Categories
New Year Resolution What Fresh Hell

Happy New Year?

When the anger and turbulence you’ve stared down for the better part of four years subsides, it’s amazing how much more difficult it becomes to write.

I’m not sure it used to be this way for me, but I could not find the energy to write a post on the now three-year anniversary of this blog.

“Blog” might be the wrong word, honestly.

This place is a glorified virtual soapbox I step onto in order to scream into a void about whatever is bugging me at that particular moment.

The early impetus was easily Trump and all of the insane bullshit that surrounded him for the past four years. Other times, it was the Chicago sports teams, namely the ursine-named ones, that drove me up a wall with their futility and cliché cheapskate stupidity.

But eventually this past June, I surpassed 241 pounds on the scale and decided at that moment that my life needed to change. I was lethargic, angry, and diabetic. I was diagnosed in 2017 after clocking a 427 blood sugar from doing some house cleaning on a lazy Saturday. From that day until sometime in 2019 I was dedicated to reaching 195 pounds, the weight my doctor told me I’d have to be to no longer be considered a type-2 diabetic.

The stress of my previous job with an hour-long commute worsened by a steady diet of BBC News showing me the absolute worst atrocities and tragedies from around the globe put me in a dour and dark state of mind. I was absolutely miserable.

Ironically, my life got better in 2020.

For starters, I began working from home in January, over two months before the Utah Jazz and the rest of the NBA were hit by one of the very first outbreaks of COVID-19.

My employer permanently moved everyone home due to our costly office space, thus preparing us for a future we had no idea would become a necessity for the rest of the world. For the longest while, it felt like I wasn’t feeling the cost of the pandemic. I wasn’t lonely with my parents and our dog. Life was scary, but it was manageable.

Then the rest of the year happened.

And then the election.

Then, the events after said election.

By the time this day one year ago rolled around, I’d had it. I was done. Nothing more could be done in my mind to scare me into the reality of what was to come.

And once it came, I knew the Rubicon had been crossed and life, as we knew it in this country, was gone forever.

The most disappointing fact of this is just how predictable all of the actions of our so-called government have been.

Republicans continue to dismantle voting rights across swathes of swing states ahead of the midterms this coming November, but because a Maserati-driving scumbag in a yacht house doesn’t want to insult Robert C. Byrd’s racist-shitbag legacy, Democrats can’t pass an updated Voting Rights Act or John Lewis Act to combat the ridiculous amounts of gerrymandering by GOP statehouses. All because that rock-faced scoundrel wants Republicans, the party currently running misinformation campaigns about what happened on this day just one fucking year ago (DOCUMENTED BY PHOTOGRAPHIC AND VIDEO EVIDENCE MIND YOU), to do something they have not done since before the Obama presidency: acknowledge that Democrats have a right to govern and therefore agree with them on some sort of empty compromise or at least a pact to get things moving in the right direction.

Not even actual progress, just FEIGNING progress would be a step forward here. But alas, because the orange tyrant wants to do fascism so dang bad, they won’t come to the table.

And since they refuse to leave the little insurrectionists’ table, Joe Manchin won’t agree to change the filibuster.

And if the filibuster doesn’t change, neither does the state of our gerrymandered-to-shit country.

And thanks to all of that, the Democrats will best-case scenario lose the House of Representatives, the body of Congress that confirms the results of all presidential elections.

The very body that was attacked on this day one year ago for attempting to do that very job.

See where I’m going with this?

All of these facts being equal, I’m quite fearful that America is going to die a very loud and painful death. As in a Second Civil War kind of death. One that would put a target on my back.

And yet, I have so much going for me right now.

My job is so easy, it’s stupefying. I barely do any work. I have more time than ever to work out, which I do regularly, and prepare meals, which I do sparingly.

I’ve lost over 50 pounds and am poised to go for at least 50 more.

I can watch inane TV shows about a Wyoming sheriff or a doctor replacing her super famous heart surgeon father at their fictional Michigan hospital. I can escape into the sands of Tatooine and the karate-crazy “Valley” of real-world suburban Atlanta.

I have outlets and outlets of entertainment at my disposal.

And yet, in the back of my mind, I know that we are heading for an awful crossroads that will soon be too encompassing to ignore.

How does one function with that fear pressing upon them?

I guess I’ll let you know once I figure that out.

Categories
Baseball Sports

Be Careful What You Wish For

Of all the things that have happened in 2021, what I’m about to bitch about is by far the least important crisis, if one can even call it that.

With legal access to abortion dying overnight in Texas, the flooding decimating the East Coast from a not-hurricane or even a tropical fucking depression (coupled with the death of an infrastructure bill that could have alleviated some of those issues thanks to a Great Value anime cosplayer and a West Virginian dinosaur), the horrifying conclusion to 20 years of an imperialism-fueled quagmire now resulting in the foremost humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan and the continuing shitshow that is the COVID-19 Pandemic thanks to motherfuckers in states like my very own Georgia, the topic of this rant which I’m about to vomit out onto this blog pales significantly in comparison. But thanks to said pandemic and the moral inability of me to venture out into COVIDia like a brainless halfwit zombie à la Walking Dead, I have dedicated far too much of my time to lamenting the end of an era that I truly did not cherish enough when it was happening in real time.

A few months back (this might as well have been years at this point), I wrote the following words after my beloved Chicago Cubs were ousted from the 2020 “playoffs”:

The club’s two biggest sparkplugs, Javier Baez and Willson Contreras, at times seemed unfit to play Double-A let alone the show. Their combined postseason output of 2-for-12, one walk, a HBP and 5 strikeouts (all Baez with the last one being a called third following a Heyward leadoff double in the 9th inning) suggests that perhaps they need new approaches at the plate or new jerseys in a different organization…

Never in my wildest dreams did I actually think the Cubs would literally back up the truck in 2021 – and at one point, it truly looked like this team would compete in spite of Jed Hoyer’s designed chaos.

When they traded Yu Darvish for a collection of teenagers and the world’s most useless Zach, Hoyer condemned this team to a slow, painful death. The rotation was a sieve without a worthwhile ace captaining the proverbial ship, and thanks to a series of lowball offers to the three most important remaining members of the 2016 squad, it was inevitable that the Cubs were going to lose some combination of Javier Baez, Kris Bryant and Anthony Rizzo.

They limped out of April with a repulsive record and awful offensive numbers heading into May before becoming the hottest team in baseball. They were hitting. They were scoring runs. The starters were doing just well enough to win thanks in most part to the lights-out bullpen trio of Andrew Chafin, Ryan Tepera, and the resurgent Craig Kimbrel.

And then June came around and……..they died.

The team fucking died.

