MattyMouthsOff

Mike McCarthy looks like an Elvis impersonator ready to sit down on the toilet one final time after crushing that large post-performance plate of Texas BBQ on the walk from the stage to the bathroom.

Mike McDaniel looks like he has a tattoo of a leafless tree with a Jack Kerouac quote attached that he doesn’t fully understand, but it felt trendy at the time.

Kevin Stefanski looks like your mom’s new boyfriend who always makes sure to remind you to “watch the leather” whenever he has to pick you up from school in his Lexus SUV.

Demeco Ryans looks like he beats the machine on the reg.

Robert Saleh looks like the cop who tries to bond with teenagers by asking if they’ve listened to the newest album by Tool.

Andy Reid looks like the guy who reads newspapers all day at the Bob Evans counter occasionally getting up to buy a pack of smokes from the vending machine and cut one loose as he smokes outside.

Brian Daboll looks like he’s got a rivalry with a local mechanic who also happens to be the umpire that’s tossed him from 16 of his son’s Little League games for heckling the opposing team’s eight & nine year-old pitchers.

Kyle Shanahan looks like an aging BMX veteran who just wants to thank Mountain Dew.

Ron Rivera looks like your friend’s father who always seems like he’s hiding that he’s got another family in another town nearby.

Nick Sirianni looks like the friend who holds everyone else’s beer at a bachelor party while they’re in the “VIP room.”

Matt Eberflus looks like the wealthy father in a 1950s studio drama who won’t let his daughter marry the man of her dreams because he works on the farm Eberflus’s bank is about to foreclose on.

Antonio Pierce looks like the biker who when flipped from his Kawasaki Ninja and through your back windshield, just hands you $500 cash and speeds off into the night.

Sean Payton looks like someone found a genie in a bottle and wished to bring the original Chuck E. Cheese to life, but only as a human being.

Arthur Smith looks like he loves Curb Your Enthusiasm but has never actually physically laughed whilst watching it.

Frank Reich looks like the proud father in a Hallmark movie whose baby girl left her big city job to come on back home to save the family business whilst also rekindling her high school romance with Sean McVay.

Sean McVay looks like the guy trying to bag Frank Reich’s daughter in a Hallmark movie.

Mike Tomlin looks like the soldier who keeps his eyes open for eight straight hours in the rain pretending that he’s dead to fool the opposition before popping up and taking out their entire camp and saying “told ‘em I’d get ‘em…dead to rights,” as he throws his aviators on and bites down on a cigar.

Jonathan Gannon looks like the guy who always picks up the tab and has become frustrated with his friends because even though he makes the most money, none of them have ever bought his ass a damn Amstel Light before!

Sean McDermott looks like the aging coyote who even after spending nine years in the joint goes right back into smuggling folks over the border, because 25 south and that strip of desert between La Cruces and Ciudad Juarez is the only place he’s ever felt at home.

Brandon Staley looks like the father trying way too hard to get his teenage daughter an athletic scholarship in water polo.

Bill Belichick looks like his favorite food is Milk Steak.

Zac Taylor looks like he owns and operates a sporting goods store called Mick’s that specializes in selling the slightly defective items that Dick’s couldn’t sell.

Shane Steichen looks like he embezzles from non-profit organizations.

Doug Pederson looks like the guy who’s still at the bar for last call on a Tuesday night because the kids are in college and he doesn’t want to be home alone with HER.

Kevin O’Connell looks like your friend’s black sheep older brother, that every kid in town bought their first fake I.D. from as a rite of passage when y’all were growing up in the burbs.

John Harbaugh looks like the pastor at your church who calls fouls in pickup basketball.

Dan Campbell looks like the owner of a used car dealership who’d be willing to knock 20% off the top if of course you’d be willing to pay cash on the spot!

Matt La Fleur looks like a frustrated male model who’s been relegated from being one of the face & body boys to a hand model.

Todd Bowles looks like the guy they based Bunny Colvin off of in The Wire.

Dennis Allen looks like he’s always stressed about inflation.

Mike Vrabel looks like he’ll dominate that six pound steak at the Boathouse, then turn around and spend his entire $50 gift card winnings on Miller Lites at the bar 10 yards from his table.

Pete Carroll looks like the high school soccer coach and teacher with tenure who tells his students and players that the disc in his back is still spinning like their favorite CD. Which of course they don’t get because it’s 2024.

“We’re in hell right now, gentlemen. And we can either stay here, get the shit kicked out of us, or we can fight our way back into the light. We can climb out of hell.” – Coach Tony D’Amato in Any Given Sunday (1999).

Ego death is entering a new universe and immediately sensing a force so powerful that it belittles you into the feeling that you are absolutely nothing. And so you think “oh I shouldn’t be here.” Which morphs into “I’ve made the biggest mess in the world and I just can’t clean it up.” Which, like quicksand, evolves into the forces of this new universe stabbing you and watching you bleed out as you so do yourself.

