The Anti-Social Network

Try to visualize the world as it is in the Social Network as though it were a real world and ask yourself, if that is a place you would like to be. It would be a world, where you were constantly surrounded by people who you sort of know but not really, often dislike, who never seem to shut the fuck up about the most random, annoying, crap imaginable. Every now and again some person you don’t know will come out of nowhere and “poke” you. People will constantly be asking you to be their friend or telling you they don’t want to be friends with you anymore like a bunch of five year olds. Everyone would be older and less attractive then how you vaguely remembered them. There would constantly be some bogus survey gauging which 80’s metal band best suits your personality being shoved in your face. Everyone would be constantly, annoyingly, attached to their significant others at all times. Everyone would have an endless supply of boring pictures that they were dying for you to look at and give your opinion on. Everyone in the world would be able to instantly give you their opinion about every single thing you did. And this entire fiasco would take place in a town called Farmville which has been gripped for years by a Mafia War of which millions of people are involved.


In the social networking world, the term “friend” is used much more loosely then in the real world. In order to be friends with someone, you just have to have spent time in the same building as them at some point in your life. You don’t have to have ever spoken with them, liked them or hung out with them. People make friends in this world just because they went to the same school or have worked in the same place, in some cases not even at the same time but they are friends because they share that vague common interest with one another. I have about 300 Facebook”friends”, here is a breakdown.

People from High School:

When you really look at it, Facebook is really just reunion.com on steroids for me. Because just about all of my friends are people that I went to High School with. In reality, I have managed to keep in contact, via phone or email or in person with the old High School Friends that I want to have as part of my life. And then Facebook came along and forged a brand new bullshit means of connectivity to a whole ton of other ones that I don’t care about and in many cases have no intention of ever speaking with again.

I can’t imagine a situation where I would ever need to converse with Joe from 11th grade shop class about anything. Or any of the girls who used to be hot and now have like 14 kids and look like sunburned sea lions slowly dying on a rocky beach someplace, in all of their photos. Or how about I strike up a chat with one of the couples, from High School, who have been married and having kids together since 1996, before we graduated, and who I am sure have never re-evaluated that decision since. The fact that I have to be reminded that these people exist is not cool. These are mental lashings that didn’t exist 8 years ago. I suppose we all need to be reminded of where we come from, even if where we come from is not memorable.

Married women who use their maiden name and then their new last name (pretty much all married women):

Everyone has dozens of these “friends”. I don’t really have a problem with this practice but it really does hammer my point home about not really being friends with people on Facebook. If you need to include whatever your last time used to be when people knew you, in order for them to recognize who you are, you are not really friends with those people. I like to think that I can recognize my true friends by sight alone without needing them to state their full names, including their given surname as though we are at the BMV or filling out foreign immigration forms on an airplane.

This is another situation that is completely indigenous to the Facebook world. In no other capacity on Earth could a single guy be friends with so many married women without getting the shit kicked out of him every 20 minutes.

People you don’t like, who keep talking to you:

It’s not so bad having friends who you don’t like sitting buried in your “friends” list. At least most of them probably don’t like you back and won’t talk to you. But at least once a month, some person, who you dislike, will leave some kind of dumbass message on your “wall”, usually asking something stupid like, “When you coming to my town again Matt?” or “We really miss you over here bud.” As though I am going to make an expensive trip halfway across the country to visit a bunch of people I hate. That’s like paying someone to hit you in the nuts with a rolling pin. And do you really miss me, really? Is that what you did today, you sat around missing people from High School who you haven’t seen or talked to in going on 20 years? Because, if you did, then that’s fucking crazy and you should probably get on some kind of serious meds.

Old work “friends”:

This is another large group of people you are friends with on Facebook. People who used to work in the same place as you did. Now I have made some great friendships through work in my life but I have not made friends with the 124 people I used to work with whom are now friends with me on Facebook. This is the group of friends who makes up the vast majority of the “I don’t even know who the fuck these people are” category. This situation is made worse in the event you left that place of work on bad terms. Now every time you scroll through your friends list, you are forced to be reminded of how you had to work someplace that you hated, in most cases for years of your life. This is another mental blow that you must endure, which did not exist prior to the magic of Social Networking.

Ex Girlfriends/Ex Boyfriends:

Breaking up with someone used to mean, you get your clothes and DVD’s back from them, you get one or two last harsh words in, you delete their number from your phone, you throw the stuff they left at your place in a river and that was pretty much it. Now, thanks to the wonderful world of social networking, this process is a lot more involved. Now, on top of everything else there are relationship status’s that must be changed, mutual friends who must be deleted before you meet someone else so they don’t act as some kind of spy for your ex, old couples photo’s that must be deleted or in more sociopathic cases, cropped so as to no longer include your ex, security settings that must be updated so that they can’t see any future photo’s or relationship status’. And if you forget a single one of these items, then god help you my friend because you are entering a world of pain. But computers are here to make our lives simpler.

People who consistently write bummer comments:

I don’t mind if every once in a while, one of my friends is bummed out and writes something on Facebook about it. Fine, you know whatever makes you feel better, I guess. But I’ve got some friends, who must feel like it is their personal calling in life, to publish every stupid little thing that goes wrong in their life to the entire world on Facebook. I don’t want to come off as completely insensitive, but I don’t need to be made aware of your ingrown toenail or a missing cat or how you feel about gas prices or the new light bulbs. Just quit bitching. Your toenail will heal, gas prices will go down, you will get used to the new light bulbs and your cat is probably dead.

People who won’t stop writing comments about political crap:

We’ve all got them. Friends, usually republican friends, who have never visited FoxNews.com, without posting a link to some article they read on their Facebook Page. Usually, accompanying their link is some kind of biased, opinionated, racist comment from them about the contents of the link. Out of my 286 friends, I currently know of one who works in any sort of political capacity. If he were to, and never does, post something political on his page, I would take it seriously. Otherwise, I don’t give a shit how my Facebook Friend Steve, who works as a night supervisor at a Valero, feels about our foreign policy in regards to South Africa as reported by Fox News.

Your guy friends who seem to have made friends with every whore on Facebook:

There are a lot of guys who seem to use Facebook as a channel to become “friends” with slutty women. It is easy to find these guys. All you have to do is look at their friends list and every other photo is of some women in a bikini or in her underwear or in a sexually suggestive position of some kind. I could understand this practice if they were ONLY friends with these sort of women and nobody else. But waters often become muddied when these men mix these sorts with their family members or their non-whore friends, or their girlfriends etc. These men usually find out the hard way, that you have no control over what anyone posts on your wall that everyone can read. And when you surround yourself with a bunch of whores, you are going to eventually get some shit posted up there that you don’t want anyone else to see. I liken it to a guy going to a strip club with his mom and his girlfriend and then knowing every single stripper in the club.

