Completely RedZoning Out

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'The Shadows of the Night'

We, the good people of Et tu, Mr. Destructo? are a pretty collegial lot. We like to chat on instant-messenger services with each other, because often one of us will discover an illegal stream and password to an Irkutsk-originating pay-per-view video of human or animal bloodsport. Last night, as I polished a new column for Vice, and General Rehavam Ze'evi worked on Part IV of his three-part series on Libya, our thoughts turned to ways to help drive more traffic to this website:

You should embed a Pat Benatar Youtube to get more pageloads. Everyone loves her.

It would probably have to be the video for "Shadows of the Night," for the one-two punch of Judge Reinhold and Bill Paxton.

I Got a Tumblr

You might have noticed that I created a Tumblr a few months ago. If not, the new Tumblr widget makes the existence of a Mr. Destructo Tumblr somewhat more obvious. You might also ask why one exists, and in this respect you and I would happen to have a lot in common. I don't really understand the purpose of a Tumblr. After using it for some months, I even looked up their article on Wikipedia just to make sure I wasn't missing anything.

Wikipedia says* it's a microblogging site, but of course so is Twitter. Given the paucity of per-article content most people toss up on their pages, Blogger probably counts for one as well, although I'm sure most people don't see it that way. Microblogging seems to definitionally reside on the intent side of behavior. Your average person running "MayasKittyGarden.blogspot.com" might only be able to burp out 250 words at once, but the company providing her webspace had a grander intention at one point in time.

MLB Playoffs: (Not Really) NLCS Game 3, via Chatlogs

As soon as I knew I was going to do a few more playoff blogs this year, I sent an email to my buddy JShap, who last showed up in "The Emmys Are for Idiots, Part II," and asked if he was interested in joining in. Last year, during the second game of the World Series, he and I wound up commenting on the game via AIM, and it was easily the best part of the piece and the most fun I had writing about the postseason. Because I still find myself quoting from it — and think it has two of the best lines ever printed on this site — I figured there was no way another chat couldn't make the Championship Series at least a little more fun.

I was right, but inadvertently, we wound up overshadowing the game, almost bailing on it completely. That probably happened for a few reasons:

1. JShap had to do some work, which meant that he had to choose what to de-prioritize. Work wasn't an option, and since he was ostensibly there to chat with me, the game wound up less scrutinized.
2. I was up until eight that morning doing work and managed to get about three and a half hours' sleep. Basically, my brain was too sluggish to really follow too much at once.
3. Joe Buck and Tim McCarver were normal and on-point. I've covered them when they've been off-the-rails nutty, staggeringly stupid, offensively disinterested and plain mediocre. This was not only one of their better games, it might be one of the best that I've heard them call.
4. I was a little burned out on baseball in general, from having written two pieces and 6,000+ words about it the day before.
5. The game was quick, efficient and pretty conventional. The innings flew by, and nothing untoward happened. Apart from a few unfortunate errors for the Phillies, this wasn't a game where you could point to anything particularly momentous or worthy of contention.

In short, NLCS Game 3 was one of those ballgames where you can understand everything that happened by just reading a box score. There wasn't something visually odd that needed interpretation, nor was the announcing or presentation mistaken enough that it would be important to note in a way that an ESPN article would not.

Because of that, the few notes I took were mostly useless. They're play-by-play stuff, the sort of thing ESPN does better and that you don't need to hear from me. At the end of the game, well over 90% of what I'd written came in the form of chat. I'll go ahead and try to ground some of that conversation in terms of action on the screen, but much if it is untethered to the game drama. If you hate chatlogs, my apologies, but it's best you punch out now.


We open with the national anthem performed by a member of Death Cab for Cutie, putting his band's unique spin on the material, which is to say acoustical, stylistically inert, vocally sub-competent, and deadly fucking dull, dull, dull. His presence here also guarantees that of his wife, Zooey Deschanel, a Manic Pixie Dream Girl best known for playing the same tissue paper-thin waifish characters, making tissue paper-thin music of forgettable quality and being so genuinely banal that a website once asked (and answered), "Is Zooey Deschanel the Most Boring Person Alive?"

Anyway, I'm thinking these things when JShap finally swans in:

