An Aging Barstool Writer Finds Relics From His Past That Explain His Entire Life

How it started:

How it's going:

This is going to be one of those posts that's hardest to write. Because it's about my favorite and yet most difficult topic to discuss. Namely, myself. But since I'm having a rather momentous birthday, this will tie together a lot of strings that have come loose in the last few days. And help me make sense a metric ton of issues surrounding this particular birthday. 

For openers, birthdays have never been a big thing to me. I think the proper age to give up celebrating your "special day" is like 12. At least it was for my sons. That 12th party is just around the time it stops being adorable little cherubs giddily displaying their friendships over pizza and cake at the Family Fun Center or whatever. By 12, boys suddenly turn into raving, wild-eyed savages, hopped up on high-fructose- and carb-fueled adrenaline, rampaging through the noisy arcade hunting for enough tickets to buy a 25-cent eraser like it's Lord of the Flies. And by the time the last mom comes to get her little feral animal, you stopped caring whether Piggy lives or dies. 

Second, this one is very much a "round number" birthday. In so far as it ends in a "0", which is round. And that is proceeded by a "6", which is even rounder. So yeah, that's a lot to deal with. I can honestly say I've never been one to get all angst ridden about these milestone birthdays. I found out the hard way early on that this is a one way street, but more on that later. As the song lyric goes, life is an hourglass glued to the table. I think of it as a streaming service where "The Rewind function is disabled for this program. You can't Fast Forward through the bad parts. And only the morbidly depressed want to skip to the end. So I just enjoy the show and hit Pause when I can to grab a beer from the fridge. The last birthday I think I actually freaked out about was when I turned 22. And that's because it seemed to me that at that age, you stop having an excuse to be a screw up, and you're actually expected to at least vaguely pass for a functioning adult. And as it turned out, I was wrong on that. 

It always just seemed to me that losing it over turning 30 because you wish you were 20 again, just means that you'll be losing it over turning 40 because you'll wish you were 30 again. And so on. If that's how you're approaching your one and only trip through this big Haunted House ride constantly losing it over getting older, you're ... well, a loser.

As fate would have it. this particular birthday comes with the cosmos pulling a giant gag on me. To the point I expect the Practical Jokers guys to be sitting in the next room with a microphone putting the universe up to it. My sister, who was never anything less than The Assistant to the Regional Mom when we were growing up, handed me a pile of papers she'd found from when I was in high school. A pocket dictionary. Some sports page clippings all related to the Red Sox. A parody song I'd written to the tune of a largely forgotten Charlie Daniels Band song that was full of  stupid, sophomoric masturbation jokes. Which is exactly what I'd expect since I was a literal high school sophomore. 

And the package she handed me included a couple of other gems that I had no recollection of. And they've completely changed the way I see my life to this point. It's like early me (Young Balls) put some treasured items from his time and place into a time capsule, to be unearthed by current me (Old Balls) at this exact moment. First was this, which she says, "Looks like it was written by a serial killer.":

Which is an outrageous claim by my sister. I've long been on record saying that if I ever do become a serial killer (which I won't because it sounds exhausting), I'm going to come up with a series of cryptic, hard to decipher symbols that will frustrate FBI code breakers and true crime fans guessing for years. I'm not just going to scribble some nonsensical manifesto like a jerk. Have some respect for my supervillain skills, please. 

I have no idea who I wrote this for. And it took my best cryptographer skills to figure out exactly what I was getting at here. But I found enough clues to translate this personal Rosetta Stone. 

And what this is, is my first ever Barstool blog. Written in 1980, 23 years before I ever sent an email to a guy putting out a free sports comedy newspaper printed on a Gutenberg press and hauled around in the back of an Astrovan. 

That is exactly what this is, I just didn't know it at the time. It's a proto-Knee Jerk Reactions column. Observations about a baseball game. References to the fans in the stands. Mocking the commercials. Critiquing the broadcasters. Mentioning what I was flipping to between innings. From notes I was taking while watching an obscure, insignificant mid-summer Sox game. And I've identified the actual game:

Here are samples, with my best interpretation:

"Minn play 'This is It' on PA - good tune but inappropriate - beats 'Country Boy' by a long road, but no J. Keiley." 

I can only think I was being sarcastic here. Because "This is It" is a classic Kenny Loggins Yacht Rock anthem, and I remember thinking how pathetic it was that all they had at Fenway was John Keiley playing Polkas on the organ. Also, "Country Boy" is an all time great song too, I just hated the Orioles who made it their own. 

"Renko has control back in 3rd - strikes outside - 11 pitches, 10 strikes - is taking time, getting rhythm"

That would be losing pitcher Steve Renko, whose name hasn't reached the frontal lobe of my brain in decades, but still exists in lines of code hidden in my head's hard drive. 

"'Country Boy' comes on P.A. - kill power quick!!!" …
More 'Country Boy," crowd yapping like a bunch of morons

The Orioles owned the Red Sox in that era. They really damaged me.

