InstaHate

My wife, who is a talent manager in Hollywood, has 84,000 followers on Instagram.

This is mostly because of her client Selena Gomez.

Selena fans, or Selenators as they are known, skew toward the teen and pre-teen.  They are big users of social media.

When my wife posts an image of Selena, or even just a photo of our family dog, the love and emoji-kisses pour in from around the world.  Japan, Sweden, Brazil, everywhere.  It’s kind of random, but awesome nonetheless.

But the love dried up on April 26.

My wife posted a photo of an Armenian Genocide memorial event two days earlier in Los Angeles.

A few words about the Genocide.  No reputable historian disputes it happened.  An estimated 1.2 to 2 million Armenians were murdered or starved to death during forced relocations by the Turkish government during World War I.

As with the Holocaust, there are thousands of hours of recorded testimony from survivors.  There is an entire book by Henry Morgenthau Sr., then U.S. Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, detailing not only the daily slaughter, but also Morgenthau’s conversations with the genocide’s architect, Talat Pasha.

Contemporary accounts from American and British missionaries described public hangings, rapes, mutilation, and the deadly march of hundreds of thousands of Armenian refugees into the Syrian desert.

Hitler himself took encouragement from the Turkish example as he contemplated his own race-based extermination.

“Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?” Hitler said.

Armenian men were decapitated in attacks targeting community leaders

In the United States, many were at least dimly aware of the tragedy.

When my parents were growing up in Nebraska, if they left food on their plate, they were told to eat it up.  Think of the starving Armenians.

Today, countries such as Germany and Rwanda publicly acknowledge the famous genocides which took place within their borders.

Germany, in particular, sets the gold standard for coming to grips with historical atrocity.

However, Turkey has taken the opposite approach.  The government aggressively denies the Armenian Genocide occurred.  Denial is a staple of public education and a basic criteria for doing business with other countries.

The United States and Israel, which should lead the way, instead refuse to recognize the Armenian Genocide as a genocide (even though the word itself was created by human rights lawyer Raphael Lemkin in specific reference to both Armenians and Jews).

The U.S. and Israel don’t want to alienate Turkey, an important strategic partner in a chaotic region.

On the other hand, countries such as France, Italy, Greece, Germany, Poland, Russia, Sweden and dozens of others have all done the right thing.  They recognize the Armenian Genocide as the first mass kill-off, by race, in the 20th century.

Back to the young Selenators.

My wife’s words about the Armenian Genocide unleashed an absolute torrent of abuse from Turkish Selenators.

SLUT!

BITCH

Fuck you

#fuckarmenia

Why are you so stupid

FUCK YOU!  SHUT UP BITCH ARMENIANS

MOTHERFUCKER aleen YOU SHOULD BUY A BRAIN AND USE IT

ASSHOLE SHUT THE FUCK UP BITCH

We hate u

Go and buy a brain racist

Oh, baby, you make me laugh.  Am i wrong?  Can you show me proof ’bout ‘Ottoman Turks killed 2 million Armenians in 1915″?  You can’t.  Bc this never happened.  You don’t know your “great” grandparents’ history.  Ironic.

You should read a book

Racist bitch

hate makes you ugly, you’re selena’s manager and i’m sure that selena isn’t a racist.  stop lying about us, we didn’t kill Armenians. YOU killed our people, and we made your parents go to another place. we did it with respect, please read history.

i hope you die

You don’t know anything about history

You should read history Aleen.  I don’t want to be rude but you shouldn’t judge people by ‘wrong’ history information.  Don’t be racist and vengeful.  God bless you

Aleen keshishian you are writing this article for what.  Yes we understood you are a fuckin disgusting human.  Sorry I said human.  You can’t be human if you think this about us

Racist prostitute!!!!

This single post by my wife triggered more than 14,000 comments.  Nearly all of them said similar things, either in English or Turkish.

By now, the hatred has migrated onto all of my wife’s other pictures on Instagram, too, including family ones.

For a while I would comb through these comments and report them to Instagram, one by one.

But for every comment I reported, ten more would pop up.

Finally, I decided to leave it alone.  The comments speak for themselves.  They are testament to the Turkish government’s 100 years of aggressively denying what happened.

Most comments are from teen and pre-teen girls.

You can get cancer ‘kay?

