(adapted from a blog article September 21, 2015)

It is often quoted, albeit incorrectly, that Benjamin Franklin said, “Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy,” and while the team’s pitcher count at Slice’s may be testing the validity of this statement, I certainly can’t argue with its intention. What Franklin actually wrote though, was regarding nature’s daily miracle of turning water into wine, most probably his beloved Port, “Behold the rain which descends from heaven upon our vineyards, there it enters the roots of the vines, to be changed into wine, a constant proof that God loves us, and loves to see us happy,” … it just doesn’t seem to have the same ring to it… yes, the same sentiment but too long, too wordy and with too much of a pinky-in-the-air quality to it. So, as the quintessential Americans that we are, what do we do? We make things the way he should have said it. Like a scorebook massaging wet dream, that weak little pop-fly that falls out of the first baseman’s glove, becomes a solid line-drive into centerfield in the scorebook. If it didn’t happen that way, well gosh darn it… it should have. It’s understandable after all, that along the way somebody tried to remember the funny little thing Franklin said about drinking, looked on Wikipedia and delivered a shortened, punched-up and slightly butchered misquote… the common man’s drink, in the common man’s language. While I’m less certain of the theological nature of these statements… and we can’t be certain how Old Ben would have felt about Jager-Bombs, Crown Royal & SoCo Caramel Apples or Goblets of Patron at 3:15am on the South Side of Chicago… by the way, brilliant Rott!!!… I can still taste that, thank you very much. I am certain of the biochemical, psychosocial, and gastrointestinal aspects of the aforementioned liquefi-coctions… and for the record that is not a misspelling. A liquefi-coction is whatever-the-hell Bavery makes during poker, in those 32 oz. glasses, that could double as a paint remover and makes you feel like a horse just kicked you in the side of the head… that in a counter-stroke of “genius”

I packed in a cooler and smuggled in my golf bag during that 94 degree GGO outing, that left Steve looking like a pile of goo that somebody crapped on the clubhouse floor. Payback is sweet! Booze, in all its many glorious forms, has a long and storied tradition as a painkiller among self-medicating athletes of all types and I have endeavored to explore this, with the help of various teammates, occasional poker players and golf buddies, all who have aided in my extensive research into this area of the human condition and as one of my fellow poker table philosophers has put it, “there’s a pork chop in every glass… and it is GOOD!”

Now to be completely honest, these many excursions into the post-ballgame, bottom-glassed, poker-fueled netherworld of after-hours nightlife has not always occurred without incident… ranging from the

absurdly bad, “oh dear god my ears are bleeding” karaoke at the Silver Eagle to the, “is that the fourth hand you’ve lost boat over boat?” slow walk around the backyard time-outs during poker games, to the “why is that guy staring at us?… Luke get your buddy, we need to leave NOW or we’re going to get shanked in the parking lot” visionary kind of moments… or is it shived in the parking lot? Is shank the verb and shiv is the noun, as in “he got shanked with the shiv” or as Ron once asked, “do you get shanked with a shank in the prison yard and shived with a shiv in the barrio?” I’m not certain, but does that seem racist? Well, I guess… if you have to ask the question. Should I ask Oscar and Luis the next time I see them? Probably not… but I digress, where was I? Oh yes, the many varied opportunities that present themselves during post-game rocket-fueled awesomeness, but first because I know “Bert”-inerney is waiting for me to resolve said issue above, here is today’s history lesson via Wikipedia…

“Shiv (possibly from the Romani word chivomengro, “knife”[1]), also chiv, is a slang term for any sharp or pointed implement used as a knife-like weapon. The Oxford English Dictionary suggests shive, a razor, documented in 1915, as the root word.[2] In the 1920s, “shiv” was also a common slang term for a bladed weapon, mostly a knife.[3] In the U.S., these improvised prison knives are often called shanks. These terms, along with “chib”, can be used either as a noun or a transitive verb, referring to the weapon or the act of attacking with such a weapon respectively. In the 1950s, British criminal Billy Hill described his use of the shiv: “I was always careful to draw my knife down on the face, never across or upwards. Always down. So that if the knife slips you don’t cut an artery. After all, chivving is chivving, but cutting an artery is usually murder. Only mugs do murder.”[5]
 
