There are some real downsides of aging. I especially enjoy when I wake up in the morning
feeling absolutely crushed by a massive hangover only to remember “Wait, I didn’t
drink last night.”. My right heel has
some sort of plantar situation that flares up without any warning leaving me
hobbling around like a peg legged sailor for an hour until it loosens up. I woke up last night with my elbow screaming
out in pain like I was Sandy Koufax after throwing 11 innings in 1966. As I scan back to the potential cause of the
injury, such mundane events as “carrying some groceries” cannot be dismissed as
potential causes. Yet, this is a
worthwhile trade just for the wisdom of age.
I often know what is going to happen before it happens. This is not because I am a gypsy fortune
teller like Little Steven Van Zandt, though I will admit he might not be a
fortune teller either. He might just
have taste in clothes like a Romanian immigrant woman in 1912. No, I know something is going to happen
because I have seen it before. I remember
hearing a big buzz about the band Of Montreal, so I stuck around the Beachland
to catch their set. The young audience
was jacked up to see them, their enthusiasm sending an electricity through the
room. Once the band started playing, I
took me moments to realize “Oh, this is a take on David Bowie. I get it.”.
I was sort of bummed I didn’t have the same glow on my face like “the
kids”. The “been there, done that”
mindset is tiring but still beneficial. Sure,
it makes it harder to regain the excitement when you see something “new”, like when
you were 14 and heard George Thorogood and the Destroyers on SNL before understanding
they were a blues cover band. “Wait… He didn’t write that Bad To The Bone riff?” Everything came after something else, except
Devo of course, which has just always been.
It is this memory of what has come before that leaves me
confident that the Pittsburgh Steelers will beat the Browns on Sunday. Since the Browns “returned” in 1999, they
have won in Pittsburgh once. Once.
Tim Couch was the QB and the #1
song in the country was “Working For The Weekend” by Loverboy. (That Loverboy part isn’t true, but I was just
thinking about the time I loaned the guitar player a quarter to get a soda out
of a radio station vending machine where I worked, so it was the first song
that came to mind when I thought about “crappy old radio songs that still make
you feel good in a guilty way”.) The
bottom line is the Browns don’t win in Pittsburgh. This is because the Steelers always shove the
Browns around, hurt a bunch of their players, and then go eat Primanti Brothers
sandwiches afterwards. Here’s all you
need to know… Baker Mayfield does not
play well under pressure. Hell, who
does? The Steelers average 5 QB sacks a
game. Baker Mayfield hurt his ribs last
week, and only practiced yesterday. If
you had hurt ribs, would you want a 275 pound man hitting you as hard as he
could? How many turnovers is he going to
make? Pittsburgh -3.
I have seen the horrifying Dak Prescott injury over and
over, perhaps more often than the Zapruder film of JFK’s assassination. Over and to the right. Over and to the right. The market will completely overreact to Dak’s
season ending injury and assume Dallas will never win again. Look, Andy Dalton isn’t great, but he IS a
legitimate NFL starter. Out of all the
backups in the league, he is the one guy I would take. Yeah, maybe Jameis Winston, but we want to
win real games not fantasy football. I
am on board with The Red Rifle to provide enough for the Cowboys to win games
they are supposed to win, like this one at home against a wildly overrated
Arizona Cardinals. This line has already
moved 4 points towards Arizona. When
they zig, we zag. Dallas +1.5
I don’t think there has ever been a team fielding as many
key injuries as the San Francisco 49ers.
Any player you can think of on
that team is either out, or playing with an injury so bad that if you had it,
you would call off work for a month. They
have three crappy QB options, no D line, no O-line and a banged up secondary. The Dolphins just beat those guys 43-17, but
when you get down to it the Dolphins didn’t really beat the 49ers, they beat
some strangers wearing 49er outfits. With
the salary cap, it’s impossible to have the depth necessary to field a good
team with those injuries. Meanwhile the
Rams are quietly winning games. They just
destroyed Washington 30-10 and made Alex Smith look like he’s never even seen a
football before. I will be stunned if
the Rams don’t win this game. Rams -3
Season Record: 8-6
Nailed them. Could not get a hold of my man and just found out he is getting married. WTF?
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