Eulogy for a friend

His emptiness is largely what was responsible for his music. It came from that dark place where he wallowed that most people avoid falling into, and if they do struggle with all their might to pull out from. What makes them talented is generally what makes them need drugs. 

Many artists, actors, and musicians excel at their craft because of anguish. Art often comes from that dark place where artists wallow that most people avoid falling into, and if they do, they struggle with all their might to pull out. 

Imagine your mom has just died, your wife told you she's divorcing you for being less of a man for crying over your loss, you totaled your car, and you accidentally killed your dog by giving him the wrong medicine ALL IN THE SAME DAY.

Imagine that disparity and grief and confusion, and how you can see nothing could ever be worse.

Now imagine living with that every single day.

Most of you don't know what pain is—and while you lament how your DVR didn't record the latest episode of your favorite reality tv show maybe recognize that there's probably somebody you know who is this night debating whether swallowing a bullet would hurt less than not swallowing a pill. 

I understand herion addiction, and while we can all mourn those who lose themselves too deeply into it, the fact remains that the time  those people are in that stupor is the only reprieve they have from their suffering. It's the only time they don't hurt. 

Maybe its not Soccer I hate but Soccer fans

In light of the harsh comments I’ve posted both publicly and in reply to other’s posts on social media the past week, I feel I should take some time to both clarify and soften my main contention with the (so-called) “sport” of soccer. 

There are a few people I’m friends with—four, I believe, although there could be one or two more—that are actual soccer fans. They watch the games year round, and do so religiously. They cheer for their favorite team with the fervor most around here display towards the Crimson Tide, and I cannot fault them for this; they are true soccer fans. 

I do, however, have a quarrel with fair-weather fans—those “band-wagoners” who only jump aboard because something is currently enjoying popularity in the social conscious. We see it in March for the NCAA basketball tournament where people who have done nothing but yell "Roll Tide" or "War Eagle" for the past 11 months are suddenly cheering for Wildcats, Blue Devils, or whatever the hell Villanova’s mascot is. We see it following BCS bowl season when the same people are suddenly rooting for some professional football team or another heading through the Playoffs and into the Super Bowl. We even see it, albeit on a smaller scale (since everyone around here seems to love the Atlanta Braves, even though they’re subversively supporting Auburn athletics in doing so), during the baseball playoffs and World Series—especially if Alabama makes the college playoffs in baseball or softball (because that’s when we see everyone come out of the woodwork dropping team members’ names as if they’re all old pals). Most heinously, we even witness it when Alabama catapults back to national prominence after a down decade, or when Auburn happens to win one or two important games (but never the most important, it seems).

Band-wagon fans feel the urge to make up for their previous disinterest in any such sport by suddenly bombarding their social media accounts with paraphernalia from the sport or their appointed favorite team in a display meant to affirm their unwavering commitment, newfound though it may be. These are the people with which I have such a problem. If it were the same few people that are always talking about soccer and their favorite teams posting World Cup news it wouldn’t matter to me. That’s who they are, and I acknowledged that when I chose to be friends with them. Hell, they can even give me a perspective on things and why something matters or what’s really important in the sport. The band-wagoners just regurgitate whatever they’ve gleaned from their ESPN app or from watching the news. To those people: I’ve heard it all before, and from a better source than you. To the true fans: please continue your fervor for whichever sport you wish.

Except for NASCAR. Fuck NASCAR

I hate Soccer

I've spent the last fifteen years of my life railing against the game of soccer, an exercise that has been lauded as "the sport of the future" since 1977. Thankfully, that dystopia has never come. But people continue to tell me that soccer will soon become part of the fabric of this country, and that soccer will eventually be as popular as football, basketball, karate, pinball, smoking, glue sniffing, menstruation, animal cruelty, photocopying, and everything else that fuels the eroticized, hyperkinetic zeitgeist of Americana. After the U.S. placed eighth in the 2002 World Cup tournament, team forward Clint Mathis said, "If we can turn one more person who wasn't a soccer fan into a soccer fan, we've accomplished something." Apparently, that's all that matters to these idiots. They won't be satisfied until we're all systematically brainwashed into thinking soccer is cool and that placing eighth (and losing to Poland!) is somehow noble. However, I know this will never happen. Not really. Dumb bunnies like Clint Mathis will be wrong forever, and that might be the only thing saving us from ourselves.

Soccer unconsciously rewards the outcast, which is why so many adults are fooled into thinking their kids love it. The truth is that most children don't love soccer; they simply hate the alternatives more. For 60 percent of the adolescents in any fourth-grade classroom, sports are a humiliation waiting to happen. These are the kids who play baseball and strike out four times a game. These are the kids afraid to get fouled in basketball, because it only means they're now required to shoot two free throws, which equates to two air balls. Basketball games actually stop to recognize their failure. And football is nothing more than an ironical death sentence; somehow, outcasts find themselves in a situation where the people normally penalized for teasing them are suddenly urged to annihilate them. 

That is why soccer seems like such a respite from all that mortification; it's the one aerobic activity where nothingness is expected. Even at the highest levels, every soccer match seems to end 1-0 or 2-1. A normal eleven-year-old can play an entire season without placing toe to sphere and nobody would even notice, assuming he or she does a proper job of running about and avoiding major collisions.

Soccer fanatics love to tell you that soccer is the most popular game on earth and that it's played by 500 million people every day, as if that somehow proves its value. Actually, the opposite is true. Why should I care that every single citizen of Chile and Iran and Gibraltar thoughtlessly adores "football"? Do the people making this argument also assume Coca-Cola is ambrosia? Real sports aren't for everyone. And don't accuse me of being the Ugly American for degrading soccer. That has nothing to do with it. It's not xenophobic to hate soccer; it's socially reprehensible to support it. To say you love soccer is to say you believe in enforced equality more than you believe in the value of competition and the capacity of the human spirit. It should surprise no one that Benito Mussolini loved being photographed with Italian soccer stars during the 1930s; they were undoubtedly kindred spirits. I would sooner have my kid deal crystal meth than play soccer. Every time I pull up behind a Ford Aerostar with a "#1 Soccer Mom" bumper sticker, I feel like I'm marching in the wake of the Khmer Rouge. 

That said, I don't feel my thoughts on soccer are radical. If push came to shove, I would be more than willing to compromise: It's not necessary to wholly outlaw soccer as a living entity. I concede that it has a right to exist. All I ask is that I never have to see it on television, that it's never played in public (or supported with public funding), and that nobody -- and I mean nobody -- ever utters the phrase "Soccer is the sport of the future" for the next forty thousand years.

From Chuck Klosterman's Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs. 

Kudos to my friend for winning an award for his writing.

Many congratulations to my friend Christopher Walsh who won the Alabama Sportswriters Association's Herby Kirby Award for his story "Their place in history: A look at Alabama's, Nick Saban's and AJ McCarron's place in college football lore." 

Find Christopher Walsh at his blog http://whosno1.blogspot.com/