In conclusion, social networking has improved our lives in some capacities, it provides entertainment value, it does add another avenue with which we can stay in contact with each other, it, in my opinion unfortunately, gives people an outlet for their frustrations, but I am sure a lot of people think that this is a good thing. And like everything else, you take the good with the bad even if the bad far outweighs the good. There have been other advancements in communication and convenience that I can’t imagine how we ever lived without, email, cell phones etc. But I have never once asked myself, what did I ever do before Facebook?

Booze III (3)

This is the third and likely not the final installment in the Booze series.  Based off of the popularity of these posts, I may just stop writing anything else and reflect on my drunken past on a bi-weekly basis. 

Who wants blackened chicken and where the hell is my car? 

These are not two questions that are asked under normal circumstances but if you read on, you will find that the situation I found myself in was anything but ordinary. 

I had been living on the near West Side of Cleveland near the Lakewood border with my good friend Chris.   On a boring Saturday night, we drove downtown in my car and parked at a local garage and went drinking.  We closed down some techno-club which was not in any sort of bar district of the city.  All I remember is that we had to walk down some stairs next to a Thai restaurant to get into the place. 

By the time we left, around 4 am, I had completely forgotten that I had driven the two of us downtown.  Chris was of no help either.  There was nowhere to get food in this neighborhood because it was basically the middle of no-man’s-land.  We got into a taxi and went home, forgetting that my car was in some sketchy parking garage in the middle of nowhere downtown Cleveland.

We get home and are drunk and starving.  Chris goes and begins to run his head under the faucet in the tub like he often tends to do when he is shitfaced.  I am not exactly sure how this helps, but you know what, whatever. 

I get the idea that I want chicken.  And luckily, I had purchased a package of frozen chicken earlier in the week.  Now, I know how to cook chicken, but when I am drunk, I make poor decisions. 

I heated up a frying pan to somewhere near four thousand degrees centigrade, opened the frozen chicken package and blindly inserted the contents into my nuclear hot frying pan.  I then began attempting to prepare some tater tots to go along with my chicken.  I don’t care what anyone says, it would have been delightful.

Somewhere in the middle of this spectacle, I put my head down on the counter next to the frying pan.  It turns out, completely frozen blocks of chicken don’t cook well in a frying pan, they basically just light on fire.  After some unspecified amount of time, I become completely past out with my head in a pile of frozen tater-tots with two pieces of chicken literally in flames, not a foot away from my head. 

I wake up to find Chris, soaking wet screaming at me and throwing baking soda on the stovetop.  He was still soaking wet and topless from having run his upper torso under the faucet for a half hour.  He is about as mad as I had ever seen anyone at me in my life.  For some reason in the midst of this fray, I come to realize that I had left my car downtown and began to ramble about this in some sort of drunk, confused, concerned, I just woke up into an emergency situation, type of babble.  This only added to Chris frustration because I was much more concerned about my car then the fact that I nearly burnt down our apartment building via frozen chicken. 

Luckily, I was able to go get my car the next day after paying a hefty parking fee, the chicken was unable to be salvaged.  Chris and I were able to patch things up, the tater tots were still edible 

Blue Goo and dishes do not go together:

At this time, I was around 21 and living in the middle of absolute nowhere Ohio, while working and in college.  My roommates and I had not done dishes for quite an unacceptable amount of time.  And it was time to do the god damned dishes.  My good buddy Matt and his girlfriend at the time agreed to go to the grocery store, while my other good buddy Ben and I stayed back and took care of the dishes. 

Both Ben and I have active gag reflexes and are unable to stomach disgusting things well.  And make no mistake about it, this dish situation was horrendous.  So I get the idea to mix up a batch of Blue Goo before we did them, you know, to take the edge off the disgustingness.

For those of you who did not grow up in rural Ohio, Blue Goo, is Vodka (a lot of it), poured into an empty Milk jug, and with Blue Kool-Aid and sugar mixed into it.  If cold, it is probably one of the easiest ways to get absolutely rip-shit in no time whatsoever. 

So Matt and his girlfriend leave to go grocery shopping, and Ben and I sit on the couch and begin passing the Blue Goo back and forth until it is completely gone,  time to do the dishes. 

We stumble into the kitchen absolutely blitzed around 11 am.  We decide that Ben will throw and I will catch.  At first, the system was working, we managed to get nearly half of the load clean and then the full brunt of the Blue Goo kicked in.  I began to get warmer and warmer until I was eventually pouring sweat like Jack from Lost.   I took my shirt off and Ben followed my lead.    Just then, Ben begins laughing his ass off but his laughter turned to pain when he realized that he had sliced his hand open on a dirty knife in the sink.  I began laughing at the overall situation just as I realized that I had done the same thing.  So now we’re both bleeding.

Throughout this process, our jeans had become soaked with dish water as did most of the kitchen.  You would be amazed at how difficult it can be to contain dish water after basically drinking half a bottle of vodka while the guy next to you drank the other half. 

I took my pants off because they had become gravely uncomfortable.  At the time, I did not wear underwear so I was basically nude, standing in a puddle of dirty dish water, with my hand bleeding, laughing my ass off and drying dishes. 

Then Ben took his pants off.  To my surprise, he had smacks on, AKA tightie-whities.  Now for whatever reason, Ben did not want to take off his boots so he attempted to take off his jeans over his boots without taking them off first.  This is a feat that is tough for someone who is not fighting a half liter of 80 proof vodka.   So Ben falls down, hard onto the linoleum, right in the middle of the most disgusting puddle of dirty dish water I had ever seen.  He begins laughing and I begin laughing at him. 

Just then, Matt and his girlfriend return from the grocery store.  Mind you, they only left about an hour before.  And when they left we were completely sober.  But what they returned to was something that nobody could have possibly predicted.  Two men, both absolutely hammered, soaking wet, one in his underwear on the floor laughing his ass off and myself, drying dishes in nothing but my birthday suit. It was like some sort of crazy, southern, gay swing party.  We all shared a nice, long laugh.   

We were able to get the dishes done and mend our various wounds, I then past out on the floor of my bedroom for about six to eight hours as did Ben. 

It is all fun and games until you accidently knock your friend out and get questioned by the cops:

When I lived in Cleveland Heights my friend Ben and I used to frequent a wine bar down the road from us.  We were there often, as we could walk to and from our apartment.  Now this is sort of embarrassing but in order to make the walks more entertaining, and due to the fact that we had both been making fun of the immensely popular at the time “X-Games” recently, we came up with a game we called “Extreme Walking”. 

“Extreme walking”, was basically just normal walking, except you have to be drunk and do stupid jumps and tricks while doing so.   For instance, if there was a curb in your way, and you jumped over it, while doing a 360 was considered, to us an extreme version of walking. All the while, the other person would commentate the exercise like one of those, ubber-hip, skater boy, douche bag, X-Game announcers.  It was fucking funny to us. If you don’t think it is, try it once; I guarantee you laugh your ass off.

