The Life And Times Of Keith Balmer

Where Were You (When The World Stopped Turning)?

Have you ever had one of those conversations where you’re reminiscing with friends about some shocking event, and you and your friends share stories about where you were, and what you were doing at the moment that shocking event happened?

This scenario played out a couple of weeks ago. I was in Charlotte with my friends Steve, Sharon, and Melissa. We were having lunch at a Mellow Mushroom. Over plates of delicious calzone, we swapped stories about the big shocking events that left a lasting imprint on our American culture. And it got me thinking, “Man, this would be a cool topic to write about.”

These events were so shocking, so instantly memorable that, as you read this, your brain will immediately transport you back in time. You will reminisce, the same way you reminisce when you hear your favorite songs of yesteryear.

And since we’re speaking of songs of yesteryear, in the words of Minnie Riperton, let’s take a trip “back down memory lane.”

The Challenger Explosion – January 28, 1986: Has there ever been an event in American history that went from cheers to tears faster than the launch of the Space Shuttle Challenger? The launch was a huge media event because one of the astronauts was Christa McAuliffe, a social studies teacher from New Hampshire. She was selected from more than 11,000 applicants to be the first teacher to travel into outer space. Because of McAuliffe’s presence, NASA arranged for many schools to view the launch live on NASA TV.

My fourth grade class crowded around a TV in our school library. We were excited. The whole country was excited. It was a historic event. Little did we know that it would turn out to be a tragic one as well.

The shuttle launch went fine. But as the Challenger ascended into the Earth’s atmosphere, something unimaginable happened. At 11:38 a.m., 73 seconds after takeoff, the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded into dozens of pieces and crashed into the Atlantic Ocean. 

We all stared at the TV in disbelief.

The silence from my classmates was deafening. My teacher didn't say a word. She just held her hand over her mouth for what felt like forever.

I was 10 years old so of course my brain was incapable of interpreting what my eyes had just saw. The only space shuttles I had ever seen explode were in Star Wars movies.

Jerry Cosyn used to work at the Kennedy Space Center. On that fateful day, he had a birds-eye view to one of America's most famous tragedies.

This is what he posted on his Facebook page.

"On January 28th 1986, I was standing on a stack of wooden pallets at the back of the Launch Control Center at Kennedy Space Center. I'd been working there for about three years, and seen over a dozen launches, and they were always exciting. I loved working there—it was sort of a childhood dream for me. Growing up in the sixties during the so-called "race to the moon", I'd wanted to be a part of the space program for as long as I could remember.

When the shuttle lifts off, there's a sound—even from three miles away—that pounds through your skin and nerves and bones. A launch is the most thrilling thing I've ever seen. I used to get a lump in my throat every time I saw a launch; it didn't matter how many times I'd seen it before; it'd always bring tears to my eyes. The achievement of building that massive, incredibly complex, unbelievably powerful machine, and carrying people, equipment, entire homes into space, is something the entire human race should be proud of. I used to watch launches and just think, "Look at what humans can do when they put their minds to it."

It was a tremendously beautiful morning, with a sky the color of blue that I've only seen in Florida. When they finally called the count down to nothing and lit her up, I was holding my breath.

She started to climb. The way it works with NASA is that KSC (Kennedy Space Center) is in charge of a launch until the vehicle clears the tower, and at that time Johnson Space Center in Houston takes over and is officially in control of the mission. The tradition is that as soon as she clears the tower, everybody watching at KSC cheers. Then as she climbs a bit and begins that slow, lazy roll over onto her back, there's usually another cheer.

Challenger rose, and she rolled, and the sky was lit up like a new sun had come to rival the old, and in that cold, crisp air, the sound was pounding through us and everything looked so beautiful: that deep blue sky with our bird lighting it up in white-orange, the water so deep blue....

And then there was that puff, and somebody next to me said "That's too early for sep," meaning separation, when the solid boosters are dropped off and the orbiter continues on its own engines. I stood there and watched that massive cloud, and saw the two devil horns of smoke curl out of it as the SRBs climbed crazily out and went up on their own, and I knew, and everybody around me knew, that we'd just seen the worst thing possible during a launch, the thing nobody ever talked about or ever wanted to see. We didn't need to hear from the control room; we knew. And in fact it was at least a couple of minutes later (which seemed like hours) before we got any word from the control room over the PA, and then all we heard was "We have lost the downlink." Such a simple statement: "We have lost the downlink." But what it meant was clear to us all.

More minutes went by before they said what we all knew: "The vehicle has exploded."

I and my two friends, David and Grady, turned and started walking back into the building. Nobody was saying anything; I remember walking as if it were a dream. We were kind of in shock, I suppose. We went in, and we walked toward the stairway to go back up to our second floor office. We never took the elevator; it was old and slow, and meant for freight. But this time, just as we were getting to the elevator on our way to the stairs, the doors opened right in front of us. There was nobody on the elevator getting off, and nobody waiting there to get on. It was as if the elevator were just offering us a ride. We got in, but not one of the three of us had the presence of mind to press the button for our floor; we just stood there, still stunned, not talking, just staring. The doors closed and the elevator went up, past our floor, all the way to the fourth floor: the firing room. And then the doors opened, and there was the launch control crew in front of us.

And there, at that moment, coming down the stairs from the rooftop, walking right past in front of us, was this little girl, about six or seven years old, screaming "Mommy! Mommy!" and there was a tall, gray-haired, dignified couple holding her hand and trying to comfort her, but they themselves were looking stricken, in deep pain, ready to cry or crumple. And I felt as if I'd just been caught snooping into something too private, too personal, too painful for anyone ever to see. By pure chance, simply because we'd stumbled into the elevator and been too dazed to think about pressing the button for our own floor, we'd just seen the astronauts' families only moments after they'd watched their loved ones die.

That night, at home, with the television endlessly showing the disaster and giving information about the astronauts who had died, I found out who those tall old people and the little girl were. They were Christa McAuliffe's parents and her daughter."

Damn.

Magic Johnson’s HIV announcement – November 7, 1991: The physical examination was supposed to be routine. Los Angeles Lakers owner Jerry Buss wanted to give Magic Johnson a gift -- a $3 million loan to supplement his salary. But Buss' advisors suggested that he take out a life insurance policy as protection against the loan. Naturally, Johnson agreed.

The results were anything but routine. The results not only changed a league, a franchise, a city, and a man.

It changed the world.

On that day, I got off the bus from school, took off my book bag, turned on the TV, and was greeted with a breaking story that literally took my breath away.

“We got some news coming out of L.A. that will shock you. Magic Johnson, the superstar point guard for the Los Angeles Lakers, will hold a press conference later today to announce he is retiring from the NBA after testing positive for HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.”

It took a couple of seconds for my brain to process what I had just heard. And then I immediately screamed, “OH MY GOD! MAGIC JOHNSON IS GOING TO DIE!”

I got home at 4 o'clock. The press conference was at 2 o'clock West Coast time, 5 o'clock on the East Coast. I kept looking up at the clock.

4:15. 4:20. 4:25. 4:30

Tick, tick, tick, tick, tick.

Time could not have moved any slower.

Finally, the clock strikes 6. I pull up a chair, and I'm sitting ridiculously close to the TV. I watch as members of the Lakers organization (Jerry West, Dr. Buss, Mitch Kupchak, Mike Dunleavy) start to walk into that little press room at The Great Western Forum. Magic walks in with his wife Cookie.

I nervously bite my nails.

"Because of the HIV virus that I have attained I will have to retire from the Lakers."

In that room, I watch as grown men began to cry. But not Magic. He shows absolutely no trace of self-pity.

Leigh Montville - Sports Illustrated, November 18, 1991 - "An insulation of miles and distance and anonymity did not exist. This sadness was here, now, inside the locked front door and right in the room. It was part of the air we breathed. A gunman can go crazy, and fires can burn, and the homeless can even stare directly into our faces on the street, and the connections at best are superficial. Too bad for these people. Isn't it a shame? Too bad. But Magic? This is someone who has lived in our house for 10 years, 12 years, for as long as some of our children can remember."

"He has told us what soft drink he prefers and what shoes he wears and how drugs can kill and why staying in school is very important. There has never been a time he did not want to talk, so we know so much more about him than just the basketball stuff. We know his background. We know his worries in the present, his plans for the future. We know his laugh, the sound of his voice, his smile. He has shared his joys and his disappointments with us without reservation. He has probably spent more time with us—and we have spent more time with him—than most of our blood relatives."

"Now he was sick? A disease that we had viewed mostly with passive dismay was suddenly immediate, real."

Consider this. In 1991, 90 percent of what we knew about HIV and AIDS was inaccurate.

We thought it was a disease only gay men could catch.

WRONG!

We thought it was a disease only dirty drug users could catch.

WRONG!

We thought you could catch it from saliva, or from toilet seats, or from a person sneezing on you.

WRONG! WRONG! WRONG!

Magic's announcement started an important national dialogue about the importance of being educated about this disease. In a related story, the sale of Latex condoms went through the roof!

The NBA reeled from Magic's announcement. In every arena, fans were overcome with emotion. Magic's one-time rival now close friend, Larry Bird, his co-star in Boston who in the 80s helped him save the NBA from irrelevance, would later admit that November 7th was the second day of his life that he cried. The first was when his father died.

Magic Johnson - “When I first announced, there was only one drug. Now there are twenty-six. People shouldn't be afraid to be tested. Early detection and all those combinations of drugs, it can really prolong your life. I had so much I wanted to do and accomplish, and I've been doing it. For the first five years, I didn't know what was going to happen. I was hoping the medicine was going to work, but you just don't know. In those years, it was always, "You okay? You okay? You okay?" everywhere I went. Now I don't get that. Now I get "You're doing great in business." No one checks anymore. Things are going great. I wear this as a badge of honor. I don't run away from it. I know that God has chosen me to make a difference in the world. So far, so good. Not only with HIV but with everything else I'm doing. I feel like I'm going to be here for a long time.”

The OJ Simpson White Bronco chase – June 17, 1994: Four days earlier, Nicole Brown Simpson, the ex-wife of the Hall of Fame running back, and Ron Goldman, a waiter at a local restaurant, were brutally murdered on the steps of her Brentwood home. Bloodstains on the walkway where the bodies were found matched Simpson's blood type. Two bloodstained gloves were found, one at the scene, the other outside Simpson's Brentwood home.

Police said that a trail of blood drops stretched across Simpson's driveway. They said bloodstains inside his home matched Nicole Simpson's blood type. Simpson becomes the focus of the investigation as evidence mounts against him, hour by hour, minute by minute.

Simpson's lawyers negotiated a deal with the Los Angeles Police Department that would allow Simpson to turn himself in at 11 a.m. Over 1,000 reporters waited for him at the police station, but he failed to appear. At 2 p.m. the LAPD issued an all-points bulletin. O.J. Simpson was now a fugitive. At 5 p.m. his friend and lawyer Robert Kardashian (Kim’s dad!) read a letter from Simpson to the media. 

"I think of my life and feel I've done most of the right things. So why do I end up like this? I can't go on. No matter what the outcome, people will look and point. I can't take that. I can't subject my children to that ... I have nothing to do with the murder. I love her ... Don't feel sorry for me. I've had a great life. Please think of the real O. J. and not this lost person. Thanks for making my life special. I hope I helped yours. Peace and love, O. J."

An hour later, a motorist in Orange County saw Simpson riding in his white Bronco driven by his friend, Al Cowlings and called the police. The police tracked calls placed from Simpson on his car phone. The lead detective on the case calls Cowlings on the car phone.

"O.J. is in the back seat holding a gun to his head," says Cowlings. "He says he'll never surrender."

Twenty police cars follow Simpson's white Bronco in a surreal, slow-motion chase. From Disneyland to Los Angeles, traffic on the 405, the busiest freeway in the country, comes to a standstill. People jam the overpasses. TV news choppers fly overhead. 

Throughout the country, 95 million Americans are glued to television sets. Bars and stores are packed with people watching. Business comes to a screeching halt. Customers are just standing, watching TV.

