emo

[Patrick Barron]

9/4/2021 – Michigan 47, Western Michigan 14 – 1-0

I've got a spreadsheet now. I put it together a month ago when the idea of doing something, anything at all, was appalling. It has columns and if I do the thing in the column I get to bold it. Some columns are daily, or at least they're daily without the extraordinary intervention that causes the "shruggie" column to get bolded. Others are, uh, less daily. Kind of got knocked off a thing I wrote about in a column this March.

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please come weed my backyard

The idea is that as we go along more things get bolded. Just two things are currently getting hit 90% of the time: walking, and people. I get to bold "people" when I undertake an activity (that does not count as another activity) in which I interact with another human, socially. Not usually 110,000 of them.

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Being in Michigan Stadium was an experience bifurcated into competing feelings. One was a sense of unreality that this was actually happening. Carl Grapentine's "good afternoon" was met with a roar unlike any other "good afternoon" to date. Before the formal pre-game festivities were initiated it was just… nice? To sit in the stands as people filed in and the team went through its pregame warmups was nice. These days people use the word "nice" to mean "not nice" when describing an experience. Here I am saying that there was a real, mild pleasure derived from sitting in a place and doing a thing I used to do and then did not do as part and parcel of massive society-wide problems. It felt strange, like amnesia lifting.

The other was a sense that life had finally, truly resumed. Like the last year was about to be dumped out of the movie, replaced by a smash cut to kickoff. There was a guy with bad jokes on a microphone narrating three guys parachuting into the stadium.

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we gotta talk about the smoke color though [Barron]

The band came out. I was vexed by first-quarter playcalling against a MAC opponent. A man holding a toddler was incensed enough to stand up and berate an official.

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those are daddy's sports words, kiddo [Barron]

This was undoubtedly after the Bell OPI call and was thus justified. It was all very normal.

For a window on a fall Saturday you could believe that 2020 was a bad dream. I have to admit that I was not much moved by the game itself—I'm spending this fall's emotional capital on things closer to home—but even I, person about ready to drop-kick college football into the next town, could do nothing but see a real college football season as a ribbon-cutting ceremony for something called Real Life.

We can talk about whether all of the above was, you know, wise*. Even outside of the context where young men hurl their heads at each other for our entertainment and now the occasional sliver of NIL money, what with a pandemic on. But we can all admit that even in the depths of our collective malaise, sitting with our people and experiencing our thing together felt better than it had any right to.

There were some preteen kids sitting behind me who predicted a screen, and then a punt, on a third and long. (They were wrong, but correct spiritually.) They were possessed of a world-weary cynicism that made me wonder if the thing actually oozed from pores in the stadium concrete and seeped its way into our bodies, the environment guiding us into a common way of being. COVID was probably the less transmissible thing in that stadium Saturday. That just goes in your lungs. Michigan goes in your bones.

That's why we're all still here, in whatever capacities we are. Not hope or fun or desire, but a giant "we." A community, one that may be loosely bound but is nonetheless real. I felt that when I posted The Story and got hundreds of comments, DMs, emails, and texts expressing support, asking if there was anything they could do. The answer is both no, and also you've already done it. I bolded my people box Saturday, continuing the thing that's letting me climb out. Hopefully it meant something to you, too.

*[For me the combination of vaccinations, open air, and the fact that vaccinated people apparently don't transmit Delta readily if asymptomatic is makes me comfortable with the situation, though I'd prefer Michigan require proof of vaccination to attend games.]

AWARDS

Known Friends and Trusted Agents Of The Week

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[Barron]

-2535ac8789d1b499[1]you're the man now, dog

#1 Ronnie Bell (RIP). Well... crap. Bell had the catch of the year taken off the board by John O'Neill Crew Hijinks, scored a long touchdown, and ripped off an impact punt return... on which he was lost for the season. This set off a firestorm on Michigan twitter, which is addressed later.

#2 Blake Corum. Corum had the most touches of anyone on offense with 14 rushes and two catches; he had two TDs and averaged 7.9 yards per carry. He also had a 79-yard kickoff return. That eases him out in front of Hassan Haskins. The two guys will likely continue splitting carries right down the middle, and that's fine by me.

#3 Dax Hill. Hill's your new spacebacker; he deleted every attempted screen to the wide side of the field and had a PBU on slant that looked impossible about a second before he made it.

Honorable mention: Seth's likely to hand some hardware to Andrew Vastardis in UFR. AJ Henning deleted a pursuit angle on long reverse TD. Mike Sainristil blocked like a demon that's into blocking instead of torturing souls. Haskins ripped through a tackle on short yardage to score and did well otherwise. Aidan Hutchinson had a sack-strip on which the WMU QB wanted to leave the state.

KFaTAotW Standings.

(points: #1: 8, #2: 5, #3: 3, HMs one each. Ties result in somewhat arbitrary assignments.)

8: Ronnie Bell (#1 WMU)

5: Blake Corum (#2 WMU)

3: Dax Hill (#3 WMU)

1: Andrew Vastardis (HM WMU), AJ Henning (HM WMU), Mike Sainristil (HM WMU), Aidan Hutchinson (HM WMU), Hassan Haskins (HM WMU)

Who's Got It Better Than Us(?) Of The Week

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[Barron]

McNamara nails Bell on his 76-yard touchdown, which followed on from the Bell catch wiped off the board and may indicate dude has a deep ball. Would be a major development.

