Author Archives: Rob G.

All I really want

Man, all I really want to do is sleep in late every day. I don’t want to have any clocks in my bedroom. Nothing but the sun in the sky and that little path it makes across the room as it rises and arcs and eventually hits me right in the face. That’s when I want to get up every day, not because it’s eight or nine or ten, but whenever, eleven, twelve, one, I don’t care. I don’t even want to know what time it is. It’s going to be a clock-free zone, my house.

And when I do wake up, I don’t want to get out of bed right away, not unless I want to. But I don’t want to, trust me, I want to have my phone right next to the bed – again, clock function totally disabled – and I’ll spend a good chunk of time just looking at the web sites that I always look at, flipping back and forth between my stupid web browsing app and my stupid social networking apps.

When I get up, seriously, I need to get one of those doggy doors built in to my front door, so that way I don’t have to put my pants on right away. I can just put my feet into my slippers, they’re right next to the bed, right where I left them when I went to bed the night before. Or, not even the night before, because I really want to evolve past the whole night/day schedule. It’ll just be, when I’m up, I’m up. And when I’m tired, I’ll go to bed, whenever, who cares.

So I’ll just get up and I won’t have to take the dog for a walk, because he’ll have figured it out himself, he’ll know how to use the doggy door when he wants to go to the bathroom, and he’ll know how to clean up after himself so I never have to look at it. Where does it go? How did he learn how to do it? I don’t care. I don’t want to know. I’ll just be content in the knowledge that he’s figured it out, that he only goes outside when he needs to, he doesn’t roam around or chase squirrels or eat garbage, he just comes right back inside and waits for me to give him a little attention.

Breakfast, man, of course I’m going to eat breakfast when I wake up. All I really want is a fully stocked kitchen. I want like a Netflix subscription, right, but instead of paying a monthly fee to have a huge database of movies and TV shows at my fingertips, I want to pay to have that same database available in my kitchen, right in my fridge and my pantry. And instead of movies and TV shows, it’s all fresh ingredients and cool snacks and juices.

And then seriously, all I really want to do is just hang out in my pajamas all day long and play Nintendo. It’s like, come on, I’m not asking for too much, OK, I’m not demanding the latest generation video game consoles, no, just give me a Nintendo Game Cube, all right? Just somebody give me all of their used Game Cube games, because I’ve never really played them, I’ve never played The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker. And that came out when I was in high school. What kind of a Zelda fan am I? How did I make it to where I am today without ever having had a Game Cube?

You want to hang out? Let’s just hang out at my place. “Rob, don’t you feel like going out every once in a while? Getting out of the house?” you might try to bait me into something, a restaurant maybe, “Let’s go bowling,” you’ll suggest. But I’ll be like, “Nah, I’m just going to stay in. Come over if you want, we’ll watch movies, we can play Super Smash Bros. Melee. I’ll call for a pizza.”

And even though you’ll make it out to be like I’m not fun anymore, you’ll hang up the phone and say something like, “All right man, I guess I’ll see you when I see you,” I’ll wait like an hour, an hour and a half, and there’s going to be a knock at my door. It’s going to be you. You’ll have a six-pack and big bag of Cooler Ranch Doritos.

“Come on in,” I’ll say as we set up the controllers for some two-player NHL Hitz. Because that’s all I want to do, yeah, that’s all anybody really wants to do. What else could you want in life, huh? What’s better than just hanging out around the house, playing video games and eating Eggo waffles until you’re so full you have to take a nap?

There’s something in the water

“There’s something in the water,” she told me from the kitchen.

I couldn’t even get myself to think of anything to say back, but part of my brain in charge of basic communication must have been running on autopilot. I heard a “Huh, really?” come out of my mouth, but I shouldn’t have engaged at all. Now I was a part of this little back and forth. Before it was just noise. But now … I don’t know.

I hoped that my mumbled response telegraphed exactly what I was thinking, look, I’m not interested, OK, I don’t care if the toilet is making a sound, because I don’t hear it, OK, I could get up, I could fiddle with the handle, I mean, do you want me to take the top off of the tank? Because I could do that. Sure, I could stop watching TV right now and check out the toilet again, you know, because I have so much training in fixing toilets.

