#Jeremy and Mike just get a pass for being silly guys | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

familyvisionis2020 · 4 years

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Day 5 - Huntsville

Jeremy’s up the earliest and sends a text to us that he’s getting breakfast with Noah at a place called the Grit. Rather than opt to join I just post up on the porch with Trey and indulge in a long long blog post.The weather is cooler and grayer, joggers and dog-walkers and kids on bikes roll down the streets, slow syrupy sunday morning, humidity and gristle, butter pats wouldn’t melt if you left them out on your plate but they wouldn’t be too taut to sink your teeth into. I feel a fundamental sense of repair from typing, reviving a column of spirit I’d quietly suffocated, knock loose a clot of rust in my clockwork and the machinery is humming along again. Now that I have the link to the blog to share to people I feel like I’m gingerly handing the missing puzzle piece to my patrons and well-wishers and companions, indulging a curiosity and rounding something out to myself that might prove the regard and sensitivity my quietness can bely, might be a kindness or a service to people who find me austere or impenetrable or bristly. I was staring at a picture of a cactus and identifying with it the other day, tall, two arms, tiny head, spiky, full of water, not so bad if you’re careful with them, just like me.

Later tonight I will watch Tired Frontier play the last set of their tiny tour with us and what will end up being our last show of the tour as well. Watching the face of the guys I see things so so different then when I saw them for the first time, when they were complete strangers, tourmates but sight unseen. What I saw in their faces the first time I saw them play: Royal is tall and broad-shouldered and country and active and maybe a little sloppy and expanive and reminds me a ton of my friend Mike, so I have love for him off the bat, also his weird tuning and rococo pedal board setup and heedless mustache and you know, wife, set off little clockworks of insecurity in me and my mind props up baseless criticisms of him sourced solely from my ignorance of him. After three shows we are not friends but I know him much better, have seen him from more angles, have a better sense of him, he loves doing bits and laughs high and loud and chills endlessly, in this way he matches the tone and cadence of Kabir magnificently. Paul is beautiful and has a face like a svelter Jim Carrey and kneads the keyboard effortlessly, digital dough, his fingers are narrow and elegant and move only enough to play the next keys, the same sort of parsimony of motion I used to see from chefs with expert knife skills. I envy his bouny raven thick-sable hair. Trey looks plainly joyful when he plays drums. He extends his crash cymbal hardware to the maximum length so his crash is preposterously high up. I can’t discern a reason other than it’s kind of fun or different. He’s enthusiastic about my writing, I get to share him some other work I’ve done, he says he loves it, I swell with gratitude and we exchange emails.

The morning in Athens goes more or less like the morning before: me and Kabir and John and Paul all go get breakfast at Donderos’ again, drink tea and coffee, pack up our stuff. We take some group photos with both bands outside on the porch with the orbs and they’re cute and silly. Kabir flipped a coin to decide whether me or John drives the next stretch, it’s me, I’m a little apprehensive because I haven’t driven a 15-passenger van in awhile, but once I’m in it’s like riding a bike, I have muscle memory of driving big vehicles from U-Haul trips and, before that, the box truck I drove to transport food donations to the pantry of the Servant Center in Greensboro. I’m a good driver, I check my mirrors, I put on a halloween mix I made in 2015 and I am feeling myself, focused, caffienated, surrounded by friends, there’s some clouds in the sky and drizzles but it’s not bad and we’re making good time. The boys just listen along with me to the DJ mix for awhile then start up a new crossword puzzle and we all 4 do it collaboratively, one person describing the clue, letters, cross-clues, and we brainstorm for answers, between the four of us we’re really good at this, and we’re all laughing and in great spirits as we methodically complete the puzzle. We stop in Marietta Georgia at one point to use the bathroom, we stop at a KFC with a 20-foot mechanized/animatronic chicken head whose eyes roll back in its head and whose giant beak opens and closes in regular time like a campy pendulum. I buy a postcard and a souveneir cup from here because I think my Mom has family from Marietta Georgia but when we’re back in the car I can’t remember if it’s Marietta Georgia or Marietta Ohio, but I figure it will be well-received either way. We get back on the road and now we’re off the highway and onto some more remote state routes and we pass into Alabama and the rain lets up but its still overcast so the light is gentle and diffuse, the hills are rolling, we pass a colony of tiny homes, weird, livestock, bulls with giant horns that when I see them I just say ‘aurochs’ absent mindedly, livestock and cotton fields and when we see police someone will just say ‘ops’ and the whole drive everyone is just in a good mood, making jokes, kind and breezy. I marvel at how these boys do not seem to carry the same sort of darkness I feel I do, or maybe they just don’t wear it on their sleeves, or maybe none of them are neurodivergent or addicted or traumatized, or maybe they are but hide it well, or have coped and healed…something I’m used to is being around people who require a space to talk about extremely serious and heavy and heartbraking things. Maybe it’s a vestige of a lifestyle I’ve left behind. In all the time I’ve spent with Kabir and Jeremy and John and David (our NC bassist who plays home shows when Jeremy is in NY), I’ve never seen anyone come close to losing their temper, yelling, crying, crumbling, whatever. I marvel at the putative stability of my friends. I like having stable friends, I like having a stable life, it’s not how my life has always been. There is a level of tranquility and calm that washes over me while I’m driving through rural Alabama with my stable friends in a well-maintained van in my healthy body wrapped around a heart that is not broken and a mind that feels as clear and capable as it has ever been. Grace is unearned, I’m told.