Honorable mention: Swing pass to Corum on the first drive causes me to say "touchdown" as soon as Corum motions out. Henning and Wilson rip big gains on end-arounds. Corum's kick return.

image​MARCUS HALL EPIC DOUBLE BIRD OF THE WEEK.

Bell is lost for the year. Awful.

Honorable mention: Bell's catch is taken off the board, violating every principle from "it's too cool to call back" to the actual rules dictating college football. WMU drives down the field and scores a touchdown on their first drive, resulting many "here we go" feelings in the stands.

[After THE JUMP: Baldwin is crazed]

Previously: The Story 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008.

Anthems for a Seventeen Year Old Girl, Broken Social Scene

HELLO.

Hey. This is about us. It's not about anything else, even Michigan football. If you care that this post is here on this date, I'm talking to you. Here is what I am saying: I can't do it. I can do some of it. Just not all of it, anymore.

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Here's a thing that happened. I went to see a movie.

The Michigan Theater has been scrapping for things to show in the (sort-of) aftermath of COVID; one of the things they struck on was a series of Studio Ghibli films. If you're vaguely familiar, you're probably familiar with My Neighbor Totoro, a movie in which a couple of young girls run across a series of increasingly large and sleepy rabbit spirits. There's also a catbus?

Catbus

If you are more than vaguely familiar you probably know all about Studio Ghibli and would like to disclaim to me at length about it; let's take a raincheck.

Anyway, My Neighbor Totoro is sweetness and light. When the Michigan fanbase collectively beat Spencer Hall into getting a Michigan themed tattoo he went with a block-M emblazoned Totoro, because spirit animal recognize spirit animal. It is a movie where a young girl gets lost and a young girl gets found. If you had to summarize this movie in one word it would be "sproing!"

[after THE JUMP: the other movie]

[Marc-Gregor Campredon]

3/4/2021 – Michigan 69, Michigan State 50 – 19-2, 14-2 Big Ten, Big Ten regular season champions

I have now watched a year of pandemic sports, and I can say that the most surreal thing to watch with nobody in the stands is college basketball. This was made plain when I turned on the Baylor-WVU game, which was about 20% full, and recoiled at the strangeness of an audio record of whether things were going well or not. People were furious at certain things. It was a sad (and unwise) echo of the Before Times, and at the same time it injected a fervor into the proceedings. It felt like a top-ten matchup, or at least the ghost of one. 

Alone amongst major sports, basketball puts fans directly adjacent to proceedings. Malices at the Palace do not transpire in other sports because there are barriers between athletes and the hoi polloi. Opportunities for portly gentlemen to confront and get absolutely wrecked by Jermaine O'Neal are limited.

This gives a basketball crowd an immediacy other sports lack. When you are close to the court the sport literally vibrates for you, each bounce of the ball resonating in your ears and feet simultaneously.

On top of that, a college basketball crowd puts several hundred dubiously sober students in prime position to mock, taunt, celebrate, wobble unsteadily, and wear varied animal costumes. The reduced number of games relative to the NBA, and the various ways in which you could succeed or fail heightens stakes. An NBA version of this MSU team is wondering whether it's worth making the playoffs just to get obliterated instead of clawing desperately to maintain a 22-year tourney streak. This turns up the volume further until a band-box arena in Vermont with maybe 3,000 people in it feels like a nuclear reactor during Championship Week.

Deleting that leaves you unsteady. The resulting season feels tangibly less real.

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eight minutes to tip [Campredon]

When the confetti came down and Michigan paraded around a sign that said "2021 Big Ten Champions" I was happy, of course, but the emptiness of that building—the failure of several hundred people to appear on the court and mill around aimlessly—hit hard. A true and proper title celebration is far from the most important thing the pandemic has taken from us, but it could only be bittersweet to see Michigan be this team, to win this thing, 358 days after the 2020 Big Ten Tournament was shut down and Zavier Simpson skyhooks unceremoniously vanished into the G-League ether.

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You may have noticed that my output on this blog has dropped substantially. There have been more weekdays without a post from me in the past couple months than years-long blocks of time prior.

I have struggled. My weak connections to the people around me have been severed and the few strong ties leaned on unto their breaking point. A lack of reliance on other people has morphed from a marker of rugged individualism into a blank, gray loneliness. Existing addictions—mostly to video games, which I compulsively click at even when I am thinking about how boring this activity is—were exacerbated. Relationships strained. My personal life roiled until there was a sudden break. A look into an abyss, and a turning away from it.

I can't say the roiling has exactly stopped but at least I have a path I can see that leads forward. It is a repeated agony that it buckles and warps, cracks and shudders, rises and descends. Work gets put in and sometimes it seems like it amounts to nothing. But I suppose if Austin Davis can put Luka Garza in a blender, there is no depth that cannot be surmounted brick by brick.

This is a stupid and flimsy thing to latch onto, the actions of college players attempting to throw a ball through a hoop, but since a large part of this years-long slide was sitting on my computer staring at a football game I had no desire to comment on I'll take it and nestle it into place. Belief starts somewhere. An ability to take joy from other people starts somewhere.

Here at what feels like the end, or at least the beginning of the end, of being locked away from each other I have concluded that the only thing to do is get up in the morning and try again.

[After THE JUMP: a regular-ass bullets section! Like nothing even happened!]