THE NCAA: A desperately out of touch organization.

This week, as part of a long line of their trivial decisions, the NCAA decided to finally hand The Ohio State University football program it’s long awaited punishment for students trading their football “things” in exchange for tattoos and money. On top of this, Ohio States coach; Jim Tressel, who has since stepped down failed to alert the authorities, once he was made aware of these egregious crimes against humanity.

These players were not trading their game day equipment or their playbooks or anything remotely important; they were trading commemorative jerseys and in one case a Big 10 Championship ring in exchange for tattoos and other merchandise. Because of this, the NCAA has decided to ban Ohio State from a bowl appearance in 2012 as well as deprive the school 9 football scholarships per year over the next five years.

I understand that the players broke some rules, but Christ, how in god’s name does that punishment fit that crime? The players who committed the infringements already sat out of at least 5 games each, the head coach was forced out the door, the entire 2011 season was basically a wash and the punishment must continue for another 5 years and essentially punish a collection of coaches and student athletes who had nothing at all to do with this?

It can be argued that nothing wrong was even done to begin with. These players did not steal anything, they did not hurt anyone; they traded some junk for tattoos and spending money. That isn’t a crime, that’s the god dam barter system. How is bartering goods against any set of rules? Civilizations would have never taken foot without this system. Without the ability to do what these kids did, we would all still be running around the dessert, chopping off each other’s heads.

The underlying problem here is this; stop expecting student athletes to be more mature then they are. They are college kids, who just happen to be good at some sport. Being good at a sport, doesn’t make them good decision makers. College students are for the most part, immature jackasses who are there to learn how to become more mature jackasses. The ones who play sports are no different; they all suffer from the same combination of dumb and broke and hormones. So why hold some of these kid’s decisions against an entire multi-million dollar per year athletic program?

I know a guy, who in college sold every bodily fluid imaginable on a bi-weekly basis for 5 years, just so he could fill his freezer with various items from fast food restaurants dollar menu’s, so that he could eat them for dinner every night. He was not alone; thousands of college kids are doing this, because they have no money. Had he happened to be an athlete and had a commemorative jersey that he could have sold for 20 bucks, no doubt he would have done so. God forbid him to save himself a pint or two of blood. This kid would have given up a kidney for a keg of beer and a package of pork chops. Why, because he was broke and stupid, and broke and stupid people do stupid shit. That is the way of the world; major financial organizations should not be brought to their knees over the choices that stupid broke college kids make.

I could understand had these kids murdered someone, but would it have made a difference as far as the punishment was concerned? Thank god the NCAA is not running this nation’s judicial system; people caught jay walking would be hung on the spot.

The NCAA is great for college sports like curling and archery and cross country running, but not for the major sports. Major football and basketball programs at these schools allow all of the other sports at the school to exist. The ticket sales alone from Ohio State Football and Basketball games earn the athletic program nearly 100 million dollars a year. So you’re welcome other sports, without them, you minus well start buying your own curling rocks and bows and arrows and whatever other crap you need for your obscure sporting activities. So someone is needed to oversee the transfer of funds within the athletic programs and the NCAA seems to do well enough in this aspect. They also do a good job of making sure the players aren't doing too many drugs, win. But when it comes to figuring out punishments for things, they are desperately out of touch with reality.

USC is currently in the midst of a two year bowl ban, because Reggie Bush accepted money from a booster years ago when he played there. So everyone who currently plays football at USC, who had no idea what Reggie Bush had done, had never even met the man, are now punished for it. Why, because the NCAA has no jurisdiction beyond punishing athletic programs. Reggie Bush is rich; as will be all of the offending Ohio State players as they trickle into the NFL. But the programs which they are no longer a part of are punished. It reminds me of “Full Metal Jacket” when everyone else had to do calisthenics because Private Pile had hidden a donut in his foot locker. Why have the ability to impose punishment at all when you have no ability to punish the actual offender(s). How old is your rule book that it is this full of shit?

I don’t know about you, but whenever I picture the NCAA rule book, I see this dusty, yellow, filthy, leather bound book, some pages missing, some are half ripped out and the whole thing must be kept inside of an air tight vacuum sealed case because it is so old, that if it were ever exposed to the Earth’s atmosphere, it would vaporize instantaneously. We all just have to take the NCAA’s word on things because nobody can actually read the book for fear of it turning into sand as soon as someone accidently breaths anywhere near it.

I don’t know what the answer is. Institutions who are governed by bodies that they could just buy at any moment never lead to any sort of a good situation. Look at the Securities and Exchange Commission, how’s that shit working out for everyone? My proposal would be to allow the NCAA to govern where they are needed, which would not include sports programs that earn enough to sustain themselves for decades on end. I could understand them stepping in, in the event of some serious rules breakdowns were to occur. They can feel free to drug test and make sure the students are actually going to school and making sure revenues find their way to the archery programs. But as far as players selling memorabilia for cash and tattoos, they should really just fuck off.

Why Professional Sports as we know it will go away:

Can you imagine Major League Baseball, as it is today, being around for another 20 years? I certainly can’t. We witnessed this week another example of the yearly owners meetings coming and going without any sort of significant changes to the salary structure which has turned the mid to small market teams into what are basically Class AAAA franchises for the larger market teams.

I don’t think you can operate a profitable, nationwide, professional sporting league of any kind, without some sort of salary cap in place. Right now, the only reason, that the vast majority of Major League Baseball teams make any money, is because of their 162 game schedules. You don’t have to sell out every game. With that kind of volume a team can get away, for several years, averaging 15 -20 thousand fans per game.

But it can’t keep being all about profitability or non-profitability. At some point, one has to look at WHY my team only has this many people showing up for games. When you have teams like the Los Angeles Dodgers, who have the second largest market in the United States to form a fan base out of, going bankrupt, something is inherently wrong with your sport.

And I think that “something” is entertainment value. Baseball is the only sport, where on a yearly basis; I can’t tell you who plays for my home team. I have no idea who is in the 2012 starting rotation for the Cleveland Indians. I have heard of Asdrubel Cabrera, other than him, I can’t name you an everyday infielder for the Tribe. If you were to ask a Red Sox fan or a Yankee fan who is on their team, they could rattle those names off in a minute.

The difference is star power on their teams compared to ours. Most major league teams are not much more than a collection of that franchises best farm system players from the year before. Which is a nice story for those kids, but leaves a lot to be desired as a fan who is supposed to care about these people and pay money to watch them?

People don’t show up to boxing matches to watch the under card, just as people don’t show up to MLB games to watch minor leaguers masquerading as professional baseball players. Most people are not stupid enough as sports fans, to allow themselves to be fooled into thinking that Jason Donald is a professional second baseman.

So until every team has the ability to retain talent for long enough that their fan bases can identify with their players, professional baseball will be on the fast track to contraction of teams and an eventual failure.

I think the best thing that could possibly happen to professional baseball, as it is today, would be for Warren Buffet to buy the Kansas City Royals. I wonder how fast, the league would impose a hard salary cap, once someone with real wealth began poaching talent from the Yankees, Red Sox and Phillies and putting them in that television market. I have a feeling it would be a matter of days.

THE NBA

The NBA is just about done already. When you are in the middle of a 130 day lockout and 85% of American’s polled don’t care, you’ve got some serious issues with your sport. I live in a city where they have Kevin Garnet, Rajon Rondo, Paul Pierce and Ray Allen on their team, and I have not met a single person who gives a half a shit about the NBA not playing games right now.

I can’t imagine how little they care in places like Minnesota and Milwaukee. Essentially the owners of the teams want a system like the NFL that limits player movement, and the players want something like MLB which allows people to just do whatever they want. And as of this week, they are both suing each other.

So the NBA is now at a point where instead of playing games, which they are supposed to be doing tonight, they are all suing each other instead.

So there is not going to be an NBA this year and maybe not even next year. And when it does come back, it doesn’t seem like a whole lot of people are going to go watch it anyway.

So case in point when it comes to “The Association”.

THE NFL:
When it comes to sustainability, the NFL is the closest thing we have to a perfect system. I can see the NFL being around in 20 years however certain changes are in order.

First off, there are way too many play stoppages throughout the course of an NFL game. Do we still need the two minute warning? That was designed to let people know when there were two minutes left before they had clocks in the stadiums. You know how long ago that was? It was before they had clocks! We can all view a satellite feed of the tops of our own heads now, on our telephones. We do not need to still be following rules from before they had clocks in stadiums.

Reviews need to work faster. I see the value in reviewing plays. There is no way the refs can get everything right, at those speeds, on the first try. But the process needs to be refined. It needs to take far less time. I propose a time limit of 15 seconds to view the replay, if it is not absolutely clear at that point, just run the play again. The NFL has turned into a game of long winded, referee explanations to the crowd about some of the most obscure crap imaginable.

I am sick of hearing..

“Upon further review, the receiver did not maintain possession of the ball throughout the entire catching motion. The player must achieve full possession of the ball, and make an athletic football move, prior to the act being considered an actual reception. The ball will be placed at the original line of scrimmage, and the Oakland Raiders will be charged with their second time out of the half. It will be third down, six yards to go.”

The replay has righted a lot of wrongs, I will give it that. It has also taught everyone more about how exactly football works then I think many of us ever cared to know. But how many hours do we have to spend starring at some guys toes, trying to see if they landed on a white line or on the field of play, or gawking at some running backs elbow to see if it hit the ground prior to a fumble? Or my personal favorite, trying to pick out a brown ball, in the midst of a sweaty, rugby scrum of humanity to see if the tip of a ball, as it is being grasped by an enormous mans arm, broke the plane of the goal line. All the while listening to a couple of jackasses debating how the whole thing is going to turn out, whenever the referee decides to pull hit fat white ass, out of his peep show booth on the sidelines and let everyone move on with their lives.

Figure out a way to make that whole thing faster. It has already taken away a lot more from the game then it needs to.

I am also getting a little tired of the offensive based refereeing mentality. I have said it before and will say it again; the guys who play in the secondary in the NFL are the best athletes in the world. Thanks to rule change after rule change after rule change, these men’s positions basically require them to work miracles on every passing play. Think about it, as an NFL cornerback, you have to somehow manage to keep a 6’5, 230 pound man, who can run like an Olympic sprinter, from catching a ball, that you don’t know where is going, without so much as touching him. Every time an NFL cornerback or Safety breaks up a pass, without being penalized for something, we have all basically just witnessed a miracle.

