This Is Life Now

There’s a certain point in life when you know things aren’t the same. It’s not a given, or blatantly obvious. There’s no one on the corner with a bullhorn telling you that this is how the world works now or that what you once had is still intact. There’s no subtle nod or someone handing you a message as you walk in the door telling you that you have to readjust your expectations.

Before the pandemic I did something rather foolhardy, I blabbed my mouth off about a crush I had on a former coworker and friend. This was a mistake of monumental proportions that would tread through into the present day. I told EVERYONE. At the time I simply thought I was seeking advice, but in hindsight, I was merely doing this to exercise what I knew to be a miraculous longshot out of me.

Fast forward to my roommate telling me my time was up. I had to find a place of my own as he decided it was time to move in with his significant other. This was a shitshow in and of its own device after I found out he had lied to me and told me initially he had planned to move out and that I could keep the apartment and move in someone else to take his place. In reality he never had planned to move out. I wasn’t prepared to do so either. These two events, my crush and moving out, snowballed straight into the pandemic. I was a mess, and I was thrown straight into isolation. My consolation was an emergency bachelor apartment that said, “Hey you’re not completely fucked but you should sit out a few months here.”

One of the last times I saw the majority of the people I hung out with in person was a work hosted event at a bar in Mar Vista a few months after I had moved into my solo apartment. I remember seeing my crush walk into the bar having been invited by a member of our department, I went to say hello, and that moment became a moment transfixed in abject horror. “I see you…”, she said as she fled to other side of the bar. I was fucked. The jig was up. My big mouth had said too much. I knew instantly in that moment I was a fucking idiot. I barely said goodbye to anyone that night and left a short time later. We all have our regrets in life, but acting like a high schooler and blathering about someone who was way out of my league was phenomenally high up there.

In the height of the pandemic I remember thinking how glad I was to have the ability to call my friends over Discord or Zoom so that we could game together, engage in a D&D session or just shoot the breeze while we were incessentally bored while waiting out what could be our Contagion. It was a great way to pass the time while those around us were succumbing and suffocating and withering away to Covid as it ravaged and stole like a robber baron with no abandon.

Hope was on the horizon, an unsaid knowledge that eventually things would return to normal. For some, it did. But for others, it fell the dominoes we didn’t know were set in it their spots waiting for that slight push or a gust of wind to propel them to the ground, clattering and echoing as they collectively found their new homes in a order that was unrecognizable.

Covid taught us that we had to rely on ourselves. This was nothing new to me. I spent the entirety of my collegiate studies by myself, living in a studio apartment hours from family or friends or school. I had the concept mastered already. After that unfortunate end with my ex-roommate I was happy to have a place to myself while everyone around us became walking biohazards, unknown around every cough or sneeze or breath.

So to online video calls and gaming we went. Propping up ourselves through cameras and microphones to keep our sanity by roleplaying characters in scenarios or taking shots at enemies in the latest FPS game, that became life for awhile. Messages coordinated our every meetup online through Slack or texts. Sometimes we couldn’t make it, or sometimes we just didn’t want to do it. Living day to day in a world of unknown was burden enough. We were taught that if friends disappeared for awhile or didn’t message or call back that that was OK (and it was). We were simply just trying to survive. So we tried.

At some point people became comfortable enough to be in a bubble, and only that bubble of people that they could trust. They would ONLY go to that friend or family’s house, and that house only. This of course didn’t stop everyone from running around and gumming up the works by being maskless or reckless, but many people were sensible enough to keep it together.

The moment I knew I was no longer in their bubble, that things weren’t the same was when I was constantly scrolling (or doom scrolling – however you want to put it) social media. I noticed that I hadn’t been invited to a gathering. Pictures and videos went up on the feeds of dinners and parties, and the common denominator I knew was missing one thing. I’m hardly the life of the party type of guy, but at least I got invites before the pandemic kicked off in full force.

I remember when I was younger watching episodes of TV shows were characters realized things had changed, that people moved on from their social activities and had to live their lives in a new, lonelier fashion. They might get married or have relationships but ultimately a more isolated position took its place, like moving to the suburbs or beginning life in a brand new city for a new job.

