So I started researching, buying cookbooks, reading studies, running, bought a gym membership, watched infommercials (technically, I was already doing that), watched extra infommercials, and what I found is that none of it did much good. What I found were tons of theories about nutrition and weight loss and I was going to try them all if that’s what it took. What I found was, I didn’t know anything about food.

I’m one of those people who becomes obsessed with the latest thing and food is my new thing. What I mean is, for most of my life I’ve had no tangible knowledge of food. The fielding percentages of the 1988 Cubs’ infield? Sure. The stuff we put in our mouths every day to stay alive? No idea. Maybe you’ve had a vast understanding of food your entire life and it bores you, but not me. I’ve known more about Roth IRAs than I did food, and the only thing I’ve known about Roth IRAs is I should have one or marry someone who does. I haven’t done either, because used guitars and motorcycles sounded more fun.

Let’s start with calories. I did not know what calories were. Technically, I still don’t know what they are, but I know they’re a measurement. I don’t know what they measure exactly, but it’s progress. Also, I don’t know anything about vitamins. Like people always say Vitamin A is good for your eyes. I assume that’s true, but I don’t really know. People say carrots have Vitamin A. I don’t know if that’s true either, but again, likely. And I’ve heard eating carrots is good for your eyes, which also could be true, or maybe it’s just a logical assumption of a couple other truths that people repeat. What does ‘good for your eyes’ even mean? They’re healthier? OK, how? Like if I ate 10 carrots every day I’d have 20-20 vision? Would I become impervious to cataracts or sharp sticks? Or is carrot eating to ocular betterment something I had to do as a kid, like learning to swim? (So proud of the phrase “ocular betterment” that I don’t even care that it’s hard to say and might not even be accurate.)

I know young, seemingly healthy people who take cups of pills every day and swear vitamins help with a cold and allergies and gingivitis and boils and pooping and bow legs and nightmares and boat sickness and jock itch and ear hair and softball pitching and getting your crescent wrench back from your neighbor. Then you have other seemingly healthy people who wouldn’t put any pill in their body and would claim Tylenol and Aspirin are nothing but placebos.

Isn’t it crazy how we can’t agree about even basic principles of nutrition and food? And I don’t mean your two loud-mouth uncles after six beers at Thanksgiving dinner. I’m talking about nutritionists. People who studied food and pay the electric bill by telling other humans what to eat. I’m talking about scientists, smart people who actually went to class in college. They don’t agree. Take milk. It basically IS its own food group. And yet, milk is highly debated. And it’s not that people disagree about the level to which milk is beneficial or should be consumed. I mean, some profess it is crucial to proper health and others say we shouldn’t be drinking it after breast-feeding. Some studies claim drinking milk helps fight osteoporosis and others say that not only does milk not fight osteoporosis, because of its high fat content, it ultimately does the opposite. It makes bones weaker.

Is that not incredible? It’s 2012. More than 40 years ago, we flew a spaceship to the moon, landed it on the dirt and rocks, men got out and walked around. I just looked at a $300 mini computer I carry around in my pocket to double check that the moon landing happened in the year ’69. Theoretically, I could take a high quality video with my phone and instantly show it to everyone I’ve ever met in the world. And we still can’t decide if we should be drinking milk or not? That makes my face hurt just thinking about it. Then you throw in the fact that it’s the milk of cows, another species altogether, which leads to all sorts of other disagreements. It does a body good, though, right? I actually have no idea.

I do think it’s fascinating. What a variety. You have vegetarians who don’t eat meat. You have vegans who don’t eat any animal products. You have raw food vegans, who don’t eat meat or animal products or anything cooked. You have people who think it’s unhealthy to consume caffeine or soda or alcohol. You have people losing weight and lowering their cholesterol while eating lots of meat. You have studies that say red meat is terrible, others that say it’s fine.

There is also that special percentage of the population who look at all the chaos and say, “Screw it, we’re all going to die eventually.” To an extent, that’s an attitude I envy, but I notice I don’t hear a lot of 50 and 60-year-olds saying it. I get frustrated by the studies, too. Coffee is bad. Then it’s good. Then it’s bad, but it has benefits. Eggs are bad. Then they’re not. Artificial sweeteners flop back and forth like Mitt Romney was involved. Carbs take a beating and then get forgotten. Anyone remember why Angus beef was so big for a while? I could go on and on. Salt … iceberg lettuce … red wine … you can find a contradictory opinion on about everything.

The shame is I think a lot of people use all that as an excuse to eat whatever they want whenever they want. That’s called diabetes. No, I’m kidding. OK, sort of kidding. Eating every baked good you see is not a logical response to scientists disagreeing about the benefits of walnuts versus almonds for middle-aged marathon runners. Nice try though. Obviously, there’s more than just a connection between food and health. I’m not sure what it is exactly. Probably never will. But I know I’ve gotten healthier in the search and I still find it interesting so I’m going to write about my observations here on this site now and then. Maybe it will be fun. Maybe it will be beneficial. Maybe it will be nothing you’ll want to consume.

The blank that needs to be filled in, however, is that this person is a PhD student named Sam who needed subjects for a study he’s doing about grief. More specifically, how men deal with grief. Hey, I’ve experienced grief! I have free time on Mondays and most other days. I am a man, by technical definitions. I like talking about myself. I told him I would be there at noon sharp.