A back-breaking 11-game losing streak sunk the team’s fleeting playoff hopes, and the entirety of July was one slow death march to deadline day.

It happened in stages. First came Joc Pederson. The former Dodger slugger signed a one-year deal with his hometown club before being unceremoniously dumped onto the laps of the Atlanta Braves (Cobb County to be technical, but you get the picture). Next came Chafin, sent packing to the A’s for a couple of…let’s just say he was traded. Then Tepera was sent across town to the White Sox in a rare crosstown deal that wouldn’t be the last.

And then, on an unassuming afternoon in the middle of a conversation with my mother on the couch, I got a text message from my dad that shattered my world.

Anthony Rizzo to the Yankees.

In that moment, I was absolutely stunned. Yes, the impasse he reached with the front office was nothing to ignore, but would they REALLY send the face of the team since 2012 out of town with all the pomp and circumstance of an Irish goodbye?

Well, yeah, pretty much.

The next day, I went shopping for a pair of shoes when the Bryant and Baez trades went down. Kimbrel was dealt to the South Side, and in one fell swoop, the greatest era of Cubs baseball died a pitiful and worthless death.

The pit in my stomach grew over the next few hours as I turned 29.

While I was on the treadmill getting in my 10,000 steps for the day, I couldn’t help but be fucking infuriated with the way this all had gone down. Rizzo and Bryant didn’t even get one last game in front of the Wrigley crowd before being peaced out.

The prospects they got back are all, best-case scenario, five years away from the major league club. And while I was trying to find like-minded individuals who were as devastated and forlorn about the impending future futility we are already returning to in Wrigleyville, I was instead greeted with a bunch of dipshits participating in what can only be described as the world’s largest circle jerk.

Since the deadline, Cubs fans online have done nothing but fawn over the newcomers. They’re celebrating the organization fielding a top-10 farm system like they did in the halcyon days of the 2012 Theo Epstein rebuild. They excitedly ring the bells of a bunch of nameless teenagers I don’t care to learn about nor study other than what’s regurgitated by the excited minor league pundits on Bleed Cubbie Blue and Bleacher Nation. Apparently, they’ve been bored by the lack of talent in the minors for the past five years that now it’s just great for them to be watching fresh new faces with glowing scouting reports once you get past the fact that all are either too young to legally get a fucking drink or are currently nursing a dead shoulder or some other “minor setbacks” like being unable to fucking hit a breaking ball.

I guess competitive MLB competition became such a bore for these people that they needed something NEW and EXCITING.

Nick Madrigal, considered the pièce de résistance of the Kimbrel deal, tore his hamstring in June, and won’t be playing with the Cubs until G-d knows when because he TORE his FUCKING HAMSTRING (the White Sox said he’d be ready by Spring Training). Bear in mind that one of Madrigal’s greatest assets is his speed, and before he was injured, he was considered a “fine, not great” infielder with concerns about his ability at the major league level. Also bear in mind that when that phrase is thrown at any infield prospect, it usually applies to an up-and-coming shortstop, the more difficult of the middle infield positions. They were saying this about Madrigal as a second baseman. And as a former (barely amateur) second baseman myself, I can personally proclaim that you must have to suck an exorbitant amount of dick defensively for baseball-knowers to look at you as a second baseman and think, “Meh, he’s not very good”.

Admittedly, even if my knuckle-dragging take on Madrigal, a highly-regarded prospect since he was drafted fourth overall in 2018, turns out to be completely off-base, let’s not forget that it was a torn hamstring that plagued Ken Griffey Jr. for the remainder of his illustrious career. Thankfully for Nick, he’s just 24 whereas Junior was 31 when he suffered the first of two hamstring tears that literally hamstrung him till the very end. And if history serves as a guide for what can happen in the future, well, it’s not great.

Don’t tell that to Cubs fans already clamoring amongst themselves that this won’t be a five-year rebuild like before.

Why, just ask Tom Ricketts! The man who personally stopped spending money on this team after 2018 sent out a long bullshit letter to the season-ticket holders assuring them that a good, competitive team would soon be coming back to Wrigley Field.

Never mind that officials around Ricketts have reportedly blabbed to Phil Rogers that not only is that bullshit, but that he intends to ride out the next three years with this collection of retreads and fringe AAA doofuses that weren’t good enough to be in professional baseball but will almost certainly make it to Chicago because Tommy Nebraska won’t put any actual investment into the team.

Like any good Republican leader, Ricketts has decided that in order to improve the situation, he will not spend any money until the team pulls itself up by the bootstraps and turns the tide of suck.

In other words, this is it.

This is the plan.

Let 29-year-old “rookies” who weren’t good enough to crack their respective previous organizations populate the Cubs roster and then watch them beat up on the Tigers, Reds, Twins, Pirates, and the phony-ass Milwaukee Brewers and then watch as one fucking nobody inexplicably wins NL Rookie of the Month and then bequeath him the cute nickname of Frank The Tank.

And then let the fanbase do the rest.

While Javy is currently getting ostracized by vengeful and miserable New York fans known for their shall we say acerbic attitudes towards anyone who isn’t a bonafide star for their team, delirious Cubs fans can’t wait to fellate this new band of little engines who couldn’t as they hit the ball slightly better than the three guys who, you know, won a fucking World Series for this carcass of a franchise just five years ago.

Gone are those selfish prima donnas who dared to ask for a raise even though their GQP-loving owner all but demanded they take insulting “offers” which amounted to unrealistic hometown discounts even by greedy sports owner standards. And in their place are a collection of never-wases getting the chance to be real boys!

And Cubs fans couldn’t be happier.

So while I rail against this group of nobodies like an insane person for apparently having grown accustomed to watching a not-shitty ballclub try to win championships, Cubs fans were apparently just waiting so long to be loveable losers once more.

And try as I have to ignore this team, it doesn’t help when you live with a true believer. No, Dad’s not happy with the team. He won’t even go to Wrigley until our shithead owner decides he doesn’t want to be a shithead owner anymore (which is pretty much never gonna be the case at this point). But even as he advocates for a Blackhawks-esque boycott, he still watches this fucking team.

And sadly, he’s not alone. The only difference between my father, a smart man, and every other Cubs fan with Stockholm Syndrome is they are joyfully watching a dead team in a dead season win meaningless games with utterly useless “baseball players”. Thus, this collection of shit-eating yokels, hicks and nimrods will be the single reason that Ricketts will get away with conning this idiotic fanbase into giving his fuckhole organization unearned attention.

Yes, I am a joyless piece of shit for ragging on underdogs like Frank Schwindel and Rafael Ortega finally getting their chances.

But I don’t care.

