The beer: Proclamation Derivative Vic Secret Pale Ale
The commentary: Some people lose front teeth. Others lose old blog posts. (Transition: smooth.) My relationship with the Biff! Bang! words you’re reading is troubled, and if the Pats weren’t such a goddamn winning machine I might have signed off altogether following the Beefheart crowning achievement. It’s not too late for me? Are you sure?
Over the… thirteen? Years? Well there’s your problem. Try writing anything for so long that even you’ll be interested to read, never mind anyone else who stumbles across something thanks to a million-dollar marketing campaign. As such, if my math is correct, I’ve published and since disqualified more than two dozen posts, ranging from three-word Meryl Streep hate crimes to multi-paragraph sob stories about a fickle college friend. Lots of anger in there. Why were these and others killed off at the expense of, I don’t know, “Tomatoes, strangely”? Let’s see.
“Trucker tan”
Tuesday, August 9, 2005
A bad joke about my pale upper arm and sunburned lower arm resembling the Polish flag. This was the birth of quick sizzle. Next.
“Too early?”
Monday, August 15, 2005
If calculating magic numbers for the defending-world-champion Boston Red Sox is your thing—in August—then look no further. Blogger was clearly my new toy since I posted eleven times that first month. Maybe more.
“Let’s do this”
Thursday, September 8, 2005
Excitement over the upcoming NFL season. Note to 2005 self: the Pats won’t win another title for ten years. Also, your cat died the day after the Broncos knocked out the Pats. That sucked worse. Somewhere in here I started a second blog (!) called “Bring Back Pat,” to be devoted to musings about my preference for the old Pat Patriot logo and the red uniforms and pants. I never posted a thing there and deleted it soon after, so “bringbackpat.blogspot.com” is again available as a domain for you old-school fans.
“Flipping and flopping”
Friday, September 23, 2005
A shameful display of misogyny that began by asking, literally, “What’s with all these women wearing flip-flops to work?” before concluding “If your left foot says flip and your right says flop then you’re wearing flip-flops, sister.” You will one day have a daughter, you smug asshole!
“Johnny Miller, are you paying attention?”
Friday, October 7, 2005
I don’t get the Johnny Miller joke—maybe check the Fire Joe Morgan archives for context—but I basically retweeted Dan Shanoff’s quote about Jason Giambi’s AL Comeback Player of the Year award: “Something seems wrong about rewarding a guy for a ‘comeback’ that only happened because he hit rock bottom after he stopped cheating.” Good stuff, but not mine.
“Pleated pants, Cambridge bicyclists and Tim McCarver must be stopped”
Friday, October 14, 2005
Another (doubtlessly) Fire Joe Morgan-inspired head-scratcher that was all about the headline. But I had a point. Three of them!
“To my reader”
Wednesday, December 14, 2005
An apology “for giving such short shrift to my blog lately” and the origin of an ongoing I-only-have-one-reader gag, which is no gag at all. “So stay tuned for the continuing saga of what’s right about psychedelic music, what’s wrong about the People’s Republic and some stuff in between (hopefully Syd Barrett emerging from self-imposed exile to lay waste to Porter Square).” Hawkwind would have played better there.
“ABC is continually jerking me around”
Thursday, March 9, 2006
An entitled primal scream about a lack of new Lost episodes. Nice insight, though, about endless reruns “stealing Wednesday nights from me and my attention span.” The nascent Lower Galactic Biffy Council Strongman Jarrod P. Biffington (Jr.) is in there somewhere.
“Already?”
Monday, April 3, 2006
In which I take issue with DJ Gallo’s use of “finally” and “all winter long” in anticipation of baseball’s weren’t-we-just-here return. “I’m the first to admit that when it comes to the Red Sox, I am one hundred percent content with the 2004 championship.” Three championships later and I’m still content with 2004: “The Red Sox became The Red Sox, Inc. sometime in the last seventeen months, and pardon me if I’d rather root for a bunch of idiots. So here’s hoping the Cubs fire their barber.” That’s when baseball lost me.
“Why Bill Belichick is the coolest”
Tuesday, May 2, 2006
Another retweet: “If [Doug Flutie] wants to come back, is the door open?” “Why don’t we get a list of hypothetical questions so we can go through them one through five?”
“Blame it on the wife”
Thursday, May 18, 2006
The “switching over to a new email application (Mozilla Thunderbird, which is pretty good so far)” introduction is 2006 in a bottle, just as the distasteful melodrama that follows is early-thirties frustration. It amounts to an extended low blow targeting someone who didn’t deserve it, lightened only by an aside about visiting Long Island, hearing someone order a Long Island iced tea and joking “Can’t you just say ‘iced tea’ down here?” It fell flat. A lot of these discarded posts did.
“‘His homer, which came when the score was 9 to 1…’”
Tuesday, May 23, 2006
The New York Daily News mourns the unrealized Manny/A-Rod trade.
“Yes!”
Friday, May 26, 2006
A puzzling shout-out to the makers of PowerAde: “Thanks to your ergonomically designed finger grooves, I managed to make it through my entire lunch without dropping the bottle. Not once!” No wonder my productivity didn’t evolve that temp job to perm.
[Scene missing]
One thing I remember writing that I can’t find anywhere was a celebration of the… ironic?… Michael Vick/“Ron Mexico” ringer tee I ordered myself. (Read further down the man’s history to understand why I engaged permanent eraser there.) I assume this was the June 2006 post I can’t account for because I had an OCD thing early on about posting at least once a month, even if there was nothing of value to say. Like…
“The hating of a movie in three words”
Saturday, July 29, 2006
“Screw you, Prada!” I don’t know, that’s pretty good.
