Even though I was never in a store that was this bad, I used to go out and shop on Black Friday.

In fact, I was so wrapped up in Black Friday that I used to write about it right here on the blog. I wrote reviews of Black Friday dating back to 2008, 2006, 2005, and even way back in 2004. After 2008, I stopped going out on Black Friday. It was around that time when I really started planning to kick my student loan repayment into high gear. Plus, some time around 2008 is when the insanity of Black Friday shopping was reaching an apex. And if there were ever two good reasons to stay away from the big box stores and malls on Black Friday, then those are two really good reasons to stay at home.

Fast forward to 2013 and things are a little bit different. First, I no longer have the albatross of student loans weighing me down. Second, stores are now opening on Thanksgiving night to accommodate a portion of the traditional Black Friday crowd. And finally, so many consumers out there are struggling financially that the idea of spending all day shopping on Black Friday just doesn’t make good financial sense any more. It’s certainly a different world than back in 2008 when I last wrote a review of what I encountered on Black Friday. And since the world is a little bit different now than it was back in 2008 I decided to brave the stores on Thanksgiving weekend for the first time in years. This is what I found…

Thanksgiving Night Shopping
Around 11:00pm I decided to go shopping for two specific items. The items weren’t for my family since I finished Christmas shopping for them well before Thanksgiving. Instead, the items I was looking to purchase were for my church’s Christmas giving tree. If you’re not familiar with a giving tree, it’s where the less fortunate folks in a parish ask the church for help in providing their kids with a merry Christmas morning by helping them buy a few gifts. Within the program, though, there are restrictions. For example, at my church you need to be an active parishioner in order to participate in the program. In other words, you can’t just show up in November and say, “Hey, I need help buying gifts again this year.” Nope – ain’t going to happen.

I also have some personal rules that I follow for the Christmas giving tree program. One of those rules is that I don’t buy gift cards. Over the years, the number of tags on the giving tree that are asking for gift cards to Walmart, Target, Shoprite, and other retailers has grown exponentially. And if the purpose of the giving tree is to ensure that young kids wake up on Christmas morning with a few toys to play with under the tree, then I don’t see how a gift card gets a 6 year old boy or a 7 year old girl to that end. One of my other rules is that I tend to gravitate towards buying gifts for boys instead of girls. Something about going into a toy store and buying a Barbie or a princess play set doesn’t work for me. I couldn’t tell you why – it just doesn’t work. Perhaps my most important rule, though, is that I try to pick giving tree tags for younger kids. I understand that teenagers have as much need for a merry Christmas morning as the young ones, but the young ones have stronger memories of the “good times” during the Christmas season. Plus, at some point if you’re a parent and you’re asking for help getting your 15 or 16 year old kid some gifts for Christmas (and you’ve done so for the last 15 or 16 years), then you failed at some aspect of your life. And I know that is a presumptuous statement, but if you have a 15+ year track record of not being able to save a few buck each year so you can buy 3 or 4 nice things for your 15+ year old kids during Christmas, then I’m not interested in advancing your inability to plan ahead and live an irresponsible lifestyle.

So I stick with getting gifts for the little ones. Now back to the story…

This year, I picked two gift tags – one for a 7 year old boy and one for a 9 year old boy. They both wanted wrestling toys. One wanted a wrestling figure and the other wanted a wrestling ring: two very easy toys to pick up on Thanksgiving night after I left my family’s house. At some point around 11:00pm I went to the local K-Mart and they had all of the toys right there. Most importantly, though, they didn’t have an excessive amount of people in the parking lot or in the store. In fact, it looked like any other Thursday night in the store. I grabbed a few wrestling figures and the ring and headed for the checkout (I go a little bit above any beyond so when a kid asks for a wrestling ring, he gets a ring and two wrestling figures and when a kid asks for a single wrestling figure, he gets three). And the checkout is what stopped me in my tracks. After very publicly promoting that they’d be open all Thanksgiving Day and night, my local K-Mart had two cashiers working. TWO! Look, if you’re only going to put two cashiers on duty on what could have been one of the heaviest shopping nights of the year, then you’re better off not opening the store at all.

Each of the two checkout lines was about 15 people deep and everyone was pissed that the store decided to open without adequate coverage in the checkout lanes. After spending some time observing (I observe a lot when I’m in these stores), I realized that people with only a few items were checking out quicker at the courtesy desk. I quickly moved over to the courtesy desk, checked out, and left the K-Mart with my Christmas giving tree toys in hand (actually, they were in a bag). My next stop was JCPenney at the Monmouth Mall. Admittedly, this stop wasn’t for the giving tree, but rather JCPenney is one of the few stores where you can find really high quality big and tall clothing, so I stopped there to see what was on sale. I wound up buying a quarter zip sweater that was actually too big (I returned it the next day for the right size). Some of my observations about JCPenney include the fact that a lot of the Thursday night shoppers – and by “a lot” I mean at least 90% of the entire population that I saw in my area that night – were of specific ethnic or cultural descent. I’m not suggesting that 90% of the people in the stores were a single ethnicity or cultural identity – not at all. Instead, I’m saying that 90% of the entire population consisted of a diversity of people including first generation Mexican immigrants, Orthodox Jewish people, first and second generation Indian families, etc. If I had to suggest a single ethnicity that was more prevalent than the rest, then I’d say that the Hispanic population outpaced everyone else by leaps and bounds. Anyway, just a random observation that occurred to me while I was at JCPenney.

After my quick stop at JCPenney (I was in the store for a total of about 10 minutes), I headed to one of the habitually worst places to shop in Monmouth County – the Neptune Township Walmart. Honestly, folks, if you ever want to have a horrendous shopping experience, then go to the Neptune Walmart at any time of the day and try to order anything from the deli counter. If you get away from that deli counter in under 15 – 20 minutes, it would be record-breaking. Anyway, my purpose of going to this disaster area on Thanksgiving Night was to purchase the gift bags that my church requires you place your giving tree gifts in before you bring them to the church. And I have to admit – this wasn’t a big ordeal for me on Thanksgiving Night. I went into the store, grabbed the two gift bags, walked to the register and waited a split second while the person in front of my checked out, and then I checked out myself and left the store. As I left the store I was asked to show my receipt and my purchases (which were in my hand because I refused to take a plastic bag to put two paper gift bags in). My entire experience at the Neptune Walmart was not aggravating at all and that is pretty shocking considering that store’s atrocious history. I should comment, though, that I didn’t venture to the back of the store where the electronics department is located. I looked back there and it looked like Armageddon on earth, but I didn’t dare take a walk to that part of the store. No reason to ruin my shopping experience, you know?