After I arrived 15 minutes late, Sam told me this was the first portion of a two-part interview. The second will be in a group setting a couple weeks from now. (Grief blog part 2 spoiler alert: There will be people to make fun of besides me. Hurray!) The only thing I could think at the time is exactly what you’re thinking now, which is, “I wonder what this guy is actually researching.” Because that’s the deal, right? The psychologist doesn’t tell the subject what he’s actually studying. Sure, he tells you he’s studying how men handle grief, but he’s actually about to demonstrate how you would shock a small child in the face with 300 volts of electricity for a dozen extra followers on Twitter.

I kept glancing around the room. I looked at the video camera and guessed it was some sort of sophisticated prop, perhaps a fake video camera with a more advanced HD video camera inside it. I looked for peep holes in the walls. I read the release form top to bottom twice before signing it, even though I have never read an apartment lease or service agreement or phone contract. Something was up. I knew it. Sam looked at me. I looked at him. I would soon figure out what, then jump up and scream “AH-HA!” then call the cops, then have Sam water-boarded in Guantanemo.

None of that happened, though. As background, I’ve never been to therapy of any kind, but this was sort of how I pictured a psychologist at work. He asked simple, general questions. He didn’t cut me off. When I couldn’t think of a word, he sat there until I thought of it. As usual, I talked in circles until I either figured out what I was trying to say or forgot the question entirely and had to start over. Now I will be the first to admit I have no idea what therapists are trying to do. I mean, I have a general idea of the general idea, but I don’t know their techniques. I don’t know what they listen for or how they evaluate progress or what they write in their little notebooks. I’m not even positive they use little notebooks. But I did recognize something from when I was a newspaper reporter, a rule I tried to live by. You can’t quote yourself. A bad habit of lazy reporters is to write the story in their head and then ask questions that they hope will lead to the answers that fit. Sports reporters are infamous for doing it, probably because they write on such tight deadlines and write about games that drive the storyline in one direction or another. We all do it. We make snap judgments about people, situations, feelings. Life practically requires it. All our experiences shape the way we expect people to act and respond.

Except that in reporting, as I’m sure it is in therapy, you can’t really get to know someone when you’re the one talking instead of them. To get really good details for a story, or in this case good details for a study, you need to let them tell you the good details. That takes time. The most interesting or pertinent information doesn’t just come spewing out when we open our mouths. It takes time. In my case, it might not ever happen because there might not be interesting details. I haven’t dealt with much grief. My life has been charmed, and I don’t mean in a ‘thank God I wasn’t born a Mayan or during the construction of the Great Pyramid or in the city of Detroit’ sort of way. I just haven’t felt much pain in my life. I haven’t been hungry. I haven’t been poor. My immediate family is all alive and healthy. The only bone I’ve ever broken was a pinky playing touch football in college. If that doesn’t scream ‘good grief’ I don’t know what does.

I talked about the death of my grandma and a relationship that went bad. He asked what methods I use to cope with grief. We talked about the old school versus new school methods of dealing with grief, men who bottle up everything inside the way I figure men did generations ago, and the men of today who tan and get their eyebrows waxed and post their feelings on Facebook. I exaggerate for effect. After an hour, he said he had enough and shut off the video recorder and that I did well. I’m not sure if that’s true, or if there really is a well in thigs case. But now that I think about it, I didn’t really talk about sarcasm, which is probably my No. 1 method of dealing with everything. Guess I’ll have to break that out in group.

This was Junior Seau on “Up Close” years ago when he played for the San Diego Chargers. It’s eery to listen to the voice of someone who has just died, even if it was an old recording. They found Seau’s body this morning in his house in Oceanside, a beautiful town on the coast just north of San Diego. It appears he shot himself in the chest. At one point in the video Chris Myers asks Seau about the physical strain of playing professional football and Seau tells him about how he bought an ice machine for his home so he could recover after games.

“I’m a 27-year-old guy,” Seau says, ”living in, probably, a 38-year-old body.”

His body made it to 43.

Whether or not Seau committed suicide and what led him to that end are just two of the questions that will be asked. We can now wonder whether his car wreck in 2010 where he drove off a cliff was actually a suicide attempt, or whether he fall asleep, as he told police. He had just been arrested and then released after a domestic violence charge. It is also logical to ask what effect Seau’s years in the NFL had on his brain and whether he suffered from Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE). That’s the disease former NFL player Dave Duerson thought he had when he shot himself in the chest on Feb. 17, 2011. Duerson left a note saying he wanted his brain to be studied after death. Researchers at Boston University found out he was right. Duerson did have CTE.

Seau’s death feels like too much of a coincidence to be a coincidence, so we will wait and listen and hopefully learn from it. We are living through sports and football history right now. It’s morbid and scary, but it is obvious our games sometimes have drastic consequences for the people playing them. Imagine the inner struggle of having desperation so severe it would drive a person to kill himself, but still enough hope that he would kill himself in a more painful way to help others. This wasn’t some back-up player who will be forgotten tomorrow. This was Junior Seau. A future hall-of-famer. He had to know that. This was the first time I’ve really thought social awareness could drastically change sports in the next decade. But more likely it will be lawyers that do it.

