I love the Patriots, and you are a pussy

I love the New England Patriots.

Let me say that again: I love the New England Patriots.

I love them even more now that being a Pats fan has become so unpopular. It's nice to know who your real friends are.

You're pissed that Bill Belichick broke the rules and videotaped the Jets. You're pissed that they rang up 52 points against the Redskins, and 149 points in their last three games alone. You're pissed that they leave their first string players on the field long after the games are effectively over, aggressively throwing the ball down the field on a never ending quest for touchdowns, pursuing points the way crackheads pursue little white rocks.

You like Peyton Manning better than Tom Brady. Peyton's commercials make you laugh. He's polite and respectful, and he's far too humble to take credit for his many accomplishments, instead crediting his teammates and coaches for the Colts' success. He even has the decency to be as ugly as a bassett hound, and to avoid dating underwear models, just to remind us that he's a regular guy, just like we are.

He's nothing like that bastard Brady, who clearly was not satisfied with merely winning three Super Bowls before the age of 30. No, Brady had to be good looking too! He insists on banging Hollywood actresses and Victoria Secret models, and getting his mug on the cover of GQ. Tom Brady is the kid in high school who outscored the geeks on the SATs, and then fucked his way through the cheerleading squad while the dorks were home studying.

Yes, Brady says all the right things. He deflects the praise, like Peyton does. He credits the coaches, and his teammates, like Manning. But you watch Brady. You see that twinkle in his eyes and that sly smile, and you know he does not believe what he's saying. You know he thinks he's the best thing to happen to football since instant replay, and you hate him for it.

You praised the Pats after their three championships. You had to. But you've always secretly looked for a reason to hate them and their golden boy QB. And lo and behold, along comes Cameragate.

You don't care that every other team probably did it. You don't care that the NFL commissioner himself admitted that the videotaping had no outcome on the one game in question. You saw the opening and you continue to pound away at it, even now, months later, after the punishments have been handed down and the league has moved on, and after the Patriots have run a train on everyone in their path since then--without the aid of videocameras.

You continue to call Bill Belichick a cheat. You continue to question past victories, including the Super Bowls, even though 100,000,000 people worldwide watched them and you still have zero evidence against the team. But you don't care, because you hate the Patriots and you always have.

So you watch the Patriots unblinkingly. You stalk them, searching for a weakness, because a weakness means that all is not lost. Every week, you manage to convince yourself that this game will be different, that this defense will be the one to finally slow the Patriots down, that the Pats will get complacent, that there's no way they can keep up the onslaught for an entire season without a single letdown.

You'll conjure up statistics to prove your point. You'll criticize past opponents, implying that real teams would have given the Patriots a harder time. But you know it's all nonsense.

You have always feared the Patriots, but you fear them more this year. This year feels different, and has since the preseason. They win Super Bowls with who-dats and other teams' castoffs; what will they do now that they are loaded with more talent than they ever have been?

You know what they will do. They will brutalize their opponents, humiliate them in their own stadiums, score touchdown after touchdown as the stands empty and the announcers whack off over the latest record that Tom Brady has shattered.

You whimper that the Patriots are classless, that they run up the score unnecessarily. You petulantly warn us that karma is a bitch, that their victims will remember and retaliate someday. You wonder aloud when someone will take a cheap shot at Brady, or Moss, and then secretly wish it to happen.

Of course, it never occurs to you that the Patriots were on the losing end more than any team they are crushing today. It was the Patriots who went 1-15 in 1990, 2-14 in 1992, and 5-11 in 2000. You forget that, not so long ago, one team after another visited the Patriots' slapdash, high school-caliber stadium, pounded them into submission, and left town laughing. You're witnessing karma now. You just fail to realize it.

If there is hope for you, it lies in the Colts. Eight weeks into the season, it is obvious: If the Pats don't lose to Indy, they will go 16-0. You can't bear to think of the headlines, the saturation coverage this feat would receive. So you obsess over the game, drown yourself in analysis, seizing upon any nugget which hints that the Colts will win, ignoring the tsunami of evidence that tells you you're wrong. You will hang your hat on last year's three-point victory over New England in the AFC championship game, impressing yourself with how Manning moved his team down the field, conveniently forgetting that he did so against special teams players and bench idiots, and that he did not fare nearly as well against the first string. Yes, the Colts won fair and square, but unless the Patriots defense takes a half off, there is no reason to expect a repeat performance. And you know it.

