Ultra-edgy cacklers, the dreaded return of Mr. VIP Trevor Story, August football in a microwaved world, the shtick prick that is Mike Vrabel

Sunday 8/30/26

The Red Sox aren't having the greatest go of it in the Bronx. Everyone said they'd get killed on Friday night with their middle-of-the-pack pitcher matching up against the Yankees' Cy Young favorite, but as is so typically the case, I had a different view/expectation. You'll often see a guy go beyond his normal level in these types of match-ups, and the other guy, with the pressure to "win easily," doesn't win at all, or barely, or leaves with a no-decision.

But this is the difference between a person knowing things thoroughly at the core level of a sport as those workings have revealed themselves over a century and a half, and someone not knowing things at all and enacting a performance of attitude instead, which is all they can do because they are wholly devoid of substance and understanding of even something as relatively simple as this.

Worth mentioning that the people in that latter camp are also almost always those who use the term "hot take." Remember: Any person who says or writes "hot take" is telling you they are an utter idiot. If they had a doctor's note--and the doctor was God--telling you they were an idiot, that wouldn't be more convincing than a single, unironic usage of the term "hot take."

People are so obnoxious in what they say, too. "I'm cackling about how much the Red Sox are going to be killed tonight." This could be a Red Sox fan talking, a Yankees fan, or a bloated, empty-headed lizard type like Tony Massarotti, for whom this kind of thing serves as the basis of a highly lucrative career thanks to our world being one almost entirely populated by perpetual adolescents regardless of anybody's date of birth and who are also the moron versions of adolescents.

That is, the forty-five-year-old guy is really a fourteen-year-old idiot inside. Same person mentally, temperamently, emotionally, as he was then. He's just fatter now and has a wife and kids, but there hasn't been a lick of growth or increase in maturity.

Are there exceptions? Sure. We covered the subject of exceptions the other day in our discussion about reading which branched off into a passage about who takes offense and who doesn't. But how many exceptions do you see? Allowing that you're one yourself?

"Cackling" is a word people now use to show how edgy and cool they are. "I'm cackling," "I cackle whenever..." Too edgy and cool to actually be able to express themselves in any original or individual way or have their own personality, never mind a compelling one, but super edgy and cool all the same. You didn't just laugh, you threw your head back and cackled, that's how edgy and DGAF and subversive that you are! Look at you doing that flouting and subverting! Whoa! You and seventy million others who speak just like you and are indistinguishable from you. I'm cackling!

It's like that person at the movie theater who makes a big show of laughing so that you know how with it they are that they're laughing at the part they're laughing at because you'd have to be very smart and in the know indeed and quite witty and sophisticated yourself to laugh right there when they did, don't you know, was I loud enough for you, do you hear me, etc.

As it was, the Sox lost 1-0. I couldn't see the game. Not for the usual reason that I was asleep, but because it was on a streaming service and I don't subscribe to any of those. You are bled a bit more dry each month in order to be able to dump the latest in machined, unvaried, formulaic, gray piffle into your basically dead brain, which is meant to be all that goes into your head in today's world, thus giving your brain the aspect of pasty porridge, which makes it easy to control and enslave you to your corporate overlords, and bleed you more and more as you do the bidding of your soulless masters while being sufficiently incapable of thought to know what you're doing and even defending what you're doing as you make your own life, the life of your kids, and the entirety of society, culture, and the world worse, because you aren't only stupid, you're (willingly) programmed to be a humanness-reducing form of stupid that punts away your own soul, with the additional kicker that you now rage and act out when anything potentially infringes upon, delays, interrupts, or tries to counteract this process which you are too stupid to recognize, let alone understand. So I just checked the box score the next morning.

The Red Sox had a decent amount of traffic on the base paths, which obviously didn't matter. What I found more distressing--and this is in the general sense now, the overall baseball sense, and, again, a sociological sense--is that when you see a game that finishes 1-0, you expect--or you did once--some awesome pitching duel. One guy throws the shutout, and the other guy is what used to be called the hard-luck loser, going 8 innings and surrendering a solo homer and taking that hard loss despite how masterful he was. But that's baseball and that's life.

