The Barryfest Chronicles

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.

I think that you can tell a lot about a city by the way it rings in the New Year.  Minneapolis, for example, is a fun enough time but not really anything to write home about.  Chicago, on the other hand, offers plenty to do but your options can be limited by the bitter cold winters and spotty public transportation system.  And then there is New York, which is more or less a crowded, expensive theme park.

While especially apparent on the last day of the year, I think the statements above hold true for their respective cities at all times.  So, after getting intimately familiar with New Orleans over the past 12 months, I cut my holiday family time short to make sure I could test my “New Year’s Eve as a microcosm” theory down in the Big Easy.

Now, New Year’s Eve is nothing if it is not another excuse for revelry.  And when it comes to revelry, if you give New Orleans an inch, in one magnificent swoop she will take a mile, your favorite watch and every clean pair of tube socks you’ve got in your top drawer.  Luckily, she will return them before you know they are even gone.  New Orleans is sneaky like that. Read the rest of this entry »

Please excuse my tardiness, as I know that I am a day late on posting my personal reaction to the presidential election.  I spent the better part of yesterday in my office with the door shut and my head in my hands, trying my best to hide the most vicious weekday hangover I’ve nursed at work since the days of Wednesday night Tickle Fight rehearsals back in Minneapolis.

Barack Obama won in a landslide on Tuesday, and I can’t think of a better reason than the dawn of a new era to tie one on so early in the work-week.  But Obama wasn’t the only person that won.  Add my name to the list of winners, and while you are at it, throw yourself on there as well. Read the rest of this entry »

I always been a pretty big fan of Halloween.  As a kid, I vaguely remember that the unpredictable Chicago weather always seemed to cooperate and that my neighborhood was consistently pretty solid when it came to the trick-or-treat candy that was being doled out.  And then in college, my fraternity’s big party of the year was called “Phright Night,” which was a huge costume bash we held at this incredible barn in the far west suburbs.  It took about a dozen buses to ship everyone out there, and at some point it became tradition to stock each bus with about 15 boxes of Franzia to keep people hydrated during the hour long commute.

So I was pumping pretty hard last night when I hit my first Halloween party of the year.  I dusted off the sweet Hunter S. Thompson/Raoul Duke ensemble I have been assembling for the last few years and was wowed by all the equally impressive costumes donned by the other party-goers.  All your classics were there:  the throwback basketball team, a few mummies, some guy in a priest outfit making NAMBLA jokes; and, of course, a litany of girls dressed as a sexy version of every public and private sector career under the sun.  It was pretty great. Read the rest of this entry »

The 2008-2009 NBA season is upon us, and for the first time in 10 years I will be intently watching “NBA Premier Week” on TNT.

See, my relationship with the NBA has been very rocky over the last decade or so.  I grew up in the suburbs of Chicago during the absolute apex of the Jordan years, and his departure and the subsequent decline of the Bulls franchise sent me on a downward spiral that was the equivalent of a spoiled teenager going off to college and suffocating under a pile of dirty laundry that develops a mind of it’s own and starts devouring DVD cases and half-opened packets of ranch dressing to feed it’s insatiable desire to expand beyond the corner of the dorm room.

As a 13 year old who spent his formative professional sport watching years following the greatest basketball player to ever put on a uniform win six titles and then leave the game as his team was being dismantled by an egomaniacal owner, I lacked the cognitive and emotional capacity to continue to support a losing, unglamorous franchise.  And my usual trump card – an allegiance to both Chicago and Boston sports teams springing from the fact that my dad spent the first 43 years of his life in Beantown and I was born at none other than Brigham and Women’s – did me no good as the Celtics were at the crest of a wave of misfortune that was eradicating their place as one of the most storied American sports franchises in the history of man. Read the rest of this entry »

I am always amazed when, after hearing that I grew up in Chicago, people aggressively inquire about how I was able to survive the harsh northern winters.  I realize that for someone who has never seen snow and lives in a place where a 40 degree day in January triggers a front page story in The Times-Picayune about the “Deep Freeze” and prompts all the local talking heads to issue dire warnings to all the folks in the Garden District reminding them to bring their exotic plants indoors so they don’t frost overnight, the idea of making through 12 consecutive months in an area with a seasonal climate may seem quite difficult.