It’s like entering a heavyweight fight and thinking that you and your opponent are going to bang on each other for 12 rounds and win, lose, or draw you’ll go the distance. But then your ass gets knocked the fuck out in the second round with a good part of the nation’s eyes on you.

Being rejected. Experiencing failure when you’d thought you were prepared enough for your mission. It’s a series of humbling daily trials and the atelophobia that comes with it.

However, the great thing about an ego death is that it creates the opportunity for rebirth. A personal renaissance of thinking and evolving for purposes of survival and perhaps success. It’s the humbling ass kickings and psychological deaths that create a fire within your soul that’s just aching to break out of its chains and fly to heights you’d never imagined possible. Nothing makes your soul’s appetite for life and knowledge grow exponentially like hard times and ego deaths!

Last Sunday night was as obvious of a total and absolute ego-death for the Dallas Cowboys as I’ve ever witnessed myself. Big D walked into San Francisco expecting to produce another classic in this long-standing “rivalry,” but Big D was notified that they couldn’t hang with the 49ers after only about two quarters of football. Witnessing all of it live (yes I hate myself enough to have watched all 60 minutes of the game) certainly created doubt that this team is at all capable of beating the 49ers in San Francisco in January. I just don’t believe they’ve got the coaching staff, and primarily the head coach to turn this team around to accomplish that this season.

The only way this becomes possible is if everyone within the Dallas Cowboys organization admits that last Sunday night was an absolute ego death and each human reverts almost to the Nash Equilibrium/Game Theory and does what’s best for themself and the organization. Which means everyone also has to make the most of every second of their time between now and the final moment of their season.

I heard a rumor on Tuesday this past week that Heart Attack Mac a.k.a. Mike McCarthy hadn’t left the Cowboys’ facilities since the team’s return to Texas following Sunday Night’s shellacking in San Francisco. He might be hellbent on getting this team back on track, but this is also the same guy who lied to Jerry Jones in his initial interview saying that he’d “immersed himself in the analytics” during his year off from football when he really didn’t do that at all. So tonight’s game against the Chargers will tell us a lot about this team and the direction they’re headed for the 12 games remaining in this NFL season.

Let’s just hope Sunday October 8, 2023 humbled them enough to shape up…

Link to my Bipolar Time Machine playlist – https://open.spotify.com/playlist/4mbHro6c2bVebupCNj3jAx

What I’m listening to in this moment – https://spotify.link/GPPqx2laXDb

And a little pop culture reference that fairly accurately parallels the real world of the Cowboys this evening. Not the first time either…

Professional wrestling. Given the fact that America turns 247 years old this year I think we can all agree it’s one of America’s “greatest pastimes” at this point. As a kid I think we watched for the wrestling and the storylines and really the whole soap opera of it all mixed with the “good and evil” between faces and heels. Granted my generation got to grow up with “Stone Cold” Steve Austin almost as its father! And who knows, maybe you’re someone who stopped watching for 10-11 years and picked it back up in your 20s because you’d maybe felt the pain that sports, life and the workplace had put on you and your physical and mental health and realized these people are actually getting hit in the face with the same ladders that are sometimes holding up over 400+ pounds of man at one time. And you’re like “wow, they do this kinda shit everyday too, it’s their job.” Which somehow gave you a newfound appreciation for the sport and the business itself.

Soon after that maybe you’re starting to think of each character you see more and more like the human being they are in the workplace and how they are managing life on the road, their careers, and of course how they were progressing their own characters. And before you know it maybe you’re in your 30s and find yourself crying during back to back Money in the Banks because you felt like you were almost watching a close friend/teammate/coworker reach the pinnacle of their career and profession they worked so hard for over the past decade. When you’ve seen and have an idea of how hard they’ve worked to get there, I mean how can you not cry when Big E or Liv Morgan (shout out to Jersey) got on a ladder and snatched a briefcase with a contract in it that they could cash in on a men’s or women’s (respectively) world championship strap at any given time within 365 days?!

They’re still following their dreams after all this time and here it is. This moment. The humanity of those moments with the pops from the fans in the arena and people at home who need to see all that hard work pay off to people who deserve it because they’ve EARNED IT. I couldn’t cry because he’s such an asshole, but I felt a similar sense of pride I guess when MJF finally won the strap in AEW. But we’ll circle back to “The Devil” later.

Back to life, back to humanity (wrong lyric I know). It’s why we love Cody Rhodes. Because he asked to be released from his WWE contract during an awful Stardust gimmick with his brother Goldust (Dustin Rhodes) in 2015. He bets on himself, goes to Japan, goes to Mexico, does it on the indies, he does all the things Punk alluded to in the “Pipebomb,” as possibilities for his next moves, but never did. Then he helps start AEW in 2019 and get the company in WWE’s eyes as a threat. His creative efforts are noticeably missed in AEW since his departure last year, but then he comes back to WWE at Wrestlemania a few months later as a huge babyface and there aren’t too many fans who don’t want to see him get the belt that eluded his father Dusty for all those years!

