see me brighten up – give me a fried fruit pie and a wrestling match to watch); my emotional architecture still collapses when I feel abandoned (no, I haven’t been dumped again, that’s not where this is going); I have never evidenced the slightest ability to put on a face other than the one that best expressed my immediate essence (I’d be terrible at the strategic reality shows I most like; I can’t pretend to like people I do not like and I’m still the 8 year old squirming in terrible boredom when forced to do something I don’t want to do).

Arrested development isn’t just the name of one of the ten best television shows of the past quarter century (you’re not reading my blog, dammit) it clearly defines who I am. I am stuck, immobile, a boyman, all change and I remain the same. Just a little less cute with each passing year.

My principal failure to grow has been in my childlike inability to wrap my mind around death with anything other than a barbed wire bow of terror and pain. I would lie awake nights trying to reconcile how one lives in a world where god was dead (I wasn’t really reading Nietzsche when I was 8, I stuck with The Sporting News, but I recall articulating a similar idea). Every ambulance I ever saw racing down the street was one which, one day, would be headed for my house. Every sickness brought to mind that one day, there’d be a stomach ache from which I wouldn’t recover. Every night I fell asleep I thought, “one of these nights I won’t wake up.”

A constant sword dangling over my head.

Only question was how will it happen?

How will it happen to me?

Will I suffer a long, lingering illness – a steady erosion of my body until I can no longer care for my most basic physical functions? Will I battle – go through painful and expensive medical treatments – only to eventually succumb? Will I shuffle painfully through hospital hallways, a shell of the man I used to be until finally I beg for it to end? John Wooden, the legendary UCLA basketball coach is 98, he says he wishes death would come. His wife died in 1985, and still today, 23 years later, her half of the bed is untouched – when the sheets are washed and placed back on the bed, he returns her dressing gown and pillow arrangement exactly as was it 2 plus decades ago. Is that how it will be? Will I watch that sword crash down upon everyone I love – filling my last, weakest, loneliest years with agony and grief?

Will I lose my mind? My entire life, I have always understood the benefit of the Buckaroo Bonzai axiom, “wherever you go, there you are.” It’s comforted me – there’s never been an occasion where the ability to slip inside my head wasn’t an option. Somewhere in my youth, perhaps 3rd grade when I was given candy by Mr. Callan for getting A’s on spelling tests – or maybe preschool when I was one of two four year olds able to read on his own, thereby negating the need for teacher interference (I always resented being told what to do – parents, teachers, bosses – I fight authority and authority, well, doesn’t always win, if truth be told – and if it does leave me bloody and battered…well, you should see the other guy). I internalized at a pre-conscious level that I was “smart” and that my brain was my friend – and while living in my head has often been isolating and left me alone – I’ve never been lonely in here. I always have me.

Will I lose that? Will I forget the starting lineup for the 1989 National League Champion San Francisco Giants?

C – Kennedy

1B – Will

2B – Robby

SS – Uribe

3B – Riles/Matty

LF- Mitch

CF – Butler

RF – Candy/Sheridan


Oberkfell played a lot of 3rd, Matty played a little short. Tracy Jones played too in our seasonlong inability to fill the sucking hole that was RF. The rotation was Caveman and Big Daddy and Garrelts and Downs and Krukow or Atlee in the last spot.

What was I talking about?

Oh yeah.

Will I wander around the woods like Henry Fonda in On Golden Pond – will I stare vacantly at my family and friends – will people cry at the sight of me – will I be pitied-pathetic-Jesus – Jesus do I not want to be pitied – I’m the guy who gets angry if someone tries to help me pick up something I’ve dropped – it’s reflexive, automatic – leave me the fuck alone, I’m fine, I don’t need your help.

Will I need help? Help from strangers? Constant help, just to survive?

Will I be alone – no one to help – dying slowly, scared, confused – broken?

Or will it be quick?

A car crash. A homicide. Accidents are the leading cause of death for Americans under the age of 44. Will I be texting on the way to work and never come home, smash into a crosstown bus and never think my thoughts ever again? There were a hundred two murders in my county last year, virtually all of them clustered around my home and work – will I be at the ATM – or a convenience store – or coming home from a late class and get shot for my watch or my ride or the 37 bucks in my wallet?