It did not always used to be like this, you are barely allowed to tackle anyone anymore without being called for a penalty. The big concern is concussions. Too many people are leaving the games concussed. I don’t know how to say this without sounding “insensitive” but NFL players get paid millions of dollars to get concussions. And to expect defensive players to have the athletic wherewithal to be able to adjust where their heads are located, in a period of four hundredths of a second, so as to not hit a receiver in his helmet, is unrealistic. I would not expect Spiderman to be able to do that let alone nonfiction NFL players. I guess I would feel differently if these guys were making 10 bucks an hour out there. Nobody wants to see minimum wage employees getting knocked stupid, but millionaires, who have gone into a field that requires them to run as fast as they can amongst a bunch of the biggest, fastest, angriest freaks in the world, logically should result in a few concussions. And nobody is paying 150 a ticket to watch these guys play grab ass out there.

From the standpoint of a financial model, the NFL is second to none. How well do you think an MLB or NBA team would fare in Green Bay? They just need a little house cleaning, other than that, they are solid.

Ass Beatable Offenses:

There are things that people do, unfortunately on an everyday basis which I feel warrant a good old fashioned ass kicking. These offenses fall under a unique subset of qualifiers within which, they aren’t illegal or even really against any sort of standard rules within your home or workplace. However, you doing any of these things should end with you catching an ass kicking. And the powers that be should ignore any sort of legal action against the party who provides the ass kicking so long as they can prove that the offender attempted to do any of the below items.

Cooking fish in the microwave at work:

Find something else for lunch you shit slob. And if you are that much of a seafood lover that you can’t pass up an opportunity to stuff left over flounder into your head on your lunch break, than eat it cold. There is no need for you to make everyone within smelling distance of the company microwave suffer because of your poor decision making. Cooking fish, at work, should buy you one passionate ass kicking, courtesy of your coworkers.

Using more than one “Corporate Term" in a single sentence:

For example, if someone starts a sentence with something like “Moving forward, we are projecting to…” that person should never get to finish that sentence. That sentence should end in a knuckle sandwich for whoever was trying to poison your ears with that nonsense.

Trying to talk sports, when you obviously know nothing about sports:

Men need to know what they are talking about when it comes to sports prior to engaging other men in a conversation about sports. I have not personally spent decades of my life honing my knowledge of every major sport on the planet to listen to some wind bag try to convince me that a hat trick in hockey is when the puck bounces off of a players head into the goal. Wasting knowledgeable sports fans time in such a manner should, at the very least, end with that man’s head inside of some sort of public toilet.

Unwanted touching of any kind:

We have all had some sort of acquaintance throughout our lives whom we would consider to be a “toucher”. Someone who thinks its okay, to have his hand on your shoulders or back or chest as he talks to you. I view this practice as an invasion of my personal space. To me, this gives me the right to invade that guy’s personal space which I will quickly take advantage of, by punching him in the throat and pushing him down on the ground.

Someone in front of you in line being a jerk to someone who makes minimum wage:

How much of a social reject do you have to be to take out your frustrations on the guy who bags your groceries? The next time I hear some douche call the bag guy at the grocery an idiot for putting something in a bag in such a way that he did not agree with, everyone within earshot should be allowed to grab that douche by the shirt collar and ram his head into the CoinStar machine until he pisses his own pants.

Cowards who yell things at you out of car windows as they drive past you:

I don’t know about you, but I immediately look for a brick to throw every time some sort of panty waste decides to yell something to me as he drives past me at 45 miles per hour. I think, if you have the superhuman ability to catch up to this person, perhaps at a stop light, you should be well within your rights to yank them out of that car window and see exactly how tough they are when the shit really hits the fan.

People who smile at you when the situation does not call for them to be smiling:

For example, when a guy comes up to you, who you are not friends with, and says something like “Well it looks like the Browns lost this weekend again, huh?” with a big smile on his face, there should be nothing stopping you from pulling his polo shirt over his head and driving his face into the carpet.

People on a moving sidewalk who think it is their ticket to stop walking:

These people are a disgrace. Just because the floor is now moving you along does not give you the right to hold everyone else at the airport hostage behind your fat, luggage towing, body. How tired are you that you can’t even walk anymore? Did you just get off of a plane ride or were you marooned in the Sahara for eight months? There should be nothing wrong with body checking these lazy water bags over the sides of the moving sidewalk in the name of everyone else’s progress.

One upper:

A “one upper” is someone who you can’t possibly tell any sort of an anecdote to without him coming back with his own, more fantastical version of your story. This one is difficult because you have to be able to prove that he is lying. Eventually the one upper will slip, something won’t tie out in his story, something will overlap incorrectly, and when it does, you should setup a meeting between the one uppers face and your size 11 boot.

People who start talking in the middle of your sentence:

There is not much in the world that pisses me off more than this. If I am saying something, at least do me the common courtesy of allowing me to finish the thought. Whatever sort of verbiage you are dying to let fall out of your stupid, inconsiderate, pie hole is not that important that it can’t wait four additional seconds. I think someone should be allowed to do this to you once as maybe he just thought you were done and didn’t realize you were still talking. But if he does it again, his head meets drywall. And drywall always wins.

These are but a few of multiple examples but I have to stop writing. I’m getting too worked up.

Occupy Wall Street; How could this happen?

I love what is going on in New York and across the country right now but the whole idea seems to be lacking direction. So far I have heard that the people involved are there to protest everything from the war in Afghanistan to Big Oil Lobbyists to the Federal Reserve to Wall Street to animal rights to environmental regulations.

I feel like such a vast swath of initiatives is holding the movement back. From a personal standpoint, I would love to see changes with our country’s archaic tax code and lack of Wall Street regulations. But I also see the value with the ongoing war in Afghanistan. So for that reason only, I don’t think I could join the cause. As far as I am concerned, I am happy to fund a hell-fire missile for every person who even thinks about blowing a spit-wad at the United States.

That being said, I am a staunch detractor for everything that goes on between Wall Street and Washington DC. I never was, until the “To Big to Fail” concept came about.

If you are going to operate a business in a free enterprise environment, you are just as free to go out of business for your bad decisions as you are to profit from good ones. At least that is how I was taught that it should work.

When I was in school, and my made up business was crumbling to the ground because of my decision to pump all of my fake money into fake radio based advertising and my extremely bloated payroll, I don’t remember having the option to lobby the Federal Reserve for money to get back on my feet. My only options were to report my fake losses and go into Chapter 11. This is where my business stayed in college for the majority of my two years in those classes. Each quarter; I was posting massive fake losses. Eventually, it came down to headcount and lousy marketing decisions on my part. I fired half on my fake staff, decreasing my fake output to meet the fake demand, and began advertising online and on television. By the time the second year ended, I was able to pay off my fake debt and basically break even. Two more years, and I would have been profitable, I think. Basically I was employing twice the amount of people I needed in order to service the amount of demand in my market and I had to trim the fat (I also suck at marketing). This is how the game SHOULD work and how it does for most people who run a business.

People often try to justify the Wall Street bailouts on some massive systemic, global problem that you need a doctorate in macro-economics to understand, when, in reality, it can be simplified quite easily.

Supply and Demand are absolutely everything. In the 90’s and early 2000’s, there was a massive demand for mortgage backed securities originating mostly from within the United States. You see, anyone who worked part time at Taco Bell was being approved for a 250,000 dollar house, in those days.

Next, all of the companies that had a hand in lending those mortgages and then reselling them as bundled “investments” abroad grew their staff to accommodate that demand. They built skyscrapers, hired thousands of people, inflated their operational costs and reaped massive profits for years.

Then the demand went away. People abroad realized that buying a bunch of poor people who can’t pay their bill’s mortgages was probably one of the worst investments anyone could have ever made, so they stopped buying them. Wall Street, realizing that nobody wanted their crappy mortgage backed securities anymore immediately put a stop to mortgage lending. After all, why would you want a bunch more mortgages if you can no longer trick people into repurchasing them?

At this point, we have a bunch of extraordinarily bloated multi-national corporations who were rebranded and modeled around this terrible, crooked business model.

What SHOULD have happened at this point is the CEO’s of these companies should have immediately reorganized their companies to match the new level of demand (none). This would have forced many of them out of business and cost many thousands of people to lose their jobs at the firms responsible for this calamity. It also, would have forced countless other people who supported those companies out of business. It would have been horrible for a lot of people and for the stock markets but it would have ripped the band-aid off much faster.

Instead, the companies went to Washington and somehow managed to secure billions of dollars from the Federal Reserve in order to stay afloat. So now, you have a bunch of huge, bloated, borderline worthless, multi-national corporations operating on everyone else’s dime. This is NOT how the game should work.

To put this in laymen’s terms, it would be like someone running a lemonade stand and at some point they found that if you put cocaine in the lemonade, it would taste sweeter and people would “like it” more and start demanding it every day. The next thing you know, the lemonade stand grows to a full blown juice bar with 50 employees working around the clock selling their cocaine lased lemonade. Then someone blows the whistle and overnight everyone realizes that there are illegal drugs in their lemonade and nobody wants it anymore. And instead of forcing the juice bar out of business and prosecuting the management, the government gives them millions of dollars to keep it going as long as they don’t fire their 50 employees. If this sounds insane to you, you probably don’t work on Wall Street.

Instead of ripping the band aid off quickly, we decide it would be better to enjoy a long, gradual, downturn that lasts for years. Eventually the band aid has to come off. But it is easier for Wall Street if it comes off over years of recession and lending freezes and countless corporate reorganization when they should have just forced them into bankruptcy in 2008 and been done with it.

All that this arduous downturn has done is passed the headache from Wall Street to Main Street who was already dealing with Trillions in government debt, the inability to secure loans for the things they need, wages that don’t match inflation, retirement money disappearing, bear markets, record oil prices and an absolutely stagnant jobs market.

Now things like loans that were difficult to get have become borderline impossible to secure for years on end. Small businesses that had run honestly for decades are forced out of business or have to trim their staffs as their demand decreases on account of nobody having money for what they are selling anymore. So these problems along with the debt and deficits that were created on Wall Street are effectively diluted back onto the consuming public (Main Street).