ME: You're late. The national anthem was sung by a douchebag from Death Cab for Cutie. The one married to Zooey Deschanel. Which is why, supposedly, Zooey Deschanel is singing "God Bless America" later. Really. The Land of the Twee and the Home of the Reedy, Weak and Affected.
JSHAP: I'd rather ride in a Death Cab for Cutie than listen to that!
ME: You realize you just backhandedly called yourself cute? I like this decision, though. It's like the people in the Giants' front office were programming the singing for this game and thought, "Wait, what if people in America don't know they're playing this game in San Francisco?" "Good point. Do you think we could have someone perform the national anthem as a series of pops and clicks?" "Yes, and let's have it sung by a tree." "The Stanford Cardinal is busy that day. Just go down to the Mission and straw poll people about what indie piece of crap they most want to hear."
JSHAP: What I love about Zooey and America both is that they're just so down to earth and relatable.
ME: I remember one time being on this plane going somewhere. I didn't know. I think I was trying to find myself, you know? Anyway, I had this really long layover at Midway, maybe four hours. I just wanted to be left by myself to work things out, but I met this really amazing country that wouldn't leave me alone until I came out of my shell and helped it perform an acoustic guitar song by clapping my hands and letting it see me smile. That country was America.
JSHAP: America totally got me into the Shins and taught me not to sweat the bullshit.
ME: America smiled at me, and I pulled a thin sundress over America's head and saw its tiny breasts, and it self-consciously covered the faint chestnut down of its pubic hair with a small hand girlish hand that had chewed fingernails and chipped polish.
JSHAP: My laughter is stifled by my erection. It's usually the other way around.
ME: I got uncomfortable typing that.
JSHAP: Well it was tastefully done, and the story called for it.

MLB Playoffs: Yankees/Twins ALDS Game 1

For earlier playoff games, please see MLB Playoffs: Rays ALDS Game 1 & Roy Halladay's Gem.

Pregame

After filling time to end the broadcast of the Reds/Phillies game, we have to go back to the TBS studio to fill time before the Yankees/Twins game. Because one of the most amazing things that can ever happen in baseball just happened, everyone in the studio feels he has to stamp his wisdom on it and offer some announcing stab at immortality. David Wells tells us all about how he knew Roy Halladay when he first came up with the Toronto Blue Jays and showed so much promise; then Halladay went back down to the minors and came out to throw a perfect game and have this kind of performance.

This is a really interesting summary, because Wells has just made 1998 and 2010 sound like they happened a few weeks apart. It's kind of like Kirk Douglas saying, "Well, I knew my son Michael had determination because once I showed him how to walk, he just wouldn't stop walking. That's how he graduated high school and produced One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, and now he's finished filming the new Wall Street movie." I know Shakespeare used to compress time like this in many of his plays, but in this case a really dumb Falstaff just poached Doc Brown's DeLorean and used it to park on Octavian to keep him from murdering Prince Hal.

You Are Christine O'Donnell

You've probably heard a lot about Delaware Republican senate candidate Christine O'Donnell in the last couple weeks. She gives everyone you know on Facebook a daily video that they can paste into their feed to seem politically "with it." Plus, she neatly helps the Democratic party make sure you never hear about its spinelessly walking back even faint promises to restore effective progressive taxation — like how they gutted and bailed on their attempt to kill the carried interest tax break. Pocket change you can believe in.

O'Donnell's so fucking nutty that she's almost a perfect distraction. First there was the video of her anti-masturbation opinion. Then it turned out that her passionate Christianity hit a speedbump a few years back when she was one of those loopy dorm-room-type witches. In 2006, perhaps because of witchcraft, she knew of classified Chinese plans to take over the United States. She thinks evolution is a myth because monkeys don't evolve pipes into their hands and turn into Presbyterians for no reason. Then there was the video where she admitted that she failed to become a hare krishna because she loved meatballs too much. And she claimed to have attended Oxford University in England, when in fact she didn't get her pedestrian American BA until a short while ago. Also, apparently somewhere along the line somebody asserted that her father was the official Philadelphia affiliate's Bozo the Clown, when he was actually just a substitute Bozo. Fine, whatever.

Anyhow, now O'Donnell has a video out to set the record straight, one in which she asserts, "I'm not a witch.... I'm you." Watch:

Series Blog, Games 2 & 3: Corporate Whore Stadium and, Like, Double Guitars

As I explained at painful and unfunny length in the Game One blog, I'm sports superstitious. Sure, I'll be ironic and dismissive about it, but I still take it seriously behaviorally. Sort of like a guy who constantly busts on fat chicks yet has unprotected sex with a different one every night. I might dismiss my sitting in a weird position for "Good Luck," and even mine some good jokes from doing so, but I'm still the one sincerely doing something inadvisable or aesthetically wanting with my body.

Because the Phillies had won Game One while I was chitchatting with people online, I had to do that for Game Two, right? I didn't want the Phils to lose. The problem was, the people I'd been yammering at weren't online. Thankfully, one of my few Pennsylvania buddies, a former online writer I know, was around and willing to be bugged. Let's play ball!

'Reverse Jinx?' World Series Game One — Sort of

I can't explain how I watched last year's World Series. I managed to pay attention, take notes and write not one but two live-blogs of the thing. I suppose I was distracted enough by the novelty of reacting to things via live-blogging to not collapse in a wet sack of neuroses about the games themselves. No such luck this year.

I'm genuinely sports superstitious. Even as I'm doing superstitious things, I can tell myself, "This is objectively nonsensical. There is no causal relationship between your behavior and team performance," yet I won't for a second stop whatever's occupying my attention. One time I saw my team win a late-inning playoff game while I was seated in a weird way and holding on to a magazine I'd been flipping through. I sat in that position, clutching that magazine, for the rest of the games. They won 'em all!—I developed a peculiar pain! No, seriously. I had trouble walking because I'd sat like a mutant to watch baseball. Somehow this made perfect sense at the time.