SIDENOTE: Well, thanks Billy… I may have just found my new

favorite quote… and thanks Wikipedia, I take back what I said about you 2 articles ago… I had no idea the use of a shiv was such an art form and kudos to Ron for being mostly correct about the prison yard “shank” and for being only half as racist as I first thought that day 3 years ago… (double-chest fist bump) … my bad.

Trying to sum up the many post ballgame stories of drunken debauchery that litter my sub-conscious is almost always made more difficult by the lack of proper context needed to understand the subtle nuisances in play, but in typical fashion I am not about to let something so monumentally trivial slow me down. Having gone through the off-season work of acquiring the many sponsors we currently enjoy, there is agreement among the players that such efforts and commitment should not go unsupported… ergo, bellying up to the bar that has provided the springtime cash to kick-off the season is like punching in for a 2nd shift job, that while sometimes enjoyable can occasionally be construed as “work”… similar to though not directly equivalent with Dolly Parton’s line from The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, “It’s a business doin’ pleasure with ya!”… of course, her business was… well, you know… so maybe not that much the same after all.

Player commitment to sponsor support is strongest early in the night, somewhere between the third and fifth pitchers of beer, when the platters of nachos and chicken wings first arrive. This is the time for early post-game analysis and general griping about how bad the Brewers are stinking it up currently, like when Jean Segura somehow stole first base… yeah, you remember it… when there’s still hope of intelligent things being said and partially understood. Later, around pitcher number seven, we begin to lose folks and the conversation turns to the bizarre… like when Hammie & Dre broke out the I-Phone video of Rocky 4 and nearly gave me whiplash with their back & forth exchange over the awesomeness of the training montage… DRAGO!!!… And Adrianne’s mid-80s classic line,

“You can’t win!!!” … which we now occasionally hear between innings or whenever someone attempts to swat a mosquito. These “group effort” outings have become the cornerstone of the team-building experience.
 
This is the part of the night when it’s deemed time to move to the next sponsor locale and as defacto ringmaster, story archivist and handler of sponsorship money, I help coordinate what is usually a short, confusing discussion of who is riding with who, who is capable of driving (not me!!) and how much tip is appropriate (HINT: always give her more of the tip than you think she needs… HA!). This transition inevitably leads to the loss of half-or-so of the group, who succumb to the “smart” choice of heading for home, while those of us with real sponsor commitment soldier on to the next establishment, sometimes without a car – safety first! – mostly without dignity and only once, without pants. Upon arrival, everyone attempts to “straighten-up & fly right” while concentrating on the next conversation, in an attempt to say something coherent like (while whispering) … “why does Dre have a stormtrooper decal in his rear window?… (and not whispering) … Dre, WHY DO YOU HAVE A… oh sorry, a stormtrooper decal?… in your… window?” … Yeah, it’s kind of like that.
 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xV7Ha3VDbzE
 
SIDENOTE: The video link here is among the best stormtrooper related 9/11 conspiracy crossover sketches available… complete with Jedi mind trick at the end… What if those WERE the droids we were looking for?

