Last year I went to that buddy’s
wedding in Boston. It was a good time. I shot the breeze with his brother, who owns
his own consulting firm for online services.
He was fresh off of launching Newsweek’s new website. We talked and I asked him if he could look at
the CobraBrigade and tell me what I needed to do to improve my work. When he got back to me we realized a simple
truth. I was not the right man for the
job. Bruce Paine, to put it simply, was
a horrible blogger. He reminded me that
blogging was a very incestual thing. You
go out there and find people of like mind and sense of humor  and interest and
you start communicating with them in their comments section. They follow you back and do the same in yours
and discover other people through it.
You link to their stuff and they link to yours and everybody metafilters
everything. I didn’t do that. I don’t use the Internet for many information
purposes and don’t read many blogs. What
blogs I read often don’t have anything to do with what I am working on so I don’t
link to them, even if I enjoy it. I don’t
want to rub another man’s rhubarb only to ingratiate myself. I wrote non-comedy posts that were too long,
and evidently that is a no-no on the Interweb.
I didn’t include enough pictures of barely dressed women until recently
when I got and email from a guy saying, “Please don’t write all that crap
without putting a pic of a babe in there somewhere!” I didn’t find a blogger I wanted to link to
me and “interview” them for no reason. In
a nutshell I bored you, didn’t stroke your ego enough, didn’t make you laugh
enough, didn’t titillate your nethers, and didn’t care enough about what you
thought to be a good blogger. Don’t take
it hard, I still loved you despite all the other stuff.
When asked to comment on the
Bissinger/Leitch thing, which I am evidently supposed to care about because I
have blogged, I don’t know what to tell you.
I don’t read Deadspin very often.
I appreciate what it is but it lacks the intimacy that I look for in a
blog and more often than not grabs a middle stance of no substance for the sake
of poking fun at both sides. There is nothing wrong with that if that is
what you are trying to do, I just don’t care for it. When the first Hep
post went big, Jack sent me a text saying, “Deadspin linked you near the
top. Good Job.” At that point, I had no idea what he was
talking about. When a guy at work was
talking about how cool it was that one of my Colts posts was up on Deadspin, I
didn’t know what the deal was. Jack always
encouraged me to send links to my better posts to people in emails to help me
get a bigger Colts following on the site.
He was doing it for my sake, to try to help me get a bigger batch of
Colts readers discussing things with me.
That was a great idea but I didn’t use it. I prefer to rest my success on Providence. A guy tried to get me to link to him by
putting a whole post together of excerpts from my posts he thought were
funny. I didn’t link to him. His page was crappy. In the end, I went to Deadspin to see if they
had anything to say about a particular fringe story or to read something
different. I think a better blog that
uses the humor and metafilter to the utmost would be something like The Big
Lead, but even it is only and once or twice a week stop for me, and I like them.
I don’t care what Buzz Bissinger
thinks about anything. I know he has a
Pulitzer but that doesn’t do anything to legitimize him for me. I know people who have become President of
the United States that are neither qualified nor capable of carrying out its
duties. I know professors who can’t
teach their subject and doctors of one thing or another who are incapable of
performing the processes that they have supposedly been evaluated to the
highest limits for. Heralding someone
offers no proof of their intrinsic value.
I don’t care if someone tells me that someone else is legitimate because
they are a doctor, professor, or President.
I care about what people put in  front of me. Friday Night Lights is a good book written by
someone with enough brains to grab the nuance of the situation and A Prayer for
the City is excellent. The behavior of
Buzz Bissinger on the Costas show was stupid and mean but not necessarily
wrong. Since Jack Cobra drug me kicking
and screaming into blogs I have read a lot of them. Knee jerk reaction: Bissinger’s comments apply
to more than half of them, I will conservatively call it 65%.
A lot of blogs are shit. I hope
this one doesn’t count as one, but it may.
I am bad about going for the cheap laugh. I can’t help myself. I love it.
It is like brushing up against a hot chick in a crowed bar and having
her wink back at you. Its cheap and
easy. I am sure I have said shitty
things here. Jack has. Will Leltch has said stupid shit on Deadspin. Leitch is a poor spokesman for the blog
world, but he cannot help what he has done.
He is guilty of having a good idea and making his page successful, but
he isn’t hugely talented and probably shouldn’t be considered the Jesus-like
figure for blogs some believe him to be.