In a strangely obverse display, I once walked home from a trip to The Booze Store during the early innings of a playoff game and discovered that while I was out, the Red Sox had scored three runs. A few minutes after sitting down in front of the TV, they gave up two. I immediately left the house and walked around my neighborhood for what I later figured out was eight miles. I periodically called friends to check the score. The Sox wound up winning by nearly ten runs, but when I'd gone home in late innings and after they'd gotten a large lead, the opposing team put runners in scoring position (RISP), and I left the house again.

This Country's Gone to the Dogs

The upside of having funny e-buddies is that you're never really at a loss for a way to kill time. You can look out the window, notice something, bring it up and then wind up riffing off each other for half an hour, mutually brainstorming, eventually wandering all over the place. If some day I really wind up hurting for new content, I could probably publish something new, every day, for a month just from the weird creative exchanges with one friend.

The downside to these exchanges, obviously, is that they're chatlogs, and chatlogs are sort of stupid and uninteresting for people who didn't participate. Sometimes, though, when they're good, all that's good about them goes to waste. You can't realistically repurpose the humor for a long piece, and you can't really make the chatlog itself something artful. Eventually you just have to have the gall, like I do, to say fuck it.

Ride the POTUS

Earlier tonight, I was browsing a series called Join or Die, in which artist Justine Lai attempts to subvert our monumental and strangely dehumanized images of the American presidents, via paintings of herself having sex with them in chronological order. According to her mission statement, her intent isn't to deliver predictably controversial anti-patriarchy subject matter, but to demythologize while also poking gentle fun of legacies.

I was looking at the paintings on a forum that had, for membership rules, mirrored and censored a few of them and was just about to click over to her website when my friend Devri logged on to AIM and fired off an IM to me in about two seconds. There are only two things that are bound to happen when someone you know does this: either they're about to tell you something you really desperately do not want to hear, know about or otherwise deal with; or they're going to tell you something awesome. In this case, it was the latter, only funnily enough, she sent me the link to the exact page I was already reading. Because I know how dearly everyone loves them, here they are: chatlogs, sweet nourishing wondrous chatlogs.

Chatlog Post #5: Iraqi Journalist Heaves Shoes at Bush's Head

Earlier today, an Iraqi journalist's freedoms and shoes were both exercised at George W. Bush, at a news conference during his surprise trip to Baghdad. Poetic justice continues to elude the American president, in this case, twice in succession and by mere inches. However, the president's Press Secretary, Dana Perino, was caught in the ensuing fray and received a microphone blow to the head, resulting in a black eye on her face and an ear-to-ear grin on at least fifty percent of Americans'. See video below:


Thankfully, a friend and I were on the job and able to bring our combined intellectual heft to bear on the issue by trying to imagine every shitty pun-filled New York Post-style headline about to drop on the front pages of the English-speaking world. How could we do it? Chatlogs. Precious, precious chatlogs.

Chatlog Post #4: It's Hard to Rhetorically Soar with the Eagles When You Lie Down with the Turkeys to Have Sex with Them

While I think most people would prefer not to go half a decade without talking to former friends or acquaintances, it's nice to know sometimes that you can pick right back up with them where you left off.

Whereas people less comfortable with you or with themselves might dance around the "did you become physically bloated in our time apart" issue; whereas a lesser personality might restrict herself to talk of children and spouses; whereas an especially solicitous individual might, in seeking to pay a disarming and non-committal compliment (e.g. "I hope that [washboard stomach, nice hair, enormous ass] of yours held up over the years"), try make you feel still capable of physically bringing it, it's good to know that there are some friends out there with the poise and composure to skip all that polite bullshit.

Some people need only wait until the twelfth line of exchange to cut right to the chase: you have sex with birds.

And some people, in fact, couldn't begin to give a damn about the big, flappy bastards.

Katie A.: how'd the turkey go? I just learned what "brining a turkey" entails
Me: It was pretty fantastic. I've done this for a few years now, so I wasn't terribly worried about it.
Katie A.: because i didn't know about turkey brining, i thought you were having Thanksgiving 2 days early. "Man, he gets into it."
Me: Ahaha
Me: ffffffff
Me: ok, gimme a minute here

Chatlog Post #1

Me: What are you going to grad school for? More book learnin'?
Cory: I'm going to be super-pretentious and get an MFA in Creative Writing
Me: Yeah, like that's an original idea.
Cory: I just need an excuse to wear more hats.
Me: If I were a professor and you came to me with that story, I'd fail you because I've heard that before.
Me: Now if you told me you'd come to get a degree in blowing lead glass, I'd be all, "Mmmmmm, tell me more."
Cory: Yes, but I'd do it IRONICALLY. That's all the rage.
Me: Do you think you can troll a creative writing course? I just picture deadpanning the reading of my story for a room of six other really fucking serious creative writers and finishing it with, "And with that, the Space Dracula, like Cincinnatus, laid down his anti-proton laser forever."