The Barrister

Back when we wrote a bunch, we had a habit of doing weekly Bills previews and recaps using bits of pop culture as thematic fulcrums. Mostly out of laziness. Also because it allowed us to crib Drew Magary without directly cribbing Drew Magary. 

With six weeks of football left (barring COVID-related season-stoppage, which is not outside the realm of likely outcomes) and the Bills sitting pretty atop the AFC East at 8-3, it seemed time to slip back into old routines in the hopes of sharing a laugh or two. And with American culture awash in very real and very absurd outgrowths of ignorant bigotry and violence, with a side of pathetic, zealous buffoonery, there's no better piece of pop culture to use as my fulcrum than HBO's Watchmen. HOLY SHIT what incredible television. Bonus points for teaching a generation of Americans about the Black Wall Street Massacre because I know for fucking SURE that they aren't teaching that shit in most high schools. If you haven't watched it yet, let me know and I'll slip you my buddy's HBO Max login just kidding Joseph I would never. 

As for the football, well, the Bills are a good football team! A friend of mine who also writes for this site and has a worse habit of pissing people off than I do insists that this is a mediocre football team but I disagree. I am happily eating crow this year as Joshua Withrop Allen and Sean Reginald McDermott remind us that nobody is perfect, especially not football fans. 

More on that below, as well as Power Ranking Trump's election lawyers, cannabis reviews from the Bay State, and some other stuff, too, probably!

THREE REASONS THE BILLS WILL SMASH TONIGHT:

1. The aforementioned Joshua. 

I don't know that I've truly expressed the mea culpa that I feel is due from my corner of the internet, what with me being so very wrong about Josh Allen. The Bills are 8-3, Allen is playing not-quite-mistake-free-ball-but-honestly-pretty-close, and more than anything - a point that can't be overstated, truly - the Bills are uproariously fun under the leadership of this big goofy kid with a rocket arm. When the Allen stans started demanding apologies from those who dared question Josh's greatness in years past, it was obviously ripe for me to start shitposting because that kind of discourse is juvenile nonsense, but honestly that kind of black-and-white approach to what we're seeing from Allen sells him short. When I watched #17 play over the course of his first two seasons, it was impossible to see a reliably likely path from his abilities under center to anything approaching success.  

Seeing Allen find that path despite how improbable it seemed in those first 20 or so starts of his career, and seeing now not just a winning football team but one that pulls hilarious, creative and - crucially - productive offensive production out of his reckless cannon of an arm is art. 

The job that Allen and the coaching staff have done to refine his accuracy is nothing short of unbelievable, and I could not be happier to have been wrong about this one. Does he have super annoying tendencies that may be his undoing in the playoffs like some sort of hubris-ridden Greek drama? Maybe! And that's the fun of it because we get to find out while he's running an amazing version of the option and lateraling to receivers who are dropping dimes for six. 

2. The coaching?

Another mea culpa coming, though it's slightly more muted. 

I like Sean McDermott as a football coach. I also think football coaches are patently ridiculous people. 

It's a profession steeped in cliché and that makes it an easy mark for criticism on the internet, and as this season plays out with Allen's numbers and the defense re-finding itself just in time for a playoff push, and the club playing truly enjoyable football under truly shit circumstances, the strength of McDermott's leadership is self-evident. He's a walking cliché and thus the easiest mark of them all, but he's also a master of those stereotypical coach tendencies. The end result is a group of football players who, by all accounts and the evidence on the field, are thriving during this pandemic season. 

The thing about clichés is that they exist for a reason and sometimes - not all the time, dear god no - but sometimes they're spot on, and in a season with few or no butts in seats, all things being equal, a team that is having a fun ass time playing together has a competitive advantage. 

Clap it up. 

3. The early-season chumps figuring it out. 

Two chumps in particular - AJ Klein and Tyler Bass - have been on my mind a lot in recent games as a couple key guys whose play has improved pretty dramatically and have produced some big moments in those wins. I won't get too deep in the weeds on either of these guys, but their play in recent weeks has been a boon to their respective units on the field. I don't read enough Bills news to really have a sense of what was wrong with Klein in his first 8 games of the season, but his numbers the last two games have been ridiculous. That kind of productivity down the stretch will be massive - especially the tackle numbers - as teams try to run on us in December weather. 

As for Bass, he's a rookie so calling him a chump is unkind but the dude was trash on the only metric that matters for a PK in the NFL: getting it through those big yellow things. That he has settled into a solidly reliable option for McDermott is a relief, if an expected one. He was never going to remain as bad as he was the first few weeks of his rookie season; whether he's good remains to be seen. But holy shit does he have a vicious right foot. 


THREE REASONS THE BILLS WILL LOSE:

1. I'm having a few friends over to watch on a projector around a firepit and it'll require no small amount of effort that is only really justified by a Bills win and the last time I did it was for the Chiefs loss and also the universe hates me. 