I don’t care about a bunch of fleeting September streakers who will be DFA’d before next April when they prove they cannot hit against top-tier pitchers and real major leaguers.

Against my better judgement, I’ve willfully watched these motherfuckers for the better part of 29 years. I have wasted my youth and my energy on this deadbeat baseball team that takes 108 years between winning World Series because the owner spends money on the park but not on the roster. I have at this point chosen to actively NOT WATCH this team while simultaneously trolling the comments section to rag on people who choose to spend their time watching this colostomy bag when the season will be over in a few weeks. In my fairness though, I like reading about that particular website’s coverage of the Bears and Bulls, two other hapless franchises whom I’ll more than likely be bitching about (again) in a couple weeks’ time. At this point, it’s my choice and I probably should not let them piss me off this much. Certainly my dog would appreciate it if I’d stop blowing up every time I see those cocksuckers on TV the very few times my father, currently battling a literal fucking kidney stone, DARES to watch his favorite team IN HIS OWN HOUSE!

I don’t have to ask Reddit if I’m the asshole, because I readily acknowledge that yes, I AM THE ASSHOLE HERE!

With that all being said, I’m allowed.

I’m allowed to be blindingly enraged with my all-time favorite sports team for taking the one champion I’ve ever seen in 29 years, mismanage the shit out of it with dipshit trades and inexplicably awful free agency signings, refuse to fix the actual problems plaguing this team, and then scrapping it like a fucking dilapidated warship.

But as I’ve already pointed out about 20 paragraphs ago, I asked for this.

When I wrote that piece in October, I LITERALLY wrote this fucking phrase:

The Cubs need to shed so much of this roster while also adding just the right number of contact-first hitters, fire-balling pitchers all while balancing the budget to re-sign the right guys. And as of this moment, I couldn’t tell you who those people even are.

As armchair GM, that’s way above my pay grade.

So, my message to any Cubs fan that just so happens upon this blog is the same thing I’m telling myself now as I look into the mirror 11 months after the fact:

“Be careful what you wish for.”

You may be tempted to be thrilled about this team’s chances in 2023 with Pete Crow-Armstrong’s one good arm and Alex Canario’s .247 batting average in Single-A, and drool over the prospect of a bunch of high schoolers one day growing up to be the nExt GrEaT cUbS RoStEr, a phrase that I once actually read and immediately made me want to drink bleach.

Before you even dare give that piece of shit a dollar again, just consider that maybe Tommy and Fam should pull themselves up by their five-billion-dollar golden parachute and make this team competitive.

Because if they aren’t willing to invest in the on-field product, don’t be surprised if you die before the next great Cubs roster is assembled.

Categories
The Game of Life

Serenity…now.

Hello, everyone.

It’s…been some time since I felt the need to sit down and write some anger-fueled prose or a SCOLDING HOT TAKE on another edition of America continuing to chop its own dick off with the dullest of butter knives.

That’s because I had to get away from it all.

As I wrote back in May, the pandemic broke me. For the first time in my working life, I was eligible for, and took, short-term disability. Apparently the same job that kept me miserable and hyper focused on the calamitous clusterfuck that was the T**** years gave me a surprise get-out-of-work-free card: two months’ worth of leave that wouldn’t count against my regular PTO.

It took a month for full approval, but I got it and immediately began rededicating my life to losing weight and getting back into shape.

I’m proud that as of this writing, I weigh approximately 28 pounds less than I did on June 1st.

For the last four years, I noticed certain clothes became much tighter and impossible to wear. Now, I’m having trouble keeping a few pairs of pants from tumbling off my body.

Left and right, shorts and t-shirts are looser than they were three weeks ago – a welcome surprise as 2021 inches ever closer towards 2022.

Remember that friend’s wedding I mentioned in my first post on this very blog?

It finally happened! And it was wonderful!

And I didn’t contract COVID!

I even began dating again.

That hasn’t been very successful, sadly – nor nearly as fun of an achievement as attending the three-times-COVID-delayed wedding, but again, welcome surprises!

Speaking of welcome surprises, I’ve started a new job! It’s essentially my old job BUT I’m getting paid astronomically more for doing about a third of my old workload. Literally more bang for my buck.

I forgot what it was like to have a job that wasn’t watching the news every waking moment of the day, so I’m still adjusting to my enormously slower pace of worklife.

But my G-d, is it nice to just breathe again. No more feeling of Big Brother watching, no surprise rugby matches to cover, or shitty British sitcoms that haven’t been viewed in 47 years.

I’m in a better place.

Not sports-wise mind you, since the Cubs traded literally everyone! The day before my birthday, no less! I now hate them with every fiber of my being!

On the plus side, I don’t waste my time watching those irrelevant losers anymore (there’ll be plenty of time for that come football season. And basketball season. Even hockey season because I don’t have enough reasons to crater my own self-esteem).

In the meantime, it’s on to the next wedding. I’ve got a cousin getting hitched in May next year, and I’m aiming for my original driver’s license weight from age 16. It’s been a hell of a journey, but I’m confident I’ll reach my destination.

Sadly, the fucking pandemic lives…but for now, I’m taking my victories where I can.

Hopefully, there will be more to come.

Categories
Politics What Fresh Hell

This Is War

On May 28th, 2021, the Republican Party officially declared war against the United States.

In other news, nobody who can make a real difference will take this salvo against our democracy seriously because Joe Manchin doesn’t want his newfound importance to die before the country dies first.

He didn’t admit this, sadly. The cretin senator of West Virginia instead concern-trolled the press with his familiar Save The Clock Tower speech minus the helpful deus ex machina to save the future from being destroyed by the past. There’s no DeLorean or lightning storm that can send us back to 1985.

Nope, we’re stuck in 1955 – the real 1955 where abortion was illegal and segregation was still the law of the land, Brown v. Board of Education be damned.

OK, I should be fair here. Abortion will be legal for a couple more months (maybe). Aside from that, Georgia, Florida, and Texas all passed new versions of old Jim Crow voting laws targeting Black voters in the hopes of preventing high voter turnout all because Daddy Fatlegs needs to run for president again in 2024, and why would you want to alienate the Capitol rioters by allowing Black people the right to have their voices heard?

All of this can be avoided of course if the Senate would kill the filibuster. However, since we live in the ninth circle of Hell, our fate rests in the hands of the most jingoist Muppet and a woman whose moral bankruptcy pales only to her cheugy desperation to be the coolest gal in the Senate cafeteria.

If it wasn’t apparent enough on January 6th, the right-wing of America wants us all dead. This isn’t hyperbolic reactionary twaddle in the hopes of making a molehill into a great big snowflake mountain.

This is war.

