I used to work all day in a steel shop, pretending I was a writer. I’d get off work, come home, realize the stink of rust and dust and cigarette smoke permeated every bit of me, shower it all off, sit down at the computer and not write.
Working construction felt like work: it was hard, and I only did it for the money. I punched a time clock when I came in, again when I went home, and got paid for every half-hour in between. Writing? Writing was a fun cool thing I thought I’d like to do someday—maybe all day—instead of work.
Not quite ten years later, I started a blog in hopes of writing for real. I set goals, schedules, deadlines. I thought about marketing and promotion, tools and platforms. I scoped out competition and sharpened my craft. I treated writing like work: I showed up every day and did the thing, even though I wasn’t punching a clock—or getting paid.
I'm a BAD WRITER. | Gimme Schalter No. 33
Using Accuracy Against My Own Values | Gimme Schalter No. 32
Has a sentence ever felt like a knife at your throat?
Have you ever read a piece of news and dropped into freefall, the world blurring around you and your phone while your stomach sinks because what you’re seeing can’t be real?
Has someone written something so wrong that it makes your bile rise and your hands shake? That you didn’t know a person could contain enough malice and ignorance to even think those words, let alone type them out and hit “Send”?
Solidarity. | Gimme Schalter No. 31
I was pacing around the parking lot of the dayjob I was about to quit with my cell phone to my ear. The voice coming through the speaker was a managing editor trying to sign me to a full-time-equivalent freelance contract.
Permalance, in industry parlance: a job’s worth of work for a job’s worth of pay, with no actual employment promised or implied.
“So far only one writer has managed to become an employee with benefits. So I’m not going to say it’s likely,” he told me. “But if you come in and kick ass for us, it is possible.”
The Old World Order | Gimme Schalter No. 30
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has destroyed buildings, killed people, and thrown global geopolitics into chaos. It’s tested our global ability to tell truth from lies, right from wrong, good from evil.
It’s also smacked a lot of online smartypantses right in the credibility.
As much as I care about political analysis (I went to school for it), I write about sports because there are concrete rules and definitive winners. You can make evaluating performances and modeling outcomes your life’s work—but at the end of the day, your subjects are what their record says they are.
Paradise Lost: A Tribute to Neil Bulson | Gimme Schalter No. 29
[CONTENT WARNINGS: Death, grief, drug use, curse words and Detroit Lions football.]
I have no fucking business writing a memorial for Neil Bulson.
First of all, he should still be here. He should not be gone. I should not have heard via mutual friends that Neil died unexpectedly at home last weekend. But he did, and he would not appreciate my wallowing in bullshit hypotheticals.
Who Jacks The Jackasses? | Gimme Schalter No. 28
At one point late in an evening otherwise lost to the dark, dank haze of Five South Case, one of the guys I was hanging out with uttered a phrase that can only precede something amazing or terrible. On this occasion, it was both.
“Check this shit out,” he said, and popped a VHS tape into his player. This is what appeared on screen:
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Knoxville vs Car (1999) - "Boob" Big Brother Skate Video Pt 11/28 |
Tom Brady's Cold War On Football History | Gimme Schalter No. 27
The sun has set on Tom Brady’s quarterbacking empire. For 22 seasons he was inescapable, inevitable. His utter dominance didn’t just stand out over multiple discrete eras of the game, it erased multiple discrete eras of the game.
He led the league in passing yards again this year; 26 of the next 31 quarterbacks on the list were former first- or second-round draft picks. He out-passed eight former No. 1 overall picks, per StatHead: elite prospects with incredible traits, all between age 22 and 33. At 44, Brady has just broken his and Warren Moon’s shared record as the oldest quarterback ever to make the Pro Bowl.
But Brady’s career started when he, a sixth-round pick who wasn’t even the unquestioned starter at Michigan, was put in the game to relieve an injured former No. 1 overall pick.
Free Expression Isn't Free | Gimme Schalter No. 26
Writers know the power of a good lie.
As authors, we put quotation marks around words that have never been spoken, and attribute them to characters that exist only in our heads. As journalists, we know that as soon as something is 50.1 percent of something else, we can go to our golf bag of words and pull out the big dog: “most.”
As PR flacks, we describe bad things as if they’re actually good:
The Internet Archive Is Not 'Legit' | Gimme Schalter No. 25
Reaching An Infection Point | Gimme Schalter No. 23
It’s been killing me to watch so many of my friends Tweet about how nobody cares if they die. Brilliant and lovely people. Writers, artists, activists, musicians. The immunocompromised, the high-risk. Souls whose presence on Earth makes Earth a better, brighter place. People who’ve made me a smarter, better person just by sharing their thoughts and art.