After about a year, both of us had become formidable extreme walk men.  We had gotten to a point where we began to try to distract each other’s maneuvers by pushing each other in mid-air in some cases. 

Most of the time, this practice was harmless but unfortunately, on this evening, I did not account for black-ice.  Ben leaped off of a landscaping planter onto the sidewalk next to me.  In an attempt to prevent him from sticking the landing, I pushed him.  He slid about 10 feet to his right and fell down and slammed his head into a glass window.   Normally there wouldn’t be anything funny about this.  But in this case, the window was for this brand new, underground, ultra-trendy nightclub which was absolutely packed inside.  So when Ben’s head smashed into the window, the laughter from inside was fairly audible to everyone outside.  So I naturally began laughing with them.

Everything began to happen fairly quickly at that point.  I realized that Ben did not get up in a reasonable timeframe.  And just as I began to get concerned a cop came out of nowhere and pushed me onto the ground and began screaming at me.  I remember he called me “tough guy” about 5 times, rapid fire.  It is really weird to have someone calling you “tough guy” when you had no intentions of in any way trying to be tough.   It occurred to me, that he thought we were fighting and that I had done this on purpose. 

Then I realized how ridiculous the whole thing was.  Like, what am I fucking Batman?  Like in the middle of a fight, I would have the foresight to realize that my opponent was about to land on some black ice, and I would then use that to my advantage to make him slide 10 feet into a glass window.   

Finally Ben woke up with nothing but a lump on his head and we explained the whole situation to the cop.  This wasn’t easy; try explaining something like “extreme walking” gone wrong to a police officer!  He then reminded us that he had every right to arrest us for public intox and/or disturbing the peace, but this time he would let us go with a warning.  Thank you Mr. Officer, I don’t know how I would have ever explained how I got arrested to my cellmates for this one.  What are you in for Tyrone? “Murder”, what are you in for Jack? “Murder”, what are you in for Matt? “an extreme walking incident”.  

Then the cop told us to “be more careful next time” and that “Ben got lucky by not being more seriously injured”.   But it isn’t like Ben had even been examined for any sort of a concussion or anything, so I felt like it was a little too early to make that sort of an assumption. So unless this cop moonlights as the best neurosurgeon in the world I find this statement to have been a dubious claim.   Finally he let us just walk away.  We went right back to extreme walking.

I wish....

People would stop blaming the President for not having jobs: 

When did it become Barack Obama’s responsibility to get everyone a job?   He is the President of the United States, not the President of the KForce Staffing Agency.   I wish that we could just have one “The President tells it like it is, day, once per year”.  On this one day, the president can say whatever he really wanted to say and be guaranteed no repercussions.  Because I would love to see Obama get in front of a microphone and tell everyone, “I’m terribly sorry that I can’t find a job for those of you who dropped out of school after the fourth grade and short of cooking up meth, have absolutely no vocational skills whatsoever, but I was too busy killing the guy who wants to fly airplanes into our buildings, thank you, god bless you, and god bless the United States of America”. 

That old people were not allowed to drive:

Old people should have to take another driving test when they turn 70.  And this test should be extremely difficult.   It should be borderline impassable.  It should be so hard that the old people don’t even attempt it and they just surrender their driver’s licenses to the state on their 70^th birthdays.  The test should involve things like swimming and pull-ups and using Twitter and staying in a handstand for 10 minutes; all things that are nearly impossible for old people to do.

These people are a menace on the roadways, which is a fact.  Not a year goes by in my life where I am not nearly killed by several old people who are still trying to drive cars.    It’s not good for them either.  I’m sure they don’t enjoy getting yelled at and flipped off all the time.  They drive slowly because they are scared of going any faster.  Their old hollow bones could not possibly withstand any sort of a fender bender and they know this.  So they don’t take any chances. 

The only compromise I would be willing to make here is to make it illegal for old people to drive during peak traffic hours.  Relegate the old people to driving between 11 am and 4 pm and then again between 7 pm and 5 am.  If the old people needed any exceptions to these windows, they could apply for a one day pass that grants their exception.   But this could turn into a double edged sword as you would likely have a shit load of old people all trying to drive around during these windows which could become a catastrophe.  Also, most old people can’t see at night for various reasons so the 7 pm to 5 am window would likely become a Hindenburg scale disaster of epic proportions.

That golf courses didn’t let just anyone play golf:

Every public golf course, right now, across the entire United States of America, is packed with hacks that have absolutely no fucking idea how to play golf.  This is a problem that I have personally witnessed grow to near biblical proportions over the past couple of years.  On a daily basis, 90% of the people who decide to go golfing are so bad at golf that it is hard to imagine how they ever managed to become toilet trained.   For people like me, who actually know how to golf and take it somewhat seriously, this is a major annoyance as I find myself constantly dodging errant tee-shots, waiting behind some idiot to line up and subsequently miss a three foot putt for five minutes, some guy who can’t golf trying to teach his kids how to not golf well, old men, who move so slowly that they would have a hard time getting out of the way of steam roller, women who think it’s just hilarious to be out trying to play golf, absolutely shit-faced thirty something’s and kids smoking pot in the woods.   And not to mention, the worst of the worst, the business men who golf because it is just something that they are supposed to do as business men.  These men generally have thousands of dollars worth of the best golf equipment, none of which they have any idea how to go about using, they play like they are tour players, measuring every putt, and every approach shot like their lives depend on it, just to slap their next shot 120 yards into the woods in front of the thirty people who are stuck behind them, because no business man, has ever let anyone play through.   

Golf is the only sport like this.  It is the only sport where someone else’s ineptness directly affects everyone else's experience.  I propose a skills challenge that must be met on the driving range, under the supervision of a golf course employee, prior to being granted access to the golf course.  If you are unable to hit a drive more than 150 yards, you’re gone, if you can’t make a putt from 30 feet in less than four strokes, you’re gone, if you think 15 minutes is an acceptable amount of time to spend on a par 3, you’re gone.   And just for good measure, they should be physically kicked in the ass throughout their entire walk back to their cars by golf course employees and fruit should be thrown at their cars as they exit the parking lot.

These are skills that anyone who has half of an idea of how golf works, could easily pass but at the same time would weed out the typical golfing riff-raff that we decent golfers are forced to put up with every weekend.   