What’s that? You don’t think the refrigerator is cold enough? OK, well, let me just poke around and pretend to play with a bunch of knobs inside. There, is it colder? No? Well, let’s just give it a minute to kick in, OK? How does that sound, does that sound like maybe that could be a plan? Maybe? We’ll just wait a little bit. And to be perfectly honest, all right, I’m a little skeptical of your ability to tell the temperature of the inside of a refrigerator just by opening the door. Look, I don’t want to get into it again, but are you taking into account how warm it is inside the house? Because I don’t know, it just feels like a fridge to me, like a regular fridge.

“Honey,” it’s a conversation now. This is something that I’m going to have to be actually dealing with.

“Huh, really?” OK, that was probably a little mean, that wasn’t on autopilot, but now I felt a little bad, making her think that I was on autopilot. If it worked though, I’d feel bad still, but if that’s as far as that conversation went, well, I’d at least be able to finish this show, I wouldn’t have to put it on pause, really give her all of my attention.

“There’s something in the water.”

There’s something in the water. Can you take a look at the oven? When did I sign up for all of this handyman work? I don’t have any technical training. And she knows it, too, she knows that I don’t know how to fix anything. I mean, sure, I can hang up a towel rack, right, that’s fine. A drill, a screwdriver, I don’t want to make it sound like I’m completely helpless here, I know how to use your basic toolkit. But machinery? What is our oven, gas? Do we have gas? Or is it oil? I’m just … I’m not really capable of dealing with stuff heavier than your average hammer-and-nails very basic work around the house.

“Babe, can we just call somebody? I mean, I don’t know how to do any of this stuff. Can we just like have someone come and take a look? A professional?”

I started to feel a little bad, although that should have done it, that should have ended the dialogue for a little bit, now I’d have to sit here and feel bad, I’d go right back to my show, but I’d feel her staring at me, like why shouldn’t she be able to ask me for some help? I mean, I’d be thinking, I guess I could just get up and check it out. Even though all I had wanted to do was just sit down for like thirty minutes, just an hour really, and even though I was direct, right, communication, you’ve got to be direct, even though I made it clear that I wasn’t ready to deal with this stuff, now I’d be sitting there, of course I’d get up, I’d feel bad about the quiet, about that look, like, why can’t he just get up?

“There’s something in the water.”

But it wasn’t over, and so I wasn’t done either, this wasn’t done, at least I wouldn’t have to feel bad.

“Fine, I’m up. OK. I’m up. What is it?”

“There’s something in the water.”

And she was just standing there, she looked totally vacant, she wasn’t looking at me, she was still looking at where I was sitting, even though I wasn’t sitting anymore. I was up. I was right here.

Her arm, it was covered in … it wasn’t water. It was liquid. Was it liquid? It looked wet. It was black. I grabbed her arm and leaned my face in to look, to smell, what was it, was it some sort of an oil? A grease? No, it was moving. It was liquid, yeah, but there were all of these tiny black … things. Like machines, but really small. Almost like little tiny robot bugs. That doesn’t make sense, I know.

But they were going up her arm. And on her fingertips. They were eating the skin. I could tell, it was only at the tips, but these things were eating her fucking skin. Holy fucking shit. I could see bone.

Motherfucker I could see her bones. And they were spreading, upward, up her shirt.

Fuck, Jesus Christ, they were on my hand now too, right where I was touching her. They were on me.

“What the fuck is this? They won’t come off? Can you get them off? You tried to get them off?”

She wasn’t responding. She wasn’t looking at me. She said it again.

“There’s something in the water.”

Bill, I didn’t really enjoy the Super Bowl this year

Dear Bill Simmons:

Did you watch the Super Bowl? Of course you watched the Super Bowl, you’re the Sports Guy, you kind of have to watch the Super Bowl. But did you like it? I didn’t really like it. I think it’s generally acknowledged that the game was boring, an uneven slugfest. Peyton didn’t have any time. The Seahawks defense was too good. Blah, blah, blah, these are all just generic Super Bowl bites that I’m rehashing almost directly from Grantland anyway.

