On the Comfort of Low Expectations

I've mentioned this before, and it will come up quite often again as the months progress, but there is only one entity of which I still consider myself a true and unabashed and vigorously biased fan, and that is my alma mater, Penn State. This is no doubt based in some kind of Freudian yearning for a return to my childhood, but hey, that's how it is to be a modern dude, and that's how it shall always be, and that's why I find myself, precisely two days into the start of football practice, already worried about the way things are going. This is because the preseason critical consensus for my alma mater is alarmingly positive (see above left), and overwhelming positivity tends to scare the hell out of me.

I feel this way, in part, because I have a genetic tendency toward pessimism. My father taught me early on that a sunny disposition gets you nowhere in life. But there is more to it than that; this is about the fundamental nature of what it means to be a sports fan. There are two types of us, really: There are those people who return every year with the same relentlessly optimistic outlook, who dismiss bad news and ugly results as an aberration, who refuse to whine or complain or concern themselves with the sudden and inevitable complications of losing, who attribute any unflattering reports about their particular team to either A.) Media bias in general, or B.) ESPN in particular. These people revel in high expectations. These are people I generally do not trust. The large majority of them are not serious about the entities they portend to support. They are the spiritual equivalent of Stepford wives. They are the reasons The Secret became a bestseller.

For the rest of us, our fandom is couched in wariness and distrust. We would rather our teams not be discussed at all (at least until that moment when they are actively not included in a discussion in which we feel they should be included, which arouses a peculiar maelstrom of jealousy and confusion). We would rather not read things like this--"Can you say 12-0?"--because what immediately comes to mind are unfulfilled expectations, years of ignominy and defeat and hopelessness, the inevitable memories of 1999 (see above), of 1997 (the other year that Sports Illustrated, given its penchant for making championship picks by assigning intoxicated three-year-olds to throw darts, chose Penn State as the preseason No. 1), of 1988 (the first losing season for Joe Paterno since advent of the New Deal), of all the great disasters that have befallen us in years past. When they say--as they have, early and often--that our team has "the easiest schedule in the country," this does not ease our minds, either, because what immediately comes to mind is the fact that our particular team is capable of losing to anyone, at anytime. (Remember this? Yeah, me neither.)

So here's what I sometimes wish, when I am feeling especially dour and skeptical and concerned about overhype, as I am heading into this season: That my alma mater could enter every year with absolutely no expectations. That there was somehow an embargo on preseason polls, that preseason "watch lists" would be considered a violation of federal law, that the very notion of prognostication did not apply to my alma mater; that the games themselves could somehow be vacuum-packed and left untampered until the first Saturday in September. At these moments, I wish that fandom remained spectral and irrational, and consisted of nothing but nostalgia and a vague cloud of hope. That way, we could always expect the worst. And if something good happened, we could just say we knew it all along.

On Drugs

Today I will unburden myself, engage in full disclosure, and permit the unvarnished truth to emerge: I am guilty of taking a performance-enhancing substance.

My excuses are manifold; I was in my twenties, and I was single, and perhaps most damning, I lived in Akron, Ohio, a Gomorroah of lawlessness and abundant rubber products. And so when a friend tipped me off to a substance called "creatine," I tried it, presuming that even if it didn't improve my biceps, perhaps it would somehow pump up my medulla oblongata, allowing me to compose brilliant copy about high-school football while working on deadline and thereby enabling me to sign a 10-year, $252-million contract to cover Andover High School for the Boston Globe. I bought this creatine from a shady character who used to hang out at the Summit Mall, wearing a bright-red shirt, dressed as an employee of a flashy front that referred to itself as "General Nutrition Center." Six months later, burdened by guilt and boredom, I gave it up. My performance in every single area of life, as far as I could tell, was exactly the same, though I may have improved slightly at billiards.

