You only get a perfect pitch every so often. Every day, you trudge out to the plate and try to eke out a single, a double, maybe lean into the ball and take your base, but that fat sucker right down the middle? Rarer than a tap-dancing manatee, so when it does arrive: take off your pants and fuck that pitch ’til it calls you Big Papi.
Stop it.
I was engaging in my usual, and beloved, analogy-torturing.
Yes, but you got a whole bunch of new Twitter followers and they’re going to show up and have no idea what the fuck is going on.
So?
So the entire site is just a series of running jokes and obscure allusions told via a set of fragmented and unintroduced narrative voices.
We call that “literature” where I come from.
Where do you come from?
Pretentious Town.
Just tell the story like a human
It is a story of lies, Enthusiasts. A story of perfidy and bosh. A story about a falsehood propagated against America by a low wretch. But enough about Tom Brady’s hairpiece.
Ba-DUM-dum.
HOW CAN I TELL THE STORY LIKE A HUMAN IF YOU’RE GOING TO COMMENT AND MAKE ME LOOK CRAZY?
Sorry.
Just shut the fuck up and let me slide into my own DMs.
That doesn’t mean anything.
SHUT THE FUCK UP. Anyway: last night was the Super Bowl. For the Foreign Enthusiasts, the Super Bowl is like the World Cup, but all at once and you’re allowed to use your hands. The Philadelphia Eagles (pronounced Iggles) were playing the New England Patriots (pronounced Faaaaahk) and the whole of America that is not New England desperately wanted to see the Pats crushed. Were the Patriots standing in front of a tank in Tienanmen Square, America would have rooted for the tank.
“Put it in gear, soldier! Make sure you get the big blond one. You’re gonna have to run him over three or four times; he’s too dumb to die quickly. And the coach with the beard. Shoot him with your giant cannon right in his hairy face.”
The Patriots, Foreign Enthusiasts, are best appreciated as a buffet of hatreds: there’s something for everyone to despise:
- Their owner looks like a half-melted vanilla ice cream cone wearing a MAGA hat; he married into his money, and makes everyone call him “Mister” because he’s the type of man who masturbates to The Color Purple.
- The coach is an obdurate prick (in public, at least) who joyously breaks running backs, cuts veterans, and has the same relationship with his kickers that Stanley Kubrick had with Shelly Duvall while filming The Shining.
- The quarterback is a Trump-suckling Zoolander clone who believes that he can play until he’s 60, if only his doctors can get his chakras in the correct order. He is also married to a supermodel, and enjoys playing tonsil hockey with his male child.
- They have a Gronk.
There is also the matter of cheating, which the Patriots do constantly and imaginatively, but only sportswriters and rival fans care about that. The NFL needs more cheating, as far as TotD is concerned. Fuck with the balls, loose bed bugs in the visitor’s locker room, whatever. Remember in The Last Boy Scout when the runner took a gun out of his pants and started shooting linebackers? Do that shit. I’d watch the shit out of that shit.
But the true locus of despicability lies in the fact that the New England Patriots led by Tom Brady and coached by Bill Belichick are the greatest team in the history of the NFL. The Steelers had their run in the 70’s, and the Cowboys had a couple good tears in the 80’s. Bears had 1985. None of them got to the Super Bowl 8 times in 15 years. They’re just so fucking good.
Don’t you hate that?
This bounty of success has, naturally, led their fan base to become insufferable. (Patriots fans are legally insufferable. If you write about them but fail to describe them as such, then you go to jail.) It is not their fault, this arrogance, but one can still loathe them for it. Pats fans–or the odious “Patriot Nation”–is at once superior and thin-skinned, braggarts searching the skies for any perceived slight, which, once spotted, is held as a grudge forever. They see conspiracies and dark cabals everywhere, and love nothing more than the sound of their own voice, especially when they’re boasting about themselves. They sound like a guy I know.
Patriots fans, Foreign Enthusiast, are hated, but they are not feared. Raiders games regularly feature stabbings, and an average of four fat guys are set on fire at each home Bills game. You don’t want to be in either parking lot wearing an opposing team’s jersey, at least not without a bunch of friends. But no place is like Philadelphia.
Philly’s a fightin’ town. Their mayors are still chosen via a round-robin tournament of bare-knuckle boxing. Most famous guy from Philadelphia is a heavyweight who doesn’t even exist, which didn’t stop residents from erecting a giant statue to him and putting it in front of their art museum. During the 70’s, the hockey team became famous not for their skill at the game, but for how well they beat the shit out of their opponents. But the football fans were the worst. Their old stadium, JFK, was the only one in the league with its own courtroom: there would be so many arrests that the city said, “Fuck it,” and sent a judge down on game days to instantly adjudicate cases. (TotD fun fact: my uncle was one of those cases.) And, as the legend goes, Eagles fans are the fans that threw D batteries at Santa.
(Philadelphia revisionist historians–apologists, the lot of ’em–will try to play down the incident. An argument often heard is that “Santa was drunk, and a terrible Santa” as if that were a reason to wing a battery at another human being.)
So, when they won the game last night, the riot came as expected.
This is where I came in. I apologize for taking so long to get to me.
Riots, as of late, occur online parallel to the physical kerfuffle. Riots, it turns out, are a hoot if you’re not in them. You can “tsk-tsk” or you can use the violence as an excuse to promulgate the same bullshit you always promulgate, or you could even call for calm and peace and love, all that good and holy whatnot.
Or you could fuck around. TotD now presents A Story In Five Acts:
I am officially Fake News.
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