The Barryfest Chronicles

A couple of weeks ago, I saw Into The Wild for the first time.  It was a pretty fascinating movie, and my fascination with the incredible cinematography and flawless acting was no doubt heightened by the fact that I hit the trees pretty hard before I popped in the DVD.  If the movie hadn’t been based on a true story, I would have called bullshit on the whole premise, and the extreme details of Chris McCandless’ ill-fated journey would have came off as completely overwrought sentimental cheese if the action in the movie (or at least a non-dramatized approximation of it) didn’t actually happen at some point in time.

Because not only were his travels unconventional to start with, but by the end of the movie I was convinced that they were also completely emblematic of a particular moment in history.  While the early 1990s are nearly two decades old,  Into The Wild isn’t exactly a period piece.  The setting is very familiar (it has cars, credit cards, fast food restaurants, television, etc) and yet the differences that exist are striking.

Alexander Supertramp was very likely riding the crest of the final, awesome wave of casual hitch hiking in the United States of America.  I’ve done my fair share of driving around this great country, and I have never – not once, not a single time in my entire life – seen someone on the side of the road trying to thumb a ride.  I am not even going to waste time to try to figure out how or why the practice is all but eradicated, because the mere fact that is does not seem to exist anymore proves my point.  What was unusual but plausible just a few years ago seems like science fiction in this day and age.  Especially when you are really, really high.

And it goes beyond Into The Wild.  I got to thinking and realized that the majority of the action in the movie takes place between 1990 and 1992, with also just so happened to be the  heyday of a novel concept know as MTV’s Rock ‘N Jock.  For those of you who do not remember Rock ‘N Jock, let me give you the rundown:  Professional athletes would team up with celebrities to play in pickup softball, baseball, basketball and football games.

These games were loosely officiated and featured people making millions of dollars a year at their day jobs muscling up to try to hit a 350 foot home run off a tee or launch a ball four stories into the air to score a 100 point basket.  If there ever was a high water mark of unnecessary risk, Rock ‘N Jock was surely it.

This type of shit would go over like a lead balloon nowadays.  The caliber of talent that would ostensibly be standing shoulder to shoulder with Dean Cain and Roger McDowell don’t even participate in the Home Run Derby or Slam Dunk contests of their actual professional leagues anymore for risk of injury or other negative effects the exhibitions may have on their form or function.  With the exception of Dhani Jones and his inexplicable quest to tackle the globe, the riskiest thing a modern day professional athlete does in the off-season is have sex with Madonna.

Another staple of the 1990s:  Seinfeld.  Now, Seinfeld isn’t exactly dated in the way that, say, a show like Deadwood is, but there are anachronisms in almost every episode that serve as constant reminders that the show originally aired in a different era.  The main characters aren’t rocking afros in apartments decked out with shag carpet, but there are no cell phones, people bring four carry-on bags to the airport and Jerry needs a blank VHS tape to record the evening’s Mets game.

Even later episodes like “The Nap” which aired in 1997,  Jerry called in a bomb threat to Yankee Stadium so George could escape from under his desk, where he had recently discovered he could catch a snooze during his work day.  It is a funny premise, but is there any doubt that a scene like that, if it happened on How I Met Your Mother, My Boys or any other show set in the present, would come off as completely improbable?  That type of shit (along with countless other instances of hijinx featured on the show) is just no longer a joke.

But because of the huge amount of  things I find completely bizarre about days not so far removed from the ones we are living in, I wonder if this is just the natural order of things when it comes to hindsight.  I mean, I am just reaching the age in which I can summon lucid memories of events in my life that took place over a decade ago, so maybe I am still getting the hang of this whole “retrospective” thing.

I can imagine that it won’t be long before we are all reminiscing about the strange days when Lil’ Wayne had a blog on ESPN.com and would show up on 1st and 10 and have debates with that contrarian prick Skip Bayless.  And history is already turning on the XFL, P. Diddy’s Making The Band and Sarah Palin, so I guess that sooner or later everything looks pretty weird when you see it in your rear view mirror.  I just didn’t realize it happens so quickly.

Dear Alex,

When it comes to performance-enhancing drugs in baseball, nothing surprises me these days.  Long before the Mitchell Report was even commissioned, I had pretty much made peace with the fact that during the thousands of hours I spent watching baseball as a kid, either on the tube while eating sandwiches with my dad or live and in-person after shelling out ungodly amounts of money at Wrigley Field or Fenway Park, I was looking at little more than a rotating cast of circus-freak junkies with drug habits that would make Pete Doherty look like Robert Barnes.

I am far from a baseball purist so I will spare you a lecture on taints, but I will go on record as saying it really fucking sucked when I figured out the specific era I grew up watching will go down as one of the dirtiest stretches in the history of any professional sport.  It was juiced-up pitchers throwing to juiced up hitters in almost every game, so there isn’t a single statistic from the entire “steroid era” that is free from the influence – be it positive or negative – of the excessive amount of doping that was going on at the time.  It was a fantasy land of large foreheads and shrunken testicles where nothing was real.