After that heading, well, this is pretty self-explanatory, I should think.

2. Bad Josh Allen

For a third year starter of any pedigree, while the dumb mistakes of your early career may rear their ugly head more infrequently, they haven't been put to bed altogether. One of the things I love about Allen is how his mistakes are simply something to overcome, and a challenge he's seemed to accept as part of the job description. His bounce back is very real after mistakes, but all the same some of the bizarre decisions he makes have the very real opportunity to cost us games.

3. San Francisco's Defense

I watch very little football that isn't the Bills, but the internet tells me that the 49ers are recently healthy at important spots on the defensive side of the ball - Richard Sherman, primarily - and that they're a solid unit against both the run and pass. SF is very much in the hunt in the NFC West, and they have the experience of having to relocate home games to Arizona to either bond the squad together or split it at the seams. If they can consistently jam up the Bills' plans on offense, it could be a tough and ugly game. 


Shifting gears....

This next feature has been ruminating for a couple weeks now, both in my brain and in reality. The kind of truly hilarious set of American circumstances that insists on one-upping itself on a near-daily basis. 

I write, of course, of the slow burn coup d'état that the Trump White House/Campaign/Organization is attempting, and I use each of those terms generously. To suggest that they're going through the motions of their various legal challenges would, again, credit the Trump team with knowing what motions are appropriate for this chosen strategy. They do not. For over a month, it's been clear that our Big Boy President got beat by Joe Biden and the only reason anyone pretends otherwise is because there's a sociopathic narcissist who still has the nuclear codes and he never learned how to admit failure despite a career absolutely steeped in it. Last I checked, and I stopped checking a while ago, Biden beat that ass to the tune of 6 million votes and something like 6000 electoral votes (don't look it up), and the death rattle of this administration has long-since transitioned to pathetic, frivolous litigant mode.

​Reverting to the mean, in other words. 

One of the themes that I have taken to heart the most over the tenure of Trump's Presidency is how unremarkable it is to see a deeply stupid fascist at work. The most prevalent lie we're told about successful fash dictators is that they're all geniuses. It's the kind of lie that excuses the rest of us for our inaction, since the destructive force of an evil genius madman requires equally genius, strong forces to stop it. So instead of asking questions about the passive ambivalence of well-intentioned Europeans - and Americans - in responding to Hitler's actions despite the fact that he was clearly a vicious idiot, we unconditionally praise the forces that eventually brought the great and powerful Hitler to heel.

The Trump Operation, from top to bottom, both the private and public sectors of the enterprise, is one most-prevalently marked by operational failures. It's only gotten worse as the administration's lifecycle has marched towards its inevitable conclusion, with any and all staffers holding a modicum of competence have been pushed out by a President who not only demands fealty to himself, but also to his various flawed beliefs about the world. Stating aloud plain-as-day facts about the world is the type of thing that can bring you in the crosshairs of this baby-brained fucking loser, which is why White House staffers who are looking for work are being fired for daring to suggest that Trump won't be sworn in as President in January, why Chris Krebs was surreptitiously fired for not publicly denouncing voting security lapses that didn't​ occur, and why John Bolton is suddenly the stupidest person Trump has ever worked with as soon as he suggests Trump lost an election in which he was dragged and whipped in a burlap sack by a guy who just six months ago was barely able to form complete sentences in public. 

Surprised, I am not, therefore, that the parting legacy of the Trump administration is this post-election loss insistence on digging deeper into a field of Ls and ensuring that our lasting memory of this humongous shithead is going to be how funny it was to watch him and his ragtag legal team go into court after court and get absolutely worked. And because I've had the idea to apply some longstanding Fire Joe Morgan principles to the various legal updates that have come into the news since election day, I wanted to take some time to riff. For you. Out of love. 

Today will be the first installment, so if you have suggestions for further rankings and/or have tidbits you want to share about Trump's hilarious legal fuckbois, @ me on Parler.

Caveat: this list isn't exhaustive and I can't really claim any sort of accuracy in what may seem like reporting here. This is me cobbling together tweet drafts and my basic knowledge of the last two weeks of legal news with some google searching and, as needed, blatant fabrication for the sake of jokes. 

I feel like the picture is all I need to put here, but also that's superficial and prejudice to simply assume that my perspective on Marc here is justified by his punchable face and the look in his eyes that screams "YES, I KNOW, I AM FIRING MY HAIR STYLIST AS SOON AS WE'RE DONE HERE." 

