Unemployed Ben

Saw some guys from my old days as a working man and watched football at a 7 plasma bar, I being the apparent pussy of the bunch was ordering Cranberry juice while my cohorts were downing pitchers and nachos at 10am. Shit I even nodded off once or twice in the first half, not too unlike the Seahawks. It felt like a let down game and it became one. A trip to the East Coast with nothing really to play for, can do that for a team. However the papers this morning made it seem the Hawks were shutout 45-0, calling them fatally flawed and destined to be seen only on golf courses after the first round. Reporters tend to be a little harsh around here when they have to watch a boring football game, makes it hard to write about the game itself so there must be some underlying story about failures so obvious its a surprise that the PlayBook hasn’t been sent to every defense coordinator in advance of all the remaining games.

Good to see and hang with some old friends though, things feel very different and yet the same all at once. These are good guys living good lives and they deserve it, a tad too focused on work though maybe. As we worked in the same company and building for a few years one of them hasn’t missed a day of work in like a decade and the other went a sketchy part of our country to help out the company, well at least it wasn’t Tampa Bay.

Just email me with your invite request for Grand Central

There is an expression that I really dig and its not something that I come across as much as I used to. The phrase is ‘They just get it”. Its not something that is easily explained, it can show up in a simple nod or perhaps even a joke told in the back of a bar but when it happens there is this unmistakable sense of recognition that tells you the person in front of you is cut from the same cloth. Its usually followed by a hey or whoa and that is all is needed.

This can also go for people you haven’t met, take Judd Apatow for instance, he just seems to get it. His writing is dead on with the way a lot of people talk and act, even if it offends. This couldn’t be any more apparent than in his newest movie Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story and in particular the following scene.

How obvious is that scene and yet it appears for the first time in 2007. Something so natural and yet so dang funny, as if you were just talking to a friend. Looking forward to this one as all the Ray’s, Doors, and Walk the Line needed a little mocking.

The words of a guy that just gets it:

I’m a man who discovered the wheel and built the Eiffel Tower out of metal and brawn. That’s what kind of man I am. You’re just a woman with a small brain. With a brain a third the size of us. It’s science.

Well if you were a man, I’d punch you. Punch you right in the mouth.

I don’t know how to put this but I’m kind of a big deal. People know me. I have many leather-bound books and my apartment smells of rich mahogany.

I’m gonna punch you in the ovary, that’s what I’m gonna do. A straight shot. Right to the babymaker.

We are laughing and we are very good friends. Good buddies sharing a special moment…laughing and enjoying our friendship, and someday we’ll look back on this with much fondness.

Sorry about the previous days of blogging, I told you the rust needed to be shaken off or more like sandblasted off with a million throwing stars.

In watching some recent sports highlights I am amazed at how much influence the referee still has on games, they make about 100k a year and can change the direction of the entire multi-billion dollar league. Seems to me even more mistakes still occur, sure the 10 camera angles help us see the miscues a whole lot easier but shouldn’t the goal of any league be to just get the call right. This is part of the reason I paled back my interest in sports and thats brings up an interesting question, where does interest become fanaticism?

More than a few times I questioned why I needed to know who the backup tight-end of the Jets was and why I felt the need to ponder if he had to play, how that might effect the teams weak side pass protection. Now consider that I don’t like the Jets and that this knowledge is only useful if I am a scout for the NFL or a obsessed fantasy football geek.

Very few of the people I hang around with would see this as a problem, actually it would be considered as an asset. However, there is a line you cross when it goes from wants to needs and obsession begins to creep into the picture, then that line is awful fuzzy. Its the highs and lows that make it so damn interesting, a roller coaster of emotions and if you come out on the winning side it can make you feel invincible. I won, so in the end if felt good at the end of the day or year but that doesn’t exclude some door slamming, desk kicking and even a few shattered CD’s. It became less fun and more like a chore, I essentially treated it like a job and the actually games were irrelevant even with my hometown Seahawks, sure I rooted for them but not if it could cost me a fantasy game.

So took a step back and it feels good, I don’t watch a game unless I want to. I don’t have to read the sports page or even worry about things like injury reports, which coach is on the hotseat or why Terrell Owens is such a gigantic tool. I let others take up where I left off and to them it might be a more enjoyable experience, I was holding on too tight and for something as silly as rooting for some millionaires to beat other millionaires in a half a billion dollar stadium I helped build and maintain with my taxes and $7 beers. Not a real complaint it just seems I am more distant from the modern athlete than at anytime in my life.

So I am a dick again, a dick to my family and to others. Why do you say? I’ll fill ya in. Its simply because someone invited themselves to the family x-mas eve party and I simply reacted in a normal fashion, which was ‘you are not related to us why would you be coming?’. Apparently this was worse than anything Hitler ever did because people freaked big time, I mean they aren’t fucking related to us and it would be uncomfortable so I said what everyone was thinking. So now that I am the designated asshole this year, I guess the gloves are off.

O.A.N. - No Country For Old Men is an amazing flick with an odd ending that caught me and seemingly the whole audience off guard, however it really made me think and I cant say that has happened in awhile, not that anyone gives a flying fuck. It was faithful to the book and that is always a good thing as the source material should always be celebrated. It reminded me of Blood Simple, a movie a lot of Coen Bros fans haven’t seen, its dark and violent and is ages away from the next movie they made, Raising Arizona. And no matter how violent or disturbing this movie was, it was still quite funny at times and thats a hard thing to do with there is evil incarnate on screen for a large portion of the movie. And good news to all their fans, they are making a flurry of movies in the next few years.

Observation: Is it just me or is Josh Brolin the new bad ass in town having nearly stole the screen away from Denzel and Russell in AG and now having the lead role in one of the best films this decade? Hopefully his B Movie days are now behind him.

X-Mas is creeping closer and closer and I haven’t purchased so much as a wreath, not even for my nieces, I feel like a bad uncle and perhaps thats because I am as I could have gone to a bball game of theirs today but I used the snow as an excuse not to go. Don’t mind driving in snow its just the other people, I see people doing many a stupid thing on dry and warm days so when snow is around I tend to stay home and make a big batch of chili. It was only average tasting but on a day like this it just seems like the thing to do and a little fire in the belly and ass will make the cold seem like a mirage that only exists outside my window.

Not sure I will ever get used to being broke, it sucks…it truly truly sucks. So many things I want and or need and yet I’ve had to pretty much repress my urges of commercialism.