Seau’s death does revisit an entirely different coincidence. It’s at least a partial coincidence, if you can look past the fact that football players on average die younger than the rest of us. Seau is the eighth member of the 1994 San Diego Chargers Super Bowl team who has already died. Many are referring to it as a “curse” of that team. There’s even a Wikipedia page called the San Diego sports curse that mentions it, although it’s most about the city’s lack of championships. It is a pretty remarkable coincidence. Eight is a huge number for one team, especially when you consider none of them made it to age 45.

I don’t believe in curses. I talk about the Chicago Cubs’ curse a lot, but if I had to be honest, I just think they’ve mostly been bad for 100 years or so. Usually I roll my eyes when people try to turn something coincidental into something dramatic or conveniently packaged, but I think this is an interesting example of how big events can give something else impact. Big events shape our memories. Oh, these guys all played on one team in the Super Bowl? That grabs the attention. It wasn’t eight men who somehow were connected to the Chargers once. This wasn’t eight men who played on the Chargers in a decade. This was eight men on the San Diego Chargers when they played the 49ers in a Super Bowl. That’s a day we paid attention. We watched. It makes us take notice. It connects us. It gives it a perspective, a dimension that it wouldn’t otherwise have. Not that I didn’t already think this, but it makes life seem insanely fast. It gives their passing a tiny bit of the intensity that the people who truly knew them must have felt.

Here are all eight members of the 1994 San Diego Chargers’
Super Bowl team who have died.

…

David Griggs, linebacker, age 28 (Feb. 5, 1967-June 19, 1995)

Griggs was killed when his car slid off an expressway ramp west of Fort Lauderdale, Fla., and hit a pole.

Rodney Culver, running back, age 26 (Dec. 23, 1969 – May 11, 1996)

Culver and his wife died with 108 other people when ValuJet Flight 592 crashed into the Florida Everglades. A fire in the baggage storage area caused the crash.

Doug Miller, linebacker, age 28 (Oct. 29, 1969-July 21, 1998)

Miller, a Wyoming native who went to South Dakota State, was struck by lightning near Dotsero, Colo.

Curtis Whitley, center, age 39 (May 10, 1969 – May 11, 2008)

Whitley died of a drug overdose. One of many former NFL players whose families are currently suing the NFL. Whitley reportedly suffered from paranoia, suicidal thoughts and severe depression, all symptoms of CTE.

Chris Mims, defensive lineman, age 38 (Sept. 29, 1970 – Oct. 15, 2008)

Mims died of an enlarged heart. He suffered financial problems and depression after his football career ended. At his death, Mims weighed more than 450 pounds.

Shawn Lee, defensive lineman, age 44 (Oct. 24, 1966 – Feb. 26, 2011)

Lee died of cardiac arrest after catching pneumonia. After football, he struggled with diabetes.

Lewis Bush, linebacker, age 42 (Dec. 2, 1969 – Dec. 8, 2011)

Bush also died of a heart attack.

Junior Seau, linebacker, age 43 (Jan. 19, 1969 – May 2, 2012)

As you know, I was a writer. Am a writer? I mean, I still write but I don’t get direct deposited checks for it anymore. I was once a newspaper columnist and then I got laid off along with everyone else you know, so now I write here on my web site and over at SoulPancake.com and in a book that I can’t tell you about yet. (It’s not that I’ve signed a confidentiality agreement or anything. I just don’t want you to think it’s almost done. Because it isn’t.)

I’m also a little obsessed with Facebook, mostly because I have to have that interaction. Need it like meth. I might rip copper wire out of street light poles for FB. I miss the daily feedback at the newspaper, the online comments and the daily emails. Now, I sit alone and write a few thousand words with only my own jaded opinion as to whether its decent enough to bother with editing. Ah, but I’m always a click away from Facebook. And if FB is anything, it’s constant feedback. Tell a joke. Post a photo. Like something. Quote the Koran. Be sarcastic. Have a misunderstanding. You can post a thought and get comments from your grade school teacher (I’m FB friends with three of mine) or a teenager or your roommate or your great aunt in Sarasota. It’s just nuts. It’s A.D.D. entertainment. And I like arguing with people in print. Because in real life I’m scared. I’m small and intimidated and want everyone to say nice things about me, but I get a little braver when I can think out my comment and write it down.

Today, for instance, I saw one of those posts-gone-viral. It’s a display of actual burger-and-fry fast-food meals that a wellness center in Illinois has had sitting out uncovered for weeks and then months and it’s never rotted or gotten moldy. Super gross, right? The point is of course that fast food is so filled with preservatives and other crap that it won’t spoil like actual food no matter how long you let it sit at room temperature. I agree with the ultimate conclusion. No one should eat that stuff. Not ever. Not in moderation. You wouldn’t hit yourself in the face with a shovel in moderation, why would you beat up your insides in moderation? If you’re anti-fast food, I’m on board. However, if you do a little online research you can quickly find that the reason fast-food burgers and fries don’t spoil is because they’re so thin and have so much surface area that they dehydrate before mold can start to grow. They basically become dried jerky. The same thing happens if you make the same size burger at home from 100 percent beef. So the original premise is shocking and believable and supports a notion a lot of people believe, but it’s false.