And what’s worse is that they really do want the rioters to come back to the polls in 2022. They want us to be frustrated by Joe Biden’s government failing to meet his ambitious promises of governing like able-minded adults. In true GOP fashion, they want to deflect, fluster, obfuscate, and wear down the opposition into apathy. After all, it worked in 2014 and 2016.

But, as I’ve written too often before, this must be the fuel in our fire. We have to stand up to these cowards and drown them in their own filth come 2022.

Because if Manchin and Sinema still hold the keys to ending the fascist filibuster at the start of play in 2023, kiss America goodbye.

Categories
First World Problems

Mental Health is a Joke

I’ve been depressed since I was eight years old.

This is a claim I cannot back up with scientific evidence, a medical diagnosis, or even real tangible proof. It’s all anecdotal at best and perhaps a claim forged in my depressive mind long enough to the point that I believe it to be true.

But I remember being a fat little kid unable to run during gym class and “whistling from my mouth”. That’s how I described wheezing to my dad, a term I learned meant that my lungs couldn’t properly take air in whenever I was running. So from the time I could start remembering doctors appointments, I’ve been listed as an asthmatic whose symptoms only manifest “upon exertion”.

The feeling of watching the other kids jogging while carrying on full conversations and laughing what felt like miles ahead of me made me feel so sad and insufficient. It’s that twinge of self-dissatisfaction I’ve carried with me to parties, family gatherings, class, the gym, the office, alone in my room while striking out for the nine trillionth time on MLB The Show…

That miserable low has been so apart of me over the past 20 years, I can’t really think of life without it. And since the pandemic, my mind has withered into a dark cave of frustration and rage. I’m triggered by the slightest fucking nuisance – an article detailing Republicans’ obstruction of a January 6th commission, Israel’s continued overuse of power and general being racist assholes to Palestinians, a bloviating drumstick sucking off Tony La Russa for giving the opposing pitching staff a license to drill his own player, etc.

I’m out of work for the first time in my over 11 years in the workforce because one day, I threw my hands up and yelled “Uncle!”

I told my boss I needed leave, she helped me start the process, and since filing my claim over 12 days ago my primary care doctor of over a decade managed to belittle and lie to my face when saying he’d help me make my case to my company’s insurance adjuster and instead torpedoed my claim, and now I’m depending on my half-retired therapist to safely navigate herself and her husband back home from the Florida Keys through treacherous waters whilst also hoping for my psychiatrist to come through for me when submitting documents on Monday.

I’ve spent over four years making myself miserable and sick to the stomach from watching the news as part of my job and now when I need to take a goddamn break, the world seems hellbent on ensuring my leave is denied and force me back into this godforsaken stretch of never-ending mental torment.

Apparently, it’s Mental Health Awareness Month. How fitting will it be for the adjuster to stonewall my mental health claim right now? I couldn’t have timed this more perfectly!

If I’d G-d forbid broken a bone or suffered some other physical injury, this claim would have started on time. But thanks to the fact that every process involving taking time off from work in America is contingent upon making sure the claimants aren’t gaming the system, something nearly nobody fucking does mind you, I’m using what little PTO I have to give myself an unwanted staycation all because employers are incessantly paranoid over the mere chance you could be wasting their time.

Yet if you ask nearly any (mostly Republican) “expert” on such things, we need to make the process to claim disability as hard as humanly possible to stop people from mooching off of a system where the richest people in this country have effectively been given welfare and wealth redistribution dozens of times over while the rest of the population festers and chokes in its own filth.

Have we ever questioned whether this system is beneficial to the minds of the average American? Doubtful. And even if we have as a society, we certainly came to the wrong fucking conclusions if the answer was to make a clinically depressed human being send in mountains of paperwork to prove to some faceless cohort of insurance adjusters something that person has known as reality their whole adult lives.

Perhaps the pandemic and the brain-fracturing 2020 election has turned me into a leftist, anti-capitalist shill. Or maybe years of being fucked by the system has taken its mental toll and left me with nothing by resentment and hatred in my heart.

Either way, mental health isn’t taken seriously in this country.

I just wish I had enough money to run away and never look back.

Categories
Racism

Enough.

“What’s that? I’ve never heard of that place. It doesn’t exist!”

Those words are the punchline of an old joke told by one of the brothers of our Jewish fraternity back in college. “E”, a white Columbian-Israeli born in Israel, grew up in the Holy Land and therefore knows more about being an Israeli than someone like myself, a lifelong member of the Diaspora, watching from afar, the Jews in our Homeland be targeted by intifadas and “blood-thirsty Arabs” wishing to “drive us into the sea”, all over a proxy war against the West and American influence.

This is the narrative we were told as young Jews growing up in the early to middle aughts. Some of this was true, a lot of the hatred against Israel is true anti-Semitism. But sadly, too many of us American Jews have indulged in our fair share of anti-Arab sentiment. I’ve written little tidbits about my childhood in the past, but I haven’t mentioned the most embarrassing and bigoted thing I’ve ever said aloud.

I think I was 12 at the time. We were living in our first house in Georgia when we were discussing the-then recent tragedies in Jerusalem. There was a bus bombing that claimed dozens of lives, but there was one suicide bombing that really got to us as a family: the Sbarro’s pizzeria. This attack had happened before 9/11 when I was still living in Chicago. Growing up, I didn’t eat much. To the dismay of my parents, I ate “nothing with a face”, a.k.a. no meat of any kind but conveniently ate anything with cheese and bread and carbs in general. Naturally, pizza was my absolute, bar-none favorite food. Still is.

And being my favorite food, I would routinely beg Mom and Dad to take me to the nearest pizza place wherever we were. Luckily for my parents, instead of having to stand on their heads to goad me into eating anything else, there was practically a Sbarro’s in any given mall that we’d frequent during shopping trips. Great for around holiday time when we’d spend hours traversing JCPenney, Marshall Fields, Carson’s, the Disney Store (my least favorite place on Earth at that age), and KB Toys. Some of my favorite memories of my middle-class upbringing were spent at a table chowing down on a big slice of Sbarro’s cheese pizza topped with the Parmesan that came in the little white packets. I remember the smell of that store, the faint burning from the ovens mixed with all the glorious smells of an average food court in the late ’90s and early aughts, and that subtle plasticky smell that lightly emanates from paper cups, their drink tops and the straws.

The thought of a store like that bombed out with dust and the smell of charred bodies is something that I thank G-d never experienced, but that fear must have struck such a cord that it all bubbled up following the wave of attacks in Jerusalem. I remember standing in the middle of my foyer for some reason proclaiming that we should pull all the Jews out of the Middle East and nuke it. Wipe it out.

End it all for the non-Jews there.

