i'm sure the majority of you will be in front of your televisions or your plate of wings and Guinness, or IPA or—heaven forbid, Bud Light watching the largest sporting event that this country produces, the National Football League's Super Bowl...

while you sift through the hours of faux-inspiration, melodrama and inanity of the hours upon hours of pre-game in anticipation of an overblown spectacle of perfect set pieces and glitzy advertising, i'd like you to turn it off. Yup, do it, turn the fucking thing off. I know its hard to fathom...

'guy, its the Super bowl, what's wrong with you?!'...

there's nothing wrong, i just think you might want to get used to it...

the NFL and its consortium of owners will make the filthiest amount of money you've ever seen or heard of by the time a pigskin is touched by a single football player tonight, let alone how much they will make by tomorrow morning. These owners, purveyors of "the most popular sport in America" will then take a months off at their palatial estates and beach front or mountain getaways and head to Manhattan to cry poor...

the Collective Bargaining Agreement between the NFL and the NFL Players Association is expiring. 2010 stands to be what is being called and "uncapped" year. You see, since 1982 the NFL has operated under a salary cap, which sets a specific dollar amount that each team must adhere to when setting its roster. Next season there will be no cap, players can sign to highest bidder, similar to baseball, but really, only for the year. In 2011, the CBA expires for real and then everything will stop. The owners will tell you that economic conditions will force them to tighten their belts and institute more stringent guidelines in managing payroll. This, by the way, after signing the most lucrative television contract in sports history with a stipulation that even if games are not played, the four networks involved are still required to hold up their financial responsibility to the league. It makes a lockout almost an inevitable event...

this is the microcosm of Capitalism. There is never enough. Greed outweighs good sense, and the common man is left holding the bag. You already pay for your TV, whether its cable, or dish, the majority of Americans pay out for what they watch. Some broadcast networks demanded a surcharge to cable that would be passed on to its customers to have the right to air these networks. As if advertising revenue had hit its ceiling, i mean; how else can they bleed a penny out of the American people...

this is what the NFL and its owners are planning to do. They are planning to lockout players from their facilities, fully prepared to let 2011 come and go with nary a game, while still getting paid for a product they are not producing, all the while blaming the greed of the players...

really...

now, i know, athletes get paid a lot of money. The likes of you and i will ever see such paychecks in our lives, and there is some give and take to be had, especially in a sport like baseball where athletes have enjoyed unprecedented wealth in their sport for over 30 years, but in football things are a little different. The average football players career is 4 years long. Most first year players do not get the million dollar, multi-year deals, with million dollar signing bonuses and those that do, the Eli Mannings of the world, sign multi-year multi-million dollar contracts, only to be wary of the fact that their ownership, at anytime, can revoke the contract as if it never existed. There is no such thing as a guaranteed contract in the NFL. Good players with smart agents can negotiate guaranteed money in the form of signing bonuses and percentages per year of the contract, but tell that to the 23 year-old who was just cut and is forced to find a job working at the Jamba Juice. Tell it to Kurt Warner 15 years ago, when he was bagging groceries, or 5 years ago when he was cut by the New York Football Giants. He is a Hall of Fame caliber quarterback, and not once in his career was he ever sure he was going to have a job from year to year. The owners of your favorite teams are about strong armed these players into eating shit, so they can take more money out of your pocket...

listen, if you're cool with that, than have at it. Eat your wings, drink your beer and enjoy what could very well be a good football game tonight. Laugh at the commercials, discuss whether Jim Nantz should be doing play by play over the likes of Greg Gumbel, and cringe at the fact that Roger Daltrey, (and i consider myself a fan of the Who), has completely lost the ability to sing Who songs. But even if you do watch, i implore you keep an eye on the dollar signs bouncing across the screen for those 3 1/2 hours, and think about your place in it all and whether it was really all worth the time and effort...

hey, look, i won't need football in 2011, the Knicks will be well on there way to a 55 win season by then on their way to fight for an NBA title. i don't need some over-orchestrated game played with increasingly suffocating restraints on gameplay to get by. i've lived through two NFL strikes/lockouts, and i am still standing here...