“Vanity in a never-ending battle against itself”
Tuesday, August 29, 2006
More misogyny, this time criticizing women who apply make-up during their subway commutes.
“Happy Halloween, Tiki Barber”
Tuesday, October 31, 2006
I guess Tiki made a lot of noise with an advanced retirement announcement? Who cares. I read too much Bill Simmons back then.
“The smallest surprise in the world”
Monday, November 13, 2006
“Not due to the fact that [Tower Records] is closing [but rather] that a chain charging $18.99 a pop for thirty-five minutes of music has been able to exist at all.”
“I’m back y’all”
Monday, December 18, 2006
I left?
“Go Bears”
Sunday, January 21, 2007
“Goddammit.” Goddammit.
“Someone’s had too much to think”
Wednesday, February 28, 2007
My first collection of half-baked things I think I think (as if today’s doesn’t lean on things I think I thought): plans to review old mixtapes (this happened, though not in series form); Peter King’s subpar editor (handled much better two years later—that was a lot of fun); early kowtowing to Sleater-Kinney’s The Woods; a stack of old issues of Newsweek I was determined to get through, not yet realizing that they obscured several overdue bills; vague shock-and-awe praise for 24, a show I would watch with more… cynicism… nowadays; a tired attack on Al Gore and the self-congratulating Oscars for their vulgar waste of money and resources (“can’t they just send the winners an email?”); a related admission that “I didn’t think The Departed was very good”; another shot at the overrated Meryl Streep, who “is so smug I want to write a check in her name and send it along with a subscription form to the New York Post, and then have that check bounce”; and a cheesy wedding-related wink for the benefit of my (then) fiancée, who hasn’t read me for years. You don’t know what you’re missing, babe.
“Fear”
Wednesday, April 11, 2007
Hand-ringing over a desire to mess with my HTML template. First-world problems.
“As in the cereal”
Saturday, June 2, 2007
From the back of a truck: “Would you like a case of Honey Bunches of Oats?”
“Good luck with that thirty-second pick”
Friday, September 14, 2007
A balanced and reasonable response to Spygate justice.
“A nugget”
Wednesday, November 7, 2007
Mike Vrabel gave zero fucks about Don Shula’s opinion regarding the Patriots’ so-far undefeated season. “Hosannah!”
“Don’t let the door yadda yadda yadda”
Thursday, November 8, 2007
Who the hell is Eric Gagne?
“That’s right, the Mascara Snake!”
Monday, August 18, 2008
An early Trout Mask Replica draft?? No, just another apology to my reader(s). I also labeled Brett Favre a “dirty ballsack” for some reason.
“Changing one’s mind on short notice”
Friday, September 12, 2008
Gather round the fireplace for this tale of a Cambridge-type woman offering her Red Line seat to an elderly gentleman and then yelling at everyone else for not doing the same. “PS: The live version of ‘Time We Left This World Today’ from Space Ritual, Vol. 2 outlasted my entire ride.”
“Maybe I should force-justify all my post titles because that looks real sharp”
Tuesday, March 23, 2010
Saving the best for last: “You dirty rat cocksuckers!” The imposter blog is long dead but I might have to restore this heat.
So there we have the salvaged fruit from a smoldering wasteland, unsafe to consume but, you know, there for emergencies, because twelve-thousand-word coming-of-age essays aren’t enough to pass the time. But what about the stuff that never progressed from an unformatted TextEdit file to the publicly available ones and zeroes of our vast inter-net? There wasn’t much to find—three in all—and some portion(s) might eventually be “developed” as did Beefheart. The first example is “Calling the race: Ty Segall’s Emotional Mugger,” in which I planned to declare early on that the subject would be the best album of a young 2016:
“My family and I visited Portsmouth on January 23 of this year. It was a Saturday and we got a parking ticket. Drag. Let’s seek retail therapy at Bull Moose—I still had store credit from CD sales and that shit burns, so what to buy? And, lo, a new Ty Segall album! Where does he find the time?”
I foresaw an opportunity to defend how often I revisit my continuing adventures based on new discoveries and changing tastes. It remains a good idea. Up next is a third short story entitled “Trial Size.” There is a beginning, an abrupt ending and no middle whatsoever:
“Jonathan-Jacob Splettshoesser had a large name and and a small skull. His skull wasn’t so small—except to you and me—as much as it was in perfect proportion to his small body. His hands, too, were small. His hair. His lungs. He even produced small things, like handwriting and ideas and waste.”
I have in mind another story about a fictional sixties/seventies/eighties band named Beard. It will be more of a Photoshop project in which I relate their history by doctoring celebrated album covers. Completion percentage: zero. Motivation/initiative: zero. Lastly, here’s a presumed fragment (and image) from 2013 that may have pointed toward a pronounced enthusiasm for the half-hour live version of “Spoon” from the fortieth-anniversary reissue of Can’s Tago Mago. In its entirety and, yes, beginning with “Also”:
“Also, look at Jaki’s simple drum kit pictured in the reissue cover above.”
Fin. I probably figured to riff on bad, overblown drummers like Peter Criss and Neil Peart. Take that, nerds!
As for LIII, the Patriots are playing in their eleventh Super Bowl of my lifetime, their ninth of the Brady–Belichick era, their fifth in G’s lifetime and their fourth in the last five years. How’s everybody feeling?
“I’m feeling pretty good.”
Danilchuk Auto Body
January 29, 2019
I agree and with a high level of confidence. Just like last year! Alas, a year-old Facebook post emerges: “As a football fan I want a Pats–Saints Super Bowl. As a Pats fan I want Brady–Foles or Brady–Keenum.” Thanks for the humbling reminder, you data-mining monster. Someone’s had too much to think.
Up next: Hotlanta. Go Pats!
More Cream Please 