SONG OF THE DAY: All That I Got Is You

One of the all-time greatest ad-libs on a hip hop track is Ghost saying “word up mommy, I love you” at the end of this song. That shit always kills me. I love, when talking to unsuspecting bougie crowds at one of my haiku slams, to say, “I think the greatest living American poet is Dennis Coles. Have any of you seen Dennis Coles’ work?” And mostly people will be like, “wtf?” for a second and I’ll go, “He publishes poetry under the pseudonym Ghostface Killah,” and then they laugh, because they think I’m joking, BUT I’M NOT FUCKING JOKING GODDAMMIT.

SPORTSBALL 69: Winter 2018

I’m resurrecting trash culture anthropology through the filter of the world’s football, with plans to do so according to solstice/equinox schedule, but I’m doing so through my patreon, because I’m attempting to move to analog zines again, or doing longer winded projects on my patreon. I’m making this first of 3 installments of this Winter 2018 Sportsball 69 free to all, because information wants to be free, but the second and third installments the coming two weeks will be patrons only, because electric bills want to be paid. It is your choice to support or not. I realize we live in a time where we’ve been trained to look at social media and click a like button instead of actually clicking a link, and I’m as guilty of that as anyone, but if you spend $20 a month on coffee, or alcohol, consider spending $1 a month on me. I’m better for you.

THE LINK - LIKE A RED CARD FOR YOUR WORLD FOOTBALL IGNORANCE

TW0 D3C4D3S 0F M3M0R13S...

two decades of memories

quickly blurred by present day's

(daze) dark immediacy

C0NV1NC1NG SVP3RV1S0RS...

convincing supervisors

I can be trusted enough

to leave me the fuck alone

c u r t b

I never shut the shower
curtain; seven a.m. rush
job off to meaningless work

Samuel Smith Oatmeal Stout

AFFORDABILITY: In all my years, I don’t remember to be drinking upon a Sammy Smith Oatmeal Stout, probably because oatmeal is some bourgoisie ass shit to me. I grew up broke, with WIC checks and screaming baby sisters who had health problems, so we ate Cream of Wheat mostly, or whatever the generic brand of that was. Man WIC checks are annoying. Even today, when food stamps are so streamlined and like a debit card you can flow with, you actually have pieces of paper with a WIC check and you have to sign like nine of them for your groceries at the store and the person working the register doesn’t know how to do it and then you have to trade your half-gallon of milk in for four pints of milk and all sorts of retarded ass shit. But I’m sure in my life I’ve drank the Oatmeal Stout, especially considering how many hippie-ish girls I’ve been in long-term relationships with. And the Sammy Smith big bottles were on sale at the Kroger, who is my friend when it comes to beer at times. Shit, they were rolling with the $12 12-packs of Stella Artois there for like a month. If beer could be cheaper, I could be richer. 4 out of 5.
DESTROYABILITY: Oatmeal cookies are kinda gross to me, and I’d prefer not to choose them but I do enjoy them if they are sprung on me unexpectedly. My favorite cookie is the fat and soft peanut butter cookie made so well by Mennonite types using massive amounts of butter-flavored Crisco. The only thing that has ever tempted me in the past five years to turn towards a Christian god are these peanut butter cookies and seeing young teenager Mennonites hanging together at the demolition derby at the Rockingham County Fair. That was beautiful. Actually there was a young woman with crazy eyes who also seemed to be Mennonite (she was hanging with them) one time at a parade I took my daughter to. Man, I hope I don’t accidentally have a Mennonite fetish. An oatmeal beer luckily does not taste heavily of oatmeal but why the hell bother if not. And why use oatmeal? I hope there’s something ancient and pagan about it but I would expect it’s just some wacky alterna-beer bullshit that does something lame to a regular man like myself like it “dries up the fermenting process and gives it more of a wild hops taste” although really I wanted to write something stupider but could only think of wild hops, which actually would be cool, except wild hops don’t work like regular hops so you can’t really brew successfully with them and plus they’ll overtake all your other shit because they so wild. 2 out of 5.
LABEL AESTHETIC: It’s a nice label, like all Sammy Smith labels be going about theyselves. The gold wrapper around the top of the bottle is a classy touch, like you’re drinking some fancy assed $250 a bottle champagne or something, when it’s only beer. I will forever be a beer drinker because that’s my caste in life. We just got given by my bro-in-law a bunch of wine, some of it some seriously expensive wine, and I can get into that stuff, but it’s just not in my bloodstream like beer is. I mean that in both a family tree genetical type way as well as a literal day-to-day interpretation. 4 out of 5.
CORPORATE MASTER: Samuel Smith is not a company but an overlord, a cruel yet mindful overlord who knows that industrial overlords cannot get over by the spiked whip alone. I am not sure what other beers they make other than exporting their fancy big bottles of white people beer to America for old men who have bushy mustaches and an ability to talk for far too long about deli meats, as well as for hippie girls both new to adulthood and far enough down their path in life to already have an etsy page for their homemade dresses. But I am not down with overlords, having underclass stamps on all my white blood cells. This is why I give blood as often as I can, because I am doing my part to bring down society from within, literally. The only problem is, and this is not a well-known fact, the upper crust elite type of people, they have private blood bank things set up for if they need blood, kind of like how normal people find out if somebody's kidney matches them, except it's more about the socio-economic match. But that's not really shocking. If they don't want their kids to possibly mix blood with the loser lower classes by making children together, you should expect they don't want an automatic injection of poverty and shiftlessness and ickery shot into their bodies. 1 out of 5.
OVERALL AMBIANCE: Samuel Smith is like one of those open brick fireplaces with a mantle kicking mad dental work and some sort of faux finish that looks like it’s 390 years old when actually some blonde haired lady in a late model BMW spent two afternoons at $40 an hour doing it... it feels good, but isn’t very practical. Or useful. For one Samuel Smith Oatmeal Stout, I could’ve had three tall cans and two fried egg sandwiches, although I would’ve had to snag a couple mayonnaise packets from the deli counter probably. 1 out of 5.
TOTAL RATING: 2 & 2/5 STARS!