Who will tell my mom? Who will feed my kitten? Who will write my wrestling Counterfactual?

Will I be scared? Will I be alone? Will I hurt?

I’ve never stopped thinking about these things; if there has been a single day over the past 30 years where I haven’t had at least a fleeting moment of terror – I’m going to die, I’m going to die, I’m going to die – then I’m unaware of it.

And after death – nothing. No magical thinking for me. Ashes and dust and endless empty.

And yeah, I’m certain of it beyond a reasonable doubt. Guilty.

3 decades of existential terror. I’m a child. A chubby child who drinks diet soda all day long and listens to Lil Wayne.

My friend Sadie died last weekend.

Sadie was an 8 year old Labrador retriever.

I spent pretty much a portion of every day for the bulk of 2008 with her, a kinder, gentler, friendlier creature you would not meet. During her eight years, Sadie’s tail never stopped wagging with excitement and joy.

Kate and I were dating before her animals became a part of my life; she has 3 dogs and two cats; most of whom have been with her virtually their whole lives and most of Kate’s adult life – and were the animals to have indicated that I wasn’t a particularly good fit for the family, I’d have been cut loose.

They have seniority, after all.

But from the first day, Sadie seemed to rally all the others to give me a chance, “this chubby guy is okay, he likes to cuddle and play and smells like fried pie and Bret Hart dvds”

I didn’t think 2008 would be the year where I found “the one” – but as it turned out, I found a whole family.

I don’t live inside my head anymore. At 38 years old, I found my people.

And one of those people was Sadie.

What I really wanted to thank her for though were the years before we met.

When you meet the people you love, and hear about their lives – the one aspect which tears you apart is not having known them before you knew them. Because there were days when they could have used you, when you could have helped, when you could have made bad things better.

But you weren’t there, you didn’t exist yet.

I wasn’t there for Kate when she had those days – but Sadie was. As hard and painful (real pain as opposed to my boyman “will I get Parkinson’s disease like Alex P Keaton” pain) as anyone’s days could possibly be – and Sadie was there. There to take care of my friend Kate.

And I wanted to thank her.

So, I did, last weekend. I held Sadie’s head in my hands and thanked her for how she treated me and how she took care of Kate – and I told her I would do my best to be half as good a boyfriend as she had been a canine companion.

And not long after, she was gone.

And it hurt. And it hurts. There’s not a socially targeted way to grieve over a dog; my academic term started this week, I have five courses and I shuffled and danced and put on as high octane a performance as am I capable of at my rapidly advancing age. But inside I just felt empty.

I guess I can put on a face other than the one I want to wear.

I resisted my urge to write about it. Both because Sadie was not my dog and because it feels cliché; and really, talking about pet loss can lead to a dismissive “yeah, okay, I’ve got real problems” response.

But I don’t care. I’ve never written for anyone but me anyway. I never do anything for anyone but me.

I’m a child, that’s how I roll.

And tonight, I wanted to write about my friend Sadie. ‘Cause she deserves it. She deserves the words to be sent out into the world that she lived and she died and she mattered. I loved her, but that’s not why she mattered. She mattered because she mattered. She was all good and no bad. I don’t know how many people, places, or things you’ve ever encountered who were all good and no bad, but I have met two. One is Kate, and one was her Sadie.

And this is for both of them. They are my people after all.

Sadie Trimble

2000-2009.

Thank you, Sadie.

The One I Wrote About OJ Simpson and Chris Benoit.

(Two years ago, Chris Benoit killed his wife and his son and then himself; a couple of days later I wrote this.)

My first hero was OJ Simpson.


In the late 1970s, I was a poor kid growing up in the San Francisco Bay Area, as OJ Simpson had been a generation before. And I was a San Francisco sports fan, of which there were relatively few in the late 70s, a deathtrap of an era for local teams. It's actually a wonder why I didn't choose to weave my boyhood with local color that would have brought me more elementary school prestige. I could maybe have worn t-shirts and caps supporting the local bathhouse. "Heyyyy, Gloryhole Junction! Whoo-hoo." My grandparents, who humored my endless need to talk local sports, perhaps would have been less supportive had I structured our conversations around NAMBLA's righteous struggle to lower the age of consent.

The Giants were bad.

The Warriors were worse.