All the usual disclaimers apply.  The above comments do not reflect the views of all Turks.  There are plenty of honest, fair-minded Turks who acknowledge not only the genocide, but also the wholesale expropriation of Armenian lands and property.

But the Instagram comments do illustrate, at least anecdotally, the results of extreme, aggressive denial.

So, for people who DO want to ‘read a book,’ as the Turkish Selenators helpfully suggested, I recommend four:

1. The Murder of a Nation, Henry Morgenthau Sr., 1918
2. Black Dog of Fate, Peter Balakian, 1997
3. There Was and There Was Not, Meline Toumani, 2014
4. Orhan’s Inheritance, Aline Ohanesian, 2015

Also worth reading is A Century of Silence, which appeared in the New Yorker on Jan. 5, 2015.

Or go to the Wikipedia page about Hrant Dink, the courageous journalist in Istanbul who kept writing about the Genocide despite multiple prosecutions by the state for ‘denigrating Turkishness.’

“There are Turks who don’t admit that their ancestors committed genocide,” Dink said in an interview.  “If you look at it, though, they seem to be nice people …. So why don’t they admit it?  Because they think that genocide is a bad thing which they would never want to commit, and because they can’t believe their ancestors would do such a thing either.”

One of Dink’s prosecutions stemmed from this public remark:  “Of course I’m saying it’s a genocide, because its consequences show it to be true and label it so.  We see that people who had lived on this soil for 4,000 years were exterminated by these events.”

I wish there were a happy end to Dink’s heroism.  But as you might guess (based on the venom unleashed by a simple Instagram post), his courage ended up killing him. Dink was shot to death in 2007 outside the newspaper office where he worked.

PAVEL’S MOUSE

A couple months ago, I clipped a news item for my wife.

It was about an alleged rape at her old high school in New Hampshire.

To me, the story was of passing interest, mainly because it occurred at her alma mater.

But my wife really went in-depth.  She stayed up late reading articles online and printing them out for our children, ages 13 and 12.

In the morning, two neat little stacks of stories — collated and stapled — sat beside each child’s bed.

“So they learn what constitutes rape,” my wife said.

“And how to avoid the situation,” she said.

Hmm.  Okay.  I hadn’t really intended to start a household conversation.  But no problem.  Always good to talk things out.

Soon enough, I realized my wife and daughter were following the court case closely.  They were waiting eagerly for the verdict.

They were rooting for the defendant to be acquitted of the felony charges.

Wait, what?

And somehow my daughter had come away from the news stories with a positive picture of the school.

“I kind of want to go to there,” she said.

What the hell?

All this culminated in an animated discussion one evening at our kitchen table.

I started by telling my wife and daughter:

a) They were both insane;

b) They were on the wrong side; and

c) Of course the kid looked nice in court, he was dressed up for court. 

As usual, my own opinions went in one ear, out the other.

The boy wound up getting convicted of multiple misdemeanors and one felony which, admittedly, seemed somewhat misapplied.  (The felony was ‘using a computer to seduce, solicit, lure or entice a child under the age of 16.’  He was 18, she was 15.  They had traded emails about their upcoming date.)

But ultimately, some tangential good did arise from our household fascination with the case.  It yielded two new entries in my wife’s already impressive array of mangled idioms.

THE HERRING BONE

As Aleen discussed the rape case, she referred to one set of emails as ‘the herring bone of the whole thing.’

This might have confused other listeners, but I have spent 30 years de-coding Aleen.

There was a double error, I realized.  She meant ‘red herring.’  But even that was wrong, since a ‘red herring’ is a seemingly important clue which turns out to be irrelevant.

What she really meant was ‘smoking gun,’ or alternatively, the ‘backbone’ of the case.

But hey, ‘herring bone’ works, too.

PAVEL’S MOUSE

Here, Aleen was aiming for ‘Pavlov’s dogs,’ but wound up instead with ‘Pavel’s mouse.’  (Sounds like the protagonist of a children’s story.)

I’m pretty sure her version will now pop into my head whenever I hear someone say ‘Pavlov’s dogs.’

Aleen has always blamed her aphoristic smash-ups on being an immigrant. She arrived in the U.S. from Beirut at just 10 months old.  Her parents never used any American sayings, she says.

Maybe mangled idioms ought to factor into our national debate on immigration.

If we restrict immigration too much, it could reduce the number of humorously bungled sayings.

I, for one, would be against that.