Sure it hurt, but I eventually got over it.  I still love baseball, but it has been a while since I approached any allegation of wrong-doing in the majors with even a marginal amount of shock or skepticism.  A resigned “Sure.  Why not?” is about all I can muster these days.  Maybe a “Figures.  Asshole.”  if the perpetrator is a dick anyways,  but I am no longer capable of anything that even approaches excitement, melancholy or doubt when the latest rumblings hit the news wire.

That was, of course, until Sports Illustrated outed you as one of the players who pissed hot during the 2003 round of anonymous drug testing designed to investigate just how big a problem Bud Selig had on his hands.  As a die hard Red Sox fan who wishes nothing but occupational ill-will on the entire Yankee squad and a lifelong baseball lover who never though you played the game the way it was meant to be played, this year’s annual spring training steroid speculations saga got a rise out of me for the first time since Jose Canseco named names way back in Juiced.

And then came your Peter Gammon’s interview and the press conference, which each added an amazing new wrinkle to the whole situation.  Here you are – the highest paid player, a mortal lock for a spot in the Hall of Fame on your first shot, and the misunderstood hero that was sent to banish the evil Barry Bonds from The Elias Sports Bureau’s record books – not just being accused of using performance-enhancing substances, but openly discussing the allegations.

Fuzzy math, factual inconsistencies and my complete disdain for you as a human being aside, I’ll admit you’ve gotten as close to facing the music as anyone of your stature, and for that I think you deserve some credit.  Your candor, although staged, made me realize that I, too, once found myself immersed in a culture where the loosey-goosey use of any number of performance-enhancing drugs was rampant.  I, too, felt great pressure to perform at a high level.  And to get an edge, I, too, turned to illicit and banned substances.

It was a time in my life I like to refer to as “college.”  During those halcyon days of consequence-free youthful indiscretion, there is no way I can claim to have always been 100% sure of what I was putting into my body.  If I were to have failed a drug test at any point during my four year stint, I probably would not have been able to immediately figure out which of my many indulgences triggered a red flag, either.  And on the occasions that my degree of inebriation prompted a “What the hell are you on?” from offended bystanders, I wasn’t always up-front in describing the particular combination of intoxicants surging through my system.

Granted, I was just looking for something to help me crank out 25 pages on the sociology of complex organizations or heighten my enjoyment of Stop Making Sense and you were violating the public trust and tarnishing the reputation of our National Pastime, but our exploits have more in common than I would like to admit.  And even though you came off as a complete shitbird over the past week (a well-coached shitbird, but a shitbird nonetheless),  at the end of the day I am buying what you are selling.  Unfortunately, all you are selling is a glib cop-out story that still doesn’t really add up.

Given Major Leauge Baseball’s epic fail on all things steroid-related, I am willing to give you the benefit of the doubt on this whole ordeal and let you get on with your career, I just ask you please stop saying you are stupid or naive or sorry.  While you and I may or may not have explicitly violated any rules with our substance-abuse, we were both cheating and we both knew it.  And had you not been caught, I am sure you would be showing just as much remorse for your past behavior as I do for mine, which is to say none at all.

You can count on the holiday season for many things, most of them welcome traditions that involve seeing friends and family and eating like one of Method Man’s torture victims.  But in this day and age, the last few months of the year wouldn’t be complete without a few people you may only be auxiliarly acquainted with wishing you well via a text message that was very likely sent to dozens, if not hundreds, of other people.

Don’t get me wrong folks, I sincerely appreciate you taking the time to tap some generic season’s greeting into your cell phone and send it to every number you have stored in your address book.  I mean, if you are still banging that out on a 10-key, you could have spent 15, hell, 20 seconds assembling such moving prose and disseminating it to anyone you have made contact with since you first got wireless service.

Of course, with one of those newfangled smart phones that most people are carrying around these days, messages like these practically write themselves.  Couple that with the growing popularity of all-inclusive service plans that usually include unlimited text messaging, and the barrier to entry on this type of communication is at an all time low.  So, while more common around major holidays and playoff victories by your hometown team, I am suspicious that mass text messages are becoming more and more prevalent. Read the rest of this entry »

The other day, I figured out that supporting facts and supporting the McCain/Palin campaign are two mutually exclusive positions.  I am not even saying that you have to be one of those people who knows a lot of facts or is even particularly good at remembering facts.  But if you have even the smallest appreciation for the beauty and simplicity of a well-stated and verifiable fact, this campaign season has got to be wearing on you.

This total disregard for truth is only part of the GOP’s anti-intellectual, populist movement that has effectively turned me into a radical intellectual militant.  I feel like I am forced to assume that if anyone out there is still planning to cast a vote for John McCain, it is likely a result of his or her below-average intellect.  I have to figure that he or she is no different than the horrifically misinformed dolts that file into the crowd for a Sarah Palin speech and proceed to slur African-American members of the media covering the event and share their desire to assassinate the man on the other side of the ticket. Read the rest of this entry »

You can tell a lot about a television network or program’s actual or intended audience by the type of commercials that run during the time-slot.  MTV gets most of their money from Clearasil and anti-smoking promos, the Food Network regularly shills kitchen appliances and household chemicals, and afternoon court shows are underwritten almost exclusively by bankruptcy and personal injury attorneys.