The Jedi mind trick is similar to the time Andrey dropped his keys in the urinal and then, realizing I had seen him do that, waved his hands like the penguin in Madagascar and said, “You didn’t see anything” … and I was like, “I’m already texting your brother… I may have been the worst person on the planet to have done that in front of.” It was recently brought to my attention that I’ve now been playing in this league so long that when I first started, my youngest daughter was just 9 years old and would sometimes come to watch our games on Friday nights. She is now 21 and occasionally joins our post-game festivities…  Oh, did I mention my daughter is a firefighter?… oh well, she’ll probably mention it 30 seconds after meeting you the next time she sees you anyway… it’s like this requirement among the EMS crowd. As the night enters this next and somewhat confusing phase, the herd is further thinned as we lose a few more individuals who are unable to sustain themselves against the hours of gut-splitting drinking and heavy laughter… or is that supposed to be the other way around? Aww, piss on it! As we inevitably make the final push towards the evening’s conclusion, while an on running debate about the merits of Taco Bell’s 4th meal is in full swing, I continue the timeless ritual known the world over as, drunk texting. Whether to those who have already left or to those who never arrived, I launch a steady barrage towards their inbox to keep them up-to-date as to how things are going (usually not well), as the garbled letters can attest, those on the receiving end can rarely decode all the awesome flowing their way… or to put that another way, “Dude, it’s like your phone gets drunk with you.” YEAH, IT DOES!!!
 

By zero-dark-thirty, only the true degenerates are left to begin the final infiltration and the codenames are deployed… Murse is on my right, Hot Mess has the left flank, Dish is on point and LBJ is in the rose bushes. The target may be a wet napkin between the toes, head butting a punching bag, sprinting through a used car lot to watch the Northern Lights play trivia crack on the magic box or making Beer-E appear incredibly uncomfortable… all while listening to yet another “true story”… no matter the challenge, this group rises to the occasion. Over the next 90 minutes, they peel off one by one like Navy Seals buddy tapping during an exfiltration of the target area, until I’m left with just my wingman, “You never leave your wingman!”… like the time I was told to “keep an eye” on the redhead at the end of the bar – a far too literal thing to say to me considering the current level of self-administered liquid pain meds in my system – because my wingman was watching “sweater vest” hit on the four “ladies with personality” behind him. I proceeded to stare at her without blinking for 8 solid minutes… prompting a one-finger salute, a clarification of everyone’s current status in the world, a short exchange regarding how to wear a

baseball hat (yes, they were all doing it wrong), a long discussion regarding the proper technique to use with a bar stool when it’s clearly the bar that is holding you up and an agreement that all involved were in fact “nice guys”. Upon exiting the scene, a post bar-time trip to Perkin’s for pancakes was called for (that I may or may not have fallen asleep in), we can’t be certain… the jury is still out on that one…  which was disrupted only momentarily by the aforementioned “ladies” from our previous sponsor, being in the booth next to us. The groups’ leader quieted her companions so they, “wouldn’t offend us”, while we assured her that we could not be “offended”. This prompted her to say something clearly meant to be offensive, to which I gave our groups’ standard poker table reply of, “well, it’ll be better for both of us, if you just relaxed into it”… which in hindsight was probably an overreach considering our 37 seconds of familiarity and now sounds much worse even with 780 words of proper context preceding it. This prompted her to yell, “WHORE!” at one or both of us…

I have since been given assurances that it was directed only at me for reasons that remain mysterious… and the entire episode was recounted the next day with a bunch of Stormtrooper videos. Huh? I guess summing it up doesn’t seem that difficult after all.
 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dfciHHG2cMY
 
SIDENOTE: The video link here was my answer to her unusual outburst… that Ean listened to for a shockingly long time and I now occasionally leave playing on Steve’s computer at work, with the volume cranked up… oh yeah, and PONTY’S A DICK!!!

There are a great variety of definitions to the word friendship, but the one I think of most often is this; “that a true friend is one who overlooks your failures and tolerates your success.” So, at the risk of barreling potentially headlong into the “guilt by association” minefield that is the many facets of friendship, I will hesitate only momentarily to refer to one of my own lifelong friends… I mean, we did meet in 2^nd grade at the age of 7, grew up playing Little League, went to the same high school and college together, were best men at each other’s weddings and now by an absolute coincidence happen to share the same office daily here at work. Therefore, I am speaking from a certain level of experience when I say that, he is without a doubt, the single most pessimistic individual I have personally ever met. He, of course, would simply say that he is a realist… which I, of course, would simply say is… bull$#!&! Much like the Seinfeld co-creator Larry David himself, if there is a way to see the negative, hopeless, or depressing side of any situation, then he is relentlessly on it immediately… faster than Eeyore the depressed donkey could bring down Pooh, Piglet, Rabbit and Tigger in the Hundred Acre Wood,