But I’ll discuss it with my wife and daughter.  There’s a good chance they will see it differently.

FREE TOM DAILEY

---

As I watched coverage of the latest shooting, I thought of Tom Dailey, the Sprint employee who got in trouble last month after the Nashville theater attack.

Dailey was being interviewed on live TV by Fox News anchor Shepard Smith.  While breathlessly describing events next door, Dailey somewhat jarringly promoted Sprint’s Cut Your Bill in Half plan.

“We were trying to promote our Cut Your Bill in Half when we had a couple police officers come in, tell us to lock all the doors, close everything,” Dailey said.

The news anchor let the first mention slide.

“Where do you work in relation to this place?” Smith asked.

Dailey, ever enthusiastic, hit the sales point again.

“We work at Sprint.  Where we cut your bill in half.”

The Fox News anchor grew annoyed.

“That’s nice advertising, here in the middle of a shooting at a movie theater,” Smith said.

Dailey quickly apologized, and blamed habit.

“I’m just so used to saying it so much,” he said.

The next day, Dailey wound up in hot water with his employer.  Sprint announced it would take action in the matter.

My heart went out to Dailey.  (And not just because he kept pronouncing ‘theater’ as thee-AY-ter.  Which I always appreciate.)

The guy was excited and discombobulated.  The guy lives in a nation where people are regularly shooting up public places for no apparent reason.  He was just yards away when one of these terrifying eruptions occurred.

Further, he has probably said the phrase ‘Where We Cut Your Bill in Half,’ oh, I don’t know, about five thousand times?  He probably gets written up if he doesn’t say it.  I bet he says these words so often, he doesn’t even hear them anymore.

To me, this weird little moment in the midst of an interview said more about the state of our nation than about Tom Dailey.

We interrupt this shooting coverage to express our outrage over the crass marketing which just interrupted our shooting coverage.  Which will be soon be interrupted by more marketing.

Or,

We apologize for this idiot accidentally reminding us that these workplace shootings are becoming so common that most of us care more about our mobile plan rates.

Or,

We apologize that the real business of America — making money — reared its head at a moment when we were pretending it was something else.  Like being a community.

Or,

We apologize for this guy shilling for Sprint after an attempted murder.  Even though we ourselves plastered the TV screen with Fox News logos, banner art, and branded ‘news personalities.’

Sprint has not said what action it took, if any, to punish the employee.

What Sprint should do instead is start using its corporate muscle to lobby lawmakers to curtail gun violence, to protect workerbees like Tom Dailey.

As for when salesmanship is appropriate, it occurred to me that a flow chart might help Dailey and his co-workers.

So I made one!

 

CLEANLINESS NOT NEXT TO GODLINESS IN OUR HOUSE

ca. 1971

Happy birthday, Leens!

I won’t bother trying to find the perfect gift.  You return most of my presents anyway.  Instead I’m giving you this blog post, plus a manicure and pedicure.

When you were a little girl in Manchester N.H., you used to comb the fringe of your family’s oriental rugs until it was perfectly straight.

You used to dump clean clothes down the laundry chute, so they would magically re-appear the next day, neatly folded.  I’m sure your mom loved that.

For fun, you used to go to your friend Sharon Rosen’s house to clean and organize her closet.  (Sharon’s mom probably did love that.)

I once found you in our kitchen staring at the carefully labeled, pastel-colored Pottery Barn organizer boxes above the computer.

“This is the only place in the house I feel safe,” you said.

You are a neatnik.

I am not.

But you have been a good sport.

For years you have put up with my messy minivan, my dirty fingernails, my chipped, coffee-stained teeth; with me wearing outdoor clothes into bed; with me rarely attending your work dinners or movie premieres; with the dog digging in the garden and jumping in bed; with smelly hockey gear in our garage; with annual Troyer family vacations in the woods; with all the endless crappy hotels at youth hockey tournaments in Phoenix, San Jose, Vegas, Detroit and Chicago.

Not supposed to jump in the pool. Or eat footballs.

Do you remember when I used to take the kids ‘splash walking’ in the rain?

They would go stomping and splashing through the biggest, deepest puddles they could find.

You were a good sport about that, too.

post-splashwalk lollipops

You have put up with the mess, the chaos and, above all, the nagging feeling — once you finally got home from work each night — that I had put all my energy into the kids and dog and was now just a tired, cranky, wrung-out dishcloth of a husband.

possibly raised on a farm

So today, for your birthday, I will finally get that manicure/pedicure you’ve been pestering me about for 15 years.