But instead of just chuckling about a picture of gross food somewhere in Illinois, I will surf the internet for research and then write some 500-word response and then re-write it and then post in the middle of a bunch of one-sentence posts by people I don’t even know who probably won’t believe me anyway, who will inevitably call me an idiot and move on with their lives. Half the time, I’m sure it makes me look like a complete weirdo. It’s a sickness. I know. So at least we can get a little entertainment out of it. I usually make an unnecessarily long post like this once a week, so I will try to re-post them all here. Here is this week’s stupidity, with a little background for setup.

The original status update was posted by my FB friend Geoff Calkins, a sports columnist in Memphis, Tenn. He’s insanely talented, been named the best columnist in the South three times or something, won tons of national awards. He used to be an attorney and has a great backstory. His post was about how a guy on the street asked him to buy him potato chips and Geoff decided that since the man surprisingly had asked for food, he would do it. But it got a little weird when the guy was really specific about the kind of chips he wanted and then also wanted candy. There was an avalanche of entertaining comments, but in the middle my attention was caught by a man who made the statement that ”most” bums are “con artists.” This was my comment …

—

“Man, this thread has it all. A fun story. A misunderstanding. A little political commentary. A bible verse. All the requirements for a proper FB thread. I can’t think of any particular good-deed-attempt-gone-wrong anecdote of my own, but I did want to correct [name redacted] that most bums are certainly not scam artists. That’s a common myth, the idea that there are professional vagrants making six figures asking for change, or a limo that drops temporary employees off at street corners before rush hour and picks them back up in the evening and they all meet back at a wearhouse and laugh about what fools middle class white people are. (Those are extreme examples of the myth, I realize, but you get the point.) My guess is it continues to circulate because it makes us feel a little better about not giving money to strangers, or simply not being able to choose who to help and who to ignore. Cause individually we can’t help everybody and thinking about all that need can be overwhelming. It’s a massive societal problem … [we pause while republicans and democrats scream about causes and blame] … and you could make good arguments for the ‘help however you can, believe in people’ philosophy or the ‘they’ll just by beer with it, that’s why my tax dollars go to programs.’ Some of them ARE gonna buy beer with it. Beer is really tasty. So are Zapps, apparently. If you live under an overpass some nights and ask strangers to buy you food, nutritional value irony is probably not your main concern. You’re living from minute to minute. Bums are a lot of things; some drug users, some seasonally down on their luck, some lazy, some with mental problems, but it does not look glamorous, and I can assure you most bums are not con artists. Unless you define “con artist” as ‘figuring out how to temporarily get by in life without a job by begging for specific kinds of delicious potato chips.’ … This came out sounding way more lectury than I meant. Just wanted to add some thoughts. Carry on. I’m off to save other parts of the internet.”

 —

See what I mean? There’s just no way to post something like that and not look like an insufferable know-it-all. Especially since I didn’t know a single person in the thread besides Geoff and only know him in a distant, journalism-circles sort of way.  That’s why I usually try to close with a psuedo-light comment, so people don’t think I’m insane. I doubt it works. (Here’s a screen shot of the comment, just so you don’t think I make this stuff up. And now that you mention it, why would I make up something this absurd?)

*Sadly, I had to look at a globe to make sure Egypt was far enough from Cameroon so that you would know I was kidding. Not a real globe. An online globe. You know what I mean. How weird is it that now unless specified, I always assume whatever we are talking about is an online thing and not something you can hold in real life? Do they even make globes anymore?

This weekend, I will be given a wedding job title for the fifth time. My first I was an usher and the last four I was cast as groomsman, once as ‘best man’ and the other three as ‘guy who makes photos awkward cause he’s a foot shorter than normal people’ and contrary to the idea you might have gotten from the first paragraph, I’m excited. Weddings are exciting. There’s too many cool ingredients for it not to be exciting. Saturday night. Gifts. Wine. Tuxedos. Booze. Sexy dresses. Hot dates. Family members you didn’t know were still living. Free food. A band. Old people dancing. Cake. Beer. Every once in a great while, if you have gone to church and prayed with enough intensity, an old relative you didn’t know was alive will get drunk and dance herself into a table of gifts and the mother-of-the-bride’s freshly poured glass of red punch. OK, those moments are rare. Usually it’s just an uncle making an awkward when-ya-gettin-married comment to the 35-year-old female cousin who’s been bringing the same ‘roommate’ to events for the past five years.

As someone who does NOT hate to brag, I must tell you I am 4-for-4 so far. I have been in four weddings and all four couples are still legally married last time I checked. I am available for rent on pretty much any weekend. I will email you my tux measurements. All I ask is a free meal, a short brunette bridesmaid for the procession, and a tasteful gift with my initials engraved into it. A small fee for a lifetime of happiness. Forget Dane Cook. I am your Good Luck Matt.

All that said, last weekend I attended the bachelor party for the latest wedding and I actually had a great time. This is unusual because as I’ve stated, I do not enjoy bachelor parties. For so many reasons. I do not enjoy going out in enormous groups or overly organized fun or scripted debauchery. I do not care for strippers at all — and not for some holier-than-thou or degradation-of-women reason (not that those aren’t great reasons) — because the idea of paying someone to show interest in me makes me feel bad for everyone involved. Especially me. Also, I hate being around guys who are super into strippers. You are way creepier than the women undressing for money. It’s not even close. The same creepy guys who kept the rest of us from joining a frat in college.