People would stop taking about “Our Founding Fathers” as though they were so great:

I am sick and tired of hearing folks talking about what the “Founding Fathers” meant for America.   Whatever they wanted no longer applies to the reality that we have created for ourselves.  The wonderful group of men, known as your Founding Fathers, that you love so much also loved things like slavery and not letting women have rights and hanging people who they thought were witches.  If you had your way, and the country actually turned into what the “Founding Fathers” had envisioned for it, we would have no cars, next to no technology for that matter, we would all have to learn how to farm, or make shoes, or shape molten metal with hammers, there would be no diversity, women would have no say in anything, people would still be dying from strep throat and scurvy and we would constantly be at war with the British, slugs and cocaine would still be considered acceptible types of medication.  So thank god you are wrong, because that sounds terrible.

 Someone would revisit the 40 hour a week idea:

Who the hell decided that it would be a good idea for everyone to work for forty hours every week of their lives and that’s the way it’s just going to be forever, and if you don’t, you get no health coverage, end of discussion?    Shouldn’t this at least be up for debate, ever?   I think people should only have to work for as long as it takes for them to complete whatever their job is on a weekly basis.  If that’s five hours, then that’s how much you work.  Conversely, if it takes them 60 hours, then too bad, that’s how long those slow ass people have to work.   I do believe that there are a lot of people out there who grossly underestimate how long of a period of time forty hours is.  You could build a small airport in less time than that.  Forty hours is a long, long time.

I am probably spoiled as I work in the IT field and over the years have come to the realization that the most talented IT people are the least busy ones because they have found ways to automate everything. Yet, those people are still forced to drive to a building 5 times a week and sit around and act busy in order to remain qualified to receive health care benefits.  How much electric bill money and fossil fuels could be conserved by not making people drive to a building every weekday?

That we were allowed to select exactly which Television Channels that we wanted:

Why can’t we do this yet?  Is there a reason why I get the 8 channels that I watch and another 1000 channels that I don’t?  It is not like I am going to wake up someday and all of sudden want to watch CSPAN or OWN or the Hunting Channel? 

The ability to select only the channels you watch would give the consumers the power to band together and deactivate channels that broadcast content that they dislike.  If all of a sudden, on a near overnight basis, 8 million people discontinued Fox News, I am pretty sure they would tone down their rhetoric.  Instead, since we all have to get these channels regardless of how we feel about them, they can pretty much just keep doing whatever they want because they have the control. 

It would also severely limit the cable companies from being able to justify the hundreds of dollars they charge for cable.  If I am only getting 8 channels, then you have to stop charging me for a thousand. 

An ex-Clevelanders take on Lebron

Patience is key…

I used to live in Cleveland. I was born and raised in the area.  I love the city, the people, the attractions and pretty much everything about it.  I embrace its negative image that many people who have never been there have created for it.  If nothing else, it keeps those kinds of judgmental shitheads out of my home town.  I don’t like to see horrible things happen to my city.  I don’t think anyone does.  But, on my birthday last year, July 8^th 2010, Lebron James tore the heart out of me and a city that had previously done nothing but worshiped him for his entire life via a 1 hour special on ESPN that he personally named “The Decision”.  If I ever become an actor and have to get myself into a pissed off mood for the camera, I know that I can always think back to that evening.

Patience is key…

Over the past ten plus months, I have been forced to endure the sight of the Miami Heat run through their competition.  Competition like the Celtics and the Bulls and Magic who were previously able to hold Lebron in check.  But now, along side of Dwayne Wade and Chris Bosh, who really could stop him?  So Lebron James will get a ring.  And it is time for me and some fans to accept a few inconvenient facts….

Patience is key…

Lebron will win multiple titles with the Miami Heat:  This is a very hard pill for a Cleveland sports fan to swallow but it is going to happen.  Any team that has Lebron James, Dwayne Wade and Chris Bosh in the starting lineup will win multiple titles.  It is a simple matter of mathematics.  There is simply not enough high powered talent left in the league that could team up and deny them of their multiple titles.  In basketball, if you have three of the best 6 players on one team, they won’t be stopped.  As bad as it may be for the integrity of the NBA product to have the most hated franchise in sports win multiple titles, it is going to happen.  There isn’t an international All-Star team that could be assembled who could get in the way of the abomination that is the Miami Heat. 

Patience is key…

Lebron James is never going to stop taking shots at Cleveland:  Lebron has joined forces with two of the best players in the league.  He no longer needs to be the best player in the world in order to win night in and night out.  One of the three just has to be that guy once every three games and they will be fine.  Therefore, his stock as a great basketball player is on the downswing.  He will likely never win another MVP trophy again.  After all, how could anyone justify a single player being the most valuable player on a team where he has more help than he knows what to do with?   

Lebron also irreversibly tarnished his image on July 8^th.  Anyone who lives outside of the Haitian Slums in Miami realizes how much of a dick move “The Decision” was.  Most people can’t get themselves to understand how a human being could possibly be brain dead enough to think that that would have been a good idea for more than eight seconds.  The spectacle took a level of arrogance that has never been seen before in organized sport.  It introduced pure hatred into professional basketball.   So if you team his regression as a basketball player along with the thermo-nuclear destruction of his public persona you have a recipe for a lot of pissed off sponsors.  There are a lot of people at companies like McDonald’s and Nike and ESPN who need Lebron James to be “liked”.  They literally have invested hundreds of millions of their dollars in people liking him. 

So what do you do when you have an image problem at work?  You pass the buck.  It is the easiest way to get the heat off of you.  People have been doing it for centuries.  If Lebron James blames the Cleveland Cavaliers ownership and his former players and the city of Cleveland for not getting him enough talent, or not trying hard enough in the playoffs or being spoiled by his greatness, enough times then it will eventually stick.  Unfortunately, one complete dickhole of a move usually leads to another.   Eventually Lebron will be able to deflect the pressure on himself back onto Cleveland.   He has all of the resources of Nike and ESPN and ABC and Disney and McDonald’s to help him do so. 

Patience is key…

The Cleveland Cavaliers are not going to win an NBA title before Lebron does:  I am terribly sorry Mr. Dan Gilbert but this was one of the dumbest statements anyone has ever made outside of the nut house.   I do understand how pissed off you were at the time you made this statement and I can appreciate your team spirit.   I think the Cavs can turn it around in about three years and be back in title contention but I think the Heat are going to win the titles for at least two of those three years.  There is just nobody left who can stop those three shitheads in Miami. 

Patience is key…

Why do I keep saying that patience is key:   From a Cleveland fans perspective, the short term is going to suck…. a lot.  We are going to have to sit and watch one of the biggest pieces of shit the world has ever seen win multiple titles with two of the other biggest pieces of shit in the world along side of him.  But it is going to get progressively better as the years go by. 

First off, the new Collective Bargaining Agreement that the NBA is ready to impose is going to lower the salary cap.  It is not going to be lowered enough to prevent Miami form having all three players, but it will be low enough to make sure they can’t ever get any better than they are right now.  Basically, I really hope Miami is completely in love with Udonis Haslem and Mike Miller as role players because they are going to need them for the long haul.  I also hope those two guys never expect to get a raise because Miami has so much invested in their big three that they can’t pay them more then what they get now. 