We make it to Huntsville on time, the venue is called the Salty Nut, kind of a spacious and tidy bar with a kind bartender my height but with a double thick country accent and the show booker is slight and soft spoken and exceedingly kind, he receives us and then points us in the direction of a nearby restaurant called Banditos Burritos. The restaurant is festooned with vaguely southwestern or hispanic decorations and also random camp like a dirty 1990s Bart Simpson doll, a ruined acoustic guitar, a King Khan poster, a garden gnome on an old-fashioned scale with the sliding thing, a skateboard without trucks painted with a sleeping cactus person wearing a sombrero, etc. The people there are so so nice and when we say we are playing the Salty Nut tonight the guy behind the counter explains that menu items with steak and all beers will cost, but otherwise we can order whatever we want for free. We get burritos, nachos, beans, rice, salsa, hot sauce, ice water in a paper cup. We feast, scarf down, all hungrier than we realized, it’s essentially a non-franchise Taco Bell by my appraisal, which is absolutely perfect as far as I’m concerned, the beans and rice feel good and substantial. Tired Frontier shows up a little after us, gets the same stuff basically, we eat and laugh and finish and go back to the venue and wait around for awhile, I join Jeremy and Royal outside skateboarding and act crazy and try to film them doing tricks but my phone dies and and eventually they stop and we go inside and set up and play. The show goes fine, TF sounds as good as they have so far. They’re playing to a crowd of the other two bands and maybe 8 people in the bar sitting at a table eating food they brought over for Banditos Burritos. The show is fine, unremarkable. When we play, I do the usual routine of trying to play my hardest and with my whole body, and end up dropping sticks more than once and missing some snare hits and not being able to keep up on the driving floor tom parts, mostly because I’m not warmed up and maybe not focusing enough, I’m letting myself get a little carried away trying to play hard and fast rather than keep things tight, I worry this may miff the other guys but after the show there is no indication that anyone even noticed it or cared. There was a cool part where I dropped a stick but instead of it falling to the floor it bounced around on top of the snare and tom and I managed to snatch it out of mid air and keep playing and Jeremy noticed that and that made me feel cool. We played hard and to my ear we got good claps between songs, we are pretty live and high energy and I think even if people don’t like our sound they appreciate the energy, but also some of the songs are earworms and catchy and people like that too, I’ve heard. We finish, the other drummer from the other band, Golden Flakes, says great set man, we perch at the merch table but sell nothng. We listen to Golden Flakes play for close to an hour, very jam band vibe, many many guitar solos, kind of sloppy, sort of high energy rock and roll I guess, I by this time am tired and pretty disinterested, get on my phone for most of it. Toward the end of their sets someone who I assume is a townie is drunk and heckling them between songs in a way that they are clearly fine with and they know the guy and to me for some reason he looks the way I imagine the way the protagonist John from Shit Town the podcast would look. We are in Alabama after all. He sounds like John (not from our band, from the podcast). He’s annoying and I’m being judgy in my head about him when I should maybe feel sorry or indifferent, idk. It feels sad to me, I don’t feel like writing more about it. It’s awkward enough, the heckling and banter from Golden Flakes, that by the end of the set we all kind of joke-rush out of there, quietly agreeing that what’s happening is awkward and unpleasant and we should go. We get put up in Thomas’s apartment, and on on the ride home the guys talk about how Huntsville’s claim to fame is being the place where the Nazi engineers taken during Operation Paperclip were taken after WW2, whose skills were put to use developing rockets, and that all manner of testing has taken place in and around the nearby military base, the Redstone Arsenal. Kabir tells a story about how a nuclear warhead was dropped on NC and by freak chance did not detonate. It would have wiped out the population of the entire Southeast. I didn’t believe it but you can read about it here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1961_Goldsboro_B-52_crash?wprov=sfti1

At the apartment I make a b-line for the couch, get my sleeping stuff out, eat an apple and a banana and a bunch of peanut butter out the jar and go to sleep. At the end of every day I feel so much more irritable and grumpy than I do at other times. I still really treasure a quiet space all to myself to sleep in and so this troubles that. But I just listen to a youtube video on European history, learn nothing, and have no dreams I remember.