Today, despite the enormous toll creatine took on my life,* it remains a legal substance. "Everyone consistently using creatine is making HUGE, AMAZING gains!" claims one bodybuilding website, which also offers me the opportunity to "GET SHREDDED LIKE ABZILLA!"**. Since I am older now, and not particularly interested in shredding myself, I no longer make deals with shopping-mall pushers. But this is what appears to have happened with Rashard Lewis, who took something store-bought and made from wild yams (because everyone knows of the health dangers of farm-raised yams) and is now paying the piper.

Lewis claims he was taking something called DHEA, which supposedly produces testosterone, and happens to be readily available on two full shelves at your neighborhood Vitamin Shoppe. According to experts, it doesn't work particularly well, but it is also perfectly legal, and so I'm not sure why I should care much at all about the fact that Rashard Lewis stimulated the economy with his GNC Gold Card. At this stage, I am like the rest of you, including, I'm guessing, Rashard Lewis himself; I am hopelessly confused. I no longer have any idea what is real and what isn't anymore, and I have no idea what any of these substances do and why some are legal and some aren't, and why some are banned and some aren't--and as usual, this is baseball's fault, because baseball fooled us for so long, because baseball altered our perceptions and broke our trust and wounded us so badly that it eliminated any intelligent and rational and nuanced conversation over these issues, and now many of us struggle to discern the difference between a man who walks into a Vitamin Shoppe and someone who purchases horse tranquilizers from a Bolivian cocaine dealer. If the standard for cheating can be found at the mall, then we are all users; me, you and ABZILLA! are all varying degrees of the same desperate and curious human.

But at least my conscience is clear.

*Which essentially consists of my friend Chuck, whenever the topic arises, referring to me as a "rampant and unapologetic steroid user."
**Little-known fact: ABZILLA! once defeated Moth-Ra without the use of his hands or feet.

On the Weirdest Science of All

Let me begin with a caveat: It is not possible for those of us who endured an awkward phase of adolescence in the 1980s to even pretend to have an unbiased opinion of John Hughes. I am willing to accept the premise that Hughes never wrote/directed a truly great film*, and yet I also find it difficult to imagine that there was a more important and influential and thoroughly enjoyable director to emerge from that period. In an era defined by artifice, Hughes' movies were an attempt to strip that away, to chronicle the daily angst of growing up in a material age, etc., etc....

And now I will stop pretending to be a film critic and get down to business. Because in all the enconiums and memorials and essays about Hughes and his films, I've seen very little about one movie in particular, a fantastic tale of wish fulfillment, Frankenstein, computer programming, thunderstorms and greasy pork sandwiches. I am speaking, of course, of Weird Science, considered by most thinking humans to be a second-tier product of the Hughes oeuvre, the story of two nerds who manage to create a woman named Lisa on a TRS-80 using DOS prompts and harnessing electromagnetism, a government mainframe, and photos cut out of Playboy magazine. They then take her to the mall, get doused by milkshakes and taunted by Robert Downey Jr., drink moonshine at an African-American blues bar, throw a hardcore house party, foil an outlaw biker gang**, wear bras on their head for no apparent reason, and learn, over the course of a weekend, how to be cool, largely by osmosis, but also through the use of nuclear weapons and illegal firearms.

It's funny, but you forget after a while just what it's actually like to be teenager; if anything, it's more erratic than what Hughes portrayed in his films. Recently, a girl who had come across one of my books friended me on Facebook. Her status updates are bracing and blinding and unexpurgated. At one point, she declared her undying love and subsequent hatred for three different boys over the course of two weeks; she is often bored, then briefly excited, then bored again. Then she is hungry. Everything is an obsession; her life, like every teenager's, is a fishbowl from which maturity is the only escape.

And in this fishbowl, in 1985, Weird Science was a lifeline. Maybe, I thought, I could somehow learn to be cool. I wasn't delusional; I didn't imagine that one day during a thunderstorm, Kathy Ireland would emerge from the monitor of my Apple II+ and use alchemy to form a Porsche 928 in my driveway. But Weird Science, like all of Hughes' movies, was about adolescent identity, about deriving some sort of comfort in who you were, about taking control of a situation rather than allowing it to subsume you. Lisa wasn't real, and the whole premise of the movie was as far from reality as any Hughes movie ever got, but so was this high-school hierarchy we felt like we'd never get away from.

