A Month Or So Of Freaky Fridays

(Lohan is all like "I'm sorry, HOW MANY HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS OF DOLLARS ON COCAINE BY THE TIME I TURN 25?")

By that headline, I do not mean to say that the reason this blog has been totally silent for over a month has anything to do with me trading bodies with Jamie Lee Curtis (I just feel like, by dint of my youth and good looks and the fact that I've destroyed my health and once-promising career with drugs and alcohol, I have more in common with Lohan than Mrs. Chris Guest). That would be a good excuse, though. I have another good excuse -- which is that I've been writing like 8,500 words of copy a week for the last month, with many of those arriving during one massive byline-pileup on Friday -- but the sorry-but-I-was-Jamie-Lee-Curtis-for-five-weeks one would obviously be better. I'll work on that.

I'm not complaining about this, necessarily. In order for me to make enough money to live doing what I'm doing, I need to be writing roughly this much or a little bit more -- that or write less and get paid more which, you know, I've considered. But the last four weeks have all featured Fridays in which I had five bylines at four different venues -- the fourth of those venues has changed week to week, which is nice at least in terms of me not having to make the same sleep-deprivation excuses to the same editors. And it's nice, too, because it means that I'm writing a lot, which is after all the idea. Here, for instance, is last Friday:

- The second of the week's two NFL neo-yaks with the esteemed Jeff Johnson, at GQ. This one involves Troy Aikman getting misty over Bob Seger and Daniel Snyder hiring and then firing Mike Shanahan's grandson. (The one from Tuesday, which is maybe funnier, involves a Tom Coughlin campaign commercial I'm rather proud of)

- A Daily Fix and a round of (erroneous, indoor-voiced, intermittently amusing) NFL picks for the Wall Street Journal.

- Another conversation-style article, because why not, with the awesome and awing Maria Bustillos, at The Awl, about fancy food and fancy people and gleeful Francophile dorkpie Adam Gopnik.

Leave out the Daily Fix, which is kind of a reflex at this point and which I've more or less been doing since Jimmy Carter was President, I'm really pretty proud and definitely pretty happy of all of the above. They also add up to something like 7,000 words of prose. I'm proud/happy about the column I wrote for Vice earlier in the week, as well, which is about Tony La Russa and what a turd he is. And I was of course delighted to get back to My Life's Work of perseverating on bad pizza and the Chamber of Commerce dingleberries who slang it in this speculative bit of Papa John-related muckraking/muckwallowing at The Awl. Which, for extra creepy We Surround Them verisimilitude, was actually banked by Papa John's ads:



Which was all very nice, and which was all something that happened in one week. (It leaves out, for instance, all the stuff I enjoyed writing the week before that, during the World Series, for Vice and with David Raposa in our baseball yak at The Awl and at Deadspin) I know that "that was nice" is usually something I type after things that are not nice, but that was all actually very nice: I liked the work, I will get paid (some) for (most of) it. The reason you haven't heard about this in this space -- a space which is designed, after all, for the production and distribution of me-spam -- is that I've been too worn out with doing it to reiterate all of it here.

I'm going to try to remedy that over the next week or so -- not with more spam so much as with something to put the last few hyperspeed months in some context. I'm aware that this is probably/inevitably going to be more interesting to the guy writing it than to any humans notionally reading the things that will (I hope) get written, but that is also true to a certain extent of most everything I write, both at this blog and elsewhere. The crush of the professional is what I signed up for; the crushing of the personal is not. At the risk of looking at the busiest and most exciting period of my career in the least flattering possible way -- at the risk of not enjoying what I think it was that I wanted 18 months ago -- I want to try to get things back into something like balance. And because I'm a doofus, I think that'll probably mean more Blogging About The Process/My Feelings. So definitely be on the look out for that? If you don't see it, it's because I'm busy or exhausted or drunk or hungover. So, maybe it's not really much of a change at all from the old status quo?

From The Prose Orphanage: The 9/12 Project

Given that what's below checks in at a mighty healthy word count, I'll keep the introduction brief. Your eyes are too important, and any sort of backstory I give for the piece -- which I started as a blog post on a train ride, repurposed into an essay for The Awl, and then was compelled by bad timing, mostly, and by a lack of other outlets for stuff like this to turn back into a blog post -- isn't important enough. It's about September 11 and September 12, and it is actually rather bloggy in terms of the HERE IS HOW I FELT AND FEEL aspects. But I like it, and I hope you like it, too, and there is no way I am going to let this many adjectives just sit around stinking up my hard drive. And so I give you:

The 9/12 Project

It is going to be a very full train and everyone on board knows what that means, although I suppose that isn't necessarily a reason not to remind people of what it means. And I suppose, too, that the conductor who gets on the PA to remind everyone what it means, first at Boston's South Station and then three minutes later at Back Bay Station and then five or so minutes after that at Route 128, can't really do anything about the sound of his voice, which arrives to the (very full) train car through his organ-pipe sinuses and the tinny Amtrak speakers. But the words themselves make me recoil, because they are a savage and unwitting parody of the muscled-up, flubby-formal copspeak that has emerged as something like our new national language of authority.

You know what this sounds like by now, this opaque and faintly menacing combination of dim authority and flabby extraneousness. The conductor's pronouncements and re-pronouncements – not-really-alerting anyone that the café car is FOR DINING ONLY… AND DRINKING, DINING AND DRINKING ONLY and not for doing your homework or setting up your computer; that it's one seat per ticketed passenger (except at Back Bay, where it's "one ticketed passenger per seat") – are guided home by weirdly formal "in this matter"-s and "for this purpose"-s tacked onto the sentences' end. We are told, for reasons known only to the conductor, that there are a lot of families on board, although context suggests that this may in some way intensify the need to use the café car for its intended purposes (ONLY).

The conductor delivers the same bad news over and over – if you are looking to make a connection, you should expect delays (on that matter) because of heightened security concerns (at this time) on New Jersey Transit and the Long Island Railroad. He walks through the train car, which is by now teetering towards Providence, then returns with another conductor. That one has a pair of sunglasses hung backwards, Guy Fieri-style, from his ears. As the second conductor follows his authoritative co-worker out of the car, the sunglasses give his shaved dome a jarring, eyes-in-the-back-of-his-head aspect. Although, really, it was only jarring because all of this happened on September 11, which means I was maybe looking for it and also already kind of jarred. The conductor gets back on the horn to thank everyone for their "voluntary cooperation" on the no-lying-down-on-the-seats issue. Another of his breathy beats. "Please do make it voluntary," he adds.

At that time a day earlier I was firing an AR-15 at a gun range an hour outside Boston during a friend's bachelor party. This is the same gun American soldiers carry, our firearms instructor noted. "It's like 'American,'" he said with hand over the AR-15, before dramatically sweeping his hands over to the AK-47 lying next to it, "and 'Taliban.'" Back on the train, I see that the blunderingly authoritative Amtrak conductor's ID swings from a Marine Corps lanyard, which would make him the second Marine to tell me what to do in two days, if also the opposite of the voluble and capable and wildly funny Eddie, who is undoubtedly the guy you should go see if you want to shoot assault rifles in North Attleboro, Mass. So: where is all this going?