It’s something that I didn’t sadly recognize was so vile, so reprehensible, even coming from the mouth of an annoyed pre-teen boy that should have been so swiftly condemned by his parents and policed out of his conscience. At least, that’s what my response would have been if my kid openly advocated for the instant destruction of millions of people for the sake of not being Jews.

My parents were not cool with this, but I cannot remember what exactly they said, probably something along the lines of “That’s not right” or “We don’t ever say things like this,” but it’s been a little less than 20 years since that dark moment that I honestly have put it so far out of my mind.

But that punchline by my fraternity brother “E” sticks with me like hot glue.

The joke goes something like this: someone will mention Palestine or Palestinians, like “Oh, I’m from Palestine.” And “E” goes, “Where’s that? What is that place? That doesn’t exist! It’s not real!”

This would be met by laughter from my fellow frat brothers, agreeing that such a place is “non-existent.” That anyone who suggests otherwise is some foolish goy who didn’t understand, didn’t get it.

I never laughed, and if I did, it was more of a laugh of, “Oh, wow, why are you actually saying something like this in 2013? Like, what fucking year is this, man?”

I never actually challenged him, and I should have because I knew better.

And now eight years later, as the IDF begins a new campaign upon the people of Gaza following violent police crackdowns against worshippers at the Al-Aqsa Mosque mere meters away from the Dome of the Rock (prominently featured in Jerusalem’s skyline) which were followed almost immediately by an ultra-nationalist right-wing Jewish sponsored pogrom in which the fascists with their tzitzit dangling under their shirts marched in the streets chanting “Death to the Arabs!,” I know far too much to sit idly by as we Jews watch our Holy Land occupants flex unparalleled muscles on a far weaker and oppressed populace with no true government of its own, no advocates outside of their own spheres of influence, and no true hope of meaningful recourse, since all of the violence committed against them is being justified as Israel “defending herself.”

Yes, “defending” against starved children in the streets throwing rocks at soldiers armed to the fucking teeth occupying their lands.

“Defending” against Soviet-era rockets that while deadly are virtually no match for the literal Skynet-esque Iron Dome defense system that blows 90% of them out of the fucking sky.

“Defending” against people protesting illegal evictions at a mosque in the middle of the holy month of Ramadan and then being attacked following Iftar.

“Defending” their lands by allowing right-wing thugs to do unto the Palestinians what right-wing genocidal Nazi thugs did to their great-grandparents in Europe during Kristallnacht:

It doesn’t matter why Israel was created in the first place anymore – we know why.

It doesn’t matter that Israel has been attacked on multiple occasions only to have won each armed conflict it’s ever faced in rather decisive fashion.

It doesn’t matter that Hamas continues to wage attacks against innocent Jews, and yes that includes the over 2,000 Katyusha rockets they’ve launched into Israel during this current exchange.

It doesn’t matter who even started this conflict in the first place.

They attacked Muslims during Ramadan.

Golda Meir literally declared war after a coordinated attack on Israel during Yom Kippur.

Why is anyone surprised that the Palestinians took those actions as anything but a declaration of war???

Literal jihads have been waged following lesser actions in the past.

Are we to assume that all of Israel, its security forces and its people have such a tiny collective memory despite living their whole lives alongside Muslims that perhaps, JUST PERHAPS strong-arming worshippers at a mosque or outraged Palestinians demonstrating against the internationally-condemned evictions set to take place in Sheikh Jarrah MIGHT inflame tensions past the point of war? Are we so full of our own shit that we have the actual chutzpah to run around on Facebook posting images of solidarity with Israel while her government TERRORIZES Palestinians with shock-and-awe tactics similar to that of the American bombings that leveled Iraq more than a decade ago?

The point is that the Israeli government has lost.

It’s perceived as a mostly-white body of maniacal fanatics looking to suppress the native population into permanent second-class citizenship while selfishly continuing to act in its own best interest, Palestinian lives be damned.

It walks like an apartheid government, talks like an apartheid government, and acts like an apartheid government.

The religious right, like in this country, are vastly influencing the Knesset’s priorities and guiding the government’s policies. They are displacing Palestinians by forcing them out of their own homes and BULLDOZING THE LAND INTO JEWISH-ONLY SETTLEMENTS, thus condemning innocent Palestinians to the street for no good goddamn reason. They are exacerbating a decades-long, now generational humanitarian crisis that needed to be solved long before Bibi Netanyahu fully sold out and became nothing but a tacit advocate of racial and religious hatred and covert genocide.

Israel, a place I STILL AGAINST ALL LOGIC AND SENSE WANT TO VISIT ON FUCKING BIRTHRIGHT, must STOP.

Stop.

Just stop.

That’s the mantra at this point.

Stop.

Palestine EXISTS, its people are REAL, and are not the butt of a shitty and racist joke.

We must stand together and demand that this conflict ends.

Societally speaking, especially in the West (and more specifically America), we’ve always asked how Israel could stop this conflict when Hamas and other terrorists are willing to blow themselves to kingdom come.

Never have we asked if Israel was ever in the wrong, nor have we asked her to display a shred of accountability.

It’s time we do that now.

Categories
The Game of Life

The Spoils of Adulthood

I bought a house.

I’m 28, single, living and working from home.

My student loans, dating back a decade, languish in purgatorial forbearance. These loans totaling up to over 25 grand with various interest rates of 4.5-6.8% lay dormant thanks to a pandemic that unleashed the forces of plague and pestilence not known to (the majority of) humanity for over a century, gumming up my life in an awkward position.

I am a college graduate stuck in his parents’ “basement,” only now, my name’s on the mortgage and I’ll start building up equity while living life in neutral, caught between parental dependence and financial freedom.

By all accounts, I’ve accomplished one of the hardest feats members of the Millennial Generation can – without a spouse!

I’ve matched my parents’ age of their first home purchase; both were 28 when they became homeowners.

So, why do I feel like an absolute failure?

Well, dear reader, I think I’ve got an idea.

As I’ve explained before, I’m a failed broadcaster. OK, technically I’m not so much “failed” as I am employed in a completely different industry than the one I earned my college degree for (along with my forborne school loan debt). My definition of “success” once looked like working as the number two broadcaster for the Biloxi Shuckers in Biloxi, Mississippi (a.k.a. Jim Crow Vegas).

That or working for a random-ass New York-Penn League club like the Renegades or the Scrappers or perhaps even as a media relations intern for the Gwinnett Stripers or Iowa Cubs.

My point is that a year or two ago, if I’d landed a job with any of MiLB’s 160 (now 120) franchises, I’d be fucking golden, baby! On my way to The Show!