CNN, ABC, CBS, and NBC all interrupt their regularly-scheduled programming. NBC famously interrupts Game 5 of the NBA Finals between the New York Knicks and the Houston Rockets.

I watch with my cousin Lamont. It is one of the most riveting things I have ever seen. We sit glued to his couch, trying to predict how this will all end.

“Is he going to kill himself?"

"Is he going to get into a shootout with police?”

It all ended when he and his massive police escort arrive at his Brentwood home at 8:00 pm. After remaining in the Bronco for about 45 minutes, Simpson is allowed to go inside for about an hour where he talks to his mother and, I kid you not, drinks a glass of orange juice.

During one of the defining moments of his life,  O.J. drinks a glass of OJ! 

In the Bronco the police find $8,000 in cash, a change of clothing, a loaded .357 Magnum, a passport, family pictures, and a fake goatee and mustache.

The Columbine High School Massacre – April 20, 1999: It is the story of our times — someone walks into a public space, a theater, a mall, a school, armed with a gun, motivated by hate, by hurt, by some irrational form of desperation, and starts shooting. They come not to kill a specific person or persons, but to stage a dark and warped act of terror. They don’t care about the people on the receiving side of their hateful infliction, or their loved ones, their hopes and dreams. It's selfish and its beyond disturbing. 

There have been 31 school shootings since Columbine. School shootings in every other country in the world COMBINED since that time is 14. We've created complex systems and over-funded programs to monitor foreign terrorists in every country, but somehow we've overlooked the terrorists at home.

At the time, we hoped Columbine wouldn't be the start of a horrific trend. 

We were wrong.

Twelve students were killed, one teacher was killed, and 21 students were injured in a massacre that, at the time, was the deadliest school shooting in American history (the Virginia Tech massacre in 2007 has since surpassed it).

I was a junior at Virginia Commonwealth University. I was walking through the student hall on my way to class when I noticed a group of students had gathered around a TV. I walked up and saw that a high school on the outskirts of Denver had turned into what looked like a war zone. 

This was an unimaginable tragedy. I remember how people tried to blame Marilyn Manson because the two killers, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, listened to his music. They tried to blame videogames. The massacre led to a huge debate about bullying and gun control. The word ‘Columbine’  became synonymous with school shootings. 

If you want to know the real story, you should read Dave Cullen’s chilling, bestselling book Columbine. It took him almost 10 years to write, and it is extraordinary. It’s a portrait of Harris and Klebold as a sort of In Cold Blood murderous duo – two kids, one suffering from depression, the other from a superiority complex, who for more than a year psyched themselves up for an Oklahoma City-style terrorist bombing -  an apolitical, over-the-top revenge fantasy against those who they felt had wronged them.

There was so much misinformation out there, so much that the media got wrong. Cullen’s book destroyed everything we thought we knew about the killers.

Myth #1: The Columbine killers were social misfits who were bullied by their classmates.

Truth: Eric Harris was a charmer and he had plenty of friends. Dylan Klebold went to the prom the weekend before the shooting. Both killers attended football games, dances, and school plays. Neither of them were in the “Trenchcoat Mafia”, and they definitely weren’t the outcasts they were portrayed to be.

Myth #2: The Columbine shooters planned a shooting spree against jocks, blacks, and Christians.

Truth: Columbine was a failed bombing. Just after 11 a.m. on April 20, they lugged a pair of duffel bags containing propane-tank bombs into Columbine’s crowded cafeteria and another in the kitchen. Then they stepped outside and waited.

Had the bombs exploded, they would have killed virtually everyone eating lunch and brought the school’s second-story library down atop the cafeteria. Armed with a pistol, a rifle and two sawed-off shotguns, the pair planned to shoot any students who tried to escape the building in the aftermath. But when the bombs failed to explode, only then did they make their way inside.

In a 2004 article for Slate, Dave Cullen said this – “psychiatrists can’t help speculating what might have happened if Columbine had never happened. Klebold might have gotten caught for some petty crime, gotten help in the process, and conceivably could have gone on to live a normal life.”

“Their view of Harris is more reassuring. Harris was not a wayward boy who could have been rescued. Harris, they believe, was irretrievable. He was a brilliant killer without a conscience, searching for the most diabolical scheme imaginable. If he had lived to adulthood and developed his murderous skills for many more years, there is no telling what he could have done. His death at Columbine may have stopped him from doing something even worse.”

September 11, 2001: I was living in Norcross, Georgia, which is about 20 miles northeast of Atlanta. I had just gotten a job at a new tapas bar in Midtown. I remember it being an absolutely gorgeous day. I jumped in my car at about 9:00 a.m. I turned on the Tom Joyner Morning Show and Tom was talking about how a plane had crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center. And I remember thinking, “Well that’s weird.” 

Any New Yorker reading this will remember that two weeks before 9/11, a paraglider flew too close to the Statue of Liberty, and he got his parachute stuck in her torch.

I was like, “It's New York. Crazy shit happens there everyday.”

But just a couple of minutes later, they reported that another airplane had crashed into the South Tower of the World Trade Center. And that’s when I felt the hair on the back of my neck stand up. That’s when I knew that today was not going to be just another ordinary day.

That’s when I knew we were under attack.

I remember sitting in my car, driving down the freeway yelling, “HOLY SHIT! WE UNDER ATTACK! OH, IT’S ON! WE GOING TO WAR! WE GOING TO WAR!”

My dad called me from back home in Virginia, and his first words were, “Are you alright son?” And I remember how hearing his voice had a calming effect on me.

“Are you near a TV?”

“No. I’m on my way to work.”

“You know I don’t like talking to you while you’re driving. Just wanted to check in. Be safe. Call me later.”

I was almost at work when I heard the news of the third plane that crashed into the Pentagon. By now, I was completely numb.

I walked into the restaurant where I worked and everyone was crowded around a TV that was mounted into the wall. It was then that I saw the devastation for the first time. I saw those two humongous skyscrapers, two symbols of America’s financial might, burning out of control.

And then I saw the Pentagon, a massive building that is the defining symbol of America's military might, a building that I had drove past a hundred times, ... one side of it, destroyed.

I was stunned.

None of my coworkers said anything. Not until somebody yelled out, “Oh my god! They’re jumping.”

She was referring to the dozens of people, hopelessly trapped in the two towers, who were now jumping from open windows - from 70, 80, 90 stories up.

Then the news broke of the fourth plane crash somewhere in a field out in western Pennsylvania.

And then ... it happened.

At approximately 9:59 a.m., 56 minutes after United Airlines Flight 175 had slammed into it, causing it to burn ferociously out of control, the South Tower collapsed.

Several of my coworkers gasped. A few screamed “OH MY GOD!” Most of them began crying.

I was speechless. I could not believe my own eyes. How in the world did that enormous building collapse? How? How was any of this possible?

And then ... it happened, again.

Thirty minutes after the South Tower collapsed, the North Tower collapsed. A female coworker ran past me and said, “I can’t watch this.”

Another female worker began crying so hard that others rushed to console her. I walked outside. And before I knew it, I had jumped in my car and started the engine.

Next thing I know, I'm driving home. I didn’t say goodbye to anybody. I just left.

The news reports on the radio told the story of a nation in complete chaos. There were unconfirmed reports that several additional planes had been hijacked. There were unconfirmed reports that the Sears Tower in Chicago, and the Library Tower in Los Angeles were targets. I turned off the radio and drove north on Peachtree Street. Whenever I stopped at a stoplight, I could see the look of fear on the faces of the other drivers. It was a look that said, “what in the hell is going on?"

There are a lot of high-rise office buildings in Atlanta, and people were being evacuated from them. Police and fire crews were everywhere. There was no terrorist threat, but at the time, we didn’t know that. I remember anxiously glancing up at the sky, looking for low-flying airplanes.

It was so eerie. I felt like I was in The Twilight Zone.

The first time I went to New York was in 1997. It was a trip planned by several of my fellow classmates. We went to see the acclaimed Broadway play ‘Rent.’ I will never forget driving into the city for the first time. There is a place in New Jersey called Weehawken. It sits directly across the Hudson River from Midtown Manhattan. You have to drive through it to get to the Lincoln Tunnel, which brings you directly into New York City.

The beautiful thing about Weehawken is that it gives you a gorgeous panoramic view of the awe-inspiring skyline of Manhattan. As we were traveling into New York, we hit Weehawken, and that world-famous skyline jumped right out at me. And standing above it all was the twin towers, the two 110-story buildings known as the World Trade Center.

I have a picture that my dad took of me. We went to the observation deck atop the Empire State Building. He took several pictures of me up there but the last picture he took was my favorite. It was me with a big smile, and behind me, towering above Lower Manhattan, was the World Trade Center.

And now those two iconic buildings were gone.

Like many Americans, I was familiar with the name Osama bin Laden. I had heard of al-Qaeda. I knew they were terrorists. But the havoc they created was overseas.

I never imagined they would attack America.

I finally made it to the freeway, and I began driving north to Norcross. I was alone with my thoughts, and my emotions ran the gamut – from anger, to sadness, to out-right panic. And then I saw a digital sign flashing from high above Interstate 85.

It was a sign that said, “NATIONAL EMERGENCY! ALL AIRPORTS CLOSED!”

America had just entered into the dawn of a new era. And it was terrifying.

The death of Michael Jackson – June 29, 2009: Me and my buddy Anthony were at Perimeter Mall, which is one of the 5000 malls located in metro Atlanta. The New York Yankees were in town and we had tickets. It was a couple of hours before the game and we were sitting in a bar drinking beer, waiting for the shuttle to come take us to Turner Field. All of a sudden our bartender and mutual friend, Stefanie, came over and said, “did you hear?”

 And we were like, “hear what?”

“Michael Jackson died.”

“Girl, stop playing.”

“No, I’m serious. It’s all over TV.”

"Wait. WHAT?"

Before my brain had time to process the news, the shuttle arrived. Me and Anthony gulped down our beer and we jumped on the bus. Word spread swiftly among our fellow passengers. Someone said, “I heard Michael Jackson just died.”

The bus driver turned on the radio and we immediately heard the DJ confirm it.

“Um, not sure if you guys have heard the news but the King of Pop, Michael Jackson, died of cardiac arrest today in Los Angeles. It is all on the TV. Pretty sad. We'll let you know if any additional news breaks. But yeah, Michael Jackson has died. He was 50 years old. Rest in peace Michael.”

As the familiar beat to Billie Jean filled the speakers on the bus, random strangers all sang along to the signature song from the King of Pop.

She Was More Like A Beauty Queen From A Movie Scene
I Said Don't Mind, But What Do You Mean I Am The One
Who Will Dance On The Floor In The Round

The next night was a Saturday night and my buddy Dave was DJing at a club in Midtown. I parked my car about six blocks from the club. As I walked down the always-crowded Peachtree Street, I heard 'Wanna Be Starting Something' coming from a Lexus full of Asian kids. Then I heard 'Don't Stop Til You Get Enough' coming from an SUV full of young white girls. Then I heard 'Remember The Time' coming from a BMW driven by a black dude with his girlfriend.

Car, after car, after car, after car. It was amazing.

In the 80s when I was a kid, I was a die-hard fan of Michael Jackson. I was infatuated with him. I had all his albums. I had the white glove. I could do the moonwalk. And when he suffered those second-degree burns while filming that Pepsi commercial, I remember I cried like a baby.

His death set off a worldwide outpouring of grief unlike anything I had ever seen. I was sad too. But a few days later I was able to pull back and carefully analyze the situation. And the truth is, while I will always love his music, I walked away from him as a fan years ago. Too many sleepovers with young boys, too much plastic surgery, too many failed comebacks, too much erratic behavior, it was all just ... too much.

The tabloids may have devoured his bizarre personal life, but his professional achievements are unlike anything we have ever seen. According to the Guinness World Records, he is the most successful entertainer of all-time. He sold a jaw-dropping 400 million records worldwide. And nobody had a bigger influence on popular culture.

Nobody.