It is going back to New York, eventually. But first one more thing, please. First let me tell you how I met my wife. It was ten years ago on September 11, on Fifth Avenue in Brooklyn. I spent a lot of time there that day. I rode a bus down Fifth Avenue with a roommate that morning, with all that smoke and ash glowering like a grotesque new planet over the river and above the low rooftops. We watched things on television with some other people in downtown Brooklyn, and then I walked back down Fifth Avenue to my apartment, where I got to work on getting drunk. I was nearly there when I walked down Fifth Avenue again – it might help to read this bit in the voice of Grandpa Simpson, but it was 20-odd blocks from my apartment on the fringes of Sunset Park to a decent bar back then. And it was then and there that I met my wife, who was on her way to my place with a friend of hers to watch some more harrowing television with another of my roommates. They were still there after another Fifth Avenue walk, and we watched the commissioner of the New York Fire Department dissolve into tears together. I remember the look on his face as he slid towards that collapse, how he recognized that what he told us would end with him in tears and how he moved on and into it anyway. What I can tell you about Kate, on that night, was that her beauty cut through the doom a bit, that she re-filled the Brita after drinking from it, that she cried at times and laughed at others and was in general as close to a symbol of possibility and hope as anything I would see again until I saw her next, nearly a month later. When I showed my not-then-wife and her friend out at the night's end, we saw that our garbage cans were sugared in pale ash. Scorched bits of paper had settled here and there – singed memos from Merrill Lynch, a page from what appeared to be a computer science textbook. My roommates and I gathered them up and brought them inside.

And now maybe we can go back to New York, and towards today. There was, in the days before this most recent September 11, a deep impatience palpable in the city. Which is admittedly not the most noteworthy or novel mood for New Yorkers, but which also seemed a reaction to something more than a desultory bag-check at the subway or the body-armored sentinels with their (oh hey) AR-15's who have faded back up from the background, and whose sunglass-blanked glares have thanked us for our voluntary assistance in this matter for a decade now. There were those most recent maddeningly vague press-conference ominousnesses – regarding what may have sort of been known about terrible things that were or weren't planned for the city on the anniversary – which didn't help. There was also the suffocating pomp and ponderousness of all those looming National Looks Back, and the private memories to face down, in private. But this wasn't that, I don't think. There is a greater, darker persistence, something too big and too present and too awful to Never Forget about.

If you were close enough to it, wherever you were, what happened on September 11 is on you still. We wear it as a livid scar or a phantom limb, wrestle it as a nightmare that haunts in daylight or an older ghost that breathes chaos into our dreams at night, but we wear it, we wrestle with it. But for all the shadowy constancy of what September 11, 2001 subtracted and extracted, September 11 is also gone, and all those facile Never Forget rituals only push it more and more profoundly away from us.

There are those flags the size of football fields and fighter jet flyovers, the memory-sanctifying resolutions that sail cheaply through the House of Representatives in shouted unanimity. There's Michelle Tafoya on NBC, asking New York Jets coach Rex Ryan after the team's Sunday night win how the significance of 9/11 "impacted the game," and Newt Gingrich using the word "celebrate" to describe the tenth anniversary of the 11th during a Republican debate a day later. So we haven't forgotten anything so much as we've misplaced nearly everything. And the culture – not you or me or your neighbors or mine, but the bigger thing that is our politics and our economy and the author of the line items of our myriad and massive debts – is now moved not so much by the terrible thing itself or the terrible things that came after, but moved by how moved we are. It's September 12 as I write this, and it has been September 12 for ten terrified, terrifying, mostly terrible years.

Among the Perpetual Seether segment of the populace, 9/12 has a resonance that has strangely little and strangely much to do with the day that preceded it. During his weepy, marker-smudged ascent, Glenn Beck asked his viewers and listeners to "remember who you were on September 12" and told them that those 9/12 selves were who and how they really were; he held 9/12 rallies and 9/12 groups sprouted on their own and, as usual, he made bank. And Tea Party Astroturf-farming concern FreedomWorks scheduled its watershed Taxpayer March on Washington, with ardent but opaque purpose, for September 12, 2009.

Whatever dry-drunk fantasia of righteous purpose Beck associates with September 12, the perverse echo of 1963's March on Washington offered by FreedomWorks in 2009 feels more apt today. In '63, a diverse group of Americans braved the risk-unto-certainty of public- and private-sector violence to voice their belief that America could not be what it should be without the liberation of less-than-free Americans. The group that hit town during both the chronological and constant September 12 a couple years ago did so in fatuous resistance to notional state violence – imaginary tax hikes, a dozen different fantastical and false socialisms – and more generally to argue against the very idea of a common good or shared purpose or responsibility; for all the teary Beck-ian unity talk, this was more the against-them fellowship of the sleeper cell than the gracious and great-hearted and hopeful fellowship of '63. The liberation this new Army of September 12 demanded in 2009 – and which they have already, in many ways, won – was from each other, everyone else, anyone else; they were demanding a safety that they could not have unless or until they were left very thoroughly alone, barricaded and border-fenced and home-protected against everything and everyone else out there.

The whole avalanche of bilious bad faith that has followed is, finally, a bleak affirmation of Beck's piteous/cynical soft-sci-fi worldview. That army of the terrified converged on the nation's capital, demanding a permanent September 12, and they have it. We have taken up residence in that long shadow, lived in and with the frantic inertia, the intermittent intimations of something terrible, the inward-turning fear at all those vague but implacable loomings. A new political class of howling, shit-scared know-nothing bullies that believes the only tough-minded response to anything is an unyielding "no;" a popular culture curled babyish around an atomizing and anomic materialism it detests and knows well it cannot afford; a thousand inexpressible and unexpressed fears and mistrusts – how we live now is a disheartening extension who we were then.

And for all the frazzled purpose of the first September 12 – the various enrollment and enlistment booms, the desperate searches for a place that would take our blood or somehow let us help – the dominant feeling in the bright, still-burning city in which I awakened that day was finally one of terrible aloneness. Some of the trains were running, and some of the offices were open. I took one to my job around Union Square, and I sent emails to everyone I could, or who I thought might care – to my friends in Washington D.C. asking if they were all right, to my friends elsewhere telling them that I was. And then I let myself out and walked downtown, past one checkpoint at 14th Street and into an emptied-out Greenwich Village. I walked down the middle of the street. I remember being aware of the absent pulse of the subway under Broadway. I remember the streets being harrowingly and absolutely ghostly, and being thankful for the periodic appearance of random people just doing whatever they were out there doing – walking to or from, dazedly riding a skateboard along the double lines in the middle of Eighth Street, signing a piece of paper spread on the sidewalk outside an Army/Navy store. ("Dear Anthony," someone wrote, ten years ago today. "Good luck in the war. I love you, always and 4ever") I remember quiet, and sirens, and the terrible sadness and anger at the lives lost. I remember, too, thinking that it would be nice to see the woman from the night before again, that she seemed kind. I remember how precious that kindness seemed.

But mostly I remember, in this most life-full of cities, a profound bottomlessness and emptiness that left me feeling terribly alone on those so-silent streets. You may have been on the streets of your city late at night or early in the morning or after some blanking blizzard, and enjoyed the solitary feeling; I have. This was different than that; this was an aloneness that had a sense about it of the irretrievable and irrevocable. The strange and unfathomable smell and heavy air that pushed uptown and the police officers that finally stopped my ramble southward reminded me of what all this really was, and why it felt so sad. It was the feeling of a drained city, its citizens either fled or locked in or otherwise elsewhere. It was quiet, but it was not peaceful, and it was not home.

If we must Never Forget anything from that not-quite-passed present, let it be the actual truth of September 12 and the days after – the way we receded from one another and ourselves, all those great and frightened distances we made, how unrecognizable everything was without everyone else there, and how awful all of that was. The terrified, traumatized non-choices we made then and have made since are not necessarily ones we'd commemorate or honor or (Newt, Newt) celebrate, of course. But memory has a higher purpose than commemoration, doesn't it? Doesn't it have to?


Update: Don't worry, everything's cool now. Or... wait, that's not the update at all. What I meant was that the good folks at GoodMenProject.com republished this at their site, here. Click the link, enjoy their other tasty prose morsels.

