The Barrister


There's a certain hesitancy necessary in a moment like this. It's beyond pessimism or skepticism, softer than those two states of mind; it indicates a readiness to dive in head-first, yet with a deliberate recognition that this is how people get hurt. 

You've seen this movie before.

To be a fan of a team so thoroughly steeped in historical disappointment is a tricky proposition, requiring a steady hand and guarded heart. To be a fan of a team of a team like that while accessing joy and hope and excitement - those things we generally seek when we choose to be a fan of anything - is difficult. You have to know when to give a shit, flipping that switch from "this team makes me drink, whatthefuckever" to "omg I love u so much."  Choosing that moment has massive implications for your blood pressure, social life, bar tab and the respectability of your #hot #internet #takes, so you don't want to fuck it up even though you totally will.

When it happens, you aren't even really making a choice, you're just conceding defeat; conceding that the team we love, despite being a regular ball of douche with regularity, maintains the ability to dominate your consciousness so fucking completely. 

I've long known that the reason I adore the Mets so stupidly - the Mets, a team that I chose and continue to choose despite the long list of reasons not to - is that it's a team that feels like home. 

Without a doubt, loving a squad like the Mets is so fucking Buffalo.

And now, just when the Sabres and Bills seem to be turning respective corners (albeit on different timelines), the Mets have astonishingly found themselves in a position where the future holds undeniable promise. Like the Sabres and Bills, the improvement playing out before my eyes seems precarious, yet assured; too good to be true, yet affirmed by clear, objectively positive signs of progress.

So, then, the choice remains to be made, and it's a question of how we respond to the varied competing narratives, both personal and communal. 

The Mets are the best team in baseball. But it's only April. They have the best player in New York City and what may be the best starting rotation in the majors. But. They're. The. Mets. And, fuck you, it's April. They've made me as happy this month as any Mets team has since 2006, but to what end? What does choosing hope get me, if not just the near certainty that disappointment is around the corner?

It gets me this. 

An April to remember. An April that creepily resembles the April that year the Bad Guys Won. An April to wonder whether the franchise can grasp success again and this time not so quickly permit it to vanish. 

Sure, the "it's way too early, they don't give out trophies for April" crowd is ABSOLUTELY right, but only if you're talking about whether it's time to start hoping for pennants and rings and even playoffs. But that's not all there is; especially not for a season as interminable as that of Major League Baseball. It's not too early to enjoy the goddamned delightful spectacle that has been the April 2015 New York Metropolitans. They are a presumptive contender, a surprising story of the first month of the season and a squad with a depth of talent that should cause baseball's top teams considerable difficulties series-to-series. 

It's not breathless optimism. It's deliberately choosing to revel in the unmistakable joy this team is giving, right now. 

Without a doubt, the Mets could lose the magic that they have found at any moment, but fuck if I'm going to let the inevitable sorrow of sports ruin the improbable greatness they can bring. 

Let's Go Mets. 

The Barrister

Sometimes, most times, nearly all times ... I take things way too fucking seriously. I am emotive and hyperbolic and a ball of rage waiting for any excuse to unload. I am the fat kid who only briefly ever got close to thin; who saw it in my friends' eyes when I started putting the weight back on last year after going on thyroid meds that were totally meant to make sure I didn't have a heart attack and also ensure that the 100 pounds I lost wasn't going to be sustainable. I'm the guy who has been married, for all intents and purposes, for most of his adult life, who has always felt some pang of regret at the obligations that accompany getting the woman of my dreams to fall in love with me at 19 years old (a woman who, shockingly, flips that story and points out that I was the man of hers). I have a job, blessedly, that keeps me horrendously busy in a profession of horrendous hours and deteriorating mental and physical health. I bought a house I love in the suburbs, but it's falling apart and I can't afford to put much more into it, and the decision to move 20 miles west of Manhattan created a distance from friends that I suspect will never be mended. My heart beats and breaks too fast, my mind races too often, I feel things to a fault, and my tendency to be self-critical manifests itself in a shocking string of defensiveness whenever I feel my worth is under attack.

