For your benefit and for ours, Drew and I have made a conscious decision to at least try to stick to sports on the podcast. Some of this is just a matter of playing to our strengths, or just to our tendencies. We have more experience being heatedly perplexed and weirdly wrong about sports than we do about any other topic, and we think about sports a lot. But also there is the reality of the broader situation, which at this moment extraordinarily bleak. So much so, in fact, that talking about sports simply because it is not that extraordinarily bleak broader thing almost qualifies as, I don't know, self-care? Self-preservation? Or maybe it is just a matter of knowing our limitations, and knowing our role. If you want to hear me complain about the Demmy-crats or how appallingly cruel and stupid every single thing in the culture is right now, you can call into the Amp show, or just wait for me to address those complaints in a blog post that's notionally about the Diamondbacks bullpen whenever I can figure out how to think or write again.
Anyway if it seems like this week's episode is kind of scanning from one subject to another at a high rate of speed, it is because that is precisely what we were doing—playing a game of The Floor Is Lava in the middle of a rushing river of the stuff, hopping from one sports-y surface to another and trying to make each other laugh. What else were we going to do?
It helped that there actually is some sports to talk about, in every sense. It is sub-ideal that the NBA Playoffs have become a grim grind of reciprocal blowouts, but we talked about why that is and what there might still be to find in it; Drew hinted at moderating his famous and longstanding zero-tolerance stance where the Boston Celtics are concerned. (This also led me to address the rumors that I have been A Magnanimous Husband when it comes to flipping away from bad playoff games to watch TV my wife wants to watch. I will say no more about this beyond that I am a very good boy.) The lurid and hysterically cheesy scandal involving Anaheim's mayor and Angels ownership is dispiriting in a bunch of different ways, but it was just tacky and oafish enough to afford us an opportunity to talk about our nation's weirdo mayors and Remember Some Corrupt Politics Guys. While joining the squad for some High-A baseball last week, Drew forged a vendetta against the extremely loud man who serves as the MC at Brooklyn Cyclones games, and he was not just ready but eager to litigate that beef on the podcast. By the time we got around to remembering Todd Zeile, or more precisely his precious black-bordered Score rookie card, we were rolling—not in any direction in particular, but at least talking about things that might otherwise have been crowded out by horror and dread.
And that was before we pried open the Funbag. There we found some glistening morsels, and devoured them hideously. These questions concerned uh regret—this one was pegged to a missed opportunity to dap up two members of Flogging Molly during a brief crossing of paths—but also the decline of religious signs at American sporting events, and the question of whether airports or NFL stadiums deliver higher volumes of binge drinking on average. (Since we recorded, I have been made aware that the original rainbow-wigged John 3:16 guy is incredibly in prison right now, so I guess this means I learned something from this week's episode as well.) At the end of the show, a police car with its sirens on pretty much parked under my window and remained there for the duration of the podcast. Is this a little bit on the nose? A little bit much? It is unquestionably both of those things. But sometimes it's better not to talk about it, and just talk about something else.
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