Hang in there, Hughes seemed to be telling us. None of this is real.

And as usual, he was right.

*Don't get me wrong: I love The Breakfast Club, too, and would readily watch it straight through on any rainy Sunday morning for the remainder of my existence, but I am not sure if it is really a great movie or a product of my own nostalgia. As for Sixteen Candles: I am among those who like this movie more than The Breakfast Club, but I dare you to engage in a serious deconstruction of a movie involving a rampant stereotype named The Donger.
**How a hardcore biker gang was notified about a teenage beer bash in the Chicago suburbs, I have no idea. But then, this subplot coincides with the moment when Bill Paxton, as Wyatt's domineering brother (the greatest role of his career to date--seriously), is (temporarily) rendered into, and I quote Wikipedia here, "an antrophomorphic pile of feces." I will admit that this movie is not based on peer-reviewed science.
It does, however, have Oingo Boingo.

On Canadians and prolate spheroids

I spent a few days in Vancouver last month, doing what Canadians do, or at least what they do in Dave Thomas movies and Glass Tiger songs: I drank potent beer, browsed tourist shops for an astonishingly overpriced Winter Olympics tuque, waited in the streets where lovers meet, and pronounced "about" as if I were discussing footwear. Also, I watched a live televised football game in early July, which made me realize A.) How desperately I missed anything even resembling football, and B.) How strange and wonderful and nonsensical Canadian football actually is. Watching Canadian football is the cultural equivalent of listening to a version of Exile on Main Street sung entirely in Welsh*; it is still football, and there is still a prolate spheroid at the center of the action, but the field is stretched and the goalposts are in the wrong place and there are three downs and before the snap there are men scrambling about and receivers sprinting toward the line of scrimmage, and I kept thinking to myself, on every single play, "That dude must be offsides. How can that dude not be offsides? How is it physically possible that this dude is not offsides?"**

Still, it was football, in July, and the fact is, three downs instead of four just speeds up the whole process; it is like watching a game starring Jason Statham. For instance: In the contest I watched, the BC Lions were trailing by ten points with three minutes to play. They scored, held their opponents to a "two-and-out," and got the ball back approximately 24 seconds later. They had so much time to score again that even after their quarterback hurled a strike directly into the arms of an opposing linebacker, they still nearly got the ball back one more time. (The consolation, of course, was that the winners had to go back to Hamilton, Ontario, whose sister city is Flint, Michigan.)

Anyway, I am no longer naive enough to assign credibility to everything I read on these Internets; however, this caveat does not apply within Canada, Mexico and Bellefonte, Pennsylvania. Therefore, I have no reason not to believe this entirely unsourced report from a man in Toronto claiming that the Buffalo Bills are considering a move to the CFL, even if writer of said report seems to imply, at one point, that the National Football League discriminated against the provinces when it sent the Dolphins to play in Toronto last season, and even if writer of said report actually says, at one point, that the NFL "despises foreigners" (which totally justifies those Morten Andersen conspiracy theories I've been espousing since 1996).

If this were to happen, I would feel sorry for Buffalo, which is best-known for its proximity to Niagara Falls and its running backs who have been tried for mass murder. But I will not lie: If the CFL invaded America, I would probably watch. At this point, I am so hungry for the game I would pay at least $15 to watch a gang of wolverines set loose on an oversized electric football board. Even if they were offside on every single play.

*Preferably by the Super Furry Animals.
**The other great fascination of Canadian football is that you spend a considerable amount of time murmuring statements like, "So that's what happened to Ken-Yon Rambo."

On Red Sox Nation

Well, that should just about do it.