The pandemic isn’t over, but life changed again. People began being more comfortable together again, life semi-resumed into a workable, more sociable fashion. But I noticed the phone wasn’t lighting up anymore. I realized that this was life now. The survival part was mostly over (except of course for the less fortunate immunocompromised), but this was where I came out. I’m an inherent people pleaser, at the cost of my childhood. I’ve racked up many friendships, but at some point I spread myself too thin. The social group I thought I could rely on fell like a house of cards. The glue to my social group left the city, and I was the excess that could be paired off like gristle on meat. I was no longer needed or thought of. I paid the price for my own foolishness.

I felt like the fool that I was in the bar that night. Now I had nothing. But that wasn’t without its own asterisk. The likelihood that I would still be surrounded by the same people sans the glue of the group is not exactly high. I would likely be in the same position that I am now, in a big city with little friends that I see more than once every few months, and living isolated and alone.

Life isn’t always kind, and as we get older we shed the things that once were: the people we used to be, the things we held on to, or the people that made us what we are. I just didn’t think it would happen so suddenly or so painfully over such a question mark in human history. But life doesn’t care, we either move on or we get left behind.

I’m still making my peace with this shift in life. My naivete with where I was at that stage in the game is my own undoing. But as I move on towards bigger and better things I can only hope that I have my eyes and ears open fully to making sure I don’t repeat what came before. Most of my days now consist of working from home and sometimes playing games on Twitch, but I know that may not last either. There’s more change to come. This is life now.

This American Carnage

There’s the old story of the scorpion and the frog, in which the only way to cross a river for the scorpion is to hop the frog’s back and traverse its way across treacherous waters. The frog agrees, reluctant, because of the scorpions nature, but does so anyway. When Donald Trump boarded America on its back, we anticipated with dread with what would happen, and so began the journey.

When Trump was elected in 2016, I remember the mood of my entire building, I was at work, they announced he had won. It was devastating. Nobody said anything. The toxic, dark feeling one gets in their heart when something violating has happened – permeated the space. It wasn’t just that an opposing side had won. We could tell, we could see and hear with our eyes and ears, that this Presidency was already rotten from the core – inside and out.

People left the building, hands in their pockets, backpacks slung over shoulders in a way that felt like they were carrying a multitude of bricks. It didn’t take long to see the toxicity multiply and creep into every bit of daily life. It multiplied, and multiplied, and multiplied. Multitudes of shitty oozed into every nook and cranny until no place was safe. Why not throw in a pandemic on top of it, it’s not like anyone was going to do anything about it.

I won’t begin to list the tapestry of shitty things this Trump administration has done, because it is vast, and I don’t have the energy after 4 long years. But McSweeny’s has documented it to hell and back, should you so desire. It has snaked in and taken root to every fabric of our democracy, our lives, and now our breath.

One of the most vile people to ever touch the halls of the White House, noted hell demon extraordinaire, noted fascist, and spectacularly shitty writer (I could write an entire article about this) who thinks he’s hot shit, Stephen Miller: wrote a speech four years ago when Trump took atop the Capitol to give his inaugural speech. It was a notable speech, more or less from the game show host, turned first time statesman. It was stark in tone, dire, given as if MS-13 had stormed the capitol and executed every Senator and Congressmen. Two words stuck out to me though: “American Carnage“.

“This American Carnage, stops right here and stops right now” he expounded, grossly conflating immigrants, radical terrorism, and anyone who essentially wasn’t white. Besides the fact that that sentence on a moral level already makes me twitch, it’s an incredibly shitty sentence. I watches speechwriters everywhere lament. ‘American Carnage’ though, is the perfect epitaph of the Trump Presidency.

Years from now, when we look back at all that remains of the legacy of one of the worst Presidents of the United States, those two words will stand like an old fast food sign, beaming bright, tall, and tattered. The hate, division, and insecure macho-man dictator qualities will parade around it, still clinging to their pride as people gawk and point as they drive by, looking for better options. The insides of the establishment will remain abandoned, say for it one or two lonely visitors who will feel comfort in the darkness, hoping for warmth, and dreading their demise when it never comes.

‘American Carnage’ will forever bounce around in my brain. It will be heard in Stephen Miller’s monotone voice, his poisonous connotation. It was the dagger which waited yielding, waiting for it to be deposited on the unsuspecting victims of its homeland. Its turn of phrase was a vessel, and its consequences were reaching and vast.