It’s why we hate Maxwell Jacob Friedman. This guy oozes the essence of someone we all knew in high school who we really didn’t like because he was and elitist snob but now he’s in his mid 20s and he’s everything he says he is and he’s the AEW World Champion. He’s so dislikable, yet so undeniably good at his craft that you can’t help but respect the greatness. It’s like watching Triple H meets Chris Jericho or dare I say it Tom Brady where the greatness you’ve hated for so long is getting hard to hate at this point because of its, dare I say it, its utter artistic beauty.

In terms of mic skills, in-ring ability, storytelling ability, and just a mind for the business, there is nobody doing it better than MJF in 2023. “The devil’s greatest trick was convincing people that he didn’t exist.” Well Maxipad had us just about fooled that he was gonna turn face at Full Gear before using brass knucks gifted from William Regal to put away Moxley and win the championship. Are you kidding me with this storytelling?! MJF is the future of this business.

There’s catharsis in all of this. Sometimes we need to see something that inspires us from maybe a relatable figure. And sometimes I think we just wanna be mad or feel some type of aggression. Why else would so many Americans be glued to CNN between 2016-2020? You thought you would get news you actually wanted to hear? C’mon we all know the assignment.

I mentioned MJF as the future of the business. Recently I got the chance to work with someone who I think is also the future of this business in quite an impre$$ive way. The only two times I’ve ever truly been starstruck on set was when I met “Stone Cold” Steve Austin on a shoot because he was a hero of mine growing up, and Mercedes Varnado formerly known as Sasha Banks in WWE. But with her, it’s a feature, I’m a department head, and I don’t wanna fanboy out to hard but I’ve gotta talk to her. So I’m like “oh I’ll wait until the last day to tell her what I wanted to tell her.” Which backfired because on the last day we did an overnight so when I finally go to talk to her it was like two or three in the morning, we’re on an ungodly hour of work, I’m getting delirious and everyone in my department is already there in the realm of delirium. Whole crew is either in that realm or about to be and that’s not always a bad thing because delirium on set is like if everyone were smoking a joint in purgatory. Almost everything becomes funny but you’re also wondering when the fuck you’re gonna get to leave.

Yet I’m still a little nervous to tell her something, the sun is coming up in a few hours so we’re all not 100% there or wishing to deal with other people, and plus I only know her in this voyeuristic way of I’ve watched her on USA Network and Fox for the last seven or eight years. It feels a little fuckin weird on my part to tell her I’m proud of her.

So finally I sit down next to her and like an awkward teenager and I say “Mercedes. I don’t know if I’m allowed to say this because I’m not in the business, but I’m really fuckin proud of you. Everything you get in this business you’ve earned.” And I told her I felt she made the right move in walking away from WWE when she did. She told me “she appreciated that,” and to her credit she did it with a smile on her face even though at this point I’m sure she was also mentally in purgatory with the crew wondering if she should hit the delirium joint as well or not.

Today I saw a tweet that said something to the effect of “rumor has it Mercedes Varnado entering Japan is the biggest thing to happen since Godzilla!” And it hit me. This woman is about to change the face of women’s professional wrestling on a global scale. With social media and the options of what to watch in wrestling these days, most fans have an idea of what’s going on in WWE, AEW, Impact, in Japan, in Mexico. So now all of these wrestlers have destinations to go that aren’t just the WWE. It’s the most fascinating time in pro wrestling since the Monday Night Wars. Mercedes has the opportunity of becoming a global superstar where she’s a draw anywhere in the world at any given time. And by doing this she’s going to bring to light more names overseas and in North America. She’ll be able to help elevate so many other women and performers into the spotlight and this is absolutely huge for women’s pro wrestling and pro wrestling in general.

Outsider’s Perscpective: professional wrestling is an interesting business for its performers. You’ve gotta be able to excel in the ring, excel on the microphone and as a storyteller excel at doing both. You can be the greatest technical wrestler anyone has ever seen before, but if you don’t have the charisma to make fans either love you or hate your guts there’s only so far you can go.

THE BIPOLAR TIME MACHINE NEXT 15 PLAYLIST:

1. “Moving in Stereo” – The Cars
2. “Da Graveyard” – Big L
3. “Jane Says” – Jane’s Addiction
4. “Sussidio” – Phil Collins
5. “Sky’s the Limit” – Biggie
6. “Cowboys From Hell” – Pantera
7. “Supernatural Thing” – Ben E. King
8. “Notorious” – Duran Duran
9. “Between the Eyes” – Ratt
10. “Chillin” – Wale
11. “The Metro” – Berlin
12. “N.Y. State of Mind” – Nas
13. “Runnin’ with the Devil” – Van Halen
14. “Travis County” – Gary Clark Jr.
15. “Secrets” – The Weeknd

It’s April 26, 2012. The NFL Draft is beginning on this particular night and both the New York Rangers and New Jersey Devils are playing in game sevens of their respective Eastern Conference playoff series’. The Rangers are playing at home against Ottawa, and the Devils are on the road in Florida. It’s one hell of a night for sports fans in the North Jersey area.

