"IF YOU'RE NOT CONTRIBUTING ANYTHING THEN GET OUT!"
my impression of the crackhead who was walking by as i got out of the car this morning
i was early to work so i thought i'd chat him up
he thinks palestine should rebrand to a cooler name, the current one soudns too creepy
"like the name of a damn witch!"
he asked what i thought of gender neutral bathrooms
i told him the rape dungeon i frequent (as a victim, mind you) recently installed one
I drove my neighbor to get Plan B for the second time this year
She got into the car livestreaming from her furry TikTok account which I'm told has a big following
I thought about giving her a lecture on how her boyfriend should be more careful
Walgreens and CVS were both out of it
I wondered where it all went
Probably into the stomachs of some cum-filled somebodies
She convinced me to drive her to an exotic pet store in New Hampshire
Not the craziest thing she convinced me to do this week
Snapped out of a trance last Tuesday after handing her a new e-cig
I was in the middle of having a breakdown over people always taking advantage of me
We stopped at a Walgreens near the pet store and finally found the B
I tried to open the plastic casing with my keys and accidentally scraped a few layers off of my thumb skin
She was playing songs off her phone that she had been listening to during her most recent visit to the psych ward
The Veggie Tales theme song
I finally got the box open at the gas station
I dropped it next to the brand new fish on her lap
First time I’ve had a fish in my car
When I got back in she dry swallowed the pill and asked if we could go to Petco to get a rat
I turned up the music and thought about being a rockstar
I might be doomed to be an artist
The sports rivalry: A cultural institution commonly misattributed to a byproduct of parochialism, a microcosm of the nationalism that feeds and is fed by the same air-blackening, water-slicking machine that chokes our turtles and forces us to choose between small pleasures now and livable comfort later (whatever that comfort may mean by that time). We - or those piss-beer-pounding Neanderthals that occupy the least-liminal centers of the norm in all their bellowing cissexuality, if you're one of those 'DUDE SPORTSBALL LMOA' types - root for the home colors because we've internalized, to whatever self-aware degree we may grant ourselves, the notion that our identity stems from the place we were born and is shared with everyone within a 200-mile radius of our high school - a tiny bit of nihilistic self-gratifying cryptofascist soil-based brotherhood...right?
The Sox (Go Sox Love My Mom) and Yanks (cheaters), counting today, have played each other in the Wild Card round 8 times, more than any other duo in MLB history. A sports historian is likely to name it alongside Packers/Bears, Falcons/Saints, and Lakers/Celtics on the mountain of athletic rivalries. To a slice of America desperately struggling to remain relevant, it's among the greatest tickets they have to sell.
The 2021 AL Wild Card game opened at Fenway Park with Yankees 1st baseman Anthony Rizzo grounding out to Bobby Dalbec. Nathan Eovaldi, a first-time All-star in 2021, his numbers bolstered somewhat by Sox starting pitcher Chris Sale sidelined with injury, would go on to pitch the next five innings without giving up a run. He would eventually be subbed out in the top of the 6th for Ryan Brasier after Rizzo scored on a 79 mph curveball. It would be one of only two runs scored by the Yankees in the entire game.
As I sit, watching the WeakStreams chat scroll past with the accumulated brain drool from an assorted selection of the foulest minds to ever be given a keyboard ("it's not gay if you like it," "I am from the future. A majority of population in 2045 is midgets" are among the nuggets that whiz by, along with some guy giving live updates of his chicken baking and one individual just posting "27 RINGS" over and over again), I find myself considering that, to actually get a big tiddie goth gf, you have to either have the kind of brain damage that makes you enjoy terrible mumble rap made by white suburbanites, or be exposed to a lot of it - because that's what those chicks are into.....
Gleyber Torres would hit a long, slow fly ball to center field, where it would be caught by the stock-still Hunter Renfroe to end the game at the top of the 9th: Sox 6, Yanks 2. The Sox, who for the first half of the season sat firmly atop - not just the AL East, not just the AL - the entire MLB, would have their record derailed by injuries and illness to key players, and ultimately fall in a number of regular-season series to the Yankees and, more fatally, the Rays, who now await them in the ALDS. We've ridden a late-season surge to the Wild Card game, and now past it into a full-blown playoff series, a solid bounce back from a 2020 season crippled by team manager Alex Cora being suspended from the league for participating in a sign stealing scandal while serving as bench coach for the Houston Astros. The series against the Rays may make for far more exciting baseball than the ALWC's firmly one-sided showing, but it lacks the punch of the rivalry.
Because the sports rivalry, far from a contrived pseudo-nationalism, is an extension of the psychological definition of the self: part of how we come to understand our own consciousness is by understanding where the consciousness of another begins. And part of how we come to understand our own limits - our passion, our enthusiasm, our fandom - is by finding not just that which engages us, but that which enrages us. The greatest heights of passion can come when one is forced to defend one's love from external forces, and in the sports rivalry, we find a greater depth of ourselves.