Knowing all this and getting a handle on it are two separate animals. I am routinely the hottest of hot fucking messes. My ability to pretend otherwise is a mixed bag.

Sports were always supposed to be fun. Writing here was always supposed to be fun. When I wrote my first piece here four years ago tomorrow, I unloaded a lot of feelings and history because I figured it would be cathartic and would allow me to laugh about all the ways that sports are amazing and awful and everything in between.  It was, for a time. It is is much less so now. 

Maybe it all was an illusion, or illusory for me at least. Maybe someone carrying such admittedly weighty yet enormously pathetic baggage (my problems being, of course, shockingly small, c'mon Dubs, think of the starving children every-fucking-where) - someone altogether ill-equipped to adequately compartmentalize the various parts of his life - was never meant to enjoy something as layered with internal conflict as professional sports. Maybe it was always impossible for a borderline socialist attorney bag of feelings to watch sports and not just rage. Rage about the economics and the health consequences and the logical inconsistencies of, say, hockey games decided in regulation being worth two points while games decided in OT or shootouts are worth three. Rage about the Bills Mafia and billionaire owners and shitheads in Rangers jerseys and OJ on the Wall and Matt Stewart and anti-tankers and Tim Graham and Mike Harrington and anyone else I could get in my crosshairs and pummel with the help of a vocabulary full of synonyms for assbag. 

Rage so hard that the line between fun and anger became inevitably blurred and the whole purpose of what I was trying to do here irrevocably muddied. 

Maybe it was always likely that the people who so graciously permitted my presence on this blog would grow distant from the site I now, last man standing, poorly manage; both because their lives became busier, like mine, and they had the good sense to prioritize their time and energy in ways I did not, but also because, I imagine, they looked at the overpowering onslaught of ugly rage and overwrought analysis of shit as inconsequential as sports and they wondered when it stopped being fun.  When it stops being fun, there stops being a reason to show up. No wonder, then, that posts have become a once every few months affair, a matter of obligation (at least for me) borne out of the fact that weebly still takes our money from time to time. 

Scizz and I started a podcast that we've half-abandoned already. We called it Happy Endings because HJs, obviously, but because it spoke to an optimism that we both had, I think, with respect to what it is DGWU Sports has always tried to achieve. That optimism is something I've been coming to more and more since that first Happy Endings recording and since I chose a song about wanting to get better for the theme. 

As conscious as I am that these paragraphs are very possibly another example of my feelings getting the better of whatever good sense I have left, some things needed to be said. Publicly. I want this to be fun again. I want sports to be something that I've somehow permitted them to not be. I want to laugh and cheer and be a big dumb asshole for my squads both here and everywhere, and I want this space to be a place where those friends of mine that founded this godforsaken institution can come back to and not wonder, as one did recently, how it became a human rights blog with #sports #takes #sometimes. Because that was my fault, obviously, and even if I disagree with Yachtsman's potshot to some extent, he's not completely wrong, and allowing that kind of criticism in the door was never something I wanted for a url that made me pee my pants laughing so often for the past four years. Taking things so seriously, shoehorning ethical and moral dilemmas into sports discussions (as I criticized Tim Graham for doing recently), creating content on the internet fueled almost exclusively by my eagerness to rage and win whatever stupid fucking argument I've found my way into ... the shit is not fun. Well, sometimes it can be, sure, but it sure as fuck has not been of late. 

So, fuck it, let's have some fun here again. The Bills just may be a viable, competitive team again and have a coach who was completely bought into the franchise, the Yanks pulled a #dosacero last night, the Mets are 6-3 after sweeping the Phillies(!!), the Sabres are on the verge of getting a generational talent and a coach not named Ted Nolan, there's a Gold Cup and the Women's World Cup this summer and the U.S. could win both, the Red Bulls inexplicably fired their most successful coach ever and look to have actually upgraded at that position while no one was looking, Liverpool is suddenly fighting for the Top 4 again, has an FA Cup semifinal this weekend and has a goalkeeper on the brink of the Golden Glove, and Spring has come to New York City. 

Might as well use it all as an excuse to say something here about how much of a wretched asshole I've allowed myself to become, and leave something up for future reference to hold me accountable to that.