I’m pregaming at home for the draft because I’m a huge football fan (and loser) and although I really don’t care about hockey, I’m keeping eyes on the games because as a bartender in West Orange, the further the Rangers and Devils go in the playoffs, the more money I make at the bar.

At this point in my life I’ve delved a little too deeply into painkillers and I have 180 milligrams of oxycodone, or (six) smurfs as we called them, and I’m mixing it with a little concoction that Uncle Fuego put me up on. You take a pint glass, you fill that fucker with ice, you throw a shot of vodka in, and you top it off with a bottle of Mike’s Hard Lemonade. In this instance I have Mike’s Hard Black Cherry Lemonade, and I have a six pack of it which will inevitably be finished by the time I go to the bars. Basically every time I finish a glass of this concoction that I call “White Trash,” I crush up a smurf and snort it too.

Sidebar: we called them smurfs because they were little blue pills containing 30 mgs each of  oxycodone. We also referred to them as Roxis, short for Roxicet/Roxicodone, but I think that’s actually a different form of the pill. Not 100% sure on that. 

At this time in my life I’m taking my year off from college and I’m an assistant coach of a JV lacrosse team. Some fuckin’ role model I was. And I have a girlfriend at Rutgers who either sees something in me that’s not there, or she’s blinded by some aspect of my personality. Because I’m currently hiding my pill dependency from her, and I’m one miserable, self-loathing, and disgusting son of a bitch. 

Once I’ve finished the entirety of my party supplies I get a ride to the bar, because even though I hate myself I’m not consciously suicidal enough to drive with this skinful of liquor and opiates in me. At least at this point in the night…

On my night off from work, I go to my shitty office to hang out and get drunker. I show up and the place is packed with hockey fans, football fans, and the crowd of folks who just feel like going out to enjoy their Thursday nights.

I sit down at the bar and my friend, Chester, arrives. Uncle Fuego and Good Ole TR are working the bar and Chester and I order vodka-clubs as the Indianapolis Colts are on the clock with the first overall pick in the 2012 NFL Draft. Woodrow and CTN are also working. Remember those guys? From the time we all went skydiving the day after Uncle Fuego and I tried bath salts?

Freefall: Bath Salts and Jumping Out of Planes

The Colts select Andrew Luck with the first overall pick. The Redskins then mortgaged their future by giving up wayyyyy too much to the Rams for their second overall pick and selecting the 2011 Heisman Trophy winner, Robert Griffin III. Trent Richardson comes off the board at three to the Cleveland Browns. Matt Kalil to the Vikings at four. And Justin Blackmon to the Jaguars (a pick they traded with Tampa Bay to get) to round out the top five.

Sidebar: as I wrote all of that I realized that none of those five guys really ever truly lived up to the lofty expectations that come with being a top five pick. Luck just retired amid what must be immense physical pain, and perhaps mental as well, that took him to a self-described dark place. RG3 went from Heisman winner to offensive rookie of the year to constantly injured to the Browns in 2016 to out of the league in 2017, and now he’s a backup in Baltimore. Richardson was decidedly a bust with Cleveland and was pretty much out of the league by 2015. Kalil is currently a free agent. And Justin Blackmon had similar problems to mine with substance abuse which never really allowed his career to gain any legs.

The Rams are supposed to pick sixth, but something that still to this day irks me a bit goes down. Jerry Jones trades up to the six spot from 14. The owner and GM of my beloved Dallas Cowboys gives up his first (14th overall) and second (45th overall) round picks to jump eight spots in the draft. Chester, also a Cowboys fan, and I are wide eyed (well as wide as can be for me, the opiates have me seeing the world in a very dim light these days as my eyelids droop) awaiting this pick. We desperately need help in the secondary so I’m hoping for a corner, or better yet, a safety which has been a position of need pretty much ever since we let Roy Williams walk at the end of the 2008 season.

Sidebar: safety’s still a position need for the Cowboys in 2019…

The owners’ puppet, Roger Goodell, walks to the podium and begins speaking into the microphone, and I’m expecting/hoping the pick will be Mark Barron, the safety from Alabama. “With the sixth overall pick in the 2012 NFL Draft, the Dallas Cowboys select Morris Claiborne, Cornerback, LSU.”

“WHAT THE FUCK?! WE COULD’VE HAD BARRON! WE COULD’VE STAYED PUT AT 14 AND TAKEN JANORIS JENKINS!” Amongst other things, are what Chester and I are yelling at the televisions. But our loudness is drowned out by the larger crowds of hockey fans cheering, and oohing and aahing every time there’s a goal or save by the Rangers or Devils. And booing loudly every time a goal goes against one of those teams, or their opponents produce something good.

Chester and I are going ape shit, and we only get more apey when Barron goes to Tampa Bay one pick later at seven. Jerry Jones has once again given up too much for a player the Cowboy faithful aren’t as high on as he is. So this leads to shots of Rumple Minze for me…

My best friend, Snake, shows up to grab his credit card tips and we kick it for a few. I’m certain he knows I’m fucked up, but I’m doing a good enough job of holding it together and I’m not yet slurring my words. He sits down and we begin having a rather philosophical conversation.