Trump was the scorpion. ‘American Carnage’ was the loaded poison in the stinger. Trump supporters, America, its transportation. When the scorpion stung the frog halfway through on their journey, the frog knew they were both doomed. “Why?” the frog asked. “I couldn’t help myself, it’s in my nature” answered the scorpion. The signs were there. We knew what it was. And yet we took the journey anyway.

As the Trump admin’s bloated carcass floats off down the river, and its architects submerge into the water, many will wonder why they were left to drown. Surely, their great leader, wouldn’t leave them like this. They wouldn’t be left to their own devices, to swim and paddle against the current, and eventually succumb to entropy and vile poison, would they?

It’s not like Trump had a history of not paying people, abandoning them when they needed him most, or distanced himself, pretending he never knew people. But he did. The stinger rose with each phrase, each riff, each hateful word priming itself into position.

Then it struck, again and again, the frog crying out in pain as the scorpion couldn’t help itself, the stinger’s gravity becoming more and more severe with each passing blow. They will feel betrayed. They will eat each other. Trump’s most ardent supporters will feel adrift, knowing they can’t reach the other side. The dread, the rage, the riding fast & furious and without care will come crashing down on top of themselves like a meteor from upon high.

I’ll end with this. When the Trump supporters stormed the Capitol, taking with them a seditionist mindset like it was a television on sale during Black Friday, the water hit their ankles. The armed insurrection was the frog’s limbs going numb, and the current taking it.

As the people smiled, posed for photos, and used themselves as a literal battering ram, nearly crushing an officer to death, and actually killing one officer with a fire extinguisher, they decided to push the stinger to and fro a few more times, just for good measure. Because as they steal the Speaker’s lectern, as they threw chairs at officers and made staffers fear for their lives, they couldn’t help themselves.

There will be a lot to examine. A lot to reflect upon, when this is over. There will be pushing and shoving and blaming and defensiveness. There will be overhauling of policies and shifts to repair the human catastrophe. Pieces will be picked up, and we will move on, limping for now. The toll of all this will be seen for years to come. It will not disappear overnight. The loved ones of the scorpion and the frog are still waiting on the other side of the river.

Maybe when this tale is told again a few decades from now, the phrasing will change, as stories tend to do. “Why?” the frog asked, looking up at the scorpion. And someone will think they’re clever will change the answer because they are a shitty writer who fancies themselves something more, something game changing. And they will offer it up as if it somehow made sense, that it wasn’t doomed from the beginning. Because they are a venomous mind. They will offer it up as prophetic, only to watch their phrasing turn on itself and excoriate both the writer and the reader, and they too will float off down the current.

“American Carnage.”

You can find Coleman on Twitter and Twitch.

Trubiscuits & Riding The Collapse: The Bears 2020 Season

Last night I, for some hair-brained reason, decided to watch the Sunday Night Football game, between the Chicago Bears and Green Bay Packer, a storied matchup between two franchises that has sparked a rivalry for decades, and also has devolved into one of the dumbest things to have to endure every year because Aaron Rodgers is Aaron Rodgers. But last night was something special, it was chaos incarnate, it was the final scene in The Cabin in the Woods, it was someone pulling the rip cord in a ‘Fucking Fire EVERYONE’ kind of fashion.

At the beginning of the season, I was more on the side of let ‘Let Nick Foles Lead the Team because Mitch Trubisky is a Golden Retriever Too Busy Staring at a Hustler Magazine’ kind of mood. That quickly devolved into an anaemic team that just sat on the floor and didn’t want to move anymore. People got mad on Twitter, they screamed for Trubisky to be put back in, and then a few weeks ago Trubisky, in all his glory, got injured on the one play that he was in, and sat out for weeks until Nick Foles got boinked and sat out with a hip injury.

I have to disclose that I only wanted to watch the game for Allen Robinson, for pure fantasy football reasons, but part of me thinks I started gripping the edges of the Bears collapse into the phantom zone and decided to re-enact that scene in Dr. Strangelove where he rides the nuclear bomb into oblivion, waving his arms frantically around his head until everything went KABOOM. It’s the same fervor you get before the roller coaster plummets towards the earth when you’ve reached the top. It broke me. Mitch broke me. Nagy broke me. I got borked.

I started doom tweeting. A friend tweeted at me, calling him ‘Trubiscuits’ and because I have access to photoshop, went absolutely nuts, cackling to myself as Trubisky threw into triple coverage because he has lead shields for eyeballs and an attention span that would make make a teenager on Mountain Dew and Adderall blush.

