Dear Cleveland Browns,

Dear Cleveland Browns,

Every Sunday, for four months out of the year, you make me wish I could have grown up in any other NFL city in our fine country.  I don’t feel like I ever “chose” to be a fan of yours.  Instead I was born into a family of fanatical people who basically, through years of conditioning, “forced” me to become a fan of yours. 

Why don’t you just stop now you may ask?  Well now I just feel like I have too much invested in this thing.  You don’t spend your entire life building a house just to move into an apartment across the street. 

I don’t think I am alone in my resentment towards being forcibly molded into a fan of your franchise.  In fact, I would be surprised if there weren’t hundreds of thousands of people exactly like me.  People, who could have been born 80 miles to the Southeast of Cleveland and been perfectly happy, celebrating six Super Bowls for Pittsburgh.  As sick as the thought makes me, those people really lucked out compared to us.

Why is it always something with you guys?  If it’s not an outbreak of staph infections, it is how you are transitioning into a new defensive scheme.  If it’s not your transition into a new defensive scheme, it is how you are trying to install the West Coast Offense (in Cleveland, in the windiest stadium in the country, for some insane reason).  If it’s not that, it is your inability to court decent free-agents, or your players are in trouble with the law or the league, or your owner cares more about soccer then football, or your running back is either a pansy whose agent won’t let him play with a sore throat or his backup has a fractured knee for the fifth time.  How can you consistently find wide receivers who can’t catch, it seems like that would be harder to accomplish then finding guys who can?  How come you can’t hire a proven NFL head coach in 13 years?  How is that even possible?  Do you think that every obscure offensive/defensive coordinator is some sort of a diamond waiting to be discovered by you? 

The fact is, that most of those guys are coordinators because that is exactly what they should be… coordinators.

At what point, with as incensed and deprived of a fan-base as you have, did you think it would be a good idea to try installing the Holmgrem/Heckert/Shurmer five year plan?  Do you think you have five years?  Five years?  Five years to produce a winner in a town that hasn’t seen one in 16?  Five years is a long time to stay patient with something you already lost patience in years ago.  If I am running a business that has been screwing its customers for the better part of two decades, whatever reforms I make to rectify that situation had better not take five years.  Not If I want to retain any clientele. 

You have a great, young core of players on both sides of the ball, but you have them coached by a man, who is easily the worst excuse for an NFL head coach that I have seen in my 32 years.  Hiring Pat Shurmer as your head coach, after he coordinated the St. Louis Rams to a 6-10 record is one of the most curious decisions I have seen made by your franchise.  And that is high praise for a team so mired in an ocean of ongoing, nonstop, curious decisions. 

The problem is, if you replace him now, which you kind of have to, and bring in a whole new system, it has to work immediately.  Otherwise your core of good, young talent will leave for greener pastures and we are all stuck for another 3+ years waiting for you guys to acquire new talent that might work in whatever system the new regime installs.  I think, if that happens you might as well just see if Baltimore needs another team and just relinquish your strangle-hold on one of the most prime pieces of property in our city. 

My advice is this.  You’re going to have to bring in a new head coach.  Retain your offensive/defensive coordinators and bring in a head coach that is proven in the NFL and who doesn’t want to completely overhaul everything.  In parallel, sign some free agents.  We can’t keep trying to cover Dez Bryant and Victor Cruz with 7^th round picks.  Hope to god, that your young core buys in, and that the system works.  Because you are just about out of time with your fans. 

Sincerely,

Matt Coan

Who are the real Zombies in this Apocalypse?

A series of gruesome murders have taken place over recent weeks leading people to an odd conclusion.  The main headline grabber comes to us from beautiful Miami Florida where commuters were rudely interrupted during their rides home, finding a naked man eating a hobo on the side of the highway.

We have another case from Baltimore Maryland, where a college student ran out of Hot Pockets and Raman Noodles and had to resort to eating his roommate. 

Meanwhile, up in Canada, a gay porn star/model/internet celebrity, killed his boyfriend, ate some of him and then boxed up the rest and mailed it off to various Canadian Government Agencies. 

Finally in the always lovely state of New Jersey, anther “zombie” was cornered by police.  Instead of allowing them to take him into custody, he did what any normal minded person would do in that situation and sliced himself open and started throwing parts of his guts at the cops. 

Clearly these incidents are gruesome and horrifying and nightmare provoking however, the people who carried them out are, and in a few cases were, as alive as you and I at the time.  Therefore, they aren’t zombies. 

Are they all psychotic?  Sure, more than likely.

Did some, if not all of them, have more drugs in their system then at a Woody Harrelson Family reunion?  Yes they probably did. 