I can’t promise it will last for long.  My nails may look good for only a day or two.  But at least for today, I’m cleaning up my act.

Happy birthday, sweet Aleeno.

May you live a long time, and may you always have this same beautiful smile on your face.

IN A BIG COUNTRY

Scotland votes on Thursday whether to leave the United Kingdom.

This made me think of two things.

First, I was on vacation with my family in Africa last year.  I didn’t have anything to read to my son at night.  We were at a supermarket near Mombasa.  There were metal detectors at the entrance.  Randomly, one item for sale was an unabridged copy of Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson.

The same guy wrote Treasure Island.  I figured Kidnapped would be a good adventure story.

Kidnapped was published in 1886.  It doesn’t hold up

In fact, it was an impenetrable mass of 18th-century Scottish politics, with just enough adventure tossed in to keep the reader slogging through historical events such as the Jacobite Uprising and the Appin Murder, plus a baffling array of places such as Essendean, Erraid, and Ballachulish.

I was so confused by the various places and clans, I resorted to Wikipedia.  Which in turn told me about the independence referendum slated for September 2014.

And here we are.  The time has come.

Scotland makes up about one-third of the land mass of Great Britain.  Roughly 5 million people live there, compared to the 52 million who live in England.  Scotland is already its own country, but has been a member since 1707 of the union of countries known as the United Kingdom.  That’s 307 years of partnership.  Thursday, it could go kaput.

Current polls show the vote as a dead heat.

the Scottish flag

The other important thought which floated through my mind this week was … the Scottish rock band Big Country.

What ever happened to those guys?

The song I remember, “In a Big Country,” was a rousing number with soaring guitars, a martial beat, and the occasional shouted interjection, “Shaaa!”

The band performed the song on Saturday Night Live in December 1983.  The Smothers Brothers were hosting.  I was a 10th-grader sitting in my kitchen in Maryland.

Great band, raucous performance.  The singer slammed on his guitar pedal and triggered a huge, careening bagpipe sound which sent the whole edifice careening toward disaster.  As Scottish art went, it certainly beat the crap out of Kidnapped.

I am sad to report that the band’s dynamic lead singer Stuart Adamson (a native of Dumferline in the Fife region of Scotland) was later undone by alcohol.

Adamson, in happier times

He died alone, by his own hand, at a Best Western hotel in 2001 in Hawaii (itself a former kingdom).

Major bummer about Adamson.  And with no direct bearing, I will grant you, on our chosen topic.

I myself am 25-percent Scottish.  My late grandfather David Brown was from Glasgow.  He arrived in Massachusetts as a child.  His dad went to work in the mills around Lowell.  Young David turned out to be a talented student and ran away from home at 16 to attend college.

He went on to become an English literature professor, including a stint at Bucknell University in Pennsylvania.

Unfortunately he died in his late 30s from a bleeding ulcer.   It was the fall of 1941.  My mom was just seven years old.  The family was living in Wilkes-Barre, Pa.  The widow and her two young daughters moved back to Nebraska to live with relatives.

The untimely death of my Scottish grandfather still ripples down through the generations.

Several years ago, I realized that my main feeling, upon the respective seventh birthdays of my kids, was relief.

Okay, at least I lived this long.  At least they’ll have their dad longer than Mom did.

When combing through family records, I once found a report card from my mother’s grade school.  A faded note in lovely cursive said the teacher was really hoping that with the arrival of springtime, Sally’s asthma would subside, and she would feel okay to join the other children at recess.

When I showed the note to my mother, her eyes welled up.

This was after her father died, she said.  She remembered her sadness.  She remembered a boy from France who was at her school.  He was equally miserable that winter.  He and my mother would sit inside at recess while the others played.

On the same topic of untimely parent deaths, there is a beautiful song on U2’s new album called “Iris (Hold Me Close).”

U2 and Apple caught flack last week for sort of jamming the album down people’s throats.  The music was released for free, which was nice.  But it was also automatically uploaded onto many iPhones and iPods whose owners didn’t want it.

Big deal.  Delete it.

It’s a wonderful album, and “Iris (Hold Me Close)” is a moving song about the death of Bono’s mom when he was 14 years old.  She died of an aneurysm suffered during the funeral of her father (Bono’s grandfather).