All the Bears angst I’ve stored in my system like a Tesla battery for the last 20 years started escaping me. The great ghosts of Dick Jauron, Paul Edinger, and Kordell Stewart smiled and nodded with approval as it corkscrewed into a fever dream. Robbie Gould shuddered somewhere in the hills of San Francisco, a cold whisper of “Bears….. God damn Bears,” left his lips.

I am prepared, jettison everyone, and I mean literally everyone. I don’t want a single recognizable face on this team, the front office, or the booth. Fire them all. I want the Bears to be a snowflake among snowflakes, disappearing into the cold, dead winds of winter.

After embracing the chaos, and finally getting some of that angst out of my system, I finished the night out playing a video game I truly suck at, Overwatch. I did competitive placements for fuck’s sake while drinking several beers, reminding myself of how much I’ve regressed in a game that I really loved for years on end.

I rode that into the ground too, with a bronze SR tank score I won’t bother mentioning in this blog because it’s too horrendous to associate myself with. But I didn’t care, I rode the wave.

The nightmare isn’t over. They won’t fire everyone because the McKaskey’s value loyalty over a good team and quarterbacks that don’t suck me into an existential acid trip. I mean, they let Lovie Smith batter our souls for the better part of a decade. But I’m ready, I’m ready to push the eject button, I’m ready for all of it to go away. I no longer care for whatever purgatory the Bears have placed themselves in. I want the Bulls season to begin so I can at least see some modicum of progress in an organization that’s beginning anew.

But at least for one night, I got to ride the wave of anarchy and feel something that didn’t give me hope or stagnation, it was a full blown snakeskin shedding, and my god I would ride that wave again. At least Jamaal Williams dancing was fun.

Coleman is exhausted and ready to take a social media break but you can find him on Twitter and Twitch doing the things that he does until his brain dissolves.

I Dream of Electric Pizza

My brain can only be described a deep fried, kinetic, David Lynch fever dream that is allowed to slow down once in awhile, and ONLY once in awhile. It has to think, ALL THE TIME. It’s never not thinking.

Even when you think I’m thinking about nothing I’m pulling some kind of Doctor Strange in my head, trying to see the possibilities, all fourteen million of them, and act them out in my head. It can be exhausting. It prevents me from sleeping, quite often.

That’s why it came as such a surprise this morning when I finally got an ounce of sleep that was worth a damn, and dreaming on top of it! I’m lucky I can sleep five hours a night, maybe six if I’m truly lucky. Sleep has become a luxury, afforded to those who aren’t as affected by stress, no less in a pandemic. It also doesn’t help that I live across the street from a construction site where heavy things are regularly dropped with gusto and the men wearing hard hats giggle and laugh like hyenas (I swear this is true). We’ll get to my dream in a second though.

But the dream was the simplest one I’ve had in a long time. And just to give you a brief run down on the types of dreams I’ve had before, let’s take a small tour of those, shall we?

  1. The first dream/nightmare I can ever remember is a Zantac 75 Commercial (what a throwback), that morphed into a nightmare where I was trying to escape The Blob, yes, THE BLOB, and it ate Mickey Mouse in front of my horrified, eight year-old eyes.
  2. Surrealist Dreams that often feel like something I’ve experienced before – a building I’ve been in before but actually haven’t – a conversation that’s been discussed.
  3. Having a nightmare where Russell Crowe came after me in the angriest way possible.

My dream this morning was the simplest one I’ve had in a long time, though it ends in a bit of a giggly “But, of course!”

My friend and I were simply going from place to place, eating pizza. Restaurants, store fronts, didn’t matter the place. We just went and got pizza. We ate it, we delighted in it. We ate the damn things like the hungry SOB’s we were. No frills, no wacky complications or David Lynch fever dreams. We just ate a lot of pizza.

It was wonderful, it was simplistic, it was likely a human response to missing out on the day-to-day functions of human life that we used to have before the pandemic. It could also just be my inner Anthony Bourdain, a yearning for social interaction over food and the bonds that it can bring. It could also just be a dream about eating some fucking pizza with one of your best friends, but I digress.

Of course the dream ended in the most ‘me’ way possible. After traveling to the last place in my dream before we departed our beloved pizza-filled dream world, I noticed it was a specialty pizza shop. We’re not talking about your neighborhood Dominos, or a Papa Johns, or some dude screaming at you to get a slice of pizza, but a fancier, cozier place with dessert pizza. It looked and felt like a chocolate shop with the fanciest and most gourmet of pizzas. It was the Fanny May of pizza.