Widmer Hefeweizen

AFFORDABILITY: The Widmer Hefeweizen is not the cheapest beer on the market, and the fact that it’s name sounds like a perverse sexual move a balding old bear homosexual dude would do to me after knocking me out with some animal tranquilizer in my drink, I don’t like it, not even slightly. The sides of my thighs get bruised just thinking about it. 0 out of 5.
DESTROYABILITY: I was playing the Super Mario Wii while drinking these motherfuckers, so I was too preoccupied with conquering castles to truly get the full, straight to the gullet effect of the Widmer Heffalumples. But, judging from how slowly I felt like drinking, even after boosting up with multiple extra lives, I would say the Heffalumples is lacking in the superior taste bud stimulation necessary to get your proper back road drunk driving swerve on the budget cuts second gen asphalts. 1 out of 5.
LABEL AESTHETIC: STOP THE PRESSES! I had a couple Widmer Hefeweizens last weekend out because it was the only good beer on tap really other than stupid Starr Hill Jomo Lager, and they brought it to me in the big ol’ pint glass with an orange slice in it and it was such an aesthetically pleasing color and tasted great with the orange in it and I enjoyed it so thoroughly that it made me think perhaps I gave it a raw deal the first time, or didn’t just drink it right. Nonetheless, I shall arbitrarily pump up their remaining categories to atone for this change in my heart’s attitude towards the Widmer Hefeweizen. But to be honest, their label is not that bad to me, as it looks like an outer space alien’s soccer jersey. Or futbol jersey. (Side note: it is okay to take notes constantly about everything at my new job because it makes it look like I care, so I do. Yesterday we were getting some sales pitch from some dude who I think might’ve been a Brazilian scientist about a machine we were gonna buy and he said, “I’m not a radioactivity guy, to be honest.” I wrote it down right away because that seemed a funny thing to hear someone say to you in your life, and no one thought it odd I wrote it down because they probably thought I was taking relevant notes for later when usually I’m just doodling out stupid shit to put into words elsewhere at later time when not confined by circumstances.) 5 out of 5.
CORPORATE MASTER: I'm not even gonna look it up because I'm sure it's in actuality owned by Anheuser Busch and the grandson of a Nazi scientist smuggled to Brazil by the U.S. government, and he's the reason Becks bought Budweiser, and now they also smuggle South American sex slaves into high end European brothels because the regular clientele have gotten kinda sick of all the Russian girls. 1 out of 5.
OVERALL AMBIANCE: So what is it, the holiday beer left in my fridge that I hated upon, or the on-tap pint I boughted with a slice of orange that I loved? Shit or perfection? Very easy, braddah, it's both. Yin and yang man, everything is 69ing with itself to achieve that perfect balance, the snake in the grass eating his own tail. They used to carve that shit into cave walls before they even knew people could make magazines out of it. Everything is good and bad. You can get really affordable mountain bikes for your kid at the new Wal-Mart Supercenter and people at Whole Foods are scrunchfaced assholes. But you can get organical foods for cheap at white people grocery stores, but cheaper American grown ground beef at the ghetto supermarket. Balance and chaos. Which means this beer's short term interaction in my life, hitting both ends of things, at different times, free in my fridge while I was unemployed (and it sucked) and at a premium price at the stupid restaurant in Scottsville with an orange in it making me feel frou-frou as fuck (and it ruled), it is perfect. So 5 out of 5.
TOTAL RATING: 2 & 2/5 STARS!