This would be why I am pissed off. You can’t make this shit up. This is something I feel strongly enough about to protest. This, to me, is a complete disgrace worthy of occupying Wall Street and or Washington for giving them our money on account of running corrupt enterprises into the ground. If I had to make up a word to describe it, it would be “Shammockery”.

This is why these folks should be occupying Wall Street. Not to protest a war or the environment. If you want to protest those things, Wall Street is not the venue. If you ask someone who is at a protest “What are you protesting?” and you get a different answer from everyone you ask, it starts to just sound like a group of whiney people who are just there to bitch about everything. One, united cause is much more effective.

Draft a mission statement that everyone can agree upon and rally around that. Here is one I have come up with…

“We gather here in Wall Street in protest of Washington’s continued coddling of crooked business owners on our dime who, through their dubious, panicked financial decisions have created an unsustainable economy for the vast majority of American’s to live in.”

I find the idea of this protest to be particularly scary in that it encompasses so many large issues. The fact that there are these many people who feel this strongly about so many different things demonstrates a complete failure of our leadership.

People have begun comparing the protesters to the “Hippies” from the 60’s and 70’s. Well all they were protesting was Vietnam and for good reason. While they were against the war at the time, they still had a livelihood to return to at the end of the day. Most of these people don’t, and at that point, is where it becomes dangerous. You can’t have one systemic failure stacked on top of another and expect people to keep calm for very long.

The youth of the movement is also particularly concerning. Massive amounts of young people, who have taken out loans to complete college and still can’t get jobs, is a recipe for disaster. And when your government’s only idea of job creation is to put people to work fixing bridges, it quickly becomes apparent that this problem isn’t going away anytime soon. These kids, should be priority one, before they figure out how they were essentially duped into financing a college education that would essentially amount to them competing with tens of thousands of other kids with the same education for a handful of available jobs.

While, I don’t believe it should be the government’s responsibility to create specific jobs, I do believe it should be the role of the government to ensure the environment available to the private sector to create jobs is serviceable. They are not doing this. Instead, they are fostering an elitist environment which only works for people in the upper classes. You see people on the news networks use the term “class warfare” and immediately dismiss the notion and smile and then move onto some story about a pig that can ride a wake board. Well, I think “class warfare” pretty much sums it up at this point, no? What would you call the idea of passing the pain of corporate millionaire fuck ups onto the lower class? Eventually that reality will set in. As soon as they can all get over the “How could this happen in America” way of thinking.

I have spent days of my life contemplating how you fix a screw up like what we witnessed in 2008 which is a level of concentration, on my part, that is rarely put forth. And I have no idea. All that I seem to be able to land on are impossible to accomplish scenarios that overhaul everything from checking account interest rates to the laws outlining the proximity with which investment banks are allowed to operate near one another, to forgiving all private sector debt and starting over. Whatever is done to fix this, is going to have to be a huge paradigm shift in how a lot of different things work at a fundamental level. And there is no way to fix it without severely pissing some large group of people off. And with our current collection of blue hairs who hate one another in DC, I don’t see any of it happening anytime soon. So buckle your seat belts America, this is setting up to be a long and dangerous ride. I have a feeling we are all about to find out how just hard the American populous can make the hammer fall.

Slogan’s that don’t make sense:

Below is a summary of things that people often say that never get questioned, although they make very little sense, if any at all.

“This is a Wild Goose Chase”

Often, when someone meets an unconquerable clerical challenge, or otherwise gets the preverbal “run-around” while trying to accomplish something, they will deem that task to be “A Wild Goose Chase”. This terminology must have originated a long time ago, when wild geese were difficult to come by. Nowadays, in 2011, you give me a net and point me toward a parking lot; and I will get you a wild goose in thirty minutes or less. From my ample experiences with wild geese, they are not difficult to come by, nor are they very elusive when put in situations where they are threatened (IE: driving directly at them in a golf cart), and are incredibly stupid animals. Their only defense mechanism is their ability to hiss at you while trying to move their fat asses out of your way at .05 miles per hour. So while the term “Wild Goose Chase” may have made sense in some bygone, goose deprived era, I no longer feel like it accurately represents a difficult to attain goal.

“It is what it is:”

You’re better off saying nothing. Because that is what this phrase equates to…. nothing. Someone who says “it is what it is” minus well have just burped in your face. At least if he had done that, there would have been comedic value involved. To me, “It is what it is” is the verbal equivalent to flinging a spoonful of mashed potatoes into someone’s hair. To me, when someone says “It is what it is” they are doing nothing but proving that they are lazy and unable to think of anything else to say while feeling like they should say something rather than nothing.

“Boy Bill, my cable keeps going out on me”

“Well, it is what it is Matt”

“Well why don’t you eat shit Bill?”

“I don’t give a rat’s ass”

Now I understand that this is a phrase one uses to express how little they care about a given topic. However, has anyone ever wanted a rat’s ass in exchange for information on a topic?

“Tim, do you have the documents on our ROI in the Asian sector?”

“Yeah, do you have that rat’s ass that I asked for?”

Now I understand how you don’t care about something, and I am fine with that as there is a veritable cornucopia of things out there that I don’t care about, but do we need to keep invoking that visual? When you say that, I have to think about a rat’s ass.

“It doesn’t matter if you win or lose as long as you have fun”

Then why practice? Why would anyone practice if winning wasn’t important? Why even bother playing anything? The idea of competition is to come out of it with a winner and a loser. Losing teaches people to want to win instead. If you take that away, which we already have, kids lose an important life lesson about how awful losing is and how awesome winning is. Now, thanks largely to this dumbass phrase, everyone gets a trophy, win or lose. When I was a kid and I lost, I was forced by my coach and my parents to stand there and watch a bunch of other kids walk away with their trophies. And you know what, it didn’t make me feel left out, it pissed me off and the next time I played that team, I threw the first pitch at their lead off batters head, and we played better and we won, and THAT was fun.

“Follow your dreams”

For real? I should follow my dreams? I feel like that would turn out to be a devastating decision for me. So I should strive to have an arm wrestling tournament in the basement of my grandmother’s house In Ohio, with Danny Devito and Cedric the Entertainer while the entire place is flooding with water and for some unexplained reason a bunch of wild dogs keep showing up and attacking people? That’s what I should be doing?

I understand the meaning is to follow your dreams in life. However I also have a lot of problems with this thinking. I would have loved to become a fighter pilot, but eventually the reality set in, that I can’t see anything. So should I still follow those dreams? How is that going to work out for me? You think the Navy is looking for any borderline blind fighter pilots to go dropping bombs on things?

“When life hands you lemon’s, you make lemonade”

There’s nothing like teaching people to accept failure. You shouldn’t enjoy something bad that happens to you. You should get in front of your problems before life has a chance to “hand you lemons”.

This phrase, to me, falls under a long list of things that people tell one another when they are trying to cheer you up. These are the worst phrases in the world because they are always being lectured to you, when you are in some sort of seriously shitty situation. Other phrases in this category are “The night is always darkest before the dawn”, “The grass is always greener on the other side”, “Don’t cry over spilled milk”. There are dozens more, none of which seem to work when someone is forcibly removed from their foreclosed home or finds out their spouse is banging the milk man. But people just keep saying them to one another, hoping that someday, “You’ve got to pull yourself up with your boot straps”, will magically help a guy whose uninsured home burnt to the ground, twenty minutes ago, feel completely better about his outlook on life.

If life handed me a lemon, I would slice it in half and squirt it life’s eyes.

“The only stupid questions are those which go unasked”

I couldn’t disagree more; there are plenty of really stupid questions that people are somehow never ashamed to ask you on a near daily basis. Anyone who believes in the above phrase should spend one hour working in some sort of an IT related Call Center and I think they would come out of that feeling differently.

“Someone shoved a donut in my printer and I cleaned most of it out with 409 but why won’t it work now?”

“What doesn’t kill you only makes you stronger”

Really? So what if you get all four of your arms and legs blown off in some sort of horrific accident? And by some miracle you managed to live? You would be stronger after that? At that point, you’re pretty much just a punching bag that can talk while someone feeds you mashed potatoes. .

This is one of many examples with which we can prove this phrase to be dubious.

What if someone breaks into your house and steals every last thing out of your home, and then steals your identify and spends all of your money and ruins your credit for decades, you lose your home, your cars, you’re wife leaves and takes your kids and marries someone you hated from your past just because she is desperate for money? That somehow leads to you becoming stronger? I’m pretty sure most of the time that leads to homicide.

“Pain is just weakness leaving the body”

Yeah whatever you say there Captain Tough Nuts. How about, I don’t really feel like being in any pain, all day and forever after that? What is that like the battle slogan for masochism? To me, I don’t find people who drive themselves to be in physical pain to be tough or particularly strong people. I pretty much just dismiss them as idiots. There is no sense in explaining to them how pain is your nervous systems way of telling you to immediately put an end to whatever is making it feel that way. 

You hear this phrase a lot at the gym as one neck-less freak often says it to another as they attempt to lift way more weight than their human bones and ligaments were ever designed to handle. Every time I hear some beef bus at the gym say this, I imagine if they would say the same thing if they got an arm ripped off by a kodiak bear. Somehow I doubt it.


To conclude this tirade, people just say things without ever stopping and thinking about what it is they’re saying. This is the world we live in, and these are the hands we’re given. Let’s use them and let’s start trying, to make this a world worth fighting for.

Going to the doctor after your 30th; A Guideline.

Going to the doctor sucks, no matter how old you are. But it seems to get exponentially worse the older you get. I’ve decided to go through and write down a few rules of thumb for people like me who have to go to the doctor.

You’re not going to have any idea who or where or how the whole proof of insurance thing works:

If you are like me, you get more and more medical insurance cards then you could ever know what to do with in the mail. So I put them all in my wallet. Then eventually when I go to the doctor, I am stuck sorting through dozens of insurance cards, some from previous jobs, some from different states, and some from companies that don’t even exist anymore. Generally, the woman working at the desk asking for this information had used up her last bit of patience about 42 years ago and has absolutely no time for you to sort this out. So she will generally, badger you with stupid questions and suggestions and critique your handling of your wallet items. “Can’t you just call, like an HR person from work and ask them?” “Why you have so many cards in your wallet?” “Someone needs to get organized!!” “You have a George Costanza Wallet!”