If we are to convict him of something it should probably be the crime of
being chaotically lucky and doing something he enjoys as a job and not having
to put pants on to go to work. His
posts, though, are guilty of some of the things that Bissinger believes are
wrong with blogs, and like I said, Buzz wasn’t wrong about everything. For a more accurate sense of it, I bow to
this excellent post on the topic. In the
end, I think the watershed moment the diarrheaic outburst of Bissinger created
was not a question of whether or not Bissinger was right or wrong or
mattered. I think its importance may
turn out to be the instigation of readers to more thoughtfully evaluate the
blogs they read for substance of content and subjectiveness of view instead of
base humor and generalities. I hope that
the end game is bloggers who invest more into evaluating their topics and incorporating
themselves deeper into the scene they comment on. Maybe they will ask themselves what they want
their blog to be, and if the answer turns out to be simplistic and trite they
will turn away from it in favor of something more substantial.
In the beginning I wanted this blog
to be a lot of things it didn’t turn out to be. No good plan survives first contact, I suppose. I wanted it to be an academic exercise for myself. I wanted to find a piece of the web and start building a forum for myself. Though I am no journalist, I wanted to develop a certain type of civic journalism for myself. I wanted to present the area of discussion, draw you in with flowing prose or devout criticism and then bicker it back and forth and boil it down to an ethos. I wanted to flash some humor and insert the oddities that pervade my real life to color it up just enough to make you laugh. I wanted to insert myself deeply into the topic, with an almost gonzo flare but devoid of the drug-fueled sensationalism of Thompson though still retaining his absolute lack of objectivity. As he put it, I wanted to be  totally "unbalanced" by my consecrated attachment to the topic. If I could get close enough I would give you something like Plimpton's Paper Lion, and if I couldn't I would give you something like Thompson's work on the Kentucky Derby which I first encountered in what is now a very worn copy of The Great Shark Hunt. A lot of it was going to be third person narratives with the evaluation that I wanted to do coming from the main character. I failed in a lot of ways. I never truly committed the time to it early on to develop a steady style to replicate. I went cheap too often to get the point across for everyone to see. I should have kept things smarter, which I can do (i think), and that would have helped develop a particular kind of reader I wanted. You have to teach your reader how to read you, and I never committed to that. I wrote how I speak. Believe it or not, my posts are done in one sitting and often done in very short periods of time. I speak like that in real life. I deliver in a steady and fast-paced stream of consciousness with character changes and big words and dirt-clod words and I interrupt you. I don't do it because I am mean, I expect you to do it to me. I love force-feeding a conversation. I like confrontation. I mean no harm except the good kind. Given that, I would go back and spend hours editing what I had just written with the intention of being presented raw. I can't help it. I always do it. I agonize over the words I use for no reason and cannot bear to read anything I write after I write it. I am sure a psychoanalyst would say that I hate myself and that I have insecurity issues but I can just say it here and save myself the money. After a couple months I stopped that and just let them go unedited, which was hard for me to do and probably hard for you to read.
Even with all of this, I still find a few blogs interesting. I check out the Cryptogon everyday. It is a good metafilter for political-type issues. If you are like me, and cannot stand the "hired bullshit" of "mainstream" media and you feel like the signal is being controlled intentionally, it is a good read. I think I'm Always Right, the public diary of CB commenter Redhead, is a fun read for those of you with a touch of intellectual voyeurism. There seem to be a lot of blogs doing what she is doing upon passive perusal, and a lot of them seem to stem from New York, but hers is of a quality and diversity that a person can tune in and see different things. Most won't give you that. Sure, she is as capable of inserting the same self-pitying angst we all shove into our blogs, but she doesn't get stuck in that, which separates her. When the personages of MCBias and the Extrapolator had their own sites, I tended to frequent their stuff more often. As they are now parts of larger wholes, I don't get around as much, not because I don't like them but because their previous format was more endearing to me. I particularly enjoyed MCBias's Random Sports Crush and his insight on the social distinctions and conventions of blogging since I never understood them in a practical sense. The best compliment I received came from Extra P. Those jokers were some of our best commenters. The blog that most closely fits the mold I would have made for myself is Beantown West, which is penned by no less a fortified scribe as Erin. I first found it as a blog Jack linked to in a series he did attempting to highlight female bloggers. I dug it instantly and have commented there often ever since. You see, Erin is a fan and tells the story of a fan IN THE STANDS. She goes to games and evaluates the players  based on what she sees. She also evaluates the club and their experience and the city that hosts them. She does this all from direct, first-hand experience. She steeps her posts with pictures she takes at the games. You see, if I had done my posts right, they would have looked nothing like Erin's, but they would have been elementally kindred, and therein lies the similarity and my failure. I would be as in touch with my franchise as she is and still be able to step back and say, "This is all horribly screwed so straighten the Hell up." She is absolutely subjective, whether she realizes it or not, and does not purchase blindly the sports world around her but calls it like it is. She is the closest thing to George Plimpton I have seen on the Interweb. If she got an at bat at Dodgers Stadium and blue punched her out on a call below the knees, I have no doubt she would kick dirt on the plate, ladylike or not. Every one of us should be that way.
