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?

Exercises in Belatedness

If this is the one place you come for your David Roth news -- and I'd ordinarily recommend making it such, because most of the fansites have a lot of inaccuracies -- I have been letting you down. Of course, there is no one anywhere who pursues "David Roth news," here or anywhere, so I'll assume you've been fine. Things have been happening -- a new series of ridiculousness-powered NFL chats with Jeff Johnson at GQ.com (those so-inclined can catch up here and here), as well as another piece for New York Magazine, a few Vice columns I'm proud of (I like this one and this one, and the most recent one is at least on the new Vice.com site).

I also gave a powerpoint presentation in front of a couple dozen people in a Brooklyn bar during a rainstorm. I helped my wife move back to Connecticut and got sad. The Kickstarter fundraising for The Classical, which was the last thing I did a post about -- ahem -- continued and continues and is doing well. All good. I had some good experiences cooking with kale. All, except for the kale, maybe worth reporting as more than a series of serial hyperlinks, given that this blog exists to catalog the things I do (and, to a lesser degree, how I feel about pizza). I'll do better. Also I'm going to post a 2200-word thing later today which is going to more than get me to my quarterly prose-quota. What a relief, right?

Ideation Session

From: Jeff Johnson
To: David Roth

Is it horribly naive to suggest to Papa John he actually have a chain of sit-down restaurants?

Aren't his margins HUGE elsewhere?

Is it not easier for store managers to have sexual encounters with their subordinates in "spaces" without a lot of customer foot fall?

Is it not enticing though, to think of a pizza/pigskin BONANZA, shepherded over by Papa John himself? 34 HD screens? College girl waitresses. Miller lite flowing.

Special appearances by Jeff George?


To: Jeff Johnson
From: David Roth

I like the idea of this happening along the lines of those commercials where he randomly shows up at peoples' houses with a bunch of pizzas and then throws a tight spiral in the street. Like Papa John gets to your house really early in the morning with a breakfast pizza -- like the Papa Benedict, with six eggs, "real bacon," spinach, etc. -- and then moves in a bunch of TVs, an industrial fryer, etc. And your home becomes Papa John's Conference USA Football Ground Zero for a day, more or less with your consent but not entirely with your consent. Strong yes on the Jeff George thing, obviously.


From: Jeff Johnson
To: David Roth

When he leaves it is beyond trashed. But the people feel blessed.

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)

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.