And here’s something else to ponder. No musician will ever be as famous as Michael Jackson. His death represents the end of an era. When he released the record-breaking Thriller album in 1982, there was only one music video channel, MTV.  Today MTV no longer plays videos, leaving that chore to their sister spinoffs MTV2 and MTVU, and also to the various other cable channels that play videos (VH1, BET, Fuse, Palladia, etc). There are all these niche music channels, and all these niche radio stations that exist today that didn’t exist in 1982. It’s practically impossible for an artist, no matter how charismatic and talented, to draw fans from all across the spectrum the way Jackson did.

He had his demons. Lord knows he did. But I thank him for sharing his unique gift with the world. And sometimes, when I'm feeling down, I pour myself a glass of wine, and I listen to one of my all-time favorite songs ...

I'm Gonna Make A Change,
For Once In My Life
It's Gonna Feel Real Good,
Gonna Make A Difference
Gonna Make It Right . . .

As I, Turn Up The Collar On
My Favorite Winter Coat
This Wind Is Blowin' My Mind
I See The Kids In The Street,
With Not Enough To Eat
Who Am I, To Be Blind?
Pretending Not To See Their Needs

A Summer's Disregard,
A Broken Bottle Top
And A One Man's Soul
They Follow Each Other On
The Wind Ya' Know
'Cause They Got Nowhere
To Go
That's Why I Want You To Know

I'm Starting With The Man In
The Mirror
I'm Asking Him To Change
His Ways
And No Message Could Have
Been Any Clearer
If You Wanna Make The World
A Better Place
Take A Look At Yourself, Then Make A Change

Dying Is Hard, Comedy Is Harder

 

How old were you when you fell in love with comedy?

For me it was the year 1989 and I was 13 years old. I was staying at my grandparents’ house for the weekend. My aunt Joyce, my uncle Stanley, my uncle Al, and my aunt Audrey had crowded around my granddad’s old floor-model TV. Uncle Al had just came home with a brand-spanking new VHS. 

For those of you born after 1993, you might not know what a VHS is, so let me explain. A VHS is like a cassette that played movies.

What’s that?

You don’t know what a cassette is?

WELL THANKS FOR MAKING ME FEEL OLD!

Wait, where was I?

Right. My uncle got his hands on The Best of Eddie Murphy: Saturday Night Live. He popped it in the VCR and for the next hour we all laughed our collective asses off. The characters that Eddie created during his legendary three and a half year run (Gumby, Buckwheat, Velvet Jones, etc) were hysterical.

Most of today’s young generation only know Eddie as Donkey in the Shrek movies, or in a bunch of hit-or-miss comedies like Norbit, Meet Dave, and Tower Heist. But in the 1980s, Eddie Murphy was the funniest man in America. At the tender age of 19 - before 48 Hours, before Trading Places, and before Beverly Hills Cop - Eddie was a breakout star on Saturday Night Live. In fact, he likely saved the show from cancellation after the original cast members, the Not Ready For Primetime Players left for greener pastures.

That Saturday Night Live VHS had a profound effect on me. From that very moment I became infatuated with comedy. I watched sitcoms incessantly, from the good (The Cosby Show, Roseanne, Married With Children, The Simpsons, Friends, Seinfeld, The Fresh Prince of Bel Air), to the bad (Diff’rent Strokes, Family Matters, Home Improvement, The Wayans Bros, Blossom, Saved By The Bell), to the ugly (Full House, Webster, ALF, Gimme A Break, Hangin’ With Mr. Cooper, Harry and the Hendersons, and the steaming pile of horseshit known as Homeboys In Outer Space).

I remember I used to sneak and listen to old standup records by raunchy comedians like Richard Pryor, Redd Foxx, Robin Harris, and Sam Kinison. My mom used to work a night job, so I had the house to myself five nights a week. I took advantage by staying up late on the weeknights and watching The Arsenio Hall Show. On Friday nights I watched HBO’s Def Comedy Jam. On Saturday nights, it was Saturday Night Live, and on Sunday nights I watched In Living Color.

And I read like it was going out of style. Anything that made me laugh. From newspaper comic strips, to joke books, to columns by Dave Barry, to books by Judy Blume.

With all the studying I did, I eventually morphed into a funny guy. I was the court jester, the class clown, the guy in the back of the class who always cracked jokes. For instance, I remember being a freshman in college, sitting in the back of my African American History class, and my professor was in the midst of telling a story …

My professor: “What was remarkable about this woman was that after she gained her freedom from slavery, she went back and purchased the freedom of her two oldest children. But she didn’t have enough money to buy her third child. So, do you know what she did?"

Me: “SHE PUT THE THIRD CHILD ON LAYAWAY!”

Yup, I was a wiseass.

I always enjoyed the act of making people laugh. I especially liked to make all the cute girls laugh because I wanted them to like me. But just because you can make them laugh, doesn’t mean they want you as their boyfriend.

I learned that the hard way.

Cute girl: “Haha. Keith you are so funny!”

Me: “Wanna hang out sometime?”

Cute girl: “I don’t think that would be a good idea.”

When I was in high school, there were 3 ways to get the girls to like you. They were …

a)     Be a star athlete

b)    Be a bad boy

c)     Be extremely handsome

I was d) none of the above.

So I had to compensate.  I had to be funny because, like most kids in school, I had a narcissistic desire to be popular. This yearning to be funny, to make people laugh, came from a very specific place. It came from living a very inward life. It came from having conversations in my head that were infinitely more interesting than the conversations I had with other people. It came from being a silent observer. It came from having a stunning lack of self-esteem. It came from isolation, loneliness, from a desperate need to be liked. It came from growing up in a small farming community named Seaboard, North Carolina, a place where there was nothing to see, and I was always bored.

It's no wonder why I love the Big Apple. New York City is the exact opposite of where I came from. Unlike Seaboard, New York has a pulse.

If New York is the city that never sleeps, than Seaboard is the town that never woke up!

It was just my mom and I. My dad moved away when I was very young, and I only saw him three times a year. I had a lot of time to myself. And I kept myself entertained by watching TV and by constantly reading. All that time I had to myself allowed me to develop my sense of humor. My brain became an incubator of comedy.

When I was in school, life had so much promise. I couldn’t wait to graduate, move out of Smallville, and live this fun and exciting life. But life didn’t turn out to be so grand. I ended up working a bunch of mind-numbing, low-paying jobs. I haven’t done any of the cool stuff I used to fantasize about doing - like driving cross country, like visiting the Grand Canyon, or like going to Napa Valley and drinking myself into a coma.

When I was in school they told me that as long as I got good grades, and I worked hard, I could be anything I wanted to be. I could live the American Dream.

What a bunch of bullshit.

They lied. There is no American Dream. It doesn’t exist. I did everything they told me to do, and just like the other 90 percent of Americans, I’m just barely getting by.

Now, 20 years after I graduated from high school, I’ve graduated again, this time from the School of Hard Knocks!

So, what does any of this have to do with comedy?

It has everything to do with comedy. The more hard times you go through, the easier it is to write. Humor is tragedy and tragedy is humor. As the great Mel Brooks once said, “Tragedy is if I cut my finger. Comedy is if you drop into an open sewer and die.”

Imagine comedy as a coin. On one side of the coin, you have the jokes, the humor. On the other side of the coin, you have fear and despair. That’s where the humor comes from.

Dave Barry, one of my comedy writing idols once said, “Comedy originates from a  mutual understanding among humans that we live in an extremely dangerous, scary world, run by all kinds of forces over which we have no control. And we’re all going to get sick and die.”

Dying is hard, comedy is harder.

Hey, pop quiz hotshot: Have you ever danced with the devil in the pale moonlight?

I did, a couple of years ago, when I tried my hand at standup. I will never forget the first time I got onstage. I was at a bar in downtown Richmond, Virginia. There were probably 20-30 people in the audience. I went onstage nervous as hell, wondering what in God’s name had I gotten myself into. I cracked a few jokes, and I remember being startled when a few people laughed. I said to myself, “well this isn’t so bad.” The next four times I did pretty good. In fact, I did so good that I invited my friends Towanda and Sherrie to one of my shows.

And as fate would have it, I bombed BIG TIME. I went down in flames. I went onstage and died a thousand deaths. I was so bad that when I went back to my table to join Towanda and Sherrie, they were too embarrassed to make eye contact with me. They looked down at their cell phones and tried to ignore me. They were my best friends before I went onstage. But when I got back to the table they acted like they didn’t know who the hell I was. They treated me like I was a stranger on the street!

Bottom line: Going on stage night after night and trying to make a room full of strangers laugh can be very rewarding, but it is really, really hard.

Jay Leno once said that there are two types of comedians. There’s the comic who gets onstage and his or her humor comes from the onstage persona, the comedic character he or she is selling to the audience.

And then there’s the comic who doesn’t have the stage persona, but who loves the art of writing the joke. This is the person who puts pen to paper and hopes that his or her next joke will kill.

Like this one …

“Stuffed deer heads on walls are bad enough, but it’s worse when you see them wearing dark glasses, having streamers around their necks, and a hat on their antlers. Because then you know they were enjoying themselves at a party when they were shot.” – Ellen DeGeneres

And that’s me. I’m the guy who loves to write the jokes. I don’t want to be onstage, I want to be on-page.

And that’s why I have this blog. One of my favorite books is Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell. In it, he asks an important question – “What makes high achievers different?”

He said that high achievers are different because they become masters of their art. And how many hours does it take to become a master?

10,000.

This blog is my attempt to reach 10,000. This blog is me working on my craft, trying to become a better (and funnier) writer. The purpose of this blog is to write essays on pop culture, sports, politics, whatever. My only requirement is that I be entertaining. In fact, I would love to have my own humor column in a famous publication (my 3 favorites are Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, and Entertainment Weekly).

We comics are strange birds. We tend to be depressed, erratic, quirky, funny, sad, insecure, insightful, suffer from obsessive-compulsive disorder, and we have a pathological need to entertain. We are people who wake up every morning and say to ourselves, “Boy, I really hope today is going to suck.” Because when things are going well, it’s impossible to write jokes.

If you’re an aspiring humorist like me, one of the best things you can do is join twitter. There are A LOT of very funny people on twitter. What better way to hone your comedy writing skills than by watching how the masters do it:

@robdelaney: “ASPIRING MASS MURDERERS – Make sure your gun works by putting it up your asshole and pulling the trigger before you go on your spree.”

@JennyJohnsonHi5: “Sarah Palin said ‘Polls are for strippers.’ Cute. Guess what Grandma? Birth control pills are for teenagers.”

@KellyOxford: “I still feel like Katy Perry is what Hugh Hefner would do if he got his hands on Zooey Deschanel.”

@natashaleggero: “College seems like a pretty expensive way to become an alcoholic.” 

@frankconniff: “Not to be outdone by Cory Booker, Chris Christie just ran into a bakery and saved a tray of cinnamon rolls from burning.”

@Travon: “So sad America ranks 25^th in the world in math. But at least we’re still in the top 10!”

@KenJennings: “That’s pretty cool of the guys in every beer ad to invite exactly one black friend to watch the game with them.”

@Capricecrane: “I’m old enough to remember when teens getting pregnant meant ‘PANIC!’, not ‘Congratulations, you get your own MTV show!”

@Stephenathome: “Scientists have invented a new strain of cannabis without the high. They celebrated with non-alcoholic beer and furious dry-humping.”

@AlbertBrooks: “Went to see Lincoln. Only seats left were in the balcony … Passed.”

@DannyZuker: “I’m constantly amazed at how different my twin daughters are. Lisa is so much more positive and confident than her sister Hog Face.”

But not only do I follow funny people on twitter, I listen to funny podcasts (like The Jimmy Dore Show and The Champs with Neal Brennan). I watch the political satire of Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, and Bill Maher. I watch terrific, critically-acclaimed comedies like 30 Rock, Parks and Rec, and Louie. I read Andy Borowitz (the New Yorker) and Charlie Pierce (Esquire). And I try and learn from the best standup comics in the business (a few of my personal favorites are Chris Rock, Dave Chappelle, Louis CK, Wanda Sykes, Patton Oswalt, DL Hughley, and Chelsea Handler).