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recentnews18-blog · 5 years

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New Post has been published on https://shovelnews.com/tim-benz-are-the-steelers-liars-or-just-dumb-tribune-review/

Tim Benz: Are the Steelers liars or just dumb? - Tribune-Review

Updated 6 hours ago

Let’s stop overcomplicating what happened with Ben Roethlisberger’s injury situation on Sunday during the Steelers’ season-altering 24-21 loss in Oakland.

Many are doing that in Pittsburgh because the more we layer the explanation, the less we are forced to acknowledge one of two clear-cut descriptions of what took place when it came to Roethlisberger being stashed on the bench.

The Steelers either were …

1. Stupid …

or …

2. Lying.

Neither option is pleasant to admit. Yet one of the two has to be true. You can believe either one, based on how you choose to reconcile your fandom of a team that normally should be held in high regard. But, in this situation, there isn’t a more plausible third option.

Simply put, either coach Mike Tomlin was ignorant about the game situation. Or, he and his quarterback aren’t being forthcoming in their explanation to you, the fan.

There is no middle ground.

I’m going to go with Option 1. And I say that with more than two decades of experience covering pro and college teams telling white lies, veiled versions of reality and textured presentations of truth.

I’ll get to why I think that in a minute. First, let’s investigate Option 2.

If Roethlisberger is lying when he said he was “just let(ting) coach tell me to go,” then we must assume that he is telling a different version of what really happened in the locker room or on the sideline. Thus, he’s totally hanging his coach out to dry.

Under lesser circumstances, that wouldn’t be hard to believe. But this is much bigger than whether “Coach Todd” allowed a quarterback sneak in the playbook, or if Antonio Brown didn’t run his pattern shallow enough in Denver, or how they botched the anthem silliness in Chicago.

Or if he really had broken toes in 2004, or if James Washington should’ve jumped for the ball down the sideli …

OK, maybe I’m making a case for the other side here by accident.

But the point is, the franchise quarterback is telling the world he was ready to play and never got a green light from the Super Bowl-winning coach in a game that resulted in a loss that may cost the organization a spot in the playoffs.

If that’s a false version of what took place, I’d imagine that would fracture the Tomlin-Roethlisberger relationship beyond repair. If Big Ben isn’t being truthful, Tomlin should’ve told his own version. Or he better do so at his own news conference on Tuesday.

If that happens, I’ll retract all of this on Wednesday. And we’ll have a mushroom cloud over the South Side.

Furthermore, for a guy who normally explains his own injuries in extreme detail, wasn’t it odd that Roethlisberger suddenly deferred all medical explanations to Tomlin? It struck me as forcing the coach to verbalize why a tolerable, managed injury kept the starting quarterback sidelined.

Plus, we’ve seen Roethlisberger play through more obvious injuries than this. Remember when he re-entered the 2015 playoff game in Cincinnati with a bad shoulder and started the next week against Denver? How about when he played through that bad ankle in San Francisco in 2011 and refused to exit a blowout loss? Or when he had to enter the game as an injured backup against Cleveland in 2015 when Landry Jones got hurt on the second drive?

Based on how he performed in this game against the Raiders when he came back, did he look worse than any of those times to you? Because he didn’t in my eyes.

That’s why I go with Option 1. It was just a dumb decision to keep Josh Dobbs in the game for — as Tomlin said — an extra “possession or so” beyond when Ben Roethlisberger was capable of coming back onto the field.

It seems to me that — for whatever reason — the line between trailing and being ahead was really thick in Tomlin’s eyes. Apparently, in Tomlin’s opinion, that “possession or so” wasn’t all that crucial because they were winning by four points at the time.

Based on the play of Tomlin’s fourth-quarter defense of late, that narrow lead shouldn’t have given him comfort in his analysis.

During three-game losing streak, the Steelers defense has given up drives of 73, 75, 79, 79 and 64 yards in fourth quarters, including two for game-winners in the final minute.

— Jeremy Fowler (@JFowlerESPN) December 10, 2018

If the Steelers are up by four in the fourth quarter of any game, Tomlin should coach as if they are down by three. Because those numbers indicate that eventuality will soon be the case.

Also, I have no idea what “rhythm and flow” Tomlin was trying to protect with Dobbs on the field when none of his four second-half possessions resulted in points. That was a strange explanation since he had no issue putting Roethlisberger back in during the Baltimore game after Dobbs completed a 22-yard pass from his own end zone.

I think Mike Tomlin foolheartedly believed he could “get by” or “stay afloat” with Dobbs against a bad Raiders club. He naively did so despite a mountain of evidence to the contrary when it comes to his club’s historical ability to put away heavy underdog Oakland teams.

That should make every Steelers fan angrier than a massaged version of the truth. We should be used that. Coaching negligence is a different story.

Source: https://triblive.com/sports/columnists/timbenz/breakfastwithbenz/14393296-74/tim-benz-are-the-steelers-liars-or-just-dumb

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