And that was my Thanksgiving Night experience.

Black Friday
The only thing I did on Black Friday was head back to JCPenney to return and switch out the quarter-zip sweater that I purchased a few days earlier. There was a small line in the store, but it was fully acceptable. In fact, I have to salute the young woman who handled my switch request at the checkout counter. She ran into a series of problems trying to make the switch in the system and she kept asking for my patience, which I always give to a cashier (I always remember that the last thing they need is an angry me staring at them). And because I was so patient with this woman, she took an additional $10 off of my purchase which brought the item down from its original price of $45 to the sale price of $25 to the additional reduced price of $15. Not bad for a nice piece of winter clothing.

And that’s the whole of my shopping experience this Black Friday. The lessons learned include that shopping on Thanksgiving Night means less crowds and higher diversity of shoppers while the big department stores make returning items a very easy and even thankful process. Another lesson learned is that I’m thankful to have completed my shopping before Thanksgiving and via all-online stores. Overall, I was very pleased with this year’s shopping experience, though not pleased enough to make it a regular occurrence each year.

However, the latest self-published review request that I received was actually an easy decision for me to make. The request was from a group called Rasslin’ Books and the book that they asked if I was interested in reviewing was called When Wrestling Was Rasslin’ by Peter Birkholz. My response to being asked to review a book about the early, regional days of professional wrestling? Of course!

The early territorial days of professional wrestling have always fascinated me as a topic of discussion. No, I’m not talking about the “regions” of WWE and WCW or today’s breakdown of WWE and TNA. And I’m not even talking about WWE in the 1980s versus the fragile coalition of the National Wrestling Alliance during that time. I’m talking about going back – way back – to the 1920s and 1930s. I’ve always been fascinated about learning the inside story of what really went on in the territories back when professional wrestling was like the Wild West!

For better or for worse, Birkholz’s book is not that story. The book’s cover suggests that this is the “inside story of the legendary Houston Wrestling promotion.” That’s true enough. However, if you’re a fan of what professional wrestling has become today, then this is not the “inside story” that you think you’re buying. This isn’t the story of why a certain performer was chosen to be a champion over someone else. This isn’t the real story of why a certain wrestler was run out of town. This isn’t the story about wrestlers (or promoters in this case) traveling the roads and filling the pages with story after story of unbelievable moments.

When Wrestling Was Rasslin’ is none of those things.

Instead, this is a story about professional wrestling. No, it’s not about the new millennium where one global behemoth company dominates the sports entertainment landscape. And no, this isn’t about the cable television war during the 1990s or the unique attitude that came along with it. In fact, this story isn’t even about the big time 1980s and the pop life prominence that wrestling first enjoyed during that decade. This is a story about a wrestling landscape that goes back further – back to the beginning of professional wrestling in the Houston, Texas area. To his credit, Birkholz does a very good job of detailing the formative years of the Houston Wrestling promotion and talking about how it survived as a business over its initial decades (and ultimately its final years). In some ways, Birkholz has written the story that people have been waiting for Paul Heyman to write about the original ECW, but I digress.

A point of contention for some readers may be that the book reads like you’re sitting down with your grandfather, uncle, or another older relative and listening to them tell stories about days gone by. This is likely a point of contention for some readers because let’s face it – younger generations today are just rude and disrespectful of the art of storytelling that so many older generations relish in. Yet, I believe the methodical pace that the book is presented in is the exact style that Birkholz is attempting to achieve and he does so masterfully.

If you’re okay with the fact that this book reads like you’re listening to a storyteller from an older generation, then one criticism of the story is that it is easy for your mind to wander to other things. For example, I usually read my books with a television on near-mute (to provide some background noise) and with the windows open so natural light and fresh air can come in. Well, it was easy to be distracted while reading this book because if you’ve ever been caught by an older relative who wants to tell you stories, you know that your mind begins to wander after a while. This isn’t a criticism of the book’s content, but it is a recommendation to read the book in short spurts of 15 – 20 pages at a time in order to get the most out of it.

One of the reasons that your mind can wander while reading this book is because it’s less of an actual story and more of a yearbook (ideally, the book would have been titled, “The Houston Wrestling Yearbook”). The methodical pace of writing that I referenced above really refers to the structure of the unofficial “chapters” in the book (there is no Table of Contents, so I assumed each of the new headings creates a new chapter). Each of these “chapters” is broken into a decade where Birkholz writes about every one of the ten years of that decade. He draws much of his material from reading match listings and recalling a memory or two of having sat through those events. This pace is interesting at first, but ultimately becomes irritating when you realize that the entire book is written in this formula. By the time I reached the “chapter” on the 1970s, I was exhausted with this format. Thankfully, I had four several hour-long train rides in the last few weeks which allowed me the time and patience I needed to make it through the book, regardless of its format.

On the flip side, once you get towards the end of the book it really becomes an interesting story about the shift in power that occurred during the 1980s. The story of how the ownership of Houston Wrestling was split up and then ultimately how Vince McMahon came in, gave Houston a shot, backed out, and then was brought back to the table is one that I would have loved to read much more about – and from more perspectives. Birkholz does an admirable job of covering that period of time and I would recommend that any wrestling fan who can get their hands on this book read through those pages because it really is an interesting part of the story.

A general criticism I would offer is that at times Birkholz the storyteller/former promoter over-sensationalizes the matches and performers that he writes about each year. Sensationalizing matches and performers is not an uncommon trait for professional wrestling promoters and announcers, so I’m already preconditioned to know how to digest this type of hype. Although, when I was some 50 pages into the book I did begin to grow weary of reading about how this guy was arguably the “greatest performer ever” and that his opponent was probably the “best wrestler in the world” and this event was the “biggest event in wrestling history” and the other event was the “most talked about event in years.” You get the point. That went on for the entire book in seemingly every paragraph. That type of hyperbole may be more true than false during the moment and more right than wrong, but it’s also tiresome for a reader to follow along over an entire book.

Also, at times it would have been nice to learn more about the behind-the-scenes discussions that accompany any wrestling promotion. Birkholz tells the early story of professional wrestling in Houston more from a long-time fan’s perspective than from what is commonly thought of as an “insider” perspective. There’s nothing wrong with his fan’s perspective, but if you think you’re going to learn about the backstage discussions that led to, for example, Verne Gagne not becoming the undisputed NWA World Heavyweight Championship in the 1950s, then you’re not going to get that here. And, frankly, that’s okay.

