Well, let’s start with this: The Yankees are about to win their 27th World Series, Barack Obama just celebrated the one-year anniversary of his presidency, and I’m fumbling through my first awkward blog post.*
*Derek Jeter just singled. Could you feel it?
So yes, I promise this is going somewhere mildly interesting — and we’ll get there, we will — but first I guess we’ll deal with some paperwork. Here’s the deal: Mark and I are journalists. At least, we are in the sense that people pay us meager amounts of money to report on other people. It can be a strange job*.
*Maybe that will be a running theme of this Blog. Of course, I don’t suspect this blog will have a running theme.
Mark had this take on it one time…
It’s essentially a fake job. It’s your job to tell a large group of people about a small group of newsworthy individuals. And when you write about sports, you’re basically working a fake job and writing about another fake job.
So yea, it can be weird.
So I guess this is where the Blog comes in. In short, we’re just two guys who like to write, two guys who like to tell stories, two guys who like sports and music and pop culture.
So I guess that’s what this place, tentatively called The Brew House, will be — a place for Mark and me to tell stories.*
*For starters, the Yankees just clinched the World Series title, and Fox did a strange montage of all the starters celebrating after the final out. You know, I don’t know how you’re supposed to act when you win the World Series. I suppose there’s no “right” way to do it. And these kind of celebrations tend to end up being a little awkward. But this one might have qualified for all-time awkward status.
First, there was Hideki Matsui, who had just driven in six runs, smiling and shouting “Yea.” Awkward. Then, there was A-Rod running in the pile with his arms up. More awkward. And it looked like a few guys tried to start a dogpile, but everyone else didn’t really want to, so the team just kind of stood up and danced around in a big mob. Again. Awkard.
So I don’t want to do it. I don’t want to bag on the Yankees. There’s plenty of people to do that. But, if you watched the celebration, if you watched the… well, awkwardness, if you watched A-Rod, I think you might have thought the same thing I did: All that talk about the Yankees having great team chemistry was greatly exaggerated.
So what will be write about? I guess we’ll see. Maybe some basketball, maybe some essays about the state of rap music, maybe some essays about the state of the newspaper industry, maybe some essays about the state of the Royals, maybe we’ll share some funny links, maybe some words about 90s television shows — who knows?
There was this guy named Oscar Wilde. He was a writer, and he once said this:
“I love talking about nothing, it’s the only thing I know anything about.”
So, I guess that’s what this place will be. We’ll be writing about nothing.
And maybe, just maybe — that’ll be something.
The Brew House 