Allow me a brief chronology: I first parted ways with baseball in 1994, when they chose to deep-six the World Series out of spite. I came back in 2000, when I moved to a cramped and leaky one-bedroom apartment in Boston, in a neighborhood known as the Fenway. I was close enough to the park that I could hear the crowd from my living-room window, and in the instant it took for the satellite to catch up, I knew that something intriguing was about to transpire on my television set. I was a graduate student, and I was perpetually broke, and I would walk to the gym on Lansdowne Street and purchase a five-dollar Italian sausage for dinner on the way home. The Red Sox were a distraction from my own work, a distraction from my attempts to write and to think and to comprehend a Samuel Beckett novel. Hell, the Red Sox were a Samuel Beckett novel.

And so I became a Red Sox fan, at age 27, for the same reason every vaguely literary soul who moved to Boston became a Red Sox fan back then; because they represented the eternal struggle of mankind. The Red Sox were made up of men like Rich Garces and Trot Nixon and Brian Daubach: They were a collection of likeable but flawed humans, forever nudging a boulder uphill. I pulled for them mostly because I could not help but sympathize with all those people who had bided the past eight decades in search of a single triumph.

And then, of course, not long after I joined up with these desperate souls, it just kind of happened; they stumbled into victory, and they did it behind a pair of (seemingly) guileless goofballs who pounded horsehides onto the Massachusetts Turnpike. And in the wake of that victory, the Red Sox themselves became something completely different; they became, as we are all well aware by now, a trend, a fad, a mainstream movement, an army of sorority girls in pink caps, a subsidiary of the school of fan obnoxiousness. The whole thing always seemed kind of hollow and false, as if their souls had somehow been inhabited by spectral figures who had wandered out of an Iowa cornfield. Now we know why. It is because the Red Sox, like everyone else in the game, sold their soul for victory.

And it doesn't matter that this whole issue is increasingly shrouded in moral relativism, and it doesn't matter that Bill James could very well be right when he says that, in 40-50 years, steroids will be rendered utterly mundane and will be accepted by the mainstream, and that no one will hold much against those who chose to engineer their own bodies. Because if nothing else, the steroid era has already transformed the most charming franchise in baseball into something hulking and unrecognizable. And I'm not sure there is any way of going back.

On Fight Clubs, Journalists, and German Magazines

Just when I have gone and condemned baseball as a stultifying and backward-thinking sport, thereby alienating approximately 47 percent of the already modest readership of this corner of cyberspace--well, along come the Mets, whose general manager, Omar Minaya, having previously hired Tyler Durden as VP for player development, defended himself by auditioning for the role of media ombudsman, accusing an unsuspecting Daily News reporter named Adam Rubin of "lobbying" for a job in player development. This led to a press conference of the genre classified by cultural anthropologists and light-beer enthusiasts as "extremely uncomfortable," during which a man's career flashes before our very eyes.

In this case, it was immediately clear that, even if Minaya's accusations were completely true (and Rubin claims they are exaggerated), his attempt to deflect the blame was embarrassingly ill-advised. And while Rubin may have erred in his judgment (though given the nature of the newspaper business, one can hardly blame him), the error appears forgivable and had little or nothing to do with the actual business at hand. "My reporting was solid, met the journalistic standards of sourcing and beyond and was untainted by any personal agenda on my part," Rubin wrote, and at this point, I have little reason to doubt him, because he is a trained journalist who is getting paid for his work and who publicly disclosed his role in this situation, and the Mets' management appears to have corroborated his account. In other words, no one denied he wrote the truth.