If you’re a wrestling fan, you should not let the lack of backstage “insider” discussion from 60 years ago prevent you from getting your hands on this book. For this wrestling fan, it was a fun read and a very colorful trip down sports entertainment’s memory lane.

The name of Foley’s latest book is Countdown to Lockdown. Lockdown’s focus is a short, six-week period of time leading up to Foley’s match against Sting in the main event of TNA Wrestling’s Lockdown event which was held in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Younger wrestling fans will love reading about Foley’s state of mind as he recounts his actions in the ring promoting this match and during the match. Older wrestling fans will enjoy reading Foley’s commentary on the wrestling world, including his frequent references to and shots at Vince McMahon. However, I think all consumers of good literature will like reading about how Foley’s life is intimately informed by the world around him and how he interacts (and gives back) to that world.

My favorite story from the book isn’t actually wrestling-related. In fact, my favorite story recounts how Foley donated money to a small area of Africa to help build a school for the children there. Yet, Foley didn’t stop by just donating money to build the school – he actually went over to Africa for a site visit. This is my favorite story in the book because Foley recounts how he was treated like a king including having choirs of young children singing his name and being greeted and thanked by all of the local townspeople.

There’s something about envisioning the “Hardcore Legend” being exalted in sub-Saharan Africa that the wrestling fan in me really enjoys. The philanthropist in me, though, loves the fact that Foley gives away so much of his income to worthwhile, charitable causes.

I also enjoyed the frequent references to Tori Amos and her song “Winter,” which you can listen to by hitting play on the video below. Foley talks about how this song is his go-to song to amp him up for the biggest matches in his wrestling career. And yet, he says that he’s only listened to this song a small handful of times before his matches. In other words, he only uses this song to get prepared for a match when it is an especially important match to him, personally. Pretty amazing.

From a wrestling fan’s perspective, the constant jabs at McMahon are really fun to read. And when I write that the jabs are fun to read, I’m not suggesting that I enjoy reading about someone taking shots at McMahon. Not at all, actually. Instead, I’m more suggesting that so few wrestling books take the time to comment on how McMahon interacts with his talent backstage that Countdown to Lockdown provides a refreshing alternative to the pack. Of particular entertainment is the discussion around Foley’s time as an announcer on WWE Smackdown!

As a reader and wrestling fan, I felt bad for Foley when he recounted his story about McMahon almost ruining a planned family vacation by yelling and screaming at Foley through his headset during a live show. In fact, Foley talks about how McMahon used the type of language that he wouldn’t even dare to repeat in his book, which is pretty amazing considering that all manner of craziness is usually included in wrestling books. After reading that story and reading about some McMahon’s other pet peeves when it comes to announcing (for example, he doesn’t like the use of “he” or “it” or “she” – instead he wants proper names always used), I watched a few minutes of WWE RAW this past Monday night and I couldn’t help but laugh to myself a little bit. Not only was Foley right on the money about McMahon’s pet peeves, but it was really funny listening to Michael Cole have to say things like, “Jack Swagger comes off the ropes into Daniel Bryan and Daniel Bryan, King, seems like he’s ready to launch a comeback against Jack Swagger. I wonder if Jack Swagger will be able to hold off the brunt of the offense being unleashed now by Daniel Bryan!? And Daniel Bryan with a few big right hands against the head of Jack Swagger; Jack Swagger reeling from this assault from Daniel Bryan and Daniel Bryan is on top!”

It’s ridiculous to listen to the announcers on WWE programing when you’re listening after reading this chapter in Foley’s book.

There are a lot of gems in Countdown to Lockdown and I think that readers of all types and ages will enjoy reading this book. It’s one of those rare pieces that starts in one literary world (wrestling books) and crosses over into a variety of other worlds including inspirational piece, autobiography, historical commentary, and work of art. If you’re looking for a good, solid read, then I highly recommend you pick up a copy of this book.

Former Monmouth forward Travis Taylor is now back on the market and won’t attend Boston College.

I’m hearing BC wasn’t aware that Taylor had been suspended for seven games last season for “violating team rules.” Really? How do you not know that?

Anyway, the 6-foot-7 Taylor, a Union, N.J. native, will visit Xavier Tuesday and is also considering Miami, Cincinnati and Arizona State.

“Travis and his family want to utilize the three remaining official visits he has left before he makes a decision,” a source with knowledge said. “Considering we’re about to enter the second live period this could drag into August.”

Taylor averaged 17.8 points and 7.6 rebounds last season.

Boston College Says No

Second, let me echo what the Asbury Park Press’ Tony Graham wrote above – how did Boston College NOT know that Taylor was suspended for seven games in the middle of last season?! Really? They didn’t know that? Who does the recruiting up there? Were they asleep at the wheel? I don’t know the details of the situation, but one could make a strong argument that the primary reason why Taylor is leaving Monmouth is because of that suspension. So did the recruiter at Boston College say, “Why are leaving Monmouth?” and accept a generic answer like, “I’m trying to raise my profile?”

I mean come on!

And finally, I wanted to repost a comment that someone named redskin22 posted on The Hawks Nest blog:

This is very sad- Ego’s is what this move is all about. The damage that his mom and mentor have done to this kid is unbelievable.

Has far as taking him back to MU – No Way!!!! He, his mom and his mentor have burn that bridge. This is what happens when people who think they know college basketball get a hold of a kid. they screw it up almost always.

Look, I don’t know what the core reason was for Taylor wanting to leave Monmouth. There were rumors that Dave Calloway’s coaching style was too aggressive for most of the players and that he treated them like kids rather than young adults. Who knows if that is true other than the players? The comment above suggests that Taylor’s Mom wanted him out of the program – who has anyway of knowing if that is true besides Mrs. Taylor and her son? Was it Taylor’s “mentor” that brought the Mom and son delusions of grandeur? No one can know for sure.

What we do know at this point is this: Taylor was suspended for seven games in the middle of the season for violating team rules. The rumors suggest that it had something to do with smoking some weed, which was a very poor decision on Taylor’s behalf as it negatively impacted his teammates during the season, the health of his team after the season ended, and his own character in the college basketball world (as the Boston College story above represents). What we can all, I think, safely speculate at this point is that this was a tremendously bad decision on Taylor’s part and that it probably wasn’t worth the few hours of a high that he may have received from smoking up.

Then again, are we now expecting college kids to consistently act with the type of responsibility that we expect from ourselves as adults? I sure hope not because the vast majority of college kids don’t take into account what impact their actions have on tomorrow, let alone what impact those actions will have on their character a few months afterward!