Leave your pride at the door:

If you’re like me and have for the most part not worked out since the onset of adulthood, the doctor is going to call you fat. He/She isn’t going to call you fat once or twice, but over and over again throughout the entire time you are talking to them. Just when you think you have moved on to talking about something else, they will circle back and call you fat again. One way or another, you’re going to walk out of that building feeling like the fattest thing that ever managed to crawl out of the ocean and grow legs.

Be prepared to be absolutely terrified:

The doctor is going to say things that to me sound like “You’re going to have a heart attack you fat shit!” One must be prepared to hear things like this; otherwise they come as quite a shock. They will also leaf through your family and personal medical history and determine that you will get diabetes if you ever eat anything again. Then, now that they’ve really got you all pissed off and fired up, they will take your blood pressure and wonder why it is so high. This generally leads to them calling you a fat bastard a half dozen more times.

Get ready to be fondled!

It’s not every day you get groped and fondled and if you do, you should probably do some serious re-evaluation of your life choices. I remember when I was young; a physical was a quick turn of the head and a cough. Now that I am 31 I expected a god damn cigarette when he was done. I don’t even know what he was looking for, he didn’t tell me anything. He just stared at it like it was going to tell him the meaning of life. And then when he was done, he just said “okay”, and started calling me fat again.

Prepare to have your doctor jump to all sorts of conclusions about things:

One thing I have noticed is that once a doctor hones into one medical concern they have for you (in my case “FAT”), they tend to use that to explain every ailment that comes out of your mouth. “Doc, my ankle hurts sometimes”, well you’re fat. “Doc, my energy levels suck”, yeah you and all the other fat people. “Doc, my fucking head is falling off”, probably because it weighs so much, the rest of your fat body is rejecting it.

The doctor is also going to do everything he/she can to stick you with a Flu Shot:

They must get some kind of commission on how many flu shots they give out because I felt like he was selling me a car. I had to tell him 10 times that I didn’t want any sort of medications that I didn’t absolutely need. But he just kept pressing me on it. Like, what is this the 13th century? If I get the flu, I get the flu. Are you expecting some sort of Bubonic Plague this winter or something? “Well you should get a flu shot; we are recommending it to everyone this year, not just elderly anymore”. Well I don’t want one pal, I don’t care if you’re recommending them to people, how is that a rationale? If you were “recommending” colonoscopies this winter, guess what? I wouldn’t want that either.

You’re going to have to answer all sorts of personal questions:

Are you sexually active? How many times a day would you say, you eat? How much water are you drinking? Are you defecating regularly? Any blood in your stool or urine? Like, Jesus Christ man, if there was blood, I probably would have led this discussion with that little tidbit. I wouldn’t just sit here and wait for you to ask me something like that. “Boy, I sure hope he asks me about the blood in my piss that seems like something that could be a huge problem. “

You also aren’t prepared to answer most of these questions. It’s not every day someone asks you how many glasses of water you drink in a day. Sometimes none, sometimes five... I suppose it all depends on if I have Gatorade available and how hung over I am.

Be prepared to not have your doctor care when you have done something he told you too:

The last time I saw this guy, I was a pack a day smoker. Now I haven’t smoked in 10 months. And I told him this and he said “okay, well that’s a start, how about exercise and diet, you fat pile of pig shit?” At least that’s what I heard. Also the last time, he saw me, my blood pressure was HIGH, like borderline hypertension high. Now it is on the high side of normal and he still wants more.

Then the entire time you are there, you have to sit and talk to a well dressed person, with all sorts of fancy equipment on, wearing a shirt and tie and nice dress pants, while you’re sitting there in a 75 cent, tie behind, crazy person, skirt thing, with your balls hanging out. I never understood that. Can’t we take care of the naked stuff first and then I get dressed and then we have our little conversation about health? Why do I have to remain basically nude the entire time? Are you trying to see how blue my legs can get in your 55 degree room I am sitting in, maybe how stuck the fish paper can get to my ass while I sit on it for 45 minutes answering your questions. Why doesn’t that make you uncomfortable? I certainly would have a very hard time playing Q&A with a stranger if his naked member was 18 inches from my chest.

You will witness the whole doctor/Nurse dynamic at work:

Is there really any clearer example of superiority in the work place then this? “I’m going to leave the room and be back in five minutes, but Heather is going to come in and take your blood pressure and test your oxygen levels”. Well why can’t you just do it? Where the hell are you going? What do you have to get back to Angry Birds? Is it really that below the good doctor to just take peoples blood pressure, why the game of musical doors? How many people need to get paid on account of my visit? Is there any way we can avoid having a woman come in here and seeing me in this see-thru, crotch less, backless, ass less, tie-behind? Oh but the doctor will manage to show back up just in time to check out your testicles. For some reason, they always manage to make time for that.

I can’t imagine how horrible it must be to be even older as your body really starts to wear down and deal with these people on a much more regular basis. At least I have time to reverse my ways and hopefully avoid having to endure more prolonged doctor’s visits. I guess it could be worse, especially since the alternative is death.

At what point am I supposed to start caring about the NBA lockout?

I ask this question in all seriousness. When are we supposed to care? Baseball runs into Football, which overlaps with Hockey, which runs into baseball, anyone have any problems with that? The NBA, at one point was just an added bonus in between the other, superior sports that we all know and love.
The NFL recently ended a lockout in time to start their regular season without having missed much, maybe a few OTA’s but who cares. For me, the NFL lockout was turning into a bit of a concern. I look forward to Fantasy Football and the whole Sunday football/food/good company tradition. So what would I have done without that for a year? Obviously I would have survived, but I probably would have enjoyed myself a little less.

If Football had stayed locked out, we would still have had baseball until October and then gone right into Hockey once it ended. This still would have been a tremendous transition but having a couple of months of Browns/Pats football and Bruins Hockey is quite a treat. Pile this on top of the fun of playing in multiple fantasy football leagues and all the fun that brings to your life, especially late in the season.

Then out here in Boston we have the Stanley Cup winning Bruins coming back which to me is by far the second most entertaining sport to watch behind football.

So, do you see my point? Where in all of this am I supposed to give a shit about the NBA not playing basketball?

Does anyone care, outside of people who work directly for the NBA in some capacity? Who needs professional basketball?

The NBA is by far the worst in my opinion in the below categories which I have made up and are loosely based on factual information.

• Competitive Balance: Only 9 NBA Franchises have won NBA championships in the last 31 years. (This is completely true). This makes the NBA very unappealing to the other 23 cities, who have either never seen a championship or have not seen one since before Drew Barrymore was feeding Reese’s Piece’s to ET.

• Media/Marketing Biases: For whatever reason, the television and marketing moguls seem to be attracted to NBA Basketball players to a point where they will sell their own farms for the sake of making people like them. More so then any of the other, better sports. Personally, I think this started with Jordan and Nike and eventually worked its way through every shoe company/sports media outlet etc. Everyone wants the next Jordan, and I’m not talking about on the court. I am talking about his next pair of shoes. Mind you he has been retired for a decade but you can’t get to Footlocker fast enough, every year, when his shoes come out. So the gravy train gets rolling, and inevitably the shoe companies want to find the next guy, enter Lebron James, or Dwayne Wade or Carmelo Anthony. Are any of these shitheads Michael Jordan? Absolutely not, not even close! But it is in the shoe companies best interest to make people think they are, so they open their wallets and pay EVERYONE in the media to talk nice about them, and pamper them, until eventually ESPN is writing blogs calling Lebron James BETTER then Michael Jordan, (mission accomplished Nike). Why this is so obvious in the NBA and not MLB or the NFL is beyond me.

• Excessive Celebration: Unfortunately I have to hand this award to the National Basketball Association as well. Now hold on when I say this, it may come as a shock to many avid NBA fans, but basketball is not that fucking hard. Basketball is not that hard for me, and I’m white and short and fat. I can’t even imagine how NOT HARD it is when you are 6’10 and an athlete and have a 4 ft vertical. At that point, you are looking down at the basket when you jump. Yet, nearly every time one of these jackaloons makes a layup, they high five and hit themselves in the chest with their fists and yell shit into the crowd as though they have actually accomplished something remotely difficult. It would be like me going out and getting the mail and after I brought it upstairs, began yelling about how awesome I was for doing it, while hitting myself in the face with my own penis. This entire situation is helped along by play by play announcers such as Marv Albert’s who still believe a reverse layup is a difficult thing to do and can’t keep their hands out of each other’s pants whenever someone makes a super difficult three point jump shot, even though any one armed blind guy could probably make one out five of them.

• Overall terrible player behavior: I don’t understand how NBA players are constantly getting themselves into trouble. First off, how dumb do you have to be, to be an NBA basketball player and commit a crime? At one point, I think the entire Portland Trailblazers starting lineup was in prison. Like anyone would have a hard time picking you out of a lineup. I think most people are going to remember getting robbed by a 7’4, 185 pound freak of a human being. How do you ever expect to get away with anything? That’s like getting robbed by Mothra. The NBA also has an extraordinarily loose drug policy. By far the loosest in all of professional sports. This is probably for good reason as I don’t think there would be much of an NBA left once people started asking for piss tests.

• The dumbest pay system in the history of organized sport: You know how much money Greg Oden has made through his first four NBA Seasons? 20 million dollars! You know how many games he has played in those four seasons? 82! I have played in more beer league softball games over the last four years then Greg Oden has NBA basketball games. This wouldn’t be nearly as much of a problem if the NBA worked their player contracts the way that everyone else in the world does. You see, in the NFL or NHL and even MLB, you have to play to make most of your money as your contract is based on incentives. In the NBA, you just have to be not dead.

• The most painful live sports experience: Anyone been to an NBA game recently? It’s like having a seizure for three hours. It is very difficult to tell where and when the actual basketball game is going on amid the dancing strippers and midgets on stilts, indoor pyrotechnics, shit falling from the ceiling on parachutes, people firing tee-shirts and other random crap at you with slingshots, the never-ending, organ music and 1990’s hip hop sound effects. All other sports have these fringe entertainment factors at work however the sport itself takes precedence over the sideshows. In the NBA, I’m not so sure.