Marc Scaringi was just added to Trump's legal team in PA this week, having replaced Linda Kerns, a Philly lawyer who revised Trump's federal lawsuit in PA to remove the request that 682k ballots be thrown out because they were processed without campaign monitors present because that request was entirely based on a lie. Kerns and others have moved to withdraw as counsel due to the apparent conflict. Can't have that! So, Scaringi was pulled into the fray and the early reports were that he would be adding that claim back to the lawsuit, because, sure it's unethical to plead claims that are entirely unsupported by the factual record as it exists in the actual world, but it's also unethical to do so as part of a large scale political grift aimed at extracting the most value out of MAGA donations as possible. With Marc Scaringi, you get what you pay for. 

Marc's first big moment on Team Trump's Litigious Fuck Squad was a five hour oral argument on the PA case yesterday, and let me tell you, he thinks it went GREAT and he thinks Rudy Giuliani is an amazing litigator. He licked Giuliani's boots hard and he licked them good after Rudy did what Rudy does best and made the President's legal position more precarious. Marc is fitting in just fine.

Did I mention Marc Scaringi is a conservative talk radio guy in Harrisburg, ran for Senate in 2012, was a staffer for Santorum? I feel like that's relevant here. 

Anyway, unlike the lawyers he is replacing on the Trump legal team, Mr. Scaringi runs an election law practice that makes him well-suited for the task of representing Trump's interests in these election challenges, and certainly makes him a great judge of whether Giuliani nailed it during Tuesday's hearing. What's that? [mumbles into earpiece] Sorry, strike that and reverse it. Scaringi doesn't know shit about election law and runs a two person firm with his wife, specializing in commercial law, and the lawyers pushed out of the PA team were actual election lawyers. Read: Scaringi has no fucking idea what's going on here. You can add "practicing in an area of law in which he has absolutely no experience" to the list of ethical breaches. 

Maybe he should just start a band and call it "Mark" and avoid the judicial oversight.

Then again, if he did that, we wouldn't get this kind of compare and contrast AP English problem.

HYPE TRAIN SOUNDTRACK

I don't have to justify this. Ever.

DROPPIN Rs AND SMOKKIN Ls

With more states legalizing the good shit lollipop, our matron saint Mary Jane, and with my current residence in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts about three years into its post-prohibition journey to the land of milk and honey, let's talk buds. I'm not sure what this space is going to be used for beyond just telling funny stories or dropping recs for strains or delivery mechanisms, but I guess that's enough? 

Anyway, one of the strains I've been gravitating back to - both in flower and vape forms - is my now-beloved Alaskan Thunder Fuck, aka ATF. Leafly's write-up, which tracks strongly with my experience, describes ATF as "usually present[ing] large, beautifully frosted buds with incredibly strong odors of pine, lemon, menthol, and skunk. Known for possessing a relaxing yet intensely euphoric high, it is also described as having a “creeper” effect as well as pronounced appetite enhancement." Also, it's a fucking GREAT name. 

Sativas are where I spend most of my time under the influence (distinct from the 1:1 medicated edibles that I take for anxiety management) and ATF is one of the best I have ever had. (I also dig that the vape oil manufacturer I have been finding for sale at my local shop makes oil that is very true to the flower's flavor palette, which is a testament to it not being fucking wretched black market knockoff garbage that was literally killing people last year.) If you like your high to be one that gets you energized and creative (if a little unfocused), rather than sinking into your couch like a useless slob, sativas are always going to be the go-to. Not that there's not a place for indicas and also being a useless slob every now and again, especially when dealing with chronic pain, insomnia or loss of appetite, but it's more of a special occasion kind of thing for me these days.

FINAL SCORE PREDICTION:

Bills 34, SF 17. 

I don't see the Niners scoring a lot tonight, and honestly you are out of your goddamned mind if you thought I was going to come back for a game preview for Monday Night Fucking Football and not pick our Bills to run roughshod over just about anyone in the league. LETSFUCKINGGOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
​

The Barrister 

As it happens, I’ve been writing a lot lately.
 
We’ve been in the new house since April and with the head start we got on unpacking over the course of a Lenten season spent getting the new space settled while prolonging our stay with my in-laws a few weeks longer, things that had been packed up for well over 16 months were suddenly thrust back into my life. Things that I’d forgotten we owned, some things that have been discarded since, and some things I’m surprised I’d lived without.
 
When I came upon the journal I’d been keeping on and off since 2001, about a third of it as-of-yet unfilled, it immediately occurred to me how much it constituted the latter, the kind of thing that is good to have around for those moments of existential crisis that require a well-rolled joint and a trip down memory lane. A marker of the kind of habit I always promise myself I’ll form but only succeed in doing briefly, in spurts.
 
It being a pandemic and the late 30s version of myself being an aspiring adult human with adult coping mechanisms, finding a leather-bound journal with pages to fill was too tempting to pass up. Even for someone as notoriously lazy and scatter-brained as me.
 