What I love about humor is that it's more than entertainment or joke-telling. It’s a universally-accepted form of social criticism. It’s attacking culture norms and the status quo. It’s a truth serum, and there is no shortage of people who demand the truth. George Bernard Shaw once said, “my way of joking is to tell the truth. It is the funniest joke in the world.”

“I like Florida. Everything is in the 80s. The temperature, the ages, … the IQs.” – George Carlin

“Liberals feel unworthy of their possessions. Conservatives feel they deserve everything they’ve stolen.” – Mort Stahl

What I love about humor is that there will never be a dearth of people to make fun of. People are weird and goofy. And they say the most ridiculous things …

“Baseball is 90 percent mental. The other half is physical.” – Yogi Berra

“Rarely is the question asked: Is our children learning?” – George W. Bush

Why do I want to be a comedy writer?

Because I’m mentally prepared to get my ass kicked. I’m mentally prepared to be rejected. I’m mentally prepared to hear the word “NO!”

Comedy is not about whether you can succeed. It’s about whether or not you can fail and continue.

My favorite quote of all-time comes from Michael Jordan:

“I’ve missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I’ve been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.”

To the people who are reading this, I thank you for joining me on this adventure. I shall leave you with my all-time favorite joke:

In 2001 Richard Wiseman, a British sociologist and creator of LaughLab, conducted a global online study to discover the world’s funniest joke. He constructed a web site that allowed visitors to submit jokes and rate the offerings of others. More than 40,000 jokes were submitted from more than 70 countries. Based on several million critiques, the world’s funniest joke is …

A couple of New Jersey hunters are out in the woods when one of them falls to the ground. He doesn’t seem to be breathing; his eyes are rolled back in his head. The other guy whips out his cell phone and calls the emergency services.

He gasps to the operator: “My friend is dead! What can I do?”

The operator, in a calm, soothing voice says, “Just take it easy. I can help. First, let’s make sure he’s dead.”

There is silence, then a single gunshot is heard.

The guy’s voice comes back on the line. He says, “OK! Now what?”

The Terrifying Reality Of Climate Change

(I've given up on writing about politics, but this one is so good, and so damn important -- that I'm keeping it).

Last month, the National Climate Data Center in Asheville, N.C. announced that 2012 was the hottest year ever in the United States since records began in 1895. Last year’s average temperature of 55.3, demolished the previous record set in 1998 by a full degree Fahrenheit. A jaw-dropping 34,000 daily high records were set at weather stations across the country, compared with only 6,664 record lows.

Last year’s weather in the United States began with an unusually warm winter, with relatively little snow across much of the country, followed by a surreal March heat wave that was so hot that trees burst into bloom and swimming pools opened early. From the first of March until the end of April, 260 tornadoes tore through the Midwest, the Ohio Valley, and the Southeastern United States. May was hot. June was hot. On June 29^th, a derecho, which is a line of severe, fast moving thunderstorms, struck the Midwest and the mid-Atlantic.

I remember June 29^th like it was yesterday. Me and a friend were having dinner at a quaint restaurant here in Richmond, Virginia. We left at around nine o’clock. It was a blazing hot night. As I was driving her back to her place, I noticed that the clouds had turned ominous frighteningly fast. Trees and stop lights began to sway violently as the winds picked up. It looked like an F5 tornado was about to drop right on top of our heads at any second. I had my pedal to the metal as I tried to outrun the storm. Neither one of us said anything, but we were both thinking the same thing: “What in the hell is going on?”

When I pulled into her apartment complex and parked the car, we both jumped out and ran into the building. When we walked into her apartment her mom was watching the news. They said the violent weather was being caused by a derecho (which at the time, was a storm I had never heard of). They also said that wind gusts were at a stunning 80 mph.

I arrived at my own apartment the next morning in a state of shock. The storm had knocked down trees, power lines, and stop signs. People were walking around looking dazed and confused. It looked like the Incredible Hulk had ran through my neighborhood. For those who’ve never been in a derecho, the best way I can describe it is that it’s like being in the middle of a powerful, fast-moving mini-hurricane.

Also in June, July, and August of last year, we saw destructive wildfires in the western United States with the two worst being in Colorado and Oregon. A total of 9 million acres, roughly the size of Connecticut and Massachusetts combined, burned to the ground.

In July, a drought crippled 60 percent of the nation, killed corn and soybean crops, and sent food prices spiraling.

Also during the summer, America suffered through a heat wave of biblical proportions. Among the cities that set temperature records were Nashville; Athens, GA; Cairo, Ill; all of which hit 109 degrees on June 29^th; Greenville, S.C. hit 107 on July 1; and Lamar, CO hit an amazing 112 degrees on June 27^th.

Hurricane Isaac rocked the Gulf Coast in August, and in November, Hurricane Sandy (or Superstorm Sandy), a storm so powerful that the mainstream media nicknamed her “Frankenstorm”, battered the East Coast. Sandy is a storm we’re going to talk about for decades. It was the second most destructive storm in American history (behind Hurricane Katrina). It affected 24 states, from Florida to Maine, and as far west as Wisconsin. It flooded Manhattan, it flooded Atlantic City, it destroyed thousands of homes, and it left millions without power. Here in Virginia, the storm triggered a blizzard.

That’s right. I said a hurricane triggered a blizzard.

Eleven weather-related disasters hit the U.S. last year, and they each caused over a billion dollars in damage, making 2012 the most destructive (and expensive) year ever.

But that was just in America. Around the world, extreme weather is felt on a daily basis.

The Met Office, Britain’s weather service, declared 2012 the wettest year ever in England. In fact, four of the five wettest years in the last century in the United Kingdom, have all occurred in the last 10 years!

In Australia, the first eight days of this year rank among the 20 hottest days in that country’s history.

Sicily and parts of southern Italy were hit with severe snowstorms for the first time since World War II.

It is so cold in Eastern Russia (minus 50 degrees Fahrenheit), that traffic lights have stopped working.

In the western Chinese province of Xinjiang, more than a thousand houses have collapsed under a relentless onslaught of snow, and over 180,000 livestock froze to death.

Meanwhile down in Rio de Janeiro, the temperature hit 109 degrees on December 26, the city’s highest recorded temperature since official records began in 1915.

And finally, this one floored me. Last year in Saudi Arabia, it rained on a day in which the temperature hit 109 degrees, which when you think about it, sounds absolutely preposterous. How can a cloudy, rainy day be that hot? There’s no way that can happen!

But it did happen, and it was the hottest downpour in the history of this planet.

Still think climate change is a “myth?”

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“Since I wrote one of the first books for a general audience about global warming way back in 1989, and since I’ve spent the intervening decades working ineffectively to slow that warming, I can say with some confidence that we’re losing the fight, badly and quickly – losing it because, most of all, we remain in denial about the peril that human civilization is in.” – climate activist Bill McKibben

One of the most hair-raising articles I’ve ever read on climate change was written by Bill McKibben in the July 19^th issue of Rolling Stone magazine. He said that in order to avoid a global catastrophe, we need to pay attention to three very important numbers:

2 degrees Celsius

Climate scientists agree. The average global temperature must not increase past 2 degrees Celsius. So far we’ve raised the average temperature of the planet to just under 0.8 degrees Celsius (thanks to our relentless burning of fossil fuels which releases toxic carbon emissions into our atmosphere). The 0.8 increase in our global temperature has been far more destructive than scientists even envisioned. For instance, a third of summer sea ice in the Arctic is gone and the oceans are 30 percent more acidic. And since carbon emissions trap a lot of warm air, as a consequence we now have more water vapor in our atmosphere, especially over our oceans. This means that the oceans are now 5 percent wetter, and this increases the likelihood of devastating floods.

565 gigatons

This is the amount of carbon that scientists believe is safe for us to burn. Anything more than that and we cross the 2 degrees Celsius threshold.

2,795 gigatons

This is the amount of carbon already contained in the coal, oil, and gas reserves of the fossil-fuel industry. This number is 5 times higher than 565. This means that the fossil-fuel industry already have enough carbon in their possession to destroy the Earth’s climate forever, and cause the deaths of millions (if not billions) of people worldwide.

In order to avoid this nightmare scenario, we have to keep the carbon that the fossil-fuel industry wants to burn, in the ground. On one side of this battle are scientists, activists, and concerned citizens all over the globe. On the other side is public enemy number one, the fossil-fuel industry, the richest, most successful, most powerful industry in the history of the world.

They are also the most destructive.

In a recent interview with Bill Moyers, writer and activist Naomi Klein said this about the fossil-fuel industry:

“Lots of companies do rotten things in the course of their business – pay terrible wages, make people work in sweatshops – and we pressure them to change those practices. But the fossil-fuel industry, … wrecking the planet is their business model. It’s what they do.”

Last year ExxonMobile CEO Rex Tillerson told Wall Street analysts that the company plans to spend $37 billion a year through 2016 ($100 million a day) searching for more oil and gas.

That means they will spend $100 million dollars a day, wrecking the planet.

The big fossil-fuel companies (Exxon, BP, Shell) have fought for years to prevent government regulation of carbon dioxide. This is because those underground reserves are their primary asset, the holding that gives their companies value. If you told them that, in order to avoid destroying the world’s climate, they couldn’t pump out their reserves, the value of their companies would plummet.

As McKibben explained in Rolling Stone: “Much of their profit comes from a single historical accident: Alone among businesses, the fossil-fuel industry is allowed to dump its main waste, carbon dioxide, for free. Nobody else gets that break – if you own a restaurant, you have to pay someone to cart away your trash. But the fossil-fuel industry is different, and for sound historical reasons: Until a quarter-century ago, almost no one knew that CO2 was dangerous.”

This is why we need President Obama, and other leaders around the world, to pass laws that make these companies pay a carbon tax. Once the Exxons, and the BPs of the world start paying for the damage they are causing, the price of their products will rise. And this is a good thing because we as consumers will start to use less of their products, thereby leveling the playing field for companies that have energy sources that don’t cause pollution.

Speaking of President Obama, later this year he is expected to make his decision on whether to allow the construction of a massive pipeline, which would be used to export tar sand oil from Alberta, Canada to oil refineries in the Gulf of Mexico. The Keystone XL pipeline would bring tar sands oil right through America’s heartland. The problem with tar sand oil is that it causes catastrophic damage to the environment.

The process of extracting tar sands oil, which is much dirtier than regular crude oil, goes a little something like this:

Thousands of acres of forests will have to be destroyed in order to get to the land where the tar sands are located. Vast amounts of fresh water must be poisoned, and vast amounts of natural gas must be burned (most likely through hydraulic fracking - a highly controversial, and toxic means of extracting natural gas). This is done to liquefy the "tar" and separate it from the "sand," thus giving it the name of the product. 

When the tar sands oil is pulled from the earth, it destroys the land, turning the area into a toxic, slimy, uninhabitable hellhole.

NASA scientist James Hansen said that if these tar sands from Canada are extracted from the Earth, it would practically be “game over for the planet.”

He also said this, ... brace yourself:

“Canada’s tar sands contain twice the amount of carbon dioxide emitted by global oil use in our entire history. If we were to fully exploit this new oil source, and continue to burn our conventional oil, gas, and coal supplies, concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere eventually would reach levels higher than in the Pliocene era, more than 2.5 million years ago, when sea level was at least 50 feet higher than it is right now. That level of heat-trapping gases would assure that the disintegration of the ice sheets would accelerate out of control. Sea levels would rise and destroy coastal cities. Global temperatures would become intolerable. Twenty to 50 percent of the planet’s species would be driven to extinction. Civilization would be at risk.”

“That is the long-term outlook. But near-term, things will be bad enough. Over the next several decades, the western United States and the semi-arid region from North Dakota to Texas will develop semi-permanent drought, with rain, when it does come, occurring in extreme events with heavy flooding. Economic losses would be incalculable. More and more of the Midwest would be a dust bowl. California’s Central Valley could no longer be irrigated. Food prices would rise to unprecedented levels.”

At least fifty oil companies, business trade associations, labor unions, and political groups with combined lobbying budgets of more than $178 million lobbied Washington in support of the Keystone XL pipeline in 2012.