Former Monmouth forward Travis Taylor has opted to transfer to Boston College and play for former Cornell coach Steve Donahue. Taylor chose the Eagles over Seton Hall and Temple.

Taylor, a 6-foot-7 sophomore from Union, N.J., averaged 17.8 points and 7.6 rebounds last season

“This was an extremely tough choice for Travis and multiple factors played into his decision making process,” said Bill Diamond, the Taylor family adviser. “It was well thought out and he and his family asked all of the right questions. Travis loved the campus, the academic reputation and the coaching staff. He has an opportunity to earn immediate playing time in one of the best conferences in the country. Steve Donahue is a proven coach and will do a tremendous job in Travis’s maturation process on and off the court.”

Monmouth gave Taylor a conditional release, allowing him to move to schools not on the team’s 2010-11 schedule. Seton Hall is not on the schedule, while Rutgers is.

Taylor has not answered several calls to his cell phone.

He was suspended for seven games last season for “violating team rules” and the team went 2-5 during that span.

From my perspective, I’m really unsure about this move in terms of being a benefit for Taylor. In the NEC he stood out as clearly the best player on his team, but also as one of the best players in the league. Moving up north and into the Atlantic Coast Conference is a whole new world – I’m not sure how Taylor will be able to perform up there, but I guess all that anybody can do is wait and see, right?

Right before my senior year of high school started in September 1999

But I’ll break that laziness out of my body at some point (soon). Moving on…

The second best atmosphere that I ever worked out in was at The Fitness Company in Ocean Township, New Jersey. The Fitness Company has been closed for a number of years and for a few years before the gym actually closed the building itself was under a great deal of development and torn up on the inside. However, before the construction started the atmosphere in that place was awesome. There was a four-foot deep swimming pool as well as a hot tub and six or seven different workout rooms. The rooms ranged from cardio equipment to a spinning room to an isometric machine room to free weights to abdominal stuff and more. Plus, there was a full court basketball court inside the gym and two racketball courts. Inside the men’s locker room was a steam room, too. This was a great place to workout in and my results from working out there showed.

For those of you who have been reading this blog for years, you may remember six or so years ago when I started losing a bunch of weight. I went from about 385 pounds to about 260 pounds and I accomplished that feat by working out at The Fitness Company. My workout regime was so good back in those days – I would go to the gym in the morning and do some cardio for about an hour and then lift weights for about an hour. Afterward, I’d swim in the pool for about an hour and then sit in the steam room for about 30 minutes. Then I went about my day (life was a lot simpler when I was in graduate school and only working part-time). And I’d usually wind up ending the day by heading back to the gym for a nighttime dip in the pool around 8:00pm or 9:00pm.

That was the life – and it was a great atmosphere to work out in. It’s too bad no one ever purchased the old Fitness Company and tried to open it back up as it used to be. The Fitness Company used to have a ton of members and they had great monthly and annual rates, too. What a shame.

Here’s hoping that the atmosphere at the new gym at the local college where I teach (which is where I’ll eventually be working out) is as good or better than these two places!

Justin Sofman is the Latest to Leave
By the way, none of the Hawks pictured are returning

Sofman said he can no longer “take the culture of it, the negativity, the yelling and screaming (of the coaches) if my heart is not in the game.”

“Maybe if I felt different about the game of basketball I would buy into everything,” Sofman said.

“I’m 21 years old. I’m not going to tell him (Calloway) how to do his job. I’m a psychology major. I’m not a coaching major.”

“I’m not going to get into how to motivate players and how to coach because I don’t know.”

“Just because I disagree with something doesn’t mean anything. What I do know is I didn’t feel motivated personally.”

“I didn’t agree with a lot of things. But how are you going to agree when you get screamed at all day, every day.”

“I wasn’t looking forward to next year without Travis, sort of,” Sofman said. “(Without Travis) it made it easier maybe (to leave). I think it’s better for the team and myself I part ways.”

Sofman said Calloway is not out of the ordinary in how he handles players from any of his other coaches dating back to high school.

“I’ve had my share of negative screamers,” Sofman said. “I’ve had the worst ones on purpose to get me ready for the next level.”

“The only difference was I was naive then and wasn’t as adult as I am now. The fact is I could take it back then and now it drives me nuts.”

“You can’t talk to an adult like that and expect to get results.”

Sofman said he liked Calloway as a person. “We had a nice conversation today (Tuesday),” Sofman said. “It’s just a conflict of working for him.”

I have mixed feelings on Sofman leaving the team because I think that he is a good player and a great asset to the team on many fronts. However, as a former high school athlete (and a pretty damn good one, too), I absolutely understand that feeling of completely losing interest in a sport in which you were once a fierce competitor.

Story Time! When I was in high school I was a pretty good wrestler. I wasn’t state championship material by any means, but I was pretty damn good. However, somewhere in the middle of wrestling season during my senior year in high school I began to really not give a damn about the sport any more (which was pretty bad since I was Captain of the team). I definitely continued to compete at a high level, but I didn’t want to win for the good of the team or for my personal advancement; more than anything else I wanted to win matches for personal pride. I’m not sure what caused me to not give a damn any more, but over the years I’ve begun to accept the notions that 1) I saw no professional or semi-professional athletic future for myself and 2) I subconsciously didn’t buy the “hype” that our coaches sold to us on a daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly basis.

From Sofman’s quotes above, it sounds like he was in the same situation. When I read Sofman saying that he can no longer take the “culture of it” and that if he “felt different about the game of basketball [he] would buy into everything,” the very same feelings conjure up in my head that I had during my senior year of high school wrestling. Specifically, it’s the idea that you have to “buy into everything” that really piques my interest. Anyone who has played a competitive sport under a good coach at a competitive high school or college knows that coaches all have their own unique motivation techniques. Some yell, some scream, some run you into the ground, some speak softly and carry a big stick – it’s part of their style as a coach. A good coach will tailor his or her motivation techniques to lead his or her athletes to a bigger picture, larger goal, or greater accomplishment.

It sounds like Sofman didn’t want to deal with Dave Calloway or his coaching staff’s motivation techniques because he no longer saw the bigger picture, wanted to attain a larger goal, or even believed that there was a greater accomplishment.

Again, if this is how Sofman really feels (and we have no reason to doubt him), then I can’t really blame the kid for making this decision. I remember how my wrestling coaches told me that if I wrestled 100 competitive matches (or more) during the off-season that I’d come back better than my competition. So… I did just that. I wrestled over 100 matches during each of my off-seasons. That’s 100+ matches after my Freshman year of wrestling, 100+ matches after my Sophomore year of wrestling, and 100+ matches after my Junior year of wrestling. Was I better than my competition? Ehhh… it’s debatable. There were certain guys that didn’t last 30 seconds wrestling against me and there were other guys that I never beat. At the end of the day and after more than a decade to consider some of these issues, I don’t think that I was any better off because of those 300+ matches that I wrestled in the off-season.