People crying out in desperation as they feel like the world is giving up on them. Like everyone’s pretending they don’t exist, deeming them expendable, throwing their bodies into the furnace that fuels the engine of capitalism.
But the evolving nature of COVID, and medical science’s race to out-pace it, means public-health guidelines not only can but must change to get the best possible outcomes for everyone.
Virtuous Un-Signaling | Gimme Schalter No. 22
As long as I’ve been writing about sports on the Internet, I’ve been apologizing to sports fans for how much of a nerd I am—and for as long as I’ve been alive, I’ve been apologizing to my fellow nerds about how much I love sports.
But as we approach the 13th anniversary of the blog post that started my writing career, I’m more comfortable than ever being unapologetically myself in any forum or crowd. For several years, my pinned Tweet has been one positing the existence of advanced Quidditch analytics:
I’ve sent smarter, funnier, and lots more popular Tweets. But this one, in one sentence, tied together everything you could expect from me and my Twitter feed in a pithy little bow.
Dayjobs and Dystopias | Gimme Schalter No. 21
This week I went back to the office for the first time in 21 months.
All I was doing was picking up a new laptop—but it might not be long before I have to go back there to regularly do, you know, work. I swung by my desk, just to see the state of the place, and found a couple of friends waiting for me:
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Mai and Trunks, standing guard |
Actually Good Green Bean Casserole
It’s hard not to have an inflated self-concept when your country dedicates a national holiday to doing your personal favorite things. So every year, when we all get together with our loved ones and set out inexhaustible spreads of fatty and carbo-loaded foods, then watch Detroit Lions football and possibly fall asleep in our chairs a little bit? T-Day stands for Ty Day.
It’s also Ty Day every time I sit down to write this week’s Gimme Schalter and remember 375 busy humans have voluntarily signed up to read whatever I feel like writing. It’s literally humbling, in that I feel very small as I wonder how I’m going make it worth all of your time. But it’s also “humbling” in the same sense some use “literally,” i.e., the exact opposite of what the word means.
So, in that spirit of overstuffed ego and belly, I offer you the recipe to my Actually Good Green Bean Casserole. Not that the standard version doesn’t have a certain appeal, but this is good. I end up making a couple of pans for both Thanksgiving AND Christmas, by request.
Blown Deadlines & Closed Doors | Gimme Schalter No. 18
Gimme Schalter is supposed to go out at 10:00 a.m. every Thursday, which will come as a shock to many of you who’ve come to expect it sometime around lunch on Friday. I haven’t stressed (too) much about blowing my own self-imposed deadline—but this Friday, the Friday my younger half-sister got married, I really really blew it.
Between driving to Minneapolis and back, recording and producing the giant 100th episode of Three & Out, attending the wedding and generally prioritizing more pressing tasks, I failed to get an issue out during a week for the first time since Gimme Schalter launched in July. In a way, it’s not a big deal; I haven’t accepted any payment for the work of this newsletter, and I’m going to try to get two out this week to catch up.
But in another way, it’s huge.
Can't Compete Without Accepting Defeat | Gimme Schalter No. 17
My son and I walked into the gym 17 minutes early, and froze. Out on the gleaming blue court were a bunch of ripped dudes in workout clothes and pinnies, playing a game like soccer but about a zillion times faster.
In the middle of it all was the guy who’d invited us to drop in: Jeremy Klepal, member of the U.S. men’s national futsal team. A few months ago, he was representing our country in the FIFA Futsal World Cup–a competition we hadn’t even qualified for since 2008. Now, my son and I were watching him run the floor with nine other guys we couldn’t hope to compete with.
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CFC 2021 | United States vs Guatemala |
Self-Care, or Selfishness? | Gimme Schalter No. 16
Football culture is a specific subset of sports culture, and not a particularly great one. All the major coaching trees that propagate approach and mentality from generation to generation have strong roots in the WWII-era U.S. military—and while we’ve thankfully moved on from ideas such as drinking water during practice makes a player soft, the idea that a football player is a soldier whose duty is to sacrifice everything for the team, without question, is still imprinted on the minds of many coaches, fans, and media members.
So in some circles, there’s nothing worse than calling a football player “selfish.” I usually push back on that, because it’s most often applied to football players (whose careers are shockingly brief) trying to make the most money they can in the time they’ve got, or taking care of their body instead of aggravating injuries trying to gut out one more game.
Aaron Rodgers is selfish.