Yes, I realize U2 is from Ireland, not Scotland.  But no one delivers an anthem like U2.  And indeed when Adamson, of Big Country, died, one of the performers at his funeral was the guitarist from U2.  (I still can’t bring myself to use the guitarist’s nom de guerre, The Edge.  It’s a tribute to U2’s music that it gradually obscured the ridiculousness of their stage names.  Bono Vox?  A singer ought not name himself ‘good voice,’ even if it’s disguised in Latin.  Total non-starter.)

Scotland is known for its castles, Highlands, ancient clans, bagpipes, philosophers, and the Loch Ness monster

I suppose there is a spectrum of parental absence, from premature death down through divorce or out-of-state residence, to a parent who is physically present but emotionally absent.

The lyrics of “In a Big Country” include several repetitions of the exhortation to ‘stay alive,’ a plea which any child surely understands at his core.

The song also includes the line, Take that look out of here/It doesn’t fit you.  It could be the admonition of a flinty Scottish parent.

And this line from “Iris (Hold Me Close):”  Iris says that I will be the death of her.  A harmless idiom, but one which could get stuck in the psyche of a grieving child, to wit, the child’s helpless rejoinder, It was not me.

The singer recalls a moment years earlier when the burial ritual was played out in reverse on a beach.  Iris playing on the Strand/She buries a boy beneath the sand.

The mother’s death shaped the singer.  The ache in my heart/Is so much a part/Of who I am.  

But her absence is neither complete nor permanent.  Something in your eyes/Took a thousand years to get here.  More simply, I got your life/Inside of me.

In Kidnapped, the hero David Balfour is just 16 years old when he becomes an orphan and leaves home.  He faces the journey stoically, telling the town’s minister:

Essendean is a good place indeed, and I have been very happy there; but then I have never been anywhere else.  My father and mother, since they are both dead, I shall be no nearer to in Essendean than in the Kingdom of Hungary.

And with that, he departs.  This is the first page of the book — the jumping-off point for David, not the end.

Fun Facts About Scotland Upon the Eve of the Independence Vote

1.  The official flower is the thistle.

2.  The motto is Nemo me impune lacessit, which means “No one attacks me with impunity.”

Robert the Bruce is almost as dumb a name as The Edge

3.  Scotland won independence from England in 1314 with Robert the Bruce leading the way against superior numbers at the Battle of Bannockburn.  The same event is chronicled in the movie Braveheart, which is considered one of the most historically inaccurate movies of all time, but is also a rollicking good time.

4.  Scotland has produced philosophers and thinkers such as David Hume, Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill, as well as the writers Robert Burns, Walter Scott, Thomas Carlyle, Arthur Conan Doyle, J.K. Rowling, and okay, fine, Robert Louis Stevenson.  Other great Scots include: Alexander Fleming (discovered penicillin); Alexander Graham Bell (invented the precursor to the iPhone); Andy Murray (first native Brit to win Wimbledon in 77 years); and the actors Sean Connery and David Niven.

5.  Another great tune by Scottish rockers is the 1988 song “I’m Gonna Be (500 Miles)” by The Proclaimers.  The band (identical twin brothers) are from Auchtermuchty, which is in the same Fife region as Adamson’s Dumferline.

7-STEP GUIDE FOR EXTREME HOCKEY GRIEVING

With only two teams left in the NHL playoffs, a growing number of friends and relatives are dealing with the heartbreak of their favorite teams being eliminated.

Myself, I watch from greater emotional distance this year, since my own favorite team, the Washington Capitals, didn’t even make the playoffs.  (Which is embarrassing enough, given that half the league makes the playoffs.)

As I was consoling friends from Chicago last night, it occurred to me that I have, over the years, developed a fairly solid program for hockey grieving.  It’s a seven-step plan.

Step No. 1  PRETEND IT DIDN’T HAPPEN

Your team didn’t lose last night.  You didn’t stay up past midnight to watch the opponent score on a double-deflection in overtime.

You don’t care about sports in general.  You damn sure don’t care about hockey.

Hockey doesn’t exist.

Canada doesn’t exist.  Just woods up there.  Woods and snow.  No people.   No pucks or skates.  No glorious hulking silver trophy which will be handed off to some OTHER team in a matter of DAYS.