truth be told, i'll be watching the game tonight, there will be nothing else on. Its too cold out and its the one thing that won't cost me any money—directly that is. The Cat Mom has been excited thinking about where she can eat in solitude this evening after her time at the kitty hospital is done 2,500 miles away. The streets of Tucson will be empty but for her Volvo tonight. She has no want, need or understanding of football, as she is not alone. There are billions of people who could care less that 106 men will be playing for a championship tonight. But all of those people are effected by the ripple and undertow that is the greed and gluttony created by such an event...

maybe there will be an Pauly Shore movie marathon to check out. One can only hope...

doing the world a favor...Vol 2

percy jackson?...

percy?...

really, that's what you're going with?..

percy jackson...

if i wanted to see a remake of Clash of the Titans, i'd go see, well, a remake of Clash of the Titans...

ok. Maybe i'll just wait for the new Harrison Madison film...

midnight movies vol 1...

if the floors could talk they would admonish you

lights be loose, sonic boom, reeks of illumination,

can you see the sounds? that's cosmic inflation,

wrecked be the norm as tracks wax poetic,

heat rises.

bodies tumble in sardine tins,

its pathetic.

(sure, thing could be worse)

i heard you talking some what not, nonsense, hell no,

bending ears, pulling legs and saying in jest. you could be erased.

this is space and time suspended, its own circus, welcome.

a three-ringed rectangle, fourth world condition,

an mta disease

men with beards...

i met up with Aces this weekend, it had been a while. He lost his battle with machine not too long ago and truth be told, i'm not good with bad news. i consider myself more an inspirational speaker, so when talk turned to his desire and wherewithal to grow a beard, i knew i was in my element...

this is my beard...

i've been growing it since late September. i've trimmed it to do my best to keep it uniformed, while allowing it to grow in full. i'll keep it until Easter Sunday, its not religious as much as it is a good round number of a date. And shit gets hot in this city in the Summer months...

the Cat Mom loves it. So much so she'll probably want more...and she'll get it.,,

my mother thinks i look like Yukon Cornelieus. i think of my young comrade Yukon and hope he hasn't broken his neck on some ski slope or on some third floor of a hospital somewhere...

the Brooklyn Bomber calls it majestic. He might be right, but the Dungeon Master would scoff at my effort...

the bastard's beard sees a therapist twice a week to offset the inferiority complex that its working through...

judge roughneck still thinks it 1998, but that's not the point...

i've noticed, since growing this beard, how i have entered an exclusive club. Even i am victim of a vain thought, now and then. When i walk the streets and i see other men, (and women unfortunately), sporting beards i rate them in comparison to mine. Rarely, at least here in the NYC, do i meet an equal, let alone a superior. But i find that i have entered an order unlike any other. As i walked through my errands in the hills this fine day i ran into a gentleman doing construction on the station clock tower wearing a beard similar in length and style to mine. We locked eyes and gave each other a head nod, it seemed a subconscious gesture. Its almost that with beard comes esteem among men. Not in a bopiti-boopiti-Family Guy way, but in a beard growers way...

you wouldn't understand, bare-face...

enjoy Aces, your life is about to change...

the following is my comment left on Judge Roughneck's facebook page. I had been toying with how to attack this issue in the constellation, but I think this says it all...

What's insulting about fiscal conservatives is that they sold us a bill of goods that anyone with a memory knows didn't work the first time, in fact, George Herbert Walker Bush lost a second term to it. He, in fact, created the moniker "voodoo economics".

Supply side economics does not work. Any effort to manipulate the law of supply and demand will always end in the benefit of the very few and a crushing blow to the rest. Supply side economics are why we are in this recession, not planes flying into buildings, or wars. Supply side economics and all of the lousy tax cuts from the W years led us into the recession of the early part of the decade, and we never really made back to level ground.

