Stuff and Shenanigans: Lots and Lots of Dots

Lol intro? Absolutely the [extended, many-minute-long bleep] not.

A 37% Sober and 100% Accurate Rundown of Absolutely Everything

Let’s begin.

Actually, where do you even start? In something like this, Xs and Os are more or less superfluous. What am I gonna do, break down tackling failures or Dillon Johnson’s emergence or Mike’s absurdity for the 1,000th time? As if any of us wanna read about that. I don’t wanna write about that.

The only thing that feels appropriate here is just, like, seven paragraphs going “AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA AAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH HHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHaaaaaand scene.” Actually I might just do that.

What, you want me to talk about how the interior offensive line has lots of room to improve? What, you want me to talk about how Rome Odunze is a freak? Howabout the pass rush being better but still not consistently havoc-y enough? Howabout the secondary’s improvement? Howabout Giles Jackson picking the perfect time to start his season and roundhouse kick Puddles in the throat? Still suboptimal defensive angles? Ja’Lynn Polk honey-badgering his way to stardom even as the roster’s WR3? Mish Powell’s hitting? Missing the Aussie foot factor? Many many many many many decibels-worth of larynxes? (Laryni? What the [redacted] is the plural of “larynx,” anyway*?)

I mean, truly: You don’t want that, and neither do I.

As someone who tends to orbit poststructuralism in my approach to ummmmmost things, (the comedian Sam Miller told me while we were driving home from a Bellingham gig that he thought it was “brave” that I have five minutes deconstructing unicorns — who are bullshit, by the way) I feel like this is just that theory plastered, undeniably true, in front of our faces.

Cause really, any words I write here are collectively no more than the 8-bit transliterated version of a billion particles and neural firings experienced by 72,000 people plus another few million. You can’t vectorize the pixels of language into accuracy. Sure, in a concept like “I bought Crystal Lite lemonade from the kids’ stand next door,” words get the job done more or less.

But this? Nah.

What on Earth could you want me to say here? How on Earth could an infinite combination of words mean anything next to that?

“Michael Penix is a Joe Burrow-style, Ruby Meylan-style, Sherman-versus-Crabtree-style honey badger-ass psychopath (compliment)?” Yeah, that’ll cover it. She said, sarcastically.

A rose is a rose is a rose, and there is nothing I can add to that.

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Some amount of years ago, my English teacher assigned us this. If you’re one of what I can only assume will be less than 10 people who actually click on that, you’ll understand the narrative irony of her demonstrating the abstract thesis of that essay by dying a month later. It was Christmas Eve, domestic violence. You might have read about it. Nine months later, my next English teacher was diagnosed with breast cancer. That was two weeks after my childhood dog had died. She beat it, until she didn’t.

In between that, I included a pitch to donate to her fundraiser bike ride down the coast on some article that cosmically otherwise didn’t matter. Somewhere around three thousand people read that in the first 48 hours. One of you donated. I checked. (It was, fittingly, UWDP user mikesbike.)

Read the assignment, if you want. And then consider that we got to be there when Saturday saturday’d.

Maybe this is dramatic, but the moments of life that both refute and corroborate the anguish of that assignment are dramatic. Like, conceptually, on whichever scale you wish to judge it by. We’re on a Miley Cyrus-in-Wrecking-Ball-style pendulum constantly swinging between pure banality (lovely, boring, contented, devastating) and drama (incredible, exhausting, life-altering, devastating).

Michael Penix throwing two perfect comeback zingers in 30 seconds is dramatic. A whole town getting washed into the sea is dramatic. A pandemic is dramatic. Coming back for seven runs against a pitcher who’d shut you out for 13 innings to stay alive is dramatic. The season of Dr. Seussian-orange wildfire sky displacing people from their homes 100 miles away is dramatic. Your cats wrastlin’ is dramatic. A 3-2 bottom-of-the-ninth home run to break a two decade-plus-long drought is dramatic. Your cats when you open a can of tuna but not for them are fucking dramatic. (Seriously, nobody exists in a binary of “no drama, perfectly content, existentially pleased,” to “HOLY SHARTPANTS DRAMA ONLY” like cats. Fuck I love cats.) The moment 72,000 people realize a blonde 23 year-old who five years ago moved 2,200 miles away from home to attend school in Eugene kicked a ball three milimeters too far to the left of his hit target on said ball: It’s dramatic.

Which, sidenote, I’m convinced is the answer to the question we all asked our math teachers of “why do we need to know this:” Because geometry — trig? — taught us that about three milimeters from 43 yards out was the difference between collective happiness and despair. As if some 8-bit-ass words like “collective happiness” could even remotely capture it.

There have been, give or take, around 85 billion people in the history of humanity.

What good luck, that we got to be here for this.

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And now to alley-oop any and all reverrence right into the trash:

By the way if you’re [name redacted] who I met at the tailgate, know that those of us without tickets who went back to watch at [address redacted] made your wife sit and watch from the back of the hallway for the last two minutes because every time she went back there, good things happened. So please thank her for her #heroic and #brave sacrifice that brought glory to Montlake. I know you’re reading this.

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Lines of the Week

The Washington defense (4th down edition):

Mish Powell on the hit (you know the one):

Those two throws:

Without comment, Dan Lanning:

And Ducks fans as Dan Lanning dan lanning’d:

Everyone dressed in green in Seattle as the clock struck mmmmm-about 1 second:

God, I love thinking about that.

And now, to close it out — *ahem* — Oregon fans this whole time:

I suppose here is where I mention these two things which are going on and say that we had the first show of this series two nights ago and it was fun as hell and the second show will be next Monday on 10/23 and tickets are the literal most affordable thing in the world and that this other show here is a dumb fun panel comedy thing at The Crocodile 10/25 and I have no idea how many tickets are sold but probably fewer than we’d all like and you should come so The Croc keeps letting us do it forever and ever, in Jesus’ name amen. That’s all!

Do good things, don’t do bad things, and bow down to Washington.