I don’t write this stuff as a bitter ex-athlete. Not at all, actually. In fact, I look back on my days as a high school athlete with very happy and exciting memories! But as Sofman says in his quotes above, I’m an adult now and I see the system that I went through for what it really was – a prolonged motivation technique that, for the vast majority of high school athletes, doesn’t help them truly excel beyond their competition. It seems that Sofman has come to this realization, too. In fact, when I read his quote of, “You can’t talk to an adult like that and expect to get results,” I pretty much know that he’s done with these motivation techniques to push him to a greater accomplishment. And I completely understand.

All of that said, I’d still encourage kids to get involved with competitive sports while in school. Competition builds a certain character and, while these athletes are young teenagers, the camaraderie of a team helps them to develop the necessary social skills that they’ll need in many aspects of their adult lives. However, when all is said and done I appreciate where Sofman is coming from because I appreciate that sometimes you have to know when to say when.

Oh, this is going to be one of those longer entries that deals with a personal story from my past which I think you might find entertaining. So sit back and relax and read a little bit of my history…

Before I get started with my story, I thought that I would let you know how this memory was dug out of the recesses of my mind. The other day the New York Times published an article that talked about how high school guidance counselors are receiving failing grades from their students. The article says:

Most people who graduated from high school in the last dozen years believe that their guidance counselors provided little meaningful advice about college or careers, a new study has found. And many said the best advice on their futures came from teachers.

“Most young adults who go on to college believe that the advice of their high school guidance counselors was inadequate and often impersonal and perfunctory,” according to the study by Public Agenda, a nonprofit research organization.

I just fall into that category of people who have graduated high school in the last twelve years. And I can safely say that my high school guidance counselor strongly falls into the category of someone who never gave me “meaningful advice about college or careers.” She definitely “was inadequate and often impersonal and perfunctory.” Frankly, she absolutely sucked at her job and I hope that she didn’t do to other students what she did to me.

Intrigued yet? Read on!

Let me set the stage. I was always an outstanding student. I swept the eighth grade graduation winning almost every academic award that Mount Arlington Public School offered including the Academic Excellence award. It was the same story in high school, where I routinely received straight A’s in honors and advanced placement classes. On top of being a great student, I was a highly involved student, too. I was Vice-President of my Freshman class and then President of my class through Junior year when I became the President of the Student Council for my Senior year. I was a varsity starter on the football, wrestling, and spring track teams and captain of the wrestling team in my Senior year. I was the New Jersey State Interscholastic Athletic Association scholar athlete of the year my Senior year in high school. I was in a bunch of honor societies including the National Honor Society. I even wrote for the school newspaper!

Needless to say, I was clearly a highly involved student – and not just “involved” with bullshit clubs that had two or three members. I was one of the leaders in my high school of approximately 1800 students.

So we’ve set the stage.

When a kid like me is getting ready to start applying to colleges, he obviously gets offers from all over the place. Now, I could go into how we were bombarded at my house with letters and packages from colleges who wanted me to apply, but that would detract from the story about how inept my old guidance counselor was during my senior year. So we’ll focus on a few schools – Muhlenberg College, Bloomsburg University, Harvard University, Princeton University, Rutgers University, and Monmouth University. Why focus on just these schools? Because these are the ones that I applied to when I was in high school.

In truth, I really wanted to go to Muhlenberg College because my football coach had worked out an arrangement for me to get, essentially, a free ride at the school where I would be playing football and possibly even wrestling in the off season. That’s what I wanted to do and I was glad that an arrangement was being worked out – I even remember meeting with the Muhlenberg College coaches on one of their visits to Roxbury High School my Senior year. In fact, I only applied to the other schools just because I wanted to see what the responses were (although I did apply to Monmouth University because they were also recruiting me to play football – which is a story for another time).

Like any overachieving student, I prepared all of my college applications well in advance of their due dates and brought them to my guidance counselor at Roxbury High School at the beginning of October in my Senior year (this would be October 1998). The reason I had to bring them to my guidance counselor was so she could attach my official transcript and get them out during the early admission period. Roxbury High School also had a service where they sent the entire application package out on behalf of the students, which was great! So, I brought my applications to the guidance counselor, she told me they would be sent off by the end of the week, and that was the end of that process. She also mentioned that sometimes colleges take weeks or even months to get back to the applicants, so I should sit tight for a while.

And I sat tight…

My senior year of football was incredible. We were going at a million miles an hour and we wound up winning the first state championship in Roxbury High School history which was major news in our town. From that victory I went on to become the captain of the wrestling team and I even won one of the winter tournaments that the wrestling team went to each year. I was pretty packed with things going on and while the college letters continued to come in, they eventually stopped coming in altogether at some time in January 1999. I thought this was weird so I asked my guidance counselor what was going on and I also brought up that I hadn’t heard from any of the schools that had I applied to yet. She told me that the applications were sent and that she would follow up with the colleges to see if they had accepted me yet.

My guidance counselor never got back to me with an update.

The months kept going by and I never heard from any of the colleges. Finally, at some point at the end of March 1999 I went in to my guidance counselor’s office and asked her what I should do. She said that she would follow up with the colleges and get back to me (sound familiar?). At this point, I began to get the impression that she was incompetent and that something must be up. I should also comment that I had been keeping my Mom apprised of the situation the entire time…

About two weeks after I went to see my guidance counselor (we’re in the middle of April 1999 at this point), I was called to her office where she told me that I had to sign some paperwork. I signed the paperwork and nonchalantly asked her what it was for. She said that it was for my transcripts to be attached to my applications so they could be sent out.

You guys putting the pieces together here? Can you see what happened here yet? If not, let me make it very clear for you…

My guidance counselor received my college applications in October 1998 and did not send them to the colleges until April 1999!

This idiot finally got around to sending out my college applications half a year after I gave them to her in the first place and months after she had already told me that the applications were sent out! My reaction at the time was, “WHAT?!”

I almost immediately knew that my chances at getting that free ride/double sport package at Muhlenburg College were gone. However, at the time I couldn’t comprehend how this woman even had a job bad of a position my guidance counselor put me in…but my Mom knew what this woman did to me. And Mom took action!