Were these people so mentally ill and deranged to a point where they were unable to control themselves in anyway whatsoever?  Absolutely, I bet they all were.

Were these people zombies?  Absolutely not.  

Want to know why?  Because there is no such thing as zombies.  They are made up.  They are fictitious, Hollywood cash cows and nothing more.  I know that people know this, and I know that they know this, and that I am just raining on their fun little fantasy land parades that they live in.  However, I want to know why I am so personally intrigued. 

I find it to be extraordinarily interesting how a spree of gruesome crimes can happen.  Said crimes are then reported on by the media, and the next thing we know, pop culture has labeled it the “Zombie Apocalypse”.  How does that happen? 

Could it be the growing popularity of zombie related television shows?  Are we all just wired somehow to quote unquote “label” everything that happens?  Maybe it is just so impossible for our brains to properly grasp such a string of horrifying events that we are forced to categorize them as something so unbelievable that we eventually land on calling it “The Zombie Apocalypse”.

Honestly, if I had to take a guess, I would say we are just plain old fashioned bored as a society.  People, for better or worse, love to hate these sorts of stories.  We have been trained to do so over the years, thanks to Hollywood, Fox News, Video Games and other moguls of modern day fiction. 

As revolting as it may be to hear, these types of things happen every single day, throughout all of the corners of this rock that we inhabit as it hypnotically spins us around the sun.  But when they happen in our American backyard, we are so intrigued that our collective, self-aggrandizing consciousness kicks into full gear.  Somehow subconsciously wanting to keep these sorts of things in the news cycles because of how boring our lives are otherwise.  If we label these things, and call them something like “The Zombie Apocalypse”, more naïve people will jump on the idea and soon enough the idea will become marketable for lack of a better term.  And before long, we will be able to guarantee ourselves something interesting to watch for on the nightly news; something to break up the monotony. 

And to me, therein lies a huge problem with us as a species.  We are, like it or not, chomping at the bit to hear about these things, just for our next chance to act shocked at how horrible they are.  Many of our lives are so boring or bad, that in a way, it feels good to hear about people who are A LOT worse off than we are.  And somewhere in the fray of the news cycles, the big questions are never asked. 

Such as; “How in the world does a human get to a point where they resort to these sorts of actions?”  Surely there had to be warning signs prior to someone dismembering their boyfriend and mailing the pieces to the government, no? 

What are we doing wrong?  How can we ensure that these people receive whatever care, counseling, incarceration required to prevent these kinds of things from happening? 

Someone needs to figure this out, because our societal lust for these sorts of things to continue, to me, raises the most red flags.  

We, as a country, could use a real kick in our asses when it comes to our collective moral.  When I can ask people who are much older than me, and who have been through things like Vietnam and World Wars, if they have ever seen things worse for America then they are right now?  And they say “No”; I think it leads to labels like this. 

People want to be able to categorize all the horrible things that happen, along with the impossibility of making a decent living in this country, along with unemployment and unrest in the streets, as something that represents a massive breakdown in our culture, an all encompassing catastrophic event of sorts.  Finally a few horrible murders happen in rapid succession and boredom mixes with frustration which mixes with fear and we call it, “The Zombie Apocalypse”.  In other words, “How can this shit get any worse?”

Giants 21 - Patriot’s 17; From an outsider’s point of view.

Something occurred to me last night. Something I never knew about myself. At some point between Tom Brady being sacked for the final time by the Giants to seal their Super Bowl victory and noticing the sheer agony on my beloved girlfriends face, I realized that when it comes to heart-wrenching professional sports losses, I am a completely callous bastard. I really need to work on my empathy towards my friends who were saddened by the Pats loss last night.

It took my girlfriend to yell at me while I marveled at Mario Manningham’s unbelievable catch in the final crucial moments of the game for me to realize my mindset going into this thing had been screwed from the get go. It took the look of complete hopelessness on her face when I looked at her, for me to finally realize; “Holy Shit, you’re not used to this sort of thing, are you?”

As I lied there, on my couch, overcome by the frigid realization of how horrible it must be for this person next to me to endure these sporting emotions for the first, maybe second time in their lives, I kept my mouth shut when she barked at me; “How would you feel if this was the Brown’s in this situation. You would be freaking out”

I kept my mouth shut for several reasons, mainly because I know there is no reasoning with someone in the grips of sports-related shock. They say Polar Bears are the most dangerous mammals on the planet; well I am pretty sure that disappointed sports fans could give them a run for their money.

I also kept my mouth shut for the fact that I had nothing nice to say in reply to her. In my head, all I seemed able to land on was “Are you kidding me? Do you have any idea how thrilled I would be if the Browns even made it to a Super Bowl, in my lifetime? I wouldn’t care if they lost by 38 points.” To say this back to her would have been hopelessly counter-productive.