So, I’ve been writing. Usually a couple times a week. Sometimes briefly, sometimes at length. I’ve been reading things I wrote years ago, too. Things I wrote stoned on my friend’s couch in Riverside while procrastinating on law school applications. Things I wrote after passing the Bar exam, after getting married, after finding out I was going to be a father. Shitty things and embarrassing things and things I barely remember feeling and things I remember like they’re still happening right now. And the additions I’ve been making, the rambling mess of apprehension and fear and hope and desperate longing for something to break through this flimsy sheen of contempt I feel towards [gestures wildly] everything.
 
I’ve been playing with ideas for a story I’m developing. A story about the son of Clarence, the angel from It’s a Wonderful Life, a half-angel, half-human staffer at a private agency that has been hired to handle outsourced miracles and other moments of heavenly grace following God’s decision to retire. It’s a stupid idea that makes me laugh and I love spending time on it.
 
I’ve been writing about what it’s like waking up every day in the midst of global and national disaster knowing that the government is riddled with not just incompetency, but the kind of rank commitment to debased human indecency that we used to only read about in history books. I've been writing about the ever-present malaise of hopelessness that has settled in among people I love and admire and how desperately unfair this whole fucking country insists on being. 

And, as it’s been since I graduated law school – and, in a way, for a while before that, too - writing remains my craft, the way I help pay the bills and make myself indispensable as an attorney. 
 
All of this is a roundabout way of noting, yes, I know it’s been a while. It’s not that I haven’t had anything to express, it’s just that I haven’t cared much to share it. Well, not here at least. 
 
Truthfully, the idea of operating a sports website during a global pandemic while America cries out for justice has seemed trite, at best. And truthfully, it’s been on that track for a while, so I can’t make any promises about words I write finding their way to this corner of the internet with anything approaching frequency. When Deadspin crumbled and then was rebooted as a shitty Disney Z-O-M-B-I-E-S version of itself, it was hard not to take it as a sign that maybe that era of the internet is over. The era where longform writing could be the thing that saves us from the heavy burden of mediocrity that has invaded legacy media; where we find online friends who bond with us over our love of obscure prose covering topics trivial and enormous and everywhere in between. I had at least two early drafts of pieces saved, mid-thought, from the Bills run last season but finishing them seemed pointless after my hangover the next day. 
 
And that's not even counting the various, pressing life events that have found their way into my chronology, making the practical question of how to find time to write here all the more complicated. Two hospitalizations, almost dying three times in 12 months, a move from New Jersey to Massachusetts, with new jobs to boot. Yet operating this site, even its skeleton crew version, remains a thing I insist on doing much to the annoyance of my wife who rightly questions the random hosting fees and domain registration fees since, well, “I thought you guys had quit that nonsense already.” Babe, you see what had happened is, we haven't? 

It’s hard not to be nostalgic for a thing, even if it’s mostly nostalgia for the idea of what it could have been.
 
So why now? Who knows. Surely part of me sees this 5-2 Bills team and wonders whether I shouldn’t start scratching that itch since it could be fun to get frisky with some wordplay over the course of a wild Josh Allen playoff run. Surely part of me also sees Liverpool, playing twice a week in front of stadiums empty of fans, defending Champions of England, and wonders whether I wouldn’t get some cathartic release out of running on sentences about how the pandemic has forced us to confront just how crucial sports and the celebration thereof can be as one of the last places where community bonds can breathe and thrive.
 
Surely part of me sees how isolating life can be from our little corners of this world in crisis, and wonders whether giving the words I write a little sunlight might be part of how I get through these next few months.

Surely all of the above. For the time being, maybe it's just that one of those blog hosting fees just auto-renewed and it felt a little bit like finding that journal except I’m not sure whether it’ll be the death rattle before we fold this thing and pack it away forever, or the moment I relearn what it was about writing in this space that made it the thing I chose to do with so many of my free hours during one of the more fun times of my life.  The moment I take note of my surprise at how I lived without.
 
I suppose we shall see.

The Barrister

In some ways, this blog and others like it are as simple as a negative proof of the product we've all set out to digest on a daily weekly annual basis. Where the Bills sell hope and change like they're running for something other than Regional Fuckboi, this space sells despair. There's a surplus and we'd like to unload it off our books, I figure, and it's a goddamn bargain for those interested in investing in distressed emotional debt.

I suppose this is as good a time as any to mention, while we're still processing my brutal metaphors, that my mission here is to write about our Bills in spite of myself and in spite of our Bills, that my brain is mush and can't possibly be asked to form coherent takes, and that here, by the grace of God go I, is where I am basically because Apologist said "hey write that recap" while we parted at a lonely midtown street corner some time ago.

Fuck the Bills and Love the Bills, alas and so on and so forth.

If time is a flat circle, as some claim it is, we're blessed to experience this kind of Bills team only once but also infinity times, so it's an open question whether that 3 point loss in Miami should be eminently shrug-off-able as 'just a thing that happened' or emotionally paralyzing as 'the thing that just happens every fuck-all time.' We're somewhere in the middle, most of us, and it's frankly just as dark a corner of cerebral sub-consciousness as sports can get. The cruelty of belief is that it's is a massively marketable phenomenon to attach to any given team, and many of us have been all-too-willing to hitch ourselves to the hope cultivated and farmed for the benefit of our preferred clubs, irrationality be fucked.