• The Goddamn NBA starting lineups: In other sports, the starting lineups are either a blurb in your program or a basically nonexistent exercise for the public announcer. But in the fucking NBA, it has to be some sort of a spectacle. And this spectacle repeats itself every single game. Why? Everyone knows who starts for their team, why do we have to go through this self indulged, professional wrestler style, entrance prior to playing basketball? If anything, this entrance looks even sillier once they start playing basketball after it ends. It would be like having Sean Michael’s WWF entrance, but then Sean Michael’s started playing badminton once the entrance ends.

• The only sport where college is better than the pro’s: NCAA football is great but any team would get waxed by any NFL team. NCAA Baseball is barely even a sport. But then there is the relationship between NCAA Basketball and the NBA. I think Duke or Carolina could give the Minnesota Timberwolves a run for their money. I think college players still play basketball better than their professional counterparts which is something you can’t say about any other sport. I know for a fact that they play better defense in college, you certainly can’t say that about any other sport. So basically the NBA is the only sport where you actually have to get worse at the sport before going pro.

So when do I start missing this shit? Why would I? To me the NBA trying to compete with the NFL and MLB and NHL is like the animated TV series, American Dad. It would probably be okay on its own but unfortunately, it is on after Family Guy, The Cleveland Show and The Simpsons, so good luck with that. The NBA Players Association, in my opinion, has made a huge mistake with this current lockout. They already had a league where they could basically do whatever in the hell they wanted, virtually no salary caps and they didn’t even have to play basketball in order to make money. Why would they ever upset that status quo? They were taking a free limo ride down easy street. Now they have opened this huge can of worms. You can’t improve upon a perfect situation NBA players, perfection can only go backwards and make things worse.

The Manager

Are managers at work necessary? In a sense, yes and in another sense, I am not so sure. Obviously the board members and executives need people on the front lines to organize and execute their vision of however they think the company should operate, but past that, are they really all that necessary?


Here is my idea of what an ideal manager does. He/She attends meetings with the board and executives and figures out what direction they want to take the company and how their direct reports can help this process. He/She also figures out what work their direct reports need to do in order to make this happen. He/She assigns the work to the direct reports and that’s it. End of discussion. Just tell people what you want them to do, by when you want it done and leave them alone.

Think about this in it's purest sense, do we all NEED to be MANAGED?  Are we all that disorganized and listless, like a bunch of leaves fluttering in the wind without some person reigning us all in and keeping us on the right track, like a bunch of dumb horses that would just wonder off into the woods without someone managing us? 

Most of the time, unless you are operating some sort of a sweatshop, you’re dealing with adults. In many cases, college educated adults who all have bills to pay. So there is really no need to have someone standing over their shoulders making sure their assignments are getting done as though they are children who don’t want to do their math homework. Everyone knows that if you don’t get things done on time, on a consistent basis, you eventually get fired. Therefore, you can’t pay bills, and eventually you end up living under a bridge someplace with a bunch of other clowns who couldn’t get their jobs done properly. So that eliminates the need of management to constantly be up peoples asses about things they need to have done and when.

Then there is the whole idea of the employees needing someone to talk to about vacation time and benefits and problems at work etc. These were important aspects of management prior to the invention of the internet. Every single piece of clerical crap like this can now be easily handled within your typical online, employee documentation portal. And if things get so bad at work that employees have to voice their opinion to someone, there is always HR.

Now, employees need to have their performance reviewed once per year. This can still be done by the manager who assigns the work to them. Whoever gets the most work done, in an acceptable way, on time, gets the bigger raises. This keeps things simple. Since the personal relationship between the employee and the manager would be minimal at best, there isn’t much room for someone rubbing the manager the wrong way, or sleeping with him/her for a raise, or ass kissing or taking credit for other peoples work. This system is based off of simple math and should work for everyone. It is much more difficult to argue with the results of a review when it is based on hard mathematical performance figures. You either got all your work done on time or you didn’t.

Then there is the idea that managers must be there to motivate the help. Motivation is something that is extraordinarily overrated in our time. I have said this before, and I will say it again, nobody likes working for a “company” unless they have some sort of major, personal financial interest in whatever the company is doing. Over people’s lifetimes, they get better and better and pretending to be motivated to be there but that is all it is, people pretending to care. So enough with this “motivation” guff, just judge people based off of the work they get done and let’s stop diluting ourselves. Stop expecting people in their 30’s, whom you pay just barely enough money to get by on a monthly basis to have a deep seeded love affair with whatever sort of widget you are selling, it is a complete waste of time and money. Judge people on production, not attitude. Unless they are a complete basket case and making other employees uncomfortable, who cares? People work to make money for themselves and their families, not because they love some company.

Managers are often very concerned with people coming in on time. I firmly believe we are at a point with our technology where employees will eventually not ever have to all drive to a common building with the companies name on it. Just about everyone who works for a company already has the ability to work from home. It is better for the employees pocket book, the environment and morale overall. Even so, within my system, if an employee is consistently late and they still get their allotted work done, who cares? You hire people that you think will get some kind of work done, if it takes them 6 hours a day to do it, mission accomplished.

And then there are meetings. Managers love meetings. Here is my policy about meetings. Unless someone can prove that whatever change they want to hold a meeting about will net the company a gain in their quarterly revenue from the previous year, there is no meeting.

Managers have also grown very fond of the team building idea within a company. Everyone has to be a part of team as though we are all playing basketball. Again, very overrated, anyone who has ever worked on a corporate team understands that most of the time the members of the team have absolutely nothing to do with one another. I once worked on a Retail Loss Prevention team for two years and all I did was write Korn Shell Scripts for data automation purposes. Yet, I still had to attend meetings about employees stealing shit from stores and report to a manager who didn’t know how to turn his monitor off and on. Corporate “teams” are nothing more than groups of people who share a similar salary range on some organizational chart, nothing more.

There is the coaching and mentoring aspect of management that I also find to be extraordinarily overrated. Since I have started my professional career in IT, I have worked directly for at least 30 separate managers. Out of those thirty people, I only learned skills that I use today (rather successfully) from two of them. I learned customer service skills within the IT business that I utilize today from a guy I worked for indirectly in a helpdesk when I was 18 (TButt). Within the same company, I eventually wound up working for a guy who taught me my management strategy and honed my troubleshooting and systems software management skills as well as organization skills that I still use (Doug). And that’s it. Other than those two dudes, I would like to thank Matt Coan for everything I have today.

I have worked for other people who I enjoyed working with and I currently have no issues with those whom I work for but in the past, I am surprised some of the people who called themselves my managers could actually hit water when they pissed. I have worked for people who were arrested for embezzlement, fired for sexual harassment, literally lied their ways into jobs which they were eventually fired from, hired people just because they were hot, used drugs in company bathrooms, sold company assets on EBay, came to work drunk, watched porn at work and one guy even got fired for calling a Hispanic person something that you never call a Hispanic person.

The fact of the matter is, managers aren’t what they used to be in the 50s and 60s and 70s and even the 80s. Much of what they were relied upon to do can be replaced by a few lines of HTML. People need their jobs much more now than ever, so everyone gets how important it is to get things done well and on time. People don’t become managers anymore for being great leaders, they become managers because they were already a manager somewhere else or because they have been working somewhere for so long that they were going to quit, so someone made them a manager. People want to be managers because it looks nice on a resume, but do we need them? Do we need all of them? Are companies making more money than they could be if they diluted half their salaries to the people who actually do the work?

Just take it easy there non-smokers

Remember Jim Fix? The big famous jogging guy? Jogged fifteen miles a day. Did a jogging book. Did a jogging video. Dropped dead of a heart attack when? When he was fucking jogging, that's when! --- Dennis Leary

I managed to quit smoking and haven’t touched one for about nine months and quitting smoking, cold turkey is easily the hardest thing I have ever done in my life. If I could do it all over again, I wouldn’t.

To me, the most interesting thing about quitting was how you don’t realize how addicted you are to something until you try to stop doing it. People, while they are smokers have absolutely no idea how much they NEED their cigarettes; as soon as they try to quit, than reality sets in.

I got to a point, about 3 months after I had quit where I was absolutely dumbfounded that something could be legal and this addictive at the same time. I felt like a victim, like I had been taken for a ride. I should have never even had the ability to become that addicted to a bunch of chemicals that I could buy at any gas station. This was the only month of my life where I felt I could identify with the non-smoking activists.

But than six months went by and the cravings subsided and than nine months and I don’t really care anymore. I guess I am about back to neutral about the whole thing. Honestly who am I to judge what anyone else does? The reality of the situation is this, cigarettes are legal, they are addictive, and nobody is forcing anyone else to smoke them.

Smokers, outside of the hood, are adults, who make their own decisions. If they want to smoke, then let them smoke, what do you give a shit?

And stop your bitching about second hand smoke from cigarettes. Do you have any idea what kind of toxic hell you breathe into your lungs every time one of the 64 million cars in this country drives by? It is a horrific, cocktail of burnt fossil fuels, lead, ozone, scorched metal, engine coolant and air that has been forced through layers of disgusting filth. And this is all mixed up, into an aerosol that billows in and out of your lungs, and into the sky, all day long. Yet, you whiny boobs don’t seem to care about that, as long as Steve from accounting walks 50 feet away from the door of your office buildings to smoke his morning cigarette.

Now, the government is attempting to force Big Tobacco to place pictures of defunct organs on their packs of cigarettes. And naturally, big tobacco is refusing and saying that it is unconstitutional; which it is by the way.

I suppose you could amend the constitution to allow for forced speech in advertising, which is detrimental to the company selling the product. But wouldn’t that open a pretty big can of worms?

First off, are there still smokers who think cigarettes are good for them? Every pack they have ever bought came with a handy warning from the Surgeon General about how your head will fall off as soon as you take one puff. Do smokers not have televisions? Have they all just missed the 26 year long “Debunkify” campaign of teens talking about how uncool and unhealthy it is to smoke? Do smokers never go to the doctor who incessantly tells them to stop smoking? What about the dentist? Do all the smokers have dentist that encourage them to keep smoking cigarettes?

Do you think maybe smokers just don’t give a shit what you people think? After all, if they cared so much, they probably wouldn’t be smokers in the first place. Putting a picture of a dead lung on a pack of cigarettes is going to do nothing but make people like me laugh every time they see one. And I am not going to laugh because of how stupid and futile I find the newest non-smoking initiative. I am not going to laugh because of how much taxpayer money the FDA will spend on the operation. I am going to laugh because at that point, I will live in a country where I can’t walk into a gas station without seeing a bunch of boxes with defunct smokers’ lungs all over them.