I Got That Work

(If/when I write a book that requires a cover, I sure hope that Pen and Pixel is still in business)

There's freelance-related anxiety that concerns having too much work, and there's freelance-related anxiety concerning not having enough work, and there is the rare and beautiful anti-nirvana state that is achieved when those two nervousnesses occupy the same consciousness. Obviously there are hundreds of thousands of worse things than feeling jittery and overworked, but as explanations for falling behind on my own self-spammery goes, it's a pretty good explanation. So I'm taking a brief break from attempting to take a longer break to get caught up on my catching up. Then I'm going to make this chimichurri for a party I'm supposed to make chimichurri for, and maybe spend 45 minutes staring at a Word document containing an assignment that I have avoided working on because of how much I hate it and hate working on it. But right: a break. So here's what I've been doing instead of blogging or feeling comfortable.

The good news is that there are some things, besides the usual Daily Fixery and daily day-jobbery. Foremost among these, probably, is the fact that I'm writing a sports column called The Mercy Rule for Vice Magazine. Which is a cool but also an intimidating thing, both because -- with the exception of my Awl NFL columns, which was not so much easy, either, but also just sort of felt different -- I've never written this sort of thing before and because, you know, it's Vice. That obviously means something different than it did back when it was Do's and Don't's and mid-aught cocaine libertarianism/libertinism -- it's a different and more serious and more complicated thing now, and my editors are both quite serious and good at editing. Also the commenters are kind of hilariously negative, so the fact that I've only gotten one "TL;DR" and been called an "asshole" once in three columns is actually kind of good, I guess? But yeah: overall the response has been good, and I'm enjoying doing it. The three columns I wrote, about Frank McCourt, the NBA lockout and Not Saving The All-Star Game<, are here and here and here. Feel free to hit the comments and call me a retard or whatever.

I'm also still doing the Yakkin' thing at The Awl, usually with the very great David Raposa. That David R, though, also has work, and this week was covering a Lil Wayne concert when he would ordinarily have been on gchat with me making fun of Ron Gardenhire. Which is a pretty good deal for him, and which gave me an excuse to write something stupid about baseball and food, which is the sort of thing I don't actually need an excuse for. But I liked doing it, and was especially delighted that one of the more ridiculous bits of the piece -- a totally made-up bit involving paunchy journeyman reliever Mike Fetters running a renegade concession stand at Miller Park -- actually seemed to have convinced Larry Granillo, the man behind the great Wezen-Ball baseball blog, that Mike Fetters was indeed hauling a cheese-vat around a big league ballpark. See if it convinces you:

While Fetters says that he "does fine" on his mobile concession, it's clearly a labor of love—only love, after all, could compel a 40-something man to pull a bubbling cauldron of Colby cheese and that cast-iron skillet around the ballpark while evading Miller Park security. Fetters charges fans just $2 to dunk any of the other concessions available at the ballpark into the "cheese tank," and will put a fried egg—that’s where the skillet and hot-plate come in—atop any concession for just a dollar. And I do mean anything: during my visit, I saw Fetters put a fried egg atop a pile of nachos, a double-patty burger ($11) from Gorman Thomas Prime, and directly into a New Era fitted cap. "Security guys are going to bust balls, because that's what they do," Fetters says. "Food inspector guys, same thing. But the way I figure, these fans gave me a lot when I pitched here. A lot of love, a lot of support. I want to give them something back, too."

Incidentally, the idea of a ballpark steakhouse called Gorman Thomas Prime is actually my favorite joke in the piece, and this is a piece that has a few hundred words of totally made up Guy Fieri BS. You can read the whole thing here. Or you could not, that'd be fine, too. I know how it feels not to have time to do things. I know because I need to make chimichurri.

Chosen Ones And Others

Last summer, in the frantic and screechy days leading up to LeBron James's peculiar, image-shredding, goofily grandiose "Decision" broadcast, I got pretty busy. There were some (Ryan Genovese-assisted) suggestions of ways to spice up the broadcast, inspired by the ultra-perplexing Dean Martin Variety Show and a puzzling over the week's wince-y phenomenology here and at Can't Stop The Bleeding (twice, actually). When James finally signed with the Heat, it was a let-down in a bunch of different ways and at a bunch of different levels, but it was also something of a relief. Not just because I'd no longer need to wade through inherently un-verifiable pseudo-scoops as part of my Daily Fix duties, although there was certainly that. Instead, something seemed settled about LeBron, who is pretty clearly the best and among the most interesting players of his generation.

It wasn't that he was a villain, although that was the narrative that (justifiably) emerged in the wake of his decision to break up with his home state in what amounted to a televised infomercial for himself. Scooby Doo cartoons and sports columns are the only place in which people "are revealed" as villains, and anyway the hero/villain thing is never not-bullshit, at least in a sports-y context. The real revelation, not so much on the evening of The Decision but during a season marked by some petty bully-boy bullshit, some pettier mean-girl bullshit, and finally by a certain hollowness -- was that LeBron was less the fun-loving if somewhat thwarted figure that he had appeared to be during his early years in Cleveland and was instead seemingly dedicated to chasing a Jordan-inf(l)ected vision of Greatness. Not greatness qua being great, although that's obviously part of it, but greatness as in vastness -- championships and memorable photos of himself after winning championships, a brand that expands and engulfs forever and ever amen, and so on. "Global icon" was a term he used for it earlier in his career, and in all its bleak, un-human and multiple capitalistic crassnesses it was apparently what he meant. It's one thing to pull against a player whose style of basketball or on-court affect or locality of employment are unappealing to you. It's another, easier, thing to wish defeat upon a player who aspires with all his being to global brand-hood, to someday being raptured directly into the NYSE. That was the disappointment, for me, with LeBron -- that a player with so beautiful a talent (and with what seemed a healthy sense of humor) aspired to become a post-human, living/breathing/sweating/pooping corporation.

It has been an orgy of revilement for LeBron since his Heat lost to the Mavericks in the NBA Finals, and while Bethlehem Shoals and I have discussed what that match-up meant to us in our GQ chats, and while everyone in the whole fucking world has discussed What LeBron's Problem Is, I apparently still had a little bit left in me on this. So I wrote something I'm pretty happy with about LeBron and His Sad Aspirations for The Awl. In it, I compare him to a Richard Serra sculpture, which is maybe not the high point of my metaphor-making career -- I'd imagine that would involve ham and either a politician or a quarterback, somehow -- but which did provide an excuse not to run a picture of LeBron with this post. So you're welcome for that, I guess?

Order Up

Long before this humble website became the internet's formeost venue for long-form politically oriented pizza criticism, it was intended to be something of a professional (snirk) site for me. I'd link to things I wrote and talk about them and maybe if I ever got business cards printed up I would even put it on those business cards. "Here," I'd say, "go to my website and check out my work." And were someone to actually do that they would find My Work as opposed to My 1600-word Pseud-Opus on Donald Trump and Papa John Schnatter or a heartfelt essay on stuffed crust pizza and The Culture. Those things are "my work" as well, and I'm proud of them beyond reason, but they're also not necessarily the sort of thing that leads to more work. Unless and until The Journal of Rambling and Impressionistic Food Studies launches a For Kids version, they're just things on a writer's website. Which I'm cool with, honestly. But I feel the need to counterbalance them with things that are a bit more professional-ish than that. So, then: here is some of that.

I had a very busy week last week, which was satisfying and unsatisfying in the usual ways. I published a great many words, was paid a small amount for a few of them and no money at all for the rest, and spent the week oscillating between cruising my twitter and refreshing my email for the This Makes It All Worth It props and wondering why I am still writing so often for free. The answer, it turns out, was the same as it has been since I wrote this a longish time ago: I'm happiest writing the stuff I care about most, and I write that stuff best, and few of the places that run things that open-ended are willing to pay for it. (That I'm not getting paid by GQ is a different and more complicated story, but boils down to a similar thing) (And also the GQ situation relates to the other part of writing for free, which is that it allows me to get read by people who might want to pay me later on) Anyway, here's a selection of what I wrote last week. I'm not going to mention what paid and what didn't -- it was, as usual, all a lot of fun. And also I live very frugally so whatever on the money thing for the time being, I guess.

