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.