Secondly, it is going to be harder and harder for Miami to attract decent role players.  Other then the fact that they won’t be able to pay them as much as everyone else, who wants to go play fourth fiddle next to three of the biggest prima donnas that the sporting world has ever seen?  They are going to have to go out and keep getting old men, who have given up trying to win on other teams and want to go to Miami just for the chance at a ring.  So have fun with the Zyndrunas Illgauskas’s and Mike Bibby’s of the world. 

Thirdly, the pressure on that franchise is never going to let up as long as they have all three of those players.  Not a single one of them strikes me as someone who handles pressure particularly well.  One thing my good buddy, Mr. Cavalier Austin Carr will tell you….  “Pressure always burst the pipe”.  Sometimes it takes a while but it will happen.   Lebron no longer being “the man” on a team, relentless media frenzies before and after every game, people booing them in every arena outside of Northern Cuba, people constantly asking Lebron questions like “What would this championship have meant in Cleveland?”  “Wouldn’t this have meant more if you had been able to do it yourself and in your home town?” Lebron not being able to take a piss in a Wendy’s bathroom without people hating him for it, the list goes on and on.  Eventually, this burden will weigh the team down.  Eventually someone will beat them in the playoffs and that loss, teamed with this pressure will tear a whole in that locker room.  You cannot have that many ego’s, with that much pressure, and that much riding on everything, with that much money floating around, and not win. 

Fourthly, Cleveland has Karma and history on its side.  Lebron James is going to play basketball for about another 12 years.   He is going to have some ups and downs and win several titles and make a lot of money.  But while sports history fades away into the background after time, you being a complete asshole remains front and center forever.  So Lebron will never be able to enjoy his empty titles as much as everyone else does.  He is never going to be able to go anywhere without people asking him about that decision.  Whatever he does from here on out in his basketball career will play second fiddle to the errors of his youth.  He is never going to experience what Michael Jordan did when he held the Championship Trophy after killing himself, with limited talent around him, for six years.  Any tears Lebron sheds when he wins that title will be for the camera, not because he played though walking pneumonia in the playoffs like Jordan, or with a broken hand like Kobe or played perfect fundamental basketball like Duncan.  It will be because he manufactured a championship with his friends.  It will be the most meaningless championship in the history of sports. And people will call it this.  And Lebron will hate them for it. 

Then of course we have the history factor on our side.  How well does being a complete douche bag usually work out in the long run when it comes to pop culture icons?  Britney Spears is still trying to stop eating hot dogs for breakfast lunch and dinner, Michael Jackson had to spend the last 20 years of his life being shot up with elephant tranquilizers in order to function, Lindsey Lohan is still trying to snort any powder she can find under her sink at the Betty Ford Clinic and Tiger Woods is not even a factor on the PGA tour and watched his entire family move to Sweden as a result.   So we, as Cleveland fans are going to have to learn to sacrifice short term joy for a long, entertaining, downfall of the hated one. 

So history always has the last laugh and it will with Lebron too. And part of me will be sad to see the downfall of a kid who has been called “The Chosen One” and “King James” since he was 15 years old.  Because the intelligent part of me will understand how someone like that never really had a chance to develop a normal logical brain.  I will “get” how compassion and the ability to be humble and a sense of personal responsibility could have never been harbored in the brain of a teenager who was given a Hummer on his 18^th birthday and was on the cover of Sports Illustrated before he graduated from High School. But I will still smile when it happens because I won’t care.   Because he earned every horrible thing that will ever happen to him.

Twister Anyone?

The weather has to be stopped.  Nothing else in the world manages to demonstrate to the human race just how feeble and powerless we really are.  We can invent things like IPad’s and International Space Stations, find planets rotating around distant stars, erect billion dollar structures that are visible from space but as soon as the wind kicks up or the ocean decides to create a bigger wave than normal, we all become ants on the driveway surrounded by kids with magnifying glasses.

I don’t believe that controlling the weather is impossible.  I think it would be hard.  I think we can do a lot of things to better protect ourselves in the meantime. I don’t think it would be a perfect science, but none are.  I liken the people who laugh at people who endorse weather control as morons.  Isn’t it at least worth a shot?  Or are we just supposed to sit around and watch Japan fall over into the Pacific and people in the Midwest float away in funnel clouds and people in the South have their homes flooded over and over and over again, on CNN, for the rest of our lives?   I would rather deal with something after I had exhausted every effort to eliminate it then just blindly deal with it. 

At some point we need to decide if this planet is ours or not and make some tough decisions.  Are the causes that we have our smartest people working on now really all that noble to begin with?   You can’t tell me we can’t pull a few people out of designing the next great phone or figuring out a new kind of pill that gives old dudes bigger hadrons and task them with applying their genius toward something that could save lives.  Currently we are not getting out in front of this problem; we are not doing ourselves any favors.

I also don’t want to hear a lot of noise about how car exhaust and aerosol cans of hair spray are to blame for the recent uptick in severe weather.  Whether it was a contributing factor or not is no longer the point.  The fact is, we needed all those things, we still do, they aren’t going away anytime soon, so we need to figure out how to survive on Earth with the shit we need.  We made this bed, so we minus well make it comfortable.

We already know that we can ionize clouds in order to weaken their strength.   We do it all the time with hurricanes that are scheduled to make landfall.  Why can’t we do this in the Midwest with storms that have a shot of producing tornados?   Now the meteorologists will likely say something like, they pop up too fast to possibly be able to react to them and ionize the clouds.  But this is my point exactly; let’s all just give up then and go back to designing our social networking websites until we all get sucked up into the sky. I will bet if someone offered a 1 billion dollar reward to anyone who figured out an affordable system to ionize cumulous clouds that have the potential to produce tornados in a timely manner, someone would figure it out in 10 years or less. 

This brings me to the issue of tidal waves.  There are presently over 200 laboratories around the world that do nothing all day except simulate tidal waves.  Yet whenever anyone asks them how it’s going over there, all we hear is “We still have a lot to learn about these waves”.   Well what the fuck?   How long is this going to take exactly?   Is there anything else we can do from our end?  You people have made the choice to study waves all day, every day so it’s time to figure it out. I’m no scientist but I am pretty sure a tidal wave is just the result of a metric shit ton of water all rushing ashore at the same time.  I also don’t think we will ever be able to stop the root cause (earthquakes under the sea floor), but how do we protect the coasts?  Is there anything we CAN do?  Or should we all just keep floating around in our cars, screaming for help every time one of these things blows in?  Every coastal city in the world, that has half a head full of sense, has some sort of 1920’s style break wall in place.  So they had to have had an idea back then about how to stop oceanic flooding.   Maybe we build them bigger?  Maybe we build them 20 times bigger?  Wouldn’t spending a couple billion on that pay itself off as soon as it worked once?  Or should we just keep flooding and melting down Nuclear Power Plants and causing trillions in damages for halves of entire countries? 