- Twitter Is The Instrument: Meet Baseball's First Tweeting, Crowdsourcing Organist, from Wired's Playbook blog. I really enjoyed this one: it's a great story, and while the piece itself isn't incandescently brilliant in its prose or content or whatever else, writing stories like this is always, always fun for me. And I like Wired, so this felt cooler for that reason.

- Yakkin' About Baseball Part IV, with David Raposa. Nothing much to add to these. They happen every two weeks and make me very happy.

- Profiles in Obscurity, for GQ's Balls Out blog. This is the NBA Playoffs blog I'm doing with Bethlehem Shoals and an increasingly astonishing list of guest-writers -- we've had Tom Scharpling and Carles from Hipster Runoff, and Lang Whitaker and a bunch of others are in the pipeline. The original role I was to have there, I think, was sort of as a chat-specific Joke Monkey, and while I've enjoyed doing that, the editor has also given me room to do some other fun stuff. Most recently, that meant the opportunity to spoof over-the-top glossy magazine profiles by writing two-graf leads for profiles of NBA end-of-benchers. I did one for Troy Murphy and one for Royal Ivey, and there are others coming this week and they were a total blast. They also proved strangely controversial -- after a great response on the day they went up (Royal Ivey even retweeted his, which is amazing), some troll-y blogger dude from Oklahoma City with 5,000-odd followers and a big red face that made him look like a smug char shiu pork roast encouraged his followers to bomb me on Twitter as an offensive anti-Oklahoma bigot because of a joke I made in the Ivey piece about Oklahoma City's restaurant scene. That is, for a joke in a joke piece that was clearly labeled as such. So for a day I had a bunch of Okies calling me a moron and a faggot and so forth on Twitter. Being from New Jersey, I know how it feels to have someone make fun of your home state with no actual knowledge of the place. (Alternately, people who have only seen the Turnpike shred New Jersey for its ugliness, which is kind of like making fun of someone's face based upon a glimpse of that person's colonoscopy) That said, whatever sympathy I felt for these dudes dissipated fairly quickly and I wound up just retweeting the most offensive slag tweets and thanking my lucky stars that there was no such thing as a Twitter when I was young. Because, man, neither 16-year-olds nor (apparently) your more thin-skinned Oklahoma adults are ready for that sort of connectivity.

- And one last one, from this week, is this piece for the very great baseball blog Pitchers and Poets, in which I ruminate on Rico Brogna's Mets tenure -- and, more to the point, on my parents' cluttered home and my own dusty memory attic -- as part of their terrific '90s First Baseman Week. (Paul Sorrento had already been taken, sadly)

And that's that for now. Look how professional of me! I'll see you sometime later this week with 1300 words on McDonald's' "Mr. Snuggles" Sweet Tea/Diabetes Cooler commercial, I'm sure.

Time Flies

I know that I should've followed up the big pizza post with more big pizza posts. Stuff about pizza-flavored Combos, pro and con and how I can see both sides of it. A defense of Domino's, or an attempt at understanding my urge to defend Domino's, or something. But I got really busy again, in a good way, and so have been off the reservation a little bit. It's nice to have good reasons for the radio silence, but also... well, I like writing here, and I should be doing it. It makes me happy. But instead I have been writing elsewhere. I have been writing:

Something about the end of the Space Shuttle program and our enervated, half-depressed culture, for New York Magazine.

Some goofy stuff about the NBA at GQ.com with my mellow the very brilliant Bethlehem Shoals.

Some other goofy stuff about Guy Fieri's imaginary Seder menu, at The Awl, with my other mellow the very funny Charles Star.

And a dozen other little goofy things for the Journal and a bunch of other places (about things like, um, The Masters). Lot of Tweeting. Lot of staying up very late for no obvious reason. Lots of that sort of responsible and reasonable thing.

At any rate, we'll get re-regulated here soon enough. Until then you should watch that video and continue to eat, read and act responsibly.

Gimme That Internet

For awhile, I was planning on trying to tote up all the words I wrote during the week before the Super Bowl. Why I was going to do this was a question that didn't occur to me until later than it probably should've, but it did occur to me. Not only would it not be much of a conversation starter -- especially when I'd have to later allow that, averaged out, I got something like seven cents per word -- but it would also probably be something of a bummer. More so to me than to the poor human stuck listening to me talk about it, but probably to both of us.

Luckily for me, though, some of those words were kind of a big deal for me. Over the last half of the week, I crashed through a story for the Wall Street Journal that was pretty easily the biggest thing I've yet done for them, and definitely the biggest journalistic "get" of a career essentially devoid of them. Which is fine, since that's not really what I do -- I compare athletes to deli meats, first and foremost. But I can see what's cool about this sort of thing, now. The piece is about the rediscovery -- after 44 years of being presumed lost -- of the network broadcast of the first Super Bowl. That one's here, and I'm pretty proud of it.

I also wrote what will probably be my last Kicked Off column for The Awl, and it is -- spoiler alert -- about the Super Bowl, and also has some more description of Super Bowl I (and more profanity, and more adjectives) than I was allowed at the Journal. I'm probably prouder of it, because my affection for my own voice overshadows my desire to be a scoopy newspaper dude. I also think I came closer to saying what I've been trying to say all year in this one than I previously have.

It's not a failure of taste that leads NFL owners—all of them owners of profitable teams, all of them beneficiaries of a television deal that pays the league $4 billion per annum—to boldly demand massive concessions from the players union because Of These Difficult Economic Times. Or that leads Sports Illustrated's NFL hagiographist/coffee-critic Peter King to write a tone-deaf piece fretting over the prospect that commissioner Roger Goodell—"sandy-haired and fit at 51," recipient of nearly $10 million in annual pay, point man on the owners' plan to extract those concessions and add two regular season games (which fans don't necessarily want) to the NFL's already brutal schedule—might be working too hard, according to friends. Or, at the most distant pole, that led Chuck Klosterman to get up at the Varsity Letters reading series on Thursday night and extemporize to the effect that the prospect of a NFL player dying on the field is something he likes most about the game. "Think about it," Klosterman said, tipsy off his own contrarianism, "they're putting their lives on the line out there." Klosterman seemed, beneath his grin and that beard and at the distance from which I regarded him, to be moved by how moved he was at the prospect, and amused at how amusing he found it.

That is all rotten, of course. But while the above are not in good taste, they are failures of perspective first and foremost. They reflect an inability or unwillingness to see beyond the self-flattery of dumb comforts and acknowledge complicated circumstances and context. Or, if you prefer, those distinct idiocies are different symptomatic presentations of the same disorder—a terminal inability to give a shit. The NFL, as it presently exists, is built to elicit this response in people—it makes emotion cheaper and easier to digest, it takes the laziest arms-length cruelties and ignorance and processes them until they are rich and filling. But the bigger the NFL makes itself—the more it gorges on synergies and succumbs to the distorting, obliterating appetites of irresponsible wealth—the more obese it becomes. The reason why the long march to the Super Bowl is exhausting—and why the entire NFL experience is increasingly obscene in an increasing number of ways—is that the NFL is not presently in shape to make a journey this long. It is too big, and getting bigger.

So, after what was certainly the busiest week of my professional life -- I even did a Sunday Daily Fix this morning -- I feel mostly physical sensations. I fell on the ice in New Haven this morning, so I've got this shame/ache cocktail going on there, and I've some of the expected carpal tunnel/brain issues. But feeling even a little bit of pride is nice, and sort of a surprise. I look forward to resting, whenever I'll get to do that, but I didn't expect all this to feel as worth-it as it currently does. This could all be undone by another slip on the ice, though. Young septuagenarian over here. Jeez.