he emits a steady stream of caustic complaints and self-defeating comments, without regard to his surroundings or those of us that have to occupy them. Periodically, I’m fond of reminding him… somewhat sarcastically… that had I known he would still be jaw-jacking in my ear 46 years later, perhaps I would not have let him sit down next to me in the lunchroom that day in elementary school… Lo, those many years ago… but I did and here we are, sooooo… yeah, it’s like that. Therefore, if the old saying holds true, in this case regarding friendship, that opposites really do attract, then I must be one of the most annoyingly positive and upbeat people

most others will likely encounter in their everyday lives. He curiously asked me once, not long ago, “what is it about your personality that allows you to tolerate me?” That is some viciously assertive insight from a dude that

once duct-taped a firecracker to the back of a toad and fired it off without a seconds thought… eh, it was 1981 – these things happened – if PETA wants to call me, I’ve told him repeatedly, that I WILL testify against him.

Where was I again? Oh yeah… positivity. My view on this subject was solidified on the baseball field, or more correctly in the dugout, during a mid-season game in 2014 when the toxicity level on the bench had reached the nuclear meltdown stage of negativity. One individual, we’ll call him a “teammate” at this point, was halfway through his usual act of going 0-4, striking out 4 times, while simultaneously giving other hitters mountains of unsolicited advice about all the things they were doing wrong at the plate. The entire bench had been experiencing a near aneurysm on a weekly basis, up one side and down the other with this guy, running the gauntlet from the usual, “I didn’t ask for your opinion” to the explosive, “SHUT the @#$% up!” … but nothing seemed to faze him or slow him down.

Finally, with multiple teammates at an emotional breaking point and Ean, Luke and several others, seriously contemplating the Class 1 & Class 2 penalties for felony assault in the parking lot… “No, seriously your honor, he had it coming, I admit the tire iron was unjustified, but the baseball bats were simply convenient” … I weighted my options and chose the road less traveled. While my teammates played Rock, Paper, Scissors to decide who would be responsible for holding him down while the others got to take free shots with padlocks wrapped in bath towels like the barracks scene in Full Metal Jacket, I simply said to my catchers… “I think when he comes back in here, I’m just going to aggressively agree with whatever he says… maybe he’ll just punch himself out, like Foreman did against Ali, if we refuse to argue with him”. The dugout fell silent, faces awash with complete dismay, cleats slowly erasing the dirt drawings of their planned flanking maneuvers on the ground in front of them. We patiently waited for… let’s call him “Smoker” … to slowly trudge back from another failed excursion to home plate, looking like Bamm-Bamm on the Flintstones, dragging his club behind him muttering incoherently to himself.

“If he hangs that weak-ass curveball one more time to me, I’m going to put it up against the fence” he said, with the misplaced confidence of someone who might connect with the baseball occasionally. I paused, looking up and down the bench at the expectant faces beside me and then with all the energy I could muster blurted out, “Yeah you are!” with the kind of over-the-top enthusiasm that bordered on the pedantically unhinged. Everyone froze, wide-eyed and silent… waiting to see if and how he might take this bait.

“I can… I’ll do it, next time… I will…” he said in rapid-fire succession, placing his bat in the rack as if it was being punished with another time-out for its many failures and then once again resuming his analysis, “I just need to keep my hands in, that’s the important thing,” as though he was trying to convince himself that his words might somehow be true and land a knockout blow to any doubters.

“I know it! You don’t have to convince me…” I crossed my arms and countered-punched, leaning backwards into the aggressiveness of my “encouragement”, trying my best to keep a straight face as my teammates’ grins slowly widened with enjoyment.