Hurricanes are an issue I think that we should have people working on stopping around the clock.  We generally get the same answers as we do with tidal waves; “There is still so much we don’t understand”.  Well that is just fine then, you just sit there and study then while we all drown. The damages that we endure from hurricanes could be made minimal by both of the aforementioned techniques.  First you ionize the shit out of the storms in order to weaken them; next you have your new massive break walls in place to eliminate the storm surge.  After all, the storm surge that hurricanes produce is the real killer.  That is what causes the most deaths and property damage. 

Finally, if you live somewhere that is at risk of real windy situations, such as hurricane force winds, tornadoes, down drafts, micro-bursts, dust storms etc… do yourself a favor and live in some sort of a structure that can withstand these things.  Let’s maybe stop putting trailer parks in Tornado Alley.  Let’s perhaps stop building New England style homes in New Orleans.  Let’s get something in place where the roof doesn’t rip off in winds any higher than 80 miles per hour.  Maybe put that thing on some stilts if you live in the French Quarter?

Let’s also build sections of our basements that don’t sit directly below our homes.  Just one room, built into a wall in our basement that is not directly under the house that is likely going to collapse and crush us in a tornado.  Maybe we look into mandating the same type of shatter proof glass that car windshields are made out of, for the houses that are at the highest risk of being hit by a twister? 

Then of course there is the education factor.  This is the favored approach by all sorts of people in law enforcement and meteorology.  The more people know how to react to various weather situations, the better prepared they are to react properly when they occur.  This is all well and good and I don’t want to sound like too much of a prick here but this idea puts entirely too much faith into current US population.  Can we please just face the inconvenient facts here?  Most of this country is thickly populated by a bunch of real dumb folks.  Most of these people cannot be sat down and taught things.  Even if those things could someday save their lives.  You kind of have to devise operational solutions for these sorts of people that will save their lives without them ever having to even put down their moonshine ladles or manage to get their tongues of their bus windows.  Basically you can’t expect most people to be able to do anything to help themselves.  You have to do it behind the scenes, on their behalf.  It is unfortunate, but it is what it is. 

The education approach is also quite flawed.  I remember in grade school where we had our “tornado drills” These drills consisted of all the students, walking out in the hallway and bending over with our hands on our heads.  Thank god a tornado never really happened because we would have probably been better off just trying to run away from it.  Then of course there was the ingenious nuclear bomb drill that consisted of us doing nothing but getting under our desks and closing our eyes.  Thanks teacher, I am sure this quarter inch piece of Formica above my head is all I am going to need to survive the thermo-nuclear explosion outside of the school window. 

Education is overrated. Education relies far too heavily on people ability to learn things and not having complete dipshits deciding what to teach them and how to teach it to them, too many variables.  Technology is a much cleaner solution.  We have a lot of smart people left, but they are going fast.  My suggestion would be to get them on the important jobs before it is too late for us all. 

Our National Pass Times:

We need new sports.  Our National Pass Times, over the years, have devolved into three immense disasters.  We, as fans, are the ones enabling all of this.  But I don’t think it is necessarily because we love Football or Baseball or Basketball so much that we would spend money on the sports unconditionally.  I think it is because of boredom.  I think it is because of lack of competition.  What else are you supposed to watch at 1 o’clock on Sunday afternoons between August and January? 

Why hasn’t anyone invented any real, new sports in the last 500 years?   Arena Football is not a new sport; it is just people playing football on way to small of a field, it’s horrible.  UFC has made its way onto the national stage nicely, but it is not a format you can challenge the NFL, NBA or MLB with.  I guess you can say NASCAR is right up there with the big three leagues but it really caters to a more specialized demographic.  The same thing with PGA Golf, you can’t expect a real diverse fan base there.  The Daytona 500 and the Masters will never captivate the entire nation the way the Super Bowl does every year.

So let’s take a look at the current state of our big three leagues that everyone loves so much.

The National Football League:

The idea of millionaires, fighting with billionaires over nine billion dollars is not an idea that sits well with a country still reeling from the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.  One thing that we must keep in mind is that, as usual, the richer of the two sides, the billionaire owners are the ones locking out the millionaire players, so this is much more the owners fault then the players.  

We have to look at the culture as a whole.  If the culture and personnel currently employed within the NFL ever went on to create any other sort of business, it would likely not be able to stay afloat for more than 15 minutes.  Basically you have a collection of some of the richest people in the world who have bought football teams, most of the time, not because they love football but because they want something to brag about at the Yacht Club to their friends.  These teams are looked at as an investment to the owners, not as a business.  There is a big difference. 

Then the owners bring on board a massive supporting cast of characters that actually run the day to day operations of the team.   Then the massive supporting cast is tasked with collecting, what they see as the least stupid professional football players that they possibly can.   And this is where the system breaks down, culturally.

The football players view their sport as a business because their union and agents sat them down in a chair and told them that it was a business.  Meanwhile, the owners look at the whole thing as an investment for themselves, like a 250 million dollar savings bond.   The players, who think they are business people, demand financial transparency from the owners which actually would make some sense, if the owners were business owners per se.   But the owners look at themselves as 32 guys who all happen to own football teams, not 32 business owners of football teams.  So it kind of makes sense that they feel as though they should not have to divulge their financials to a bunch of football players.   After all, if you buy a share of Google, the Google employees don’t demand to see your finances in order to determine if you are paying them enough or have purchased what they think are enough shares.  That would be ridiculous. 

Basically, this is the kind of perplexing stalemate that will always ensue when rich people start to argue about things.  It’s never about logic and reason and what is good for the end product or industry, it’s about what’s good for me right now, and how many different courts and lawyers do I have at my disposal to get it.   I expect the arguments between the players and owners to last exactly as long as it takes for this thing to really start costing them money in which case, we will have football again, maybe a shortened season, but it will happen. 

And we will watch the games and go to them and spend money at them because the majority of us are way too dumb to understand that the NFL players and owners are treating us all exactly like Pakistan treats the United States.  Just keep giving us our billions and we promise to deliver something to you someday.

The National Basketball Association:

While I will miss NFL football in the unlikely event the lockout lasts into the season, I hope the NBA just folds as a result of their impending lockout this summer.  What an absolute garbage product that league has turned into, in less than 10 years.  I hope the NBA players think they hold as much power as the NFL Players Union and demand all sorts of unreasonable crap out of the owners.  I then hope the owners fire all of the current NBA players and go get new ones if they choose to continue owning their teams.   This is one situation where I am counting on rich people to do the right thing and stick it to the players as much as they possibly can, to the fullest extent of the law.