This is a violent game. Men get paralyzed playing it. Players grow old and wind up in wheelchairs, their bodies irretrievably ravaged and broken. It is a hard, unforgiving game, and should be played that way. Teams should try to score when they have the ball, and should do so aggressively, no matter how big the lead is. Mercy is for girls' softball. If it were any other team, you might agree, but you don't.

Keep hating the Patriots. Keep throwing things at the television and cursing as they gang-rape one team after another. Keep picking the Colts and telling yourself that they can hang with the Patriots, and when Brady is on the sideline, clowning with his teammates late in the game with a 24-point lead, turn off your TV and stop torturing yourself.

Of course, I'll keep watching.

Bad for Baseball

I hope the stands are empty when Barry Bonds hits his 756th home run.

But if fans do show up, I hope that, when the ball lands among them in the bleachers, they avoid it like radioactive waste.

Of course, Barry's got his supporters, and they are more denial-ridden than a church basement full of alcoholics who can quit whenever they want. Their love of Bonds, or the team he plays for, blinds them to his desire to excel at any cost--to his health, to the kids who watch him, or to the game itself.

Bonds's defenders have heard the responses to the allegations, many from Bonds himself, and they repeat them dutifully. But they are either ignorant of the facts, or they hope that we are.

"Steroids don't improve hand-eye coordination," they tell us, "and steroids don't make you see the ball better or swing the bat faster." No, and robbing a bank doesn't improve your credit rating, either. But it does provide a pile of tax-free cash that any self-respecting criminal would drool over. Steroids provide major benefits for those stupid enough to use them; to pretend otherwise is disingenuous.

We can learn a lot from men like Lou Ferrigno and Lyle Alzado, who have spoken openly about their steroid use. Steroid users are so driven to win that they are willing to to break the law and the rules of their sport--and to pay with their long-term health--for an extra few pounds on a bench press, or 1/10th of a second in a footrace, or, yes, for another 30 feet on a fly ball.

They also speak of personality changes. Their confidence seems to grow along with their muscle mass, providing a mental edge to match the physical one. We've all seen that guy at the gym, the one whose biceps popped seemingly overnight, who suddenly had no problem hitting on the chick behind the counter, even though her six-foot-four, 265-pound husband owned the place.

Steroids aren't magic. They won't turn Peter Gammons into Pete Rose. What they will do is turn a long fly out into an easy home run. That little nudge was all it took: Suddenly, players who previously only had warning track power were approaching, or besting, the single-season home run totals of guys named Ruth and Maris.

Don't believe me? Think all these home run hitters were on the level? In that case, I guess it's just a coincidence that the Luis Gonzalezes and Sammy Sosas of the world were putting balls on the moon by the bucketload--until baseball outlawed steroids. Now, they're all mortal again, and they want me to believe that the spike in production was just random chance. I don't buy it.

Like any great outrage, there is more than one party at fault. The egotistical, hyper-competitive players could not have gotten away with this had it not been for teammates and managers who loved the stratospheric offense too much to object in any way.

The owners aren't blind either. They read the papers just like you do, they saw the bloated stats, and they drew the same conclusion that any half-witted twelve-year-old could have. And then they did nothing.

Voltaire said, "Every man is guilty of all the good he did not do." In the interest of fairness, and the health of its players, major league baseball leadership should have pushed hard for a comprehensive, all-encompassing steroid ban as soon as the problem became embarrassingly obvious. Sure, the MLB players' association, by many accounts the strongest union in American history, would have made that a difficult, if not impossible task. But the owners should have fought for it. They didn't.

I am asking for something unrealistic, you are saying. No sport would ever do such a thing. But you're wrong.

Funny, isn't it, how we never see NFL kickers booting 73-yard field goals or 90-yard punts. We don't see running backs vaulting into the end zone from the 7-yard line. We hardly ever hear NFL steroid allegations at all. That's because the game has cracked down on illegal drug use, and created a meaningful test program with harsh penalties. Todd Sauerbrun, a punter for the Denver Broncos, was suspended for four games - four - for taking a diet pill which was sold over-the-counter. We regularly hear of similar suspensions, for marijuana and other drugs, by the NFL, long suspensions which cut deeply into a player's paycheck. When's the last time a baseball player was suspended for a drug violation?