I hope it catches on. I hope it catches on big time. I hope it gets to a point where I can’t buy a burger at McDonald’s without a picture of some morbidly obese person on the wrapper. I hope that every time I am pumping more, good old fashioned gasoline, into my truck, that I have to watch a video of the polar ice caps melting, in real time, above the pump. I hope that someday, when I decide to take a shower that is longer than some interest group likes, a video of the dust bowl drought begins to play in my bathroom. I hope that every package of meat in the grocery store has some diatribe printed on the wrapper about how this animal died in vein and how I should not eat him. I hope every beer I get at the bar comes in a glass with a picture of some guys liver spots on it. I hope every piece of music that contains explicit lyrics comes with a note about how “The Trench Coat Mafia” liked to listen to Marylyn Manson. I hope every door knob has a flu warning above it, brought to you by Purell. I hope every cell phone comes with a picture of a brain tumor on it.

At that point, in my opinion, America would be the most hilarious thing since the first time I watched Bigger and Blacker by Chris Rock. I don’t even know if I would be able to leave my house without laughing until I gagged.

Luckily, there is not really all that much preventing such hysterically paranoid propaganda from invading our lives. So there is a fairly good chance, unless quite a few things are reformed, that this could eventually become reality for us all; starting with a bunch of packs of cigarettes with black lungs on the boxes.

Don’t get me wrong. It is not bad to care about things, but when you caring about something turn into expensive ridiculousness for us all, than I have a big problem with it. Every time the activists decide to run anything about big tobacco up the flagpole to the Supreme Court, it cost all of the tax payer’s money. Err-go, we are all buying cigarettes.

To me, one of our biggest problems in this country, is this “what about me” mentality. Too many people are going through their lives, paying to much attention to everyone else around them and making things up in their heads about how they are somehow negatively affecting their awful lives. Nothing is ever my fault, it is everyone else, doing things around me that I disagree with that makes my life so drab and boring and worthless. So it is these people, who take it upon themselves to ignore the established order and attempt to pass rules and changes that do absolutely nothing but cost everyone else money, all for a minority of “concerned citizens”.

Do what I do, ignore people. Unless someone is directly effecting what I am trying to get accomplished in the next five minutes, that guy could be smoking crack at a Pizza Hut for all I care. What that guy wants to do is what that guy wants to do. I don’t want to do it. I am smart enough to understand that it would be an awful idea to join him. I am also smart enough to know that if that guy keeps doing what he is doing he is going to either die or go to jail. There is no need for me to take it upon myself to launch an anti-crack smoking at Pizza Hut campaign on the taxpayer’s dime. I’m not going to alert my congressman. These things work themselves out, not everything requires my intervention. I don’t need to get involved with everything that I think it annoying. I’m not going to let things that annoy me take over my life like that. I’m probably just going to laugh about it for ten minutes and go home and cook some chicken that came in a package with a picture of a guy who died from untreated Salmonella.

It doesn't matter how big the warnings on the cigarettes are; you could have a black pack, with a skull and crossbones on the front, called TUMORS, and smokers would be around the block going, "I can't wait to get my hands on these fucking things! I bet ya get a tumor as soon as you light up!" ---- Dennis Leary

America Deserved it's Credit Rating Downgrade:

As I am sure you are aware, the United States has been downgraded to the AA+ Credit Rating by Standard and Poor. This of course, will force world markets to sell off for a while, but I do not think it is going to doom us all as the world media likes to portray it. But things are going to change. Everything is going to start costing a little bit more as every company who operates under its own credit umbrella (every company you have ever heard of), passes the buck onto the consumers in order to compensate for their higher interest rates. Fine, whatever, what else is new? I don’t think anyone ever expected to ever go to a grocery store and pay what they did in 1986 again.

But eventually, this has to stop. These children in Washington are going to have to find a way to play nice together and stop playing political games with the potential of ruining people’s lives. Luckily for my side of the equation, the vast majority of this country does not blame the president for this debacle. The voting majority realizes that he was blocked in every attempt to get anything done by the Tea Baggers. If anyone is going to be hurt politically by this, it is them and their lackey Johnny Boehner (Thanks for producing this gem Southern Ohio). And let’s face facts, the people who like the Tea Party, have very little to lose, because they don’t fall under the demographic of people who have much money vested in the stock markets.

All blame aside, you can’t keep trying to operate the government with people who have such conflicting ideas of how the world works. The idea of checks and balances is all well and good if you have two parties with some semblance of mutual respect for one another. After all, when this works it prevents any one party from doing whatever they want no matter how horrible the ideas are. But we don’t have these sorts of people in DC anymore. These people absolutely hate each other. You couldn’t run a lemonade stand for very long, at the end of your driveway, if the two people running it had a deep seeded hatred for one another.

The idea is to be able to invoke a healthy, productive debate between two sides of each equation. Not to have a bunch of clowns who hate each other so much that they won’t even use the same bathrooms, yelling at each other and doing everything they can to screw the other side over in order to gain a bargaining chip for a future election. As far as the public is concerned, this has become taxation with the illusion of representation. These people do not have our best interest at heart.

If you talk to anyone in government who stands to gain anything from blocking progress, they generally hide behind the thought that it is a “good idea” to have these sorts of ongoing debates because they prevent some sort of disaster that they made up in their heads from happening. Again, I agree, to a point but there has to be limitations to this debate. After all, with your logic, why not just have two parties running the country, one with all Southern Christians, and the other with all Muslims, and see how productive that “debate” turns out to be. People would get stabbed on live television before they determine whether or not it was a good idea to wear pants outside of their homes. We are about two little steps below this sort of comical ineptness in Washington, right now.

If anything, for how long these kids have been slap fighting with each other in DC, this credit downgrade was a slap on the wrist. Any other organization, who managed to operate at such a low level of progress and results would have been forced into bankruptcy, forget a lowered credit rating, grab a box, put your shit in it and get on Monster.com.

So did the United States deserve its lowered credit rating, you bet your ass it did? It probably should have happened a lot sooner. If you compare this country to a person, it would be like Equifax, feeling so bad for them that it never lowered their credit rating, for decades, even though they were unemployed, addicted to meth, constantly taking out new lines of credit for shit they don’t need, and paying back the bare minimum, if anything, every month, in a currency that is backed by a bunch of metal that doesn’t really exist anymore. How we managed to stay at AAA for as long as we did is beyond me.

So now, the big “to do” is to figure out how we climb back to a AAA credit rating as a country, why? Shouldn’t we fix the broken system that caused us to be downgraded in the first place? After all, if someone is bleeding, you first have to stop them from bleeding before you give them more blood.

My question is this, why do we need all these jackaloons in Washington anymore to begin with? Between the US House of Representatives and the US Senate, we have 535 “representatives”. Each one of these people earns about 155,000 dollars a year. They also, don’t pay for much of anything during their terms. This includes, airfare, most of their food, gym memberships, housing etc. Also, each one has their own support staff, accounting teams, call center staff etc, on their payroll. Currently, there are about 24,000 people in Washington doing nothing but supporting Congressman and Senators. Let’s take a really low estimate and say that each of these 24,000 folks all makes 50,000 per year. If you total all of this up, just paying these idiots, costs the taxpayers about 2 billion dollars a year. Mind you, this is a very low estimate, that doesn’t take into account building maintenance, their housing, their travel, their food, their horrendous decision making, their family’s tagging along, their employees vacation time, employee benefits etc. A grand total would be at least another billion per year on top of the two billion they are already getting paid.

So, as hard as that previous paragraph is to swallow, ask yourself, what are you getting out of these people? There are essential services, that we need some of these people there for, namely defense, anti-terrorism, infrastructure, food safety etc. But I have a hard time believing that the American populous needs 25,000 skin bags in Washington DC representing them. This is 2011. Long gone are the days where communities and regions of America were so cut off from technology and the countries capital that it was necessary to elect someone and send them to Washington to represent you.

So get rid of them. Bring the vote back to the people who they are supposedly voting for anyway. After all, if they are really representing their constituents, as they say they are, nothing would change right? Develop an ultra-secure method of allowing the US population to vote for anything that requires the Senate and Congress to vote for now. Just have all the votes on Thursday nights, once a week and give the people their voice again. This technology is nothing new; you can easily dump online polling data into a massive database and get results in near real time. We were already doing this in 1996. If anything it would be a lot quicker than whatever the hell you call this current system. Nobody would have to ever turn on their televisions and see a bunch of 40 – 50 – 60 -70, something, overpaid, white, racist, dickheads yelling at each other about how much they hate providing armor for troops who are being shot at, ever again. The amount of money, sending these men back to wherever they came from, would save, is nearly impossible to calculate until you try. You force lobbyists out of the equation completely unless they want to try to bribe everyone in the United States instead of just our current collection of corrupt geriatrics in DC.

And above all, it fixes what is broken. You can’t pay off the whole country but you can easily pay off a few hundred representatives of that country. How else do you think Wall Street got its Tarp money? How else do you think real Healthcare reform was filibustered? How else did it take so long to agree upon a debt ceiling deal that second graders understood was completely necessary to saving the countries credit rating? It is because, these men and women who represent us, are paid to vote on things the way that benefits them and nobody else. They then go on camera and SPIN their justifications for these decisions to their constituents however they are told to do so. This is how you have such systemic breakdowns in progress like we just witnessed with the debt ceiling debate. When you know full well, that voting a certain way, or wasting time in other ways, will inevitably damage the lives of everyone in your country, and you do it anyway, your system is irreversibly broken. These sorts of situations should not even be possible. If there is even a method of filibustering elementary decisions like “Hey should we make everything more expensive for everyone in our already poor ass country?”, then you have to reform the system, it can’t work, ever again, period.

Our current ability to do this sort of shit is why our credit was downgraded, and I am glad. I am not interested in watching these sorts of stalemates on CNN anymore. I find it embarrassing and shameful to be lumped in with people like John Boehner and Eric Cantor, in the eyes of my international friends whose countries still enjoy AAA Prime credit ratings and governments that can make trivial decisions for their countries. You have to reform the system to a point where people can no longer do things that ruin their people’s lives. It is that simple. If WE all voted for things, not Congressman and Senators, I really don’t think we would have half as hard of a time making these kinds of decisions. After all, we are free of outside influences like, Big Oil, Wall Street and “Interest” Groups. So we would vote for things because we thought they were right or wrong not because some focus group wanted to pay for a trip to the Sahara for my family if I voted “No” on something.