However, thanks to reality and watching a year of wanton death and destruction unfold before my eyes from the comfort of my spare bedroom in MY HOUSE (that’s kinda nice to write for the first time, not gonna lie), I’ve discovered that my idea of #winning wasn’t so much a dream as it was agonizing limbo.

I’d be working a low-paying job on a monthly $2,000 stipend while trying to balance a rent, utilities, groceries, general living expenses (including managing my diabetes and depression) on top of any surprise or unforeseen costs. It would be living a life of all work and no play while ironically busting my ass to provide baseball fans a cheap, fun family experience they’d never forget.

In my darkest days with my former MiLB team in 2016, I had convinced myself that the little town I was toiling away in would never forget my name.

Now, I’m just curious if they remember me ever existing at all.

Good fucking riddance.

Yet even now, knowing that my one-time dream was just wool pulled over my sheepish eyes, I see colleagues, friends, unrequited loves and their “successful” boyfriends calling games for collegiate summer league teams and wonder why the shit I’m stuck writing angry soliloquies to myself on a blog that in spirit still doesn’t have a name, indeed one not even bearing my real name!

I waffle between self-assurance that I’m on the path required to further my journey and bemoaning my failure to become a faceless cog in the Entertainment Exemption Industrial Complex of American minor league sports.

10 years of playing little league/rec league baseball, ages 4-and-a-half to 18, I never suffered a single concussion.

One year in minor league baseball, I rung my fucking bell like I was the Philadelphia Phillies celebrating a Bryce Harper dinger while, of all things, pulling a tarp wearing shorts and a T-shirt in a biblically rain soaked derecho working for a team that couldn’t afford a full-time grounds crew staff!

Those seven months slogging as a good little worker ant brought me crippling debt, worsening depression, and post-concussive symptoms.

It was the lowest point of my life that I somewhat artfully hid through some nifty smiling depression. Determined to score that next job in baseball, I knew I was gonna land on my feet in yet another small town that also would never forget the great “Sam Brody.”

I mean, c’mon, I got my last job while working as a cashier at Target! How hard can this shit be?

Four years later, I should be thanking all 120 surviving franchises for refusing to hire me. Sure, they might have avoided me due to the workers’ comp I took for one weekend’s worth of games lost due to my one and only concussion (knocking on all the wood) that likely soured my boss’s perception of whether I’d be a good fit, but at least I wasn’t stuck in Flyhead, Texas watching the pandemic tear through our country, unable to be with the two most important people I’ll ever know.

Ah, that phrase though, “a good fit.” As if the totality of a human beings’ worth within the workforce can be unequivocally encapsulated by the same turn of phrase used to assess the comfort of wearing a fucking Nyan Cat T-shirt or a pair of one of Joe Montana’s shitty Skechers.

Seeing how the pandemic dirty dicked all of sports, it’s an acute miracle I’m not behind the mic of one minor league baseball’s survivors – or worse, one of the now-defunct franchises that laughed my resume into their MacBook’s recycling bin.

And yet the emptiness remains.

I couldn’t get a job in the field I set out to find work within, and because of that, I feel like an utter fuckup.

I lost.

I’m 28, single, living and working from home.

I just bought a fucking house.

So, why does this feel like failure?

Categories
Racism

Believe Your Own Eyes

One step forward, nine steps back.

As any watershed moment in American history seemingly reminds us, with every advance society takes towards progress, that foot path lengthens mid-stride.

Yes, something remarkable did happen today, but now there’s a new shitstorm on the horizon with thousands of tiny fires to extinguish and oh by the way, the sky is definitely falling.

So it was on January 6th, so it is on April 21st.

Nine days before Derek Chauvin was found guilty of the murder of George Floyd, 20-year-old Daunte Wright’s life ended at the hands of a veteran police officer thanks to her mistaking her service weapon for her Taser.

He died 10 miles down the road from the courthouse where George Floyd’s murderer was convicted.

13 days before Kim Potter murdered Daunte at that traffic stop, approximately 424 miles away in the City of Chicago, Officer Eric Stillman shot and murdered 13-year-old Adam Toledo. According to the Chicago PD, Toledo had a gun on his person the moment Stillman discharged his weapon in the early hours of March 29th. As we learned six days ago when Stillman’s body camera footage of the encounter from 16 days prior was finally released to the general public, this was a lie.

Eric Stillman murdered Adam Toledo in cold blood on camera.

Former Brooklyn Center Police Officer Kim Potter executed Daunte Wright in broad daylight.

Believe your eyes.

If Derek Chauvin taught us anything in those agonizing nine minutes and 29 seconds, it was that you can unequivocally believe your eyes.

In matters of Police vs. We the People, your eyes do not lie.

Ignore them at your own peril.

If this country has any hope of addressing and changing the endemic failures of our system, we as a people must be willing to ensure that the officers who overstep and murder innocent men, women, boys, and girls are tried, convicted, sentenced, and punished.

If not us, then who?

Who will be the guardians of our neighbors, of ourselves?

Who will protect your children and your children’s children when men in uniform violate their social contract with the people they are duty-bound to protect and serve?

It’s painfully obvious to all that for scores of victims and their loved ones, Derek Chauvin’s conviction amounts to too little too late.

Years late and millions of dollars short.

Eric Garner, Alton Sterling, Trayvon Martin, Mike Brown, Freddie Gray, Philando Castile, Sandra Bland, and fucking too many for one man to remember will never receive their justice.

The pain their families have endured not only remains, but compounds with the next gross misuse of deadly force, compounding that grief and misery upon a pile of trauma that only evolves.

Quite literally with no justice, there is no peace.

Scores of Black and Brown men, women, and children whose names are lost to time and indifference won’t have their stories shared with a growing, galvanized foundation of Americans beleaguered by this nation’s grimly incessant game of Minority Russian Roulette. All we mere commoners can do is walk the streets with slogans and signs while facing hordes of armored thugs with badges and state-issued licenses to kill. Everyday folks endure this all, put themselves at the risk of suffering violent overzealous policing, just to possibly catch the eyes and tickle the ears of the privileged elite sequestered from reality within Capitol Hill in the hopes that these pampered cretins with exclusive access to universal healthcare MIGHT engage in semantics debates over meaningful reforms till they’re blue (or red) in the face.

Think about that for a minute.

Young 20-somethings, teenagers, ELEMENTARY SCHOOL KIDS will march in the names of the wronged, carrying upon their shoulders a burden not unlike those who picketed for civil rights alongside Dr. King, Reverend Jackson, Minister Malcolm X, and Representative Lewis. And they do this in the vain hope that perhaps, by the slimmest, most negligible margins, the United States Senate will sign long-needed common-sense policing reforms and voting protections into law.