So when the time came to delight and gorge myself on the delicacies in front of me, I stepped up, practically cleared my throat as if to announce the greatest pizza order of all time, and the trays of pizza in front of me were whisked away in one fell swoop like Wiley E. Coyote had pulled a magical cartoon lever, NO MORE PIZZA FOR YOU FUCK-O. I was stunned, taken a-back. My mouth was agog.

The magical pizza man in front of me grunted something about the day being over, and I was slightly saddened to hear such a thing, not even staying open long enough for me to stuff one piece of greasy-filled cheese & bread into my face at a Roadrunner’s pace. But the fix was in, the day was done, and then I woke up, much to my dismay. No pizza, no friends, just the cold silence of the morning, and the hum of the fucking construction crew across the street cackling like hyenas.

Of course not long after I had woken up, the very friend I had gotten pizza with in my dream started texting me some of the ridiculous shit Rudy Giuliani was doing to try and overthrow the election, and it was like we hadn’t missed a beat. Happy Thursday.

You can find Coleman on Twitter, where the pizza runs down his face like hair dye on Rudy Giuliani.

The NBA’s Storied Bubble Season Is Likely to Have An Incredibly Drunk, Sophomoric Follow Up

Well, here we are folks. The NBA managed to salvage their 2020 NBA season in COIVD times by instituting one of the most incredible (and yet unnecessary) things with their bubble-style playoffs that took place at Disney World, which resulted in no positive cases and no lockdowns. And now, the NBA is going full tilt into a semi-regular 72 game season, knowing full well it was going to come to this. Now they just released their schedule for the new NBA season.

Obviously, it goes without saying, that trying to institute a season where things were normal and they would go out and about home and away is not going to work as planned.

Each NBA team will play the teams within its conference three times for a total of 42 games, while playing the teams from the opposing conference twice each (30 games). Within each team’s division, the league has already assigned which opponents will be played twice at home, and which will be played twice on the road. Each division within a conference will then play all five teams from another intraconference division twice at home, and all five teams from the remaining division twice on the road.

ESPN

Despite the fact that I don’t think they should be playing a 72 game season, which will continue to melt my brain into the ninth ring of hell, this was absolutely necessary. The more teams cut down on their exposure, the better. But all of it doesn’t mean a god damn thing if teams and players get reckless, trying to return to some “normalcy” by their extra-curricular activities. We saw this in the MLB, with Mike Clevinger and Zach Plesac, two knuckle-headed knuckleheads breaking COVID protocols. The NFL was no stranger to breakers of protocol, including having to fine Jon Gruden multiples times as well as his players for attending an in-person charity event held in a Las Vegas ballroom. Even the NBA wasn’t completely safe, despite no cases.

I simply don’t have enough faith that players, coaches, or personnel won’t do everything in their power to protect themselves and those around them. The cynic in me is running free. I would love to be proven wrong. I’ll let someone yell at me from a safe distance with a mask on, “Juicy” pants, and a bullhorn if the entire 2021 NBA season goes off without a hitch. But time and time again through COVID we’ve heard of people doing dumb shit. I don’t see that changing with a full season here. And that is why this 2021 NBA season is going to be an incredible drunk circus of a time. Even if everyone in the NBA does everything to protect themselves, a deus-ex machina could fly out of the ether to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat.

COVID rates are continuing to spike out of control, and we’re heading into what’s being called a ‘dark winter‘. Hospitals are filled to the brim. El Paso, Texas has multiple makeshift morgues stacking bodies upon bodies like electronics in a chain store. The health of our own physicians, nurses and hospital workers is reaching a tipping point. A change in the U.S. Presidential leadership isn’t on the books until January 2oth when an actual President that gives a shit about preserving the health of Americans will take over and even then it will take time to get an actual plan to contain this deadly virus.

On top of all this, the season yet to be’s Finals is butting up against the Summer Olympic Games of 2020. Literally one day separates these two between July 22nd and July 23rd when the flames will be lit. I feel like this too is a harbinger hanging over the NBA, its axe ready to swing, a bell in the distance waiting to toll. I’m ready for the NBA season to be patched and wonky and stop and start like an ‘L Train’. The question is not if but when, and how easily is that train fixable?