The cruelty of belief is that it is equal parts goodness and elusiveness, the treasure at the end of the rainbow, sight unseen.

Depending on where you fall on the spectrum of Billschausen syndrome, you either got all in with this team recently (Hi!) or were on the precipice (or you billieve unconditionally, in which case why are you here?), and depending on where you fall, you're either out now, huffing and puffing about the uselessness of it all, or at the very least have a foot in the door open while you consider things like whether you left the oven on and, if so, whether it might be more useful to stick your head right up in it on Sundays because why let this team suck the life out of you when you're fully capable of killing yourself all on your own.

In the same way that people are drawn to comments sections and cable news out of morbid curiosity at the train wreck humans involved, being a fan of this team is very much about the allure of something so earth-shatteringly shitty that you sort of need to crane your head to look. Besides, there's virtue in learning to repackage the experience of watching a terrible football team into a fun exercise in schadenfreude and moral superiority. So long as the team is going to trip over its own putrid tendencies towards failure, we may as well alight our hearts with ideas that we deserve better and that we have answers that would fix what ails our Bills, if only if only if only. So long as this team is going to struggle through another fall as if it's the harvest and they're farming melancholy, we may as well pull out a dictaphone and assemble a cacophony of sarcasm and derision as tribute to the Wagon-Circling Buffalo Bills, the only team that would consider it a badge of pride that they left home without a map, keep taking the wrong trail and have yet again stumbled upon some band of horsemen or patriots or birds or marine mammals or whatnot, thereby necessitating wagon circling from the get.

tl;dr: When you live in Chump City, it's no consolation that you've been elected mayor.

Don't get me wrong: I'm *still* hopeful, and therein lies the annoying and inestimable rub. All they gotta do is win this weekend and they'll show us they really are the team we hope them hahahahahahahahaha hahahaha.

Fuck it. Let's do the damn thing, I guess.

The Barrister

I'm finally flying back home from Buffalo (EDIT: this was yesterday; I had to work and nap after getting back to New Jersey) and, like every trip to the Mother Ship of My Aching Heart, the weekend afforded little in the way of time for introspection after - without any real competition - the most interesting day of Bills football I've experienced in my 25 or so years as a fan. The unbridled hype of last year's opener (my last trip to Orchard Park) was replaced with a patient optimism about this godforsaken team and a lingering, uncomfortable buzz surrounding something completely unrelated to football. A day that gave all fans something to smile about, from ear to fucking ear, gave many of us in attendance an unshakable disgust with the parade of horrors on display. Death threats emblazoned on t-shirts. Tackling dummies playing the part of vague Muslim effigies. Fathers and sons screaming at an American citizen to stand when he prefers to kneel; screaming at an American citizen while the first verse of our National Anthem rang out. Chants of USA! raining down upon an American citizen and those who support him. Chants of USA! covering all manner of uniquely American sins.

I'm a bleeding heart. I'm an aspiring pragmatist above all else. I'm a venomous blogger who has been told not to use this space for this kind of commentary. I'm a Bills fan who left New Era Field feeling very apart from this new era of Buffalo Bills football. Sunday made it abundantly clear that I hold a minority opinion dwarfed by the rage of those who believe patriotism is a concept over which monopoly control may be exercised, who believe "American" is a one-size-fits-all panacea, and who believe dissent entitles you to nothing more than a one-way ticket back *there* (wherever that is) on the horse you rode in on.

All the same, I left New Era Field and its tailgate wasteland environs knowing that I'm not alone and proud of the pockets of dissent that sprang forth regardless of the un-American brand that would be seared onto their efforts by those who would sooner silence disagreement than attempt to understand it. They were outmanned and outflanked by those who opt to speak against black lives and against advocacy civil liberties; who opt to speak in support of unquestioning devotion to uniforms and badges and authority under the heel of a boot. But they were present all the same, and the peaceful, non-violent advocacy from people of color and white allies alike was something to celebrate. It was the best of Buffalo on display, and more than many other cities would show in similar circumstances.

Also the Star Spangled Banner sucks, Francis Scott Key was a questionable human, and America the Beautiful is the absolute jam.

​And then there was the game, and like I said, it's shitty that I'm left feeling like I gotta speak out about a player doing something as harmless as kneeling - the ultimate sign of respect and fealty - during the NFL's ongoing commercial use of America's anthem, but it's monumentally more shitty that police wearing the badge of the State, cloaked in the authority of our collective promise to each other and ourselves through adherence to our nations' laws, are killing Americans with the kind of arbitrariness and lack of oversight endemic of the Empire from which we declared independence in 1776. So I guess I'll deal. As will you.