To keep yourself from checking the internet or discussing hockey, put a thick rubber band around your wrist.  Whenever you find yourself reading or talking about the forbidden topic, snap the band as hard as you can.

Not unlike a laboratory rat, you will gradually be reconditioned.

True, the rubber band becomes less effective, and incredibly painful, if you have children who play ice hockey, and who practice four days a week at a rink where hockey is constantly discussed.

But you still need to wear the rubber band and snap it hard every single time.  It’s a mandatory step.

Step No. 2  EAT YOUR ANGUISH

Dull the pain by eating constantly and voraciously.

In the spring of 2009, I ate an entire chocolate pecan pie in the 12 hours after the Capitals lost Game 7 to the Penguins.

By the time I finished the pie, I felt bloated, disgusted, ashamed, and mentally weak.  But I survived those 12 hours.  I didn’t jump off a roof.  Which is amazing, considering my team’s performance in Game 7.

Step No. 3  YOUR OPPONENTS WILL ONE DAY DIE

This step is not the most enlightened or compassionate step.

But it’s vital to surviving those first few days.

Remember that the players on the other team — the guys whose very names make you want to smash windows or vomit into your breakfast cereal — they will each one day go the way of all mortal flesh.  They’ll croak.  Some will even suffer long horrible illnesses.  (Which they semi-deserve, if you think about it, for not folding under pressure and for not GIVING AWAY THE DAMN GAME LIKE, OH, I DON’T KNOW, A CERTAIN TEAM WHOSE NAME RHYMES WITH APPITALS?)

Step No.  4  YOU TOO WILL ONE DAY DIE

Sounds like a bummer, right?  Seems like a counterproductive thought.

It’s actually liberating.  Remind yourself repeatedly that you will one day die and that when you do, you won’t have to keep re-playing over and over the moment Pat LaFontaine scored in QUADRUPLE OVERTIME of Game 7 to knock the Capitals out of the 1987 playoffs. 

Nor will you need to obsess about Sergei Gonchar bobbling the puck against the Penguins (it’s always the Penguins) and gift-wrapping an overtime goal for Martin ‘May His Name Be Eternally Damned’ Straka.

When you are dead, you won’t replay those moments in your head anymore.  Because the moments will not exist.  Because you will not exist.  And neither will Martin Straka, thank God.

Step No. 5  THINK ABOUT BANGLADESH

In the midst of your misery, it’s helpful to think of faraway lands where clean water and regular meals are scarce.

I’m talking about grinding poverty.  I’m talking about India, Africa, and rural China.

I’m talking about places where people do not give a RAT’S ASS who won the conference finals.  Where people don’t know Nick Leddy or Nick Backstrom or Nick Lidstrom or a single hockey-playing Nick.  Where the fact that the Rangers – the Rangers! – might win the Stanley Cup this year doesn’t cause immediate heartburn, tightness in the chest, and rapid, shallow breathing.

People in Bangladesh don’t give a shit.  They have bigger problems.

Admittedly it’s hard, in your current state, to imagine a bigger problem than Marian Hossa and Bryan Bickell suddenly deciding NOT TO SCORE A SINGLE MEANINGFUL GOAL, EVEN THOUGH THEY ARE PAID MILLIONS OF DOLLARS TO DO PRECISELY THAT.

But bigger problems exist.

Supposedly.

In India, Africa, and China.

Think about those places.

Step No. 6  THINK ABOUT THE TORONTO MAPLE LEAFS

If your mind keeps drifting back to hockey, if you find you really couldn’t care less about Bangladesh, shift your thoughts to those less fortunate than you within the hockey world.  Believe me, there is always some other team which crapped the bed even worse than your team did.

And yes, I’m speaking specifically here about the Maple Leafs blowing a 3-goal lead last year against the Bruins.

And the Bruins blowing a 3-0 series lead against the Flyers in 2010.

And the Sharks doing the same thing this year against the Kings.

And the Capitals doing pretty much all these things, over and over, year after year, for 40 straight years.

Important clarification:  by suggesting you think of others, I am not suggesting you feel compassion for them.  That’s a lot to ask of you right now.

You can think of these other teams with scorn and derision.  The point is, at least you’re thinking about them, not your own pathetic band of overpaid candy-asses who couldn’t be bothered to set up shop in the crease, or create a single headache for the opposing goalie, or SCORE ONE PATHETIC GOAL WHEN IT REALLY MATTERED.