And the NFL is not alone. Immediately after competing, Olympic athletes are led to a room where an official watches them urinate into a cup, so they can be drug tested. Medals and world-records are routinely stripped from offenders. Think Bonds is in any similar danger?

I don't care that I am experiencing "baseball history". This is not a heartwarming story. This is the story of an already-great player, for whom mere greatness was no longer enough. I hate what Barry Bonds has done to baseball, and what baseball, in turn, has done to us.

Good day, and welcome to post #400

It's been well over two years, three quarters of a million site visits, and now, 400 posts. Thanks for making this little ol' web page so much fun for me. Here's to the next 400!

It's funny to me how many comments I still get about the Vaseline lip therapy post. The post is two and a half years old, people! It's absolutely ridiculous to have to talk about this again, but if it keeps coming up...

Vaseline lip therapy is the same thing as regular Vaseline, and yeah, Vaseline can be used as lube. In fact, back in the day, before Astroglide came along, that was pretty much the only option. I never got what was so hard to believe about me using it for anal.

Sometimes I get the impression that people have stopped thinking about it, and are just parroting what they have heard others say. "It must be ridiculous, because I heard someone else say it was!"

Go back and read it again. Stop repeating what you hear and ask yourself what is so hard to believe about it. I'm only going to answer the same question so many times before I tell you to fuck off.

Oh, and as a word to the wise, when you are using lube, you only need a small amount on the tip. Lube should be used sparingly, just to make penetration easier. You're not buttering an ear of corn, for Christ's sake!

But I digress.

And now, for the other question that I always get. Namely, "Is this stuff real?"

From time to time, I have to remind readers that I change names, dates, times, places, and circumstances to protect my anonymity, and to make the story flow better. Do I make some things up? Sure.

I'm not trying to convince you that I'm a legendary chick magnet, or the corporate version of Michael Jordan. That was never the point. Go back and read the 399 posts before this one: Do I ever insist that this is all 100%, unequivocally, real?

And by the way, what, exactly, in this blog is so hard to believe? That I had sex with a few girls? That I got a promotion and drove a nice car? What, these things don't happen in real life?

Of course they do, but that does not stop readers from savaging me as a "liar". Does it bother me? Yeah, in a way, because they seem oblivious to what I am trying to do.

I blog to entertain you. Read it, and have fun. Hopefully, it'll take your mind off your high credit card balance or your psychopathic boss for a few minutes before you have to get back to work. That's all.

L. Ron Hubbard was a horrible human being, so twisted that his own son compared him to Adolf Hitler. But he did say one interesting thing: "If it isn't true for you, it isn't true." If you think I'm lying, go with it. Assume this is all fiction. Whatever else one can say about me, I am a good writer. The story and the characters are strong enough to hold readers' attention, true or not. When the book based on this blog finally gets published, it will be sold as fiction. Those who give it a chance will love it from the start, and it will be irrelevant what shelf they pulled it from at Barnes & Noble.

There are less able writers (James Frey and Tucker Max come immediately to mind) who vehemently insist (or, in Frey's case, insisted) that every word they utter is gospel truth. In my opinion, they do so because their stories lack a certain appeal, and they feel compelled to add that magic tagline of, "...and it's all 100% true!" for the extra spark of interest that the story cannot generate on its own. I will never stoop to that; when it comes to writing skill, neither of them is fit to sniff my boxers.

So are these stories true or not?

Let's put it this way: You wouldn't write a cookbook if you didn't know how to cook. Yes, I am a writer, and I have turned my life into a story. Life doesn't unfold the way a book does, and the writer in me knows how to make it fit, so that's what I do. Put your cynicism and personal issues aside and read what I have to say. Listen to my inner thoughts. If you do, you will feel a genuineness that can't be faked.

If you read it, you can assume that something like it happened to me at some point in my life. If sex and work success are that foreign to you, you should stop blog-reading and leave the house once in a while.

A lot of you readers are loyal fans and great friends. A lot of you are also immature imbeciles. It's cliche to say so, but if you don't like what I am doing here for any reason, do me a favor: Leave and don't come back.

And as I mentioned recently, if I were really trying to pump myself up, why on Earth would I admit to cracking under the pressure and quitting my job, probably doing long-term career damage? Why would I admit to getting shot down by girls and dating sometimes weird or less-than-beautiful ones? Why would I admit to so many imperfections?

But again, ultimately your truth is determined by you, and whatever it is you should embrace it.

Check back soon, and go Pats!!

Love,
Stevo