Their reward? Infinite lectures from these distanced observers as high up as the Oval Office to remain calm while the other performative mannequins engage in an insincere kabuki theater, all to allay the fears of an emotionally detached and miserable, intransigent segment of Americans too content with a callous and withered system that’s all but crumpled beneath the weight of its own myth.

2020 kicked a hornets’ nest, rung alarm bells that will not only NOT be un-rung but will remain sounding whenever the next Pamela Turner is gunned down with prejudice.

Evermore diverse crowds shall declare that Black Lives Matter if police continue slaughtering the Tamir Rices and Ma’Kiyah Bryants of the world.

It started long before Emmitt Till or Breonna Taylor, and it will not end thanks to 12 jurors in Minneapolis.

This fight will never end in our lifetime.

So, yes, Derek Chauvin’s conviction should bring us all copious amounts of joyful relief.

But, like in any war, one battle is just that: one battle.

Black lives matter today, tomorrow, and forever.

One conviction won’t do if the necessity for such convictions never ends.

Categories
Coronavirus Politics

Preamble to a New Declaration: Freedom from Self-Destruction

You could argue that a picture of a bombed out Washington, D.C. during the Martin Luther King riots of ’68 would make for a more fitting backdrop considering not only the topic of this piece but also the state of America at this millionth racial flashpoint over the past blah-blah-blah decade(s). However, if you’ve been reading this little blog of mine, you’ll know my affinity for (in my view correctly) comparing America of today to a perilously close version of 1940’s Nazi Germany: that is, a former democratic republic-turned fascist caricature that ultimately cannibalized itself, slaughtered its own people, and collapsed under the weight of its own oppression.

Hence why I feel that photo of a sacked 1945 Berlin is sadly more apropos.

The immunity is here!

I have a full course of the Pfizer vaccine pfacillitating the pfucking power of pfull immunity from this motherpfucking pfuckpface of a pfuckhole virus.

That’s the best news I’ve had in a year, and I’ll be happier when I’m not so tired and my arm stops feeling like a giant bee stung the shit out of it.

Of course, it’s going to work itself out. What WON’T work itself out is the country we’ve all been simultaneously lucky to have been birthed into…so long as we have a lack of melanin and a shit load of money.

Sadly, I’m not one of those lucky pfew.

We need to change before we die a painful and pitiful death.

Next week, we’ll be gearing up for the conclusion to the most public murder trial arguably since OJ Simpson, and likely the most important policing-related trial since the miscarriage of justice that was the 1992 Rodney King fiasco.

Because an all-white jury in one of the wealthiest counties in L.A. (along with being the home turf of most LAPD officers at the time) acquitted four officers of the savage beating of a Black man in the middle of a freeway, the country witnessed the most destructive racial riot in its history, one that still reverberates on our streets with every acquittal, grand jury dismissal, non-action and faux mea culpa issued by the most corrupt criminal gang in America: the police.

We’re seeing the fruits of the gutless defense of one of those four defendants whom despite ganging up on a LONE MAN in the middle of a busy fucking interstate highway, uttered the universal get-out-jail-free applause line for every cop facing prison time for murdering innocent BIPOC.

“I was completely in fear for my life,” Laurence Powell, the man who struck Rodney King 56 times on video camera, told his sympathetic allies, the jury, in Simi Valley all those years ago. True, he later was found guilty in a federal case, along with the leader of that merry gang of psychopaths Stacey Koon, of civil rights violations and served 30 months in prison.

Sadly, that line of defense has acquitted more murderers in the eyes of too many juries at the expense of the families of the many dead who’ve suffered for our nation’s refusal to reconcile with the inherently unequal system of society we’ve hardwired into every facet of American life.

Michael Brown’s killer Darren Wilson used similar wording in an interview with Stephanopoulos eight years ago, so similar in fact that this article’s headline paraphrased his comments into an almost carbon copy of Powell’s mewlings more than a decade before. Not to mention a dash of good ol’ fashioned “he was like a big burly man”:

“I just felt the immense power that he had. And then the way I’ve described it is it was like a 5-year-old holding onto Hulk Hogan. That’s just how big this man was […]”.

Michael Brown was 18 at the time of his untimely murder at the hands of this whiny pissant.

He was a normal young man, no more remarkable, made of flesh and bone as opposed to the wrought iron and hatred Wilson’s teary-eyed sob story would have you believe.

Of course, this same defense was employed by the yellow-bellied fat puddle of pork shit George Zimmerman – not even an ACTUAL cop – for justifying murdering a 17-year-old boy he stalked in the middle of the night. Trayvon Martin rightly defended himself against this wannabe Klansman, but died anyway. The fucked up part about this situation was that racist Pillsbury Doughboy didn’t even need to say the words “I was in fear for my life” because the jury said it for him (emphasis mine):

“He had a right to defend himself,” [the juror] said. “If he felt threatened that his life was going to be taken away from him, or he was going to have bodily harm, he had a right.”

But notice something else in these stories: the only person who actually said he feared for his life was Laurence Powell.

Instead of saying that phrase in direct quotes, each of the acquitted murderers or their advocates merely echoed that sentiment. It’s the headlines of ABC and CNN that repeat Powell’s now hallowed defense, the words stained in the memories of these agencies that covered that explosive 1992 trial and thus broadcast its devastating impact on a national, even global level.

No doubt had he testified and not taken the coward’s way out, Derek Chauvin would have echoed that sentiment to his jury. Kim Potter will likely use a similar justification despite having 26 years of experience with I would assume more than a 20-year-old kid ducking a missed court date for smoking fucking grass.

I’m sure even Eric Stillman, the Chicago Police’s newest high-profile child killer, will say it too, if not have the media simply say it for him as they replay his hurried and terrified gasps of fear over the body of Adam Toledo, knowing full well what he did was inhuman and worthy of the flames of hellfire if such place does exist.

Will this matter? Who knows and frankly, will a single one of us be shocked if nothing befalls this cadre of badged wannabe Steve Rogerses?

I’m expecting this country’s violent objection of progress to kick in, even in the middle of a global pandemic that’s left us all burned into withered husks of our former selves.

And as the justice system will likely fail us once more, we can ALWAYS depend on the forces of ineptitude and ego-devouring fame fucking to condemn us to our continued existence in this by-the-rich, for-the-soulless society governed by hedge funds and lobbyists at the detriment to regular human beings.

