Day Three

It’s raining.  It’s raining and it will not stop, and it’s never going to stop raining, and I’m going to drown in the woods. (But at least I don’t have to watch the NHL Awards tonight.  Thank God for small favors.  Heh.)

At Apple Hill I get to see many of my favorite friends, including frequent commenters, Elise and Piece_of_etc.  The Apple Hill Chamber Players is a year round organization, and both Elise and Piece_of_Etc are wonderful musicians and people.

They are also lunatics.

Piece_of_etc  gets comically peeved when I bitch about the sub-human accommodations here, but I feel it is my duty to TELL THE TRUTH.  I’m living in a mouse infested shack and it will NEVER stop raining and it’s a MIRACLE I’m still alive.  If Piece_of_Etc wants me to stop whining, well, maybe he better get to work building me a fully equipped bungalow (PLUMBING INCLUDED) with cable television and a hot tub.

Today, while gazing pathetically out into the torrential rain, I suggested that we begin building an ark so that this doesn’t happen to us:

Totally realistic depiction

Piece_of_Etc was unimpressed with my apocalyptic vision of our near future, but he agreed that we should build the ark.  Here’s how he sees our situation:

Totally UNrealistic.  This could never happen.

Day Two

I’m still alive!  And I’m slowing coming to terms with nature.

Is anyone else getting ants in their pants about the Sabres?  I keep breathlessly checking the computer for news that Darcy has traded Lindy and Jochen Hecht for Bylsma and Malkin.  Or, maybe Darcy will trade Yo-Yo and the rights to Andrew Peters to the Islanders for their first round pick, and then we get Tavares! ….that would rock.

Too Much Nature

Well, I’ve arrived at Apple Hill and I am about to embark on the scariest night of the year- The First Night in the Shack. I’m currently huddled in my shack trying to convince myself that bats/mice/monsters could NOT fit through the crack at the base of my shack’s door.

My computer has no Internet service in the shack (there is service in the office area), but the phone seems to be humming along just fine. I’m tapping out this post on my phone. It’s an annoying way to write, but not as annoying as sitting around in the eerie silence waiting for a nature induced death. (Which is what I usually do on my first night here.)

So, every year when I arrive here, I go through a process of reacclimation. First I’m horrified, then I’m scared, then I’m resigned, and tomorrow I’ll be happy as a clam. I need a few minutes to make my peace with nature before I can move on with the experince of making music with some of my very best friends, but every year, after a brief inner temper tantrum, I fall back in love with this place.

Even though I’m still in the “scared” phase, I’ve already begun to remember how pretty nature can be. Just a minute ago I stepped out of my shack and gasped outloud at the amazing sky full of stars. It’s so beautiful outside that I thought, “I wish the internet could see this,” so I pointed my phone up at the sky and took this photo so you could see.

(stars not pictured) (but they’re there)

Right after my brush with the beautiful stars I scurried back into my cabin where I intend to remain for the rest of the night. I think I’m going to watch some Columbo DVDs on my laptop in an effort to distract myself from my extreme nature-y situation.

Time To Trade all the Sabres!

Hooray!  The hockey season is FINALLY over, and now we can get down to the delightful task of trading away all of the old sucky Sabres, for NEW sucky Sabres!  WOO!

I read something interesting on Kukla’s Korner today.  John Madden is going to test the market on July 1st.

I want him!

Ew, gross!  Not him!…..

…..HIM!  (disclaimer: he’s only slightly less gross than the football John Madden)

Before you get all uppity and, “He’s old! He’s never been that productive!  He’s on the decline!” I say to you, “I know, but gather ’round and listen to me.”

Seven reasons the Sabres should sign John Madden:

1. Have you EVER seen a Sabre look like John Madden looks in that picture?  No.  No, you have not.  Because most of our  players are little wusses.  I like how beat-up John Madden is willing to get, and I like how he’s got a respectable playoff beard- like a man.

2. The Sabres are in desperate need of a leader, and John Madden seems like one of those “I REALLY WANT TO LEAD” eager-beaver types, like Briere was, only with credibility and a cranky disposition.