I stole this image from Grantland too. Sorry Bill. I’ll make it up to you once I’m one of your full-time employees.

But aside from the game, did you like the Super Bowl? Like, you’ve made a career out of following sports, writing about sports, so in many ways, this event is like the peak of everything that professional sports strives to be. Or, American professional sports anyway. Because the NFL is pure America, or it strives to be anyway. It more or less exists within the confines of the United States, and judging from the spectacle that was Sunday’s Super Bowl, it’s not a comfortable fit either.

Look at the NFL, and look at NASCAR, its racecar cousin. They’re both basically the same thing. They’re these giant sports that, for the most part, are totally inaccessible to the average American. Anybody can grab a basketball and head to the park for a little pickup, and it’s the same for baseball and soccer. But tackle football? The Daytona 500? You can’t go out and join a pit crew.

I guess you could join a pit crew. But you’d have to make it your job, like that would have to be your whole life. And so, unless you’re committed to climbing that ladder, unless you somehow find a way to coach or play football at some sort of a professional level, you’re really left with whatever the NFL or NASCAR decides to give you.

And, just like most of the writers at Grantland have been pointing out all season, they’re giving us these shows. The NFL has perfected football as an event, as sports entertainment. It’s big, it’s loud, and it’s got something for everyone.

Maybe it would have been OK if there were an actual football game to watch. But the one-sided assault that was Sunday night’s game brought into stark relief what a bunch of nonsense the Super Bowl is as a national event.

Commercials? Like, you have these increasingly rare moments when a large portion of the country turns its attention to the same thing at the same time, and the best we can do is a bunch of advertisements? I don’t care how entertaining you think you’re being trying to sell me Coca-Cola of Bud Light, it’s still a billboard, something that, if I were watching a regular TV show, something that I recorded on my DVR, I’d gladly skip over, one hundred percent of the time.

And I think about other sports, the finals in hockey, baseball, basketball, regardless of how we watch them on TV or follow them on the Internet, it’s all mostly centered around actual sports, fighting for the championship in front of actual fans. Maybe it’s just a natural consequence of the stop-and-go nature of professional football, and yeah, there were plenty of fans visiting New York from Seattle and Denver, but the whole event just felt fake, totally inauthentic. I was more interested in reading about the throngs of out-of-towners getting stuck for hours at some train station in Secaucus than I was in the actual game.

I don’t want to be a downer. But it was just really lame. The commercials were really lame. Yeah it was cool seeing Seinfeld and George act like Seinfeld and George, but was it really that funny? Was that cute puppy and horse Budweiser ad worth me tuning into Channel 5 rather than just clicking play on my computer?

I don’t know. Maybe if the Giants were playing I would have been a little more pumped.

Hey Bill, can I still have a job at Grantland? Please?

Love,

Rob

My best friend Craig

I want to take a minute and give a big shout out to my best friend. Craig, you’re the greatest. I’ve never felt closer to anybody else in my life. And even though you took that job in Cincinnati a year and a half ago and, yeah, we haven’t really seen as much of each other as we used to, I just want to let you know that, Craig, I hold our friendship in a very special place in my heart. And I guard that special place. It’s protected. Because you’re a special guy. Craig, you’re my best friend.

Even though you got married last month, even though I wasn’t invited to the wedding, that’s cool Craig, and yes, I completely understand. Not every wedding is a big deal, sometimes it’s nice to have a more intimate ceremony, I get it. And the bachelor party that you had in Vegas a few weeks before? It’s cool man, you were probably just looking out for me, you know how much I hate flying, right, and gambling. It’s not that I hate it, I just suck at it, and so you actually did me a huge favor, saved me from losing my rent money at the blackjack table. So thanks dude, you’re a good friend. You’re the best.