“He’s not that good of a pitcher… I just shouldn’t drop my elbow like that,” he said in a short and quick combination, repeating one of the most tired and overused phrases pushed by would-be hitting coaches everywhere.

“Yeah, you shouldn’t,” I emphatically agreed, absorbing the punishment of his many body blows, glancing down at the floor as my teammates realized what my “rope-a-dope” strategy was accomplishing, with their hands covering their faces.

“It’s… it’s just… windy out there… and there are these big holes in the batter’s box,” he said flaying about wildly, grasping for anything… the winds of unearned confidence slowing blowing away from him.

“Yeah, there are!” I gushed, sensing the tables turning… “is that all you got George?”

“It’s kind of embarrassing that I haven’t done it already,” he said meekly, punching the last of his strength out and his energy quickly fading… jab… jab, jab.

“Yeah, it is… imagine how we feel having to watch you.” I pressed my advantage, Ali’s pointed words loudly ringing in my ears… “Now’s not the time to get tired George.”

“I’m a… a good hitter,” he said almost to himself, with the kind of monumental lack of insight characteristic of the cosmically self-delusional.

“Of course, you are! Among the best I’ve ever seen!” I trumpeted again, now with ever increasing and almost copious levels of forced enthusiasm.

“Maybe next time … maybe I’ll just concentrate on making contact next time,” he said quietly sitting down at the end of the bench, fulfilling Lombardi’s classic line, “fatigue makes cowards of us all.”

“Yeah … yeah, you will!” I said slowly standing up triumphantly, picking up my bat and heading out of the dugout victorious… Nighty-nighty, George.

My teammates quickly picked up on the skill, turning the tables on one another while stifling giggles and wide-ass grins. “That will never fit in there,” … “That’s what she said!” … “Yeah, she did!” It went on and on, easing tensions and rebuilding team camaraderie. A few innings later we were back in the field on defense. I was playing third base, when the batter squared to bunt, then changed his mind and pulled the bat back. From the dugout Tony yelled, “Tom, watch the bunt!” and without thinking I simply replied, “I got it.” From behind me in left field was “Smoker” who yelled, “Yeah, you do!” Mike Mack playing shortstop almost pissed himself, he was laughing so hard. Between pitches he whispered to me, “He doesn’t understand what it means, but he hears everyone else doing it and he just wants to be part of the group.” Yeah, he does!

It has been just over 10 years since that exchange and the power we found in aggressive agreement has persistently prevailed season after season. The toxicity that polluted our team’s bench was gone overnight, as teammates learned to deflect the negativity and redirect the team’s sense of humor and general enjoyment of the game. Every time “Smoker” began another one of his tirades, his teammates would lean in like an exaggerated version of an E.F. Hutton commercial, remember… “When E.F. Hutton talks, people listen” … to see who would land the first comment and win back the serenity of a quiet bench. Without planning or seemingly even much effort, the young players on that team had turned my passing thought into an artform… they grow up so fast, don’t they? Yeah, they do!

And while this is an old story reworked into a new article, I still feel the need to end it in my now customary style… with a nod to that line that has become a timeless classic among my friends, that even though he has now read one…yes, a single one of these articles and his response to it was, “We laughed, we cried… it became part of us,”… god, even in surrender, Ponty is still a dick!

By Tom Kersten (adapted from a blog article August 14, 2016)

Rage is a fascinating subject, especially if you have the opportunity to see it up close. Like a Rube Goldberg machine… It is complex, difficult to understand, entirely self-perpetuating and the smallest of actions can set off catastrophic results. I live inside just such a system, balanced precariously like a three-legged stool between the words… Wife, Daughters and Responsibility… coated in a thick veneer of constantly cycling hormones, with my only defense being a toxic biochemical cloud of perspiration and fear trailing behind me, as a type of warning to others… It’s too late for me but you can still save yourself. Think I’m exaggerating? Being too hard on the women-folk, am I? Recently, my wife brought home a book about raising children, not all that unusual as she works in a library, but the title gave me pause – “People I Want to Punch in the Throat” – I’m not going to lie, one some level I had grave concerns for my personal safety, reflexively rubbing my neck and adjusting my shirt collar in a very Rodney Dangerfield kind of way. My wife simply nodded slowly, like Geena Davis in The Fly, as if to say… Be afraid, be VERY afraid… And I was. If she had an evil laugh, this is where she would have used it.