I went home and told my Mom what my guidance counselor told me and, from what I remember, all Hell broke loose! My Mom may need to refresh my memory on what happened next, but she either physically went to the high school or called the high school and went ape shit on this idiot guidance counselor. Like most Moms, my Mom is good at going crazy when other people’s incompetence negatively affects her children. Hey – you don’t mess with someone’s kids, you know? As I recall, I’m pretty sure my Mom threatened this woman with lawsuits and possibly with some physical damage (my Mom doesn’t take any shit from any one – she’ll smack a bitch if the situation calls for it).

From what I remember, after Hurricane Mom dealt with my guidance counselor I was called back into the useless counselor’s office and the woman promised me that she would be calling each college personally to admit that she made a major mistake and that my applications shouldn’t be viewed negatively because of her incompetence. She was also going to try to get me the dual sport package back at Muhlenburg College as well as the various scholarship money that I was eligible for given the fact that I was averaging a perfect 4.0 on a 4.0 GPA basis.

Well, Muhlenburg wasn’t interested so that whole package was gone. Rutgers said that they were interested, but that I was past some deadline for certain types of financial aid and that I’d have to pay most of the tuition. Bloomsburg said that they would take me, but only if I was in their History program (which I didn’t want to be in at all). Harvard never responded. And Princeton said they would be interested, but that they couldn’t offer a financial aid package and that I would have to be in an academic program that I didn’t want to be in (I don’t remember which one it was – something with science, I think). The only one who accepted me on the spot and offered multiple thousands of dollars in scholarship funds was Monmouth University. I accepted the Monmouth University offer and that was the end of my dealings with my completely incompetent high school guidance counselor.

My Mom thought that I had a legitimate lawsuit against the high school and the guidance counselor and I agreed (she probably still thinks I have a legitimate lawsuit). In fact, I think that the incompetence of the woman who was my guidance counselor cut short what was an otherwise meteoric academic rise for me throughout my younger years. I mean look – I was on a roll! And I was going along at the speed of light until I hit the brick wall that was the incompetence of my high school guidance counselor.

Looking back, I was pretty aggravated at how this whole thing went down. At the time, I really wanted to play football in college and I thought that with my grades and extracurricular involvement that I should be qualifying to go to school for free (and I still believe that I should have gotten a free ride in college). Granted, I did have an opportunity to play football at Monmouth University, but it didn’t work out – which, again, is an entry for another time (which most of you will find pretty interesting).

However, I’ve learned many things from my experience with my inept guidance counselor. First, I’ve learned the ins and outs of the entire college admissions process. This is something that no one in my family really knew inside and out prior to me going to college and this fiasco with my guidance counselor. Second, I learned that most high school guidance counselors cannot be trusted to be effective at their jobs (also proven by the New York Times article linked above). And third, I learned that when it comes time for my kids, my nieces, and my nephews (when they’re all born) to apply to college that I would like to take an active role in their application process so that they aren’t screwed over by their guidance counselors like my counselor screwed me over.

I wonder how many other students were academically harmed by this woman’s inability to perform the basic functions of her job. I wonder why she was able to keep that job for so long. I wonder how many students could have gone to Ivy League schools if this woman knew how to do her job correctly. Isn’t it amazing to consider how many lives one person’s incompetence has either ruined or negatively affected?

To end on a good note, though, the other day I went to my old high school’s website and the incompetent moron who served as my guidance counselor is no longer employed by Roxbury High School. Thank God no one else has to suffer getting their legs cut out from underneath them because of that horrible, miserable woman.

This entry deals with something that I uncovered the other day that initially shocked me, then saddened me, but ultimately made me shake my head in disbelief and laugh at other people’s neuroses. I expect that many of you will have a similar reaction. This entry deals with the neuroses or delusions (you decide which one – I’ll use both words throughout this entry) of my former grade school classmates – people who once, a long, long time ago, I considered friends. This is a longer entry that I put together over a few days, so you might only want to read this particular entry when you have some extra time.

First, some background…

Grade School in Mt. Arlington
My family moved to Mount Arlington in Morris County in the summer of 1988. We moved from Manhattan because our family grew by one when my younger brother was born on Christmas in 1987. We arrived in New Jersey just in time for me to enter the second grade at the local elementary school. Since I was coming in from a Catholic school in New York, I obviously knew none of the kids in the local elementary school and thus didn’t have any friends when I started at the elementary school. It was no big deal, really, because in second grade you become friends with kids just by sitting next to them which is exactly what happened to me.

The kid that I sat next to in all of my classes in the second grade (and, actually, until I graduated eighth grade) was a kid named Brian. He was a great guy and we were buddies. Unfortunately, Brian passed away a few years ago after fighting some diseases (I believe it was a form of cancer). But when I was younger, Brian was one of my first friends in the new grade school and we continued to talk and bullshit once in a while through high school and after I went away to college. He was a good guy. Anyway, as you might expect, it took a matter of weeks for me to become friends with everyone in the second grade. One of the reasons why this was so easy to do was because there were only 40 or so kids in the entire grade and I also participated in local recreation sports (soccer in the fall, basketball in the winter, and little league in the spring). Plus, living in a somewhat small town, it’s not that hard to get to know everyone!

That was the beginning of me making friends in Mount Arlington. While I didn’t know any of the local Mount Arlington people, I did know all of the kids that lived in my neighborhood. Unfortunately, one of my best friends (who is my age) and his younger brother (who is a year or two younger than us) went to a different elementary school in a nearby town (Roxbury). The local town boundaries are drawn weird in my part of the town and it made it such that some of the kids in my neighborhood went to one school and some went to another; one of those weird things you’ll only find in a New Jersey small town!

Anyway, I had a great time in grade school and by the time I reached the eighth grade, I had a lot of good friends in Mount Arlington. As I recall, I only got into one fight in seventh grade with some weird kid who moved into town for a few months and then promptly moved out. I was an outstanding student (one of these days I’ll write an entry on here about my eighth grade graduation, where I swept every major academic award at the graduation ceremony – it was honestly ridiculous – ask my family).

Moving on to Roxbury High School and Sports
When my eighth grade class graduated, I think that the majority of us were all excited to move on to high school. The local high school was comprised of some 1400 to 1500 students. About 1200 of these students came from the neighboring Roxbury school district while 200 or so came from Mount Arlington. In other words, the kids from Mount Arlington were an extreme minority in Roxbury High School.

Honestly, I was never bothered by this because I never really had the time to think about being in the minority.