Also, you’ve always got a married guy who after a drink and a half thinks he’s been cast in the movie “Very Bad Things.” He always takes things too far and makes everyone uncomfortable every time they have to see his wife from now until eternity. That guy always wants to go to Vegas. Always. I’m also not a fan of Vegas, with the one exception being the March Madness trip where you watch college basketball for four straight days and fly home. Vegas would be a lot better if everyone who said “What happens in Vegas …” was banned from the city.

We all know couples who get in big arguments about the bachelor party*, which should be an immediate deal-breaker. If there is any disagreement whatsoever about what should happen, or what should be allowed, or where it should be held, that’s your get out of bad marriage free card. A red flag so big Toby Keith would fly it in his yard. Call the wedding off. You’ve got no shot. Move on. Find someone else. Save us all the cost of a juicer you’re never going to use anyway.

What’s even worse is the combined bachelor and bachelorette parties which apparently occur when you can’t trust each other for one night of fun. There is zero chance of anyone having a good time at those because bachelorette parties ruin anything they touch. At least men are trying to show their buddy a good time. Women are just hazing each other … OK, first, we’ll make her wear this terrible outfit. Then we’ll embarrass her in public. Then we’ll make her beg for $1 bills from strangers with erotic-shaped suckers. Then we’ll annoy everyone at a comedy show or restaurant or anything other location we crush in our parade of cackling. I am paraphrasing, but only lightly.

One of my favorite movies, ironically, is “Bachelor Party,” the Tom Hanks flick with Tawny Kitaen way back before she got into the ‘who can do more meth’ contest with Gary Busey. Remember that one? A donkey snorts drugs. They crash a bus. The stuffy frat guy gets smacked around. The crazy friends chase “guns and firetrucks and hookers.” It’s hilarious. In the movies. In real life, I mean, do we even need stereotypical bachelor parties anymore? You’re not an 18-year-old kid going off to war. It’s 2012. You’re probably 32 and have stock options. You’ve been partying for a decade. The percentages say this won’t be your last wedding*. If you think your life is ending, don’t get married. Santorum didn’t win the nomination. There are no laws that say every enjoyable moment after age 21 must produce a child.

*I’m always scared to joke about divorce because so many of my good friends have gotten divorced and they’re great people and nobody wants to hear the guy who’s never been married cracking wise about it, so I will just say one thing. And I think most people would agree. Tone it down a little on the second, third and fourth weddings. Most people do, but there are those special few out there rocking the designer gown, 12 bridesmaids, 350 guests, and three bachelorette parties for marriage No. 3. We get it. You’re happy. We’ve seen your posts on Facebook about it taking 44 years to find the love of your life. Congratulations. But let me use a sports analogy. Last night I was watching the Chicago White Sox play the Baltimore Orioles and the Sox closer Hector Santiago gave up two home runs in the ninth that tied the game. Fans booed. The insufferable White Sox announcers pouted children. And eventually Hector ended the inning by striking out the last batter. So what if after that strikeout Hector had pumped his fist and pointed to the heavens and started high-fiving his teammates? Yea, people would have looked at him like he was an idiot. That’s all I’m saying. In some situations, you just walk back to the dugout.

I’m going to wrap this up while I still have a couple friends left. This weekend’s groom had what I would call the perfect bachelor party, which was to get together all his friends and hang out. He likes the outdoors and shooting guns and riding around in ATVs and fishing, so we went camping for a night. A group of a dozen guys from the different stages of his life sat around a campfire on the river above Pine Flat Lake. We had a coffee pot plugged into a generator, so we weren’t exactly roughing it. I slept in a tent. That should count. We didn’t catch any fish. No one got hurt. They won’t make any movies about it, but it was cool to hear high school and college stories from the guys that knew him back then. I was reminded why he is such a good friend and his marriage will no doubt keep my streak alive. I will miss him and his future wife, though. Hope they have phones in Cameroon.

So here is the question I can’t stop asking: Why was he ever attractive to a 25-year-old woman? And not to ruin the ending of this post, but that question leads to the bigger question: Why are women so attracted to fame?

I’ve posted the video of the University of Arkansas athletic director explaining why he fired his football coach, if you hadn’t heard the story by now. I keep hearing and reading about Arkansas choosing integrity over wins. No. This was about the rules of being a boss. You cannot hire someone you’re secretly sleeping with, and you can’t sleep with people who work for you. Good ol Petrino. Nothing like losing a $3 million-per-year job to make you analyze your choices. But I get it. Old men have trouble resisting young, pretty women. It’s not a complicated equation. But what about the other direction? What lands a good-looking, 25-year-old woman in a relationship with a 51-year-old man who looks and acts a lot more like the red-faced guy at the end of the bar than he does a distinguished George Clooney?

First off, we have to make some assumptions. Because we don’t know a lot of the details about Petrino’s mistress and probably never will. We have to assume Jessica Dorrell is intelligent. She played volleyball at Arkansas. She was an academic qualifier. She earned a college degree. She’s no doubt motivated and driven. She may not have been the most qualified person for the job Petrino helped her get a couple weeks ago (although who knows, maybe she was), but she was at least passable in a group of 200 applicants.