The game, though? Apart from the heat that Kaep continually got for daring to be a black man with an opinion? It was dope as hell. The best game I've ever seen live, and that's saying something because I went to the Bills' last two games in New Jersey against the Jets (combined score 65-40), and the opener last year. When the Bills beat Arizona four weeks ago and it looked like there was a chance there'd be something to cheer for when I headed up to WNY for Week 6, I knew that the game was going to be the one that sealed my Sundays for the foreseeable future. A loss and the start of hockey season would have seemed a blessèd relief. A win, and I knew I'd be be left buzzing about what's still to come.

And here we are. 

The game was hilarious in its arc - from a close nail-biter to a thorough walloping in the matter of just a few series. When the floodgates opened in the third quarter, it suddenly became a party. The edge of fans' anger at Kaepernick (or each other) was dulled in the face of such impeccable play from our Bills. What a weird sentence to write. It was the kind of win that binds us all together for our love of this stupid team, suggests we may have more that keeps us coming together than that forces us apart, and gives us some small hope for coming together and making the most of this shared world of ours, even if it seems impossible at present.

Sports, man. Maybe.

The Barrister

If you'd given me the option to take 2-2 before the season started, I probably would have taken 2-2 before the season started - putting aside my not insignificant pipe dream of a world ablaze with a nice 1-9 run, of course. I would not have been able to predict the breakdown of wins and losses that have come with the 2-2 start, though; such is the nature of this particular football club at this particular sixteen-year-long-moment in human history. 

The rad thing about this Sunday evening reality is that no matter if you are buying in on the possibility that these two improbable wins are the start of some great run (I have not bought in, and am a ways off yet, my hyperbole herein notwithstanding), these two improbable wins are nevertheless really fucking improbable. This Bills team was left for dead by this fan base, and quite fucking right that they were. Dreadful is not a strong enough word for it when it was a thing we've seen enough before; enough big talk during off-season PR pushes and enough capable rhetoric paired with highly suspect play. The Bills team we saw through Weeks 1 and 2 were fucking bad and deserved all the scorn they got and more.

And now they're, well, not bad at all. At least not now, not yet, not still. They were so bad and then with a token firing and a drastically scaled down offense relying on proficient execution of straightforward concepts, they've moved the pendulum far enough the other way to make even the most jaded fan (read: all of us) give a polite golf clap and tip of the cap.

As with everything, as for always, the salient question is "how long can this possibly last?," and the joyous answer is "we can't tell, but this team suddenly looks capable of beating a lot of squads." At worst, our resort to the fallout shelter of pessimism has no immediate justification beyond "because it's Buffalo" and, perhaps more relevantly, "because most teams fail." Which is all well and good. Four weeks in, for this particular football team in particular, it feels pretty ok. 

​As with everything, I want more. Gimme some more. 

The Barrister

These fucking guys.

In the sense that yesterday's game was very different from the first two exhibitions this season, yes, things have changed and hooray I guess. In the sense that the probative value of the win against Arizona is limited AF, giving us little real sense of which Bills team will show up for the next four, eight, fourteen games this year, and that the prejudicial tendencies of the game are high AF as it threatens to elicit a too-familiar and unwelcome optimism in even the most jaded sports fan, fuck this win.

This team is fucking bullshit. Winning capably a few times a year is their recipe for the bait-and-switch, and even if they don't intend to, giving us performances like Sunday's does little else than give us a glimpse of winning football, a confirmation that the Bills can manage to play winning football here and there, and Exhibit A for why we shit bricks when winning football proves elusive as it always does eventually.

Good god this team is fucking bullshit.

Harts called this in his preview, and this Week 3 win was literally the best case scenario after an OC gets canned and the team gets an unmistakable spark as it [insert cliché regarding getting back to basics and/or getting the ball to playmakers]. Part of The Apologist's piece was poking fun at that clichéd predictability of the narrative wrapped up in throwing an assistant coach or coordinator under the bus when the HC is under fire, but this time the clichés ended up being prescient, which makes sense because sometimes that happens and those times are what keeps coaches believing that token firings can help a bad team become suddenly good.

What we had yesterday really can't be viewed through a lens other than one that recognizes the likelihood that this game was a blip; a fun blip, for sure - the kind of serendipity-laden result that permits lazy and/or blissfully hopeful consumers of the sport talk of Any Given Sunday as if the NFL was all about parity and wasn't a place where nearly half of the teams have not won a title and probably won't be sniffing one any time soon - but a blip all the same.

That all said, what we had yesterday - set against the paradigm of 74% of Super Bowls being won by 28% of the NFL's teams - was enjoyable and glorious and about all we can hope for under the soon-to-be sun-scorched and/or flooded earth. Eat at Arby's.