As long as you are focused on the Maple Leafs, you don’t have to contemplate any of that.

Unless of course you’re a Leafs fan.

In which case, you should think about the Blackhawks losing last night on a weak, double-deflected wristshot from the left point.  The puck deflected off Tyler Toffoli’s stick and then Nick Leddy’s arm before fluttering, slowly, agonizingly, over goalie Corey Crawford’s shoulder.

At least it didn’t happen to the Leafs!

Yes, the Leafs failed to make the playoffs.  But that humiliation happened weeks ago.  That’s ancient history during the playoffs.

Step No. 7  SNAP AT YOUR LOVED ONES, OVER AND OVER, FOR NO GOOD REASON, FOR DAYS ON END

Yes, this step will be rough on your loved ones.  But screw your loved ones.  You don’t love them, or anyone, or anything, anymore.  You’re all done with love, hope, trust and charity.

You sure as hell don’t believe in hockey anymore, nor the importance of helping your child with homework, nor the value of throwing the baseball with your daughter or preparing lunch for her, because LaFontaine – it had to be the golden boy! – put a weak-ass shot past Bob Mason in the fourth overtime at 2am on Easter Morning in ’87.  Four overtimes.  It was the next day when the stupid game ended.

Maybe if your loved ones could understand this for a second, could wrap their feeble, non-hockey oriented brains around the concept of such an atrocity, perhaps they wouldn’t keep bothering you with mundane, annoying requests.

Like being picked up from school.

Or having their heavy suitcase carried upstairs after a long business trip.

Are your loved ones totally unaware that Sami Kapanen’s goal against the Capitals in 2008 shouldn’t even have counted because his Flyer teammate Patrick Thoresen straight-up shoved D.C. defender Shaone Morrisonn into netminder Cristobal Huet, knocking Huet well out of the goal?  What in the actual hell?  That was goalie interference.

Sami fucking Kapanen

Are your loved ones blissfully ignorant that the Capitals capped their thrilling President’s Trophy season in 2010 by blowing a 3-1 series lead and collapsing in the FIRST round of the playoffs against a Montreal Canadiens team whose average rostered player appeared approximately 5’1” and 120 lbs?

Really, if your loved ones cared at all about you, they would be brooding about these same cosmic injustices, instead of making insane demands such as ‘Please walk the dog,’ or ‘Can you pass the salt?’

When such requests are made, you should erupt with volcanic anger.  This is an important safety valve for you.  It will speed the grieving process.  It will make the whole household run more smoothly.

You may say:  What about my child?  He roots for the same team I do, and so he’s grieving, too.  I can’t yell at him.

Sure you can!  Extreme hockey grief is like a sinking ship.  It’s every man for himself.  You need to be selfish and ruthless to survive.  Do not wait in line for a lifeboat.  Knock over everyone smaller than yourself to procure a lifeboat.

Plus, if you don’t yell at your child now, how will he learn the family tradition of hockey heartbreak?  How will he pass along the 7-step program to his own children?

You may say:  I actually feel guilty.  My kid only roots for this team because I do, and now he is going to bed in tears every other night because the team ALWAYS SUCKS.

Such feelings of guilt and shame are natural.  The most effective way of coping with them is to tamp them down and suppress them very tightly.  Pack down the feelings until they are the same approximate consistency as the vulcanized rubber of a hockey puck.

This too will help build the foundation for your family’s annual experience of hockey bereavement.

 

 

 

BOLSHY, DOUGHTY SWEDES

The grandparents were in town last weekend.

They always inject some unpredictability into proceedings.

Omaha natives Tom and Sally Troyer

For instance, I wasn’t prepared for the intensity of my 79-year-old mother’s attention to the NFL Draft Combine.

For those unfamiliar with the Combine, it’s a highly ritualized, somewhat absurd showcase for college football players hoping to be drafted into the NFL next year.

Without pads or helmets, the players are put through the paces and tested for speed, strength, size, agility, and skill, under the watchful eye of coaches and general managers.  And it’s all televised.

decent speed for a big man

My 10-year-old son was watching, which didn’t surprise me.  But Grammy Sally didn’t miss a moment, either.