Last weekend the largest climate rally in American history took place in our nation's capital. An estimated 35,000 people joined the Forward On Climate Rally, where protesters delivered a clear message to Barack Obama – say “NO” to the Keystone XL pipeline.

What will the president decide? We don’t know. During last week’s State of the Union Address he said we needed to take action on climate change, and he talked about the need to develop more solar and wind energy. But just moments later, he said he was speeding up new gas and oil permits.

I hope he says no. But deep down, I have a sad feeling that he is going to approve the pipeline.

I hope I’m wrong. God I hope I’m wrong.

What’s the weather going to be like in the next year? Or in 5 years? 10 years? 20 years?

It’s going to get worse. And we’re going to have certain media outlets say “climate change isn’t happening”, and when that stops working, they’ll say “climate change is happening but it’s not man-made.”

And why would they do that? Why would our media tell these bold-faced lies?

Because they gotta protect the fossil-fuel industry at all costs.

According to the media watchdog group ‘Media Matters’, the three Sunday morning political talk shows spent a combined eight minutes talking about climate change in 2012.

Eight minutes … combined.

The three nightly news programs on ABC, NBC, and CBS weren’t much better. They spent a total of one hour combined talking about climate change in 2012. What they did, like in the case of Superstorm Sandy, was that they talked about the disaster, but they did not talk about what caused it.

And when they did talk about climate change, they embarrassed themselves by not interviewing a single climate scientist. Not one. Instead, they talked to, I kid you not, Republicans. Instead of bringing on a scientist, someone who has spent years studying climate change, they brought on a bunch of Republicans, most of whom refuse to even believe climate change is a real thing.

Good grief! No wonder the American public is so woefully uninformed.

I would love to tell you that I’m brimming with optimism. But I’m not. If you were to ask me how I feel about climate change, and the future of our planet, I would give you a two-word answer:

"We’re fucked."

We’re in trouble because the permafrost, which is the frozen ground that has locked in leaves, and roots, and other materials in the arctic tundra since the Ice Age, has started to melt due to rising temperatures. And once it melts, it will release an ungodly amount of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, which will make things much, much worse. 

We’re in trouble because a big study conducted by 20 countries that are most affected by climate change, mostly south of the Equator, pointed out that as many as 400,000 people are dying every year due to climate change.

We’re in trouble because China and India, the two most heavily-populated countries in the world, are lifting millions of their residents out of poverty. And as their middle class continues to grow, so will their demand for more cars, televisions, air-conditioners, washing machines – all things that rely on the burning of fossil fuels.

We’re in trouble because China burns more coal, which releases radioactive clouds filled with toxic ash into the atmosphere, than all the countries in the world combined.

We’re in trouble because the U.S. is set to become the world’s largest producer of oil within 7 years (surpassing Saudi Arabia). This is NOT a good thing.

We’re in trouble because the United Nations Environmental Program released a report late last year that suggest carbon emissions have increased by 20 percent since 2000. This is NOT a good thing.

We’re in trouble because we pump over a billion tons of carbon into our atmosphere every hour!

We’re in trouble because cap-and-trade was defeated in Congress, and the international climate change summits held in Copenhagen and Kyoto were big fat flops because the world leaders couldn’t agree on anything.

And finally, we’re in trouble because this is now the 333^rd consecutive month with an above average temperature. That means that if you were born after 1985, you have never lived in a month that was colder than the average month.

In 2010, the Pentagon declared, in its Quadrennial Defense Review, that "changes in the global climate are increasing the frequency and intensity of cyclones, droughts, floods, and other radical weather events, and that the effects may destabilize governments; spark mass migrations, famine, and pandemics; and prompt military conflict in particularly vulnerable areas of the world, including the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and sub-Saharan Africa."

There are frightening projections of how much the climate is going to change by 2100. According to a recent study by The International Energy Agency, a rise in global temperature will eclipse 3 degrees Celsius. Scientists are freaking out because we’re on pace to surpass 2 degrees Celsius. But 3 degrees Celsius? We’re talking about the transformation of our planet into something … unrecognizable.

A recent report released by the World Bank indicated a possible rise in global temperature to over 4 degrees Celsius. That’s mind-boggling! If this happens, say goodbye to Manhattan, Miami, New Orleans, San Diego, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and every other coastal city on Earth. Four degrees Celsius will mean that our great-grandchildren will grow up on a planet straight out of a science fiction movie.

Last year, more than $600 billion dollars was spent worldwide on oil and gas exploration and production, according to a Harvard study titled “Oil: The New Revolution.” That study forecasts a boom in fossil-fuel production that could push the global heating of the planet to 8 degrees Celsius. If this happens, say goodbye to the human race because we will cease to exist.

I'm not kidding. A global temperature rise of 8 degrees Celsius will kill everybody on this planet.

Maybe the super-rich will go live on the Moon, because they damn sure ain’t living on Earth.

I can’t predict how far we will go over the 2 degrees Celsius benchmark, but I am convinced that we will.

Why?

Because there’s money to be made. But only for a very few people. The .00001 of the top one percent will make billions, while the rest of civilization chokes to death. Eventually they will choke to death too. But they don’t care. They don’t care that they are destroying this planet.

They. Don’t. Care. 

And as much harm as the fossil-fuel industry is doing, I’m not without blame. Every time I wake up in the middle of the night, and turn on the heat, or in the summer when I run the air conditioner all day, I am contributing to climate change. We all are. I don’t have children, but if I did, I would worry about the planet that we are leaving them to deal with.

And I'm so angry at all the climate change deniers, the people who think this is all a big joke, a hoax concocted by scientists in an effort to dupe the government into giving them money.

What a bunch of nonsense. If you're a climate change denier, don't talk to me because I don't want to hear your bullshit. Go sell crazy somewhere else.

If climate change doesn’t terrify you, then you are horribly misinformed. This is our greatest threat. And what are we doing?

Nothing. Not a goddamn thing. We’re too preoccupied with starting wars in the Middle East.

Why?

Because that’s where the fucking oil is! The only reason we go to war anymore is to drop bombs on brown-skinned people, just so we can get our hands on their precious oil.

The future of human civilization is at stake, and the only thing our world leaders want is more and more is oil.

Drill baby drill.

Down The Lonely Dark Road Of Addiction

(To honor the one-year anniversary of Whitney Houston's death, I am posting an essay I wrote last year. Please share this as it is a very important topic.)

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I was home last Saturday night watching a movie when my friend Sherrie texted me with some heartbreaking news.

"Whitney Houston dead!"

Her spectacular voice made her famous. Her personal life made her infamous.

And now she was gone.

Damn.

I hate it when the demons win. 

I wasn’t shocked that she died. Anybody who followed the trainwreck soap opera that was Whitney Houston knew she was living on borrowed time. But the news of her demise was devastating nonetheless.

She was the most accomplished female artist ever, selling 170 million albums, singles, and videos. Two of her albums, 'Whitney Houston' (her phenomenal debut), and the soundtrack to The Bodyguard are two of the most successful albums ever (they sold a combined 60 million copies). Her rendition of The Star Spangled Banner at the 1991 Super Bowl was so awesome it overshadowed the football game. Her career defining 'I Will Always Love You' is the best-selling single of all-time. And her influence on pop culture is unparalleled. She paved the way for Mariah Carey, Celine Dion, Toni Braxton, Mary J. Blige, Beyonce, Adele, and countless others.

And seriously, have you seen American Idol? Every other female contestant is a Whitney wannabe, trying their best to sound like the pop icon. Any second-rate dancer can imitate Michael Jackson's show-stopping moves, but how many people have you seen who can sing like Whitney?

Very, very few.

I guess I needed to know how other people felt about her passing. So I decided to check out what people were saying on the message boards.

Bad idea.

After about 10 minutes of tasteless jokes and people passing judgment, I had had enough. Even in the event of tragedy people on the internet still find a way to expose their inner tool. I got so pissed at all those perfect little people who live perfect little lives casting stones.

She was somebody's mother, somebody's daughter. Where was the empathy? Where was the compassion? The American poet Miller Williams wrote a powerful poem about compassion:

Have compassion for everyone you meet

even if they don’t want it. What seems conceit

bad manners, or cynicism is always a sign

of things no ears have heard, no eyes have seen

you do not know what wars are going on

down there where the spirit meets the bone

There were numerous wars going on inside Whitney Houston. On one hand she was a pop superstar who had a once-in-a-generation talent. But on the other hand she was an addict, addicted to drugs, alcohol, and Bobby Brown.

People who suffer from addiction are tortured souls, and they drive their family and friends down a road that leads straight to hell. 

And there is no worse feeling than standing helplessly ashore, while the person you love drowns in the murky waters of addiction.

I should know. I’ve seen it firsthand.

I have two fathers. One was named Sam. He adopted me when I was a wayward 19-year-old. He died two years ago, but not before instilling in me an understanding of what it meant to be a responsible adult.

My biological dad is named Melvin. Our relationship is complex. I wasn't raised by him. My biological mom raised me as a single parent. Melvin lived in Richmond and I lived in North Carolina. He married a woman named Freida and he lived with their three kids. He was by all means a responsible adult. He worked hard, paid the bills, and provided for his family.

Every summer I would stay a couple of weeks with my dad, my stepmom, and my stepsisters. We were the black Brady Bunch. And my childhood with them was one that was filled with a lot of great memories.

But after 12 years of marriage something happened. My dad met a guy named David who at the time was dating my dad’s sister-in-law Pam. David was my dad’s exact opposite: unemployed, immature, and reckless.

David would drink, do drugs, and get into vicious fights with my Aunt Pam. He could be charming one minute and a sociopath the next. To this day I don’t know what it was my dad saw in David, but whatever he saw, he liked. He and David soon became inseparable. Although my dad always used to hang out on the weekends, this was different. All of a sudden my dad was hanging out a lot more than usual, and with some really sketchy people. And his personality changed. He became more combative towards my stepmom and more neglectful of his kids. And my dad’s old friends, guys he had been cool with for years, began dropping like flies.

Then came the breakup.

A child will never forget when his parents divorce. For me it was April 1994. I was visiting my dad and my stepmom during my high school Easter break. My stepmom and I had just left the house. After driving a couple of blocks, she pulled the car over and laid a bombshell on me.

“Keith, there’s something I have to tell you. Me and your dad are getting a divorce.”

I was stunned. I had just turned 18 and I had already decided that I was going to move to Richmond after I graduated from high school. And I was going to move in with my dad and my stepmom (whom I adored).

“But … why?”

“It’s hard to explain … but your father has changed. He’s no longer the man I married. I don’t know who he is … I’ve asked him to move out. I’m sorry … I know this is hard for you.”

I nodded. And then I quickly turned my head and looked out the window. I didn’t want my stepmom to see me cry.

What exactly happened to my dad?

I moved in with him a couple of years later and got a bird’s-eye view of his downfall. We lived in Mosby Court, a rough housing project about a mile east of downtown. When I was younger my dad was always a clean-cut, clean-shaven guy who took pride in his appearance. But now he looked a hot mess. His hair was never combed and his clothes were all raggedy.

When I was a kid I liked all of my dad’s friends. But now, he only hung out with people who looked like they belonged in a police lineup.

And dad was hardly ever sober. His eyes were always bloodshot. His speech always slurred. I never knew exactly what he was doing because he never brought it around me, but I wasn't stupid. I knew he was doing something!

I would ask him, "Hey man. Are you alright?" And his answer was always the same: "Yup!"

Also, papa was a rolling stone. He was always out in the street. And when he was home we would often argue. His behavior was so erratic. One night at around 3 o'clock in the morning, he fell asleep while frying some chicken. Moments later, the force of my coughing woke me up. That's when I noticed the smoke. I dashed towards the kitchen, banging my feet against everything because the smoke made it hard to see where I was going. I turned off the stove and threw away the charred remains of his late night dinner. Then I opened every window in the apartment. That's when I noticed my dad asleep on the couch. And all I could think was "how in the world can somebody sleep through all of this?" If I hadn't been there that night he could have died.

I woke him up and told him what happened. And the first thing he did was yell at me for throwing away his burnt chicken.