You see, my world is full of wonder. I have always wondered about a lot of things. I have always wondered what it would be like to be a middle backer on an NFL team. It is third and short on the 3 and the other guys bring Alstott in. Everybody on God's green acre knows what is going to happen. They snap it and he is coming into my gap. Do I have the root to step in and try to stick him? Will I square up and get low or will I chicken out and go high and try to strip it? Will he just obliterate me or can a guy who wants it bad enough take one for the team and get his neck broken? The next day my post would have been all about how great I felt at getting a chance and how awesome it felt to get run over by one of the hardest monsters God ever created. Erin's post would not be about how she had her life's dream fulfilled by getting a chance to step in at Dodger Stadium, but how the umpire clearly wanted to get her out of there and gave her a called strike 3 on a curve in the dirt. Then she would tell us how nice the clubhouses were but that they needed softer TP in the can and that, when Hoyt Wilhelm told her she did a good job, she told him to shut up because he was a knuckleballer and didn't know anything.
We weren't all bad, though. We had our moments. When Jack was on, he was posting as good a baseball post as anybody else out there and he was doing it with better frequency. Somebody oughta give that guy a jarb. We also had some things going for us that nobody else had on their sports blog. How many blogs have resident physicians doing detailed posts on the nature and physiology of sports injuries? CobraBrigade did and I loved everyone of those posts. I don't know why they didn't get more attention, I thought they were absolutely brilliant. I wish we had been able to get one every week or so. I also thought the discussion of whether or not Doc Morgan should tag the daughter of one of his patients to be one of the best things that ever happened here. Not only that, but how often do you get pictures of slaughtered animal carcasses not involving Mike Vick and Playboy parties and Cougar chases? How often does U.S. Customs interrupt your liveblog? That shit happens all the time around here.
What I did not realize until recently, and what has become the crux of this particular rant, is that CobraBrigade did not turn out to be what I wanted but it ended up being exactly what I needed. When I lived in Bloomington I didn't need CobraBrigade. If I wanted to talk about sports I could see most of my friends any time I wanted. Then I moved to Minneapolis. It was then that I realized that the value of CB was not in the work but in the discussion. As gravity draws me deeper into isolation, I realize that what CB gave me was a place to talk about sports with my buddies and that is a precious commodity and it, like all the others, comes at a premium in my life. In fact, until just a few days ago I held notions of trying to keep it alive. I knew I couldn't do it alone, so I put out feelers to people who did things with the quality I require. I talked to the guys at Arin it Out, which is very much a sister site to CB, but the GM wanted to keep his own thing going which I understood because here I was trying to keep our thing going. Still, it is very nice to see that AIO is hitting a nice stride and starting to get the comments it deserves. The GM, or Mexico as I know him, is doing yeoman's work and I was never sure if anyone was realizing it but there are words in the comment section nowadays and it is nice to see and it wouldn't hurt to get a little more out of Kelper once in a while. I talked to my other choice, who is known as El Racha. We were in the same class in the 1st grade. We were like peas and carrots. We talked all the time and they wouldn't let us be in the same class together ever again after that. I don't know what kind of dingleberry provides that kind of solution to six-year olds who are developing peers for the first time but since we both had straight As it hardly seemed a problem. Someone should have had their jaw boxed for that one. Regardless, I still know him and wanted to bring him on but he is busy trying to develop himself as a stand-up comedian and a husband and doesn't want to take the time to blog. If his wife isn't pregnant in the next six months I will never forgive him. Where was I? But it wasn't to be and we will fade away, so it goes. Still, the lesson learned is that CobraBrigade was successful at something for me even if I failed at what I wanted to do. It was the forum, even if I took it for granted. When I look back I am surprised at how often we made good decisions. The only bad decision we ever made was using "Where the Competition is subdued" as our motto. I wanted to go with "Sweep the Leg" which is a Karate Kid reference and funnier to me. When we reformatted the site and gave the page its new look I think it was awesome. All thanks for that go to Brian, who was always really good to us when we screwed stuff up. It got me writing again, which I hadn't done since I finished my senior thesis three years ago. (For those of you wondering I presented the notion that the United States allows the behavior of Israel to effect the way we make policy to the detriment of U.S. sovereignty. It was based on the behavior of the Reagan Administration leading up to the bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut in 1983 and how it effected the chain of command and led to the disaster. It was viewed by more ignorant classmates as being anti-semitic, which I assure you I am not. That would be like saying I hate vegetarians because I like pork chops.)