Important Versus More Important

Where to start? I guess I'll start with the less significant stuff. Which is that what is going on in Egypt is terrifying and inspiring in equal measure. I'm under no illusions about what type of government might replace that of Hosni Mubarak there, but if it's a government chosen by the people who actually live there -- as opposed to one installed and maintained by a brutal and unaccountable military and crass, cynical international elites (like us!) -- it won't be worse than this. The Egyptians deserve better, like everyone deserves better, and I hope they get it. Given what we've seen, and given the craft and bravery and simple and amazing courage of what's going on there, it's hard to see how even the sourest bigot couldn't pull for them. Whatever their religion and whatever they want as a future -- it's safe to assume that the future will be a bit less forward-thinking on one notable non-Arab neighbor -- the Egyptians are working hard for theirs, and whatever they get they will certainly have earned.

Also, it's glib and maybe unfair, but I'll say it -- I would be really interested in seeing how our own brave exurban tricorn aficionados would behave when faced with a tyranny that deserves the name, and which has nastier things in mind than a modest tax hike on people a few brackets above them. Priorities, courage, so on -- it puts itself into perspective, I guess.

More importantly, though, much more importantly -- I wrote a David Foster Wallace parody/riff/homage/whatever for The Awl today, and I really like it and think you should read it. It is called "Brief Interviews With Hideous Football Players," and it includes but is not limited to Mike Singletary discussing his new job coaching a team in Animal Planet's Puppy Bowl and Jeremy Shockey discussing the signature appetizers he created with David Roth The Writer (and American) favorite Guy Fieri at Houlihan's. Again, sort of puts everything into perspective. Let us hope that the Egyptians can do as well as I did?

No, sorry. Can't make that joke, honestly. Pray for them. Click my BS if you've got time. Bless everyone and everything, and goodnight.

For The Love Of Footballs

I've been kind of bumping up against this all year, but Friday finally marked the day when I more or less ran out of time with my NFL column at The Awl. I still filed something, it still ran, and I'm still happy enough with it, but I just didn't give myself enough time to write it the way -- that is, at the vast and adjectivally padded length -- that I wanted to. That I went back and added 600-odd words to the draft after it went up is my own ridiculousness at work, although it'll presumably fascinate and confound future students of my writing as they comb through my Uncollected Works. "Why does he require so many words to describe this?" they will wonder. They will wonder that frequently.

Anyway, chalk another up for the vexations of my busy Fridays and confused priorities. The Awl NFL thing is basically the byline I'm proudest of right now -- well, that and the one I share with Jeff Johnson on the Yakkin' About Football things, which have seemingly migrated to Sundays -- and yet they're the last thing I write every week.

And this has been your peek under the hood of my lawnmower-engine work habits. Back to something else, all of us.

I Have A Snow Day!

I was going to be doing my usual Wall Street Journal Four Lessons thing on today's Giants/Vikings game, but... well, watch the video. I have never had a better excuse for taking a day off, and yet I still don't have to shovel. Although this does kind of put the whole "sometimes Minneapolis is just better" argument from earlier this week into some perspective.

(Also, the game has been postponed until Monday night, and moved to Detroit. Where tickets will be free on a first-come/first-served basis. Which means what's in that amazing video may not actually be the weirdest thing that happens involving this game. If anyone actually reads those Four Lessons things -- and they don't, except to call me a NYC elitist for not knowing the nicknames of Eagles players -- tomorrow night would be the time for that)

Also good Sunday news: the most recent Yakkin' About Football went up today at The Awl. Quiet day for readership, but it's just nice to have it up at all. And by "it" I mean "a ton of fake names for New England Patriots players." Here you go on that. I'm going to go do something that doesn't involve typing about football, now.

Thanks And You're Welcome

I'm back in New York City after four days in the benign sensory deprivation/regression therapy experience that is the ancestral home in New Jersey. Me, the wife, my parents, and the excitable bathmat pictured at left, hanging around a weirdly cold house -- the 64-degree setting on the thermostat was seemingly non-negotiable, with my mother going so far as to offer a sweater to a small/elderly/beloved Thanksgiving guest rather than goosing the temperature a few degrees. Eccentric parents are going to be eccentric parents, though, and I brought sweaters. And that giddy little shag carpeted animal is going to be cute, but it's also going to be fed weird things by my parents -- cheesecake? goose-liver pate? -- and then my parents are going to blame each other for feeding it weird things. And then the dog is going to poop in various places throughout the home, usually on or near one of the half-dozen or so wee-wee pads(tm) that have been scattered about the house in an attempt to both minimize carpet-related damage and define down the definition of "housebroken." This is all normal. I know it doesn't look that way, but it's normal.

It's actually not at all normal, I know. But the ways in which my annual Thanksgiving trips to the happy, underheated, secretly weird home have become normal -- the unconscious rapprochement I've realized with my family and hometown and past, and which you probably have, too -- has been much on my mind of late. In part, this is because -- belatedly, so incredibly freaking belatedly -- my novel is finished, and in the hands of my estimable agent, and because my novel is (subtextually, I guess) mostly about that topic. I write what I know, just like anyone else, and while I don't necessarily know what to make of the passage of time's effect on my family and myself, or on that cluttering, chilly homestead, I am at least aware that it is happening, and that the fact that it is happening makes me feel something.


The easiest label for that "something" would, I guess, be nostalgia or regret. This is because a sort of vague melancholy is my default mood/mode, but also because that's a pretty normal response to the passage of time and the inexorability of change and all that. We, or at least I, tend to struggle for a sense of control and equilibrium all of our days, but the accretion of all that time is something we can't control, no matter how on point we are about calling people back on time, getting up when the alarm goes off, et cetera. I battled myself to get the novel finished, while all around me my life rose in great teetering piles, and it has been a strange sensation, facing all that accumulation and wondering what to do with/about it, what to do next. And if I hadn't been alternately anxious and busy, if I hadn't spent all this time knee-deep in lame-brand scotch and inertia, the same accumulation would've happened. I'm not totally sure what I'm writing about, here, but I think I could write a lot more about it if given the opportunity.

I was given such an opportunity by my good friends at The Awl before Thanksgiving, as part of their Real American Thanksgiving Cookbook project -- a sort of compendium of essay-fied recipes by Awl staffers and commenters and adjunct semi-regular humperinos such as myself. I'm pretty happy with what I wrote, which was an essay about my parents' house and Thanksgiving -- still and probably always my favorite holiday -- wrapped around my second grade teacher's recipe for cranberry-orange relish.

Kate revealed to me, after the essay went up, that she has always found the recipe a little too tart. We made a half-recipe this year, and made it a little sweeter -- the guest list was smaller, and 20 percent of said guest list bashfully/finally went on record with her it's-just-too-cranny sentiments. I complain about my parents' house and weirdness because I worry about them getting old, I guess, and because I'm noticing myself getting older. But, as the Awl essay points out, it's a hopeful and happy thing that all this weirdness has proven so enduring, and so adaptable.

Revolutionary Unconsciousness

When I talk to people about my NFL columns for The Awl, it's tough for me not to say something like "I write the same column every week." I don't, or not entirely -- it's just this kind of reflexive self-deprecating thing that might well be charming in a more successful person, or one with higher self-esteem. But if I could write the same column every week, it would be this one's. I think it's my favorite, and anyone who has ever suffered through my football-is-socialist spiel in the past -- it's a three-scotches-in favorite, and a Chupacabran legend at certain bars -- will perhaps be happy to see that it's finally made it into print. Perhaps? I don't know, I don't know how you feel. But I'm pretty proud of the piece so, if you're into that sort of thing, feel free to read it.