I never had any time to think about this because I chose to be highly involved in Roxbury High School. I played football, I wrestled, I ran track (okay, I threw shot put, which doesn’t exactly constitute an act of “running”), I ran for – and won – four different student government positions. By my senior year I became what the made-for-TV movies would call “popular” or a “big man on campus” without even trying to be either – it just happened organically as a result of my participation and excellence in these various activities (to toot my own horn for a moment).

But we’ll get to my senior year soon enough…

Getting back to freshman football, anyone who played football at Roxbury during the late 1990’s can tell you that we practiced a lot! I spent the bulk of my free time during the summer before my freshman year at football practice. Anyone who has ever played on a good sports team can also tell you that when you play a sport with a bunch of guys at a relatively young age, you become very good friends and you create a bond. In fact, to this day on a weekly basis I still speak to some of the guys that I played football and wrestled with in high school.

One of the great things for me playing football at Roxbury was that some of my neighborhood friends played on the football team so I was getting to play a sport with some people that I had been friends with for a long, long time (before we moved to Mount Arlington in 1988). Plus, my cousin (who is actually only 5 days younger than I am) moved into town and he played on the freshman football team, too. My older brother also played, but he was on the Varsity squad with some of the other neighborhood guys.

Over the years we grew into a very tight football team and eventually won the school’s first state championship in that sport. Many of us also wrestled on the same team for four years; by the end of our senior year we had become a very close group of friends. Like I said above, here we are today – fifteen years after I met some of these guys for the first time and almost eleven years after we all graduated from high school – and we all still talk regularly. Those guys are great and I think that every guy should have that level of camaraderie while in high school.

Queue the Psycho Music
But I began this story in Mount Arlington because that’s where the neurotic or delusional people in this story come from…

At some point between graduating eighth grade and some time in high school (I can’t pinpoint when, exactly), a small portion of my buddies from Mount Arlington began to dislike me. Don’t ask me why this happened because I am nowhere near the level of psychotic necessary to fully understand where these people are coming from on this one. I just know that during my senior year of high school my girlfriend at the time informed me that three or four guys from Mount Arlington didn’t like me any more.

At the time, I flabbergasted by this revelation. I couldn’t imagine why these guys didn’t like me! I didn’t have any of these guys in my classes in high school because I was taking the honors curriculum and, other than a few of the girls that I went to grade school with, there weren’t many of my former Mount Arlington classmates in my classes. I definitely never went out of my way to be mean to these guys or anyone, really. The last meaningful conversations that I had with any of the guys from Mount Arlington were in grade school before we graduated and like I said earlier, they were friendly and cordial. In fact, I distinctly remember going to one of their birthday parties at a local army base and going over to one of their houses to watch a football game (must have been the Super Bowl, I don’t remember).

I was “friends” with these two or three kids, make no mistake about it. Were we good friends? Eh, it’s hard not to be good friends with everyone when you’re in a class of about 40 kids for seven years so I’d say we were good friends. Were we best friends? Definitely not. But we were good friends.

So What Was the Problem?
From what I’ve heard (and, again, I’m thinking back over eleven years ago to something that my girlfriend at the time told me) these two or three guys began to dislike me because they thought that I “forgot where I came from.” Well, that’s a nice little catchphrase for high school kids to throw around, but it really doesn’t hold any water once you apply it to the reality of my situation as I outlined above.

So while I think that these guys were being a little bit delusional, I also think that I know what happened here.

We went to Roxbury High School and I was the only one who began playing football; I was the only guy who began running for (and winning) school-wide offices in student government; I was the only guy who wrestled and eventually became the Captain of the wrestling team. Like I said earlier, I was one of the few guys from Roxbury who wound up being considered a “big man on campus” (a distinction that I didn’t care about nor did I ever seek to achieve – these things happen organically). Oh, and by the way, I hate the term “big man on campus.” I’d prefer to say that I was a student that was actively engaged in his personal success, the success of his teammates, the success of his high school, and the success of his extended hometown. But since more people probably understand what high school was like when I use that cheesy “big man” phrase, so be it.

You get the point.

I went to high school and excelled at all of these sports with teammates who were primarily from Roxbury (i.e. not my classmates from grade school in Mount Arlington). Bear in mind that my best friends from my neighborhood (which was essentially Roxbury) and my blood-related family (my older brother and cousin) were also on these teams, too.

What it boils down to is that when we arrived in high school, I did my thing and these two or three guys did their thing…except part of their thing was telling each other and then agreeing with each other that I “forgot where I came from.”

Talk about surrounding yourself with “yes” men!

Since I learned that these guys didn’t like me as my Senior year was coming to a close, it didn’t really affect me in high school. And, because I had zero interactions with these guys after eighth grade, them choosing to not like me did not effect me in college or graduate school and it doesn’t effect me today. For those of you in your late 20’s – put yourself in my shoes. If someone that essentially faded into the background while you were in high school didn’t like you because of their own neuroses and you didn’t know about it – could that possibly have any effect on you? I thought not.

For comparison’s sake, think of it like any of the actors on Saved by the Bell finding out that one of the background characters who filled a seat during the classroom scenes saying that they didn’t like one of the characters on the show. Except in my case, these people weren’t even in the seats in my classes!

And if I am going to be completely honest, then I should say that my life has been so filled with a variety of ups, downs (mostly ups), events, volunteering, work, school, etc. that these people occupy 0.00% of my mental energy. In other words, I completely forgot about them. It happens – I guarantee that there are people that you went to school with that you forgot even existed. Think about it…

Okay Joe, But What’s the Point?
That’s a good deal of background information to digest, so you might watn to take a break at this point.

Back? Good!

Through a weird series of clicks on Facebook the other day I was reminded of these couple of guys and their dislike of me. I clicked on one link that took me to another link that took me to another link (you’ve all been on Facebook, I’m sure you know what it’s like when you see something that catches your eye). Ultimately, I wound up on this little photo-based website that one of these guys put together. The website was put together for their little clique of twenty or so people that hung out with each other back during high school (hey, I wasn’t invited to hang out – maybe I should be the one harboring ill will towards them! LOL).

Calvin Pissing

I’m sure you’ve all seen that picture of Calvin the cartoon character pissing on something. For your viewing pleasure, I’ve included it here. Well, when I clicked on the “opinions” page of that poorly put together website, I saw Calvin pissing on someone’s head. The image looked like it was put together during the stone age of the internet, when people used MS Paint to create crude versions of what Adobe Photoshop does with ease today. I looked at the picture of Calvin pissing on that head and I swore that something looked familiar. I could barely make out the face on the head because the quality was incredibly poor, but I swore that the head that Calvin was pissing on looked a lot like…me!