And no, I wasn’t stalking you on Facebook, so I’m sorry if this is all coming off as a little intrusive. But I was talking to Phil a while back and he mentioned something like, “I bet you can’t wait for Vegas, right?” and I was like, “Vegas?” and he was like, “Oh, you know what? I don’t know what I mean … I meant … I mean … weren’t you going to Vegas? Maybe that was someone else. Maybe that was … uh … I forgot what I was going to say.”

And I let it go, I mean, I could tell that something was up, but I didn’t want to get in his face. And even though I tried, I couldn’t shake the feeling, like it was so obvious that Phil thought I had been included in something that I clearly wasn’t a part of. So when everyone was out to lunch I started snooping around the office and, you remember Carl, right? I think you guys worked together for a little while after college, and then I started working with Carl, I forgot how it even came up, but yeah, we were talking one time about our mutual acquaintance.

Yeah, that’s how it came up, it’s just coming back to me now. I had been working here for a few months and one day everyone was out for drinks after work. And I’ve never really understood what the protocol is, like what’s appropriate and what’s not appropriate for friend requesting your coworkers. Like, I see you guys every day, obviously I think we should be friends on Facebook. But does it come across as too strong if one day I’m just going down the list requesting coworker after coworker?

So I was out after work that one day and Carl was on his phone, I saw him scrolling through his News Feed and I said, “Hey man, you’re on Facebook?” like it was a question, even though it was a stupid question, of course he’s on Facebook, of course I’m looking at his cell phone screen over his shoulder, I should’ve just kept pretending to mind my own business. But I whipped out my cell phone and I was like, “Friend request sent!” totally over the top, but in a self-aware way. Maybe it was too self-aware. Maybe that’s why I never saw Carl out for drinks after that.

Anyway, yes, now that I’m saying this all out loud, it does seem a little crazy, me remembering the one mutual Facebook friend Carl and I had in common, you. Me, waiting for Carl to go on his lunch break, then going over to his computer and searching your name under his Facebook account, confirming what I already kind of knew to be true, that you did the Vegas bachelor party thing, that I wasn’t invited, that for some reason you changed your privacy settings to deny people like me from seeing what was going on while allowing people like Carl to see status updates and photos from the trip on his News Feed.

Craig, it’s cool, man, you’re my best friend. And yeah, sometimes you go through huge chunks of time without talking to your best friend. I mean, this is a big planet, and life has a way of pulling us in many different directions. So it’s not totally unreasonable for two best friends to go a couple of years without speaking or answering each other’s phone calls or returning any of each other’s text messages. Did you get a new phone number? Like a Cincinnati area code?

It’s cool dude, next time you’re in New York, give me a shout, OK, I’ll buy you a beer, we can catch up on old times. Did I tell you that Diane and I are expecting our second kid? Yeah man, it’s going to be a boy. I was thinking about naming him Craig, after you, after my best friend. Would you be the godfather? I mean, you only have to be as involved in little Craig’s life as you want to, but if you did want to, I mean, you could be like as into his life as possible. You could be like his second dad. Hey, if anything happens to Diane or me, would it be cool if I listed you as the guy that gets to raise the boys? No pressure, if you say no, that’s no, that’s cool. But just think about it. And if you and … what was her name, your new wife? I’m really anxious to meet her. But if you guys have kids and you want to do the same, Diane and I would be more than happy to … I’m getting carried away.

But I miss you man. I wish some of those jobs that I applied to in Cincinnati would at least give me a call back. It’s like, you don’t understand man, I’ve applied for everything. I went to Cincinnati craigslist and I sent my resume out to pretty much every listing available. Is there anything open by you? Just let me know.

Craig, I love you dude. I hope we get in touch soon. Man I hope you read this and you give me a call. Don’t worry if it’s like five years from now, you stumble across this and you think, shit, it’s probably too late now to reach out. It’s not too late. I don’t care if it’s like five, ten, thirty years from now, just give me a ring man, it’ll be like we never lost touch. Because it won’t be weird or awkward, it’ll just be two best friends, hanging out, catching up on old times, shooting the shit.