The Niners were maybe the worst franchise in professional sports.

But we had OJ Simpson.

OJ Simpson, in the late 70s, was on his last legs (well, leg, as he was running on one knee at that point) but he was a 49er and his previous exploits left him still one of the most famous athletes in the world. I had an old OJ Buffalo Bills football card that I took to school 3 days out of 5; I began to follow USC football because that had been OJ's alma mater, a following that would, years later, lead to my brief, glorious, weekend stint as an undergrad there (everytime I go back to California, California kicks my ass – sometimes I consider heading back for a fourth tour of duty, as, were I to snap my fingers and be anywhere in the world, it would be San Francisco, but there's only so many times one dude can get thrashed about the head and neck areas).

Who knows what seminal influences go into making up a boy's identity, particularly a boy largely raised by women (although, admittedly, most of my influences were in the frosting family – dude liked to eat, yo) but probably OJ Simpson was significant, yeah.

I sat with Kirk Hiner in the brand new Subway restaurant in Ada, Ohio in the summer of 1994; I was 23, newly single, completely broken and about to start my 3rd year of law school; Kirk was visiting from New York where he was dating a girl with a great body and an unusual affinity for penguins; OJ Simpson, maybe as recently as a week or two previous, had just sliced off the heads of his ex wife and her ambiguous waiter friend.

It is a conversation that Kirk and I both vividly recall.

I recall it because I told him that I'd never be surprised by anything again.

He recalls it because he responded with the creation of a bumper sticker philosophy that I'm certain could be the basis of a new religion if he could write a couple of science fiction books to propagate it and maybe pick up a midlevel celebrity endorsement (my choice..Sandy Duncan): Everything Will Happen.

That was 13 years ago.

Since then, whether the event was something large and cataclysmic (9-11'ish) or whether it was smaller and more personal, like my winding up in a taxicab with Regis Philbin's pen – I have been able to pretty quickly synthesize every occurrence of my life into a digestible unit; I have been able to find the appropriate box inside my head in which I could fit whatever has presented itself.

Everything Will Happen.

I've been the youngest trial attorney in California and then made ten bucks an hour teaching high school history. I've gained and then lost 150 pounds. I've dodged student loan collection agents and then won six figures on a game show. I had a 4.0 in grad school and then couldn't get a community college professorship. Our play got produced by the first theater we ever submitted to and then we spent 10 months getting nothing but stage doors slammed in our faces.

Friends have come and gone. Family too. And Women.

Like a supernova, someone will flash into my life and then just as quickly fade away to nothing.

And I view it with something approximating Stoic equanimity.

Everything Will Happen.

OJ Simpson taught me that. Your first hero should teach you something.

My last hero was Chris Benoit.

I have a fair number of visitors to this blog, and they come in 3 types. There are those of you who are new. Welcome. You have a lot to catch up on. There are those of you who have been here awhile and maybe even have read the stuff from http://www.spoonmillionaires.com/. Thanks for sticking around; I apologize for the lack of output; I can't say that's about the change anytime soon, I really haven't decided what's the best outlet for what passes for my thoughts. I'm thinking about doing nothing but haiku, but it's tough to make my veiled references to ham products in 17 syllables.

Then there's the third group. There is a group of wrestling fans who have been with me since I wrote for a guy named Steve "Soundbite" Roberts in a freaky little internet wrestling subculture in the mid-late 1990s. They followed me to my Counterfactual (note, the lack of link is because this ain't a plug) a massive, ridiculously excessive in a very Jividen way, undertaking where I attempt to rewrite the last 25 years of professional wrestling in a way that could only be analogized to someone who spends his weekends piling on KISS makeup to look like Peter Criss or proudly proclaims to the Howard Stern interviewer that he is, in fact, Darth Nilus.

And some of those wrestling fans are still with me here; almost ten years later, still living on the margins of society with their Dragon's Gate DVDs and their unsettling knowledge of suplex variants (my favorite – the blockbuster – discuss…)

The rest of this isn't to them. They know all of it.

But it might be for them; if might be for them because this isn't going to get said anymore in polite conversation for a very long time.

Chris Benoit was arguably the finest professional wrestler who ever lived.

And the rest of you don't understand that, I know. You never heard of Chris Benoit until today and don't I know that it's not real so how could one fake athlete be better than another fake athlete and yeah, I get that, see.