And dad kept getting into trouble with the police. I will never forget the Sunday morning I picked him up from the city jail. He walked out and I barely recognized him. He had lost his wife, his job, and his self-respect. He had hit rock bottom. The metamorphosis was complete. Bruce Banner had turned into The Incredible Addict.

It was around this time that I met Sam (who would eventually become my adopted dad). He was a coworker of mine at the library I worked part-time at. He would later introduce me to his wife Brenda (who became my adopted mom), and his little daughter Samone (who became my adopted sister). Like every kid who grew up in a single parent home, I fantasized about how cool it would be to live in a two-parent household. And I would find that two-parent household, not with Melvin and Frieda, but with Sam and Brenda.

Life is funny that way.

A few months after meeting Sam’s extended family, one of my dad's “friends” stole my entire CD collection while my dad slept in the next room.

That was the last straw. I moved in with Sam and his family shortly thereafter.

After I left, my biological dad still couldn't keep it together. My stepsister Nicole told me that she had heard about how far our dad had fallen. So she and my stepmom Freida went over to his apartment unannounced.

“When I looked into dad’s eyes that day I knew. And then I looked around and the apartment was a mess. And I just started crying. And the sight of me crying hit him hard. He looked at me and he apologized. He kept saying I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’ll do better. I’ll do better.”

My stepsister told me that in 1996. It’s 16 years later and my dad is still trying to do better.

Addiction occurs when you need more of a drug to get you high and you suffer withdrawal symptoms when the drug level in your body drops. Addiction causes a change in the brain. When that change occurs, you lose control over your urges. You lose control over your behavior. And not only do you change mentally, but in most cases, you change physically as well.

Here in America millions of people are coping with addiction. And the number of things we are addicted to is astounding: sedatives (alcohol, Quaaludes, valium), stimulants (ecstasy, cocaine, crystal meth), narcotics (heroin, oxycontin, vicodin), psychedelics (LSD, PCP), antidepressants (Prozac, Zoloft), hydrocarbons (inhalants, nitrates), anesthetics, and steroids.

An addiction is even worse for young adults. Statistics show the younger you are when using drugs, the greater chance you have at becoming addicted. If a teen uses alcohol regularly at age 13, there’s a 43 percent chance he or she will become an alcoholic. By comparison, there’s only a 10 percent chance for those who start at age 21. When teens use drugs and/or alcohol, their still-growing brain confuses these substances with the natural neurotransmitters that influences our mood, our sleep, and our appetite.

Not to make excuses, but being a teenager today is no walk in the park. I don’t miss being a teenager one bit. The peer pressure was off the charts. And I remember being in a constant state of confusion, anxiety, and depression.

And I remembered being offered drugs, a lot.

And because I have a tendency to look at everything through pop-culture lenses, I decided to check out how many celebrities have died as a result of their addiction to drugs and/or alcohol. The list was staggering. Here are some of the more famous names: John Belushi, Lenny Bruce, Richard Burton, Truman Capote, Kurt Cobain, Dorothy Dandridge, DJ AM, Chris Farley, Judy Garland (who like Whitney Houston, was also found dead in a bathtub at the age of 48), Jimi Hendrix, Billie Holiday, Michael Hutchence, Michael Jackson, Janis Joplin, Heath Ledger, Bruce Lee, Gerald Levert, Frankie Lymon, Jim Morrison, Anna Nicole Smith, Marilyn Monroe, Brittany Murphy, River Phoenix, Elvis Presley, movie producer Don Simpson, Ike Turner, and Amy Winehouse.

Yes. A drug addiction can kill you. But addictions aren’t just limited to drugs. We're also addicted to gambling, sex, pornography, people, love, food, work, and computer and video games.

But how do you know if someone has fallen prey to drugs and/or alcohol? What are the warning signs?

I can tell you from experience, those warning signs aren’t hard to notice. All you have to do is pay attention.

Does your friend or loved one:

Turn up late for functions or dates?

No longer follows through on his or her commitments?

Appears to be sick often?

Has problems at work?

Withdraws from family and friends?

Has unexplained absences in his or her schedule?

Has new “friends” whom you’ve never met?

Has lapses of concentration or memory?

Stays out late frequently and sleeps in more during the day?

Appears surprisingly secretive about specific aspects of his or her life?

If you answered yes to more than one of these questions, then it might be time to confront this person. But if you’re going to confront them, don’t half-ass it. Be firm and direct. Expect them to get angry. And expect denial. And be prepared to be empathetic – make a sustained effort to understand what it’s like to feel so out-of-control, so miserable, so lonely, so frustrated, and so tormented by the past that alcohol and drugs are the only reliable ways to feel good.

When it comes to addiction, here are two things I believe:

Number one, I believe addiction is a disease.

That’s why reading those comments about Whitney Houston made me so upset. A lot of people played the personal responsibility card. They said she could’ve stopped at any time if she really wanted to.

Not true. Addicts can’t stop any time they want to. Addictions are diseases of the brain. They control what you think and they control how you feel. And because most addicts don’t think they’re addicts, they can't muster up the strength to walk away on their own.

And number two, 12 step programs don’t work for everyone.

The percentage of successful recoveries is modest. According to a survey from Alcoholics Anonymous, nine out of 10 people drop out within the first year.

Can you imagine what the friends and family members of Eric Clapton had to go through? He kicked his heroin habit, but got hooked on cocaine. Then he kicked his cocaine habit and became an alcoholic.

Quitting is HARD. And it takes baby steps. We all know of people who have overcome addiction. And they live their lives one day at a time. And each day represents yet another step towards recovery.

My dad left Richmond several years ago and now lives back in my tiny hometown with my grandmother. That's the good news. The bad news is that he's not exactly in recovery. He's in his early fifties, but he looks much older than that. After years of putting poison into his body, his hair is now completely white and he’s missing some of his teeth. And to add insult to injury, his addiction to alcohol appears to be worse than ever. We often get into arguments when I’m home because he wants me to drive him around town so he can get his drink-on, so he can "waste away again in Margaritaville!"

A couple of years ago he nearly died from a brain aneurysm. He was hospitalized for four months. I looked at him in his hospital bed and I wondered if his near-death experience would be enough to make him quit drinking.

It wasn’t.

My biological mom tells me to pray for him. But I’ve been praying for him for 18 years. And I think I’m done. I’m waving the white flag. I’m tired.

The day after I learned of Whitney Houston’s death, I set my ipod to my Somber Station, which is a playlist of melancholy songs. One of the first songs my ipod played was 'Angel' by Sarah McLachlan.

How appropriate.

That song, which is the most haunting song I’ve ever heard, was inspired by the fatal overdose of Smashing Pumpkins keyboardist Jonathan Melvoin. The “angel” symbolizes the drugs the addict gives in to repeatedly. The first time I heard this song I immediately thought of my dad. Now when I hear it, I think of Whitney Houston.

To all of the addicts who are out there, to all of the addicts who are “in the arms of the angel,” may you find the help you so desperately need.

Your family and friends are rooting for you.

A Linebacker And A Fake Dead Girlfriend

When I was in the eighth grade I lived across the street from a girl named Antoinette. She was short, spunky, and had a bit of a feisty attitude. I would see her from across the street and wave. But we didn’t have much of a relationship. We were neighbors, nothing more, nothing less. One weekend a friend of mine named Jeremiah came to spend the weekend with me. We were talking and at one point he asked me if I had a girlfriend. What I should have said was no. But I was embarrassed and I didn't want the guy to think less of me. So I made one up.

“Yeah … Of course I do! Um, the girl across the street? Antoinette? Yeah, that’s my girlfriend.”

This greatly satisfied him. A mischievous smile came across his face.

“Did you kiss her?”

Once again, I lied.

“We um … yeah… we kiss. Lots of times.”

“Yo man, that’s cool.”

He didn’t bring it up again for the rest of the weekend. Whew! Bullet dodged, ... or so I thought.

When I got back to school on Monday everybody was talking about me and Antoinette.

“I didn’t know you were dating Antoinette!”

“Hey man, how long you been dating Antoinette?”

“Keith and Antoinette, sitting in a tree, k-i-s-s-i-n-g.”

YIKES! I was in trouble. Big trouble. Antoinette was not the type of girl who was going to take this lightly. I knew there was a strong possibility that my fake girlfriend was going to kick my real ass!

I wouldn’t have long to wait. A couple of days later while I was out with friends, Antoinette cornered me.

“WHY YOU TELL EVERYBODY I'M YOUR GIRLFRIEND? WHY YOU TELLING THAT LIE?”

Before I could say a word she delivered a crotch shot, a swift kick to my nether regions. I let out a scream, which sounded like a cross between a dying cat and Mariah Carey hitting a high note.

“THAT’S WHAT YOU GET FOR LYING!”

I crumpled to the ground in severe pain, so much so that I didn’t even hear the sound of my buddies laughing at me.

That was the first and only time I ever invented a fake girlfriend.

“Faith is believing in something that you most likely can’t see, but you believe it to be true. You feel it in your heart, and in your soul, that it’s true, but you still take that leap.” – Manti Te’o

Unless you’ve been living under a rock these past few days then you already know the bizarre story of Notre Dame star linebacker Manti Te’o. But for those who don’t, here’s a quick rundown.

Te’o met a Stanford student named Lennay Kekua either in 2009 or early 2012. He met her either after a football game in Palo Alto, or he met her on Facebook. They became friends and fell in love, but their relationship was strictly online. He didn’t visit her at Stanford. She didn’t visit him in South Bend. Last April, she was involved in a near-fatal car accident. While she was in a hospital nursing her wounds, doctors discovered that she had leukemia. Shortly after, she fell into a coma. Too weak to talk, she was comforted by the sound of Te’o’s voice, who called her everyday as she inched closer and closer to death. On September 11, Te’o’s beloved grandmother passed away. Either on the same day, or three days later, Lennay Kekua passes. Inspired by her death, Te’o leads Notre Dame to a 20-3 upset win over Michigan State. He became an instant media darling. He was on the cover of Sports Illustrated. He was on CBS This Morning. He was on ESPN with letters that Kekua had written him while she lay on her deathbed. His emotional story became Notre Dame’s rally cry, and the Fighting Irish finished the regular season undefeated, and landed a spot in the national championship game against Alabama.

A couple of weeks ago, Timothy Burke and Jack Dickey, two writers for the snarky sports website Deadspin, received an anonymous tip. There was something fishy about the Manti Te’o story. So they did some investigating. And what they found was stunning.

There was no recorded death of anybody with the name Lennay Kekua. Her passing, which was recounted so many times in the national media, produced no obituary and no funeral announcement. There was no report of a severe car accident involving anybody named Lennay Kekua. The Stanford registrar’s office had no record of her ever being enrolled. The only proof that she ever existed came from a couple of Twitter accounts. And the picture of Lennay Kekua that was plastered all over TV, was actually of a woman in California who had no idea her picture was being used as the face of a dead girlfriend.

We found out the ugly truth on Wednesday afternoon when Deadspin released their jaw-dropping piece. The inspirational, heartbreaking story of Manti Te’o was all a lie, an elaborate hoax.

Lennay Kekua didn’t exist.

Are you confused yet? Good!

After Deadspin published their bombshell piece, Te'o released a statement saying that he had been the victim of a cruel practical joke. In a surreal press conference on Wednesday night, Notre Dame’s athletic director Jack Swarbrick, backed Te’o’s story all the way saying, “Every single thing about this was real to Manti. There was no suspicion. The grief was real, the affection was real, and that’s the sad nature of this cruel game.”

Swarbrick revealed that a private outside firm had been hired to investigate. Hell, the man even cried. But the cynic in me became angry. Declan Sullivan, a 20-year-old videographer, died while filming Notre Dame’s football practice from atop a tower two years ago.

Jack Swarbrick never cried in a press conference about that.

Lizzy Seeberg was a student at neighboring St. Mary’s University. Two years ago she committed suicide just days after reporting that a Notre Dame football player had sexually assaulted her.

Jack Swarbrick never cried in a press conference about that either.

Why is Manti Te'o’s phony-baloney girlfriend more tragic than the suicide of a girl who accused a Notre Dame football player of rape?

