Week one
The game: Patriots at Dolphins
The beer: Turtle Swamp JP Porter
The result: Loss, 20–7
The method: NFL Game Pass NFL+
The knockout: Steelers win, 23–20

Week two
The game: Patriots at Steelers
The beer: Moat Mountain Boneshaker Brown Ale
The result: Win, 17–14
The method: NFL+
The knockout: Packers win, 27–10

Week three
The game: Ravens at Patriots
The beer: Earth Eagle October Skies Lager
The result: Loss, 37–26
The method: NFL+
The knockout: Chargers lose, 38–10

Week four
The game: Patriots at Packers
The beer: Riverwalk Shucked Amber Lager
The result: Loss, 27–24
The method: Live via Paramount+

Week five
The game: Lions at Patriots
The beer: Shovel Town Pumpkin Ale
The result: 29–0
The method: NFL+

Week six
The game: Patriots at Browns
The beer: Founders KBS Imperial Stout
The result: 38–15
The method: NFL+

The headline: “When you are gone I keep track of the time in my diary line by line, and the past is behind.” – Earth Opera, “The Red Sox Are Winning”

The commentary: I’m getting all the mileage I can out of this supposed “Bosstown Sound”—the Red Sox did not win (neither are the Yankees) and hippies were not slaughtered (only regular intervals of NRA-targeted children). But that opening “diary” lyric? Beautiful. Maybe another manufactured music scene will offer inspiration ahead of XIV.

Meanwhile: NFL Game Pass changed their name, reduced their price and confused the hell out of me. Nothing about the service, or at least about the way I use the service, is different from last season. Suddenly the league turns generous? I guess I’ll find out tonight, as a non-existent ESPN subscription, a janky digital antenna and overcast conditions may force a choice between watching on my Kindle or seeking out a dank North Shore sports bar. Shudder. The frustrating thing is that we’ve moved from a North Shore town with two breweries to a North Shore city with two breweries… and none of the four are open past eight o’clock on a Monday! I mean, football on a Kindle?? What a foul form—Tony Eason weeps.

A Foul Form, you say? Short, but likely to cream it up come January 1. Off’s self-titled 2012 “album” set the precedent but I’m kind of grasping at straws here, since Ty Segall has tread water awhile (even if the song “Hello, Hi” is the best of the year) and “new”-band-I’m-into King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard is overstuffing a mediocre 2022 compared to peak output I’m in Your Mind Fuzz and Infest the Rats’ Nest (though neither is better than Shellac’s Dude Incredible in 2014 or Segall’s own First Taste in 2019, respectively, and First Taste probably wasn’t even better than the Osees’ Oh Sees’ Face Stabber to begin with).

King Gizzard has a fifth (!) ’22 release on the horizon but I’m not holding my breath, with Omnium Gatherum and Ice, Death, Planets, Lungs, Mushrooms and Lava producing three great songs apiece (“Gaia,” “Predator X” and “Red Smoke”; “Iron Lung,” “Gliese 710” and “Ice V”—lo, the “Xmas blues” potential!) and Made in Timeland and Laminated Denim combining for zero. I suppose I like them in the way I do Spacemen 3—ape enough good shit well and your shit, too, will rock—but it took a lot of patience. Segall’s and (at the time) Thee Oh Sees’ towering catalogs were similarly intimidating but those paid off much more kindly. Sometimes you have to shut up and dive in. King Gizzard, therefore, was a matter of time and attention given their overt theft of Segall’s early releases and John Dwyer’s entire batch of them—all that’s missing is Bent Arcana/Moon-Drenched/etc. electro-jazz—but I might not have bothered with any Osees studio product whatsoever last year. Drag.

Back to A Foul Form. Blink and its ten tracks are over—you could have listened all the way through in the time it took me to write the last paragraph, with the HTML and the links and shit. It’s great and it’s over—not quite the hiatus-buster I expected. But an Osees album (EP?) is an Osees album (definitely EP), even if you have to listen twice. Play four of those fuckers right in a row in the middle of a live set and you’ll wonder if twenty minutes is too long!

A year less a day later, Boston’s Royale instead of Cambridge’s Sinclair, very similar photo, usurping a second consecutive Survivor Fall premiere. I guess Dwyer subscribes to Paramount+ as well.

[Indeed: “Withered Hand” (Volume 14), “Animated Violence” (Volume 10) and “If I Had My Way” (Volume 13). So nice (Volume 9).]

The tour seems to have wrapped so hopefully they’re back in the studio, ready to unleash a Gizzardian double album of the hottest piss. I can’t wait. (I took no pictures of Segall at the same venue two months earlier, betraying my shifted allegiance in case years of cream and today’s “tread water” remark didn’t end all debate. Hello? Hi!)

This concludes “Cord-cutting and concerts XIII.” Should I speak of Triangle of Sadness, Saturday’s date-night feature presentation—“Marx and plumbing XIII”? As if each act didn’t run twenty minutes too long, never mind the gags—har! har! Jesus Christ. “Mac and Bailey XIII,” then? Warmer. “Beer and football XIII”? That’s the one.

Your 2022/2023 New England Patriots are a weird bunch. Lose a top defensive player in JC Jackson, gain a worthy fourth-round replacement in Jack Jones to fill the role of cornerback who intercepts passes thrown right at him. Of course, Devin McCourty is still perfecting the art of perfecting bad angles—how anyone takes him seriously as a valuable contributor is beyond me. Listen: “As much as I like McCourty [Edit: Pardon me??], anyone who says he deserves to win [Rookie of the Year] over Suh is a total, total homer who probably couldn’t name the Pats’ backup quarterback.” I stand by all of that through today, except for the part about McCourty being any good. We’ll always have “Free Free Safety Advice.” And for every idiot Patriots fan who can’t name the backup, there are two or three ready to forgo aspirin and drive the third-stringer to Canton.

Zappe looked great last week… against the Browns. He looked fine the week before… against the Lions. And he really didn’t look like much the week before that… against what has since been exposed as another Aaron Rodgers fraud-o-rama. Bring in Joel Klatt! People went nuts for Scott Zolak once upon a time as well, to the point that he never has to pay for a drink or another letting out of his pants around here for the rest of his life. Is it the Z? Some asshole in the crowd of last week’s broadcast covered up an obvious number-four VINATIERI nameplate with a homemade ZAPPE. Assassinate that motherfucker. He is your 2022/2023 New England Patriots fan.

Looks like Mac’s going tonight and I’m glad, assuming the guy’s healthy enough—for every long week there’s a short week, you see. I don’t know if he’s the future or even if he’s all that good, and that’s why: I want to know. If so then great! Make room for six more banners. If not, though, show Belichick the door and let someone else make the call on Brady’s replacement. We’re in year fucking three. “In Bill we trust!” Idiots.

No knockout talk. You’re goddamn right. But I did buy a new bike, the subject of which made it as far as the title of this post and now a closing afterthought. Maybe I should ride that sucker—I’ll make for an amazing total package with my puffy old-man saddle and my giant orange helmet. Har! Har!

Up next: Monday night on ESPN via NBC with Fox’s former broadcast team. Cheers!