Professional wrestling's not a sport, but it's a craft; like acting, for example. And you recognize that, say Phillip Seymour Hoffman is just better at the craft of acting than Scott Baio.

There's probably an actor you admire. Someone whose work is consistently great, but who doesn't get the recognition of Tim Cruise.

And you've loved him for years in the little roles, the supporting parts, the small movies. You go see him in anything; you hope he gets recognized come awards season; you talk him up to all your friends, remind everyone when he's gonna be on Conan.

I know he exists for you. He's an actor. Or a rock band. Or a painter. Or a poet. Or a playwright. Or a professor.

He's a craftsman. An artisan. He's great. He's a genius. He's on your personal Mt. Rushmore of dudes you really dig, who really speak to you in a deep and profound way.

And I have to be honest with you.

As good as he is, as brilliant as he is at what he does – he couldn't lace Chris Benoit's boots.

He, me, you, none of anyone who will ever read this will ever be as good at anything as Chris Benoit was at being a professional wrestler.  I know that sounds like the hyperbole of the moment.  But it's not.  Because these last three sentences I didn't write back in 2007; I'm writing them in August of '09.

And somewhere that just has to be said. 'Cause…the thing of it is…the thing of it is that he was great because his work was so…admirable. There was a dignity to Chris Benoit's work, to his craft – that was undeniable even when surrounded by the slop that makes up so much of what "sports entertainment" is in the 21st century.

You could…we could, my nerd brethren and I, safely watch a Chris Benoit match with one of you – with someone in straight society – and say see – see – do you see how hard he works, do you see how dramatic it is – do you see how real, how pure, how….how…good that guy is?

I've met someone recently, and she's coming to visit. This is a rare occurrence for me; not meeting someone, that's pretty common, but having a woman enjoy my company (and let's be honest, for me to enjoy hers, I know that cuts against my normal schtick, but I'm not gonna kayfabe this blog) sufficiently to spend time with me inside my home is a more rare happening than you'd guess.

My middle brother, with whom I have watched wrestling, usually taped from Japanese television, for two hours every week for the better part of the last ten years, gave me the following two pieces of advice about the impending visit of my new friend.

(And since both my brothers, despite being much younger than I am, are much more married than I will likely ever be, I tend to listen to their advice on such things.)

1. Don't talk. You know, like you do. You're only gonna fuck it up.

2. Tell her you only own six wrestling DVDs. Hide your shame.

No one was ever ashamed about Chris Benoit. He was who you wanted to watch. I am 36 years old; I have two graduate degrees; I am a professional and my closet is filled with suits and ties.

I have one professional wrestling t-shirt.

It's a Chris Benoit t-shirt.

I started writing the Counterfactual, hundreds of pages of reconstructed history, with a hidden goal I revealed to Kirk at one point; to fictionally save the life of Owen Hart, who was my favorite wrestler when I was a child, and who died in a ring stunt gone wrong 8 years ago.

But the more I dig in the dirt, the more I change the flapping of one butterfly's wings, the more it just keeps going wrong. I should probably take a lesson from this.

As a teenager, Chris Benoit trained with Owen Hart in Calgary. And for nearly fifteen years, Chris Benoit wrestled with or against a man named Eddy Guerrero; they were best friends and embraced in Madison Square Garden at the close of a major wrestling show in a moment akin to that favorite guy of yours winning the Academy Award for Best Actor.

Owen's dead. Eddy's dead. Chris is dead.

Chris Benoit killed his wife, his young son, and himself over the weekend. It was grizzly; it was indefensible; and it is about to turn him into a monster.

He's about to become OJ Simpson. He's about to become a thing. An issue. Fodder for talk radio and cable news shows and blogs. And he'll never be Chris Benoit again.

Never.

And that needs to be said too. Because it's true and it's real and it happened and it is literally the last thing you would expect.

But it didn't surprise me.

Because nothing surprises me.

And it needs to be said; it needs to be said because when a man kills his family it needs to be said that he did it.

It also needs to be said that same man performed his craft with a dignity that is beyond peer.

Both things can be true.

A man can be hero, and deservedly so. And also a monster, and deservedly so.

Both things can be true.

My last hero taught me that.