Never in my life have I seen a sport, with the exception of modern fixed boxing, that relies so heavily on media hype, then the current NBA.  Every playoff game this year has been built up to be some sort of epic battle between two teams with such storied history that you won’t even be able to watch it without smashing your television in amazement.  Then you tune in for 5 minutes, just to find out that you are watching the Bulls play the Heat in some sort of sporting event that loosely resembles organized basketball.  Every single player is screaming at the referees every time they commit some sort of a foul, nobody has made a shot outside of three feet from the rim in like 30 years, players named Joakim Noah are yelling anti-gay slurs into the crowd, and half the players aren’t even really trying to play well for various personal and financial reasons.  The broadcast that you are watching, if you are one of the lucky people who actually get TNT, is full of wonderful, top notch human beings like Marv Albert and Charles Barkley who between the two of them have slept with ever male and female prostitute in America.

Nobody has made any sort of layup in the last 10 years without immediately screaming at the top of their lungs into the stands like the Incredible Hulk after he smashes a tank.  As though making a layup in basketball is such a difficult prospect, such a momentous achievement that we should all act like we have just conquered the Roman’s at the battle of Carthage after doing so.  Combine this shit product with the fact that only 8 different franchises have won NBA titles over the past 30 years and your sport is basically swimming through a world of crap. 

With any luck, the owners will lock out the players for so long that the majority of the league will be contracted, leaving the 6 relevant NBA teams that are left to duke it out with each other, once a month on Pay-Per-View, much like the current UFC.  I then hope the NHL takes over for the NBA in the cities where NBA teams were contracted.  At present, the NHL is a far superior and reasonable athletic product.  

Major League Baseball:

If you watch ESPN, you probably think that Major League Baseball consist of four teams, The Red Sox, Yankees, Mets and The Phillies.  The Mets, while finishing dead last in the NL East last season had more games broadcast nationally on ESPN then the Rangers and Giants combined.  For those of you who don’t follow sports, the Rangers and Giants played in the World Series last season. 

Combine this annoyance with the fact that the four aforementioned teams have been poaching all of the top rate talent in the league for the past 20 years taking full advantage of the non-existent salary cap.  

We then came to find out that every baseball player who hit a home run between 1990 and 2007 was injecting every possible kind of steroid he could get his hands on in the dugout in between at bats.  Nobody seemed to notice that Barry Bonds basically transformed from a skinny kid into a horse who could swing a baseball bat in about 9 months time.  The man’s head grew 7 inches wider in one year.  His Head!!!!   It doesn’t take a neurosurgeon to know that people don’t hit a growth spurt in their late 20’s that causes their head to grow to nearly twice its original size. 

Nobody outside of the East Coast even watches baseball anymore.  Hence you have teams like the Indians who have the best record in baseball and about 11 fans coming to watch every game.  And then yeah, that’s pretty much Major League Baseball for you.  

Baseball would be well off to just follow the NBA’s lead and contract to a point where you are left with a handful of relevant franchises that people actually care about playing one another.  Do we really need the Pirates or the Royals or the Padres of the world anymore?  Would anyone even care if they went away? 

We would also benefit from a huge decline in having to listen to baseball sportscasters incessantly shoving their idea of how baseball is some sort of a sacred spectacle that we should all stop in our tracks and worship the nostalgia and history every time some guy runs 90 feet.   Not a lot makes me more sick then listening to Joe Buck precede an everyday baseball broadcast with some sort of  historical montage, ripe with images of the sport from the 40’s and 50’s as though anyone really still gives a shit. 

It’s not that these are bad sports at their fundamental level, but the money generating machines that they have been forced to turn themselves into has made them bad, period.  As soon as you take anything that is not about money and make it completely about money it will go to hell quickly.  This culture has made Disney and ESPN and ABC and players and owners and sponsors and merchandisers Trillions over the years but are the sports any better for it?   Are the cities that harbor these teams better for it?  Are the fans that pay for the stadiums and arenas and baseball parks and team merchandise getting any sort of a return on their investments?  Or are we all just getting screwed out of the sports that we once loved while a handful of people get ridiculously rich? 

Booze II

This is a follow up to the immensely popular blog posting “booze”.  Unfortunately for myself, I do not have a shortage of such stories.  Writing these down often makes me wonder how I am alive and have never been to jail.  This is not fun for me.

I’m just going to crash at Dan’s: 

Myself and several friends partied the night away at a popular spot in Cleveland’s West Bank of the Flats which, at that time, was just a massive river-walk of bars and debauchery.  This particular bar was an 80’s themed bar and offered a drink, mostly consisting of Bacardi 151, called the Top Gun.  I had five of these drinks, over the course of about three hours.  I remember doing the shoulder dance with some forty eight year old lady for at least two of those hours.

At the time I lived in Cleveland Heights which would have been a fairly hefty cab fare, clear across pretty much the entire city.  So I got the brilliant idea to just walk to Dan’s apartment (basically across the street) and crash there. 

Unfortunately, I didn’t call Dan until I had arrived at the entrance to his building.  After about 3 harassing, one after the other, 4 AM phone calls to Dan, he finally answered his phone.  I told him that I was at his apartment and to let me in.   He then told me that he was in Canada.  He had told me that he was going to Canada, which is why he wasn’t out with us in the first place.  I don’t know why I thought he was home or how I could have forgotten which country my best friend was in. 

So I call a taxi, after all it was my only recourse.  The taxi said he would be there in ten minutes.  So I grab a seat on the sidewalk, on top of a retaining wall with a bunch of plants behind me. It was one of those huge concrete, decorative planters with a bunch of Tulips and shit in it.  At some point, I laid back into the plants and must have gotten very comfortable because I didn’t wake up until 9 AM the next day.   Now, at the time, I was working weird shifts and had weekdays off.  So I remember this was a Monday morning at 9 AM in downtown Cleveland. 

More responsible people, who were likely on their way to work were bustling by me in the streets. People were offering me change.  They thought I was a vagrant instead of some kid that got so hammered at an 80’s bar that had missed his cab and passed out drunk in a flower bed for five hours.  I took their change.  How I did not get arrested or mugged is absolutely beyond me.  My cigarettes and lighter were stolen. 

How I got rabbit punched on St. Patrick’s Day:

I am not sure which St. Patrick’s Day this was but as usual I started drinking downtown at around 8 AM With my friend Steven and some other friends.  Steven is one of these people who can drink all day long.  I on the other hand am really not.  You can find my friend Steven on any St. Patrick’s Day, still going strong late into the night, generally with lipstick all over his face, his shirt missing, his pants filthy, but still ready to party. 

I cannot do this.  Generally by 2 or 3 PM on St. Patrick’s Day, I am so shitfaced, that all I can think about is getting home and passing out.  So after a day of bar hopping, who knows how many shots, green beers, cocktails and at one point being thrown out a bar because Steven knocked over a ladder which broke a window, and calling a newscaster a shithead while he was live on the air, it was time for me to get home. 