World B. Free: On Writing For No Money

In terms of fancy-person attention, it has been a good couple of weeks for The Awl. One of their groundbreaking and reliably amusing and very handsomely written columns found itself on New York Magazine's Approval Matrix, which is apparently a much bigger deal than I'd previously understood. But more than that, there was a B1 feature on The Awl in The New York Times -- a very important dinosaur that I like despite the fact that it employs Matt Bai -- by the very excellent David Carr. (Whose retweet of my most recent Awl NFL column was honestly a much bigger deal to me than the New York Magazine thing, although that is only because I'm a doofus and not because it's objectively a bigger deal) All of this was good news in a bunch of different ways, from proving to my parents that writing for a website (on the Internet) is actually a real thing that people do to blessing the very deserving people behind The Awl with some positive attention. It's a great site, and I'm proud to be a part of it. All of that, I imagine, goes without saying. But that article also introduced a fairly complicated new element to my relationship with the site.

It started with this sentence, which different people will read in different ways, but which refers to The Awl itself: "Revenue for the year will surpass $200,000." Which, I know, is almost Pooh Jeter-caliber chip-stacking, just in terms of the number of digits/ducats involved. That's revenue for the entire site, presumably, before bandwith and tech stuff and snacks and other not-so-incidentals are taken out. So it's a decent chunk of money -- a big enough figure to inspire phone conversations with my parents and emails from friends wondering if/when that site is going to pay me -- but it's also fundamentally not when it's put in context. But about that parenthetical, back there.

So, as I wrote in an earlier me-on-me post that further marked the continued descent of this space into a spammier-than-usual LiveJournal, I am not getting paid by The Awl for the few thousand words of copy of mine that appear on the site every week. The arithmetic of it is simple and -- in the plain sense of how easy or difficult it makes it for me to buy groceries/scotch -- obviously unsatisfying: zero dollars and zero cents. But the calculus of it, which doesn't necessarily make much more sense but is at least a little less stark in its disappointing aspects, is worth going over.

This, as America has been requesting for generations, is at long last the calculus that is also gymnastics. (This is why my "street name" is Calc-Nasty) I've never been on the inside enough, writing-wise, to ever really come close to making a living at it -- I haven't gotten the apparently-still-industry-standard dollar per word rate since my trade magazine days some years ago. This is, in part, by choice -- I went out of my way to try to write for venues I enjoyed reading, and that's a narrow and generally unprofitable niche. So I did a lot of writing for $300 or $400 per piece, and there's no real way that adds up. The Wall Street Journal stuff -- now serving on Sundays! -- does something to even things out, but not a lot. I've got a part-time day gig. But I never really made notable inroads on the profitability thing. I have lived very luckily, and very cheaply, for years. Which is okay -- it's not that okay, but it's more or less okay -- because of... well, here are the gymnastics, before the calculus.

It's okay because why would I really WANT to write some feature for, like, Fast Company or some (any) Conde Nast magazine or whatever when I don't read those magazines and don't really have ideas for that sort of piece anyway? The answer, which I actually know, is that I would want to do that so that I could go out to dinner every now and then, or buy lunch without some gnawing pang in the gut, or any number of other things that I was last able to do when I had a steady and stable paycheck and a good deal less debt on my personal ledger. Honestly, I don't know people at enough magazines -- enough editors, or even enough writers who have been in those venues -- to have a shot at getting in. But also I don't try. This is circular. The point being that, as I'm 32 and persnickety and only inclined towards doing a few things, I am almost willing to do with less in the way of lunch rather than have to hustle my ass off to write a $300 feature (again, the only kind I can get into print -- the kind working writers do for yuks after cashing a check from, like, Esquire or Allure or someplace) that I kinda-sorta care about. And by almost I mean that I am willing to do that. I don't necessarily agree with myself, but here I am, doing it.

Of course, this isn't just -- or isn't entirely -- self-defeating behavior from a guy with some issues. The fact is that I am happier when I'm writing stuff that I'm proud of, when I feel like I'm writing at my best and doing great work. It's vain, maybe, but I imagine most any writer would tell you that. No one goes into this particular line of work for the money or perks or furs or VIP Room shit. And the way out, the only writing endgame that really works for me even in the abstract, is an opportunity to get paid to write the stuff I do best. I wish, or a part of me wishes, that said stuff was world-changing journalistic stuff, instead of dense, allusive football columns that are 80% jokes about lunchmeat. It'd be easier to explain than, "Oh, I'm the guy who compares quarterbacks to different types of ham."

But if I'm going to get to do the writing that I'm good at -- which is the lunchmeat thing, sadly, and which I think I'm pretty good at -- then I have to do it. I don't know that anyone could get paid for that, be it me or someone better organized or more focused or taller or whatever. It's not quite inventing a genre -- people have been comparing Ben Roethlisberger to olive loaf since long before olive loaf was invented -- but it's not an exercise in playing the standards, either. But if I'm going to write and be okay -- not feel badly, choose badly, act like a jerk or a layabout or some other lousy thing -- then I'll need to be writing my stuff. Would I love it if The Awl were paying me a dollar a word, or if someone wanted to turn my goofy chats with Jeff Johnson into a popular series of young adult novels? Fuck yes, because I'd have new shirts. But because I love it, and because I'm a happier and better dude when I do it, and because The Awl is a brilliant and generous platform for it, I do it for free. And they're doing the same thing, honestly -- going pretty broke (note the first graf of Carr's piece for the arrival of Choire's first Awl paycheck) running only the stuff they like. Some of that is tough-to-categorize, webby serial stuff -- Sean McTiernan's month-long dance with the devil in his 31-horror-movies-in-October series, for instance. Some of that comes in the form of delightful, literary essays about pop stuff written in a way that wouldn't fit at most sites. Some of it, thankfully for me, is long-form joke-riffage about NFL coaches and hate letters to Chris Berman.

It'll either earn me money someday or it won't, but it is really the stuff I'm best at right now. And earning money the other way -- a few more dribs and a few more drabs, with a lot more agita and notably less satisfaction -- wasn't working for me, either. This way, with this place and even at this rate, is working for me -- I'm doing the work I want to do. In a market that made sense or worked or valued what I do more highly, I'd of course not give it away so cheap. That's not this market, though, and I wasn't nearly as proud of my work (or, barf-alert, myself) when I was hustling bylines for three-digit paychecks at various other venues. If I'd ever had better-paying work at other places, I might feel differently. I never knew anything that much better than this, though, money-wise. And I've never known anything better in terms of my satisfaction with my work, affection for my editors, or positive response from an audience. Some things are more important than money. Like shirts. You would not believe my shirts. I look like a homeless Stephen Malkmus.

Anyway, there's all that. I'm sure this decision will look amazing when the platinum edition of "My Chris Berman Problem And Ours, A NFL Journey" hits stores. I'll be sitting pretty signing copies at Del Posto for secretaries of state and generally looking wise as fuck, steady wearing a shirt without even smallish olive oil stains on it. Or anyway, not the shirt I'm wearing now. I look like a batik made of everything I've cooked in the last few months. That's the other side of this: self-batik. I never said it was easy, or smart. But it's the only thing I can imagine even working this well.

Sonned By Willow Smith, or A Career Highlight?

I don't usually put pictures of myself on this website -- I'm above trading on my looks at this point in my career, frankly -- but I'm making an exception at left to show my expression when I heard that Willow Smith's "Whip My Hair" was closer to the "Brilliant" axis on this week's New York Magazine Approval Matrix than were my Yakkin' About Football conversations with Jeff Johnson at The Awl. But then I realized that my goofy Yakkin' About Football conversations with Jeff Johnson at The Awl were even on the Approval Matrix, and I was happier. And kind of startled. Now that I know someone's reading these things, they're going to get a lot tougher. You'll see a lot more /anxious silence in my responses and a lot less stuff about Freezie Freakies.

