Because it’s about my favorite and yet most difficult topic to discuss.
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.
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.
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’re free to’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 as it turned out, I was wrong on that.
As fate would have it.
this particular birthday comes with the cosmos pulling a giant gag on me.
Some sports page clippings all related to the Red Sox.
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.
First was this, which she says, “Looks like it was written by a serial killer.
“:
Which is an outrageous claim by my sister.
I’m not just going to scribble some nonsensical manifesto like a jerk.
Have some respect for my supervillain skills, hey.
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.
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.
Mentioning what I was flipping to between innings.
From notes I was taking while watching an obscure, insignificant mid-summer Sox game.
I can only think I was being sarcastic here.
“‘Country Boy’ comes on P.A.
- kill power quick!!!”
They really damaged me.
“Hawk + Ned say 1B is no longer non-defen.
- sorry (god.
thing Chig not watching”
Hawk is Ken Harrelson.
Ned is play-by-play guy Ned Martin.
And I believe the answer is 1-in-9 times, or 11%.
Math isn’t hard.
“Turned on ‘Fridays’ for a minute or so … That was the short lived ABC response toSaturday Night Live.
It starred Michael Richards, Julia-Louis Dreyfus and Larry David.
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.”
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.
“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.”
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 beforeon Father’s Day.
And the timing of finding this personal artifact especially powerful because he passed exactly 50 years ago last week.
Which feels like a millennium ago and something that’s ever present at the same time.
I just know that having this in my hands again is like eternity playing Pickleball with my soul.
No past, present or future, that’s just how we perceive things, if that makes sense.
I’ve got regrets about that time.
It doesn’t matter why.
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.
In the wake of my father’s death, I found comfort in certain things.
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 ofHBO 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.
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.
