20,000 Different Kinds of Sentimentality

So much of what I write at this time of year is about the NFL, and much of what I write about the NFL can be filed under either "exasperated/political" or "frankly hallucinatory." I have examples of both up today, although the most recent edition of my goof-therapy football-yakking with Jeff Johnson has not yet gone up at GQ as I write this. But this week's Vice column came out pretty well, I think, both in general and as an example of what I do actually think is kind of great about the NFL. As overbranded and generally, half-fascistic-ly dumb as the league is, and as multiply objectionable as it is in so many ways, it's also a great place to project some feelings and get some escapism up in yourself. And when formerly (and possibly still) crummy teams from crumbling cities random pull off upsets and generally don't look terrible... well, you'd have to be a much more serious and well-balanced human than me not to write a column about how awesome that is.

That both teams are sharing first place at this point in the season makes even non-partisan fans feel good, especially since the Bills got there by knocking off the unctuously sadistic New England Patriots on Sunday in a comeback you’d scoff at for being unrealistic if you saw it in a movie. Whether that success has any greater football significance remains to be seen, although it wouldn't be surprising if it didn’t—Detroit hasn't beaten a good team yet, and Buffalo has trailed by three scores in both of their last two games. And of course, appealing though it is to think otherwise, nothing that either team does will do much to make the cities of Detroit or Buffalo less like their bleak selves.

But there's still something worth celebrating here, even if it's illusory and despite the fact that—broadly speaking—it’s all pretty resoundingly insignificant. The NFL's militaristic pomp and goony storylines are not, after all, the only way to understand or enjoy a football game. American culture is currently screaming profanities at itself from the bottom of a canyon-sized rut; everyplace, increasingly, feels like a cross between Detroit and Buffalo. So a stunning comeback win or two from the NFL's ultimate rust-belt no-hopers offers a very in-context type of escapism, and inspires a different and sweeter sort of sentimentality.

Because of the inherent TL;DR issues at Vice, that's like half the column, but there are jokes en route to the end. This should in no way suggest that I am giving up on seeing the NFL as a giant ass-carnival of bad ideas and bad faith. It still is. But I'm certainly not boycotting a Bills team powered by friend-of-the-program Ryan Fitzpatrick, or a Lions team that wins and plays joyously. The opposite. I am, for all the usual qualifications, LOVING that shit.

Arise, Ye Punt Returners

There's not necessarily too much to say about this one. My piece in this week's issue of New York Magazine isn't the first time I've written about NFL semioto-economic weirdness or its plutocratic creepery -- not by a longshot, actually, or even the first time in the last seven days. But this is the first time I've written about it for New York Magazine, and it's the first time I've tied it into the NBA lockout and written about it at an economic length and honestly this whole "it needs to be the first time" thing of yours is weird. I like the piece. Just go with it for once, okay? Thanks. Jeez. Like pulling teeth with you sometimes.

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.

Tom Brady Speaks Out On Ugg Apparel

So, Tom Brady is endorsing Ugg men's apparel. It's a pretty huge deal, which is why the sports media is covering it. It's obvious that this could be what apparel-market watchers and total buttheads call "a game change." But it's also clear that men will never buy Ugg apparel. So, it's complicated.

I did what journalists do and called Tom Brady for comment on this. What I got was a very long statement, a lot of it about hair care and a small portion of it about the difficulties of shaving when your chin looks like his does. But I've edited the most salient bit and put it below. I think it's quite illuminating.

BRADY: And you see this happen every time someone tries to branch out and try something different, push himself. When Justin Timberlake -- close friend, we watch DVR'ed episodes of Entourage on Tuesdays, sometimes via Skype but every Tuesday since 2005 -- wanted to get into restaurants, people were like, "You're spreading yourself too thin, concentrate on your acting." That's just an example. There are a bunch of others. Bruce Willis and his vodka brand, and this one's near and dear to me because Bruce and I were co-chairs of this Anti-Death Tax Gala that Robert Kraft threw last year, but Bruce put his heart and soul into that vodka, and everyone in the media's like, "no, famous people can't have vodka brands, but maybe you can have yours as long as you don't go back to making music."

I'm maybe off topic, but my point being that Ugg clothing is a product I believe in, it's a natural fit, and so partnering with them isn't the sort of thing I really like seeing criticized. And there's this argument that Uggs, you hear this argument, sometimes: "Ugg boots are just for women, and more specifically they're just for women in certain parts of Nassau County and that Pamela Geller woman who goes around stopping up the toilets in Middle Eastern restaurants with paper towels because she hates Sharia law so much." And that sentiment is ignorant, that sentiment is stupid, okay. Because I buy the boots for my offensive lineman every season, and they love them. Logan Mankins wears them during practice. You can't see it, but Tully Banta-Cain wears this fur-lined Ugg hat that I got him for Secret Santa last year under his helmet when it gets cold. It's disgusting, by this point, it looks like a giant hairy pancake and smells like microwaved diapers, but Tully swears by it. And these are men. Tell Tully Banta-Cain that men don't wear Ugg apparel, you know?

But my point is that I'm branching out -- because I'm not just a football player, you know, any more than Bruce Willis is just an actor. He's a bluesman. He loves vodka. He's a PERSON, okay. And people have interests, and some of us have brands, and those brands need cultivating the same as any other person's brand does. So I feel like people need to get over it. And anyway, I'm trying to focus on the Jets. That's job one.

(The Awl Yakkin' About Football thing has been delayed this week, but this will be discussed, when Jeff and I finally get around to discussing things)

Richard Seymour Is Making Sense

I could link to the video of Oakland Raiders lineman Richard Seymour straight slapping Ben Roethlisberger's rape-ham of a face in today's Oakland/Pittsburgh tilt -- can and will, friends -- but I'm pretty sure the NFL will have it pulled down off YouTube sooner than later. So I'll go with a somewhat more abstract bit of imagery above, which pretty well sums up what you'll see in the video.

Am I now suddenly reversing my stance on NFL violence, or idiot macho stuff, or what is generally a slap-averse approach to life? No, not really. Although I feel like it's healthy to make exceptions when a shit-talking serial sexual assault suspect is on the receiving end. My thoughts on Roethlisberger, and what kind of processed meat he resembles most, are obviously a matter of public record. But I'd be remiss if I didn't link to this, and thank the mighty Joey Litman for bringing it to my TV-less attention up here in New Haven.

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.

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.

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.