You could accuse Dorrell of being a gold digger. Petrino did give her $20,000 and got her a job. But there are probably plenty of men in Arkansas with money, right? At least a dozen. Seriously though, if money is the only motivation, a pretty woman has dating options. And $20k isn’t exactly Tiger Woods divorce money. Also, let’s go ahead and assume Dorrell doesn’t have psychological problems or an old-guy fetish or that Petrino didn’t give her dad a kidney or any number of things that would shed some light. Maybe he’d promised to support her for a long time, or even leave his wife for her, but both seem a logistical improbability. What could they have had in common besides a desire for the Razorbacks football team to win?

The answer you’re left with is fame. That’s what he had. In Arkansas, Bobby Petrino was famous. He was bigger than any congressman or mayor, maybe even the governor. He’d taken Arkansas to a BCS bowl. He’d made them an SEC and national contender again. His approval rating was seemingly untouchable. Clearly, fame is attractive to women in all sorts of situations and settings, but why? You can’t hold fame. You can’t buy things with it. In this case, she couldn’t bask in it at parties or brag about it in magazine interviews or get into clubs because of it. She was just out on a motorcycle ride with a guy she was dating. Theoretically, she would be dating him now if it weren’t for those meddling police officers and their dastardly “reports.”

Obviously, I am making generalizations. Men can be, and are, attracted to fame. We make bad decisions because of it, too. But it seems the draw is far greater for women as a group. I’m not sure if that’s an American thing, if girls grow up being told again and again that fame is appealing and necessary in our society. Every day we are sold famous products by famous people. Fame equals glamour. Glamour equals relevance. Relevance equals self-worth. When you get to self-worth, the equations get complicated and numerous.

My best guess is we want so badly for our lives to matter, to be something special and unique, that some of us are just happy to brush with fame. Even if he’s 51. Even if he’s a liar and cheater. Even if it has to be a secret. I’ve never dated anyone even remotely famous, but it must be exciting on some level. It must make a person feel famous by association, even if she isn’t. Actually, that’s not exactly true. She’s sort of famous now.

This is a graphic. I am not actually arguing with my parents ... probably.

I am currently in two fights over text message. I mean, I am not in arguments about text messaging. I’m not debating the pros and cons of an electronic world. I’m fighting through texts. And honestly, I could end both situations at about any point (or at least dissipate them) if I poked my iPhone a couple times and called the other person involved. But I’m not doing that. That’s where I’m at in my life. I’d rather be in a low-maintenance argument than have to talk on the phone. I’m a lot more sarcastic and biting when I have time to contemplate and type it out, which is entertaining, though as Charlie Sheen has proven, entertaining is not always the healthiest direction. A lot of people say things they regret in the moment. My responses get more regrettable with editing.

Here’s the part where you smack yourself in the face repeatedly with a spatula. One of the arguments is the direct result of texting. I typed something I thought was completely innocuous. She read something she interpreted as hurtful. She immediately took it to a new level without clarifying. I took offense. OK, I didn’t take offense, but I could have taken offense if I was the kind of person who took offense to things, or maybe just not so lazy. I am a little annoyed that she would even think I meant what she thought I meant, so now I’m irritated that it’s going to take 10 more texts to work through this, and at the end of it she will assume I really DID mean what she thought I meant but she made me backtrack because she CONFRONTED me and my hurtful sarcasm.

I assume this is how World War I started.

Years ago, when I was a newspaper columnist in Wisconsin I wrote a piece about a woman with a nonverbal learning disorder. She had written a book about her diagnosis and her life. I was skeptical. I’m skeptical about a lot of things. Food allergies. Thyroid conditions. Gluten-free stuff. Sick days. Any reason for a failed steroid test. Back pain. Attention Deficit Disorder. My general feeling is if you give people excuses, they will ride them like thoroughbreds. Before the interview, I read a little about nonverbal learning disorder and thought, “Great, now there’s a scientific diagnosis for people who didn’t develop social skills. Whatever happened to the phrase ‘home-schooled’?” I realize those are just generally negative and unproductive thoughts, but at least they stay in my brain most of the time. And on this public web site, of course.

Whatever the cause of the woman’s communication problems, hearing her description and the resulting effects on her life was fascinating. In a Wikipedia entry, it makes you want to clean bathroom grout as a more entertaining option. In life examples, though, pretty damn interesting. Imagine never picking up sarcasm, even the second and third time. And then imagine watching people talk to you differently because they know you take everything literally. But you don’t really know when or how they’re talking to you differently, you just know it’s happening. Imagine not being able to interpret or even notice the hundreds of tiny movements most of us process instantly and subconsciously: a raised eyebrow, a smirk, crossed arms, voice inflection, a pause, a glance, an eyeroll.

Annoying couples talk about finishing each other’s sentences (congrats, your predictability is the stuff of legend) and being able to tell what the other is thinking without saying a word. Well yes. You probably can. We all do it every day. You’ve heard that statistic about how a woman can tell within a couple minutes of meeting a man whether she will date him or not. Because what we are communicating constantly without words. On the receiving end, we’re all interrogators, analyzing expressions, looking for clues. We’re all Dr. House from that show “House,” except looking for simple life clues instead of complicated medical ones. We’re learning from the moment we meet someone, although the musty cat smell and stain on the shirt probably said plenty about our datability. Everything we’ve seen and learned up to this point has honed our communication skills.

