vintown

I once had a dog named Muska. My then girlfriend bought him for us and we named him after my favorite skateboarder, Chad Muska. We all moved to Tacoma and our relationship ended, Muska stayed behind. I was sad about relationship, but it was the dog that I missed.

Moving back to Alabama, I did some dumb stuff. I was directionless like so many people in their mid-20s and one day I decided that the thing missing from my life was a dog. So, I went out and found Larry.

The place I got him from is hard to explain to someone who has never been in the South. It was a trailer in the woods and there were quite a few dogs running around. I remember lots of camo and these dogs were clearly bred to help with hunting. I just wanted a beagle. Dressed in my pseudo-preppy outfit from my very serious job at a furniture store, the guy knew I wasn’t going on any hunts.

“What are you gonna do, make him a yard dog?” (more…)

I always thought of myself as someone who would get married. I can remember dating someone for a couple of months and talking about what it would be like if we got married, but never in any sort of serious manner and never in a way where it was actually possible. With Sam I took it slow and didn’t try to say anything like that too early in the relationship, but I knew early on that if I didn’t marry Sam that I probably wouldn’t get married. That if I fucked this one up, this one that was better than all those other ones, I just wasn’t going to be the marrying type. (I could say more here, but I don’t want to step on any material I might need for my vows.) Now it’s happening and it’s happening soon.

We’re a little less than three months until the wedding which will take place on January 28th in the city of New Orleans. (more…)

The Chicago Cubs won the World Series and I’m left wondering what the big deal is.

Everyone I know is really excited about this and I’m happy for the family and friends that I have who are Cubs fan. My uncle is the biggest Cubs fan I know, he listens to pretty much every game of the season on the radio and he does it every single year. I couldn’t be happier for him. He deserves this. All those fans deserve this, except for the ones who are entitled, drunk jerks. So, like 30% of them deserve this. Good for you guys. I just don’t see what the big deal is.

I think something that makes me not that impressed is that this seems like it was destined to be this way. (more…)

This show is dumb, like really dumb.

It’s about a woman who becomes a zombie, but doesn’t become one of those zombies as long as she eats brains. So she quits her job and goes to work at the medical examiner’s office where fresh brains come in regularly. When she eats these brains she gets visions of the people that she eats and helps to solve the crime of how they were murdered while also taking on their personality traits.

Like I said, dumb. The premise is absolutely ridiculous and I never would’ve even bothered to check out the show if it wasn’t for the executive producers, Rob Thomas and Diane Ruggiero. You see, Rob Thomas created my all-time favorite show, Veronica Mars, and Diane Ruggiero was a key part of the writing staff and an executive producer. They absolutely nailed that show and earned my loyalty to the point that I would watch this show.  (more…)

There was a time when Chikara was, by far, my favorite brand of wrestling. I got into it when Claudio Castagnoli (Cesaro) and Sara Del Rey were full-time roster members, Colt Cabana, the Young Bucks and El Generico were regular guest stars, and before they even had a singles title. It was way different and more fun than most wrestling I had watched prior to that, but it was also just as good. I would put this era of Chikara up against just about any other “great” wrestling out there, it was that good.

My first DVD was King of Trios 2011, which remains one of my all-time favorite events. There was just so much fun stuff that weekend. Great nostalgia with guest stars like The 1-2-3 Kid, The Great Sasuke, Dick Togo and Jinsei Shinzaki mixed with new favorites like The Colony and El Generico and some great comedy wrestling with Matt Classic and the Osaka Pro guys. It was a perfect event to be introduced to what Chikara is and what it could be.  (more…)

When people think of the Chicago Cubs’ long run without a World Series they will often Billy Goat Curses, The Amazin’ Mets, Gatorade Gloves, Steve Bartman and any other number of bad luck excuses they can come up with. The story is that the Cubs have sucked, but it’s not their fault. The universe is against them, God loves watching the Cubs lose and some other such nonsense.

The truth is that the Cubs just haven’t been very well run and now they are. They’ve always had tons of money and they have always been able to do what they’ve done over the past few years, they just haven’t.

To illustrate this, I decided to look back at the past fifteen years of MLB. I chose 15 years because nearly every team in baseball has made the playoffs at least once in this period (everyone except the Seattle Mariners) and there have been a total of nine different World Series winners with five other teams making their first World Series appearance. This is the age of parity and the opportunity to strike has never been better. (more…)

Part three started off with me living in Washington state, then going to Alabama, then Wisconsin, a quick sojourn to Hawaii and finally back to Wisconsin. I’d finally stay put in one state and with that I’d finally be able to really sink my teeth into a team.

2008: I went to a lot of games this summer with my new group of friends from work. I didn’t get along great with my son’s mother so I didn’t really have to spend much time changing diapers outside of every other weekend. I ended up going to a lot of games that year and the Brewers were pretty damn good. I even took Nolan to one of them. (more…)

Last time out we finished up the 1990s with lots of regret about trying to be cool and not enough baseball, but as we enter into the 2000s you’ll see that would not be the case for a long time after.

2001: This was the time that I decided to do more of the things that made me happy when I was younger and less of everything else dumb. I bought a Koosh frisbee, played catch with a baseball glove, I went to wrestling and I watched baseball. Then I moved to Seattle.

I was very much a believer of the “fresh start” and I saw Seattle as the place I would spend the rest of my life. I went to a Seahawks game almost immediately after moving there and decided that the Seattle sports teams would be my teams from now on, but I hadn’t yet been to a Mariners game. Then one day while working as a door-to-door salesman (no, really), a customer turned me down for the sale but offered me two tickets to that night’s Mariners game.

(Total shot in the dark, but I’m pretty sure it was this game.)

And just like that, I was back. (more…)

Yesterday we covered the first 12 years of my baseball fan life and some of my earliest memories. The strike in 1994 put a dent in what could have been one of my all-time favorite seasons, but that’s okay because today we start off with, you guessed it, one of my all-time favorite seasons.

1995: This is the season when it all went off. For starters, I’m pretty sure this is the year that my aunt, uncle and their friend Flippy took my cousins and I to an early season Cubs game. It was absolutely freezing and the Cubs were probably losing. We sat in the bleachers and who knows what I said (my guess? Calm down), but some drunk adult wanted to fight me. Me, a 13-year old. Flippy ended up pushing the guy away from me and getting thrown out of the game, much to the chagrin of everyone else in the crowd. (more…)

I think that I’m all the way into baseball again. For as long as I can remember baseball has been my thing and then it just wasn’t. I don’t know if it’s because I had a baseball blog and burned myself out or if it was something else, but there was a couple of years there where I really didn’t get a lot of enjoyment from it. I would skip watching the World Series more often than not. It just didn’t excite me anymore and I don’t really understand why that happened because right now it excites me very much. Right now I don’t want to miss a single inning of playoff baseball even though I have no emotional connection to any of these teams.

I thought it would be a fun exercise to go through my baseball fandom year-by-year to get a grip on where it started, where it wained and how the hell I ended up liking the Mariners and Brewers when my entire family is so firmly behind the Cubs.

Let’s take a trip down memory lane and go all the way back to the beginning.

December, 1981: Born. Don’t remember watching any baseball. (more…)