I sat and looked at that picture for a minute and went through the mental index of pictures of myself in my head. I was trying to figure out what picture my head could have been cropped from and after a minute or two of thinking, I singled out which picture it had to be. A few years ago I scanned all of my physical pictures to an electronic library that I keep on my computer, so I went to that electronic library and lo and behold – I found the suspected picture. Just to be sure, I blew up the picture of Calvin pissing on my head, put it side by side with the picture in my electronic library, and I found a perfect match (albeit a much, much lower quality image from the website).

Wow. That’s Weird. So What?
At the beginning of this entry I said that I was initially shocked and saddened when I saw this picture, but then I ultimately shook my head in disbelief and laughed it off. And that’s exactly what happened. When I placed that head as my own, I was shocked. When I realized that these were my “good friends” from grade school who created the crude image, I was saddened. Finally, when I realized that these people clearly have a deep level of neurosis or delusional thoughts about me and why they went one way in high school and I went another, I actually began laughing out loud. How could I not find the humor in this!?

Think about it.

Here are two or three guys that I literally did not have one thought about through my entire time in high school until my girlfriend brought them back to my attention for a few minutes. Here is a small group of guys that, I kid you not, I have not had one thought about since high school until I stumbled across this little website the other day. I could probably count on two hands the amount of minutes that I’ve spent thinking about any of these people in the last fifteen years.

In the mean time, these people are so neurotic about me and how I rose to be a popular kid in high school that they put my head underneath Calvin’s piss stream! Ha ha ha!!! How great is that?! They created this negative energy about me and then obsessed over that negative energy while I only had enough time in my day to practice football, practice wrestling, and do my school work! They actually spent time in their day finding ways to feed their irrational dislike of me while I forgot that they existed!

I’ve spent the last fifteen years living a life free and clear of any ill will and this picture shows me that they have, in part, obsessed over how much they believe their own bullshit fairy tales! Ha ha ha! Meanwhile, I haven’t devoted one minute of my time to their obsession! I win!

But Joe, You Must Have Been Mean to Them, Right?
The funny thing is that I never disliked any of these guys (or the 20 or so other people that they probably infected with their negativity). In fact, I always had a great affection and consideration for all of my old grade school friends. How could I not have a great admiration for my friends from grade school? As I recall (and I admit that I’m thinking back over twenty years – many of which are clouded by vodka – so my memory might be fuzzy), we all always had a good time in grade school. And as for the few folks from Mount Arlington who traveled in the same circles as I did in high school – we had a lot of fun, too. I went to my ten year high school reunion a few months ago and I saw two people that I went to school with in both Mount Arlington and Roxbury and it was great to see them – we had an awesome time catching up with what everyone was doing with their lives.

But for these few guys, I guess in their warped world view I must have “forgotten where I came from.”

Ha ha ha!!!

How could I have forgotten where I came from? When we all entered the high school, I kept in touch with as many of the Mount Arlington kids as possible. Between being involved in student government, playing football, and trying my damnedest to get Advanced Placement credits in the honors program I didn’t have that much time to speak with every single classmate that I knew! And how does one who is building bonds with his teammates, which include his blood-related family members as well as kids that he’s known since he was very young, forget where he is coming from? That is, by far, the most ridiculous catchphrase that these guys could have thrown their support behind.

Let’s think about what their version of remembering where one comes from must include. In their version, I would have to remain in my hometown no matter what the outside world had to offer. In other words, there would be no football, no wrestling, no student government…hell, no college, no living down the shore for the last ten years, no jobs too far from home, no knowledge of anything outside of the little bubble that is Mount Arlington in Morris County, New Jersey. Unbelievable! And how is it that I forgot where I came from when none of these ridiculous rules applied to these two or three guys when they went off to college and moved to various parts of the state? But let’s not let reality ruin the delusions.

Frankly, if I wanted to take a negative, self-indulgent stance like these few guys have taken, then I might suggest that it was they who abandoned me once we entered Roxbury High School! Of course, I can see the complete insanity that believing such rubbish would require and I’m just not that far away from sanity.

And In Conclusion…
What it comes down is that – even more than a decade after graduating high school and fifteen years after graduating grade school – these people have an irrational hatred in their hearts. They have the type of hate that you find in the worst people on this planet and I find it really shocking.

In the end, I’ve always liked these people because after we graduated from Mount Arlington, I never created a false reality about what their motives were during our high school years. My last true interactions with them were in grade school and those interactions were awesome. When we entered high school and I was preoccupied with living a very exciting, very full life, these guys created a fairy tale regarding me forgetting my Mount Arlington roots. Side note – wouldn’t my roots be in Manhattan? Oh well, let’s not ruin their story.

At this point in my life (and their lives, I’d imagine), I find this absolutely hilarious. I believe that their neuroses and delusions are for them and their psychiatrists to figure out. For me, though, my last meaningful memories of these people were good ones until I found that childish image on one of their weird websites last Monday.

Since I’m not a bitter, angry, hateful person like they clearly are and since I harbor no ill will towards any of them, I hope that they enjoyed creating their little picture and their fairy tales all of those years ago. Hey, sometimes people are weird and I guess I found out that this group of people is just a weird group. Good for them! Be weird! More the power to you! Even after finding that picture and finding the real hate in their hearts, I still only wish the best for them and their little clique.

Some Final Words
And so here we are after nearly 4,200 words in this entry. I hope that this entry does some justice to these delusional people. I hope by acknowledging their irrationality I can bring some closure to their fairy tale – hopefully I can bring them a, “And they lived happily ever after.” Yay!

There is so much more that I could write about this story and this little group of guys. There are more twists and turns in the story that I wish I knew more about. For example, one of these three guys from Mount Arlington that decided they didn’t like me had a huge crush on my girlfriend in high school. However, since I didn’t interact with their little clique, there was no way for me to know that he had a thing for her (plus, it wouldn’t have stopped me from making my move). He felt like I was sweeping in and stealing the object of his desires right in front of him (which is true, I guess). I don’t really know much more about the situation than that, so I can’t really talk more about it (but how great could that part of the story be, huh?).

Back in the real world, though, I know that I’ll forget about these guys and their pettiness and hatred for another decade or two. In truth, I’ve already forgotten about them multiple times during the last week! I’m sure that their psychiatrists will suggest that they do the same with me.

I hope you enjoyed that brief look into my grade school and high school world! There are many more tales from Mount Arlington and Roxbury that have yet to be written. Maybe I’ll run across another picture or person on Facebook that dislodges another memory!

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– The 50 Greatest Moments in TNA History
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