3. John Madden has won two Cups.  Two.  And a Selke.  I used to poo-poo the idea that Cup experience is all that valuable, but then I watched two seasons of a team with zero Cup winners, coached by a guy with zero Cup wins and I changed my mind.  The Sabres really need SOMEONE around who knows what it takes to win it all.

4. Here’s what Pookie said when I emailed her about him:

I think his leadership could be really good for a team like the Sabres.  He’s a hard-ass and I suspect he has absolutely no qualms about telling younger players to shape up.  I think he’d love to see himself as a Scott Stevens for a rudderless group.

We HAVE a rudderless group here in Buffalo!

5. Here’s the OTHER thing Pookie said:

You know what his biggest strength to you guys would be?  Coach killing.  He’s been a key player on a lot of classic coach killing teams!

Now, I know that most of you don’t want Lindy to be fired, but I feel strongly about this one.  If Lindy comes back next year, and the Sabres are good, and they all start listening to him again, GREAT!  Lindy’s an awesome dude, and super fun to have around, and it would ROCK if the Sabres stopped sucking.  BUT.  If Lindy comes back, and the Sabres still seem disorganized, disinterested, and all around sucky, SOMEONE needs to be fired, and that someone is usually the coach.  One of the things I HATED about last season was that the players seemed to be coach killing, BUT THEY COULDN’T EVEN DO THAT RIGHT.  If coach killing is what we need, John Madden’s got the experience to get it done.

Hopefully we won’t need a coach killer next season, but if I have to watch another season of Derek Roy TRYING to kill Lindy and FAILING, I swear to LINDY RUFF I will lose my effing mind.

5. His nickname is Maddog.  The only dog nickname the Sabres currently have is “Pommerdoodle.”

6. According to the Ookies, John Madden is totally humorless and his interviews are all-dour-all-the-time.  Perfect.  Hopefully he’s like that in practices, and on the team plane, and on the bench, and in the workout room, and in hotel rooms, and EVERY MINUTE OF EVERY DAY.  The Sabres could really use a dour asshole around.  They certainly responded to Chris Drury, didn’t they?

7. I really believe the Sabres HAVE to pick up a grizzled vet, and we could do a WHOLE lot worse than John Madden.  (See: Guerin, Bill)

(Thank you to the Ookies, fabulous Devils fans, who obviously greatly influenced this post.  By “influenced” I pretty much mean “told me all of this stuff, exactly”.)

Housekeeping

I have SO MUCH to do you guys.  The BPO season is wrapping up this afternoon, and then on Tuesday I’m headed off to Bat Shack Camp. As of right now, I’m TOTALLY unprepared to leave town for two weeks, and I have a LOT of music to learn.  So, my plan was to get up early and get some work done.

I did get up early, but I failed to get any work done.  Rather than check a single thing off my redonkulously long “to do” list, I decided that I would spend a few minutes sprucing up the blog a bit while I drank my coffee.

Three hours later, after reading almost the ENTIRETY of my archives from the last year, I have made the following improvements to this blog:

1. I updated and combined the “About TWC” and “FAQ” pages and renamed it “Aboot”.  I’ve been meaning to do this for roughly one million years, so I’m glad it’s done, but I realize that it makes almost ZERO difference to anyone but me. So…that was time well spent.

2. I’ve officially ended the Helmet Nuzzle Project.  Thank you SO MUCH to everyone who contributed delightful helmet nuzzles.  I have all the pictures stored safely in a file on my desktop, and I have every intention of one day doing something FABULOUS with them once I figure out what that fabulous thing is and I have a good chunk of free time.  I’m sorry that I haven’t done anything yet.

3.  I swapped out a lot of the “Favorite Posts” entries.  I was getting a little depressed looking at that list because most of the posts were written ages ago.  When I first started TWC I was so creatively envigorated by the Sabres and hockey blogging that it was easy to churn out decent material, but over the last year or so, I think I’ve struggled a bit.  This morning I sat down with the intention of finding a decent post written in the last year, and I discovered a few things:

-I had a good stretch in mid-March.  Three of the posts that I added to “Favorites” (Coach Killing, Please Come Home, and Lindy and Buffalo) were all written in one week.  They all have a different tone, but they all are reflect a sort of “rock bottom” as a fan.  When I think about that stretch of time I remember myself being miserable about the Sabres, so it’s interesting to note that I was apparently fairly inspired by the Sabres’ suckitude.

