Um.
[video]
I went to Honduras (San Pedro Sula to be exact and The World’s Most Violent City to be more exact) to cover the U.S. Men’s National Team’s opening World Cup qualifier. They lost, but the wasn’t really the point. Dispatches: one, two, and three.
(They’re also at Deadspin: one, two, three.)
“I believe that my skill-set that I have built as a pharmacy manager in combination with my knowledge of college football makes me a viable, although admittedly unconventional, candidate for this position.” — This position: head football coach at Wisconsin.
A man awakens in a bed. It’s a large bed for a man who does not necessarily look large on television but is actually very large in comparison to the average human being. It’s a round bed because if you can have a gigantic-ass round bed then you’re gonna damn well have a friggin’ huge round bed.
After rolling over a few times—remember: big bed—he’s out of bed, and he walks over to his desk, pulls out the chair from under it, and flips open the top of his laptop rather easily and more easily than anyone ever should be able to open a laptop. On the screen, it’s already loaded. That video, that one that shouldn’t matter anymore but that he still watches every morning: he’s got it on his phone and his iPad, just in case.
The video: a tall man with a boring name walks onto a stage and puts on a red-and-gold hat. He shakes the hand of an older man—a man probably more than twice his age—then they look forward, still holding hands, presumably posing for a photo because of the shadow-and-flash that flickers all over the screen. Then, it’s over.
Tears slide down his cheeks as he goes to click refresh with his right hand, until his left hand grabs his other wrist as if they’re controlled by two different people—but nothing is further from the truth; he is complete control. And he’s crying all the while, but he’s also smiling so wide that he’s clearly not happy, no one’s ever that happy. He is going to do something strange or something un-understandable because you don’t just smile like that and then be a normal person.
The tears—only one on each side, from each eye—fall into a funnel sitting on a mason jar on the desk. These last two tears filled the jar, so he lifts off the funnel and places it on the desk. He picks up the open mason jar, and doesn’t look away from his screen, now showing “Up Next: Mike Singletary on Coaching Ray Lewis by killamicrophonebooksare4nerdz67.” Then: his right arm quickly snaps to the side, and as if propelled by something as simple someone snapping his thumbs (but something actually way more complex), the mason jar zips across the bedroom—it is a big bedroom because it must fit a big bed— and into a dark closet, the door of which is only open by about seven inches. The jar, which should be broken and should be empty, lands on a shelf, unbroken and full. It sits next to and along with 50 or so—probably more, but only he knows the exact number—other topless mason jars filled with that same cloudy liquid.
He doesn’t look in because he knows what happened and he knows it every time. Instead, he walks toward the bedroom door and takes a robe from off the door hook. A robe made of every edition of the American flag sewn together. He slides his arms into both sides, raises the yellow hood, revealing the brown snake you can only see when the hood is up, and opens the door. He feigns four separate punches and jabs, ducks his head once, and sprints down the stairs and toward the day’s new light.
“That’s what I’m talking about! I am talking about acquiring shit no one in his right mind acquires and paying for it and being troubled by it the rest of your life, moving it from house to house, in this case being put in the hospital by it, and so forth.” — “You & Me”
“Sports can struggle to find proper footing in a moment like this. By definition sports are trivial events—games. Stakes are low. To say a real life tragedy puts a sporting event in perspective is unnecessary and wildly glib. Waking up puts sports in perspective.” — Jason Gay, being as close to perfection as a human being with a keyboard and a brain can be
[video]
This is our courtyard. And that is snow.
We are currently devising a plan to protect, cultivate, and harvest this extremely rare natural material. Suggestions are welcome.
“The universe is finite. Or: The universe is infinite. One of those things is true—unless there’s some kind of alternate-capacity state of being that exists between ending and never-ending. If that’s the case, a lot of what we think we know and the ways we think about existence and, really, the meaning of everything from random meteor showers to why I ate a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich for Thanksgiving probably exist in some different way, a similar way possibly, but in a slightly or maybe totally different way from how we know or think of things to be.” —
This is the first paragraph of a (new! weekly!) column about curling. (via outsidemagazine)
Also: mine.