The main reason I kept my mouth shut was because I know exactly what she was going through. I know how futile any words or actions are to soothe the disappointment she was feeling. Lucky for her she was able to make it to adulthood before enduring such wounds; I got to learn about that kind of pain when I was eight.

To be honest with you Jessie, if it were the Browns in that situation, I would have been sitting next to you, stoic and unsurprised by their failure, speechless, yet calm, because I was freaking out in 1987 when I learned about the game of football as John Elway marched the Bronco’s down the field in the final moments to a touchdown in the AFC Championship, crushing the Brown’s Super Bowl dreams.

I was irate a year later, in 1988, when Brown’s running back Ernest Byner could have simply fallen down into the end zone through a hole, large enough to drive a dump truck through and instead fumbled on the one yard line. And as his fumble was recovered by those same hated Bronco’s, another AFC Championship was lost and another Super Bowl was missed.

For me, the worst came two years later in 1989 in the NBA Eastern Conference Finals, as the Cavaliers, out of a timeout, called a defense that would inevitably force Craig Ehlo to switch onto Michael Jordan. You can imagine who won that matchup. By the time Ehlo had jumped and landed again, Jordan was still rising through the air in his signature fade away jump shot, with less than a second left on the clock, he sent a line drive shot that hit the back of the rim, rattled around for what seemed like an eternity, and then unmercifully fell through the basket, winning the game for the Bulls and sealing the fate of, what is still to this day, my favorite Cavaliers team of all time.

It was this game, when I was 10 years old that I really, consciously realized how horrible the world of a professional sports fan could be. Little did I know how these losses, I would carry with me forever, stains on my soul.

I wish I could say that this was the end of this torturous journey for me, but since, I have had to endure a blown save in game 7 of the World Series by Jose Mesa, allowing the Florida Marlins to win the game in the bottom of the 9th, with 2 outs, crushing the championship dreams of the Indians in 1997. I again had to watch them lose to the Braves in another World Series and lose to your Red Sox in the ALCS after winning the first two games of the series.

I have endured being a fan of a basketball team that until recently, made the playoff’s every year for six seasons and never managed to win a championship, even though they had the best player in the word on their side.

I have had to watch that best player in the NBA spurn my home town, live on ESPN, to announce he was joining the Miami Heat which also happened to take place on my 30th birthday.

Fast forward two years when I am expected to empathize with someone about a sports team, which I’ll be honest here, I sort of half care about to begin with.

At first I felt like the victim, of a person taking this sports loss out on me as I ogled at Mario Manningham’s miraculous fourth quarter catch. I felt like I was being attacked, used as a punching back. Then I thought about it. Look at the body of work it has taken for me to become so hardened to this sort of disappointment, a decade’s long siege of soul crippling misery for me to transform into a person who doesn’t even so much as bat an eye to losses by my teams that I root for.

I am so used to it, that I expect it now. Even if the Brown’s had been in the Patriot’s shoes, and say they were up by 28 points, with two minutes left, I would still be sitting back waiting for the other shoe to fall. Surely, John Elway would come out of retirement for that final five minutes or the gates of hell would open along the 50 yard line consuming every Brown’s player, and leaving the Giants as the victors by forfeit. This is just the way it is for me and how it always has been.

I firmly believe that there is a certain amount of a person’s soul that is dedicated to sports disappointment. And once it is filled, it cannot accommodate anymore; like being caught in a rain storm, eventually you can only get so wet before any additional water just runs right off. That part of my being has been supersaturated with devastating disappointment for a long time now, and there is nowhere left to tack on anymore.

This is why I immediately went back to using the brand new paper shredder I purchased at Bed Bath and Beyond yesterday as the final seconds ticked off the clock in the Super Bowl; my girlfriend marching around the apartment, throwing things and completely beside herself. There was no consoling her, just as there was no consoling me in 1989 as I hyperventilated on the stairs of my childhood home, my parents imploring me to just breath in my nose and out my mouth as I watched the Cavaliers leave the court, and Michael Jordan celebrate his achievement.

In a way, if you are going to choose to continue rooting for sports teams, it is better to be like her. To react like that shows that she still holds out hope for her teams, something I don’t do anymore. The fact of the matter is, your disappointment stems from the fact that most of the time, your teams win, which is why this comes as such as surprise to you. Rooting for a collection of teams who have never won anything in my lifetime, and as of today do not seem real close to changing that inconvenient fact, eventually transforms you into the callous bastard of a sports fan, I am today.

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.