I really hope someone in the NFL says or does something ridiculous, and bails me out on this anxiety thing. Hold on... and, thank you, Brett. Obliged. Also, even by New York Post standards, that is basically the most ridiculous URL head-text I've ever seen. (Words rhymed: "ringee" and "thingee") Stop hiring 8-year-olds to write those, you guys! Stop it right now. (They'll never stop, I know)

The Tired Sounds Of...

When I write, I write a lot. This is also true of when I talk or eat, but it's especially pronounced when it comes to This Writing Shit. I'm a really fast typist, and if I'm going to be honest also pretty well enamored by the sound of my own voice, and so writing 1,000 words to me doesn't always feel like a big deal. (Doing the Daily Fix -- which used to be an inexplicable 1300 words, and is still over a thousand most days -- on the regular has also conditioned me to think of 1,000 words as an hour-and-change/no-big-deal deal)

Obviously this isn't always the case -- when I'm trying to write in my inside/professional voice, for instance, it's obviously more difficult. But I don't need to tell you that this, say, is different from this. All you have to do is read them to see as much. The former's a third as long as the latter, but took several more drafts and several more hours to do. Some of that is the nature of working with newspaper editors -- good ones, in this case, but still people who most definitely will redline a draft and send it back to you -- but a lot of it is just me working the way I work. When it's happening for me, it happens in these big loud tumults of words and long, parenthetical-rich sentences -- for instance, there'd be a parenthetical here, were I making this sentence an example -- and things of that nature. You get some alliteration and some jokes and whatever, but it's basically an exploded drawing of my brain, hopefully with some connection to whatever the topic in question is. The struggle is to give it some shape, or to edit out the more egregious jokes or -- and I have some work to do on this part, I know -- limiting the parentheticals and finding some focus.

And maybe that's all that went on this week with my two pieces for The Awl, and I'm reading too much into it. So, as per usual, I did two football-related pieces for The Awl this week. The first one was this chat with Jeff Johnson which, once again, was fun as hell and -- because making jokes about Brett Favre's fantastically wise cock-shot gambit comes almost as easily to me as does writing long parentheticals -- about as easy as could be. It came out pretty funny, got a nice response, and I hope you'll read it. It's also almost 2,000 words and took about an hour or so to do. As long as NFL people keep doing silly/objectionable/easily-riffed-upon things, we could continue doing these every week, and it'll never be difficult or less fun. That's not the problem.

The problem was the weekly Kicked Off column, which -- and this is the doesn't-usually-happen part -- wound up being an intense struggle for me. Part of the problem was that I didn't totally know what I was going to be writing about. I was going to write about Favre and his photogenic peen, before realizing that it had actually apparently been covered fairly well in the sports press. Then I was going to write about embattled 49ers head coach, crucifix aficionado and objectively crazy human Mike Singletary, and coaches in general. And then, finally, I settled on the eventual topic -- Ben Roethlisberger and the dual, duelling uglinesses of his personal behavior and the NFL's institutional arbitrariness.

It wasn't that easy, though. For most of Thursday, I sat in front of my computer (yes, I do write on a computer, ladies) with nothing happening at all. I wrote a paragraph and tweaked it, then deleted it. I wrote some jokes about what Andy Reid's office must smell like, which is obviously kind of evergreen (the writing, not the smell of the office -- I'm getting a pretty strong "old fried" vibe, there). But the engine wasn't really turning over. I don't know what the cause of this was, and still kind of don't -- I think there was probably some anxiety about writing something too serious and not having people enjoy it as much as my cavalcade of dick jokes, and definitely some anxiety over wanting to have each Awl NFL column be the best thing written about football in that, or any, week. Which sounds okay, I guess, in a hard-driving perfectionist sense (and another way in which I'm like Tom Coughlin, I suppose), but which is also a pretty goofy way to address an unpaid online column I'm doing for yuks, even if I hope that the column could become a book or something someday. So I'm doubly proud of the mini-essay that resulted, both because I think it's pretty good in its own right and because it was something I did under duress late at night on Thursday and then in double-time on Friday. Mostly, though, I'm happy that it got done.

Which, you know, probably isn't the highest standard, necessarily. But while I've stressed over stuff like this before, this was the first time I'd really been in doubt about whether something was going to get done in time in a long while. With a lot of what I write for money, I simply don't worry about it enough to experience this sort of anxiety. I'm not tearing the Daily Fix out of my soul, and the Four Lessons things I'm writing for the WSJ's Metropolis section (and am supposed to be writing right now) aren't things I agonize over. (Although I did work hard on my Dan Dierdorf imitation in this one) The Awl columns mean a bit more to me, which makes a perverse type of sense given that I'm doing them for free. The relative editorial latitude, the ability to pick my subjects and write in my own voice and with the words I like best -- that should make it more fun. Ditto the reliable ego-feedback of a couple of weekly bylines and a generally kind response from the Awl's commenters (the rare internet commenters whose opinion I actually value). As usual with me, though, I tend to forget that having fun is even an option -- writing's my favorite thing, more or less, but because it's also my work, I kind of fall back on my default mood, which is self-lacerating anxiety/scotch-wanting. File that under the Mental Beatdown of Freelancing, I guess. Anyway, the good news: I still enjoy this stuff. The unsurprising news: I need to remind myself of that, sometimes.

Talking About What Matters

So, Jeff Johnson wrote a series of amazingly joke-dense and strange NFL previews for McSweeney's years ago -- back when I was just a young pup working at AOL and somehow making more money than I've ever made since -- that pretty much changed the way I thought about sportswriting. Which is to say that I hadn't previously known that you could compare a Jacksonville Jaguars game to the experience of getting a nosebleed in a rental car, although that was obviously what most Jags games are like and also is way better than, like, talking about match-up problems in the secondary. So obviously I was excited to get the opportunity to talk Randy Moss -- and high-altitude intercourse, and Ryan Fitzpatrick's ultimate frisbee chops, and et cetera -- with him at The Awl today. It went a little something like this:

Jeff: You go out and get Randy Moss because…

David: Tall, great at football, future Hall of Famer, knows lots of trivia about Robert Byrd, is as defiantly country as any multi-millionaire in the world. What the Vikings are doing seems unlike anything I can think of another NFL team ever doing, though.

Jeff: Building by getting older.

David: Just stacking the olds and giving it One Last Try. Totally not the move in the NFL.

Jeff: Maybe Jan Stenerud will come out of retirement.

David: You know he’s keeping fit.

Jeff: Skiing.

David: Doing decathlons in Bemidji or whatever.

Jeff: Having sex in the Alps.

David: High-altitude sex: that was P90X before P90X was.

Jeff: I don’t want to live in a world where he can’t.

And so on. Good times. Read it, if you have five minutes to spare on things that really don't matter and might not amuse you.

Wit Or Wit-Out: On Michael Vick, Ethical Hurdles and Barf Monsters In Brian Dawkins Jerseys

Ordinarily I'm happy to tuck the links to Kicked Off, my NFL column at The Awl, over into the right hand corner. And while I've done that with this week's column, which deals with Michael Vick, Philadelphia monsterfans and the moral and (as usual) ethical quandaries of NFL fandom -- assiduous site maintenance being my hallmark, here -- I thought it worthy of a miniature post, as well. Not just because I'm kind of proud of it (I am, but I love all my adjectivally unbalanced creations equally) (Not really), but because... well, because I had that great picture of a dog in a Redskins jersey gnawing on a Michael Vick figurine, and wanted to use it.