I remember back when I was much younger, I found myself inexplicably engaged by a made-for-TV movie on Lifetime.  I am not sure exactly how old I was at the time, but I had just started expanding my media consumption horizon beyond TGIF, SNICK, Cubs games on WGN, and of course The Real World, so I was relatively new to basic and extended basic cable channels.

And being unfamiliar with the target demographic of Lifetime, I allowed myself to get wrapped up in the story of a family having a hard time coping with the loss of their teen-aged daughter without even a twinge of embarrassment or guilt.  This is, until a network promo informed me I was watching “Lifetime.  Television for Women.”  I quickly shut off the TV, made sure no one had witnessed this emasculating episode and slowly backpedaled out of the room with a mortified look on my face.  Of course, hindsight being 20/20, I should have been suspicious when all the commercials were for osteoporosis treatments and hormone replacement therapy. Read the rest of this entry »

I assume that the advanced technology you find in bathrooms these days is designed to be more hygienic and, for good measure, maybe conserve some energy, water and refuse.  But in reality, almost every time I walk into a bathroom with motion detectors everywhere, the following sequence of events unfolds:

1. The urinal that I am at does not automatically flush after I take care of my business, but the three other ones do as I walk past them
2. I am not expecting the soap dispenser to be touch free so I jam my hand into it and then feel all over to find the part you are supposed to push
3. Waving my hand in front of the paper towel dispenser is futile so I reach in, pull hard, and end up ripping off twice as much as I need Read the rest of this entry »

September is half in the bag and the heat and humidity down here are still turning my brain to mush on a daily basis.  I’ve been told that there is an end in sight, but I sure as shit haven’t caught a glimpse of it.  I will never act like I am going to miss the Chicago winters – the way they arrive out of nowhere with bone-chilling cold and don’t let up until the torrential rains of spring blow through – but I do feel another dose of seasonal affective disorder creeping into my UV-damaged, sweat-soaked psyche.

I think New Orleans is slowly making me insane.  Thankfully, this is not the type of “insane” that is caused by a bad breakup and then fueled with a steady diet of prescription pills and whippets.  No, no, no.  The “insane” I am feeling now is a good thing; maybe the best of things.  It is a liberating and enlightening psychosis that makes the Charles Shaw taste sweeter and the drunken heaters seem more satisfying.

Unlike up north, where even in the dog days of summer a pleasant cool breeze tips you off that day is turning into night and, eventually, that summer is fading into fall, the shitbird weather down here is in dire need of a desk calendar and a fucking Flick-Flack. Read the rest of this entry »

You read that right.  Matt Grevers is my best friend.  Or at least that is what I have been telling everyone I know since he won two Olympic medals this week.  It is really not that big of a deal, really, just the obvious next step in our relationship.  See, we have been growing closer and closer over the last month and a half.  You know, back when he qualified for the Olympics.

Yep, each time I spread the news of his swimming prowess to anyone I did not go to college with, he became a bigger and bigger part of my life.  Sure, it started out plenty truthful – me explaining that we were in the same fraternity, he was a year younger than me, I would see him fairly often, mostly around the house or at events and stuff -  but escalated quickly from there.  Before I knew it, it became:

“Didn’t a swimmer from Northwestern qualify for the Olympics? You wouldn’t happen to know him, would you?” someone would ask.

“Know him?  He was the best man at my wedding.  So, yeah, I guess you could say we’re pretty tight.” I would quickly reply.

It got a bit out of hand.  But lost in the fake details of my egregious exaggeration of our relationship are a few very solid truths about the newest American Hero:

1. He’s a real good dude.
2. I beat him in a dance-off at a date party a few years ago.

Congratulations, Grevers.

During the doldrums of summer, I found myself at home one weekday evening with nothing to do.  The Red Sox were not playing, I promised Glizz that I would not start Season 2 of The Wire until he returned from his law school sponsored vacation in Greece (a promise that I at least kept for the first 4 weeks of his 6 week excursion), and I had yet to buy the Grateful Dead Six pack for Rock Band.

Flipping around on the tube, I stumbled across the TBS original sitcom My Boys.  I figured I would give it a go.  All I knew going into my first viewing was that it is set in Chicago and filmed in HD.  Hitting one of these criteria is good enough for me to give something the old college try, so the fact that it got both was promising.  Besides, it prominently features Jim Gaffigan, so it can’t be that bad, right?

Right.  It’s really not that bad.  Under different circumstance, it may not have earned the “Record entire season” distinction on my DVR, but for some reason I was feeling charitable after my first viewing and gave it the go.  After watching one cleverly written, comfortably paced episode after another it dawned on me:  Sure, this show is not going to be the next Seinfeld or It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia (hell, I don’t even think it will be the next The Single Guy or Boston Common), but does that automatically qualify it as unwatchable?  An alleged film major, for example, may say “Yes, that does make it unwatchable.”  He may also say “Christ, man!  I figured you were recording it to be ironic!” Read the rest of this entry »