“You need to make something, brother,” he begins to tell me, “whether it’s another short film or a screenplay, you just need to work on your art.”

“But I don’t really have time.”

“You’re full of shit, Chern. You’re at a bar watching the draft and drinking enough alcohol to kill a large 22 year-old child, on a Thursday night. You could easily be at home writing a script or something. And also watching the draft and drinking enough alcohol to kill a large 22 year-old child at the same time if you wanted to.”

I know he’s right and I feel as though there’s no correct response to this on my end. So I play the emotions card.

“I’ve got a lot going on right now, man. A lot of shit to work out with myself and my mind. I believe they call it depression.”

“Oh I don’t know, maybe stop doing pills? Cut back on the drinking too?”

“That’s not it.”

“Bro, if you’re miserable you can do something about it. You don’t have to stay there. Look at me, I’m doing my thing. Making my art, and managing school and work. I’m not staying in that place after some of the shit that’s happened to me this year.”

Instead of immediately heeding his advice and going home to write, I ordered us two shots of Rumple Minze. And after Snake left I called my guy and got three more smurfs, which I immediately upon receipt crushed up into one line and railed in the bathroom.

Sidebar: I would eventually heed his advice and cut out the pills when I went back to school in August of 2012. I heeded it even more in the spring of 2013 when I produced The Dream Interpreter, a short film that went to the Short Film Corner at the Cannes Film Festival in 2014, and when I wrote 40 pages of a screenplay entitled A Year Off, basically an embellished detailing of the shit I got into during my year off from college and what ultimately brought me back to college. 

Although I cut out the pills in 2012, I didn’t stop drinking until about 2:10pm on August 29, 2017. But here we are 26 months later…

Both the Devils and Rangers won their game sevens that night to advance to the next round of the Stanley Cup Playoffs, and every bar in the area was packed with happy campers for the most part. Some degenerate gamblers being the exception.

Chester looked over at me and said “let’s go up the street.”

So we went up the street to a dive bar where the lonely people go and on this particular night it was like something out of a movie. Folks were celebrating their hockey victories with loads of liquor and at one point we were all banging our fists on the bar like it was a celebratory ritual. Two different people offered me cocaine and my response both times was, “sure, twist my arm why don’t ya!” And of course, I kept drinking…

Sidebar: you’ll have to excuse me, at this point in the night things get a little fuzzy for about the next two hours or so. Weird, right? I’m not just fucked up, I’m not just wasted. No, I’m licking dirt off the ground on Mars that’s how out of my mind I am right now in the night. So I’m going off what I was told at the time had happened from several “witnesses” to my actions on the night.

It’s about 1:30 in the morning and Chester and I are outside of this dive bar. He claims that he told me not to go back to my office in the condition that I was in at the time. I told him he was right. And then proceeded to stumble down the street and into my office.

I walked in and apparently everyone said to themselves, “HOLY COKE!” I sat down at the bar, eating my own damn face and when I tried to order a drink, both Fuego and TR said “no fuckin’ way, Chern. You’re good, you’ve had enough.”

We used to lock the door and throw another lock with a chain on it on the door handles for extra measures when we closed. So when Fuego and TR call “laaaaast calllll,” I look at Fuego and I slam my fists together (still eating my face while I try to retrieve my jaw from the other side of the room), and I say “lo-lo-lock it up! Lock the door!”

Fuego’s girlfriend eventually offers to give me a ride home and I begin to come back to earth when we’re parked outside my parents’ place. She bursts into a heartfelt speech that sounded similar to this in its conclusion:

“I’m kinda mad at them. They were all fine and dandy until you walked in and then they all decided to cop an attitude. Hun, you’ve got a problem that you need to work out on your own, but I still think they overreacted a bit.”

“Isn’t she beautiful?” I asked.

“Isn’t who beautiful?”

“Bessie.” And I turned to point at the shitty white minivan my family had owned for almost 14 years (as of 2012). I had actually car-mitzvah’d her on November 28, 2011 by splitting a slice of cheesecake with Fuego in the parking lot outside our office. I took a bite and he said “welp, I’m going back inside.”

She laughs and tells me to go get some sleep. Because that’s really about to happen in my world right now.

I go inside and I realize that I’m super horny and I want to go see my girlfriend at Rutgers. So I tell her I’m coming down and then I try to sneak the keys to Bessie out of my parents’ room, but I wake them up. I’m being a real pain in the ass and they (super wisely) won’t let me get the keys. It gets to the point where my dad has to push me to the ground and eventually I get kicked out of the house for the night.

So I call my girlfriend’s sister and ask her if she wants to go down to Rutgers. She says “not tonight,” and I press the issue before she finally realizes my state of mind and hangs up on me. Eventually I call my girl and ask her to pick me up. It’s a little after three in the morning now, but she agrees.

I try to make things easier for her so I begin walking to Bloomfield, a town that the Garden State Parkway exits to. I walk to Bloomfield via Watchung Avenue and she picks me up right on the border of Montclair and Bloomfield. I’ve recently, within the past several days, become obsessed with a song by Lana Del Rey called “Blue Jeans,” and I play it on repeat for roughly the entire drive back down to Rutgers.