So let's revel in the afterglow a bit, y'all. Even in the struggle to 3 to 6 wins, a few Sundays will feel damn good.

The Barrister, who isn't spending much time on this today

I despise being right. Particularly so when the manner in which I was right was the result of (a) self-protective pessimism (that shit actually does work no matter what Apologist says; PSA that he's a delightful idiot), and (b) everything that was supposed to be good about the godforsaken syrup-less pancakes of a Bills team was actually bad whilst the things that were supposed to be bad were actually completely decent. 

Losing a game like yesterday's - a game that was completely within reach due to a pretty poor opponent on the other side of the ball - is a thing that this particular football club does very well. Not just the football club owned by the Pegulas; the club in the midst of some big PR effort to convince the fans that the sale of the team acted as some sort of metaphysical squeegee, wiping the grime of the playoff drought from our collective dashboard; the club, that we're told, was resetting the Drought Clock to zero when Terry and Kim assumed full control, that made splashes with coaching hires and shake ups and all of it. Losing a game like they lost yesterday is quintessentially Bills, hearkening back to Gregggggg Williams and Jauron and Gailey and Marrone and, yes, everything we know about Rex Fucking Ryan. All the highly polished viral videos and memes and stellar tweets and hope and whatever else this team is selling cannot change the fact that the Buffalo Bills traveled to Baltimore and laid the same kind of turd they've been laying under every coach, every GM, and both owners since I was in college and drinking a volume of alcohol that ensured I wouldn't notice for a few years.

Make no mistake about it: the loss yesterday, the way they lost yesterday, puts a lie to everything we've been told for the last few months and, yes, since the Pegulas took over. 

Does that sound harsh? Good. 

Engendering hope among a fanbase is certainly part of the job of running a football team, and when you're looking at a 16 year shit sandwich that isn't even old enough to have watched MTV when it was still pretty ok, there's a portion of that hope-farming that will always be a risk. Talking meekly about your chances doesn't help put butts in the seats, and talking big about your chances risks that those seats will be chock-full of butts and assholes screaming for your head when that big talk blows up in your face. 

The Bills don't owe us anything, in any event. Their promises of wins and success and progress didn't form some sacred contract no matter how much we'd like to take their chump asses to court and air out the putrid crotch rot of their failures. That's not how this works, nor should it be. Thing is, neither do we owe them - not Rex not Sammy not Roman not Tyrod not Shady not Terry not Kim and certainly not Russ "Burns When He Pees" Brandon - the kind of allegiances that would be required to look at a game like yesterday and declare "it's just the first game, they have time to turn it around." It doesn't matter that the team is likable, it doesn't matter that there is talent arguably waiting to be uncorked and powerbombed onto the NFL. I mean, God bless you if that's where your head it at; I'm incredibly jealous and interested in the xanax you've been pilfering from [insert personal relationship here].

Of course they have time to turn it around. And of course I have a shot at sitting on the Supreme Court later in my career. Possibilities are just that, and they're not doing it for me anymore. I'm simply not there. "It's just the first game" implicitly disregards what this team has specifically shown us, both yesterday and myriad times prior, and from an outsider's perspective there's just no evidence that this particular club - these players, these coaches, these executives and managers - have the stuff to fix what ails it. 

Could I be wrong? Sure. Absolutely. I'd be thrilled if I turn out to be a ball of acid reflux and hyperbole (both true) that doesn't know shit about shit (likely true). I'd be thrilled to look back at this pessimism and laugh at how silly it all was because just around the corner was the Big Turnaround that we were all promised. Things change, and I'm only seeing the surface of the product; if this was just a bad game on the road to a winning season, great, sangrias for everyone. I'm the guy the kept forgetting the game was still happening every time I got up from my laptop to snag another beer and inevitably started chatting with the horde of Giants fans in my buddy's backyard; I have no claim to a higher plane of understanding on this, though if you need to discuss comparative religion or financial markets while watching me roll a cigarette, I got you. 

But, after watching the Bills' final drive, positioned to snatch a win against a Ravens team that had basically been a rotting drainpipe on offense for the entire game, only to see them fizzle in the exact same way as every team that's come before them? We really buying their hope this week? Get the fuck out of here. Sure, they'll snag some impressive wins and they might even do it soon. That's what they do in between shooting themselves in the foot for the millionth time. This team once again, directly and with blessed immediacy, made it impossible to view them through any lens than the same one we started using sometime between Music City and Sammy's drop. At a certain point this club has to stop simply restarting the Effort Train with moves that have amounted to little else than shuffling the chairs on the deck of the Titanic, only way sadder. At a certain point, who the fuck knows when, someone at this club has to make themselves accountable for the kinds of games like yesterday; games that reveal scant character among the players and the coaches, and leave fans marveling at the disconnect between ambition and production out of One Bills Drive. 

