Whelp, That Went Poorly: The Winners And Losers From A Week In Hell
What a week. If you haven't been following along, Kelly and I managed to get Barstool Radio cancelled by delivering a show that makes Out and About look straighter than Jocko Willink's podcast. As the dust settles, there are clear winners and losers from all this. If I've learned anything about baking an image-repair cupcake, the magical ingredients are contrition and pandering! So let's see where everybody landed:
WINNERS!
Ohio's Tate
Probably the clear winner of this entire saga. I don't really know what his motive was, but I also don't have a huge beef with the guy. He kept my head out of his sights and seems to harbor respect for my writing, so I'll just offer this: you should come aboard, dude. If I had to guess, Dave probably has a job for you. Don't go to Chicago though; they're happy. You belong here, burning in hell with the rest of our Hills-Have-Eyes collective. Unless you truly love what you do (and I suspect you do), you'll never realize your full potential unless you burn the figurative ships. You'll always pull punches when you fear that going for broke on the blog might leak back to civilian life. This place requires immersion, a head-first swan dive into the roiling deep, something I was taught by Kevin and Big Cat years back when I worried that a blog on rub-and-tug etiquette might extinguish any lighted path back to my tutoring business. Needless to say, I wrote the blog and haven't come within three-hundred yards of an SAT student for years—a professional choice and by no means a court order.
BREAKING: In the minutes since I submitted this blog, Tate has been hired full-time. We eagerly await his arrival. I tried yesterday to come up with something, anything, to slow him down for a bit on the rundown. I ran a criminal background check but the man has lived by the book. Nothing a few nights out on the town in New York can't fix.
Kirk
You can't beat Kirk. Not just because he's probably the best pound-for-pound fighter we've got. No, Kirk is unbeatable and possibly immortal because nobody hates Kirk better than Kirk hates Kirk. How do you win against a guy who, when you say "go kill yourself," laughs and tells you he's tried to no avail? Yet like Bill Murray in Groundhog's Day, God simply won't let him punch out of this endless shift. How do you knock a man down when he lives comfortably at both rock bottom and mountaintop? He simultaneously exists both dead and alive, retractable claws ever-ready like some ferocious Schrodinger's Cat. It's confounding and I'm yet to find some unseen achilles to his method, so I eat the shit and accept his inevitability.
Kirk, you are my brother in macabre ideations. Next time you're thinking of bathing with a space heater, call me up and we'll live stream our exits together. I'll bring bath salts and my skimpiest trunks and you can choose the music. Until then, if you're looking for a place to empty a load, please consider my tonsils. I know you eat clean.
Chicago
While the New York office tore itself to absolute shreds, Chicago was cosplaying as livestock and playing handball. If we're the Titanic, they're the merry band that strikes up a waltz to distract everyone from imminent doom. Except the entire band has a lifeboat outfitted like an Oligarch's yacht, with heated seats and warming drawers filled with tinfoil-wrapped grilled cheeses and year-end bonuses—cushy perks offered for the small cost of working on Fridays.
Klemmer
Klemmer quietly put out a fabulous piece of work while the fire raged. I really like Klemmer as a person and he's a voice of reason in dark times. Even though he looks like a POW of successive global conflicts—captured and imprisoned across multiple decades such that you start to think… is he doing this on purpose?—I will always hold him in the highest regard. Well done, Klemmer, and thank you for your counsel.
Barstool Radio/Dave Portnoy Show/Whatever Kirk, Whit, and Dave Are Called
Even with an over/under on a two-episode lifespan, this promises to be fun. We're all going to watch it. Which makes us all winners! Right? … right?
LOSERS!
Francis
Obviously. This was a loss. I've been stress-eating pastries laced with Xanax like some picky Bernadoodle who won't take his deworming pills. Seriously, I don't know who brought that box of cinnamon buns to the office yesterday but for fuck's sake, stop enabling us. Half our staff is ten calories away from Joe Exotic trying to monetize our offspring. If I lose sight of my penis due to protruding gut growth, I'll sue for body dysmorphia. Dad's lawyer is best in the biz and I can cry on command thanks to Gia's TikTok tutorials. Oh well. I'd like to be here as long as Dave will have me, but I've got that sinking feeling yet again. You take your licks and keep showing up until your key card stops working. Then it's back to hunting and gathering and waving hello to my old pal Pete the Sweep. Worse things have happened to better people.
Kelly
My cohost, my partner, my friend. I can't help but think about what could have been—us sipping flinty Chablis in matching alpaca sweaters thrifted from bargain bins in Bushwick. Somewhere, someday, we'll make that happen. Maybe Kirk will give us the last ten minutes of his show for the segment? A boy can dream. Until then, let's write our way back into the win column.
Nate
I guess Nate straddles the winner and loser line. He had a win firmly in his hands and he watched it dissipate faster than dandelion fluff in a fresh breeze thanks to a power trip fueled by old TV remote batteries. I'm not entirely sure what happened there but I will say it's a shame Nate isn't doing Fridays anymore—that was pretty solid.
Still, far be it for me to come to the defense of Nate. That dude gives me the heebie-jeebies. If I saw him on the sidewalk I'd guide my family behind me and splay my keys between my fingers in my Barbour coat pocket. You just don't know what it would take to kill something like that. Seriously, he looks like a pile of afterbirth. As though the doctor who delivered him absentmindedly wrapped up the umbilical cord and the embryonic sack in a blue blankie and sent his parents home with a bunch of human sausage casing which, miraculously, came to life like some fucked-up Frosty the Snowman x Frankenstein plot mashup. Meanwhile, a perfectly healthy baby was hoisted into a hospital dumpster among dirty syringes and spent IV bags, ferried to the county landfill, and subsequently grew up as the Whitewashed plot of Slumdog Millionaire.
What happened to your JAW, Nate? Heavenly father, the mandibles on this lad! His entire mouth is made of molars. You could lash him to a canoe paddle and use him to extract woozy drivers from crumpled collisions. Lord help us if he's bitten when the zombies come. The head of Pac Man on the body of Stephen Hawking right before the chair. Minutes before. Hours at most.
That's all. I'd say let's hope for a peaceful week next week but I somehow doubt that's in store. For now, I'll start looking for marginally smaller apartments and punching up my resume. God have mercy on us all.