One can only hope that the NBA’s protocols become even more stringent, like obnoxiously stringent, with people’s health and so much money on the line. But that same money line which is driving all of this is exactly what’s driving everything to go full tilt into madness, tightening the cilice around our leg the more we twist and try to do what’s right. Obviously only time will tell, and I could end up being full of shit, I’ll be happy to ever be so and wish nothing but good health to all participants, but I have my doubts, Montresor, and for the love of god, the brick wall is getting higher.

At some point in time Coleman would like to feel optimism, and might do so at some point on Twitter.

Motherloving Human Dildo Mike Pence Let An HIV Crisis Break Out In Indiana, Now He’s Done The Same for Coronavirus, Never Elect Him Again

When Mike Pence was appointed as the head of the coronavirus task force, I shit a brick. Like an actual, brick-sized brick. Mike Pence, of all robot-stuck-in-a-human-suit people, was named the head of the task force?! Had people forgotten about Indiana? There’s only so many times since he was appointed as the corona czar that I could beat my hands against the wall so people would fucking remember that in his tenure as governor he did everything humanly possible to let an HIV outbreak in Indiana run rampant. I was reminded how feeble and evil Pence’s actions were when I saw a tweet alluding to Mike Pence fucking off to Florida this week for a vacation, he would later cancel it after an immense backlash, and opted to “stay in D.C.” so Trump could piss and moan about losing both the popular vote and the electoral college.

The thing you have to remember about Mike Pence is that he’s a far more capable politician than Trump who just so happens to have a horrific soft spot for letting viruses cleave off portions of the human population. HIV first began showing itself in Indiana in November 2014, with a diagnosis in Scott County. By January of 2015, that number had exploded to 17. Indiana didn’t bother contacting the county until February.

One of the big reasons the crisis went full tilt was because Mike Pence was vehemently opposed to a needle exchange program. It wasn’t until March of 2015 (when cases reached 81) that Pence would allow needle exchanges to be established, but of course Pence did the Pence thing that Pence does which was giving permission to open one, but not funding it.

On the same day, however, Pence also undermined the effects of the new law, signing another bill that toughened the punishment for people found carrying needles. It upgraded possession of a syringe with intent to commit an offense with a controlled substance from a misdemeanor to a felony charge, subject to imprisonment for up to 2.5 years.

Politico

Every step forward in tackling the HIV crisis in their midst was met with a baseball bat wrapped in barbed wire to the face. Mike Pence did so little in tackling the problem it exploded to 215 cases by 2017. He was criticized by both the National Institute on Drug Abuse and the CDC criticized Pence, saying the crisis was preventable. Hence my brick-shitting anger crystalizing.

The coronavirus task force went from meeting several times a week, to once a week, and even excluded Fauci at one point. Trump stopped attending the meetings. They declared they beat coronavirus, but had to walk it back.

You would think if Pence had an ounce of amperage running through the particles in his brain he would have remembered the glaring response from his time as Governor, but the fact is he doesn’t care. If he truly thought it mattered he would have stood defiant in front of Trump and the nation, or at least caused a ruckus behind the scenes, vowing to do everything in his power to cut the virus down. He didn’t. He let it thrive. And listen, he’s the Vice President of the United States, which largely is considered a powerless, back-seat, Big Head cushy job that lets one spring-board to the next position of leader of the free world. But since Cheney, VP’s have grown more powerful.

He could have said he was doing it to preserve Christianity or something for fuck’s sake. But again, he didn’t. Because despite all his blow-hard knuckle tapping on the table talking about morality, abortion and Christianity, Mike Pence failed his way up to the top like so many white men in the world. He doesn’t have to do shit, because he IS THE SHIT. He’s in the most comfortable spot on planet Earth, and if he fails, he doesn’t have to truly take the fall for it.

The United States has started suffering staggering numbers of new diagnoses totally over 100,000 almost every day for the last week. Was all of this preventable? Probably not, but there’s definitely zero reason it should be totaling the sum number of entire cities day after day. The US, left to its own devices, unfortunately isn’t taking up the position to nurture itself, only piecemealing a response together that’s being offset by ripping its own stitches out repeatedly. A real statesman would take charge. It’s only because of Mike Pence’s failed leadership have we gotten to where we are.