Nope. Neither guy made it out of the sixth inning, and then a cadre of relievers were involved. It sucks. What was far and away the best position in sports, which was reminiscent of the hero setting out in the likes of Homer, with everyone keyed on how the man in the middle of it all would fare over the course of his journey, is no more. Now he's just a glorified long reliever who happens to begin the game.

Once the Sox lost this game, it was going to be exceedingly difficult to take the series, which was a virtual no-go anyway as it stood coming. Four-game series are hard series to win. I prefer not to see them on the schedule, because I like when you're assured a winner and a loser, as with three-game series. Yesterday was a doubleheader, and those are difficult to sweep, thus compounding the difficulty of a series victory. The Sox showed a bit of life--though not as much as the final score suggested, as they padded their lead late--in shutting out the Yankees, then weren't ever really in it in the second game.

So today is the "big" one, I guess. If the Red Sox win, they split the series, get out of the Bronx without losing ground and stay two back, and take the season series from the Yankees, which would matter if they finish with the same record, which is certainly possible, though I feel like the Yankees are going to end up being the first Wild Card team. I don't see them faltering that much over the last month of the season.

Roman Anthony and Trevor Story are rejoining the Red Sox today. Trevor Story. Ugh. Could barely make contact in the minors, but they just bring him back. Are you going to install him as the starter at short as well? Play him all that much? You have the impression with Story that he's catered to like he's some VIP, a term I hate, but that's how they treat him, with everything being "comped," if you follow me. The comping of a career. You don't need to hit, you don't need to play good defense, you don't even need to make contact more than a few times a week, because it's you, wonderful you, thank you for joining us tonight, Mr. Story, would you like your regular table?

College football has returned in semi-earnest. August games are weird. These games really should start in September. It's amazing how much of a change in feeling a few days can make. Going to a college football game--or watching one on TV--on August 28 is a whole different thing than if were 9/3. It's just how it is.

Then again, college football is such an ugly, misshapen mess now, and almost everything is long on almost everyone, most of whom just want to sit on their ass, eat, scroll, watch lowest common denominator junk that never impels them to use their brains in the slightest, what I'm talking about here won't matter to more than a precious few, despite most people's obsession with the word "vibe."

September does have a different feel, though, and so too do college campuses in September versus August. And yes, those few days do matter. Look at Norman Rockwell's 1950 painting, Coin Toss. Okay, these athletes depicted in the work are a bit younger, but it looks like football should be played on a day such as that. Hard to say the same about a sticky August Saturday in a world which we've essentially microwaved.

The Patriots traded Kayshon Boutte, which is probably for the best for him, but I don't understand why Mike Vrabel felt a need to say that he probably would have been inactive if he'd remained on the team. What is the need to say this? What does it do for you? Why ding the player like that? I say a lot of unpleasant truths in this journal. But in each instance in which I do so, it's for a positive reason. An attempt to bring about change by dragging certain things into the light where they can be seen, understood, called out for what they are, known about, addressed.

Saying a player wouldn't be good enough to dress for you if you kept him after you trade him is just a dick move to me. It's the kind of thing an asshole says in order to purposefully be an asshole. If I was on that team, I'd think this hypocrite, with all of his preaching about family and personal responsibility, is also a jerk. A boorish jerk.

Vrabel is as fake as football coaches come. His act is entirely one of shtick. His personal brand of shtick, but it's shtick all the same, and the media types who tongue him are too thick in the head--and just such pathetic toadies anyway--to see it for what it is, which should be obvious to the non-moron. But there are very few of those now. Vrabel's a bad guy. As I wrote the other day, he's the coach version of bone-on-bone, the cartilage having deteriorated. His shelf life somewhere, I strongly suspect, can only be so long.

Boutte wasn't the best receiver. He wasn't even a solid receiver. He may not have been an average receiver. But he seemed like a good teammate who did what was asked of him and he did at least have a kind of minor chemistry with Drake Maye, who I expect thought highly of him. You don't have to belittle a guy like that after you trade him.