I ended up writing about the woman, not because of the uniqueness of her story or the self-published book that was sure to be distributed mostly as gifts at family gatherings, but because of how familiar the details of her life felt. We have all known what it’s like to misinterpret or to misunderstand, to not understand exactly why someone’s social skills were awful, to have to exchange 10 text messages to clarify something. That was before text messaging, but looking back, the woman’s whole life was a 10-text clarification. Every hour of every day she must have felt like she was moving in a waste-deep pool while everyone else jogged on an escalator.

I wonder sometimes if a social communication regression is coming. We talk about “kids these days” being stuck in front of video games and not getting outside to learn important lessons, like, Don’t smart off to the kid who punches hard. But what about the rest of us? When I got my iPhone a while back, the cheery guy in the red, collared shirt asked if 400 minutes a month would be enough talk time? Yea, probably 400 a year would be enough. Just give me unlimited texts and leave me alone. Can we have a massive shift to electronic communication and have no cumulative effect? Will we all be socially uncomfortable in a generation or two? I have no idea. I’m just throwing unanswerable questions at the wall, at this point. OK, enough of this. I’m a busy man. I have unnecessary misunderstandings to continue unresolving.

So yea, a lot has happened. I’m not a journalist anymore. That’s big. In January of 2006, I moved to Fresno, Calif., for a big promotion and my first decent salary, on my way to becoming the most famous sports columnist of our times. Two years later I might as well have been a rotary phone repairman. People would say to me, “You’re safe, right? That could never happen to you, could it? I mean, the Fresno Bee can’t NOT have a sports columnist can it?” And I would say, “First of all, stop using double negatives. I’m having trouble following.” But yes, at some point columnists and pretty much everything else became an expendable luxury.

It’s good, though, because I’ve always wanted to write books and try stand-up comedy and have a fun web site and a bunch of other stuff I probably wouldn’t ever get around to if I was being paid to watch football games. I’m not saying it was always good pay. When I started as a sports writer in Selma, Ala., in 2000, I was making $9.25 an hour and I remember the grinning publisher bringing me into his office after a month and giving me a HUGE RAISE! 50 CENTS AN HOUR! I probably should have felt like an idiot for taking out student loans to get a college education that led to a job that involved getting a RAISE to get to $9.75 an hour, but it never felt like that. It always felt like I was getting paid to watch sports and meet cool people.

I got laid off almost a year ago, last May, and I’ve been goofing off a lot. I went to visit a bunch of people I’d been saying I’d go see. I went home to Kansas for a while. And I’ve started a book. I don’t want to give away the idea just yet cause I really think it could be something great. I don’t have a publisher yet, but I have a PR firm (cause you only have to write a check to get one of those and they get super excited because you’re paying them to get super excited) and hopefully a publisher won’t be far behind.

As for this site, I’m still not sure what it’s going to be exactly. It’s being redesigned by my friend Paul and it will continue to be changed and adapted for whatever’s ahead. If I decide to sell home-made pottery, you can purchase it here, is what I’m saying. I’m updating all the bio information since I’m not Matt James, sports columnist, so much as Matt James, unemployed guy with an old car. The site may change names. It will probably change addresses. You will be informed of everything. Don’t worry. I’ve got lots of ideas, but we’re going to start with just posting a lot of my writing and thoughts and silliness and go from there. I realize this is a boring post, but if someday people look back through the archives of this site, they’ll at least know what happened and that I didn’t just take a nap for two years.

Also, there was a moment in Popeyes Chicken that I have been regretting for a while now.  It’s a long story, which I will get to momentarily.

There are no statistics to back this up, but there seem to be more homeless people in Fresno during the winter. A lot more. In my mind, that’s because it is warmer here than in most parts of the country, and homeless people migrate to the West Coast* from North Dakota or Vermont or Russia. Somewhere cold. In downtown Fresno, there are little towns of people living in tents and boxes under the overpasses and sometimes I drive around down there and gawk. It’s unbecoming, I realize, but I justify it by thinking that I am at least aware of the homeless problem, which is something. It’s not helping, but it’s something.

*This could be because there are so many train tracks downtown, but I also figure people get to Fresno riding the rails from some exotic location. Do people still ride the rails? Do they carry their belongings in a bandana tied around the end of a stick? How many more of my cultural references are stuck in black-and-white movies from the 1940s?

It just amazes me that in the year 2009, so many people could be living like that. Although I have no idea why the passing of time or the advancement of technology would have an affect on the homeless population. It is not just the homeless who are asking for help, though. At intersections, boys and girls hold signs asking for donations to pay for funerals. Some have car washes. Others just want help. A mother and son were selling candy outside a grocery store last night and I was in such a hurry to get to a house to watch the national title game that I didn’t even find out what the money was for.

I’ve seen middle age men with signs that ask for help for a single dad, and women with signs who ask for money for an out-of-work mom. I don’t know if they are really single dads or out-of-work moms. There is an urban legend, I guess you’d call it, that there are panhandlers who make a great living begging for money. I’m not sure if that comes from movies or just our worst suspicions of human nature*, but I doubt there are many people dressing up in dirty clothes, writing desperate messages on cardboard and making $70,000 a year.

*I had two extra tickets at a college football game a couple years ago, and a man came up to me and said he and his son wanted to go to the game, but couldn’t afford it. I gave him the tickets and he walked back to the street corner and started to sell them for more than face value. There was no son. I suppose we all have stories like that, where our good intentions were taken advantage of, and I was more upset about having my trust eroded than losing two football tickets under false pretense.