I’m speaking of course of the human Pet Rock Joe Manchin: an ancient relic of days gone by that never did anything other than look really unique in a world of far fewer choices for entertainment and self-distraction. Last night, MSDNC’s very own Lawrence O’Donnell had guest LA Times columnist and fellow mountain person Virginia Heffernan and her dear mother Nancy to explain why it is Joe Manchin just won’t fall in line with the Democratic agenda of securing voting rights for all and fixing a crumbling infrastructure. The younger Heffernan’s defense of West Virginia’s senior senator amounted to him essentially having fun being such a wittle outswider from West Virginny! She more or less said he likes to keep people “on their toes”, not wanting to be pegged down as any sort of predictable politician with his past support of Planned Parenthood and his sterling endorsement from the fundamentalist terrorist organization that is the NRA.

Oh, how lovely! And here I thought he was merely defending the filibuster simply to uphold the legacy of the virulent segregationist that once used Appalachian Joe’s seat to obstruct the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

A move by the way that the man himself later fucking regretted.

Now, it should be noted that in that above article I linked, John Lewis (yes that John Lewis) defended the legacy of the late Robert C. Byrd, the man whom Manchin wishes to honor by keeping the filibuster alive.

You know, that same filibuster that Byrd later was sorry for using to try to obstruct Black Americans from receiving human rights codified in the law.

So………ya know………take that and read into it exactly what you should.

That sentient Sam Eagle would be so goddamn moronic as to justify his obnoxious stubbornness by defending the act of a racist who later disavowed said act of defiance should be the true only thing you should remember about Senator Pet Rock.

He and Curtsy McFucksuckle of Arizona have only one answer for those of you wishing for a government with some semblance of pride, equity, and a sense of actual lasting justice and change:

That day, it was minimum wage she gleefully condemned to hell.

Tomorrow, it’ll be the infrastructure bill that will help seniors looking for guaranteed long-term care.

And soon enough, she’ll say the same when it’s time to expand a historically imbalanced and anti-American Supreme Court, federal protection of voting rights for all Americans (her constituents included), and of course to abolishing the filibuster, permanently gridlocking Congress in a battle of wills between the Democrats seeking to govern, and the GQP wishing to sew enough discontent and frustration among liberal and left-leaning voters to dissuade (or just outright prevent) them from voting for progressives who could otherwise fix this broken merry-go-round of idiocy after the midterms.

Meanwhile, the virus isn’t going anyway.

The pandemic still rages on thanks to Gym Jordan and every other Trumpist goon looking to stop people from ending the virus because maybe they like the reports of horrifyingly disproportionate minority deaths.

After all, that’s fewer people to vote them out of office, right?

Listen, folks.

We’re in some motherpfucking deep shit here.

People are dying and our politicians seem to want that.

They don’t want us to use our voices to push them into doing their actual jobs rather than using their newfound fame to self-satisfyingly smirk like the cat that ate the canary as their own voters die from endemic poverty and other inequalities along with this never-ending virus.

Don’t forget that this is what insignificant afterthoughts truly desire:

Remember this degenerate when January rolls around. Because soon after the new year, it’ll be campaign season 2022. And thanks to our leaders and their inability to get shit done, this next election, and the election after, and the election after that one too, will all be the most important elections of our lives.

Until we empower progressive lawmakers to give us a green economic strategy to transform our energy consumption and output, a healthcare system that cares for us as opposed to treat us in our dying days, and an equitable society that won’t murder Black boys, girls, men and women for simply breathing in front of a poorly-trained and emotionally-feeble gangbanger with a badge, men like this will continue protecting the black holes within our society that allow for the continued and dogged denigration of our country while perpetuating a false dream of opportunity.

We must make that country for ourselves, or else face the same fate as the previous dominant species of this realm.

Good luck to us all.

Categories
First World Problems Politics

To Live and Die on Twitter

Here I was worried about having a Twitter in my name thinking I’d get in trouble for tweeting out my unfiltered beliefs online that I’d deactivated not one, not two, not three, but four (possibly five) Twitter accounts with my actual name.

Come 2016, I briefly had a Twitter for the minor league team. About a month or so after coming back to Atlanta, that shit was gone. I turfed it and went on with life.

And then the Nazi president struck and suddenly I needed to be back on that little bird app to make sure the world hadn’t ended in 180 characters or less.

I’d made a handful of “anonymous” accounts, basically just accounts without my name (like this blog). I did have one last account with my true identity before getting rid of that sucker in 2018. Thinking I could safely browse the Twitter-sphere, I forayed into that great valley of memes and feet pics/thirst traps under my assumed name.

At first I only browsed. Then the browsing turned into casual likes, and retweets, and eventually full-on tweets. Sometimes, even telling Trump to go fuck himself personally! What a thrill to verbally assault that fucking orange clown!

And then I began “violating” Twitter’s policies: one time was for telling someone to play in traffic, another for telling the official @GOP account to “eat shit and die”.

With one anonymous account down, I resorted to posting on my self-described “sports” account in which I’d try to avoid the political bullshit, more or less making that little corner of binary code my home for venting about the state of the pandemified world.

Of course, I interacted with more and more people, inevitably catching Twitter’s attention for a handful tweets, like the time I reacted to a post where a woman posted screenshots of demented texts from her abusive father who beat her and her mother on the regular. Upon my reply of “I wanna beat this fucking guy to shit WOW you abusive fucking prick”, I was suspended for abuse and harassment even though 1) I wasn’t tweeting at this man in particular and 2) HE WAS THREATENING HIS DAUGHTER WHO WENT ON TWITTER AND POST SAID THREATS AS HER OWN WAY OF COPING.

And yet that caught me a 10-day Twitter jail run.

But of all the times I more or less told Candace Owens to go fuck herself, called Matt Walsh a stupid fascist, or even went after Donald Fucking Trump himself, the final straw was the following:

YES, you read that correctly!

“I don’t see Tucker Carlson, I just see a redneck.”

And thus, the Twitter gods consigned my 20-follower account to ***SUSPENSION**** (pending review).

In direct violation of their policy that you must not create a new account to skirt a suspension, I fucking did that shit knowing that just like the last account I had this happen, they were never gonna give me a chance. So, I figured I’d try again.

And dear reader, I made an account that racked up 6 followers IN ONE DAY.

I felt FAMOUS, ALIVE: I had BEATEN the Great Jack Dorsey and his merry band of sometimes-not-completely-oblivious-to-actual-harassment moderators policing the high seas of the Timeline.

Alas, I tried following the girl with the abusive father and send her message, something I couldn’t do without listing my phone number.

And dear reader, you know damn well my stupid ass posted the only phone number I own, the very one linked with my currently suspended account. You know, the same account they told me not to try skirting around the suspension with a new account?

Hardly the smartest social media violation I’ve ever committed, but sadly it will more than likely end my Twitter days.

All of this, keep in mind, beginning because I was too damn afraid to have a Twitter in my own name in the first place.

All’s well that ends well, I suppose.

Maybe Tom from MySpace will welcome me back.  

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