Only Jack Swarbrick can answer that. In the meantime, the sports world could only scratch its head at such an odd story.

1. Notre Dame says Te’o never met Lennay Kekua, that their relationship was strictly online. But his own father gave the South Bend Tribune a detailed account of how the couple first met at a Stanford game in 2009, and rendezvoused in Hawaii after becoming a “couple” in early 2012. And Te’o himself told ESPN that she was “the most beautiful girl I had ever met.”

2. Te’o called Kekua “the love of my life.” His parents were convinced they were going to get married. But, if you believe Notre Dame’s account, they actually never met, not even once. They never even Skyped.

3. After he supposedly received the shock of his life – a phone call from someone using Kekua’s voice and phone (after she had allegedly died) – he stayed quiet for three weeks. It wasn’t until December 26 that he told school officials who then hired private investigators.

None of this makes sense.

Meeting a girl online is one thing. But to call her your girlfriend before you’ve even laid eyes on her? WHO DOES THAT?

And even worse, Te’o publicly mourned the girl. Even if he was tricked (and I have my doubts), he clearly sensationalized the relationship in an effort to win sympathy. The guy was up for the Heisman Award, college football’s most prestigious honor. His unbelievable story of triumph over tragedy helped to make him a contender for that award.

A girlfriend who is in an “accident” and you don’t go visit her?

A girlfriend who is hospitalized with leukemia and you don’t go visit her?

A girlfriend who is buried and you don’t go to her funeral?

Good grief! You know you’re a terrible boyfriend when your fake girlfriend dies, just so she can break up with you!

During that press conference, Jack Swarbrick cited the documentary ‘Catfish’ as the motivation for the person perpetuating the hoax. Catfish is not just the name of a funny-looking fish with whiskers, and it’s not just the name of a documentary, and it’s not just the name of an MTV show, the word also describes someone with questionable motives.

Catfish (n.) – someone who pretends to be someone they’re not using Facebook, Twitter, or other social media to create false identities, particularly to pursue deceptive online romances.

I’ve seen the Catfish documentary, in which a guy falls in love with a girl on Facebook who turns out to be not who she says she is, and I wasn’t entirely convinced that the whole thing wasn’t a big ruse.

In one particular episode of the MTV show, Nev Schulman (the show’s creator and producer) meets Sunny, who says she has been “dating” a medical student online named “Jameson” for eight months.

“He’s going to be an anesthesiologist. He does online classes,” Sunny says of the mysterious “Jameson.”

Schulman convinces Sunny to take a road trip to meet “Jameson” face to face. Sunny agrees, only to find out that “Jameson” was really a woman who had been pretending to be a man online for four years.

The Catfish in the Manti Te’o story is a young man by the name of Ronaiah Tuiasosopo. Apparently he orchestrated the whole thing. He is also a good friend of Te’o.

The writer who did the most to canonize the mythology of Manti Te’o was Sports Illustrated’s Pete Thamel. In the October 1^st edition of the magazine, which placed Te’o on the cover, Thamel wrote that the linebacker “has restored the shine to the Golden Dome.”

Even before his great 2012 season, the media had already defined Te’o as one of the good guys. The narrative said that he was a humble Boy Scout, a Mormon, a devoted family man, and a guy who returned to Notre Dame for his senior season because, in the words of his father, “he was lead there to do something.”

But the problem is that our sports media is too quick to elevate athletes who they deem worthy. As Travis Waldron writes for ThinkProgress:

“This is a familiar pattern in sports, where heroes are built on against-the-odds or larger-than-life stories that aren’t verified or properly vetted until it’s too late. Then, when a story-shattering revelation comes to the surface, the media forgets the image it helped create and turns its attention to destroying that image piece by piece. Little attention is ever paid to its own role in the process.”

The same sports media that built up the false mythology of Manti Te’o, also built up the false mythology of Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa, Lance Armstrong, and many others.

What Pete Thamel and the rest of the sports media did, was that they forgot the most important thing you should do after an athlete tells you their life story:

Trust, but verify.

It is amazing that two young writers who nobody had ever heard of (including one who is about to finish his last semester of college), completely schooled our sports media in the fine art of journalism. No one bothered to verify if this unbelievable story was true. Not Sports Illustrated. Not ESPN. Not Yahoo Sports. Nobody. And Manti Te’o would have gotten away with the whole thing if it hadn’t been for those meddling kids!

I studied journalism at VCU and I was taught that you always verify a person’s story. What this tells me is that our corporate sports media is just as lazy as our corporate political media.

As for Te’o, we have three possible scenarios.

1. He was completely fooled and he had no idea that the love of his life was as real as a three dollar bill.

If this is true, Manti Te’o is the dumbest person on the face of the Earth. 

Likelihood of it being true: 10 percent

2. He was initially fooled, yet played along in a weird game of willful deceit.

If this is true, he played along either as a savvy PR tactic, or to hide his own humiliation.

Likelihood of it being true: 20 percent.

3. He was in on it the whole time.

Likelihood of it being true: 70 percent.

Why do I believe this? Well, let’s analyze Manti Te’o in his own words. Late Friday night, he gave an interview to ESPN’s Jeremy Schaap. He said he didn’t know for sure that Lennay Kekua never existed until Wednesday, when his friend Ronaiah Tuiasosopo called him and admitted that he and two other people were behind the hoax.

In the interview he said he lied about meeting Kekua, and that lie is the reason his father went to bat for his son, telling reporters that Te’o and Kekua had met face to face.

He said he tried to speak with Kekua via Skype and Facetime on several occasions, but the person at the other end of the line was in what he called a “black box” and wasn’t seen.

He planned to meet Kekua in person several times, in Los Angeles and in Hawaii, but on each occasion she called off the meeting or sent others in her place.

And finally, at one point Schaap asks Te’o why didn’t he go see Kekua in the hospital. And Te’o’s answer was, “it never crossed my mind. I don’t know. I was in school.”

IT NEVER CROSSED HIS MIND??? WHAT THE HELL???

He presented NO FACTS! Nothing! No verifiable proof. He didn’t prove that he wasn’t involved. His answers were illogical. Swarbrick said that the school had been investigating for weeks, but he didn’t know it was a hoax until Wednesday?

When it comes to lying, Manti Te’o is a repeat offender. He lied to the press. He lied to his family. He even continued to lie about the dead girl even after he found out she wasn’t real. Then, he and his crisis management team decides to wait until midnight on a Friday to give an audio-only interview to a reporter of his liking. And he expects us to believe him?

Child please!

But here’s the thing. Even though it’s a hoax, I gotta admit, it’s a pretty damn good one. As Malcolm Gladwell pointed out, this story hits on all the right themes. You got the pretty girl who survives a car accident, only to find out she has leukemia, which is the real-life equivalent to 'Love Story', the Hollywood classic starring Ali MacGraw and Ryan O’Neal.

You got the inspirational angle. Te’o said that Kekua didn’t want him to come to her funeral. She wanted him to use her death as motivation. In the movie 'Knute Rockne All American', Rockne goes to visit his star football player George Gipp (portrayed by Ronald Reagan), who is dying of pneumonia. And Gipp says to him – “I’ve got to go Rock. It’s all right. I’m not afraid. Sometime Rock, when the team is up against it, when things are wrong and the breaks are beating the boys, ask them to go in there with all they’ve got and win just for the Gipper. I don’t know where I’ll be then Rock. But I’ll know about it, and I’ll be happy.”

And finally, you got the Notre Dame angle. No other school is better at mythmaking than the school of the Fighting Irish. It’s the home of Knute Rockne, George Gipp, and Rudy. It is the most storied (and most hated) college football program in America. Trust me, if this Manti Te’o story had happened at Texas Tech, or UCLA, it wouldn’t have the same national appeal.

This story had heartbreak, inspiration, and Notre Dame. Now that’s what I call the Tearjerker Trifecta!

This is, without question, the most bizarre sports scandal since Tonya Harding’s goons kneecapped Nancy Kerrigan. And if you think I haven’t spent the last week writing Te'o jokes, then you’re crazy.

Here’s a few of my favorites.

1. THIS JUST IN FROM FOX NEWS: Karl Rove is reporting the results of Manti Te’o’s girlfriend are “too close to call.”

2. Manti Te’o has 99 problems and a girlfriend ain’t one.

3. I heard M. Night Shyamalan has a new movie. It’s about Manti Te’o and his girlfriend and she doesn’t … Well … I don’t want to spoil the ending.

4. If Manti Te’o thinks having a fake girlfriend is bad, wait until he meets her parents! 

5. BREAKING NEWS: Notre Dame Confirms Manti Te'o Now Dating Siri.

6. Manti Te’o just changed his Facebook status from “In A Relationship” to “It’s Really Fucking Complicated.”

7. Personally, I believe Manti Te’o. But my girlfriend, Marilyn Monroe, thinks he’s full of shit. 

8. “I don’t have fake girlfriends often. But when I do, I drink Dos Equis. Stay thirsty my friends!”

We don’t know the whole story. We don’t know why anybody would create this elaborate hoax. We don’t know why a guy would go on TV and pretend that he had a dead girlfriend. But there are two things for which I am sure. I am 70 percent sure that Manti Te’o, the Lying Hawaiian, is in on this hoax. And I’m 100 percent sure that Manti Te’o, Lennay Kekua, and Ronaiah Tuiasosopo are three names that I cannot pronounce with confidence.

We may never know the full story. But what we do know is that there is a real possibility that this strange soap opera may damage Te’o in the upcoming NFL draft. The beautiful irony is that Manti Te’o had a fake dead girlfriend, and now she’s haunting him from her fake grave.

And wow, that’s just awesome.

The NFL Needs Its Head Examined

Last Sunday I watched in horror as Robert Griffith III, the spectacular rookie quarterback for the Washington Redskins, brutally twisted his knee and collapsed in pain. It was late in the fourth quarter and the Redskins were trying to mount a comeback against the Seattle Seahawks. What angered me was the fact that coach Mike Shanahan had decided to leave his star quarterback in the game even though he was limping badly. Griffith, who was already playing with a knee brace, re-injured his knee midway through the first quarter. And as the game wore on, his movements became more and more labored. 

I was pissed. 

“They need to take him out NOW before he gets hurt!”

Too late.

The cruel irony is that Griffith was injured on a play in which he wasn’t even touched.

The Redskins lost the game, but I didn’t care. My only concern was for the health of our quarterback, a charismatic 22-year-old with astonishing talent and a cool nickname (RG3), who had rejuvenated a moribund franchise and a hapless fanbase.

After the game, there were questions that needed to be answered. Questions like, “why in the world was Griffith in the game when he was so hurt that he could barely move?”

Shanahan said he kept Griffith in the game because the quarterback told him that he was “hurt” and “not injured”, “so that was enough for me.”

The reality is that every NFL player plays the game while hurt. It’s part of the league’s DNA, part of its macho culture.

After the game RG3 was asked what he would have done if Shanahan had taken him out: “I’d probably have been right back out there on the field. You respect authority and I respect coach Shanahan, … at the same time you have to step up and be a man sometimes. There was no way I was coming out of the game."

Common sense tells you that you don’t foolishly risk the promising career of a 22-year-old. But this is the NFL. This is the big boys league, the ultimate tough-guy sport. These are our modern-day gladiators, risking their bodies and somehow being able to play while suffering through brutal injuries. Fans are constantly treated to stories of guys playing with broken ribs, separated shoulders, slipped discs, and concussions.

On Wednesday, Robert Griffith III had surgery for a total reconstruction of his right knee to repair a torn ACL and LCL. He had a similar reconstruction on the same knee three years ago when he was a sophomore at Baylor University.

Sally Jenkins, sports columnist for the Washington Post, said in a column she wrote this past week:

“There is no confusion over Robert Griffith III’s knee – and there never was. The Washington Redskins drafted a healthy, thrilling young player and by the time they got done using him up, he lurched around like a pirate with a peg leg.”

But she could have said that about any NFL player. Once the sport is done using them up, most of them lurch around with broken bodies and shattered souls.

Our society demands injury of the few, for the entertainment of the many.