"Hawk + Ned say 1B is no longer non-defen. pos. - sorry (god. thing Chig not watching"

Hawk is Ken Harrelson. Ned is play-by-play guy Ned Martin. Chig was my best friend, with whom I must have had heated debates about the importance of a good defensive 1st baseman. 

"Hancock looking like '67 Yaz, nailing runner at second after base hit before run could score - heads up

"Mel Allen axiom would hv. come true again if Zim didn't hit Hoffman for Hancock - Hoff rips liner up middle"

Garry Hancock was a mediocre left fielder. I was way too young to have seen that Carl Yastrzemski throw I referenced, but I spent way too much time reading Sox history books. Obviously. And as well as I can recall, The Mel Allen Axiom goes something like "D'ya ever notice how often the guy who ends an inning with a great defensive play leads off the next inning?" And I believe the answer is 1-in-9 times, or 11%. Math isn't hard. 

"Turned on 'Fridays' for a minute or so … Funny bit - clths made from Muppet hides - forgot Kenny Loggins is on, damn - shld sing best tune last"

Fridays? That was the short lived ABC response to Saturday Night Live. It starred Michael Richards, Julia-Louis Dreyfus and Larry David. Digging into IMDB, Loggins was on the premiere episode the previous fall, so this had to have been a rerun. My love of comedy, the future stars of the biggest sitcoms of all time, smooth, mellow 80s rock, and sitting home watching TV by myself instead of talking to girls is clearly on display in this one. 

Holy cats. This is pretty much what I do for a living now. The Beta test for everything I do to keep the lights on at Stately Thornton Manor now. (And believe me, I'm stealing some of these ideas for Patriots season.) Sent to me through the decades from my past self. Like the saying goes, "The boy is father to the man." That kid you were when you were six years old is pretty much the person you'll be at 26 or 56. Just with a few extra features and in different packaging. 

But there was one other, bigger gem in the treasure chest my sister brought with her. From 4th grade. Profound to me, not at all because I would've gotten Straight A's were it not for getting marked down in Conduct (true), but for what's on the back. 

Apr. 

"I am very happy with Jerry's continued excellent progress. He is 3 book reports behind."

"Thank you for the interest you take in him." - John F. Thornton"

There, in perfect penmanship, is my dad taking interest in my schoolwork in a way I didn't recall him ever doing. Academics was Mom Duty, as far as I remember. More significantly, as he signed this, he only had four months to live. That would be this handsome devil:

I've written about him before on Father's Day. And the timing of finding this personal artifact especially powerful because he passed exactly 50 years ago last week. (On my sister's birthday, no less, which would've been the darkest episode of My Sweet 16 MTV ever produced.) Which feels like a millennium ago and something that's ever present at the same time. I don't know if he was already confined to the bed he spent his final summer in at the time of the report card. Or if I was on the receiving end of the lecture he gave my brother about his report card once: "Even a MORON can sit there with his hands folded and his mouth shut and get an 'A' in Conduct!" I just know that having this in my hands again is like eternity playing Pickleball with my soul. It feels like the theory of Block Time, where there is no past and no future; everything everywhere all existing at one time. No past, present or future, that's just how we perceive things, if that makes sense. 

I've got regrets about that time. I truly believe that someday Bud Thornton and I will be having a catch in that great Iowa cornfield in the sky and I'll ask him to forgive 9 year old me for acting out toward the end, the way I've asked God to every day for 50 years. I might have been angry at seeing the guy who was a giant to me when he was laughing with his brothers at family parties or pulling me onto his knee to tell me stories about his adventures on an aircraft carrier in the war being … diminished? Reduced? It doesn't matter why. No excuses. Son Like a Champion Today. 

But that's a small part of the whole picture. Mostly I find myself at an age he (and my uncles) never made it to. Fate has dealt me a better hand than the one they deserved and didn't get. And it's a question of what to do with it. I married a woman so much like the one he did that sometimes it's astonishing. (You sly dog, Sigmund Freud.) Stayed close with my brothers and sister the way he did. And tried to raise kids the way he did. Only longer. And when we're tossing the ball around in that celestial infield, I intend to ask him if he's satisfied with how I did. 

Circling back to the part about those weirdly obsessive notes I took as a skinny teenager with a "Yankee Bite" shirt and preposterously huge hair, there's a cause and effect here. In the wake of my father's death, I found comfort in certain things. Sports. Comedy. The written word. Obsessing over ridiculous pop culture nonsense. Eventually I learned to use all that to friends because I could make the cool kids in school laugh. Then to doing stand up, where sports has always been a major part of what I talk about. And because of that, a couple of HBO appearances. Then posting regular recaps of every Pats game to the Patriots Planet message board. Which became the writing sample I sent to Dave Portnoy who replied, "You're hired. It doesn't pay anything" and changed the trajectory of my life. Permanently. 

I don't know how the serious man who raised me would feel about his youngest living his life typing Lowest Common Denominator gibberish into a keyboard to as a distraction for strangers on a thing called the internet. What I have discovered this birthday is that I never had a choice. This was always me. 

Thanks for reading this far. Both in terms of words and the 19 1/2 years I've been doing this for Barstool. Now for my birthday present, go tell your parents you love them.