But mostly I'm proud of the piece. It's not perfect, obviously, but I really did want to get it right, and I think hours of fussing over it helped me come pretty close to that. (Also helpful were the near-invisible edits of The Awl's Alex Balk, who manages to cut down the shag on these columns with real grace; I barely notice, and it doesn't hurt at all) There's a tendency for me to fall back into the same harangue every week with these -- said harangue being, in short, that the NFL demands an unseemly ethical quiescence from its fans because of its singular brutality and exploitiveness. While I didn't feel that any less acutely this week than I did last, or the week before that, or back in like 2008 when I was moaning about the Patriots and the end of everything good in the universe. The tough part to remember, and the thing I can't forget if I actually want these pieces to be any fun to read, is that I actually do kind of enjoy watching football. This means that, because players like Michael Vick are so transcendently gifted and what they can do so unique and remarkable, I need to kind of re-examine the NFL fan's ethical bargain every week knowing that 1) I'm going to come down on the "buy" side every week and 2) my livelihood at WSJ (and elsewhere) depends to a great degree on sucking it up and dealing with the squeamishness.

It helps that Vick is fascinating, and a beautiful player and vexingly complex subject. But while I can't write this particular column every week, I'm feeling pretty good, at the moment, about the challenge of writing something like it for another few months. I'm sure it won't be easy, because if past experience holds I'm going to be sick to death of the whole dumb thing by Week 13. But I imagine it will be interesting, and there's always room in my workday for something like that. Or... well, there's not actually room in my workday. But I look forward to trying to fit it in anyway, is what I'm saying.

Concuss and Discuss, or Everyone Works During The NFL Season

Here is a reasonable person doing a reasonable thing. His name is Jared Allen, he plays for the Minnesota Vikings, he fucking loves guns, and he is almost impossible for me to relate to in any way. It's not just that I'm kind of meh on guns, have not been arrested for DUI even once, and have never driven Dan Orlovsky's face into the turf of Ford Field. It's that the life experiences and physical bigness and immense wealth and tremendous overwhelming love of firearms that have shaped Jared Allen's personality is as foreign to me as can be. This isn't to say that I can relate with, say, Jose Reyes's life experience -- I don't love fried meats or other Dominican delicacies, I did not grow up excruciatingly poor and then become excruciatingly rich. But man: writing about the NFL, which is mostly what I've been doing for the last two weeks and mostly what I'll be doing for the next five months, sure feels strange.

I mentioned it earlier, but I should probably have been linking to the two columns I've done for The Awl in my new role as their weekly NFL columnist. Which, like so many of my other gigs, sounds really awesome until you check out the (imaginary, in this case) pay stubs. But I love that site, love the editors, and am pretty proud of the two columns I've written for them thus far -- the first is an elaborate scene-setting given over almost entirely to making fun of Chris Berman; the second is about mirroring and reflexive unreflectiveness in the broader NFL discourse. So kind of like Peter King if you replaced his pumpkin spice latte with scotch and his love of the NFL and everyone in it with intense ambivalence. There are also predictions at the end of every column, in which I'm getting soundly out-predicted by a flipped Canadian coin and posting a winning percentage that even Charlie Morton thinks is pathetic.

Anyway, it has been fun, and as you can see I've decided to busy up the righthand column -- which did not contain nearly enough information, obviously -- with links to each of these columns and all of those to come. I will, however, probably be saving most of my NFL insights -- insights such as What Is The Deal With Jared Allen, among other pricelessnesses -- for my bylined stuff. Between The Awl column, which I have apparently decided to make a sprawling weekly exercise in cultural studies capped with totally incorrect predictions, and additional NFL writing for the Journal -- More bad predictions! Semi-gamers for the Metropolis blog! -- I'm really pushing my NFL tolerance to its limits. This is a sport I'm more fascinated by than actually interested in, and I watch the games -- and the behavior of the totally reasonable national heroes playing and coaching those games, like the 100% not DSM-diagnosable mentally ill man at right -- at a much further remove than I do any other sport. In part because the players are like strange zoo monsters, and in larger part because of its outsized impact on the broader national discourse and the terribly stupid fear-based machismo that defines NFL culture.

The sport itself is interesting to me, maybe more so than ever -- when you start noticing for the patterns of the game and the intricacies of each play, football is a fascinatingly complex (if also culturally complicated) thing. But the discourse surrounding it keeps me at arm's length -- increasingly rapt at the weird, brutish intricacy of the sport itself, but also puzzled by the combination of incautious canonization and casual loathing to which the players are subjected, irritated by the terrified gay-panic weirdness of its broader discourse, discouraged by the sheer equine scope and bellowing utterances of CBS halftime dude Shannon Sharpe's face. If this sort of insight sounds like the sort of thing you're interested in reading over and over again, with varying intensity of expression and a fairly high amount of profanity, man do I have some good news for you about your next four-plus months.

Write What You Know (That You Find Objectionable)

The sound of corny aggro pseudo-Sousa on highlights and the bray of eight-dude pregame shows and the screaming -- just straight-up screaming -- of a half-in-the-bag Chris Berman. The terse, impatient crypto-Rumsfeldianism of a coach's press conference and the audible-on-mic line-on-line grunting and the glottal honking of Tony Siragusa in a golf shirt, talking about toughness. It is not only nearly NFL season, it increasingly seems that it is always NFL season. The Real Housewives of New Jersey? That would basically be the AFC North turned into people with burnt umber tans, periodic instances of depressingly cartoonish pontoon fakebreasts, and industrial-grade pill habits. Protests against the Non-Ground Zero Non-Mosque? Basically just New York Jets fans getting ready for the season to start. Katy Perry's videos? They're what people think about while masturbating in the bathroom at Cowboys Stadium, basically. The only difference between Fox News and Fox's pre-game show is that Fox and Friends features nine fewer commentators and no Jimmy Johnson. These are FACTS.

They are not facts. But my push-pull revulsion/attraction to the NFL is both weird and undeniable at this point. Given that I write about football as part of my livelihood -- and that I willingly solicited The Awl in hopes of writing a NFL column this year, and that I am actually going to be writing that column -- I don't really have the option of sitting it out. Increasingly, though, I don't want to sit it out. Increasingly, I'm drawn to the sociocultural car wreck -- and often-torpid sports-watching exercise -- that is the NFL. No pro sport is covered more poorly in the media, I don't think -- who is YOUR favorite NFL writer? Take as much time as you need -- and the interplay between long moments of inertia and short spurts of violence is less poetic to me than it is like being stuck in traffic. No pro sport, with the possible exception of hockey, features less-relatable, less-sympathetic players; no sport anywhere features more unconscionably nasty management or more disagreeable self-important martinets as head coaches. These are pretty close to facts, too. It's not just that I dislike a lot about the NFL. It's that I have a hard time, sometimes, understanding how a decent human being could like anything about the NFL.

But, but: I sort of do like the NFL. I really do like fantasy football, and I really did enjoy watching the NFL Playoffs last year. Which is probably why -- despite the fact that the NFL is easily the most objectionable pro sports league and the sport itself is not at all my aesthetic favorite -- I enjoy writing about the NFL so much. Over the course of a year, I wear down: by Week 14, I'm just kind of mumbling to myself; by Week 16 I'm essentially just making stuff up. By the Super Bowl, I'm basically writing eulogies for everything I hold dear while also trying to discuss injuries in the secondary, the pitfalls of the West Coast Offense, and etc. But I think I not only enjoy the challenge, I enjoy the argument with myself. Being a sports fan is never something I've felt terribly guilty about -- occasionally dorky, but not even really that anymore, as my dorkiness has become something merely factual, rather than something to try to obscure in order to impress others -- but the NFL conjures in me this weird combination of haughty down-the-nose dismissiveness, ethical revulsion, and anthropological how-does-this-even-work curiosity. None of them are exactly fun feelings, but they're all at least more complicated than getting bummed out by how poorly run the Mets are.

I guess this means that I'm ready for some football? I am, at least, roughly as ready as I ever will be, or allow myself to be. Let the challenge begin.