“Are you not entertained? Are you not entertained? Is this not why you are here?” – Maximus (Russell Crowe) in Gladiator

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“I remember every season, multiple occasions where I’d hit someone so hard that my eyes went cross-eyed, and they wouldn’t come uncrossed for a full series of plays. There are the cases where you hit a guy and you’d get into a collision where everything goes off. You’re dazed. And there are others where you are involved in a big, long drive. You start on your own five-yard line, and drive all the way down the field, fifteen … eighteen plays in a row sometimes. Every play: collision, collision, collision. By the time you get to the other end of the field, you’re seeing spots. You feel like you’re going to black out. Literally, these white explosions – boom, boom, boom – lights getting dimmer and brighter, dimmer and brighter.” – Kyle Turley (former NFL lineman)

In September 2009, researchers at the University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research – in a telephone survey of retired players – found that Alzheimer’s disease, or something very similar, was being diagnosed in former NFL players nineteen times more often than in the national population among men ages 30 through 49.

One month later, Malcolm Gladwell, in a much-discussed piece for the New Yorker, compared football to dogfighting. What made his essay so intriguing was that he interviewed several neuropathologists who were studying the effects of repeated blows to the head. They looked at the brains of several deceased ex-football players. And what they discovered was that most of them suffered from a neurological disorder known as chronic traumatic encephalopathy (C.T.E.). Gladwell explains it like this: 

“Found in people who have suffered some kind of brain trauma, CTE has many of the same manifestations as Alzheimer’s: it begins with behavioral and personality changes, followed by disinhibition and irritability, before moving on to dementia. And CTE appears later in life as well, because it takes a long time for the initial trauma to give rise to nerve-cell breakdown and death. But CTE isn’t the result of an endogenous disease. It’s the result of injury.” 

The journal Neurology released the results of a study of 3,439 retired pro players. It reported that veterans of the NFL are more likely than the rest of us to die from brain diseases, including Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (Lou Gehrig’s disease). 

And now, former players are fighting back. The National Football League is facing a class-action lawsuit. Filed in June of last year, and on the behalf of more than 2000 former players, this lawsuit accuses the league of hiding information about the dangers of concussions.

A concussion occurs when the head either accelerates rapidly and then is stopped, or is spun rapidly. This violent shaking causes brain cells to become depolarized and fire all their neurotransmitters at once in an unhealthy cascade, flooding the brain with chemicals and deadening certain receptors linked to learning and memory. The results often include confusion, blurred vision, memory loss, nausea, and sometimes unconsciousness.

For decades the NFL denied through their own paid medical experts that playing football had no long-term effect on the brain. In fact, concussion diagnoses didn’t even exist as recently as 10 years ago. A player would suffer from a vicious hit to the head and he would lie on the ground for a few minutes. The medical staff would help him up and the player would stagger back to the sideline. The announcer calling the game would tell the audience watching that the player “got his bell rung.” Cameras would catch the guy on the sideline as the medical staff revived him with a whiff of smelling salts, followed by a gulp of oxygen. A couple of minutes later and that guy was right back out on the field.

What neuropathologists have discovered is that it’s not just concussions that can cause CTE, but all the little hits to the head as well. A concussion, even a few of them, scattered over the years of your life, will not rot away your brain. But the dozens of or hundreds of sub-concussions, the ordinary brain knocks that a football player suffers every day, in every practice, and in every game can definitely lead to CTE.

This is not something that the average fan thinks about while he or she is watching on their flat-screen TV, but an offensive lineman (whose job is to protect the quarterback), takes a shot to the head on every single play. We’re talking 50, 60, 70 shots to the head every Sunday, for 16 straight weeks.

Football is an inherently physical game with little chance of ever fully eradicating the risk of injury. But it seems to have little choice but to adapt. 

At the college level, the Ivy League last year decided to significantly reduce the number of full contact practices that teams can hold. The NFL has stiffened penalties for hits to the head, moved kickoffs up 5 yards in an attempt to reduce the violent collisions that occur on that play, and just last month, they instituted a policy requiring an independent trainer to attend each game to aid in identifying concussions.

Fans of the NFL lit up the internet message boards. They were not pleased. 

“This is not good. Freaking women organs ruining this league!”

“The NFL is turning into a touch football ‘Nancy Boy’ league!” 

“The pussification of the NFL continues. Every single goddamn year the rules get more and more VAGINIZED!”

The postgame commentary following a Monday Night Football game in mid-October got at the heart of the dilemma. 

Steve Young: “If you do something that’s devastating, a big hit, you’re going to probably be exposed to being suspended.

Stuart Scott: “But isn’t that football? I mean seriously. A devastating hit ... isn’t that ... hasn’t that been football?”

Matt Millen: “Listen, this bothers me, what we’re talking about right here. It’s wrong. You can’t take the competition and the toughness and all the stuff that goes into making the game great ... you can’t take it out of the game.”

Young: “What they’re worried about is that Darryl Stingley hit. They’re going to legislate it out.”

Millen: “That is stupid.” 

Trent Dilfer: “This game was built, and people love it, because of the gladiatorial nature of it. Those guys out there, are sacrificing their bodies and laying it all on the line, and that’s what people enjoy. And the league is going to rob us of all that … It’s an absolute joke. First of all, every week we’re talking about thousands of hits. Eventually the head is going to get hit. This is part of football. It’s going to happen. These guys are going to get blown up. It’s a physical game and you can’t take it out of it.”

Young: “A defenseless player, you’re gonna have to take it easy on him.”

Millen: “YOU CAN’T!” 

Young: “You’re going to have to! Or, you’re going to sit out for a couple of weeks.”

Scott: “That’s not football!”

The NFL wants to regulate the violence. They want to foist the responsibility for player safety onto the players themselves.

Good luck with that! 

The day players decide to take it easy on each other is the day the NFL loses its spot as the most popular sport in America.

How popular is the NFL?

A Harris poll of the American public was conducted back in September. It found that 59% of Americans followed pro football (the highest ever). 

“It’s been remarkable in recent years that nothing – not an offseason lockout of players, not increasing emphasis in the media on the long-term health risks of concussions suffered while playing football, not the NFL’s heavy-handed actions to try to curb concussions, not replacement refs, nothing can slow the growing popularity of the NFL. It’s not just America’s most popular sport, it may be America’s most popular cultural institution of any kind.”

But the league is at a crossroads.

Jay Coakley, a sports sociologist at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs recently said this: “Football is really on the verge of a turning point here. We may see it in 15 years in pretty much the same place as boxing or ultimate fighting.”

In other words, less a lucrative American colossus and more a niche sport beloved for its brutality. And he may not be far from the truth. You can feel it in the air. More and more people are starting to question the wisdom of allowing their sons to play a sport that can cause brain degeneration. And some of these people are famous NFL players. 

Bart Scott, the fearsome linebacker for the New York Jets, told a reporter last year that he won’t allow his son to play football. Kurt Warner, the Super Bowl winning quarterback who sustained multiple concussions throughout his career, has also said he won’t allow his children to play. Ditto for Troy Aikman, the Hall of Fame quarterback for the Dallas Cowboys. Even the father of New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady, perhaps the league’s most prominent player, said recently that he was not sure he would have allowed his son to play when he was young if he had known the possible long-term health risks.

Thanks to the work of neuropathologists, these long-term health risks now include CTE. Bennett Omalu, the famed pathologist, diagnosed the first known case of CTE in a football player after he examined the brain of former Pittsburgh Steeler center Mike Webster. One of the greatest players in NFL history, Webster suffered from amnesia, dementia, depression, and acute bone and muscle pain. He ended his life as a recluse, sleeping on the floor of the Pittsburgh Amtrak station. He was only 50-years-old when he died from a heart attack.

Omalu also examined Webster’s Pittsburgh Steeler teammate Terry Long, who drifted into chaos, killing himself seven years ago by drinking antifreeze. 

He examined Andre Waters, the former defensive back for the Philadelphia Eagles. Waters sank into deep depression and pleaded with his girlfriend – “I need help! Somebody help me!” Moments later, he died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head. Omalu determined that Waters’ brain tissue had degenerated into that of an 85-year-old man with Alzheimer’s. 

Andre Waters was only 44-years-old.

Omalu examined Justin Strzelczyk, another ex-Steeler who died when he drove the wrong way down a freeway and crashed his car, at 90 miles per hour, into a tank truck.

He examined Chris Henry, the talented and troubled wide receiver for the Cincinnati Bengals who died at 26, after he was thrown (or jumped) from the back of his girlfriend’s truck.

In every single case he found the same silent killer: CTE.

Last year the NFL donated more than $30 million to the National Institute of Health for unrestricted sports and health research, and last week the NIH dropped a bombshell. Junior Seau, the NFL great who committed suicide last year, suffered from the effects of CTE.

Gary Plummer, Seau’s former teammate with the San Diego Chargers, was stunned. He told the Los Angeles Times – “At the time when he killed himself, I was thinking concussions contributed maybe 10% to 20% of what he did. Now you have to say to yourself: Was it more than that? Was it 25% to 50%? You just don’t know.”

“I used to think, you made your bed, just lay in it. But you start thinking, wait a second, these guys [in the league] were not forthcoming, even when I had a concussion. They’d put up two fingers and say, ‘How many fingers do I have up? Ok, get back in the game.’ So it makes you think, makes you say to yourself, ‘What were these guys hiding? And did they know it?”

Plummer is a plantiff in one of the more than 80 concussion lawsuits against the NFL, legal actions that could potentially devastate the sport. Other plaintiffs include Super Bowl-winning quarterback Jim McMahon of the Chicago Bears, the family of former Atlanta Falcons safety Ray Easterling, who shot and killed himself two weeks before Seau, and the family of McMahon’s former teammate, Dave Duerson, who sent a text to his friends and family members requesting that his brain be studied for CTE, before shooting himself in the chest.

Football killed Junior Seau, it killed Dave Duerson, and it killed a host of other players as well. And now, a tremor has gone through the league. Players are talking openly about football and brain cells. And they are skittish about their own health. “Is it something I think about? Yeah, absolutely,” Baltimore Ravens center Matt Birk told the New York Times. He’s one of more than a hundred current and former players who’ve signed over their brains for postmortem study.

For me personally, I’m terribly conflicted. I have loved the sport since I was a kid. I played it when I was a kid. I've been to numerous games. There isn’t a more exciting time for me than the arrival of autumn and the beginning of the football season. Right now, even as I write this, I got one eye on my laptop and the other on the playoff thriller between the Denver Broncos and the Baltimore Ravens. I’m flinching at every big hit, and I find myself getting angry every time I see a defensive player recklessly launch himself helmet-first at an offensive player.

I’ve been a Washington Redskins fan since I was seven. This week I turn 37. We’re talking about 30 years of fandom.

Do you know how hard it is to walk away from something after 30 years?

That’s the emotional side of my brain. But the intellectual side is saying something completely different. It's saying that, in 15 years, football as we know it will be done.

We’re still in the embryonic stage of CTE. We are just now beginning to scratch the surface. And as we constantly learn the science, what is going to happen is that we are going to discover that CTE occurs not just at the professional level, and not just at the collegiate level, but at the high school level as well. And once that discovery is made, once the neuropathologists discover CTE in high school players, then all bets are off.

Parents will snatch their children off the team. Universities (starting with the Ivy League) will drop the sport, and corporate sponsors (the real lifeblood of the NFL) will finally come to the realization that they can’t have their brand associated with what some would consider human cockfighting. More and more lawsuits will rain down, and it will all come out in court that the NFL and the NCAA lied to their players and/or hid the risks. This will lead insurance companies to refuse to provide liability coverage for football players because of the exorbitant costs. 

And as soon as school districts are unable to get liability insurance, they will be forced to drop scholastic football. Without the flow of grade school players from high schools to college, and then to the NFL, football withers and dies. 

I predict that it will be transformed into something like flag football, with an emphasis on the passing game, speed, and hand-skills. But the day and age of 275-pound linebackers obliterating quarterbacks, running backs, and wide receivers will soon be over. And as a 30-year fan of the sport, I'm ok with that.

Football’s day of reckoning is coming. Brace yourself.