She was a big fan of Jeff Janis, a 6-foot-3 wide receiver from Saginaw Valley State University.  She was impressed he could run the 40-yard dash in 4.42 seconds.  She thought he might look good in a Washington Redskins uniform.

sweet moniker

She also liked Oregon running back De’Anthony Thomas.  But it had nothing do with his 40-yard dash.

“I like the apostrophe in the middle of his name,” she said.

Mom had thoughts on other topics, too.

First, she taught us two words.

Bolshy

I guess this adjective derives from the term Bolshevik, and was used, at least in the Midwest in the 1940s and 1950s, to refer to a disobedient or rowdy person, especially a child.

My mom is from Nebraska.  Her friend Judy is from Kansas.

‘Bolshy’ was the word for rule-breaking kids in Kansas when Judy was young.

Doughty

he looks brave, i guess

This word came up during the Olympics.  One of Team Canada’s hockey players was defenseman Drew Doughty from the Los Angeles Kings.  Mom made a comment about the meaning of his last name.

I thought she was talking about “dowdy,” which means ‘having a dull or uninteresting appearance.’

But she was talking about “doughty,” which means ‘brave, strong and determined.’

(Neither of these words, by the way, is to be confused with ‘doubty,’ a more obscure modifier which means ‘full of doubt.’)

The Olympics also gave Grammy Sally a chance to explore ethnic stereotypes.

We were discussing the Swedish national hockey team, including Nicklas Backstrom.

Grammy Sally brought up the opinions of her own grandmother, Gaye, who helped raise my mom and aunt after their dad died young.

Apparently Gaye had little use for Swedish people.

“No good words ever came after ‘Swede,'” when Gaye was talking, according to Grammy Sally.

This struck me as odd, since Swedes seem about as unobjectionable as possible.

But I guess Gaye, of Irish descent, found the many Swedish-Americans in Nebraska to be, hmm, I’ll just say, “the strong, silent type.”  She preferred a bit more chatter and poetry in her companions.

Personally, I’ve always liked Swedes.  My favorite hockey player growing up was Bengt Gustafsson.  One of my favorites today is the above-mentioned Backstrom.

Sadly, Backstrom was kicked out of the Olympics on the eve of the gold-medal game against Canada for taking Zyrtec D, an allergy medication which contains pseudephedrine.

So I guess we can add “hopped up” to the stereotypes about Swedes.  (No wonder they beat the Finns in the semifinals!)

riding under the influence?

Incidentally, only a member of the eternally cursed Washington Capitals could play for a silver-medal winning team and come home without a damn medal.  Jesus.

Backstrom didn’t appear altered when he arrived for a game earlier in the tournament with his teammate Marcus Johansson.  They were wearing suits and riding bicycles.  They looked like missionaries.

available for purchase at Russian Machine Never Breaks website

One can already buy a t-shirt which memorializes the eco-friendly arrival of these two Swedes.

The other time Grammy Sally went off script this weekend was when we pulled up at the ice rink in Valencia for Lulu’s game against the Jr. Flyers Pee Wee A team.

We parked beside a pick-up truck which had a window decal.  It showed a boy in an Uncle Sam outfit urinating on the word, “OBAMA.”

Grammy Sally objected to this sticker, as did my daughter Lulu.

“Some people don’t like the president,” my mom told Lulu, “BECAUSE HE’S BLACK.”

I said there could be other reasons why a voter disliked President Obama, so we shouldn’t automatically assign racism as the motive.

But the two of them didn’t listen.  By the time I exited our minivan, my mom, with her cane in one hand, was using her other hand to try to peel the decal off the pick-up truck.  She was being cheered on by her granddaughter.

The attempted petty theft alarmed me since:  a) it was against the law; b) it was a bad example to set for a girl who is already bolshy herself; and c) it seemed like a good way to start a parking-lot altercation. 

In fact, if you do a Venn diagram of ‘pick-up truck drivers,’ ‘youth hockey parents,’ and ‘owners of anti-Obama, urination-themed bumper stickers,’ I am pretty sure the people in the middle are big-time bolshy.

I managed to shoo away Grammy Sally, so we didn’t get the crap kicked out of us.

Then we went inside the rink, where Lulu’s team got the crap kicked out of them.

After the game, Grammy Sally wanted to take a second crack at the Obama sticker, but the truck was gone.

As of today, the grandparents are gone, too.  We are back on script, as a household.  It’s a lot less entertaining.