I am a firm believer that people have to be governed. But I am also a firm believer that people have to do their jobs. And when people don’t do their jobs, they shouldn’t keep them. When people in government stop doing their jobs, we end up where we are, right now. Fire the people who aren’t doing their jobs and let’s take some of the power back from the inept.

Or let’s just keep doing this. I can’t wait to pay 8 bucks for a box of cereal.

Odd jobs and how they made me... me

You don’t ever realize how much you learn from working in obscure jobs while in school. You don’t realize how much fun you are having while working in these capacities until you turn around and are all of a sudden thrust into the normal career oriented work force. I got into a debate last night with an old friend of mine (Bart), about tax codes and how billionaires are hoarding all of the money and dragging down the economy. I couldn’t help but find it funny how the two of us were able to have such a debate when 12 years ago we were working in a carpet warehouse in Ohio.


The Carpet Warehouse:

12 years ago, Bart and I were working together in a carpeting warehouse, cutting pieces of carpet for a bunch of asshole carpet installers who did nothing but complain and give us shit while doing so. They called me a hippy because I had long hair at the time. I tried to fight several of them on more than one occasion. To this day, every time I see a carpet installer on the road, I give them the finger. They are all cut from the same douche-bag cloth. I will always have hard wood floors throughout any house I own.

Although I do look back at that particular job and recognize it as the job that taught me about hard work. I think Bart would look at it in a similar light. Our boss at the time, Al, was the walking personification of a crotchety, racist, chain-smoking, hard working, ball busting, American old white man. I am convinced that Al didn’t even know what my name was as he always referred to me as “Lazy Cock”. Bart and the other help were also given their own names by Al.

We had a fork lift, with a massive metal boom on the front of it that everyone, including Al, referred to as “The Dick”. On more than one occasion, I managed to ram “The Dick” through the drywall that separated our carpet warehouse with the Paint warehouse next door. I am pretty sure we were supposed to have some sort of a license to operate that thing but it didn’t ever seem to come up.

Then of course were the circumstances where the entire dick would just fall off of the fork lift and smash into the ground. Mind you, this thing weighs 300+ pounds. And the only person who could properly reattach the Dick, were Al and some butch lesbian lady who would come out of the warehouse office like a professional wrestler walking into the ring whenever she would hear the dick smash into the pavement. This lady was not messing around. We were all absolutely terrified of her.

We were very young, so we often showed up to work, hung over or still drunk, often late. Bart would often show up for work, climb on top of the carpet padding and fall asleep, sometimes for hours. Horrific cuts on your hands were a daily occurrence. You wouldn’t believe how sharp a razor has to be in order to slice a straight line through a roll of carpeting. So that blade would need changing often and even the most minor slip while doing so, could lead to massive blood loss.

Al was always telling us to go buy him packs of cigarettes but we weren’t even old enough to buy them. So we were forced to drive around town until we could locate a gas station that would sell cigarettes to minors on behalf of our 72 year old boss.

Al, also never had any concept of what was available for order at any sort of a fast food restaurant. Once a day, one of us would go and get lunch for everyone in the warehouse. Everyone besides Al knew what they wanted from Burger King or McDonald’s or wherever. When it came time for Al to make his selection, he would always say something like, “Gimme one of those big sandwiches ya lazy cock!” And that was as specific as it got, just go get Al some sort of a “Big Sandwich”. And no matter what sort of crap you brought back, Al would eat the shit out if. He used to walk around the warehouse, while he ate his big sandwich and just stare at the rolls of carpeting on the racks as though he was at the louver looking at ancient works of art.

I remember the day that I had to leave the carpet warehouse in order to go back to college, I thanked Al for the opportunity he gave me and he walked me out to my truck and just before I left, he looked me straight in the eye and told me, “I got 10 to 1 odds you flunk out of that school you dumb fuck”. I never heard from Al again. He was and possibly still is, a great man.

Landscaping:

My best friend owned a landscaping company and still does. When you watch him do this job, it quickly becomes apparent that he was put on this Earth to landscape. What he manages to do with a few cubic yards of dirt and some trees can only be described as an art form. Me on the other hand, not so much.

It was fun and all working for my best friend over the summer while I was still in High School so we got to spend a lot of time together but the work was extraordinarily hard which lead to mistakes on my part.

There was one yard, in Newbury Ohio, which we referred to as “The Beast” where quite a few mishaps occurred. My friend Matt was always the one who would mow the lawns while I weed whacked. Earlier in the year, the muffler had broken off of our weed whacker, so this thing sounded like a  747 on takeoff. After a while using the thing, it would become so loud that it would begin to skew ones sense of reality and decision making.

At one point, Matt was on the mower and I was weed whacking as usual and I look up to see Matt in a full wind sprint towards me, he is yelling something and waving his arms in the air, but I could not hear anything. I then noticed that his mower was still running, about 30 yards behind him, but still I had no clue why he was running away from it. Finally, in a veritable panic at this point, I managed to locate the choke on the whacker and shut it down. Immediately, I heard Matt yelling, “BEES!!!! BEEES!!! GET THE FUCK OUT OF HERE!!!!”

I dropped the weed whacker and began running alongside of Matt through this person’s back yard. Apparently there was a hornets’ nest that Matt had run over and destroyed. You could see a formidable cloud of bees chasing us. This person basically lived on an undeveloped golf course so it was a good 200 yard sprint back to the safety of the truck. By the time we got into the truck, Matt had been stung at least 10 times; I managed to escape with none. We had to sit there for an hour before either of us became brave enough to go back out and get the equipment and finish the job.

We often mowed The Beast first, often around 7:30 am and I am not a morning person. On a separate morning from the bee incident, we arrived bright and early and got to work. I always grabbed my weed whacker and did the front yard and ditch first. I was completely out of it on this particular morning and was just kind of in a zone, not really paying attention.

I noticed for some reason that the lady who owned the place kept staring at me out her front window as I was trimming the weeds directly in front of the window. She had kind of a shocked and humored look on her face. I just smiled back at her as I remember thinking to myself, “See something you like lady?” Just as I was thinking this, I noticed that the air from the exhaust of the weed whacker seemed especially hot this morning below the waist. I looked down, thinking that there was something wrong with the weed whacker only to find out that my penis was hanging completely out of my shorts taking the full brunt of the exhaust as it was exposed to the world.

I immediately zipped up as the lady in the house gave me the thumbs up and began laughing her ass off. I remember wondering how long it had been like that. I had gone to the gas station that morning and bought iced tea and a Honey Bun, was I exposed that entire time? When we got back into the truck to leave, Matt informed me that the lady had included a 100 dollar tip, 50 for each of us. So that was nice of her.
One particularly sweltering morning, we arrived in University Heights to put in a new front lawn at a mansion. We both had F150 pickup trucks and in order to properly replace a lawn, you first have to remove the old one. So we began taking turns, loading the trucks and one would drive the load to the dump and we would rotate. While the other one was gone, at the dump, the other would stay back and grade out new top soil on top of where we had previously removed the old lawn.

When my time came to stay back while Matt drove a load to the dump, it was around 2 pm and about 92 degrees. And for some insane reason, all I had to drink were five cans of Coors Beer. I tried to avoid it, but I was so thirsty that I swear my tongue was stuck to the top of my mouth. So I drank one beer, then two, then 3. Eventually, I had pounded all five beers in these rich peoples driveway of their mansion. I went back to grading top soil. I got tired quickly and decided to sit up against a tree in the front yard and take a breather. Well I ended up passing out. For an hour, drunk in this person’s front yard, up against a tree. Finally Matt came back from the dump and I had heard his truck pull up. So I sprang to my feet and acted like I had been grading top soil the entire time. But there was no hiding it. I smelled like beer, I had left five empty beer cans on the drive way, no work had been done since he had left, and at that point, I was just kind of stumbling around the front yard with a rake, trying to remember what the hell I was supposed to be doing.

The Lumber Yard:

I worked in a lumber yard while in college in the winter time. Basically, contractors would show up, order the lumber they needed for whatever they were supposed to build, I would get a form from my boss with the order, then I had to drive around on a fork truck and put the load together, band it and eventually put it on a truck. This is fine in the summer but is a pain in the ass in the winter.

Believe it or not, most builders prefer to work in the winter to avoid heat so we were still busy as hell. And the store I worked at had just hired a new manager "Ernie" who would only let us come into the store to get our forms. Ernie was a huge asshole. But he needed us, just as much as the store needed him. Without us, he would have been forced to take all the orders and put all the loads together and load/unload all the trucks. So we got creative.

Whenever Ernie would answer the phone in his office, he would grab it hastily and jam it into his ear as though he was expecting a call from the President. So we, on more than one occasion would take black caulk which matched the color of his black phone and spray it onto his ear piece. We would then call him with our cell phones. He would then pick up the call and jam a glob of black caulk into his own ear. If you have any experience with caulk or caulking, you know how difficult it is to get that crap off of your skin.  So dumbass Ernie, would have to walk around the rest of the day, talking to customers and working the register, with the caulk all over his ear and head. 

He also backed his truck into every spot that he parked in all day. So at least once a day we would take an one of our Lumber Store Bumper Stickers that we were supposed to include in our loads and stick it to the back of his truck. It got to a point where he had about 28 of the same Lumber Store bumper stickers on the back of his truck. And he would have to drive all the way home to Eerie PA looking like an absolute moron.

One time we found a dead cat in the yard and placed it under his windshield wiper. Amazingly, Ernie had no problem with us starting fires out in the lumber yard in order to keep ourselves warm. That is basically how much he didn’t want us inside of the store. As my friend and fellow yard worker were standing around one of our fires out in the yard one afternoon, I noticed that he had his can of spray paint tucked into the front of his pants as we often did. Unfortunately, it was whistling, which is an abnormal thing for a can of spray paint to be doing. It was going to explode as it was too close to the heat. So he panics and pulls it out of his pants and drops it on the ground, directly into the fire. We had no time to get out of the way of the fireball that ensued. The explosion that a full can of spray paint creates when thrown into a fire is incredible. I dove out from behind the building like Howie Long in Firestorm with an absolute wall of flames curling up my back. My Carhart caught on fire, and my knit hat was smoldering, my jeans were hot to the touch. And just as this fiasco was taking place, we had our first drive in customer of the day; some guy looking for tomato stakes. “What the hell is going on here?!!” he yelled. I told him something like, “don’t worry, this happens all the time sir, nothing to worry about”. Unfortunately we didn’t sell tomato stakes. So we had to turn him away.  Shockingly our store eventually closed.