In situations like that I am reminded of two stories, the first told by Joe Posnanski, the Sports Illustrated writer, who was sitting by the late Buck O’Neil at a baseball game. Buck was old by this time, in his final years, with many reasons to hold at least a little bitterness. He had seen racial injustice as a young man. He had been kept out of the Big Leagues as a player. He had not yet been inducted into the Hall of Fame, even though everything about his life and personality and career made him a wonderful choice. Posnanski was writing a book about O’Neil and so they were sitting at a game together when they saw a man get a foul ball and not give it to a boy nearby. Posnanski was irritated, as many of us would be, but O’Neil told him, wait, maybe that man has a son at home. Maybe his son is sick and the ball will make his day. Who thinks like that? Buck always saw the best in people, even strangers. He was a rare human being.

The second story happened several years ago. I was writing about a blind Creighton University basketball fan. He and a friend went to the games and sat together so the friend could do play-by-play and he could follow the action. Yes, he could probably have listened to the radio broadcast on headphones, but it wouldn’t have been the same. He wouldn’t have been able to feel the crowd, or hear when the players changed direction on the court. During the interviews, I found out that it had been a medical error that blinded the man as a child, that too much oxygen had been pumped into his ventilator. I forget the exact details. But I asked him if his family sued the doctors, if he’d received some sort of settlement from the hospital, and I’ll never forget his response: Why? It’s not like they meant to do it.

Of course I never think of those two stories at the time. I get angry at the con-man stealing my tickets, but I hope that at some point in my life I’m able to have even a bit of that understanding, that I’m able to see light where there only appears to be darkness.

I think about beggars a lot. I saw a man the other day in a wheelchair in Merced, Calif. It was late at night and it was raining lightly and I could see him on a narrow median in the middle of four lanes. He was in a wheelchair and missing at least one of his legs. He had a sign that I couldn’t read. How did he get there? What happened to him? Was he a nice man? Were there no other options better than sitting in the dark and the rain at a remote intersection with no street lights? But I was in a hurry with two friends and didn’t give him money, or buy him food, or see if he needed a ride.

One of my favorite writers in the world, San Francisco Chronicle columnist Jon Carroll, writes a piece every year about something he calls The Untied Way. That is not a typo. It’s really just an idea where he encourages readers around the holidays to go to the ATM and take out an uncomfortable amount of money and then hand it out in $20 bills to people who ask for money. Will some of them use it in unsavory and foolish ways? Sure. Have I spent money in unsavory and foolish ways? Probably more than most people who beg for money. Just this week I made a $50 bluff on a busted straight draw.

Here is the 2009 Untied Way column. His point is beautiful and simple. You don’t have time to figure out who might use the money to buy booze, or which person has a hard-luck story, or who is good or bad, and who are you to be deciding who is good and bad anyway? You either have compassion or you don’t. You either help someone else or you don’t. You either give or you drive past. I’m not saying The Untied Way is what you should do, or that you’re a bad person for not giving to beggars. You can’t give to everyone. I think about that sometimes. Well, what if I gave money to everyone who asked for it? My PG&E bill was $260 last month. I’d be broke. I can’t do that. So I should just not give to anyone, to be fair. Besides, don’t our taxes pay for homeless shelters and programs? I’m not even sure if I think about that stuff, or it’s just my justification.

I think we all get that way a little sometimes. There must be a reason I’m driving this Volkswagen and that person is on the corner holding a sign, hoping a stranger will hand them a dollar out of a moving car window. They must have taken some evil path, made some bad choice that led to this. It’s more soothing than thinking of the world as a big spinning ball we could all fall off at any point. If there’s anything good about a recession, it’s that the people in need aren’t just shadowy figures we can ignore. They aren’t just people with chemical imbalances who talk to themselves. We all know people who have lost houses and jobs, people who’ve had family meetings around the kitchen table to figure out bigger issues than voting on the summer vacation.

All this to say that one day in December, I was sitting in Popeyes Chicken, listening to a couple fight. I’m assuming they were a couple, because at several points they discussed whether “this” was really going to work, and the many issues with each others’ behavior. They were sitting in a booth and both talking loudly, but awkwardly, like they were performing in some sort of street theater and wanted everyone in the audience to be able to hear. But it was only the three of us there. At one point the man, with dirty overalls and a pony tail, went to the register and asked the girl with a headset if she would change the music to blues. The jazz they were playing was obnoxious and terrible, he said.

It was so distracting that I didn’t see a woman come in, didn’t see her until she walked up to my booth and asked for a piece of my chicken. And even though it was my last chicken strip, and I was already full, and I probably shouldn’t have been eating fast food anyway (especially not finishing fast food), I said no, I wanted to eat it. I’ll say that I was caught off guard. Maybe it was the brashness that surprised me, that someone would ask to eat my food from my plate in a restaurant. I’m kind of a push-over most of the time, and I got defensive there for a second, decided I wasn’t going to let someone’s forwardness pressure me.

But now I’m thinking how hungry that woman must have been to ask that way. I’m thinking she probably had children. I’m thinking about all the times I wondered what the person asking for charity might do with the money, whether they would buy food or drugs, and here I turned away someone who asked for the very item that I had predetermined was suitable for my charity.

I’m still thinking about the woman, a month later, still thinking about our chicken encounter, still thinking I’m the one who needed help.