Mike Pence won’t ride out into the sunset after he leaves office, because he’ll ride out in the dead of winter under a veil of darkness stacked with human bodies a mile high. He doesn’t deserve another day in office, and his failures will leave a permanent crack in the lives of Americans who will suffer long after he’s gone.

Coleman can be found on Twitter yelling about Mike Pence.

Rick Santorum Would Like You To Acknowledge GOP Feelings After 4 Years of Endless Cruelty – No.

Give people time….

Rick Santorum (11-6-20)

This morning on CNN, while attempting to navigate the new numbers of vote counts coming in, Rick Santorum attempted to make the case to allow the process to play out and for GOP voters to allow themselves some time and space to grieve over the what seems increasingly likely the loss of their beloved blank check and empty vessel Donald Trump in the Presidency of the United States.

I’ll readily admit I want Donald Trump to lose in the most agonizing position possible, but putting that aside for a second, I find the notion of Rick Santorum wanting to allow space for grief, frankly, hilarious. The same man who wanted to reinstate ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ would like you give him a minute to the same party that enabled a Muslim ban within the first week of moving into the White House.

Rick Santorum would like you to give him a minute for the party that didn’t care about the psychological damage of children when they knowingly separated them from their parents with no potential way to reunite them later. Rick Santorum would like you to give him and his party some space like he gave the Kurds when he threw them to Turkey and just left them without a support system.

Rick Santorum would like you to give him the time of day so he can grieve for the party that took away civil service protections and LGBTQ+ protections. Rick Santorum would like you to give him a minute to the party that claimed Barack Obama was a nefarious Muslim bent on destroying America.

Rick Santorium needs a modicum of protection for a man who gassed protestors so he could take a photo op in front of a church, holding a bible upside down.

Rick Santorum would like sixty seconds for the party of a man who still wants the Exonerated Five (formerly known as the Central Park Five) dead.

Rick Santorum needs thousands of milliseconds for the party that sought to protect Donald Trump after being impeached.

Rick Santorum desperately wants a moment to lament the falling of a man who admired dictators, and talked about ‘very fine people on both sides‘ at a KKK rally.

The list is endless. The cruelty is infinite. The only thing that stood in its way was a chamber of Congress being flipped to the other side, a planet being knocked out of alignment, but even that was limited in its capacity. Had the House not been flipped blue, the thoughts of what could have been – linger like snowflakes in the wind.

The amount of damage that will have to be raized and exercised will be enormous. It will take decades to heal structural, spiritual, and philosophical wounds.

Rick Santorum needs some time to choreograph his better angels. The man whose party did everything to alienate, overtake, and overwhelm wants a safe space to think about what will no longer be. He’s free to do that on his own time, but we don’t have to give him anything.

The White Sox Hiring Tony La Russa Is Nuclear Grade Bullshit

On Friday the White Sox dropped the bomb that they were hiring, much to the chagrin of literally every person I know who is a White Sox fan, a secretly seething White Sox general manager Rick Hahn, Chicago sports media, and whoever else was within earshot of me yelling loudly in my own apartment, Tony La Russa.

The rumors had started just days earlier, it was a choice between him and former Astro’s manager AJ Hinch, who had been banned from baseball for a year due to his roll in the Astros cheating scandal that involved banging on barrels just the year prior. But seemingly by Friday, the fix was in. A.J. Hinch hadn’t even been interviewed, let alone been given a ceremonial bang on the barrel. It was La Russa’s position to lose.

To understand the hire, you have to go back. La Russa managed the White Sox from 1979 to 1986. It was his first start as a baseball manager. When La Russa was fired in 1986, the White Sox had been off to a horrific start, going 26-38. He was fired by none other than noted White Sox homer Hawk Harrelson (you gotta be bleeping me). Jerry Reinsdorf, the owner of both the Chicago Bulls and the Chicago White Sox, would go on to reveal later that he regretted letting La Russa be fired, despite the screaming dumpster fire record that lay before him at the time.

To me, the Tony La Russa hiring is a perfect, text book example of cronyism. La Russa hadn’t managed a ball club since 2011, since retiring from the Cardinals after winning a World Series. He hadn’t been in serious contention for any managerial position in 9 years. Suddenly, without warning, without the expressed written consent of his own general manager (snickers incessently), the man who should have been making the hire – Jerry Reinsdorf leaned over the steering wheel and yanked out the keys, leaving Rick Hahn grasping the power steering as the car tumbled down the hill. The mere fact that Rick Hahn’s head didn’t explode Scanners style at the press conference was astonishing. Reinsdorf was here to say essentially, “Hey, big whoops about the firing back in 1986, want a job?”