The real tack to these conservative democrats should be through strong and viable liberal opposition. It was a mistake to make a deal with the devil in the first place. I'd rather have a strong minority of honest-free thinkers than a feckless majority.

apparently, someone finally woke up our President. ...

nice to hear from ya', bro'ham...

bing!...

so by now a couple of old men in tuxedos have lifted a poor-overgrown varmint in the air and have announced whether this animal saw its shadow, through which proclaiming either a quick end to our frozen suffering or a deeper foray into the stark reality that is the dead of winter. Groundhogs Day...

black folk have always mused that the shortest month of the year is the one they were given to celebrate their history, and there they are, sharing it with a groundhog and a a couple of dead presidents...

February is the coldest month of the year on average. It is the definition of bleak and throughout its days it holds all of us captive to its malaise. We've fully digressed from our holiday high, hitting bottom and reaching for anything that will give us hope, like, say, a groundhog's skill of prognostication...

i, instead, am reminded of one Ned Ryerson. The annoying ghost of times past that Phil Connors meets over and over again in the film Groundhog Day. Ned is representative of the fears, and hurdles we face. For me, February is one big hurdle. Annually i sink further inward. Cold, and disaffected by the barren wasteland before me. Creatively i shut down...

this page has sat silent for the better part of the year. This is how it starts, an unwillingness to see things to their end, that's January, until a slow, dull stagger comes to a full stop. Ned Ryerson, rearing his ugly head...

Phil, after several replays of the meeting with Ned, finally seems to master the event with aplomb, even employing Ned to his advantage. The lesson is clear, after years of falling prey to the claws of February, to Ned, the time has come to use it to my advantage...

meet the new Ned, here's to making sure he isn't the same as the old Ned...

an open letter to the sheep...

'we are all fighting the same

we are all in the same war

we are all in the same revolution

got to know who you're fighting for'

—Fight the Fight, Living Colour (1990)

you want change? Then let's get some! But i'm not convinced you want it...

you want affordable health insurance but you don't want the government to run, presumably because the Health/Medical Industrial Complex is running it so well. i was once fortunate enough to qualify for Medicaid after a health emergency. To put things in perspective, my two prescriptions cost a total $10. Under my plan with Local 3 i paid $40. Under government operated Medicaid i never paid out of pocket for appointments, EKGs or Echos, under my plan with Local 3 there was a $20+ copay. You have to ask yourself, is this about socialism or is it about profit. The tea baggers are being tea bagged...

you want Obama to eat shit, well, he's eating it, but not because of some Red Bulled Doc Brown-like gasbag. Obama's party sold their souls for some extra seats in Congress, but what they got were left handed republicans, who are holding onto the center for dear life. There is no change in the middle...

you want the banks to stop giving bonuses and the current administration to bailout the tax payer not the big bad banks. If my memory serves this bailout plan was the brainchild of the former administration. While Tim Geithner hasn't picked the ball up and ran with it, the onus lies upon the former administration and Congress, many of whom are still sitting in the same seats on this very day. You want change, forget about democracy. Voting is our right and privilege, but what is it worth when our elected officials are more concerned with what's in the lobby then your family's living room. You want change, get your money out of the market, fire your broker, fire your bank! Walk out, bring your business to a local financial institute. Its just plain hypocritical to complain about the state of the banking industry while you have a Chase, Bank Of America or Citibank ATM card in your wallet...

once you begin to realize that the world doesn't revolve around sound bytes, and gasbags and politicians and that in fact is is being run by people who have more money and control over what you buy for dinner than you do—once you get that—maybe we can have a serious conversation...

the elder had a Social Studies teacher named Hoffman. He would always lecture the class about how he was going to move out of the country at some point due to the cold war/nuclear crisis of the '80s. The fear of mismanagement leading to a nuclear holocaust. Right now i want to leave because of the fear that is crippling this nation. Manufactured fear. Fear of socialism, or disarmament of your Borelli, fear of faux-"death panels", whatever other nonsense that has scared you into the idea that unfettered capitalism is the only answer. This is the result of "smaller government"...

time to man up and take some responsibility for yourselves—you're being tea bagged...