-I added “Poor Timmy” which I think is a pretty funny post, and I added “Sabres @ Leafs 1/1/09: Special “Fuck You, Sabres” Edition” which is a good example of the ranting lunatic that the Sabres reduced me to this season.

-Reading through the archives for the 2008/09 season was quite interesting both from a blogging perspective and from the perspective of a fan.   If you write a hockey blog I highly recommend that you read your archives because you might be surprised by what you find.  Without this blog as a record, I probably would have summed up the last season as “meh,” so it’s just fascinating to find all sorts of evidence that I WAS fully engaged with the Sabres last season.  It’s kind of cool how our emotions surrounding sports are all-consuming and TOTALLY fleeting at the same time.

4. Could I BE any more obsessed with myself today?  I just spent the last three hours reading every word I wrote about a HOCKEY team last year, and then I spent 45 minutes writing this post telling YOU all about my experience reading about MYSELF.  I’m pathetic, and I really need to get on with my day.  Heh.

WOOOOOO!

I’ll be honest and admit that I haven’t been that engaged during the Cup Finals.  I was switching my allegiences nightly, and I just didn’t really care.

But game 7s are special, and it was SO FUN to see all those Pittsburgh kids skate with the Cup.

The Cup is magical and wonderful and I’m so glad we get to see it skated around at the end of the season.

WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

Hey!  It’s my hideous Penguins husband!  WOOOOOO!!

I can’t find a picture of foxy, foxy Max Talbot skating around with the Cup right now, but it was suh-WEET!

*happy sigh*

Useful Anxiety

The Hamilton Coyotes are bringing up all sorts of complicated issues for me.

A lot of the times I’m able to approach it like, “Well, it’s all out of my control and I might as well just hope for the best.  Maybe a team in Hamilton would make the market stronger, and the Sabres more competitive.”, but then I read something like this (or even worse, I read the comments), and I get really scared.

The fact that I’m fretful about Buffalo and the Sabres is a reminder that for many years I felt alienated and disconnected from my life here.  I’m fully engaged now, regardless of the Sabres.  For that, I am eternally grateful.

For a long time after I became a Sabres fan, I rarely worried about anything.  The Sabres were a vessel for my useless anxiety.  I burned all my stupid fretfulness on the Sabres, and found a more relaxed approach to everything else.  It was the sheer power of rookie enthusiasm.  To some degree, I think this magic has worn off.  I’m not a blissed out new fan anymore, I’m a regular fan.  In place of the new fan, is a regular Buffalonian.

After a good run of feeling impenetrable, lately I’m vulnerable to the same stresses and anxieties as everyone else.

I’m kind of like a junkie now though.   I miss the overall feeling of civic pride that the Sabres used to provide.  I want it back.  If thinking about the Sabres isn’t filling my heart with Buffalo-centric pride and joy, I want to think about something that does.

Lately I’ve been spending less time thinking about the Sabres, and a lot more time thinking about Buffalo in general.  I know I need to do more to pitch in around here, and I know that any energy I spent on volunteering would help to ease the useless anxiety I feel because of a “threat” like the Hamilton Coyotes.

Does anyone have any good suggestions?  Any Buffalo causes that are near and dear to your heart?

Dude.

POOR COREY MCINTYRE!

Months after we all got sick of making jokes about him and his alleged public masturbation, HE’S CLEARED OF ALL WRONG DOING.  It really WAS mistaken identity, probably with a dash of “unfair racial profiling”, and DEFINITELY with a hearty dose of “unreliable witness”.

I suppose there are worse things that could happen to an innocent man than being accused of masturbating outside the window of an old woman, but as far as false accusations go THIS ONE IS PRETTY BAD.