But after enduring my first summer here in the Crescent City, I assure can assure you this:  Summer in New Orleans makes Winter in Chicago look like Spring in Faulconbridge.  What, exactly, do people down here think is so hard about a Chicago winter?

You want to know what I think is “hard”?  Driving around in a car that, even with the protection of a sun visor, turns into a convection oven after as little as an hour in a parking lot.  Or how about walking out your front door in the evening after a cold shower and the strategic, liberal application of Gold Bond to various parts of your body, and still sweating through your entire wardrobe before you reach your first stop of the night.  That’s “hard.” 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 »

Dear Dan,

Across the street from my apartment, there is a decent sized, stand-alone building that formerly served as a Robért Fresh Market but is now completely boarded up and dying for occupation.  Other than the two days the ample parking lot served as base camp for the cast and crew filming Carmen Electra’s new movie, it just sits there, an apparent casualty of the disorganized jack-o-lantern spattering of property revitalization that has been trudging along since the storm of 2005.

Don’t get me wrong, there is amazing work going on all over the city; in every single neighborhood and on every single block.  But there are some shocking plots of land that, for one reason or another, have just been left behind.  This is one of them.

I think it would be a perfect place to open a Trader Joe’s.

I mean, you’ve got stores in Minnesota and those fucking rubes make you jump through hoops just to grab a sixer of microbrew with your groceries.  If you were to open in the greater New Orleans area, there would be no need for that loophole exploiting pay-for-your-groceries-at-one-register-then-walk-through-the-antechamber-to-the-booze-shop bullshit I had to go through at the St. Louis Park location up north. Read the rest of this entry »

Dear Scott Van Pelt,

I only became a regular listener to sports radio since I have come down here to New Orleans, as my morning commute changed from the six block walk I had in Minneapolis (a trip just long enough to expose you to the extremes of Minnesota weather but too short to help you fully shake off a hangover from the night before) to my current 15-20 minute drive to the office.

The only other time in my life that I regularly listened to any radio at all was back in high school, which was the last time I regularly drove before the invention of iPods.  And for a variety of reasons, I did not listen to sports radio back then.  In a major sports city like Chicago, the radio waves are full of local sports talk shows hosted by fat, obnoxious, bigoted homers hailing from the South Side.  You even find these fucking mopes for a few hours here and there on the ESPN affiliate, so there is really nowhere on the AM waves to hide from these shitbirds.  And besides, I was perfectly happy rocking out to The Drive, probably the best radio station on the planet (although WWOZ here in New Orleans gives it a serious run for it’s money). Read the rest of this entry »

I never really liked my job when I was living in Minneapolis.  And, considering I was putting in consecutive 65+ hour weeks at some points, my memory of life in the Twin Cities is unduly influenced by the days I spent doing little more than programming spreadsheets and running HOST reports.  Or the time I was answering to the VP of Merchandising because there had been a run on wiper fluid after a huge fucking snowstorm ripped across the Midwest.  Or the time the guy in the cube next to me wouldn’t stop listening to “Throw Some Ds On It” over and over again for the better part of a month.  Or the time I got gang-raped by a group of supply-chain experts in the cafeteria.

That last part might be a bit inaccurate, but I’ve been out of there for almost a year now, and the mental images and vignettes warehoused during my term are getting hazy and disjointed.  Add to that all the work I have done to actively misremember the unfortunately large part my former employer played in my former life, and my ability to recall many of the great times had while not slaving over a hot keyboard in seizure-inducing florescent lights has been severely compromised.

Luckily, a few things from the Mpls Era have stayed with me, such as:

1. How, when driving over the Hennepin Ave bridge to St. Anthony Main in the early evening, the orangish glow from the setting sun and the Steely Dan blasting from the car stereo made me look 15% more attractive than I actually am
2. That time I caught a Police concert and a Prince concert in the same week
3. Memorial Day of 2007, which was spent cruising around Like Minnetonka at the the helm of a pontoon boat, blasting “Play Deep” by The Outfield. Read the rest of this entry »

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 »