Considering this daily exposure to the psychologically delicate, emotionally driven rage that permeates my household, one would think I might have built up a near immunity to outbursts of all types… A wooden and callused shell of a man, emotionally bereft and completely oblivious to the violent displays of rage that frequently appear during tense moments on any baseball field. Our team has taken to calling these types of temper tantrums… “Hulk Smash” moments. These are the little ball-gasms of man-child emotions, bordering on masochistic delight, that leaves people speechless… And much like any prolonged session of aggressive masturbation, leaves everyone involved feeling unfulfilled, slightly ashamed and socially isolated. But as I’ve explained to my children on multiple occasions, this is why crazy trumps tough every day of the week.  If people think you’re tough, someone will eventually want to find out how tough… but if people think you’re crazy… (whew!)… no one ever wants to find out how crazy.

Not the dangerous kind of crazy, not the you’re about to be hog-tied by your fellow passengers on an airplane crazy with a big “C”… Just crazy with a small “c”, like boarding a full elevator and refusing to turn around to watch the floor numbers click by, but rather breaking social convention and starring uncomfortably at everyone as if to say, I could go postal on you at any moment or break into tears body-rocking on the floor… I have no idea what’s coming next… SO… Just don’t! Suddenly, you are given a wide berth by default, as if the neighborhood’s old ladies got together and warned everyone, “just let him do what he wants, Marge’s boy has… some issues”. It’s freedom from within society’s constraints and it will come as no surprise to anyone who knows me, that I have strategically employed this tactic with frequent success and that deep down inside I am filled with an anger and rage equal to the white-hot intensity of a thousand suns…  or I could just be more than slightly sarcastic… or as Jeff Bridges says to John Goodman in The Big Lebowski, “You’re not wrong Walter… You’re just an asshole!”

Far too often though, society defers to these individuals who stand out from the crowd and attempts to make them “leaders”. While the qualities on display may be greatly beneficial in certain circumstances, true leadership consists of much more than a cult of personality. Aristotle once warned us that, “He who cannot first be a good follower, cannot be a good leader”… of course, Aristotle also thought women were “disfigured” men and that they played little to no role in reproduction… so consider your sources. But the fact remains, no one wants to follow someone who’s nuttier than a fruitcake or a silverback mountain gorilla. Unpredictable, self-absorbed, power hungry and prone to violence… These are the requirements of a Mafia hitman, not a leader. A true leader moves the entire group in a positive direction, cultivating relationships that challenge and reward, but most of all… A true leader makes it all about the “us” and not about the “me”.

Ultimately, leaders inspire others to join the worthy cause, to find the breath that motivates people to push passed the difficulty of the now and beyond the pain of the present… To grasp the elusiveness of possibility and put forth the effort needed to help the movement press forward to reach the vaunted goal. All too often however, history praises the leader above the act of leadership itself, above the goal… George Washington at Valley Forge, Abraham Lincoln at Gettysburg, Mahatma Gandhi at Dandi, Martin Luther King, Jr. at Selma… Great leaders and great leadership forces, even demands that the focus be put back on the “us”… The service to others and to the cause… And never on the praise of the individual person. This is where actual leadership… and true inspiration really reside. 

Finally, on the recommendation of one of my closest poker table “advisors”, I will be ending all my blog articles with the same tagline… To honor one of our friends who, despite being asked multiple times to read these posts, still refuses to do so. This passive aggressive behavior will continue to be repeated with almost Tourette’s like consistency until he notices his mistake and takes the appropriate action to apologize for his lack of emotional support… PONTY IS A DICK!!!