Sidebar: not going to mention your name because I doubt you want to be a part of this story at all, but I’m sorry. For a lot of things, most things, but in this one instance, making you listen to the same song on repeat for like 45 minutes.

We get down to Rutgers and I have no idea how my pleasure pickle was able to function at this point, but it works and we do our thing a few times over the course of several hours before finally falling asleep. Or passing out in my case.

We wake up around one in the afternoon, I feel like death and she skips class to drive us back up north. I get to practice and I’m wearing sunglasses to hide the look of a deadman even though my breath and pores are emulating the smells of Rumple Minze, vodka, and despair. I had texted my fellow coaches the night before to tell them I was going down to Rutgers to get laid, and both the wording and the timing of the text were evidence enough that I was clearly under the influence of something, so none of them say a word to me as they’re probably more just impressed that I’ve made it to the field that day in one piece. Practice ends and I head home to shower before a Friday night of work.

Before I even open the doors to my office I can feel the awkwardness and I know the “asshole, asshole, asshole” chants are undoubtedly for me this evening. Fuego, is providing me the courtesy of pretending like he doesn’t remember, nor wants to talk about me the night before. TR on the other hand walks in a few minutes late and tells me to come with him. We walk to the back of the bar/restaurant.

“Fuego talk to you yet?”

“About what?” Playing dumb even though I know exactly what conversation we’re about to have.

“If you ever come in here looking like that again, I’ll fire you myself.”

Despite knowing he’s absolutely right, I put this look on my face that basically exudes the words “fuck you, TR.” But, he powers through it knowing he doesn’t give half a fuck about my attitudinal, rebellious, 22 year-old bullshit.

“Francis wasn’t here. The O’Irishes weren’t here. But, if any of them had been, you’d have been fired right there on the spot. And don’t even try to tell me you weren’t swimming in a pool of blow and roxis last night. Get it together, bud. Get it the fuck together.”

Now this is three (five if you include the car key incident with my rents) times in less than 24 hours that I’ve been told by mentors, friends, and loved ones that I have an evident problem. That I’m just a head floating in midair like the damn Cheshire Cat, just snorting, smoking, drinking, dropping anything that alters one’s mind that’s put in front of my face. But, I’m 22 and I think I know what’s best for me and for the next few months I’m about to put my lifestyle ahead of just about everything and everyone in my life. But, those are different stories for a different time…

 

For those of you who give a shit, here are the next 15 songs on the “Bipolar Time Machine” playlist on my Spotify account:

1. “Boyz-N-The-Hood” – Eazy-E
2. “I’m Back” – Lil Scrappy
3. “Lucky Penny” – JD McPherson
4. “Look On Down From a Bridge” – Mazzy Star
5. “Love is a Battlefield” – Pat Benatar
6. “Control” – Puddle of Mudd
7. “Blue on Black” – Kenny Wayne Shepherd
8. “A Real Hero” – College
9. “Doin’ Time” – Sublime
10. “Lofticries” – Purity Ring
11. “Judas” – Fozzy
12. “What’s Love Got to Do With It” – Tina Turner
13. “Come Undone” – Duran Duran
14. “The World is Yours” – Nas
15. “It’s Now or Never” – Elvis Presley

 

 

I’ve been a Dallas Cowboys fan my entire life. My dad’s whole side of the family are Giants fans, mom’s whole side are Steelers fans. Based on the places I lived growing up, and my family history, I could’ve been a Giants fan, an Eagles fan, a Bears fan, or a Steelers fan. And I chose to be the black sheep of the family and the sore thumb of many a group of friends. I also went to college in Virginia where I was surrounded by a sea of WFT fans and Steelers fans. To give you an idea of how much I love this team, I have the Blue Star tattooed on my left ass cheek…

It’s insane because they’re almost the equivalent of a significant other who plays Jedi-mind-tricks over and over again, but you’re a glutton for punishment and love them so much that you’ll buy into their false senses of hope and security. So why do I watch every minute of every single Cowboys game? Because I’m disgusting human and I hate myself. Yep, that’s right. I once watched all 60 minutes of a 46-7 loss at Green Bay in 2010 in an already lost season that at that point left us at 1-7, and Jerry Jones fired Wade Phillips the next day which simply began the Jason Garrett era.

As well as all of the 44-6 loss in a week 17 “win and we’re in” game in 2008. Okay, that one I may have turned off at 34-3 to save some face in front of the predominantly Giants’ fan crowd of friends I was going to go out to get drunk with that night. Must’ve really lost a lot of something in myself between 2008 and 2010 I guess, but hey Kurosawa used to say “to be an artist means to never avert one’s eyes.” Granted he grew up with the events of World War and the H-Bomb, and I grew up with GTA:Vice City, but you get the point.

