I wrote the following stuff this year that I didn’t totally hate.
Stuff I wrote in 2014
Because sometimes you forget what you did for the past 365 days
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- Consider the Villain, or 24 Hours at Florida State. I checked into the hotel for this game and no one was there for ten minutes or so: no one, like, no one in the whole building, or outside, or visible in the parking lot. There was an abandoned restaurant with rotting cypress panels on the left, and nothing to the right but live oaks, and just a TV playing a screensaver of waves rolling beneath a computer moon, and I really thought “Shit, I finally did it. I finally ended up in a video game about an abandoned world I have to decode through elaborate puzzle work.” Then the clerk showed up, checked me in, and unsolicited told me that a reporter from the New York Times was staying there, too. I’ve never been to a town where I felt less at ease the entire time, or more watched.
- Pantsform: Jim Harbaugh’s pants, reviewed. They were, as it turned out, really bad pants.
- What it’s like to die at the Rose Bowl. The Rose Bowl is just stunning and death-y and perfect, basically.
- Cross-country Skiing, or why you’ll never be a secret Scandinavian.
- Flying the world’s fastest plane: Behind the stick of the SR-71. Probably the most fun I had this year because at the end you’re left with the conclusion that this man got to fly a plane indistinguishable from a god.
- Arian Foster hates Caillou, and you should, too. A cause I’m still pretty passionate about. Fuck Caillou.
- The Istanbul Derby. Dylan Lathrop did the illustrations for this, and they’re better than any of the writing. It’s a really superdramatic, self-serious thing to say “this thing haunts me.” But yeah: Istanbul’s haunting as hell, even if you never try to write about it or its soccer fans setting off fireworks on the subway.
- Mile High Baseball. For the record: I did not expense the weed.
- Derrick Brooks made it look easy. Mostly because I just really like writing about defensive players as skill players, and because Derrick Brooks is so damn cool.
- Outkast, at last. This was really just a shortcut excuse to write about “B.O.B.”, which feels less like a song than a thesis on how to exist at this point.
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