This is not an ideal situation, but in the end, this the way it should be. There is course correction on both ends, and we move forward, with Minaya clinging to his job and Tony Bernazard/Tyler Durden accepting a position a prominent soap company. Still, I have no idea if this is the way it will be in the future, most notably if the future is being prophesized correctly by Chris Anderson, the editor of Wired magazine and the author of book called Free, which Malcolm Gladwell ably dissected in this New Yorker piece. In what seems like a deliberately contentious interview with a German magazine called Der Spiegel, Anderson declared that the very concepts of "media" and "journalism" and "news" are antiquated, 20th-century notions, stated that "newspapers are not important," and then said this:

Attention and reputation are two non-monetary economies. The vast majority of people online write for free. We've tried paying some of our bloggers and they thought it was insulting. They're not doing it for the money, they're doing it for attention and reputation, or just for fun....In the past, the media was a full-time job. But maybe the media is going to be a part time job. Maybe media won't be a job at all, but will instead be a hobby.

So here's a question: If Adam Rubin were, say, a lifelong fan of the New York Mets, who was, shall we say, writing about this for a blog called "The Daily News," would this story have ever broken in the first place? Or would Rubin have decided it was in the best interests of the fans to maintain Bernazard/Durden's place in the organization, and to preserve Omar Minaya's reputation? And if he had broken this story, and Minaya had accused him of a conflict of interest--of accepting free box seats or cheering in the press box or soliciting autographs from David Wright--well, what would be the repercussions? In our hypothetical scenario, Adam Rubin is working for free, doing it for the attention and the reputation, and treating his public responsibility as a hobby...so how would he ever be held accountable*, and how would anyone know what to actually believe? (Besides, don't the Mets embody enough moral complexities without adding another layer?)

This is the future Anderson appears to be heralding, a future that most intelligent bloggers don't even advocate,** a future that may be economically viable but that is also intellectually dangerous. My guess is that even Omar Minaya understands this now.

*And don't tell me his audience would hold him accountable, because if this were true, Perez Hilton cease to exist.
**According to a survey conducted by my alma mater and all-around bitchin' party school Penn State University, 75 percent of sports bloggers do not see themselves as rivals of professional journalists. The other 25 percent were busy searching Bing for photos of Megan Fox.

On "Party Schools"

Every so often, as the years pass me by, I am tempted to consider how different my life would be if I had aspired to attend a private college with a prestigious reputation rather than the state university around the corner. Perhaps I would comprehend Chaos Theory, or Pavement lyrics, or the plot of Lost. Perhaps I would do my own taxes, or at least be able to effectively cheat on them. Perhaps I would work at Goldman Sachs, or perhaps I would meet up with my colleagues in the philosophy department to drink Glenfiddich and debate Heidigger on Sunday evening, rather than devouring two full hours of The Celebrity Apprentice.

And then something like this happens, something that reminds me of the true purpose of higher education, which is to squander the family's nest egg while sitting on a salvaged couch, listening to The Lemonheads, watching Elvis Presley films, manipulating cola cans in order to consume plant-based intoxicants, phoning the women of Kappa Kappa Gamma and conspiring to gather kegs of bargain-basement Wisconsin-based beer for outdoor tailgate parties that will most likely end with a regrettable coupling and the theft of at least one public sculpture:

Penn State University has been ranked the No. 1 party school in the nation by the Princeton Review.

The Princeton Review today released its rankings, which also give Penn State the No. 1 ranking in two other categories: students pack the stadiums (intercollegiate sports popular) and lots of beer (usage reported high).

Penn State also made Top 20 rankings in some other areas: students dissatisfied with financial aid, No. 2; jock schools, No. 3; major frat and sorority scene, No. 3; best athletic facilities, No. 3; best career services, No. 6; everyone plays intramural sports, No. 6; best college newspaper, No. 6; lots of hard liquor, No. 9; students study the least, No. 11; and least politically active students, No. 17.

That last paragraph is the best summation I have ever read of my own life from the ages of 18 to 22. And Penn State will, of course, back away from this distinction, due to obvious political concerns--but if I am being honest, I know a lot of strange and disconcerting and unhappy Ivy League graduates, and I know a lot of truly happy and successful and intellectual people who got through Penn State while consuming houseplants on a dare or passing out in the student section in the third quarter of a football game.

In conclusion, to paraphrase Homer Simpson, the moral of the story is: Never Try.