Games that all the PR in the world can't wipe clean. 
​

The Barrister​

(NB: Apologist will follow this with something more upbeat for the "has yet to succumb to crippling angst over their preferred sports teams yet" crowd, so feel free to skip this, but in the meantime it's time to flex some muscles and get a little stretch in. It’s been a while. Clear eyes, full hearts, can definitely lose it's actually likely.)

At a certain point after I left New York City to inexplicably put down some roots in the Garden State, after I decided to scale my day-to-day to a new place and new routine, new people and new options, I started thinking a lot about the legacy that our interests and priorities leave with us. This is often little more than self-indulgent introspection, for sure, but when you have some extra commuting time on your hands and most of that is sitting down on a regional train service that makes the NYC subway look like a frenetic cattle car complete with all the physio-fecal smells you come to expect, it's not the worst thing to make an effort to use the time to your advantage. It’s a pretty dumb habit in a lot of ways, most notably because I’m liable to get hung up on certain problems or anxieties at inappropriate times, including times when I'm by no means alone, which makes the whole exercise self-defeating sometimes. 

By way of example - which is not needed to illustrate the point but since when is necessity a prerequisite? - this past weekend I went to a small wedding with some old friends and as I navigated the evening with my too-good-for-me wife, the pitfalls for an extroverted over-sharer like myself were everywhere. By the time the after-party kicked into gear, my BAC checking in at a respectable clip and my six foot two inch frame questioning its close relationship with me given my inability to sit still during a Bruno Mars song, I was in a really good place. And when I say good, I obviously mean that I was telling way too many stories about shenanigans both past and present, talking about work way too much and making new best friends that I most surely will never see again.  As my too-good-for-me wife is bound to remind me, frequently, people don’t really care about my shit. The friend of the bride did not love me hijacking a conversation to talk about markets and self-interested fucks who ruin our economy, but that’s where my head was at after the handful of Finger Lakes Rieslings, I was having a moment and needed to work through it, and also I totally apologized later and we ended up having a hilarious night and homegirl is on that list of great humans and new best friends that I will definitely forget to keep in touch with. 

To put it a different way, introspection is not really a team sport, by its nature, but man do I like to triage my bullshit out in plain view. I totally get that people aren’t necessarily on board, especially when they’ve known me for all of twenty minutes, it’s just that I don’t really care.

In the midst of these indulgent bullshit problems I let consume me as I seek a less arduous, more interesting way to get through each day without feeling some vaguely defined weight on my shoulders, constructed by a job that delightfully lays waste to my health and well-being and a home I feel like is being held together by duct tape and hasty prayers to no one in particular, the decisions about how to cut through that bullshit to prioritize the to-do list I have on my plate become a matter of imperatives.

Me? I like to put down markers in my memory, emphasizing what’s important and what experiences get earmarked for consideration at some later date. It’s entirely hokey to discuss, yet nevertheless plainly true for me that life is far easier to manage when you place markers into the dirt along your personal timeline and attempt to categorize information in some useful way. Whether laid down in hindsight or in real time, those notches in our history provide a point of reference within the series of stored memories, making it easier to look back and make sense of the progression of time; easier to lean forward with some degree of well-defined perspective on how our past is prologue.  

​So, I suppose, we choose what matters to us and we likewise choose to put down those markers to help us make sense of those valued portions of our life. We power rank the fuck out of our varied interests and dreams and the varied people and places and institutions we consider our own, and in the end we sort the information into buckets and probably power rank the buckets as well. In the first one you get all the non-negotiables, the stuff you can’t live without, and in the last bucket are the frivolities and dreams and luxuries, and somewhere in between is where the shit gets really complicated.

A bunch of nonsense, non-formative moments can be swept under the rug of our subconscious: the time you chatted up someone at a bar out of boredom; the passing moment on a dance floor during yet another wedding reception of yet another friend/cousin/sibling/child; the 18th time you watched a team you love play a milquetoast field-goal-riddled game against some milquetoast squad from some (as it turns out) usefully pathetic city.

A career, a friendship, a love affair, a family? Your list will be different than mine, but when we rank our priorities, when we decide to carve out space in our journey (or not) for those things and let them impact our days in the short-term (or not), the way we sort through our experiences and internalize a memory or a feeling takes on varying degrees of importance. We remember names of family members and concepts necessary for our jobs and how our spouse smelled the first time our kid fell asleep with us on the couch; we probably don’t remember the name of the guy we bump into sometimes on the train, or the way a friend we see twice a year takes her coffee.

And then we have football.

(And yes, I’m aware that I overthink things. If you’re new here, a hearty welp to you. Welcome to the Jungle, we’ve got fun and games and our teams are basically gout.  If you’re not new here, settle the fuck down, and yes that means you Joe Buffalo Wins. I’m sure you have some amazing tweets to ping me with soon, bud, and I’m sure they’ll be really well-phrased.)