I hope that McIntyre is the recipient of some kind of delightful karmic compensation for this humiliation, because according to my scorecard, the universe owes this guy.  Big time.

Poop!

I just realized that I have to WORK during game 7!  That blows!

I wonder if the BPO would reschedule something if it conflicted with a Sabres game 7 in the Stanley Cup Finals.  Maaaybe.  I…kind of doubt it.  OH MY GOD.  WHAT IF THEY DIDN’T?  (Coworkers?  Thoughts?)

Someday the Sabres will be in the playoffs again!….and I might have to WORK!  This is going to keep me up tonight.

I can’t IMAGINE how torturous it would be to be on stage in those circumstances.  Of course, I also can’t imagine the Sabres being in a SCF game 7.  Heh.

Maybe I’ll mentally file this little anxiety under, “happy problems/we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.”

The Peoria Sabres

I’m reading Will Leitch’s “God Save the Fan” right now, and it’s often pretty funny, and it’s often really repetitive (Yes, ESPN sucks.  WE GET IT ALREADY), but one essay really jumped out at me last night.

Leitch writes about sticking with his boyhood football team the St. Louis Cardinals when they move to Arizona.  He even goes so far as to suggest that a person who doesn’t follow a team through a geographical move is not a real fan.  This idea blew my mind mostly because my instincts tell me that if the Sabres ever moved, I would devote my life to rooting against them.

Leitch’s argument:

See, here’s the thing: Being a sports fan is a year-round job.  At the end of the season, You’ve got your free agency period and then the draft and then your salary cap cut date and the next thing you know, it’s training camp.  So, when exactly was I supposed to switch loyalties?  Was there one day that I cared about Vai Sikahema, and another day when I was supposed to stop?  I read some piece of information about my Cardinals every day of the year.  I know the fifty-three-man roster.  I know the draft picks, I know the coaching staff, I know the name of the guy who plays the mascot.  It’s a full-time position, rooting for a football team….so how am I just supposed to say, “All right, yesterday I cared about these players, but now I care about these”?  If something as wishy-washy as geography guides your rooting interests, isn’t it wishy-washy to move your loyalty around just because someone realized the franchise could make more money in Boise rather than Topeka?

He loses me a bit when he argues that geography is a silly reason to choose one team over another (the reason I became a hockey fan was so that I had an excuse to cheer for Buffalo- nothing wishy-washy about it), but he does make a good case for loyalty.  Once you have your team, you have your team.  Plain and simple.

Although the Bills are the most obvious comparison (and the most likely to actually leave) I’m going to use the Sabres simply because I just don’t care enough about the Bills to make this interesting. If the Bills left town, I’d be sad for all the Buffalonians who love them, but NO WAY would I cheer for Marshawn Lynch if he were running girls over with his car in Toronto or LA instead of Buffalo.  The Bill can just forget it.

The Sabres might be a different story.  Would I suddenly STOP rooting for Goose and Crunchy just because the team moved away?  It’s difficult to imagine.  As much as I bitch about the Sabres and claim that I want them ALL TO BE TRADED, it’s hard to picture rooting against them as a group.  If Lindy and the whole gang were playing in a different city, would I still cheer for them?

I’m not bringing this up to get everyone depressed imagining a bleak future without the Sabres, I just think it’s an interesting way of thinking about the team.  It’s an interesting way to measure what it is that we’re cheering for.  I really think I’m mostly cheering for Buffalo, but I spend so much time watching these players that I do have attachments to them.  I am cheering for the players too.  In the absence of an NHL team in Buffalo I might find myself cheering for the Peoria Sabres just out of habit.

I really don’t know!

Please don’t get yourself depressed by thinking about this too hard, and please don’t spend any time trying to figure out what kind of terrible situation would have to evolve in order for the Sabres to leave.  This is just a simple exercise.  If the current Sabres were plopped down in Peoria, Illinois tonight, would you still be a fan tomorrow? I think it’s interesting and kind of fun to ponder.

After a lot of thought, I voted for “I’d probably keep cheering for the Sabres,” but honestly, I might devote my life to hating them.  It’s a really tough call.