From a Clevelander to a Bostonian: What could Cleveland learn?

I left a lot of really great friends when I left Ohio. I had no idea who I would meet in Boston and if I would make new friends. To be honest, New England doesn’t exactly have a reputation for producing the friendliest of people. Most of my perception of New England was based off of watching Indian’s/Red Sox and Cavaliers/Celtics playoff series’ on television while growing up. After moving to the area I realized that I was stupid for judging an entire region based off of its sports fans. If everyone else took my approach the civil war would be an ongoing, ever-evolving conflict.
I have a trip planned in August that will finally pair one of my good Boston area friends with my best Ohio friend for a weekend of golf and booze. I am extremely interested in seeing how they interact. Knowing the two of them, it should be profoundly hilarious. On one hand, my Bostonian friend is an ex-marine, wise-ass; on the other hand my Ohio friend is arguably the most self confident human being since Howard Hughes and has the absolute worst impression of the Boston accent imaginable.

One bad rap that Boston get’s a lot is with regards to its roads and traffic and highway system. Whatever sort of horror stories you have heard on this topic are absolutely true, if not worse than whatever you’ve heard. There is no possible way to know round about when you will arrive anywhere in the region via automobile. Fifteen minute trips can and often do turn into hour long trips. If FDR could have seen what has become of his Interstate Highway System idea in New England, I think he would have just pulled the plug on the whole thing.

But most things that make up a “reputation” couldn’t be further from reality. People are certainly different here but just as friendly, if not friendlier then where I come from. And the people would probably be even more friendly with better roads. People are just as passionate here about their sports teams as in Cleveland with the exception of the Red Sox. People here, love the Boston Red Sox like Clevelanders love the Browns. I have always seen Cleveland as a city where somewhat of a subculture of folks love the Indians but here everyone loves the Sox as part of their birthright, much like Clevelanders with the Browns. This passion for sports has played a key role in my ability to fit in with people here.

People here are, I think by nature, somewhat wise-ass, which helps me. I come from a very long line of wise-assed culture where it would have been impossible to survive without such a skill.

Here, people have a history of having played hockey and baseball whereas in Ohio Football is the religion. And to be honest I always considered hockey to be sort of weird and silly until I went to a Boston Bruins game and realized how closely the atmosphere in that place resembled that of the Dog Pound at a Browns game. If Cleveland ever has the opportunity to get an NHL Franchise, they should do everything they can to do so. It is hands down the most exciting professional sport outside of the NFL.

I do miss my family. Since I moved here, my sister has had a baby boy and now has a baby girl on the way. My inability to be a part of their lives weighs heavily on me but I do what I can for their birthdays and holiday’s. Some days, I feel like I abandoned my parents. But I talk to them often enough and they have never given me the impression that I did anything of the sort.

I also owe a lot to my girlfriend. Generally when a girlfriend introduces you to her friends, it becomes more of an obligatory errand, however, in my current case, nearly every single friend of hers that I have met, with the exception of one guy I pushed across a bar on Halloween, has been awesome. She has surrounded herself and subsequently me, with some of the most down to Earth, funny, intelligent people I have ever met. When left to my own instincts, I generally tend to surround myself with the, let’s get as drunk as humanly possible and fight someone crowd but these folks are much classier and I love her for introducing me to them.

Nobody from where I come from wants to hear it, but Cleveland could learn a thing or two from Boston. Unfortunately I think most Clevelanders are like me prior to me arriving in New England. The first thing that pops into a Clevelanders head when they think of Boston is C.C. Sabathia getting shelled in the ALCS, at Fenway, with the entire crowd chanting “over-rated”, basically allowing a snapshot of 30 thousand people mold their impression of this enormous population center.

Clevelanders also, and I was certainly guilty of this prior to moving here, think that everyone in New England sounds like Matt Damon and Ben Affleck in Good Will Hunting when they talk. Well they don’t, there are areas where these accents are more noticeable but for the most part everyone speaks normally. I have noticed that the really thick accents are generally reserved for the over 40 crowd in New England. The younger the people get, the less the accent seems to come out.

I think Clevelanders take things more personally then just about any populous of any city on Earth with the exception of maybe Kabul Afghanistan. The city has been the subject of plenty of abuse. Basically since the Cuyahoga River lit on fire like 300 years ago. Since, it has been a non-stop turn-style of media organizations badgering Cleveland for all they are worth.

But it’s not like Cleveland is the only city where bad/embarrassing things happen. They happen everywhere. Boston is the city where the 9/11 terrorists managed to board airplanes and where the “Big Dig” happened. New York is the city that nearly managed to collapse our entire financial system three years ago. Chicago and Detroit nearly burnt themselves down on multiple occasions. Los Angeles, has managed to become flat broke while being the residence of the richest populous in the country. Finding someone who knows how to read in Miami is like trying to find a Democratic Atheist in Texas. Texas gave us George Herbert Walker Bush. Philly fans booed Santa Claus. Cleveland is the city that accidently managed to light a river on fire like 70 years ago and that Lebron James embarrassed on ESPN. Oh, let’s all just kill ourselves now.

So what’s the difference? Cleveland vehemently, to the point of a fault, defends itself in the face of opposition. All that this accomplishes is more attention for a sore topic. Nobody is ever going to stop talking about “The Decision” as long every time they do, they receive 3 million hits to their news story or a record breaking television broadcast. While they might be assholes, media moguls are not stupid people. Controversy sells and they are in the business of making money. Whether you agree with, disagree with, are hurt or offended by something does not matter, it will still make them money. So if you have a large population center of overly defensive people who are more than willing to pay attention to negative press, of course people will take advantage of that. And they will keep doing so until the gravy train stops. There is no better, clearer cut example of this then Forbes magazine rating Cleveland America’s most miserable city in 2009. Obviously there is no such method of properly indexing misery of millions of people. Anyone who made it through the fourth grade realizes this. But they publish these sorts of “ratings” once a year, with the statistics purposely manipulated in order to best piss off the most sensitive crowds. And sorry Cleveland, you are by far the most sensitive crowd so it makes sense for the shitheads at Forbes to do these things.

In my opinion, other cities do a better job of owning their “issues”. If you tell a Clevelander that their town is full of corn fields, they will bark back at you about how “there are no farms in Greater Cleveland.” It will generally spur a heated retort from them. Meanwhile, if you call someone from Boston a “Chowder Head”, they will generally tell you something about the industry and what it has accomplished for the region and the rich history behind it. And how much money it is still making and how many people have jobs because of it. They own it. They realize that these are the things that made Boston, Boston and they aren’t anything to be ashamed about.

So what made Cleveland, Cleveland? It’s convenient location as a gateway between the Midwestern and Eastern population centers as well as the steel and the manufacturing industry all the while, producing the media and ideas behind this country’s Rock & Roll Industry. More recently, it has built itself into the leading city for Biomedical, Health and related research in the entire United States of America. Not far outside of the city lies the single greatest amusement park on Earth (and that is not just my opinion) that nobody has ever heard of in Cedar Point, which is surrounded by a chain of what seem like borderline tropical, party islands that are only a 30 minute ferry ride away in Put in Bay. And don’t even get me started on the dining and food industry downtown anchored by the absolute standard in farmers markets “The West Side Market”. But they don’t own it.

People outside of Cleveland wouldn’t ever know about things like the Cleveland Clinic managing to transplant faces of attack victims successfully or their finding proven methods of creating new spinal cords for paralyzed people using stem cells or any number of the royalty and celebrities that refuse treatment at any other hospital system outside of the Cleveland Clinic. No, if you ask anyone what they think is going on in Cleveland, they will tell you that it is the city that Lebron James left or a city that has lousy weather in the winter.

Just about everyone who I meet after I tell them that I grew up in the Cleveland area asks me “So did you grow up on a farm”. These aren’t dumb people. One of the guys who asked me this is one of the industry leaders in the sports medicine field along the Eastern Seaboard. They’re not trying to be rude, they just honestly don’t know so the natural inclination is to generalize.

However, if you ask someone from around here, what they think is going on in Chicago, they will say something like “Oh, I love Chicago, such a fun city; I would love to get back there.” So what’s the difference? Chicago has just as bad, if not worse weather in the winter, is smack dab in the middle of this countries grain belt with nearly three times as many farms in its home state of Illinois, but nobody identifies Chicago that way, why?

To me, the answer is branding. More people were murdered last year in “Chicago land” then any other region in this country but that story comes and goes and the positive aspects of Chicago again overshadow the negatives. Before you know it people are again talking about the airline industries resurgence and their merchandising prowess of Chicago and how proud everyone is of Obama. This is the way their town is branded. They realize their identity and they own it.

Imagine for a minute if Cleveland held that statistic: we would hear about Cleveland being the murder capital of America, every day of our lives for years to come. This is because, the local population enables the story to live on and on with their own stubbornness and protesting. They don’t let things die. Thanks to this reputation alone, every media company in the country would continuously pound home the point via the internet and television and late night talk show hosts all because they know they are going to get a major reaction out of the city. And that reaction draws attention, which boost ratings and in turn fills their pockets. Because Cleveland is a town who’s brand is in a constant state of flux based off of whatever the flavor of the week is. And that is often a lousy flavor. One year it will be Lebron leaving for Miami, the year before will be all the crime around town, the year before that will be how bad the Browns are, the year before that will be how the infrastructure is old and ugly and too expensive to fix. So the circle never completes. You never get back to the positive aspects when every time you open up a paper the first three pages are dedicated to everything bad around town. The image never revolves back to great healthcare, or how a Cleveland Ship Builder just won a multi-billion dollar deal to develop Naval Destroyer’s. By the amount of time it takes for one bad thing to finally die, something else will inevitably have gone wrong.

My advice, find your identity as a city, once and for all and to hell with what anyone else thinks about it. There is far too much that is great about the city that I grew up in and fell in love with to take such a half glass empty approach about.

And Boston, build some better friggin roads for the love of all that is holy.

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