Seriously, Craig, dude, give me a call man. For real.

Teambuilding

Of course I’m a team player. I just don’t like being told what to do. So as long as we can establish some team rules, you know, a solid foundation upon which we can build this team, a platform if you will, well, I don’t know why I said platform, it’s the same as foundation, but you get the idea right? We’re a team, and we’re always mindful of the principles that bind us together, first and foremost, don’t tell me what to do. Not you.

Definitely not Susan. Seriously, if she tells me to do one more thing, well, we’re still all going to be on a team. All of us, except for Susan. She’s going to be on a different team. By herself. Go ahead Susan, see if anybody wants to join your team. Anybody feel like switching sides? Because I hear Susan’s recruiting. What’s that Susan? You brought donuts? Sorry Susan, but nobody wants your cheap store-bought donuts, OK?

If you want real donuts, please, go to Dunkin Donuts, OK? And Steve, while you’re there, can you grab me an extra large with milk? And a bowtie? See if anybody else wants one. Please. See if the rest of the team needs any coffee. Team. Listen up, Steve’s going out for coffee. Here, Steve, put it on the corporate card.

Or, if you like, you can always switch teams. I hear Susan has a new team, a bunch of real up-and-comers. Who did they get? I heard they stole someone away from our side not too long ago. It was right about the same time that that box of old store-bought powdered donuts disappeared from the office kitchen. You know, the ones that must have left there by mistake last week, because nobody ate them, I don’t even think anybody bothered to open the box.

Oh yeah, that was Susan, right, she’s the one that we lost. But who else? Did anybody else switch sides? Nobody? It’s just Susan? Well, that doesn’t really sound like enough people to make up a whole team. It’s more like she’s her own non-entity, a free-agent of sorts, although, considering how there aren’t too many other teams around this office, you know, besides our team, I can’t really see anybody picking her up. She’d have to make a pretty generous offer.

She’d have to go out and treat everybody to burritos. And not on the corporate card. That would have to be like a personal gift, from Susan, to the rest of the team. And even then, it’s not like we’d just let her back on the team automatically. The burritos would be a good first step, absolutely, but it would be an act of faith. Maybe we’d let her back on. Maybe not. Probably not.

But maybe. And even though I’m not guaranteeing anything, I do guarantee this, that if and when we decide to let Susan back on the team, she’s starting from the bottom. And Susan, I don’t know why you haven’t already started taking everybody’s burrito order, but you should pay attention here. If we start you from the bottom, temp, or assistant temp, it’s not a punishment, no, it’s for your own good. You’ve got to learn the fundamentals of being a team player. You need like a foundation.

There I go, saying foundation again, totally unnecessary. I need some coffee. Is Steve back? What, he didn’t leave yet? He’s on a call? Hey Susan, good news, it looks like there’s actually enough for a new team, now that we’ve had to let Steve go. You hear that Steve? Yeah, you’re on a new team, it’s just you and Susan. You like that? Do you?

Hello? Yes, this is Rob. No, boss, I was just doing some teambuilding exercises. She said what? No, that’s crazy, I don’t know what she’s talking about. Well, was she drinking? Like, did she go out for lunch? Well, I don’t know, maybe she had a couple of drinks. She wasn’t really receptive to any of the teambuilding.

No, I just thought we could have used some … OK fine I’ll stop it … well why do I have to go to HR and sign papers? I don’t want to sign any papers. Because I was just joking around, why does everybody take everything so seriously? You’re telling me I don’t have a choice? Listen, boss, I’m not trying to make any threats here, but I’m this close to switching teams, OK, and to think, I was just about to buy everybody lunch. Do you like burritos boss? You ever have flautas? They’re delicious. They’re like little mini taco burritos. I’ll get you beef. Just hang tight boss, I’ll be down in fifteen.

Hey Susan, put down some beef flautas for the boss. Come on, this will be just the lunch to bring the team back together. Come on, Susan, please. Susan put down the phone. I said sorry. Come on Susan. I’ll tell you what, put down the phone and I’ll buy you lunch. You like chimichangas?