Yesterday’s loss for some reason might be the most painful and heartbreaking of them all. More so than the “Dez Catch Game” at Green Bay in January of 2015. More so than the 34-31 loss to Green Bay at home in the 2016 playoffs, where we came back from down 18 to tie it up only to be dismayed by Rodgers being Rodgers on the final drive of the game. Definitely more so than the 34-3 shellacking in Minnesota in the 09 playoffs. More so than Romo’s fumbled snap up in Seattle in the 2006 playoffs. 16 year-old me punched a tree after that game, don’t ask me who won that fight. More so than all of the week 17 “win and we’re in” games that we didn’t win in 2008, 2011, 2012, and 2013. I mean, brother, we take this heartbreaking loss shit to a whole different level and make it a damn art form. But shit, at least we’d won ONE game in some of those playoff trots.

Sidebar: the 2007 loss in the playoffs to the Giants was particularly painful, because I lived in North Jersey, so I had to go to school the next day and take shit from virtually everybody including one particular authoritative figure who once told me “I’d love to bust you,” because I kind of did whatever I wanted as a teenager who felt invincible and constantly showed up to classes with eyes as red as the devil’s dick and one time a Poland Spring bottle filled with Majorska. I may or may not have done lines of cocaine off the desk in a computer class once or twice, and I may or may not have popped other people’s Vicodin in some classes. That authoritative figure pulled me out of class that day and I thought I was getting in trouble for a party I was at over the weekend that got broken up by the cops, even though I’d escaped (like always) through the side door. But no, he just wanted to show me the cover of the Daily Post or USA Today with pictures of Giants players celebrating their defeat of the Cowboys…

I think some of the reasons yesterday’s loss was particularly bad is because this was the first time in a while that I felt like we had two very good and exciting units in our offense and defense at the same time. It was one helluva fun squad to watch most weeks. I mean even in four of the five losses we had in the regular season, they were fun games to watch. At times it felt like they were winning games in spite of Mike McCarthy, that’s the kind of talent level it appeared we had. The defense went from being the worst I’ve ever seen in 2020 to an extremely-bad-ass-fun-to-watch defense in 2021. When I say that 2020 was the worst defense I’ve ever seen, I don’t just mean for the Cowboys or the NFL, I mean it was the absolute worst defense I’ve ever seen anywhere.

Yet this team felt different. It felt like this team was going to start clicking at the perfect time and that maybe we wouldn’t win it all, but at least they’d give us a fun playoff run. At least inspire on some of the hope that they’ve been building all season for our fan base and prove that this franchise was different this time around!

Sidebar: the four losses referenced: 31-29 @ Tampa, 36-33 in OT to Vegas on Thanksgiving night, 19-9 at KC (a little less fun because it was a defensive struggle) and 25-22 to Arizona. Denver was the only team that truly fucked us up this past season.

I stopped buying jerseys after 2014 because I think I’m a “Jersey Curse.” I got Troy Aikman’s jersey as a kid. His career ended that next season. I got Emmitt Smith’s jersey, he went to Arizona. I got Terrell Owens’ jersey, he was cut less than 18 months later. I got Marion Barber’s jersey for Christmas in 2007, he was never the same player after that and was gone following the 2010 season.

But here’s what did me in. My pops sent me a Sean Lee jersey in April of 2014 as a sort of gift for a short film that I produced getting into the Cannes Film Festival. May 2014 on the flight back stateside from that event, we get delayed in the air because Dulles like apparently closed for several hours so we had to land in Richmond, where we couldn’t get off the plane because it’s not an international airport. I turn my phone back on and I’m met with the alert: “Sean Lee, torn ACL, out for season.”

It’s become a borderline love/hate relationship with this franchise. I love them so much, but they cause me so much irrational pain. It’s football! It’s a sport, it’s a game. Yet this team has the ability to make my week better or worse in the fall and early winter. I had 46 text messages during and after the game last night and I waited until this morning to respond to any of them. Because I flat out didn’t want to talk to anybody after that L. And then I decided to rewatch the “abridged” version of yesterday’s game at two A.M. Why? Because I’m a disgusting human and I hate myself.

So here are my (jumbled) takes on the current state of the franchise. I think that had we beaten San Fran, we match up better with the Buccaneers today than we did in week one when we were a play away from beating them. Had we matched up with Green Bay there’s really nothing that tells me that Mike McCarthy learned anything in coaching Aaron Rodgers for 13 seasons, that could be used to slow him down. This team overachieved in a lot of ways this year. We were 6-0 in the division which means we were 6-5 against all others. We were 5-4 against teams above .500 but the best of those five wins came against a 10-7 Patriots team that was 2-4 after we beat them. And two of those wins came against the Philadelphia Eagles.

Sidebar: Nick Sirianni said in his initial presser as the Eagles’ head coach that part of being smart was knowing what to do. That team didn’t look like they knew what to do at all in Tampa Bay yesterday.

Is 2022 a make or break year for Dak Prescott? His numbers have been fantastic but he’s 1-3 in the playoffs now. I actually like Dak Prescott a lot, but I don’t love him. Why? Because being a sports fan means sometimes being irrational which means ya gotta do it in the playoffs.