The press conference itself was a shit show. Hahn glazed over the announcement with as much enthusiasm as a hostage victim in a Saw movie. He did as much as robotically was required in five minutes from a general manager, and then quickly abandoned ship to give La Russa the mantle. La Russa then quickly asserted himself over the role of manager.

Look, is La Russa qualified to coach a team? Certainly. He has the experience. He’s coached teams to the World Series. He’s in the Hall of Fame. He can coach a team. But is a man who has espoused views for players kneeling four years ago right for an exciting, young, and boisterous team? La Russa has since gone on the record to say his views have evolved.

As long as it’s peacefully protested and sincere – and what I’m learning more and more with like the Players’ Alliance and especially the White Sox, when your protests actually have action-oriented results, the way you’re going to impact to make things better, I’m all for it.”

Tony La Russa

But the telling part of his bullshit is the glimmer it is sheathed in. Using words like “peacefully protested and sincere”and “action-oriented results.” It’s the same assholes who start pointing at riots and then blaming the entirety of Black Lives Matter. Let’s revisit his statement from 2016.

“I would tell [a player protesting the anthem to] sit inside the clubhouse,” La Russa told “The Dan LeBatard Show.” “You’re not going to be out there representing our team and our organization by disrespecting the flag. No, sir, I would not allow it. … If you want to make your statement you make it in the clubhouse, but not out there, you’re not going to show it that way publicly and disrespectfully.”

Tony La Russa

He said that about Colin Kaepernick, who was ceremoniously ousted from the NFL for kneeling and protesting. Now is it to say that yes, sure he may have evolved a little bit, but it’s the ticks and glimmers in speeches like his that tell us he’s still not all the way there.

Tony La Russa is the kind of manager that once he gets his hands on a team, it becomes HIS team. It’s his way or the highway. And if you get in his way, you best get out of the way. I know these types of people. My father is one of those types of people. And those people fall the hardest.

If a player is trying to be sincere, how, with La Russa as the arbiter suddenly gets to decide what is and what isn’t sincere, to be trusted? What about La Russa’s past statements gives you the window to say that he’s evolved? Why was he singling out players in the press conference?

“I’m going to look for action, and not just verbage”

Words backed by actions are of course great, but words today are powerful. They just are. And to say otherwise is ignorant as fuck.

It’s very possible that La Russa lets everything go by and doesn’t start any fights. I sincerely* hope he does. I hope he doesn’t restrict this team in any way. I hope he lets the team BE the team that they are. Because they’re fun. They’re exciting. Some of them are wacky and goofy. And it’s hard not to be concerned about an iron hand coming down between all of that and saying otherwise.

If they had at least interviewed A.J. Hinch maybe I’d be less upset, or if they had at least interviewed a FEW candidates before settling on La Russa I’d be in a ‘whatever’ phase. I suspect that this is going to eat me for the entirety of his tenure, even if he manages to take this club far.

I was listening to the Laurence Holmes Show on 670 SCR from Chicago about all this, and his Thursday and Friday shows were pretty much everything I had in my own brain. This feels like a step backwards for a bright team. It’s not the right move. There’s nothing about this team that screams Tony La Russa. Laurence put it pretty succinctly, after going into great detail about La Russa’s past, his comments, and the hiring process for all of this, “This sucks…”.

It doesn’t just suck, it’s nuclear grade bullshit.

You can find Coleman generalizing about sports on Twitter.

5 Days To The Election – So Here Are 5 Times I Raged on Jedi: Fallen Order

There were a few times I raged on Jedi: Fallen Order. Here they are in no particular order. And yes, I am bad at parrying. (I enjoyed the game).

1. The entirety of Kashyyyk

2. The god damn GIANT SPIDERS.

3. Kashyyyk again (and anything gross & gooey).

4. The fucking battle arena map with all the monsters/spiders (fuck you) and the Boba Fett jackass. Designed by some kind of Star Wars – Saw character/sadist.

5. Seriously Fuck Kashyyyk.

Love you, Respawn Entertainment.

You can find me on Twitch raging, raging against the dying of my own stream. You can also find me on Twitter raging about literally everything.