I have to thank the CobraBrigade the same way I have to thank people like Jack and Luke. Sometimes you don't always see the value of friends until you see the people you have met because of them. Someone like Luke, who is a good friend in his own right, introduced me to Ken Rudolph who introduced me to Kelper who introduced me to Mexico and then I met Shooter, etc. Through Jack I met Buck, Doc Morgan, Hoosiernation and so forth. That is the beauty of the sports blog done well. It created its little sports talk family and gave us a place to do it. For those that would have sports blogging be a "movement" against something or to some place I think you are looking in the wrong tree. Sports blogs are a very sedentary thing. If you want it to be a grand thing that will eventually topple the slum of Sportscenter or supplant the oligarchy of sportswriters, you won't find sports blogs doing it. They aren't a group purposed for activity and Will Leitch is not Che. Most sports blogs are filled with the product of people who want to bitch about sports from the relative safety and non-confrontational venue of their couch or desk chair and they welcome the same thing into their comment section with thirsty delight. Sports blogging, in the end, may be too easy to produce. These people attempt in vain to be witty while commenting on the most ignorant content. They do this in anonymity and comfort and it suits them. I will admit here and now that I MAY be one of them, you decide. Because these blogs go nowhere, and do little whether in activity or in conversion through content, they will never be able to provide a progress significant to produce a viable alternative to the forcefed mainstream. It is because of this that I am so ardently behind Beantown West. This person is moving, is going out and experiencing and then bringing it back and crafting it into something palatable for those of us with such delicate constitutions. That is why I most fervently and respectfully ask those who have enjoyed Bruce Paine to visit Beantown West and Arin it Out and give them support.
So that is the last one. If you made it this far I appreciate it. Thanks be to Jack for getting it rolling and to Buck and Morgan for partnering up on it. I would also like to make this offer to the people in our close family of bloggers. If you need somebody to fill a post for one reason or another or you need someone to chime in with a Bruce Paine style comment, you can always find me at brucelikespaine@yahoo.com. I will check that about once a week or so. Outside of that, good luck to all of the bloggers out there and have fun. Make sure you all purchase your AR 15s before the general election in November or the next President may not let you have them. I can guarantee the people that come for you will. It is all of us or none of us. Igitur qui desiderat pacem, praeparet bellum.
Bruce Paine
Minneapolis, May 2008
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Good stuff here Bruce. Pleasure as always.
The door will be unlocked if you decide to head over.
Man, this is really happening. Getting ready to shut down shop...
I always liked the "Where the Mongoose is the One that Dies!" motto myself.
Been a pleasure Bruce....
A lonely tear drops my eye ...
Any one of you guys are more than welcome on The Serious Tip anytime. I'll blast a few rounds for you this weekend, Bruce.
I still want a Cobra Brigade t-shirt.
you can find them on cafepress. go back to our shooter posts and you'll find the link
http://www.cafepress.com/cobrabrigade
I have one
As always Bruce...its been a pleasure. Good luck in the tundra that is Minnesota...wear the Shooter shirt proud!
I feel that I have not seen or heard the last from Mr. Paine. I have this gut feeling that one day I'll turn on the TV and somehow Bruce will be interviewed by national news for some phenomenon that happened in Minny. Good luck up there Bruce.
I think that the key is if you write long, interesting posts, they are too long for dumb people to read, so you only get smart responses back, ha. But yeah, I agree with all the stuff you're saying about blogging. Blogging is about setting the table for a discussion. The best bloggers go out and create their own news, not just read a news story or get unreliable stuff that mainstream agencies won't touch. Etc. I should save this post for posterity, because you bring up a lot of good points. And if this is it for all of you, good-bye, and have a good life.
Very nicely said (even the stuff I disagreed with). If you ever want to vent over at I'm Always Right, I'll...sure, why not...I'll let you post there (yes post, not comment), but be prepared for an answering/argumentative post back. Just email me whenever you get the urge.
I hate it when I compliment someone and then can't remember what I said. But I really meant it, whatever it was.
Yeah, they always pick some local yokel to talk to when a tornado hits the trailer park. Imagine their surprise when this one holds forth on the fall of Rome.
I was SO lucky not to live in a trailer park. Tornados jump on trailer parks like volunteer firemen jump on Amish buffets.
What the hell am I to do in between classes of evidence and constitutional law? Or in between the 5th and 6th race at the North California county fair circuit?