We had taken the early bus from Steven’s house in Old Brooklyn downtown in the morning so I assumed I could just take the bus back to his place now in the late afternoon.   He told me that his door was unlocked and I was welcome to go in and pass out. 

Unfortunately, I had no idea which bus to get onto to get back to his place.  I did not pay close enough attention that morning.  Adding to my confusion was the fact that I was absolutely hammered and could not properly communicate with anyone.  So I basically just got onto the first bus I saw.  I passed out on the bus and woke up with the driver yelling at me.  I had reached the end of the bus line and I had to get off.  I needed to be in Old Brooklyn, but this bus had taken me to a town called Parma Heights.  Luckily I was able to locate where I was on a map at the bus station and found that I was less than two miles from where I should have gotten off. 

So I began to walk, in the rain from Parma Heights to Old Brooklyn.  It is now about 4 o’clock in the afternoon, I am wearing a green lay that I came to realize had colored my shirt and neck green throughout the day, and I am completely shitfaced.  

I did not piss at the bus station like I should have.   Now I am stuck in a very thickly settled, residential area with nowhere to relieve myself.  It is the middle of the afternoon, so I couldn’t really just duck behind a couple of trees like you can do at night.  Finally, I reached a boiling point, I couldn’t hold out any longer.  I did the best I could to hide myself behind a tree, on some guy’s tree-lawn in order to urinate.  I began to relieve myself on his front lawn.  I thought I had gotten away with it and was sort of laughing to myself when out of nowhere, some guy, who I assume was the home owner, ran up behind me and rabbit punched me in the back.  I learned the hard way about how painful it is to be punched in the kidneys while urinating.  It felt like a bolt of lightning had struck me in the back and exited out of my junk.

The man yelled something about calling the cops but by then I had run a good block away from him with no intentions of slowing down.  I glanced behind me and noticed that he was quite a rotund individual with no chance of chasing me down, even as drunk as I was.

After much trial and error, and having walked through a Taco Bell Drive through, I made my way back to Steven’s house to find him already there and past out.  Had I waited another 30 minutes, I could have just taken the bus with him and avoided being rabbit punched by an obese man in his front yard. 

The North American Golf Tour:

 One summer when I was 23 or 24 me and a good friend were invited to play on a local golf “tour” called the North American Gold Tour.   We accomplished this marvel, by demonstrating, to the “commissioner” that we both carried a 5 or less handicap throughout an entire calendar year.  We were able to prove this to him, by scanning and emailing copies of our own scorecards to his yahoo email account.   These scorecards were not from any sort of commissioned, supervised events, they were just me and my friends golfing and drinking as usual, doing a half assed job of keeping score and then emailing the scorecards to this guy who allowed us to join his golf tour.   So I immediately found the entire thing ridiculous and refused to in any way take it seriously. 

For the sake of this story, you also have to keep in mind that this particular tour, went by what is known as the Callaway Handicapping System.  All that you need to know about this system is that it is incredibly complex and complete bullshit.

The story starts the night before my first tournament.  My friend had a party in his yard which I attended.  I had to be at this tournament at 7 AM the next day and it was only a few miles from where the party was.  So it made sense for me to crash there and then head to the tournament the next day. 

The party got a little out of control.  Myself and my friend Matt mixed up a batch of what we called Blue Goo.  This is a plastic milk bottle, that you wash out, then fill with nearly an entire bottle of Vodka.  You then add sugar and a packet of Blue Kool-Aid.  We were a classy bunch back then. We drank the entire thing and past out around 4 in the morning. 

We woke up to my alarm two hours later and had one hour to get to this golf course and play in the first ever golf tournament of our lives.  My friend Matt has always been able to mask a hangover a lot better than I can.  When I am hung over, everyone around me knows about it. 

I arrive at the golf course and am immediately paired up with two of the biggest, straight-edge, Kaki-short wearing yuppie douche bags I have ever seen.  These men were taking this very seriously.  Meanwhile I am in jeans and am wearing a collared shirt, but only because I have to in order for the golf course to allow me to be there. 

I realize after about two shots that attempting to play golf was a huge mistake.  My sluggish pace and general disdain towards my playing partners has already worn their patience with me thin.  On top of all this, it turned out to be one of the hottest days of that summer and I could not have possibly been more hung over.  After I tee-off on the fifth hole, I told my playing partners that I had to go piss in the woods.  But I could not make it to the trees before vomiting in front of them right there on the tee-box. 

My playing partners walked off sighting the tournament rule that if someone in your group is slowing you down, you do not have to wait for them. 

I lumbered on alone, after about 12 holes; I was so hot that I took my shirt off.   My shirt smelled like Vodka and my jeans were absolutely soaked with perspiration.  This was one of the longest days of my life.  After all of this, I was really not golfing all that badly.  I was basically playing scratch golf. 

Little did I know that I was in the third to last group.  And it was customary for all of the groups who finished before mine to wait around the 18^th green and watch all of the other groups finish.  I hit a terrible approach shot about 25 yards over the 18^th green into all of these spectators.  They then stood in amazement as I come into view as a person with no shirt on, visibly hung over, sun burnt, tired, and sweaty, and dirty man.  At this point I was just dragging my golf bag behind me, not even able to lift it off the ground. My lips were a bluish, whitish, dehydrated hue and I couldn’t breathe without wheezing.  Several people went as far as to ask me if I was okay and if I could continue.  I was forced to play my chip surrounded by this mass of men who are all wearing their top of the line golf polo shirts and khaki pants, looking at me like I am some sort of criminal.

I managed a great up and down and ended up paring the hole.  A member of my group begrudgingly signed my scorecard vouching for its accuracy.  After all, it was accurate.  I ended up 13 over par for the day, not exactly a great round. I quickly got myself into the club-house to find my friend Matt in similar shape, drinking about a gallon of Iced Tea.  Before I could sit down, the Tour “Commissioner” asked the two of us to follow him into a ball room that was part of the club house.  We handed him our scorecards, and he yelled at us, mostly me, for a good five minutes about how he expected better conduct out of us.  I didn’t understand this.  How can you expect anything out of someone you had just met, for a period of five minutes, 6 hours earlier? 

In a stunning turn of events, my 12 over par, combined with the complete horseshit of the Callaway Handicapping System won the tournament.  I had the eighth worst score of the day, but thanks to their ridiculous handicapping system I walked out of there a winner. 

The look on those yuppies faces as I walked out of that club house, with three hundred of their dollars, fighting a horrendous handover, smelling like a bottle of vodka, with no shirt on, is one of the most beautiful sights I have ever seen.  I dry heaved in the parking lot a couple more times, tossed my clubs in the back of my truck and went home.  I never played on the North American Golf Tour again.