jocking brady, again

i think my criticism of tom brady came off as too bitter yesterday so i figured i'd waste more virtual space with some sort of follow-up piece. i caught an article by jemele hill that brought me back to this topic. it was an interesting take on what i broached yesterday and intriguing to hear a woman's perspective. the fact that she's a sports journalist in a field dominated by men with yellow armpits, beef jerky breath, and fantasies of channeling hunter s. thompson is not lost on me.

so, brady...clearly i don't know the cat, so i can't give any real account as to the kind of guy he is. for all i know, he could be a contagious person who you can't get enough of. as a sports fan, i am tired of him for the same reason people tired of aikman and the dallas cowboys in the 90s -- they win so much that it becomes a bore to watch, but i know that's sort of shallow. as a father, i'm just not so impressed by him due to the fact that he gets a pass for having no relationship with his kid just because he can read a defense or loft air balls to randy moss. sure, on some levels i envy the level of success and accomplishment the guy has attained. who wouldn't? but when i soak up my kids and drizzle occasional tears of joy over the fact that they are in my life, i feel like maybe the guy is short-changing himself.

my father evaporated from my life when i was around 10 years old. he hasn't a clue as to where i am or what's happening with me. it's part of my fabric, and at this stage i would not alter that back story even slightly. to do so would be to redefine who i am, to alter the hue and fit of my own skin. no thanks...the skin fits just fine and i can't afford an exorbitant shrink bill now that i have college funds to build up. still, now that i have kids, i can't even begin to fathom some point in my life where i would not know a single thing about either of my kids. it's incomprehensible, yet it happens.

the good thing is that we're all humans and with that comes hope. sometimes we get the chance to alter the course of time and space to make things right. i suspect tom brady will do that somewhere down the line.

in the meantime, let's gooooooooooo giaaaaants!!!!

confessions of a convalescent mind

greetings from mount percocet. that's where i've spent the last 4 days, shirking responsibility for my words and actions. hernia surgery turned out to be a bigger bitch than i expected, but i think i'm almost out of the woods in terms of recovery. in terms of fogged mind, however, one foot remains in the woods, which is not so bad.

compared to how i usually spend this very same weekend, or for at least the past five years, the situation could not have been more different. usually this weekend i'm up to my waist in fresh utah powder, an ear-to-ear grin on my wind-burned face, as i bomb snowbird's mineral basin. the closest i've gotten to that passion is watching the winter x games on espn. i'm hitting mount snow in vermont with some friends in 6 weeks just to get some turns in and to validate my toleration of yet another winter. it should be a good test for my bionic groin.

in the meantime, here are a few blurred snippets of what i can remember from the experience...

violation - i woke up from surgery to discover that my pubes had been shaved. i guess i should have figured this would happen since i knew they'd be operating in my downtown area, but it still threw me off when i first noticed it. then i got to thinking - that has to fall on the list of world's worst jobs, right? think about if you punched a clock each day (maybe you even got great 401k benefits for it) and spent your day shaving pubes. someone's gotta do it...

threat of violation (unrealized, thank god) - my mother-in-law came to town this weekend to see the baby and to assist with managing the house while was out of commission. potential gross-out alert...the nurses told me that percocet and other pain killing narcotics can cause constipation. as someone who carries around a gigantic bag of bathroom issues on his back, this is the last thing i needed to hear. that first night, high as hell, i remember sharing this with wifey and her mom. it was probably at some inappropriate time. in fact, i am sure it was during dinner. well, my mother-in-law is a nurse, so she already knew this and suggested to my wife, right in front of me, that we might want to give him an enema tomorrow. this did not happen in the end...whew!

life imitating what? - wifey equipped me with a couple of trashy magazines, people and us, which i eventually consumed in small doses. what deep words of wisdom did a glean? let's see. oh, trista lost 30 pounds in 5 months after giving birth and feels sexy again. thank jesus because i was losing so much fucking sleep over this. i guess the mags are running out of new ways to rephrase the same concept of brittney being fucked up, so now they're enticing us with exclusives on irrelevant reality television stars losing pregnancy weight. could there be any more delicious news than this?

bunch of brady - i totally bought into the superbowl hype machine. i'm embarrassed to admit how much of this recycled and sensationalized content i have absorbed via the internet and several sports channels the past few days. the following is going to sound self-righteous, but i don't care. this hit me when i was putting the jackal to bed...brushing errant strands of hair from his forehead, planting kisses on him, and telling him i love him so much. i am sick of tom brady and how the media jocks him and the patriots. aside from the fact that they have won enough and that their bit is tired, i suppose i have a bit of an issue with that guy and perhaps an even deeper issue with the machine that promotes him as this golden boy. for me it boils down to his relationship, or lack thereof, with his son. (in case you live under a rock, brady left bridget moynihan to be with gisele bundchen. moynihan had a baby boy, brady's, not too long after, and she's raising the kid on her own...) at the end of the day, no matter how many super bowl rings he rocks, no matter how many quarterback records he holds, and no matter how often he makes sweet country love to gisele, he still has nada with his estranged baby boy. for someone with what would seem like an overflowing cup, it looks kind of empty to me. but don't expect that side of his story to get much ink. the other day, watching a press conference with him, i wondered if any reporter in the room would get the balls to broach the topic. i think i dozed off at some point, but i doubt anyone did.

house call - i think it was sometime saturday morning that my cell phone rang, and the number did not register in my phone book. since i felt like a feather, i rolled the dice and answered. surprisingly i heard my psychologist on the other end of the line. (back story: he and i had played some phone tag over the previous few weeks of the new year in an attempt to arrange a sit-down. basically i want a mental/emotional check-up before committing to certain paths this year and had yet to nail down a date.) here's how it went:

hello?

RG, it's doctor lincoln.

hey there.

how are you?

i'm high on percocet. you?

oh, why is that? (voice smacks of real concern)

i had surgery the other day. nothing to worry about.

good, because i've heard some stories.

i bet. (giggle...almost lose control)

yeah, so be careful with that.

no problem. i don't really like it. (lying...almost giggle again)

that's good. (seeing through the lie) so when can we get together?