Every year the goal is the chip, but we haven’t even been to an NFC Championship Game since the 95 season, which is also the last time we won the Super Bowl.

We need to draft an offensive tackle in the first round this year. Tyron’s on the downside and Collins has a tendency to be a drive killer with the flags he draws. We need to re-sign Jayron Kearse, Randy Gregory, and Cedrick Wilson. We need a coach who can have this squad prepared for playoff games at home. I’m fairly certain that Mike McCarthy isn’t that. I don’t know if Dak Prescott is THE guy in the long-term, and I don’t know what this team will look like in eight months when we’ve gone through free agency, the draft, training camp, and preseason. But the one thing I do know is that come September 2022, I’ll undoubtedly be somewhere on the first Sunday of the season (or Monday or Thursday) watching my motherfuckin’ Dallas Cowboys…

P.S. Cowboys – stop fucking up Thanksgiving. It’s my favorite holiday.

It’s been so difficult to put it all into words what that beautiful moment meant to me on Sunday night. I keep re-reading this without grasping how to truly express that. Nonetheless, here goes nothing…

Dear Big E, Wrestling Fans, and Anyone Who’s Ever Worked Their Ass Off Chasing Down Their Dream(s),

The Money in the Bank PPV is by far my favorite WWE event each year. To me the 8-man/8-woman ladder matches are some of the most fun and entertaining battles you’ll ever get to see in professional wrestling. And the Money in the Bank briefcase which hangs above the ring and is the object of each wrestler’s obsession and desire in said ladder match, which contains a contract that its holder can cash in for a shot at a world title (whether men’s or women’s) at any given point within 365 days, is by far WWE’s most fun gimmick. I mean someone can cash in the contract on the same night like Dean Ambrose did in 2016, or a day later as Nikki Cross did last Monday night with her briefcase to win the RAW Women’s strap, or you can hold onto it for 287 days and cash in the day after Mania and after the current champion has just been beaten down by the IIconics as Carmella did to Charlotte in 2018.

But watching Big E make the climb on Sunday, was one of the most exciting and beautiful moments I’ve ever witnessed in all my years of watching wrestling. When Seth Rollins started making his climb to the top of the ladder and Big E slid into the ring and went up to drop him off the ladder with The Big Ending, I began to celebrate some. I was using my right fist to punch my left palm and kept yelling at the TV “GO GET IT, GO GET YOURS!” As he reached the top of the ladder and WWE went it for a close-up my thoughts were “holy shit, he’s either about to get screwed here with someone else coming up off-camera with a nut shot, or he’s gonna win this fuckin’ thing!” Much like most of the fans seen behind him on camera, the moment he unhooked the briefcase, snatched his dreams, and the bell rang, and much like he himself did, I began celebrating as if I’d just become Mr. Money in the Bank. And as the cameras stayed on him celebrating extremely wide-eyed and ecstatic, the emotions of the situation set in, and I began to cry.

It’s been hard for me to put this into words since Sunday night, but I’ve found that the best description is that it felt like I was watching one of my best friends who grew up on the same block as me. Someone I’d watched put his head down and go to work, and work extremely hard at that, whilst running down his dream for the past decade. Someone whom it felt like if he made it, everyone from that same block made it. Someone who has found a way to embrace and make everything work that Vinnie Mac and the front office has thrown his way. Someone who is long overdue for a major championship run. It was so inspiring to me.

Like I said it felt like because he made it, we all made it. Like everything he’d been through in the last decade was culminating. Big E has busted his ass and I think what caused me to get so emotional was knowing that, and feeling inspired to be self-motivated in running down my own dreams. It made me feel like if I stay the course I’ve been on where I think I’m going to be a great filmmaker one day, and I continue to work hard as hell day in and day out when I’m making my own films, or when I’m working on bigger jobs in different capacities, that I’ll get there myself. And it will be deserved because it will 100% be EARNED!

In the past two months I was able to shoot my own personal passion project which is now in the editing process, but I’ve also worked a dozen other jobs in the capacities of grip, electrician, prop assistant, art coordinator, truck PA, G&E swing, best boy electric and best boy grip. A mentor/boss of mine once told me “Chernick, everywhere you go, you always hustle!” Big E’s climb to that briefcase reminded me that if I keep busting my ass like I have been, I’ll get to where I really want to be sooner or later.

So Big E, THANK YOU AND CONGRATULATIONS! NOW GO GET YOURS, BROTHER!!!

• Sincerely, Matt Chernick

After a near year and a half hiatus, Snake and Chern are back with The Imaginary Humans Podcast!

Starting off with the 2020 election and political takes and show polls, the dudes venture into the territories of television shows, the workforce, John Carpenter flicks, drug reform, Alex Trebek, and more!

Was Carpenter ahead of his time? Should college athletes be paid? Do you have FOMO? HOMO (hope of missing out)? Is the War on Drugs stupid? Batty versus The Genie! Is Neil Degrasse-Tyson the next Jeopardy host?

Join us for about two hours of podcasting in four parts. ENJOY!